Page 318 – Electric Literature

11 Thrilling Procedurals That Don’t Involve Police

Posted on June 24, 2020June 22, 2020 by Intern Electric Lit

Amidst nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism in policing, the role of crime writers in shaping public perceptions of the police has also been called into question. Police procedurals are among the most ubiquitous programming on television and almost always center the perspectives of the cops, often depicting acts of brutality as the necessary tactics of heroes who are seeking justice on the public’s behalf. Crime fiction, one of the most popular genres in the world, similarly centers the work of cops, ex-cops, and private detectives or amateur sleuths whose ultimate goal is to identify the correct perpetrator and hand them off to the police.

Of course, there is pleasure in watching experts do their work or passionate amateurs race to solve problems and achieve something—but the thing they achieve doesn’t have to be an arrest and conviction within our current system of policing and punishment. Perhaps in the future we will have crime fiction that envisions justice beyond arrest and incarceration. For now, if you’re looking to defund or abolish the police from your own reading list, consider swapping in one of the following nonfiction tales of heroes who are not cops or ex-cops, fighting to achieve something other than putting people in jail.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

The heroines of Shetterly’s book are the Black women mathematicians — Dorothy Vaughn, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Hoover, and others — who work for the precursor agency to NASA during World War II. In the newly (somewhat) desegregated defense industry, they serve in the computing pool, operate state-of-the-art calculating machines, question their superiors, catch errors, author research reports, hold or earn graduate degrees, and devotedly support each other’s work. These Black women win recognition and respect in a Jim Crow-era world as they perfect airplanes for the war effort and help to launch the nation’s burgeoning space program.

Then Comes Marriage by Roberta Kaplan

The heroine of this story is Jewish lesbian civil rights lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who represented Edie Windsor in the landmark Supreme Court case United States v. Windsor, which ultimately struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and made LGBTQ+ marriage equality the law of the land in 2015. Kaplan details her strategies in the lower courts and in focusing the case on Justice Anthony Kennedy’s jurisprudence, while also describing the “rainbow coalition” of LGBTQ+ legal advocates and other cases that paved the way for this victory. Through it all, she interweaves her own story of coming out to a homophobic family as well as her compelling personal relationship with Edie Windsor’s late wife, who had been her psychotherapist when she was younger.

The Scarlett Letters by Jenny Nordbak

Nordbak’s memoir details her time working as a dominatrix in a Los Angeles dungeon. It has a case-of-the-week procedural feel as she learns the ropes of her new trade and puzzles out how to cater to each client’s fantasies while staying true to her own boundaries and comfort levels. She investigates new kinks at the conferences and festivals she attends with her colleagues, all while living a double life as a healthcare construction supervisor by day. If you like the idea of sex worker procedurals replacing cop procedurals in your life, this book is a fine place to start.

The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum

The hero of this tale is pioneering scientist Harvey Washington Wiley, chief chemist at the Department of Agriculture in the late 19th century. In a world where cakes are colored with lead and arsenic, milk is preserved with formaldehyde, and poisoned bread and dead rats from the slaughterhouse floor get thrown into meat processors, Harvey leads the fight for food safety. He performs experiments, writes articles, delivers speeches, and joins forces with muckraking journalists and the nascent pure food movement to battle an obstructionist Congress and secure passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

The Queen of Katwe by Tim Crothers

The heroes of this story are Phiona Mutesi, a young Ugandan girl from a poor neighborhood, and Robert Katende, the program outreach coordinator who introduces her to chess and trains her to play. Written by a sports journalist, the book follows Phiona as she competes in national and international championships (including in Siberia), and gains the respect of older players who think she might just be a budding grandmaster.

Diagnosis by Lisa Sanders, M.D.

Physician Lisa Sanders, who worked as an advisor to the TV show House, M.D. and graduated from the Yale School of Medicine, offers up a collection of real life medical puzzles, from stomach pains following a barracuda dinner to perplexing full body rashes to headaches induced by a zebra attack. She illuminates the combination of expertise, careful procedure, and luck that it takes for doctors to successfully diagnose and treat their patients, inviting readers to share in the confusions experienced along the way and the thrills of finally hitting on the right solution.

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

Follow the quest of programmers in the 1980s and early ’90s as they race to bring the first fully computer animated feature length film (Toy Story) to the big screen. Written by a co-founder of Pixar, this book goes on to detail his subsequent mission as well: to create a sustainable culture that would allow the studio to produce hit after hit for years to come, at a time when many comparable tech companies and studios were flopping after putting out one or two big hits. Catmull reveals both the processes of trial and error and the principles underlying the creatively generative culture that ultimately developed at Pixar.

The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan

Cahalan, a journalist who was herself misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, dives into the story of Stanford psychology professor David Rosenhan, who in the early 1970s sent seven sane people into psychiatric hospitals to investigate diagnostic criteria and treatment conditions for the mentally ill. At first the researcher and his team would appear to be the heroes of this tale. After telling doctors they were experiencing auditory hallucinations, the undercover subjects endured isolating and dehumanizing treatments, resulting in a Science article that prompted a revision of the DSM and helped revolutionize the mental healthcare system. However, Cahalan’s investigation uncovers numerous red flags in Rosenhan’s work, raising the possibility that the experiment’s results and even many of its subjects were fabricated. Cahalan digs deep and illuminates the mysteries surrounding this fraught yet influential study.

Alexander McQueen: Blood Beneath the Skin by Andrew Wilson

Follow McQueen, a gay man with a troubled working class upbringing, as he launches a career that takes him to the heights of the fashion industry, where he produces haunting and stunningly beautiful designs. The young McQueen talks his way into a bespoke tailoring job on London’s Savile Row, then a graduate course in fashion design at Central Saint Martins. As creative director at Givenchy, he produces six collections a year, while insisting that none of them can be a normal catwalk show, each needs to be amazing. McQueen eventually launches the fashion house that will design Kate Middleton’s royal wedding dress, though his struggles with mental health lead to his own suicide the year before.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Policing isn’t the only institution that has systematically exploited Black people. Medical research has been using cervical cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman, since 1951; the cells were harvested without her knowledge or consent, and though they played a pivotal role in medical breakthroughs for decades to come, the Lacks family was never credited or compensated. In what can only be called a journalism procedural, Lacks’s family and a science writer work to uncover the truth about this medical exploitation—and move a little closer to justice.

Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan’s Mountains and Coasts in Search of My Family’s Past by Jessica J. Lee

Two Trees Make a Forest by Jessica J. Lee

After discovering her grandfather’s fragmented autobiographical writings, Lee — who has a doctorate in environmental history — travels to the island of Taiwan to hunt down lost parts of his story and attempt to reconnect with distant relatives. She offers a poetic tour and anti-colonial reclamation of the island through her descriptions of its flora, fauna, natural disasters, and political history. This title is due to be released on August 4, 2020.

Sharlene Teo Thought Writing a Book Would Be More Like a Bjork Video

Posted on June 24, 2020June 22, 2020 by Jess Zimmerman

In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we’re talking to Sharlene Teo, who’s teaching a six-week workshop on building and maintaining emotional suspense in fiction—a technique she uses to great effect in her novel Ponti. Teo talked to us about the problems with the ideas of “good” and “bad” writing, putting your darlings in a graveyard, and why not everyone will do a twirly dance when they read your book.

What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

Don’t be too precious about cutting things that multiple people have flagged as awkward or confusing. You’re not a genius, it’s just not clearly written enough. The best feedback and advice is often the most specific. Not everyone is your type of reader; treasure the ones that are, but also listen open-mindedly to the critiques of those that aren’t your type of reader, their critiques could be valuable too.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

Being confronted, at times, by the historical limitations of the space. Diverse representation in both the workshop and reading syllabus is very important. If not, it just becomes an echo chamber of Anglo-American literature and the specific orientations and limitations of that perspective. Most notably, what connotes “good” or “bad” writing: we’ve all heard of the tropes of Carveresque minimalism and the Hemingway style. I’ve often heard the argument, also in regards to publication diversity statistics, that if the work is “good enough” it’ll be published; that’s simply not true. There’s a whole variety of ways of telling stories and representing reality that hasn’t fully been covered in and out of the classroom.

What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?

There’s a whole variety of ways of telling stories and representing reality that hasn’t fully been covered in and out of the classroom.

I always tell my students writing a novel is like stringing pearls on a necklace. Each chapter or scene should gleam and pass muster (luster?) in its own self-contained way. It’s lazy/no excuse to say that readers in your workshop group don’t “get” the brilliance of this chapter because it’ll be explained later etc. There are no shortcuts. If it doesn’t stand up on its own it is not doing enough work for itself.

Does everyone “have a novel in them”?

Everyone who is passionate about reading, and stories, and expressing their compost heap of imagination, emotions, memories and views of the world in writing has some kind of novel in them. Other people have other forms of art in them. We all have our own mediums. People at parties who don’t read for pleasure often make the assumption that you can churn a novel out if you have the time simply if you are literate. (Maybe I need to start going to better parties.) That’s a gross but common oversimplification of the existential and intellectual effort that goes into the process. If you are “too busy” to read or don’t enjoy reading and just want to be famous for being clever then no, you absolutely do not have a novel in you, and u are also not that clever, haha.

Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?

I would never encourage anyone to give up writing—that strikes me as an arrogant and pernicious thing to do, taking someone’s creative life into your hands. I think, if it really pained a student of mine to write, and they hated every second of it, I’d encourage them to take a break and recharge their imaginative well with other forms of art and relaxation before starting again. It is never too late to start writing. Writing is not a race, it’s a life-long marathon and a spiritual practice for some. Hello Julia Cameron! There shouldn’t be any prescriptive rules around it, although solicited advice can be helpful. Just do whatever works for you, and that includes fallow periods, breaks, times when you feel disenchanted/frustrated with writing. It takes a long time to get better at writing—most days, I feel despairing of the limits of my own ability and articulacy. But the key thing to me is remaining energized and curious about stories: why they matter, how they work or don’t work. I take my own creative failures (so many!) as lessons/ research.

What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?

Constructive criticism. It’s good to know what is working but even better to know how you can make it work even better.

Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?

Put your darlings in a blank word document so they can hang out with your other shelved darlings, not dead, but soon forgotten.

It depends on what motivates them to finish a project. I think expecting or feeling entitled to publication and glowing success sets one up for disappointment and potential bitterness if reality doesn’t meet expectation, but at the same time, having the goal of publication is fine too. I used to dream when my book came out it would be like an IRL version of the Bjork “Bachelorette” video where everyone reads it and does a twirly dance etc. but I was sorely disappointed that this is not the case, but also relieved as well! Many books get published, life goes on, it’s all about keeping going, not the immediate highs of external validation. That isn’t as sustaining as the solace and surprise you get from reading and writing stories and trying to make sense of the world in words.

In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?

Kill your darlings: Put your darlings in a blank word document so they can hang out with your other shelved darlings, not dead, but soon forgotten. A darling graveyard you can revisit in a few years and either feel inspired to start something new, mystified you wrote that, or relieved they didn’t see the light of the world.
Show don’t tell: Sitting hunched over her laptop, she considered this truism through narrowed eyes and a coffee-addled brain and concluded that sometimes over-description is over-written, annoying and slows the pace down. SO, I mean, it depends. Sometimes, just tell us what happens! Lol
Write what you know: I HATE the literal interpretation of this, it leads to the reductive assumption (more for female and POC writers, I’ve observed) that their fiction is a thinly veiled narrativization of their immediate experience. It’s dismissive of the strange and transformative powers of imagination, how memory, creativity and subjective interpretations of the world combine to form a different beast than the sum of its parts. I believe in writing from a place that feels emotionally and intellectually true to you and what you’re fascinated/frustrated by. I believe every writer has thematic territories and wastelands they keep returning to inexorably and oftentimes unconsciously throughout their work. I think writing into the unknown from a place of known curiosity is more apt.
Character is plot: What is plot? Is it characters moving through time, actively making decisions that advance or altar their view of the world? I feel tired trying to parse this right now. Ask me tomorrow or something.

What’s the best hobby for writers?

Physical exercise of some sort, we’re in our heads so much.

What’s the best workshop snack?

Humble pie.

9 Books About Misfits and Weirdos

Posted on June 23, 2020June 25, 2020 by Jo Lou

When the going gets weird, I look to the weird to help me keep going.

I Keep My Worries in My Teeth : Anna Cox (author) : 9781542044530 ...

The three women in my novel, I Keep My Worries In My Teeth, are all misfits. Ruth is a widow who steals photographs and hoards time because she’s trying to bring back her dead husband. Esther only understands the world when she bites it. While her dental proclivities make dating difficult they make her the most successful MouthFeel™ tester the pencil factory has ever had. Frankie is a teenage punk who secretly loves soap operas and only communicates in military code and tap shoes. These women didn’t start out as kooks but a town tragedy forces them to recreate their lives so they do what freaks and misfits do best—cleverly adapt in order to thrive in lousy situations.

The word “misfit” implies the lack of a proper fit and while some people might see misfits as unfit, my novel and the following stories and poems prove the opposite. Through break-ups, housekeeping hacks, tiger teeth mishaps, extreme vowel restriction, and pestilence-based assignation attempts, these characters turn normalcy on its head. In the best of times, life is weird but especially right now, when everything feels all wrong, let these freaks and misfits make you feel all right.

Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints by Phyllis Diller

Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hint by Phyllis Diller

Unexpectedly out of work, Esther, the pencil factory’s MouthFeel™ Tester, has no way of calming anxious teeth so she frantically searches for biting substitutes, toothing her way through her apartment’s hard inventory of toilet plungers, table legs, and wooden hangers. Phyllis Diller didn’t have to gnaw on faux colonial table legs to make people laugh. As one of the first female comedians to be a household name, she built a career pointing out the rigidity and ridiculousness of female domesticity.

Published in 1966, her housekeeping hints are a timely antidote to Instagram’s filtered-perfection whack-o influencer culture plus they’ll make you laugh as you’re working from home, Zoom-ing, home-schooling, hating Zoom but doing it anyway while trying to remember what day it is, and cook, cook, cooking, again. Diller offers child-rearing advice like, “Remember my tranquilizers are coming out of your allowance” and cooking tips such as, “Don’t spend too much time planning meals. You don’t want a charge of premeditation.”

If you can’t find your own copy, I read it on YouTube as a way to laugh during the pandemic.

No One Belongs Here More Than You af Miranda July som e-bog

“The Swim Team” from No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

My novel has three main characters but photography is a kind of fourth character, a silver nitrate trickster mucking with everyone’s understanding of memory, reality, and time. “The Swim Team” has nothing to do with photography but every semester I read it to my photography students anyway because the great thing about photography is you can create your own reality and the terrible thing about photography is you can create your own reality. In July’s short story, the swimmers never dip into a pool, but they bond as a team, breaststroking and executing perfect dives on a dry kitchen floor.

Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser

What happens when laughter goes rogue? This story follows the delirious rise and deleterious fall of laughter clubs, “those half-real, half-legendary places where laughter was rung out of willing victims by special arts.” When the laughter craze falls out of fashion, it is replaced by weeping cubs, but when the most gifted laugher refuses to stop laughing, she faces unexpected consequences.

I Am an Executioner by Rajesh Parameswaran

“The Infamous Bengal Ming” in I Am An Executioner: Love Stories by Rajesh Parameswaran

It’s tricky to express affection with your teeth. After a long dry spell, Esther finally has a date and at the end of the night he invites Esther back to his apartment. She’s excited and tequila brave but her teeth are bossy drunks and it has been too long since they’ve sunk themselves into anything hard…

Attempted dentinal affection doesn’t end well for Esther nor for the tiger in “The Infamous Bengal Ming.” This wickedly funny story is told from a tiger’s perspective and shows how love redeems and destroys.

“The Rememberer” from The Girl In The Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender

Some couples split because of infidelity while others break up because one of them can’t keep their teeth in check, but in “The Rememberer” a woman breaks up with her boyfriend because he is “experiencing reverse evolution” at the rate of about a million years a day. One day she returns from work to discover he is an ape. A few weeks later, he’s a sea turtle. Like all the stories in this collection, Bender combines absurdity with emotional acuity. Who hasn’t wondered if their ex was regressing right before their eyes?

Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlife by David Eagleman

Throughout I Keep My Worries In My Teeth, Ruth talks to her dead husband as if he’s still alive. She asks him what it’s like wherever he is and while Ruth never receives an answer, David Eagleman’s fantastic and bizarre afterlife scenarios might just change how you live.

One of the forty tales imagines the afterlife as a kind of terrible sitcom where you’re forced to confront all the irritating versions of how your life could have been. Another story imagines that in the afterlife, life is reordered and relived according to categories of activity. So, you spend “eighteen months waiting in line, nine days pretending to know what is being talked about, six days clipping nails, six months watching commercials and you take all of your pain, all at once.”

Eunoia by Christian Bök

Frankie, the teenage punk, spends most of my novel communicating by wearing tap shoes and using a military code. This unwelcome limitation expands Frankie’s appreciation of her speech. She learns to loves how her words echo on concrete and hates how carpet swallows her voice.

Speaking in tap shoes seemed like a clever restriction until I read Eunoia, a book of poetry where each chapter only uses words that contain one type of vowel, like in this stanza from the E chapter:

Westerners revere the Greek legends. Versemen retell the represented events, the resplendent scenes, where, hellbent, the Greek freemen seek revenge whenever Helen, the new-wed empress, weeps.

Best read out loud, the book’s restrictions showcase the flexibility of language and reveal each vowel’s quirks.

“The Connoisseuse of Slugs” from The Dead and The Living by Sharon Olds

And now, I must apologize to all the poetry readers in the small Ontario town where I live. If you’re wondering who checked out every single Sharon Olds book from the library—right before the library closed for months—it was me. I’ve used my long quarantine nights to contemplate erecting a shrine to Sharon Olds, but her poems deserve better than the cat-hair-clump-duct-tape disaster that I’d erect. And speaking of erect, this poem is also about slugs.

Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War by Jeffrey A. Lockwood

This nonfiction history of militarized entomology is so enthralling, comical, and preposterous it should be fiction. Did you know someone tried to assassinate President Lincoln by sending him a louse-infested military uniform?

Read it for the fascinating historical and contemporary explorations of world-wide weaponized insects but also read it as a reminder that the freakiest people are the ones who act the most normal and seem the most in control. Better to put down that Colorado potato beetle bomb and let your freak flag fly.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s New Novel Explores the Dark Side of Social Distancing

Posted on June 23, 2020May 20, 2020 by Jo Lou

Ottessa Moshfegh can write about cynicism and vice in a way that is at once dangerously validating and innocuously readable. Her characters are young, prideful, verbose, and hate the world just enough more than they hate themselves to make room for an inventive plot every time. Death in Her Hands, Moshfegh’s latest, is a little different. On page one, a lonely old widow named Vesta finds a mysterious note. The rest of the novel follows her spiraling obsession with the anonymous message, resulting in comically extravagant theories that anxiously trouble the line between reality and delusion. The only other character is a dog.

In light of the current pandemic, Death in Her Hands feels eerily clairvoyant. It’s a deeply internal thriller about what the mind can convince itself when left truly alone—the potential ramifications of what we now call social distancing, written years before it became a practice that defined our daily lives. And the predictions are grim!

I spoke to Ottessa Moshfegh over the phone about her new book in early March, back before its release date was twice postponed, along with a brief follow up mid-May. We talked about alienation, genre conventions, and what it means to get older, among other things. We also spent the first five minutes of our call chatting about the then-burgeoning pandemic, an eerily clairvoyant discourse in and of itself that I had to cut off to start our interview (Her take? “The timing of this outbreak is so creepy to me. Like, is this on purpose?”). But with Ottessa Moshfegh, what else can you expect?

Verity Sturm: What’s the story of its genesis?

Ottessa Moshfegh: I was living in Oakland. I had finished my short story collection (Homesick for Another World) and was waiting for it to come out, so I had this limbic period of not knowing what to do next. Like, I knew that a lot of things were going to happen—I was going to move, my book was going to come out. But I was done writing short stories, and I desperately needed a creative project. So I told myself that I would write 1000 words a day, without looking back at what I had written the day before, until I reached the end of a novel. And everything that happened was a discovery. It was like an exercise in being present, and I think that became what the book was about—the character being led in the present moment by her imagination.

So it worked. I mean, I wrote it and I put it away. I went on book tour for Eileen and then started revising it when I was living in a cabin in the woods on a lake, kind of the place that I had been imagining while writing the story, so that was really cool to get to go there. It’s a family place in Maine but I tried to avoid specifically naming the town in the book because I didn’t want it to seem like Maine exactly. But back to the question of where it started, I have no idea. I have no idea about how Vesta, like… I don’t know. It just kind of appeared on the page and became a book.

VS: Death in Her Hands is packaged as a traditional thriller, it’s got the classic title and cover design and old lady/death note imagery. Your first move into genre fiction was with Eileen, and in an interview with Vintage Books you mentioned that it was a “creative decision, not a commercial one” meant to bring attention to the limitations of systems, whether social or narrative. How does Death in Her Hands work within this genre-system?

OM: I’m fascinated by how the genre becomes institutionalized. That happens because of the books, not because there’s some preexisting idea of what a mystery novel should be. Nobody said, “okay this is the genre and now you have to write books in that genre.” I’m thinking, what would my version of that be? And what I find interesting is playing and toeing the line between expectation and the unexpected. I’m not interested in reading novels that could have been written by some computer program, you know? There should be some overriding element of human intelligence and some form of expression rather than another thing in a series that’s exactly like the last book that you loved. But I think it’s exciting when books can be placed side by side with other books of a particular genre and defy expectations around that genre.

VS: Speaking of defying expectation, your previous protagonists have been mostly young people disgruntled with life before they’ve seen half of it. What moved you to approach Death in Her Hands from 72-year-old Vesta?

OM: I was interested in a character who had already had a life, and the question of what we do at the end. Like, we’re completely alone, we’re no longer planning for the future, and we’re not even trying to really understand what’s happening in the world around us anymore. I mean, I don’t know, I’m 38, I’m not 70. My parents are in their 70s now and I wouldn’t say they have opted out of life at all, they’re both completely awake. But I was interested in a character who would be isolated physically, and also kind of spiritually. Her husband had died and she never really had a life of engagement because it was only through her husband that she really engaged in society. So what happens when you try to know yourself when you know that your life is almost over? I guess I was thinking a lot about death. It is called Death in Her Hands.

VS: Although older, Vesta speaks with an insular contempt not unlike that of your previous protagonists. You now have multiple books steeped in the first-person depths of a highly critical, often retributive perspective. Why write from a place of such bitter judgment?

OM: Probably because that’s what I was doing. I felt really, really alienated, and pretty tormented by my internal life. Although things have changed significantly in the last five years, for the better. Hmm. I want to answer this in an interesting way.

VS: There is NO pressure.

I’m not interested in reading novels that could have been written by some computer program, you know?

OM: I guess I’ve been interested in how a character in isolation can try to make sense of the world around her without actually interacting with it. Because in some sense that is what fiction is — it’s creating a world in the fortress of a two-dimensional page, an illusion in the mind of the reader that feels real enough that you can understand it. And I feel like that’s exactly what people do when they’re alienated. They have a version of reality within the fortress of their own mind. The way that we build worlds is that we see, we take evidence of things, and we make a judgment of them. And then that’s how we ascribe meaning, that’s how we build a value system and a belief system. For me, that’s essentially what fiction is.

VS: You’ve been pretty open about the torment of your internal life, often referring your 20s as some derivative of hell in interviews and profiles. But you’ve also said “I have an unflappable belief that my future is bright and that I’m blessed.” I’m wondering if you recall when or how in the past five years, as you said, your life began to change significantly for the better. And since so many of your followers are young people familiar with the cynicism of your characters, do you have any advice to junior writers or artists along the way?

OM: I think that my life actually took the turn before I started to feel the effects of it, and I also think it’s partially just a matter of getting older. This sounds weird, but when you’re in college, you have this manufactured society around you that consists of your fellow students, faculty, staff, whatever. And when you leave that system you are suddenly confronted with the world at large and you have to fit your life into it accordingly unless you want to live in a hole or never have relationships outside of college. I think the process of becoming an adult is maybe a little bit delayed in our society since the middle class has this pathway that has been kind of paved for you. There’s an expectation that you will graduate from high school, go to a four-year college, graduate from that, and then be in a career.

That didn’t happen for me, thank god, and part of that was because I knew that I was a writer. I think that the turn happened for me psychically when I realized I had reached a certain point of independence—I felt confident enough in what I was doing to reject the principles of my institutions from my path and really live according to my own compass. And by “institutions from my path,” I mean my family, my education, the region on earth where I was brought up.

So, I don’t know, I think independence and self-reliance are really important in beginning adulthood according to what you want rather than what anyone else is doing or what anyone else thinks you should do. And I think I got really lucky that what I wanted to do ended up being the very thing that was going to get me to that point. I mean, I don’t know. Is this making any sense?

VS: Yes! So much, you have no idea. Now, if your life has changed so much in the past five years, can we expect your writing to change too?

OM: Oh, yeah. Definitely. Always.

VS: Death in Her Hands seems to grow more prescient with every day that passes in the COVID-19 pandemic. What’s it like to publish a book about isolation at a time when it is so widespread and normalized, if not mandated?

I’m interested in how a character in isolation tries to make sense of the world around her without actually interacting with it.

OM: The pandemic and consequent quarantine has definitely distanced me from the experience of publishing the book: I usually go out with the book on tour, and I get to interact with readers and deliver my work to the world in a way that feels personal. I’m grateful that the book will be available this summer so that people who are still isolating, or recovering from isolation, can read it if they want.

VS: A difference between our alienation (in quarantine) and Vesta’s is that she voluntarily elects hers, stating that she’s “pleased with [her] decision” to start an independent life in the removed woods of pseudo-Maine upon the death of her husband. Vesta’s isolation precipitates the paranoia that drives the darkness of this novel, but it also seems to empower her. Do you think that being alone is always this double-edged sword? What is there to gain from gap between what it giveth and what it taketh away?

OM: I do think it’s a double-edged sword. Depending on your personality, isolation can have varied effects. For Vesta, her isolation gives her access to herself on her own terms. She lives according to her own whims and rules. But it’s also a self-reflective universe, and that self can feel like a trap for her sometimes. Having time to be alone with myself is crucial. Privacy and silence are the conditions for me to write, attune to the pace and movements of my own mind. Forced isolation can feel very different, of course.

VS: You have now written multiple books both in isolation and about isolation, and have recently identified yourself as an “isolator” in a piece for The Guardian. The evidence suggests that you’re kind of an expert in the art of being alone. Any tips for the rest of us?

OM: I don’t mean to boast that I have mastered isolation, or that my life is intrinsically better because I’m an isolator. It’s just my habit, what I’m accustomed to. It helps to have a project, some sense of duty or purpose.

In “All My Mother’s Lovers,” a Mother’s Secret Letters Reveal Her Secret Life

Posted on June 22, 2020May 12, 2020 by Jo Lou

Not to sound like an assistant district attorney from SVU, but it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that acclaimed essayist and book critic Ilana Masad has carved a prominent space for herself in the realm of mother-daughter literature with her debut novel, All My Mother’s Lovers. It sits upon a throne of 2020 Most Anticipated lists and has charmed its way into the hearts and minds of readers and critics alike, marking it as one of this year’s most memorable debuts.

When her mother dies suddenly in a car crash, 27-year-old Maggie Krause returns home to find a devastated father and brother and, while going through her mother’s belongings, five sealed envelopes—each addressed to a mysterious man she’s never heard of. In an effort to learn the truth about her mother, Maggie opts out of shiva to hand-deliver the letters herself. What unfolds is the secret life her mother, Iris, kept from her family, forcing Maggie to reconcile herself with the mother she thought she knew, and didn’t know at all.

Told from the perspective of both Maggie and Iris, All My Mother’s Lovers is a poignant examination of intergenerational relationships, grief, and identity—all while trying to navigate selfhood through it all. It asks us to honor the relationships we have with the people we grew up around, and reminds us that our connection to them isn’t temporal, but a lasting imprint that never changes even when we do.

Greg Mania: This novel was born from a single line that kept you awake one night when you were in the first semester of your PhD program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln: “Maggie is in the midst of a second lazy orgasm when her brother, Ariel, calls to tell her their mother has died.” What was it about that particular line, which is the first sentence of the book, that you just couldn’t shake?

Ilana Masad: I think most writers have come up with endless lines in the middle of the night when they couldn’t sleep, and those of us who, like me, can’t be bothered to get up and write them down nine times out of ten, usually lose those lines to the ether (and let’s be honest, most of them probably aren’t really as brilliant as we think they are in the wakeful exhaustion of the moment anyway). But for whatever reason, this one was still there in the morning, and I really have no idea why! Something I liked about it that night, and still enjoy, is the sonic quality of some of the words: “lazy orgasm” for instance, the “z” sound of both the zee and the soft ess. I guess I also like the existential neatness within it, this push and pull between sex and death.

GM: How has being a book critic helped you write this book?

IM: Indirectly, I can see it having helped this way: being a critic means keeping up with contemporary fiction, or trying to. I didn’t purposefully set out to write about the genre that I also tend to write fiction in most often (and yes, contemporary general/literary fiction is a genre), but it’s kind of what happened as time went on. In that way, reading, and reading closely, became part of my job, and I’m sure I internalized elements of structure, plot, and pacing that were successful as well as marketable in some way, even though I wasn’t doing so consciously. That is, when I read as a critic, I’m reading differently as I would as a fiction writer trying to learn from the form, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t learn things by some kind of osmosis, if that makes sense.

GM: Were there any specific challenges when shifting to the role of novelist? If so, how did you contend with them?

The only thing that feels different to me about books and culture criticism is their increasing unsteadiness as a career.

IM: This isn’t the first novel I’ve written, or even the first I’ve sent out (it’s the seventh of the former, fourth of the latter) but it’s the first I’ve sold, and so I really appreciate your framing of the question here, because it’s true that I’ve really never been in the role of the novelist before, certainly not in any public way like this. One of the biggest challenges has been being on this end of things—the A rather than the Q, the guest and not the host, the subject of the review rather than its byline. It’s surreal, after having spent years being on the other end, and (knock on wood!) having no plans to stop that anytime soon.

GM: Conversely, do you think your approach to book criticism will change now that you’re a novelist yourself?

IM: I really don’t think so! I first started publishing criticism in 2013, and fiction in 2012, and have kept writing and publishing those simultaneously ever since. It’s the ratio that’s changed, really, and that was largely due to the fact that over time, as I developed my skills in both areas, I learned that I potentially could make a career in criticism, while the fiction side of things was still much less clear to me. At this point, the only thing that feels different to me about books and culture criticism is their increasing unsteadiness as a career as well.

GM: The mother-daughter relationship is a bubbling cauldron in literature. Is there a text in this regard that had a profound impact on you and, if so, how?

IM: You know, I’m trying to think of whether there was one like this when I was younger and I can’t think of that many. So many of the books I read as a kid featured orphans or children whose parents were just sort of mysteriously absent from their everyday lives, and later, when I was trying to read all these classics that I thought everyone in the U.S. had read in high school, so many of the mothers were dead, and if not dead, then silly and sort of unimportant. It’s only in recent years that I feel like I’ve been reading a lot of books that dive deeply into this particular relationship, really, which makes me so glad.

The one book that I can think of as being formative when I was younger, and which also included nuanced and complex mother-daughter relationships is Little Women. I’ve read that book so many times, and each time I do, I find something new in those relationships. Marmee tries to respect her daughters’ decisions but also attempts to impart some of her own wisdom. She’s not perfect—sometimes she’s pushy, sometimes she’s holier-than-thou, occasionally she’s furious or exhausted. She’s human, in other words. And her daughters don’t always recognize her as a person who existed before they did, as a woman who is not solely a mother but also an individual with her own thoughts and desires and dreams; but sometimes, in glimpses and moments, they can and do, and that’s always felt so powerful and beautiful to me, and so rare for literature of the time, too.

GM: Iris is a character rich in dimension, and that is something Maggie discovers about her mom throughout the course of the book. What do you want your readers to take away about parents, specifically?

IM: I want readers to take away whatever it is they need to from the book—it’s not for me to say what that’ll be. (I know this sounds cheeky, but I mean it sincerely!)

In terms of how I think about parents: they fascinate me. This is probably partially because my own dad died when I was a teenager, and one of the things I started to mourn very early were all the things I’d never know about him, the conversations I’d never get to have with him, the stories that I’d never get to hear.

The older I get the more I think about how adulthood is this bizarre social construct that we all participate in, and how our parents must have felt just as confused and strange and out of control as so many of us do at various points in their lives, even as they presented whatever façade it is they presented to us when we were young. And that makes me think a lot about the distance between how children perceive their parents—which can be in a variety of ways, of course, from all-knowing and benevolent to dangerous and unpredictable and, most likely, somewhere in between—and how adults perceive their parents. The thing we have as adults is both our own life experience through which to read our parents and the capacity to learn more about them, to ask them things, to find out more. That doesn’t mean they’ll respond, or tell the truth; it doesn’t mean we’re required to ask or that all of us even want to. But that potential for communication is there, and I wonder how many of us don’t take advantage of it because of how deeply prescribed our hierarchical roles are.

GM: This is also a story of intergenerational relationships. How does identity, for you, unfold when presented in the context of different generations?

The older I get the more I think about how adulthood is this bizarre social construct that we all participate in.

IM: What a wonderfully complex question! I think that the specifics depend very much on the identity, but more broadly speaking, I think a few key things change and evolve over time that create these seeming gaps between generations: social and political contexts (by which I mean things like what is normative or accepted on the one hand, and what laws and rights have been created under whatever political system one lives in) and, alongside that, language. So, to take Maggie’s identity as an example: she uses the words gay and lesbian to describe herself but identifies most often as queer, because that word describes not only her sexual orientation but also an identification with a kind of umbrella-term (that some object to) for the LGBTQ+ community, and also, in addition to that, a kind of way of being in the world that implies a political stance. On the other hand, women of Iris’s generation might identify much more strongly with the word lesbian because of the kind of stigma it carried when they were coming of age and coming out and the political implications of identifying with it.

When I think of the various intersecting identities we all carry, I like to think of the time periods where we came into or became aware of particular aspects of our identities as well, because I think that our terminology is often bound up with it in ways that are deeply emotional and difficult to shake.

GM: Grief is another major theme. You remind your reader that there is no one way to grieve, no wikiHow on how to deal with the frenetic emotions that run through you like slides on a projector. Did you learn something new about grief while writing this book?

IM: I learned how Maggie grieved, and how Peter grieved, and Ariel and Iris as well. All of them grieve in different ways in various moments in the book. Grief, unfortunately, has been in my life for very nearly as long as I can remember myself—it’s something I feel a strange kinship with. I have for some years now only experienced it second or third-hand, via the grief of those close to me, which scares me, a little, because for a good portion of my life, grief arrived like clockwork every four or five years. Part of me, I think, wrote this book with some bizarre and totally irrational superstitious idea that it would be a delay tactic, that by writing out all this grief I’d delay it entering my life directly again. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently, for probably obvious reasons.

GM: Has writing this book helped you reconcile with any grief in your life? Is so, how?

IM: I don’t think so, but only because I’m not sure I conceptualize grief that way—I don’t know if it’s something I can reconcile with. If anything, I think writing the book let me admit how much grief still lives in me and just how uncomfortable it still is, and probably will be for a long time.

Visiting the Local Greasy Spoon with an Actual Saint

Posted on June 22, 2020June 22, 2020 by Halimah Marcus

The following story was chosen by Nicole Chung as the winner of the 2020 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. The prize is awarded annually by Selected Shorts and a guest author judge. The winning entry receives $1000, a 10-week writing course with Gotham Writers Workshop and publication in Electric Literature. In lieu of a live performance at Symphony Space in Manhattan, Selected Shorts has arranged for the winning story to be recorded by Emily Skeggs, which you can watch here.

Prayer for the Ides of February

Winters, my hands become geological. First they chap, then fissures open in the webbing between each finger, then granules surface from within. This year, the granules have begun aggregating into complex structures. I sand down the pale, coral-like extrusions with a nail file or discreetly snap them off. In the privacy of my apartment, I tweeze out the roots. It’s hard to keep up, and leaves my hands prone to bleeding and my mittens bloody.

What do I do, I ask my mother. From far away, she consults the Harvard pathophysiology guide that’s always lived on her nightstand, thousands of pages thick with all the very best ailments. But that’s no help, so she dredges up her catechism and suggests petitioning Saint Lucy.

Although I’m thoroughly agnostic, ambivalent to the bone, you descend from the heavens right away, halo blazing. You gently take my hands in your own, diagnosing it as a bad case of longing, something within me yearning beyond.

Can you make it go away? I ask.

Are you sure you want me to? you ask. It’s really quite lovely.

I’ve fallen behind on pruning, and latticework, admittedly charming, now encircles my knuckles. I imagine letting it grow out, myself as art installation. Then, when no gallery can contain me, lowered to the seafloor, generating much-needed habitat for eels and cephalopods.

But it’s rendered my hands useless, I object. And I’m too young to become a full-time monument to my own solitude.

With an air of approval, you loop your immaculate arm carefully through mine for a stroll to the famous local diner. They’ve decorated with red cutout hearts and cupid garlands. You get the grilled cheese, I get an egg cream, we share a platter of fries. I couldn’t remember which one St. Lucy was; you are, of course, the one always depicted with her eyes both in her face and on a plate, which we make space for by the jams. You also doff your halo, wedging it between the ketchup and the napkin dispenser, where it dims. You seem much more approachable now that I can stop averting my eyes.

After we’ve finished, the waiter sweeps up my sloughings and clears the dishes as well, we realize belatedly, as your eye-plate. I rush to save the eyes before they get thrown out, but you catch my elbow and pull me back. We never learn what becomes of them.

I do not ask if you regret your virgin martyrdom, if wedding Christ was really an excuse to rebuff mortal men, if you respond so readily to all your supplicants. You do not point out my hypocrisy, resorting to religion only when science fails me. We linger long after the bill is settled, speaking of thoughts and feelings and other womanish trifles, voices low, for no one but each other. “Only the Lonely” plays on the jukebox but for once does not apply.

7 Revolutionary Anthologies by Black Women Writers

Posted on June 19, 2020June 18, 2020 by Jess Zimmerman

I once took a course called “Modern American Literature” in college. The syllabus didn’t include one single Black female author. Every author we read was a white guy. I wondered why the works of Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison or Alice Walker—voices that turned the pretentious, white male-dominated literary canon on its head—did not qualify as Modern American Literature. As the lone Black female student in this class, I couldn’t help but feel that the lesson here was that I didn’t belong. My blackness, my womanness, was not American Literature. As I grew older and delved deeper into diverse literature, I discovered that Black and brown women were not superfluous or alien to Americanness, but essential to the story of the United States, and as long as our voices are suppressed, the story would never be complete.

The struggle for racial equality is far more than a moment in time—it’s a movement, one that Black women and women of color have been documenting for decades.

As we observe a wave of protests across the world, demanding justice for George Floyd and the countless other black people killed by police brutality, it’s increasingly important to understand the Black experience in order to be an ally for racial justice. Although the conversation on racial justice is often centered on Black men, we must not forget the names of the Black women who have recently been killed by law enforcement and racist vigilantes: Breonna Taylor, Oluwatoyin Salau, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, and countless other voices that were silenced. In their honor, we celebrate Black female voices from across the diaspora through literature.

One of the most powerful things people can do right now is to educate themselves by going directly to the source, that is, #ownvoices texts and literature that speaks directly to the impact of racial injustice in the United States. It’s important to note that the struggle for racial equality is far more expansive than this troubling moment in time—it’s a movement, one that Black women and women of color have been documenting for decades. The following anthologies capture the voices that always existed but were often shunned, ignored, or silenced altogether.

Sisterfire: Black Womanist Fiction & Poetry edited by Charlotte Watson Sherman

The Sisterfire anthology came as a response to troubling times. Editor Charlotte Watson Sherman writes: “Shortly after the Rodney King Uprising, I woke from a dream with a voice telling me to ‘do the anthology.’” The anthology features writers such as Alice Walker, Bell Hooks, Ntozake Shange, Lucille Clifton, and more. The book is divided into nine parts, beginning with “Becoming Fluent: Mothers, Daughters, and other Family” and “Night Vision: Crack and Violence Against Black Women,” with each part alternating between poetry and fiction to paint a landscape of the issues heavy on the minds of women writers at the forefront of the Black womanist thought movement.

Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves by Glory Edim

This book is the ultimate ode to Black women writers. A collection of essays written by the most prominent Black women writers of our time reflecting on the role literature played in their own coming of age journeys. The collection includes essays by Jesmyn Ward, Jaqueline Woodson, Gabourey Sidibe, Tayari Jones, and others. With this anthology, Edim sends a clear message, “The essays in the following pages remind us of the magnificence of literature; how it can provide us with a vision of ourselves, affirm our talents, and ultimately help us narrate our own stories.”

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldua

Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, this collection (edited by Chicana writers, but including work from women with a range of racial identities) explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, the “complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color’s oppression and liberation.”

Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology edited by Barbara Smith

This collection of essays and poetry by Black feminist and lesbian activists is one of the leading texts in the field of women’s studies. Editor Barbara Smith brought together Toi Derricotte, Audre Lorde, Patricia Jones, Jewelle L. Gómez and many more. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women’s lives and writings.

New Daughters of Africa edited by Margaret Busby

New Daughters of Africa spans a range of genres—autobiography, memoir, oral history, letters, diaries, short stories, novels, poetry, drama, humor, politics, journalism, essays, and speeches—demonstrating the diversity and extraordinary literary achievements of black women who remain underrepresented. The anthology includes work from Margo Jefferson, Nawal El Saadawi, Edwidge Danticat, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Imbolo Mbue, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Taiye Selasi, and Chinelo Okparanta. Each of the pieces in this collection demonstrates an uplifting sense of sisterhood, honors the strong links that endure from generation to generation, and addresses the common obstacles female writers of color face as they negotiate issues of race, gender, and class and address vital matters of independence, freedom, and oppression.

The Black Woman: An Anthology edited by Toni Cade Bambara

The Black Woman is a collection of early, emerging works from some of the most celebrated Black female writers. First published in 1970, The Black Woman introduced readers to groundbreaking original essays, poems, and stories. The anthology features bestselling novelist Alice Walker, poets Audre Lorde and Nikki Giovanni, writer Paule Marshall, activist Grace Lee Boggs, and musician Abbey Lincoln. These legendary voices tackle issues surrounding race and sex, body image, the economy, politics, labor, and much more.

Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence

Color of Violence addresses the pervasive issue of violence against Black and brown women. With social media being more accessible than ever, we are seeing an endless stream of names turned into hashtags after violent encounters from police brutality to domestic and sexual violence. One in five women will experience sexual violence in their lifetimes and these numbers increase significantly for women of color, immigrant women, LGBTQIA+ women, and disabled women. The volume’s 30 pieces—which include poems, short essays, position papers, letters, and personal reflections—ask one haunting question: “What will it take to stop violence against women of color?”

You Should Have Been Listening to Octavia Butler This Whole Time

Posted on June 19, 2020June 18, 2020 by Jess Zimmerman

COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests across the U.S. and all over the world have drawn our attention to systems of inequality that sustain white supremacy, racism, and anti-Blackness as well as the wealth gap, lack of social security, and inefficient health and education systems. We are recognizing and naming injustices, but we also need to organize ourselves for collective action and sustainable community building. In their boundless wisdom, Black women like Octavia Butler have given us the blueprint. Butler’s Parable of the Sower is an excellent example of the work Black women have done to prepare us for this moment and the movement it is creating. Through her protagonist Lauren Olamina, Butler has been telling the world for decades that it was not going to last in its capitalist, racist, sexist, homophobic form for much longer. She showed us the way injustice would cause the earth to burn, and the importance of community building for survival and revolution. Through Parable of the Sower, we had a better future in our hands, but we did not listen.

Butler’s Parable of the Sower is an excellent example of the work Black women have done to prepare us for this moment and the movement it is creating.

Published in 1993, Parable of the Sower warned us of the effects of climate change, disease outbreaks beyond our control, and an egotistical white-wing president backed by racist religious fundamentalists. Still, we were not ready. This is an indictment on us and our failure to listen to Black women. It need not render us immobile, though; instead, it calls us to act. If we did not know before, it is now clear, through speeches, poetry, music, and works of fiction, that Black women are powerful beyond measure. This power is not limited to knowledge and foresight, but extends to our thinking and attention on the way forward that has already, at least in part, been charted for us.

Consider—
We are born
Not with purpose,
But with potential.

We meet Lauren Olamina as a teenager with a sense of knowing. She quietly rejects the religion of her father, a Baptist preacher and the religious leader in their community of less than two dozen families in the fictional city of Robledo, California. It quickly becomes clear that Lauren is not only a hyperempath, feeling the observable pain and pleasure of other people, but a thinker and a strategist with a deep understanding of risk assessment, timing, and holding knowledge until the appropriate time. She learns, at the behest of her parents, to control herself so that no one can detect her hyperempathy. At the hands of her own brothers, she experiences the danger of her vulnerability in much the same way that Black women experience pain and learn to protect and heal ourselves from pain inflicted upon us by our kin. We use the same skills to shield ourselves from a world intent on eradicating us.

Lauren spends time in deep thought and preparation. She knows the time will come when she will have to escape. She will need skills and supplies as a refugee. When her brother expresses his desire to leave, she tries to stop him, but she can’t make him understand timing. She is left to wait for news of his death. There is no celebration in the confirmation of her knowing because knowing is not the goal. Her vision is greater than her own exaltation and it is linked to the survival of her community so that it can one day thrive. She seeks liberation.

Through her observation of the world around her and her instinct, Lauren creates her own belief system—Earthseed. The scripture itself is about the changing nature of the god and, by extension, the world. It speaks to the power of the individual to affect change. Though it is never explicitly stated, it becomes clear that people—individually and in community—are god, shaping and reshaping the world through responses to what we have already created. It places responsibility on people themselves and calls on us to be attentive to our visions, understanding every decision as a move toward or away from it. Through it, Butler calls us to action.

All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.

When the community is invaded and destroyed and most of the people murdered, Lauren is forced to leave. She scavenges with strangers in her own home for whatever might be of use and, when it is safe, unearths the stash she has prepared. The work of Black women—and girls—has always involved being hundreds of steps ahead, to see what is invisible, and to push past fear, grief, and exhaustion. This is what keeps Lauren alive and helps her to save others—another role Black women consistently hold. With the principles of Earthseed as her anchor, she embarks on a philosophical and physical journey toward a better world with societal destruction, violence, and crises of leadership at her heels.

The work of Black women—and girls—has always involved being hundreds of steps ahead.

Strong, highly skilled, armed, and androgynous, Lauren could easily move with speed and stealth toward her own safety and comfort—but neither she or Earthseed is singular in purpose. Black women have, for decades, committed to community and refused to leave anyone behind. In our move toward Black liberation, we know that we need people to believe and work with us to create it, but we also know that the people who don’t join us deserve it too, and we will have to carry them. It is much easier, however, if they come with us. Earthseed was about getting people to a place where they are willing to join the journey.

Embrace diversity.
Unite—
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.

One of the most difficult lessons from Lauren’s leadership of the Earthseed community is her insistence on making space for people in the face of great opposition. As they journey, the group members—previously saved and supported by earlier members—take great exception to Lauren’s openness. They do not understand her commitment to growing the community. She welcomed people without indoctrination. The understanding was that they had to work and contribute to the wellbeing of the community. It did not matter whether or not they came with skills. She was prepared to teach if they were prepared to learn. She built trust and dedication. She nurtured a solidarity that cannot be forced upon people. Lauren viewed diversity as survival and a pooling of resources, and understood that acceptance and care would bring people into the practice of Earthseed which was more important than debating dogma.

Kindness eases Change.
Love quiets fear.

The survival of the individual in Parable of the Sower is tied to the commitment and care of the community. Lauren never promised her followers an easy journey. She assured them that there would be work and everyone would have to carry their own weight.

We depend on the power of community and the wisdom of Black women to transport us to our home among the stars.

Today, as Black Lives Matter protests take place across the U.S. and all over the world, we have confirmation that the communities Black women have been building and nurturing are critical to the liberation project. Adaptation and acceptance of our roles in this work move us toward the “new normal” that was elusive during the time of COVID-19, but is within our reach thanks to Black visionaries. Lauren used people’s need to survive to bring them to Earthseed. Black women are doing the same work now — pointing to the lived experiences of vulnerable people to recruit people to the revolutionary work ahead.

There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.

As with Earthseed, we depend on the power of community and the wisdom of Black women to transport us to our home among the stars. May we listen, may we learn, may we touch, change, and be changed. Change is god. God is change. Black women are still changing the world.

4 Working-Class Women Fight For Success in Hyper-Competitive Seoul

Posted on June 18, 2020May 6, 2020 by Jo Lou

In Frances Cha’s debut If I Had Your Face, four women reckon with their past and present circumstances as they make their way through the wilds of contemporary Seoul.

The beautiful, icy Kyuri works at a room salon pouring drinks for wealthy men. Miho, an artist who won a scholarship to New York and uneasy entry into the city’s upper echelons, is dating the heir of one of the country’s major conglomerates. Ara, who can’t speak, works in a hair salon and worships a K-pop star. Wonna is pregnant and wonders how she and her husband will afford to raise a child. Sujin has plastic surgery done for the chance of getting herself on the path to a better job.

Cha, a former travel and culture editor for CNN in Seoul, offers a crisp portrait of the South Korean capital and its various obsessions—plastic surgery, class, food, and skincare—through the alternating voices of the four women. I spoke to Cha, who lives in Brooklyn, about judging plastic surgery, K-pop fandom, and Korean fried chicken.

JR Ramakrishnan: One of the fixations of your novel is beauty and Kyuri is the plastic surgery enthusiast. From the outside, it seems to be a very harsh obsession and one that comes with a lot of pressure and debt. Would you talk about this culture of plastic surgery?

Frances Cha: Kyuri represents the most extreme of that kind of mentality towards plastic surgery. I think it’s really a cultural difference in the way that things are more blunt in Korean culture. Whenever the subject comes up, I do feel that there is a judgment about plastic surgery. It’s very real and I completely understand where it comes from. There is this sense that you should never have to change who you are. That to change means that you are bending to societal oppression and is considered frivolous and weak.

However, something like braces, which is very prevalent in American society as well, has a similar effect to plastic surgery. It costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time, involves pain, and it drastically changes your face. You don’t really include that in the same category as plastic surgery and it probably is, in ways that your confidence is affected and how that, in turn, affects all parts of your life—from your love life to your job prospects.

Plastic surgery is considered a very tactical way to make your life better. [But] I really hate the fact that it’s generalized for all of Korean society.

So yes, plastic surgery is considered a very tactical way to make your life better. I really hate the fact that it’s generalized for all of Korean society. I know Koreans who have had plastic surgery and I know those who haven’t and would never. I really don’t like the generalization that all Korean women have had it, but I also don’t like the judgment of anyone who’s had it.

The women in my book are not born into wealth and status. Even if they did have academic success and got a job with a really good salary, oftentimes, it’s impossible to buy an apartment because real estate prices have skyrocketed so exorbitantly. You need help in some form, whether it’s from your family, or you get a loan. But again, loans require financial standing and all of that. And so, the very practical way for Kyuri and for Sujin to make their lives better is by getting plastic surgery and having that improve their job prospects. I would hope that the reader will reserve judgment on them. I wanted to explore the deeper reasons why they make the choices they do. These are not, to me, frivolous or vain choices.

JRR: Status is everything, it seems. We see Miho navigating the upper-class world of Ruby and Hanbin both in New York and Seoul. In Kyuri’s world—she is the top girl in her room salon and had to work her way up there. You write (from the realist Kyuri’s perspective) “It’s basic human nature, this need to look down on someone to feel better about yourself. There’s no point getting upset about it.”

You have also an especially urban marker—the boundaries of what is the city and what is not—when you have one of the Bruce, one of Kyuri clients, make an offhand remark about a place that “barely counts as Seoul.” I also feel like the where-did-you-go-to-school question that Miho fields from Ruby’s rich friend is so loaded, but obviously everyone everywhere asks this in social contexts. Is it especially next-level in Seoul? Could you discuss this?

FC: Yes, the part about Miho being asked about her middle school actually comes from my own experience. I attended a public middle school in a province of Korea. It’s not like it was that far outside of Seoul, probably about an hour and a half from the center of the city. Some of the responses that I would get upon being asked that! Like where?

Korean society is so connected. You are always trying to identify what mutual person you have in common and the easiest way to do that is through finding out which school you went to. I do see, again, from how Western perspectives that this might all be very terrible, but it’s actually stemming from a place of trying to find connection and trying to understand the other person and contextualize the other person. And yes, of course, there’s some judgment embedded in that.

New Yorkers have such disdain for New Jersey, which I find so ridiculous because it is literally 10 minutes away.

But New Yorkers also have these preconceived notions about neighborhoods. Living in the West Village versus, you know, Queens, for example. What kind of connotations does that bring, or, God forbid New Jersey, which is where I am quarantined right now. New Yorkers have such disdain for New Jersey, which I find so ridiculous because it is literally 10 minutes away. I just have a heightened observation of these dynamics because it’s just a very different cultural norm.

JRR: Can we talk about Ara? Her story is intriguing because she can’t speak—because of a childhood incident—and she is obsessed with a K-pop idol in the novel.

FC: My grandmother was deaf from her early 20s. Because of her disability, she very much lived in her own world. I would have all these questions to ask or want to ask her but it was impossible to infiltrate her world, which was very isolated even if she was with other family members. She was an inspiration for Ara.

Also in Korea, I go to the hair salon often because it’s so cheap. A beautiful, amazing blowout is like $10. I have this kind of therapist relationship with my stylist, who I’ve been going to for 20 years. I really believe that hairstylists function as therapists. They definitely do in the West as well but I think it’s more intensified because you don’t have therapy at your disposal in Korea. I’m so grateful to my stylist and was thinking of her a lot.

Ara’s K-pop obsession came from when I was in a very dark place in my personal life after my father passed away. I went really off the deep end into the world of K-pop. The way that Ara is immersed in that world and in that all-consuming fandom is from my personal experience. I wanted to have her to be isolated but at the same time working (at the salon). I love Ara so much. She comes from a very personal place.

JRR: There is a lot of abandonment (by parents, lovers, etc.) but also strong friendship in the novel. Could you meditate on that?

FC: I wanted to explore people who are not born into wealth and who have to carve out a life for themselves and rely on each other. In Korea, friendships are so intense. People really go to bat for each other in a way that is just so moving and dramatic.

I wanted to explore people who are not born into wealth and who have to carve out a life for themselves and rely on each other.

This fierce loyalty often lands people in trouble because of nepotism. In every industry and at every level, there are people who get into trouble because of this. In general, this actually comes from a place of really caring for friends. You feel bad for not helping people out if you have the power to do so. It’s considered a betrayal if you turn your back by not helping someone else if you can.

When I was at school, I used to volunteer at an orphanage, which inspired the one in the book. It was a very formative experience for me, this isolated orphanage in the middle of the woods and seeing the children grow up and build bonds there. In every stage of my own life, I’ve had friends who have pulled me out of dark places. I wanted to explore how even if you are abandoned by your family, it’s possible to have your own family by making one, which is what the women in the book are doing.

JRR: It seems that in the last decade or so, there’s been this growing Korean literary mafia. I don’t know if Alexander Chee and Min Jin Lee are the capos or what, but what an incredible output recent years have brought! What do you think of this flourishing? What are your Korean American and Korean literary favs?

FC: I don’t even know where to start with gratitude and my absolute idolization of the incredible Korean American and Korean writers out there! Janice Lee is amazing. She has also been so incredible in her mentorship and the way that she’s encouraged me in key moments in my career.

I had the honor of being published on the same day in the U.S. as Kim Ji-young and her book, Born in 1982. It came out a few years ago in Korea, and has been a sensation. I think it is an absolutely incredible literary piece. Han Kang, who wrote The Vegetarian, has been incredibly inspirational as well. Baek Hee-na, who just won the biggest prize in children’s literature in the world, is someone I appreciate on a daily basis because I have children.

E.J. Koh’s The Magical Lives of Others is remarkable. I have been recommending it and gifting it to everyone. There’s Ed Park, who was one of my workshop professors at Columbia, just wrote for the New Yorker about the rise of anti-Asian sentiment in the States.

JRR: Korean culture—cinema, skincare, and pop music—has been having a moment globally. What do you think is the greatest Korean contribution to global pop culture thus far? My vote is for the spa culture. I love Spa Castle in Queens. Have you been there?

FC: I have not but I’ve actually covered spa culture a lot for CNN. I interviewed the ladies who scrub in a piece I call the Secrets of the Scrub Mistress. Not pop culture exactly but right now I would say drive-thru coronavirus testing is a life-changing and life-saving modern Korean invention. I would say Korean fried chicken too. I could subsist off that exclusively.

“The Little Engine That Could” Is a Capitalist Nightmare

Posted on June 18, 2020June 17, 2020 by Jess Zimmerman

I would try in my cheeriest hushed voice to suggest other books and DVDs at the library, but what my son Theo wanted, from about ages three through five, were train stories. “Chug, chug, chug. Puff, puff, puff. Ding-dong, ding-dong,” I would soon be reading, “along came the little train.” Again.

The Little Engine that Could by Watty Piper required my greatest test of will to endure. The book is enjoying its 90th anniversary this year, with a coup of a celebrity endorsement for its reissue: in early April, Dolly Parton chose it as the first book in “Goodnight with Dolly,” her YouTube series of reading bedtime stories during the pandemic.

We are supposed to take great inspiration from this story, which began as an American folk tale dating back to the early 20th century. Like John Henry, another industrial-era folk tale, The Little Engine that Could is a story of tremendous, mind-over-matter determination. She is a little engine, not built to haul freight or passengers, but she huffs and puffs “I think I can I think I can I think I can” to pull a train full of dolls and toys over the mountain.

I am happy for the engine, the dolls and toys, and the “good little girls and boys” on the other side of the mountain, but there is a loose end in this story that reveals a cruel theme underneath it all. It begins not with the little blue engine that could, but a little red engine that couldn’t.

She is the one who goes “Chug, chug, chug” in the book’s opening line, taking the toys to the foot of the mountain. “She puffed along happily,” Piper writes,

Then all of a sudden she stopped with a jerk. She simply could not go another inch. She tried and she tried, but her wheels would not turn.
What were all those good little boys and girls on the other side of the mountain going to do without the jolly toys to play with and the wholesome food to eat?
“Here comes a shiny new engine,” said the little clown who had jumped out of the train. “Let us ask him to help us.”

The help they seek is not for the little red engine—to see what is wrong, to repair her—but for themselves, to find a new ride over the mountain. “What are all those good little boys and girls going to do” indeed. They have no toys or food? That line always raises my hackles, because of what the story doesn’t also ask: What is the little red engine going to do? The answer is, we don’t know; as soon as she stops working, despite all she did to get everyone to the foot of the mountain, she vanishes from the story. The implication of this is, we shouldn’t care, either. Once her wheels stop, she’s not worth a second thought.

Because these stories are about ‘the value of hard work,’ we learn about what kind of work is valued.

I have been the red engine. I have also been the blue engine, but that doesn’t help with the feeling that what we convey to our kids through anthropomorphized train stories like these is the cruel world of work. If a train is just a train, and the story is about riding it, or how it passes by—The Little Train by Lois Lenski, Train by Donald Crews, Train Coming! by Betty Ren Wright—the readers/listeners/viewers can admire its machinery, strength, and speed. But when we get to know the lives of the engines, because the stories are about “the value of hard work,” we learn about what kind of work is valued, how it is valued, and how their performance of this work—and these values—determines their fates.

For a few examples, Choo Choo by Virginia Lee Burton is about an engine who wants to be seen as “smart,” “fast,” and “beautiful,” but when she tries to achieve this independently and neglects her duties, she becomes “a naughty runaway.” In Tootle by Gertrude Crampton, the spectacled train school teacher “always tells the new locomotives that he will not be angry if they sometimes spill the soup pulling the diner … But they will never, never be good trains unless they get 100 A+ in Staying On the Rails No Matter What.” What happens? Tootle goes off the rails. Thomas (the Tank Engine) & Friends are not friends. They are coworkers, who compete to be seen as “really useful engines” by Sir Topham Hat, fearing the scrap heap if they fail. These stories all have happy endings, of course, but they should begin with the same epigraph from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”

The Little Engine that Could rankles me the most because in the days of Theo’s train obsession (he is now twelve), I saw myself in the little red engine in two ways. First, I was a part-time community college teacher who, after six interviews, couldn’t manage to get a full-time job. We had moved from Iowa to Michigan for my wife to start a Ph.D. program, and upon arrival my professional wheels had apparently just stopped working. Secondly, my wife spent long days on campus teaching and taking classes, which also meant that I was the primary caretaker for our kids—our daughter Lena was born when Theo was three—and our family’s homemaker. In many ways this was the hardest and most rewarding job I’ve ever had, but it wasn’t honored as “work” in the same way. Socially speaking, making a home is being “out of the workforce.”

Homemaking, in other words, is not the little blue engine pulling a train over a mountain, a singular act of physical strength that gets cheers from all the dolls and toys. Homemaking is the little red engine getting all the dolls, toys, and wholesome food organized, out the door, on the train, and to the foot of the mountain in the first place, a feat that takes tremendous emotional and physical resources but is not cheered, or even acknowledged, because we don’t have methods or practices of knowing it. Traditional gender roles, of course, have everything to do with this. “There are no yard measures, neatly divided into the fractions of an inch, that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter, or the fidelity of a sister, or the capacity of a housekeeper,” Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own. “They remain even at this moment unclassifiable,” where traditionally male achievements are measured, known, and routinely celebrated. All I had to show for my homemaking was that everything was as it should have been: the house was standing, everyone was still alive, and dinner was almost ready.

There is a feminist aspect of The Little Engine that Could not to be overlooked: the mentally and physically strong protagonist is a “she.” However, her heroism is honored when she proves herself to be as strong as any of the male freight and passenger engines. Male strength is what we glorify, whether a man or woman demonstrates it; likewise, whether the mom or dad performs it, homemaking and caretaking is invisible.

If her labor is unknown, why is the little red engine even in The Little Engine that Could? Why not just begin the story with the little blue engine approaching the mountain, facing a challenge, and overcoming it?

There are a couple possibilities. One has to do with the story’s structure. After the little red engine breaks down, the “shiny new engine” that the dolls and toys flag down tells them that he pulls passenger trains only. Then a freight train denies them help, saying, “I am a very important engine indeed”—too important for toys. Third, a rusty old engine says, “I must rest my weary wheels.” These three denials may provide a central meaning of the book. As a review of the book’s 50th anniversary reissue in The New York Times puts it, “The bigger train, the finer train, the older train—for which read ‘grown-ups’—all spurn the dolls’ pleas (too busy, too superior, too tired—how familiar the litany to a child), leaving it up to the little engine, the alter-ego children can identify with.”

‘I think I can I think I can I think I can’ is an expression of her determination—and also desperation. She is huffing and puffing for her life.

But I’m not sure I want my own children to identify with the little blue engine. There’s another reason this first, failed engine might be in the book. The brief story of the red engine provides dramatic tension: if she couldn’t do it, it’s possible that the little blue engine can’t do it either. And what if the blue engine fails? She would not have better terms of employment than her little red counterpart. The stakes are the same. If something happens and she is unable to carry the dolls and toys any further, she’d be abandoned, too. “I think I can I think I can I think I can” is an expression of her determination—and also desperation. She is huffing and puffing for her life.

The most bitter moment in The Little Engine that Could is when they crest the mountaintop. “Hurrah, hurrah,” cheer all the dolls and toys, “the good little boys and girls in the city will be happy because you helped us, kind, Little Blue Engine.” The rewards of her help are not only physical, but also moral: these feelings of kindness, goodness, and happiness are hers to enjoy. The red engine never got a “hurrah, hurrah” for the help she gave, and now, in retrospect, her failure becomes a moral one, too.

After six years in Michigan, my wife neared the end of her Ph.D. program, and we came to realize we wanted to switch roles: she wanted to be the primary caretaker, at least for the foreseeable future, and I (still) wanted a full-time job. It was my turn to be a little blue engine. I sent out sixteen applications across the country, got one interview in Connecticut, and one temporary full-time job. Hurrah—but my contract was for a year (so only one “hurrah”). We decided it was not enough to relocate us all. I would go alone, and to keep applying for jobs on the tenure track.

I had been a most-of-the-time dad and homemaker, and I would become a father who came home for one weekend a month. I also would become a husband who had left his wife with two kids to raise, a house to run, and a dissertation to write; she had to be both a red engine and a blue one. This move was the hardest thing I have ever done, professionally and personally, and the hardest thing I ever want to do.

My two lowest moments were these. The week after I moved to Connecticut, I was driving home from work and got stuck behind a school bus. The bus’s little stop sign blinkered its lights, the doors folded open, and elementary school kids ran out to hug their parents. I missed my family so much I couldn’t bear to watch. For the next stretch of road it was the same scene again and again—oversized, bouncing backpacks, parents taking pictures of their kids—and behind them I wept over the steering wheel.

The second lowest moment came in March. My dad, in Seattle, had a heart attack. He collapsed at the gym. There was a defibrillator on the wall, and a stranger saved his life.

I was doing every last thing imaginable in my do-or-die, I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can job search year.

My spring break was the following week. I had to see him, and I also wanted to see my mom and siblings, all of whom were living through the shock and would now begin the recovery. But I had planned to spend the week with my wife and kids, who were, at that point, in family therapy because of my absence; I was anxious—desperate, really—to spend time with them. My dad told me that he understood, that it was fine not to cancel or shorten my trip to Michigan. But he had died—died!—and was saved. How could I not go see him? I still feel guilty about this. In retrospect, I could have just taken time off of work and made two separate trips, but this didn’t even occur to me. I was doing every last thing imaginable, including perfect attendance as a hard-working employee in my do-or-die, I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can job search year.

While in Connecticut I sent out 24 applications, and by the end of the year I did feel like a really useful engine. I had three job offers, two of them on the tenure-track, and hurrah, hurrah, I would pull my family over the mountain to Philadelphia. But, as the blue engine, I also felt like a bad father, husband, and son. Emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, the railroad had ridden all over me.

I have to amend an earlier statement: the little red engine may have heard the dolls and toys cheer “hurrah, hurrah” at some point in her life. We don’t know. The sound of the cheer may have also been different, something like—in my recollection—the dryer click-clicking as it turned in the basement, little Lena kicking on a baby blanket, and Theo talking to himself as he lined up his Thomas & Friends engines on the curvy wooden track. Our cozy, two-bedroom, hardwood-floored, red-brick duplex had a working fireplace. Those long, house-bound afternoons during a midwestern winter, warmed by flickering coals, are among my favorite memories of being a young family.

Sometimes I could even steal a moment just to watch and listen to it all, partly just amazed that no one and no thing needed my immediate attention. Perhaps there should be a prequel to The Little Engine that Could—call it The Little Engine that Finally Got to Sit Down for a Minute?—that can make this peaceful picture “achievement” enough.

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