What We Can—and Can’t—Learn About Louisa May Alcott from Her Teenage Fiction

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Each “Unfinished Business” will examine an unfinished work left behind by one of our greatest authors. What might have been genius, and what might have been better left locked in the drawer? How and why do we read these final words from our favorite writers — and what would they have to say about it? We’ll piece together the rumors and fragments and notes to find the real story.

Last summer, an unfinished and previously unknown work by American writer Louisa May Alcott was published in The Strand Magazine, a small literary quarterly based in Birmingham, Michigan. 

“Aunt Nellie’s Diary” is not a lost tale about the March sisters, Alcott’s best-known creations. In fact, the unfinished story published in The Strand dates from the very beginning of Alcott’s career, before Little Women or any of its sequels. Discovered in Harvard University’s Houghton Library, “Aunt Nellie’s Diary” was handwritten by Alcott in an 1848 journal, when she was just 17 years old. The story comes in at 9400 words, which is quite long compared to the stories published in the magazines Alcott admired like Godey’s Lady’s Book. (Among the poetry, gossip, advice columns, and essays on fashion, one issue I examined contained several short stories, all well under 7000 words). 

But “Aunt Nellie’s Diary” is still an incomplete fragment, not because the ending was lost or damaged, but because Alcott never finished it. She just stopped writing partway through a sentence: “I begged and prayed she would…” 

Did she get stuck? Bored? Distracted? We have no way to know.

What we do know is that at 17, Alcott was already an ambitious writer. According to biographer Katharine Anthony, at this point Louisa “could write melodramatic fiction with extreme fluency and prolificness.” She’d grown up writing plays with her siblings, which were often performed at family events. By the end of the following year, she’d finish her first novel, The Inheritance—though her first publication, in 1852 would come with a poem called “Sunlight” (under pseudonym “Flora Fairfield”) in Peterson’s Magazine, for which Alcott was paid $5. 

Arguably, these early pieces can shine a light on crucial moments in a writer’s development.

Scholars would class “Aunt Nellie’s Diary” as a piece of “juvenilia,” meaning that it comes from a writer’s youthful period, before finding publication or achieving wider recognition. Arguably, these early pieces can shine a light on crucial moments in a writer’s development, showing their interest in certain themes and highlighting supposed talents as well as deficits not yet overcome.

In The Strand’s introduction to the story, Dr. Daniel Shealy, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, claims that “Aunt Nellie’s Diary” has this kind of appeal, showing readers “an emerging talent on the cusp of a promising career.” 

Alcott’s diaries show that she modeled her early work on the stories that dominated popular magazines at the time. She hoped that commercial success would allow her to make an independent living as a writer. So she closely studied the wildly beloved Sketches of Everyday Life written by Fredrika Bremer. Bremer published stories of independent women travelling through Europe and the Americas, and describing the tangled marriage plots of others. Though called “sketches,” these were not insubstantial works at all—Bremer, sometimes called the “Swedish Jane Austen,” is regarded as an early activist for gender equality and radical for her view that fiction should center less on male characters. Alcott thought her stories were important, and in a memorable scene in Little Women, Alcott depicts Mrs. March reading Bremer’s book to her four daughters. 

Critics categorize stories like Bremer’s as “sentimental” works, employing high emotions and feelings to manipulate a reader’s sympathy disproportionately. The term “sentimental fiction” originated with a class of respected 18th century novels, like Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, but by Alcott’s time it was becoming synonymous with terms like “women’s fiction” and “domestic fiction,” and viewed as frivolous entertainment. One of Alcott’s biographers, Harrier Reisen, described these sentimental stories as the “chick lit of the day.”

In any case, the 17-year-old Louisa Alcott enjoyed these stories, and wanted to write some of her own, like “Aunt Nellie’s Diary.” But she also submitted her sentimental works to publishers under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, suggesting she may not have wanted her own name associated with them. In her diaries Alcott confessed she secretly preferred more “lurid things” like the Twice-Told Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, as long as they were “true and strong also.” 

Her attraction to realistic fiction clashed with the uplifting sentimentality and melodrama she was writing.

Louisa knew Hawthorne as an associate of her father, Bronson Alcott, who had also worked closely with Thoreau and Emerson in Concord. Hawthorne’s stories depicted a turn towards darker allegories like “The Minister’s Black Veil” and the complex psychological realism of stories like “Wakefield.” But for Alcott, her attraction to realistic fiction clashed with the uplifting sentimentality and melodrama she was writing. 

Shealy argues that “Aunt Nellie’s Diary” reflects Alcott’s struggle between these two diverging literary paths, and that her abandonment of the story could be a sign that, at 17, she was not yet able to reconcile these strands as she eventually would, to great success, in later stories like “The Masked Marriage” and “The Lady and the Woman,” and then in her masterpiece, Little Women.

As the title suggests, “Aunt Nellie’s Diary” is written in the form of the actual diary of “Aunt” Nellie, beginning on her 40th birthday. (Unmarried and seemingly quite content, Nellie is a classic Bremeresque narrator.) The day is marked by the arrival of Nellie’s 18-year-old orphan niece Annie, and Annie’s friend Isabel Loving. Annie is “gentle,” “simple, loving, and sunny-haired,” and “full of quiet happiness,” even as a “solitary childhood and lonely life have thrown a shade of sadness over her.” But by a few days into the visit, Aunt Nellie seems to have had enough of the “beautiful” and “dark-haired” friend, Isabel: “How often are we deceived by a bright exterior, little dreaming of the darkness within. Isabel is not what I thought her. I fear under a fine gay manner of a light laughing face she conceals a cold, unfeeling heart, bent only on the accomplishment of her wishes. There is something not quite true about her,” she thinks. Nellie believes that it is Annie’s harder upbringing that has left her with “frank simplicity” while Isabel has been spoiled by a “selfish worldly” father who, in raising Isabel, “allowed her will in everything.” 

The plot revolves around the girls’ shared interest in Edward Clifford, a sickly young man who has also lost his mother, and who blends a “gentle heart” with the “calm and noble mind of his father.” Once a “pale, slender boy” weeping at his mother’s deathbed, Edward is now a “tall noble-looking young man” with a “low musical voice.” Understandably, Aunt Nellie and Annie and Isabel are more than happy to nurse him back to health. 

Then come a few pages of horseback riding and society parties; Edward reads aloud from a “Life of Napoleon” and does a sketch of Isabel. Annie refuses to get jealous, which annoys Isabel. There’s a fancy ball where Isabel wears a black Night costume covered in silver stars and moons, and Annie, naturally, wears all white with a “rose-coloured veil” and a wreath of “dewy half blown buds” so as to be Morning. 

You get the idea.

Here, the descriptive writing is already lush and impressive, but the symbolism is a little on-the-nose.

It’s far from the quality of Alcott’s later works. Still, lovers of Little Women will find resonance with the sisterly tug-of-war between Jo and Amy over Laurie—though with far less shading and complexity. Here, the descriptive writing is already lush and impressive, but the symbolism is a little on-the-nose, the characters more like caricatures, and the plot stalls for pages. Once Alcott gets the initial pieces in place she couldn’t decide what to do with them. 

Will the lovely (but much blander) Annie win over Edward? That would make for a suitable, sentimental story ending. But Alcott pulls repeatedly away from this conventional choice, in favor of spending more time with the more interesting (selfish, jealous, secretive) Isabel. In a Godey’s Lady’s Book story, Isabel should not triumph without being somehow morally redeemed. Over and over in the story, Alcott sets up moments that could push this to happen, then stops short.

Perhaps to try and resolve this (quite late in the story) Alcott adds a stately friend of Edward’s to the mix: a “Mr. Ainslie,” who arrives at the costume party dressed as “Saint Guy.” Seeing him makes Isabel turn “very pale” and hastily drop her veil. She claims she doesn’t know him, but rushes away. Nellie later witnesses Ainslie in the cloak room with Isabel, begging her to see him again, saying that he forgives her “for all that has passed” but that she should not “try” his love again. 

Annie later confesses to Nellie that when she and Isabel were at school together, her friend had been engaged to “high-born rich and handsome” Herbert Ainslie, but that she did not love him. Annie simply can’t understand how her friend “could be cold and careless when she had won so true and fond a heart.”

And possibly Alcott could not either, because a few lines later, she abandoned the story in mid-sentence: “Well not many days ago she told me she had written to Mr. Ainslie, breaking off the engagement, that she no longer loved him and would not be fettered by any bonds. I begged and prayed she would…”

Here, The Strand Magazine urges its readers to submit their own endings to the story, in a contest for a chance to have their final scenes published in some later issue. One challenge in doing this would be reconciling the many inconsistencies in the story: did Isabel only just call off this engagement? If so, why hasn’t Annie once brought this up during her competition with Isabel over Edward? 

Perhaps Alcott would have dealt with these issues in a second draft, in which she’d also have needed to trim a lot of wheel-spinning in the middle, to get the story to publishable length. But she never did.

Perhaps Alcott would have dealt with these issues in a second draft. But she never did.

Why did young Louisa never finish the story? Possibly she saw the sentimental ending coming, found it unsatisfying, and so preferred to just walk away. If she later would become a huge success for her ability to combine Hawthornian surprise and depth to romantic characters like the March sisters, at 17 she may simply have not quite been ready yet. 

Of course, it is also possible that Alcott didn’t abandon the story because she was stuck, or lacked interest, but simply because life was getting in the way. 

In 1848, Louisa’s father Bronson had spent his wife’s inheritance on an idyllic farmland in Concord he called “Hillside,” leaving nothing left to keep up with living expenses. The solution was to rent out the house and move everyone to a tiny basement apartment in Boston’s South End, where Bronson wanted to give a series of intellectual lectures called “Conversations on West Street” based on his transcendentalist work with Emerson and Thoreau.

Biographer Susan Cheever notes that Louisa was stretched thin in taking care of her siblings and their household while their mother was busy working. Due to the potato famine in Ireland, the city of Boston had recently become flooded with starving Irish immigrants—Louisa’s mother Abba Alcott was running a Mission project to care for them, even as the Alcotts themselves were falling into poverty. 

At one point everyone in the Alcott household got smallpox, supposedly passed from an Irish family that Abba had been feeding at their home. Louisa wrote a series of “Hospital Sketches” during this time, describing the grotesque scenes of illness and death that she witnessed while helping her mother in these charity efforts, and these are notably quite different in tone from “Aunt Nellie’s Diary.” But she had little time for writing at all in that year.

Louisa was running the household, on top of teaching: her mother brought Louisa to help run a series of reading classes for emancipated former slaves in their neighborhood. Both women were active in the abolitionist and feminist protest movements of the day. Meanwhile, the nation was lurching towards Civil War, and Bronson Alcott’s ambitions as a street philosopher weren’t exactly paying the bills. During this period her father was also “experiencing mental states and visions that suggest a frighteningly disturbed mind.” According to Cheever, “he began working on a series of arcane charts showing invisible forces. He refused to sleep or eat. He thought he was God.”

It was one of the darkest and most difficult chapters in Louisa’s life. It is almost amazing that none of this weight is reflected in stories like “Aunt Nellie’s Diary.” Instead, it seems that Alcott relied on her scant writing and reading time as an escape from all the uncertainty and horror around her. Remarkably, she’d later look back on this same time in life as her “sentimental period.” Even as her father was turning into a character in a Hawthorne story, Louisa was reading as much “Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and Charlotte Brontë” as she could get her hands on, and we can hope she found lots of “tenderness and compassion” in all the exploitation of “high emotions and feelings.”

Shortly after abandoning “Aunt Nellie’s Diary” Alcott began working on her first novel, The Inheritance, which Cheever describes as a “short romantic Cinderella story written in girlish, sentimental prose” that is “weirdly enlivened by desperate feelings of its author.” This novel revolves around an Annie-ish character: a young orphan named Edith Adelon, who works tirelessly for the wealthy Hamilton family, only to discover that she is actually the true heir to their fortune. When a will is finally discovered that proves she should get the inheritance, angelic Edith rips it up and says she doesn’t want the Hamilton family’s riches, but only their love. (But of course she does then marry a wealthy prince or something and so ends up wealthy anyway). 

Harriet Reisen noted that the novel was also a kind of escapism for the overworked, struggling, impoverished Alcott, and with pages “furnished with the fine things she coveted.”Reisen notes that “Louisa never attempted to publish The Inheritance. She had written it only for practice, and as an exercise it is impressive.”

The Inheritance was not published until 1997, when editors at Dutton announced it as a “lost novel” of Alcott’s and compared it to the work of Jane Austen. There was no introduction explaining to readers that it was written by Alcott at age 18, or in any way framing it as a work of juvenilia that lovers of Little Women might find less accomplished. 

There was no introduction explaining to readers that it was written by Alcott at age 18.

A review in Publisher’s Weekly called the novel “charming” but noted it does not rise to the “smart dialogue or lived-in characters” seen in Austen’s works. (Interestingly, they noted that biographers contend that The Inheritance is the novel that Jo March is meant to have written in Little Women.) In either case, PW remarked that it is an impressive accomplishment for Alcott at age 17, a reminder again that the book, which Alcott herself never tried to publish, should be read and judged not as a mature work but as “juvenilia.” 

Scholars will argue that juvenilia provides useful insight into the early training of great writers, and undoubtedly these works are of great importance to biographers. But by the same token there is something exploitative about unearthing these journeyman works and publishing them as if they are “lost” works by the master writers they’d someday become. These works weren’t misplaced somewhere, or held back by censors—they were never published because these writers didn’t want readers seeing their early fumblings, let alone comparing it to the work of their mature literary idols.

In a 2007 Guardian review of a newly published collection of Virginia Woolf’s early writings, Nick Tanner puts it this way: “Is there any point in reading juvenilia? Loosely defined as work created during a writer’s youth, the term encompasses everything from early jottings about pets to works of the status of Frankenstein. While the genre has always fascinated academics, however, a recent batch of publications has attempted to bring the writing of youthful authors to a wider readership. But are such works really a chance to watch a great artist finding his or her voice, or simply the literary equivalent of seeing a photo of your friend on a potty?”

In the case of Virginia Woolf, the publication was a collection of homemade family newspapers, some written when she was as young as 10, called Hyde Park Gate News. An introduction to the volume by biographer Hermione Lee, suggests that one can detect seeds of genius in the little news articles written with her siblings. 

These works weren’t misplaced somewhere, or held back by censors—they were never published because these writers didn’t want readers seeing their early fumblings.

Three volumes of Austen’s childhood notebooks were similarly mined for stories and poems written when she was as young as 11 or 12, and published as “Other Youthful Writings” alongside a novella, Love and Friendship, written when she was 15. A series of stories written by 18-year-old Charlotte Brontë under pseudonym “Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley” supposedly contain early models for characters later found in Jane Eyre. One can find new publications of stories written by Truman Capote at age 8, Ernest Hemingway at 10, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “secret boyhood diary”, poems written by Faulkner for The Mississippian at 16, etc. etc. 

These works are no doubt appealing to publishers because there aren’t many chances to sell “new” work by long-dead authors—never mind that this work from early in the lives of some of these early 20th century authors handily falls in the realm of public domain, and so can be printed freely, without need for royalties or obtaining permission from these writers’ estates. 

The Strand Magazine has, as part of its stated mission, published a slew of “previous unpublished” stories similar to “Aunt Nellie’s Diary” including “John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Joseph Heller, Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, and H.G. Wells.”

In some cases, these stories may have been better left resting in the university archives, for ardent scholars to find, without risking any public damage to the reputations of these authors. If a fan of Little Women were to pick up The Inheritance without knowing how young Alcott was when she wrote it (and that she never attempted to publish it), they might come away disappointed. On the other hand, there’s not likely to be much general interest in these kinds of works at all unless the writers’ reputations are widely secure. (Penguin Classics isn’t publishing volumes of the childhood work of just anybody.) 

Recently, I told my own students that I’d saved my first rejection letter, for an 80-page fantasy “novel” based on an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign, which I sent to publisher TSR when I was thirteen. I’m proud of getting the rejection, but I’d sooner set the floppy disks on fire than have anyone read it now.

I’m reminded of a former professor of mine who said it was once traditional for graduates of our writing program to break into the university library to steal back their graduate theses so that these fumblings wouldn’t be found if they someday became famous. It’s a romantic idea, of course, from back in the day when these theses were actually printed out and filed away in hardcopy. Today’s writers would probably need to hire skilled hackers if they wanted to wipe their own juvenilia from the digital archives—let alone what floats around inevitably forever on the internet (old emails, blogs, forum posts, etc., etc.). 

In some cases, these stories may have been better left resting in the university archives, for ardent scholars to find.

But I’m also reminded that, as a young fan of J.D. Salinger’s, I once crossed state lines (twice) to get my hands on some of his early unpublished works, knowing full well that the famous recluse never wanted anyone to see them.

Perhaps one of the best approaches to dealing with one’s early work is that of another reclusive writer, Thomas Pynchon. In 1984, he published a volume of stories called Slow Learner, containing several pieces written early in his career that he looked back on already as lesser work. 

In a lengthy introduction to the book, Pynchon dissected these stories, pointing out for each what parts he now saw as cringeworthy, and what parts he still admired. “My best hope is that, pretentious, goofy and ill-considered as they get now and then, these stories will still be of some use with all their flaws intact, as illustrative of typical problems in entry-level fiction, and cautionary about some practices which younger writers might prefer to avoid.”

For a writer who had by then already been living for twenty years out of the public eye, it is a touching and honest self-exposure—a comfort to young writers who admired him, to show that all that fumbling and awkwardness is a natural part of the process. 

Maybe the early and previously unpublished works mentioned here will have that same impact on young writers today. Maybe a reader of The Strand will find “Aunt Nellie’s Diary” compelling and be inspired to find an inventive ending—and maybe it will inspire other readers to go deeper into Alcott’s work and life. But we should still be mindful of the fact that, from the start and then all through her long career, Alcott herself was not interested in going back to the piece, just as she never sought for The Inheritance to be published. Whatever reasons she had for leaving these in the drawer should still be taken into account.

Can “The Topeka School” Explain What’s Wrong with Josh Hawley?

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

“America is adolescence without end,” Ben Lerner writes in The Topeka School. His witty, revelatory novel follows the Gordon Family—Adam, a high school debate star, and his parents—in 1997 Kansas. The book is dense with themes, but none more haunting than the question of toxic masculinity’s source. While Lerner offers no straightforward answer—nothing about this book is straightforward—the setting itself is a clue. Do high school debate tournaments provide hints for what will become of its champions?

The Topeka School stayed with me for months. In the weeks after reading, I relived every infuriating experience from my own high school debate league. The boy who explained that the distribution of semi-finalists was designed to ensure a girl must make it to finals, because without interference, she wouldn’t get there. The boy who suggested Hillary Clinton was too angry to be President, and then, when I countered, asserted I was too angry to be the victor. The judge who docked points from me because I was “too emotional” (I wasn’t even crying!). 

It’s a scary thing to imbue a young boy with confidence he hasn’t yet had the time to earn.

I knew Lerner’s characters. I’d debated them in high school and college. It’s a scary thing to imbue a young boy with confidence he hasn’t yet had the time to earn. As Lerner writes of Adam and his classmates, “they are told constantly…that they are individuals, rugged even, but in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although they’re not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys, Peter Pans, man-children.”

Several of Lerner’s boys turn alt-right years in the future, and I wondered if the same became of any of my former debate rivals. What happened to the diligent, smart 17-year-old boy who won the national championship arguing against punitive measures for the investment banks that perpetrated the 2008 financial crisis? And the one who equated affirmative action to fascism? Has he changed his mind, or had he already become his final form? Is he a lawyer, looking towards a future run for office, or did he leave politics behind? 20 years from now, when I’m watching their Supreme Court nominations, will they be Kavanaughs? 

By the end of October 2020, I’d Googled each and every one of my former debate competitors to determine which way they were voting. As I figured it, nothing about a Biden vote suggests someone has turned out okay, but a Trump vote screams something went wrong. I scrolled the profiles of the few rogue Trump supporters. I read their arguments. I reread their arguments. I screenshotted their arguments and sent them to dozens of group chats. “Can you believe this????” I’d write, as though it was shocking to know one of the 74 million Trump voters. But the thing is, it was. Encountering a Trump fan at some point is a statistical likelihood, but it’s eerie when it’s someone from your formative years—how could you see the world so differently when you had started in the same place? How did the girl who first explained to you the mechanics of a blow job end up defending the police? She used to be fun! It was even eerier to see this uncritical embrace of our fascist President from the people with whom I’d learned to think critically about politics. My old debate pals used skills I’d watched them develop as teenagers to defend our ignoble Commander-in-Chief. 

By 2021, I had become a curious observer, but I must admit that in high school, I was one of Lerner’s boys. I always thought I was right. I was (and am) a privileged white person who believed my opinion mattered more than it did. I once hid a competitors’ shoes to prevent him from getting to the round on time (in my defense, he shouldn’t have taken them off). Another school’s coach once yelled at me for openly talking shit about a competitor. His exact words were “we never root for someone else to lose.” (I was confused—in a world where only one can win, isn’t rooting for yourself the same as is rooting for everyone else to lose?) No one I knew in high school would have been surprised if I’d sought public office, although I consider it a great act of service that I have not. 

Still, my membership into their club—not so much a friend but rather a person worthy of being treated as a threat—depended more on my assimilation than anything else. It was still a boys’ club, with or without me, and toxic masculinity depends on the compliance of some women—white women in particular. Arrogance and an inability to admit error aren’t unique to men, but they are more common. Like the U.S. Senate, my debate league was mostly boys. I’d argue it’s not a stretch to attribute much of the toxicity to their nascent masculinity. 

I didn’t need to wait long to meet another of Lerner’s boys. On January 6th, 2021, violent protesters stormed the Capitol to protest the results of our election. Six Republican senators voted to overturn the results, and on that day, our nation minted a new villain—Missouri Senator Josh Hawley.

Josh Hawley is no ordinary Josh. Like Lerner’s characters, his familiarity shook me: his ability to talk around an issue, his champion high school debate record, his smug confidence. Look at his Wikipedia page—he’s literally sneering in the photo. It took no effort to picture him as a 17-year-old cross-examining me in the finals, lamenting my ill-preparedness, leering just the way he does on FOX News. 

Of course, debate is not the only high school activity that breeds overconfident youngsters, and Hawley is far from the only right-wing senator with a high school debate record. You can’t throw a stone in Washington without hitting an Ivy-League-educated right-wing senator who cut their teeth on high school debate, although I’d encourage you to try. Ted Cruz, a champion Princeton debater, has a similar background, but he simply didn’t strike the same spooky chord as Hawley. Perhaps it’s that Cruz is older, so he feels more distant. Hawley is disturbingly boyish, and the familiarity haunts me – his hairline cannot recede fast enough for him to become a stranger. Perhaps it’s that I was given more time to ease into Cruz’s villainy. With a personality like his, Hawley should have had the courtesy to offer us some warm-up time! Instead, he turned himself into a household name overnight by opposing Democracy in a country notoriously obsessed with Democracy. In the most toxically-masculine-high-school-debate move of all, he took an unwavering line on an unpopular position to turn the spotlight squarely on him. 

You can’t throw a stone in Washington without hitting an Ivy-League-educated right-wing senator who cut their teeth on high school debate, although I’d encourage you to try.

Teenage debaters do this tactically. In the climax of The Topeka School, Adam competes against a team from Austin. His opponent employs a tool not common to their category: the spread, in which you speak at a pace of several hundred words per minute so the other team cannot possibly refute every argument. Some judges love the spread, others hate it, but either way, it’s a strategy that allows the debater to center himself (or herself – but probably himself). The gamble pays off: Adam is caught off guard, and the spreaders win. Hawley essentially did the same—he intentionally confused us to garner attention very quickly. He took a shocking viewpoint to force the conversation further to his side, when in truth, his position was so unreasonable we should never have needed to address it. Whether or not he’s won remains to be seen.

Hawley may well have learned his behavior as a Missouri debate star in the 1990s, one state over from Adam. Early in The Topeka School, Lerner describes a debate round in which Adam scores an easy victory: “Adam had no idea if what he was saying was true…The key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious.” Debate is less about figuring out what you think is right than it is about proving someone else wrong. It doesn’t teach values—there is no discussion of what’s actually good or bad, only that such a dichotomy exists at all.

High school debaters take fixed positions on issues they can’t possibly fully comprehend, whose outcomes they’ll never see. The judge—likely a parent who doesn’t have the answers either—has a matter of minutes to decide who’s right. Aggression wins. Volume wins. Confidence wins. Being right doesn’t win—if a high schooler knew how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we’d surely live in a very different world.

Of course, kids should grapple with our social issues. They’re our only hope. But we don’t have to teach them the other side is always wrong, and that truth is determined by persuasive elocution. We can teach them to hold opposing viewpoints in their head at once. We can teach them to be kind. We can teach them that they don’t yet have all the answers. It’s terrifying that we teach kids how to argue before we teach them how to empathize. 

In debate’s defense, it teaches students to follow the rules—at least, as long as the power resides with the judge. In the most iconic image from the January insurrection, Hawley holds his fist in the air, saluting his supporters. This photo is an undeniable salute to white supremacists. But I saw something else, too. In debate, a fist in the air means “stop”—you’re out of time, and you’ll be disqualified if you continue. Hawley was, by all accounts, a successful debater. He stopped when he saw the fist. Now, he was using the fist to egg people on. What if the debate fist was the last rule he ever followed? In debate, if you don’t follow the rules, you lose. In politics, you can break all the rules (“laws”), and still be elected President of the United States. Hawley would listen to a debate judge who could bar him from the final round, but not the will of 81 million Americans. 

It’s terrifying that we teach kids how to argue before we teach them how to empathize.

If a fist in the air reminds me of debate, a stop sign means something else to me, too. My freshman year of college, I was sexually assaulted by a boy on the Stanford Debate team. I said no, and he went forward. He was also a skilled debater; he respected the fist of a judge. When the judge had authority, his stop sign mattered. But mine did not. Boys who want to win know what rules they must follow. Those with power must be obeyed. Those without it can be ignored. 

I may have just made the January 2021 insurrection about me (that’s sort of my thing), but I do think the fist is important. Wasn’t Hawley’s fist in the air a stop sign of his own? Stop counting votes. Stop respecting democracy. When did he stop obeying the signs of authority figures, and instead start issuing his own? Was it when he became a Senator, or the Missouri Attorney General, or was it long before that?

Not all former debaters turn into Josh Hawley, of course, and not all become sexual predators. Nor are white supremacy and sexual assault the only two ways to be bad, but they are significant both in their severity and in their frequency (case in point: Trump became President). Maybe there’s hope, though. Maybe we can find these boys at their forks in the road and prod them in the right direction, or at the very least, away from power. As Lerner writes of Adam’s young, right-wing debate coach, “one moment, Evanson struck him as a precocious young man, destined for the corridors of power—a conservative judge, a senator, the president of the NRA—and at other times Evanson seemed fated to drive sleeping debaters, sleeping drivelers, home from Junction City.” Perhaps this is the crux of it, the turning point. Go one way, and you might be okay. Turn the other, and you’re Josh Hawley.

The Topeka School doesn’t tell us, though, how its characters choose which way to go. The liberal Adam isn’t seduced by bad politics, but continues to treat other people poorly; the violent, future-MAGA fan Darren is dealing with cognitive challenges that complicate his behavior; the right-wing Evanson shows up after college, with only brief hints of his past. Without answers from Lerner on how his boys turned into his men, we must look elsewhere. 

Hawley’s mentor, John Danforth, described supporting Josh Hawley as the “worst decision he ever made in his life.” Did Danforth really not know? Were there no clues? A former college classmate said of Hawley, “Most freshmen are on a journey to discover who they are and what strengths they have to offer the world, but Josh seemed to have already completed that process by the time he arrived at Stanford.” And that’s just the danger. In Hawley’s 2021 world, Donald Trump was President, and he was unwilling to consider another option. Was college too late? His signature on a friend’s eighth-grade yearbook chillingly reads “Josh Hawley, President 2024.” A 13-year-old wanting to be President isn’t terrible—a 13-year-old who has already become Josh Hawley is. 2024 is soon, but don’t rush it, Josh—you have the next 40 years to destroy us.

One genre of post-insurrection-Hawley-tweet that annoyed me most was the joke that he’s proof “idiots” can go to the top-tier universities, too. I’m not offended by the sentiment—I’m intimately aware that top universities are populated by people with a wide range of intellectual capacities. Rather, it’s the idea that Hawley is an “idiot” for having heinous political views. The word “idiot” is a dismissal (and one with an ableist history). “Idiots” aren’t scary. “Idiots” aren’t a threat. Hawley did not think Trump was the legal victor; he was making a bet on January 6th. And we should all be very afraid of whatever he’s betting on. Taking the wrong side and doubling down may have been impressive when he did it in high school, but now, it’s simply terrifying.

They know their power is fragile. They know they’re no better than anyone else, and they know we know.

I hope the past four years have made us keener to identify toxic masculinity early. Lerner agrees, writing, “If we’ve learned anything, it’s how dangerous that fragile masculinity can be.” The fragility is what makes it so toxic. That’s why the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville chanted, “Jews will not replace us,” why Republicans fight against affirmative action, why men fear the #MeToo movement. They know their power is fragile. They know they’re no better than anyone else, and they know we know.

The Topeka School points towards the roots of toxic masculinity, but it doesn’t offer all the answers. Josh Hawley is one version of what Lerner’s boys could grow up to be, but there are others. Lerner uses a high school debater to show us that language is no longer used for communication—it’s used as a weapon. If we’re going to give it to children, we must teach them to wield them responsibly, teach them to think through their positions before attempting to win with them. If we don’t, we may be looking at a whole lot more Josh Hawleys.

A Black Love Story Unfolds in Southeast London

Posted on by Jo Lou

Open Water is part of a new wave of Black British literature, telling authentic stories that connect to people who have felt unheard and unseen. Debut novelist Caleb Azumah Nelson, a 25-year-old South Londoner, manages to voice the inner thoughts so many Black people have felt with nuance and care, without homogenizing our experiences. 

The backbone of Open Water is a delicate love story burgeoning in South East London. A photographer meets a dancer while working together on a project to document Black life in London, their connection is electric, intense, and complicated. But at its core, the novel takes an unflinching look at the complexities and nuances of being Black in Britain—from racial profiling, the pressures of masculinity, and the multifacetedness of Black love, art, and community.

Niellah Arboine: How did the story came about and why now?

Caleb Azumah Nelson: I think it’s weird because the story feels like it’s taken on a different sort of dynamic and different meaning on this side of the pandemic.

While so much of the book is fictional, it really felt like a confrontation with myself and with my feelings and experiences that I had had.

NA: Did you ever feel pressure to accurately represent the Black British millennial experience?

CAN: The experience I was so insistent on getting right was the Southeast London experience. And there’s a really specific texture to Southeast London. And also how the community comes together and interacts. I really wanted to portray that specifically. 

NA: At the root of Open Water, it’s a story about forbidden love or love under unexpected circumstances which I think is quite a classic, universal theme. What was the inspiration behind it, and what are some of your favorite love stories? 

CAN: I really wanted to explore love in its various ways and forms, like Moonlight and Beale Street—those have just been massive influences in my life. Maybe not so much thinking about forbidden love, but the ways that we love and the ways that we share each other in various circumstances. So much of our day-to-day expressions are expressions of love in various forms: self-love or, expressing love for your family, for your friends, or romantic partners.

NA: Why did you show a multifaceted look at Black love? Which parts of Open Water do you think this shines through the most?

CAN: I wrote the novel, wondering whether love could be a site of freedom. That was my guiding force. The moments where the main characters are spending time together, choosing to spend time together (which I think takes a certain kind of trust), allowed me to really think about the ways in which we love each other and the ways in which this love is expressed. 

NA: What role does music and art play in Open Water? 

I’m interested in how Black people want to be seen.

CAN: Art, especially music, was so central to the lives of the characters. They served as a place where they could honestly express themselves, but could also use art to map their emotions when they didn’t have the words. There was also a sense of community and intimacy which was fostered when the characters were engaging in art together, or with others. I think sharing that experience of seeing and hearing art, and really feeling it, is a powerful thing. 

NA: Open Water shows a really balanced look at identity, you managed to go from trauma and Black masculinity and the police to what freedom looks like for Black people and art and expression. How did you manage the mix like the personal with the political? 

CAN: I think it emerges from my work as a photographer, 99% of my work is portraiture. I’m just really interested in what space I can afford for Black people when I’m seeing them, and how Black people want to be seen. And trying to afford people this fullness and wholeness that isn’t really afforded to us generally in our day-to-day life. 

It was important that this is what the width and the breadth of the Black life can look like. There’s trauma and there is state-led violence that is consistently going against us, but there’s also this real love, and there’s also this real hope, that permeates our days.

NA: Why is community such an important theme within Open Water?

There’s trauma and state-led violence that is consistently going against us, but there’s also this real love and hope that permeates our days.

CAN: There’s a knowledge, when you’re a Black person, of your proximity to death, be it physical, psychological, emotional. You know that at any moment or any day, you could be faced with a situation that brings you face to face with such death. But I think Black people forge communities with each other, with this knowledge, but also with the view of continuing to hope. To create small worlds with each other which reflect the world as we want it to be. Otherwise, the only thing we end up doing is waiting for our demise, and that’s not a life.

NA: With your US debut out now, how do you think Black Americans might receive Open Water? 

CAN: It’s weird, I didn’t anticipate it getting the sort of attention. I woke up this morning and someone had written a review for The New York Times. It feels like, despite the fact that it’s such a specific sort of experience, that there are connections and parallels being made—and something that I’m really grateful for is that there’s not this like homogenization of Black experiences. 

7 Books About Teen Friendships From the 1970s to the 2000s

Posted on by Jo Lou

One of the reasons I’m fascinated by teenage friendships is because my own experience during those years of my life was so confusing. My family moved to Florida from New York when I was 9 and I found it very difficult to make friends at my new school. My homeroom teacher thought it would be funny to seat me next to the other Brittany in class, and the rest is history. Well, actually the rest of the story is that as the years went on, more and more Brittanys came to our school, and eventually there were five. We had to call each other by our last names so lunchtime and hallway banter wasn’t a complete shit show, and the fact that we all remained friends throughout middle school and most of high school became quite the novelty.

The Brittanys by Brittany Ackerman

We were known in school as “The Brittanys,” but the truth is, our name alone couldn’t keep us all as close as perhaps I’d wanted it to. We grew up and eventually the five Brittanys went our separate ways. I wrote my debut novel, The Brittanys, in an attempt to re-write the past, to imagine a world where these friendships were the epicenter of my own existence, where the girls who were all named Brittany were everything—were it—when in reality we were all just girls blessed with the same namesake. In writing, I’m able to deepen these years on the page and create plot and meaning and also a whole lot of questioning. How does the fragility of youth affect our future selves? How can one friend (or five) influence us as we grow up? Do girls need each other to survive?  

Here are 7 books about teen friendships from the 1970s to 2000s:

1970s Zanesville, Illinois

In Zanesville

In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard

The 14-year-old narrator of In Zanesville is best friends with Felicia, aka Flea. These two girls, who are members of the marching band, are invited to the popular girl’s sleepover by some sweet strike of luck. 

“I look at Felicia, who looks back at me, coolly, chewing. I point to my chin, and her eyes bug out in alarm. She takes her napkin and saws away at her own chin, eyes grateful. I give her a slight nod—Yes, you got it—and then glance questioningly at the pop on the counter. She discreetly mimes opening a bottle and then looks back to her plate.” 

These are friends who read each other’s minds, who can understand a glance from across the room, who are always aiming to help each other fit in, or at the very least not stand out. The book encapsulates a year in the life of these two girls as they grow apart, fall back together, and try not to burn down the house. 

1970s Upstate New York

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Berie is 15 when she meets Sils at her job in Storyland in upstate New York where Berie sells tickets and Sils gets to play Cinderella. It’s the kind of friendship where doing nothing becomes everything, listening to records, hitching rides to concerts, snacking on whatever you can find in the fridge, sharing clothes, sharing lives. Berie is envious when Sils gets a boyfriend, Mike, and contemplates her own womanhood and existence:

“I only wanted my body to bloom and bleed and be loved.  I was raw with want, but in part it was a simple want, one made for easy satisfaction, quick drama, deep life: I wanted to go places and do things with Sils.” 

Their easy-going, almost dream-like friendship is challenged when Sils needs Berie’s help and the tables are turned. Lorrie Moore’s writing is masterful amidst the backdrop of Storyland, where fairytale characters smoke cigarettes in costume on their break. One summer changes everything for Berie, who ultimately, like the rest of us, just wants to find where she fits in, how she can blossom, and when she’ll be loved.  

1980s London

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

The narrator of Zadie Smith’s brilliant Swing Time meets Tracey at a ballet class. The plot of these two girls’ lives unfolds in a friendship that spans years and cities, all with the humble beginning of that one dance class where, lined up next to each other, the girls were like “two iron filings drawn to a magnet.” The book is a revelation of how friendship can be the mirror from which we learn our own identity and that it is in others that we can find ourselves.

“I saw all my years at once, but they were not piled up on each other, experience after experience, building into something of substance — the opposite. A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.” 

This treasure of a novel argues that who we are is defined by our interpersonal exchanges—our jealousies, our admirations, our mistakes, our rivalries, our struggles—ultimately, our complicated love.

1980s Florida

The Blurry Years by Eleanor Kriseman

Callie, the narrator of The Blurry Years, is a young girl coming of age on the chaotic Florida coast. Her experiences in girlhood take her to all the darkest places and the book is an immaculate story of why we sometimes need to leave places in order to grow. Throughout the novel, Callie meditates on gender and identity:

“Like there were formulas to being a woman, and you just needed to be reminded every so often of the right ways to act, the right things to say, the right clothes to wear.”

Callie is drawn to Jazz, a neighbor, who she befriends about halfway through the novel. Jazz is everything Callie is not in her bikini top and cutoffs. She has her period, she is an expert at eyeliner and makeup, and she is an oasis for Callie who is seeking escape from her tumultuous relationship with her mom. But ultimately Callie must decide if she’s ready to plunge into the deep end of womanhood and give up her innocence, even with a bestie at her side as bold and daring as Jazz.

1980s Tennessee

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson

“And this was what I finally realized, that even as we sank deeper and deeper into our lives, we were always separate.  And I wondered what it would feel like, to fall but to hold on to someone else so you weren’t alone.” 

The narrator of Kevin Wilson’s perfect novel, Nothing to See Here, Lillian, took the fall for her roommate and best friend, Madison, back in their prestigious boarding school days. Lillian had ended up at the school for her intelligence, had truly earned her spot with her smarts and wit, while Madison came from money and privilege like the rest of the students. The two meet again as adults in 1995 when Madison once more needs Lillian’s help. Lillian is now 28, but her undying love and affection for Madison proves the key to the door of her future, one that involves two step-kids who spontaneously combust; all of it a metaphor for the fragility of our harbored resentment, how we fall short as human beings, and how we tenderly love each other in an attempt to fix and repair the world.

1990s Long Island, New York

Justine by Forsyth Harmon

Forsyth Harmon’s illustrated novel, Justine, takes place in the summer of 1999 in Long Island. This story holds space for the ways teenage girls desire, the ways they worship, the ways they get themselves into trouble. Ali befriends Justine at the local Stop & Shop and is immediately entranced by her thinness, her coolness. Justine takes Ali under her wing as they spend days sunbathing, obsessing over the latest trends in makeup and fashion, and Justine slowly but surely becomes Ali’s idol. The intensity of Ali’s first crush drives her to reshape her every waking moment towards perfection, towards Justine: “Justine was the light shining on me and the dark shadow it cast, and I wanted to stand there forever in the relief of that contrast.” 

This book made me look back on all my past crushes, the ones that did exactly what the word implies—“crushed” me and flattened me in a way that made me reconsider my whole existence. Although the title places emphasis on Justine, the true character study for me was with Ali and her coming-of-age story of sexuality, longing, and the ubiquitous spring of youth.

2000s Florida

“BFF” from Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard

First of all, I would happily read Sarah Gerard’s grocery list if she chose to publish it. Sunshine State is a marvel of Florida, women, religion, pyramid schemes, sex, and humanity taking place in the late ’90s and early aughts. “BFF,” the first essay in the collection, dives into the narrative of a long-lost friendship that is so true to the enigma of the relationships of our youth. The back and forth dynamic between the two girls leaves the reader to fill in the gaps. 

I’ve shown countless creative writing classes this essay and had students imitate its form, its beauty in the simplicity of sections like “Lies I know you told me, Lies I heard you tell yourself, Lies I told you” and “You were the closest thing I had to a sister.  I knew your body like it was my body; I knew it as it was changing.” Although this piece is about a friendship falling apart, the degeneration of trust and honesty over time, it feels important to add to the list because of how true it is that we often drift away from our former selves, versions of us that were tied to the past.  

Boyhoods Lost to This Endless War

Posted on by Alyssa Songsiridej

Campfire Outside Valdorros

The boy should be in a robe ringing altar bells or chasing a tattered and dust-covered ball through an equally ragged plaza or searching in a mirror for his first whisker, but somebody’s given him a uniform and a rifle and the idea he belongs here with us. The white poplars creak and sigh—a haunting language—while the flames of the campfire dance in the boy’s agitated eyes. He pinches the nub of a cigarette. A few of his teeth have already rotted, black and splintered. Through the poplars is the moon. It casts a silver light upon their thin and groaning tops, and, as if somebody elbowed him to explain his presence among us, the boy begins:

“My father didn’t run. The fascists surrounded the village. He changed from his suit so we could bury him in it, kissed my mother, told me and my two younger brothers we were now the men of the house, then stood by the door, smoking, waiting for their lorry. It startled the fascists, how, with his shoulders back, he stepped out to meet them. A few must have been hoping for a fight. One grabbed me by the arm. I stiffened my spine, too, but another said, ‘Leave him, he’s only a child.’ When they pulled away that’s when my mother collapsed, like she’d been struck behind the knees. She was crying, screaming something, but I was already out the door for the gravel pit. That’s where they’d taken the other group a few days earlier. A soldier was posted as a sentry on the road. I didn’t have time to go around him, so I nodded and wished him a pleasant evening. He was too confused to respond. Their smartest don’t guard the roads. The second I was in the shadows I was sprinting again. They’d parked by the pit’s edge. The fascists stood before the headlights, passing around bottles. My father was seated closest to the tailgate. He shook his head and chuckled when he saw me, an expression like so this was the best my seed could produce. The fascists glanced back occasionally, but the headlights were in their eyes. I untied my father and helped him free the others. ‘Now go,’ he told me. I tried to say it was no use, that a guard had seen me. ‘I’m joining the fight,’ I started, but he slapped me, a quick soundless pop on the lips. ‘Go,’ he shouted as a whisper. To the men he said, ‘We give him a minute, then we run.’ From a distance, I watched my father and the others escape, and I followed them through the night. They were going to reunite with Manolo’s Division along the Arroyo de San Juan. The birds could have told you the division had recently regrouped along the bent elbow of that river. Each stone between Carrascal del Río and Valle de Tabladillo knew it. Clouds took the shape of an arrow every few hours and pointed to their camp. So, through the trees, I counted the lorries of fascists as they barreled past. Countries have sent fewer to conquer foreign lands. By the time I reached the river, it was almost over. Only my father and another remained. That soldier hadn’t counted his bullets properly. He was rolling fallen comrades off their weapons, pushing the barrels to his head, but they’d all been emptied. He was determined to rob the fascists of the pleasure. Finally, he palmed a large stone. As for my father, the fascists encircled him, tightening notch by notch like a garrote, until he was out of bullets. They took their time with him. Time I had to get closer, from one tree to the next. I saw each of them so clearly.” The boy examines the last of his cigarette, tries to pull smoke from it but draws nothing so flicks it into the fire. “Should they get scarred, grow a beard, lose half their face to a bomb, I’d still recognize them.”

There will be no end to this thing. That’s the bitter brew. The boy’s going to live long enough to sire a few sons who will watch helplessly as fascists drag him toward a lorry, and on and on it will go.

Isidro passes the boy a crumpled pack of cigarettes. The war had, at some point, torn two fingers from Isidro’s left hand. But eight remain. You only need a thumb and finger to squeeze a trigger. Many yet still to lose. And, afterwards, you might think it would fall to our disembodied limbs to go at the others’, carrying on our noble fight, but, no—I saw early this morning, the stars still out, how it ends.

In the dream, a bullet caught me, clean through the neck. My last thought was, so long I’ve been waiting for you, I thought you’d never show. Then I was above my body, watching it curl like a fetus and sink into the earth. My skin melted away, then my organs. I was bones joining with the bones of our ancestors, and together we coiled and became a ladder that twisted amidst a starless space, and from the infinite depths of the darkness beyond I didn’t feel God necessarily but judgment. We were fucked. We were terribly, irrevocably fucked. I awoke with a start, grabbed hold of my fleeing breath, my galloping heart, then searched for a comfortable position so as to fall back asleep. What else was there to do? The lions long ago locked and loaded their rifles while the lambs have nothing stockpiled. Arm in arm, we go marching to the end.

8 Memoirs by Blind Authors

Posted on by Jo Lou

Avoiding the impulse to create “inspiration porn”—narratives that highlight the overcoming of obstacles in order to make sighted people feel uplifted and grateful for what they have—out of one’s life about blindness in an ocularcentric world is not easy.

Blind memoirs that manage to make the reader think about biases and assumptions about blindness, rather than feeling sad or inspired, are the backbone of my personal and cultural history of blindness, There Plant Eyes. It’s important to me to juxtapose the lives of many kinds of actual blind people with the engrained and ubiquitous images of blindness and blind characters in literary, cinematic, religious, philosophical, and scientific constructions over roughly three millennia of Western culture. These images have been created, almost exclusively, by sighted people and tend to oscillate dramatically between idealizing archetypes such as the blind poet (Homer) and blind prophet (Tiresias), on the one hand, and pitying or wanting to cure actual blind people, on the other. 

Fading black text on a purple gradient background. The text reads: There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness by M. Leona Godin

Although the blind memoirists that have helped to shape my own understanding of blindness are each very different, some similarities of experience rise to the conscious surface when they are read side by side. Perhaps the most dominant takeaway from many of these first-person accounts is that the stigma of blindness is often more debilitating than the blindness itself. Beyond that, however, what is important to me in reading blind memoirs is that these many different kinds of lives show how there are as many ways of being blind as there are of being sighted. I want to celebrate the diversity amongst us, because blindness seems an identity set apart—as if we are not also women, people of color, gay, scientists, artists, punks, and parents—leaving us with blind caricatures that are flattened and monolithic and wholly devoid of real blind experiences.

Black and white photograph of Hellen Keller and three other people in front of Niagara Falls. The text reads: The World I Live In by Helen Keller. Edited and with an Introduction by Roger Shattuck

The World I Live In by Helen Keller

Our society rarely acknowledges how pissed off we can get—not about being blind (a la Al Pacino’s annoying character in Scent of a Woman), but at sighted people for restricting our domain to our blind experience. Case in point: Helen Keller’s first and most famous autobiography Story of My Life was written when she was barely into her 20s and is still the book that most people read today. But just a few years later she wrote The World I Live In, which drips with frustration at not being allowed to write beyond herself:

“The editors are so kind that they are no doubt right in thinking that nothing I have to say about the affairs of the universe would be interesting. But until they give me opportunity to write about matters that are not-me, the world must go on uninstructed and unreformed, and I can only do my best with the one small subject upon which I am allowed to discourse.”

In other words, the only kind of book that people seem to want from blind authors are memoirs. If we venture beyond ourselves and our blindness to speak of other matters, we are often slapped down. (Keller was roundly criticized for her outspoken liberal views.) Thus I offer The World I Live In as a kind of disclaimer for this list as a whole: blind people do not always want to write memoirs, but are very often urged to do so by their sighted family, friends, editors, publishers, and readers.

Photograph of Haben Girma facing to the left against a red background. White text reads: Haben: The Deafblind Woman who Conquered Harvard Law by Haben Girma

Haben by Haben Girma

More than a hundred years had passed since Helen Keller became the first deafblind person to earn a BA at Radcliffe College in 1904, when Haben Girma became the first deafblind woman to graduate from Harvard Law in 2013. In her 2018 memoir, she highlights the moments in her life when cultural biases forced her to fight for her own rights and led her to pursue a career as a human rights lawyer.

Her story emerges as one that is inextricably linked to our society’s prejudices against disabled people:

“Disability professionals warned me: work hard or you’ll never find employment. Around seventy percent of blind people are unemployed. I studied hard in school, graduating high school as valedictorian. I spent a summer sharpening my independence skills at the Louisiana Center for the Blind. My college GPA is excellent. I even have volunteer work experience on my résumé. The seventy percent unemployment rate still managed to claim me…”

Haben’s story makes clear how hard you have to work to overcome the low expectations placed on disabled people, and how this can change in the digital age. In her brief conversation with President Obama during the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, she tells him:

“Technology can bridge the gap for people with disabilities, and as internet services open more opportunities for people, we’re going to see more people with disabilities employed and succeeding.”

Silhouette of a man standing at the entrance of a cave. Grey text reads: The Inspiration for the Award-Winning Film Notes on Blindness. Touching the Rock by John M. Hull

Touching the Rock by John Hull

Touching the Rock consists of a series of journal entries from 1983 to ’86 that Hull dictated into a tape recorder in the three years after he went totally blind. His thoughts about the experience and social constructions of blindness are by turns philosophical and humorous. I believe it was in Touching the Rock that I first read about the third-person approach that many sighted people take when dealing with a blind person in their midst. For instance, when getting into a car with a group of friends, John Hull heard:

“Will you put John in the back with you?”

“No, I’ll put him in the front with you.”

“All right, you put him in then.”

Hull finally broke the litany of good intentions by “crying out with an exceedingly loud voice, ‘John is not put anywhere, thank you very much. John is asked if he has any preferences about where he sits.’”

This situation and the anger it provokes rings true for most blind people, I think, and the contrite response also feels familiar. “These people are all sensitive, and well aware of the humiliation which this approach implies. So the question arises, why do they do it?”

Half white and half brown background with blurry black stain in the shape of a person. Title reads: Slack Jaw by Jim Knipfel. Embedded on the brown section text reads: You better start learning braille now...

Slackjaw by Jim Knipfel 

Slackjaw is a rollicking ride on a punk denial train wreck. Knipfel has retinitis pigmentosa (RP), so that his vision loss happened gradually, making it awfully easy (and also dangerous) to avoid adopting the accouterments of blindness, namely the white cane that is so stigmatic, and getting help from organizations that were antithetical to his nihilistic sensibilities:

“A number of organizations in the city tried to help what I loosely referred to as ‘people like me’—the Lighthouse was one-but there was always something too touchy-feely about them. I would rather go blind and stick a .38 in my mouth than take part in a group hug.”

When he finally couldn’t avoid it any longer, Knipfel got himself trained with a blind man’s cane and found that it did indeed make life easier. He reluctantly tells a friend: “Everybody parts in front of me like the fucking Red Sea, that’s for damn sure.”

Blurry photograph of tulips. Text reads: Sight Unseen by Georgina Kleege

Sight Unseen by Georgina Kleege

Sight Unseen is part memoir and part cultural critique. Kleege unravels centuries of archetypes and stereotypes in literature and film, and celebrates the rare instances “when blind characters get uppity,” because it is in such moments that “they begin to chip away at the lingering remnants of the Oedipal image.”

Because the image of the blind has been painted (almost exclusively) by sighted people, the blind characters in books and movies are generally not about the experience of blind people, but rather about the usefulness of blindness as corrective for wrong-headedness—think Gloucester in King Lear. Of course, like many blind readers, Kleege is “not so naive as to expect that fiction should provide me with role models, but it’s hard not to cringe at traditional representations of blindness as a life-ending tragedy. And while the notion that a blind person can bring enlightenment to sighted peers shows progress, it still makes me weary and somewhat alarmed.”

A big part of the problem is that blind characters generally play the role of sidekick to the sighted protagonist, so that the blind man remains an “instructive spectacle, useful to everyone but himself.” 

Image of a man sitting on a wooden deck faceing the body of water. Text reads: Stephen Kuusisto, Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening

Eavesdropping by Stephen Kuusisto

Kuusisto’s first memoir, Planet of the Blind, is largely about learning to accept his blindness after a childhood spent in denial, thanks to his mother’s horror and dread of the stigma of blindness. In Eavesdropping, he leans into the sensory experience of blindness in a beautiful lyrical series of meditations on the non-visual world. As he tells it in his preface, the book is a kind of defense of travel by ear ignited by a newly blind woman’s angry protest: “Why travel anywhere if you can’t see?” The arguments against such a fear are made of crackling ice and warbling birds and singing humans; from Helsinki, Finland to Durham, New Hampshire, New York to Venice.

The sonic snapshots are delicate and specific. One of my favorites comes early, a blind boy encountering a horse:

“He snorted. 

I noticed the ringing of silence. An insect traveled between our bursts of forced air. 

Sunlight warmed my face. I was standing in a wide sunbeam. 

I was in the luminous whereabouts of horse!”

Yellow background with cursive text above an imagine of a girl laying down. The text reads: Do you Dream in Color? insight from a girl without night by Laurie Ruben

Do You Dream in Color? by Laurie Ruben 

Opera singer and educator Laurie Ruben’s memoir details, with humor and candor, how her blindness caused others to treat her differently. Her perfect pitch, a gorgeous soprano voice, and dedicated work ethic were rarely enough to ward off the unapologetic discrimination she experienced in the competitive classical music world. In college, her voice teacher informed her that she had not been accepted into a prestigious summer program because “they were scared, scared you wouldn’t be able to learn the music as fast as they would need you to, scared that you would hold the others back.” He gritted his teeth and continued:

“Laurie, in order for someone to hire you, you’ve got to be better than the others. You’ve got to have something so compelling about your singing that they would justify going out of their way and working past their own fears to hire you over another singer.”

Often times blind people must do the work of two: working hard to hone our craft and working hard to make sighted people feel comfortable around our blindness. Thus we find ourselves held to higher standards just to be thought an equal: “I couldn’t be normal, or good, or great. I had to be superwoman.”

Portrait of a man with a dark, blurred spot covering most of the face and chest. Text reads: Blind Man's Bluff: a memoir by James Tate Hill

Blind Man’s Bluff by James Tate Hill

In his forthcoming memoir, Hill demonstrates with painful and hilarious exactitude just how crippling visual impairment can be when one attempts to “pass” as sighted. It also demonstrates the neediness of most sighted people to be seen:

“What most people want to know is what I see when I look at them, and the short answer is this: I don’t see what I look directly at. If I look up or to the side, I can see something, and this usually fends off further questions.”

What Hill actually sees is complex and confusing—a far cry from the simple darkness and light metaphors that so often accompany those of blindness and sight: 

“Instead of a smudge, picture a kaleidoscope. Borderless  shapes fall against each other, microscopic organisms, a timelapsed photograph of a distant galaxy.”

The urge to “bluff” the sighted by “passing” as one of them is shared by many visually impaired people in order to avoid the stigma of blindness—a state of being that seems so terrible to many sighted people that they cannot even imagine it for themselves. As Hill puts it: “The most frequent compliment heard by people with a disability is I could never do what you do, but everyone knows how to adapt.”

A Reading List on the Palestinian Experience in the Face of Oppression

Posted on by Jo Lou

What can memory endure? A story, we know, can be told and retold for generations, find its way centuries later in the mouth of a descendant. What then of a memory expunged—so thoroughly and violently that it splinters and disperses across the world? The question often posed to Palestinians is who has the right to a memory? If the efforts to ethnically cleanse neighborhoods in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, and so many others are successful, will the families still be allowed to remember them as their homes? Will their children? Will their children’s children?
 
Collective memory, for Palestinians, continues to be an anchor. The precise and beautiful understanding shared by so many of us that, even after so many decades, with enough patience, the memory returns faithfully and belongs to us all. There is no substitute for addressing the continued subjugation of Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid laws and open-air imprisonment, but what follows is a list of works that we believe capture, each in their own way, some small piece of our enduring collective memory.

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

This book’s undertaking is remarkable: renowned historian Khalidi captures over a century of history in strong, compelling prose, including that of his own family (his great-great-great-uncle was the mayor of Jerusalem in the late 19th-century). It is widely considered required reading for anyone truly wishing to understand Palestine.

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa

A multigenerational story about a Palestinian family, Mornings in Jenin follows Amal and her family, displaced from an olive-farming village to refugee camps in Jenin. It’s a magnificently sprawling exploration of kinship, love, and dispossession.

The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said

The Question of Palestine by Edward Said

Another essential read, Said lays forth a comprehensive and captivating account on the “Palestinian question.” This book is an astonishing work; while parts of it are necessarily dated (its last edition came out in the early ’90s), it remains an imperative work, with Said bringing an academic’s rigor and precision to the discourse of Palestine.

Sitti's Secrets

Sitti’s Secrets by Naomi Shihab Nye, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter

I came across this beautifully written (and illustrated) children’s book when I was a high schooler in Beirut. I reread it countless times. Nye perfectly captures the complex family dynamics that exist in diaspora, and the task of loving people despite barriers of oceans, language, and time zones.

Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

This book is a masterwork. Masalha maps the millennia-old history of Palestine, spanning from early Egyptian and Assyrian texts to the present day. The beating, returning heart of the book is the eloquent, unequivocal assertion that Palestine is by no means a “modern invention,” but one with a rich and extensive past.

Sadder than Water: New and Selected Poems

Sadder Than Water by Samih al-Qasim, translated by by Nazih Kassis

This 2006 translation made clear what many Arabic readers had long known: al-Qasim is an indisputable, singular talent. A widely celebrated resistance poet who faced imprisonment and censorship over the course of his career, al-Qasim’s poems glint with arresting metaphors and memorable allusions.

Born Palestinian, Born Black by Suheir Hammad

The first book of poetry I read by a Palestinian woman writing in English, Born Palestinian, Born Black literally changed my life. The poems in this collection are haunting meditations on womanhood, Palestine, and home, resulting in pieces that are both visually and sonically stunning.

Cover of Justice for Some by Noura Erakat

Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine by Noura Erakat

Erakat, a legal scholar and human rights attorney, offers a framework for understanding the Palestinian liberation struggle that marries the historical with the legal. Through vibrant, attentive writing, Erakat shows us how susceptible the law can be to politics, and offers a powerful case for how international law could someday be used as a vehicle for genuine justice.

Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories by Ghassan Kanafani, translated by Hilary Kilpatrick

It’s hard to summarize the brilliance of this collection. Translated from Arabic, these stories include the gorgeous novella (and parable) “Men in the Sun,” which follows the plight of three Palestinian men leaving their refugee camp in Iraq to seek something resembling a better life.

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis

This powerful collection of essays, speeches, and interviews capture Davis’s views on the interconnectedness of liberation struggles around the world—and throughout history. It’s a galvanizing read for anyone genuinely interested in understanding (and learning to advocate for) the practice of intersectionality.

Baddawi by Leila Abdelrazaq

A strikingly drawn graphic novel, Baddawi is the story of the author’s father as a young boy. It explores his childhood in a refugee camp in northern Lebanon, and both the visual and written elements of this debut book are phenomenal.

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Munir Akash, Carolyn Forché, Sinan Antoon, Amira El-Zein

These selected works, translated from Arabic, illustrate all that is beloved about Darwish. Considered one of Palestine’s most remarkable poets, these poems encapsulate Darwish’s impressive lyricism, vision, and range in a career that spanned nearly four decades.

In Kristen Arnett’s “With Teeth,” Being a Queer Mom Is Terrifying

Posted on by Jo Lou

You might know her from her uproariously funny Twitter account or her New York Times-bestselling debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, or maybe you’re just being introduced to the former librarian-turned-literary-superstar/Florida brand ambassador now. For fans of Kristen Arnett, the anticipated wait for her next book is over. With Teeth is out just in time for how it’s meant to be read: outside and preferably with a glass of two-for-eight dollar red wine from 7-Eleven in hand—an homage to its author.

With Teeth by Kristen Arnett

Despite how much she loves him, Sammie Lucas is frightened of her own son. Samson makes little to no effort to reciprocate his mother’s efforts to bond with him, leading Sammie to question her own maternal instincts all while taking on all the responsibilities of the household as her wife, Monika, continues to invest the majority of her time and attention into work. As her resentment towards Monika builds and Samson’s hostility grows up alongside him, Sammie is forced to reckon—with herself. 

As she struggles to reconcile her past as a carefree young queer woman living her life from one night out to the next with her role now as wife and mother, she is forced to consider the possibility that the doubts she possesses and the questions she asks may ultimately lead her down a path as winding as the Florida roads she drives along. 

Embedded with Arnett’s unmistakable brand of humor and permeating with a fresh display of vulnerability, With Teeth is a gift with a heart as big as its author’s. 

Greg Mania: I love that we’ve started to develop a pattern of interviewing each other every time one of us has a book out; I hope we continue doing this well into the afterlife. 

This book is, in some ways, a departure from your last. Your voice is still present, as is your sense of humor. But I feel like you’re embracing complexity more here, taking a beat to sit in discomfort a bit longer. What was that like for you?

Kristen Arnett: Honestly, it was… difficult AND fun? Some of the difficulty came from the natural unease of writing a character that so often self-sabotages. Going through that first draft, it was like, “God, this asshole” sometimes whenever Sammie would make a choice that seemed terrible. But that’s just her character! And also, I loved it? So much of humor is subjective. I think you and I have talked about that before, but I am obsessed with trying out different types of comedy, purely from a stylistic point of view.

For Mostly Dead Things, it was hilarious to watch Jessa be the straight man (pun intended), the person who never got the joke while everyone laughed around her, but for With Teeth, I had the most fun putting everyone into extremely uncomfortable situations! Like, I thought, How much discomfort can I put into a scene and still find it hilarious? And that was ridiculously funny to me, to make these characters deeply ill at ease, to make them press through embarrassing and awkward situations—deeply HUMAN situations. Because god knows we’ve all been there!

GM: You offer a masterclass in how to write queerness—or any identity marker for that matter—without it serving as the facilitator of plot in both of your books. With Teeth is about queer relationships and queer parenthood, but at the end of the day, it’s about relationships and parenthood. Queerness is something that’s just there; it’s not looming nor is it an impetus of any kind. What made you want to explore parenthood through the lens of queerness?

KA: It felt really important to me to think about queerness here in terms of community; the having of a community, sure, but also the lack of one. There’s this way in which queerness in Central Florida is there, but not actually represented. People move from all over the world to work at our theme parks, and many of those people are gay, but there isn’t a corresponding representation of queer-servicing spaces to accommodate them. Like, hardly anything. And the spaces we do have are very much places for single, young people: bars and clubs, that kind of thing. There’s this unspoken stuff that happens in queer community.

I’ve noticed in Central Florida when once you’ve leaned into marriage and kids, you no longer fit into what is available to you in terms of queer spaces.

I’ve noticed in Central Florida when once you’ve leaned into marriage and kids, you no longer fit into what is available to you in terms of queer spaces. Like, there are no mommy groups or anything, there aren’t places to go where you see yourself reflected back at you. And if there are some, there aren’t very many. We’re a red state. So then it becomes trying to fit into some kind of heteronormative roles that don’t fit with queerness, all for the sake of raising a child. It would be devastating and so goddamn hard, you know? I wanted to really lean into this stuff, because what if, hear me out, the person being shoved into this role (someone who’s constantly under scrutiny, someone who has to be perfect at it, even more so than a heterosexual parent), just really fucking sucks at being a mom? That, to me, felt extremely important to write about.

GM: How much do you think that the pressure Sammie feels—always caught in the crosshairs of those who doubt two queer parents, specifically two women, can successfully raise a boy—accounts for her missteps in motherhood? 

KA: I think that would have to be part of it, for sure, but I think it’s more complicated than that. The fact that Sammie feels these pressures in her life that are put on her with regard to motherhood and queerness—very real pressures, absolutely—means that she can kind of push all of her insecurities onto that. So there are ways in which she very likely doesn’t take ownership for the ways in which she is complicit in her own bad choices (selfishness, etc.) because she’s able to fob it all off on these pressures. It’s not my fault, it’s society—that kind of thing. In reality, it’s society AND Sammie. It’s both things. I think that’s why Sammie feels so deeply real and very human to me. She is messy and she kind of understands that, but she’s also a person who doesn’t want to be judged for it (I mean, who does), but she also doesn’t want to deal with her wrongness, either, so she makes up a lot of excuses.

GM: I also appreciate that queer trauma isn’t at the forefront—Sammie’s parents’ rejection of her is brought up for context, but it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

KA: Right, exactly. That is something that’s there, of course, something that’s going to inform her character and the choices she makes, but it’s not going to be the overarching theme of her life or her story. Queer people have these issues all the time, right? It’s the stuff that’s contained inside of us, to a degree, but it’s not the totality of who we are. 

GM: I’m going to volley back a question you asked me, one that stayed with me long after I answered you: your relationship with your parents—and your subsequent estrangement from them—has shaped so much of your work. How do you see it shaping With Teeth and also shaping future work?

KA: I mean, I think those past relationships absolutely mark who we are, because they have a say in who we’ve been and where we’re headed, you know? I think that it has to sit there a little in how I’m thinking about this character who is also estranged from her parents, because I think it would also inform how she thinks about her relationship with her own kid. I know that it makes me think a lot about the role of family in my own fiction—the dynamics of how specific relationships function—because that is a big part of my own life, especially as a queer person. I mean, it makes me consider all the ways that we define family. Blood isn’t always who our closest family is, not when you’re queer and you have the freedom to make up your own household. Intimacy—romantic or platonic—is a big part of how I consider who makes up my world. I want to write that into my fiction because my fiction is queer, too.

GM: Are there any other texts that have recently piqued your interest in terms of their exploration of queerness? If so, which ones?

KA: Oh, wow, this is a great question because I honestly feel like there are so many. Every day there are more and more extremely queer, extremely great books being published and it just makes writing and reading feel incredible! I have to say that Torrey Peter’s recent book, Detransition, Baby, is just magnificent, and discusses so much about queer parenthood. Just phenomenal. Memorial by Bryan Washington is so queer and also dissects place and relationships. Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier is so extremely queer and so messy and interesting, unpacking queerness and motherhood and class at the same time, which is just wildly impressive. Every day there is just new gay fiction and I am so in love with all of it!

GM: Since Sammie is the narrator, we get a front-row seat to her internal life. But, as a reader, I sense a rich complexity in her wife, Monika. What made you want to write the book (mostly) from Sammie’s perspective, as opposed to dividing it between Sammie, Monika, and their son, Samson?

Blood isn’t always who our closest family is, not when you’re queer and you have the freedom to make up your own household.

KA: That was very purposeful on my part, because it relates back to my very firmly held opinion that everyone in a household is an unreliable narrator. I wanted to be pretty close on Sammie, a woman who is queer and a mother and navigating those identities, and see how much of her story I could tell without needing another voice to take over and give it credibility or contradict her, because I think in our own minds inside a household, we are the main characters. I also wanted there to be a real sense of claustrophobia on Sammie’s part, because her life is running a household, but it is essentially run entirely inside that household. She moves from the house, to the car, to wherever she is dropping off her kid, and then back again. Her world gradually narrows, this feeling of being stifled, confined—I wanted that there, absolutely. I think it was important for that voice to belong to Sammie alone. Plus, I think it really adds an “Oh, fuck” quality to things once you realize how little she’s able to see things in terms of everyone else’s perspective.

GM: Something I’ve been thinking and talking about a lot lately is the complexity of grief, especially ever since reading Tomboyland by Melissa Faliveno. She writes about the nuance of grief, how it can appear in many shapes and forms, and considers expanding our definition of it. To me, it seems as though Sammie is grieving what once was—and not just her marriage and the baby she lost—but also who she used to be: a party-goer, care-free, able to move through life with an almost reckless abandon. Was grief an emotion you considered when writing about Sammie reflecting on her life before meeting Monika?

KA: Oh, absolutely, yes! Grief is one of those things that takes so many shapes, a million forms. For Sammie, I think it’s perfectly reasonable that grief would be stuffed inside of a lot of other things (a ravioli of feelings, if you will). I also think that Sammie is a person who probably didn’t realize that grief was what she was feeling for a long, long time. That happens, too, I think—this way in which we compartmentalize feelings that we don’t like, refusing to allow them air, never really understanding what it is we’re actually feeling because we don’t allow ourselves any time to examine it. People are so messy, I fucking love it.

GM: Now to the more-serious questions: there are still nods to 7-Eleven in this book. Do you still get the usual (Steel Reserve and Yosemite Road two-for-eight dollar red wine)?

KA: Of course I do! God, it’s such a great value. I have a four-pack of Steel Reserve tallboys in my fridge right now, actually! Might as well crack one open and drink it, why not!

GM: Florida reprises its role as a character in and of itself in this book. Do you think that the way you write and think about Florida has changed since your first book?

KA: I really think so, yes! And that makes sense to me, because I think about Florida like I’d think about another person, and people are changing all the time. They change, but so do I, everyone does. And that means our relationships to each other are changing, too. So my relationship with Florida is still there, still potent, still so strong—just ever evolving, turning into something different every day.

GM: What’s it like now?

KA: I think it’s cycling back to a place of freshness again. And by that, I mean I feel like I’m starting to see it through new eyes. Like, romantically. Like Florida and I have been in a long marriage and we kind of sometimes take each other for granted, but right now we’re rekindling things. There’s a spark. Part of that definitely comes from this past year of pandemic, being away from home in the desert half that time at my fellowship. It made me miss home so fiercely. I just couldn’t wait to be back again, to feel that warm, sticky, humid embrace. And now that I’m down in Miami, I’m getting to know a whole new side of Florida. It all feels really new. I feel very much in love.

7 Writing Residencies That Are Family-Friendly

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

After a year of lockdown, writing residencies are back. Residencies are a good way to dedicate time to your craft or make connections with those who share your passion, but it’s hard to clear your schedule to go off to some remote location for a week when you have a kid. Here we’ve compiled a short list of short-term, family-friendly residencies where you can receive support for both your writing and the particular struggles of being a parent. 

Two Cape Cod buildings
Image from the MVICW website.

Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing

MVICW offers a writing program that focuses on fostering community and artistic bonds between writers in the idyllic scenery Martha’s Vineyard. In 2021, the MVICW Summer Writers’ Conference will be virtual. Interested participants can register online. There is a Parent Writer Fellowship awarded to two fiction writers and two poets, which covers tuition and lodging for the week-long retreat. While applications are currently closed, the regular deadline to apply is January 31st. 

A cute cabin with diamond-paned windows
Image from the Hewnoaks website.

Hewnoaks

Hewnoaks is a residency for writers, visual artists, and performing artists in rural Maine that offers two $500 childcare stipends for parents who are in residence without their children. Residencies last from one to two weeks for those who are early to mid-career. Applications will open in February of 2022. 

A long building with a wraparound porch and three chimneys
Image taken from Cuttyhunk Island Writer’s Residency’s website.

Cuttyhunk Island Writer’s Residency

Fourteen writers are accepted for this seven-day retreat off the coast of Cape Cod on Cuttyhunk Island. There are two full-ride fellowships offered to parents, one for any parent writer and the other for a poet who works full- or part-time. Applications open in December 2021 and close on March 1st, 2022.

A house made of white stone
Image from Marble House Project website.

Marble House Project 

Marble House Project hosts a 17-day family residency in Vermont during the summer where artists can bring a partner and children. There is daycare available for children between the ages of four to fourteen on weekdays until 3:30 PM. Applications open in January 2022 for the 2023 season. 

A snow-covered porch and trees
Image from Unruly Retreat website.

The Unruly Retreat 

This retreat in Virginia is for women who are parents or primary caregivers of any kind — be it for foster kids or elderly parents. The Unruly Retreat offers three free six-day writing retreats, as well as a 50% discounted rate for longer stays of two to four weeks. Childcare is not provided, but children and partners can be brought along. Applications are currently open.  

A green building that says "Elsewhere" over the door
Image from Elsewhere Studios website.

Elsewhere Studios

Artists of any kind are welcome at Elsewhere Studies in Colorado, which chooses four parent creatives to host for a ten-day period. Attendees are given the choice of whether to bring their families and awarded a $1000 stipend they can spend on anything related to the retreat, including childcare. Application information will be available online in the fall.

A barn
Image from Millay Colony Residency website.

The Virtual Artist Residency at Millay Colony Residency

The Millay Colony welcomes six to seven visual artists, writers and composers a month between April and November. Each year, four applicants who have children at home under the age of 18 receive the Parent/Creator Fellowship; the Millay Colony may also create a residency period devoted to a parent/artist cohort. The Millay Colony for the Arts does not include/invite children to their residencies. The next deadline is October 1st.

Additional research by Sophie Stein

I Got an Artificial Intelligence to Write My Novel

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, among writers “influence always proceeds by misinterpretation.” In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom argues that writers willfully ignore and misinterpret their predecessors in order to make their canvases as blank as possible. 

Bloom’s specific stages of anxiety (outlined much like the stages of grief) are a bit too Freudian and peculiar to be truly universal, but he’s right that to create is to exist in a state of anxiety. Like construction in Rome, we writers are always building on top of something. I too keep an eye on particular contemporary writers, like Richard Powers and Rebecca Goldstein, just in case.

But in the past year my anxiety of influence has shifted far and away to another source: an entity called GPT-3. It’s an artificial neural network with over 175 billion parameters—think of it like an artificial brain with the computing power of 175 billion connections (if it makes you feel any better, you probably have around 125 trillion synapses in your own brain, for comparison).

In the past year my anxiety of influence has shifted far and away to another source: an entity called GPT-3.

Developed by OpenAI, GPT-3 costs several million dollars of computational work just to train, and now subscription services that let you access GPT-3 are both approval-only and cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month. 

GPT-3 is a natural language processor, which means it’s trained to try to complete any prompt that it’s given. Its training data is basically the entire internet, so given a prompt, like a few paragraphs of text, it will make a guess as to what comes next. These guesses show that GPT-3 can really write. It can write in all sorts of styles, oftentimes as convincingly as a real human author. Like a medium, it can even channel the dead. The anxiety I feel toward it is different than toward any writer that once lived and breathed. I think it represents the first warning shots of an impending man vs. machine agon of language. 

This is not something anyone in the publishing industry appears to have noticed. The academization of literature, making it a prerequisite for writers to climb the hierarchy up all the way to that famous MFA program (a journey now necessary if you want to be published and reviewed), has created a lot of writers incurious about technology and science. So I doubt more than a handful in the literary community are paying attention to how things might change for them as the limits of deep learning get pushed further out. 

Confronting my anxiety head on (Bloom might deem this the “daemonization” stage), I decided to see if GPT-3 could have written my debut novel, The Revelations. To prove to myself, once and for all, there’s nothing to be anxious about (oh reader—there is). 

I decided to see if GPT-3 could have written my debut novel, The Revelations.

Getting access to GPT-3 requires various approvals, which is why the running joke is that OpenAI should drop the “Open” from their name. This gives interacting with GPT-3 an oracular quality, since you’re communicating with its galaxy brain hosted on some tightly-controlled server. Once my sojourn to Delphi was complete, I fed GPT-3 the jacket copy of my novel—that description on the flaps of the hardcover that tells readers what they’re getting into. This gave GPT-3 a sense of who I was and how to write like me. Then, trying not to bias the experiment, I flipped to a random section of The Revelations and selected a few paragraphs I thought ripe for comparison.

The randomly-arrived at short scene is around the middle of the novel. Carmen, a young scientist, has been pursuing what she thinks was the murder of one of her colleagues in the New York City subway. The events surrounding the investigation have gotten stranger and more mysterious over time, and now, unable to make any progress, she’s staking out the subway station late at night. Within the strained atmosphere she’s been under, and the mysterious guttural phone calls she’s been getting from unlisted numbers since she started the investigation, she begins to dread seeing something inhuman. Here’s the original:

“Stand clear of the closing doors, please.” 

Eventually the people become less numerous. In the lateness of the night her mind begins to imagine scenarios, to play them out again and again on a loop, as if some part of her is daring something to happen, is waiting for something drastic. Instead the night just gets later and later and the people fewer and fewer, until finally entire trains are coming and going without the entrance or exit of a single soul. And Carmen is becoming half-terrified of the menacing long platform next to her, which extends into that subterranean realm… the scenario she imagines is that a creature, something huge but lithe, something with an animal head, peeks from the side out onto the platform, a bull’s head maybe, leering at her, its mouth gaping and panting, its eyes impossibly dark and lewd upon her, and eventually the image becomes so strong, and the expectation so intense, that she suddenly bolts from her wooden seat, pushing through the turnstiles and in her flight continually whipping around to look until she reaches the safety of the surface. 

Now here’s GTP-3’s version, fed the above paragraph up to the word “creature” (as well as the jacket copy of the book). Where the bolded text starts below is where GPT-3 took over writing:

And Carmen is becoming half-terrified of the menacing long platform next to her, which extends into that subterranean realm . . . the scenario she imagines is that of a creature who crawled out of the earth in a burrow, a huge being with tiny eyes and long and stumpy arms. . . But this wasn’t a dream, was it? The wind of the passing trains nearly knocks her off her feet, and before she knows it she is bursting out of the subway, up the stairs, through the turnstiles and out onto the street, running down the sidewalk, her breath coming in gasps and the crescendo is rising and rising in the pit of her stomach, her sneakers flapping against the asphalt, and they are all just blurs now, someone turning up a music system looks up, a dog barks and gets its leash yanked, an old couple walking arm in arm looks up, but no one notices her, and the city throbs, breathes, exhales.

To get this I merely prompted GPT-3 a handful of times, threw out the first two results, and deleted a few clauses of GPT-3’s third try. It took about five minutes. I didn’t add a single thing, it’s all GPT-3. Damn machine had the gall to write my book.

No doubt, this artificial prose has flaws. Long and stumpy arms? Wind from a subway isn’t strong enough to nearly knock someone off their feet. Carmen is too terrified in this version, rather than just creeped out. That sentence where she considers whether this is a dream doesn’t add up grammatically. Although perhaps Bloom would say this is merely the “clinamen” stage of anxiety, a classic misreading to make this technological shadow of myself look worse than it is.

Still. Any writer worth their ink should start feeling some AI anxiety on reading that output. There are a number of advanced literary techniques GPT-3 is using here. The long run-on sentence of Carmen’s flight means GPT-3 knows that style is apt for describing characters in motion. And the break in narrative to linger on the people who don’t notice her flight as she runs past, that’s good technique as well. It’s cinematic, makes a reader focus on the city itself. The last line of “and the city throbs, breathes, exhales” is definitely something I’d write. It fits the atmosphere of the novel, which treats New York City like its own organism possessing a centuries-slow consciousness. 

That particular phrase is so appropriate for the novel it felt reminiscent. After searching the text of the book I came upon a similar phrase describing a storm the characters find themselves caught in, on what becomes the night of the murder.

The city inhales and exhales in great whooping winds.

That’s from a section GPT-3 wasn’t shown. It can’t possibly have seen it. While GPT-3 itself is trained on a corpus of text (basically the entire internet) from the year 2019, The Revelations came out only last month. Just the fact that the AI deduced to write “and the city throbs, breathes, exhales” from the given sample and jacket copy—it’s uncanny.

I’m happy to report there are still issues with GPT-3. It has limited space for input and output, only about 1,500 words or so, and the fact is that if you feed it its own ramblings it becomes more and more incoherent. The AI still needs a human editor to tether it to reality. But it’s a fine first-draft writer in short bursts, especially since it can generate paragraphs about 1000x faster than a human. You just click and there’s the text for you to pick and choose from. I wouldn’t want to write this way, but others will surely use it as a co-author, and it might legitimately improve their books. And if they did use it—who would know?

Beyond an artificial helper, writers should seriously be worried about GPT-4 as a direct competitor. When GPT-5 rolls around, they should feel dread. Therein lies the heart of this new technological anxiety: its inevitable nature. Consider that when I was born, language, whenever I encountered it, was always generated by human consciousness. When I die, will most language come from a source separate from consciousness? Things that speak and things that feel are now entirely dissociable. I grew up in my mother’s independent bookstore, so to me this is anathema, a debasement of the holy. Why is no other writer in the world freaking out about this new Babel?

It doesn’t help that the post-work future is so often envisioned as the AIs doing all the labor, leaving humans free to spend their days making art. But what if the AIs are better at making art too?

Does this output even count as “art”? The words of an AI have no intentionality. Only conscious minds produce meaning. This is more like infinite monkeys typed out infinite nonsense, and eventually this creates a Sylvia Plath poem. One might argue it is the consciousness of the observer that gives meaning to art, not consciousness as art’s producer, but then the reply is that any meaning here is just pareidolia—it’s like seeing faces on the rocks on Mars. It is a deep fake of meaning itself. In this way AI robs us of our very words by diluting their importance away. These machines give us sentences with perfect syntax but without intentional semantic content—something I’ve called the “semantic apocalypse.”

Post-work future is so often envisioned as the AIs doing all the labor, leaving humans free to spend their days making art. But what if the AIs are better at making art too?

As it stands right now, GPT-3 could not write The Revelations, even with a heavy editorial hand. It could certainly contribute a number of relevant scenes and phrases. Maybe, hopefully, GPT-3 is as good as natural language processors get. Maybe it will always need micromanagement. Maybe maybe maybe. Maybe not. The situation for poets is already far worse. Oh, poor poets. All the things GPT-3 struggles with, like long-term coherency, causality, common sense knowledge, character development, etc, are all things that rarely matter in poems. Same for songwriters. Consider the recent “Drowned in the Sun,” a catchy new Nirvana song made by an AI trained on their old work.

What would Bloom’s horror have been if in the future a simple prompt to GPT-X generates a perfect new Shakespeare sonnet? What anxiety would your average poet feel then? Prompt. Perfect poem. Prompt. Perfect poem. Prompt. And if it can do this for any living writer as well, in any format? Some authors may declare it doesn’t matter, that it’s their identity that makes a product special, not the product itself. But what an honest crafter of language would feel—one who cares about language qua language—is anxiety. The forever crippling kind.

Now, I’m not saying that writers are necessarily under existential threat from GPT-3. When I attend literary events I don’t only see a bunch of dinosaurs plodding across a tar pit. I just get flashes of a possible future. GPT-3 and its ilk could, somehow, not affect literature at all. But just by existing they do necessarily make human production of art smaller in its shadow.

I will tell you a funny thing. A strange one as well, though perhaps it was always inevitable. Lately, if I look in the mirror too long, I see only an ape staring back.