When I was approached to write this article, Ukraine’s battles for sovereignty were in the eastern parts of the country against Russian-backed separatists, where they have been since February 2014. In a few short days since, the Russian troops that had amassed around the border of Ukraine for months invaded the democratic country and initiated air strikes and attacks on Ukrainian forces and civilians—hundreds of lives have already been lost. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has refused to leave the capital of Kyiv, telling the United States government, “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
The world now watches as Ukrainian civilians take up arms alongside their army and hold “cocktail parties” where they make boxes of Molotov cocktails that will be used on Russian forces entering their cities. The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko and his brother, Wladimir, two boxing champions, have said they too will take up arms alongside the men and women, young and elderly, who are prepared to defend their homeland.
Ukrainians have long-prepared for this moment. Their rich land has been invaded many times before and their people have suffered innumerable losses for generations. The Ukrainian language and culture has nearly been eradicated at multiple points in their long history, and they’ve been fighting an active war for nearly ten years against a Russian president whose intent is erasure. Today, many people around the world are witnessing for the first time the immeasurable patriotism, loyalty, courage, and grit that makes Ukranians so singular.
In order to write I Will Die in a Foreign Land compassionately and correctly, I knew I had to become a de-facto scholar in Ukrainian history and culture. I started the first draft in 2016, two years after the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv and the Russian annexation of Crimea and Donbas. I relied heavily on the work of a few dedicated journalists and incredible documentaries. The deeper I went into the story, the more realized I was not going to be able to simply write about the Maidan events—I found I had a responsibility to contextualize Euromaidan and Donbas for an American audience that would be largely unfamiliar with Ukrainian-Russian relations, that Ukraine is a sovereign nation despite once being a part of the USSR, and that Vladimir Putin himself is a tyrant akin to Stalin and not a true representative of the Russian people. It was when I began to dig into the Ukrainian language, literature, art, film, and music that the spirit of the novel, about four individuals whose lives are changed by the Euromaidan protests, emerged. [Editor’s note: Kalani Pickhart will be donating all of her proceeds from I Will Die in a Foreign Land to the Ukrainian Red Cross and ICRC Ukraine.]
There are many lists like this one being shared out there on social media by Ukrainian writers and translators, as well as independent bookstores and booksellers. I encourage interested readers to seek multiple resources. Here, though, are mine:
Grey Beesby Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Drayluk
This beautiful, heart-wrenching book follows a beekeeper in the gray zone of Eastern Ukraine, where the war has destroyed most of the village and driven out most residents, except the beekeeper and his frenemy. This is a story about survival, friendship, and the powerful significance of home. A must-read to understand life in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.
“To understand the trends underlying current events in Ukraine and their impact on the world, one has to examine their roots.”
In The Gates of Europe, Harvard professor Plokhy gives a comprehensive history of Ukraine, starting in 45,000 B.C.E and ending in the war in Donbas, that highlights the long battle for sovereignty and identity. Complete with maps, a glossary of Ukrainian terms, and a “Who’s Who” section on major historical players, this book is a critical text for understanding Ukraine’s intricate and complex history.
The effects of the 1986 nuclear disaster on Ukrainians and Belarusians cannot be overstated. Alexievich’s Nobel Prize-winning book compiles a tapestry of real accounts from those who were closely affected by the blast. Haunting and gripping, this book provides additional insight into the gritty, survivalist nature of the Ukrainian people.
This compelling and affecting essay collection is an honest reckoning: shortly after the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv, Bilocerkowyz returns home to the US.
Patriotism runs in the veins of Bilocerkowyz, the granddaughter of politically active refugees and the daughter of a scholar of Ukrainian dissidents. She moves to Lviv in 2013 to teach at a university, but also to bear witness to the revolution and to gain a deeper insight into an ancestral history defined by oppression. Through these intimate reflections, Bilocerkowicz interweaves post-Soviet narratives and family mythology, creating a tapestry of interconnected essays that illuminate the complexity and responsibility of being a child of the Ukrainian diaspora. A tender and fearless read.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Anne Applebaum is one of the foremost writers and political commentators on the influence of Russian and Eastern European politics in the United States and Western Europe. Red Famine takes readers inside what Ukrainians call the Holodomor, a genocidal, man-made famine that ultimately killed 5 million people. The famine was implemented by Josef Stalin shortly before WWII in order to eliminate the rise of Ukrainian uprisings and identity. A must-read for those seeking to understand the deeply embedded generational distrust and trauma of Ukrainians against the Russian government.
This list or any list concerning Ukrainian literature would not be complete without Serhiy Zhadan, a prolific poet, novelist, and philanthropist. A finalist for the PEN America 2021 Translation Award, A New Orthography is a powerful portrait of Ukrainian citizens during wartime, and speaks directly to this current moment and the national psyche:
“Eastern Ukraine, the end of the second millennium.
The world is brimming with music and fire.
In the darkness flying fish and singing animals give voice.
In the meantime, almost everyone who got married then has died.
In the meantime, the parents of people my age have died.
In the meantime, most heroes have died.”
Composed of selections from Zhadan’s earlier books as well as stand-alone pieces, all from 2016 to 2020, the poems grapple with the perilous future of Ukraine and the destruction that has transformed both the people and the land itself:
“Let’s start with what’s most difficult—with singing
Perhaps lesser-known than Zabuzhko’s monumental feminist manifesto, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets takes its readers through 60 years of Ukrainian history, interweaving the stories of three women: Daryna, a modern-day journalist, Vlada, her artist best friend who dies tragically under suspicious circumstances, and Olena, an insurgency soldier in an old post-WWII photograph Daryna discovers. A lyrical tome that slips into stream-of-consciousness, this 700-page novel may not be for the casual reader, but it is absolutely one of the most rewarding and incredible books I’ve ever read.
This translation of Shevchenko’s poetry is the go-to concerning the Ukrainian national hero. An artist, political figure, folklorist, and ethnographer, Shevchenko is memorialized around the world as the father of modern Ukrainian literature and language. He spent many years in exile for criticizing the Russian Empire through his works, and continued to write despite multiple arrests. Shevchenko was originally buried in St. Petersburg, but his remains were eventually transferred to Ukraine where he was buried near the Dnipro River—a wish he expressed in his poem Zapovit (“My Testament”). For readers interested in getting to the heart of Ukrainian literature, reading Shevchenko is a necessity.
Remember when Trump got elected and people started buying all the copies of 1984? It was like that, apparently, for Emily St. John Mandel in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and her 2014 post-apocalypse novel Station Eleven started once again flying off the shelves. The book isabout a flu-like virus that kills almost everyone on earth, and a troupe of actors playing Shakespeare to scattered settlements in the aftermath. Six years after Station Eleven was published, its author suddenly found herself comforting her fans about a deadly virus in real time. “If it helps,” Mandel tweeted kindly to one sleepless reader, “as alarming as this moment is, I remain certain that this isn’t going to end with a traveling Shakespearean theatre company traversing the wasteland of the post-apocalypse.”
Her reader tweeted back: “That’s the part I was looking forward to.”
Hope. That’s what HBO tells me its new Station Eleven adaptation is all about: “an apocalypse that just might make you feel good,” in 10 episodes that cross the end of one pandemic year, and the beginning of yet another one. But what does it mean to look forward to an apocalypse? What does it mean to feel good about the end of the world?
The word “apocalypse” in the vernacular of early 2000s American pop culture means ending: end of civilization, end of ethics. It means grizzled men with no feelings aside from paternalism and revenge shooting their way through hordes of zombie cannibals. It means surviving, whatever it takes. The apocalypse-as-ending fantasy looks forward to a world in which any violence is justified by the fear of one’s own end. Some Americans already live there—are quite comfortable in the world of stand-your-ground defense laws against the nebulous threat posed by Black teenagers walking home with candy in their hands.
That’s the apocalypse Station Eleven inherits. Still, the root of the word, as I’ve often been reminded these last two years, is not “end” but “unveiling.” Sometimes when we talk about apocalypse what we’re looking forward to is the idea that there’s something different on the other side. “It [the pandemic] is a portal,” Arhundati Roy wrote in a ubiquitous-at-the-time essay from April 2020, “a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred and dead ideas …. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.”
The apocalypse-as-ending fantasy looks forward to a world in which any violence is justified by the fear of one’s own end.
It’s that second kind of apocalypse that reviewers and readers saw in Station Eleven back in 2014. “Unlike most postapocalyptic works, it leaves us not fearful for the end of the world but appreciative of the grace of everyday existence,” wrote Anthony Domestico in TheSan Francisco Chronicle. The gracefulness of the novel begins with the type of apocalypse it imagines. Quick, and relatively painless, without fallout or flattened cities, the novel’s agent of the end is “the Georgia Flu.” It kills 99% of the people who contract it. Mandel describes it as “like a neutron bomb,” but the effect is much less disruptive. Within a few weeks, the world is simply emptied out. Think of it: there would be 80,000 people left in New York City. No one would ever have to stand in line again. Remember how the skies cleared two weeks into quarantine? Remember the animals dancing in the empty streets, and how we thought we caught a glimpse of the world freed from the pressure of our existence? #Wearethevirus started circulating in my leftwing Instagram feed. Indigenous activists pushed back: not all humans are equally responsible for the poisoning of earth. Who is this “We” you’re talking about?
In most fictional apocalypses, the survivors are the most competent, the smartest, the best prepared. In the real world it comes down to infrastructure, power, and urban planning. Take, for example, that neutron bomb Mandel mentions as a comparison for Station Eleven’s Georgia Flu. In the almost-apocalypse of the Cold War, Russian nuclear missiles were trained on American cities. As Dean MacCannell wrote back in 1984, that was one reason urban planners started building suburbs, and white people with the means started moving away. Black farmers, undermined by racist USDA policy, lost their farms, but the new suburban neighborhoods were closed to them. These new communities were often governed by tacit or explicit restrictions on race. As MacCannell puts it, “Every reflex is to keep the big city black.”
In most fictional apocalypses, the survivors are the most competent, the smartest, the best prepared.
In her book Infrastructures of Apocalypse, Jessica Hurley notes that at this same time, the federal government pulled funding from cities and spent instead on building more bombs. Cities started to crumble from within. Urban blight led to white flight until major cities such as Philadelphia were majority-Black in a country where Black Americans made up 12% of the population. Who else lived in cities in the 80s? Most Indigenous people, relocated to cities after U.S. “termination” policy ended land trust programs in the 1950s, mentally disabled folks kicked out of institutions the government wanted to close, trans people, immigrants, and queers. Futurelessness was a stark almost-reality: Historian Manning Marable writes that had Russia set off its nuclear bombs in 1984, more than 80% of Black Americans in the whole wide world would have been dead before the sound waves hit the suburbs. So much for luck. So much for being prepared.
“It’s a story where civilization collapses, but our humanity persists,” Mandel said about her novel. Shakespeare makes it. So do newspapers. So does classical music, a little bit of jazz, high-heeled shoes, corporate reports, celebrity gossip magazines, and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. The novel’s main cultural curators are both old white men. There’s Clark, a gay corporate consultant who curates “the Museum of Civilization at the Severn City Airport,” deciding which objects to preserve from the past. Then there’s Dieter, the senior actor in the Traveling Symphony, who claims the troupe only plays Shakespeare because “people want what’s best about the world.” Over and over again the novel tries to make white wealthy culture feel universal, with extended reveries about what humanity has lost: “almost everything, almost everyone.” Yet even those eulogies betray their singular perspective. “No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below … no more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup.” It’s a book that aims to speak to our shared humanity, but its perspective is only ever that of people who swim in backyard pools, who trust the cops, whose water flows lead-free through well-maintained municipal pipes.
In the novel’s most explicit moments of erasure, the book’s two disabled characters quietly exit, each preferring to die rather than burden other survivors.
Everyone else’s culture is, more or less, erased. It’s not that queer, Black, Brown, and disabled people aren’t in this novel at all, it’s just that they’re either supporting the imperative of dominant culture’s survival or they’re neatly put back in their box. In one scene, we meet the novel’s only Black male character, a guy with cornrows whose wife has been shot. All we learn about this man is that he works in the fields of a Virginian plantation. Even Clark—the book’s one explicitly gay character—makes it all the way through the end times and into his museum only, apparently, to never have sex again. The novel is full of characters who are described with black skin or Arabic or Korean names, but as games studies scholar TreaAndrea Russworm has noted is common in post-apocalypses created by white folks, none of them seem aware of their own race. In the novel’s most explicit moments of erasure, the book’s two disabled characters quietly exit, each preferring to die rather than burden other survivors. It’s the classic bait and switch of white supremacy to tell us that on balance, losing everyone, losing everything else to apocalypse is a fair price to pay for what’s “best” about the world.
“What I was really interested in writing about was what’s the new culture and the new world that begins to emerge?” Mandel told NPR. But in this most graceful of apocalyptic tales, the new world we end up with is an unsullied reflection of the dominant culture of the old. Twenty years pass, newspapers re-emerge, and Clark collects a copy of the New Petoskey News. Sitting there in the museum with the first post-pandemic paper in his hands, he remembers the experience of sunrise seen from an airplane back when those existed: “there was a moment in the flight when the rising sunlight spread from east to west … and although of course he knew … that it was always night and always morning somewhere on earth, in those moments he’d harbored a secret pleasure in the thought that the world was waking up.” Not everything was lost, not everyone. As culture re-emerges after the pandemic, an old white guy gets to re-experience the glorious sensation of seeming to be at the center of the world.
How do we get to a future that is hard for us to imagine?
And yet, in spite of everything, marginalized people do survive. Plenty of viewers and readers dislike that fact when they encounter it in fiction. As a one-star review of HBO’s queerer, browner, blacker, adaptation of Station Eleven put it, “none of these characters seem like they would survive a pandemic.” And yet this strategy of persisting in spite of every form that genocide takes is an old one for people whose futures white cis patriarchal culture views as collateral. “There Are Black People in the Future,” read a billboard by Pittsburgh artist Alisha B. Wormsley, part of her project called Shaping the Past. The neighborhood around the billboard gentrified until finally developers had the phrase wiped out to make way for their new condo frontier. In the rest of Shaping the Past, “There are Black People in the Future” is printed on other objects: railroad spikes, crumpled Newport packs, tea cups, crosses, cassette tapes, and empty bags of sunflower seeds. In many ways Shaping the Past feels like a parallel project to the novel Station Eleven. Created around the same time, its collections of objects do some of the same things as Mandel’s lists of the lost comforts of a much-reduced white upper class. Wormsley, too, gestures towards both apocalypse and eulogy, but her phrase revives. There always have been, there always will be. There are real stories of escape, of care, of hiding, waiting, fighting, compromise, and grief behind this persistence, which that reviewer does not want to understand.
“It is a portal,” Arhundati Roy wrote in 2020. Since then, so much has changed. I don’t mean everything, and I don’t mean nearly enough. But I wanted to see what Station Eleven had to say for itself 8 years after its publication, after the election of Trump, Hurricane Maria, COVID-19, a flowering of mutual aid, so many dead, and the uprisings after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I wanted to see if the HBO series would still try to defend the book’s “realistic” apocalypse, in which nothing but whiteness is imagined to survive.
The HBO adaptation starts out with an essential worker walking off the job. A supermarket cashier in a Santa hat, tipped off about the virus by our hero Jeevan Chaudhury, walks right out the sliding doors and goes home. In many ways, the series Station Eleven is at the tip of what will certainly be a tidal wave of art to come out of the pandemic. It’s far from perfect, but right from the start, it’s filled with lessons learned. The moment I begin to build some trust in the series’ vision of the future, though, is when we meet the series’ August. In the book, August is a white, cis, violin-playing Trekkie poet. In the show, he’s played by Prince Amponsah—a Ghanaian-Canadian actor who lost both his forearms in a house fire in 2012. The sight of a Black, disabled actor living his life, using his arms, laughing with his chosen family, told me right away that this is an entirely different future than the one that the novel is able to imagine.
Differences multiply from there, and while some of them might be chalked up to a greater appetite for diversity among HBO’s viewership, others deeply change the significance of the story. For starters, the novel’s central text, the comic book Station Eleven,is written by a Black woman—meaning that this version centers an artifact of Black art passing on into the future in this world. The Chaudhury brothers speak Hindi together. Their sibling family, two brothers, a lost sister, an impromptu white kid, parents missing or dead, offer an echo of the series’ later explorations of alternative family in the forms of a jerry-rigged maternity ward, a band of feral kids called the Undersea, and the queer as fuck Traveling Symphony, less of a wagon train now, and more of an arts loft party on wheels that rolls into town with a marching band playing Parliament on baritone horn. Tellingly, too, the Museum of Civilization is no longer a bastion of hope and memory. It’s a sinister, cloistered community led by an autocratic triumvirate of patriarch, matriarch, and cop. This is a fact that points to how the whole weight of the series has shifted—from a book about how art can bridge the rifts that crisis tears in time, repairing the white Western culture that it claims was our world’s “best,” to a series about the need for rupture, if we are to leave a murderous and fearful past behind.
How do we get to a future that is hard for us to imagine? Changed as it is, the new Station Eleven doesn’t have any answers for that. It does have questions. At the end of the series, our new old, white autocratic Clark watches the Undersea leaving the Museum of Civilization, scattering across the fields beyond the Severn City Airport runway. Hundreds of children he never even knew were there. His question is, “What the fuck?” and it’s the last line he gets in the show. The most interesting thing about this moment is that we don’t know any better than Clark how to make sense of the Undersea. They’ve never been satisfactorily explained. What the fuck are these children? Are they sinister little terrorists? Where are they going? Where did they get those silly hats? Clark’s WTF directs our attention to everything we don’t understand about the needs, configurations, and solutions the future may find for itself. That’s the part I’m looking forward to, and here it is: everything I can’t yet know about how we will survive.
The train is lost. Halted in the middle of a grassland, it seems no one knows where we are. Ma says the clouds have shot the sun so it’s hard to tell the time of the day or the direction. I gaze at the string of rail cars disappearing into the horizon as if searching for their beginning. Ma raises the glass window, coal and sand on the sill. Papa’s standing outside on a grass patch next to our coach, the smoke from his cigarette blurring his face. Ma flings her hand through her long hair, knots it into a bun, raises a bottle of water to her mouth.
We are back from Ma’s sister wedding, where everyone dressed up and group danced. Papa drank with the men and chewed on roasted cashews and chips. He shrugged a lot as if he didn’t want to upset anyone by having an opinion. Uncle and aunts who resembled Ma and who didn’t patted me on my head–oh how tall you are now, or we saw you when you were a baby or what grade are you in, beta?
I want to grow up beautiful and gloomy like Ma. Everyone pays attention to you when you are lost in your world. At home, Papa keeps following Ma, and she goes about her day like it’s nothing. I watch the water disappear in the tunnel of her neck, the fake pearl necklace (because we’re traveling on a train) shifting on the edge of her collarbone.
A hawker comes by with packets of biscuits and cold drinks. Perhaps he got on the train at the last station. Ma signals him to go away but he stays for a few seconds, a cola bottle condensing in the grip of his fingers. Ma shakes my shoulder and I immediately regret staring at the cold drink. She has this way of looking at me that I feel I must apologize for wanting. In distance the clouds are shape shifting. Switchblade light and sound explosions. A few seats away, a little girl keeps bubbling her saliva.
Outside, the light dims quick like fast forwarding a movie. Mostly I’m waiting for the train to move, the first push that will startle me so my fear of being stuck here forever remains unspoken the way Ma doesn’t talk about the names she picked for the baby who didn’t live. Papa says at idle times like these we leaf through all our failures. I stare at his silhouette in the darkening day, trying to understand what it means. If he’s thinking he should have married someone other than Ma. If he’s forced to love me no matter how careless I am like when I lost the LED from his circuit board or spilled ink on his research paper. Ma peels an orange, its rinds curled at the edges. Her fingers tug the white strands from the slices, dig the seeds out like a secret. How snug and odd this betrayal–the way things separate from what they’ve known and protected all their life.
In one, the detective is a constant. They march through the mystery at hand, gathering information, forming hypotheses, arriving at conclusions. These detectives are cleanly drawn, with distinctive habits and mannerisms and turns of phrases and sartorial choices, with lines that do not change. They serve the purpose of solving the crime; who they are beyond that doesn’t really matter.
In the second kind of detective story, the detective matters as much as the mystery itself. Arguably more: the mystery matters because it matters to the detective. Part of the delight in reading these stories is getting to know the detective, understanding why solving the mystery is vital to them, and appreciating how they change and grow throughout the narrative.
I grew up reading detective stories of the former category, but when I realized that my debut novel The Verifiers was going to be a murder mystery—albeit one examining the implications of Big Tech, data collection, algorithms and AI for how we make romantic (and other) choices—I knew I wanted my detective to belong to the latter. The sleuth I created, Claudia Lin, is a 25-year-old second-generation Chinese American who rebels against model-minority expectations and hasn’t told her mother she prefers girls (with the result that her mother is perpetually on her case to find a nice Chinese boy). She lucks into a job at a boutique agency called Veracity that helps its clients investigate the truthfulness of potential romantic partners they meet on dating platforms; when a client with an unusual request goes missing, Claudia decides to investigate that as well, and ends up uncovering a maelstrom of intrigue and deceit. Along the way she navigates her complicated family dynamics, finds a fulfilment in the work that she does, and even, maybe, starts to consider the possibility of dating herself.
Below are seven novels I read over the course of writing The Verifiers that feature wildly different detectives—a Cold War spy, an Scottish journalist in the 1980s, and a multiverse traveller, to name a few—all of whom have deeply compelling voices and personal stories. Plus, most of them are series, and so if you enjoy these books, there is more to be had.
Set in Buenos Aires during the Argentine Revolution of 1966, Who is Vera Kelly? follows the eponymous CIA spy—and closeted lesbian—as she wiretaps politicians, infiltrates a Marxist student group, and, once the coup takes place and she finds herself stranded, plans her escape. At the same time, this is as much a coming-of-age story as a spy thriller. The present-day chapters are interspersed with Vera’s backstory: her fraught relationship with her mother, her love for her high school best friend, her prior life in New York City.
There is so much I love about this novel. The quiet, assured elegance of the writing, the descriptions of Buenos Aires and New York City, the subversion of the Cold War spy story; and Vera herself, intelligent, wry and resourceful, at once masterfully self-sufficient and achingly lonely. At the end of it all, the most important mystery is the one suggested by the title, which the reader unravels along with Vera herself as she tries to find her way home.
Detective Elouise “Lou” Norton is a Black LAPD homicide detective whose sister went missing as a teenager. When, years later, the body of another teenage girl is found in the same neighborhood, Lou becomes convinced that the two crimes are linked and that by solving this murder, she can finally learn what happened to her sister. Lou’s voice pulls you along from the very first page: she’s smart and snarky and driven, her observations spot-on and frequently hilarious, someone whose toughness makes her vulnerability even more poignant. Plus, I love how fully Lou’s life is portrayed—she may be focused on solving a crime, but she also has a circle of close friends, a philandering husband to worry about, and colleagues who respect and also challenge her.
All of Tana French’s novels are wonderful psychological studies of her detectives, but The Likeness is my personal favorite. Ex-Dublin Murder Squad detective Cassie Maddox is persuaded to impersonate a murder victim, Lexi Madison, to whom she bears an uncanny resemblance (and who in fact was living under one of Cassie’s aliases from an earlier undercover assignment). She moves into the house where the victim lived with her four housemates, who are now suspects in the murder, and gradually the boundaries between her life as Cassie Maddox and as Lexi Madison begin to blur. The premise is completely outrageous but French pulls it off, in my opinion, because of how compelling Cassie is as a character: she is in deep, and we as the reader are right there with her.
Paddy Meehan is a teenage copygirl at the Scottish Daily News in Glasgow circa 1981 who desperately wants to be a journalist and to have a bigger life than what her tight-knit working-class Roman Catholic community expects of her, which is to get married and start raising children. When the newspaper publishes an article about one of the suspects in the brutal murder of a toddler, who is her fiancé’s young cousin, Paddy’s family and community shun her, believing that she betrayed them to advance her career. This impels Paddy to start investigating herself, and she becomes increasingly convinced that the police are on the wrong track.
Field of Blood is the only book on this list to be written in the third person, which creates a bit more distance between the reader and Paddy as the primary narrator (and allows for other occasional viewpoints), but Paddy emerges, in all her insecurities and recklessness and longing for things she is aware she’s not supposed to want, as a most vivid character.
Sherlock Holmes as a female scholar (abrasive still, because it wouldn’t be Holmes otherwise) and John Watson as an ex-military transport mindship with PTSD called The Shadow’s Child, reluctantly teaming up to solve a murder in a Confucian galactic empire inspired by Vietnamese culture: need I say more. This novella is an inspired recasting of the Holmes-and-Watson pair, but one centred by The Shadow’s Child’s efforts to come to terms with its past and finally move beyond it.
As a writer who gets pretty attached to her characters, I have to admire how Steph Cha destroys her amateur-detective protagonist’s life over the course of a few days. Juniper Song, self-described “half-employed twentysomething”, has been adrift since tragedy befell her younger sister while Song was away at college, for which Song holds herself to some extent responsible. Now she lives in Los Angeles, where she grew up, reads Raymond Chandler novels (she’s obsessed with Philip Marlowe), and hangs out with Diego and Luke, her two best friends from college. Then Luke asks her to investigate whether his father is having an affair, as Luke suspects, and Song’s life turns into its own noir novel—a fact she notes more than once—complete with dead bodies in car trunks, threats from menacing strangers, femme fatales, and once again losing those closest to her.
Song is a second-generation Korean American, and the passages describing her upbringing and her family—as well as what it’s like to move through America as a young Asian woman—are among the most affecting in the novel.
I had to find a way to shoehorn this book in, which was one of my favorite reads of 2021. In The Space Between Worlds, humans have cracked multiverse travel, but you can only visit a world if the version of you on that world is no longer alive. This means that the poorer and/or less privileged you are, the more valued you are as a traverser, someone who moves between worlds to collect data—and that makes Cara, who is only alive in nine of 381 identified worlds, the perfect traverser.
There’s a bona fide murder mystery: one of Cara’s eight remaining doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, and Cara has to figure out what happened (which, needless to say, blows up into something far bigger than she ever imagined). But Cara herself is just as much of a mystery, because the Cara who is our narrator is in fact an imposter—she’s Cara from another world, who took the place of this world’s Cara when the latter died during her first traversing assignment. The ways that Micaiah Johnson deploys that setup to inform and surprise the reader—and Cara, as she learns the truth about her own past and her relationships on this world—are deeply satisfying.
Picture a romance novel. Are there heaving bosoms and swaggering poses? Is the word “trashy” one of the first to pop into your mind? If so, your stereotypes are decades out of date. Recent years have seen a marked shift away from shirtless ab shots and “clinch covers” that feature a passionate embrace toward bright, flirty graphics. Modern romance covers are opting for graphic illustration in a bid to outrun the sexist stigma that has dogged the genre since its inception and repackage the books for new audiences. This evolution reflects changes within the genre and broader attitudes toward it as well.
Romance cover art first took off with the increased availability of cheap mass market paperbacks after World War II. The popularity of pulp fiction influenced dramatic covers that often carried, at best, tenuous connections to the plot within a book. Through the 1970s, a “chocolate box pretty” style predominated, favoring distant, longing gazes rather than overt lust. A few groundbreaking clinch covers heralded a shift into the Baroque 1980s, along with a cult of popularity surrounding male cover models like Fabio. Ripped abs and ripped bodices abounded in lush, turbulent scenes that cover artists typically painted from photographs. This fantastical style evolved into the rococo 90s: a softer, dreamier version of the painterly scenes. By the 2000s, digital artwork had transformed the landscape and photography, with its promise of edits and filters, and became accepted as a method of projecting romantic fantasy on covers.
Ripped abs and ripped bodices abounded in lush, turbulent scenes that cover artists typically painted from photographs.
Since then, the market has cycled through various trends in an ever-shorter cycle. “Romance reinvents itself every five years,” says Jeanne DeVita, a writer, editor, and founder of the Romance Academy. While covers continue to vary by subgenre, graphic illustration reigns supreme in contemporary romance, with flat, iconic designs that tend to convey “cute” rather than steamy. “I don’t think I could find a trade paperback that actually has [photorealistic] people on it right now,” DeVita says.Larger-format trade paperbacks also lend romance novels more weight—both literal and figurative—than mass market volumes.
A sampling of recent books like The Heart Principle, The Worst Best Man, or Love Her or Lose Herproves DeVita’s point: each features a playful, graphic illustrated cover with visual cues to the book’s characters and plot. While they convey romantic tension, no one’s clothes are being ripped off. Or take the cover of The Roommate, which is fairly sedate for such a hot book. The main characters are seated separately on a couch, the neon title font the only nod to one of the main character’s work in the porn industry.
“A cover’s job is to make someone pick up the book and [want to] figure out what it’s about,” explains Colleen Reinhart, Associate Art Director at Penguin Random House and designer of The Roommate’s cover. The challenge for designers is to communicate the conventions of romance while also standing out from the rest of the shelf—hence the trend toward vivid colors and plot-related illustrations that convey details without customers even having to read the jacket copy.
Playful illustrated covers don’t always make it obvious that explicit sex scenes could be in store. “Because they can look very fun and young, they sometimes can look innocent. I’ve had friends of mine read books that I’ve done the cover [for] and have been surprised that they’ve been so steamy,” Reinhart says.
Leaning toward an aesthetic that’s more lukewarm than sizzling is one way that contemporary illustration has captured converts to the genre.
Leaning toward an aesthetic that’s more lukewarm than sizzling is one way that contemporary illustration has captured converts to the genre, seducing modern readers by removing the embarrassment of being seen reading something obviously titillating. As artist Nicole Linh Anderson wrote in a 2020 edition of her newsletter: “I would rather be caught dead than to be seen toting around a paperback copy of The Duke and I on my lunch break at my entirely male workplace.”
Close to half of the respondents of a 2014 survey of romance readers said they disliked traditional romance covers, finding them “cheesy” or “embarrassing,” and only 13% said that they had never hidden a novel. The expanded use of step-backs in the 1990s—covers with a demure top layer that cover the overtly romantic or sexual imagery of the page below—and the launch of e-readers in the 2000s were saving graces for many who prefer to keep their reading material to themselves. But there are counterpoints, too: “I don’t care if people see me reading romance,” says author Talia Hibbert.
Changing the look of the book is, perhaps, an imperfect solution to the larger problem of societal judgment of female desire. According to the Romance Writers of America, 82% of the billion-dollar industry’s readers are women. “It’s one of the few industries that feels very women-focused … both the creators and audience are [primarily] women,” says Reinhart. But sexist attitudes have meant that it is often denigrated and dismissed precisely because is seen as a ‘women’s genre.'”
“The stigma has been … lessened by using the illustrated covers,” Cindy Hwang, Berkley VP and Editorial Director says. But “I think there are still certain attitudes towards romance that will be very hard to eradicate completely.”
“I think we still really fight that perception publicly that romance is ‘trash’ or ‘mommy porn,’ that there isn’t great writing … and wonderful stories, and really diverse life experiences,” DeVita says. Non-romance readers who judge the genre based on over-the-top covers, she says, miss out on the “humor and heart and community in romance.”
Covers are integral to how these stories are perceived. “Covers are marketing, and covers have to do a lot more work to do in a very crowded market,” says Sarah Wendell of the romance website Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Canny marketers recognize that books are status objects, part of how readers present their tastes and identities online as well as on shelves. “There’s a new generation of readers who are so acutely aware of social media and how to use it, and illustrated covers just scream ‘photo op,’” adds bookseller Amanda Diehl of Belmont Books in Massachusetts. “The illustrated cover is more covert in saying, ‘This is a romance, maybe even a really sexy one!’”
Leah Koch, owner of The Ripped Bodice bookshop in Los Angeles (where I previously worked as a bookseller) says that illustration often “makes [romance books] more respectable to people who are not traditional fans of the genre.” She finds that particularly “cutesy” illustrations can be “infantilizing” or “come off as very, very PG,” toning down and perhaps missing opportunities to celebrate the genre’s innate sexiness.
Enticing new readers without conceding to sexist disdain about depictions of women’s desire is a difficult proposition. “Tricking people is changing attitudes. Because I think some people are only going to understand if they give the genre a chance,” Hibbert says. “The purist in me might be deeply offended by that approach, but there are some upsides … this newfound diversity in the range of cover options has made it so that queer romance novels, for example, can have much more interesting and maybe more accurate covers.”
Published romance is still overwhelmingly straight and white: The Ripped Bodice’s most recent industry diversity report showed that only 12% of books published by major imprints in 2020 were by authors of color. But illustration offers more opportunities to reinforce that thin, white, and heterosexual is not the only look of love.
Illustration offers more opportunities to reinforce that thin, white, and heterosexual is not the only look of love.
Hibbert is happy with the illustrated covers Avon designed for her Brown Sisters series, which depict her main characters as described, with diverse bodies and backgrounds. For her prior self-published books, Hibbert says she struggled to find accurate and representative stock photography. Illustration allows for a broader representation than can usually be found in stock imagery, as it is limited only by the imagination rather than the boundaries of historical privilege. “Illustrated covers are the answer to a lot of our prayers,” says DeVita, because they can challenge entrenched marginalization and accelerate inclusive depictions of all kinds of characters. After decades of offensively exoticizing covers, for example (see the entire “sheik” oeuvre), the illustrated cover of Ayesha At Last features the strong profile of a hijabi heroine—as do its contents.
In addition to their broader visual appeal, covers also reflect changes within the pages of romance. Historical romance covers have trended toward strong solo figures, but the illustration craze has penetrated the subgenre on covers like To Love and To Loathe. Both kinds of covers indicate a textual shift in which increasingly modern values about gender and racial equality are translated into what is most often a vaguely Regency past (perfectly encapsulated by the podcast Heaving Bosoms as “England-times”). Now in both historical and contemporary romances, “pop feminism is part of the foreplay,” says Linh Anderson. Because in our times, she says, “there is nothing hotter than a ripped white man quietly absorbing an extremely rudimentary explanation about racial justice.”
Rita Frangie, Senior Director of Art and Design for Berkley, thinks that the way covers are “evolving and changing” will help tackle the stigma and marginalization that have hindered romance as designers take into consideration modern mores, relationships, and diversity. “I think more representation is being done and that’s probably one of the allures, how people are more open to romance these days,” she says.
The popularity of the Netflix show Bridgerton, based on Julia Quinn’s hit romance series, has also proved the prestige that a mainstream streaming platform can confer. Straight male colleagues who wouldn’t be caught dead reading a romance novel have unblushingly admitted to enjoying the show. New covers for the books were also rolled out after the series’ release featuring torso photography that straddles the needs of screen-driven realism (by alluding to the characters in the show) and fantasy projection (by not showing faces, so readers can imagine their own). No illustration necessary.
Straight male colleagues who wouldn’t be caught dead reading a romance novel have unblushingly admitted to enjoying the show.
“Our primary goal now is not to let people assume that [things like Bridgerton] are isolated events, because the leadership and the respect has always been there, and to keep on pushing forward,” says Hwang.
In many ways, the illustration trend is helping to open up romance, allowing for greater representations of diversity and encouraging broader acceptance of the genre despite sexist stigma. But covers cannot solve pervasive problems; they simply visualize them and make them comprehensible. Covers will continue to evolve as attitudes do, using new techniques to attract readers to the world of romantic storytelling and welcome those already in the know.
“The language of [covers] has changed,” Wendell says, “but the goal is the same: to tell a potential reader, ‘This book contains happiness, so come on over and take a closer look.’”
Cary Dubek becomes a gay icon overnight. He doesn’t do anything to earn his acclaim; his thirteen-year-old viral pop star brother, Chase Dreams, sings his second hit about him. “My Brother’s Gay and That’s Okay!” goes from gay hit to “no Moonlight” to Tomi Lahren catnip to camp. After a wild day of internet fame, Cary and his sister Brooke celebrate at a gay bar. An old theater friend approaches Cary, tickled by the video. He says he didn’t know that Cary is gay. Without thinking, Cary replies, “Oh, thanks.” Thus unfold many situations on the HBO series The Other Two, a sitcom about Chase’s jealous older siblings trying to make it in New York.
Cary (Drew Tarver) waits tables and wants to act, booking a role smelling farts in a cat food commercial. Brooke (Heléne Yorke) used to dance and is figuring out her next career move. Created by former head SNL writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, the series flaunts an absurd sensibility and a much smarter commentary than what SNL serves up around midnight.
Cary captured my affection. He’s an adorable, awkward otter that I felt an affinity for through his deadpan disaffection. We present similarly, too: dry and sarcastic, scruffy and strong eyebrows, mostly masculine and sneakily shy. More significantly, his attitude toward his sexuality resonated with me. Chaperoning a school dance, Cary hits it off with the school drama teacher, Jeremy. Jeremy came out in tenth grade. Cary admits he didn’t until his senior year of college, to which Jeremy replies, “Oh, ewww.”
Identifying alternately as bisexual or queer, I came out later, confused by the innominate blend of feelings I’d felt for various people. I often brace myself during the coming out talk on dates with gay men. He came out in middle school, had known, forever, who he was. Would he judge me for taking so long to know who I am?
I often brace myself during the coming out talk on dates with gay men.
I grimaced when Cary thanks the guy at the bar for not thinking he was gay. But I knew, too, how often I’d said nothing in similar circumstances. Cary just doesn’t get away with it. When you’re bisexual, people often assume you’re actually gay or straight, that maybe there’s some simpler self you can’t admit. At a wedding, a relative asks if there’s a special guy. I feel seen, my sexuality acknowledged by extended family. I feel weirdly pigeonholed, too. The dog trainer says we can roll out some of our new tricks for me to pick up chicks. I never correct people. Closeted, these comments would have descended me into a well of self-doubt and dread, but now it’s an eye roll, a shrug or squirm. They’re correct in some sense, right? Raised Catholic, I feel the heat of guilt. Being queer and out, it’s not so much outright lying, but lying by omission. An “Oh, thanks,” you realize, is pretty fucked up to actually say out loud.
I’ve been out for years. I’ve been to gay bars and a bathhouse, albeit under the security of a monogamous relationship with my first boyfriend’s guidance. Yet watching Cary in the bar, I knew there were some scars I probably needed to examine.
My boyfriend and I met the easiest way: we were friends first. I’d been out to myself for years at that point but had never given my gay feelings pure oxygen. After we broke up, I lurched back onto the dating scene, ticking on Tinder my interest in men for the first time (in earnest, let’s be honest). I approached dating men the way I’d always known how with women, only modifying my behavior to account for the pandemic. We’d complete a first-date interview over virtual drinks, kindling a romantic connection. I thrilled under this attention. There were really men out there who were interested in me and found me attractive.F
These dates would end with a discussion of what we were looking for. Many of my dates had joined Tinder seeking long-term relationships. The thought of getting into something immediately made me queasy, but when they asked, I’d demur, “I’m not really looking for a relationship, but I’m open to seeing where things go.” Sometimes I’d flake, or we would keep meeting on virtual dates. They wanted to explore. I didn’t, which I’d been open about, but I’d keep going out just in case things changed. Unsettled by what felt like a power imbalance, I felt disingenuous, a liar. Who was I?
They wanted to explore. I didn’t, which I’d been open about, but I’d keep going out just in case things changed.
Realizing I needed not just to get back out there but also to learn how to enter the gay world alone, I began looking for models of gay life. I did what any millennial with social media would naturally do, and turned to the Instagays the algorithm had been convinced I would stan. These accounts made me miserable. They flaunted a coupledom I had just lost. My apartment has cockroaches instead of a fan favorite goldendoodle. Men with devastating abs work out together while I can only take ironic selfies as a post-run sweat monster. Watching The Other Two, I see Cary not so far from me in my doom scrolling. He’s making missteps in the gay dating world as he comes to openly embrace his sexuality. And within all of this, the show’s humor is cause for joy and celebration.
Nothing is sacred in The Other Two. The parody is so finely tuned that we can see everybody has gone a bit crazy in this media-hungry world. One moment, a group of Instagays might have us in stitches. The next, our laughter dials up a few painful notches when an agent tells Cary, “I’m literally gagging for you, f****t,” or an acting teacher yells that gay sex is all about shame. Cary books the role smelling the fart in the commercial only after he drops his voice an octave; it would be too much if he was at a party, smelling a fart and gay.
As Cary buckles under the demands of the acting world, he invites Jeremy to Chase’s fourteenth birthday party. Cary’s hair has gotten poofier, streaked blond. In a last-ditch effort to “get jacked fast” before bartending shirtless on Watch What Happens Live, Cary got a spray tan that has yet to fade. Brooke tells her ex and friend, Lance, that Cary’s going through something, he’s “a bit orange” inside.
I hadn’t turned orange yet, but I recognized my behavior in Cary on that date—high off of recognition, fundamentally disconnected from the person he’s with. All night with Jeremy, Cary acts like an asshole, obsessed with his trajectory to recognition. After one rude comment too many, Jeremy leaves. He tells Cary that the guy he’d met a month ago would make fun of him today. “It feels like you don’t really know who you are right now.”
Months into my riveting virtual dating life, I was sitting in therapy, fundamentally frustrated by what I was going through. My therapist gets me with her metaphors. She told me sometimes people put up an ad at a racquetball court saying they’re looking for a partner. So you find a partner and then one of you wants to go to competitions and get more serious and the other doesn’t. Maybe I’d put up an ad for a racquetball partner and what I really wanted was to play racquetball. To mix my metaphors like the non-athlete I am, I’d put up too many bumpers. It was easier, safer, to approach dating as if I could one day be interested in something long-term as opposed to admitting I didn’t want that. Instead of defining my wants as not long-term, I needed a more robust vocabulary to articulate what I did want.
If the show’s first season brings Cary to deeper self-acceptance, the second season becomes even more beautifully complicated. More self-actualized, Cary realizes that he needs something else from his life right now.
Instead of defining my wants as not long-term, I needed a more robust vocabulary to articulate what I did want.
Cary is with his first boyfriend, a sweet guy named Jess. It’s taken a lot for Cary to get here. His rejection of his straight roommate marks a major moment in which he declares he deserves more. At the second season’s opening, he feels dewy and doe-eyed; he’s so happy, he just says it to himself, “I have a boyfriend,” and a passerby immediately spits, “F****t.” The show’s humor, its vision of New York and the entertainment industry, acts as a crystal ball, the tenor of the jokes revealing Cary’s own complicated—and often unstated—feelings toward self-acceptance.
Quickly, his relationship with Jess is complicated. In one of the season’s best episodes, Cary’s mother, Pat (Molly Shannon), hosts a talk show and introduces a segment in which conservative dads accept their gay sons for a cash prize. Cary watches the day’s guests at the studio and spots them later at brunch with Jess. What they don’t know is that the father-son duo is a couple who found an opportunity in their age difference to cheat the system. At brunch, they decide to “do Grindr” and invite a third. Cary and Jess approach them to say hi and show what a “good gay couple” can be like.
They spend the day together, the two couples, plus the third who suddenly has to pass as another repressed son. After normie activities curated by Cary and Jess, they end up at a gay club. Cary confesses to the “dad” that his dad died before he could fully accept him—he even stopped coming to New York. The daddy kisses Cary. The kiss cracks something open for him. What has he never allowed himself to imagine he could want?
For years, I’d had this feeling that other people looked at me as if they knew who I really was. But I always did know who I was. Most likely, I wasn’t someone who would orange himself to bartend shirtless on Watch What Happens Live. (Most likely, who can say?) It wasn’t that I didn’t know who I was but that I’d never grasped the full extent of what I could want. The messaging I’d consumed was mainstream. Public opinion toward queer people has evolved, but the expectations are still hetero: now that we can get married, we should shut up and dissolve into mainstream society.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know who I was but that I’d never grasped the full extent of what I could want.
A weekend trip with Jess where they encounter a married Instagay catalyzes this realization for Cary, too. Breaking up with Jess, he delivers a monologue unlike any other I’ve seen on TV: “I don’t want to go to Disney Paris. I want to go to regular Paris and find some guy named Pierre on the street and blow him and never see him again. And I think I do want to use a butt plug. That sounds really hot to me. I think I’m just realizing I’ve only seen six dicks my whole life and three of them were straight and one of them is mine and one of them was so bad it shouldn’t even count. I don’t know, I feel like maybe I need to see more dicks before I settle down. I mean, shouldn’t I first see fifty dicks and then there will be one dick that’s like, that’s the dick for me?”
Cary’s story in the second season becomes one of gay discovery; he begins defining himself and his desires in relation to all the queer possibilities he encounters. He has his first Grindr hookup, wrestles his phone in an airplane bathroom to send a butthole picture to a guy he’s talking to. That Cary explores this on screen felt particularly validating after my racquetball discovery. I ignored Tinder, favoring the gay dating apps. I stopped defining what I wanted in the negative—against long-term—and learned to speak a language I’d never known: “looking” and “into” and all manner of acronyms. Just like Cary, I could embrace these desires and all they entailed—photos and Grindr and “preparing” for gay dates.
Recognizing I can talk about my experiences with my friends, gay or straight, I’ve come to find the journey is gritty, absurd, messy, joyful.
The rules I’d designated to meaningfully explore gay dating for the first time were written by my past self who’d dated straight and sought monogamy. I have so few friends who are queer men, so while I could certainly discuss my dating life with other friends, I felt there was some lack of solidarity or acute understanding of what Grindr and gay open relationships are like. Cary Dubek—for his presentation, his messy feelings, Tarver’s own bisexuality—became my Virgil into a world I’d wanted to explore but couldn’t articulate why it daunted me. Plus, Cary has Brooke. Their relationship is one of the most poignant aspects of the show; they encourage each other to be unabashedly themselves. Recognizing I can talk about my experiences with my friends, gay or straight, I’ve come to find the journey is gritty, absurd, messy, joyful.
Dating around in the gay world, my wants evolved. I could find connection in different forms of relationships, and I could be open in discussing all this with others, both friends and romantic partners. I could shed the shame and join the other fish in our queer sea.
As a lapsed Catholic, I might still respond to knee-jerk judgements. But the most powerful impression the church left on me was shame. We can talk about how we’ve erred in confession, but otherwise should feel small, guilty. I’d been out to friends and family for years, but it took an extra push for me to embrace my queer desires on queer terms.
The Other Two affirms that it’s as okay to connect with the scheming couple and their third as with Cary and Jess. There are so many ways to be gay. Opening up, I’ve found so much more possibility. Discovering the joy and absurdity in the world of queer dating, I’ve connected more with the gay men I meet. We can bond over the realities we understand. We can go out for a drink and maybe it’s romantic, or maybe we’re forming a chosen family, or experimenting with alternate modes of being together. I’ve found real possibility with all sorts of people and forms of relationships, and in them, the possibility to be open in talking about intimacy, sexuality, and the dating world which we know, together. The show has helped me become queerer on queer terms. I can say up front that I’m looking for something that might not “lead” anywhere, that might not look like a “successful” relationship. Even when I get invited to wedding after wedding without a plus one, I know I’m not alone. I can relish unconventional ways of being with someone because that’s what feels right.
Embracing and naming the discomfort has allowed me to better connect with the men I go out with, to find solidarity in a coalition. I can think a bit more dialectically. I can disagree, and assert myself without plunging into some crisis of identity. Alongside my Brookes and Carys, I can find the support I need to plant a flag, say what I want is worthy, good. So go ahead, send the butthole pic.
How do you start writing when you’re incarcerated in prison? How do you establish a literary life without access to craft workshops, the internet, or even to the outside world?
The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison, PEN America’s new writing handbook, addresses those questions to serve as “a road map for incarcerated people and their allies to have a thriving writing life behind bars.” In addition to providing guidance on developing a personal and professional writing life while incarcerated, The Sentences That Create Us provides introductions to the foundations of writing, strategies for addressing trauma in writing, as well as writing exercises developed by prison educators.
I spoke to Caits Meissner, the director of the Prison and Justice Writing at PEN America, about the ways in which the literary community should support abolition work and how The Sentences That Create Us functions as an organizing and self-empowerment tool.
Editor’s note: Deirdre Sugiuchi will be moderating a panel, Time Has Come Today, with Caits Meissner, Caleb Gayle, CT Mexica, and Deb Olin Unferth about writing imprisonment, incarceration, and social change at AWP in Philadelphia on March 26th 2022.
Deirdre Sugiuchi: How did you put this book together?
Caits Meissner: While I admired the former handbook (the predecessor to Sentences), it wasn’t responsive to the needs of people in prison. It was a craft book. I thought, “What differentiates this? Other than that it exists and is directed towards incarcerated people, but 10 years later now, we’re in a different place in society, having different conversations, and mass incarceration is a huge conversation.”
When I started this work, it was just myself and one other colleague. We were going through the hundreds of hundreds of letters we would get every week, and started to see what people were asking for. Certainly people wanted to understand how to write, but what they really wanted to understand was the business of writing, and they wanted to understand what they needed to do to participate as a literary community member. They wanted to understand if other people were writing in prison and what that looked like—you have to imagine that when you’re in prison, you don’t have the internet. You might have an email platform where you can send one email that is censored and looked at by the Department of Corrections, but you live in a vacuum. It’s not like us where we jump on Twitter and see the whole landscape exploding.
DS: What are the challenges of writing while in prison?
CM: Alone time and quiet is non-existent in prison—imagine writing on a tiny bunk with the toilet next to you and potentially your roommate going to the bathroom as you try to type. The first challenge is just being able to block out all of the noise. Larger challenges include all the things that prison does to a person: writing through all of the regret, guilt, anger, frustration, being separated from loved ones, the psychological drama.
What’s hard to grasp is censorship. Everything that comes in and out of the prison mailroom is read, reviewed and censored by a random mail clerk. Often when incarcerated writers publish their work, it comes with punitive results. I had a great deal of anxiety when the book came out about some of the authors being targeted by their administrations, being put into solitary confinement, being seen as a threat for exposing harm, being dropped from jobs or programs. I had somebody who won our contest with a piece about the mental health board he worked with in the prison. For him, that job was a way to give back in the context of prison, and because he wrote about the trouble, he was removed from that job and he had to fight to get his job back.
The folks that I work with are really persistent and have really decided on a soul level that I’m not gonna stop no matter what. The abuse they end up taking is really beyond my comprehension.
DS: We’re talking about adults who are cut off from everything.
CM: I’ve been to over 23 prisons at this point across the country. I go in multiple times a week, you lock your cell phone, you go to the metal detector. I’ll be three, four, five hours in a prison without technology, and I still cannot imagine what life in prison is like. Even reading all the stories, having multiple colleagues and friends being in the facilities for years, and it’s still beyond my imagination, how incredibly disconnected people are. I think what I started to understand with this book was that there was a real opportunity to think about the various things that people are asking for and need in prison, and also on the outside, we’re really interested in working with folks inside.
In 2018, I went to the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop, one of my favorite organizations. A lot of people were excited about PEN America—they know the writing contest—but Zeke Caligiuri was like, “Cool, PEN America. I wanna tell you about the writing collective we started before anybody was here.” I thought it was gripping. Zeke Caligiuri’s “On Building Prison Writing Communities” really was the first essay idea I had for the book. I said, “We’re going to do introductions to each genre because that’s part of this, but I want them to speak to prison as much as possible—the experience of writing through trauma, using an example from justice-involved authors, not solely, but enough that people see the community of the space just through the book and how the names echo through the text, and who is referencing who…”
That’s the driving energy of this collection. It has to be helping folks on every end of the spectrum, the lower case writer who says, “I want to write better letters to my girlfriend,” the incarcerated person who’s working on their legal work and wants to understand, “I’m going to the board, how do I tell my story? I wanna come home.” This book ultimately is about getting people home from prison, metaphorically and literally.
DS: How did you choose the contributors?
CM: I reached out to long-time prison educators I knew and said, “Give me your best piece and offer a little pedagogy in it as well.” I also wanted a writing collection that’s inspired to form based on the scope in prison, to understand the context of the room in which these things happen as well. My work as an editor was very hands-on. I was saying, “Piper Kerman, can you write about writing about people you know, because you wrote Orange is the New Black?”
This book is an organizing tool, it’s a self-empowerment tool, it’s a life-giving tome, it is a book full of life, and any spirit of life in prison is crushed.
I was asking, “What can we do to make something that’s never been made before, seen before, written before about these tried and true topics?” We had to cut 200 pages out of the original draft; there were so many other people I wish I could have included. A lot of our work was trying to both keep some of the echoes of the text intact and also really trying to carve each essay, really figuring out how to get it to its most sharp, unique offering to really get a taste of what writing can do in prison and out of prison as well.
DS: In the introduction, you write that one of your goals was to develop approaches to address trauma in writing, in a way to support an authentic journey, accountability, and restoration. Can you discuss?
CM: I think first and foremost, what the contributors in this book were really generous with was saying that this kind of writing is really hard. You look at a chapter like “On Non-Fiction Memoir” by Patrick O’Neil where he is saying, “Here are the traumas that came up for me in writing my memoir, which had to do with addiction and death,” and what it takes to hold yourself through that. Sarah Shourd wrote in “On Dramatic Theater” about being in solitary confinement for a year overseas, and then coming home and writing a play about solitary and interviewing people, and literally having to go under the covers and hide from herself during it.
What I think is such a bomb in reading those particular excerpts is they say writing is going to bring you into very painful moments, how do you stay with the feeling without losing yourself? How do you create safety in a completely unsafe environment where your cellmate might honestly try to kill you? How do you build psychological safety, in a place that is fundamentally the exact opposite of safe?
These writers talk about what writing can do for us—create an internal life of the mind that becomes a parallel world to the one you’re living in physically, and that reality creating is phenomenally powerful. I think in order to address harm you’ve done and harm done to you, both heavy things, you need some baseline of safety to go there. I think writing can provide a path, and especially within a book like this where you’re living it alongside people who are opening up their path to be able to really strengthen the mind.
DS: What are your hopes for the book?
CM: My dreams for this book are big and they’re already happening. We have 75,000 copies we’re working on distributing to prisons. We’re looking to start these writing group pilots to help us develop this curriculum in tandem with leaders in the field. I see this book getting into the hands of public defenders, helping their clients to understand how to better write for their cases. My hope is that it is a comfort and an inspiration for people behind the walls, but my bigger hope is that the book will start to change the culture. That’s a lofty goal, but I think it’s possible with the community around it. My sense is that this book will help the literary community be on the cutting edge of abolition work at its core, that’s not me speaking as a PEN America representative, we’re a free expression org, but as Caits.
My hope is that it is a comfort and an inspiration for people behind the walls, but my bigger hope is that the book will start to change the culture.
I hope that also the literary community continues to be excited by that charge and instead of being kind of… “Yeah, abstractly, I support anti-mass incarceration movements,” that people start to think: we have 2.3 million people currently incarcerated, which means we have millions and millions and millions, if not billions of people affected by incarceration—family, friends, communities, plus all the people that have come home from prison, plus, people on probation and parole. The apparatus of mass incarceration, the influence of it, is so deep and so wide and so vast on levels people don’t even realize.
I’d like to see a completely different way of dealing with harm in our world. I think prisons are just dungeons, they’re horrible soul-sucking places. This book is an organizing tool, it’s a self-empowerment tool, it’s a life-giving tome, it is a book full of life, and any spirit of life in prison is crushed. My hope for this book is that it builds movements and the rightful leaders of movements. I hope this inspires them.
DS: How can the literary community support anti-mass incarceration movements?
CM: There are many ways to be involved in this movement—from writing about the topic, to supporting the work of incarcerated writers, to keeping the conversation alive in your communities or homes, to bringing guest speakers into your workplace.
Often people get sparked and want to volunteer and they find the organizations are overloaded with volunteers. I always say look locally to organizations like Books Through Bars and local reentry programs, even local prisons and jails to see where your volunteer efforts can make a difference. If there aren’t any organizations in your area, start local efforts, especially in areas where you’re outside of a big city. Big city prisons are full of volunteers because creative people flock to cities, but once we get out into the woods, so to speak, those opportunities really dry up.
I also think it’s wonderful to have themed issues about mass incarceration, but it’s perhaps even more wonderful when we incorporate justice-involved writers, formerly and currently incarcerated, into our publications, welcoming people into the larger literary community, really opening space and operating from a standpoint of radical inclusivity.
Behind the tennis courts, Veena finds the grassy clearing that has been fruitful for her. Since her move to the area a week and a half ago, she has found a dead monarch with its wings intact, and half a mouse skull.
Today, she has less luck. She picks up a handful of green-capped acorns and two pine cones. Then she spots something shiny in the grass. An iridescent abalone shell, surely dropped by a child who brought it back from a beach vacation in Florida or California.
“Hi.”
She turns to find a boy, hardly four years in age, standing behind her. He has bright eyes. Brown eyes.
“What are you doing?” he asks. A sweatband made of blue terry cloth keeps his long blond hair out of his eyes.
A woman, her figure flat as a pancake, stands at his side.
“Sorry,” she says to Veena. The woman raises her eyebrows and offers Veena a knowing smile, at once both apologetic and proud. “He likes to talk.”
“I dropped something,” Veena says to the boy.
“I can help you find it,” the boy says. “I’m good at finding things.”
She thinks about giving him the shell. It is in her right fist, its edges pressed against her palm. With her other hand she massages her side. She has an ache in her hip that she notices only when she stops moving.
Finders, keepers, a voice in her head says.
“No, you can’t,” she says out loud. She massages her hip again. The boy watches her do this.
His mother takes hold of his hand.
“We should go,” she says. “Finish our walk and let this nice lady finish hers.”
The boy persists even after Veena turns to leave.
“What did you lose?”
Veena puts the morning’s haul into the tote hanging from the doorknob of her bedroom, a room she has all to herself. The tote contains a portion of her son Neel’s collection. The rest is still in her moving boxes. Before she and Mitchell separated, it had hung from their bedroom door and he frequently complained that it was too heavy, that the knob would fall off. But he never made her move it.
The last time they took Neel to the nature center was on a Sunday, two weeks before he died. Two years ago now. He was seven. The exchange is a single large room near the nature center’s entrance, a place where children can bring in found natural objects and trade them in for points towards prizes, all from nature. The shelves have bins and drawers and everything is neatly categorized. There are lotus pods, sand dollars, barnacles, sea beans, devil’s claws. Bark, pine cones, paper wasp nests. Dead, dried-up insects: butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers, earwigs, houseflies. Tiny pins with slips of paper pierce insect bodies, identifying them by scientific name. Dermaptera. Musca domestica. Caelifera. Some items are local, others are most certainly ordered in bulk from a wholesaler.
Everything has a price in points.
Small, standard shells such as scallops, clams, and cockles cost twenty points. Shark-eye shells are twenty-five. Big or unusual shells cost up to two hundred apiece. A large conch, of which there is only one on display at a time, is one thousand. Little polished stones, fifty. Small geodes, five hundred. Mid-sized geodes, two thousand. Big geodes, four thousand. And the elk antlers, up on the highest shelf in the back corner of the room, unreachable by any human under seven feet tall without aid of a step stool, are ten thousand points. They are gleaming and polished, each side with four spiky branches. A donation from a hunting family that loves nature.
“The young man with his eye on the antlers,” the white-haired woman behind the desk said when Neel walked in on that final Sunday. The woman’s name was Rosemary.
She looked at Veena and Mitchell. “I love him,” she mouthed, her lips, colored raspberry, moving deliberately. She wore a seashell-patterned blouse. She was typical of the center’s employees: patient, older, a lover of nature, eager to share that love with the next generation. She was always there on Sundays, and Veena knew her blouses well—the one with planets, the one with dinosaurs, the one with microscopic organisms, the one with mammals of the savanna.
Neel surveyed all the objects in the room, moving from shelf to shelf. He opened drawers, ran his small fingers across the edge of a prickly pine cone, peered through the mouth of a sand dollar with one eye. He blew air up towards the strands of hair that fell across his eyes. He needed a haircut.
Then, abruptly, wordlessly, the moment marked, as always, by a satisfied sigh, he was done. He took his canvas bag to Rosemary, and carefully placed his three rocks for trade on the desk, leaving a gap between each one. Up to three items could be traded in per day.
He watched as Rosemary picked up the rock with lustrous flakes.
“Tell me about it,” she said.
Neel took a small notebook out of his bag and flipped through it until he found what he was looking for. notebook itself had little written in it, just a drawing and a word or two, but his oral report was thorough.
“A gift from Toby, found in his grandmother’s backyard. Likely to be igneous with mica.”
Rosemary nodded. “I believe you’re right.”
When she set it down in a different spot, Neel moved it back to where he had first set it.
“Sorry,” Rosemary said. Veena could hear the kindness in her voice. She understood Neel. So many people did not.
Rosemary picked up another rock. “And this?”
“Discovered last Friday at four p.m. in my backyard. Fossil seashell. Cretaceous.”
“A mold, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” Neel said. “Not a cast.”
Rosemary leaned in.
Still holding the fossil mold, she pointed to the third rock.
“Parking lot of Publix, while Mommy was putting groceries in the car. Ordinary gravel, but shaped like a blue whale.”
“Wonder can be as ordinary as a piece of gravel,” Rosemary said.
For Rosemary, the questions were protocol. The mission of the exchange was to help children observe the natural world around them, to be curious and respectful, and also have fun. Asking questions was also a way for her to confirm that they did not disrupt anything alive in their pursuit.
“All nonliving today, Neel?”
A simple question, but Neel had a long answer. He explained the scientific definition of nonliving: things that cannot grow, move or breathe. And of the living: anything that has ever needed food and water and produced waste.
Rosemary’s eyes did not glaze over when Neel spoke. There was no smirk. Instead, she looked at Veena and seemed to silently acknowledge Neel’s brilliance.
“So, a dead thing is living,” Neel concluded. “Because it was once alive.”
“That’s right. Let’s add it up, shall we?” she said.
Neel moved close to Rosemary as she input his points, as if supervising her work. He did not understand the concept of personal space, according to the school counselor who was trying to help him with it.
“Move back,” Veena said. He was so close that Rosemary could probably feel his warm breath on her neck.
“He’s fine,” Rosemary said.
Neel spent a few of his points on an extra-large sand dollar, a polished tiger’s eye with silky shades of yellow and brown, and a white wolf tooth shaped like a crescent moon. He was always careful not to spend too much.
“What’s my current total?” he asked.
“After today’s purchases, you’re at three thousand, four hundred and ninety-eight,” Rosemary said.
“Still a lot left to go,” he said.
After the visit to the exchange, Veena, Mitchell, and Neel had plans to visit Veena’s parents, who lived farther north, in Roswell. But first, they went to Taco Planet, for a late breakfast, the three of them each ordering the same migas tacos.
“Do we have to go to Ammamma and Thatha’s house today?” Neel asked. “I wanted to play with Toby.”
“You can play with Toby tomorrow,” Veena said. “You know, I only met my grandparents a few times. We didn’t go to India often.”
“I know,” Neel said. Mitchell patted his back.
“You’re lucky we live so close to them,” Veena said.
“So lucky,” Neel said. He rolled his eyes. He had just started doing that.
In the shower, hot water streams over Veena’s body and she turns the handle to make it hotter, allowing the jets to scald her back.
She wanted to make time for the nature center today. The daily three-item limit meant it was important that she went frequently. If Mitchell helped, if he added points to Neel’s account too, it would be so much easier. But he would not help.
Everything else was impossible—walking, smiling, opening mail, eating—but the sex was addictive, a temporary relief, as dismal as it was necessary.
“Veena,” he said, when she told him the address of the house she was moving into, how close it was to the center. “You need to stop.”
For the first two months after Neel died, Veena and Mitchell had sex every night, starting from the night Neel’s body was taken to the morgue at Emory University Hospital. It was she who sought him out under the cool sheets, wrapping her arms around his shoulders, tearless but full of sorrow, hopeful that she could lose herself in his hair and scent. Everything else was impossible—walking, smiling, opening mail, eating—but the sex was addictive, a temporary relief, as dismal as it was necessary.
Then, after those two months, it stopped—the relief, the need, the desire. She jumped when Mitchell touched her, pulled away if he tried to kiss her. His proximity was intolerable.
Veena works in supply chain. She has for years. She quit at twenty-nine when Neel was born, and then returned to the same job five years later, when he started kindergarten. Her company’s software follows the life of a product, from its birth to its death. The orange: from the tree, to the truck, to Publix, to the brown bag. A bottle of shampoo: from the supplier, to warehouses, to salons around the country.
Her job is to make sure that the company’s clients are happy, that the software is properly tracking their oranges and shampoo and books and purses and battery-operated puppies that somersault. If there are any problems, she is there to help.
At the client site today, the corporate offices of a major retail chain, she does what the in-house analysts should be able to do themselves. Inwardly rolling her eyes, she adjusts the system so that it sends a remote-control car to a warehouse in Tucson instead of Omaha. She doubles the shipments of a face cream to Kansas City and cuts in half what is being sent to Dayton, realizing by the end of the process that it is her company’s software that is faulty, not the in-house analysts.
She finishes by noon and phones her office to say she is sick, unable to attend her afternoon meeting. Then she drives home and crawls into bed, choosing to skip lunch altogether, though her stomach is hollow with hunger. She skips lunch often. She will be thirty-eight in a month and her metabolism is waning.
When she wakes up from her nap she has a headache, and takes an ibuprofen. If she hurries, she might make it to the nature center before it closes. She pulls on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and her Tulane hoodie, and heads to the car.
At the exchange, Rosemary greets her.
“I’ve missed you. It’s been months,” she says. Her thick, long white hair is loose around her shoulders. Her blouse is covered with marsupials of all sorts, some that Veena recognizes, some that she does not, all with babies in their pouches.
“I just moved to the neighborhood,” Veena says. “I’ll be coming more often.” She says nothing about Mitchell or the separation. She takes the items out of the bag and sets them on Rosemary’s desk. Veena looks up and checks, as she always does, for the antlers. There they are. Still gleaming.
“Don’t worry, they’re still available,” Rosemary says. She looks down at what Veena has brought. The abalone shell, the mouse skull, the dead butterfly.
Rosemary does not ask questions about the objects. She enters points into Neel’s account that Veena knows are too high. It is a silent transaction, a compassionate one, and one that breaks the rules. Only children are supposed to trade.
Veena does not thank Rosemary, though her gratitude is immense. She must leave as little room as possible for either of them to be implicated.
It was a school shooting. Neel was the only one who died. Two shots went into his body. One in his abdomen, one in his leg. Only one other person—the art teacher—was shot, but she escaped with minor injuries. An officer from the scene called them with the news. Neel was rushed to the hospital. Veena cannot remember the officer’s name, only that he had lied. “He didn’t tell us how bad it was,” Veena later said to Mitchell. “He just said to come to the hospital.”
“Would that have been the right thing to do?” Mitchell replied. “To tell us on the phone?”
Within ten minutes of the call, Veena and Mitchell were at Neel’s side, his eyes closed, unconscious, his broken leg in a brace. He yawned a few times, his mouth in an O like an infant’s, his lungs hungry for air. Then there was a terrible, soft gurgling sound. That was it.
His backpack had made it to the hospital somehow. In it was his lunchbox, and a brownie, half-eaten, that Veena had packed that morning. Before the staff wheeled him away, Veena sat and ate the rest of the brownie, turning the mushy bits in her mouth as she looked at Neel’s shut eyes, the hair that would never be cut. She didn’t offer any to Mitchell.
The man who killed Neel was forty-two years old, father to a five-year-old boy himself. Six months later, he was sentenced to life in prison. The night of the sentencing, neither Veena nor Mitchell could sleep. Mitchell because he thought it was not enough, Veena because she knew that nothing ever would be.
Days, weeks, and months go by. Spring turns to summer.
Veena’s parents go to India, to visit her sick grandmother in Coimbatore.
“Can you take care of the plants while we’re away?” her mother asks.
“I don’t know,” Veena says. It is an honest answer.
“Veena,” her mother says. “Ammamma is dying, and the plants need water.”
“Okay,” Veena says.
“Veena?”
“Yes?”
“Please take care of yourself while we are gone.” Fall approaches. Veena runs, collects objects, goes to the nature center, eats takeout and prepared items she buys at Whole Foods. Her hip pain is persistent, but she gets used to it. Rosemary gets her up to 7,438 points.
Veena begins to order objects online to take into the nature center. Shells, coyote claws, and, for $24.99, a raccoon skull. One day, unable to control the impulse, she orders three mid-sized geodes from Arizona for $150.
Every other Sunday, she goes to her childhood home to water her mother’s plants, pinching off dead leaves, as her mother instructed her to. “The way to promote new growth is to get rid of the old,” her mother said.
Her mother had wanted Neel to be cremated, as per Hindu tradition, but Veena and Mitchell buried him in Mitchell’s family cemetery in Dallas.
“We only bury children who still have their milk teeth,” her mother said. “Children of Neel’s age should be cremated. We do not preserve the body, Veena. He will not be able to rest peacefully.”
That was what she and her mother had fought about, that two years later they still had not fully recovered from. Baby teeth. What would Neel say about baby teeth? Living.
One day in late September, Veena goes to the nature exchange and finds a college student behind the desk instead of Rosemary. The girl is toying with a scallop shell, carelessly bending it at its edge as she chews her gum.
“So your son isn’t here? Is he sick?” the girl asks. Her jaw moves vigorously as she chews.
“Yes,” Veena says.
“What happened?”
“Broken leg.”
“He’s sick and he broke his foot? Poor kid.”
Veena nods. She takes out the objects she has brought: a flat, polished rock; an unusually large pine cone, and three inches of snake skin.
The girl writes a number down on a piece of paper and hands it to Veena.
“I’ll enter it later,” she says. “Computer’s down, but give me your son’s name.”
“That’s it?” Veena says. “Twenty-five points for all this?”
The girl blows a bubble and pops it with her tongue. “This is how we do it,” she says. “I went by the books.”
Veena writes Neel’s name down on the piece of paper and slides it towards the girl.
“Here’s the account holder’s name.”
“You mean your son?” the girl says. “So you wanna pick something out? Poor kid might want something.”
“He wants the antlers.”
“Ten thousand points.”
“I know. We’re saving up.”
“That’s nice. He’ll have to come in and get them himself though. That’s the rule when it’s a big prize like that,” the girl says, an air of authority about her.
“He might not be better for months,” Veena says.
“It might take months to get the points anyway.”
“I don’t know if he can come in.”
“I mean, we can hold it for him if y’all decide on it,” the girl says, her eyebrows furrowed.
“He’s dead,” Veena says. “He’s been dead for two years.”
The girl stops chewing her gum.
“But he did break his leg,” Veena says, wishing she had left it at this in the first place. “He died with a broken leg.”
The girl goes to a bin full of shells, sticks her hand in and fills Veena’s paper bag.
“Take them,” she says. “I won’t tell my manager.”
If Neel were alive, he would be nine, almost ten. Maybe reading Harry Potter, or having sleepovers. He would be moving towards adolescence, but he would still be sweet. Still collecting his treasures and playing Lego with his best friend, Toby.
In the initial months after Neel’s death, Veena tried many things. She took up yoga. She let an artist paint grief on her naked body. The artist had lost a child too, years ago. The artist wore loose, flowing skirts, and big hoop earrings. Her coppery hair was long and wild.
“I don’t understand those mothers who don’t want their babies to get bigger. The ones who want to freeze them in time,” the artist said, as she painted a green line from Veena’s belly button down to the top of her pelvis, just above the mound of hair.
“You hardly have scars,” she said to Veena.
“I used stretch mark cream every day,” Veena said. “I wish I hadn’t.”
Afterwards, Veena looked at herself in the full-length mirror mounted to the wall. It was a cheap mirror, and it made her look thinner than she was. She studied the art and ran her fingers over the dry paint. It would be photographed for her memory and then washed away in the shower the following day. Grief was an elongated lavender foxglove, its small bulbs alive but drooping. It was a cluster of rocks. Igneous, Neel would say. Red tulips. A small fountain of water. There were two brown lines on the rocks. Two squirrels in abstraction, maybe? And three streaks in the air. Butterflies?
“Why so many flowers?” Veena asked.
“Grief is alive,” the artist said. “It’s everywhere.” Her eyes were anxious. “You don’t like it?”
“It’s beautiful,” Veena said. “I wish I could see the beauty without the pain. Just for a moment.”
When she showed Mitchell the art that evening, he looked away from her naked body, as if she were blinding him.
“Do what you need to do,” he said.
“Isn’t this hard for you?” she asked. When he looked back at her his eyes were full and glistening. “You’re making it harder.”
Neither of them had any interest in activism, in fighting publicly against gun violence or school shootings. Time did nothing to change this. People called now and then: a father from Sandy Hook, a brother from Red Lake, a mother from Columbine, inviting them to join the cause, to campaign.
Instead, they sent generous checks. “This is all we can do right now,” Mitchell said, speaking for both of them.
Six months after Neel died, right after the sentencing, Veena had a bench installed at his elementary school, with an ocean scene painted on it, a beach, waves, birds above. They shared a love for nature, mother and son. She had once worked at the aquarium, right after college.
Neel’s class was there for the unveiling. There were still twenty-three children in the class, Neel’s spot replaced by a brown-haired girl who moved from Michigan just weeks after the shooting.
The children planted an oak sapling next to the bench. Neel’s teacher, Ms. Hackbarth, started the digging, and each child in the class took a turn. Two children placed the sapling in the ground and all the children took turns patting dirt around it, their small hands frantic and eager. Mitchell was out of town for a business trip. Veena had offered to reschedule the event.
“I’ll see it soon enough,” he promised.
After the planting was done, Ms. Hackbarth gave Veena a hug and sent each child in the class up to Veena to do the same. When Toby hugged her, Veena held him extra-long, sniffing him for any essence of her son that he might have retained. Then, single file, the children and their teacher went back into the school. Veena stayed in the playground alone, sitting on the bench.
Once a month, she still goes to the school and sits on the bench. She invited the artist who painted her body to join, but she never came. Mitchell came once or twice, but not after that.
“There are people who let their wounds heal and there are those who pick at them and pick at them,” he said. “I can’t be picking.”
This month, she spends some time cleaning the bench, using wet wipes on the legs and on the seat. Then she sits and waits. Nobody comes.
The gum-chewing girl is there the next time Veena goes to the nature center, in early October.
“Hey,” the girl says.
“I’ve got some good stuff,” Veena says enthusiastically. She opens her brown paper bag and takes out the three geodes she ordered from Arizona.
“Look, I’m really sorry about this,” the girl says. “But your son’s account has been deactivated.”
“What do you mean?”
“The points belonged to him. Since he’s gone, the account had to be deactivated.”
Veena can’t tell whether the girl is lying. She hears the words as if she, Veena, is reading them to herself, as if they were typed out and handed to her.
“Where’s Rosemary?”
The girl sighs. She is not chewing gum today. “I feel really bad about this, but I don’t make the rules.”
“Where’s Rosemary?”
“She’s on vacation, visiting her grandchildren. This has nothing to do with her.”
This girl was too young to understand. Veena had renewed her nature center membership on the phone for two years, keeping it at the family level, never taking Neel off.
“If you have other children, I could transfer the points,” the girl offers.
“I don’t have other children,” Veena says.
At home, Veena feels sick. She takes a box of day-old cucumber sushi out of the fridge. She eats with her fingers, lifting each piece to her mouth, eating it dry, letting the rice and sesame scrape against her tongue, not bothering to open the soy sauce packet. It’s a sign, she tells herself. She must not go back. Mitchell was right. She had to move on.
But the next day, she skips work and drives to the nature center. She bypasses the exchange and walks into the presentation hall, where she sits in the front row. A few families are there with young children, though the room is mostly empty. She has seen this same turtle presentation many times, with Neel.
The captive turtle’s name is Felix. A woman named Barbara with a polo shirt and khakis and a white plastic name tag pinned to her chest takes Felix out of a deep wooden crate. The turtle inches forward.
Barbara explains that Felix has a friend, another captive turtle, named Felicia. They’ve been together for ten years.
A kid around nine or so raises a hand. “Do they have babies?” he asks.
Barbara shakes her head. “Good question.” She reaches forward to pull Felix back. He’s getting away.
“Even though we take care of them really well, in captivity they are under stress,” Barbara says. Veena feels like Barbara is looking at her. “It is very hard to reproduce under stress.”
The kid’s hand shoots up into the air again.
“Are they happy?” he asks.
“Well,” Barbara says, “They are comfortable.”
After Neel’s death, Veena and Mitchell became like other childless adults who had no reason to be home early in the evenings, whose post-work hours were leisurely, a time to relax and read a book, to go for a quick run, or to even sneak in a short nap. Mitchell found some peace in all this, Veena did not.
Some times of the year were harder than others. Neither she nor Mitchell grew up celebrating Christmas—he was Jewish—and they never made a fuss over Santa or presents. It was actually Halloween, not Christmas, that was difficult for Veena now. What a cruel holiday it was, to make light of death and caskets, of bloody wounds, to bring packs of eager children to her doorstep.
Perhaps that is why, this year, Mitchell calls her on Halloween morning. It is the first call from him since she moved into the new house. She invites him to come over in the evening. When he says yes, she is surprised.
They drink cream soda mixed with Kahlúa in tall glasses and sit on the living room couch waiting for kids to come. It is cool and breezy, the windows are open, the air brittle and fragrant with burning hickory from a neighbor’s fire, a perfect night for trick-or-treating. At first, no one knocks, and Veena is anxious, but then dozens come, little ones with their parents, older ones in groups of five or six. Goldilocks. Annie. A decapitated ant holding its own head. A gaggle of geese. A pencil. Storm troopers.
When Veena runs out of candy and the doorbell rings again, she panics. Then she tells Mitchell to open the door and keep the kids waiting. She goes upstairs and comes back with Neel’s tote.
At the door, she opens the tote for the costumed children: a spooky potato growing sprouts, a zombie rockstar, Harry Potter with a scar on the wrong side. They reach into the bag and retrieve a rock, a shell, a pine cone. “Cool!” the potato says. “Accio!” Harry Potter says.
After 8 p.m., the younger children stop coming and high schoolers show up. The big kids have put little effort into their costumes: a hobo, a girl in yellow sweats holding a sign that says “banana,” a boy wearing a T-shirt that says “Too Cool for a Costume.”
“They’re too old to be here,” Veena whispers to Mitchell, who is standing behind her with his glass. “I don’t have anything for you,” she says to them. She tries to shut the door, but Mitchell stops her, and presents Neel’s tote to them.
“Take something,” he orders.
The teenagers reach in and pull objects out, a piece of sea glass, an arrowhead, a lotus seed pod, dry and hard, the color of rust.
The banana girl throws the pod to the ground and crushes it with the tip of her yellow sneakers.
“Let’s go,” she says. “There’s nothing for us here.”
One of the boys throws the arrowhead into the bushes.
“Weirdos,” the other one says.
“Give them back if you don’t want them,” Veena shouts as they walk away.
A rock comes flying towards her and hits the side of her bad hip.
“Hey!” she shouts, but the kids run off, and Mitchell leads her inside, to the couch.
She does not protest.
He pulls back the edge of her jeans and inspects her. There’s a small red bruise. He touches it and she winces.
Her head on his chest, she tells him about the canceled nature exchange account. How she feels like she cannot go on without the antlers. There is nothing she wants more. She sobs.
“I’ll get you antlers,” he says. He kisses her, first on each of her eyes, and then on her lips. Now he is crying too. “I’ll buy some. I’ll order some.”
“I want those antlers,” she says. “Neel’s antlers.”
“Okay, I’ll get them for you,” he says.
They are careless, his words, but they give her hope.
She licks the salt of her own tears and then, her voice a heavy hush, says, “Come upstairs.”
She goes to the nature center one final time, with Mitchell. It is a Sunday. The plan is his: walk in, make a large donation, ask for the antlers.
“Whatever they want,” he says, “I’ll give it to them.”
A sense of adventure fills her as they drive, a sense of pursuit. But when they get to the center, there are no antlers, just the gum-chewing girl at the desk whose name Veena still cannot remember. Since they last met, the girl has pierced her earlobes, Veena notices.
“Someone claimed them,” the girl says. “Just this week.”
“You have them in the back!” Veena says accusingly. “I know you do.”
“No,” the girl says.
Veena strides past the girl’s desk, opening a door that says “Staff Only,” shouting, “I’ll find them. You’re keeping them away from me.”
How could she come so close and have it end like this? She feels that she is two Veenas now, one version of her unable to control the other.
“Hey, what are you doing?” the girl says. “Hey.” She looks at Mitchell. “You need to stop her.”
“Veena, honey,” Mitchell says, following her in.
“Help me,” Veena says. “Or stay away.”
The girl is on her phone, calling for help.
The backroom is full of shelves, like a warehouse. Veena walks up and down the four aisles, opening the largest of the plastic bins she can reach in search of the antlers. She moves quickly. Mitchell catches up. He puts his arms around her, his grasp tight. She fights it.
“Stop, Veena. Stop.”
“I need to find them.”
The girl is in the back room now too. And Rosemary is there. Veena stops trying to escape Mitchell’s grasp, and studies Rosemary’s blouse. It is covered with acorns. Neel hated acorns. He hated them because they were so plentiful, so easy to find. So boring.
Veena wriggles out of Mitchell’s arms and starts opening bins again, throwing things to the ground in fury, surprised by her own recklessness.
“Tell me where they are,” she shouts at the girl, who has stopped chewing her gum. “Tell me!”
Rosemary walks up to Veena, coming closer until they are nose to nose. Veena has never been this close to her, close enough to smell her. Lavender perfume, and under that, a trace of staleness, something musty. Raspberry-colored lipstick, breath like oranges. And one long white hair sprouting from her chin. Living, Veena can’t help but think.
“The antlers exist,” Rosemary says. “Just because they aren’t here anymore, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
Veena cannot stand any longer. She collapses to the floor, draws her knees to her chest, and rocks back and forth. The rocks, the shells, the pine cones, the antlers, everything belonged to those who were alive. That’s what Rosemary was saying, wasn’t it?
She feels light-headed, a little dizzy. She looks up and knows how it seems to them. Their faces, all their faces, are twisted with pity. The older woman understands her pain, the younger one is alarmed. Mitchell is alive and present, but too long in her company and he would decay.
For now, she has no choice but to stay where she is. In order to exist, she cannot choose life, just as she did not choose death.
“Why?” Veena says. “Why does someone else get to have them?”
If one of them answers her, she does not hear it. Instead, it is her own voice that speaks to her. In her hands, the antlers had no future. They belonged in the home of the boy from the park, or Toby’s, in the hands of the active, curious, living child who had carefully collected points, and proudly claimed it for his bookshelf.
Mitchell offers her his hand. “Come,” he says, his voice gentle, and patient. They walk to the parking lot hand in hand. She knows that when they get home, he will not come inside.
Isaac Fellman’s novel Dead Collectionsis a sticky book. Content-wise, I mean: Its characters’ immediate concerns are largely driven by various liquids being too slow, too viscous, or in the wrong place altogether.
Sol, the vampire archivist trans man protagonist—yes, all those things, keep up—needs regular blood transfusions to stay “alive,” or un-alive-but-sentient, however you prefer. In the hours before his weekly transfusion, Sol’s blood circulates sluggishly, sapping him of energy. Early in the novel, he takes a very bleak, very hot shower to try and get his blood pumping more freely and to wash away some of the uncannily stagnant sweat that accumulates atop his semi-responsive flesh. It’s the most visceral, least hygienically-satisfying shower scene I’ve ever read. I think about it, like, twice a week.
That’s the other sticky thing about the story: there’s a scene where a guy takes a shower—that’s it! He just showers!—and I’ve been thinking about it for months. It’s not because Dead Collections is wanting for events; the novel combines action, mystery, romance, the paranormal, melodrama and a half-dozen other genres into a remarkably fulfilling blitz of a book.
Sol’s professional life is spiraling out of control, partially caused by stickiness of his own doing (after-hours sex with a new partner in his office) and partially due to external stickiness (archival materials decomposing rapidly and for unclear reasons, the walls themselves becoming damp and musty, abrupt slime problems). The humors of Sol’s (after)life are imbalanced, and he spends Dead Collections trying to, if not correct them entirely, at least get his juices flowing again.
With so much going on, Fellman doesn’t waste a moment between the action. If a character takes a shower, goddammit, you’re going to remember that shower. That might be the key to why this book stuck with me long after I read it—Felmman sweats the small stuff. Even when the small stuff is literally sweat.
Calvin Kasulke: Can you talk to me about your decision to write about vampirism as a medical issue, rather than one that’s strictly supernatural?
Isaac Fellman: I am interested in the supernatural only insofar as it allows me to shortcut and shunt characters into unexpected mental states, in unexpected orders. I also find it metaphorically interesting—sometimes—but mostly I just think of the supernatural as a tool, like a scalpel, by which I can expose more of my characters.
As a writer, you spend so much time moving your characters from interesting mental state to interesting mental state, and the strictly natural world gives us fewer opportunities to do that. Which is why, even though I don’t really think of myself as a genre guy, most of my work has supernatural elements.
Also, I’m interested in medicine and in characters’ experiences of disability. Disability is an experience, as members of the community often observe, that people go in and out of. You have no guarantee that you are never going to be disabled, or if you’re disabled, you often have no guarantee that it’ll last forever. It’s a common and a normal experience, and so it felt natural to look at being a vampire through the lens of chronic illness: something that’s rough, sometimes provides insight, often involves a struggle to get accommodation and care.
CK: Right, even a paranormal experience like vampirism is going to include the kind of quotidian challenges that a medical disability presents.
IF: I really wanted to focus on the day-to-day grind of: By what mechanism does [Sol] get blood in this very medicalized world of vampirism? What is the blood clinic like? What are the chairs there like? Who is motivated to work there? Is it in a nice place, is it a pleasant environment, or is it not? It’s definitely not.
I’m not making this book sound very cheerful. It’s actually an extremely fun book, to my mind, but sometimes you’ve got to get a colonoscopy in this fallen world. Sometimes you have to go to a terrible medical place, where you sit on a recliner that has the imprint of a million butts on it, and get all your blood re-circled. That’s just how it goes.
CK: So, Sol is a trans man and an archivist. You are a trans man and an archivist. Are you, like Sol, a vampire?
IF: I put it in my bio that I’m not, and that’s my final word on the matter.
CK: That’s fair. My actual question is: With those similarities between you and Sol—vampirism notwithstanding—are you at all concerned about the book being read as autofiction?
IF: I do worry about it being read that way. I have another book coming out this year that is, in a lot of strange ways, a lot more autobiographical. Even though Sol shares a ton of biographical details with me, in a way that the main character of this other book does not—
CK: Being a telekinetic, academic, PhD candidate, woman.
IF: Right. Not to mention a straight woman, and one who has been in an abusive relationship with a man, which is an experience that I actually haven’t had. Nonetheless, the stuff that’s going through this woman’s brain is so much more like my brain than the stuff that goes through Sol’s brain.
It felt natural to look at being a vampire through the lens of chronic illness: something that’s rough, sometimes provides insight, often involves a struggle to get accommodation and care.
It’s almost like writing about somebody who is not much like me is what freed me to write about experiences that I have. If a character is too unlike you, it becomes an intellectual slog. If they’re too much like you, then it becomes a different kind of intellectual slog because you’re not analyzing, you’re not interpreting, and you’re not being surprised by the character. It’s why my characters have biographical stuff in common with me, or emotional and intellectual vibes in common with me, but never both.
Autofiction is not a thing that I think is bad, I just want people to assume the right books are auto fiction. In this particular case, it’s not. Although, obviously, I literally put his job on the same street corner as mine. It is not subtle. People will recognize physical places that I know. It is embarrassing, because the book is also about San Francisco and my love of the Bay Area. So I wanted to capture all of those weird little tricks of the light and weird street corner markets where shoplifted items are sold.
CK: This is your only book that’s set in a place that exists, right?
IF: It’s my first book that’s in a place that exists, discounting the books that I never published that died in terrible ways.
CK: Do you want to talk about your unpublished books that died a horrible death to become part of this book?
IF: Much of Dead Collections is centered upon an archival collection by a person who was a TV writer in the ’90s and created some iconic work, especially to queer people. It occupied a similar cultural place to Xena: Warrior Princess or Buffy, in the sense that if you knew, you knew.
CK: And that writer has since passed, and in her archives is this big unfinished novel that’s supposed to be a sequel to the TV show she wrote.
IF: Right. Sol thinks, oh my God, this thing that I was an obsessive fan of, that really defined my youth, I’m going to read the sequel novel that she wrote.
[I’m] examining the ways that some transmascs have used fandom as both a way to imagine transition, but also to avoid transitioning or thinking about it.
And the punchline of this, which is a very common archival experience—in that you think something is going to change your life in the course of your research and it doesn’t—is that it is not a good book. And it is such a bummer. It’s just so clearly the work of somebody who is creatively stuck, and it’s not really redeemable.
All of those excerpts are lightly edited excerpts of a book that I wrote about five years ago that didn’t go anywhere. In the end, I thought that it was too much of a mess to want to tidy up. The only thing that I really liked about it were the ideas for the world, and that all made it into this one, but I deliberately took things out of context so that it looks worse.
CK: That iconic show, Feet of Clay, is the one that Sol was really into as an early teen. What fandoms were you into around that age?
IF: A lot of what is going on in Dead Collections is me examining the ways that some transmascs, specifically, have used fandom—empathizing deeply with male characters and writing about their relationships and all of this stuff—as both a way to imagine transition, but also to avoid transitioning or thinking about it, because you have this safe place where your big feelings about masculinity can go. It’s a thing that for Sol, in the book, is often very painful to remember.
In fact, there’s a flashback to when the two main characters of the book met in fandom at the time. And their interaction was cruel and intellectually sophomoric. Both of them were clearly in a lot of pain, for gendered reasons that they could not acknowledge. And so, as a result of associating fandom with this particular aspect of my transmasculinity, I didn’t have any interaction with it for many years. But recently I actually have reconnected with it, and I have been writing and reading it again.
The historical fiction [novel] that I am writing now is based upon original research that I ended up doing as a result of being interested in historical fiction on the same topic. So now I’m doing an original story based on the same universe where I have written fanfic—which actually has been incredibly creatively productive because to me, the best way to be creatively productive is to self-own as much as possible. Just commit to doing the most circuitous and commercially untenable creative task possible, and eventually you will come up with something that loops around to being commercially viable.
The path to originality always lies through pursuing one’s obsessions. If they are obsessions with a third party piece of material, the route to originality is through those pieces of material. This is true of people who are writing fanfic and then adapting it into original work; It is also true of people who are simply writing fanfic. That’s the thing that I think people don’t understand about fanfic. It is often wildly original, and ends up being that way through releasing the obligation for work to be about you in any way, because it’s patently about some guy on TV. You end up unlocking some really fascinating levels of weird that it’s harder to access sometimes, when you don’t have that freedom of “It’s not me, it’s not about me.”
CK: There’s been a lot of vampire media in the last decade or two. Was there any vampire content you wanted to consciously avoid, or anything you simply couldn’t avoid?
IF: It is just astonishing how completely I have avoided vampires, culturally. It’s hard to name a trope that I’m actually less interested in inherently. I believe I saw the first Twilight movie once. I am definitely aware of everything that happens in TheVampire Chronicles, because I have the kinds of friends who, when we were younger, would simply describe books to me, as I’d describe books to them. We were young people of certain persuasions.
God knows, we’ve all read the work of somebody who’s never written fantasy before. They’ve always written hard literary fiction, and they’re like, I’m going to write a lovely little fantasy book and I’m going to use the first five ideas that I have. I’m sure they’re very original. And of course, they’re the five greatest clichés of the field, and they simply don’t know. I don’t want to insult people who like vampires, the ways that you insult people who like fantasy by thinking, “And it’s going to have a dragon, but this dragon can talk.” Any similarity to real examples is coincidental.
You can’t really write a romance without exposing the kind of romance that you want. That’s hard enough to do even to a potential romantic prospect.
But because you have the cultural osmosis of vampires, you can’t not think of them. I am aware of the ways that Buffy subverted and did not subvert the sexy vampires of Anne Rice. You know what’s going on in the world of vampires, whether or not you plan to or want to. And I think that my disinterest in them has a lot to do with the fact that I couldn’t avoid them. I don’t make any claims to originality in this, but the route by which I became fascinated by vampires and realized that they are in fact interesting, and they are very sexy and cool, is making the vampirism suck. No pun intended.
Once I realized that I could make it terrible, I was like, oh yeah, I love writing about people who are having a terrible time. He is going to have to go to this clinic. And then people will be weird to him. Because I love writing about people being weird to you. It’s a really underrated emotion to explore in fiction. It’s not fun to experience, but it sure is fascinating to write about.
CK: So there are two pretty major romances in Dead Collections, one that happens in the past tense and one in the present. What kinds of romantic relationships are you attracted to writing?
IF: I love writing romance. I don’t always do it, but it’s not because there’s a lack of pleasure in it. It’s because romance is intensely personal. You can’t really write a romance without exposing the kind of romance that you want. That’s hard enough to do even to a potential romantic prospect, much less to the entirety of the English-speaking public.
This book really called out for a really intense, really emotional romance that, to be clear, is very heightened. It speaks to a desire in me, but not a literal one.
CK: We keep returning to this idea of writing about subjects that aren’t too personal, but also aren’t too distant from your experiences or desires. How was writing a heightened romance, as you said, like the one in your book?
IF: Usually I am interested in writing about relationships between people who have really been through it and who struggle with intimacy as a result, and who have still found a way to an intimacy that is quiet and everyday and moving, because they make it work every single day. These relationships are about building something —a lifelong bond of mutual support. For Sol and Elsie, the relationship is about tearing something down—depression, the closet.
And it’s got flaws. I will go on record as saying that I do not think that it will last the whole lives of these characters. It may not even last a few years. It’s volatile. It’s something that they begin quickly and that is marked by over-the-top passion, which is expressed on both parts, somewhat theatrically, and a little bit performatively—which doesn’t mean it’s not real.
I started writing this when I was about a year into transition. It was relatively early in my experience. This book was me imagining what it would be like to fall in love as a trans person, and to write about trans people tearing things down—being exciting and desirable and in a position to learn fascinating things about themselves that they didn’t know, because they didn’t have bodies before they were 35. And I think it’s a rare exception for me, in that it really is just about two crazy kids in love, by which I mean literally two 40-year-olds in love.
CK: Two 40-year-olds at a rejuvenated part of their lives, though.
IF: Two 40-year-olds who are having experiences that a lot of people have when they’re 19, but they for various reasons have not had yet.
CK: This is the first book that you are publishing since transitioning. Has the process of either writing this book or putting it out there been different for you because of that?
IF: I have a really bad habit of reading my Goodreads reviews. I shouldn’t do it, I’m always going to stop tomorrow. It’s bad. But there is a review of my first book on Goodreads where the headline is something like: “Lyrical and a bit remote.”
This book was me imagining what it would be like to fall in love as a trans person, and to write about trans people tearing things down.
It’s so accurate. That person really nailed what’s going on with it. A lot of my pre-transition work was lyrical and a bit remote. It’s dissociative. It’s disembodied. It’s imagining people as theoretical, like “If I was a person who felt at home in my life, what would I feel like?”
That was the question that my writing was asking before then, which is part of the reason that it has gotten better since I transitioned—because now I can write from the actual perspective of somebody who, in a flawed, confusing way, does have more of a connection to my life and feels more grounded.
CK: Last one, going back to the romance aspect: Which is the nastiest sex scene in the book?
IF: The movie theater one. It’s the most gratuitous. The others have a role—this one has a role too, in that it’s about Sol bottoming for the first time. He is a service top throughout the book, mostly, but in this particular scene he realizes that he feels safe, just being touched and admired and all of the attention is on him, as opposed to all of the attention being on Elsie, his partner.
Sorry, I’ve just convinced myself that it does actually have an important role. But to me, it’s the nastiest because it is the most vulnerable for him and for me, and also because it’s a physically gross scene. They’re having sex in this abandoned room. I have OCD. That is not cool for me. But I really pushed through it, and I push through it for a reason, which is that my characters deserve to fuck all the time.
CK: Why didn’t you include Dracula? He’s in the public domain.
My husband likes to tell a story from when he was eight years old, in Los Angeles, in 1975: His parents dropped him and his seven-year-old brother at the movies to see Disney’s animated 1942 classic Bambi, then in its fourth re-release. Their parents drove home, and as they walked in the door, the phone rang. It was the younger boy calling from the theater lobby payphone, outraged: “You don’t expect us to sit here and watch Bambi’s mother being dead, do you?”
Across the country in suburban Baltimore, I was seven, too. Even if my mother had judged me able to handle the death of Bambi’s mother on film (which I doubt), she would no more have left me at a movie theater without an adult than given me the keys to the car. But on a shelf of old children’s books, culled from the mixed-lot boxes my mother bought at farm auctions, was a copy of Bambi: A Life in the Woodsby Felix Salten, bound in green cardboard stamped with figures from children’s books. Attracted by a familiar character name, as I’d also been to musty, foxed copies of The Adventures ofPinocchio and Raggedy Ann Stories, and with no one to forbid or warn me, I read it.
I was a timorous reader. I started Little Women several times, but each time I stopped where Beth gets scarlet fever and appears likely to die. Eventually I steeled myself to read on, and I cried over her eventual death, but I was not shocked. No more was I shocked by Bambi: the likelihood of his mother’s death hangs over the book. In Chapter 2, she brings Bambi to the meadow for the first time, telling him:
“I’m going out alone first. Stay here and wait. And don’t take your eyes off me for a minute. If you see me run back here, then turn round and run as fast as you can. I’ll catch up with you soon.” She grew silent and seemed to be thinking. Then she went on earnestly, “Run anyway as fast as your legs will carry you. Run even if something should happen … even if you should see me fall to the ground … Don’t think of me, do you understand? No matter what you see or hear, start running right away and just as fast as you possibly can. Do you promise me to do that?”
I thought of this passage when I heard that Jack Zipes’ new translation of Salten’s novelemphasizes something of which most American readers have been unaware: his use of Bambi’s plight as an analogy for European antisemitism and the worsening conditions for Jews in Salten’s home country of Austria and elsewhere on the continent. Bambi, published in 1923 as a novel for adults, was banned in Germany in 1936. “It is a book about survival in your own home,” Zipes told The Guardian in December 2021. In the forest, “All the animals have been persecuted. And I think what shakes the reader is that there are also some animals who are traitors, who help the hunters kill.”
The translation reflected the anxiety of being a child, not the anxiety of being a Jew.
Rereading my old copy, translated in 1928 by Whittaker Chambers, brought back how it reflected my childhood fears—of losing my mother in a crowd, of my parents dying, of the general indifference and cruelty of the big world outside the bedroom where I read. The novel painted the world as a beautiful and dangerous place, whose beauties were easy to see and whose dangers were implied without being named (why couldn’t I be dropped off at the movies?). I would have learned about the Holocaust around the same time I read Bambi, but of course I didn’t connect the two myself. The translation reflected the anxiety of being a child, not the anxiety of being a Jew.
Bambi starts slowly, the whole opening chapter devoted to the first hours of the fawn’s life: the quiet of the little glade where he is born, the silent weariness of his mother. A magpie intrudes, chattering inanely:
“How amazing to think that he should be able to get right up and walk! How interesting! I’ve never seen the like of it before in all my born days. Of course, I’m still young, only a year out of the nest, you might say. But I think it’s wonderful.”
When the unwanted postpartum visitor eventually takes the hint and flies off, Bambi’s mother licks her fawn as the voices of the forest fill the silence:
The wood-thrush rejoiced incessantly, the doves cooed without stopping, the blackbirds whistled, finches warbled, the tit-mice chirped. Through the midst of these songs the jay flew, uttering its quarrelsome cry, the magpie mocked them, and the pheasants cackled loud and high. At times the shrill exulting of a woodpecker rose above all the other voices. The call of the falcon shrilled, light and piercing, over the tree-tops, and the hoarse crow chorus was heard continuously.
I barely remembered this chapter; it must have bored me when I was young. Now, I’m delighted by how it braids together the novel’s different registers. There’s the way it inhabits the subjectivity of its animal hero in characteristic bildungsroman fashion:
The little fawn understood not one of the many songs and calls, not a word of the conversations …. Nor did he heed any of the odors which blew through the woods. He only heard the soft licking against his coat that washed him and warmed him and kissed him. And he smelled nothing but his mother’s body near him.
There’s a sense of the beauty and complexity of the forest, of the sacredness of birth. The intrusive magpie brings the petty comedy of social life, the mundane existing beside the miracle. If I found it boring as a child, now I find it beautiful.
In the Disney movie, however, Bambi’s birth is a spectacle. Assembled to view “the young prince” are virtually all the peaceful creatures of the forest, neatly arranged according to species: quail in one section, rabbits in the next. That the forest is American, not Viennese, is clear from the folksy aw-shucks quality of the dialect. (“He doesn’t walk very good, does he?” asks the young rabbit Thumper, a character invented for the movie.) The sense of occasion is at odds, too, with the novel’s emphasis on the seclusion and safety of the glade where Bambi’s mother nurses her fawn. Here, the new child is a public figure, the center of attention, atop a stratified social hierarchy almost from the moment he is born.
In the novel, Bambi starts learning early about danger and death.
In the novel, Bambi starts learning early about danger and death.Like any child, he has many questions, such as when he sees a polecat kill a mouse. Evading his question about why it happened, his mother assures him that they will not kill a mouse: “Because we never kill anything.” Later, in the heat of summer, Bambi pesters his mother to go to the meadow again:
His mother lifted her head. “Go to the meadow,” she said, “go to the meadow now?” Her voice was so full of astonishment and terror that Bambi became quite frightened.
When he tries to get her to explain why, she says, “You’ll find out all about it later when you’re bigger … we don’t talk about such things to children.” It’s not just danger—a word he has heard before and doesn’t understand—it’s also sex. The ellipses in the dialogue are in the original German as well:
“Can we only go there early in the morning?” Bambi was curious.
His mother was patient. “Only in the early morning or late evening,” she said, “or at night.”
“And never in the daytime, ever?”
His mother hesitated. “Well,” she said at last, “sometimes a few of us do go there in the daytime …. But those are special occasions …. I can’t just explain it to you, you are too young yet …. Some of us do go there …. But we are exposed to the greatest danger.”
Chambers and Zipes differ moderately in style, with Zipes cleaving more faithfully to the German (“polecat”) and Chambers privileging his American audience (“ferret”). An aim of Zipes’ translation is to restore Salten’s more overt anthropomorphism, which Chambers softened. To a reader familiar with the 1928 translation, some of Zipes’ more faithful anthropomorphic choices are jarring; it feels odd to read that a fawn “yelled,” for example. (Because I am thinking so much of my childhood reading, the passages quoted are from Chambers.) But both Zipes and Chambers preserve ellipses like the ones in Bambi’s mother’s explanation. In them, the adult explains without explaining. She tells the child as much as she thinks he can take, while also indicating that there is more she’s not telling him.
This is what Disney leaves out: not the danger, but the awareness of danger; not the growing up, but the awareness of the changes that must come. What the movie puts in their place is ignorance. Salten’s animals, like Vienna’s Jews, cannot remain ignorant, even though they don’t understand everything that is to come. Ignorance is too costly.
This is what Disney leaves out: not the danger, but the awareness of danger; not the growing up, but the awareness of the changes that must come.
In Chapter 6 of the novel, as Bambi grows, his mother leaves him alone for increasingly long stretches. He and his cousins, Faline and Gobo, speculate that the mothers are with the distant, mysterious fathers—that is, it’s rutting season, though they don’t know what that is. As Bambi roams the forest alone one night, he is overcome with loneliness and begins to call for his mother. At this moment, “one of the fathers” appears: “What are you crying about?” Bambi, awed, cannot speak. “Your mother has no time for you now,” declares the old stag. “Can’t you stay by yourself? Shame on you!”
Throughout the autumn, Bambi becomes more competent and self-sufficient. In the next chapter, after a brush with hunters in which Bambi becomes separated from his mother and sees one of the younger stags shot, he encounters the old stag again.
“Where is your mother?” asked the stag.
Bambi answered still very softly, “I don’t know.”
The old stag kept gazing at him. “And still you’re not calling for her?” he said.
Bambi looked into the noble, iron-gray face, looked at the stag’s antlers and suddenly felt full of courage. “I can stay by myself, too,” he said.
Bambi’s mother returns. Winter comes; she teaches him how to find enough food to survive. They spend more time in the society of other deer and assorted forest creatures. As he did with the magpie at Bambi’s birth, Salten satirizes the self-importance, the jockeying for social position, and the rampant speculation and gossip of human society. The animals, like people, act according to their instincts and rationalize them afterwards. (Later, when Bambi and Faline fall in love, there’s a sly comedy in the contrast between their clearly instinctive mating behavior and their romantic conversation about it.) The deer talk about the much-feared, little-understood threat they call “He”—a strange-smelling creature, walking erect with a strange and powerful face, and a “terrible third leg,” as Bambi first perceives it, that spits fire.
Bambi’s mother said, “He throws His hand at you, my grandmother told me so.”
“Is that so?” asked old Nettla. “What is it that bangs so terribly then?”
“That’s when He tears His hand off,” Bambi’s mother explained. “Then the fire flashes and the thunder cracks. He’s all fire inside.”
“Excuse me,” said Ronno. “It’s true that He’s all fire inside. But that about His hand is wrong. A hand couldn’t make such wounds. You can see that for yourself. It’s much more likely that it’s a tooth He throws at us. A tooth would explain a great many things, you know. You really die from His bite.”
It’s not much of a stretch to think about Vienna’s Jews speculating about the Austrians among whom they lived, and the Germans just over the border, when the animals exchange their theories about how to keep safe and out of the way of Him, assigning importance to their own choices even though events will prove those choices largely irrelevant when disaster comes. In another scene, a squirrel and some birds bicker about who is responsible for the death of a hunted buck:
“My voice is probably louder than yours, and I warned him as well as I could,” the crow said in an impudent tone. “But gentlemen of that stamp pay little attention to the likes of us.”
“Much too little, really,” the squirrel agreed.
“Well, we did what we could,” said the magpie. “We’re certainly not to blame when an accident happens.”
In Chapter 10—the late winter of Bambi’s first year—hunters come to the forest, shooting hares, pheasants, deer. Bambi and his mother must flee across an open space. She gives him one last warning: “And don’t forget, Bambi, my child, don’t pay any attention to me when we get out there. Even if I fall, don’t pay any attention to me, just keep on running.” Bambi’s survival instinct propels him to safety; when he comes to his senses, his mother is gone. He survives the rest of winter with the help of old Nettla, past her breeding years and kind under a crusty exterior. Soon spring has come and he is rubbing the velvet off new antlers of his own.
Bambi’s survival instinct propels him to safety; when he comes to his senses, his mother is gone.
In the movie, Bambi hardly seems to have grown in size at all between his birth and the loss of his mother. He seems very small indeed as he wanders the snowy forest calling for her. For the first time in the movie, the old stag speaks to him: “Your mother can’t be with you any more. Come, my son.” With one bereft backward glance, Bambi falls into step behind the huge deer, and they disappear into the whiteness of the falling snow. The old stag seems as remote as ever. What kind of care can he possibly give Bambi? Yet almost immediately the world is green again, and he’s a young adult, ready to fall in love.
This is what sentimentality is—the movie’s insistence on Bambi’s innocence against all the evidence to the contrary—and what enables it is a simplified narrative that ruthlessly excludes the truth of his situation. Movie viewers’ hearts break for him because of the pitiful contrast between his ignorance and the enormity of all that can happen in the world. Compared to Salten’s novel, Disney’s sentimentality seems downright willful, determined not to acknowledge that a fawn could lose his mother, or that he should learn to care for himself, so that when the worst happens, it seems—as it did to my husband’s brother—an utter betrayal.
It has been a betrayal in more ways than one. Railing against the Disneyfication of Bambi is a recurring theme for scholars of Salten’s work, and Zipes lobs familiar pejoratives at the film: “sugary,” “syrupy,” “sentimental.” His lucid introduction, “Born to Be Killed” makes a persuasive argument for rediscovering “The Original Bambi” (the pointed title of his translation). But I wonder if the most valuable aspect of this rediscovery might be in reassessing how we came to think of children as needing to be protected from knowledge. Why should they not know that the natural world is complex, bloody, beautiful, and dangerous? Why should they not learn that reality is nuanced and complicated; that we all live in a present created by a history not of our making; that to grow in understanding is the work of a lifetime?
I wonder if the most valuable aspect of this rediscovery might be in reassessing how we came to think of children as needing to be protected from knowledge.
The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest is unlikely to be banned in 2022, but every day we read of attempts to ban other works that convey difficult truths: The 1619 Project, The Bluest Eye, Fun Home, Maus. Each time, the justifications offered are about protecting children—most recently, in the case of Maus, from reading “rough” language and seeing drawings of naked mice. Rather than expose children to even a hint of painful realities, we defend, we deny. And then, of course, they are betrayed twice: once when they learn what can happen—what has happened—and again when they realize that we shielded them from it. Perhaps a third time, too, when, unaccustomed to facing history, knowing too little about the world’s dangers, they become vulnerable to them: vulnerable to becoming oppressors in a world that still seeks to oppress, or oppressed themselves—either predator or prey.
After the annexation of Austria, Felix Salten was fired by the newspaper for which he had written for more than twenty years. The Gestapo descended on his publisher’s offices and seized all the unsold copies of his works. No longer able to publish in Austria, he struggled to receive payments for work published abroad. In 1939, at nearly seventy years old, Salten managed to emigrate to Zurich, where he died in 1945. His one surviving sister, Rosalie, remained in Vienna, where she lived in increasing poverty and desperation. In June 1942, Rosalie was deported to the concentration camp Theresienstadt. She died there on August 30, 1942, just a few weeks after the release of the movie Bambi. Though Zipes’ aim is to restore the novel’s political allegory for a new generation of readers, to read The Original Bambi is to be reminded that the heavily foreshadowed death of a mother doe is not, after all, the most shocking of losses or betrayals.
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