Last night I visited an MFA program to speak about literary magazines. As I chatted with students, I thought about the security I felt fifteen years ago when I was a student myself. I would graduate, continue to hone my craft, and when I was ready, submit my work far and wide. Eventually I would be published, find an agent, then finish and hopefully publish my novel. While I understood that none of this would be easy, it all felt wonderfully possible.
But yesterday I was struck by the insecurity many of these students seem to feel. I was asked, quite seriously, if literary journals would continue to exist. I was asked about the impact of AI on writers and literary magazines, the dissolution of Twitter—which I’ll never call X—and where writers can build community. I was even asked by one student if serious artistic pursuit can exist under late-stage capitalism. “Are we all doomed?” he said. I did my best to assure him that while the landscape might be more treacherous, we are not doomed, at least not yet.
Resistance adds fuel to our fire, but Electric Literature has recently faced some unprecedented challenges. The NEA has been effectively destroyed, free speech is no longer protected, and grant funding for the arts is drying up. As artists, we are in a fight for our lives, and we must continue that fight. Electric Literature costs about $500,000 a year to run. We need to raise $35,000 to get us through 2025 and balance the budget for 2026. This is the largest goal we’ve ever set for a campaign, but difficult times call for greater ambition. We need our community to stand strong by our side.
Electric Literature remains committed to being a home for writers of all backgrounds, beliefs, and identities. This year we published our first book, Both/And: Essays by Trans and Gender Nonconforming Writers of Color, combatting increased attacks on the trans community by amplifying their voices. By December, we will have published over 500 writers whose work—brilliant, funny, and moving—we are honored to platform. And once again, we will have supported over three million readers this year, many of whom visit Electric Literature daily.
To be clear, Electric Literature is not backing down. We will continue publishing groundbreaking writing for our readers, knowing that literary pursuit in the face of rising facism is righteous, noble work. And we will continue being a home for emerging writers and essential new voices. Please join us in this work by supporting EL today.
Time is absurd. It can be blissfully light, and crushingly endless. If it’s the latter, you might find yourself drowning in hours, suffocated by swelling moments and the past leaking and everything too much everywhere. But mostly, time is structure. It’s how you meet your friend for lunch before the café closes, count the days until that Special Event, or consider your ancestors from centuries ago. So, what does it look like when time loses its form? When linearity crumbles and its boundaries dissolve?
I began writing my debut poetry book, Sticky Time, during a month that felt like it might never end. I was in the throes of a depressive episode and the worst eczema flare of my life. So, I wrote to process, to control. I ate hours and spat them back up—through the absurdity came some calm. I also became obsessed with “eternalism,” a concept that past, present, and future all happen at once, but our consciousness only has access to the present. Much of Sticky Time explores the psychic implications of this idea, as well as the aforementioned blending of temporal sensory experiences. I picture time as this web-like filter over reality, glistening with my past and future selves. I hold a piece of the web in my hand, and it tells me truths and lies and laughs and the smell of rain takes me to summer camp and a Fleetwood Mac song takes me to that roadtrip and it’s all divine. Because it’s all here, in time, begging to be written.
The eight poetry books below similarly experiment with time. They take back control by distorting its rules, highlighting its subjectivity, and reducing it to a fragmented putty. Poetry gives us the power to play, and through this manipulation, conjure a little temporal synesthesia. Each of these books holds a crooked mirror to the infinite ways we experience time, reconciling what it means to exist in and exert agency over its wobbly bounds.
Resurrection, reincarnation, reinvention, revisitation. In Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere, Anastacia-Reneé gives us a multi-dimensional tapestry filled with Black woman gods, time-jumpers, and parallel universes. This is an “everywhen” book. We meet lovers communicating across lifetimes; we enter the Atlantic Apartments, where access to the year 1984 is granted through a sign that reads, “where’s the beef?” We even hear from one speaker about “The Museum of a Long, Long, Time Ago,” where they experience love, joy, anxiety, and fear through pills from a distant era—our present. With metaphysical composition, Anastacia-Reneé contorts linearity beyond recognition, creating a stunning, surreal collection of boundary-pushing Afrofuturism. Mystical and inescapable.
Crush is a tragic, liminal space. In it, Siken constructs a timeless reality as the speaker panics through grief and fantasy, yearning for his dead lover. This heartbreak manifests in his tireless manipulation of time as a wish to reunite with his beloved. Over and over, he grants himself the role of director for the scenes in his life, craving the ability to pause, replay, and change his fated path. In “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out,” Siken writes, “You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say.” This obsession bleeds through the collection, building to a psychedelic trip in “You Are Jeff.” There, we are transported to a dreamlike scenario that iterates, looping backwards and sideways until landing in a dark car with a beautiful boy. All throughout Crush, time runs, slips, and disintegrates under Siken’s pen as the speaker moves closer to acceptance. A gut-wrenching, beautiful read.
With experimental flare, The Past stretches and folds memory through intergenerational narratives. The collection opens withthe poem “Coming to America,” where Xu writes, “They spoke to me in heavy abstraction / My tongue fading out / Sometimes a mouth is lost to slow time.” Underlying these poems is a fraught attitude towards the temporal. She describes time as boring and violent; she “decapitates” the past, refusing to be limited by its restraints. Rightfully so. In portraying her family’s immigration, she uses censorship-inspired styles that reflect the Chinese government’s surveillance. And in “Tiananmen Sonnets,” Xu conceals the massacre’s date within each poem, accompanied by symbolic visuals. The complexities of heritage are on full display here, as she grapples with personal, familial, and historical strands of time. In “Why Write,” she asserts “I am not writing to photograph the past. I am writing to sit inside the pauses of Uncle’s sentences, the commas of the dead.” So in those pauses we will join her.
disgust spins our speaker through a week of degradation orchestrated by an unseen dom figure. Born from an audio transcript of a performance piece, the book is an epic, grotesque confessional poem. The text is split into seven days, each with a varying number of intervals. The result is a hyper-present, hyper-immediate narrative. But distorted. Each day, quotidian acts like opening a door, cooking, and dressing are disrupted by the mounting limitations of “d’s” protocol. These limitations also contort the speaker’s concept of time. They lose track of the days and, dislodged, say, “I am can hardly remember anything. Everything is getting lost. I have no writing. It’s hard to speak my mouth isn’t working. I’m tired. Everything in reverse.” The form of transcription, with its stutters, misplaced punctuation, and indistinct muttering, creates an overflowing world of distress. In disgust, Saint Spero envelops us in this one, suffocating week, with little room to escape.
In Lora Mathis’ The Snakes Came Back, the speaker embarks on a profound journey to heal the self, connect with the infinite, and transcend the temporal body. Many of the poems take place in 2020, a year notorious for its disorienting time. Mathis captures the sensation of days blurring and nights looping as the self longs for the past. Each section of the book is separated by the alchemical symbol for “hour,” as personified figures like Dawn, Tomorrow, Day, and Night pull the speaker through her healing journey. And the snakes. They’re everywhere, slithering through the hours, shifting in meaning as the speaker explores the complex interplay between spirit and body. Mathis asks us to reflect on why, if the spirit knows it’s infinite, the body still craves permanence amidst the one-way flow of time.
Jenny Xie’s The Rupture Tense ripples us through time. The book begins with ekphrastic poems that invoke Li Zhensheng’s haunting photographs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In that past, the speaker finds traces of the future—indicating Xie’s examination of “postmemory,” the concept that trauma can leak through generations. At its core, The Rupture Tense navigates this melting of past, present, and future. With sharp metaphors like, “My present tenses are just basins / where endings approach room temperature,” Xie guides us through a reckoning with both personal and cultural histories. Her fragmented memories of childhood displacement from China, retold in layers, reveal an ungraspable truth left to the past. And through surreal imagery like “Memory pulls the past out of its outlines and stuffs it back in all the wrong spaces,” Xie beautifully manipulates the language of time, exhibiting the visceral weight of history.
Comprised of long, stream-of-consciousness poems, A Duration is concerned with the integration of past selves with the present, nature with humanity, and body with spirit. The poems serve as portals into countless beginnings, each thread evading its end by dropping off mid-sentence and picking up without pause. Meier meditates on rivers, animal tracks, his childhood, his friends, and King Lear, breathing life into temporal abstractions with lines like, “‘Hours hold days in between trees,’ the evening said.” The effect is one of being held by a master storyteller. And the pervasive interplay between time and its subjects suggests the eternal possibility for rebirth. “No self is in control of everything in the body. Nothing happens again. Things again. Things begin,” he writes. A Duration reminds us that time is both linear and fractal, but writing gives us access to everything at once.
Like playing a song on repeat, Messinger’s pleasureis amiracle seeks infinity in narrow, contained spaces. Here, linear time is repressive, and our speaker is plagued by chronophobia—the fear of time passing. In the face of depression, she crawls into moments in search of pure pleasure, frustrated with time itself and believing that reliving memory is the antidote. Many words are merged without spaces, perhaps indicating a rushed dissatisfaction with the present. In “though it feels like a very long time ago,” Messinger writes, “it’s about free time, some people call it newtime. kinds of waiting go on forever. I call that fading.” The book also experiments with form, using shapes, epistolary poems, and sound to illustrate this concept of betweenness. As this battle with the temporal contends with compression, Messinger continually asks how the speaker can escape her narrow path to finally transcend the crowded moment.
I was introduced to Bryan Washington’s writingin grad school. It feels important to note that I met my spouse in that class. In their presentation on Lot, being a Texas native, my spouse taught the class the geographical map of Houston as drawn through the stories in Washington’s collection. The two of us could be characters in a Washington story.
Washington writes evocative love stories, set in modern times and filled with longing. Across his oeuvre, Washington maintains a consistency represented through his fiction’s themes and characters: queer Black and Asian people, moving through life, fucking other queer people to find a form of connection, friendship, community, and love. One could argue that Washington is obsessed with writing many versions of the same character, each more poignant than the last. Then is it surprising that the writing advice he gives all writers is to “write towards their obsessions?”
On the occasion of his third novel Palaver—currentlya National Book Award Finalist—being published, I had the opportunity to talk with him for Electric Literature’s 23 Questions and get a peek into the writer’s life.
– Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal Editorial Intern
1. Describe your publication week in a six-word story.
BW: Writing for about three hours in the morning, taking a break for lunch and coffee, editing something else for two or three hours, then spending the evening with friends.
There is sea and there is land and there is the place where the two meet. They slip and slide into each other, a shuddering of sunlit sprays and burnished pebbles. It is the place where change is constant, where we can lay our bodies down and feel the commingling of two forces tugging the sand out from under us, land-dried fecundity reentering the wet. Our skin is scraped raw and clean. The salt mattes everywhere.
It is impossible to block memories on the ever-shifting shoreline, and that is why so many of us come here, through summer and winter, for the relief of unfettered remembrance. Standing in the flushing tide we are able to see the faces of our lost loved ones, to recall their embraces, in some cases to remember their violent deaths. There are many who refuse to come here, afraid of the ragged holes of love they will find, while those of us who do, come with the rhythm of ritual, ready for the complications of grief renewed. We grow to recognize one another, sometimes holding each other through the spasming of sobs or listening while someone recounts a story, a smile, a laugh, or a fight. “Hold this memory with me” we tell each other, “for in a minute we will walk back inland, and the memory will be gone. Bear witness to my grief, so that I may know that it is real.”
And then we turn back. Walk across the sand to the road where our cars are parked. Dry ourselves off. Already, the memories have faded. Already, we do not know what we remembered on the shoreline, in the grit sand that dragged under our toes. But we feel it in our bodies, that we have cried or been elated or mourned. We feel the soft imprint of a fellow rememberer’s hand on our shoulder and know that we took part in something strangely collective and human. And we go home. Our bodies relieved by the reprieve of connection.
When I return home, it is to a different collective. My partner of five years, Mark, washing dishes at the sink, and my ten-year-old daughter, Stella, pirouetting in the kitchen, no doubt avoiding a chore.
“How was it?” asks Mark.
“I don’t remember,” I say lightly.
Stella pulls me into a dance spin and I, in turn, pull her in for a hug. She’s grown, growing, always growing. Long legs and arms on a short torso, dark curly hair falling over her eyes because her ponytail’s come loose again. She smells like dirt and soap rubbed together, of a kid both looked after and let loose.
“Okay, let go, Mama,” she muffles into my shoulder.
Mark dries his hands and rolls his eyes at us jokingly.
“My turn,” he says as he comes up close to hold me. His words are warm in my ear. “You were safe?”
“I was,” I say to him.
I squeeze him back. He’s tall and fair and foreign, but our relationship has been working like nothing ever has for me before.
Later, when Stella is asleep in a sprawl on her bed and it’s just me and him idling in the living room, I tell him what I’ve been thinking about.
“I think it might be time to take Stella to the shoreline with me.”
Mark stiffens. But he keeps his voice measured.
“She’s your daughter,” he says. “I can’t tell you what to do.”
“You don’t approve,” I say.
“She’s only ten,” he says. “Who could she possibly have to remember? And if there is a loved one to remember, it will be a brutal loss that she witnessed at a young age. Why would you want her to know about it?”
“You don’t know what it’s like,” I say, “to be disconnected from your own history. To not even know which parts you’re disconnected from. It isn’t healthy, Mark.”
“I’m not looking to argue, Ariadne. I just think Stella can wait a couple more years.”
“And you’re saying this as her stepfather or as a therapist?”
“Both.”
A silence flickers under our dimmed lamps.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll wait.”
I park my car on the road by the shoreline and get out. There is an eerie stillness in the wind that blows in with the waves. A dozen familiar faces are lined up on the road, all standing in front of their cars, none moving to the beach. The wind sucks at their hair and clothes but they are all, as one, looking in the same direction toward the sea.
Down on the east part of the bay, there is a large military truck, khaki green, canvas, and steel, laden with building materials. And around the truck are maybe seven or eight soldiers building a barbed-wire fence across the sand, a few feet from the tide line. They have big rolls of concrete, which they bury in the sand to hold the metal fence poles up, the wire all snagged and sharp rolling out between each pole. The sound of wind and waves mutes whatever sounds the soldiers are making, though they seem to be in conversation, gesturing this way and that about how best to build this fence, how best to block our access to respite. They pretend not to notice us.
“I heard this might happen.”
Defne, a regular, stands next to me. Her voice is flat. I reach out for her hand and she offers it willingly. I slip my fingers through the thick, wrinkled joints of her own. I feel her silver and gold rings, as immovable as she is.
“Whose military are they?” I ask. I don’t add the obvious “yours or mine” to the question. Here on the shoreline, neither of us have allegiances to any army.
“Does it matter?”
Her voice is brittle with the decades of conflict.
It feels like we are watching a theatrical play. The soldiers are badly dressed for the sand. They slip into the soft, unpredictable mounds, are confused by and kicking at the protected turtle nests. A younger one forgets himself and moves closer to the waves washing up onto the beach. The moment he enters the block-free zone his body contorts in unexpected horror. We can’t hear him scream at first, but his wails grow so frantic they perforate the wind, shrill and frenzied like an abandoned infant’s. He looks too young to be remembering someone he killed himself, and is more likely grieving a loss of his own, but the tenor of his terror is hard to discern. Two of his fellow soldiers reach for his flailing arms and pull him away. He falls to his knees on the dry sand, gasping and flustered.
He looks too young to be remembering someone he killed himself, and is more likely grieving a loss of his own, but the tenor of his terror is hard to discern.
“Cowards,” mutters Defne.
The word ricochets through me and I peel off my clothes down to my swimsuit. I put my mesh water shoes on and walk down toward the sea on the west edge of the bay. It will take the soldiers a couple more hours to build the fence all the way across, and I intend to do what I came here to do. The others follow me down. As if all we needed was one person to begin the familiar trajectory down to the water, to break the spell cast by the interlopers on our beach.
Now the roles have reversed. The soldiers have stopped working and they are staring at us as if we are an ancient chorus harbingering doom. But our show will be different from theirs. It’s been a long time since one of us has panicked in the thrust of grief like the young man did. Our bodies are long accustomed to the acute pain of loss. Each visit has lessened the sheer shock of our remembrance. We enter our memories together, ready to sit in our salt-watered hurt.
I am not in there long when someone grips hold of my arm to pull me out of the water. I stumble and fall, the pebbles scratch up against my body, and my head hits a rock, hard. Water goes up my nose as I am dragged, a thumb is pressed ruthlessly into me. I can hear someone screaming but it’s not me; maybe it’s the person dragging me. The screams stop and I am beached on the dry land catching my breath. The sand is sore on my skinned knees. I touch blood dripping from the back of my head. Around me are more of my peers, lying stricken on the sand, each of us shocked back into blockage, gulping air and coughing. The soldiers surround us, their black laced boots ugly and wet. They are shouting.
“What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?”
I can see now, from up close, that they’re not military. They’re police special forces. Their logo is emblazoned on their camo-shirts. I spit grit out of my mouth. One of the men in our party yells back at them.
“You have no business taking us out of the sea. This is our right, we are allowed freedom of movement.”
The young policeman who’d been in the water just moments earlier is here, too, and his terror of us and the shoreline is clear to all. His eyes are wide and rolling, he keeps fumbling at his baton.
“You’re heretics!” he shouts. “This is not of God. You are engaging in devilry. The shoreline is where the devil lives. I saw it. I saw it.”
If he wasn’t armed, if my head wasn’t aching, I would laugh.
One of his colleagues tries to calm him, and behind them I see Defne rising from the ground and determinedly walking back to the sea. Others rise and follow. They look like Nereids, I think, with the sun emblazoned behind them, the sand granules on their wet bodies glittering. But the young policeman has lost himself to his fear; he escapes his colleague’s platitudes and instead runs after Defne to stop her. His baton comes out, once, twice, against Defne’s head and I see Defne fall, the fall of someone who won’t get up again, and I see others tackling the man to the ground, I see more batons come out against the bare, lovely bodies of my friends, and all the while I think, will this memory be erased, can I hold it, please, please, don’t let me lose it don’t let me lose Defne don’t let me lose this shoreline too.
I get home and the memory of what has happened down at the shoreline is still fresh, but I know it is only a matter of time before a block is placed on it. I try to tell Mark as much as I can but I mostly weep, my head throbbing around the sting of my open wound, and he brooks no discussion but takes me straight to the hospital.
In the waiting room I scream-whisper at him, “Mark, don’t let me forget it, don’t let me. Write it down for me, I have to remember it, to remember her, Defne, I have to.”
The writing-down of a memory about to be blocked isn’t allowed. We know this. But Mark sees my despair and ultimately has no compunctions about breaking the laws of a country he does not belong to. He finds pen and paper and takes me to the quietest spot he can find. He turns on the audio recording on his phone.
“Go,” he whispers.
I spit my words out, repeat myself, backtrack, try to remember the faces of the policemen, but Mark keeps me focused on the people I was with, the people I am worried I have lost, their names and how they fell. It takes half an hour and my name has been called by triage twice now. I ask Mark “Is it done?” And he says yes. He takes photographs of his notes and then uploads the audio and the images to the cloud, sends them to friends abroad. He marks the subject line with “for safekeeping” and I am struck by how absurd that phrase is, how today I was reminded that we can keep nothing safe or safely.
A week passes. I remember nothing despite the pain pulsing in my head. I was away from home and I fell and hit my head and now have short-term memory loss. The nurses looked tired when they told me this. The doctor was nowhere to be found.
Stella is at school today and I’m home, editing a client’s latest report, rewriting entire sentences to make them make sense. And Mark walks in, his face so serious it looks like someone has died.
“What happened?” I ask.
He’s wordless, just pulls up his laptop, opens his email. There’s a message from a friend of his from abroad, Mette. She lives in Copenhagen. I vaguely remember that she does something like humanitarian law. I lean toward the screen to read her missive.
Dear Mark,
It’s been a year now since you sent me the first email of horrors. It was a recording of Ariadne, speaking about the violent loss of her ex, of Stella’s father. You had gone down to the beach with her and she remembered it all, told you everything. You stood in the sea with her looking for a 3G signal so you could upload the recording and send it to me. When I called you the next day you had no memory of it. I didn’t press you. I was concerned that if I forced you to remember against the power of the memory blockers I may cause you permanent damage. Besides, Stella’s father’s death was six years ago now. It seemed too long ago to be worth upsetting you. I did ask you to stop going to the beach. I made up some scientific-sounding research that proved it could be bad for you. I think it convinced you, but not Ariadne.
You sent me another recording, some eight months later, about a patient you were concerned about. She hadn’t turned up to her sessions and had told you she was worried that her work would get her killed. I called you again. Again, you had no memory of sending me your recording. Again, I didn’t push, though I extrapolated what had happened.
But last week you sent me something too close for comfort. Ariadne speaking of witnessing a murder that very day, on the beach. Ariadne injured so badly she was lucky to be alive. I’m sending it back to you. I don’t know if you will be able to listen to it. I don’t know how the block works, if it will even allow you to read and retain this email. But Mark, make no mistake. Ariadne is probably under surveillance now. Your family is no longer safe. You need to leave. You know my family will always welcome you here. I will buy you your tickets in an instant. Please say yes, Mark. Please tell Ariadne to say yes. We can keep you safe. We can help. Come to Copenhagen.
—METTE
I stare. I move the cursor to open the recording attached in the email.
“Don’t,” says Mark. “It doesn’t work. It just sounds like scramble and it gives you a migraine.”
I ignore him and press Play. I hear my voice, in tears, for a split second.
“Don’t let me forget—” And then it turns into a muddle of screeches and high-pitched buzzings that scream as if the dead are drilling through my head. I hurriedly push the laptop away from me. Mark reaches out to save it from tumbling onto the floor and turns the volume off.
My head is vibrating with pain but from the inside out. I touch the healing wound on the back of my skull. How did I get it? I wonder. Was I bludgeoned? Who tried to kill me? My pain and fear careen into fury and anger. Who tried to kill me? I will find them. I will force them to speak the truth to me until their teeth are ground down to dust from fighting against their own memory blocker.
“Ariadne, we should leave here,” says Mark.
“Not until we uncover what these monsters have done to me,” I say.
I can’t believe he wants to leave, when we should stay and fight.
“I’m not doing this,” he says. “I’m not staying here to watch you die and not even have the dignity to remember it. I’m not looking after Stella without her mother, without even the full memory of her mother.”
His words are like corrective lenses to my rage. But everything in me wants to reject them.
“We can shame them. We can ask Mette to send the recordings to international media—”
“We can do that when we are far away from here. Somewhere where we have the right to memory. Somewhere where you will not be imprisoned or worse.”
I will not leave my beach, my sea, my home, my olive groves, my clementines, my friends, my chaos of singing muezzins and priests.
I cannot. I will not leave my beach, my sea, my home, my olive groves, my clementines, my friends, my chaos of singing muezzins and priests. I will not leave it for the cold, smooth-edged, organized towns of Scandinavia. I cannot, I say to myself. I cannot. And then I cry, long wrenching sobs pulsating with goodbye and grief and loss because I know that I will leave. That Mark is right. That by the end of the week, he and Stella and I will be on a plane. That my life has endured as much chaos and violence as it was able and that the only option now is to stay and die or leave and thrive.
Mark is already replying to Mette. He is already booking our tickets. He is already calling our friends to tell them that we are leaving. He is looking around our house to see what we need.
“Can I go to the beach one last time?” I beg.
“No,” he says. “No. We will go to a multitude of other beaches in our life. But I will not let you go where you were injured.”
Less than ten days later, we arrive in Copenhagen, never to return home again.
And just like that an entire part of my self is brought back into memory, and another part, the part that belongs, is ablated.
Our friends in Copenhagen are friendly and caring enough. It takes us months to accustom ourselves to the influx of violent memories. Some arrive piecemeal, others in one long shock of body horror that resembles a panic attack, only more immersive.
It is most upsetting to watch Stella remember her father. She was so young when she lost him that it is hard for her to understand if what she remembers is something from a childhood now fully unblocked or just her own mind playing tricks. She asks me for details, asks me to witness with her, asks me for confirmation. I answer as best I can, grateful that she was, at least, not present when he was shot, clean through the head, in the car seat next to me. Grateful, at least, that she has been spared both that memory and its reemergence.
I can tell that I have remembered his death over and over again. My body responds to it with a knowing, expectant grief. This was the work I did in my sea. It is different to hold the memory now in my every day, in my every breath, but I am not run ragged by it. It has been under process. Unlike the memory of Defne’s death, which still hangs raw and bloody in me. I wake from nightmares. Sometimes I wake from them and realize I wasn’t even sleeping, just standing in Mette’s kitchen trying to make coffee or buttering toast and I am stiff, unable to move.
Mark does what he can. Mette, her husband, and their two college-aged children do what they can too. We have been told multiple times that we can stay in their home as long as we need. But I can hear Mark and Mette talking about Denmark’s zero-asylum-seeker policy. The rise of the right-wing party here. They talk of other options, like Canada or the USA, or me and Mark marrying, Mark adopting Stella as his own. Sometimes they ask me what I think. I reply thoughtfully, I remain engaged, but I am not sure I will ever be truly present again.
And then there is the anger and the rage and the strategizing. I send the recordings to journalists and editors across the world. They reply, eager to take up our cause. I have lawyers from all over calling to see if I want representation in international courts. Mette helps me navigate through most of the legal things. I appreciate her fierceness, how she does not waste time pitying me, how she does not mince her words to spare my feelings. She respects me and expects me to know my situation better than anyone else.
But then the turn comes that I should have foreseen but I did not. Stella comes home one day from the school she is enrolled in, where she is having trouble making friends even though she never had such troubles in the past. She tells me she’s been online for months now, has made social media accounts without my permission. She’s been talking to other kids like her. Refugees, she calls them and herself. I cringe at this. She tells me there is a weekend-long event, in Brussels, for refugee families like ours, from countries that employ memory blockers. That we’ve been invited. She wants to go.
When she is asleep I tell the others. They think it’s a good idea. I think that it’s not something I can do. I cry through the soft Danish bedsheets and pillowcases all night. Forever cushioned in memories and foreign fabrics, never able to return home. Mark lets me grieve but he doesn’t let me refuse Stella. He says Stella and I should go to Brussels. And so I pack. I steady myself. And together, my daughter and I leave to meet more people like us.
It is raining in Brussels. It feels like it is always raining everywhere in continental Europe. I don’t understand how people live here without the sun. Stella and I enter an enormous conference space that looks more like a ballroom. It is teeming with people. There is a long table covered in food and drink. We are given name tags and shown where the people from each country have been designated to sit, if we so wish. We stand, a little overwhelmed, not yet moving to our designation. Stella is excited. She can barely stand in one place, pivoting on her toes and then her heels looking for the kids she found on social media.
Someone comes barreling into her shrieking, “Stella!” and tackles her with a big hug. It’s a teenage girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old. She’s wearing a brightly patterned hijab, a long-sleeve shirt, and jeans. “Sara!” Stella shrieks back. They hug and break apart and laugh and cry and hug again. They barely say any words. I can’t help but laugh, too, at their unmarred joy and love. Mark was right that Stella needed this. I can see in her face that she feels like she is allowed to grieve here, with kids her age who understand her. Sara pulls her toward a group of kids who are sitting on the floor yelling joyously at each other and playing games. Stella looks back at me and I nod. I smile. I am, genuinely, happy that she has found this for herself.
Mark said I needed this, too, but I’m not yet convinced. I make my way toward my people. I don’t know who or what to expect there. It seems like many of them already know one another. They are talking, laughing, making jokes. I stand there awkwardly. I see that some of them are reading my name tag. It is only then that I realize that I might be famous. That every one of my people who lives in exile has probably heard the recording of me recounting Defne’s death, as it went viral through the media.
The first person to approach me is a young man, who thanks me. And then his voice cracks. He tells me he lost his parents, didn’t know what had happened to them. That his uncle and aunt who lived abroad sent for him. And that the shock of remembering how his parents died led to him to depression and ideation for years. Hearing my voice, he says, reminded him that he wasn’t alone. We are tied together in the horror of our losses.
I don’t know what to say. I stutter something about not having considered anyone in that moment other than my own selfish anguish but I am glad that it provided him with some solace.
A woman approaches. She is older, hair silvered, carries a weight and confidence to her even though she is shorter than me. There is something about her that is familiar, like home, like an aunt from childhood.
“Ariadne,” she says, as if she’s known me my whole life. She reaches for my face and cups my cheek in her hand. There are rings on her fingers. Gold and silver. I reach my hand up to pull her hand away, to look at it.
“For months now I thought about reaching out,” she says. “And then I saw your name on the list. I thought it might be better in person. To talk about her in person.”
“About Defne,” I say, slowly realizing who this woman might be.
“She was my sister,” says the woman simply.
I feel the sea bursting my heart open. It rushes through me. I hold hands with Defne’s sister. She holds hands with me. Together it feels as though we are holding the sea, and Defne, her life and her death. We hold the place of shifting sands and waters where she would go to remember. We remember for her.
Julian Brave NoiseCat, a writer, powwow dancer, and Oscar nominated filmmaker, opens his debut book, We Survived the Night, with the story of his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, abandoned as a newborn in a garbage burner at the St. Joseph’s Mission School for Indigenous Canadians. St. Joseph’s was one of more than 100 missionary boarding schools where attendance for Indigenous children was made mandatory under Canadian law in 1894 so they could be taught to “unlearn their Indian ways.” Labeled thereafter as the “Garbage Can Kid,” Ed left the Canim Lake Indian Reserve as soon as he was grown and built a career as a semi-famous Indian artist, embracing an itinerant lifestyle that NoiseCat likens to Coyote’s—the folkloric trickster ancestor of the Secwepemc and St’at’imc people who traversed the land, did much good (such as sharing with the Indians the salmon he liberated from the Fraser River) but also was driven by self-interest.
Part memoir, part reported indigenous history, part recounting of the lost folklore tales of Coyote, NoiseCat’s memoir moves from the hurt inflicted by his father, who abandoned him at six years old, to conversation on the intergenerational trauma of colonisation and erasure that has shaped men like his father and created fractured familial structures within Indian communities. He reports on the Tlingit in Southeast Alaska working to save herring from endangerment by the commercial fishing industry; the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina fighting for federal recognition; the continuing exodus of Ouje-Bougoumou Cree from their ancestral lands in Quebec, and other stories that highlight how his people continue to persist
In conversation, Julian tells me he sees his work as trying to write back into strength his people and other Indigenous peoples, to tell their stories that no one else will—stories that are difficult, funny, and ultimately, good. On Zoom, we spoke about the confluence of land and indigenous identity, writing uncomfortable familial truths, contending with the Western facade of freedom and equality, and more.
Bareerah Ghani: In the opening chapter, you write that all indigenous peoples are related but that your humanity remains deeply particular, “tied to our places of origin.” When you identify yourselves in your language, you essentially say, “we are our lands and our lands are us.” I am fascinated by your choice of the word “humanity.” Can you talk about it in connection with how land and indigenous identity are inseparable?
Julian Brave NoiseCat: In my people’s language, as in all of the Salish languages, the root word for people and land are actually one and the same, which has fascinated me ever since I started learning my language about ten or fifteen years ago. There’s this idea that there’s something essential about our humanity that is supposed to be tied to the land and the places that we come from, and perhaps vice versa, that land also lives in some relationship to humanity. I find there is something essential in the view that Native people, that people are supposed to live in relationship to their places. And I think we live in a moment in time wherein we are increasingly alienated from one another and from the land.
BG: When speaking of your own self-discovery, you write, “I’ve been looking out at the Indian world to look within and looking within to look out at that Indian world.” To me, this circles the idea that we exist in community, in relation to one another. Elsewhere, you talk about obligations to relatives as one of the oldest laws indigenous people abide by. I see this in stark juxtaposition to the hyper focus on individualism in Western culture at large. As someone who traverses both cultures, how do you contend with this polarity?
In my people’s language, as in all of the Salish languages, the root word for people and land are actually one and the same.
JBN: I think that’s exactly right, it is implicitly a juxtaposition with the crisis of meaning and connection in Western capitalist civilization right now. I don’t make that explicit very often in the text but, I am a child of two worlds. My father is Secwepemc and St’at’imc, and my mother is an Irish-Jewish New Yorker. If you heard her speak, you could tell. But on my mother’s side of the family, being related to each other doesn’t carry as much weight as it does on my father’s side of the family. We are mostly from Ireland and have a little bit of Hungarian Jewish ancestry, but I’ve never been to the place that my ancestors on that side of the family call home. We don’t really have many family traditions, despite the fact that I’m a writer, and I learned that from my mom, and that that comes from my grandfather, who was also a writer.
Part of what I think Native life in general has to offer the world, and that this book is saying, is that there are ways Native people live in relationship to one another, to the land, to our culture and traditions, to who we are, that are essential for our humanity. In my view, a big part of the crisis in so many individuated, nuclear, family, atomized parts of the Western world has to do with the fact that so many people are cut off from these essential parts of what makes us human.
BG: I’m Pakistani, and our culture is also very family-centric, so it’s been really interesting to find that in your community. I think about my language, how it’s being passed on less and less. When you speak of your ancestral tongue, you note there are fewer fluent speakers. But then you also say, in your ancestral narratives about Coyote, cultural and linguistic death is said to be like sleep. I understood this as a hopeful lens where Indigenous languages and cultures are eternal, that there is more to being Indigenous, that loss of language is not necessarily loss of indigeneity.
JBN: I wrote We Survived the Night at the same time as I directed the documentary Sugarcane alongside Emily Cassie—the documentary is in part about the system that nearly wiped my culture off the face of the earth, as it did with almost all other Indigenous cultures across Canada and the United States. I inevitably thought very purposefully about what parts of my own culture and tradition were nearly killed off, and that I had a responsibility as a storyteller to bring them to life on the page. And so, I see my work in this book as telling these stories, as an act of speaking my family, my people, Indigenous peoples across this land, and our cultures and traditions back into strength by telling real, complicated stories that engage with us in all of our layers and complexity, but ultimately in a way that is filled with love. Ultimately I see a people who, contrary to the entire premise of the colonial project, still have an incredibly beautiful and powerful and meaningful way of life that deserves to be seen as good.
BG: When you write these difficult stories, especially about your relationship with your father and Koko, who you call your second father, I admire the way you are empathetic, offering grace for their behavior and choices, even when those have hurt you deeply. How do you grapple with conflicting emotions or guilt that may surface when speaking uncomfortable truths about family history?
If your culture is an oral culture it can’t be a lecture. Otherwise, nobody’s gonna remember the stories.
JBN: To write this book, I actually made the pretty unusual decision as a 28-year-old bachelor living on the East Coast at the time, to move back in with my dad, who I hadn’t lived with since I was 6 years old, and who still owed me the money I’d loaned him to come to my own high school graduation. I think because we reconnected, I was able to understand him and his story at much greater depth than I had before. While we were living together, during the day, I would be writing We Survived the Night and working on my documentary, including doing a lot of research, and so I started reading—and it really was reading because this oral history has nearly died out—all of these stories about our first trickster forefather, Coyote. I ended up seeing so many parallels between him and my trickster dad. That concept helped me understand my father as both this epic, mythic figure who made my world, and also, a destructive force who left it and left me with a lot of pain. Within our own traditions, there is a very capacious moral outlook and understanding of the paradoxical, contradictory forces that often shape our lives and this world. I think that those stories were always there, in part, to help us understand men like my dad who made our families, but who also created pain in their wake. What I’m trying to suggest is that this tradition, that has nearly been completely forgotten by all human records, actually gets at a lot of the truth that I see in my family, in the indigenous world I’ve reported on, and in the world beyond that. It’s perhaps not a stretch to suggest that this is still a world shaped by tricksters and their tricks.
BG: Can you talk a little about your choice to include the Coyote stories as interspersed narratives within your broader reporting and personal stories?
JBN: I think about the text as a woven narrative, and that’s very intentional—that use of the metaphor of weaving—because for my people, the St’at’imc in particular, my grandfather’s people, weaving is considered the highest art form. Among all Salish people, it’s considered the highest art form. And so the book weaves together memoir, family history, criticism, reportage, and the mythology of the Coyote stories into this sort of woven text that is itself an echo of my great-grandmother’s basket weaving and my great-great-grandmother’s basket weaving. That is to put these ideas from mythology and reporting in conversation very intentionally with the personal lived experiences.
BG: That’s beautiful. That’s what makes this most insightful, a book you’re learning from, because it’s speaking of all this history that doesn’t exist outside of this.
JBN: What I would also say is that the reason why the Coyote stories are so funny and entertaining and have these slapstick elements and this really interesting contradictory figure at their core, is in part to convey the contradictions in our humanity and in the world more broadly, but also to make sure that the story is entertaining. Because if your culture is an oral culture, and it’s essential to pass down parts of what makes you you to the next generation, it can’t be a lecture, you know? Otherwise, nobody’s gonna remember the stories. And I think that piece of it, the narrative quality of the Coyote stories and the oral histories are essential to what has made them endure across thousands and thousands of years.
BG: Speaking of Coyote, at one point you talk about how following your forebears’ path can feel like you’re losing your way. You extend that into conversations about rampant alcoholism and drug use, absentee fathers and broken familial structures, which are all a manifestation of trauma, a pattern that’s passed down generations because of colonization. How do you go about forming new pathways of living while continuing to honor ancestral suffering and sacrifice?
The trickster narrative is an incredibly flexible story that can account for figures like my father, ancient environmental history, and even contemporary trickster politicians.
JBN: What I’m trying to do is capture the full breadth and depth of the lives of the people who have let me in to help tell their stories, whether those be my relatives, my dad, myself, or Native people across Canada and the United States. Part of what is often so frustrating about being a Native person on this land is that we are so often overlooked, and then when we are mentioned, our story is flattened into a story about tragedy and loss. We are often depicted as the poster children of all of the most awful social outcomes that happen here in North America. And while it’s true that we fall to the bottom of every statistical measurement of misery in Canada and the United States, the richness of our lives across this land transcends that. I think that there’s a lot of beauty out in the Native world. There are many consequential political leaders and movements who have and are reshaping big debates in these countries about the environment, politics, culture, and the arts. We deserve and demand to be seen as significant players in the story of a land that was ours for thousands and thousands of years before it was others. And our traditions are often the ones that can capture those stories best. I think that the trickster narrative, for example, is an incredibly flexible kind of story that can account for figures like my father, ancient environmental history, like the creation of the Fraser River and the leading of the first salmon up that river, and even contemporary trickster politicians like Donald Trump. We were always assumed to be people who had nothing really to add to broader human understanding of the world, and I think that the exact opposite is the case.
BG: In your book you bring up Dakota 38, the largest mass execution in US history under Lincoln’s orders, and point out that this country is yet to come to terms with the fact that “its Great Emancipator freed the slaves and hung the Indians in the same week.” It got me thinking about myth-making and false narratives at the core of this nation. How do you contend with this American facade of espousing freedom and equality?
JBN: I think we’re in a moment in time wherein old myths about America as a land of immigrants, as a more tolerant melting pot, as a democracy, a land of opportunity, are very much falling by the wayside. I think that that has led to a broader crisis of meaning. What is the story of this land and this country? In that search, I would humbly suggest we turn to the First People and stories of this land to understand it. There’s a surprising amount of richness that stories that were nearly killed off by colonization but somehow still persist can bring to our conversation about what it is to be upon this land. Not just as Indigenous peoples, but as all people on this land. That has often been very much discounted. The story of Thanksgiving, for example, is one of the founding myths of this country and what’s really happening in that story is that the Natives were kind enough to let these starving pilgrims come over for a feast. That’s such a Native thing to do, such a generous act between neighbors, and of course, even those basics of the story are not remembered that way. There are countless other examples.
Part of what I’m trying to do, especially in the reported parts of the book, is to show how Native stories and the presence of Native people can reshape our understanding of these big ideas and myths about what it is to be American. For example, myths of race, assimilation, and colonization can add depth, not only to our understanding of Native people, but to our understanding of this place more broadly.
The word divorce is never far from our consciousness. There are the celebrity divorces that constantly loop in the news cycle, and marriage counselors all over social media offering tips and tricks to maintain a healthy marriage and avoid divorce. Now, more than ever, we also have divorce memoirs, a subset of which, written by women prioritizing happiness over staying in bad marriages, are hitting best-seller lists.
When I was going through my own divorce, I was desperate to read real-life stories of women like me who were leaving their marriages to find their own version of happiness, control, and empowerment. I read all the self-help books, I vented to my therapist and friends, and I journaled all my fears and anxieties about what life on the other side of divorce would look like for me. Yet somehow, I was unable to find memoirs I could relate to, memoirs I could see myself in, memoirs that offered a sense of hope that I would not simply survive divorce, but thrive. It wasn’t until I started writing my military divorce memoir, Camouflage, that I stumbled upon the books I was once searching for. Their backdrops and circumstances vary, but each book includes universal truths, emotions that mirror my experiences, provide a sense of community, and validate all the reasons I chose to walk away from my marriage.
The following reading list includes books I wish I’d had access to throughout my divorce process. These authors tell deeply personal stories in gorgeous prose, and in some cases, turn to research and interviews in order to connect their own experiences to broader cultural issues. They all offer hope for women that divorce isn’t a life-altering ending, but a beginning, a path to a new life, a chance at reinvention and endless possibilities. For these women, life after divorce is empowering.
In her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Smith uses her skills as a poet to pen lyrical vignettes describing how her marriage ended in divorce and she was thrust into the role of a single mother to her two young children. Her story starts with a pinecone her husband brings home from a business trip, which leads to the heartbreaking discovery that he’s keeping secrets. Smith uses an unconventional structure, sometimes addressing the reader directly, to reevaluate red flags throughout her marriage, such as her husband’s resentment toward her professional success, and ultimately arrives at a fresh, cathartic perspective. Infused with commentary on gender roles, family, and work, You Could Make This Place Beautiful isn’t simply a divorce memoir, but a relatable and hard-fought journey about coping with unexpected life events and rediscovering ourselves.
After moving with her artist husband from New York City to rural Pennsylvania, having children, and opening a bookstore, McMasters discovers that her life isn’t as picturesque as it seems and decides to end her marriage and start over in the suburbs. In this memoir in essays that uses setting as a character, McMasters writes introspectively about her crumbling marriage, her divorce, parenthood, ambition, and identity as she nears middle age. As its title suggests, McMasters highlights a variety of types of leaving: leaving a marriage, leaving a home, leaving a location, leaving a job, leaving people. Filled with reflection on what home means and hope for the possibility of endings transforming into beginnings, The Leaving Season nurtures the idea that renewal and rebuilding a new life for ourselves is possible.
One look at the cover of Lyz Lenz’ This American Ex-Wife leaves little doubt about her tone: a wedding dress in flames. After Lenz reaches a breaking point, she decides to end her twelve-year marriage. As she escapes her unhappiness and embraces her new life on her own, she realizes there are advantages to getting divorced. This fierce memoir details the lead up to Lenz’ divorce, while flipping the script on the common narrative that divorce is synonymous with failure. Instead, Lenz makes a case for the power of divorce, the taking back of women’s control and equality as they put their own happiness first. Hers isn’t just a memoir, it’s a manifesto that incorporates research, statistics, and interviews, a cultural critique of the institution of American heterosexual marriage that urges readers to understand that divorce “requires learning to reimagine happiness beyond what everyone told you it should look like.”
In her debut memoir, Jamison writes with wisdom and graceful prose about the end of her marriage, her life as a single mother to a toddler, her career ambitions, and dating in the aftermath of divorce. As she faces this new stage in her life and focuses on her intense love for her young daughter, she also examines her parents, motherhood, and the complicated nature of romantic relationships. Jamison explores these and other themes, including finding joy after loss, the struggle of starting over, and grappling with a sense of self when that self seems to be splintered off in too many directions. As she so eloquently writes, “If you ever feel like you’re in the wrong story, leave.”
No relationship or friendship is perfect. Sometimes love runs its course. Sometimes we outgrow people. In Hannah Pittard’s case, everything happens all at once. This genre-bending memoir cleverly combines fact and fiction as Pittard tells the story of her discovery that her husband is having an affair with her best friend, which results in the end of her marriage and her long friendship with a woman she trusted. With humor and candor, Pittard shares real exchanges and fills in the blanks of her knowledge with speculation as she analyzes what went wrong. We Are Too Many pulls readers into a fast-paced, time-jumping narrative about the demise of a marriage, betrayal, broken trust, and starting over while coping with heartbreak. The fact that this memoir is told through dialogue creates the illusion that we’re part of the conversations, experiencing the emotions right alongside the author. But even as it shows how complicated relationships and female friendships can be, this book also reminds us that it’s possible to find humor in dark times.
This Story Will Change tells the story of Crane’s marriage and its end with humor, wisdom, and a unique stream of consciousness style that blends short vignettes and a third-person point of view. When Crane’s husband of fifteen years unexpectedly confesses that he’s unhappy in their marriage, she suddenly finds herself in couples counseling and living in an apartment with a friend, searching for answers amidst confusion and deep-diving into what went wrong in order to heal. Crane’s nonlinear method of storytelling mimics the nonlinear nature of breakups and the disorienting, discordant, often confusing blend of messy emotions associated with divorce and heartache. The title itself is the ultimate chef’s kiss, because as anyone who has gone through a divorce knows, the story, the lessons learned, the takeaways, and the big feelings will all change with the passage of time.
After her divorce, Anelise Chen’s mother makes a texting typo, telling her to “clam down.” As a result of this unintentionally humorous advice, Chen transforms herself into a “clam.” What follows is an investigation through introspection and research into what it means to withdraw, hide, remain silent, and protect ourselves. Chen uses experimental and various points of view, including different types of clams and interviews with her immigrant father who disappeared earlier in her life, to create a memoir that reads like fiction while also giving readers the sense that maybe the author felt safer telling her story in someone else’s voice. Incorporating threads of art, history, literature, and science, Clam Down brings novelistic breadth to discussions of family dynamics and forgiveness, adaptation and survival, transformation and connectedness, and learning from the past.
Blow Your House Down is an unapologetically honest personal story threaded through with cultural criticism. Despite appearing to have the perfect family, Gina Frangello’s realization that she’s unhappy in her marriage pushes her to a secret life—a passionate extramarital affair. As the affair destroys her marriage and leads to divorce, Frangello also finds herself grieving the death of her best friend, struggling with chronic illness, caring for elderly parents, and parenting three children of her own. Frangello doesn’t hold anything back as she details her path to living an authentic life that’s paved with the exploration of female sexuality and rage. The resultant memoir dives into feminism, love, motherhood, pain, self-discovery, and what it means to be good.
When her long marriage abruptly ends, Florence Williams employs her skills as a journalist to search for the scientific meaning behind heartbreak, grief, and loneliness. The result is a hybrid memoir that brings together personal introspection, social commentary, and science journalism. It all starts when Williams lands herself in the hospital with unexplained weight loss, lack of sleep, and ultimately a Type 1 diabetes diagnosis. She then goes on a quest to understand and heal the physical effects of divorce. Her methods are wide ranging and unorthodox. There’s bloodwork to find genetic markers of grief, meditation, spending time in the wilderness, and psychedelic drug therapies. At its core, Heartbreak reminds us that grief and trauma affects our body in more ways than we may think.
The debut novels we are featuring this fall are remarkably different in almost every possible aspect. One, Underspin, is a polyphonic novel that roves across perspectives surrounding a circuit of competitive table tennis players in the 2000s. Another, Boy from the North Country, moves between the present in a pastoral house in the Hudson Valley—where the narrator is raised by his mother—and the 1970s in a rent-stabilized Manhattan apartment frequented by Bob Dylan. The third, The Endless Week, is a novel immersed in the dialogue of thought that focuses on two siblings in search of their lost mother—while a slipstream of phrases, aphorisms, and proverbs left by their father follows them through an estranged language of ghosts and the internet.
Despite structural, tonal, thematic, and stylistic differences, these three authors share a great appreciation for harmonizing their characters’ voices and a fascination with the way the counter-experiences of play and grief can resonate and ricochet off of one another. From table tennis to painting to poetry, the characters in these novels demonstrate a deep need and desire to become almost child-like in their creative or competitive natures. By returning to a place of innocence and curiosity, they ask what it really means to win and whether there is an absolute purpose to art-making. In different ways, each author’s exploration becomes a source or path towards healing, remembering, and honoring a loved one. Ultimately, across their many divergences, these authors do seem to overlap in one instance. Through the interweaving of voices, ideas, egos, and personalities, they have each developed a plurality of narrators that come together to create a coherent and glistening web: the book.
This fall, E.Y. Zhao, author of Underspin; Sam Sussman, author of Boy from the North Country; and Laura Vazquez, author of The Endless Week are our craft interview debut novelists. In our discussions, we touched on the initial inspirations behind their projects, the many different consciousnesses a narrator embodies, and the idea of revision as a construction site.
Kyla D. Walker: What was the research process for the novel like and have you ever been involved in the competitive table tennis circuit?
E.Y. Zhao: I trained and played competitively in American tournaments from the ages of 9 to 15, then basically quit because school took up too much time and I’d burned out. I played freshman year of college and the second year of my MFA, competing in the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association with my club teams, but since then the most I’ve played is for book-related research and events.
At its most intense, my training looked like twelve combined weekly hours of group sessions, private sessions, and competition time at the St. Louis Table Tennis Club, and two months over the summer when I’d train six hours a day. My coach ran a practice out of her basement in Chesterfield, Missouri, and my parents would drive me an hour’s round-trip after dinner. I’d compete in tournaments once every third month, probably, a lot around the Midwest, and twice a year at the big national tournaments in Vegas and Baltimore. But compared to kids who were at the top, that’s nothing. So I brought all that lived experience and my general sense of inadequacy to the novel.
To write the book specifically, I traveled to Düsseldorf, one of the world’s table tennis capitals, and interviewed players and managers at the Bundesliga team Borussia Düsseldorf. I also played in the amateur clubs at Borussia Düsseldorf and TTC Champions Düsseldorf. I wanted to understand pros better, their psychologies and concerns; turns out they’re beyond my imagination. I asked Dang Qiu, who I remember being just outside the Top 10, what he needed to improve to break through, and he kind of gave me a blank stare. Because at that level there are still technical tweaks, sure—see Coco Gauff changing her serve, for example—but everyone is fast and consistent with sufficient technique; so much of it is psychological, tactical, philosophical.
Returning to table tennis ten years after I quit competing has been fascinating and emotionally charged, to an unexpected degree. I’m more mature, but the feelings of insufficiency welled up faster than I’d expected. It’s given me a chance to refine and reexamine those feelings on the page. On the other hand, the community aspect, which was always my favorite part and not fully in my control when I was a kid who couldn’t drive or dictate her time, has deepened in a poignant way. I’m writing to you from Paris, where I spontaneously met the founders of Ping Pang Paris, a ping-pong social space. They range in background from national team players to newbies, but—unlike when I was a kid—their place in and love for the sport is not contingent on skill level. There was so much pressure to perform when I was younger, and now I finally savor the enjoyment and freedom I observed in table tennis-playing adults around me. It’s really bittersweet.
KW: Admittedly, table tennis is a very different sport from tennis. However, there are similarities and overlapping philosophies, and recently it feels as though pop culture has been fixated on tennis as well as the personalities behind the players. How has this and previous art around tennis (such as Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest) affected or influenced the novel, if at all?
EZ: One of my early influences was tennis star Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open, which came out in 2012. What struck me about Open was Agassi’s doubt and abjection. I first read it when I was twelve and already behind where I felt I should be as a player. There were no table tennis novels or memoirs accessible to me (and very few in general), and it was comforting to recognize myself in Agassi’s depiction of himself as a scared, lonely, bullied pre-teen. Even when he wins majors, he kind of glosses it by; as he writes, losses are more memorable and striking.
Beyond Agassi, art about tennis didn’t influence Underspin all that much. Maybe because I haven’t read Infinite Jest, but also because tennis is the “more winning,” the more glamorous, and the ethos of American table tennis to me was its grunginess, scrappiness, and outsiderness. I know there’s plenty of that on the tennis challenger circuit, for example, and those aspects of Challengers the movie resonated, but part of my motivation to write Underspin was portraying this underdog atmosphere.
A bit more on David Foster Wallace: It’s not just that I haven’t read InfiniteJest, but his general orientation toward tennis (in his essays) feels different than mine toward table tennis. He’s writing with not just belief in genius and transcendence, but belief (or delusion?) that he can somehow describe or analyze his way into it. Underspin depends on a few postulates: 1) The spectators who narrate the book can’t understand their idol, Ryan Lo, 2) the idol is enthralling for being flawed, 3) table tennis is a bit abject. So the pure, deranged, worshipful excess of the Federer essay did not belong in my writing universe.
Even now that table tennis has gained some standing after the Paris Olympics, you can glean the vibe from the fact that current World No. 1, Wang Chuqin, is lovingly called “Big Head,” and the World No. 1 before him, Fan Zhendong, was known as “Little Fatty.” No god-like nomenclature here.
KW: What was your favorite part of the writing process for this project?
EZ: Underspin is a bit of a tribute album. Every chapter recognizably calls on at least one writer. Herr Doktor Eckert’s chapter is Ishiguro. Susanne and Kagin borrow from A Visit from the Goon Squad. Kevin and Co. are from Mariana Enríquez. Kristian emerges from Adam Johnson’s “Dark Meadow.” I won’t generate the whole list, I want people to identify their own beloved writers as well, but I loved paying homage to the geniuses who made me a reader and writer.
KW: In Underspin, each chapter shifts to a different character’s perspective—sometimes in 3rd person POV, sometimes in 1st, even once in collective 1st—what was the most difficult part about this? And how did you decide on the style of POV for each character/chapter?
EZ: Here’s my shorthand for POV:
Present tense: The consequences of the moment are not yet available within the story.
First person: The motor / heart of the story is dramatic irony, tension between what the reader can understand and what the narrator is willing to say.
I drafted POVs instinctively and my first choice was correct for everyone but Kristian, which could either mean I did all right or I’m too stubborn to revise POV and you shouldn’t listen to anything I say. For Kristian, I initially jammed him in a shifting third-person story because I was afraid of what I’d have to write if I got “into his head.” Interestingly, I learned through writing Underspin that first-person can be the more “distant” point of view because of what the narrator withholds. As the writer, you ostensibly understand on some level what they are withholding, but you also participate in their self-occlusion.
It wasn’t hard to “switch,” per se; the most difficult aspect was probably finding an agent and editor who’d take a book switching POVs every twenty pages. But I did have a writer who read the manuscript for a contest say I didn’t really know how to write close-third. That stung, but hopefully it’s gotten better since then…
KW: How has your writing process or relationship to your writing evolved over time and especially after finishing Underspin?
EZ: I wrote twice as much material as made the final cut, and as a stubborn person with a fragile ego, it’s made me so much more comfortable with revision. I go into a draft knowing I’ll rewrite it at least a couple of times and trying to cherish that first-draft encounter for itself. Every round of revision brings something different and to get through the querying, submission, and publication process, I had to learn to enjoy that.
Kyla D. Walker: When was the moment you felt ready to begin writing Boy from the North Country? And what was that initial spark—such as an opening sentence, scene, or possibly the end—that kicked off the novel?
Sam Sussman: Boy from the North Country is a tribute to my mother. After her death, I knew that I needed to write about her life. It took years for me to begin. Around the one year anniversary of her death, I decided to take seven days away from the world. I read, wrote, painted, meditated, reflected on her life and mine. This became an annual tradition for me. Every year, between September 9 to 16, I would take off from work, power down my computer and phone, and spend those uninterrupted days at home, in the house where I grew up, outside Goshen, in the Hudson Valley. I found this time restorative and healing. One afternoon in the third year of this ritual, in September 2020, I was painting outside. The easel was set on the hill, overlooking the valley. As I moved the paintbrush across the canvas, I thought of a story my mother once told me about something that happened to her in a painting class when she was a young woman. I set down the brush, walked inside, and began to write.
KW: How did the settings of upstate New York and Manhattan help sculpt the story or shift the prose?
SS: Places are archives of memories and meaning. I was lucky to write Boy from the North Country in the two places in which it is set, the house in the Hudson Valley where my mother raised me, and the rent-stabilized apartment in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan that my mother lived in beginning in the 1970s, and in which I now live. Each of these places are part of me, and I knew that Boy from the North Country would be a more powerful novel if I could capture their magic. The swaying pine trees. The howl of the coyote. The echo of the freight train that runs along the tracks down the valley. This is the soundtrack of my life in this home. My memories of childhood, of my mother reading to me on warm summer afternoons, of the last weeks of her life, which we spent here; all this I wanted to raise out of the landscape, the hills, the floorboards, and set into the book.
The apartment in New York has its own majesty. My mother lived in that apartment when she was pursuing her own life as an artist, before she was my mother. I felt us living here together, our lives in parallel, decades apart. Writing about that period of her life made me feel closer to her. Then there’s the added detail that her romantic relationship with Dylan began when she lived here, and he wrote part of Blood on the Tracks in this apartment. So on those nights when I wrote the chapters centered on their relationship, here in the apartment, space, time, and memory all seemed to come together.
KW: Evan’s mother plays such a huge, poignant role in the novel. This goes even further in the mesmeric Chapter Eight, where the novel’s consciousness belongs to her. What were some of the things you did to capture her voice and perspective on the page?
SS: The concept of “autofiction” is often invoked to describe a writer transferring her life into literature. For me, the “auto” has to be larger than the self. We are all the people we have loved and who have loved us. For me, writing a novel about my life meant writing a novel that draws on my mother’s life and wisdom. After her death, I learned that loss brings us closer to people in unexpected ways. She wasn’t here to speak to me, so I had to think more deeply than ever before about her choices and values. I had to become a more careful student of her life. Writing a novel drawn from our lives was a way of spending more time with her. She was also a writer, and had spent the last decade of her life writing a column for the regional newspaper. I reread her essays, and in some cases even wove her written words directly into mine. You could say there are parts of Boy from the North Country that we wrote together.
KW: Through writing a novel that so deeply explores the ideas of memory’s reliability and the stories that get passed down to us about who we are, do you feel you learned more about truth, beauty, and/or your own self in a significant way?
SS: My mother used to say, “There are two stories to every life.” She meant that our lives become the story that we tell about ourselves. This isn’t about the facts of our lives, or the reliability of memory; it’s about how we relate to facts and memories. We can tell the story of our life with love or bitterness, resentment or redemption, anguish or faith. That choice becomes who we are. My mother suffered many difficulties in her life. She used to say, “We are here to take the pieces of the universe we have been given, burnish them with love, and return them in better condition than we received.” Her death was the most difficult piece of the universe that I have received. Writing this novel was my way of burnishing her death with love and returning this devastating experience to the universe in better condition than I received it, with the hope that it finds other people who have lived through their own grief and feel uplifted by a story in which love is greater than loss. Of all the stories we can tell of our lives, that is the one by which I choose to live.
Kyla D. Walker: What was the genesis of or inspiration for The Endless Week?
Laura Vazquez: La semaine perpétuelle is a book I began writing during a residency at the Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. It originates from several distinct figures, a young boy in his bedroom watching internet videos, a very old woman, bedridden and obese, who can no longer speak, a man living alone, obsessed with cleanliness, a young girl who sings in online videos, and a young man living in a water-damaged shared apartment, using drugs. Each of these figures possesses a voice. I simply had to follow each of these voices—they intertwined and created the book.
KW: How did you decide on the structure for the novel?
LV: The structure was imposed by the text itself, by the interweaving of voices. It resembles the root system of trees, it unfolds in branches, these branches intersect, touch one another. As always in my books, the structure imposed itself naturally, through the text, through the voices in the text, through their particular rhythm, their musicality, their movement.
KW: What did revision look like for this project?
LV: An immense construction site. In reality, when I write a book, there’s a first draft that follows, that attempts to follow all the paths, all the writing directions. This first draft is about one and a half to two times longer than the final text, that’s what happened for this book. So I reread and corrected this text dozens of times until reaching the final form. I know the final form is there when my corrections risk damaging the text and when I myself decide the orientation of things, when it’s no longer the text that decides. It’s a subtle moment to pass through, very subtle, but ultimately you just have to listen to the text. It’s the text that knows.
KW: How has your previous background in poetry influenced your prose?
LV: I think poetry can do everything. It makes poetry, books of poetry, but it also makes novels, narrative texts, it also makes theater, it can make investigations, documentary texts. Poetry is capable of taking on all forms, and it’s only poetry that interests me. My first books were identified as pure poetry books. It was later that I began writing narrative texts. It’s always poetry I’m seeking in writing, it’s all that interests me in a text.
KW: What was your favorite part of the writing process for The Endless Week?
LV: I don’t really have a favorite, but there are some parts I felt more deeply than others. I believe there are two parts that had a concrete and powerful effect on me. First, the sorts of songs, prayers that Sara makes to the grandmother who is bedridden and cannot speak. These sorts of prayers, love songs to the grandmother, have at moments an almost carnal sensation. Then, the grandmother’s monologues—she’s in dialogue with the past and the future. She hears the past and the future in her body. And then there’s this moment where the grandmother sees pain and the pain leaves her body. And then she has pity for the pain. That was a very intense writing moment.
The truth is that I have always been impatient with real life, with its tedium, and its pettiness, its flossing and flushing, its what’s-for-dinner, and how-you-doing [. . .] It is why I was not so good at marriage, and better at having short affairs. You got the passion and the yearning, the magic and the mystery, the heightened emotion, and the febrile love-making, without garbage, dishes, or casual flatulence. Perfection and transcendence, in so far as these things are achievable, (and, of course, they are, by their very natures, not), is what I craved. The sublime, in all its swirling, cloud-lit, overwrought, mountain-top, Gothic ruination, with all its silliness and pretension, its awesomeness and sentimentality—I wanted more of that, please. And, never mind its ridiculous, adolescent jerk-off tendencies, I never really outgrew it.
–Mom, aka Katherine Min, from her essay “On Being a Sprinter”
Mom loved pork sausage, ice cream, high-fat foods that my health-obsessed dad—a former tennis star—looked upon with a pained-saint face. (“Think about your arteries,” he’d say). Every time Mom and I went grocery shopping, we stopped at McDonald’s for milkshakes and French fries, with the tacit understanding not to mention it to my dad, throwing our trash in the bin in the garage, low-key hiding it, not because he would be angry but because his sad disapproval with martyr undertones was unpleasant to behold.
Mom would take me out to lunch at our small town’s one deli and we wouldn’t mention it to my dad, coming home heavy with salami grease, buoyant with root beer bubbles. Meanwhile Dad would eat leftover beans he made for lunch, to save both money and his arteries.
Mom would take me clothes shopping and say “fuck it” and buy the two of us fun and beautiful outfits that I suspected we couldn’t afford. Mom would say “Don’t you worry about that” in a warning tone on the few occasions when I asked if an item was too expensive.
I mostly felt like this was all fine: My dad enjoyed his frugality and health-nut-ness; Mom and I enjoyed our indulgences; everybody won. Except when I got older, Mom confided in me about credit card debt. I thought the concept of debt sounded scary—wasn’t that how people lost their cars and homes?—but I didn’t really know anything; Mom didn’t share specifics. I should’ve been more vigilant, I thought, should’ve said no to more outfits. I did my best to repress my feelings of guilt and fear. (Not to brag, but I’m pretty good at repressing feelings). I kept going with Mom to restaurants and clothing stores. It just felt heavier, more complicated, than before.
In my adulthood, I have always had a gut reaction to credit card debt the way some people might feel about, say, ebola. Horrifying, intolerable, to be avoided at all costs. This feeling came from my early experiences with Mom, yes, but also, I suspect . . . from Madame Bovary.
Mom and I used to read novels out loud together, on evenings and weekends, from when I was little until I left for college. We read Madame Bovary (in English) when I was fourteen or so.
In my adulthood, I have always had a gut reaction to credit card debt the way some people might feel about, say, ebola.
As I remember it: Madame Bovary is married to a man whose biggest vice is being kinda boring. Monsieur Bovary works as a doctor. She stays home, as one did in the 1800s. She has a baby girl named Berthe. She’s irritable, finds the baby annoying, finds her duties taking care of the home annoying. She’s bored. An unctuous moneylender talks her into buying luxurious clothes and fancy curtains and other home decorations on credit. This eases her boredom somewhat. She enters into a passionate affair with an aristocratic fuck-boy, which also helps ease her boredom. Eventually, her debt moves past the point of no return. The moneylender informs her that unless she comes up with an impossibly large sum of money in a few days, Monsieur Bovary’s home and business will be repossessed—or something. The family is ruined. She really doesn’t want to tell her husband this. She asks the aristocratic fuck-boy for the money; he declines. [Spoiler alert!:] She kills herself.
I could hear the tenderness, the reverence, in Mom’s voice as she read aloud. We’d stop here and there to discuss. As I remember it, Mom’s authentic gut reaction to the novel was along the lines of: Hell yeah! Fuck the patriarchy, fuck living the small-town housewife life that everyone expects you to live. Go ahead and buy those fancy curtains! Sleep with that sleazy aristocrat! Get it, girl! Who cares if you look ridiculous, if the moneylender and the aristocrat and the townspeople make dismissive comments about your stupidity behind your back. Who the fuck cares? Life is dreary; get your kicks while you can! She saw in Madame Bovary a kindred spirit.
As for me, at age 14 or so, my authentic gut reaction was three-fold:
I’m surprised Mom feels the way she does. I want to learn from her reaction. It seems like she’s saying we must not sneer at people for being impractical, or unsatisfied with the status quo, or unwilling/unable to play by the rules, people who do extreme, ridiculous, unwise things motivated by an unruly yearning for more. (More of what? It doesn’t matter, just more.) It seems like she’s saying we should respect words like ‘transcendence’ and ‘longing,’ respect impulsivity and throwing caution to the wind. Ok, interesting; message received. I agree that let’s not sneer at Madame B the way some of the townspeople in the novel do.
But also . . . I’m supposed to connect with someone who’s brought down by curtains? I want to see myself in Madame B—as Mom clearly does—I want to believe I’ll become like her, like both of them, when I grow up, but . . . curtains? Isn’t yearning for fancy curtains simply materialism? What’s so lofty about that? And it hurts my budding feminism the way the moneylender and the aristocrat and the townspeople laugh at Madame B for being stupid. How horrible not to be seen as smart! She makes it too easy for them. If she had acted more intelligently, she could’ve commanded their respect, or at least avoided their derision. (Like me in our small New Hampshire town, in high school, assiduously demanding my classmates’ and teachers’ respect by getting impeccably good grades and carrying myself with impeccable aloof dignity. 14-year-old me felt it was very, very important to be respected.) And what’s so great about Madame B’s grumpiness and brutal disregard for her husband and child? Why couldn’t she have just, I don’t know, spent less money and found a more sustainable way of living?
Uh oh. Why is my authentic reaction so different from Mom’s?
Mom divorced my dad when I was in college, when she was a couple years into writing her novel The Fetishist. Mom was single for a while, bouncing around having bad experiences on dating apps. Then she met my stepdad and they lived happily ever after, as it were, until her death from cancer ten years later.
I recognize both Madame Bovary and Mom in the character of Emi from her novel, The Fetishist. Emi is a Japanese American classical violinist. She plunges into an affair with a sexy, emotionally unavailable fellow musician. The sex is transcendent. Emi divorces her husband of many years (who, like Monsieur Bovary, is a minor character in the background of his wife’s story), so she and her lover can be together. When the lover subsequently rejects her, Emi is so heartbroken she descends into alcoholism and, despite her daughter’s efforts to care for her, ends up killing herself.
When I read the scenes of Emi wasting away in her nightgown before her suicide, with her mug of Bailey’s, wailing about how she is no longer beautiful, as her daughter strokes her back and murmurs to her, I can’t help imagining that Mom was imagining an alternate ending to her own story—the worst-case-scenario of impulsivity and a divorce in middle-age.
Despite what some might call Emi’s abject pathetic-ness (actually, because of it), we feel the author’s tender connection to her character. Similar to Flaubert, who is rumored to have said “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Emi, c’est Mom. (Though of course it’s not a one-to-one, and Emi isn’t the character from The Fetishist who Mom most resembles.) Both Mom and Emi possess that itchy incurable dissatisfaction with being cautious, the impulse to pitch oneself headlong into the pursuit of pleasure and transcendence, come what may.
Except Mom didn’t have a tragic suicidal ending. She had a different tragic ending.
In the hospice center at the end of her life, she said she wished she had more money to leave me, but she was proud to have gotten out of consumer debt before she died, and to have a 401k to split among her loved ones. “Don’t save your share for retirement!” she said. “Spend it on something fun!” She was completely serious and a little indignant, probably sensing that my frugal ass would not obey.
She hugged her polite, studious teenage nephews. She whispered her deathbed wisdom/advice/command into their ears: “Party more.”
It’s spring of 2025, and I’m in the Philippines visiting a dear writer-friend who I met in my MFA program. I bought the flights before I found out I was being laid off from the teaching job that I’ve had for 12 years. When I found out about the layoff, I panicked, checked if the ticket was non-refundable (it was), tried to crunch numbers, chastised myself for being irresponsible. My fear was disproportionate; I have enough savings to cover it. My fear was about losing more than money—it was about losing self-control, perhaps, or safety. I soothed myself by saying: Everything will be cheap once I get there.
My friend and I spend a few days on a small island a couple of hours south of Manila. We write in a cute little coffee shop across from our hotel each morning, then explore the island by motorbike each afternoon, zooming past lush tropical foliage and befuddled cows and dogs with proudly dangling nipples.
It’s hard to remember when she first disclosed this or that, what age I was. I don’t remember when she first told me she struggled with suicidal thoughts.
“I started a new essay!” I tell her excitedly over matcha lattes at the end of a writing session. “It turns out I have a lot of thoughts about Madame Bovary!”
There’s a silence, then we both burst out laughing at my earnestness, at how unintentionally pretentious I just sounded. “I have a lot of thoughts about Madame Bovary!” one of us trumpets to the other at random moments throughout the rest of our stay, our giggles dissipating in the salty humid air.
Mom confided in me about a lot of things, starting when I was a child. It’s hard to remember when she first disclosed this or that, what age I was. I don’t remember when she first told me she struggled with suicidal thoughts. I remember rows of prescription pill bottles lining her bedside table, the same one where our stack of books awaited us, picked out lovingly by her, the primordial TBR list.
I remember her telling me frankly and unselfconsciously about her depression and anxiety, about taking/needing high levels of mental-health medication, and about the niggling, tingling little thought that sometimes glittered and pestered in her mind—the knowledge that she could end her life by taking more than the prescribed amount of these pills.
I don’t remember feeling upset with her for having suicidal thoughts, or for sharing this fact with me. (Do you trust me when I say this? Should I trust myself?) What I remember is feeling special, chosen, touched that she trusted me with a sensitive secret. I felt respected.
I don’t remember consciously fearing Mom would leave us via suicide—though I must have. When I think of my deep fear of overspending, I suspect that in my mind, credit card debt became sneakily tangled up with losing my impulsive, extravagant, not-so-practical Mom. Madame Bovary wove a string of equivalences in my mind: pursuing pleasure = becoming broke and getting laughed at = death. The fact that Mom was so sympathetic to Madame B was another strand in the tangle. Mom took pride in being similar to Flaubert’s protagonist, in not being satisfied, in not accepting drudgery or living at a cautious pace. Of course I must’ve feared losing her to her row of pill bottles, even if I suppressed this fear.
As an adult, I have always been extremely frugal. I struggle to be less frugal. Sometimes I put off grocery shopping; I eat canned tuna or eggs or ramen for just one more day, just one more, because less-frequent grocery shopping means a lower monthly expenditure. Sometimes I go to great lengths to walk, bike, or take inconvenient public transit when my (used, 250k miles, twenty-year-old) car is in the shop, to avoid spending money on Lyfts. I regularly wear clothes and make-up that I’ve owned for ten or even twenty years.
So far I’ve always been a low-earner—the only jobs I’ve had for sizable lengths of time are waitress and ESL teacher. But still. I am more frugal than I need to be. The idea of spending too much, of one day finding myself destitute, of having to admit my destitution to others, of one day having someone smart with money like Madame B’s moneylender make a derisive comment about my stupidity, fills me with panicky shame and oceanic fear. A shadowy corner of my mind still associates overspending with humiliation and death.
In the café in the Philippines, as I turn Flaubert’s story over and over in my mind, I think I am writing an essay about Madame B. I think about how much sympathy Mom had for her. Then something clicks in my mind. If you consider the story from another point of view: Monsieur Bovary marries a young woman, treats her kindly, trusts her with the household finances, works to provide for her, and returns from work one day to learn she has ruined him financially and offed herself, leaving him impoverished and alone with their kid.
We feel sympathy for this guy, right?
Except Flaubert doesn’t seem to. The novel’s lens stays zoomed in on the enormity of Madame B’s emotional experience. Monsieur B skulks around in soft focus in the background, hardly more than an extra. We don’t hate him; he isn’t interesting enough to hate. He is simply, devastatingly, unimportant to the author. And to most readers. It’s taken over two decades since first reading the novel for me to even consider, and only because I’m writing this essay (“I have a lot of thoughts about Madame Bovary!”) that maybe one ought to, I don’t know, have some sympathy for the guy. When Mom and I were reading aloud, I don’t remember her sparing any thoughts for him.
Therein lies a dark side to Mom’s reaction to Madame Bovary, which I absorbed at 14: We don’t care about the suffering of Monsieur B or Berthe (the unfortunate daughter, whom Madame B finds so tiresome for having normal baby needs). They are civilians. They are boring. Madame B is Interesting. We care about the lofty suffering of the Interesting. We don’t care about boring civilians. Their suffering doesn’t really matter.
As I observed and learned from Mom’s reaction to Madame Bovary, I developed a fear of one day proving to be a boring civilian myself.
Mom divorced my dad when I was 22. As I observed the slow-burn leading to the divorce, in my late high school through college years, as Mom confided in me about it, it was impossible not to notice that Mom saw my dad as a civilian. Like Monsieur B, he was patient and kind. He let her spend their communal money even when it resulted in credit card debt, with little more than a disapproving tut-tut. (Not a perfect analogy, for many reasons. One is that Mom worked full-time, whereas Madame B did not.) Like Monsieur B, my dad’s suffering didn’t seem to matter much.
We care about the lofty suffering of the Interesting. We don’t care about boring civilians.
“Maybe there are two kinds of people in this world,” Mom said once, in a dreamy thinking-aloud tone, “the really interesting ones and the others, who are just lucky to get to be around them.”
She said this when I was a teenager, when her marriage to my dad was at a particularly rocky moment. (The general picture was always the same: She was dissatisfied; he urged her to stay. She disrespected him; he still urged her to stay.) I knew she was talking about herself as one of the really interesting ones and my dad as one of the “just lucky to be around them” ones. I felt a full body disgust and a hot pressure-building sensation that I couldn’t name back then, couldn’t recognize, as anger. That’s gross, I thought but didn’t say, opting instead for a sullen nod. I wasn’t sure why I thought it was gross. That’s part of why I didn’t try to voice it. Instead, I suppressed it and filed the moment away in my mental filing cabinet, in the bulging folder marked “To Brood Over in Silence.”
So many moments in my life when I’m angry and can’t even name it and am actively suppressing it because I’m scared to hear what the anger might want to tell me. Because I’m worried someone I love will see the anger as a sign that I’m boring and conventional, I’m not one of “the really interesting ones.” I worry the anger means I’m tiresome and predictable—snot-nosed baby Berthe howling for milk. I worry if I admit I am suffering, I will learn that my suffering doesn’t matter. I worry I’ll lose Mom’s trust, her respect, our closeness—my most prized, most beloved treasures.
I explain to my friend over juicy glistening tocino with rice and egg that in my Madame Bovary essay, I am exploring a binary in my mind: between the Really Interesting Ones (a special group I count myself among but am scared of being cast out of) and Boring Civilians.
“I know this binary is immature. It’s juvenile to think of the world this way,” I tell my friend. “And therefore the essay is better if I can end by saying, ‘I don’t think that way anymore. I’ve evolved past it. I love myself now.’” I shovel a bite of sweet pork into my mouth, flushing from more than just the weak A/C of the coffeeshop.
“Have you?” my friend asks. “Or, I mean, do you?”
I use chewing as an excuse not to answer.
I still don’t have enough sympathy for Monsieur B. It took me over two decades to even consider that maybe I should. I know intellectually I should feel bad for him, but I don’t feel it in my dark pulsing hot-blooded heart. Or rather, I don’t let myself feel it.
Maybe I’m still a confused fourteen-year-old, scared that if I feel sympathy for him, then the “cool kids,” the Interesting Ones, my mom, will write me off as being similar to him. There’s an element of schoolyard cruelty in this: Children often opt not to show sympathy for an ‘uncool’ kid for fear of being seen as less cool by association.
I don’t want to still be a fourteen-year-old. Maybe one day, when I love myself more, I’ll be less afraid of being similar to Monsieur B. I’ll be able to muster more hot-blooded sympathy for him.
Perhaps it goes without saying?—I am afraid of resembling my dad. I like to notice the ways we are different, and I tremble with cringing shame at the ways we are similar. Like my dad, I often make a pot of beans because it’s a cheap and healthy meal. Like my dad, I favor old used cars and can go years without buying myself clothes. Unlike my dad, I indulge in frequent casual splurges when in the company of others. (Frugality is a dish best served solo; frugality in front of witnesses, frugality that affects others, is called stinginess). When I’m with friends, I eat out if they suggest it, I insist on buying them a drink if they’ll let me. I act unconcerned about money, breezy, knowing I’ll take it out on myself later with my cans of tuna. And I tell myself, proudly, that I’m not that similar to my dad, I’m definitely so much less frugal than my dad.
Surely, he, like me, was pushed toward caution in counterbalance to Mom’s excesses. Perhaps he, like me, was moved by subconscious fear that she would go too far into debt and kill herself. But I don’t like to write about how he and I are similar. I tend to keep him in soft focus in the background, a minor character. I’m reluctant to adjust the lens, to sharpen his image. It’s a lifelong habit, seeking to align myself with Mom and not with him.
On some level, Madame B’s story terrifies me. I’m supposed to relate but instead I recoil. Maybe I’m scared of pleasure. Maybe I’m afraid of my desire for more. (More of what? Anything really. More sex and restaurants and killer outfits and insouciant spending and a life of luxury and artmaking.) Afraid if I embrace my desires too much, I’ll drown.
Maybe one day, when I love myself more, I’ll be less afraid of being similar to Monsieur B.
Does this fear make me less of an artist? It’s true I’ve lived a small life so far, in some ways. Like sticking with full-time ESL teaching for over a decade, despite not loving it, despite wishing I had more time to write. Fear held me back from quitting. Fear of financial instability, leading to death, yadda yadda . . . by now you know the tune.
Before leaving for the Philippines, I decided I won’t look for another full-time job after my upcoming layoff. Instead, I will patch together months of house-sitting and visiting friends and family so I can live cheaply and focus on writing for a while. I’m excited, full of yearning. I’m also, of course, scared. But I’m trying to re-wire some things in my brain. I want to teach myself that I can take measured risks, financial and otherwise, and not die.
My friend and I are having matcha lattes for the last time, at the lovely but weakly-air-conditioned coffee shop on the small island. Tomorrow we’ll pack up our salt- and sand-crusted possessions and make the motorbike/ferry/airplane/car trek to her family’s home in Manila.
“I tried ending the essay with, like, I can be both extravagant and frugal, both artistic and practical. I can be both my mom and my dad, Madame B and Monsieur B,” I say, my voice an auditory eye roll. “But I don’t know, it feels too tidy and uplifting.”
“Right,” my friend says, in a slow thinking-aloud voice. “And also, it’s not like you’re equally both things, right?”
Something deep and primal in me clenches. I start babbling, holding forth on other essays I’ve read with overly tidy endings. I change the subject, essentially, not letting her finish her thought.
I’m nervous that what she means is: “You’re more like Monsieur B than Madame B.” I don’t want to hear her say it, because it’ll hurt me.
It takes an hour or so before I consider that maybe she meant the opposite? Even here in the fun and safety of conversation with a close friend, on a literal tropical island vacation I’ve been un-frugal enough to treat myself to, I’m scared of being called out as Monsieur B. The dynamic feels familiar. I love that Mom never said or did anything to suggest I was boring; in fact she vehemently denied it, and scolded me for even thinking it, on the few occasions I told her I worried about this. Her reaction soothed me. And yet, I always felt on some level like I was pulling off a con. Like I could be found out at any moment—a dramatic irrevocable reveal: “Wait, you’re not one of us interesting ones,” Mom and Flaubert sizing me up, disappointment in their discerning eyes. “You’re a Monsieur B.” You’re someone who can remain in soft focus in the background and be abandoned without a second thought. You’re someone whose suffering doesn’t matter.
I’m not fully there yet, but maybe I’m slowly circling closer to having sympathy for Monsieur B. For my dad. For myself.
Earlier this year, I met a very nice author at a book festival who, upon learning what I did for work, leaned in and asked me apologetically, “Didn’t Electric Lit close?”
“Not on my watch!” I responded, possibly yelled. I like to think that my tone was defiant, even triumphant, but I may have sounded deranged.
Though the author was misinformed, I couldn’t take offense. The survival of all literary magazines, especially magazines like Electric Lit—an independent, nonprofit publication that is completely free to read—is far from guaranteed; every year is a gift.
Because fear is a powerful motivator, I have occasionally pictured a world without Electric Literature in order to pump myself up to write a letter like this one. Electric Lit publishes over 500 writers per year. Their important, moving, funny, weird, and incisive work is read by over three million readers annually, many of whom make visiting our website a daily practice. Where would they go if we pulled the plug? And what would happen to the tens of thousands of short stories, essays, poems, and interviews—from award-winning to viral to niche to classic—championed and preserved by Electric Lit?
Just this year, the NEA was gutted, and grant funding for the arts continues to diminish. Yet with your support, Electric Lit persists as a home for human stories in a country that is increasingly inhospitable to art. While AI is churning out slop, we are one of the few venues that pair emerging writers with experienced editors. And as free speech is under threat, as books are banned and protestors are arrested, we are proud to be a platform for writers of all backgrounds, beliefs, and identities to speak openly, to critique, to create, and to hone their craft.
Simply put, Electric Literature is a gift. A gift to me, who has devoted my adult working life to EL’s mission; a gift to our small but mighty staff, who get to make their passion their vocation; a gift to our dozens of eminently employable interns who gain valuable professional experience; a gift to the thousands of writers who have launched and grown their careers at EL; and a gift to the millions who get to read free, world-class literature every day of the week. Supporting writers and readers costs money—$500,000 a year, to be precise—and we need your financial help to sustain this gift.
Today, I’m asking you to give Electric Literature the gift of another year. We need to raise $35,000 to get us through 2025 and balance the budget for 2026. This is the largest goal we’ve ever set for a campaign, but in these challenging times, we need our community to step up. The world is a better place with Electric Lit in it—let’s fight to keep it that way.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Place Envy by Michael Lowenthal, which will be published by Mad Creek Books on February 6, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
Growing up in places where his family had no past, and met mostly with silence from his Holocaust-refugee grandparents, Michael Lowenthal longed to be from somewhere. Then he realized he was gay and felt displaced from his own displaced family. Place Envy—his first book of essays after five acclaimed books of fiction—chronicles his quest for orientation in the world: as an agnostic Jew, as a queer traveler and lover, and as a writer who can tell or twist the truth. Yearning for a queer lineage, he obsesses about an uncle who perished at Bergen-Belsen but then finds, in his grandmother’s German hometown, a more surprising legacy. He lives with a Pennsylvania Amish family; accompanies blind gay men on a Mexican cruise; plays jazz with Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist who claimed to hail from Saturn; and pursues a clarifying love affair in Brazil. Collectively, these essays recount Lowenthal’s many journeys of dislocation and relocation: to foreign countries and subcultures and to the riskiest shores of family and self.
Here is the cover, designed by Adam Bohannon:
Michael Lowenthal: As a kid, I attended a summer camp whose highest achievement rating, awarded for mastery of various survivalist skills, was called the Pathfinder. The orienteering test involved being blindfolded and then driven miles and miles from camp, where you were deposited deep in the Vermont woods and challenged to hike home—alone—aided only by a compass and half a dozen topographical maps. (How, how, did the camp ever secure insurance coverage?) In prep for the test, I spent hours poring over topogaphical maps, until eventually they seemed a kind of holy scripture, imbued with both terror and the prospect of salvation.
When I saw Adam Bohannon’s early iteration of the Place Envy cover, featuring a map—albeit one of a different sort, more mythological and almost campy—that old, charged image of a topographical map came immediately to mind, and I asked if we might explore it as a design element.
Because Place Envy takes a broad view of the idea of place—as a matter not just of geography but also of identity, belonging, and sexual (as well as spiritual and familial) orientation—the publisher and I worried that a map might come across as too literal and limiting. It was thrilling, then, to see Adam’s savvy, expansive, and visually upending treatment of the element.
By revealing the map only through unevenly spaced cutouts (I think of them as peepholes through which we glimpse a mysterious and fundamentally unknowable terrain), the design suggests that place is often difficult to see and conveys the challenge of orienting ourselves in relation to the world. It’s not just summer campers who struggle to be Pathfinders.
I love especially how the glimpses of the map that we do see reveal so little about their real-world location. Where is this a map of? I have no idea. The one visible word, in the upper left-hand corner, is not legible to me. Its second and third letters suggest a language other than English, and I’m not even sure how I’d google the word, if I wanted to (which I don’t).
Beyond all this high-concept stuff, I also find the design simply beautiful to look at. I’ll be so proud to see it on my shelf.
Adam Bohannon: First off, the title is really great: evocative and open to different interpretations and “readings.” The subtitle does a really great job of supporting that and also providing focus. From my “designer’s view,” the text is about journeys + diaspora + queerness + finding + return. And, every cover design is its own journey, so off we went. This one started out in some completely different places in the first round. Compass roses, uncanny architectures, disruptive imagery, and a 1920 imaginary map called the Anciente Mappe of Fairyland were all starting points.
Like a lot of things in design life, that map ended up being a point of departure. The map was interpreted as being a little too vintage + maybe giving too much J.R.R. Tolkien. But, still, the treatments I gave to that opened up the author’s mind and gave us the idea of topographical maps, which could serve as stand-ins for “place.” Layering pieces of the topographical maps on different textures and colors gave us some options. And we went from a purposeful flatness in those designs to the layered “eye fake out” that we see in the final design.
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