The Many Lives of Jewish Lore’s Favorite Monster

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

In the late 16th century, rumors of an impending pogrom swirl around the Jewish ghetto. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague and an expert in the Kabbalah capable of  bringing life to inanimate forms, decides to protect his community with a golem, a figure made from earth and animated through religious ritual. Golems do not speak and do not think for themselves. They have super strength, a dogmatic allegiance to their creator, and little else. In other words: they are perfect bodyguards. Under the cover of night, the Maharal gathers clay from the Vltava river to build a humanoid figure. When Rabbit Loew carves “emet,” the Hebrew word for “truth” on the golem’s forehead, his work is done; the golem is alive. The golem curbs the violent threats against the Jewish ghetto and serves as a valuable handyman for its neighbors, completing chores and fetching water. However, the creature loses discipline. It runs amok, threatening the community it was created to defend. Rabbi Loew must destroy his monster. To do so, he erases the first letter of “emet,” leaving “met,” meaning “dead.”

The Golem of Prague is perhaps the most famous story of the golem, but Jewish people have crafted golems—in stories, at least—since long before the 16th century. Our clay creatures wind their way through religious texts, stories of rabbis, and Jewish folklore.

Our clay creatures wind their way through religious texts, stories of rabbis, and Jewish folklore.

These tales aren’t always by Jewish writers and artists. German-Christian writers throughout the 1800s and the early 1900s examined Jewish communities and their golems. Famously, The Brothers Grimm include an iteration of the golem tale in their collected stories. In this version, the rabbi who creates the golem is killed, suffocated by the falling clay of his monster.

Once you know the monster you are looking for, golems are everywhere. 

But why? All things considered, golems are rather unassuming monsters. They are (canonically speaking) not very flashy; the word “golem” is used in modern Hebrew to mean dumb or helpless. And as far as Jewish representation goes, the golem’s unintelligent and potentially destructive nature directly contrasts with Judaism’s focus on learning, wisdom, and religious law. Yet even today, golems lurch through pages of novels, movie screens, and video games. In Prague, the legend of the golem thrives: Golem Biscuits cafe bakes golem cookies, nearly every gift store sells posters of Rabbi Loew and his golem strolling through cobblestone streets. And the appearance of golems in recent literature and media allows us to explore both experiences of Jewishness and popular perceptions of Jewish culture.

In Jewish diasporic writing, the golem appears during moments of crisis: the pogroms of the 16th century, the heavy flow of Jewish immigration to the U.S. during the 1800s, and the Holocaust. The golem, it seems, is needed at points of crisis to alleviate Jewish pain.

Golems present a powerful model for Jewish resistance against antisemitic violence, especially in historical novels. In Alice Hoffman’s 2019 novel The World That We Knew, Jewish parents seek the help of a rabbi to create a golem to defend their daughter, Lea, against Nazi terror. Hoffman introduces golems as nearly omnipotent: communing with fish and birds, seeing the future, and speaking with the dead. It is necessary to kill the golem once it has fulfilled its purpose. The rabbi’s daughter accepts the task and builds a golem from river mud and menstrual blood. Hoffman’s golem is named Ava, “reminiscent of Chava, the Hebrew word for life,” signifying both Ava’s new life and the continued existence that Ava’s protection grants Lea.

The golem, it seems, is needed at points of crisis to alleviate Jewish pain.

Hoffman spins a funhouse version of 1930s Europe—a kaleidoscopic world of magical herons and Nazi soldiers and Jewish resistance fighters. Lea and her golem cross borders and fight for safety. Ultimately, Ava begs Lea to deactivate her—because if the Golem of Prague has taught us anything, it’s that golems must be unmade. When Lea protests, Ava says: “‘It doesn’t matter. You know what I am. My kind are always destroyed.” To which Lea replies, “So are mine!” 

For me, Hoffman’s connection between Ava, an omnipotent being, and Lea, a 12-year-old refugee, brings to mind the ways in which real-life Jewish people protected themselves and preserved culture during the Holocaust. Additionally, while most traditional golems are male, Ava’s gender draws links between this Jewish mythical figure of protection and female resistance fighters. I think also of images of women baking Matzo in the Warsaw ghetto, or seated around Seder tables in post-war displaced persons camps in Germany. While Ava participates in violent resistance, her kindness is another type of rebellion, against the charge of inhumanity brought against her kind. 

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker, another relatively recent golem novel, imagines a jinni and a golem as recent immigrants to New York at the end of the 19th century. Like Hoffman, Wecker blends Jewish mythology with the lived experiences of Jews. We begin with Otto Rotfeld, a Polish man who longs for a wife. He takes his quest to Kabbalist scholar Yehudah Schaalman and requests a golem. Again, the golem is described as base, unthinking: “It’s a beast of burden. A lumbering, unthinking slave. A lumbering, unthinking slave. Golems are built for protection and brute force.” Chava, the golem-wife, is brought to life aboard a steamship to America, destined to be a submission and docile companion. Rotfeld dies en route to New York, leaving Chava without a master, and with an individual identity to contend with. In New York, Chava meets a freed jinni, Ahmed. The pair—new to America and new to life as sentient, terrestrial beings—navigate their neighborhood, and their personhood.

Hoffman and Wecker both announce the supposed soullessness of golems at their novel’s openings, only to deliberately undermine these assumptions by the end. These golems are compassionate, empathetic, and sensitive. Indeed, the word “soul” appears consistently throughout the two texts, and both golems search for the nebulous combination of factors that make up identity, consciousness, and freedom. While classic golem tales tell us golems must be unmade, these golems ask: how do I continue to exist? Moreover: how do I exist as a Jewish person? 

While classic golem tales tell us golems must be unmade, these golems ask: how do I continue to exist?

While Hoffman and Wecker insert golems into historical time periods, other Jewish authors probe intimate and personal explorations of identity grounded in a contemporary context. In Sarah Matthes’ poem “Golem,” she focuses on a variety of golem myths, including the Golem of Prague, Solomon ibn Gabirol, and even Adam, the first man. However, Matthes also tackles another meaning of golem, a slur to demean women without children: “Sometimes women like me are called golems, too. / Not human until another human beats inside of us.” In an interview with Alma, Matthes details her efforts to examine “the repercussions are within a Jewish lineage to not have my own kids.” By bringing forth the golem’s heritage, Matthes directs the reader towards how Jewish culture may be continued other than (or in addition to) flesh-and-bone descendants. Many acts, Matthes reminds us, result in creation. 

In her 2020 memoir Golem Girl, painter Riva Lehrer explores growing up as a disabled person and discovering and integrating herself into disability culture. Lehrer probes our society’s nature to view the disabled body as “a symbol of evil” and describes herself as a golem, writing: “I am a Golem. My body was built by human hands.” Throughout the memoir, Lehrer uses phrases like “a golem refuge” and refers to herself as “a golem among golems.” In this way, the word golem, and all its accompanying assumptions, becomes a way Lehrer explores perceptions and realities of disability.

In Golem Girl, the pairing of the figure of a golem with Lehrer’s art is also significant. Lehrer intersperses her portraits in the pages of Golem Girl. Each portrait features a subject set before “disability-meaningful backgrounds [and] accessories.” In one, her subject, Mat Fraser, stands naked before a patchworked circus tent (a “reference to Sealo the Sealboy, and sideshow”). The final painting in Golem Girl is a duo of self-portraits—one of Lehrer’s feet clad in orange socks and shoes, one of Lehrer from the neck up, wearing silver glasses and a braided tail. On her forehead, the Hebrew letters of “emet” peek out from below her bangs. Lehrer’s paintings both underscore autonomy and representation, and emphasize a deep relationship between creator and art. As the golem is brought to life through a rabbi’s actions, Lehrer’s art brings to life her explorations of sexuality, Jewish identity, disability culture, and the definitions of human. 

For these Jewish writers, golems are symbols of hope and resistance, a means to explore embodiment, disability, and art, and a way to understand inflection points of Jewish history and bring forth threads of culture preservation. Above all, the golem is adaptable, as malleable as the clay of the Vltava river. And by refashioning the golems to explore personal and historical contexts, these artists partake in the grand Jewish tradition of golem-making. As the rabbis of Jewish lore crafted golems, these contemporary Jewish American artists participate today by responding to, and continuing, the golem myth. 

Golems always felt like our monster.

I understand the impulse to make the golem an empathetic, positive figure, as these contemporary writers do. To me, it says there’s a longevity to the survival of Jewish culture, which I find comforting. Golems always felt like our monster. But golems turning on their creators is also an important part of golem lore.

In fact, it’s the only part of the golem story that many contemporary tellings consider.  The protective golems of Hoffman’s world do not seem to populate pop culture. Instead, golems are often villains. In these adaptations, the second half of the story, the violent confrontation, seems to obscure other facets, including the power of language to animate the golem, and the golem’s initial charge of protecting the Jewish people.

In The Limehouse Golem, for instance, a 2016 murder mystery film adapted from a novel, detectives race to find the identity of a brutal serial killer nicknamed “The Golem.” This Golem has nothing to do with Jewish lore (though a Talmudic scholar is one of the victims), or with protecting the Jewish people; the sobriquet comes instead from the killer’s mindless violence. Golems even get a feature, of sorts, in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Donny Donowitz, known as “The Bear Jew,” who wields a Louisville Slugger emblazoned with the signatures of Jewish heroes (including Anne Frank), is referred to as “the golem” by Hitler. Here—like in Hoffman’s work—a golem rises to the challenge of Nazi terror. However, in Tarantino’s hyper-violent revenge fantasy, this golem does not come from the European Jewish communities under siege. It is Nazi soldiers, not Jewish people, who give Donny his nickname.

This, too, may be a factor of the inherent Jewishness of the golem, when filtered through non-Jewish creators. After all, why use a golem? Why not use another monster? The golem is a distinctly Jewish figure. (I’ve sometimes heard golems described as “The Jewish Frankenstein”—although of course, the golems of Jewish folklore predate Mary Shelley’s novel, so more accurately, Frankenstein is a gentile golem.) We may thank its many appearances in centuries of Jewish and non-Jewish art for this. When we ask what a golem is, we cannot only discuss clay and creator, protection and destruction, language and silence. The answer must include the golem’s ethnic lineage. The golem is a Jewish monster, even when its form doesn’t hew exactly to the genre-defining Golem of Prague. 

Another question, then: Is there something extra-spooky about a Jewish monster? Alt-right leader Richard Spencer has used the word “golem” to criticize “the mainstream media,” saying: “One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem animated by some dark power to repeat.” So, again, it is important to ask: why does Spencer use the golem? I think the answer may lie in the underlying assumptions behind the “dark power” animating golems. 

Another question, then: Is there something extra-spooky about a Jewish monster?

In Judaic studies scholar Michael Weingrad’s 2017 essay “Brave New Golems,” he describes the golem as “a classically negative Christian imagining of Judaism itself: unlovely, slightly threatening, and hopelessly literal and earthbound.” Inscrutability and otherness are classic tropes used to stoke antisemitic sentiment. Take The Protocols of The Elders of Zion, a falsified document detailing a meeting of Jewish leaders in which they plotted world domination. Stateside, Henry Ford distributed half a million copies of The Protocols via his newspaper, gaining him praise from Hitler. Today, The Protocols remains widely dispersed and read through alt-right channels and is still treated in some circles as a legitimate document. This modern-day usage suggests that its depictions of Jewish people still resonate, and it’s easy to see how these sentiments are expressed—either intentionally or unintentionally—with golems. Indeed, golems have fueled antisemitism for nearly as long as they’ve embodied Jewish protection. The Grimm Brothers’ golem story, where the rabbi is accidentally crushed by his creation, was likely not intended to celebrate Jewish culture or Jewish acts of resistance. Instead, for a 19th-century German audience unfamiliar with Kabbalistic practices, Grimm’s golems could present further proof of dark magic practiced by Jewish people.

This schism between Jewish representation and Christian representation appears in many ways, including the manner by which the golem is operated, according to academics Edan Dekel and David Gantt Gurley: 

All Christian accounts follow Grimm in identifying the utterance of holy words as the key to the animation process. The Jewish versions, on the other hand, emphasize the act of writing the secret name and inserting it into a cavity of the head (usually the mouth), an act which by definition defies pronunciation.

Of course, it is not a matter of villainous golems being “bad golems.” Instead, the use of a golem without a contextualization of the golem’s historical significance may point towards perceptions of Jewishness and Jewish culture.

When I visited Prague, I bought no fewer than four golem-themed souvenirs. I keep a golem postcard on my desk. On it, the rabbi and a terra-cotta-colored golem walk side by side. Rabbi Loew (bespectacled, a book tucked under his arm) is turned towards the golem, a palm placed on the golem’s massive leg. They’ve always seemed intimate to me, like best friends. 

Most versions of the Golem of Prague story do not end with Rabbi Loew destroying the golem, breaking its human form, and returning its body to the earth. Instead, once Rabbi Loew transforms the inscription on his creature’s forehead, he places his creation in the attic of Prague’s Old New Synagogue synagogue. It is there when you need it, ready to be made again. 

Cameroonian American Stories About Rejecting Societal Expectation

Posted on by Jo Lou

Identity is anything but simple in Nana Nkweti’s short story collection, Walking on Cowrie Shells. In “Rain Check at MomoCon,” teenager Astrid Atangana—an aspiring graphic novelist—hides her acceptance letter from Princeton from her Cameroonian parents, quietly rejecting the mold of the high-achieving child of immigrants that her parents expect her to inhabit. In “The Devil is A Liar,” a middle-aged first-time mother, Temperance, struggles to feel like she is an acceptably good daughter to her deeply religious Cameroonian mother, while also maintaining her own hyphenated identity as both American and Cameroonian. And in “Dance the Fiya Dance,” Chambu must contend with constant judgment from her Cameroonian family and community, who deem her too American to be a proper woman for a good man, even as they simultaneously pressure her towards finding one—preferably from Cameroon, of course. 

Walking on Cowrie Shells

In the stories of this effervescent debut collection, the protagonists find themselves at once wanting to meet and subvert the expectations set upon them by their surrounding communities. From gender identity, to ethnic identity, to family roles, the stories’ main characters both long to fit in with and to break the bounds of those ideas. Ideas about what Blackness is in these stories are particularly multifaceted and full of tension—from animosity between African Americans and Cameroonians in “Schoolyard Cannibal,” to competition in a relationship for who is most authentically African in “Kinks,” what it means to be Black in the American settings of these stories is constantly being negotiated by the characters and within the narratives themselves. Ultimately, the question of embracing complexity is the force propelling these stories forward: embracing complexity in order to be fully human.

Nana Nkweti is a Cameroonian American writer, Caine Prize finalist, and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her writing has been published in journals and magazines such as Brittle Paper, New Orleans Review, and The Baffler, amongst others.

We discussed the struggles of negotiating multiple cultural identities at once; the ways in which returning to our home countries in adolescence indelibly shaped us; and the ongoing work to resist the pressure of the myth of monolithic Blackness in our work and lives.

Michelle Chikaonda: Many of the Cameroonian American protagonists of these stories are characters who seem to feel like misfits in their worlds, with the stories then mapping out their paths toward making places for themselves within those worlds. How did this come to be a theme that you ended up meditating on?

Nana Nkweti: There are some leitmotifs I consciously incorporate into my writing. For instance, I am a hyphenated-American, multi-cultural woman with roots in Africa and the United States, so I naturally gravitate toward depicting characters who have hybrid identities. I can easily identify that authorial impulse coming to bear on my texts. Now the fun part begins as readers engage in their own meaning-making, decoding themes and patterns embedded like secret codes between sentences, unbeknownst even to me.

Are my characters misfits? I can’t rightly say. I do know they are humans trying their best to “human” and some Mami Watas and zombies too! They are all evolving and yes, sometimes trying to puzzle out where they best fit in the world. In that regard, aren’t we all misfits? Who hasn’t been a teen on that angst-riddled road to adulthood like Astrid Atangana in “Raincheck at MomoCon?” Who amongst us hasn’t grappled with God/Allah/Buddha/Vishnu, questioning one’s faith in times of hardship as Temperance Ealy does in “The Devil is a Liar?”

MC: I know that, as a continent of 54 countries, Africans are far from culturally monolithic. That being said, I felt so many resonances with these stories that, for the purposes of this question, I’m going to temporarily disregard that understanding.

In reading your work I was reminded of how African girls are so often raised with a very heavy-handed push toward the notion of “goodness”—serving community, obeying parents, choosing family over love and personal ambition. As an African woman myself—from Malawi—the spirit of quiet rebellion emanating from these stories’ female protagonists is jarring, but in a great way.

What pushed you to write the boundary-breaking women in your stories? Were there times in which you foresaw other ends they could have come to than what eventually happened in each of the stories?

NN: Sometimes the rebellions are quiet. Sometimes they are thunderous, as is the case of the young heroine in “Their Girl,” who has all the finesse of an Uzi!

Women are complicated. African women are complicated. It was important for me to portray us in all our complexity, in the fullness of ourselves. There have always been specific societal norms and pressures on women. Even in our fourth wave of feminism, even after Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement and Chimamanda’s We Should All Be Feminists, there is still so much “boundary-breaking” work to do. A quick glance at online discussions of women in the public sphere can attest to that.

Why do we still need women to be likeable, sugar and spice and everything nice? Why are women still so incessantly shamed as too fat/too thin/too old/too sexual/too unmarried/too smart for their own good?

Why do we still need women to be likeable, sugar and spice and everything nice? Why are women still so incessantly shamed as too fat/too thin/too old/too sexual/too unmarried/too smart for their own good? Add intersectionality to that and we get stereotyped as Mammys, Jezebels, Sapphires aka Angry Black women. Now add another layer of African identity in the mix, and yet another layer for those born in the West like me. All those layers of societal tip-toeing, walking on cowrie shells so you don’t come across as too Americanized as in “whey, you don’t cook fufu, you’re not married, you don’t want kids, you have your own bank account?”—enough is enough. And of course, this is a gross exaggeration.

African identity is as multivalent as the cultures of the 54 states on the continent and the people in the cities and villages within. But I’ve found folks like to whip out this mythical notion of traditional African womanhood as a cudgel to enforce conformity sometimes. The characters in my book submit to, embrace, tolerate these ideals or reject them wholesale. No one choice is “the right one.” What I explore is these women tackling the notion that the “choice” is theirs to make. 

What pushed me to write into this? I myself have been a feminist for as long as I can remember. The dearest wish of my 10-year-old self was to earn a degree from Oxford and have three girl-children—husband optional. Was I anti connubial bliss back then? Not really.

I just remember having this deep sense, even as a child, that the world needed to do right by women—equal wages, equal educational opportunities, equal everything. Even if my Mom had never taken lil’ me to an ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] march—which still has yet to pass by the way—I could already see inequities in the books I voraciously read. Why did only boys get to have the adventures, for example? At the same time, I still was myself a “good African girl”—in the Olympics of the Mind and Gifted and Talented in America, attending home economics classes and carrying water buckets on my head as a teen in Africa, then later dutifully pursuing degrees as is our way. I embraced this identity while also noting its strictures, the stresses attendant in maintaining that perfect façade. My female characters are allowed to be themselves—warts and all.

MC: One question that haunts these pieces is the question of “enough”—specifically, of whether or not the lead characters can ever be Cameroonian enough or American enough. What do you perceive as the nature of the friction between those identities—both in your stories and in life, if we have time to go there—and why does the oppositional energy between the two feel this strong?

NN: So my collection has a range of lead characters—some quite comfortable in their cultural skin, some not. That “enough” question is complicated and different for each of them. For instance, in “Kinks,” Jennifer’s mother gave her “the blondest of names,” she was raised as “one of two Black girls in a Scarsdale elementary,” and then went to Yale, a PWI [predominantly white instutite]. She has been disconnected from “Black” culture—African and African diasporic. Her arc involves a struggle not to lose herself in her romantic relationship even while simultaneously folding in “being African and Black” into that very “self,” figuring out what those identities mean without the gatekeeping notions of “authenticity’ imposed upon her by Kwame and his ilk. 

I would say that if there is an “oppositional energy” it often comes from without. As a hyphenated person myself, I totally love being able to draw on two cultures, taking the best (to me, at least) and eschewing the worst. Even I had to grow into that acceptance though because all too often people feel the need to categorize and police you. I remember submitting my writing to African fellowships and awards for consideration. and some required I establish “Africanness” by supplying my parents’ passports. Now intellectually you rationalize that this is all admin and eligibility language. But still, it’s yet another moment being reminded that you are Other. 

MC: In a related vein—there is a lot of tension between varying representations of Blackness in each of these narratives. What was your experience of rendering these on the page, especially given the larger cultural myth of monolithic Blackness that often creates real pressure to oversimplify Blackness to a few known dimensions? Was there anything in particular driving your narratives’ investigation of this tension?

Global Blackness is not a monolith. Africa is not a monolith.

NN: Global Blackness is not a monolith. Africa is not a monolith. At times the “tension” occurs in my book as the work instinctively bucks against lazy stereotypes and reductive categorizations—received by Western culture, yes, yet also prevalent amongst Black folks ourselves due to issues like tribalism, national identity, or class. Witness in “The Devil is a Liar,” Andrew Ealy chastising his wife Temperance for being “elitist” as she privileges her own middle-class path to motherhood as “the right” one. Tensions further arise due to internalized anti-Blackness like in “Raincheck at MomoCon,” when Astrid Atangana being “complimented” as “pretty for a dark-skinned girl”—a moment emblematic of the colorism, featurism, texturism issues in our communities. What partly drives me is a hope that we can all see ourselves and move past these arbitrary divisions that keep us from unifying.

What happens sometimes is you come across some people who wants to be cultural gatekeepers, because they try to use their notion of authenticity, to enforce conformity of what their ideal of Africanness is. And that also happens when you’re in African American culture sometimes; there’s a sense of “This is what it means to be Black in America.” I try to complicate those narratives as much as I can. Because while they can be true in some instances, many times they’re not. And I think that continued reliance on those narratives is problematically reductive. So the more I can help illuminate us to ourselves—to all Black people in the diaspora, to the point where we can get over all these misunderstandings and false ideas of each other—the better we will all be.

MC: You really zoomed in on the lives of women in these narratives—not just the young women protagonists, but their aunties, their little sisters, their frenemies. Men don’t get nearly the airtime that women do in these pieces, and when they do get roles they are decidedly secondary roles. Could you discuss in more detail your effort to complicate the notion of womanhood in these stories?

NN: Regarding the roles of men in the book—it really just depended on the character. There are men in this collection I absolutely delighted in writing and two stories that feature male leads—“It Just Kills You Inside” and “The Statistician’s Wife.” Yet I acknowledge that I revel in centering female protagonists and depicting them in all their complexity. 

The notion of a singular African womanhood serves the purpose of perpetuating gender inequality, but it’s not necessarily what actually existed in Africa. Maybe someplace, maybe somebody’s village, but it’s not a monolith, it’s not every village. Growing up, for example, I was that girl who was the one who was carrying water on my head and who naturally has a nurturing disposition; I’m the firstborn of many children. So I was always that kid with that sense of responsibility. But I was also that girl who was with my mom at ERA marches when I was just a baby. At a very young age, I had a sense of wanting more for women than what we were getting; my idea of myself and what I wanted for women was more power, more equality, even then. And all those things are things that I find interesting to explore on the page: to give my female characters the fullness of life. They’re flawed, they’re anti-heroines, and I still love them, all of them. They make choices that I wouldn’t make, and sometimes they make choices that I would make. And I think that’s what the breadth of humanity, of our humanity, looks like.

MC: One thing I noticed was the absence of extensively narrativized trauma, in any of the stories. Even in 2021, it often feels as though Black stories are not legitimized unless they also comprise profound trauma—racialized trauma, violent intra-familial trauma—but none of your stories played into that expectation. Even in “The Statistician’s Wife,” a story whose main thread is domestic violence, the violence is just that: a single thread in a larger, vibrant, non-violent narrative. Could you discuss this decision, if it was a conscious decision, in greater depth?

NN: Trauma depictions in Black narratives are so ubiquitous, and hard to completely get away from. Even when I wrote one story which was veering into that stuff—in “Night Becomes Us,” Zainab is dealing with the violence of Boko Haram in the north part of Cameroon—I address that violence, certainly, but I don’t want that to define her entire life and that entire story.

The notion of a singular African womanhood serves the purpose of perpetuating gender inequality, but it’s not necessarily what actually existed in Africa.

I think that personal stuff is very political, and that showing us our humanity beyond that huge trauma is not just personally important, but politically so. People sometimes behave as if the only stories that need to be told about us are the ones where the only way our humanity is acknowledged is when a gun is being pointed at our heads. Do those stories need to be told? Yes, of course. But should they be the only stories that you get lauded for, or get seen or get seen as the “real” Africa story? No, and I think that’s what I’m always consciously pushing against.

In “The Statistician’s Wife,” for example, it was a very conscious choice that Victoria was more alive, on the page, than she is dead. She’s dead in the beginning, yes, but then you see her, vibrantly, throughout the rest of the story. Because that was what was important to me: how she lived, not that she died. I did not want to have Black women actively traumatized on the page, and I didn’t want to have a Black person traumatized in that way. Because it’s just too easy to show us being mutilated, burned, shot, tortured. Again, it’s not that these things don’t happen—of course they do. But do they have to keep on happening over and over again, narratively speaking—does a protagonist’s raison d’etre have to lie on the bones of my body?

Why do we always have to see these continuous stories where the origin myth of the protagonist’s journey is for a wife and child to be brutally murdered, and for the reader to be almost offered that brutality to feed themselves on? I constantly interrogate those notions, of the function of Black trauma in narrative, in my work.

MC: You made the decision not to translate any of the non-English dialogue, only to italicize. Why? To be clear I believe this was a brilliant choice, but I’ve participated in many conversations with writers around the question of translation and/or italicizing, and I would love to hear your perspective on this.

NN: American English a living language, an amalgam of calques and loanwords reflecting all the people who immigrated here to call this country home. These words are never translated. You come to understand their usage from the context. It’s why an African woman like me has tons of Yiddish vocab—the language of European shtetls—having grown up reading Roth and hearing “schlemiel” and “schlimazel” in the Laverne and Shirley tv show’s theme song. I particularly love celebrating the contributions of BIPOC cultures to the English language literary canon as Hurston does in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Yes, I know that mainstream canonization is not the be and end all of everything, but I love to see it. There is an understanding of the beauty in the words we create, that they should be immortalized. Me, unapologetically inserting our words in my texts comes from a knowledge that they deserve to hold space. As for the notion of italics, I think it’s a personal choice for the author. Some writers like Junot Diaz, who says he is writing for (his) six best friends, choose not to. For me, aesthetically I love the look of italics and feel like they make people wake up and pay close attention—they add flavor, the peppeh to your sauce.

9 Books About Being Unemployed and Underemployed

Posted on by Jo Lou

Like many millennials, I’ve spent a lot of my adult life being unemployed and underemployed, either stringing side gigs and internships together in a frantic attempt at permanence, or else sitting forlorn at my laptop scrolling job boards and flinging résumés into the swirling abyss. Almost everyone has experienced unemployment at some point in their lives, and yet it’s a topic that isn’t much addressed in fiction. As I’ve written before, I think this is because unemployment doesn’t actually make for great fiction. You apply for jobs, send emails, go to networking seminars, have an interview, never hear back, and rinse and repeat, usually for months. Not really the kind of action that can propel a plot.  

Because it’s such a difficult experience to get down on paper, I’m always appreciative when writers do it well. In different hands, unemployment can be a sword hanging over a protagonist’s head, it can be a slowly devouring monster, it can be a gift disguised as tragedy, or it can simply be the soup in which the characters find themselves swimming… or drowning. 

In my novel, Mona at Sea, I suppose unemployment is a little of all of these: my character, Mona Mireles, finds herself unemployed and rudderless at the outset of the Great Recession, and though she eventually finds a job, she has to learn that meaningful work, for her, will have to come outside of the 9 to 5. It’s a realization that I suspect will resonate with many readers. And with income inequality and opportunity hoarding rampant across the United States, I sadly venture that unemployment and underemployment will soon see a new heyday in literature. 

Temporary by Hilary Leichter 

Temporary is a funny and surreal novel about a temp who finds herself in increasingly bizarre job placements: pirate, witch, ghost, human barnacle. As we watch the unnamed protagonist try to do her best in her rapidly changing work environment, it becomes clear that the novel is a razor-tipped critique of the modern gig economy, and lays bare all the costs of living a temporary and precarious life. 

The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®

The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein 

The Great Recession was a huge blow for recent college grads, and in The Fallback Plan, we meet Esther Kohler who has moved back home after graduation and must fight ennui and a bad economy in order to figure out what she’s going to do with her life. Esther’s mother arranges a regular babysitting job for her, and through her increasingly complicated interactions with this new family, Esther sees that she can no longer drift, and that she needs to take charge of her life.   

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders 

George Saunders is kind of the master of the sad sack: middle-aged middlemen with middling lives who are in the process of being ground down into existential dust by an uncaring universe. In his first short story collection, his characters have jobs, but they’re usually horrible and demeaning, and his characters are bad at them. With tragicomic wit, Saunders exposes the many lies at the heart of capitalism, all with empathy for the people just trying to make it work.  

Spokane Author's Book to Become Jack Black Movie! - KXLY

The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter 

Matt Prior has sunk all his family’s money into the failing venture, poetfolio.com, a dubious concept linking free verse poetry with financial advice, and now he faces imminent ruin. So he does what any middle aged unemployed man does: he starts selling pot. Walter uses self-deprecating humor and a critical eye to skewer late-stage capitalism, and the kind of lunacy that would drive someone to marry poetry and finance.   

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole 

Ignatius J. Reilly wouldn’t say he was unemployed, but rather lacking “some particular perversion which today’s employer is seeking.” Forced by his mother, Reilly takes a job as a file clerk at a pants company, only to incite a walkout and cause a $500,000 lawsuit against the owner. Then he takes a job selling hot dogs, but can’t stop himself from consuming all of his product. Reilly’s experiences with unemployment and underemployment are torture for his mother, but hilarious for us. 

And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer's Reflections on Grief, Unemployment & Inappropriate Jokes About Death: III, J Mase: 9780359494729: Amazon.com: Books

And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment & Inappropriate Jokes About Death by J Mase III

Part memoir, part poetry collection, part workbook and part rant, Mase’s book gives readers permission to feel all of it, and even encourages screaming directly into the pages if that will help. J Mase III takes an unflinching look at the work we do, the work we give away for free, as well as beautiful and heartbreaking meditations on grief and pain, and the way forward to healing. 

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami 

Toru Okada is unemployed and innocently boiling a pot of spaghetti in the morning, when his phone rings and he is propelled into a Tokyo underworld, darkened by shadows from WWII and filled with prostitutes of the mind, ruthless politicians, and disappearing cats. Okada’s unemployment is only incidental to the plot, but it does allow him unlimited time to sit at the bottom of a deep, dark well, which he does a lot. I’m sure there’s a metaphor there.  

Parable of the Sower

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler 

Grand Central Publishing reissued this classic dystopian novel in 2019 because *gestures to everything* the general state of the world was looking a lot like the post-climate-apocalypse hellscape Butler envisioned in 1993. Set in the 2020s in California, the book follows Lauren Olamina as she struggles to survive in a world with no jobs, no social order, little water, and little hope. But Lauren not only survives—she begins devising her own religion called Earthseed, with the belief that human destiny lies in the stars, far beyond the wastelands of Earth. 

Book cover for 9781529032703

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

This account of Orwell’s time being desperately poor and homeless in the late 1920s is vivid and startling and frighteningly timeless:

“In practice nobody cares if work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’?”

We Could All Use a Win This Summer

Posted on by Kelly Luce 





Euro Cup, 2016





Here’s what you need to understand: we all needed a win that summer.
By we I mean me, the boys, my girls and our parched country, our 
  
sulking land with its hands under the table, crushed knuckles and tanned, twitching knees, a nervous laughter capable of lasting through 
  
overtime. The hands become fabric become flags calling for the final 
whistle, for joy’s uncontained shrill. And when it finally happens, we 
  
leave all our things on the floor and exit with just our beating bodies. 
And someone’s voice asks where we should go, and the men on the 
  
radio clench their microphones, say anywhere, anywhere but home. 

 





Reprise





And when it finally happens—because it has to, because, like most things, it is not a mistake, not the wrong call made by the referee’s hands but a real win—the city cracks itself open to me. But I don’t stay. I don’t hop on the bike and sit by the pier until dawn, watching morning creep up in layers of blue, then yellow, then orange. I don’t walk down an expensive avenue making guesses at the price of things, killing time until the first train home, or the next one. Not yet. I go home with the boys, who spend the last half hour searching for me, and who, when they finally find me at a crossroads with a shadow and said bike, the public garden a midnight stage, will absolutely not leave me behind, a girl in the mouth of adventure. On our way back to the suburbs, we weave through fireworks and TV crews and people raising statues for all of us winners. I lay down on the backseat with my eyes closed, the way a child would just to be carried into bed. Nothing costs us the game and there is still time. 

	


	





	

		
9 Novels About Women Fighting for a Just Society
			

				Posted on  by Jo Lou			

			


	
		

		
	

		

My aunt Lisa is the first female scientist I ever knew, the only one I knew for years. One of my mother’s eight siblings, she is an ornithologist who has had research gigs at Point Reyes and Mono Lake, among others, and leads private birding tours on the California coast. I come from a large family that trends conservative, often overtly suspicious of environmentalists, and while Aunt Lisa prefers birding to debating her ecological convictions, her whole life is, to me, a statement. She helped me realize that a career could be as much a form of activism as a protest march, and after that, I started to see activism everywhere—in caregiving, in gardens, in cooking, in fashion choices.










For me, the challenge of this small-scale, hyper-local activism is believing it can deliver the global systemic changes we need before it is too late. In my collection, Site Fidelity, the characters face environmental catastrophe and economic injustice—some take direct action, some work for change through their careers, some through the ways they care for the members of their families and communities—but they are also forced to grapple with what, if anything, their actions achieve. When a Catholic nun pours bleach into a bulldozer’s oil pan on a fracking site, nothing happens—no public criminal report, no visible work stoppage. A woman converts an old quarry to an urban natural area only to see it destroyed by a flood. A scientist dumps a rancher’s diesel fuel to prevent him from burning a Gunnison sage grouse breeding lek, knowing full well the cans can be easily refilled. 





I don’t always feel particularly hopeful about our collective ability to solve climate change, or even the efficacy of my own attempts at activism, but the idea that people all over the world are engaging in small acts of resistance every day buoys me. Aunt Lisa had no intention of being any kind of role model. And yet.





Here are nine novels about activism of all kinds, all written by women:










In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez





Based on the true story of the Mirabal sisters, known as Las Mariposas, this heartbreaking book explores the costs of living under and resisting a repressive dictatorship while also bringing the sisters, its heroines, fully to life. The women fall in love, pursue education, bear children, and try to live fearlessly in a world of torture, disappearances, and political murders. Alvarez writes their courage and ferocity as well as their vulnerability and their fears. 





Kickdown





Kickdown by Rebecca Clarren





The Dunbar sisters—already struggling to manage their family’s western Colorado ranch after the death of their father—begin to suspect that an accident at a nearby natural gas well is causing their neighbors’ animals to miscarry and has possibly poisoned the stream that runs through their own ranch. The sisters, each facing their own life challenges, work to overcome their own disagreements about how to proceed in the face of a community divided over the ecological costs and perceived economic benefits of natural gas development.










Hot Season by Susan DeFreitas





Set at a small college in Arizona known for its radical environmental politics, Hot Season follows four young women involved to various degrees in a local dispute surrounding water rights for a local housing development in the post-9/11 era. With beautiful, thorough descriptions of desert riparian ecosystems and rich explorations of female friendship and rivalries, Hot Season explores activism as a complicated source of youthful idealism and identity construction.










Stay and Fight by Madeline ffitch





When Helen invites Karen and Lily and their son Perley to live on her small acreage in Appalachia, they become a tight family that includes their neighbor, Rudy, who establishes a fruit tree nursery on an oil and gas pipeline easement along the property’s edge. The women’s self-sufficiency and willingness to live outside the demands of modern capitalism is activism in its own right, and while the novel explores the ways society suspects and punishes poverty and refuses to stand up against extraction mentalities, it’s the intelligence and warmth of the characters that makes this an unforgettable story.





cover





Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge





The fictional character of Libertie’s mother, Cathy, is based on the first real-life Black female doctor in New York State, and while activism is only one of the finely woven threads in this beautiful story, it is one source of the conflict between mother and daughter that frame the book. Cathy is a nuanced and complicated character—her efforts to heal the people who need her sometimes fail, and the compromises she makes to keep the operation running alienate other members of her community and Libertie herself. The exploration of intergenerational expectations and misunderstandings about what it means to be responsible to one’s self and one’s community is especially brutal and brilliant. 





My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki





My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki





Desperate for a job, Jane begins producing a show called My American Wife! that exists to promote American meat exports to Japanese housewives. As she travels across the country for the features and interviews, Jane, increasingly disturbed by the impact of meat production, secretly begins to film the darker side of the industry. Meanwhile, in Japan, Akiko’s abusive husband orders her to cook and eat every recipe in Jane’s show to increase their chances of conceiving a child. The women’s stories converge at the end of the book in complicated and satisfying ways. 





Image result for women talking by miriam toews





Women Talking by Miriam Toews





A group of Mennonite women meets in the aftermath of unspeakable violence—the men in their remote village have been drugging, torturing, and molesting them—to decide whether to take action, and what such action might look like given their linguistic and cultural isolation from the world around them. The women contemplate and discuss the requirements of their faith, their responsibilities to their own bodies and souls and to those of their daughters and their sons, the limits of forgiveness, and the possibilities of peace after such horrors. The book highlights the women’s sorrow and rage and, most memorably, their compassion, as they seek to change their community.





Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk





Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk





When a series of deaths occur in the rural Polish village where she lives, Janina Duszejko is convinced that the wild animals in the area have turned to murder as revenge against the local hunters. Her efforts to convince her neighbors, friends, and most memorably, the local police force to take her theory seriously explores the violence that results from humanity’s belief in its superiority to animal life, the ways religion and cultural conservativism are barriers to any real questioning of this hierarchy. This is more often classified as a literary crime novel, but Janina’s actions throughout the book are rooted, like all activism, in her conviction that change is necessary for a just society.










Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth





Barn 8 is a novel about a direct-action protest in which a group of activists—including Janey and Cleveland, both auditors for the American egg industry—try to liberate all of the chickens on a single egg farm in one night. The story is told by a variety of narrators, some central to the plot, some more peripheral, allowing a wide range of perspectives and judgments including those of the chickens themselves, whose consciousness and eventual transformation outlasts the human fallibility the botched heist reveals. 

	


	





	

		
Hoax Diaries Were the Original Deepfakes
			

				Posted on  by Jess Zimmerman			

			


	
		

		
	

		

One by one, the girls got the texts, all from an unknown number: menacing messages, threats and jeers. Worse, videos of them, their faces and bodies, at parties in hot tubs, drinking and smoking with friends. The only thing was, it wasn’t really them. 





“That’s not me in the video,” one of the students said adamantly in a news segment about the scandal on Good Morning America. “I thought no one would believe me.” 





They were looking at “deepfake” videos, allegedly sent by a woman named Raffaella Spone, a Bucks County, Pennsylvania mom whose teenage daughter was on a rivaling cheerleading squad. Spone, who also goes by Raffaella Innella, had created the videos and sent them to the girls’ cheerleading coaches as well in the hopes that they would get them kicked off their teams.The videos were so realistic that they looked convincing, even though the scenarios—drinking, smoking, nudity—were entirely computer-generated.





Deepfakes—lifelike renderings of real people using AI technology—are increasingly easy to make. They came to prominent attention lately when some convincing videos of a false Tom Cruise went viral on Tik Tok. In an older deepfake of Barack Obama created by Jordan Peele, he slips in an expletive about Donald Trump. It’s thrilling to watch him say it, but there is something eerie about it, like an animated wax figure. Last Christmas, Britain’s Channel 4 issued a deepfake video of Queen Elizabeth alongside her annual Christmas address to warn viewers about fake news. Both issue a challenge to the viewer, first showing how real the videos can look, then urging them to practice skepticism.





For a society full of skeptics, we don’t seem to be that capable of sniffing out falsities.





False identities and fake news are part of our cultural narrative now. A large swath of the country thinks the “mainstream media” is peddling lies, mistrust in medicine and government is at an all-time high. Complicated, over-the-top stories in the Q-Anon universe—adrenochrome, girls shipped in Wayfair furniture for trafficking, microchips transmitted through vaccines—are taken as fact by a startling number of people. Anonymous sources and masked online personas are a fact of our online lives, increased by a year spent at home behind screens. For a society full of skeptics, we don’t seem to be that capable of sniffing out falsities. 





The deepfake phenomenon, with its suspension of belief and its sly, do-it-yourself artistry, reminds me of a hoax diary, a work of fiction that is passed off as an authentic journal. Not to be confused with a memoir, a true hoax diary is somewhat rare—and their outcomes and reception are not always predictable. 





Perhaps the most well-known hoax diary is Go Ask Alice, published in 1971, a supposedly anonymous diary that tells the first-hand story of a teenage girl’s rapid descent from a normal suburban girlhood into drug addiction, prostitution, homelessness and ultimately death by overdose. As a middle schooler, I devoured the story, wide-eyed, haunted by the nameless narrator’s demise. The cover called it a “real diary” and the author “Anonymous.” I simply believed these things to be true. And I loved it. 








The book’s “editor” was Beatrice Sparks, a Mormon youth therapist who claimed to have been given the diary by a young client. The book was critically lauded and well-received, appearing on the American Library Association’s 1971 “Best Books for Young Adults” list and becoming an international bestseller. Libraries had a hard time keeping enough copies to meet demands for it. In early interviews, Sparks skirted around its origin, though she admitted she didn’t have the original diary.  As it turns out, Sparks had written the book entirely, and went on to publish several other moralistic, titillating titles: about a suicidal boy drawn into a satanic cult, a girl seduced by her teacher, a pregnant teen, a teen with AIDS. If Alice was debunked early on, the admission was quiet, resulting only in a disclaimer added to the title page calling it fiction (I must have missed that). Sparks got away with her hoax; the book remains popular and has not gone out of print since it was published. As late as 1995, Nat Hentoff gushed in The Village Voice for Banned Books Week that it was a “powerful account” of addiction without being preachy. Rereading it as an adult, it’s not quite as believable (there is a veritable literary tradition of writers rediscovering it with disappointment), but the fact of its falsity is a part of the story.





On the opposite end of the lurid Go Ask Alice is The Diary of a Farmer’s Wife, the purported diary a woman named Anne Hughes kept from 1796 to 1797. Its content is wholesome, if somewhat banal: conversations with neighbors and conflicts with servants, local events and recipes, and it was first published publicly in 1937 in a serial in the British magazine Farmer’s Weekly. The origin and timeline of that diary is murky. A woman named Jeanne Preston, who said she had been given Hughes’s diary as a young girl, submitted clips she said she had transcribed from the diary. The original was lost, however, possibly lent to an American GI who stayed with Preston and never returned it. Both Preston and the publishing editor died before seeing the diary published as a book—and without providing an explanation for its dicey origins. Despite this, like Go Ask Alice, the diary’s popularity endured, republished several times and even made into a BBC TV drama. To the people who care about Anne Hughes’s diary, it’s agreed that Preston likely added and embellished parts of the book, but the historical value of the diary’s depiction of 18th century farming life is valuable. Its veracity is secondary. 





The Hitler Diaries is perhaps the most famous hoax diary, and the one with the direst consequences. In 1983, West German magazine Stern announced a bombshell discovery: sixty small notebooks supposedly written by Adolf Hitler himself, chronicling his rise to power in the 1930s and the execution of the Holocaust (as well as tedious details about flatulence and Eva Braun’s complaints of his halitosis). A journalist, Gerd Heideman, brought the documents to Stern, claiming they had been discovered in the rubble of an airplane crash shortly after World War II. Stern’s editors kept investigations at arm’s length, at Heideman’s insistence that the person who found them needed their identity protected. But once the German Federal Archives began looking deeper into the notebooks, the story fell apart: not only were they false, they were badly forged. The handwriting didn’t match, the materials were contemporary, and many parts seem to be plagiarized from published work. The forger was revealed to be a small-time crook named Konrad Kujau, who went to jail along with Heidemann. The Stern editors who’d been duped resigned from their jobs, too. 





I haven’t found much about hoax diary unveilings in the past ten years or so. Maybe the format has simply changed.





In the ‘90s, one of the handwriting experts who debunked the Hitler Diaries helped unveil a fake published diary of James Maybrick, suspected to be Jack the Ripper, just a month before it was set to be published. But I haven’t found much about hoax diary unveilings in the past ten years or so. Maybe the format has simply changed. The Lonelygirl15 hoax fooled the internet when YouTube was newly formed in the early 2000s. Sixteen-year-old Bree made video blogs from her bedroom, which became more and more bizarre as it was revealed that her family was involved in the occult and an evil organization called “The Order.” In 2006, the channel was revealed to be a scripted show created by a Marin County, California amateur filmmaker named Miles Beckett. Around that time, reality television was also part of the zeitgeist, abundant and increasingly scripted—I’m thinking of the 2010 series finale of the teenage reality drama The Hills, in which a final shot pulls away to reveal the walls of a set and a full Hollywood backlot. Over time, perhaps, we’ve come to expect fiction and non-fiction to be blurred and mingled. The internet has given us so much more content to parse through. Plus, though journaling is still prevalent, the tattered physical notebook is less a part of our consciousness. 





The false memoir is its own enduring problem, but it’s different. I admire the hoax diary for its own distinct form. There is a particular artistry and trickery in assuming another identity, even the boring and unflattering parts, a deviousness in creating fiction so immersive it claims grit and authenticity. It’s a master class in fiction writing. There is a thrill, too, for readers to believe we have access to a once-private document, to pry into someone’s psyche. 





I think the truth is that we want to believe in hoaxes and conspiracies and deepfake videos. I want the video of Barack Obama to be real; I’m searching the Queen’s face for it to match the real thing. There’s a fun in believing in conspiracies, even if they make no sense (how could a microchip be small enough to fit in a vaccine? How could Democrats be organized enough to run a pedophile ring if they can’t even raise the minimum wage?) I think this when I watch Catfish or even 90 Day Fiancé, the reality show that chronicles Americans in relationships with international partners, some of whom aren’t who they seem: they are overly filtered, or gunning for a green card, or one person keeps canceling meetups last minute. I always puzzle over why these people could fool themselves so easily. But self-deception is a survival tool and a comfort. Just like we search a deepfake video or a blog for authenticity, yearning for it, these people are willing to trick themselves to see true love, even where a hoax might lurk. . 





I always puzzle over why these people could fool themselves so easily. But self-deception is a survival tool and a comfort.





In fact, I’d created my own hoax diary in the name of love once. As a middle schooler, inspired by a crush, I filled a spiral notebook with a diary novel based on a character I nicknamed Rainbowgal. She was a cooler kind of avatar of me: she wore a lot of color and skateboarded (I didn’t), was tomboyish yet pretty, free-spirited and unabashed (I wasn’t). Her only downfall, the plot of the story, was that she had a crush on someone with the same initials as a boy I had a crush on, but he wouldn’t notice her. In hindsight, it was an obvious knock-off of Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl and diary novels I’d loved: The Diary of Anne Frank, Harriet the Spy, the Amelia’s Notebook series (an illustrated series first published in American Girl Magazine), Letters from Rifka, and the Dear America series. My diary was illustrated with cartoons and marginalia, each doodle intentional and imbued with a message. I worked on the notebook for weeks, and slipped it into my crush’s desk for him to find. Later, I gave him a birthday card signed “Rainbowgal,” hoping for an explosive connection. Spoiler: that didn’t happen. I’m amazed at the machinations it would have taken to make my plan successful: boy reads captivating diary of a charming stranger and falls in love. Girl is unmasked and revealed to be a regular classmate, like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtains manipulating the great big head of the Great and Powerful Oz. Of course, the boy sees that the regular girl is all he’s ever wanted, and they live happily ever after. Even though he’s been fooled, he’s still intrigued—kind of like the millions of teens who devoured Go Ask Alice.  





I’m not sure anyone ever read my diary novel. Like famous hoax diaries in history, the original document is missing, thrown out in a fit of humiliation or despair. The crush faded and I moved on. But the memory remained, and the character and story I’d created eclipsed the impetus for it. Some years later in English class we read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a post-modern memoir/fiction about the Vietnam War. At one point, O’Brien concedes that some of the stories the narrator has told are false—but, he says, they are still true: “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” This struck my teenage heart deeply.





 It was around that time that I found out Go Ask Alice was a deepfake, a hoax diary that had cemented itself in my mind as real, but was a work of fiction. Worse than that, it was propaganda, a product of the War on Drugs to steer young readers away from trouble. I grappled with what this meant, like I’d grappled with the hard truth that The Blair Witch Project was also created in a studio with a script, instead of with a handheld camcorder by terrified teenagers. In the end, I guess it doesn’t matter. Tom Cruise the person is no more real to me than Tom Cruise the deepfake. Rainbowgal’s imprint is only what I make it. The conspiracies and tall tales of our time will be lore, an emblem of who we were, whether they happened or not. There’s no escaping the truth of it. 

	


	





	

		
Our Favorite Essays about Queer Pop Culture
			

				Posted on  by Intern Electric Lit			

			


	
		

		
	

		

Over the last 5 years, there has been an explosion of queer representation in all forms of media. From TV shows like Pose to Steven Universe, movies like Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Moonlight, musicians Lil Nas X and the late SOPHIE, and books like In the Dream House and Freshwater, people across the LGBTQ community can finally start to see themselves represented. Here are some of our favorite essays that examine queer identity in pop culture. 





Person looking away from camera with a rainbow beside their head
Photo by Johannes Krupinski





“I Wrote the Super Queer Novel My Younger Self Needed” by Celia Laskey





For Celia Laskey, growing up in a small town in Maine meant having no exposure to queer culture. In her assigned readings, the focus was on cishet men fawning over cishet women, while lesbianism could only be a personified punchline. In her essay, she reflects on the ways that having access to diverse literature with humanized queer characters could’ve eased her coming out.





It’s impossible to say what might have happened if I had grown up in a different world, but I think my chances of being happier sooner would have greatly increased in a world where queer people are visible, where our stories are just as valid. 










“‘Dirty Computer’ is Not a Coming Out Album-Because Janelle Monáe’s Music Has Been Queer All Along” by Laura Passin





Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer was a cultural and critical success that generated conversation about her sexuality and relationship with Tessa Thompson. However, Laura Passin makes the case that Monáe’s queerness was never hidden, while also portraying Dirty Computer as confessional poetry instead of a coming out statement.





Monáe is not exactly casting off a straight mask to reveal a queer reality. But is she casting off a mask at all? Is Janelle Monáe’s new persona really closer to “herself”?










“Frog and Toad Are Queer Relationship Goals” by S.E. Fleenor





Frog and Toad are friends and lovers. S.E. Fleenor may not have grown up with the beloved childhood amphibians, but in their essay, they tackle why this relationship rings true to queer couples today. 





They made me feel understood not just as a person, but as a queer person in love. 










“Everything I Know About Queer Community I Learned from Swamp Thing” by Emme Lund





In the 1989 sequel movie The Return of the Swamp Thing, Emme Lund saw a future for herself for the first time. In a stark contrast to other movies and narratives about monsters and “othered” creatures, this movie doesn’t betray the Swamp Thing. Lund dissects why Swamp Thing’s “happily ever after” meant so much for a closeted trans girl growing up in an evangelical family.





To me, the movie always felt like it was made for people who feel monstrous, a portrayal of a monster’s survival and eventual happiness. 





KJ Apa as Archie Andrews, shirtless in bed
Screenshot from “Riverdale”





“How “Riverdale” Turns Masculinity Into a Queer Thirst Trap” by Manuel Betancourt 





The CW adaptation of the Archie comics, Riverdale, is a cultural amalgamation of a “post-James Franco world.” In his essay, Manuel Betancourt dives into how Riverdale uses the many cliches and tropes of teen television to turn Archie into a campy and homoerotic beefcake.





To titillate with such sanctified male ideals is to court a gay gaze that’s long been denied.





Screenshot from Jaws





“‘Jaws’ is a Film Full of Queer Intimacy You Never Noticed” by Jen Corrigan





Although Jaws feels like a staple of film bros and masculinity, Corrigan examines it through her own bisexual lens. Her perspective of both queerness and sexual fluidity speaks volumes to the tale of sharks, violence, and isolated men at sea.





What I like about the sexuality in Jaws is the ambiguity. There’s an in-betweenness there in which the men are not gay nor straight but are instead neither or both.










“Carly Rae Jepsen’s Queer Renaissance” by Michael Waters





Pop artist Carly Rae Jepsen might be best known for her 2012 viral hit “Call Me Maybe,” but to Waters, she represents an ambiguity and safe space for queer listeners. In this essay, he explains to a straight audience how a straight Candian singer built herself a loyal following of queer fans. 





Jepsen’s anonymity within her own music allows all kinds of desire to permeate into it. In a music world in which spaces for queer people, especially queer women, are so limited, there is a revolution in that.










“How Queer Writers Are Creating Queer Genres” by Alanna Duncan





When Duncan looked to contemporary works by queer writers, she found the same themes popping up: fragments, distance, the second person. In examining a number of novels including Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies and Patrick Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, she pinpoints exactly what makes queer writing so distinct to a queer audience.





As queer people, everywhere we turn, we must reassert ourselves and take up space, over and over again.

	


	





	

		
Black People Work So Hard to Speak Out That We Forget How to Embrace Quietness
			

				Posted on  by Jess Zimmerman			

			


	
		

		
	

		

To be Black in America is to be many things. 





We live in a moment where this is nearly a given. From novels like Luster to variety shows like Random Acts of Flyness, it’s increasingly clear that describing Blackness is like holding water in cupped hands—it’s something fluid that will seep through your grasp. And yet, there is one trait that tends to linger. So often, to be Black in America is to be defined by speech. This means refusing to be silenced, to vocally claim the right to be Black and exist freely.





There is an almost heroic beauty in thinking about Blackness this way. A nation within a nation forged through speaking truth to power. However, this uplifting refrain leaves much unsaid. While speech is essential for obtaining social justice, coupling Black identity to expression also forecloses other ways of being. Blackness becomes a lived experience always oriented outwards and locked into a prescribed register of defiance. The possibility for another type of justice—the freedom to not have to speak—is muted.  





The possibility for another type of justice—the freedom to not have to speak—is muted.





For Black men in particular, this dissonance takes on a unique tone. From the outset, men are already socialized to be aggressive in their voice, to never accept being silenced. Black masculinity is written with this grammar in mind, and when left unexamined, it reproduces itself in further acts of silencing. It dominates discursive space, often at the direct expense of Black women and non-binary folks. And this is notwithstanding the reflexive harm. An identity propelled by expression leaves little room for introspection. You’re seldom encouraged to be quiet. 





One of the foremost thinkers of quietness is Brown University professor Kevin Quashie, who in 2012, published The Sovereignty of Quiet. Noting the limits of fastening Black identity to a performance in the public sphere, Quashie’s work seeks to forgo racialized and gendered expectations of expression. Instead, he asks: what about quietness? Not silence—as silence implies “repression,” “withholding,” an “act of concealment”—but rather quietness, because this is when the mind lies in repose. It’s in quietness that we can breathe and privately sift through our thoughts and emotions—a key piece in what it means to be human. And so by reducing Blackness to oral expression, we fail to grasp the full expanse of the Black self. In his smooth and succinct writing, Quashie implodes our idea of Blackness and in turn, Black male identity. The focus shifts inward, and we’re brought to wonder: what does it mean to be a Black man and quiet?





Particular Kind of Black Man





Tope Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man offers an answer to this question. Published in 2019, Folarin’s debut novel is about Tunde Akinola and his upbringing as a first-generation Nigerian American. The story follows Tunde and his family as they move from city to city in the Southwestern United States, eagerly grasping for some semblance of their American Dream. The promise of possibility hums throughout the book. Tunde’s father starts a modest, but successful, ice cream truck business. Tunde and his brother, Tayo, grow enamored with the best of ‘90s hip-hop and R&B. Tunde attends Morehouse College and falls in love. However, the dream quickly dissolves into an illusion. Tunde’s mother is overwhelmed by schizophrenia in the face of a lonely reality that could never match her hopes for America. She returns to Nigeria, swiftly replaced by a distant stepmother. Tunde’s father can neither sustain his ice cream truck business nor hold down a steady job. As Tayo later reminds Tunde, “we eventually moved to Texas because Dad was convinced that, as he put it, he would never be anything more than a n*gger in Utah.”





Then there is Tunde himself. “I am black, I can’t change that,” he bluntly acknowledges, “but I had no idea of how to be a black American.” And as he grows up, Tunde is not given the space to investigate nor inhabit his own notion of Blackness. Instead, he is forced to become “his [father’s] idea of the perfect black man.” Tunde remembers:





Following [my father’s] lead, I created a template for the kind of black man I wanted to be. I studied the way that Sidney Poitier held his head when he spoke. Tall, erect, proud. I studied Hakeem Olajuwon’s walk, loping and graceful. I studied Bryant Gumbel—he always seemed so poised during interviews, and sometimes after I finished watching him on TV I’d run to the bathroom and practice asking questions as if I were him. 





Here lies the tragic topos in A Particular Kind of Black Man. Tunde’s earnest emulation of figures like Sidney Poitier and Bryant Gumbel—actors, performers—is not incidental. It is Folarin’s potent critique of respectability politics and how it intersects with expression. Tunde has been marshaled into performing a constricting standard of Blackness: one defined by its palatability to white America. 





It might feel easy to fault Tunde’s father for setting these expectations. However, he is also a character clearly deceived by the American charade, who wields speech as a necessary defense mechanism. Tunde’s father presses upon his children, “People can say anything they want about the way you look, about your skin. But if you learn to speak better than them, there is nothing they can do.” He so desperately wants the country’s promise to be true, where hard work and being the “perfect black man” will preserve his son. This move brings to light the transactional demands placed on immigrant communities, which so commonly masquerade as innocuous aspirations. To succeed in America, you must assimilate, even when the cost is your own sense of self. Folarin thereby locates the kaleidoscopic pressures faced by Tunde. He has been handed society’s script to a tripartite role—Black, American, man—and is expected to perform the part. The problem is: he’s been given no freedom to improvise his lines. 





He has been handed society’s script to a tripartite role—Black, American, man—and is expected to perform the part. The problem is: he’s been given no freedom to improvise his lines.





As the novel progresses, Tunde gradually struggles with the fact he’s become a man who does not believe in the self he has created, but must still perform as that person. Time and time again, his ingrained tendency to dissemble has left him unable to access a stable sense of identity. And as a result, Tunde at first unsurely, then undoubtedly, experiences a series of mental episodes. This psychological unraveling is deftly transmitted through the novel’s form. The narrative cadence shuttles between the first, second, and third person. Scenes are peppered with fugue-like recollections and ambiguous double memories. Folarin slips seamlessly between the past and present tense, leaving us occasionally unsure about what events have actually transpired. Yet, one certainty emerges from this formal fray: Tunde yearns to double back and create an ego detached from society’s expectations for a particular kind of Black man. As the sociologist Erving Goffman famously claimed, “A back region or backstage may be . . . where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course . . . Here the performer can relax; he can drop his front, forgo speaking his lines.” Folarin thus exposes us to a psyche without this backstage. 





Or at least at first glance, there seems to be no backstage. A Particular Kind of Black Man is pocketed by chapters where Tunde phones his grandmother in Nigeria. Transcribed in lilting italics, their exchanges reveal a familiar back-and-forth, while also inadvertently brushing upon the profound. “All I’m saying is how can I know you are real when I never see you?” Tunde questions. As his grandmother lovingly prods her grandson with further inquiries about his life, Tunde slowly unmasks and reveals his feelings of dissolution and double memories. To this she responds, “Has it occurred to you that these other memories are showing you something important about your life? . . . Before you discard them or assume you are sick, why don’t you allow them to speak to you?”





With Folarin’s hypnotic prose, it is sometimes unclear whether Tunde’s grandmother actually exists. However, this surreal vagueness is vital. Even if he might be speaking to himself, Tunde is granted the space to speak inwardly during these conversations. Here, there is no need to project someone he is not. He is working through repressed emotions and bubbling questions that naturally arise when contemplating the self. There is no exaggerated performance, no anxious proclamations, but rather an honest interrogation of subjectivity. In such moments, A Particular Kind of Black Man speaks for itself; sotto voce. Folarin’s deployment of italics is akin to a fermata in a symphony; a pause where we’re meant to parse meaning from the quietness. There are other moments in the story where quietness briefly reigns. Yet it’s these phone conversations and their hushed tenor that best limn Tunde’s interior. This alone is not enough to preserve him wholly. We only sense some sort of resolution in Tunde’s character at the novel’s end when he travels to Nigeria and reunites with his mother. But, the whispered interludes with his grandmother—or his own subconscious—at least provide a reprieve from the totalizing pressure to be a particular kind of Black man. It offers a quiet retreat backstage.  





The novel presents an example on the emergent possibilities for Black men if encouraged to be quiet.





And in effect, we see the novel’s stakes. Folarin vividly illustrates the psychological ramifications of an identity rooted in constant expression. Societal and interpersonal pressures have conscribed Tunde into a public-facing performance without giving him the chance to wander within and explore who else he might be. The novel presents an example—albeit staccato—on the emergent possibilities for Black men if encouraged to be quiet. Rather than resting Black masculinity on an expressive caricature, it pulls back the curtain onto a potential life away from the stage, a life of discreet humanity. “An aesthetic of quiet is not incompatible with black culture,” Quashie attests, “but to notice and understand it requires a shift in how we read, what we look for, and what we expect, even what we remain open to.” Literature is a site of redefinition where bordered expectations become porous, and ideas of the self are subject to change. However, these changes can only occur once we learn to hear what is said both loudly and softly. 





This is an urgent project not solely for Black men’s sake. In her New York Times review of the novel, Elaine Castillo remarks on how, “The dilemmas of diaspora as they intersect with masculinity have corrosive effects on not just selfhood but intimacy.” The compulsion to speak hinders Black men’s capacity to engage truthfully with the self but also with others. And although Blackness is not a monolith, Black folks are still in community. A Particular Kind of Black Man offers glimpses into how else Black men can be for themselves and in turn, for those around them. Neither a feminine nor masculine aesthetic, quietness is a balm; a capacious ethos suitable for releasing the constrictive pressures of Black masculinity. It’s a challenge that must be taken up because not all that one is, will be found outside.

	


	





	

		
Poetry About Black Womanhood and Desire
			

				Posted on  by Jo Lou			

			


	
		

		
	

		

At times, I find myself struggling to articulate the relationship that Black women have to vulnerability, desirability, femininity, and everything in between. Chet’la Sebree’s most recent innovative book-length poem, Field Study, assembles moments of sheer honesty about microaggressions, interracial relationships, heartbreak, Blackness, and so much more. 










Field Study is an immersive, intimate exploration of seeing and being seen, of wanting and being wanted. The speaker rigorously attempts to understand pieces of herself in relation to her past romantic relationships. “I’m not good at small talk,” she begins, before pulling us into disparate modes of conversations that feel like she’s confiding in us, her readers, and sharing her deepest secrets. I reveled in this text over the course of one night, then voluntarily chose to do it again the next day. The connections made through these lyrical odes are mesmerizing and Sebree doesn’t shy away from recounting these poetic truths:





“I worry that being nobody’s happily ever after
makes me nobody.
To be nobody is to be no body is to be weightless. I could use more levity.
I worry that not being anyone’s happily ever
after makes me no one, which could also mean
I’m never alone.”





Sebree is an assistant professor of English and the director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts at Bucknell University. Her first collection, Mistress, was the winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 2020. A graduate of American University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, Sebree has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, and more. Her poetry has appeared in Kenyon Review, Guernica, Poetry International, and other publications. Most recently, Field Study was the winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poet.





I spoke to Sebree over email about heartbreak, desire, and Black womanhood. 










Kukuwa Ashun: Before getting into your writing, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge this really striking cover for Field Study. There’s a hand that belongs—I presume—to a Black woman and the silhouette of this hand hovers over a white sheet, as if she’s ready to uncover what’s beneath. Can you talk about the link between observation, exploration, and discovery in this cover and in your writing?   








Chet’la Sebree: I am so in love with the cover because of all the ways the image can be read. It comes from a painting by Alex Gardner, who primarily paints androgynous Black figures. We looked at a couple of his pieces as June Park started designing. Ultimately, we landed on Untitled (2017). And when I look at this cover, I still see the full-scaled painting in which it’s clearer that a hand is reaching for a curved back—the bottom of the white shirt lifted to reveal the skin of the person hunched over. For me, there is so much in the articulation of the hand, in its gesture. Is it someone reaching toward the back with tenderness or slight menace? I’m not sure. I’m also drawn to the fact that the hand hovers and casts a shadow, that it’s in motion, on the precipice of something. I love that anticipation. There’s so much hovering, seeking, and waiting in the process that leads from observation to exploration to discovery. 





I hadn’t seen the cover as a person reaching toward a bed or a sheet until you mentioned it, but now I can’t unsee it. Funnily enough, a bed was one of the things I talked to people at FSG about when we discussed cover options. I thought, with my nonexistent design and/or marketing mind, an empty bed might be a great image, so I love that the bed, which serves as one of the fields in the poems, is still present!





KA: Let’s talk about what the field means in the book, as you note on the first page:





“This field is my brain’s backlog of books and
a lot of bedrooms.
This field has maps made of men, of finger pads,
of scrotal sacs. My muscles a Moleskine.”





When did you know that you wanted to take your readers on this journey, to these distinct, personal places? 





CS: I wrote those lines after a dinner party in 2017 when I felt like I’d found my way into this topic I’d been writing about and around for several years: interracial relationships. I didn’t really have a sense of where I was going quite yet, but I did know that I was seeking to peel back a curtain, that I wanted to get into the weeds with people. And a line from my former boss, mentor, and friend Shara McCallum just kept coming back to me: “don’t write about what you’re not willing to cannibalize.” 





Field Study is loosely based on the fall out of a former relationship. And I felt like I was ready to process it, ready to eat its meat and find nourishment in its digestion, but to do that, I felt like I was consuming part of me and my history. One afternoon, sitting in a well-lit office in which I’d been writing, I knew where I was headed and so I wrote the final lines of the book. And so the act of discovery was writing into the middle—what was the meat that I was going to eat to get there.





Field Study is about more than a relationship, though; it’s about Black womanhood, desire more generally, family, history, and finding oneself. And it became clear pretty quickly that those conversations would require a venture into intimate spaces. There is so much silence that surrounds women’s bodies and lives, and in order to get to the truth of it all, I felt I had to delve into the “personal.” That’s about all I knew initially. I knew I wanted to survey a field and collect observational information from books and films and friends and see how all of it came together.





KA: This investigation of self is ultimately you committing to analyzing not only your decisions, but the actions of others around you, which isn’t an easy feat. At the beginning of the book, it appears as if you’re writing about a relationship that you had with one man. More than halfway through the book, you admit that you are actually writing about three different men, three different relationships. What was the importance of drawing attention to this miscalculation?





CS: Life is complicated and messy. We misremember things. In general, it is important to me that this speaker errs, that she is fallible, that she is capable of violence and harm in a way that renders her deeply human. 





I was ready to process [my former relationship], ready to eat its meat and find nourishment in its digestion, but to do that, I was consuming part of me and my history.





In this moment specifically, however, I wanted to remind readers that this is all artifice, that the field is constructed. Observational research is influenced by the observer, and here our observer sometimes sees what she wants. There’s a seamless symmetry in the dichotomy of two men—one Black, one white. But the reality is that life isn’t that easily categorized. In this moment, I wanted to amplify the fact that this field is constructed and manipulated through one person’s lens and that that person is prone to error. 





In this world of quick Twitter cancellations, I think we forget that sometimes we err. We will. We’re human. And though, two men—one Black, one white—made for an easy comparison, I realized that that’s what I was doing, making an easy comparison, that in reality the story is much more complicated and nuanced (and, at times, just downright different). I guess, in this way, it also allows for the potential of the speaker’s untrustworthiness, how she might be manipulating the data as she reports her findings, which raises questions of the line between fact and fiction. What is truth? Which truth matters? And which truths do we share because they’re convenient and support our version of things? These are all questions I’m still navigating.





KA: The cadence and rhythm of language in this work is so strong, deliberate. Yet, while living through some of these moments, I imagine you were still trying to find the language to figure out some of these things as they were happening. For example, one of my favorite lines comes after a quote by Mikki Kendall about subservience and submission:





“My mom was young mother turned bread-
winner turned boat owner.
I know nothing of subservience, submission.”





What’s the function of these revelations in relation to some of the other intriguing quotes interspersed throughout Field Study?





CS: The quotes are at the core of Field Study; they are responsible for so much of the writing. When I started the project, I set out to write an essay about the representation of interracial relationships in the show Scandal. Clearly, I went a little left of the initial plan, but I managed to keep some of the references. 





When I’m writing, I’m often thinking about singularity—how through a single speaker’s story, I can tell a wider one but how I’m never trying to tell everyone’s. As a Black woman who spends a lot of time navigating primarily white spaces, I often feel lumped in with a group of similarly hued humans, as if there is only one narrative for ways we, as Black women, can be in this world. In a rejection of this and monolithic representations, I often turn towards the Audre Lorde quote from “Learning from the 1960s”: “We do not have to become a mix of indistinguishable particles resembling a vat of homogenized chocolate milk.” 





KA: There’s this moment where you also loosely reveal that there was a first, initial book about the man you were in a relationship with. I’m curious about how that book differed from this one.





CS: Okay, so I’m going to try to give the short version. 





I was writing my first book, born of my graduate thesis in which historical research figured prominently, when my aunt died of terminal brain cancer. Then, in my grief, I pivoted and started writing poems about illness and the body and care. It was one big unruly project about the body and desire and illness and Black womanhood, and I finally decided it might be more than one book. As I started to parse out the poems, I started finding through lines that led me to my first collection, Mistress. 





I often feel lumped in with a group of similarly hued humans, as if there is only one narrative for ways we, as Black women, can be in this world.





My canned summary of it goes a little something like this: Mistress explores Black women’s experiences and representation through two voices—an imagined Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who had at least six of Thomas Jefferson’s children, and a contemporary speaker who bares my name. Through this cross-generational conversation, the two speakers demonstrate how the ways the world treats and discusses Black women have not changed dramatically in over 200 years. 





In that book, I gave the second speaker my name because I knew I was doing a violence to Sally Hemings’s legacy. She’s a woman without a voice in history since no primary source documents from her exist, and I’ve occupied that silence in service of art. I recognized, throughout the project, the potential for harm. I still wrestle with it, but I felt if I made my anxieties transparent in the work and if I also implicated myself, perhaps that made it better. 





All of this to say, there is a lot of scaffolding around that project. There is this easiness where I feel equipped to say, “this is not Sally Hemings; this is just my imagination,” which also translates into “this is not Chet’la Sebree.” And I have been good with that. People occasionally call me on it, ask if I am the contemporary speaker, and I say something like she’s loosely based on me the way that my “Sally” is based on Sally Hemings. Again, a lot of scaffolding.





This is harder to achieve with Field Study, even though there’s no named speaker; there isn’t as much distance that I can create, especially since if you look closely there is crossover between the experiences of the speaker of Field Study and contemporary speaker in Mistress. If anything, those speakers are the same—she’s just keeping you more at arm’s length in my first collection. In Field Study, it feels a lot easier to collapse me into the poetry.





And even as I’m talking, I’m creating that distance with the “she” and the “speaker.” And that distance isn’t untrue. She is me, and she isn’t, which is what makes this project so difficult to discuss at times. Is it a prose poem? A lyric memoir? Your guess is probably as good as mine. But I feel perhaps the least comfortable with the word “nonfiction,” even pushed back on it in very early conversations and stages of book-making. I wanted the space for untruth. Sometimes the fictionalized bits sound better, or a lie serves the line creating the cadence or rhythm you previously mentioned. I wanted that space to navigate and the space for my story and the speaker’s to be separate. Overall, though, I think this book feels more intimate than Mistress, which is my way of circling back to the question you actually asked.





KA: The questions you pose throughout this book are so introspective, and I might be cheating because I want to turn a few of them back to you. What is truth in poetry? What exists in the gaps?





CS: Ha, I wish I had an answer to that first one. But for the second: everything exists in the gaps! The silence of poetry, the information withheld, that’s where poems sing for me. I’m often encouraging students to stop telling me how I’m supposed to understand an image and let me just sit with it. I think that’s another reason I hesitate to call this nonfiction or essay or memoir. I am most comfortable calling this poetry not only because of the fictions and half-truths, but also because of the way in which I still leave lots of gaps. I don’t tell complete stories here because of gaps in memory or because some things are just for me. There are certainly stories earlier readers asked for me to further expand upon, but that wasn’t the point of what I was doing. I wanted to accrue image and notes and abandon my readers without apology. 





It makes me think of Hannah Gamble’s “The Stories I Tell Do Not Have Endings.” It’s a poem she published in her collection Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast; an earlier version also appeared in the journal Ecotone. I often show student both versions, and they are like “wait; what’s happening in this poem? It jumps all over the place.” And then I remind them of the title—how it told us initially what to expect, how we wouldn’t be getting answers or complete narratives. This, for me, makes the best poetry. There are these chasms or these series of thread from which, hopefully, readers are able to make meaning. And in attempting to make meaning as a reader, we’re bringing ourselves and our understandings and our experiences. So, I guess what exists in the gaps is space for the reader and the self to unfurl in the world I’ve built. And maybe that’s where we are all our most true—in the things we still can’t render into language for which we need collective silence.

	


	





	

		
When Your Father Is a Man of God, But Also an Adulterer
			

				Posted on  by Jo Lou			

			


	
		

		
	

		

Caroline Nolan is frantically finishing preparations for her sister Abigail’s bridal shower at their family ranch house, when she finds a gold-packaged condom underneath her grandmother’s old bed.





For many families, this might be a slight embarrassment or fodder for jokes, but Caroline is the daughter of Luke Nolan: pastor of the third largest Evangelical Christian church in Texas, renowned in Evangelical circles across the country for his “Hope for More” abstinence campaign. 





Caroline simply slips the condom into her pocket. A few hours later, she will use it herself. 





Both Caroline and Abigail are about to leave the nest, though their plans have varying degrees of approval from the church. Caroline will attend a state college in the fall (not the expected Bible school) and 24-year-old Abigail is getting married (to a boy who’s perfectly nice but Caroline isn’t convinced Abigail really loves). The day of Abigail’s bridal shower, a scandal breaks: their father has had an affair. As further deception comes to light and upends their community, the distant sisters unite to find their way forward. 










As a woman who came of age in an Evangelical church, I felt like Kelsey McKinney wrote God Spare the Girls just for me. There isn’t much fiction that portrays Evangelical communities, despite it feeling like only fiction could capture the complicated nature of Evangelicalism, the emotional cost of maintaining the perfect public image coupled with the supportive community of the church, the reductive teachings alongside beliefs about grace and forgiveness. McKinney—raised Evangelical in Texas—renders these complexities beautifully in her debut novel. 





Via the magic of Google docs, McKinney and I chatted about purity culture and women’s selfhood, power dynamics within Evangelicalism, and the pain of questioning everything you’ve ever known.










Melanie Pierce: What motivated you to write about this world? Did you see a gap in fiction and set out to fill it, or did the setting of an Evangelical Texas community lend itself well to the themes you wanted to explore?








Kelsey McKinney: The story I wanted to tell—one about faith and power and what it is like to question everything you’ve ever known—fit best in the Evangelical Texas culture. I wanted it to feel like a real place and a real family and a real problem, and so I dug into Evangelical Christianity and specifically white Texas Evangelical Christianity. 





I didn’t realize that there weren’t many other stories like this. But of course, I knew it in my soul, right? I knew that the culture I grew up in wasn’t common in fiction because I grew up reading everything I could get my hands on. Once I became aware of that, it became even more important to me to get it right. I wasn’t writing for people who don’t know about the church. I was writing for people who grew up Evangelical. I wanted to get it right for them, for us. 





I’ve spent many, many years in therapy and I’ve come to realize that when I was reading (especially as a young teen) I was subconsciously looking for other ways to live. I didn’t see a life I wanted anywhere around me. I didn’t see any women I wanted to grow up to be like. And in books I did. I found people, if not with my same problem, with solutions I might copy. 





MP: Abigail and Caroline Nolan grapple with the complexity of Evangelicalism: they uncover layer upon layer of institutional manipulation going on within the Hope Church and the claustrophobia of living within this rigid belief system (especially for women), while also valuing the community and the sense of purpose the church can offer, too. Did writing this book affect how you think about Evangelicalism—both in terms of the religious institution and as a personal faith? 





KM: Yes, absolutely. When I started working on this book, I set several google alerts for terms like “pastor sex” and read absolutely everything I could find. I talked to people who have been whistleblowers in their own churches. I’m a reporter by trade, and I couldn’t help myself. I think I grew up—as is the nature of being the daughter of a youth pastor— a little more disillusioned with the church as a structure than many, but that reporting forced me to think hard about structures and power dynamics I had always accepted as “good.” 





When I lost my faith, I had a really hard time. Sloughing off an entire culture is painful and realizing the ways in which that culture hurt you and treated you poorly is also painful. I started working on the book after I was well into processing that hurt, and I think it was really good for me. Fiction allowed me to hold up a lot of things to the light and say, you know what, this was bad, but I think it also gave me the space to acknowledge that the church was this beautiful, supportive space for me for a long time. It’s hard to hold both of those truths in your hands: that the white Evangelical church can be hateful and harmful and ignorant, and that it can be supportive and caring. I hope I’ve done that in the book. I did really try. 





MP: Another way I think the book complicates Evangelicalism is by dramatizing one line of reasoning behind purity culture, particularly how Luke Nolan’s abstinence campaign encourages young people to “hope for more” than a series of meaningless relationships. This focus on self-respect versus shame almost sounds like a positive spin on purity culture, except…still no! What were you hoping to point to regarding purity culture? 





It’s hard to hold both of those truths: that the white Evangelical church can be hateful and harmful and ignorant, and that it can be supportive and caring.





KM: The first scenes I had of this book took place way earlier, during the early 2000s True Love Waits era. But even Evangelicals turn their nose up at that kind of rhetoric today, and as I worked on Caroline in particular, I wanted to make that conversation more nuanced. I wanted to focus on a purity culture that was aware of its status in the world and of external perception, but that hasn’t changed much more than the branding. 





People who didn’t grow up Evangelical and have read this book thought this part was a kind of absurdism. They don’t really realize how pervasive this kind of narrative is in Evangelical communities. And that has been a really enjoyable reaction to me, because that’s part of what I was trying to toy with: the idea that Luke Nolan is infinitely aware of how Christians believe they are being perceived and how he manipulates that awareness to gain power. It doesn’t matter, really, that the outside world couldn’t care less about his movement if everyone participating in it believes that the secular world hates them for it. 





MP: This is so interesting. Evangelicals are supposed to be in the world and not of it, and yet, the church still exists in exchange with the world. I like what you’re saying here, that the church both considers how it presents itself to the world and pits itself as being against the world, and how Luke Nolan’s character captures that.





KM: Something I thought so much about after I left the church is how Evangelicalism separates itself from “the world” and demands its believers do the same, but what that looks like is trends that are mainstream hit Evangelicalism ten years later. People were still wearing fedoras in megachurches in like 2019! It’s not a clean separation as much as it is a delay. Luke Nolan, because he is brilliant and because he’s manipulative, knows that and uses it to his advantage. 





MP: Shifting gears here, the novel’s epigraph is an excerpt from the story of Lot: 





“Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.” 
Genesis 19:8—NIV





The way Lot treats his wife and daughters becomes a breaking point in Caroline’s and Abigail’s questioning of their faith, and the epigraph feels foundational, so key to the thematic underpinnings of this story. Why did you select the epigraph? 





Both girls are looking at the whole world through [the lens of the patriarchal church], which value ‘submission’ and ‘meekness’ and ‘modesty’ over almost everything else.





KM: At the height of my faith, I could not parse the story of Lot’s wife and daughters. It’s such a small part of the Bible, but the imagery is immense and the consequences worse. I always knew that story would haunt this book, that it would be the driving wedge between Abigail and her father, and that it would be a parallel for the betrayals happening at The Hope: this ugly, confusing thing that no one wants to look too closely at because the repercussions could be infinite. 





MP: The last line of the novel slayed me. Which I think speaks to your intention to write this book for people who grew up Evangelical. You detail the story of Lot’s family and its emotional impact on Caroline and Abigail, so readers certainly don’t need to be familiar with the story to understand how it undermines the girls’ faith. For readers like me, though, who’ve grappled with the meaning of the story ourselves, the last line packs a punch. 





How Caroline and Abigail interact with the story of Lot’s family also dramatizes a complicated theme that you mentioned, both as a fundamental piece to the book you wanted to write and your personal experience: what it’s like to question everything you’ve ever known. This strikes me as a theme that speaks to a wider audience than Evangelicals, as it feels like every day we’re asked to question what we believe is true about the world. 





KM: Right, so I’m glad you picked up on this because to me, that is the heart of the book. That question of “what is it like to question you’ve ever known?” is universal. I think that can happen because someone you loved turns out to be bad, or because you need to question the faith you believe in, or because something you thought would make you feel a certain way didn’t. I hope it will be a bridge. I hope that there are pieces of this book (like that question) that will resonate for other people. For Caroline Nolan, that question is one she avoids for a long time. Part of its purpose as a narrative device, though, is to show that even in their moments of greatest questioning, the only way they know how to consider what to do is to turn toward God. They don’t have other ways to process. It’s painful to realize you don’t believe something and also to not know how to not believe it. 





MP: In Abigail and Caroline’s world, rebellion can take many forms. Caroline appears to be the “rebellious” sister, but Abigail defies her father’s teachings too, albeit in quieter, subtler ways, like getting a tattoo. Perhaps the particulars of their rebellions are specific to Evangelicalism, but claiming agency over one’s body and ambition is a struggle common to many young women. Could you talk about using the lens of a patriarchal church to examine female selfhood?





KM: So it’s interesting you use the word “lens” here. As a book, I don’t think God Spare The Girls is told through that lens. I think it’s more focused on these girls without the kind of judgement of that culture. Or at least, I hope it is. But both girls are looking at the whole world through those lenses, which value “submission” and “meekness” and “modesty” over almost everything else. Their rebellions are small, right? If at a party in college Caroline confessed these “sins” to anyone not raised in this culture, they would probably roll their eyes. But that’s part of the point. These girls have to fight so hard against this culture to make space for themselves within it. Inside, these girls know they are constrained and they push against that. The lenses are the constraints. 





MP: Right, I appreciate the way you clarify the lens of your book, and from my perspective, the book does exactly what you describe. I feel like even outside Evangelical circles, selflessness, submission, and meekness are expectations society puts on women. “She doesn’t spend enough time with her family/kids, she wears the pants in her relationship, she’s too loud”––these are mainstream criticisms of women that stem from a similar root. But these expectations for women are amplified in Evangelical circles, by nature of them being Biblical teachings. 





Women are the ones who pass on faith to their children, organizing bake sales and planning Bible studies. They have this kind of soft power that no one recognizes.





KM: Yes, of course. These standards for women aren’t specific to Evangelicals, but there are higher stakes in an Evangelical church. In “society,” your failure to comply is what? A menace? An annoyance? It might ostracize you. But in a faith group, your rebellion is a reason to stage an intervention. At its height, your rebellion may even be taken as a sign that you never believed in the first place. It’s your standing in the community that’s at stake, but (depending on your theology) it might also be your eternal life. Those kinds of stakes are so hard to rebel against. It’s a little off-topic, but that’s why I really admire the work that artists like Semler and Lil Nas X are doing right now in music. They’re asking questions about why those stakes are so high and who benefits from there being such dire consequences? Their art is trying to push back from that damnation to ask who gets to decide whether or not you’re damned. Because in a lot of Evangelical churches in this country, it doesn’t feel like God is making that choice––it’s being made by the people who uphold these standards. The Luke Nolans of the world, it often feels like, get to decide how you feel about yourself and your standing with your god. That’s a lot of power they’re hoarding!





MP: Okay, I want to talk more about the idea of “women’s spaces.” The book opens with Abigail’s bridal shower, where her fiance, Matthew, makes an appearance. Before he’s allowed entry into the shower (with all women attendees), he’s instructed what to say, how to act, even which flowers to present his bride-to-be. The scene depicts the pressure placed on Luke’s family to project the perfect public image, but it’s also a scene of Caroline (with Abigail pulling the strings) asserting herself over a man—someone who holds power over her in Evangelical culture. 





This got me thinking about the spaces Evangelical women often carve out in their churches: bridal and baby showers, ladies’ Bible studies, etc. The nature of those spaces still reveal the limitations placed on Evangelical women, but women are protective of them––if men are granted entry, as Matthew is, they must do what the women say! It’s sort of a permitted exertion of power over men. I’m wondering what inspired you to write Mathew into the bridal shower scene?





KM: Oh, this is so interesting because I didn’t even think about it this way, but that’s absolutely true. I inserted Matthew into the bridal shower scene because I wanted to show how clueless he is, how little he has to think about any of this shit that Abigail and Caroline have spent their whole lives worrying about. Most of the men in this book are meant to be these loveable dummies who exist in their world without thinking about it. Much of that is based on what I saw with my own eyes in the church. Faith is—statistically and culturally!—something women care more about. They are the ones who protect it, who pass it on to their children, who organize the bake sales and plan these Bible studies. They have this kind of soft power that no one recognizes. 





A great example of this is Beth Moore—she is a fucking titan of Biblical teaching. As a reader, she’s one of the smartest literary analysts I’ve ever encountered. But what’s fascinating is only recently did Beth Moore break from the formal belief of Complementarianism, which is this idea that women and men have separate but equal purposes. She came out and said you know what, I was wrong on that. I really admire that ability to stand in your own failure, but it’s also stunning because Beth Moore has been PREACHING for years! She was already pushing that standard. But she did it within the guidelines of her faith, right? Men don’t watch Beth Moore videos. I don’t know what they watch. She was only teaching women so it was an exertion of power that was permissible. Like Abigail, she found places where she could do what she wanted to do.