Sleep Is a Runaway Train and I’m Tied to the Tracks

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

“My Sleep” by Sara Jaffe

“Are you asleep?” Carmen said.

I had been standing up strumming with my guitar around my neck, and then I had sat down on my amp. My pick was still pinched between my fingers. The last thing I remembered was playing the scratchy part of the riff, right before Carmen went into her “Whoa-oa-oa”s.

“What the fuck?” Carmen said. “Do you know how little I sleep?” She pointed to her eyes, under which I guessed I was supposed to see bags.

LJ watched us from behind the drums. “Maybe you’re getting sick?” they said.

“I feel fine,” I said. I didn’t get sick. I hadn’t had a cold in years.

LJ said, “Do you want some of my Adderall, though?”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t know if it would help, but my sleep was hungry and unaccountable. LJ ran up to their room and Carmen turned toward the wall, pretending her bass needed tuning. “It’s not something to be mad about,” I said. I put my fingers on the strings and tried to place them where they’d been when my body blinked out. I let one chord careen into another.

“I think it had more of a spastic Bo Diddley kind of sound,” LJ said, ambling back down the stairs. She handed me two blue pills.

“I’ll take them next time,” I said. “I’m awake now.”

After practice I called my ex for advice. We hadn’t officially broken up, but I’d starting calling her my ex to prepare for the eventual detachment. She suggested I look into a sleep study. “I don’t think that will help me,” I said. I slept fine at night. I didn’t snore dangerously, or have insomnia like Carmen, who in the middle of the night would power-clean our kitchen until she wore herself out. Insomniacs had those taut, rangy hours, their own relationship with the dark.

“Then a therapist?” my ex said.

“I’m not depressed,” I said.

“Depression can manifest in a lot of different ways,” she said. “It’s not just feeling sad.” My ex was eight years older than me and ran a tenants’ rights nonprofit, and when I lived in the city over the summer I’d always let her pay for my drinks and dinner.

“I feel 100% normal the rest of the time,” I said. We talked for a minute about her upcoming visit. I looked at the clock—still a half hour until the dining hall opened. “I have to go to dinner,” I said.

That night I woke up at 4am and felt awake. I considered cleaning the kitchen. I felt a little figure knocking around inside my skull, playing it like a drum. I got up and went over to my desk. I dumped the paper clips out of an old Altoids container and found the blue pills in my jeans pocket. I put the container with the pills in my backpack, so I’d have them when I needed them.

In the morning I drank tea in my kitchen and coffee at the café, where I sat outside with LJ and our friends who smoked. I stayed awake in Poetry and Ideology of Early Modern England and fell asleep in Queering the City, which was my favorite class. I usually had something to say. We’d been talking about Giovanni’s Room and I’d been working up to a comment about how David needed to be out of the city, at the cottage in the countryside, to tell his story, as if Paris for him was both possibility and paralysis, and as I was thinking I was noticing how awake I felt and what a relief it was, which was something I often noticed just before the curtain of sleep drew over me. By the time I woke up, moments or minutes later, my insights were irrelevant and on the board was a word I didn’t know.

My ex had left me a voicemail during class. “I’ve been thinking about your sleep thing,” she said. “I wonder if it might have to do with how hard you push yourself, like that thing you told me about your Bat Mitzvah?” I let the message end and threw my phone in my bag, then dug it out and played it again. I’d forgotten that I’d told her about the time I’d had to ask my parents to make me practice for my Bat Mitzvah for an hour a day, because that’s what all my friends’ parents made them do. The story was supposed to illustrate my parents’ inattentiveness. At the end of the message my ex suggested I try taking naps. Who had time to deliberately put themselves to bed in the middle of the day? I didn’t have any classes for the rest of the afternoon, so I went to the library. I chose the room with the least comfortable chairs, and every time I felt myself falling asleep I stood up and got a drink of water from the fountain in the hall, until I didn’t feel like drinking any more water. I tried listening to music on my headphones, a song by Le Suisse that I thought might give me some ideas for the song we’d been trying to finish. There was something in the way the guitar buzzed around the bass line, threatening to land. I had LJ’s Adderalls in my bag but what I had to get done—commenting on a story for my fiction workshop about a guy on a long hike—wasn’t important enough to waste them on.

My workshop met the next afternoon in the lounge of an old wooden cottage that housed the English Department overflow. We sat on couches and armchairs and there was one guy who always sat on the floor and took his shoes off. I was the only sophomore. There was a crew of seniors who looked like writers, two tousled blond guys who I never saw anywhere else and a tall mean girl, Dani, who was nice to me at parties. They went out to the bar with our professor after class. The story about the hike was by one of the blond guys, and I might have gotten more out of if I’d cared more about philosophy, or the Bible. It sounded like a 36-year-old had written it. I had loved the story we’d read the week before by Dani, particularly a scene on a subway where the narrator tells the person he’s talking to on a cell phone that he has to get off because the train is about to go back underground. Then you find out they’re only halfway across the bridge.

I woke up to movement from my left as my couchmate went into his backpack for a pen. Dani was arguing that the girlfriend in the story could be more three-dimensional and the shoeless guy was saying it didn’t matter because all the characters were archetypes. Our professor let them fly. After class I took my time packing up. I liked our cozy lounge, the tiny bathroom in the back, how I’d never heard of any other class that met there. Outside, the people who smoked stood smoking and talking about whether they were going to walk or drive to the bar. My professor, smoking, called me over. “Not such a fan of Austin’s story?” he said.

“No, I liked it,” I said.

“I mean, I get it,” he said. “I used to doze off in lecture classes all the time. Just a little more awkward in our intimate setting?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling something thicker than embarrassment. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping.”

“Insomnia,” my professor said. “Curse of the trade. Are you left-handed, too?”

“No,” I said. It was probably the third time we’d spoken to each other directly, and this was my second class with him.

My professor dialed up a sympathetic smile. “Don’t sweat it,” he said, stamping out his cigarette on the concrete steps. “Coming to the bar with us?”

“I’m not 21,” I said. My ex had given me an old ID of hers, but it was expired and not one of our features was alike.

At the health center I took a number. When the intake person asked the reason for my visit, I said, “I’m falling asleep all the time. At inconvenient times.”

“So, excessive fatigue?” she said. I let her write that down.

Everyone else in the waiting room was wearing sweatpants and looked sick, thumbing their phone screens dull-eyed. The desk person called my name and sent me to the room of the nurse practitioner on duty. She had soft curly hair that reminded me of pictures of my mom in the ’80s. I explained my sleep and she nodded empathically. “Is there any chance you’re pregnant?” she said.

“What?” I whispered, instantly rageful. I tried to remember if it felt more empowering to say I only have sex with women or I don’t have sex with men.

I tried to remember if it felt more empowering to say I only have sex with women or I don’t have sex with men.

“I’m required to ask,” she said, semi-apologetically. She continued to lob off the obvious questions—how many hours of sleep did I get a night? was I drinking excessively?—and suggest possible diagnoses: anemia, thyroid.

“What about narcolepsy?” I said.

“You know,” she said, “depression’s not just feeling sad.” She left me with a referral for Mental Health and a lab order to get blood drawn. I sat with my arm out in the blood-taking chair and felt my sleep pawing around in me, unsatisfied.

At home LJ sat at the kitchen table drinking soy milk from a shot glass. They finished the shot and poured another. “Do you want me to get you a bigger glass?” I said.

LJ had done something to their knee and had to quit rugby one game into the season. “I want to feel powerful,” they said. I’d never asked why they had the Adderall, if they also had other pills.

“Should we have a party?” I said.

I went to my room and got the handle of Bacardi my ex had given me as a back-to-school present. LJ went out to get mixers and I texted Carmen, who said she’d invite people. Davey showed up at 8 with a plastic punch bowl. We poured in the rum and lemonade and Sprite, and decided the drink should be called the Lucky Michelle, for the girl LJ had their eye on. “I need it!” LJ said, meaning the drink or the luck, slamming a cupful, always more modest than anyone.

I drank one cup and ladled another. Everyone was in the living room getting ready to play Celebrity, but this wasn’t the kind of party I’d meant. “Don’t you think we should go find Michelle?” I said to LJ. I wanted a dark room packed with people. I wanted to talk to strangers in word balloons and have them stick wherever.

“I know where she is,” said Davey’s roommate.

Before we left I grabbed Carmen by the wrist and made her watch me throw my phone into the laundry pile. “I can’t find my phone!” I said.

“Call your laundry!” she said.

On the cold sidewalk we were a warm cheery clump, so alive. LJ crouched to let Little Doug pounce up on her back and took off monkey-screaming down the block. Carmen and Davey sang songs from RENT. “My ex knows the writer whose story they stole to make that musical,” I said, and Carmen said, “Does she know you call her your ex? Isn’t she coming next weekend?” and I said, “It’s a really fucked-up story, this writer never saw a cent from it.”

The party was at an off-campus duplex. I let my friends push through to the backyard without me and I stood in the living room surrounded by bodies. I had ended up with the water bottle of leftover Lucky Michelle and I wet my lips with it. Leaning against the staircase was Dani from workshop, who yelled my name and reached her hands out when she saw me. “I knew you’d be here!” she said, grabbing my wrists to extract me from the crowd. “She always knows where to be!” she said to her friend, who didn’t care. “I wanted to tell you,” Dani said, “I loved that you talked about that scene on the subway in my story.”

“It was my favorite,” I said.

“Mine too!” said Dani. “Did you know fucking Austin told me I should cut it?”

“Because it’s not about God!” I had to be yelling in her ear for her to hear me, I was close to her, she laughed harder than I’d thought she would and her shoulder settled, touching mine.

“Why don’t you ever come with us to the bar?” she said. I said I didn’t have an ID. “We need to get you one!” she said. She was wearing a leotard or a shirt that looked like a leotard.

“Maybe you noticed,” I said, “I have this problem with sleeping.”

Dani gave me a quick look. She said something to her friend and pushed me around the corner into the bathroom. It was surprising that at such a crowded party the bathroom was unoccupied, and I took it as a sign—that I should take the key she passed me, that I should sniff up the powder like someone who knew how. I watched what Dani did and tilted my head back, tasting the chemical drip. Sleep was a coward’s drug. “Is this what you wanted?” Dani said, pressing her body back against the towel rack, and her tone with me had changed, I had to prove I deserved her attention.

I felt for my phone in my pocket and remembered I’d set myself free for the night. I took a step toward Dani. “Thank you so much,” I said. “That really helped.” My whole body whistled and I hated guilt. If she offered another keyful I’d say no.

In the morning there was a hole in my memory. It didn’t start right after I’d left the bathroom—I remembered going into the living room and seeing LJ and Michelle making out in an armchair, going into the backyard and seeing Carmen being intense with someone by the keg, I remembered remembering I’d left my water bottle in the bathroom and finding it on a stool by the stairs. When I found it it was empty. I lay in bed and waited for the rest of the night to roil back. I remembered getting home and digging for my phone in my laundry pile and finding it dead, flattening out in bed with one foot on the floor to stop the spins.

I sat up. I felt fine. I found my roommates in the kitchen looking terrible. Michelle sat on LJ’s lap. Carmen was saying something about the pizza she’d eaten at the party on Fountain Ave. “You went to Fountain?” I said.

“We all did,” she said. “It was your idea?”

“Right,” I said.

“Did you black out?” said Michelle, who I didn’t really know. I reached into the hole as far as I could and came up with nothing. I should have been scared but the idea of oblivion awed me. Who had I been there?

Carmen said, “What was going on with you and that Dani girl? You were talking about how you didn’t know if she was a dancer?”

The cocaine, I was pretty sure, hadn’t caused the hole—I’d been arrow-sharp but it hadn’t lasted and I’d found more to drink. “No, nothing,” I said. “We were talking about writing.” I knew how it would sound. For a flash I remembered Dani leaning back on the towel rack and I wondered if I’d found her again and gone back into the bathroom, if she’d given me more drugs, if I’d remember if she had. “I think she might have wanted to make out with me,” I said, to hear how it sounded out loud. Carmen started lecturing me on straight girls and Michelle looked embarrassed. LJ, over-loudly, suggested we get out of the house and find breakfast.

I drank coffee and ate eggs and then did so much work at the library. I took a break and went out on the steps to call my ex. “Are we okay?” she said.

I told her I’d forgotten my phone at home. “We had a cocktail party,” I said. “We made up this cocktail, the Lucky Michelle? Then I guess I drank so much I blacked out.” I said it to feel the satiny cloak. Like my sleep, all it wanted was to pull me in deeper. My ex was freaking out. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m not even hungover.”

She thought I was in deep avoidance mode. “Can I find you a therapist?” she said. “I’m sure I know people in the city who know people up there.”

I told her I was talking to Mental Health. “I’m not anti-therapy,” I said, which was true. I spent the afternoon finishing the story I had due for workshop. I was writing about the train tracks near my house growing up, which my protagonist had to cross to get to and from school. At the beginning of the year she had taken the long way around, but she had eventually decided it wasn’t worth the extra time. She joined a group of her friends who walked home over the tracks every day. They walked down the muddy embankment and under the overpass where pigeons nested and shat and cooed warily. Someone had spraypainted REVENANT in red on the overpass wall, but it didn’t really have a Satanic effect. When they got to the tracks a freight train was stopped there. My protagonist’s friends walked right up to the train and hoisted themselves up and over the platform between cars, but she wasn’t that coordinated. The train was heavy and silent and still, its bottom lip a few feet off the ground, so she tossed her backpack through and went under. I printed the story and got copies to everyone’s mailboxes, thinking for a second about writing something extra on Dani’s. I didn’t want more drugs from her. But if I did—what would I write? I’m still sleeping or I’m not sleeping anymore.

At practice I kept trying to get my friends to give me information about what I’d been like during the part of the night I’d lost, but all Carmen remembered was that I’d been “bossier than usual,” and LJ remembered that I’d been singing on the way to the second party. “It sounded amazing,” she said, “there was something in your voice.” I tried to get her to bring back some words or a tune—was it “Archangels Thunderbird”? “Bury the Hair”? Did it sound like something I was coming up with on the spot?—but all she could say was “You sounded so free.” We were still trying to get through the song we were stuck on. LJ banged, Carmen noodled, and I buzzed without landing. We couldn’t talk about what we wanted the song to sound like, that wasn’t what we did. One by one we stopped and glowered. My amp hummed, blotting our air.

At practice I kept trying to get my friends to give me information about what I’d been like during the part of the night I’d lost.

“Are we okay?” I said.

On Monday morning I felt as alert as I had been all weekend, which I attributed more to the hole than the drugs. Some knot in me had worked itself out. It made sense that it had had to happen when I wasn’t, or couldn’t be, paying attention. I had a voicemail from the health center after Early Modern England saying my results were normal. My iron was a little low. I wasn’t displaying the symptoms of narcolepsy. At lunch I filled a bowl with spinach from the salad bar, and in Queering the City I sat in the third row and was alert at my desk. I listened, I answered, I took notes. I thought, “I’m so awake!” The rush of relief, and that was the end of me—the flurry of fast blinking and then the sinking sensation / when someone drowns, who was that, Schuyler, who we’d read a few weeks before.

The professor asked to speak to me after class. She made me walk with her to her office down the hall. “Sit,” she said. She said, “Is anything alright? I mean, everything?” She didn’t wear compassion naturally.

I tried to get in front of it. “It’s happening to me everywhere,” I said. “At band practice the other day. . .” She asked if I’d been to the health center. “Last week,” I said. “I’m waiting on the results.”

“Unfortunately,” she said, “one’s actions can still be read as disrespectful.”

“Oh no,” I said. “I can’t help it.” I wanted her to find the Adderall in my bag, blame my sleep on drugs. Weren’t Schuyler and those other poets crazy for pills? I said, “Is it disrespectful to you or the other students?”

She didn’t like the question. “The other students are doing what they can to be present and attentive,” she said.

“Oh right,” I said. “Good information. I mean, I’m sorry. My coffee this morning must have been decaf.” The thing about the Schuyler line was the irony, which only floated if the medium was right.

I walked home past Fountain Ave and tried to feel some animal pull. My hole wasn’t a cloak but a void, flat black and unreadable. At least my sleep let me feel the release of succumbing to it. At home LJ was having a long goodbye on the porch with Michelle, and Carmen was napping. I went up to my room and called my ex. I got really comfortable on my bed. “About next weekend,” I said. She sighed in a way that sounded melodramatic but I knew was real. I’d heard it on the humid, impervious nights I’d spent in her apartment over the summer, drinking cold wine on the fire escape and watching movies that came out before I was born, when she realized in a few hours she’d have to get up and take care of the world.

“You’re doing a really bad job,” she said. I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about how at our last dinner before I went back to school I thought about paying and didn’t. “So there you go,” she said. “I know you’ve always wanted to hear that.” She was right. I felt innocent. Not of what she’d accused me, but of everything else. My brain eased and quieted. It was dough in a bowl. “Oh my god are you asleep?” my ex said. After she hung up on me I closed my eyes and slept until it was dark.

When I woke up the house felt empty. “I’m home!” I yelled.

Carmen came down the hall and pushed my door open. “Are you sick?” she said. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t get sick,” I said. I should have invited her to sit down and told her that I’d ended things with my ex, or brought things closer to ending, she’d be glad to hear it, but I didn’t yet know how the story should go. I sat up and turned on my bedside light. “You don’t have a fake ID, do you?”

“Hold on,” she said. She came back with an ID of a 23-year-old named Casey, who looked remarkably like both of us. “I used it to get into shows in Boston last summer,” Carmen said. It was such an un-Carmen thing to have done.

“My fiction professor invited me to come to the bar after class,” I said. “Is it cool if I borrow it?” I turned on the light and we looked at Casey’s face. She really could have been our brother or sister, our grown-up child.

Before my next workshop I put the ID in my wallet and hid mine behind my leftover Metrocards. I went to the café and drank 16 ounces of coffee—iced so I could get it quickly through a straw—and reread my story, which I thought was pretty good, though I felt self-conscious about having used the word “shat” for the pigeons; it didn’t sound like me. Dani was outside the English building smoking with Austin. “What’s up,” she said. “You don’t smoke, right?”

“Not really,” I said. I stood there with my ice-filled cup.

“Rachel and I hung out at Caleb and those guys’ party last week,” Dani said.

“Cool,” said Austin. I wanted him to ask a question about me so I could hear what Dani would say. I tried to look at Dani without looking at her.

“Austin just got into divinity school,” she said. She could have been joking, but he was her friend.

“Wow, congratulations,” I said, and then it was time to go in. As in all workshops I sat and listened and took notes, and most things people said were what I expected, how the logistics of the walk from the school to the tracks were confusing (true), how the protagonist’s friends didn’t raise enough of a protest when she started to crawl under the train (intentional), how they wanted to know what was up with her parents, who weren’t in the story at all. When the guy without shoes brought up the parent thing I felt embarrassed for writing a story about someone so young.

It was our professor’s habit to keep quiet until the whole class had spoken. Then he would pronounce. At the end of our discussion, he agreed about the logistics and the friends, said the parent part didn’t seem relevant. Then he sat back and said, “And I was thinking, when she decides to go underneath,” and he hadn’t even finished his sentence when Dani started nodding, and I could feel the 16 ounces sugaring my veins, and Austin and everyone were nodding, and I nodded too, though I couldn’t see it coming—“wouldn’t it have been something if the train started moving?”

Book Bans Continue to Threaten the Wellbeing of Authors

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

As I sit down to write this piece, I’m reeling from the news that the Supreme Court might hear a case whose sole purpose is to undo the right to marriage that queer activists fought so hard for. I have a family who thinks I will burn in hell for being gay. I have been told that my queer YA romances will harm teens. The seemingly best candidate for a Democratic presidential run in 2028, Gavin Newsom, has thrown trans people under the bus of fascism. 

And threaded through the fear of all of the above is the specter—more well-formed than phantom, really—of censorship. Since 2020, attempts to challenge, ban, and remove books from school and library shelves have exploded in number. In fact, in 2024, the American Library Association (ALA)’s Office for Intellectual Freedom “tracked 821 attempts to censor library materials and services. In those cases, 2,452 unique titles were challenged.” 

Although those numbers indicate a decrease from 2023’s numbers—likely due to factors such as under-reporting, quiet censorship, or broad legislative restrictions—the ALA pointed out that “the number of documented attempts to censor books continues to far exceed the numbers prior to 2020.” 

When I studied journalism back in the 2010s, I learned about things like impartiality and objectivity. If I were writing this piece in 2015, I would stick to facts and quotes from experts; no personal feelings or Karis interjections. But here’s the thing: I dropped out of my journalism grad program in 2016, and over the past nine years, I’ve learned that good journalism is subjective at times. Because in 2025, we in the US are living under a blatantly fascist government, and it’s actually the duty of journalists to tell that truth. 

This is my offering of truth to the world on the subject of book bans and authors. Because in addition to having studied journalism, I am an author. I have written eight young adult novels and one for adults; more than half of my bibliography is made up of sapphic romances. And I am scared. 

I am scared that once my books are published, they’ll be banned, and I’ll be put on watchlists. I am scared that my books won’t even get bought by publishers because they’re so queer. I am scared. Book bans are having a chilling effect on authors at every stage of their careers, from aspiring ones like me to award-winning, multi-published bestsellers.

Romance author Adib Khorram, whose bibliography includes award-winning and oft-banned YA novels like Darius the Great is Not Okay as well as adult romances including It Had to be Him, said he’s aware that authors of romances geared toward adults are “very sensitive to the creep of obscenity laws.” He mentioned the Miller Test, which determines what counts as obscenity.

“If any mention of sex becomes defined as obscenity, a large percentage of romance novels will be considered ‘obscene,’” Khorram said. “This carries not just concerns about sales, but concerns about legal ramifications. There is a current of puritanism at work in many of these attempts, and we must fight hard to reject it.”

I am scared that my books won’t even get bought by publishers because they’re so queer.

There are societal, financial, legal, and emotional consequences to book challenges, and authors are facing the brunt of these attacks.

Three years ago, I spoke with award-winning author Kyle Lukoff about how book banning attempts were affecting his mental health. I reached out to Lukoff again recently to ask how he sees the fight against censorship progressing—or not. 

Lukoff spoke to the ways things have changed, indicating that events like the inauguration of a second Trump administration and right-wing legislative attempts to broadly censor information have intensified, with authors and reading champions simultaneously rising up to fight those attempts. 

“The right people are being empowered to fight this and also the wrong people have much more institutional power behind them,” Lukoff said. 

He also mentioned a belief in the interconnectedness of the fascism-on-a-government-scale that we are seeing and attempts to ban books, a position that I entirely agree with.

“I think book banning is interwoven with these larger fights around racial justice, around trans liberation, around queer rights, around religious diversity, around anti-Zionism,” Lukoff said. “Book banning is intertwined with…this larger sort of evangelical Christian project of educating children to be loyal to empire. Book banning has its roots in all of those issues, so it neatly encapsulates a lot of ideals that are connected to both fascism and also liberation.”

Lukoff is an author of many picture books and novels for young readers. He’s also a trans man who hasn’t shied away from writing books like When Aidan Became a Brother and Too Bright to See—books where queer and trans children can see themselves. Which means he has been a target of bans and censorship for more than five years, engaged in a fight for basic rights on top of his job as an author.

“[Today], the largest impact that it’s having on me is a kind of detached numbness that I really don’t like,” he said. “I can’t feel anything anymore. I think I’m felt out.”

Lukoff described receiving messages from educators or librarians sharing the consequences they have met as a result of championing books, and added, “The hardest part for me is knowing that the worst thing that’s happening to a person is for me just, like, a Tuesday.”

And he’s not the only author feeling the weight of these five years. Katryn Bury is the author of the Drew Leclair mystery series for middle grade readers. 

“I set out to write Drew Leclair Gets a Clue because when I was a kid, I got the messaging that I was too much—too many marginalizations,” Bury said. “The messaging was, ‘You can’t also be queer.’ So I wanted to write a Nancy Drew-like character that was all those things, but none of those things were the central part of the story.”

After her book was shared on ALA’s 2023 Rainbow List, Bury received reports and read news articles in which Drew Leclair was added to several challenge lists. Bury described the shock of feelings that came from there.

“When I first got the news, I had this run of emotions where I felt like, ‘this is ludicrous,’ and then I did feel this wave of shame,” she said, confessing that for a moment she wondered if the challengers were right, and she shouldn’t have written the books. 

I know the feeling of shame that comes when someone declares the work you’ve done is problematic. In fact, the first time I came out to my family, it was on the heels of an email which expressed grief over the news that my books were queer. It said that my books “could do harm to young readers.” I haven’t even published a book, yet I relate so deeply to Bury’s fear of—maybe they’re right.

“And then…I got so, so mad,” Bury added, though. “I just don’t want kids to have to go through that, because I remember how exhausting it was, to try to mask and fail. I don’t want any kid to go through that.”

It was the reminder I need, too, that this work—the work of writing books, yes, but also of fighting for freedom of information at all levels and in all areas of public life—has resonance far beyond myself.  

Khorram, whose four YA novels have all been challenged or subjected to soft censorship, spoke to the care and concern kidlit authors have for their young readers.  

I know the feeling of shame that comes when someone declares the work you’ve done is problematic.

“If you ask almost anyone who writes for young people, they do it because they care about young people, because they want kids to see themselves in books, because they want kids to have access to literature that’s relevant to their lives, fun, engaging, sometimes educational, and representative of the world they live in,” Khorram said. “So to have people saying that the work I’m doing is harmful to children is really disheartening.”

The tag “groomer” has been applied to many a queer or BIPOC kidlit author (including Khorram) by right-wing agitators, who often go on to be credibly accused and even convicted of crimes against children themselves.

“What I keep getting accused of, they keep getting arrested for,” Khorram said. “I know what I’m about, but it still really sucks to have people call me a groomer.”

Although censorship of kidlit books is often the bigger news item, authors of books for adults—and not just romance authors, but authors of all genres—should be warned that their books aren’t necessarily safe, either. “The book banning movement has been slower to affect many authors of books for adults, though of course there are always exceptions (just ask Art Spiegelman and Jodi Picoult!),” Khorram said. “Nonetheless, if the pace continues, we’re likely to see closures of entire library systems, and that will affect everyone.”

Libraries are invaluable public resources, home to books but also a safe space for children to hang out and a spot where people without WiFi access can connect. If library systems get shut down, we in the US will be much poorer for it.

By now, I’ve filled this article with a lot of really negative things. The piece is kind of a bummer, because, let’s be real—the world is a bummer lately. Which is a very mild and euphemistic way of saying that fascists are running the US and that it is dangerous and terrifying to live here. Authors, as public figures, know firsthand the dangers of being in any way misaligned with the cishet, white, Christian model. Bury even described receiving hate mail that went so far as to single out her daughter, a frightening and invasive missive. 

It’s a scary time, but there are glimmers of hope, of communities banding together to fight back, and of ways that we—authors, readers, citizens who care about children and the right to freedom of information—can join this fight.

Since the spring of 2024, Authors Against Book Bans (AABB) has brought together authors from across the country to join the fight against censorship. In addition to his job as an author, Khorram is one of the National Leaders of AABB, a role he describes as, “a bunch of spiders in the web liaising between all the regional leaders and organizations and connecting people to all the resources they need.”

AABB provides organizing assistance, information, and calls to action, in addition to other resources. These resources include training on things like “how to speak to legislators,” Khorram said. “AABB also partners with lots of other Freedom to Read organizations across the country to share knowledge, resources, and strategy.”

The organization has seen wins in various states in its efforts to enshrine the protection to read legislatively in the US. 

“Even in places like Texas and Florida, AABB members helped stop not all but some of the worst legislation…this year,” Khorram shared. 

And authors aren’t the only ones who can fight back. 

“I see what the right is doing and how they’re mobilizing and I think, ‘we need to be that motivated,’” Bury said. “We need to be showing up at library board meetings, school board meetings, to voice our support for these books…we need to show up for the things we support!”

It’s a scary time, but there are glimmers of hope, of communities banding together to fight back.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a parent of a schoolkid or a daily library patron, Bury added. “If your community is having anything like this, it should not matter if you have kids,” she said. 

That said, if you are a parent of a school-aged child and you, too, feel the frustration that comes with news like this, there are actionable steps you can take. They go beyond attendance at school and public library board meetings, and include active support of librarians and educators. A simple action step can be to write letters to superintendents praising diverse book collections and requesting banned books be stocked on the shelves. And, of course, voting in local elections matters greatly.

“People should vote in their school board elections, vote in their library board elections, they should patronize their school and public libraries,” Khorram said as well. “The public library and the school library are some of the greatest inventions ever. They cost a tiny amount of budget…it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what gets spent on the military or, now, on kidnapping people and sending them to El Salvador. [But] a place where anyone can go and have access to knowledge is one of the most wonderful things about our democracy, and I think people need to fight for that.”

Librarians are already doing so much good work, but Bury did have a request for them as well: Work hard to diversify the books you put in your displays.

“I would love it if more librarians did that deep dive and started supporting not the same 10 books for Banned Books Week every year,” Bury said. “God love Captain Underpants, but that does not need uplifting anymore. I would love it if librarians would…make 25 percent of their selections from authors that are new or not well-known.”

The world is a scary place right now. I’m scared—every day, I battle the fear and despair that threaten to immobilize me. Stories like those of Khorram and AABB; Bury and her librarian colleagues; Lukoff and the countless other kidlit authors who continue to write their stories so well that freedom cannot help but ring—they give me hope.

And so I fight on. I will keep writing my books, keep supporting stories of queer and trans and BIPOC and disabled kids and adults. I am afraid, and I am demoralized, and in many ways I am numb, but the fight marches on, inside of me and in the world.

8 Books That Queer the Vampire

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Vampires are a mixed signifier. They can represent sinister, unstoppable power or conquerable vice. While their folkloric iterations were possible to ward off with garlic and other household items, as the figure of the vampire has evolved into modernity it has become chained to its victims by bonds of power and desire. Eighteenth century Europe imagined vampires as physically grotesque, but by the nineteenth century, the German literary imagination was already transforming them. Goethe’s vampire girls search for ancient pagan lovers. In the hands of tubercular Romantics, vampires could signify the hot, appealing scions of the upper class who would delight, use, and then abuse you (Polidori, author of The Vampyre, based a vampyric sketch on his boyfriend/boss, Lord Byron).

Gay overtones were part of the vampire tradition from the start—Christabel, written between 1797 and 1800 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, focuses on a woman seduced by a female supernatural being named Geraldine. Bram Stoker knew Oscar Wilde from childhood and wrote Dracula shortly after Wilde’s indecency trial over sex with men. The book features clear caricatures of Wilde’s manners. In the trial’s wake, a reactionary Stoker destroyed his own correspondence with Wilde, edited all references to personal correspondence with Wilde to add condemnation of him, and began work on a book about a predatory monster who lures a young man to his castle. Even if vampires weren’t gay, they were frequently menacing men with foreign accents or viciously sexual women—in either case, threats to the system of control and containment represented by state and family. It’s interesting to note that the appearance of literary vampires coincides with the acceleration of European imperialism, anxiety about revolutionary violence, and the enforcement of racial hierarchy. 

In my book Fawn’s Blood, vampires are about blood drinking, gay sex, and taking pleasure in monstrosity and perceived deviance. I wanted to write about young queer people’s relationship to their need for other queer people—the raw, sexual kind of need, the desire for inspiration while living a life without precedent, and also the kind of need that asks for advice, care, solidarity and support. Like vampires, queer people have, depending on the era they live in, a tendency to be lonely. In imagining vampires, I want to show a web of people tied together through bonds of desire, people who have the potential to harm themselves and others but who also have the potential to survive if their needs are met. Vampires can signify a lot more than contagion and the erosion of newly-invented family structures. 

Here is a list of queer vampire novels that approach the idea of “inhumanity” in creative, queer ways.

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Carmilla was published in 1872 and is among the first vampire novels written in English. Laura is our Gothic heroine: an Austrian girl who as a child dreamed of a vampiric panther and a beautiful scary woman by her bed. After a carriage accident, she meets Carmilla, a sickly girl who looks just like the lady from her dreams. Carmilla touches Laura’s hair, kisses her, and invites herself to live in Laura’s house. She hates the sound of church bells and hymns and her presence causes Laura to have nightmares of a catlike beast feeding on her. It takes a shockingly familiar old painting to clue our heroine in that this stranger might be a seventeenth-century fiend. Conversational, serially published, salacious, and quite readable, this book’s great surprise is how clearly lesbian it is (they kiss each other’s faces, bounce each other’s long brown hair in their hands), even though the framing is that lesbianism will lead you to a coffin of blood. 

Hungerstone by Kat Dunn

Hungerstone, a Carmilla-redux, is part of a recent lit-fic grappling with the Gothic origins of speculative fiction and the novel in general. Here, Dunn revives the Victorian lesbian in a tale about the wife of a steel magnate discovering her true desire…for Carmilla, who, as in the original, invites herself into Lenore’s house and feeds on local girls. Desire becomes a source of tension as she grapples with terror of the unknown and her need for companionship, sensuality, and love. There’s something fun about taking what you like from a literary predecessor and running with it—Carmilla is ripe to inspire more lesbian takes.

Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk

Thirst is a contemporary novel that follows a monstrous sapphic vampire unleashed on 19th century Buenos Aires. After a self-enforced hibernation of over a century, she falls in love with Alma, who is grieving her dying mother in the present day. Our nameless vampire was never human since she was gifted as food to a male vampire, fed on in childhood, turned, and taught her only feral hunger. After her vampire sisters are killed by slayers, she becomes a solitary woman of the world— an inverted Gothic heroine who murders the innocent rather than fight for her own virtue. Vampirism in this book is about distance from humanity, the hypocrisy of “civilization,” and the disconcerting proximity between intimacy and the ability to do harm. Each time our vampire comes close to the women she desires, she can only watch as they die at her hands or destroy themselves to avoid her; as she risks pursuit of Alma, the woman who opened her tomb, she wonders if love means death. One could also ask—does feminism or lesbianism mean abandoning the family? 

“Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time” by K.M. Szpara

This novelette follows Finley, a gay trans man who is nonconsensually, but pleasurably, bitten by Andreas, an ancient gay vampire of dubious morals. In this world, laws prohibit vampires from biting humans and turning them into vampires without government approval. There is also an explicit ban that prohibits trans people from turning into the undead. When Finley’s new body betrays him, he goes for medical help, only to discover that his long, new life will be spent outside the confines of the law and in a slightly alien body that will no longer respond to human medicine. Sexy, worldbuilding-heavy, and trans, I didn’t read this until after I’d written my own book, yet many of Sparza’s ideas about vampires, transness, medicine, and contagion echo my own.

Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman 

Everything is going wrong for the trans man vampire and archivist at the center of this book. He is trapped in early hormonal transition, a dead-end archival job, lives in the basement where he works, and his TERF colleague is trying to get him fired—she saw an embarrassing personal object on his desk which is also his bed. Suddenly, he is handed a trove of documents related to a dead TV writer by the writer’s attractive wife. The black box of human nature, the terror of confronting desire, and the embarrassment of being truly known by someone else form the heart of this vampire love story. 

Lost Souls by William Joseph Martin

This Southern novel from the goth-inflected trans New Orleans-ophile of ’90s bad boy fame involves a teen runaway, a vampire bar owner, and plenty of blood, guts, and intrigue. Set in the same town as Drawing Blood—a gay story about two traumatized men falling in love in a haunted house—Martin’s vampire novel is a character-driven story of a half-vampire youth and a pair of human teens motivated by passion for countercultural music and tangled up in the business of a vampire coven whose leader is an age-old predator. This Southern, counterculture, over-the-top horror adventure takes itself just seriously enough, like a Marilyn Manson lookalike with real knives in their belt. Martin later wrote a much tamer book called Liquor about two gay guys just trying to open a restaurant in New Orleans. Lost Souls is him at his darkest and pulpiest.

The Lost Girls by Sonia Hartl

Holly, trapped in her adolescence after being turned by predatory vampire Elton, tries to get revenge. Hartl mocks the romantic hero of vampire/monster romance in the form of abusive, manipulative Elton, who seduces teen girls and turns them into vampires. Holly, Rose, and Ida, his victims, pursue him righteously, yet there’s melancholy Anne Rice angst going on as well—the women have had their lives derailed and options restricted by a bloodthirsty boy. There is meaning they can find together, but it might be a slog. Nestled inside its revenge narrative, the book explores how these women struggle to find sustainable dynamics with one another. The ending is not fluffy, and despite what they learn, these girls are not well-adjusted. 

It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror by Joe Vallese

These essays meditate on queer and trans relationships to the horror genre. I love the essays on Hereditary and Dead Ringers more than I love the movies themselves. There are explorations of The Birds and unconsummated lesbian desire, takes on trans pregnancy, closeted feederism, love for one’s body, and the echoing afterimages of Sleepaway Camp through different queer brains. An unexpected highlight of the book is Bishakh Som’s beautiful black-and-white illustrations that punctuate the thematic sections organizing these essays.

The Best Ghost Stories Are Really Love Stories

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

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 Here is 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 Eleven was 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. 

Every New Scar Reminds Me of the Last

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Scars by Joshua C. Gaines

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. 

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Last and First Tales” by Samuel R. Delany

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Last and First Tales by Samuel R. Delany, which will be published in fall 2026 by Coffee House Press. You can pre-order your copy here.

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

A Provocative Story Collection About Immigrants, Bodies Under Siege, and the Horror of Being Perceived

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

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.

Finding My Voice Was Not on the Syllabus

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

How to Use a Mouth

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. 

I still sing from the holes.

7 Poetry Books Written From Activism’s Front Lines

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

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 really wanted 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 by Jacqui Germain

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.)

It Ain’t Over Until We’re Smoking Cigars on the Drillpad by Mark Tilsen

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 by Andrea Abi-Karam

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. 

Motherfield by Julia Cimafiejeva 

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.” 

‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land by Brandy Nālani McDougall

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. 

Hong Kong Without Us edited by The Bauhinia Project

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.” 

When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal edited by Celes Tisdale

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. 

15 Small Press Books You Don’t Want to Miss This Fall

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

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.

Press 53: I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever by George Choundas

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.

Tin House: Wanting by Claire Jia

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.

Trident Press: The Pot Job by Bart Schaneman

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.  

Tin House: Great Disasters by Grady Chambers

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.

University of Wisconsin Press: Town College City Road by Patrick McGinty

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. 

University of New Mexico Press: Waiting for Godínez by Daniel A. Olivas

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. 

Dzanc Books: Guest Privileges by Gaar Adams

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.

Whiskey Tit: Child of Light by Jesi Bender

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.

SFWP: Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir by Caroline Hagood

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.

Restless Books: A Wilderness of Mirrors by Olufemi Terry

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.

Two Dollar Radio: Absence by Issa Quincy

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.

Littoral Books: Euphoria by Dave Patterson

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. 

Modern Artist: I Watched You From the Ocean Floor by Erin Cecelia Thomas

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.