Everyone Deserves a Mother Figure Like Juniper from “Wise Child”

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Monica Furlong’s Wise Child was the first time I ever saw a mother that I wanted to be. I was ten or eleven the first time I read it, and I didn’t think about mothers much beyond the fact that they were just sort of there—often harried, overworked, and tired, but useful if you needed a meal or a hug. Although I had a vague sense at the time that I wanted to have kids one day, none of my concrete experiences of what motherhood looked like made it seem all that appealing. Even in books, mothers were mostly just background noise; fathers were at least allowed to be funny or have quirky hobbies, but mothers rarely seemed to have inner lives. Furlong’s Juniper, an independent-minded woman with supernatural healing skills living in a dream cottage full of magic, was different.

The term “voracious reader” is clichéd, but it’s the most accurate one to describe what I was like as a kid. I had a bottomless appetite when it came to reading materials, by which I mean that if I didn’t have a book nearby I would resort to the backs of cereal boxes or the weird ads in the yellow pages. I also read literally all the time: at breakfast in the morning, on the school bus, under my desk instead of listening to the math lesson, in the bath. I once got in trouble during gym class for sneaking a book into the outfield during baseball (I’d hidden it under my shirt when we were changing). It wasn’t just that I loved the stories (although I did), but also that my brain craved that specific stimulation, and without its constant input I felt tortuously bored. It was a lonely way to be, not because I was teased for my reading or anything—I had plenty of friends, and I was so cavalier about my obsession that I don’t think it occurred to them to make fun of it—but because I never had anyone to talk to about the fictional worlds that felt at least half real.

I didn’t know anyone who read like I did, least of all my own mother—she had some Danielle Steele books lying around, and at least one installment of the Outlander series, but I’m not sure that I ever actually saw her sit down and crack any of them. Sometimes when she saw me sprawled out on the couch with a book she’d say, “I used to be a reader before I had kids, but now I don’t have the time.” The comment didn’t have any particular layers of meaning to it—other than I should have been helping out more around the house, probably—but I saw dark undercurrents in it: a hint that motherhood thwarted intellectual pursuits, and a threat that if I ever became a mother, I, too, would have to stop reading.

I didn’t have anyone around me to whom I could recommend Wise Child and its prequel Juniper, even though I desperately wanted to talk about them. When my middle sister was old enough to read them, I bought her a copy of each, and she loved them as much as I did. But other than her, I didn’t meet anyone else who had even heard of them until I was an adult, at which point I met a whole bunch of other people—mostly women—who had read and loved those books. They became a sort of password, a shorthand for seeing that someone else had been the kind of kid you’d been: bookish, witchy, often wanting something that you couldn’t quite put into words. I get a quiet thrill every time I meet another Wise Child reader, like I’m meeting members of an extended ersatz family. When I had my own kid, one of the things I wanted most was to shape him into that particular kind of weirdo, too—or, at least, provide the environment in which that kind of weirdo would thrive. I just sort of assumed that any child of mine would inherit this thing that seemed so essentially a part of me that I couldn’t imagine not passing it on.

The hero of Wise Child is a nine year old girl named Margit, although that name is used only once in the book. The rest of the time she’s referred to by her nickname, though as she explains, “Wise Child” is not exactly meant as a compliment—in her language, it’s a term used for children who “used long words, as I often did, or who had big eyes, or who seemed somehow old beyond their years.” Wise Child, who lives on a remote Scottish island in some nebulous Medieval era, finds herself suddenly homeless after the death of her grandmother, with whom she’d been living; both her parents are still alive, but her glamorous mother has run off to live a life of luxury on the mainland, and her father is a sea captain off on some voyage. With nowhere else to go, Wise Child winds up living with Juniper, a mysterious woman who lives in a house on a nearby hill and is widely regarded as a witch. The village priest especially seems to fear and dislike her.

I wanted Wise Child’s life, and by extension the attention and care she received from her guardian and mentor.

As it turns out, Juniper is a witch, although she says that’s a vulgar term—instead, she calls herself a doran (the italics are Furlong’s),  which she describes to Wise Child as being someone who has found a way of  perceiving “the pattern” and as a consequence “lives in the rhythm.” The rest of the book is more or less Juniper teaching Wise Child how to be a doran, punctuated by run-ins with Wise Child’s mother, who is up to no good, and the village priest, who thinks Juniper is in league with the devil. Although parts of Wise Child’s journey to becoming a doran involve magic and spells and thrilling rituals, most of it is more prosaic: memorizing herblore, learning Latin, trekking through the countryside to gather ingredients for the healing ointments and poultices they make. But somehow the descriptions of those day to day chores interested me just as much as the chapters about flying on a broom. I loved all of it; it was the kind of book that made me want to step into it and live inside its story. I wanted Juniper’s house with its hearth and its garden and its stone dairy. I wanted her life. I also wanted Wise Child’s life, and by extension the attention and care she received from her guardian and mentor.

Reading Wise Child for the first time made me feel the way I knew I was supposed to feel in church—that sensation of goosebumps mixed with something unlocking inside out and expanding outwards and outwards and outwards. It’s a moment of touching the infinite unknowable, I guess, or a moment when you know that magic or God or whatever is real. Given all of that, maybe it’s not surprising that Monica Furlong devoted most of her life to religious writing, much of it, like Juniper herself, both subversive and progressive. She was particularly interested in the ordination of women in the Church of England, a context in which Wise Child makes perfect sense, since it’s a fantasy about a quasi-religious order in which women are autonomous and powerful spiritual teachers. It’s also a book about religious men who react violently to women who challenge the status quo, and it’s a book about motherhood, or at the very least a book that’s deeply concerned with mothers, biological and otherwise.

Juniper wasn’t just the kind of mother I aspired to be—she was first the kind of mother I wanted to have.

Juniper was the first mother-figure I saw who genuinely seemed to love every part of parenting, who approached it as an interesting and interactive project, who felt like she got as much out of it as she put into it. She also had a real life outside of taking care of  Wise Child, with friends, travel, interests, and, of course, plenty of time for reading. I loved the way she took Wise Child seriously, listening to feedback and admitting when she was wrong; I still remember the sense of injustice I had as a kid about grownups not understanding that I was a fully-formed person with opinions and feelings of my own. But Juniper’s softness didn’t make her a pushover and, even though respectfully listened to Wise Child’s complaints about her chores, she never let her get out of doing them. 

Juniper wasn’t just the kind of mother I aspired to be—she was first the kind of mother I wanted to have. Not exactly in a parenting sense—my own mother was and continues to be wonderful—but almost in a religious sense. I longed for someone who could induct me into the great mysteries of life, who could make me feel a sense of sustained awe about the world, who could teach me to “live in the rhythm” the way Juniper did. I suspect that this was what Furlong had wanted throughout her life too: some kind of spiritual foremother who could model the divine feminine for her. (She even called the goddess Juniper worships “the Mother.”) Wise Child was my introduction to the idea that faith doesn’t have to be prescriptive or dry, that it can be full of that dizzy, expansive joy that I sometimes felt flashes of but could never hold onto for very long. That catch-your-breath goosebumps that I would, later, associate with falling in love.

My nine-year-old son and I have been reading Wise Child at bedtime for the past few weeks. We make a whole ritual out of it, putting a log in the fireplace and getting our pajamas on and generally letting Furlong’s words and the flickering snap of the fire transport us back to Medieval Britain. I’ve been wanting to read this book to him for ages now, but I’ve held off, partly out of selfish fear: what if he doesn’t like it? What if he just doesn’t care? It felt oddly vulnerable to offer this piece of myself up for his judgment.

There is a part towards the end of the book when Wise Child tells Juniper that she is done chasing her biological mother’s love, and that she wants Juniper to be her new mother. I was surprised when my son laughed out loud, saying “that’s not how it works, you can’t choose your mother.” We argued back and forth about the idea of chosen family, but I understand to a certain extent what he means: at nine years old, he doesn’t get to choose much about his life.

But while he might not have chosen me, I chose him, or an idea of him, when I decided to have a kid. Because of that, I gamely worry that I am not living up to that choice, that I am not a good enough mother, that I am not Juniper-caliber. Sometimes motherhood seems both too big and too small. I will never be enough to fill this outsized role, but I also feel confined by it, a sensation that’s been exponentially heightened this year when my son and I have literally been confined together for ten months. I have no problem extending grace to other mothers, quick with a glib “they’re only human” and “we’re all just doing our best,” but there are moments when I know I am not doing my best. Some days—more days than I would like to admit—I am just trying to make it until bedtime.

Then again, life is basically a string of bedtimes, some more anxiously anticipated than others. What I mean by that is: you don’t really get to know the overarching narrative until later, if ever. Juniper takes things hour by hour, for the most part, and then season by season. When Wise Child first comes to live at her house, Juniper’s focus is first on caring for her body: feeding her, washing her hair, giving her a warm nest to sleep in and a chair by the fire. It’s not until Wise Child is physically stronger—like The Secret Garden, one of the pleasures of this book is that it equates eating and gaining weight with happiness—that she can be nurtured in other ways

Sometimes motherhood seems both too big and too small. I will never be enough to fill this outsized role, but I also feel confined by it.

And even though my son believes that you only get one mother in life, the reality is that his life is full of mothers who fill in where I fall short—his aunts, his grandmothers, the summer camp director whose every word he hangs on, the handful of teachers who have seen him for the quirky little joy he is, a constellation of mothers of all genders. If motherhood seems too big sometimes, that’s probably because our modern be-all-end-all conception of what a mother should be describes a role that takes multiple people to fill.

My son likes Wise Child well enough, I think; he reacts, he asks questions, he offers analysis. I don’t know if he’ll ever be the bookish weirdo—he likes being read to, but he’s still not too keen on independent reading—but that’s all right. I didn’t turn out to be much like my mother, but the parts of her that I see in myself are gifts that I appreciate very much. What matters most is that she was present, that she made sure I was clean and fed and had a warm place to sleep and outlets for my interests, even if they were not hers. She was the one who took me to the library and helped me check out stacks of books, who paid off the fines I racked up as my Christmas and birthday presents, who scoured my grandparents’ basement to find the paperbacks she’d loved as a kid. And really, if she didn’t have time to read, whose fault was that? It belongs at least partly to the kid who spent so much time sprawled on the couch with a beat-up Judy Blume instead of doing the bare minimum to help out around the house.

My mother gave me the gift of accessing the enchantment of books; I hope that I help my son find a gateway to a similar feeling, through whatever medium. Even if books aren’t what takes him there, the moments when we read together are still a communion of sorts. We come together and share in this moment, and then we separate. It’s a pattern that will only grow broader as he gets older; the separations will be wider, punctuated by, hopefully, moments of the same old wonder of joining. Maybe that’s living the rhythm, or at least a part of it. Maybe it’s as easy as that.

The First Day and Everything After

Posted on by Alyssa Songsiridej

“After Life” by Joel Cuthbertson

This all really happened to me.

My wife gave birth at exactly 0400 on a Tuesday. She noticed the clock as she pushed our daughter into the world, which should tell you everything you need to know about my wife. She is immaculate. She misses nothing. Our child was issued in confused terror as I began to cry.

“Maybe he wanted a boy,” whispered one of the scrubs.

After stitches, after clean-up, after measurements, the staff gave us one hour alone. We were in awe. Awe felt oddly like incomprehension. Pictures, a lullaby, and phone calls came of their own accord. My wife’s parents insisted via video that our baby was the image of their daughter. The new baby, they squealed, like our old baby. They assumed her, which made me jealous. They were certain of her and themselves and knew the next time they’d sleep. The jealousy increased.

Once our hour was over, the labor nurse told us to pack up, fetched a wheelchair, and escorted us from the scene of contest. The recovery floor was older, dimmer. The paintings in the gray hallways were all the same colors as each other, in the same teakwood frames. Even the faces were softer than labor and delivery, the nurses clustering at their desks socially. Their counterparts upstairs huddled too, but with an air of war.

Every RN shoved a pacifier into our daughter’s mouth with verve—stirred, moved, manipulated. Our daughter’s mouth was often open, was not always crying, was searching with small aperture movements, narrowing, widening. I couldn’t describe her to you. She was eyes and lips and nose all topped with wild, dark-brown hair. A baby. Absolutely individual.

Each recovery room contained two beds, but they tried not to double-book so that Dad could have a place to rest. And everyone said “Dad” just like that. Universal Dad, a Platonic oomph in the phrasing, Dad as a form that Moms might invoke, a wandering accessory all Moms could contain. If she was lucky. One nurse said Partner. There was a TV we didn’t expect and uncomfortable chairs, one of them wide enough we assumed it had something to do with nursing. It was too small for two people, insulting for one large person. We tried to ignore it, but it was always in the way. They’d thought in excess of the things we might need, and it annoyed us. A medium-sized, small-city hospital. What there was of downtown pressed at the drafty window.

The weight of our half-used blankets, the streetlights’ sour glow, even the splay of my wife’s hair, its vitality and near-agency—there was more I remember. But we must get to the story.

I took the baby from my wife, the morning still dark with winter clouds, and walked the cold linoleum in overused socks. Our girl, her cone head, the joints at elbows and knees loose, pliable. I still didn’t recognize her, which surprised and slightly worried me, but I was drawn by her. I could feel myself circling and circling her, our living gravity well. She’d come out crying and staring. When she closed her eyelids something seemed to shut off in the room, and still we orbited. We warped around her mentally and physically and were distended with new paradigms of self and meaning. It was that quick.

One day, I realized, I wouldn’t be here. I would die. The proof was in my arms.

Mammals abounded as comparisons. Her mouse hands. Her marmot tummy.

As I paced, she cried more loudly. I bobbed on the balls of my feet, imitating Dad bounces and Dad noises. She’d eaten, she’d been changed. I focused on her weight in my arms. There was not a next, simply a hope she might respond favorably to my performance. There was step after step after step.

One day, I realized, I wouldn’t be here. I would die. The proof was in my arms. After a time, the proof fell asleep.

My wife jerked awake at the silence. I whispered my epiphany.

“That actually makes a lot of sense.”

“She wasn’t here before.”

“Exactly.”

“People can not be here.”

“Yes, yes. Exactly,” said my wife. We’d never done drugs, but we figured this was about the gist of it. Everything was irradiated and unspeakable. We fell asleep looking at each other across the visage of our invented, incarnate mewling. I was in the second bed parallel to hers, the baby in the rolling carrier between us. A plastic tub on a makeshift dresser, with wheels. Her first home. The sun still wasn’t up but I could see the reassuring lines on my wife’s forehead in the blue light. When the baby didn’t cry out for half an hour, I woke and stared at her chest. It rose. It fell. I drifted uncertainly.

We were roused at eight or nine o’clock in the morning by a new nurse. She was a middle-aged, middle-heavy woman with a reassuring mien. Her hair was nurse-tight, her shoes nurse-practical. She spoke nursely.

She bathed our daughter, talking the whole time. “I always give one piece of advice because parents these days are so focused on experts and opinions and all that. Oops”—to the baby—“did that surprise you? Anyway, I like to remind everyone that there is still such a thing as instinct. I had my dad living with me, and he’s older. A few years ago he gets a fever, he’s got some belly pains. So I call the doctor, right?”

My wife gripped the sheets as the nurse submerged our daughter beneath a faucet.

“We gave my dad some acetaminophen to lower his temperature, and because the temperature comes down, the doctor says give it some time. Well, I know it’s probably nothing, but I have this bad feeling. I lean into this feeling. And I swear, I don’t know what you believe, I don’t know what you think, but I heard a voice. A man’s voice spoke right to me, and said, ‘Go now.’ I got my dad in the car and we raced to the ER. What do you think? Diverticulitis, and it was bad. He probably would have died.”

“What, what did the voice sound like?” I asked.

“It saved my father’s life.”

“‘He,’ you said. ‘A man.’”

“Oh, it certainly was.”

We watched our daughter as she was enfolded by the nurse’s towel, her squirming limbs, her voice cawing with uncertainty. Ten months ago there wasn’t a baby who shared my genes and now there was. Zoom out. There wasn’t, and now there was. The nurse never told me how the voice sounded. The nurse, with one aside, began this whole tale for me. She left, and I took our daughter into my arms.

We didn’t have any family in town, but friends were expected. When they arrived we played hosts for our own comfort. Drinks? You must try the ice. Nothing like hospital ice. I pushed the ice too hard. We kept the door open for some reason. Sarah was my closest friend from college, and she’d come with her husband. As with serial killers, so with baby lovers: Sarah cataloged body parts.

“Look at her toes. Her hands. She grips so well! And those feet. They keep folding in prayer. I want to eat them.”

“And all she needs is breast milk. Can you believe that?” said Micah, her husband, who had no children or even the ability to lactate.

We made small talk and batted about innocuous predictions for our daughter’s life. I can’t remember any of them. I wish I could, but that conversation was built on somnolent good manners, and blurs into what comes next.

This, finally, is the story.

Outside our room, there was a sudden shift in the white noise, as if someone changed the channel. Pressure built in the air from unseen, frantic movements. I was alert to sounds in crescendo, one voice calling to another. An aide rushed past. Then three nurses.

“Oh my God,” said my wife.

Our daughter began to cry in Sarah’s arms. Stunned, we asked each other urgent, obvious questions. “Has something happened?”

Micah assumed the role of common sense. “It’s probably nothing. Something in the nursery maybe. A scared parent.”

“I kept waking up this morning, just to see if she was still breathing,” I said.

“Exactly. The staff is just being safe.”

Doctors appeared as well, jogging the way all doctors jog, hands clapped on their writhing stethoscopes.

Go. Now.

A voice spoke to me. A Voice.

Go. Now. I shivered.

I didn’t, however, listen. I nodded in concert with Micah to calm myself, to ensure proper reaction. “Everything’s fine,” I told my wife. “Don’t they announce a code if something goes wrong?”

“Code Pink, I think,” said Sarah. “Like, if a baby is stolen.” I acted as if, yes, that’s exactly what I meant.

“That’s exactly what I meant,” I said. “If we even get on the wrong elevator and have her with us, they announce Code…Kidnap. They shut the hospital down.”

“And wouldn’t there be more people?” said Micah. “There weren’t that many nurses.”

Our daughter kept crying in Sarah’s arms, but with less vigor.

Someone screamed. An animal noise. Not a child.

The scream sounded a second time and my wife asked to have our daughter back and as Sarah handed her over she said, “We should see what’s going on,” and I said, “We’d get in the way,” and Micah said, “Maybe we should close the door. We don’t want to be insensitive,” and I thought, great, even Micah realizes something awful has taken place. He was balding. The Voice remained silent.

“Go see what it is,” said my wife, and the Voice, it said nothing, but I remembered the tone, it seemed embedded in her words. Careful and practical and insistent, she nodded at me again. “Go see what it is.”

Go. Now. So I went.

Other patients and their families were poking their heads from behind doors, but no one ventured forth. A conspiracy of Dads nodded me along the corridor but stayed in their rooms. I was walking in the correct direction without thinking. There was a small crowd of medical professionals at the end of the hall, instruments lifeless. An otherwise empty desk was crowded by two janitors and their carts. They must have already been on the floor. I could hear sobbing, but no more screams.

A security guard rounded the corner and stopped me before I reached the hidden spectacle. The sobbing grew distinct. The guard put his hand in the air to cease and desist me, and I agreed with him. I wanted to stop.

“Unless there’s a problem, sir, please stay in your room.” He was short and very fat. All the worst of me was bubbling to the surface. I stared past him, down the antiseptic corridor, all the heads of the other Dads behind me, and I knew I shouldn’t go any further.

“What happened?” I said.

More sobbing. The two janitors were pushing their mops back and forth, idle. The wheels on the buckets squeaked.

“Sir, please return to your room.”

There was the sound of feet walking on glass mingled with great blubs of emotion and urgent conversations in the hall. Nurses speaking to nurses speaking to doctors and the doctors shaking their heads, clueless, without any answer. The sobbing continued as I turned back toward my room. My daughter was in this hospital. A Dad.

A man named Greg pulled me to his doorway. We’d met and quickly bonded at the ice machine. He was burdened with multiple kids and wore a face that said as much, a manager at a car dealership who played music in clubs on the weekend. He guided my arm before I understood what was taking place, his six-year-old son hanging on the door beside him.

“Did you see anything?” he whispered.

“No, the guard asked me to turn back.”

“Awful. It’s awful.”

“What happened?”

“No, it’s better not to know. You can’t control these things. Some things are better with blinders, New Dad.”

“Hey,” I told him. He was older, pudgy in a confident way, his knit polo battered but expensive. “What the hell happened?”

Greg bobbed his head, leaned closer. “A baby died.”

I swayed. Sometimes Dads sway. Sometimes they reach for the doorframe and picture their daughter’s silhouette stilled, still.

Greg kept speaking, was electrified to finish what he’d been allowed to start.

“Okay, but that’s not the worst of it.” He shooed his son back from the door. “I mean, I guess the father about bum-rushed the nurses’ desk and said their baby wasn’t breathing, I don’t have a lot of details on that, but then all these people started rushing toward the room. I went there myself. The mom’s crying, okay? The father was holding his head and the mom was crying and the father started banging his head against the wall and wailing and, well, they told him to stop. I was still in the hallway, you know. No one could have guessed what was going to happen. No one. He stopped banging his head and so I turned away.”

“He was just banging his head?”

“Yeah, but as I’m walking away I hear glass break, shatter I mean, and so I hurry back. They have the door open, you know. No HIPPA in an emergency, I guess. Nobody’s thinking. There’s a dead baby, isn’t there? That should be enough, right? But the guy jumped, apparently. I saw a lamp on the floor, that wide-ass chair turned over. I dunno. It was chaos. People were rushing around, others were kind of stunned. No one was ready for that. But yeah, somehow he broke the window and jumped. He killed himself, the coward.”

Oh, I thought. Coward. I was swallowing a lot and not speaking. Greg patted my shoulder and I hurried back to my own wife, my own child, Sarah and Micah waiting for news, police surging out of the elevator, sirens outside, but then this was a hospital, there’d been sirens all night. Coward. Greg was already summarizing, narrating, drawing moral conclusions. I saw nothing, not even the aftermath, and I was blank. I could barely remember the words. He broke the window and jumped.

“Down that way!” someone directed the police, uniforms who jingled deadly metal.

Positions in our room had remained the same. My wife clutched our daughter, Sarah sat on the windowsill, her finger clasped in our newborn’s fist, Micah in the too-wide chair at the base of the bed. I saw his serious face, his slow-blinking eyes.

“It’s not good.” I felt embarrassed but continued. “Very bad. A baby, I guess, I mean, a baby died just down the hall.”

“Holy hell.”

“I knew it,” said my wife, whispering into our daughter’s back. “I knew it. I knew it.”

She moved our daughter from one shoulder to the other. Babies were transferred like that. They were carried through the world and bobbed outlook to outlook, their vantage adjusted, predetermined.

Micah became aggressively reasonable. “So why are there police?”

I didn’t know how to deflect, how to massage the information.

“The, the father jumped,” I sputtered.

“Like, out the window, jumped?” said Sarah.

“Oh my God. I knew it. I knew it.” My wife eyed our window, studied its latch.

Sarah shifted her weight, wanted to reach for my wife, our baby, me, to comfort us, I assume. She grew fidgety. Micah began pacing, filling the room with his purposeful reflection. I tried not to recall the Voice and watched my wife. She wanted to be alone, wanted to turn off the lights, probably, to simulate a cave of primordial solitude where she could hold our child in private. I wanted the same, but neither of us was capable of saying so.

“He must have already been very unstable,” said Micah. “Mentally, I mean.”

“He was banging his head against the wall, I guess, and then, yeah, he jumped.”

“And no one stopped him?”

“They tried, I think. There weren’t enough of them, maybe.”

Micah paused. “Or he just surprised them. Who expects something that bad to get worse?”

I hadn’t, and I told myself I hadn’t, and I repeated such to the doubts in my head that remembered and rehearsed the Voice’s command to Go, now. The doubts were trying to calculate the exact timing of my inaction.

Two police officers escorted a crying nurse past our room. I recognized her. The nurse whose father had almost died from diverticulitis. But he hadn’t. She’d saved him.

Time passed. Probably. Some aide asked if we needed anything. There was the back and forth of many official-looking persons, not only medical or police but business suits, probably the hospital administration, maybe its lawyers. At some point, an officer came by and Micah stepped forward, taking control, the type of civilian who nods at soldiers in uniform and the soldiers nod back. He told the officer we hadn’t seen anything, and the officer wanted me to confirm this, mentioned a security guard who’d made a note of my room number, who’d managed to describe me, as if I’d been in a lineup, as if there was something to accuse me of, and there wasn’t. I concurred with Micah and said I’d done nothing. I said, with anger for some reason, “I didn’t even see the guy jump.” Everything I told him was true and innocuous, but it felt like a lie. 

“Your baby is beautiful,” said the officer. Then he left.

Sarah and Micah settled on the other hospital bed, Micah with his hand on his coat, Sarah inching away from it. Our daughter was asleep in my wife’s lap and my wife was staring out the window. She couldn’t take her eyes from the glass, her ghost in its image, her own features of soft, quiet uncertainty. My wife folded the tips of her fingers into our daughter, talon-like, fierce.

“No more police,” said Micah.

“So quiet,” said Sarah.

They’d stayed here much longer than they planned, but they didn’t know how to escape.

I suppose we heard the group before we saw them. An entourage wheeled the bereaved mother through the hallway toward the elevators. She was younger than I wanted to know and slumped in her wheelchair. Someone had to place her arm back in her lap. Drugged, I guessed. The hospital didn’t have a psych ward, but maybe she was being taken to the morgue for the father, or for the baby.

I searched for a small package, for I didn’t know what. A box. A bag. A doll’s form trailing in the grip of some orderly. There was a presence on the mother’s knees, a glimpse, and then they were gone. She, like a negative of ourselves, was also never going to sleep again. I played out strange scenarios where I wrestled the father to the ground, possibly beat him as a way to save him. I hurt him and tied him and consoled him and yelled at him to look at his wife, to witness her, and he lived, he was alive because of me. Go. Now.

Tomorrow, they were sending this baby home with us forever.

43 Books By Women of Color to Read in 2021

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

This is the fifth year I’ve put together a list of books I’m anticipating by women writers of color, a catalog I started assembling because, in 2016, I found I had trouble finding such upcoming books. It occurred to me that if I published this list, others might find it useful.

The list turned out to be one of Electric Literature’s most shared pieces for the year, and, to my surprise and delight, I’m often told it helps inform school syllabi and other publications’ books coverage. My extravagant hope is that, one day, publishing will be so inclusive, so much more reflective of an increasingly and splendidly diverse country, that we’ll have no need for such a list. Today, plainly, is not that day; as recently as 2018, white people wrote 89 percent of the books published by major publishing companies. 

One day, publishing will be so inclusive that we’ll have no need for such a list. Today, plainly, is not that day.

A few words on methodology: this is one list, necessarily incomplete, of books I’m personally anticipating. If you see a book missing and want to support it, a good way to do so is by preordering it from your local independent bookstore, requesting it from the library, shouting about it from social-media rooftops, or hey, all of the above. 

In the past couple of years, I’d expanded the list to nonbinary writers; this year, though, I’ve increasingly heard from nonbinary writers that it can be preferable to avoid grouping nonbinary people with women. Accordingly, though I’m eagerly anticipating 2021 books from nonbinary writers of color including Akwaeke Emezi, Rivers Solomon, and Emery Lee, this year I limited this list to forthcoming books from women. The term “of color” is also a flawed, complex label with ever-changing valences—one increasingly replaced by the more specific “Black, Indigenous, and of color,” or BIPOC—and I imagine these categories will keep adapting to better suit our rapidly shifting world. 

Please join me in rejoicing over these 43 upcoming novels, memoirs, and collections by women writers of color: though the year ahead looks terribly uncertain, we’ll have these books, and hallelujah.

January

Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

I’ve been looking forward to this awhile: a memoir and first book from the Whiting Award-winning Nadia Owusu, one that traverses countries and languages. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah says Aftershocks is “a majestically rendered telling of all the history, hurt, and love a body can contain.”

Eman Quotah, Bride of the Sea 

This debut novel is about a newlywed couple in Cleveland whose marriage ends shortly after their first child is born. When the father returns to Saudi Arabia, the mother, afraid of losing her daughter, disappears with their child.

Danielle Geller, Dog Flowers 

I first read Geller’s work in a striking New Yorker piece in which she annotated the first page of the first Navajo-English dictionary with her history. In this memoir, Geller returns home after her mother dies, finds eight suitcases filled with her mother’s life, and sets out to better understand her family history.

Koa Beck, White Feminism 

From the former editor-in-chief of Jezebel, this book examines the history of feminism. Patrisse Khan-Cullors—cofounder of Black Lives Matter—says Beck “illuminates the broad landscapes of systemic oppression and demands that white feminism evolve lest it continue to be as oppressive as the patriarchy.”

FEBRUARY

Dantiel W. Moniz, Milk Blood Heat

O, The Oprah Magazine says that, in this debut story collection, “like Danielle Evans and Lauren Groff, Moniz is unafraid to expose the darkened corners of the Sunshine State, and of female desire.” Moniz’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere.

Patricia Engel, Infinite Country 

I’ve admired Engel’s writing a long time, and her new book deepened that admiration. An exquisitely told story of family, war, and migration, this is a novel our increasingly divided country wants and needs to read.

Isabel Yap, Never Have I Ever 

A debut collection from Small Beer Press, Never Have I Ever combines fabulism, horror, and science fiction. Charlie Jane Anders says that “these gorgeous stories will help you to glimpse a world that is both stranger and more immense and varied than any you’ve visited before.”

Randa Jarrar, Love Is an Ex-Country 

I love Jarrar’s writing, and Love Is an Ex-Country is a memoir about a cross-country road trip inspired by an Egyptian belly dancer’s 1940s journey across America. The book is also, wonderfully, about claiming joy. Carmen Maria Machado calls it “a perfect, unforgettable howl of a book,” and Myriam Gurba says Jarrar is “the Arab femme daddy” of her dreams. 

Leesa Cross-Smith, This Close to Okay 

This Close to Okay is about two strangers, a therapist and a man on a bridge, who share a life-changing weekend. Cross-Smith’s writing is reliably a delight—Roxane Gay has called her “a consummate storyteller”—and in a time of such isolation, a novel about strangers coming together seems especially appealing.

Rebecca Carroll, Surviving the White Gaze 

Carroll, a WNYC cultural critic and podcast host, has previously published interview-based books; now, she’s written a memoir about growing up as the only Black person in her New Hampshire town, and about adoption, belonging, and racism. I would pick this book up based on the title alone.

Te-Ping Chen, Land of Big Numbers 

A debut story collection about people in China as well as the country’s diaspora, from a Wall Street Journal reporter who was previously a correspondent in Beijing and Hong Kong. Madeleine Thien says that “Te-Ping Chen has a superb eye for detail in a China where transformation occurs simultaneously too fast and too slow for lives in pursuit of meaning in a brave new world.”

MARCH

Naima Coster, What’s Mine and Yours (Hachette) 

From the author of Halsey Street comes an explosive saga about two North Carolinian families on different sides of a high-school integration initiative. An unfailingly generous and compassionate novel.

Mary H.K. Choi, Yolk

In my household, we are such admirers of Choi’s fiction that we tussle over who gets to be first in reading advance copies of her books. Yolk is about two sisters carving out lives in New York City, and about the evolution of their complicated relationship after one of the sisters receives a cancer diagnosis. Moving and funny and trenchant.

Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie 

If you’re not already reading Kaitlyn Greenidge’s writing, you’re missing out. I remember first hearing Greenidge read a decade ago at the Sunday Salon reading series in New York, and knowing I had to keep following her work. Libertie, Greenidge’s second novel, is inspired by the life of one of the first Black woman doctors in the U.S. during Reconstruction-era Brooklyn.

Angeline Boulley, Firekeeper’s Daughter 

A young-adult thriller about an Ojibwe teenager who becomes involved in an FBI investigation of a lethal drug, Firekeeper’s Daughter has drawn comparison to books by Angie Thomas and Tommy Orange.

Gabriela Garcia, Of Women and Salt 

Another book I’ve anticipated for a while, Of Women and Salt is a debut novel about the daughter of a Cuban immigrant, Jeanette, who takes in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Garcia has worked as an organizer in migrant rights movements, and Terese Marie Mailhot says Garcia’s novel is a “true and profound work on migration, legacy, and survival.”

Helen Oyeyemi, Peaces

In Oyeyemi’s new novel, a couple and their pet mongoose get on a sleeper train called The Lucky Day, and it seems as though they’re the only people on the train. Mysteries and improbabilities abound; if you’re familiar with Oyeyemi’s wildly inventive fiction, you know it’s impossible to know what happens next.

Hala Alyan, The Arsonists’ City 

I’ve been on the lookout for Hala Alyan’s work ever since I read an unforgettable poem of hers last fall. From the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, The Arsonists’ City is a story of a far-flung family that returns to Beirut when the patriarch decides to sell their ancestral home.

Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense 

Silence Is a Sense is a novel about a Syrian woman left mute by the trauma of war and migration. She leads an isolated life in an English city until she begins writing for a magazine and venturing into surrounding communities.

Jamie Figueroa, Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer 

A ghost-beset, angel-haunted novel, Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer is about a woman trying desperately to help her sibling. Tiphanie Yanique says the book “begins in prayer and does what prayer does–gives us hope, reveals our deepest griefs, and sometimes even redeems.”

Imbolo Mbue, How Beautiful We Were 

Set in a fictional town in Africa called Kosawa, Mbue’s expansive, suspenseful new novel is about a community that fights back against dictatorship and environmental pollution. A saga told from the perspective of a generation of children, as well as the family of a girl who grows up to become a revolutionary.

APRIL 

Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Knopf)) 

I’ve been waiting for this book since reading Zauner’s incandescent short piece about grieving her mother’s death. Zauner, who is also known as the indie rockstar Japanese Breakfast, has written a memoir about food, mourning, race, music, and Koreanness.

Anjali Enjeti, Southbound; also, in May, The Parted Earth 

You might have seen a lot of Enjeti’s name lately, as she’s the co-founder of They See Blue, a grassroots organization focused on South Asian American voters. They See Blue has been heavily involved in the elections in Georgia, and a good way to thank Enjeti for her work would be to preorder her first book, Southbound, a collection of essays about social change and identity. She’s also publishing her first novel, The Parted Earth, in May.

Elissa Washuta, White Magic 

A new book from the formidable Elissa Washuta, this time an essay collection about land, colonization, and witchery. Melissa Febos says it’s “a bracingly original work that enthralled me in a hypnosis on the other side of which I was changed for the better, more likely to trust my own strange intelligence.”

Kirstin Valdez Quade, Five Wounds 

I’ve loved Quade’s writing for years, and her first novel, Five Wounds, is about five generations of the New Mexican Padilla family and a new baby. “All the fabulous mess of humanity is, somehow, in these pages,” says C Pam Zhang. 

Syan Rose, Our Work Is Everywhere

In this graphic nonfiction book, subtitled as “An Illustrated Oral History of Queer and Trans Resistance,” queer and trans organizers, artists, leaders, and others speak in their own words about their experiences with resistance and justice.

Yang Huang, My Good Son 

Huang’s second novel is about a tailor living in post-Tiananmen China who hopes to send his son Feng to the U.S. to study. He asks an American customer for help sponsoring Feng, and what results for the tailor and his family shines a light on vast, abiding disparities in opportunity.

Morgan Jerkins, Caul Baby 

A woman who desperately wants a child, and whose previous pregnancies have ended in sorrow, turns to magic in the form of a powerful family’s healing abilities. Caul Baby is a debut novel from Jerkins, who has written two previous nonfiction books and is a contributing editor at Zora.

Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts 

Whereabouts is the first novel in almost a decade from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lahiri, and it’s about a woman who both wants to belong and has trouble forming lasting ties. Intriguingly, Lahiri first wrote this book in Italian—a language she started learning relatively recently—then translated it into English.

MAY

Stacey Abrams, While Justice Sleeps

The incredible Abrams has not only devoted herself for years to voting rights in Georgia and elsewhere, but she also has written nine romantic-suspense thrillers under the name Selena Montgomery. While Justice Sleeps will be the first novel she’ll publish as Stacey Abrams, and the book is centered on lifetime appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court, and on what can happen when one person has too much control over the country. May this book absolutely thrive.

Larissa Pham, Pop Song 

A debut memoir-in-essays about love and art, featuring the work of Anne Carson, Frank Ocean, and Agnes Martin, among others. “There are so many times in my past when reading Pop Song could have saved my life,” says Esmé Weijun Wang. “It may very well save yours.” 

Linda Rui Feng, Swimming Back to Trout River 

Feng’s debut is about a ten-year-old girl in a small Chinese village in 1986 whose parents live in America and have promised to return by her twelfth birthday. A novel about longing and secrets and immigrant compromises, one Garth Greenwell calls one of the most beautiful debuts he’s read in years.

JUNE

Ashley C. Ford, Somebody’s Daughter

I’ll jump to read Ford’s writing, and this is her first book, a memoir about her childhood with a father in prison. Her writing shines with extraordinary insight and grace, and Somebody’s Daughter is a book so many of you will want to read.

Zakiya Harris, The Other Black Girl 

A debut novel about two young Black women who meet in the predominantly white world of publishing in New York, from a writer who’s worked as an editor at Knopf. Attica Locke calls The Other Black Girl “the funniest, wildest, deepest, most thought-provoking ride of a book.”

AUGUST

Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts 

This is another book I’ve been anticipating for years, as I’ve long admired Kat Chow’s work with NPR Code Switch. Chow’s memoir is a debut centered on her mother’s death, and Jacqueline Woodson says it’s “a love song to loss, to family, to the power of writing things down and remembering.” 

Carolina De Robertis, The President and the Frog 

The President and the Frog is about the former president of an unnamed Latin American country, and a long conversation he has in his lush presidential gardens with a journalist. De Robertis’s large-hearted fiction is always a boon, and I’m so glad we’ll have more of it soon.

Anna Qu, Made in China

In this debut memoir, Qu tells the story of how, as a teenager in Queens, she was sent to work in her family garment factory, and was punished for doing her homework. Qu alerted the Office of Children and Family Services, and what resulted had lasting consequences she explores in what Alexandra Chang calls “a sympathetic, brave portrayal of the confusions, difficulties, and hurts that come with growing up between worlds.”

Fall onwards

Imani Perry, South to America

Perry is another writer whose work I’ve loved following for years. She is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, and her remarkable writing and scholarship mostly focus on Black thought and imagination. The nonfiction South to America takes readers on a trip through the American South, which, Perry argues, is the American heartland.

Munroe Bergdorf, Transitional

Transitional is the first book from the groundbreaking Black trans activist and model Bergdorf, who was named Changemaker of the Year by Cosmopolitan. Described as a gender manifesto arguing that everyone experiences transitions of many kinds, Transitional also examines the history of gender throughout the world.

Natashia Deón, The Perishing

NAACP Image Award Nominee Natashia Deón’s first novel was a revelation, and she returns with The Perishing, a portrait of a Black immortal woman in 1930s Los Angeles trying to save the world.

Zeba Blay, Carefree Black Girls

This collection of essays by culture writer Blay celebrates influential Black women throughout history, including Josephine Baker, Rihanna, and Cardi B. 

Chibundu Onuzu, Sankofa

From the writer of the moving Welcome to Lagos, this novel follows the life of a biracial woman who learns that her father was a radical who became a controversial leader of his West African country.

I Will Never Watch “Children of Men” the Same Way Again

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

I was 23 the first time I saw Children of Men. I had graduated from college and was working an administrative job and trying to figure out how to be a writer. I lived in a little house with my boyfriend; we had a clothesline and a garden; sometimes I felt very old, but I was very young.

For those who haven’t seen it, Children of Men is about the end of humanity. Women have become infertile, so no new children are born; as the human race ages into obsolescence, society breaks down. Misery reigns and a suicide drug called Quietus becomes a popular way out. Amid all this, Clive Owen’s character, a disaffected former activist named Theo, takes on an impossible task: shepherding a young pregnant woman—the first in decades—past phalanx after phalanx of men with guns to a ship off the coast of Britain that will take her and her baby to safety. Along the way, nearly everyone he has ever loved is killed before his eyes.

It’s a dark film, to say the least. But I left the theater with a sense of lifting joy.

The apocalypse was a crucible, I felt, for heroism. I loved to write stories about ordinary people showing extraordinary strength at the end of the world.

Why did I love the end of the world so much? Part of it was the privilege, surely, of growing up white and middle-class in pre-9/11 America. I was safe in my home and my city as a child, my life was orderly, and so I had the luxury of seeing danger as excitement.

But there was also something specific about stories of apocalypse that appealed to me, starting when I was very young. When asked to explain it I would say that when civilization begins to fall, when humanity itself is on the brink, that’s when we will be morally tested as people. The apocalypse was a crucible, I felt, for heroism. I loved to write stories about ordinary people showing extraordinary strength at the end of the world. These people were always girls: girls riding through ruined cities on horseback, or captaining boats across a poisoned ocean.

Now I think those girls were the heroes I thought I could be, if called upon. Some part of me thought it would be thrilling to be called.

That thrill sizzled in my brain as I watched Children of Men in the fall of 2006. It was around that time that I began to write my first novel, about a girl who becomes a leader in a world ravaged by climate change. 

I knew the climate was already changing. That same year, I visited a research station in the rainforest and listened to a scientist talk about the trees he measured. As the nights grew hotter, the trees shrank, and as the trees shrank, the nights grew hotter. I asked him what he would say to people who didn’t believe in climate change. He looked at me like I was from outer space.

“I live in the rainforest,” he said. “Everyone believes in climate change here.”

But I did not live in the rainforest. I believed, but that belief was abstract to me. I went to graduate school. I wrote and dreamed and marched with the rest of humanity towards our end.

I can’t tell you exactly when I started being afraid. Maybe it’s not interesting: the moment when someone who’s felt safe all her life realizes she’s just the tiniest bit unsafe.

Maybe it’s not interesting: the moment when someone who’s felt safe all her life realizes she’s just the tiniest bit unsafe.

But what I can say is there came a point when my dreams of the end of the world began to change. A few years ago—it’s almost embarrassing to talk about 2016 but sure, around then—I started writing about farmers. 

These farmers lived at the edge of the forest, in quiet country. Far away, the cities lay empty, the highways overgrown. Sometimes my characters made mention of a great war. Other times the tragedy went unnamed.

But whatever had happened in their past, these people were not fighting any longer. They were growing vegetables and canning them for the winter. They were raising sheep and goats. Sometimes they had a dance with dandelion wine.

My farm stories were post-apocalyptic in a sense. But they were not dystopian. They described not a hell on Earth but simply an Earth, a place where, after terrible pain, people go on living. 

After a while I started writing a novel from those stories. As happens, almost everything I started with, I later winnowed away. But what I kept was an idea about fiction in dark times, or fiction about dark times—that it can serve as a laboratory of different ways to be. After the world ends, before it became the way it is. The infinite variety of ways to make a life, a town, a world’s worth of lives.

There’s a girl on horseback in my novel—old habits die hard. But I don’t know if she’s a hero. I’m older now and I’ve been, as have we all, morally tested by a pandemic and an administration that separates parents from their children and sends troops in unmarked vans to hunt down Black people in American cities. I don’t know how well I’ve done on any of these tests, and I’m certainly not excited for more of them, though they come every day. Living in what can feel like the end of the world, I have no illusions about my own heroism.

Living in what can feel like the end of the world, I have no illusions about my own heroism. But I do want to think about how we will survive together.

But I do want to think about how we will survive together, and how we humans might care for each other after modernity, or late capitalism, or whatever you’d call the blasted era in which we live. These are the stories I want to tell now, not dystopias but simply topias, stories of people making a place for one another in the world.

I rewatched Children of Men the other day. I’m 37 years old now; I have a two-year-old son. We put him in a little mask when we take him to the park, so he doesn’t give or get a deadly virus. My appetite for dystopia has never been lower—at night I want cooking shows, or dramas about the English landed gentry. Still, I was curious. I wanted to see how the end of the world hit me now.

Turns out I’d forgotten almost everything about this movie. Spoilers follow: the world’s youngest person, age 18, dies at the very beginning. His baby pictures, splashed across TV screens within the TV, nearly destroyed me. Also, the main character has lost his only child, a little son, to a flu pandemic. Upon learning this I had to disengage and look up biographies of the actors on Wikipedia. Clive Owen, it turns out, is a fan of the soccer team Liverpool FC. Julianne Moore writes children’s books.

As I acclimated, I could see glimpses of what I’d loved so much back in 2006—the intrigue of the plot, the code names, the way Theo makes contact with the underground through posters reading “Have you seen this dog?” I remembered the humor and ease with which Clare-Hope Ashitey plays the pregnant Kee, a light in the darkness.

And then there were things I’d never seen. I’d always thought of Children of Men as a movie about Theo and Kee, persevering against all odds, heroes saving a fallen—or at least falling—world. What I saw this time was the way that world comes toward them, gathering around them and embracing them, even and especially when the danger is greatest.

What I saw this time was the way that world comes toward them, even and especially when the danger is greatest.

There’s the old activist, Jasper—Michael Caine in long hair and a Fair Isle sweater—who gives his life to save Theo and Kee. There’s the midwife, Miriam, who cares for Kee and ends up giving her life, too. There’s Marichka, the woman in the refugee camp who helps Theo, Kee, and Kee’s tiny baby get into the rowboat that will take them to safety.

And then there are the men who pause in their shooting and shelling to let Kee and her child go past. The refugees who reach out to them in adoration even as a battle rages. The animals—cows and sheep and, in particular, dogs—who seem to draw near to them as though called.

Children of Men is a hero story, sure. And it’s a dystopia, most definitely. But it’s also a story about community—people who come together, even if briefly, to protect those among them most in need of protection.

I’m not going to be naive and say this kind of community is going to protect us, in the real world, from what’s coming or what’s already here. But it’s where my eye goes, as a writer and a person, at this time in my life and the life of the world. It’s what allows me to look at all that’s falling and try to see what might rise.

10 Feminist Retellings of Mythology

Posted on by Jo Lou

Truth be told, I loathe re-imaginings of myths. The impulse feels reformist rather than revolutionary. I find these renderings on the whole stale and striving, hubristically clever, empty adaptations overly attached to their sources. They trip over their own longing for narrative’s initial hit of euphoria or devastation and slip misty-eyed into nostalgia. Maybe that makes my list invalid, or maybe that makes the books on it exceptional, which they all are. 

With that out of the way, I’ll start all over. At the end of story-telling is myth-making: exhausted, stripped down narrative, pure grammar crystalized into affect. And when it’s good, it’s very-very good, a risk with the added danger of feeling safe. Myth-structure holds the power to awaken us to our own history and also to make ourselves into strangers. In Saturation Project, I adopted myth in the first section as a way of finding a repressed girlhood. The story of Atalanta, broken and re-set askew in tiny cages of self-conscious self-mythologizing, led me into my own memory and located a specialized knowledge that accommodated both unruly wildernesses and intense interiorities. 

Though my book is memoir, fiction immediately comes to mind for the epic task of feminist re-mythologizing. Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Madeline Miller, Sarah Ruhl, Natalie Haynes, and Emily Hauser, for instance, all retell the Trojan War from the perspective of the women in the background. Hashtag we love to see it. Moving in and out of myth though offers writers a little more room to play and to surprise.

Image result for jesmyn ward salvage the bones

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

I exchanged letters last year with a writer incarcerated in Texas (through Deb Olin Unferth’s marvelous PenCity Writers Program) about Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. He was especially vivid at accounting for the way Ward uses fractured and recombinant myth (ancient Greek, biblical, American South) to pick up narrative speed.

“Triptych: Texas Pool Party” in Triple Canopy Magazine by Namwali Serpell

My students in a text image class gravitated to a breath-taking moment in Namwali Serpell’s “Triptych: Texas Pool Party”  that adopts the Perseus myth briefly to economize the narrative. The piece—a three-part fictional re-telling of news story captured on video of a Texas pool party in which a white police officer assaulted a 15-year-old Black girl in 2015—shifts point of view midway, pivots into heroic rhetoric, its tyrannies and fallacies, to reveal the real monsters in our midst (despite the grand jury declining to indict the offending officer).

Antígona González by Sara Uribe, translated by John Pluecker

Two weeks before the end of 2020, I listened, rapt, to a bilingual choral zoom reading of Sara Uribe’s Antígona González by Rosa Alcalá, Susan Briante, giovanni singleton, Carmen Giménez Smith, and Anna Maria Hong. Antigone is already feminist, but this updating of her story concentrates thousands and decades of missing bodies, missing family and friends, in Mexico into a singular grief, a singular search and standing before the law. I rely on communal contexts because they signal conversation like a counterpunch that explodes into a contrapuntal extended dance remix. In other words, these books, equal parts inventive and disruptive, aim to take back patriarchy’s tools in order to dismantle its house (versioning Audre Lorde, an autopoetic myth-maker herself).

Under Everything by Daisy Johnson

Daisy Johnson’s Under Everything hijacks the Oedipus cycle with fairy tale riffs and fingerings. Her Jocasta-figure steps from the shadows into a visceral presence; her Oedipus is trans. The novel’s gorgeous prose immerses us in fluidity—gender, sexuality, memory, language—yet that very mutability, its queer, abolitionist currents, determines “everything” eternally. 

Fablesque by Anna Maria Hong

All of Anna Maria Hong’s books feature fabulous feminist retellings—I name her Queen and King of the genre! —that disenchant narrative form as a vector of cultural myths. Her latest, Fablesque, features détournementsof Siren, Ouranus, and Kronos, from the Greco-Roman tradition, along with fairy tale and fable refigurations. This book and her sharp, animist Age of Glass share a poetic interest in mythological beasts, human monsters, and mutated half-gods with Donika Kelly’s delicious debut Bestiary, marvelously questioning the shapes our identities take. 

For Her Dark Skin by Percival Everett

For Her Dark Skin, Percival Everett’s satirical treatment of the Medea myth adopts a common enough idea, that myth is always related to questions of origins: how, why, and what things are the way they are, but renders it terrifyingly hilarious and cruel. When Everett turns this idea on gender and race, he refers us back to our linguistic and narrative frames, which become an endlessly reductive and recycled fate. We live in myth/language because it lives in us. If I’m making it seem more like an argument than a joyride that unexpectedly overtakes us, I’m Deadalus wrong. 

Cassandra by Christa Wolf, The Cassandra by Sharma Shields, and Choke-Box: A Fem-Noir by Christina Milletti

While the re-activation of specific myths gathers tension in the distance between the contemporary world and the ancient one, the opposite is also true, often simultaneously. Christa Wolf, Sharma Shields, and Christina Milletti give the best voice to Cassandra, whose story seems especially resonant right now. Cassandra prefigures our current gaslighter-zeitgeist and instantly imbues it with tragedy. Women, especially Black women, are mocked, belittled, and ignored for speaking the truth—about sexual violence, racism, the climate crisis, and the pandemic. Sharma and Wolf focus their warnings on the industrial military complex. Milletti’s Choke Box: A Fem-Noir is a more subtle, inter-textual retelling than Wolf’s Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays and Sheilds’ The Cassandra. And Milletti catches us in half-complicity, stuck between sympathy and judgment. We question both the Cassandra-figure’s reliability as a narrator and the over-confidence of male authority, undermining her at every turn. 

Image result for trail of lightning by rebecca roanhorse

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

If climate catastrophe is our present and apocalypse is our future, Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning makes vivid that the end of the world is also our colonial past, where America’s beginning was the Dinétah’s (traditional homeland of the Navajo tribe) demise. In this heart-racing, Navajo-myth-meets-urban-post-apocalyptic-fantasy, however, the badass protagonist makes clear “This wasn’t our end. This was our rebirth.”

You Can’t Hoard Your Way into the American Dream

Posted on by Alyssa Songsiridej

Son

In terms of helping people throw out unnecessary shit before a big move, my father’s my crowning achievement. His garage. Ziggurat of yogurt containers. Six-foot pyramid of Folgers cans. Worm farm. Dollhouses, boxes of bullets with no gun, three passenger doors (all different colors) for a 1993 Toyota Camry. No need for the full catalogue.

He cried when I held up can after can and pronounced them dead, things devoid of spirit and history. Like a plastic surgeon wielding a scalpel, I excised his memories from the objects I’d excised from his garage with an expressionless slash.

My amateur diagnosis, unkind: You have succumbed to the capitalist nightmare—prevented from earning anything of value, you cling to the useless like a child to its reeking security blanket.

As a child, he lived in a shack on stilts, near a reeking shore in Hong Kong, sharing canned corn with six siblings. Now he is an auto mechanic in the state of Maine who eats seconds for every meal and eats too many meals besides. It’s that old saw, the immigrant story.

The muchness is the problem, I try to explain. Listen it’s sad about the corn and the filthy water, but if you carry that everywhere, you’ll die of sepsis. Corn does not digest in the human stomach. Realize you can’t strap stability to your back. You can’t trade Toyota doors for a new house when yours gets ruined in a flood. You can’t pack your wife’s clothes into yogurt containers after the chemo stops working.

I’m ruthless because I’ve seen the other way of doing it. My (white) friends’ parents never hoarded cans, car parts. The stability is invisible. How much space does a bank account occupy? A will? A trust? 

Make friends! I say. A friend at the movie theater can get you a ticket. A friend in the police can erase your tickets. Friends store themselves, very space efficient. Call them with your expensive string-and-can and ask them for a favor. If they’re rich (the right kinds of friends) they’ll give you what you need. Everybody I know who’s anybody (and that’s everybody because I make the right friends) has friends and their friends have friends and they’ve all got money.

Please meet these kinds of people? Before you’re too old to be conveniently stored.

When I finally throw everything out and drive the moving truck to the new house, I give him commandments: Keep the garage clean. Inside of it, store a new-used (Volvo) sedan. Smile at passersby from your driveway. Accept invitations to drink at the Irish bar with your co-workers. Yes, it starts with drunks. Even drunks have connections—the right kinds.

Despite all I’ve done, tried to do (for him!), he slumps his shoulders at me.

“How did I make you so ashamed?” he asks.

I can only cluck my tongue:

Not shame. I know I’ve told you things like the air we breathe is commodification and the water we drink, Eurocentric hierarchy, but I learned that in my liberal arts college. Our president wore a bowtie. My roommates’ grandfather invented the fucking barcode! I nearly lost my scholarship money for mispronouncing Goethe, but I endured such humiliations to get here, this level of clarity. If only you could see the cornlessness of my digestive tract.

Where I live, the auto shops are tucked tastefully away. Where I live, they don’t sell canned vegetables at the grocery store, never mind corn.

No, no shame on my end. Only care. A desire to see you…progress.

Go now. Was that a Lion’s Club bumper sticker on your neighbor’s Volvo? And the name of the little pub on the corner? O’Sullivan’s? You are the horse and this neighborhood, your water. I can’t do it for you. The point is, these people will be here when I can’t. And I don’t mean it cruelly, but I will not be here.

I also migrated. And like you, I’m lucky if I make it back on holidays.

As the Pandemic Drags On, “Zone One” Warns Us Not to Hope

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Hope is irresistible. A dozen years ago hope got us a president, and against all logic we’ve continued hoping ever since. But Colson Whitehead’s 2011 novel Zone One dumps a bucket of ice water over those who dare to hang on to hope as a pandemic unfolds around them. The denizens of the zone live minute-to-minute dodging zombies, securing rations, and scouring Manhattan to find an abandoned pied-a-terre in which to crash, just as we’ve all been living minute-to-minute in the face of indifferent leadership, traumatic grocery runs, and the endlessly punishing newsfeed of our own catastrophe. Whenever humans are in constant peril, hope is a life-threatening distraction.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Mark Spitz, Zone One’s protagonist, loves to call himself “mediocre,” the consummate B-student—but Spitz (a sobriquet, and the only name we ever get for him) is first and foremost a survivor. The central command he has for us is to stop dreaming of a better tomorrow. No one knows when or if the plague will end, and the sooner Zone One’s residents accept that situation, the better equipped they’ll be to put their heads down, kill the “skel” in front of them, power through their night terrors, and do it all again in a few hours. You don’t waste precious mental resources reliving the glory days of punching a time card, eating at chain restaurants, or commuting to Chelsea, because even a moment’s distraction can make you a victim.

In the old world, Spitz’s mediocrity took the forms of doing lame jobs in lieu of having a career, ducking out of relationships at the slightest hint of vulnerability, living with his parents, and maintaining a social schedule consistent with these life choices. It’s fitting that Spitz spends his last night before the monsters come in the most humdrum way possible—playing table games in Atlantic City, then enduring hours of traffic to return to his Long Island home. When, post-zombie apocalypse, Spitz and his fellow grunts are tasked with clearing the undead out of New York City, he finds that his previous indifference to his own future makes him enormously qualified to succeed in pandemic life.

The central command he has for us is to stop dreaming of a better tomorrow.

There’s a name for those in Zone One who, against all odds, continue to believe that the zombie apocalypse will soon disappear: “pheenies.” As in “phoenix,” as in oh yeah, we’re definitely going to rise from the ashes and get everything back the way it was. Better to fall in line and be content with the “MRE bacon-and-eggs paste” in front of you. The novel tells us point-blank that “you never heard Mark Spitz say, ‘When this is all over’ or ‘Once things get back to normal.’” As someone accustomed to getting by on the bare minimum, Spitz quickly learns the only lesson he’ll ever need: “If you weren’t concentrating on how to survive the next five minutes, you wouldn’t survive them.” 

Most of the zone’s zombies are of the usual raving brain-eater variety, but roughly one percent are “stragglers.” These poor saps spend their undead days haunting the mundane places of their former lives, silent and immobile. Even with their entrails dangling or jaws missing, Mark Spitz can’t help but look upon these macabre flesh sculptures and see his former elementary school teacher, his old drinking buddy, an erstwhile lover. In these moments, Spitz comes as close as he ever gets to experiencing nostalgia, and thus he is nearly eaten. Our past is just as dangerous as our future. For my part, I don’t dwell on the hugs I used to give, or how the air around me used to be breathable without a cloth filter, and Spitz doesn’t dwell on the friends and relatives he’ll never see again, or how losing money at blackjack might not have been the best choice for a final blowout blast. But memories persist, perhaps more so than fantasies, and even the best of us can have lapses.

When I caught myself trying to conjure up a nation where we lived up to barely acceptable standards, it seemed so utterly impossible that I only got more depressed.

I reread this novel for a book club a few months ago, in the doldrums of the Trump presidency as COVID continued its national assault on prisons, on nursing homes, and on some of our most vulnerable citizens. At the time, the specter of a permanent authoritarian regime perpetuating these conditions forever seemed very real, and Spitz’s never-look-forward mantra spoke to me. Indeed, it was the only advice that made any sense. What else was there to do? Pretend that not only would we defeat the virus but also stop locking our fellow humans in cages, start giving everyone health care, and restore science to its proper place as one of the foundational pillars of our society? Please. How could I negotiate hand-washing, mask-wearing, social-distancing, and pretend enthusiasm for Zoom calls while deluding myself in this way? Maybe imagining a better world constituted self-care for some people (vaccinies?), but when I caught myself trying to conjure up a nation where we lived up to barely acceptable standards, it seemed so utterly impossible that I only got more depressed, more likely to say screw it and invite 20 of my closest friends over for karaoke. 

But a few scant weeks later, I don’t know what to think. Just when I had trained myself to be content only getting through this, my one lifetime, all of a sudden the usual doomscrolling turned into the end credits of our horror movie. While I remain in mortal fear of experiencing anything that could be called joy, now COVID’s number one abettor will  be removed from office on  January 20, and an effective first-generation vaccine is already finding its way into our immune systems. Even as we set the record for new cases of the virus, the urge to smile has fought its way back from the brink, bubbling up in my gut and threatening to appear unannounced instead of restricting itself to a prearranged digital happy hour. I can’t help it—I’m turning into a pheenie after all.

27 Debuts to Look Forward To in the First Half of 2021

Posted on by Jo Lou

Last year was a difficult one, but there were at least 40 up sides: debut authors, with fresh voices and viewpoints, whose work offered us perspective or escape. As the calendar turns over, the problems we faced last year still linger, but a new group of writers are set to introduce their work to readers across the globe.

Whether you’re seeking a revealing memoir about family secrets or a short story collection about women all named Sarah, the first half of 2021 offers something new for everyone.

January

The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.

The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.

Robert Jones, Jr.’s debut novel is about a forbidden romantic relationship between two Black men enslaved on a Mississipi plantation during the Antebellum. Jones explores queerness through a new lens that has rarely been explored in literature. The Prophets is one of the most powerful Black queer historical novels ever written.

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Torrey Peters’s first full-length novel is about searching for connection and family while navigating the challenges of gender. Ames thought detransitioning would give him a happy, unremarkable life, but it may have wrecked his relationship. His partner Reese wants a child, but doesn’t know how to have the family with Ames that she envisioned with Amy. The result is a domestic drama filled with tangled lives for modern times.

Hades, Argentina

Hades, Argentina by Daniel Loedel

A decade after leaving Argentina, a man returns home under less-than-ideal circumstances: the first woman he loved is dying. His return isn’t a rosy homecoming, but one where he must confront the ghosts of his past while grappling with the man he has become in America.

The Divines by Ellie Eaton

Set in present-day Los Angeles and a 1990s British boarding school, Ellie Eaton’s book carefully examines the destructive relationships of teenage girls. At the center is Josephine, a freelance writer who was one of the private school’s biggest bullies. Revisiting the shuttered school in her 30s, she begins to dig into her own past and grapple with the decisions she made decades ago.

Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu

In her debut memoir, Nadia Owusu invites readers into her globe-spanning childhood and young adulthood. After her mother abandoned her as a toddler, Owusu’s father, a U.N. official, brought his children and his new wife from continent to continent, until his death when the author was 13. This memoir follows her to Rome, Dar-es-Salaam, London, Kampala, New York, and elsewhere as she comes to term with her family tragedies and her own identity.

Dog Flowers by Danielle Geller

Dog Flowers by Danielle Geller

After her mother dies during alcohol treatment, Geller returns to the Florida Navajo reservation where she grew up and finds a suitcase packed with photos, diaries, letters, and personal ephemera. Using her experience as a librarian and archivist, Geller digs into her family history, mixingher own narrative with the story she derives from her mother’s documents.

February

Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

Throughout these sublime stories, Dantiel W. Moniz explores love and loss with grace. The stories center on Floridian women and girls trying to find their place in the world—from a teenager resisting her restrictive church to two sisters transporting their father’s ashes.

Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler

Just after the 2016 election, a woman’s relationship falls apart when she discovers her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist. Her own truths and beliefs begin to unravel after she flees to Berlin and catches herself becoming more secretive and manipulative with those around her.

Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

Te-Ping Chen’s story collection is an expansive look at modern China, as it struggles with the influence of the past and envisions a new future. Chen offers both realism and magical realism throughout the collection, which allows her to tackle her vision of Chinese culture with both clear-eyed practicality and dreamlike allegory—for instance, a strange new fruit that brings on troubling memories of the Cultural Revolution when eaten.

As You Were by David Tromblay

Novelist David Tromblay’s debut memoir investigates his relationship with his alcoholic father, and the long shadow cast on his family by the boarding schools in which Native American children like his grandmother were indoctrinated and abused. He explores his family legacy of anger and trauma to figure out how he survived to become the man he is.

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Let’s Get Back to the Party by Zak Salih

Sebastian Mote is a 35-year-old gay high school teacher who just wants to settle down and have kids and maybe a white picket fence. Why is that so hard? At a wedding, he runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham, also a proud gay man, who dismisses Sebastian’s yearnings for a marriage and babies as heteronormative. Oscar is upset at the rise of bachelorette parties at gay bars and the mainstreaming of queer culture. Sebastian and Oscar are both attracted and repelled by each other’s life choices, both struggling to find their place and to envision a meaningful future for themselves. Set in the weeks after the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, Let’s Get Back to the Party is an insightful novel about what it means to be a gay man in a rapidly-changing America. 

March 

Abundance by Jakob Guanzon

Jakob Guanzon’s novel follows a down-in-their-luck father and son who are evicted from their trailer and living in a truck. Abundance takes a critical and unsentimental look at the harsh effects of poverty in a country that’s seemingly teeming with abundance.

Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer by Jamie Figueroa | Penguin Random House Canada

Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer by Jamie Figueroa

A brother and sister come together in their childhood home after their mother passes away to pack things up and move on with their lives. The brother is on a self-destructive path and the sister tries everything in her power to save him, including coming up with a bet that may save his life.

The Recent East by Thomas Grattan

The Recent East is a multigenerational story that starts with a family who escapes East Germany for upstate New York. After the Berlin Wall falls, their daughter Beate Haas is told that she can reclaim her parents’ abandoned house in their hometown of Kritzhagen. 

Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?

Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? by Jesse McCarthy

In this essay collection, for readers of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jia Tolentino, Jesse McCarthy covers topics ranging from trap music to Kehinde Wiley’s paintings. Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? highlights his keen eye as he observes the intersection between art, race, literature, and politics.

Women and Other Monsters by Jess Zimmerman

Women and Other Monsters by Jess Zimmerman

“Beware their ambition, their ugliness, their insatiable hunger, their ferocious rage.” What does it mean to be a monstrous woman? To be a woman who is too ambitious, too hungry, too angry, too ugly to fit into the societal norms dictated by our patriarchal society? In her book, Electric Literature’s editor-in-chief Jess Zimmerman analyzes feminism through eleven female monsters from Greek legends to build a new mythology: one where the hero is a monstrous woman with power and agency.

Sarahland by Sam Cohen

Sarahland is a queer experimental reimagining of selfhood; nearly every story in this collection is about a woman named Sarah. Sam Cohen tackles so much in this wide ranging book of Sarah origin stories, as one Sarah plays dead for a wealthy necrophiliac while another uses her Buffy fan-fiction to process her emotions.

Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia

Set mainly in present-day Miami, Gabriela Garcia’s novel is about Carmen who harbors ghosts from her past and her daughter Jeanette who is struggling with addiction. The two make decisions—including taking in the daughter of a neighbor who was detained by ICE—that begin to tear their relationship apart. Their relationship implodes when Jeanette travels to Cuba and learns unforgivable truths about her mother from her grandmother who stayed behind.

April

Low Country by J. Nicole Jones

Low Country by J. Nicole Jones

Pitched as The Glass Castle meets Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, this Southern memoir follows J. Nicole Jones as she grows up in a family that swings from extreme wealth to extreme poverty in South Carolina. On the outside, their family is perfect, but behind closed doors, violence and anger erupt.

What Comes After by JoAnne Tompkins

What Comes After by JoAnne Tompkins

The sudden death of two teenagers reverberates through a small town in Washington State. The mystery deepens with the arrival of a pregnant 16-year-old stranger who might be the key in solving what happened. 

May

The Parted Earth by Anjali Enjeti

A multigenerational novel that spans decades and continents, The Parted Earth looks at how the Partition of India and Pakistan left an indelible mark on three generations of women. Enjeti crafts a compelling story about the search to uncover ancestral secrets and the quest for belonging. 


The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy

In their satire about social media, Alex McElroy provides a darkly humorous dissection into public personas. The novel follows a failed social media influencer and a struggling actor who create The Atmosphere, a cult-like rehabilitation center for toxic white men hoping for absolution. However, like their careers, things don’t go as planned and take a turn for the worse almost immediately.

Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger

We all have mythologies that we build around our parents. Lilly Dancyger (editor of the anthology Burn it Down: Women Writing About Anger) worshiped her father Joe, a brilliant East Village sculptor in the grip of a heroin addiction. After her father’s sudden death when she was a young girl, Lilly becomes self-destructive. Years later, she uses his artwork to reexamine the mythology she built about her father and to understand who exactly was Joe Schactman.  

 June

The Other Black Girl | Book by Zakiya Dalila Harris | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

Zakiya Dalila Harris tackles #PublishingSoWhite in her novel about two Black women working in book publishing. Editorial assistant Nella, the only Black employee at Wagner Books, is thrilled at the prospect of finally having a kinship with a fellow Black colleague when Hazel is hired and becomes her cubicle-mate. But not long after Hazel’s arrival, threatening notes start appearing on Nella’s desk. 

Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung

Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung

In this introspective Hong Kong-Canadian novel about grieving and difficult familial relationships, an unnamed narrator examines the ramifications of growing up in an “astronaut” family with a father who stayed in Hong Kong as a breadwinner while his wife and children moved permanently to Canada. 

Bewilderness by Karen Tucker

Bewilderness by Karen Tucker

Bewilderness follows Irene and Lucy, coworkers in a pool hall in rural North Carolina. The two young women, already magnetically attracted to each other, form a bond after an impulsive plot to exact revenge on a customer who was being a creep to them. Their codependent friendship intensifies over the highs of popping opioid pills and scamming drug dealers to fuel their growing addiction. But what happens when the person who has been enabling your addiction wants to get clean and leaves you behind?  

Yes, Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage

Struggling playwright Jonah Keller is living in a shitty Bushwick apartment and barely getting by on his menial restaurant pay. But everything seems finally to be going his way after Jonah carefully crafts a “chance” meeting with a Pulitzer prize-winning writer so he can further his ambitions. As their torrid affair spills over into the summer in the Hamptons, Jonah begins to notice all might not be what it seems with his older lover. The predator quickly becomes the prey in this tense page-turner. A riveting queer novel, Yes, Daddy takes a critical look at the way power imbalances play out in relationships. 

7 (More) Literary Translators You Should Know

Posted on by Jo Lou

Translating novels, short stories, and poetry into English in a way that remains true to their original form can take years, even decades of dedication. And then there is the job of persuading the Anglophone publishing world to take chances. Translators’ labor is ultimately rewarding for readers who are able to embark on these previously-unknown literary journeys. 

The second part of our list of contemporary translators features award-winning translators who are also novelists and poets, who work from Korean, Telugu, Tamil, Portuguese, and Bulgarian to English, and one who renders contemporary American literature into Japanese. I spoke to them about the anti-imperialism of translation acts, the numerical abundance (also the economic precarity) of BIPOC translators, and the joys and challenges of translating swearing and grammar that doesn’t exist in English. 

Don Mee Choi: Korean to English

Seoul-born Korean American poet Don Mee Choi includes translations of South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, and her recent book, Autobiography of a Death. Choi’s radiant and supremely-thoughtful (references include Walter Benjamin, Ingmar Bergman, Korean shamanism, and her own personal history) in her treatise, Translation Is a Mode=Translation Is an Anti-Neocolonial Mode, certainly will have you considering language, translation, and life in general, from a different perspective. Choi’s own collection of poetry DMZ Colony won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. 

On non-poets being translators of poetry: “Reading translation is an extension of translation. It’s an opportunity for poets and non-poets to practice curiosity and dislodge themselves from whatever cultural greatness they were taught to believe in. So reading translation is about not making things great again. It’s an anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist act. Therefore, I think translation is always possible.”

Translating a chain letter: “I pretended to write in English when I was a little child because I thought that my father was a foreigner. There is a poem about this in my collection, Hardly War. I was convinced that my father had to be a foreigner because I never saw him more than a few times a year. As a war photojournalist, he was in Vietnam and other war zones. I wanted to know the language he spoke outside of South Korea. After we moved to Hong Kong, I couldn’t play piano anymore, so I played with my father’s typewriter instead. One day, I received a chain letter in English—this was popular way back when—and I typed all 91 letters. When my mom asked me what I was typing, I translated the letter to her, overly exaggerating that something terrible might happen to my father if I didn’t type all the letters. My father is almost 91 this year. I can’t take credit for it, but I can’t help wondering.” 

Madhu H. Kaza: Telugu to English  

Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, New York City-based Madhu H. Kaza’s translated works include stories by the feminist writers Volga and Vimala Devi. She edited Aster(ix) Journal’s Kitchen Table Translation, a wondrous investigation of the pathways of translation and migration. The volume features John Keene, Teju Cole, Don Mee Choi, and many others. In her terrific introductory essay, Kaza writes:

“For me, with all its predicaments, all the violence it may carry on its back, translation is an act of hospitality. Hospitality, conceived not as charity, not as condescension or even merely tolerance. A hospitality that recognizes both the dignity and the difference of the other.”

An early act of translation: “There’s a big difference in my relation to the words mamidikaya and mango, which are equivalent. When I arrived in the U.S. as a child I kept asking my mom for mamidikaya and finally in exasperation—because these fruit were not available anywhere in Michigan at the time—she presented me with a round, red, mealy item and said, “Here, this is an apple-mango.” I can’t tell you how furiously I hated apples into my adulthood. The word ‘mango’ was also ruined for me.”

On the challenges that face BIPOC translators: “It took me more than 20 years from my first attempt to learn to read Telugu to the time when I began translating Telugu fiction. One reason it took so long is that I never had access to any institutional support for this work, and working on Telugu was never my primary occupation. I take translation seriously, but it’s still very much a small side project for me. Of course, we need much more support for emerging BIPOC translators and translators working in under-represented languages, but I’m wary of most diversity efforts, well-intentioned as they are. We need people to get together and think deeply about this, and not get self-congratulatory about adding one new diversity mentorship to their ongoing programs. We need to think about how mentorships can be more dynamic and less isolating for the mentees. I was talking with the wonderful translator Katrina Dodson about the idea of creating a retreat for BIPOC translators, a gathering where people could build community, share ideas and resources, discuss translation, and, crucially, also be given some time to do their own work. If someone wants to offer space and fund such a project, I’m here. BIPOC translators are here and we have so many more ideas about this.”

Meena Kandasamy: Tamil to English 

To her renaissance woman resume, which includes poet, novelist, and activist, Meena Kandasamy added her first translated book in 2020, the Tamil language novel, Women Dreaming by Salma. Her translation wish list includes Malathi Maithri’s poems (“definitely want to do them before I turn 40”) and the novelists Sivakami and Bama. (“my dream will come true if I translate a novel each from them”). She’s hoping to finish her decade-long labor of translating the love poetry in the classic Tamil text, the Thirukkural in 2020. 

Story-crafting in English and Tamil: “English is my second language, so when I write in English I do labor twice as hard, but sometimes, the hard work involved itself adds to the artistic dimension. I am much more fussy and exacting because I want to choose the precise word in a second language, I pay far more attention to how it sounds off the page because the rhythms of my ears are still attuned to Tamil almost as a reflect. I personally think I’m more successful writing in English than if I were in Tamil because it allows me to be twice removed—once as a writer (standing outside, writing in), and secondly as someone very conscious that this is not her mother-tongue. There is a sense of strangeness that remains, and that perhaps makes all my English writing very much my own.”

On swearing: “I loved the women swearing. It is a very Tamil thing—women might appear very pious, religious but when you rub them the wrong way, you hear things come out of their mouths that will shock you. I kept feeling—will the English reader get this? So, there’d be a character who will implore Allah, and say, ‘Allah why don’t you punish this cunt-son?’ The extreme religiosity marries so easily with coarse profanity.”

Natascha Bruce: Chinese to English

Natascha Bruce studied Chinese at Cambridge but only started taking translation seriously when she entered a Chinese translation competition while working for an NGO in Jerusalem. Soon after, she moved with her partner to Hong Kong, where she met Chinese-language writers, read their works, and began her career as a translator of Chinese novels. She is currently working on Dorothy Tse’s first novel, Owlish and the Music-Box Ballerina, and her other translated works include Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong and Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngo. Bruce, who now lives in Chile, says she has “a meaningful relationship with Chinese, Italian and Spanish, although these relationships are wildly different to one another.” 

On the cultural specificities of translating Malaysian Chinese: “I’ve only been to Malaysia twice: once to Genting Highlands when I was doing research for my translation of Yeng Pway Ngon’s Lonely Face, and once to visit Sok Fong in Kampar while I was translating Lake Like a Mirror. Sok Fong introduced me to her cats, took me around her local pasar (market), showed me the coffee shops where she goes to write, read my palm, described the different places she had been while writing the stories, told me about books she liked. At the start of the project, I worried constantly about not having access to the specific cadences of Malaysian English, and about upsetting the careful balance of Sok Fong’s stories by not even knowing what I didn’t know about their context. As I came to know Sok Fong, though, and felt a deepening intimacy with her and her writing, I had a growing confidence that I could trust my responses to the words she had put on the page.”

On Hong Kong’s trilingual protest slangs: “In the past year I’ve been awed by the ingenuity of Hong Kong protest slang—the way protesters have shifted between Cantonese, Mandarin, and English to adapt to new restrictions, using the enforced trilingualism of Hong Kong to their advantage. They’re merging characters to create totally new ones, appropriating police insults, making extensive use of homophones both within and across languages, playing on the different pronunciations of characters in Cantonese and Mandarin, often all at once. The speed, the adaptability, the mixture of playfulness and defiance, the bravery: it’s phenomenal.”

Izidora Angel: Bulgarian to English 

Chicago-based Izidora Angel’s next book is Nataliya Deleva’s debut Four Minutes. Her first effort was Hristo Karastoyanov’s The Same Night Awaits Us All. Her next fairy godmother-ing adventure (which includes playing agent, PR person, social media guru, grant writer, and branding expert) is Yordanka Beleva’s Keder (“some of the most beautiful, heartbreaking and almost magical writing to come out of Bulgaria in the last few years.”). Check out one of her stories published in the Los Angeles Review. Angel is the co-founder of The Third Coast Translators Collective. 

The “Inferential Mood” in Bulgarian: “This is what I love and loathe about translating the Bulgarian. It’s got these crazy 37 moods and tenses. Can you imagine studying this? So really the richness of the tongue is all in the grammar, in the way a verb is conjugated to relay so much potency. The inferential mood alleges something has happened while acknowledging that the teller of the event was not there to witness the event, so… did it actually happen? It’s the perfect gossip tense! Honestly, Bulgarian newspapers get away with murder by employing it. On the whole, though, the inferential mood demonstrates how analytical and uniquely structured the Bulgarian is and this tense is, naturally, impossible to render into English. In English, you can say ‘allegedly’ a couple of times but that’s too burdensome to employ for the duration of a novel, so you have to choose: did it or did it not happen—and run with it.”

On the fight against erasure: “I’ve found that the collective’s mission ebbs and flows with the times. We may have come together as language artists looking to create community, but lately, we’ve zeroed in on some pretty serious battles: the massive underrepresentation of women in translation, the erasure of the translator from the very work they have translated, the ghastly financial conditions we work under, the preservation and protection of endangered and Indigenous languages. 

Next time you read a review of a novel in translation in a mainstream outlet, see how long it is before the translator is even named, and count how many words are used to review the actual translation. This is what I mean when I say it is a tooth and nail fight to combat our erasure. It is somehow presumed that a translator churns out a text word by word. Outlets like The New York Times are really leaving half the story on the table when they dedicate zero space and intellectual curiosity to who reverse-engineered the novel and put it back together and how. Of course, doing this would inevitably shake up their reviewer shortlist.”

Katrina Dodson: Portuguese to English 

When Katrina Dodson returned from her first trip to Brazil in 2002, she began learning Portuguese by listening to cassettes on her Walkman. Her experience of Brazil, especially of its music, was so expansive that she wanted to share the country’s many faces by becoming a translator. Dodson is the translator of Clarice Lispector’s The Complete Stories, she also speaks (and studied) her mother’s ancestral tongue, Vietnamese, and teaches translation at Columbia University. 

Katrina Dodson in Vietnamese vs. Katrina Dodson in Brazilian Portuguese: “It’s a source of anguish and something of a mystery to me that my life trajectory has led to a point where I can sometimes pass as Brazilian—with no family relationship to the country—whereas I speak Vietnamese like a child. My Brazilian persona is brighter and more open than my American self, with bigger hand gestures, probably in part because I love speaking Portuguese, so it automatically puts me in a better mood. Plus, there’s this element of escaping the same old self I grew up with, so it makes things lighter; the language is less saturated by time. 

In Vietnamese, I feel so small and tentative, always worried that someone won’t understand the words I’m struggling to pronounce or will start laughing at me (like my relatives), or even worse, start talking so fast that I can’t understand. I grew up hearing Vietnamese and actually studied it in college and spent a semester living with a family in Hanoi, but the language is so different from English, with six tones, so I lose it quickly when I don’t practice.

It’s funny, being a heritage speaker should in some ways embolden you to reclaim your roots, but for me, every time I make a mistake in Vietnamese, it reminds me that I’m only half, and that I didn’t grow up speaking it with both parents at home. When I say something wrong in Portuguese, it’s just a momentary lapse in my performance without any heavier consequences for my sense of identity. Reading Vietnamese American writers like Vi Khi Nao and Ocean Vuong brings up a lot of memories and sensory associations for me, and their bold imaginations inspire me to reshape my relationship to Vietnamese.”

Translating a Brazilian classic: “Macunaíma is about as far from The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector as you can get, in many ways, so I am very curious to see who will get excited about Mário de Andrade’s 1928 modernist classic. Lispector is a master of conjuring emotional landscapes and complex psychological states, and readers can dive into her writing without any awareness of Brazilian culture or history. Andrade’s experimental novel, on the other hand, is something of a Brazilian national epic that weaves together a patchwork portrait of Brazil based on an encyclopedic array of sources, including Indigenous myths, rural folktales, Afro-Brazilian syncretic religious practices, and Iberian troubadour ballads. As with epic and folklore, there’s no interiority—it’s all episodic action, and the complexity lies in the novel’s inventive language, as well as in Andrade’s recasting of collective storytelling in this roving narrative about the trickster hero Macunaíma. 

Translating Macunaíma has led me to completely reinvent my approach to translation, especially in considering what is untranslatable, in part because the book mixes various regional forms of spoken Brazilian—as opposed to written Portuguese—with dizzying lists of flora and fauna in Tupi, the major Indigenous language, as well as words from other Indigenous languages and Bantu languages. There’s a common misconception that translating means making everything comprehensible, but the best works of literature often produce deliberate ambiguity and sometimes outright illegibility. So in determining which non-Portuguese words to leave in the original, I think about the music of these list poems that conjure the abundance of the Amazon rainforest, the ethos of using local, non-European naming conventions for the natural world in the Americas, as well as which non-Portuguese phrases function as incantations or bridges back to certain histories that would lose their power if I substituted them with words in English.”

Aoko Matsuda: English to Japanese

While all the translators on this list deliver books from the world’s many languages into English, Aoko Matsuda translates English books into Japanese. She has translated works by contemporary American writers such as Karen Russell and Carmen Maria Machado. In addition to her translation work, Matsuda is also a fiction writer. Her latest short story collection, Where the Wild Ladies Are, translated by Polly Barton, is a feminist reimagining of classic Japanese ghost stories.

Reading the English translation of her book: “One thing I learned by being translated is that the act of translating is not a one-way process. It’s always an interaction, and even when we don’t actually communicate during their process of translating, I can see that interaction from their texts afterwards, and see how they understand me and my stories. The feeling when I read them is electrifying.”

The popularity of American literature in Japan: “It is not easy to come up with a name of a contemporary American writer who is as famous in Japan as Murakami is in the U.S., but the publishers and translators in Japan have always been passionate about introducing the works of American writers, as well as the works of the contemporary writers of other countries. There are a certain number of Japanese book lovers who are especially fond of foreign literature, and they always look forward to reading the books of newly introduced writers. One thing I love about Japanese readers is that they empathize and love the strange and compelling stories written by the contemporary American female writers, like Miranda July, Kelly Link, and all of the writers I’ve translated.” 

Mom’s Ex-Fiancé Makes a Bad Boyfriend

Posted on by Alyssa Songsiridej

“That Old Country Music” by Kevin Barry

Hannah Cryan waited in the Transit van up in the Curlews. Setanta Bromell had parked so that the van was secreted in the shade of the Forestry pines and could not easily be seen from the road. He had taken the dirtbike from the back of the van then and headed down to Castlebaldwin pissing smoke. His morning’s ambition was to rob the petrol station there with a claw hammer. Setanta was her fiancé of these recent times and, despite it all, the word still rolled glamorously to her lips.

It was the second Monday of May. She was a little more than four months pregnant. The whitethorn blossom was decked over the high fields as if for the staging of a witch’s wedding. Already the morning was humid and warm, and snaps of wind cut from the hillsides and sent the blossom everywhere in vague, drifting clouds. Even with the windows shut, her eyes streamed, and she could feel sore pulses in her throat like slow, angry worms. Setanta was thirty-two years old to her seventeen and it was not long at all since he had been her mother’s fiancé.

That’s the way it goes sometimes with close-knit families, he said.

Don’t even fucken joke about it, she said.

Setanta’s plan—if it could be held up to the light as such—was to get into the petrol station just after it opened, show the claw hammer and start roaring out of himself. As she waited on the mountain, Hannah jawed helplessly on her gums and tapped her phone for the time—it showed 7:17 a.m. and then died.

Fuckwad, she said, and threw the phone to the dash.

Castlebaldwin was a ten-minute scramble away and he’d been gone for more than twice that. The van had laboured to climb even the low mountains of the Curlews and she tried not to think deeply about its viability for escape. The drone from the N4 down below was becoming more steady, the morning traffic thickening to a stream. It was difficult to believe that just last night she had laughed with excitement as she took the first baby bump photo for her Insta and Setanta’s needle buzzed jauntily as he tattooed a lizard on his left calf. He told her in a voice scratchy with emotion that he loved her and that their souls were made of the same kind of stuff. She licked his earlobe and showed him the selfie and he cried in hard, gulpy jags. She did not remark that the lizard looked more like it had frog dimensions, really, nor that the rapid blinking effect had returned to Setanta’s left eye.

She had asked him to leave the keys of the van but he would not. When he had a plan worked out his mouth fixed into a tight hard rim like a steel toecap. In truth, she knew well that Setanta Bromell of Frenchpark was not making solid decisions lately. She sneezed and reflexively laid a hand to her belly to reassure the visitor. High slants of sunlight now breached the top of the Forestry pines and showed a stretch of scarred hillside rising to Aghanagh bog. The gorse on the higher hills was lit from the inside out an electric living yellow. Dead for half a year the Curlews were like some casual miracle reviving. Setanta Bromell said that May, always, was the number one month of the year for going mad.

Passing through the narrow kitchen of her mother’s house, four and a half months previously, he had placed a hand to her skinny hip and turned on the cow eyes and that was enough. Her mother when she’d been drinking slept like the dead. By night, it had become the custom that Setanta and Hannah would talk. She liked to listen to his stories about work. He told her about the man with the huge swastika on his back that Setanta had remodelled into the ancient flag that showed in quadrants the symbols of the four proud provinces of Ireland: the red hand, the triple crown, the hawk and dagger, the harp.

Better a ‘Ra head than a Nazi, he said.

There was a quick russety shimmer athrough the yellow gorse as a fox moved for her den. Hannah’s lip moved softly at the sight and made a wordless murmuring. Now the birds were going dipshit unseen in the hedges, in the pines. Setanta Bromell owed her mother, like, four grand? His eyes rolled up as if to see the stars when he came.

She waited. The Transit van smelled like a stale morning mouth. She listened for the growls of the dirtbike climbing the backroad but no sound rose above the birds, above the N4’s sea-like drone, above the hot wind in gusty snaps from the hillside.

Her hands lay folded loosely across her belly. She tried to do what the lady doctor at the clinic had told her to do in the panic times—she felt out her breaths on an individual basis. You had to get yourself on intimate terms with every breath that passed through your body. You had to listen to each breath as it travelled and smooth out its journey. In the Transit she sat and concentrated as well as she could but still her breaths came short and wildly.

Now the sunlight broke fully across the canopy of pines and came starkly through the van. Hannah closed her eyes against it to see dreamy pink fields on the back of her lids. She clawed at the greasy vinyl of the seat. She listened, and in the gaps between the wind it was just the birds in conference, in the high springtime excitedly, a vast and unpredictable family.

Still on the air there was not a whisper of Setanta Bromell’s dirtbike.

He did not drink much. She’d say that for him. He would sit up late while her mother slept. For a long while, they had sat at opposite ends of the L-shaped sofa, as far apart from each other as they could get, which in itself had signaled a situation. He said that particular stretches of ground had for him a lucky vibration. He said the Curlews most of all. Once a prime buck had skittered from the ditch and lurched into the side of the van and dropped stone dead of the shock and all Setanta had to do was haul it home and hang it to be skinned.

These are the type days I get in the Curlews all the time, he said.

He spoke often of fatedness and of meant-to-be’s. Then came the 3 a.m. of his soft, slow hand in the kitchen, and it was a case of smoochy-smoochy and throwing each other up against the walls before anyone knew the fuck what was going on.

She pulled down the sun visor for its mirror. She had a face on her like a scorched budgie. She detested her new self. By nature like a stick, she was taking on weight with the pregnancy. Beneath her breath, she made the words of a Taylor Swift song for distraction but the song did not take.

News headline: there was no sign of Setanta Bromell on no fucking dirtbike.

She saw him with his limbs splayed on the petrol station floor. She heard the ratchety cruel tightening of the cuffs. Or maybe the Belarussian who worked the morning shift had just hopped the counter and grabbed the hammer and laid Setanta out flat with a single bop to the broadside of the head. The Belarussian was a massive fuck who must have weighed about as much as a cement mixer. Setanta’s plan had gaps and weak spots.

Hannah Cryan climbed from the van and walked from the Forestry pines onto the backroad. By now the morning had clouded over and the vast spread of the whitethorn blossom across the hillsides and the high fields and the ditches made an ominous aura as it moved in the wind. Once, as a child, she had been slapped across the face by her mother for bringing an armful of the blossom into the house. The whitethorn flowers so much as passing the threshold was a harbinger of certain death in the family. By about the Tuesday of the next week. She had meant it as a gift for her lovely young mother.

As she sat on a five-bar gate up in the Curlew mountains the great meanness of the morning descended on her. She hummed a string of four or five notes against the meanness, not knowing where they came from nor how.

The plan was that they would drive through the day and the north to the ferry at Larne for Stranraer, and from there descend through Scotland and the Borders— she watched his lips move as he recited solemnly the steps of it—through Cumbria to Yorkshire and to his cousins in the city of Wakefield. Over the nights, as they conspired, the word “Wakefield” had taken on the burnish of legend. She saw the city lights spread out. She imagined a child with a North of England accent and a neat little flat in a tower block. She saw herself and Setanta in the bed eating toast and taking photos  of each other—his muscles flexed; her eyelashes fitted— and the toddler gurgling along in pure happiness on the rug on the floor. Setanta Bromell might soften his cough in Wakefield, she believed, and think harder about his decisions, and forget all the nonsense with the lizards and the claw hammers.

The day was up and about itself. The fields trembled.

Catastrophe was a low-slung animal creeping darkly over the ditches, across the hills.

Her mother had found her one careless morning under the throw on the sofa, topless and asleep in the hot, emotional clutches of Setanta Bromell. That had made it a morning for the annals. Since then, they had slept in two sleeping bags zipped together at his King Ink studio. The studio was located over a butcher’s shop in Boyle. It reeked of their wild love and animal death. Setanta was 18 months behind on the rent and had a notice to quit and lately this involuntary blinking in the left eye.

But desperate times, he said, very often turned out to be disguised opportunities.

Wakefield, as a shimmering prospect, was held aloft before her like a priest’s chalice.

By now she knew that he would not come back from Castlebaldwin. On the five-bar gate of a tiny farm high in the Curlew mountains she again closed her eyes for the pink fields. She went into a dream. If the moment was never-ending it might not even exist. She felt the presence of something very old and uncaring on the air. An insect’s steady keening from the ditch was incessant like a hopeless prayer or the workings of his needle. He had tattooed on her inner thigh a swallow in flight.

In the black times make you think of summer, he said.

In the black times, she thought, it’d take more than a badly-drawn swallow aiming for my fucken gash.

He was probably in the holding cell at Ballymote already. He was already on first name terms with every guard in the vicinity. Setanta Bromell was—and here the words came unbidden, as if from an old ballad recalled—already in chains. The new life within twitched with nervous expectancy. As if it knew already of all the disasters to come.

Hannah Cryan came to ascend from herself. Above the green fields and the whitethorn blossom moving in the morning wind, above the stone walls and the Forestry pines, above the inland sea of the grasses, above the broken drone of the motorway, above all of this she measured out the stretch of her seventeen years. They had been mean and slow-feeling years. She was almost as old as the century and felt it. Her man in jail and a child at the breast—it was all playing out by the chorus and verse.

Her legs weak, her step uncertain, feeling lightheaded and frightful, she trailed back to the van and climbed into it. She sucked the last warm dregs from a bottle of water on the dash but her thirst was not sated. Often he kept six-packs of sparkling water from Aldi in back of the van. For his digestion, he said, which was at the best of times troublesome.

They had been mean and slow-feeling years. She was almost as old as the century and felt it.

She got out and opened the back doors and rooted around among her fiancé’s astonishing detritus. She found no water but she did find the ten euro claw hammer from Simons Brothers hardware.

The scales of the morning fell away.

She stood by the side of the van with the claw in her hand.

She swung it hard and precisely to extract the eyes from the brute, lying face of Setanta Bromell. That the sockets might dangle and his lively tongue loll.

She hadn’t the strength to climb back in the van. She sat on the ground on the pine kernels and cried for a short while. A few months ago she had been skin and flint and edges and points—she had been hard—but now she was softened and plush like a lazy old cat. It was foreign to her. She felt slowed and mawkish with it. He had softened her merely with glances, his touch and words. More than softened, she had been opened.

On the mountain time loosened, unspooled. The fields blinked.

The gorse whispered. Morning?

It must have been coming by now for noon. If she had the legs to carry her, they might take her the five miles down to Boyle. But if she did not get past this moment, she would not have to face the next.

She looked out across the high fields. Just now as the cloudbank shifted to let the sun break through the whitethorn blossom was tipping; the strange vibrancy of its bloom would not tomorrow be so ghostly nor at the same time so vivid; by tacit agreement with our mountain the year already was turning. The strongest impulse she had was not towards love but towards that old burning loneliness, and she knew by nature the old tune’s circle and turn—it’s the way the wound wants the knife wants the wound wants the knife.

Now she heard before its sound even broke on the air the scratch and meek resolve of her mother’s Corolla. It was neither taxed nor insured. It was taken out only at moments of high emergency. These were not yet so few as her poor mother might have hoped.

And yes, here it came, inevitably, around the bend from the backroad into the Forestry pines, and Hannah felt a volley of tiny kicks within.

Lou-Lou Cryan was a hollowed woman now. She was like a reed from the drink and the nerves. She stepped from the Corolla and came soft-footed and stoically through the gloom of the pine trees to take her daughter in her arms.

Oh you poor fool, she said. Oh you poor sweet fucking fool.