While I’ve never been one to match my reading habits to the seasons, I recognize certain books pair well with different times of year. Breezy novels for summer, thick heady tomes for winter. Fall books tend to be moody—something to get you to feel. Carson Faust’s If the Dead Belong Hereis the ideal fall book, perfect to read curled up with a blanket and hot mug of tea.
If the Dead Belong Here deals with the disappearance of six-year-old Laurel, and how her family navigates the aftermath of her loss. Moving through time and varying perspectives, it is a gorgeous meditation on grief—with appearances by those the living are grieving: yes, as ghosts. But despite the ghosts, or maybe because of them, I’d describe If the Dead Belong Here as a family saga. While it deals with the preternatural, exploring what it means to be haunted, at its core, it’s a story of the love and legacy of family—including chosen family.
I read the novel over the summer, the time my reading habits tend toward quickly tearing through books. But If the Dead Belong Here slowed me down, in the very best way. Despite wanting to know what happened to Laurel, her sister Nadine, her mother Ayita, and the rest of the family, I was spellbound by Faust’s poetic prose and wanted to savor the novel as long as possible.
I met Carson Faust at Tin House Summer Workshop in 2021, and he is the person who introduced me to astrology. Before the interview, we emailed about this novel being a Libra—fitting for such a gorgeous book. I loved getting the opportunity to catch up about his debut novel and discuss storytelling, ghosts, and fear.
Rachel León: You mention in the acknowledgments this book wouldn’t exist without your grandma Betty and the stories she shared with you about ghosts. Should we start by honoring your grandma and the power of storytelling?
Carson Faust: Absolutely. A lot of the novel stemmed from family silences when I was growing up. The narrative centers around loss, especially that of my uncle Shane. I think my uncle Shane was 15 when he passed, and my dad would have been 13 or 14. The circumstances around my uncle’s death weren’t revealed to me early on, but I know now that it was always kind of hanging over my family. As I grew up, I started asking questions—my aunties and my grandma were more willing to talk about losses and processing grief. It wasn’t until I was late into my teenage years and adulthood that I truly started listening to family stories. My grandma talks about what people would consider preternatural things. She chats about when she started dating her partner, who she was with for like 50 years: “His parents, even after they died, wouldn’t leave me alone. They’d always hated me, so they stayed in the house and stomped up and down the stairs and made a ruckus in the rocking chair. I eventually had to talk to them and say, Listen, this is our house now; you have to leave.”…I’ve never had experiences with ghosts like that, but that they were brought up as if they’re people—because they are—shaped how I thought about ghosts in this novel. I think of ghosts as people with very limited communication skills.
Communing with ghosts, both through storytelling, and in a novel, was a way of combating silence. Bringing ghosts into the novel was a way of bringing folks who were not physically there into the narrative itself. This novel moves through time, so it was a way of bringing the past into the present of the novel.
RL: So the (written) novel was inspired by your grandma’s (orally told) stories—I’m wondering what each form can and can’t do.
I think of ghosts as people with very limited communication skills.
CF: I think when you tell a story orally, it’s often a recounting of a perspective. Whereas writing on the page—my preferred mode of communication—allows you space to ruminate and obsess and get into the psychology of a choice. If I’m relayed a family story from someone, their opinion can come through in tone or in the information they’re sharing. I found it kind of liberating: I felt a level of agency as I retold and fictionalized my family history. I could think: If this person had made a slightly different choice, what might the result have been? Or, if the last conversation with this person had gone this way, how would that translate to the emotional charge of the loss?
RL: At the beginning of the novel is a family tree, and while I used to think such an inclusion was to help orient the reader, in your novel, it felt like a nod to lineage, legacy, and inheritance.
CF: A good deal of my family in South Carolina map out their family trees in the front page of their Bibles. So to me, the presence of a family tree at the beginning is a nod to that. In previous drafts, there were also more structurally heavy-handed reinterpretations of the documents that I thumbed through as I was doing research—affidavits, census records, anthropological studies…non-primary sources about my family. As I was writing, I was like, do I need to center how other voices have described my family in the past? It became more important to instead center voices that reminded me of my grandma. In a world where so much information on Native people comes from non-Native sources, I had the license in this novel to tell the story how I think it will best come across. And the closest I can get to a voice that sounds and feels like the ones I heard telling these stories growing up feels correct for this novel.
RL: This novel is beautifully poetic, but also has a strong plot. I’ve heard writers talk like it’s either one or the other, maybe because it’s hard to pull off both organically. But you do. Any thoughts on the marriage between language and story?
CF: I don’t identify as a plotter, so I appreciate that it’s coming across okay as it’s not my natural state. When I draft, it’s not even language driven, but emotion driven. I’m trying to capture a moment, and it’s not until later that I can connect that moment to an arc, which is what plot asks of you. For me, it’s easier to bring a plot to an organic situation. If you start with plot and try to imbue some chaos later, I find that more challenging. I feel the same way about the language. I am by nature a little ornate with my writing. It’s the editing process that allows me to peel some of that back. What I try to think about as I edit: Is this metaphor serving the structure of the narrative? There are plenty of cool metaphors you can use, but if it doesn’t fit the tone of the piece, it might not belong.
RL: We get two male perspectives, but the women dominate this story, and the family is very matrilineal. Can you talk about this decision?
CF: It’s funny, it doesn’t feel like a decision per se—it’s how the story came to me. When you edit a book, you start to ruminate: Why did it come up that way? Almost all of the lessons that I carry with me came from the women in my life. My true strength came from elder women, like my grandma and my aunts and folks who shaped who I am. I think that’s why the women in this story came to me so fully formed.
I want to make sure I’m doing this as accurately as possible, and I’m presenting women that feel real, because that can be a challenge for anyone, but especially as a male writer. I want to do as best I can to make it feel true and authentic, and I hope it came across that way. Because so many layers of myself reflect more deeply the lessons that the women in my life gave me, it felt easier to do.
RL: I’d like to talk about one of the male characters: Morgan.
CF: Morgan’s narrative first came to me from an emotional sense. Morgan is a 15-year-old gay boy in the 70s in the deep South. When you’re that young, it feels easier to run away, sever ties, and start your life anew. It doesn’t always feel realistic or desirable to fight the battles one would need to fight—with relatives, loved ones, the community—to just be your authentic self. Morgan’s impulse to escape is based in fear, but it’s a fear of self. The fear of starting anew is much smaller than the fear of confronting potential rejection violence and seeing love transform into something ugly.
I think a novel is a vehicle for obsession. And every character in this novel is seeking connection. Often, they’re not getting it from the source that they want it from, so they find other ways of feeling that connection. Morgan fears a weakness in his connection to his family if he is his authentic self, so he seeks connection with Fallon. We have Nadine, who’s like, I’m a huge support for my mother, but she is unable to support me. So she goes to Dallas. It’s that aspect of chosen family or chosen people—it takes shapes in ways you don’t always expect.
RL: Reading Morgan’s story now, as we’re again seeing assaults on LGBTQIA+ rights, made me think of something I heard Carmen Maria Machado say recently. She was talking about how history is a circle, that people think we move forward and make progress, but we don’t, we return to the same stuff over and over.
CF: I agree that history happens in cycles, and current affairs happen in cycles. Violence and bigotry don’t go away, but they change shape. Right now, we’re seeing all of these attacks on trans folks. I think people who benefit from violence are cowards, so they often go after the smallest population, or the smallest category of person within a community, and see what they can get away with, then build from there. These cowards have no interest in taking on the whole of any community.
A novel is a vehicle for obsession.
In terms of Morgan’s narrative—he’s the only person in that small community who is queer, so of course, he is going to be a target for bigotry—that’s where all the aggression is going to go because he’s the only option. This violence doesn’t go away. It just changes shape.
It’s in my mind that as long as I’m alive, these themes will be relevant.
RL: You posted on Instagram recently that you hope these ghost stories also prove to be love stories, which is beautiful and true to the novel.
CF: One of the many things I was trying to subvert was genre. It’s less common now, but in many stories, the ghost is there for vengeance, and the ghost wants their death to be explained. They want everyone to understand what they had to live through. The way my grandma talks about ghosts, and the way she interacted with my uncle’s ghost after he passed, was very different. He came to her the week of his death, and explained he was okay and had passed on. There are times when she’s told me that story where she feels peaceful about it, but there are other times where she’s terrified.
RL: So the stories are the same, but her response to them changes?
CF: Yeah, the first time, she was like, “I was really glad that he told me he was okay. I got some closure.” And then I asked her a couple weeks ago, and she said, “I hate ghosts. I hate when they show up. It’s awful.” I’m like, Well, which is it? The answer is it’s all of it.
In this novel, so many of the ghosts are trying to connect with their relatives because their communication skills are not fantastic. Their communication is read as terrifying, and it probably is, but they don’t know that. Here, ghosts are trying to help their family—it is based in love and wanting their relatives to survive what they couldn’t. “Just because I couldn’t make it through this disease, this depression, whatever it may be, it does not mean that you have to do the same.” It’s a cliche that love is an action, but the ghosts in this novel are trying to spark these characters into action, and in most cases it works because they’re terrifying.
RL: I’d like to contextualize the novel within the scope of contemporary literature. You had a story in the 2023 anthology Never Whistle at Night. It seems to me like there’s a bit of a renaissance with Indigenous horror stories. But then I also wouldn’t consider this horror, I suppose…
CF: I think horror does the same thing that a lot of literary novels do. Horror specifically is good at taking the temperature of where society is at.Think of the way Get Out contextualized police violence. Horror novels and movies are like temperature checks for what was scaring people at the time. In terms of Native representation and BIPOC representation in the genre of horror, I think there’s a lot of anxiety about race in the United States—go figure. One of the novels that really shaped how I began writing this novel was White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi, which is very much a novel about how the UK deals with race and colonization. I think that’s why I responded to that novel so strongly. The novel gave me a map as to how to write this one.
Horror specifically is good at taking the temperature of where society is at.
I interviewed Stephen Graham Jones recently and he said something along the lines of: for the longest time he felt he was walking on two different paths—he would write hyper-literary novels, and he would write hyper-horror novels, and he wouldn’t attempt to mix the two. But he reached a point in his career where he finally wrote something that was literary and horror. He finally gave himself permission to walk in both worlds. When Station Elevenwas nominated as a finalist for the National Book Award, that was huge—that a sci-fi-leaning dystopian novel was heralded in literary circles. We’ve been moving toward this space of breaking down that barrier between genre and literary fiction for a long time, and I’m glad to see it, because I sometimes struggle with straight up genre fiction and with straight up literary fiction—I need both.
RL: If you had to categorize the novel, would you call it literary horror?
CF: I didn’t write this novel attempting for it to be scary. I didn’t want one of the emotions that people walk away from this book with to be fear. I think the presence of ghosts and the presence of preternatural elements will lead people to read it as horror, and I welcome that. But if intent matters—I’m going to embarrass myself here, but I was reading my Goodreads reviews, and somebody who I very much agree with, was like, This is less of a horror/fear novel and more of a sadness and despair novel. That’s true. I’m always trying to be depressing. There are things that will scare some people in this book, but I find what the living people endure to be much more horrifying than any of the stuff that ghosts and spirits are capable of. The living beings with more agency in this novel are far more terrifying than whatever the ghosts can pull out.
RL: Yeah, I never thought this novel was trying to generate fear. I read it as a meditation on grief and loss.
CF: Cancer being sad? Groundbreaking. [Laughs]
RL: I loved how you illustrated the way substance use can offer a thinning of the veil, which is something I hadn’t considered before.
CF: I think about heavy substance abuse in the same way I do about any form of self-harm—it often stems from or manifests when you feel that you have no control. Like harming yourself in some way is something you can control. A lot of characters in this novel, when they feel they don’t have control—over a situation, over themselves, over the world at large—turn to these different forms of self-harm. Alcohol is a poison, and poison, by its very nature, does bring you closer to death. When Nadine finally feels the presence of the preternatural world is when she’s near death. The more death that surrounds you, the closer you get to it yourself. Those are all ways of thinning the veil. And to me, that’s just becoming aware of your own mortality. It’s less about the act of crossing over somewhere, more about your awareness of where consciousness will or won’t go after a chapter closes.
RL: You’re the person who introduced me to astrology, so I thought we could end on an astrological note. You’re an eighth house sun, and eighth house suns are said to be intuitive, not shying away from the hard things like death and mysteries, because they understand that these things are also responsible for rebirth and transformation. Is that true for you?
CF: Yes, obviously. And even outside of writing, I’m that same way. When I even think about the music I would listen to growing up… I’m like, You are 10 years old. What do you have to be sad about? It feels dramatic, but I think melancholy and heartbreak are things certain people inherit. Even if life were just peachy keen, I would find something to be melancholy about. It’s built into my DNA.
I am seven years old, sitting nude on the toilet, staring at the line where the pattern breaks on our linoleum floor, when my little brother bursts through the unlocked bathroom door. He jumps up and down to announce the new toy my best friend, Joey, has brought over to show me. From my warmed plastic toilet seat, I have a straight eyeshot across the hallway, through my bedroom door, and to my open bedroom window. Outside the window, Joey and three neighborhood kids wait for me to come admire the toy. Erin, the neighbor girl, points at me. It doesn’t matter which toy Joey is holding. I can’t see it, and in less time than I have left in elementary school the toy will reach obscurity. Now, the commercials for it run incessantly between pre-dawn segments of the Bozo the Clown show, and any other time we might possibly sit in front of our family’s 13-inch black and white screen. Our TV has only a few channels and we change them with clunky dials. We live in base housing on the Air Force Academy, and each day the TV networks begin with the national anthem. I believe the uniformed good-guys who live on bases have special TV channels, and I believe TV stations off base don’t open with the anthem. Erin, the neighbor girl, says something I can’t hear, and I scream at my brother to shut the door. His excitement shifts, his face turns to horror. Either I leap up, my ass unwiped, my prepubescent bits dangling, to slam the door, or my brother does it for me. I assume it’s me because I’m standing there and because I refuse to give my little brother agency beyond what he’s capable of breaking. I hear laughter outside. I lock the door and scan the bathroom for another way out.
I am fourteen, reading Watchmen for the first time, and I’m angry at the wrong parts, the pages full of text I have to slow to read as my page-flipping hand shakes with Tourette’s impatience. I’m not angry at the rape that, while necessary-ish to the plot, seems so common. It’s the 90s and kids my age have stories of what would soon be called date rape, but what the courts currently refer to as: “an error in judgement,” or “boys will be boys,” or they don’t bother to name it at all and instead ask if her skirt touched her knees, or if the no could possibly be taken as an answer to another question. Does is mean is, for example. Our reelected president and role-model says: It depends. My mother, the Air Force Major, refuses to discuss her Commander in Chief with her children. My father stays out late and is still in bed when I leave for school.
I lock the door and scan the bathroom for another way out.
I grow my hair long like a skater I saw on MTV and for the first time notice girls glancing at me in the halls. This attention is what I decide I will always want. Does yes mean yes? The young dark-haired intern mouthing, “Yes, Mr. President” from beneath his desk says: It does. On the day I finish Watchmen, the girl I love more than toys or graphic novels says yes to a school dance, and it’s a big deal because I’m me and she’s Mormon, and I practice dancing alone in my room all weekend and into the next week. I walk to the dance, and we meet on the front steps of the school where I’m wearing Bugle Boy pants and an O. P. shirt and she’s in a 90s hot-pink dress that drops barely below her knees.
When I walk up, her shoulder length brown hair flips in the twilight breeze that carries woodsmoke through our Cayuga Lake valley. Fiery leaves gather, swirling in the school doorways, and I don’t have a coat to offer her. We don’t hold hands, but our knuckles brush as we walk into the school dance. We make sure our friends see us together. We eat and drink soda from the lunch line. And for the first time I get onto a dance floor and in the middle of the second song she asks, “Is that the only dance you know?” And it is. The softer me that believes it could work out with a Mormon girl, that believes learning one dance is enough, panics through the school-pizza-filled pit of my stomach and changes, and lies, and says, “No. I know lots of dances.” For the last time I leave the dance floor. I buy a Dr. Pepper and sit on the partially extended wooden bleachers and perfect the mental gymnastics that will allow me to watch my future partners dance with other men from the sidelines for the rest of my life.
I am twenty-one and drunk in the back of a cab with girls in short party dresses sitting on either side of me. I can feel the cabby’s jealousy through the rearview mirror. The girls are kissing me, and they are kissing each other so close to my face I can smell their clove cigarettes, their vanilla perfume. I grab one’s thigh, and she takes my hand and pulls it up into her crotch, a really weird word for something so warm and damp and desired. I want her now even more than I will want—six hours from now—to never drink again.
When we reach their apartment, we stumble through the humid air, up outdoor concrete stairs, and I slip, or trip, and slide against the stucco wall, embedding fiberglass hairs along a gash beneath my eye. As we sit in the good light of the kitchen floor, their drunken hands are unsteady with the tweezers, and I imagine going blind for this. Neither of them are the woman I’m in a relationship with—a serious relationship where I take her out to clubs and drink and watch her dance with other men. That woman fell asleep hours ago in another town, trusting me like I trust her. I stumble into the bathroom and lock the door. In the mirror, the deep maroon lines along my cheek have begun to swell and feel numb when I touch them with my shock-shaking hand. I pray to the god who only taught me one dance to please not let me scar, even though I was raised Catholic and know I deserve far worse. Outside the door I hear a man’s voice, and when I leave the bathroom he and one of my kissing companions, and another woman I’ve never seen before, walk into one of the bedrooms. The woman who stays with me, who held my hand between her legs, runs past me into the bathroom. She kneels on the terracotta tile floor, wraps her hair around her hand from behind, leans over the toilet bowl and vomits.
I walk into the kitchen, open a couple cabinets, give up and grab a glass from the sink, and fill it for her with water. From the other bedroom two girls moan together as if the man wasn’t even there. When I walk into the bathroom, she flushes and she brushes her teeth. She lights a clove and takes a drag, and I can hear it crackle. She hands it to me and I take a few drags too and try to believe I can’t taste her vomit on the sugar-coated filter. I lean back into her couch with my eyes locked to a water stain on her ceiling and try to stop the room from spinning. When she’s done with the clove, she takes my hand and leads me to her bedroom. She keeps her apartment cold, her air-conditioner cranked, but we’re both sweating. In her bed, we strip to our underwear. She turns on a lamp next to the bed. I lay at the edge of the bed on my back and put one foot on the floor to hold the world to its undulating axis, to keep it steady. She puts on a Mazzy Star CD and lays on my chest with her naked breasts against me, and begins to snore before the first song ends.
From this moment on, our alcohol laced sweat is the most intimate thing our bodies will ever share. When I wake five hours later, the sun cuts razors through her plastic window blinds. My eyes want to puke themselves out and my heart pounds in the half of my face that feels on fire. She has rolled over and her black thong underwear has shifted half way down her ass. Where I had laid my face, pale streaks of blood stripe her pillow, and the tableside lamp remains on. I turn it off and stand and lean against her wall and want to die. I drink the glass of water I’d filled for her, and quietly dress myself.
I am asleep and dreaming when they hose the boxes down with thirty-six-degree water.
I walk past the other bedroom door and imagine the scene inside. All I want is a quick peek. Instead, I slip from the apartment, closing the front door and hear the handle-lock’s soft click behind me. At the bottom of the stairs, the Texas summer sun hits me, unapologetic and vengeful. I walk across the parking lot and, after checking for fire ants, kneel behind a dumpster and vomit up the water I just drank. There’s nothing else in it really, some yellow foam that comes out last and briefly floats on top before the dry earth absorbs it all. Some snot clings to my long hair. My neck sweats down my back. I hate this state. I remember: The name of the toy Joey wanted to show me was The Animal. The Animal was a truck with claws that came out of the wheels so that, no matter the situation, it could claw its way out.
I am twenty-eight and my country keeps killing innocent people and I believe I can make a difference. I’m in the Air Force officer’s version of basic training. Kinder. Gentler. They can shave my head, but they can’t call me names, or beat me. Apparently that annoys them, so they pack me off to survival school where they are allowed to treat me as a prisoner of war. In a three foot wide by four foot deep room, I have a prisoner’s burlap hood over my face. They play Muslim prayers and “Boots” by Kipling on repeat for hours, then Yoko Ono screaming the refrain of “Hey Jude” for an entire day. Two feet in any direction from madness, I piss into a can in the dark and they scream at me while I try to pour the can into a bag and drench my sleeve in my own urine. They hit me in the face for that. Then they hit me for reasons I don’t understand.
Later they fold me into a small box with a perforated lid which it sounds like they lock from the outside with a padlock. Maybe I can’t make a difference. Maybe I should have planned for this better. I begin to disassociate from reality. My unbreakable imaginary fists begin to chip away at the top of the wooden box. My hits land like they do in Kill Bill, until the roof slowly splinters. I am asleep and dreaming when they hose the boxes down with thirty-six-degree water. I know the temperature because they tell me exactly how cold it is, and it feels that cold as it soaks through my layers of fabric. It falls through the holes in the box top into my nose, onto my face. Awake, and drowning, and unable to move, I wish I was back on the toilet with the open door, or on the dance floor. This “training” teaches me things I doubt they intend—how to hate them for example. How to distrust a United States uniform as much as any other, maybe even more, maybe even if I’m wearing one. Maybe the water pouring through the top of the box and filling the scant air space around me will wash my own piss off my arm. I begin to struggle and gasp for air.
The Animal could not claw its way from this place, even with its claws out. In practice the claws never worked right anyway—they always ended up getting the truck stuck as they lodged into every crevasse. All that weaponized design and preparation, and when it mattered, the smooth wheels worked best; at least they could steer around obstacles and wouldn’t sink into every hole, every puddle of mud. Maybe the honest and softer me, fourteen and buried on the dance floor, receives a wake up tap on the shoulder as my fortifications of lies, built to protect a vulnerable core, fail in this flood. Or maybe I’m not drowning. Maybe it’s just a locked box and sweat, and the water from the frozen hose comes later. Regardless, I won’t walk away from today as I was. When the water reaches my ears I yell like a wounded dog, and they open the box. Too cramped and cold-numbed to move on my own, two men in camouflaged uniforms drag me by my shoulders from the box and let me fall into a pile of snow. On my back, soaked and shivering, the gray sky appears new to me as if everything outside the box is unknown space, untouched experience. A few flakes flurry on the breeze. And when they finally pull the hood back down over my head, they’re too late to blot out my hope. The me that remains is no longer guided by belief, only purpose.
I am thirty-five and also seven, learning to navigate a used life and a new one. I have left the Air Force, and thirty-five-year-old me makes the uniforms I no longer trust pay for my brain meds and my graduate school. I have a toddler now, a daughter whose name means dreamland. With her I am seven, and for the first time in my life I know how to be the age I am because I’ve been there before. My role is the big brother I never had, and I teach her the things I wish I had known. She teaches me too. We play, and she moves in and out of her imagination and tells me the sounds I need to make. I am a train, and she rides upon my back. I am a sun bear, and she rides upon my back. There’s a lot of riding happening. When we visit the local pool together, I’m a dolphin, but when I sit on the aluminum bleachers during her swimming lessons I find myself holding my breath for her, so I try not to watch.
I am seven with adult fractures and I need help.
At night, she falls asleep in her bed beside the stereo, and I write about music because I’ve yet to read words that reach the same transcendence. I tell the VA shrink, when words I write can move beyond their physical nature, so perhaps can I. For education, I read poems about jazz by writers desperate to capture in verse what they heard in a night so tactile it left their hair smelling like cigarettes for days. And it was too late for showers anyway. The music had soaked into their pillows and dreams, victims of an unexpected high low high low -high-high-higher wrapped in a sound tornado. These dead white beats all want to talk about the Buddha, and petty thievery, and about getting teenagers on their dicks. I just want to figure out how to exist on a page and also float above it. I want to look up at a sky of snow again and close my eyes and open them to the same sky over and over, like it’s some magic trick that no one’s waiting there to cover my head in burlap.
I am seven with adult fractures and I need help. I don’t heal like I did the first time around. My new body remembers every hurt in its bones, and every slight in its dreams. It finds comfort in illusion and hides from the real. I cry harder at movies than at funerals. Though I’ll never wear a uniform again, marching became almost second nature, and my favorite dance move is the about-face. I perform it every bit as well as my otherwise constant state of immediate future preparation. This march of time, this off the dancefloor dance that keeps me unmoored from anything resembling life in the present tense—I am always twenty minutes from now, and always twenty years ago. The new seven year old me plans ahead, and I know to always lock the bathroom door, and by the time she is seven so will my daughter. The younger woman I married, who is also older than me, crawls beneath my blankets. Some nights we share our bodies and some nights we share blanket forts. Either way, she falls asleep on my shoulder, her breasts against me, and when I wake she’s still there. And I don’t have to sneak out, or drink her glass of water.
I am forty-two and have all the answers. They come to me, one after the other, a quick succession of midlife wisdom without doubt, a clarity of purpose I call my midlife opportunity. What I want is as clear to me now as what I wanted at fourteen. I want to go back, and try smarter. And so, I am also fourteen and also have all the answers, a confidence laced in a redo attitude of “if I knew then what I know now,” because this time I do.
I read Watchmen for the second time, and I fear for my daughter and the chain reactions that will shape her many possible futures. I notice for the first time, the only double page spread in the graphic novel, except for the very end, spans the exact center, and the turning point of the story. My story has turned. This time around I am not humiliated by my lack, and my daughter won’t be either. I am a father, and she looks to me for certainty. I feel today-years-old every time I discover “I don’t know” is also a certainty. My daughter takes every cushion off every chair and couch and from them makes a soft three sided tunnel of boxes that she crawls into and calls her “queendom.” She says I may enter, and I tell her I don’t really do boxes. So she crawls out and sits on my lap and says the rest of the apartment can be part of her queendom too, and the soft boxes can be her chambers. Except she doesn’t say chambers. She says “chang-ers,” like hangers with a ch in front. I tell her, we will join your queendom. And I don’t correct her pronunciation. She asks me how many queendoms the world has and I say, none I know of, but we do have queens. She asks why they aren’t called queendoms and I tell her, some words take time to invent. She asks me to play with her hand-puppet badger, Constance, and tells badger-me to keep her company. Together, she and Constance practice holding their breath. After forty Mississippis, she asks me if I was a baby. I ask, me or Constance? She says me. I say, a long time ago I was, but I remember it like you remember your first step, which she then swears she remembers. She asks if she can put her music on while she reads a book about a goat who’s a picky eater. I put on her favorite band, Pearl and the Beard, and when she falls asleep beside her book and begins to breathe heavily, I change it to Mazzy Star.
At forty-two, I no longer take as many medications in the morning, and my dreams run more glide than panic. My quiet revenge against indoctrination is raising a young mind the government will never get to use against itself. My quiet revenge against groupthink are the post-military degrees I milk for all the tax payers are worth. I about-face, regrow my MTV hair, reclaim an earlier mind. I un-remember what ribbons they awarded me for my service. When my daughter wakes, she asks for a back scratch and asks fourteen year old me to dance with her at the living room ball. And I say, yes.
I am forty-nine and I am twenty-one, at a confluence of adulthoods. Forty-nine-year-old me collects memories, and copies them into stacks of legal pads. And I’m doing twenty-one right this time, not in the back of a cab between women I barely know, or dodging tweezers on a central Texas apartment kitchen floor. We have a house now, a dining room. On my birthday, we sit at our dining room table, and the two women beside me in their queendom are neither false nor fleeting. Over dinner, my brother calls for my birthday and I put him on speaker phone while he excitedly fills us in on his new job, tells how he builds organized teams, and works closely with animals. He talks about a few animals he’s in charge of then pauses. He’s been thinking, he says, and the enthusiasm leaves his voice. He begins to apologize for that time when we were kids and he opened the bathroom door when my friend… I tell him we’re at the dinner table and remind him he is on speaker phone. And he says, oh, and his voice brightens as he explains, in laughing detail, exactly what happened anyway before apologizing again. He explains it the way I do, where I’m the one to jump up and shut the door. While my daughter and brother laugh, I say I barely remember any of it, and I say I forgive him. It’s a lie—I do remember. But it’s true that I forgive him. I tell him about a story idea I have where the plot is a spinning top, like a tornado and an anti-tornado meeting in the sky.
We have a house now, a dining room. On my birthday, we sit at our dining room table.
While we talk, my daughter takes a quick call from her boyfriend. She dates boys who show up at our home in expensive cars that can avoid obstacles, pot holes, low water crossings, cars that basically drive themselves. I want to tell the boys to keep their hands on the wheel anyway. I don’t, though. Instead, I tell them what time I want her home, and I tell them no means no, and I don’t ask any questions I don’t want honest answers to. I know what can happen in the seats of cars. My daughter sings, and memorizes K-Pop dances, and plays ethereal instrumentals my words fail to approximate. She has no problem asking for what she wants.
When I hit my socializing limit, my wife listens to my brother, responds with dinner-table kindness, and fills him in on our lives adding the details I always miss. While they chat, I clear the table and wash some dishes before putting them into the dishwasher—clean—to be cleaned again. Walking toward the bathroom I pass our hallway mirror with its small ledge where we place treasures we find in the Pacific Northwest forests: tiny pine cones, the lower jawbone of a shrew, a shard of snowflake obsidian. I stop and pull back my graying hair. I turn my face in the mirror, and press my fingers along the two invisible lines that once ruined an evening. Even looking close I can’t see a single scar, but they are there.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover ofLast and First Tales by Samuel R. Delany, which will be published in fall 2026 by Coffee House Press. You can pre-order your copyhere.
Sci-fi Grand Master Samuel R. Delany presents a career and genre-spanning anthology of stories: innovative, erotic, provocative, and unforgettable.
From the publication of his first novel The Jewels of Aptor to his 1975 bestseller Dhalgren and beyond, Samuel R. Delany has been a fearless and unique figure in American letters. Curated by the author, Last and First Tales gathers Delany’s twenty-first century short fiction alongside previously unavailable work dating back to his earliest, startlingly precocious experiments in prose. Here you will find queer sexual awakenings; a future in which race and gender have evolved in strange new ways; newly emended versions of Delany’s classic stories; and myriad other reminiscences, inquiries, and transgressions.
As Junot Díaz writes in his foreword, “In Last and First Tales a reader will find the entire breadth of Delany’s remarkable sixty-five-plus-year oeuvre. All the singularities of talent, of insight, of compassion, all the rigorous intellectual and aesthetic surveys, the endless restless erudition and curiosity…I can think of no better survey of the labyrinth that is Delany’s work.”
Here is the cover, painted by Gregory Frux:
Samuel R. Delany: I lived for a year and a half in an old brownstone building in the East Village. I was living with my then-lover Ron Beauman, whom I met on the stoop. After sex, he was charmed by the idea of living with a literary lover. While I was there, I wrote two of the stories in this collection: “Drift Glass” and “Among the Blobs.” Ultimately, he decided a lover who wrote all day wasn’t as exciting as he thought it would be. I returned from a trip to London to find he had replaced me, and was ready for me to move out.
So it goes.
I had learned, at a rent party I threw, from a Dalton schoolmate, the great poet W.H. Auden lived a few doors down from that home. He was once the babysitter for my friend and his sister, a fact that amused as we partied down the street. It was there that the pornographic poem “The Platonic Blow” was set, years previously. Auden had a bar beneath his house—as for me, the Electric Circus nightclub was next door.
Ultimately, both the gay scene and literary figures found homes in that neighborhood for the same reason: the rent was cheap. Human beauty and self-expression bloom when they’re given the chance to. Too few places like this remain today.
Gregory Frux: In 1984 I had just come back from Italy where I was completing my Master of Fine Arts, where I had found the courage to paint outdoors. In Italy I painted on the streets in the famous small marble town of Carrara, which is the source of the best marble for artists in Italy and a welcoming place for them.
My first subjects back home were in East Village, which had many of the components that were important in my work. These were political (rent strike poster in the window) diverse community (Afghan restaurant and a variety of locals) and history (the 19th century brownstone architecture with carved figures). It was a raw time in the East Village, and it had a lot of character. Friends posed for some of the figures both on site and later in the studio. I was just getting to know Chip about this time after writing him a fan letter and sending an illustration I had done for Dhalgren. He graciously responded and invited me over. At that time I was painting portraits and this painting pointed me in a new direction of cityscape and landscape, often peopled, which I have continued to this day.
The name of this painting is “Words on 32 St. Mark’s Place” by Gregory Frux, www.fruxart.com
Like the stories it harbors, the title of Kristina Ten’s debut short story collection is both a promise and a provocation. Close your eyes and you can picture the kid who used to whisper those kinds of words to you at the slumber party. It’s the smirking boy who knows where his dad keeps the booze; it’s the pierced girl you’ve been having queer dreams about.
Granted, Ten’s mode is speculative fiction, and so, in her rendering, that friend you’re crushing on speaks a cursed language she picked up from a demented video game. That chemically curious boy doesn’t just huff glue—he uses it to conjure ghosts. Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine summons the ominous possibilities of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, infusing adolescence—and adulthood—with even more danger than they already had.
The characters of Tell Me Yours are vulnerable in more ways than one. They are often immigrants, like Ten herself, navigating schools and workplaces allergic to “foreigners.” Others are women whose bodies are under siege, fleeing Earth to seek abortions, or doing (literal) battle with sexist doctors, or darkly manipulating their flesh to keep their spot on the volleyball team. Yet there are no easy victims here; Ten also affords her protagonists resilience and revenge. The book’s pages are sticky with blood, yes, but also with guts.
I spoke with the McSweeney’s Stephen Dixon Award winner and Shirley Jackson Award finalist by phone.
Chelsea Davis: A theme throughout Tell Me Yours is disorientation. We meet many of your protagonists as they’re struggling to adjust to a new place: a new country; a new summer camp; a new planet. Are there aspects of speculative fiction that make it an especially good fit for exploring displacement?
Kristina Ten: In writing speculative fiction, I think what I’m doing is trying to build a world in which my characters feel at home or feel a sense of belonging. Because of the various intersections of their identities, they haven’t found that place in the real world.
For someone like me, home has never been a place with fixed coordinates. I moved to the U.S. when I was young, and since then, I’ve lived in New York, New Jersey, Boston, the Bay Area, Colorado, Chicago, and then to New York again. I joke with my family that we all have permanent motion sickness. So because I don’t have this commitment to home as a specific place, I think that I look for those places in speculative fiction.
Also, with a place like Moscow, for example—I lived there as a kid, but I don’t remember it well, and it’s very difficult to go back now. So creating a speculative world allows me to imagine a place I don’t remember well, to visit people I can’t easily visit in reality, and even to reclaim, and make better, places that I’ve been.
CD: Do any examples of that last move come to mind from this collection?
KT: When I write about San Francisco [in “The Advocate” and “Adjective”], I write about it fondly but critically.
For someone like me, home has never been a place with fixed coordinates.
I can very rarely write about a place when I’m presently living there. It always has to be in the rearview. I think that like with the distance of speculative fiction and also with the distance of time, I can think about it a little bit more critically.
CD: In addition to disorientation, has writing these stories helped you better understand any other aspects of your experience of immigration?
KT: Looking at the collection all together, I’ve come to the realization that just being perceived is terrible. All of my characters are so concerned with how they’re defined by other people. They want to be American enough, or to be immigrant enough, or to follow the rules of the American healthcare system enough to be deemed a docile enough patient, but also a patient who advocates for themselves. And they always fail.
These characters are all people-pleasers. They lose themselves completely because they are trying to anticipate what these other people in their lives want them to be. That can ladder up to obedience at the level of citizen and nation, like in “Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod.”
Something that I don’t think was in my thesis—so to speak—when I started writing this book, but that I think I started to poke at as I wrote, is rules. What do rules offer us? How can they serve us? When do they stop serving us? I’m interested in obedience and disobedience and rule breakers.
CD: Your mentioning rules makes me think about how many of these stories are either structured as a game or feature games as a plot event. “Adjective” uses Mad Libs as a hermit crab form; there are also video games (“Dizzy Room”), jousts (“The Advocate”), card games (“The Flood”), trivia (“Another Round Again”).
KT: Where games and rules have served me in the past, and where they serve these characters, is that they’re a language with which to speak to the world when you don’t feel like you have another shared language. Maybe you’re the first-generation kid at school, or the new kid at camp, or the new employee at the office who feels like a fish out of water. When it’s difficult to relate to people, games are this way of speaking to people that goes beyond language, generation, and past experience. I think fiction can be the same way—the stories that we tell each other.
CD: I wanted to return to what you said a little bit earlier about how being perceived is terrible. Vulnerability is such a double-edged sword in Tell Me Yours: there’s vulnerability as weakness in “Bunny Ears,” and as the chinks in your literal armor, in “The Advocate.” But then you also channel the idea that we can’t connect with other people without some degree of vulnerability, like in “Mel for Melissa,” which highlights a girlhood friendship forged through sharing intimate pain. Are you feeling vulnerable as you watch your first book enter the world?
KT: There’s always a degree of vulnerability in putting yourself out there. This is my debut collection, and like all writers and artists, I feel this very volatile shift from just typing away in jumbo-shrimp/pretzel form for ten hours a day over my laptop in the dark to suddenly being at book events and having to talk out loud to other people about this thing that had felt so private.
Violence is always at this remove through metaphor and image that makes something more bearable by abstraction.
That said, the truth is that I do also have the armor that you’re talking about, as someone who’s predominantly a fiction writer. I am in awe of memoirists, and creative nonfiction writers and lyric essayists and poets. They have less of that defense.
But when my parents come up to me, and they’re asking, “I read this story, and it’s really sad, and it’s obviously about XYZ,” I can say, “Oh, mom and dad, no, no, I understand your concern, but it’s fiction. 100% fiction.”
CD: There are some eruptions of intense body horror in these stories. I’m thinking of “Bunny Ears,” “Mel for Melissa,” “The Flood,” and “Last Letter First.”
KT: Up until a few years ago, I was really invested in the distancing power of fairytales—in how that distance allows us to talk about things that are difficult to talk about. It makes it easier for the writer in the writing; it makes it easier for the reader in the reading. In a fairytale, a character isn’t actually depicted being brutally raped, but instead the petals of a flower curl on the ground. Violence is always at this remove through metaphor and image that makes something more bearable by abstraction. I’ve found this so valuable in my own writing.
I was also really interested in the way fairy tales have been applied over the years at different times in different countries to circumvent censorship—again, through the abstraction of message.
Then I read some fiction by Dorothy Allison, who isn’t a speculative fiction writer, but writes in a very in-your-face way about really difficult things like violence and intimacy. She has a speech, which is included at the back of the 20th anniversary edition of Bastard Out of Carolina, about the presentation of violence in fiction. How sometimes no other way of writing violence, except explicitly, suffices. It made me wonder, “Am I leaning on abstraction to look away? What could be gained from looking at this thing unflinchingly?”
After that, I became less interested in abstraction and more in direct, this-is-how-it-is writing. And even in going a step beyond that, towards the exaggeration that we see in body horror. I’m still interested in fairy tales; I just have a different relationship with them now than I did a few years ago.
CD: One of the stories in Tell Me Yours that most clearly engages with folklore is “The Flood, The Tumble, The Talons, The Trick.” A water dragon gets kidnapped by an abusive man who uses her magically self-healing body in horrible ways to support his card shark hustle. What about that mythological creature made you want to bring it to our own era?
KT: Pretty much every time I’m playing with fairytales or myths, I end up transposing them into modern settings. I find it comforting seeing these great, infallible figures fall—to see that some of the most difficult things in life are difficult even for gods and immortal beings. They’re not free of the exoticizing male gaze, in “The Flood, The Tumble”; or, in some of my other stories, of immigration offices and DMV lines and the mania of planning a wedding.
We moved from Russia when I was young, and my father’s side is Korean. In a way, I was thinking about writing this story for my grandfather, who passed before I was born but who still has this active presence in our family through my father.
I’m interested in the slippery threshold between spaces of realism and spaces of speculative writing.
The water dragon comes from the stories that he read growing up. At least in “Western” media, it’s the variety of dragon that I see less often. I think the story pokes a little bit of fun at that, at folks assuming that “dragon” equals a winged, fire-breathing thing.
CD: It’s a violent story, in ways that are both disturbing and cathartic. Is there a connection between gender and body horror for you? A lot of the characters who have bad things happen to their bodies in Tell Me Yours happen to be girls and women.
KT: I guess in part the violence is happening and circling around female characters because that’s mostly who this book is about; all of the protagonists are women in the collection.
But I also think that’s the part of the book that’s nonfiction—it’s not speculative at all, but grim, gritty realism. There is a line in “Mel for Melissa” that talks about how these characters have been raised to feel like their bodies are malleable—malleable at the hands of other people. This leads to this sense that they sometimes take up too much space. At other times, they feel so insubstantial that they might just blow away.
All they’ve really known is other people asserting what they want on their bodies. All they’ve known is that kind of violence. So, it’s counterintuitive, but for the characters in Tell Me Yours, committing violence themselves can be a reclamatory movement because they’re taking control of their own bodies. Yes, it’s horrible, what the characters do in “Mel for Melissa” and “Bunny Ears,” but it is a choice they’re making. Whereas throughout their lives there’s been so much push and pull from external forces on their bodies, their minds—what they should look like, how they should behave, what they should think.
CD: Part of what makes that coercion possible in “Mel for Melissa” is that the protagonists are teenagers. There are a lot of young characters in this collection, and the book’s dedication evokes that period of life, too: “for the last one awake at the sleepover.” What about the years before adulthood draws you to narrativizing that age?
KT: Childhood is this time where anything is possible. Being a speculative fiction writer—especially a slipstream or fabulist writer—I’m interested in the slippery threshold between spaces of realism and spaces of speculative writing. So I’m drawn to that time in our lives.
Some of those rituals that we engaged in—saying “Bloody Mary” in the mirror, or using Ouija boards—I probably scoffed at and pretended not to believe in. But I did those things because I did believe. That’s a space that I am always trying to access now that I am an adult.
CD: The kids’ parents are often absent in these stories, too.
KT: We see that often in fairy tales, where one or both parents are missing.
But I’m also probably just drawing from what I know. I am an only child, and I moved to the States with my parents when I was young, and they were both working a lot. I never had an official babysitter. Sometimes I got dropped off with the family next door. But as soon as my parents deemed me old enough, I babysat myself.
Because I didn’t have siblings around me I was also one of those kids who spent a lot of time around adults. I was that “precocious” and “old soul” kid. I stepped into that role very comfortably, and I grew up quickly because of that.
I think maybe that’s one of the reasons that I lean back toward childhood in my work. If you’re a kid who was forced to be an adult early, maybe as an adult you find yourself returning to your younger years, embracing some of the playfulness that you didn’t then.
At eighteen, I listened into the blackness of a headset as classmates whispered about the hunger to die or a scarlet realization she never said yes the previous night.
Back then I believed I could help people. Forty hours of crisis hotline training, I thought I was mastering something.
Did I stop vomiting dinners of Lucky Charms in basement bathrooms? No, I spooned my emptiness into no one.
This week, my old campus on the news, students building protests with tent poles. Spilling flags across the same damp grass where I drank Boone’s, smoked cloves, and slept.
I was only on Butler Lawn for one night. I wasn’t radical. The university hosted a sleepover for incoming students to demonstrate the safety of New York.
Our parents received letters promising extra security, cameras, spotlights. My rebellion – a stomach growl from my sleeping bag.
Why didn’t I use my mouth to snarl instead of singing my fear of Freshman Fifteen into dark toilets?
My mother says, if you were there, you would be protesting too. Yes, I respond, but when the NYPD arrived, I would have run.
Where Exactly Is Armenia?
Click to enlarge
Holes
I used to visit a woman in Berkeley who placed her hand on my spine to seek my sadness. Her room warmed with listening.
The Israeli president announced, “we remember the Armenians.”
It doesn’t take much to displace a people.
Ask me about the fences, shredding of flowers.
Count dream-slivers, each bullet in a mouth.
The woman’s fingers swam in the dark ocean of my back.
Poetry has always been a cartographer for me, the way to start scratching out a map when I am lost.
When I was working on my book, Something Small of How to See a River, I reallywanted to find other contemporary poetry books directly from movement and activism spaces. I had been a guest in the beautiful Indigenous Water Protector movement in Standing Rock, where I helped organize a school for the kids who lived at the camp. When I returned home, I didn’t know how to make sense of the experience I’d had: the joys and the sense of community and the land alongside the intense state violence—and, in the end, the pipeline that did run through Lakȟóta land and beneath the river. Through poetry, I was trying to figure out how to process this experience, to see if there was a way for me to write my small corner of this very big story.
How did other poets balance the delicate tension of writing about a collective movement from an individual perspective? How did they process the successes and failures? How do they see the role of art within activism? I didn’t know much poetry directly from these spaces—but I expected to find it easily. Yet, I kept coming up with crickets. While the tradition of the protest poem is powerful and ever-present, I haven’t found much traditionally published poetry that comes from direct, personal experience on activism’s front-lines. (Although I do believe that within movements, people know who their poets and storytellers are).
This makes me even more grateful for the incredible books listed below. I strongly believe that these poetry books are essential to our understanding of resistance. In the face of facism and oppressive state violence, they give me not fragile hope, but imagination, resilience, and a re-centering on our interconnectedness.
Bittering the Wound is a deep and careful storytelling that comes directly from Germain’s experiences during the Ferguson uprisings. Germain has a continuous focus on protest as a form of love: for one’s community, for one’s ancestors, for Blackness, for oneself. The city is alive, the streets are alive, the protestors are alive and embodied—and they are all asking the question, “How do we care for each other when we live in institutions of violence?” It’s a book that insists both on the deep trauma and violence that occurred and the community care that is woven into every moment. I really appreciate Germain’s focus also on what happens after a big movement—when the cameras leave and organizers and activists are left to deal with the trauma, with the intimate aspects of a very public story. (Also, huge shout out to Germain for recommending several of the books on this list to me.)
Tilsen is a Lakȟóta poet, organizer, and educator who was deeply involved at the Oceti Sakowin Water Protector Camp and is truly a poet of the community. His work holds the small and distinctive details of folks working together to survive and resist—the helicopters spinning overhead, the “donation tent couture,” the trips to the casino to use the, ahem, facilities—with deep heart, asking “let me be fearless/just one more time.” It also asks the reader to show up—to not just read about a movement space, but to become a part of it, to join the resistance. He writes, “Put on your orange coat/Use the ear plugs when offered/let the medics take care of you/if you forget to take care of yourself have someone remind you.”
Villainy is a very bodily, queer exploration of grief and protest. Ab-Karam writes directly from the sites of activism and struggle, most especially the protests against the Muslim Bans of 2018. Karam is also deeply critical of the traditional publishing model and poets “writing about the riot from a youtube video” and it shows in the way the book refuses any traditional model of what a poetry book should look or sound like. Some pages include just a single line (“I WANT A BETTER APOCALYPSE THIS ONE SUCKS”), while some are in large blocks of all caps. A thick layering of sensation, ideas, repeated phrases (“this myth is hard on on the body”) build like wheatpaste posters, a complicated and collective insistence on survival and resistance and queer community care.
Cimafiejeva writes from Belarussian protests against the dictator Lukashenko. Like in Abi-Karam’s work, there’s a constant pushing against language and what it can express in extreme political circumstances. The book finds two different approaches: the first half, a straightforward prose diary of the protests and the brutality of the regime; the second, a collection of lyric and slightly surreal explorations of Belarus and the very idea of homeland. The two sections play off each other like reflections in a lake, grounding the readers in the specificity of the violence and then providing the strange mirror only poetry can—a wry, and weary, but still almost playful examination of what a person owes to her homeland, what a poet owes to her homeland, and what that homeland owes to her. She begins one poem: “A poet’s body belongs to his motherland/motherland speaks through the poet’s mouth” and ends it: “No, you don’t need the body of a poettess/It’s mine.”
McDougall’s gorgeous book centers on Native Hawaiian life and connection and resistance. It’s an active re-making, re-imagining—a reminder that Hawaii has always been an Indigenous place. Many poems in the collection come from McDougall’s experience at Mauna Kea, in resistance of the telescope planned for this sacred Hawaiian mountain, where the “sky is so thin, / thinnest of all skins come to stitch / a new story.” Her poems, threaded deeply with Hawaiian language, highlight the work of this Native resistance, of bringing one another food, water, and medicine, of putting one’s body on the line for the land. While the book acknowledges colonial violence, it always holds a deep sovereignty and love.
I’ve never read a book that pushes against the commodification of poetry quite like this. Hong Kong Without Us is essentially an anonymously written and edited anthology from the youth-led Hong Kong protests against Chinese authoritarian control in 2019-2020. The editors, who refer to themselves as the Bauhinia Project, gathered submitted work, poetry they found written on walls, and even Facebook posts, bringing individual voices together into a searing collective chorus. There’s a constant desperation present among the primarily young poets, but also a strong sense of desire to care for and protect others. One seventeen year old writes, “I’m sorry Hongkongers,/I’m just a high schooler/the cops are stronger than me,/ I couldn’t protect anyone/but I could smother canisters/of tear gas for you.”
In 1971, men imprisoned at Attica (some for infractions like driving without a license or a forged check) organized a tent city in the prison yard, where they petitioned for their basic human rights. The uprising ended in a brutal massacre: 32 inmates and 10 guards were murdered by the police. Shortly afterward, Celes Tisdale began teaching poetry workshops at Attica. This book is a collection of the men’s poems, as well as reflective journals from Tisdale. There’s both a cautiousness and a bravery present here—in the way both Tisdale and the men feel the constant surveillance of the prison and the way they continue to tell the stories anyhow. In “13th of Genocide” Isaiah Hawkins writes “The clouds were low/when the sun rose that day/ For the white folks were coming/ to lay some black brothers away.” There’s also an incredibly moving focus from the men on tender moments from their childhood, especially the love of their mothers, an insistence on the gentleness they deserve, the humanity the carceral system works so hard to deny them.
This is the first list I have written for Electric Literature since the tragic passing of EL’s former Deputy Editor, Jo Lou. Years ago, I wrote a small press column for BuzzFeed Books, and when that publication shuttered (an experience too common for anyone working in media), Jo helped me find a new home at EL by agreeing to give a quarterly column a shot.
And, home is the right word. Jo, as an editor, was a writer’s dream come true. She gave me space to cover the weird and wonderful small press books I love, would occasionally forward me something from a press or publicist—always a suggestion, never a mandate. Jo got it. She got why people write, she got why people read, she got why we all want to talk about it. And, she got why it matters to make the discourse better, smarter, and just more interesting.
In this list, the theme is place. Returning to Beijing, San Antonio, Denver, or Euphoria, Maine. Running from Chicagoland, rural Pennsylvania, from ecological or emotional disaster.
Place means something different to all of us, and in many of these books, place is intrinsically linked with home. When a wildfire sweeps through a coastal community, a group finds refuge—and community—on the rocky banks of the Pacific. When a girl’s mother dies, the place she lives no longer feels like home. These books ask questions about what it means to belong to somewhere, whether you are welcomed or not, what it means to stay or leave, or to exist in-between.
I remain grateful for the opportunity to read what others write about place, especially as it’s a topic that appears frequently in my own fiction. Jo, wherever she is now, knew how much it mattered to provide space for these ideas and explorations. I think she’d want us to keep writing, keep reading.
A man’s uncle tells an epic (and ever-changing) tale of his prize-fighting rooster, a trio of sisters shows such a deep love to a daughter that the force of their emotion endures beyond the grave, and middle school classmates move on from their youthful cruelties to adult lives tinged with regret. In these dozen stories, George Choundas explores connections, some going back decades and spanning familial generations, and others fleeting, like a pedi-cab driver who trades a fare for a date. Even the shortest stories in the collection have a resonant emotional unfolding. An excellent entry into the category of short form.
When Ye Lians’s childhood friend Wenyu returns to Beijing after years away in America, what could be a happy reunion turns into a lament of past hurts, questions about choices made, and an opening to explore paths not taken. In Jia’s braided novel, Ye Lian’s story is paralleled with that of Cheng, a talented mathematician who, to his peril, rejects assimilating as an international student at a university in Illinois before returning to China. The stakes are high for all of the characters—livelihoods, marriages, identity, and even life itself is on the line as they wrestle with how the West has infiltrated and shaped their lives. In Wanting, it is America that exists as the exotic other. A stunning novel that beautifully explores how our desires to have more can destroy what we already have.
Jaded Ibis Press: Curtains of Rain (Cortinas de Lluvia) by Anel I. Flores
In returning to her hometown of San Antonio, Solitaria has to confront her biological family while being supported by her found family. It has been a decade and a half since a violent exorcism perpetrated by her biological family forced her to leave. The novel follows Solitaria through a period of becoming, as she learns to understand her past self and recognize her power in her present self. In every interaction, she is reconciling versions of herself. Curtains of Rain also holds a deep acknowledgment of the borderlands between the US and Mexico, where the geographical lines are inconsistent with lived experience. A gorgeous queer novel from an emerging voice.
When a start-up cannabis store in Denver is robbed, the owners round up a crew to track down their product. Operating in the contemporary gray area of legal weed, the shop owners have little choice but to take matters into their own hands. A longtime friend to the owners is Henry, an out of work journalist who, after returning to Colorado from a stint in South Korea, currently lugs kegs at a brewery, but takes a better paying job as a budtender—and he smells a story. The Pot Job is a modern western that combines the cannabis industry with the ennui of a not fully committed ex-at returning to the US, full of casual lawlessness and page turning-action. Schaneman’s narrative of Henry as the western hero is a refreshing impulse toward introspection.
Caesar, Ryan, Ben, Neil, David, and Graham have been friends since their Chicagoland boyhood, but when they enter high school, their paths—and who they are to one another—begin to crystalize. There is nothing particularly remarkable about the group of young men nor their alcohol-fueled escapades. Yet, set against the backdrop of the September 11, 2001 terror attack, the group is rocked when a member of their friend group enlists in the military. Told from the perspective of Graham, the novel perfectly captures the glittering wreckage left behind from teenaged and 20-something relationships. As Graham makes his way into adulthood, the choices his friends have made around him—like parenthood, military service, sobriety—throw his own decisions into a starker relief. An homage to coming of age in the 2000s and a brilliant exploration of what it means to grow up.
West Virginia University Press: Epic and Lovely by Mo Daviau
Nina Simone Blaine—and many others in her circle—has a deadly (and fictionalized) genetic condition called A12, present specifically in those born to much older fathers. In Nina’s case, it’s the 40 year age gap between her Texas beauty-queen mother and her long-dead lounge singer father that has caused her A12. Now, Nina is pregnant after being told her genetic condition would make it either impossible or lead to dramatic health complications to carry to term. The biological is father is also A12—in addition to being wildly irresponsible, emotionally stunted, and sexually sadistic. In Epic and Lovely, Nina must grapple with her decisions about her birth family, the relationships with the rest of her A12 cohort, and the physician who has studied them, all while she figures out how to keep her baby safe. An original voice.
Kurt Boozel is like a lot of working class kids: just trying to make good on his smarts and escape a small town. Kurt’s math talents lead him to a regional university on scholarship, where he desperately tries to fit it and ultimately ends up in NYC, slogging through a finance job. Yet while Kurt is making money his parents could never dream of, he’s unhappy. Closeted in high school, he is out to his Wall Street finance bros, but not to his parents. On a treacherous drive from the city to his Pennsylvania hometown—while considering selling his maybe reckless, maybe life-changing investment in crypto—Kurt has to come to terms with what kind of man he is, and the kind of man he wants to be. Town College City Road takes a nuanced look at class mobility, considering both what we gain, and what we lose.
Many readers will be familiar with the structure of this play in two acts, a retelling of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In Olivas’s version, Jesús and Isabel wait for Godínez in a public park; ICE believes Jesús is undocumented, and while he is rounded up nightly, his incompetent yet still powerful captors don’t lock the gates, and he returns to Isabel. In the park they meet Piso, a literary agent who refuses email attachments (a relatable nod to the literary world). Olivas has a knack for levity, even as Waiting for Godínez unspools one part of America’s tragic rejection of Chicanos. It is also, like much of Olivas’s work, a celebration of the diverse Mexican and Mexican-American diaspora. Great writing infused with humanity.
While journalist Gaar Adams is living in the Persian Gulf, he finds a thriving queer community. Despite the deep lack of protection for queer people—including state sanctioned torture and the death penalty—there are vibrant LGBTQ+ spaces all across the Gulf, some more clandestine than others. From a barbershop, he finds a cruising spot, and from there he learns to navigate the rules of being gay in the Gulf. Yet, part of what Adams is ultimately negotiating is what it will mean for his personal relationships that this network of queer men are largely, like himself, not citizens of the nations they inhabit. He is, after all, ultimately looking for lasting love. Wonderfully textured, Guest Privileges is layered with a nearly impossible balance of the terror of being outed and the joy of living authentically.
Thirteen year old Ambrétte has a complicated family. Her father is a brilliant electrical engineer, but his work in the 1880s and 90s takes him away from their home. Her brother is just as smart, though his dogged loyalty to their father creates tension. Ambrétte’s mother, who would much rather be living in Paris than upstate New York, is somewhat aloof; she’s more interested in Ambrétte as a spiritual medium than as a daughter. When Ambrétte forges a friendship with another lonely girl, an orphan, her mother deeply disapproves. Child of Light, set mostly at the tail end of the gilded age, explores extreme class differences, how propriety gets in the way of meaningful relationships, and how magical thinking puts up barriers to connection on one’s current material plane. Beautifully written and artfully plotted, Bender’s Ambrétte is unforgettable.
It’s COVID lockdown in Brooklyn, and in between playing ponies, judging her kid’s talent shows, eating cornichons, and applying postcolonial discourse to Paw Patrol on long, sleepless nights, Carolyn Hagood (or someone like her) has just landed on the tenure track. In this speculative memoir, amidst the absurdity of parenting and while still being a daughter to her own parents, one of whom has cancer, sandwich-generation Hagood tries to write her “Heavy Tome.” It’s meant to be a penultimate work of great literature, but instead comes out in short, episodic bursts. Packed with consideration of important texts and literary theory, the Hagood of this speculative memoir is just as comfortable with the inner workers of Ulysses or Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacra as she is letting a dog lick peanut butter off her face—all while a goblin spurs her along. Wry and canny, thoughtful and provocative, reading Hagood is a true joy.
Emil has a plan to become a neurosurgeon, but he takes a year off from his studies to live with his widowed aunt and cousins in Stadmutter, a fictional town in an unnamed country that parallels South Africa. Away from his hometown, he is thrust into a world of drugs, intellectualizing, and racial tension. He is in Stadmutter at his father’s insistence he get closer to the family, but said family is not interested. It’s uncertain what Emil wants and who he wants to be, but he opens himself to exploring. As he spends time with a wealthy operator of Haitian and German descent and a PhD student who’s struggling with her identity, Emil finds himself caught up between the two and a charismatic leader of a political movement. Terry perfectly captures how youthful decisions—or indecisions—can have radical impacts on the rest of our lives.
The unnamed narrator of Absence has his experiences threaded together by a favorite poem of his mother’s. People share letters and stories, tell of their experiences, and even confess to him. There is the dark secret of a former teacher, the son of a wealthy Indian businessman who is on the outs with his family, and an empathetic Boston bus driver. The narrator becomes a collector of stories; he’s one of those people who, whether it’s projecting an open heart or some other kind of vibe, people are drawn to and called to share. The pastiche of letters and encounters have a richness of detail which rings of reality, and of loss. Crisscrossing continents and delving into deep backstories, Quincy’s novel is ultimately a testament to why personal narratives, even fictional ones, matter.
In Euphoria, Maine, formerly the epicenter of an ice harvesting industry, people stay, return, or are dragged into town either by a romantic partner or the romance of circumstance. A young mother sees a giraffe outside her window after the zoo’s gates have been breached; the message from the city is to shoot the wild animals, but she does not. A woman does a secret fire dance at midnight, only to find her neighbors and husband were a rapt audience all along. A man whose wife is dying of cancer connects with a father and son via a remote control plane he flies across a foggy Maine beach until it crashes. In these ten stories, Patterson finds empathy in every character, all connected by the town of Euphoria, and the mastery comes with not knowing if it’s love or loss until the very end of each.
Bookended by two stories where displaced people are living in tents due to a climate-change fueled fire and no practical employment for people who care about the arts, these eleven stories look at different kinds of exile. When her father starts taking pleasure in butchering after her mother’s death, a girl hides in the barn with her favorite chicken; a teenager wants to drown in a swimming pool after her best friend dies in a lake; a grocery store worker tracks down missing carts and finds a woman who has secretly been building a massive art installation from the mesh of the baskets. I Watched You from the Ocean Floor is a beautiful missive to the people we love and the people we’ve lost.
Rose Dommu’s Best Woman comes as a family drama and coming-of-age story intricately wrapped within the genre of romantic comedy. Containing all the most necessary elements — a much-anticipated return to one’s hometown, a long-held high school crush, and one little lie that snowballs into much more—the novel chronicles Julia Rosenberg’s pilgrimage from New York City to Boca Raton to serve in her younger brother’s wedding as his “best woman” a few years after coming out and beginning hormones. All things considered, Julia leads a relatively stable life in her queer New York City bubble; her family back home is supportive, she has wonderful friends and a job that (barely) pays her rent—but there is something missing from her life. Following a fateful trip to the mall, that something begins to outline itself as Kim Cameron: Julia’s high-school crush, a devoted lesbian, and the newly-minted maid of honor in the wedding. The question is not so much whether Kim might like Julia in her estrogenized, grown-up form, but how far Julia will go to ensure they find themselves closer than was ever deemed possible in Julia’s adolescent fantasies.
Best Woman is a sparkling love story that, like its influences (My Best Friend’s Wedding, Garden State), is at turns heart-wrenching and buoyant, allowing both its protagonist and readers to contemplate their truest desires and most avoided fears. Dommu charts a course for Julia characterized by less-than-graceful missteps and just the right amount of humor, leaving her hurling toward the consequences of her own actions to reveal that what she wants may not in fact be what she needs most. With an unforgettable cast of supporting characters and a voice that’s sure of itself, Best Woman and Dommu offer an almost-scientifically perfect cocktail of love, betrayal, angst and relief. Best Woman is as re-readable as its influences are rewatchable.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Dommu via Zoom ahead of her debut’s release to discuss being trans at straight weddings, the possibilities of transition, and the necessity of intimacy and community for queer people.
Christ: The title Best Woman has a few meanings. Can you say more about how those came to be?
Rose Dommu: When I started writing the book, it was named My Best Trans Wedding. Early on, I thought about calling it “Best Woman,” but it seemed so first thought. Closer to finishing it, I realized that there was no other title. It’s very descriptive. Julia is the best woman in the wedding, and so much of this novel is about Julia trying to prove that she is the best version of a woman that she, as a trans woman, can be. I really liked the way that the title worked on those two levels, and I also liked the idea that my name forever would be linked to the words “best woman.” So my official title could be Rose Dommu: Best Woman.
C: In what ways do you see transness as enhancing or interrupting the rhythms of the rom-com genre?
RD: It does both in a way that identity tends to do in those kind of formulaic, almost archetypical stories in which we have traditionally only seen cis, white hetero people for millennium. Adding transnesses into the narrative disrupts the conventions of the form, but brings so many new possibilities to them. Go back as far as Shakespeare and look at the ways in which gender deviance and trickery were used as plot devices in Twelfth Night. The same thing happens when you inject a trans character into any story. I wanted to write a story in which the main character’s identity as a trans person wasn’t circumstantial. I wanted to write a story in which the story could only happen if that character was trans.
C: What is it about weddings in particular that make the experience of being a trans woman so tenuous?
RD: Weddings are gender. Period. From top to bottom everything about the wedding is gendered, from what people wear to whose side they sit on, all of the activities leading up to the wedding, what kind of gifts you give, what you have to wear. It’s possibly the most gendered group experience we can have socially because it is, by nature, about the wedding of two different genders to create some new kind of, like, transcendent unit. If it’s a family wedding, it’s a time when you are checking in with everyone in your larger familial sphere. You meet everyone’s new kids, and you see that aunt you haven’t seen since you were 10.
Sticking a trans person in that very gendered atmosphere seemed like a good place to send a character who needed to confront—not in an antagonistic way—her family at-large for the first time since transitioning, and figure out what her new place within that ecosystem. Transitioning does or can really change the dynamics in your family. There’s so many gendered expectations of a wedding that it was really interesting to see how a trans character would navigate that.
C: I have like four weddings to go to this year, and I’ve been to a handful over the last four years since I’ve transitioned. The expectation is all the attention is always on the bride, but when you’re the only visibly trans woman at a wedding, you’re next in line in terms of attention, whether you really want it or not.
RD: Absolutely. And I think it becomes like, “Oh, how are we going to deal with her?” You become like the drunk uncle everyone is worried is going to get on the mic and make a speech and embarrass everybody, and you’re literally just there existing.
I wanted to write a story in which the story could only happen if that character was trans.
C: I love how many tropes there are pulled from various romantic comedies throughout the novel. One of the most obvious ones that comes through is the regression of self that happens when you return to your hometown. How is that further complicated by Julia’s transition?
RD: Transition really is like going through a second puberty. We put chemicals in our bodies, forcing them to essentially go through the puberty that we missed. My emotions have never been as heightened as they were in the early years of my transition, when I was on my highest dose of hormones. That’s already a really volatile emotional and physical state to be in anywhere. In New York, Julia is feeling that in the safest environment she can be, surrounded by all of her super queer friends. She’s really insulated. And then she’s thrown into the most cis-hetero experience possible, full of all of her family and people she’s known her whole life, and she’s doing it essentially with the hormones of a pubescent girl. That is a recipe for disaster.
C: There’s a thematic dichotomy of honesty and pretending throughout a lot of the book. How do those habits and practices come into play in a story about family, tradition, romance, and transition?
RD: I think to both protect ourselves and to protect our family members, we do a lot of pretending. We have to [do] a lot of managing: managing everyone’s expectations and their egos. A family unit has to pretend to be better than maybe they necessarily are, especially in situations where the spotlight is on them, like the wedding. Honesty and illusion are two sides of the same coin. They are really the foundation of the trans experience because early on in my transition, I felt like I was doing all of this smoke and mirrors to try to show something that was actually deeply true about myself. That need softened over time, and now I actually sometimes wish I had more energy to be full fantasy, but it’s too hard.
But weddings are all about fantasy. Why else would you throw this huge party that no one can afford, no one really wants to go to. All of it, pretending that these two people are actually going to spend the rest of their lives together, when in fact we know in all likelihood, they’re getting divorced within the next 10 years. We all pretend that we’re having the time of our lives. We have to pretend that a wedding is the most important event in this married couple’s life when in fact it’s just like a big party. Every character in the novel is doing a version of what Julia is doing, which is projecting some kind of illusion, some kind of idealized version of themselves that they want other people to see, while holding something deeply true, and in many cases, deeply painful inside of them. And those characters are only able to finally come closer together when they start letting each other see the true parts of themselves.
C: Best Woman captures so acutely that transition is both a bridge and a chasm in relationships. How does this complexity show up in Julia’s extended circle of friends and family?
RD: It really is both at the same time in almost every relationship. Look at her and Daytona: becoming sisters in this way. It has absolutely brought them closer together and Daytona shows up for Julia in some really striking, meaningful ways. We also see that Julia’s transition in some ways created a chasm between them, because Daytona felt like in their group, she was the woman, being trans was her thing.
In trying so hard to be woke, so many people end up being even more aggressive than if they were just being outright transphobic.
The same thing happened between Julia and her mother. This refrain that she repeats to herself throughout the book that her mother said, “Oh, I always wanted a daughter.” We know that that comes back to bite her in the ass in the end. Transitioning gave everyone in Julia’s life this new context with which to understand her better, but at the same time, whether it was transphobia or straight-up misogyny or just distance and societal pressure, it also created its own form of distance. On the flip side, there are relationships that were incredibly distant, like Julia’s relationship with her father, and in this really lovely way, he shows up for her, bringing them closer together. It doesn’t even really have much to do with transition, it’s more about him recognizing that she needs him in a way that she hasn’t since she was a child. Julia would not have had the emotional vulnerability to accept that kind of help five, ten years ago.
C: Throughout all the wedding festivities, it becomes apparent how thin the line is between well-meaning liberalism and side-eyeing conservatism. How do Julia and Kim make sense of the information they take in with the difference in their perspectives they’ve been given?
RD: That’s really tricky because in trying so hard to be woke, to be inclusive, to have empathy, so many people end up being even more aggressive than if they were just being outright transphobic. The best example of this is a cis woman who’s overcompensating by being like, hey, lady. And you know the “lady” is so pointed that it almost sounds like, “Hey, male-bodied person who has a penis who I’m pretending is a woman.”
That kind of liberalism can be very stinky and people very often want a pat on the back for it. They want everyone to know how accepting they are and that need is in and of itself a type of aggression. These are two women who live in maybe the most progressive city in the country and have not gone back to where they were raised in any meaningful way. Julia is really trying to move in silence. Whereas Kim’s a little bit more defensive and more prone to call out bad behavior when she sees it. That’s really what kicks off the whole dynamic between them at the Cheesecake Factory when the waiter misgenders Julia. And the thing is, Julia in that moment thinks to herself she would’ve preferred it if they just ignored it, because she’s learned that it’s so much easier and safer to just let that go. Honestly, if you were gonna say something to every service worker who misgenders you, you would never get anything done.
C: What function do you see nostalgia playing in Best Woman?
RD: It’s a book about going home again. Nostalgia is baked into that. It’s about this adult woman who has carved out her own life through blood, sweat, and tears. Going home to a place that she didn’t really feel safe or normal in growing up that she has really outgrown. Nostalgia is something she uses as a way to insulate herself against that. That’s why on the plane ride home she’s watching all those classic rom-coms. She’s kind of hypnotizing herself and priming herself to experience this week as if it’s happening to someone else.
Transition is kind of the most selfish act you can commit. And thank God!
C: We know Julia in the book has named herself after Julia Roberts because she says so, but is it a coincidence that both Kim and Julia’s names are also from My Best Friend’s Wedding? Was that a choice?
RD: It is not a coincidence at all. Even though the circumstances of the plot are very different, it’s kind of the fantasy of what if Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz’s characters at the end of My Best Friend’s Wedding were both like, “Fuck Dermot Mulroney. Why don’t we just hook up?”
C: The epigraph comes from My Best Friend’s Wedding where Julia Roberts’s character says she must be ruthless in the pursuit of her own happiness. How does this apply so neatly to Julia and to trans women more generally?
RD: This is a very un-woke thing for me to say, buttransition is kind of the most selfish act you can commit. And thank God!It’s like a spell that you’re placing over yourself and over everyone in your life. You’re saying, “My reality is more important than yours, and you need to meet me there.” You do have to be ruthless to be trans in a transphobic world. You have to selfish. You have to put your own comfort and self-actualization above the lived experience of literally everyone you will ever encounter again, and that’s why I think trans people are so fucking badass.
C: Towards the end of the book Julia’s relationship to Daytona is spotlighted. Why was it important to have Daytona appear à la Rupert Everett at the end of the novel?
RD: Julia really believes at the beginning of the novel that she needs Kim’s validation to finally be a version of herself that she will be totally happy and comfortable and satisfied with. Not to be too corny, but what she actually needed was what she already had the whole time, which was sisterhood and community. Daytona is the complete representation of that. The women, the people, in my life who have—not to be too Wicked: For Good-promo about it—changed me for the better are other trans people and particularly trans women. Being seen by them is so moving and powerful. That’s the real love story of this book.
She’d done it. Mission accomplished. She’d solved the problem of the hot dog guy.
The mayor wanted a way to get rid of the wiener vendor once and for all. He’d emailed Loretta’s boss demanding an immediate solution. The hot dog guy wasn’t on-brand for Lanier and they’d spent a lot of money on the marketing firm to come up with that brand. Hot dog guys weren’t a part of it.
Now the problem was solved and all Loretta needed was a cigarette. She deserved a cigarette. She’d earned her cigarette, but, of course, there was no smoking inside the health department where she worked. What kind of example would that set? She could smoke outside as long as she was ten feet away from the building, but people would see her, and it had been suggested that employees of the county health department huddled around the building while they smoked did not make for the best optics.
“Fuck the optics,” Loretta mumbled.
She hauled herself out of her chair and shuffled down the hall to wait beside the one printer they all shared, a sad and ancient device that lived in their break room, like one more hulking and resentful employee.
She was still half an hour away from her lunch break, but she could escape by pretending she had an emergency inspection. There wasn’t really any such thing as an emergency inspection. Even if a customer at a restaurant found a whole nest of cockroaches tucked under their jumbo-size pork tenderloin sandwich, there were still reams of paperwork to be filled out before Loretta ever showed up. Paperwork that took days if not weeks to process. Still, only her boss knew that, and lucky for Loretta, her boss was at some conference in Indianapolis today.
She grabbed the pages off the printer, warm and pleasing in her hand. She turned the sign on her door to “Out of office,” which the boss insisted they all do when they were gone. She shoved the pages into her purse and made a noise that could have passed for a goodbye toward the receptionist out front. Then she got in her car to head home, where she could take off her shoes and her bra and have a cigarette on her couch, where the optics were just fine.
She snapped her seatbelt into place, one in a long list of new rules she’d been forced to surrender to over the course of her life. When she was young, kids roamed free over the landscape of the car interior and eventually curled up in the foot well behind the passenger seat like small animals. Not anymore. That was life. A series of endless surrenders to one change after another.
But not the hot dog guy. Oh, no. This was her victory. Score one for Loretta.
The temperature readings were the key. A stroke of pure bureaucratic brilliance on her part. The specific high-sensitivity type of thermometer required to get those readings was exorbitantly expensive, first off. So the hot dog guy would have to invest in one, and given what he was charging for his hot dogs, it was unlikely he could afford it.
But even if he could, he’d have to take the temperature of the hot dogs in his cart every hour on the hour, recording each reading carefully on a form Loretta had designed expressly for this purpose. This sheet would have to be turned in to her daily.
She tapped her fingers across the steering wheel. Was that enough? Would it satisfy her boss and the mayor who wanted the hot dog situation taken care of ASAP? Should she make it twice daily, instead? If once daily didn’t drive him out of business, she could go for two. It would work. She was sure.
Loretta didn’t know the hot dog guy, though his name was etched onto her brain now. Dan Fortlow. Daniel West Fortlow. He’d filled out his full name on all the health department paperwork in his initial vendor application. She knew his address, a split-level on the Hilltop in one of the subdivisions next to the Catholic school. She’d kissed Carly Chandler in the house next door to his during her junior year of high school, just on a lark. Carly was a horrible kisser and did not take direction well. Now Carly was a secretary out at the college and the mother of four. Loretta hoped for her husband’s sake that Carly’s skills had developed along the way. Or maybe her husband didn’t care about that sort of thing.
Daniel West Fortlow had no idea that Loretta had kissed Carly in the house next door. He probably had no idea who Carly was, let alone Loretta. He hadn’t grown up in Lanier, because if he had, Loretta would have known his name.
What did Daniel West Fortlow look like? She didn’t know. Maybe she could invent another form that required a photo or a copy of his driver’s license? Would that be an abuse of authority? Did she care?
Loretta had never seen the hot dog guy because she didn’t go to the farmer’s market, which was when the hot dog guy set up most of the time. She didn’t walk around town all the time like Rachel and Liz. She didn’t hang out at any of the coffee shops or the bars or go to concerts or movies in the theater where you had to bring your own chair because the old ones had been sent to a special place in Indianapolis to get reupholstered and, years later, had not yet returned.
Loretta didn’t do any of those things because every time she left her house, she could not ignore all that had already been lost. The Corner Market was gone. Some former local news anchor and her B-list reality TV star husband were living in Mr. Knorr’s men’s clothing store now. Nothing in Lanier was the same, so what did any of it matter? The hot dog guy was just another in a long line of transgressions against the perfect state of the world that had existed in Loretta’s childhood, everything since then a slow and inevitable fall from grace as far as Loretta was concerned.
“The mayor has something to prove here,” her boss had told her. “That survey has him all stirred up.”
The stupid sex survey was all anyone in town wanted to talk about, and for that exact reason, Loretta had nothing to say about it. Sex was sex, another bodily function. What was the big deal?
Loretta unlocked the door to her house, closed her eyes, and breathed in deeply. She’d been trying to smoke less inside, but cigarette was still all she could smell. There was zero hint of the expensive new air freshener she’d plugged in last night. “Spring breeze,” the package said, but there was nothing springy or breezy about her house. It was the third air freshener she’d tried, with no success. The house smelled of cigarettes, just like it had when it had been her mother’s house and her grandmother’s before that.
“Better than smelling like cat pee,” Loretta imagined her mother saying.
Cigarette smoke and cats—that would be the brand of the women in Loretta’s family, the number of cats increasing through the generations. Grandma Pat had one. Loretta’s mom had gotten up to three at one point. Loretta had maxed out at five, just before her mother had died, sixteen years ago now.
Loretta had been mere pages away from finishing her dissertation when her mom had gotten sick. She was getting a PhD in folklore, which her mom was convinced was something Loretta had made up. She would have majored in witchcraft if there had been such a thing, but there wasn’t. Folklore was as close as Loretta could get. Witchcraft was her specialty, at least.
Loretta had been deep in the research for her dissertation, exploring the herb lore of Irish midwives in the nineteenth century. She’d dreamed in potions and poultices. She had been so close to being done and she’d had no idea what would come next, but it would not involve going back to Lanier.
Then her mother had found the lump and Loretta was an only child. There was no one else to take care of her. Loretta had packed up three boxes of her belongings, most of them copies of microfiche documents from Irish women’s diaries, and driven across the country, back to Lanier.
Her mom was down to no cats when Loretta had arrived. She’d let them die off one by one with no replacement, as if she were determined to sink into complete and utter loneliness. The first of Loretta’s cats had appeared while her mom was still in the hospital, an orange tabby that was the ugliest cat Loretta had ever seen. Still, she fed him. He was there waiting when she came home from a long day at the hospital watching her mother show more kindness to the nurses and the doctors than she had ever directed at Loretta. The nurses and doctors loved Loretta’s mom. “Aren’t you lucky to have her for a mom?” they said to her, their faces lit up, and Loretta nodded. She was. She was lucky. Of course she was.
Loretta picked up the next cat at the animal shelter the week they sent her mother home to die, the two of them alone in the house except for hospice visits that never lasted long enough. Her mom complained about the cats. She didn’t want them in the room with her. She’d developed an allergy in her illness, her mother claimed. The cats made her sneeze. They hurt her tender skin when they walked across her body.
But when Loretta stood on the other side of her mother’s closed bedroom door, she could hear her whispering to them, sweet nothings about how beautiful and soft they were. She would find them snuggled up with her mother on the bed, her hand still resting on their warm bodies. In those moments, Loretta hated the cats.
Now Gus was the only one of those original cats who was still alive, sixteen years old and feeling every bit of it. Loretta’s friend Tom had brought Gus to her as a kitten one month after her mom had died.
“I don’t want another cat,” Loretta had said. “Get it out of here.”
She had been sad, of course. Her mother was dead. She had no idea what would happen next. Feeding the cats was the only thing that got her out of bed. But one day, standing at her kitchen counter with the cats swirling around her legs and waiting for their treats, she realized that she was relieved. She realized that with her mother gone, she could breathe at last. She couldn’t say that out loud though. Not even to the cats.
Now Loretta plopped down on the couch, her butt, as always, landing right on the place where the cushions had thinned out and the hardwood frame poked through underneath.
“Dammit all to hell,” she said.
She should buy a new couch. She should paint the walls a new color. She should rip up the shag carpet that had been there so long she wasn’t even sure what color it had started out as. But she didn’t. Everything in the house was exactly the same as it had been when her mother died.
Gus wobbled into the room on unsteady feet. He couldn’t reach his back to clean himself anymore so she had to cut the matted fur off every couple of weeks. He’d started peeing in a corner of her bedroom and that meant it was the beginning of the end, but she couldn’t put him down, any more than she could buy a new couch.
“Why do you think you won’t make your house your own?” This was the question her therapist had asked her. This was the question more than one therapist had asked her. She’d been through three of them, hoping that maybe it would help her get her life going again. Every one of them wanted to talk about her mother, but Loretta didn’t have anything to say about that. She wasn’t one of those people, the kind who blamed all their problems on mommy or daddy issues. The nurses and doctors had been right. Loretta was lucky to have her mother and that was that. Nothing more to say.
Gus stopped his unsteady weave to stare at her.
“No one asked you, Gus.” She unhooked her bra and pulled out a cigarette, trying to recapture that moment of joy at besting the hot dog guy. That was how life was though. The good moments never lasted.
Tom came over on Saturday and insisted that Loretta go for a walk with him, instead of sitting at her kitchen table drinking coffee while she smoked one cigarette after another, which was what they usually did together.
“Getting some air will be good for you,” Tom said. He was wearing the bright orange sneakers she’d seen on his feet every time he’d come to visit during the twenty years he lived in New York, and that was some comfort to Loretta. Though if he’d owned the shoes that long, it was fair to say he probably hadn’t done that much walking in them.
“Do you know me?” Loretta squinted at him as he stood on her front step, refusing to come in like a normal human and sit down. “Since when have I cared about what’s good for me?”
“Well, maybe I care,” Tom said. “Anyway, it’s all the rage now. No one has coffee or drinks anymore. Everyone goes for walks together instead. Because of Covid, but now, it’s multitasking and all.”
“I hate it.”
“Do it for me and my belly.” Tom patted the place where the buttons on his shirt bulged.
“Fine.”
Loretta was not going to put on sneakers though. The idea that you’d own a whole separate pair of shoes just for walking was abhorrent. While she was bent over to pull on her garden clogs, Gus slipped out the door.
“You’re too old to go out, Gus!” Loretta yelled. “If you get weak and can’t make it back home, on your own head it will be.”
“Gus is tougher than he looks,” Tom said.
Loretta didn’t think that was true, but she didn’t have the energy to argue. She was already exhausted and they hadn’t even started.
“Let’s walk down Main Street.” Tom waved his hand up the street, like he was Mickey Mouse at Disneyland instead of her best friend inviting her to walk on a street she knew better than the contours of her own face.
“Fine,” Loretta said.
This was how Tom was since he’d moved back from New York with his husband. Lanier was like Disneyland to him. Everything was so delightful. Everything was so easy compared to life in a big city. How long before the shine wore off, Loretta wondered. She’d known Tom since they were babies and the one constant in his life was restlessness. He said he was in Lanier for the duration, but Loretta doubted it. He’d go back to New York or California or Prague or whatever new place took his fancy, leaving her alone in Lanier, again.
“Did you take the survey?” Tom asked.
“No,” Loretta said.
Tom shrugged. “I didn’t think you would.”
They turned onto Main Street where the Corner Market used to be. Now it was an upscale home goods store, only everything in there was painted white. White chairs. White planters. White signs that said “JOY” in faded gray letters. People ate it up.
Loretta ran her fingers across the potted rosemary plant, trimmed into a tight ball, that sat outside the store. She raised her hand to her face and inhaled. She didn’t have anything to say about the sex survey. She had bigger fish to fry. She’d turned in her proposed regulation for the hot dog guy to her boss on Friday. Would the boss go for it? Loretta had worked harder on those five pages than she had on anything she’d ever done at the health department. She’d worked harder on those five pages than she had since her dissertation. She was proud of them, which was pathetic. She was pathetic. There was something satisfying about admitting it.
She was pathetic. There was something satisfying about admitting it.
“Do you remember that book Cindy gave you?” Tom stopped, waiting for the crosswalk light to change.
“What book?”
“Cindy” was what Tom had always called her mother. Never Mrs. Sawyer. Never “Loretta’s mom.” Always Cindy. Loretta had tried it once, calling her mother by her first name.
“Who exactly do you think you are?” her mother had said when Loretta attempted it, that tone in her voice that always made Loretta flinch. Not that she thought her mom was going to hit her. She’d been too old by then. But the tone felt the same as one of her mother’s slaps, like there was a sore place inside Loretta that only her mother’s voice could touch.
“The book about sex,” Tom said. “Remember, we used to pull it out from under your bed and look at it over and over again?”
“That book.” Loretta peered inside the windows of the dentist’s, which was where their elementary school principal had lived and then a lawyer who made the downstairs into his office. “What about that book?”
“Just one of the survey questions made me think of it.”
“Hmm.” How much farther would Tom expect her to walk? She should have asked. No, she should have imposed some limits. Twenty minutes. And no route that went down to the river, because that would involve going uphill on the way back. Loretta did not go uphill.
“It was this question about how you first learned about sex and did you have sex education, and all I could think of was Cindy and that book and how it just showed up in your room one day.” Tom stopped to study a for sale sign in front of the Waxman funeral parlor, the last one left downtown. He was obsessed with real estate. Maybe it was a New York thing.
“It didn’t just show up.” Loretta wondered if she had enough time while they were stopped to smoke a cigarette. “There was a note inside that said if I had any questions, I should never be afraid to ask her.”
“Right.” Tom laughed. “Like you were going to do that.”
“I could have though.” She resisted the urge to groan when Tom started walking again. “It was better than what most parents did though, wasn’t it? What did Marge and Gary tell you? Nothing.”
“Oh, please, do not make me imagine a sex talk from Marge and Gary.” Tom grabbed his stomach and made a gagging noise. “The horror.”
“Right, well the book was better than that.” Loretta had always thought Tom’s mother, Marge, was a beauty. Her memory of Gary was fuzzy. He’d moved to New York when they divorced, taking Tom with him for most of high school, stealing her best friend away. Gary she could take or leave.
“Was it though?” Tom waved at someone across the street. Loretta didn’t recognize them. One of Tom’s new friends. “All I remember was that it described an orgasm as like a sneeze. Like, o-kay? I guess?”
Loretta remembered that too. And the cartoonish drawings of the naked women and men. The women were all fat and the men entirely too hairy. Had she half expected that she would sneeze the first time she had an orgasm? Maybe.
“It was a good book.” Loretta stared across the street at the building that had been turned into upscale apartments she could never afford and the soda fountain that was now a pizza place. This was why she didn’t go for walks. She knew the town had changed. She didn’t need to have it flaunted in her face. “I would’ve given it to my kid.”
“Sure,” Tom said.
“I’m going home.” Loretta stopped short in the street. Fuck this walk.
“You don’t want to see where they’re putting in the new brewery?”
“I do not.” She could feel where her clogs had already rubbed the back of her ankles raw, the pain a satisfying confirmation of what a bad idea it was to walk. And what would Gus be doing, now? Meowing to get back in. Shivering in his old-cat bones.
“Okay.” Tom smoothed his hand over his stomach, which did nothing for the bulging buttons. “I’ll see you around.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Loretta turned off Main Street as soon as she could, into one of the alleys, which were the one part of town that remained unchanged.
“So that’s all sorted, then,” Loretta said. She shifted around in the low, backless chair in the therapist’s office, trying in vain to get comfortable. The therapist—Loretta had forgotten this one’s name—tilted her head and watched.
The therapist didn’t give a damn that Loretta’s chair was uncomfortable. It was intentional, for all Loretta knew. What happened to the couches you always saw on TV and in the movies? Loretta was being cheated out of the comfortable couch every other therapist seemed to have. If there was a comfortable couch here, she could fall asleep on it. Who would stop her? It was “her time.” That’s what the therapists were always telling her.
“Good,” the therapist said. This one was young and one half of her hair was shaved, the other half long.
Loretta had just finished telling her the saga of the hot dog guy. She could talk about that for hours and she always struggled to fill the pointed silence during therapy. The boss was running her proposal by the county lawyer, but Loretta was optimistic. Her last thoughts as she drifted off to sleep at night were to imagine the hot dog guy’s face as she informed him of the new regulations. Technically, it would probably not be Loretta who would tell the hot dog guy, but in her fantasy, it was.
“What else is going on?” the therapist asked.
Loretta tried crossing her legs, but that didn’t help. The chair really was horrible. “I had this stupid conversation with Tom the other day.”
“Tom is . . . ?”
“A friend.” Her best friend, but she was too old to call him that.
“What did you and Tom talk about?” the therapist asked.
“This book my mom gave me when I was little,” Loretta said. “A sex book.”
The therapist raised one eyebrow and waited.
“You know, a book that explained the facts of life.” Loretta shrugged and let her eyes roam around the room, looking at anything but the face of the therapist. She wished there were a window. A window gave you a legitimate place to look. How long could she reasonably stare at a painting of clouds though? Not long enough. “I thought it was a good idea, that Mom gave me that book. I mean, a lot of other parents didn’t say anything. And it’s not like there was any sex education in school back then. I mean, there probably isn’t now either. But, then? I think we watched some video about periods and body odor and that was it.”
The therapist’s head moved in the tiniest of nods.
“So, I felt like Mom was ahead of the game, but Tom didn’t think so. I don’t know. He was awfully interested in the book at the time.” She pictured Tom, sitting on her bedroom floor, flipping through the pages of the book and drinking root beer, which her mother had bought just for him. Mom had loved Tom. She bought his favorite root beer and barbecue chips, the smell of which made Loretta gag, but no one cared. Her mom said more than once that Loretta could do worse than to marry Tom. That was before she knew he was gay.
“Of course, the book didn’t say anything about gay sex,” Loretta added.
“You don’t talk about your mom much,” the therapist said.
Oh, here we go. “She was a good mom,” Loretta said. “I had a good childhood. It couldn’t have been easy for her, being a single mother.”
“And you gave up grad school to take care of her, right?” The therapist flipped through her notes.
Loretta forgot she’d told this one about that. In the intake session. She’d talked to so many therapists, it was hard to keep track of what she’d told to who.
“Yeah, I had to.” Loretta wondered if the therapist would care if she sat on the floor. It had to be better than the chair. Maybe she could lie down. Take a nap. That would be a more productive use of her time than this.
“That must have been hard though,” the therapist said.
Loretta shrugged. When her mother had been sick at the end and it was just the two of them, Loretta realized how finely attuned she was to the way her mother’s emotions sequenced, over and over again. Panic first. Her mother hadn’t been ready to die. She hadn’t said it, but Loretta knew. That stuff people said about mothers and daughters—it was true. She could feel what her mother felt. She’d always been able to, whether she wanted to or not, so she knew her mother was panicked.
She’d reach out to comfort her mom. To touch her hand or smooth her hair. “I know it’s hard,” she had said to her once.
Then like a switch had been flipped, the panic disappeared, replaced by rage. “It’s not hard,” her mother had said, her voice sharp. “Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know, Mom! Maybe because you’re dying!” That was what Loretta wanted to say, but she didn’t. She had been too scared to talk back to her mother, even in her forties.
Her mom’s rage had flared hot for a moment and then it faded to silence, a simmering under the surface. Was that better or worse? Loretta had spent a lot of time contemplating that as her mother slept or stared out the window in stony silence. She’d wished for a sibling in those moments, someone else to be on the inside of this with her. She couldn’t explain it to anyone else. She’d tried.
“But your mom’s so nice,” people would say. “So sweet.” Even Tom would say that. And it was true. It absolutely was. It was Loretta’s mother who took Aunt Gerdie to the grocery when she couldn’t drive anymore. It was Loretta’s mother who watched her young neighbor’s baby sometimes while she ran errands, even if her mother complained and told everyone the woman was really sneaking off to fool around with her ex, who was clearly no good for her.
Everyone loved Mom. And Mom loved Loretta.
“Do you miss her?” the therapist asked. “Your mom?”
“Of course,” Loretta said. “Of course I miss her. What kind of daughter wouldn’t miss her mother?”
“Lots of kinds,” the therapist said.
Well, not Loretta.
Loretta kept going to one therapist after another mostly because it was free. At least five sessions a year were, which was all she was ever going to do, anyway. That was what their health insurance covered or at least that’s what Loretta had thought. When she got a bill for the three sessions she’d been to and it was over three hundred dollars, she was understandably enraged. There was no way she was going to pay for therapy that didn’t even work.
“What the hell is this?” she emailed the human resources person.
Loretta sat at her desk, refreshing her inbox every minute as she waited for a response. She was so focused on the screen and her rage that she didn’t notice her boss until he knocked on the doorframe.
“There’s a glitch,” the boss said, one foot out of Loretta’s office and one foot in, as if he wanted to be ready to flee.
“I know.” Loretta gestured at the therapy bill on her desk. “Damn insurance.”
“What? No, not that.” The boss jangled the keys in his pocket. “The hot dog guy. There’s a glitch there.”
The county lawyer was worried that the excessive number of temperature readings required by the new regulation might set them up for a harassment suit, the boss explained. Discrimination at the very least.
“Discrimination against hot dog vendors? Are you kidding me?” Loretta said. Her voice was loud enough to make the boss glance nervously out the door.
He laughed and held his hands up as if fending off an attack. “Don’t kill the messenger.”
“So what now?” Loretta glared at the bill on her desk. “He just goes on selling his hot dogs full of rat hair, unchecked? Putting the public at risk with his mystery meat?”
“I admire your passion, Loretta, but—,” the boss started to say.
Passion? Her passion? She didn’t give a shit about the hot dog guy. He was just another crappy thing in her crappy job and crappier life. But she’d spent time and effort on that regulation. It had been satisfying to think that now she’d be the one making changes in Lanier. There were no hot dog carts when she was growing up and there would be none now.
There were no hot dog carts when she was growing up and there would be none now.
Loretta’s computer made the swoopy noise that indicated a new email. She leaned forward to read the response from HR.
“It’s not dead in the water,” the boss was saying. “There just might have to be some tweaks.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Loretta grumbled.
The HR person was sorry to inform Loretta that her latest therapist was, in fact, out of network, which was why her fees hadn’t been covered. This despite the fact that Loretta had asked the therapist woman explicitly if she was in her network.
“Oh, yes, yes,” the therapist had assured her. “Of course.”
It was all too much. Loretta crumpled the therapy bill into a tiny ball and slammed it into the trash can beside her desk.
“Fuck this,” Loretta said.
“Now, really.” The boss took a step backward. “No need for profanity, Loretta.”
“Whatever,” Loretta mumbled.
That was all on Wednesday, and from there, the rest of the week got worse and worse. Gus threw up twice on the couch and then once across her bedspread. Her drier stopped working, which meant she had to hang the vomit-covered bedspread out in the backyard, where a bird managed to poop on it, so she had to wash it all over again. She tried to call the therapist to talk about the whole insurance situation, but every time she dialed the number, it rang and rang. Loretta remembered there was a receptionist in the building there every now and then, but apparently, she just worked when she felt like it and wouldn’t that be nice. Maybe Loretta should work just when she felt like it. How would that be?
She called Tom to complain, but he was at some conference in Florida and didn’t have time to talk. When she woke up Saturday morning, Gus wasn’t in his usual place at the end of her bed. She had to search the whole house for an hour before she found him curled up on a towel that had fallen behind the couch. When she shook his bag of treats to lure him out, he barely lifted his head. Maybe he was just cold. Or tired. Maybe he was dying. She leaned over the back of the couch, talking to him in her best Gus voice, but his ears barely twitched.
“Fuck it, Gus,” she said at last. “You can’t leave me now.”
He answered with a tiny meow, so weak his voice gave out halfway through.
She sat back on the sofa, the springs poking her in the same place they always did. She picked up her phone to see if she’d missed Tom’s call. Nothing. She couldn’t stay in the house another minute with Gus dying behind the couch.
She glanced at the time on her phone. Just past nine in the morning. The farmer’s market would be open now.
She went upstairs and pulled on the previous day’s work clothes. They were clean enough. “Don’t die while I’m gone,” she called to Gus as she went out the door.
On Main Street, she could see the big flags they put out for the farmer’s market from three blocks away. Why did they need flags to tell people there was a farmer’s market? You either went because you needed zucchini, or you didn’t. When had the farmer’s market become a big, fancy tourist attraction, with activities for the kids and a petting zoo and food trucks?
And a hot dog cart. Don’t forget the hot dog cart, even if he wasn’t officially a part of the farmer’s market. Loretta could smell the salty, sharp scent of the hot dogs long before she found the cart. The aroma hit her somewhere beneath her belly button with the memories of backyard barbecues and trips to the ballpark and the beans and weenies that Grandma Pat would make her sometimes when it was just the two of them.
Nostalgic crap. She would not let herself be distracted.
When she spotted it at last, the hot dog cart was smaller than she thought it would be. Really no bigger than a grocery cart. It was yellow and orange, with a cartoon wiener dog painted on the side and a yellow and orange umbrella to match.
She crossed her arms tight across her chest and waited for the woman in front of her, who was buying a hot dog for herself and a little boy who bounced around her with a balloon that kept hitting Loretta in the face.
“Sorry, sorry,” the woman repeated.
“It’s fine,” Loretta said.
The little boy could not decide if he wanted ketchup or mustard or both on his hot dog. “What does it matter?” Loretta wanted to scream at the kid but did not. She used the opportunity instead to study the hot dog guy’s face.
Daniel West Fortlow. He was in his forties. Younger than Loretta expected. And thinner. Surely a guy who sold hot dogs should be a little on the chubby side. Dan Fortlow was not. He looked like the unremarkable guy in an ’80s cover band, not the singer or the lead guitarist. The bass player who stood at the back, staring at his guitar through the whole set so that no one remembered his face afterward.
“There you go, young man,” Dan Fortlow said as he finally handed the kid his hot dog.
He was the kind of guy who called kids “young man.” Loretta focused on how annoying this was to distract herself from Dan Fortlow’s smile, which, unlike the rest of him, was impossible to forget.
“What can I get for you this fine afternoon?” he asked Loretta when the woman and her son finally moved on.
“You’re ruining my life,” Loretta said. This was not what she’d rehearsed in her head. It was just what came out.
The smile on Dan Fortlow’s face disappeared like it had been wiped clean. He blinked at Loretta. “I’m ruining your life with hot dogs?”
“Yes,” Loretta said.
Dan Fortlow frowned. “I didn’t know that was possible.” He wiped a smear of ketchup off the top of the cart. “I guess you’ll have to explain.”
“Why are you doing this?” Loretta planted her hands on the top of his cart and then was knocked off balance when it rocked. That had to be a violation of some sort. So unsafe. “No one wants your stupid hot dogs.”
Even as she said this, her mouth was watering at the smell wafting out of the cart. She remembered from his application that he made his own pickle relish. Baked his own buns. But that was not important. That was not the point.
Dan Fortlow tilted his head and studied Loretta. “Do you want a hot dog?” He flexed one of his hands, which was covered with a clear plastic glove, as per health code regulations. “On the house?”
“No.” Loretta glanced toward the farmer’s market, where people were standing in little clumps talking to each other. Some of them sat at picnic tables eating their hot dogs. She saw Liz and Charlie at a table with Rachel. Did they have hot dogs? Traitors.
“Okay.” Dan Fortlow pursed his lips and stuck his hands in his pockets. “What do you want?”
Loretta surveyed the booths and tables of the farmer’s market around them. What did she want?
Mom had gone to the farmer’s market every Saturday starting in late June, on a quest to get the first tomatoes of the season. Mom had loved tomatoes. She craved them all year round. Every year she’d bought a bag some farmer had sworn up and down were homegrown, but Mom knew they were not. It was too early for homegrown tomatoes. The tomatoes were too pretty. Too mushy. Too tasteless. Mom would spend the next few days railing at the duplicitousness of it all. The betrayal of those first tomatoes seemed to erase all her joy when the truly homegrown tomatoes arrived. Or maybe that was just how Loretta remembered it.
Loretta stared up at the inside of Dan Fortlow’s umbrella, glowing orange and yellow. It felt warm under there. Safe. Contained.
“I want things to be the way they used to be,” Loretta said. She closed her eyes and felt the heat off the cart, trapped under the umbrella. “I’m tired of everything changing all the time.”
She felt so alone all the time. She always had, but since Mom had died, the loneliness was like a pulsing under her skin. It itched. It stung. She wanted it to stop.
She remembered the last picnic she’d been to. Right after she’d come home to Lanier. A church event of some sort. Mom had still been well enough to go, but Loretta had slept in and made Mom late. Which meant they’d arrived on time instead of twenty minutes early, like Mom required.
Loretta had driven them to the church because Mom had been too weak to walk. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she’d said in the car.
Nothing. No response. Mom had stared straight ahead, so that all Loretta could see was that familiar profile.
“I love you,” Loretta added.
Mom turned her head toward the window, her lips shut tight. Mom didn’t speak to Loretta at the picnic. Didn’t speak to her again until the next morning, when Loretta came down to find her at the breakfast table, bright and cheery and going on about Susan Black’s daughter, who was getting divorced.
Loretta stared at Dan Fortlow. “A hot dog is a simple pleasure,” he’d written in his application. “The food of our childhood, easy to eat, cupped snugly in the palm of your hand.”
Who could be so fucking eloquent about hot dogs?
“I have chips, too,” Dan Fortlow said. He pulled a big plastic bag of individual chip bags up and shook it like a weird hot dog Santa Claus. “I like the maple barbecue flavor.”
“Yes, please,” Loretta whispered. “And a hot dog. Extra ketchup.”
To be disabled in this rapidly changing world is to understand how deeply interconnected all of our fates are. The Covid-19 pandemic we are still living through showed, for a brief moment, that US society can shift towards mutual aid and care. Unfortunately, that high point of compassion has been followed by state and cultural abandonment of the most vulnerable people in our communities.
It’s been twenty-five years since the passing of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990, a landmark bill that helped provide protections and needed benefits for disabled people in the United States. Yet it is difficult to celebrate that legacy in the face of rising eugenics ideology from the state. The Trump administration is actively dismantling public health in ways that harm disabled communities. In this moment, stories by disabled writers and activists are vital to understanding our interconnections and to make space for solidarity. Disabled folks are often the “canaries in the coalmine,” warning the rest of society that ableism and fascism go hand-in-hand when they decide who is the “ideal citizen” deserving of support, resources, and even life. When the US government decides that certain people are a “drain” on society and that, in the words of the leader of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr. Mehmet Oz, we have a “patriotic duty to be healthy,” will those who aren’t “healthy” simply be discarded or disappeared?
In the face of increased abandonment and oppression, disabled writers, organizers and advocates continue to tell their stories. They are writing about the vast diversity of disabled experiences and advocating for justice that spans the disability community and the whole of society. The writers on this list have become north stars to many disabled folks working in solidarity in their communities. May these books remind us that disability touches all of our lives whether we want to face that fact or not. Centering disabled people’s stories and experiences is the only way towards the collective creation of a more caring world.
In The Future is Disabled, Piepzna-Samarasinha speaks from their experiences as a queer, disabled artist, caregiver, and organizer. Her personal stories, essays, and poetic reflections envision futures in which disabled people not only survive impending disasters and societal abandonment, but thrive in solidarity with one another. Their writing provides a reflective framework on how to create care webs of people whose care and survival is interconnected.
In Black Disability Politics, Sami Schalk explores how political engagement with disability has been central to Black activism and organizing from the 1970s to the present day. Schalk includes archival accounts from the Black Panther Party, The National Black Women’s Health Project, and interviews with Black disabled cultural workers to explain the tenets of Black disability politics in a white supremacist society. From how Black activists have pushed for public health initiatives that center marginalized disabled people to how their work shapes current understanding of liberation, Schalk’s scholarly and deeply personal writing is essential.
Bioethicist and professor Ashely Shew uses her own experience as an amputee with chronic illnesses to relate with other disabled people attempting to navigate social spaces in a society that views disability as a “problem” to fix rather than a state of being anyone can encounter. Shew argues against “technoableism,” or the ways in which technology is used as a “solution” to disability. Instead, she shares insight from her life, research, and the experiences of others across the disability spectrum as to how we can create futures that are more accessible and equitable for everyone. When we actually listen to and trust disabled people’s lived experiences, a more accessible world is possible.
This is the second anthology edited by Alice Wong, writer and the creator of the Disability Visibility storytelling project. This collection of stories, photoessays, poems and other work by well known disabled writers and newer voices is organized into four parts: Love and Care, Pleasure and Desire, Creativity and Power, and Everything and Everywhere.The stories speak to the intimacy of being vulnerable with someone else who provides home health care, building loving relationships between two queer disabled lovers, and finding pleasure through nude self-photography as Sami Shalk describes in “Pleasure is the Point.” At its core, this book is gathering testimonies of how disabled people share love, care, and intimacy in a world that undervalues this kind of vulnerability.
Imani Barbarin, or @crutchesandspice as she is known across her social media, is a writer, creator, and disability rights activist who has gained a following for biting political commentary and speaking about the experiences of living in the United States as a Black woman with cerebral palsy. Barbarin uses humor to help her audience develop media literacy and understand the way ableism intersects with every issue communities face in the US. If I Were You I’d Kill Myself, her debut memoir, recounts the experience of growing up with cerebral palsy and hearing all kinds of platitudes about how “inspiring” and “brave” she was just for existing. She also writes about contemporary political and cultural issues through a queer disabled lens with her unabashed candor and wit.
Godin began losing her vision when she was ten. This book, a historical and scientific examination of seeing illustrates how stories we tell about blindness and sight have shaped our culture. Godin speaks about her own experiences and analyzes the way blindness has been represented in myths, art, and media as both a lack of consciousness and a special power that makes blind characters otherworldly. She also includes accounts of how science and technology have shaped how blind people navigate the world, speaking of her own experiences with changing vision and adaptive technologies. As with other books on this list, Godin perfectly blends the personal and cultural, affirming that for disabled writers, the two are inextricable.
Creators of the incredibly important Death Panel Podcast, the authors provide an in-depth analysis of the deeply harmful and unsustainable ways that society treats disabled, mad, and vulnerable people. Language like “surplus” and “burden” reveal how capitalism informs a “healthcare” system that the state is incentivized to control through extractive private health insurance and carceral mental hospitals. Adler Bolton and Vierkant argue that leftist politics and solidarity organizing must center on disability justice and universal access to healthcare in order to create a more just, caring society that is free from the violence of capitalist exploitation.
In Disabled Ecologies, Sunaura Taylor tells the story of the environmental contamination of an aquifer beneath Tucson, Arizona and the long-term effects on the landscape and largely Mexican-American community surrounding it. Taylor weaves together the accounts of the residents affected by the contamination across generations and the ways in which humans and ecosystems can be disabled due to the harm of ecological disaster. These stories illustrate how disability affects all life in an ecosystem, and, in an age in which environmental racism and contamination cause more disability, call for a society built on robust care and connection.
This deeply vulnerable memoir in verse by queer, non-binary, Black writer and cultural worker Walela Nehanda is a living archive of their experiences surviving leukemia and treatment in a broken US healthcare system. Nehanda draws on the stories of their ancestors to inform their experiences. Their poetic reflections speak of struggles to access compassionate care, but also the ways in which their diagnosis caused a self-awakening about how they were living and how they wanted to create a life in the face of death.
In Johanna Hedva’s debut essay collection, Hedva illustrates how disability and illness exist in both personal and cultural realms, emphasizing the vital importance of mutual care and understanding. Hedva displays a radical vulnerability in describing their experiences with chronic illness and pain, kink culture, astrology and more. This is a personal exploration but also an indictment of an ableist culture that reduces disabled people to drains on a capitalist society. Through it all, Hedva affirms with biting humor, anger, and tenderness that ableism harms us all.
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