The Horror at the Heart of the Island Paradise Fantasy

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Surely 2020 will be remembered as the year that the United States became an archipelago. Over the past month, the majority of Americans have spent more time than ever before at home, alone or with a small group of companions—on islands, that is, both socially and physically. Even the luckiest of people sheltering in place—those for whom home is not dangerous—have mourned  the isolation and claustrophobia built into this new normal. But living in enforced solitude hasn’t stopped a good number of us from choosing to spend our newly abundant free time on…imaginary islands. 

The video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons has become the feel-good hit of the quarantine, garnering millions of users worldwide and overwhelming Nintendo with console orders since its March 20 launch. The plot is as simple as it is soothing: players spend their time festooning a personal desert island with decorations and cheery animal friends. Through a fluke of release-date luck, New Horizons arrived at a time when it was similar enough to our current circumstances (strict boundaries, focus on the home, widespread availability of face masks) to not cause FOMO, but different enough (visits with friends, no illness worse than a wasp sting, capitalism based mostly on selling fish) to be gently cathartic rather than stressful. The fantasy of a lovely isle to which one has freely traveled allows a given player to imaginatively rewrite her involuntary, often materially drab isolation as a pastel-hued tropical vacation. 

But the wish-fulfillment that Animal Crossing provides isn’t new. For millennia, mainlanders have used and abused islands for our own imaginative and material needs, projecting onto them pleasure and possibility. 

For millennia, mainlanders have used and abused islands for our own imaginative and material needs.

For the ancient Greeks, heaven was an island. The Fortunate Isles, supposedly located somewhere in the Atlantic, were believed to be the final reward and eternal residence of exceptionally heroic men. (Variants of this legend include the Odyssey’s Isle of Ogygia, on which Calypso ensnares Odysseus for seven years with the joint promises of immortality and nymph nookie.) The possibility that islands grant everlasting life has continued to fascinate ever since. Early Christians pictured the Garden of Eden as an isle; the occupants of J.M. Barrie’s Neverland never age; Themyscira, the island-nation from the Wonder Woman comics, is populated by immortal Amazons. Mainlanders seem to assume that islands’ geographical separation from the civilizations of terra firma grants them a kind of temporal separation as well, an enchanted bend in the river of time where the water stands eerily still. Because isles float in these static pockets, this line of thinking goes, their inhabitants are protected from the corruptions of aging—and of modernity. 

It’s here that the fantasy begins to sour. When we suggest that islands are immune to the march of the centuries, we also imply that their human inhabitants are forever trapped in a primitive way of life, as unchanging as the amber-glazed mosquitos of a certain island-based Spielberg blockbuster. (To do so also overlooks the fact that islands are often topographically dynamic, perpetually reshaping themselves via volcanic or sedimentary action.) This attitude was perhaps most clearly emblematized in Paul Gauguin’s late nineteenth-century paintings of Tahitians as noble savages, but “has barely undergone revisions in the West since,” as anthropologist Carmen M. White notes. Gaugin’s assertion that denizens of the Tropics lead, in his words, “a more natural, more primitive, and above all, less spoiled” existence lives on in tourist advertising and fictional media that present islands as prehistoric paradises, and islanders their pure-hearted stewards. 

The French painter’s fever-dream of an uncivilized Tahiti yielding itself to the first civilized man lucky enough to wash up on its shores reflects an abiding tradition of colonialist fantasies about islands. The geographical protections that made islands easy targets for cultural domination, in Gaugin’s mind, also made them appealing targets for political domination. In the 1516 book that coined the word and concept of Utopia, for instance, Englishman Thomas More placed his ideal society on an imaginary crescent-shaped isle off the coast of South America (originally a peninsula that the state’s founder broke off from the mainland). The fictional Utopian commonwealth is presented as far more prosperous, stable, and egalitarian than the England in which More lived—thanks primarily to its modest size, which made its shores defensible and its polis manageable. The title character of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe derives a similar comfort from total political control of an island, albeit at a drastically reduced scale. Having established a two-man colony on the island on which he was shipwrecked near Trinidad, Crusoe savored “a secret kind of pleasure to think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of all this country.”

Islands seem like petri dishes in which mainlanders hope their wildest dreams will flourish.

It is because of this enticing combination of physical isolation and apparently controllable social conditions that many continent-dwellers still regard islands as “tabulae rasae: potential laboratories for any conceivable human project, in thought or in action,” as sociologist Godfrey Baldacchino puts it. Over the centuries, mainlanders have used islands to conduct imaginary experiments in civic society (More’s Utopia, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Sir Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis); in education and authoritarianism (William Shakespeare’s The Tempest); in domesticity (Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson); in romance (Randal Kleiser’s film The Blue Lagoon); and, of course, in dinosaurs (Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park). (This is not to say that the experiments always go off well, of course—just ask the unfortunate souls who settle down on islands in Lord of the Flies, “The Most Dangerous Game,” and The Beach.) Small, self-contained, and freeingly distant from “the real world” to which the contestants of tropical reality shows like Love Island  condescendingly refer (a phrase by which they mean, of course, the continent), islands seem like so many petri dishes in which mainlanders hope their wildest dreams will flourish. 

Recently, however, hairline cracks have begun to appear in the foundation of this fantasy. A darker kind of island narrative has emerged, one that attempts to inject a degree of accountability into the stereotype of islands as escapist paradise. Two American productions, both filmed in Fiji and released in the past year, initially register as standard entries in the genre of tropical-experiment porn—but eventually show themselves to be takedowns of the idea that islands are contextless testing-grounds for mainlanders’ wildest whims. This critique becomes crushingly explicit in Jeff Wadlow’s horror flick Fantasy Island (2020), which follows a small group of visitors to a vaguely tropical isle whose magical properties grant each guest the ability to live out one wish. In keeping with the 1970s TV series to which the film serves as a prequel, however, each fantasy eventually turns dark: a wannabe G.I. is permitted to play soldier, only to be confronted with the violence and impossible choices inherent to war; a bacchanalian pool party becomes the site of a slaughter.

Love Island (CBS, 2019), the U.S. adaptation of the megahit British reality show of the same name, similarly undermines its own island reverie, albeit more subtly than does Fantasy Island. The series places a group of genetically gifted Americans in a lavish villa somewhere in Fiji (and I do mean “somewhere”: just as the precise location of Fantasy Island is kept vague within the movie itself, the 22-episode CBS series never specifies which of the nation’s over 300 islands we’ve washed up on the shores of). Contestants compete for a cash prize by courting and pairing off with one another, a death-march towards monogamy interrupted only by the periodic arrival of new, tempting singles. Viewers gradually vote their least favorite couples off the show until only one remains. 

On these conjured islands, one can experience a prelapsarian past and a hedonistic present without a single thought of the future.

Asked why his team chose to set Love Island in Fiji, one of the program’s executive producers explained to the LA Times that “Fiji mean[s] something to Americans. It feels like a place you would want to come and fall in love.” In both CBS’s and Wadlow’s productions, the “something” that Fiji apparently “mean[s]” is a passive backdrop against which American travelers can engage in thrilling exploration, devoid of consequences back on the mainland. On these conjured islands, both screen narratives initially hint, one can experience a prelapsarian past and a hedonistic present without a single thought of the future. 

In order to shape Fiji into an ahistorical stage for their own adventures, however, sojourners to the lands of Love and Fantasy must scrub their destinations of one inconvenient truth: the existence of other humans. Love Island and Fantasy Island make glaringly clear that mainland cultures’ romanticization of islands continues to hinge on the imagined or literal eradication of the real people who live on them—despite the fact that the Earth’s islands are, taken together, twice as densely populated as its continents. (Let us not forget that Manhattan, Singapore, Great Britain and Hong Kong are all islands, too.)

By the time Fantasy Island deposits its vacationing protagonists on the shores of their tropical destination, the island’s original inhabitants are long gone, having sold their residence to the present-day resort’s host, Mr. Roarke, for six cases of rum. But the resort’s guests are not troubled by this story of indigenous disappearance. They’re here to party, and immediately make good on the plan with umbrella-topped drinks featuring—yup—rum. It’s in their interest to overlook the details of the island’s human past, after all. Without the South Pacific slate having been wiped clean of prior residents, the guests would not be able to use this slice of land as their own personal playground-laboratory. 

Likewise, although the visitors express some initial puzzlement about the downright science fictional capabilities of the island—the extraordinarily realistic, bespoke wish fulfillments it offers each of them—their doubts are soon allayed by the flimsy explanations that the people populating their fantasies are either well-paid actors or holograms. The latter theory makes literal the extent to which the cliché of the island paradise is constituted of mainlanders’ projections.

And projections work best when displayed on a blank screen, whether they are supporting the manufactured narrative of a fictional film or of a reality show. Accordingly, it is not until over halfway through the season that the American stars of Love Island interact with actual islanders (to receive a foot rub from two presumably local masseuses). Apart from this interlude and two other fleeting moments, however, the contestants inhabit an island within an island, spending 99% of their time in the palatial villa that the show’s makers constructed just for them. What’s more, these luxurious digs seem expressly designed to physically and aesthetically separate the contestants from the surrounding island: the villa’s neon signs (“Good Vibes Only”), day-glo paint job, AstroTurf, and electric-blue pool cut a jarring contrast with the deep green background of Fiji’s lush forests. At night, a mile of fairy light strands encase the outdoor patio in a crisscross pattern, looking, for all the world, like a net. 

The paradisiacal mainstages of Love and Fantasy Islands are thus kept hermetically sealed—not only from Fijians, as it turns out, but also from another class of inconvenient human. Both islands’ visitors make every effort to leave the people from their own pasts back on the mainland. Although the contestants on Love Island have virtually nothing to do all day but talk about themselves, they discuss their hometown exes, friends, and families with astonishing rarity and brevity. In this way, the contestants—or the show’s editors, at least—choose to keep each hottie’s interpersonal past an uncomplicated blank, as amnesiac as the lotus-eaters of another island. Similarly, it is the express goal of more than one Fantasy Island guest to rewrite her past relationships—not to completely forget the people from her prior life, per se, but to edit them in a way that more perfectly aligns with her own desires. 

Explorers and daydreamers from the continent have long evacuated islands of their residents.

In all of these respects, Love Island and Fantasy Island seem, at first blush, to be predictable distillations of the exploitative historical relationship between Euro-Americans and Fijians, mainlands and islands. Explorers and daydreamers from the continent have long evacuated islands of their residents, either voiding them of people entirely or imaginatively voiding them of fully realized people whose complexity, history, and rights equal their own. These are the mental gymnastics that made it possible for Europeans and Americans to colonize and enslave Fijians in the nineteenth century, for instance. But what makes Love and Fantasy Island members of a novel and moderately more self-aware strain of island story is that the empty-island fantasies they so carefully craft in their opening acts exist only to be eventually deconstructed. For the real plots of both works take off when the seemingly vacuum-sealed perimeters of their respective islands are breached by other humans, unhappy reminders of the social past and present. 

This twist is less surprising to observe in Fantasy Island, whose horror branding should prime us to expect the eventual collapse of any fantasy we see onscreen. Consequently, what begin as blissfully self-absorbed romps for the guests eventually darken as the island shows them the inevitable interpersonal consequences of their hearts’ desires. A woman exacting Hostel-style revenge on what she believes to be the hologram of a childhood bully realizes that she has unwittingly been torturing the genuine article; brothers carousing at an extravagant mansion discover that it is owned by a drug lord with dangerous enemies. Even host Mr. Roarke is eventually revealed to be guilty of tyrannizing another person to fulfill his own impossible yearning, keeping his tuberculosis-ridden wife alive—but physically miserable—with the help of the island’s magic. 

These sick vignettes are less lessons in being careful what you wish for and more reminders that our fantasies very often entail exerting power over people. “This isn’t your fantasy!” the guests repeatedly shriek at one another as their dreamscapes begin to collide with one another. So, too, in standard horror film fashion, do the interpersonal sins from each character’s past come back to bite them in a tender place: we eventually learn that our five protagonists have been brought to Fantasy Island because they all had a hand in causing a tragic death back home. 

If the problem of other people means that there is no such thing as an innocent wish, it also means that there is no such thing as an empty island.

If the problem of other people means that there is no such thing as an innocent wish, it also means that there is no such thing as an empty island. Fantasy Island implies that its island’s first inhabitants—those who lost the place, centuries ago, in an unfair booze trade with Mr. Roarke—are the ones now doling out karmic justice to the guests. It is eventually revealed that the visitors’ nightmares have come to life because their welcome rum cocktails were spiked with enchanted island water. Through the same alcohol that robbed them of their home, the original Fantasy Islanders reassert their presence. 

The forces that besiege the social fortress of Love Island are not so much supernatural as potently natural. The show’s basic rhythm is to wait until contestants have found an equilibrium in which the group is largely subdivided into contented pairs—then to introduce one to six attractive strangers to stir the pot. (“Fiji is my sandbox, and I’m ready to play,” remarks Kyra, the first newcomer to disrupt the balance.) The narrator reminds us continually that “this is Love Island, so you never know who’s gonna come through that door, or that beach.” He means this literally: fresh contestants first emerge, Venus-like, from the natural landscapes of the island, approaching the highly artificial villa from the beach (by foot) or the ocean (by jetski and boat) as though miraculously birthed by the sand, the sea, the jungle. In this way, the island itself asserts a kind of chaotic sexual energy, disrupting the fragile ecosystems of the villa’s committed relationships with the invasive species of new singles. The result is typically a monogamy massacre, as previously besotted couples split to pursue shiny new toys. 

In other ways, too, the show delights in destroying the fiction of unperturbed coupledom  by reintroducing of off-island personal relationships. Late in the season, the final four couples’ families and friends come to Fiji to meet their loved ones’ new loved ones. The double social  bubble that is the island villa has left the show’s members unprepared for this intrusion of external opinions, and the emotional fallout of the exercise throws at least one formerly rock-steady pair (Caro and Ray) off-balance. These upsets accurately foretell how unready these island-born pairs were to reenter their established social universes back on the mainland: three of the four couples who made it to the finale of Love Island broke up within months of the show’s airing. 

In exacting these harsh vengeances on the characters who visit them, Love Island and Fantasy Island suggest that islands are simply places, not paradises, and that our ideal worlds swiftly become monomaniacal when they’re dreamed up without considering the realities of other humans. And Fantasy Island’s nod towards indigenous land theft reminds us that the particular strain of monomania that islands seem to invite has always had material roots in colonialism. Today’s visitors to tropical vacation spots continue to unknowingly or willfully ignore those locales’ deep histories of violent contact between islanders and outsiders (as well as the abiding legacies of that contact, like local poverty and language erasure). We turn the same blind eye every time we log on to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a game which, as Gita Jackson points out, is “basically a fantasy of harmless colonialism.” As the player fills her conveniently abandoned island with adoring animal subjects (much less complicated than human ones) and natural resources that she’s blithely plundered from nearby regions, ruthless dominion has never looked cuter. After all, it’s little more than the ability to reign over one’s companions and physical surroundings that distinguishes an island paradise from an island prison—or from a quarantine zone.

Does She Have Postpartum or Is She Just Realistic?

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

“Nuclear”
by Kate Tighe-Pigott

Galena won’t shut up about the mineshaft. “You guys have to see this,” she keeps saying, packing her two-month-old daughter into the baby carrier I sent her a few months back. The baby still doesn’t have a name. They are working on it, Galena says, though they often go with Stinky Butt or Boo Boo. Maybe they’ll let her pick her own name when she’s old enough. Harriet and I share a concerned glance, which I’m sure Galena doesn’t miss. It’s April, and we’re in the parking lot at Rifle Falls State Park. I rub the baby’s feet. “How do you feel about that, Stinky Butt?” The moniker hangs in the air, big and awkward. Harriet and I have just endured a four-hour drive from Denver, already exhausted from the overnight flights we’d taken from the east coast.

Galena’s husband, Jake, reached out to us last week and asked us to come. He was worried. “You know her,” he’d said on the phone. “Everything’s at full speed. Dude—,” he censored himself while he sighed, “babies are fragile.” Before we left, Jake offered to keep Stinky Butt with him, but Galena refused.

You know her,” he’d said on the phone. “Everything’s at full speed. Dude—,” he censored himself while he sighed, “babies are fragile.

The spring snow floats up as my friends and I cross the parking lot. “You guys,” Galena says. “I can’t believe you came!” Her enthusiasm masks annoyance. “Of course,” says Harriet. It’s reasonable to visit an old friend’s new baby. Stumped for what to say, I ask how Jake’s handling everything. “Who cares?” says Galena. “I’m not attracted to him anymore.” I guffaw. 

“That’s totally normal,” says Harriet, to both of us. Harriet has two kids at home. Baby Boo Boo whatever, zipped inside her mother’s coat, is Galena’s first. I’ve struggled with multiple late-term losses. 

We survey the map at the trailhead. Then, bearing right, we follow the ascent, and the narrow stone passage opens to a frozen meadow. Ice crystals melt on our cheeks. The snow heartens me, because we all grew up in rural Maine and also in the past. Soon, we’re at the waterfall, the normal destination for this hike, lively amid moss and snow. We snap photos, but Galena urges us onward, toward this mineshaft she keeps mentioning. The narrow path is covered in red shale. Despite the newborn in her coat, despite her temporal proximity to giving birth, Galena nearly runs. Harriet, who is the least athletic of us and has the nicest shoes, navigates the terrain more sensibly. I lag behind with her. “Bionic woman!” I shout. 

Galena stops in front of a trail junction thirty feet ahead of us, and swings her arms to the right, shakes her butt to the right, hops her butt to the right in short, backward hops, kicks a leg to the right, karate chopping the air, then disappears around a ridge. Is the baby jiggling around too much? What about her little gray brain? Tiny neck snapping. Is this the mania Jake was talking about? Stinky Butt must have endured this in utero, though. I presume we’re supposed to go right. 

Harriet links her arm in mine and sighs. “How are you, Amy?” she says. 

“Good,” I say, my voice too high. “I can’t believe Galena had a baby.” 

“I know,” says Harriet. It’s dangerous because of her diabetes; we’ve all seen Steel Magnolias. The cells of her kidneys are decaying faster than they ought to for a thirty-six-year-old. Anyway, I am not one to speak. My body treats babies like hostile invaders. 

Two late miscarriages, after bassinets and genders and names. Both times, I birthed the babies, held them while they died. Both times, I used a breast pump to ease the swelling, until my husband pried from me the motor and tubes and silicone nipples and plastic bottles and dumped them into trashbags with onesies and board books and JellyCat stuffed animals, and hid everything in the basement. He’s good. I’m grateful. After the second loss, we did genetic testing, went through three rounds of IVF, egg counting, hormone shots, dwindling savings, a lost job (mine), viable embryos dissolving into blood. We stopped last year, and I’ve been trying to get back on my feet, which has involved adult coloring books, Fiona Apple, and copious weed. When Harriet says, “How are you?” this is what she is referring to. When I say, “Good,” I mean, not dead.

Along the trail, a sign warns that the ground may contain radioactive materials. I take a picture of it with my phone. 

“Jesus Christ!” Galena yells from the path ahead of us. “That’s not a picture. This is a picture.” She flings a hand at miles of dry orange plain, and behind that, snowcapped Rockies. 

I read up on Rifle before we arrived. In the fifties and sixties, it was a site of nuke testing, above ground, underground. I tell my friends a story I heard on the radio about an American man, employed by the US government to walk through the fake neighborhoods decimated by nuke tests. It was his job to observe the eviscerated pig bodies, the fleece and teeth of the sheep in the rubble, and then to carry those images inside him for the rest of his life. Galena says she has to move before Stinky Butt hits six months, because her house has mill tailings, the worthless, granular byproducts of uranium milling that people around here used as fill. “To make cement, finish their yards, bury their sump pumps,” she says. “It’s everywhere. One X-ray per year, they say. Can you picture the baby in a few months, shoving radioactive dirt in her mouth? Didn’t have this problem in Maine, did we?” 

I put my phone in my pocket as we single-file through a narrow rock formation that rounds the outside of the hill we’re climbing. The radio piece also told the story of a Japanese man who was at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I touch both walls of the stone corridor as I explain it to them. “Not only did he survive both of our planet’s only nuclear attacks,” I say, “but he also, somehow, did not become deranged. He fell in love and got married and—totally miraculously—had two daughters.” 

“Why is that miraculous?” Galena asks from the front our line. 

“Miraculous that he wanted to, and miraculous that he could. Because the gamma rays shredded his DNA, twice.”  

“Huh.” She doesn’t get it. My point is more like Godzilla—how a monstrous thing can spare you or destroy you.

“My god you guys!” Galena jumps. “Here it is. The mineshaft.” She grabs my hand. “Will you go in with me?” She’s skipping backwards on the trail. “No bears, I promise.” 

I catch Harriet’s eye. Risk seeking behavior. But it’s not out of character. In high school, we got on the evening news by dancing on the sidewalk behind the WGME news desk. We stole her dad’s snowmobile. We snuck Harriet’s crush into Galena’s bedroom. We raced beater cars down Whites Bridge Road. When I gave it up to Lesser Ben, Galena shot out his tires with her BB gun. I’d go into any mineshaft with her.

When I gave it up to Lesser Ben, Galena shot out his tires with her BB gun. I’d go into any mineshaft with her.

The cave is shallow and bright, and there are three steps carved into the stone on the far side that lead up to a small passageway that cuts deeper inside the mountain. I can’t even see if there is a bobcat in there. “Maybe the baby can stay back with Harriet?” I suggest. Harriet nods. This is what we are here to do: help Galena make safe choices.

“No way.” Galena unzips her coat and unclips the carrier. Stinky Butt squirms, her mouth a perfect O. Galena slips her out of the carrier and into the cold air, hands her to me. “She’s part of it. Plus Boo Boo loves adventure.” Part of what? The Earth? Aren’t we all? Despite myself, I see what Jake is talking about. 

I take the baby. “Sh,” I say, softening every part of me. Her head smells like oatmeal, like honey. “Yes,” I sway and bounce. “It’s okay.” I am lying. Galena goes in first.

“Are you sure?” Harriet calls out. “I’m happy to watch her.” 

“Mildred! Dotty!” Galena shouts, the names she uses when we’re too reasonable. “Stop being old biddies.” 

“Does seem a little dangerous,” I say, holding the child. 

“Where are your balls?” Galena scrambles up so that her face pops through the opening again. “Give her here.” 

I bite my lips and shrug. Moms are shot-callers, and I’m not going to keep her baby from her. I hand the child over the rock to Galena. Then I swing my legs up and hang by my belly for a second to catch Harriet’s eye. “Dial nine-one,” I say. Harriet, I can tell, is annoyed at being made to wait and worry. 

“We’ll be back in four-to-seven minutes,” Galena calls out. 

“Wait,” Harriet says. She takes my hand and swings her legs over, dusts her name-brand slacks. 

Galena insists I kill the light from my cell, and the darkness is total. We have taken seats on the rails, knees touching. I search for our outlines, but see nothing. Their knees bump mine. Sand and pebbles grind beneath my legs. My finger finds the cool raised top of what I imagine is a railroad spike. I hear us breathe. 

“Shouldn’t we have a canary?” I ask. 

“We have her,” Galena says of her baby. Harriet snorts. “Just kidding. I was down here all summer. It’s totally safe.” I file this for the conversation we’ll inevitably have with Jake.

In the dark, I imagine ammonites, those spiral-shaped fossils of nautilus-like creatures that lived in the temperate sea that is now Colorado. I imagine the ammonites floating all around us, in beds of rainbow topaz and tourmaline crystals, spikes of rose quarts, purple amethyst, red garnet. In the dark, I envision so many shapes and colors. 

“I never wanted a baby.” 

Our hands reach out, find the nylon of her winter coat, her silky pony tail, the nape of her neck. Our foreheads clonk too heavily onto hers. 

“God,” Galena says. We find her hands and hold them.   

“What made you decide?”  

“He’d be a great dad.” We hear what she doesn’t say: what she would have lost if she had chosen differently. 

“I would never trade her. I just mean—.”

“I know.” 

Galena doesn’t want the baby she has. How cruel and senseless is this universe? Not worthy of this new girl. I bite my rage. We hold hands in the dark. 

“How far underground are we?” 

“Millions of miles.” 

“Can we stay here?” 

“Do you think there are bugs?” 

“There are bats. But they’re more afraid of us.”  

“What about uranium? If a bomb went off would we be safer down here?”

“What is it with you and nukes?” Then Galena says, “She’s hungry.” We hear a zipper. The rip of Velcro. The wrinkle of Gore-Tex. The squeak of a tiny new voice. “Guys, feel my boobs.” Our hands cast out stupidly, and she grabs them, puts them on her skin. Her breasts are scorching hot and rock hard, like a Kevlar vest left in the sun.

As the baby nurses in the dark, we confess all kinds of things: debt, weed, wine, psilocybin, work husbands, failed attempts at threesomes. I remind Galena of her time as an exotic dancer. We rib each other for our exes and agree mine was the most shameful, because he was—probably still is—a Republican, though Galena’s could talk for hours about maps, and Harriet’s wrote “you are so sweat” in a note explaining why he stole her car. 

“God we’re old,” Galena says. 

“Geriatric,” I say, speaking for my womb. It’s not so bad. My marriage is loose and light—platonic—a comfy sweater I sometimes wear.

As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I make out the curves of Harriet’s right cheek and jawbone, the light in her right eye. Galena’s dimpled chin and bright eyes are lit from below. In the dim green light, through their North Face gear, mother and child look like Renaissance versions of themselves. “Why can I see you?” I say. Galena strokes the baby’s wagging arm, which, in its movement, leaves behind a green facsimile of where it’s just been. She seems—I’ll say it—bioluminescent. 

“Do you have a glow-in-the-dark baby?” I ask. 

Harriet squeaks, delighted, bewilderment in her grin. Everyone is tinged with green. 

“Isn’t she amazing?” Galena says. “This is it. This is what I wanted to show you. I wanted her aunties to see what she could do.” 

My jaw hangs. I reach out to touch the baby’s arm. In it I see swirling galaxies of what I imagine are cell clusters, and the electric green pathways of neurons. “How did this happen?” I ask. 

“How the hell should I know?” Galena says. “Maybe we’re evolving.” She reaches into her coat, hands shaking. “Low again,” she says. “Breastfeeding dehydrates me.” She clicks her insulin pump three times. She’d told me in college once that she shouldn’t drink because of her diabetes, though she continues to. I hear the crinkle of a Clif bar she has produced from her coat pocket. 

I think of the mill tailings. The nuke testing. “Is she radioactive?” I ask. “I mean, have you brought her near a Geiger counter? Or a doctor?” Harriet giggles. 

“My child’s a freaking miracle,” Galena says, mouth full of rice syrup and rolled oats. “If you don’t like it, that’s your bag of shit.” 

My child’s a freaking miracle,” Galena says, mouth full of rice syrup and rolled oats. “If you don’t like it, that’s your bag of shit. 

“I do like it.” Of course I do. “Can I hold her?” This is not something I ask of people with babies, because I hate the moment when the baby arches its back and cries out for its mama—which they always do—and also because I don’t want any moms to even secretly worry that I’m a craven witch or baby snatcher.

“Course,” Galena holds the child in the air, electric green arms and legs, and green heart pumping luminous blood. In her self-generated light, the baby seems pointillist, as if just the nuclei of the cells are illuminated. I think of the Hiroshima babies, the ones I Google in fits of anguish. The twisted up, no-face babies. The two-headed, bulbed-feet babies. The many-armed babies. Of the myriad horrible outcomes of radioactivity, glowing is miraculous.

“Hi,” I coo. “Hi.” My finger slips into her grasp. “Does she have super powers?”

“Besides glowing?” Galena says. “She’s a super pooper.” The baby murmurs and wiggles against me. I sense her agitation and stand up to rock and jiggle. “Watch your step,” Galena says. “Jake’ll murder me if she comes back banged up. He’s such a nervous dad.”

“Does he know?” Harriet says. 

“He’s not blind, and he does night time feedings. I wouldn’t fuck with a guy who doesn’t pull his weight, you know.” Harriet knows. Her husband doesn’t pull his weight. And my husband, well, since we spent our life savings and my youth on failed inseminations, my husband pulls my weight most of the time. I miss him suddenly. “Can you see up my nose?” I ask, realizing I am illuminated from below by the new baby’s head. 

“Let’s tell ghost stories!” Galena says. The cave air is cold and clean, and we’re shielded from wind and snow. 

“Once I was in the attic at my grandmother’s house,” I make my voice eerie, “And I took some acid, and I was freaking out and I heard the shower running even though I was up there alone and then a woman walked out in a white dress and she walked toward me and toward me until she was very close and then she reached out and touched me.” I touched Galena’s knee. 

“Jesus!” she said.

“Is that true?” Harriet asked. 

“No.” I say. My ex, the Republican, told me that story. A true story is that I took mushrooms last year and didn’t think I was breathing so I called 9-1-1 on myself and paramedics came and told me I was breathing, but I didn’t believe them. My husband watched me until the effects wore off.

The baby squirms on my shoulder. “Pat her back,” Galena says. “She needs to burp.” I pat the child gently, through her soft blanket. “Harder,” Galena says. Galena gets up to show me. She wacks the child a few times. “Get a rhythm,” she says. “She won’t break.”

I pat and pat and jiggle and pat. Tiny ribs compress under my hand, a living system in my arms. “Why haven’t you named her?” I ask. I named the babies I birthed too early. Said their names as their breathing slowed. 

“I’m holding out for Roxy,” Galena says. Roxy was her favorite snowboard brand in high school, and also the alias she used after she broke up with a guy who turned stalkery. “But Jake thinks it’s a hooker name” 

“Like mother,” I chasten, leaving the rest unfinished. 

“Dancer!” she corrects. “Don’t be such a Puritan.” 

Just then, the baby burps. The burp rumbles up through her ribs under my hand and explodes into the cavern, illuminating everything. In the flash, I see the bones of old sabertooths, flecks of mica, maybe diamonds, the veins of rusting iron ore, stalactites, and the skulls of dead animals—horses? Or dogs? 

“Holy shit!” Harriet says, standing. The cave darkens again and we can only see the baby and her halo. “We have to go.” She sounds annoyed that she let herself get dragged into this. Like that night Galena talked us into going to New York with no hotel room because we “weren’t going to sleep.” 

A deep moan echoes from the ground above us. Pebbles rattle dully against the cave floor and ping off the old rails. “Give her here,” Galena says.

As the ceiling falls in, I turn from my friend’s outstretched arms, covering the child’s head with my head and shoulders and arms and belly. Chunks of cave wall punch my back and legs. I hold my breath, bracing for more. 

When the rock fall is over, the baby girl and I are ashy, but unburied. I exhale. I shake debris out of my hair as Roxy wails for her mama, as green as that girl from the exorcist and projectile vomiting all over me. I think of chemotherapy. Do her bones hurt? Is her magic a burden to her? 

“Hey!” It’s Galena, calling from the other side of a wall of stones. “You guys okay?” 

“I got her,” I yell. “She’s okay. We’re okay.” 

My friends will go for help. Galena councils me to open my blouse and comfort the baby with skin-to-skin contact. She likes R.E.M. songs, Galena says. They soothe her.

“What?” I say, suddenly unable to remember anything about R.E.M.

“‘Losing My Religion’ is her favorite,” Galena calls out, and tells us to sit tight. 

Aren’t you worried? I want to ask. Aren’t you out of your mind? But I sense that she has gone already and her worry won’t help us now. I try to breathe, imagine the child choking, cracking apart like a vase, her skull crushed by falling rocks, her skin boiling with radiation, her muscles dissolving into a bloody mess. Every whisper of every waking hour. I unzip my coat and curse my tee-shirt, pull it up over my breasts and cover us with my coat. I walk the glowing baby around in the dark, trying to remember the lyrics, trying to find the rhythm, the right combo of shuffle and bounce, low hum, and sha-sha-sha. Calm can crescendo like a singing bowl or an orgasm: it’s an art I’m not practiced in. 

Roxy stretches tiny dry fingers against my neck, still screaming. Recently, she was not even alive. She must feel homesick for nothingness, for the twinkle of a star being born, a soul being retrieved from a dolphin, a felled oak, a dragonfly and who knows what else from other life-having planets. Now here she is, stuck on radioactive land, drinking hot breast milk from a mother whose internal organs decay by the minute due to faultily regulated sugars, in a town with a restaurant called Shooters. “I’m sorry.” I steady my breath. The baby straightens her back and wails. “You’re stuck here for a while.” On Earth, I mean. With the crazies. I’m going to tell Jake to back off. Galena’s fine. So what if she doesn’t feel dread every second? So what if she just feels the wonder?

Kali Fajardo-Anstine Encourages You to Flout the Writing Rules

Posted on 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 time, we’re talking to Kali Fajardo-Anstine, whose short story collection Sabrina & Corina was a finalist for the National Book Award. Fajardo-Anstine is teaching a five-week masterclass (online, of course!) on the use of point of view in short fiction. Participants will get the opportunity to write four stories in four weeks, each using a different POV—and to receive feedback and instruction from a celebrated writer. We asked Fajardo-Anstine about good writing advice, bad writing advice, and what to eat during workshop.

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

Deadlines. Each workshop I have taken has pushed me to meet a deadline, which in turn has allowed me to produce more work. The bulk of Sabrina & Corina was written during my time in the MFA program at the University of Wyoming and the deadlines allowed me to train myself to produce on a regular schedule. 

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

There’s a lot of advice thrown around as gospel. For example, I was once told to never include phone calls in fiction. That’s silly. Human beings talk on the phone sometimes. The first rule should be there are no rules, if something is well-written. 

The first rule should be there are no rules, if something is well-written.

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

Revise and cut. As a younger writer, I was often too emotionally attached to my prose. I found it difficult to cut passages or words from sentences. This held me back for a long time. 

Does everyone “have a novel in them”?

No.

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

No, never. I might encourage a student to put a project aside for some time, but I would never tell someone to stop writing. Writing to me is an almost spiritual act. To tell a student to give up is akin to asking someone to stop prayer. 

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

This isn’t an either/or question for me. I believe we need a mixture. Writers must understand what they are doing well and also where they may have shortcomings. As a teacher, I am nurturing but I am also honest. This is modeled after the kind of instruction I wished I had more often throughout my schooling. 

To tell a student to give up writing is akin to asking someone to stop prayer.

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

No, in the sense that publication isn’t guaranteed. I think students should write toward creating art that meets their own personal standards and tastes. This means reading widely, developing a personal vision.

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

  • Kill your darlings: Revision can be a great pleasure and a pathway to great work. 
  • Show don’t tell: Isn’t all storytelling telling? 
  • Write what you know: Sure, but if you don’t know something, learn about it. 
  • Character is plot: Don’t laugh at me, but I’ve truly never heard of this 

What’s the best hobby for writers?

For me, I enjoy long walks. I’ve walked as a form of meditation and exercise since I was a teenager. I talk to myself on walks, I daydream, I work out plot problems, I invent, and I observe. 

What’s the best workshop snack?

I love raw almonds and Celestial Seasoning’s fruit sampler variety pack of tea. 

7 Books About Forgotten Wars

Posted on by Jo Lou

I grew up with the stories of my grandfather’s heroism as an airman in World War II. He jumped out of a burning B-17 bomber over Germany and was captured by the Nazis, who sent him to Stalag 17 prison camp. Grandpa Ed survived over two years in prison and a march across the Alps to return home and raise his family. His service was celebrated at every Memorial Day parade and on every Veterans Day. His son’s experience was a different story.

My Uncle Jack followed his father into the Air Force and was shot down over the mountains bordering Vietnam during the CIA-led “Secret War” in Laos—an officially neutral country that the United States dropped two and a half million tons of bombs on between 1964 and 1973, or a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day, for nine years. 

Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world, but I didn’t learn about it in school. My AP History class ended neatly with the victory of the Allies in World War II; we were told to study the Korean War—appropriately nicknamed “The Forgotten War”—and Vietnam War on our own time before the exam. Instead, I learned about the war in Laos when I uncovered declassified CIA documents, letters, and maps about my uncle’s disappearance in my childhood home after my mother’s death. 

In 2013, I traveled across Southeast Asia, recreating a trip my grandfather had taken in 1973 in search of his son. My book, What We Inherit: A Secret War and A Family’s Search for Answers, tells the story of my family’s four-decade search to bring my uncle home, and incorporates interviews with former CIA officers, refugees, veterans, and the people who still live in the shadow of the bombs. In Laos, I walked through villages where family laundry lines are draped over bomb craters. Communist leaders from the war are on their currency, while leftover American bombs in the soil still kill an average of fifty people a year. The “Secret War,” to the people inside Laos, is anything but secret.

History is full of wars that don’t make it into American history books. Here are seven reads that bring “forgotten” wars to life. 

The U.S. Secret War in Laos: Run Me to The Earth by Paul Yoon

Yoon’s novel explores the intersecting lives of three orphans—Alisak, Prany, and Noi—in 1960s Laos. They navigate fallen and falling American bombs to deliver messages and supplies to a makeshift field hospital in an old farmhouse, where each of them reflects on their past and tries to imagine any kind of future. “Where did they go at nights? A museum or Paris. The moon. A cave, an endless beach. They had been doing this since they were children. No one ever said home.”

Run Me to The Earth spans several decades to portray the mark that the war makes on each of the characters as they try to rebuild their lives. Yoon’s book is a harrowing reminder of how war follows you, no matter where you go.

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Sri Lankan Civil War: The Story of A Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam

The Sri Lankan civil war lasted for 25 years, but Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Story of A Brief Marriage takes place over a single day and night. As Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority is pushed toward the coast by an advancing army, two young refugees, Dinesh and Ganga, wed at the request of Ganga’s father, who seeks stability for his daughter in the midst of war. We see Dinesh helping the wounded in their makeshift camp and burying the bodies of those who don’t make it as he tries to come to terms with the death all around him and the marriage before him:

“Didn’t dying in the end mean being separated from other humans…? Unless, on the other hand, dying meant being separated from oneself above all, being separated from all the intimate personal details that had come to constitute one’s life. If that was the case then surely he should try instead to be alone, should spend his remaining time committing to memory the shape of his hands and feet, the texture of his hair, fingernails and teeth, appreciating for a last time the sound of his own breathing, the sensation of his chest expanding and contracting.”

Arudpragasam puts war in the realm of daily life, and that sensation stays with the reader long after the last page is done.

Second Italo-Ethiopian War: The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King is set during Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia. It is inspired by the author’s grandfather, who fought against the Italians, and her great-grandmother, who went to war as a young girl. The role of women in war is at the heart of The Shadow King. We watch protagonist Hirut go from orphan to maid to battle with a group of women who will stop at nothing to defend their country, and their bodies, from invasion: “She is a soldier trapped inside a barbed-wire fence, but she is still at war and the battlefield is her own body, and perhaps, she has come to realize as a prisoner, that is where it has always been.”

Mengiste’s book was published to rave reviews and is a finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction. The stories of women in war matter, and Mengiste’s book is bringing national attention to an often-forgotten war from a rarely seen perspective.

Cambodian Genocide: In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner

The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, when dictator Pol Pot attempted to create a master race and to remake Cambodia as an agrarian utopia, killing over two million Cambodians in the process. Vaddey Ratner’s In The Shadow of the Banyan follows a young girl named Raami, who (like the book’s author) is a royal whose life is upended when the Khmer Rouge come to power and separate her family. As Cambodians are sent to the “Killing Fields” and to labor camps, the child narrator proclaims: “The problem with being seven is that you’re aware of so much and yet you understand so little.” But in the hands of Ratner’s narrator, it’s the reader who comes to understand war through the eyes of a child.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer

American-Indian Wars: The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer

Many elementary school curriculums bring up Native Americans in the context of the First Thanksgiving before letting them drop from view, appearing again only as side notes in lesson plans on Manifest Destiny and the American West.

Mixing memoir with extensive interviews, David Treuer—an Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota—reminds readers that the story of Native American didn’t end at Wounded Knee. In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, he investigates the legacy of racism in the United States that continued after World War II, as descendants of the American-Indian Wars sought to live their lives in a country that had largely portrayed them as victims, if not outright writing them out of, their history:

“The disease was the feeling of powerlessness that takes hold of even the most powerful Indian men…that feeling that we’ve lost, that we’ve always lost, that we’ve already lost—our land, our cultures, our communities, ourselves. This disease is the story told about us and the one we so often tell about ourselves. But it’s one we’ve managed to beat again and again—in our insistence on our own existence and our successful struggles to exist in our homelands on our own terms.”

War of Canudos, Brazil: The War of The End of The World by Mario Vargas Llosa

In 1897, at least 15,000 people died when the Brazilian army attacked the inhabits of Canudos in Bahia. Canudos was largely populated by the followers of a wandering preacher and self-proclaimed prophet named Antônio Conselheiro, or “The Counselor.” Slavery in Brazil had only been outlawed in 1888, and many of the inhabitants of Canudos were former slaves; historians have emphasized the role of race and class in the vehemence of the national government’s crackdown. It took multiple military campaigns to wipe out the village, and violent beheadings and rapes befell the inhabitants.

Llosa’s 1981 novel The War of The End of The World is a fictionalized account of the War of Canudos. The Nobel Prize-winning work depicts the extreme violence of the battle between a small settlement and the national military force bent on destroying them:

“Honor, vengeance, that rigorous religion, those punctilious codes of conduct—how to explain their existence here, at the end of the world, among people who possessed nothing but the rags and the lice they had on them?”

War Trash by Ha Jin

Korean War: War Trash by Ha Jin 

Ha Jin’s War Trash is dedicated to the author’s father, who was an officer in the Red Army during the Korean War. The American forces who supported South Korea in this conflict, against a North Korea backed by the Soviet Union, would later refer to it as “The Forgotten War.”

Narrator Yu Yuan is a 73-year-old veteran who forgets nothing in the memoir he is writing to his American-born grandchildren about his time as a Chinese soldier in a U.S. POW Camp. Yuan describes violent clashes between Chinese prisoners who want to be repatriated to Mao Zedong’s mainland China and those who seek a new life in Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek. As an English speaker, Yuan is alternately courted and beaten by both groups and his American captors, giving readers a glimpse into life behind bars and the psychology of a divided nation.

The author himself joined the People’s Liberation Army at 14 and spent time in Korea, and it’s easy to forget that Yuan’s “memoir” is Jin’s fiction. The novel is a testament to the difficulty of writing about war from a position other than the victor’s: “To witness is to make the truth known, but we must remember that most victims have no voice of their own, and that in bearing witness to their stories we must not appropriate them.”

Laotian Refugees Take Center Stage in “How to Pronounce Knife”

Posted on by Jo Lou

Often in literature, a refugee’s narrative ends with their arrival to a Western country, grateful and full of hope for a better future. But what happens when the “happy ever after” promise is not an easy tale of assimilation but a complicated tale of survival in the forgotten? Souvankham Thammavongsa’s first book of fiction, How to Pronounce Knife, asks readers to see the stories behind the Lao immigrants and refugees who are our school bus drivers, our nail salon technicians, our worm pickers, and our chicken factory workers—and challenges us to reimagine refugees, assimilation, and survival.

For one, only a handful of stories mention the CIA bombing of Laos or the Secret War. Then there’s the hero of the stories themselves. Unlike the traditional refugee narrative, which moves the refugee off to the side and ends with the heroism of the West, Laotian characters take center stage with robust interiority. In Thammavongsa’s work, refugees don’t have to be just tragic or sad but can be imbued with humor, complexity, and the unexpected. Most importantly, Thammavongsa doesn’t write for a white audience. She writes, tenderly and profoundly, for her characters. Her love is apparent in her delicate descriptions: confident children protect their parents, workers perform jobs with care and pride, and messy love stories show us that leaving is proof we are alive. The power of How to Pronounce Knife lies in seeing the unseen. I know that firsthand—as the daughter of refugees, I’m able to finally see myself in stories.

I spoke with Souvankham Thammavongsa on the phone to discuss upending expectations with humor, the power of lonely love, and what it means to succeed as a refugee.  

Angela So: I wanted to start by asking you about the title of the collection, which is also the title of the opening story. How to Pronounce Knife has such a strong directive, and it is already raising concerns of language and misunderstanding. But also the knife itself is so vivid, because it can be violent and yet be protective. How did you come up with the title?

Souvankham Thammavongsa: I thought about the word “knife” itself. We all agree that we cannot say the letter we see right there. We learn to do that. It isn’t just a letter or a word—not knowing how to pronounce it lets other people know where you come from, what your family life is like without meaning to tell. Those things aren’t hidden and it begins with a word and the way you say it. And I felt like it was the armature of the collection: every story is about people we seldom hear from but we see all the time.

AS: When I was reading the collection, I was so intrigued by the sense of namelessness, because all the stories take place in a nameless Western city. But sometimes, characters receive no name, like the girl in “How to Pronounce Knife.” And this is where I feel implicated as a reader, which I thought was very fascinating.

ST: That it could be you, right?

AS: Right, that could be me! But I also realize, especially on my second reading, that there were more characters whose names I didn’t remember. I remembered their occupations. So in that Western way, I was minimizing them still. I was shifting back and forth, and as the daughter of refugees, I wanted to see these people but my brain was still calling Jai, the School Bus Driver. How did you decide to name characters?

Every story is about people we seldom hear from but we see all the time.

ST: I felt like not naming the characters could give me a kind of remove and distance. I feel that remove is important to the story, and yet, even though we don’t know their names, there’s a kind of intimacy to them. I don’t feel that the main characters are minimized. When we talk about a school bus driver, I want people to think about the story of the School Bus Driver. If they see a school bus driver, I want them to not think that he just drives a school bus, but that he has another life we don’t know about.

But he is named in that story. It’s the narrator that calls him the School Bus Driver. I think that’s the tragedy of that story. What it does is it isolates him. His own wife renames him Jay, and the outside world just sees him as the School Bus Driver, and even in a story where he’s at the center, the narrator calls him the School Bus Driver. That’s why at the end, when he insists his name is Jai and that it means heart, the moment is so charged.

AS: I also love the line the narrator says, “No one here knows Jai means heart,” she would say. So what if that’s what it means? It doesn’t mean anything in English. And English is the only language that means something here.” That really broke my heart, because the notion that English is all that matters here is woven throughout a lot of the stories.

ST: The moment is sad, but it’s also sort of funny. Because what if we take a name like Joe, what does Joe mean in English? Like [Jai’s wife] is saying, “Oh, I know Jai means heart,” but what does a popular easy name like Joe mean, either. Of course, the School Bus Driver doesn’t say that, because he doesn’t know the language. It’s not the outside world that’s being racist or terrible to you. It’s this intimate relationship that’s in your own house.

AS: That’s something that I thought was fascinating about the collection, because when people talk about assimilation, they always assume it’s just the children that want to assimilate, and not the adults. But in “Edge of the World,” there’s an older woman that is surprised that the protagonist still speaks Laotian. And there’s a moment, when as a reader, I expect, “Oh, good for you, you are keeping our culture,” but instead, she’s like, “That’s a terrible mistake.” She scolds them, the protagonist and the protagonist’s mother. I thought that was so funny.

ST: And the mother is like, “Why would anyone want to do that!” You know, you’re going to learn English anyways, so why lose this private intimate language? I felt that there was an opportunity to laugh there.

AS: It’s one of my favorite moments. You’re so gifted in upending expectations. That moment for me, I really thought it was going to fall into that traditional Western notion of assimilation.

ST: Right, or in “Picking Worms,” when you think maybe the mother is going to take on some White lover, she says, “What do you want me to do? Get one of them white guys? Can you imagine. They probably will want me to say things like ‘Me lope you long tie’ and pump me like one of them hogs.” 

AS: When you were writing these stories, were you consciously deciding those moments?

I wanted to write stories about refugees and immigrants that are trying to get to the next minute, hour, day, or next year.

ST: No. I thought of my mom and dad. Whenever they talked about—which they rarely did—but in those moments, I caught them or their friends talking, it was somehow very funny. Like if my dad’s talking about building a raft of bamboo to cross the Mekong River to get to the refugee camp, another refugee will say, “Well, you know what? I got across by holding on to someone’s severed leg!” Then they would burst out laughing. It wasn’t two sad people talking about how sad they were; they would one-up each other in a more tragic way, and then they would laugh at how ridiculous it really was. I wanted to capture that. Whenever I read stories about refugees and immigrants, they’re always so sad and tragic—and rightly so—but also that’s a very narrow way of looking at ourselves.

There’s a lot more to us than being sad, we are also really fun and hilarious and angry and ungrateful. Whenever we hear stories about immigrants and refugees, we hear about success. It’s always children going to Stanford, or they have a Ph.D. in chemistry. Or we are some brave hero and saving a dangling baby on the side of a building, or we’re crazy rich. I just wanted to write stories about refugees and immigrants that are trying to get to the next minute, hour, day, or next year. Those lives are important and successful too.

AS: I remember thinking the political way refugees are used to show the power of humanity.

ST: If a county lets you in, they’re quite proud and want to be patted on the back for what they did for you. But my dad always says, “Someone needed your help, and you should help them not because you want attention for your capacity to recognize someone else’s humanity.” 

AS: You talked about how you wanted your story to shine a light on the stories that aren’t shown, because they’re just trying to make it to make it to the next day. I think about how the refugee story is typically set in the camps and then they make it to a Western country and then the story ends.

ST: None of these stories take place in the camps.

AS: Did you decide that when you were working on these stories?

ST: Yes, because there are already books and movies and documentaries and photographic documentation—that deal with that. I felt like I didn’t need to do that. Also, it’s not really my experience—it’s my parents. I left the refugee camp when I was a year old, so to ask me, “What was the refugee camp like?” How do I know? I was just a year old! I don’t want to be a talking head for refugees or give people a history lesson. I want to be a writer and I’m here to be one. 

I was thinking about how to pronounce knife and not knowing how to do stuff, making mistakes, and how doing something wrong is actually a powerful thing, because you can see the error. You have a wider view of things. You can see why someone would get something wrong. Why put a letter in front, if you’re not even going to use it, to say out loud? At the same time, who are these people who have been educated, but they can’t even explain to the child why the letter that is right there we do not say out loud.

AS: I remember reading that story and laughing, because I never thought about the absurdity of the English language. The rules don’t make sense.

ST: It’s not like the child is wrong. It does make sense the first letter should be said, but when she gets into that argument, she’s also protecting her dad, the love of her dad. She doesn’t want everyone at school to know her dad doesn’t know. Even that scene, it’s supposed to be traumatic and sad, it’s told off-stage. That was a private moment for the character, and I didn’t want people to see that moment, so I wanted it to happen off-stage.

Even in the story, “Chick-A-Chee!” the lunch lady says, “Don’t you mean trick-or-treating? And the child says, “No, Missus Furman. We went Chick-A-Chee!”

AS: I love the description of her face—it’s intrusive. That’s so funny to me, and so real. That’s how it feels.

ST: Right! Like how people come with their knowledge, and they want to correct you. But actually it’s just funny to have the child so sturdy and confident in what she knows and what she did. And part of the reason she gets so much candy is because she’s saying it wrong.

AS: I remember finishing the story, and the first thing I thought was, “This is a collection of love stories.”

ST: Yes, love of self! These stories are not about people who hate themselves. That’s what it is when the child says, “No, Missus Furman. It’s Chick-A-Chee.” Someone is protecting themselves and the way they imagine the world. Or even in the story, “Paris.” Red thinks about what she knows of love. “The only love Red knew was that lonely love one feels in the aisles of the supermarket, or the talk of the television. It’s always there for you, sprawling out at all hours of the night.” Love of self, love of family, even when it’s romantic love, like that seventy-year-old woman being able to walk away.

AS: That “simple uncomplicated lonely love”—how do you resolve that tension between lonely and love?

ST: Just because someone is alone it does not mean they don’t feel love. Love can be lonely.

AS: I’m curious about homes, because it feels like that lonely love has to happen in a place where you belong. You write about the homes of these characters with such great details and as a way to protect the self from the intrusive outside, but also there’s mold and sometimes blood outside your front door. What does home mean in the collection?

ST: I feel that home is an interior thing. It’s not just a building with a door that you have a key to get into. The home that you carry inside you, your interior home, it’s always there for you wherever you are, wherever you live.

AS: In a lot of these stories though, there are things that challenge their interior homes. One of the challenges is their occupation. You write with authority but also tenderness. Each job feels like an art form—I especially think of the Worm Picker. She has a system, and when I read it, it felt like a ballet. She has such precise, careful movements. How did you decide which occupations and how were you able to paint them in such a way that was so lived and believable?

ST: Work is really important to me. Work can carry you the way love can. It takes up a lot of hours in your life, you devote yourself to it. 

I wanted to write a mother-daughter story where they didn’t go to the mall or get their nails done, but they’re doing manual labor.

My dad always said to me, “You can do anything and you would be good at it.” I thought about the integrity a person brings to a job, even if it could be thought of as demeaning or as a thing you would hate to do, it’s your job and you bring some sense of pride and love into it, whether you’re doing nails or picking worms. That integrity is heroic. I think there’s some form of love that makes them show up every day. I feel that everyone who has a job—they feel a sense of pride, not just for having the job, but that they belong somewhere.

It’s always been a thing for me to notice something beautiful in something other people wouldn’t find beautiful—redefining what others define for me. Like worms. I was one of those kids, if I saw a fat juicy worm, I would pick it up and show it to my friends, and they would run away. But I didn’t understand why. I would think this worm would make such good fishing bait, because it was so juicy, whereas other people would be afraid of it. I hadn’t seen anything in literature about worm picking. I was reading some Richard Ford stories, and when the father and son are together, they go hunting. I wanted to write a mother-daughter story where they didn’t go to the mall or get their nails done, but they’re doing some manual labor. I wanted to bring out the beauty of that work.

AS: I have one more question, and it’s about hope. In “Mani-Pedi,” Raymond says, “Don’t you go reminding me what dreams a man ought to have. That I can dream at all means something to me.” But then the narrator’s response to the sister is fascinating. “She didn’t want to recognize that face and see it hoping. Hope is a terrible thing for her. Hope meant it wasn’t there for you whatever it was you were hoping for.”

Both of those seem like theses in some way; there’s a lot of hope in the stories. There’s also a sense of hopelessness. How is that theme working throughout? And maybe the ways it connects to love? To me, there’s this triangle: being seen/unseen, being love/unloved, and hopeful/unhopeful.

ST: All these things we desire for ourselves, like love and hope, but they’re not like a rubber ball. They’re things we can’t see, but we feel them alone. Even when you fall in love, it’s brutal, because you’re alone with those feelings until the other person confesses or says it out loud. Even then, you don’t really know if that’s true, because you’re not inside that heart. I think hope and love are like that letter in knife, the silent k. They are things we know about and maybe see sometimes, but we agree to not say out loud.

AS: That saying out loud—that’s the moment I felt like these were love stories, because there are so many attempts to find love, but not many that end successfully. There’s a risk with the hopefulness that they can fix things. But also the father in “Edge of the World” doesn’t go after his wife. To even have lost love means I’m alive.

ST: Being alive is the most important thing.

AS: That’s such a triumphant sense of asking to be seen, and in some ways, asking to be loved.

ST: To be loved, you have to be seen. 

I put someone at the center of the story. You’re the star. You’re the leading man. You’re the leading woman. Maybe you don’t get the love or hope you wanted, but you are still at the center of the story. 

What is success? Is it successful to get what you want? What happens when you get what you want? That want is always going to be there—it’s just in a container for now. 

The New Generation of Holocaust Memoirs

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

I was first introduced to the monsters when I was very young. They were rarely spoken of and yet always present. As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I felt trauma everywhere, as a sort of all-encompassing stardust. It was present in the way my grandfather asked about the weather, in the way my dad kept the house so clean that your lungs filled with bleach whenever you took a breath, in recipes, and routines. Still, I couldn’t quite ask my family for any details. And as long as my grandfather lived, I could barely get more than a few words out of him. His tales were brief and stifled by tears and an unfortunate, albeit intentional, lack of memory.

I’d have to find out about the monsters elsewhere, so I did. First, it was from Elie Wiesel, whose 1956 memoir Night forged a new literary genre. Since Wiesel recorded his story of survival and terror in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the Holocaust memoir has been an important part of the literary canon as well as the American experience (Wiesel emigrated to the United States in 1955). A decade prior in Europe, similar accounts had been written by Italian chemist Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz and Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychologist, in Man’s Search for Meaning. These are  first-person stories by men who survived the unimaginable, stories—as Levi would say—interwoven with freezing dawns.

As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I felt trauma everywhere, as a sort of all-encompassing stardust.

Their memoirs are not only about their own experiences but about those whose experiences can never really be known. “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty to bear witness for the dead and for the living…to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time,” wrote Wiesel. What he posits is essentially the need for storytellers.

As a generation of survivors continues to disappear, those left to tell their stories are children, or grandchildren like me, who grew up in the shadow of their family’s traumas, entrenched in secrets, surrounded by puzzles. In recent months, three new memoirs by Esther Safran Foer, Hadley Freeman, and Ariana Neuman have given readers a glimpse of a new type of Holocaust memoir—one written not by the survivor, but their next of kin. Their writings have breached the literary canon, making way for a new type of storyteller, one who not only bears witness to the dead, but triumphantly wakes them from their slumber. 

When I was in college, I assumed the responsibility of collecting my family’s history. I laminated the documents, recorded the testimonies, and even traveled to Poland to visit my grandfather’s home town. Years later, my Aunt Faye would become the family’s lead historian—connecting with the children of my grandfather’s estranged sister, Genia, as well as other cousins and friends of my grandparents. Faye Riva Rosenzweig, named for both her paternal and maternal grandmothers, was born in a displaced-persons camp in what was formerly the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Northern Germany. A young refugee, she grew up surrounded by an unspoken, creeping feeling that trouble, even in good times, was imminent.  

I’ve always adored my Aunt Faye, and as I got older, I understood that the burden of maintaining our family’s legacy as Holocaust survivors had largely fallen on her. As my own obsessions unfurled, her ambitions came to light. Suddenly, our family’s photos were on the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s website. You could search our name and pictures of my grandmother cradling my aunt would pop up. As I—the granddaughter—became more and more curious, my aunt—the daughter—assumed the work of quelling my curiosity. In I Want You to Know We’re Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir, Esther Safran Foer describes a similar multi-generational phenomenon.

Like my aunt, Safran Foer was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany. In 1949, she became a two-and-a-half-year-old refugee. At the time of writing her book, Safran Foer displays an intimate understanding of her childhood and young adult years in America, citing how different she felt from other kids growing up. But unlike many of her fellow memoirists, she comprehends why she feels so different. She understands her family’s struggles, recalling her mother’s experience of fleeing the Nazis after losing her entire family. And although she knows quite a lot about her mother, her father—who committed suicide when she was just eight years-old—remains a mystery. 

In the summer of 1998, Safran Foer urged her son Jonathan to visit the shtetl Trochenbrod, in Ukraine, where she believed her father to be from, in hopes that he would find that family that hid her father from the Nazis. Jonathan, as those who have read his half-fictitious, half-autobiographical novel Everything is Illuminated already know, found nothing. More than a decade later, his mother decided to take the journey herself; I Want You to Know We’re Still Here is the result of that exploration. In the book, when Esther tells her mother, Ethel, about her trip, Ethel screams, “How can you do this to me?” She fears for her daughter’s safety, likely remembering the Ukraine of her childhood, the place where her entire family was killed by Nazis. Nevertheless, Safran Foer travels to Trochenbrod, armed with an old photograph and the guidance of a couple historians,  in search of the family who hid her father from the Nazis. While there, she learns the names of her father’s first wife and daughter, Tzipora and Asya, who had been murdered during the liquidation of the Ukrainian village of Chetvernia in 1942. 

Unlike some of her fellow second-generation memoirists, Safran Foer leads with a vision that is quintessentially Jewish. Her propensity for remembrance is present from the start, as she chronicles her mother’s resilient escape from the Nazis—almost entirely on foot—from what was then Eastern Poland to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. She possesses an acute awareness of the refugee experience, recognizing the sheer presence of absence that’s been with her since birth. Safran Foer’s quest, then, is about filling in the gaps, about understanding how those gaps became gaps in the first place. 

Sometimes, though, the gaps are more like voids. Sometimes, children and grandchildren of survivors know nothing of their families’ origins, or what they think they know turns out to be very wrong. In her book House of Glass, Hadley Freeman begins with little prior knowledge of her own lineage. Having spent her life convinced that her posh grandmother was French, Freeman’s detective work reveals that her grandmother was born in what is now Poland, but was then still Austria-Hungary. Freeman maps the very divergent paths of her grandmother, Sala, and her three brothers, each of whose stories represents a separate strand of the Jewish experience through the twentieth century. “Learning about them,” writes Freeman, “provided me with not just a map for what was behind me but one that explained where we are today.” In Freeman’s family, trauma and silence are recurring themes. Her grandmother lived a life of quiet complacency, relying on luxury to quell her lifelong sadness.

As a result, her grandmother’s children—her father and his brother—never really got involved in the past. They, too, remained quiet, even assimilating to secular life out of fears they’d seem too Jewish. Freeman acknowledges that the responsibility to tell the stories, to wake the dead, to discover that her great-uncle Jacques—her grandmother’s brother—had been killed in Auschwitz, would fall entirely on her shoulders.

A third-generation chronicler of the Holocaust, Freeman is not simply a memoirist, but an interpreter of silence.

A third-generation chronicler of the Holocaust, Freeman is not simply a memoirist, but an interpreter of the silence, silence spanning two generations. Freeman’s book is the sort every grandchild of Holocaust survivors longs to write. It’s the kind of book I’ve dreamed of writing. It’s a deep dive, an illumination of lives previously unknown—a looking glass through which kaleidoscopes of homes destroyed; parents, cousins, and lovers dragged to their deaths; and bodies furtively huddled in dark shadows suddenly appear before our eyes.

I am lucky to have recorded testimony from my grandfather. When I watch him, sitting in a chair, speaking to an invisible interviewer, the life I’ve long imagined is made all the more real. My focus sharpens and I can see a family, a shtetl, and a boy. In When Time Stopped, Ariana Neumann includes segments of her father’s unpublished memoirs—projecting images of twilight train rides and crumbling cityscapes. 

Neumann’s father was in his 50s when she was born, so although close to Freeman in age, she is closer to Freeman’s father in her proximity to the Holocaust. Hans Neumann kept secret virtually every detail of his life before his immigration to Venezuela. For Neumann, her father was simply a Czech immigrant, and the question of her grandparents was, of course, a non-starter. As for her Jewish heritage, Neumann asserted up until college that she was Catholic, like the majority of Venezuelans.  

As a child, Neumann always longed for the perfect mystery to solve. What she didn’t know was that she’d wind up solving the mystery of her father’s life, and along with it, awaken the ghosts of her grandparents, Ella and Otto, both of whom were killed in Auschwitz. She recalls a few once-mystifying encounters with her father, all of which become startlingly clear when she understands his history: a twilight shouting fit in a language she’d never heard, his paranoia around a set of bug bites which he mistook for tiny bullet holes, a tearful visit to an old train station in Prague. In her memoir, Neumann also wakes the ghosts of her father’s past lives: Handa, the secular Jewish boy writing poetry in the streets of Prague; Jan Šebesta, the Czech chemist working in Berlin while hiding in plain sight from the Nazis; and finally Hans Neumann, Venezuelan businessman and philanthropist with a penchant for timekeeping.

“Sometimes I lose my bearings,” writes Neumann. “I want to rush again to my father. I want to tear along the checkered floor of the hall to the long windowless room and, as he raises his visor and looks up from his watches, explain that I finally solved the puzzle. I have to let him know that I found the boy he was, the unfortunate boy, and that I love him.” 

When I traveled to Poland in 2011, my grandfather had been dead for about a year. Had he been alive, I’m sure he would have reacted a bit like Esther Safran Foer’s mother, giving me plenty of reasons not to go. Mameleh, no, he’d caution. I’ll admit I’ve put most of the visit out of my mind. In Sosnowiec, Poland, every remnant of Jewish history has been paved over. There is a single Jewish graveyard which remains barely intact. Beneath the mounds of snails and several hundred invasive species of moss, you can still make out symbols representing the different tribes of Israel on each gravestone. Across the street, there is a Catholic cemetery flanked with ivory columns and lions’ heads, the grounds perfectly manicured and mausoleums shimmering silver. 

How do I tell the story of a life so brazenly torn to shreds?

How do I tell the story of my grandfather’s childhood when this is what his home has become? How do I tell the story of a life so brazenly torn to shreds?

In her diary, which predates any Holocaust memoir, Anne Frank writes, “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” While writing about life inside the camps may not have given these writers courage, it did give birth to an invigorated sense of selfhood. Sisyphean in nature, first-generation Holocaust memoirs are testaments of willpower, of the mind engaged, against all odds. My grandfather always told me that he stayed alive because he tricked the Nazis into believing he could do any job. If they need an electrician, he was an electrician. If they needed someone to roll a boulder up a hill, he was the best man for the job. One must imagine David Rosenzweig happy. 

In a segment of his unfinished memoir, Neumann’s father, Hans, recalls a quote from Nietzsche: “What separates humans from animals is the ability to find one’s condition risible. Nazis tended to solemnity and humorlessness. They always showed what Nietzsche called ‘Tierischer Ernst,’ a certain ‘animal earnestness,’ a complete inability to laugh at themselves….They could not recognize their own ridiculousness or indeed appreciate the absurdity of anything. Without imagination they were predictable.”

By writing alongside her father’s memoir, Neumann shows us Hans’s mind in motion. As he hides boldly in plain sight, she wakes up the ghosts of her grandparents. She is a  detective—searching ceaselessly, paving over craters of lost history. And her father, just like my grandfather, is rolling a rock up a hill, tricking the monsters in broad daylight.

10 Unmissable Books From the “Flyover States”

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

When I lived in Washington, D.C. we considered the “flyover states” anything between the east coast and the west coast, a place where one would only touch down if forced to refuel. Well, now that I live in Michigan I take great offense to that notion. We have a coast line here that could rival California’s, but most of you will never see it and that’s fine with us, thank you very much. 

A flyover state is technically a state that experiences the largest discrepancy in the ratio of destination flights to flyovers. A (perhaps less than scientific) study conducted by ChampionTraveler reveals that West Virginia is currently the most flown-over state. The top ten “flyover” states, according to ChampionTraveler, are West Virginia, Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Kentucky, Wyoming, Virginia, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Alabama. But anywhere writer who’s in between New York and L.A. runs the risk of being sidelined in the literary world.

Here are some exceptional writers to know from the often-overlooked middle of the country.

Sara Pritchard, Crackpots

I was introduced to Sara Pritchard and her prize-winning novel-in-stories, Crackpots, when I attended the West Virginia Writers Conference in 2007. It’s still on my mind thirteen years later. And, I wasn’t alone in my favorable appraisal. Crackpots, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was chosen by Ursula Hegi as the winner of the coveted Bakeless Prize. The book, which centers on a spunky girl named Ruby Reese, is jam-packed with superb imagery like “I touched hands that were hard and cold like lawn Jesus,” but still manages to be a moving tribute to a resilient young woman. Pritchard, who refers to her own state as “West-by-Gawd, Virginia,” has been the recipient of several literary awards, including the West Virginia Individual Artist’s Literary Fellowship (twice) and in 2010, a Pushcart Prize for her story “Two Studies in Entropy,” which was originally published in New Letters, and is a part of her 2013 short story collection, Help Wanted: Female.

Katy Simpson Smith, The Everlasting

Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Katy Simpson Smith fourth book, The Everlasting, is a transportive historical novel spanning 2000 years, which takes place in Rome, Italy–about as far away from Mississippi as one can get both figuratively and geographically. This novel, punctuated with commentary from Satan about the choices we all have to make between earthly or spiritual love, right and wrong, momentary desires and everlasting pain, follows four sets of lovers through two millennia. The erudite, lyrical prose is bound to capture you on page one and convey you right through to the end on what might feel like wings. 

Beth Ann Fennelly, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-memoirs

Beth Ann Fennelly, the poet laureate of Mississippi, received her MFA from the University of Arkansas, and unfortunately I am not as familiar with her poetry as I am with her sixth book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-memoirs, which was published by W. W. Norton, and was a Goodreads Favorite for 2017. I loved this book, and it’s impossible to do it justice in a blurb, because each memoir is as beautiful and singular as beach glass, or as one Goodreads reader put it, like a shot of chartreuse—”exquisite and barbed.” That about sums it up. 

DaMaris Hill, A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland

A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing is a mesmerizing hybrid text honoring the history of black women freedom fighters. Hill, a celebrated poet and academic, includes poetry, prose and photography to capture the complicated history of black women for whom being “bound” has taken many forms throughout U.S. history. As Roxane Gay noted, “This book offers an education. This book bears witness. This book is a reckoning.”  This is a book that, as Ada Limon said, “serves as a much needed resurrection.” A riveting, necessary read. I could not put it down.

Jeffrey Skinner, The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets

I love Jeffrey Skinner’s hilarious, yet moving self-help memoir. Though Skinner has been published everywhere, including Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other prestigious journals, he’s a charming, helpful and unassuming poetry coach. Once upon a time, Skinner worked as a private eye, and he intersperses the self-help chapters in this book with humorous anecdotes about his life hunting down bad guys. The best parts of the book aren’t new—all poets know that discipline, revision, and persistence are keys to creating a successful writing life, but Skinner reminds writers that we are supposed to be having fun. This is a book about getting down to the work, which, we all know, is the only thing that counts.

Sarah Gorham, Study in Perfect

Study in Perfect is an erudite, yet accessible collection of lyrical essays, exploring the concept of flawlessness. Bernard Cooper chose this collection as the winner of the 2014 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction, praising it for its lyricism as well as its entertainment value, which we all know doesn’t always go hand in hand. In prose that calls to mind contemporary essayists, Maggie Nelson and Lia Purpura, Gorham renders the human experience in a new and potent way. Even ruminations on real estate holdings are awash with existential meaning. “The Changeling,” a poignant piece about Gorham’s mentally handicapped sister, Becky, succinctly, yet tenderly, examines the myriad joys and challenges she brought to the household. On a sentence level this collection is exquisitely crafted: “We toss our very human experience over the landscape like a soggy net,” Gorham says at one point. Fear is described as “amplified tinnitus and as an ant that bears “the whole mind away.” Reading Study in Perfect, one is constantly reminded that this book was written by a writer with an extraordinarily poetic voice.

Daniel Mueller, Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey

Daniel Mueller’s first collection of stories, How Animals Mate, won the Sewanee Award and garnered some acclaim, but this second collection, Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey, which I absolutely loved, seemed to fly under the radar when it was published in 2013. These stories run the range: there’s the boy who decides to emulate the neighborhood sociopath, and the corporate systems analyst who is trying to come to terms with his homoerotic childhood within his conservative family, and other parents and children doing middling to crazy things to each other. In terms of empathy and erudition, Mueller rivals Elizabeth Strout and Alice Munro. As Paul Harding said in his blurb of the book, half of these eleven stories “made me want to sleep with the lights on, and all of them reaffirmed that Dan Mueller is some kind of mad artistic genius.”

Wendy Rawlings, Time for Bed

The thirteen stories in Wendy Rawlings’s Time for Bed are sumptuous, and boy, are you in for a wild ride as these stories veer from acerbic to serious to hilarious. Coffins for Kids! first published in The Kenyon Review takes the reader inside the life of a mother who embarks on a road trip to find the perfect custom fit coffin after her daughter is killed in a school shooting. In one of her last stories, Again, a grown woman crawls back into the womb of her mother in order to begin her life again. In another a college student contends with her parent’s impending divorce. Her father has left her mother for the “cafeteria lady” at her high school. Rawlings has been a celebrated “writer’s writer” since her twenties when one of her first stories was published in The Atlantic and she landed a much-coveted scholarship to Bread Loaf, but she has yet to garner wide acclaim. Her first collection of stories, Come Back, Irish, was stellar, as was her novel, The Agnostics. I loved them all. Not to be missed.

Desiree Cooper, Know the Mother

Know the Mother, the debut short story collection by long-time Detroit Free Press columnist Desiree Cooper, is a finely woven blend of humorous and unflinching tales. The stories in Know the Mother are about real people grappling with relationships. Just about every variation of relationship is covered here: married couples, adult children, aging parents, adults looking back on childhood. Because each piece touches on a different topic there is something for everyone. One doesn’t finish this collection feeling defeated by the world. Humans are fallible, as a collective, but we need each other. We are capable of treating each other better.

Christie Hodgen, Elegies for the Brokenhearted

I have been a fan of Hodgen’s for years. A quick search of my online shopping history reveals that I have given her book, Elegies for the Brokenhearted to thirteen friends, and I think that number is way low. A novel-in-stories, Elegies is comprised of five elegies for people who have impacted the life of the main character, Mary McCarthy. Even though Mary spends the entire novel addressing dead people, it’s not the least bit dismal. For Hodgen, telling the story in elegies provides a container for unpacking what makes us human and endears us to one another. The beloved people she pays tribute to includes a wayward uncle, a childhood classmate, and a gay coworker. These vignettes are brilliant, and they serve as a reminder that even abbreviated relationships can change the course of a person’s (and possibly a reader’s) life forever. 

Please Hide My Sex Toys When I Die

Posted on by Kelly Luce

Bedside

The moment my sister dies, I must drive to her house and empty her bedside table: satin handcuffs; nipple clamps; the three-tier butt plug, like a tiny glass layer cake; the dishwasher-safe prostate wand; and an army of shimmering glass dildos. The veiny one, startling in its realism, is my favorite—as if my sister found an enchanted, well-endowed prince frozen in ice, and instead of a kiss to set him free, she broke off his dick and took it home.

“Promise me,” my sister had said when she got married and had to draw up her first will. And she made me double down when she had the baby. “Promise. If Ma finds them, it’ll kill her.”

“It will not,” I said. “Let’s say you and Darryl die—”

“Jesus!” her husband Darryl said.

“—let’s say you die in a fiery plane crash,” I went on. “Ma and I go up to your house. Ma goes into your room.” Our mother will smooth the rumpled bedspread, sniff the sheets, suck in the particle remnants of my sister from the pillowcases, the pink bras folded in the drawers. “But then,” I said, “Ma opens the bedside table. She takes out your never-ending string of anal beads. Ma finds me, rocking the baby—my baby, now that you’re dead—and holds the anal beads before her like a Christmas garland. ‘What is this?’ she will say. ‘Is this for the computer?’

“So it will be me,” I told my sister, “holding the baby, who will burn hot with your shame.”

My sister patted my hand. “Honey. We made Ma the guardian, if something happens to us. Because you’re a writer. You don’t have any money.”

“Then I’m definitely going to let Ma find the glass menagerie on her own!” I cried, and stormed out of her house—cut deep by this future she’d imagined without me.

“Probably,” I whisper to her now, “Ma already knows? Anyone with two eyes can see you and Darryl get into some weird shit.” Darryl. So tender, engorged with to-do’s he pours out on her hospital bed: pallbearers, who should read at her funeral, who should do what and when.

“Please,” he says. He’s fixed today on where she wants her ashes scattered.

But my sister is husked, bone and dry skin in her paper gown. Burn her up now, you’d get less than a thimbleful. “Oh, Darryl,” she says, “I don’t fucking know.”

I say, “We’ll put your ashes in a vial, and the baby can wear it around her neck.” 

I say, “We’ll each take a small bite of you. Ingest you. Carry you.” 

I say, “We’ll bury you with the dildos. Darryl, you’re not planning on using them again, right?” 

And when my sister finally laughs, Darryl leaves to hate me tearfully from the hallway, which is right and good.

It’s not like we don’t see it, the What Happens After. Me, holding the baby in the church when Darryl marries again. But what my sister likes is when I crawl into the bed beside her and scratch her smooth head. My nails leave thin, pink trails in her scalp. She closes her eyes.

“The dildos,” she murmurs. “Promise me.”

We see it, What Happens After the Bedside Table. We even like to gaze at it. Almost pleasant—that wide, white space after the heart stops.

When the Family Business Is Pot Brownies

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Alia Volz’s mother, Meridy, moved from the Midwest to San Francisco in 1975. An artist with an affinity for magic, Mer got by doing illustration work and occasionally peddling tarot readings on a rug on Fisherman’s Wharf. That is, until July 4, 1976, when Mer’s marijuana brownie selling friend, the Rainbow Lady, called her and said: “I’d like you to take over the business.”

In Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco, Volz chronicles Mer’s time running what would become her super successful brownie business, Sticky Fingers. Volz details how Mer, with the help of Volz’s father Doug, and a spirited cast of characters grew the small operation into a San Francisco phenomenon which sold 10,000 brownies a month. Weaving together oral history, archival research, and her own personal memories, Volz uncovers the connections Sticky Fingers had to a wide range of historical events from the assassination of Harvey Milk to the Jonestown Massacre and the AIDS crisis. Through her examination of Sticky Fingers and the circles it operated in, Volz masterfully documents the history of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ and artist community in the 1970s and ’80s.

As the COVID-19 pandemic began to sweep through America, Volz and I—both sheltered in place on opposite coasts—exchanged notes wishing each other and our cities well. We then went on to discuss growing up in an alternative family, recording people’s stories, her mother’s contributions to the seismic shift in our country’s views of cannabis and the reverberations the Sticky Fingers story still has today.

Elizabeth Lothian: Your mother “inherited” the brownie business on America’s bicentennial. The views of our country at the time were very different as compared to today—beliefs and laws about pot were draconian and the role of women in society was greatly limited. When you started writing Home Baked did you recognize the many ways in which your mother, as a business owner and a woman, was a pioneer? 

Alia Volz: My mom doesn’t view herself as a pioneer. Isn’t that odd? If you ask her directly, she’ll stammer around the answer. She was just following her gut, her hippie oracles, and her conscience. Of course, I knew my mom was exceptional—and that she took unusual risks. But I didn’t feel the weight of her contributions until I’d spent years studying the history of medical marijuana and the evolution of U.S. drug policy. It was a nice surprise!

I knew my mom was exceptional. But I didn’t feel the weight of her contributions until I’d spent years studying the history of medical marijuana.

EL: That’s so interesting that it took studying the history of medical marijuana and our country’s drug policies for you to appreciate your mother’s contributions.

AV: One thing about growing up in an alternative family is that it feels normal. Breaking laws was normal. Baking and wrapping thousands of pot brownies together was normal. Lounging around with my mom and her customers was normal. The broader social and political implications of my mom’s work only became clear through research.

EL: Speaking of research, you note in prologue that you began compiling the history of Sticky Fingers over a decade ago by recording your mother’s best stories. At first this was just for yourself but then as she told more stories, your curiosity about the vastness of her contribution to not only cannabis history but to the greater societal movements of San Francisco and America at large grew. Can you walk me through how you expanded your research from there?

AV: It was organic. There were questions my mom couldn’t answer. She’d say, “You should ask Barb about this.” So, I went to my godmother Barb, who brought more people into the project. My interview pool expanded much like the brownie business back in the day—through word of mouth. I had to hunt down a few folks, but most of the connections flowed naturally. I tried to keep it that way. Then I used what emerged in interviews to guide my archival research.

Inevitably, my sources contradicted each other. Sometimes they contradicted historical record. I found these misalignments fascinating and tried to weave them into the book. The stories we tell ourselves about our past say a lot about our self-image, state of mind, desires, etc. What we forget defines us as much as what we remember.

EL: You weave in the spirit of San Francisco in the time of Sticky Fingers in such a natural and nuanced manner. Larger than a backdrop for telling the story of the business, it becomes the heartbeat. Do you think that Sticky Fingers would have been able to flourish in the ways in which it did if it had been started in a different city?

It gave us a population of dreamers—which, when you think about it, is an ideal market for marijuana.

AV: An old saying has it that, “The country tipped sideways, and all the loose screws rolled to California.” San Francisco was built on waves of mass migration—usually of people chasing an illusion. Think of the Gold Rush, the Summer of Love, the dot-com boom. In the ‘70s, the Gay Liberation movement drew folks from all over the world looking for a safe place to live out of the closet. The fantasies were usually overblown, but once people came here, they stayed and did other things. It gave us a population of dreamers—which, when you think about it, is an ideal market for marijuana.

Sticky Fingers Brownies was a creature of the ‘70s. Consider this: some people were buying illegal pot brownies to use on the job. It’s hard to imagine anyone doing that in San Francisco today, even though it’s legal now. The cost of living is too high to risk losing your job. Back in the day, work took a backseat to lifestyle and creativity.

San Francisco is also a physically small city. The population in the ‘70s was only about 700,000, and I think that made word of mouth particularly effective. Later, when the AIDS crisis hit, the intricate social networks helped us face the pandemic in innovative ways. 

EL: Your mother is an artist, as is your father who comes to join the Sticky Fingers empire, and the majority of people in the Sticky Fingers world. Through telling their stories you end up documenting the history of the artist community in San Francisco in a personal and greatly detailed way. Was it important to you to archive the history of this community—especially as it seems to be an ever dwindling one in San Francisco?

AV: Very much so. This project is driven by oral history. I would ask former customers about their relationship to Sticky Fingers Brownies and end up hearing about amazing art scenes and culture pockets, many of which were influential but not well-documented. Stories carry a weight of responsibility. I wanted to save it all.

Some rabbit holes consumed me. There were months when I did nothing but interview buskers who’d worked Fisherman’s Wharf during the golden age of street performance; they called it the New Vaudeville. I fell in love with those stories and could’ve written an entire book on that alone. I had to restrain myself to make room for the punks, psychics, disco queens, genderfuck theater radicals, and so forth. So many obsessions! In the final draft, the buskers of Fisherman’s Wharf are condensed into a few pages. The hardest part was committing to one through line and cutting the rest.

Today, we’re facing a pandemic that specifically endangers elders. Now is a good time to ask parents, grandparents, and elderly friends about the stories they carry.

When people pass away, history dies with them. Today, we’re facing a pandemic that specifically endangers elders. Now is a good time to ask parents, grandparents, and elderly friends about the stories they carry. If you can record, even better. People are full of surprises.

EL: You make a great and especially timely point about the history people carry with them through their stories. Many significant moments in American history are intrinsically connected to the Sticky Fingers world—from the “gaycott” against Florida citrus to the Jonestown massacre and the assassination of Harvey Milk. I felt like I learned so much more about these moments through your writing than I had in history and social studies courses! When you began writing Home Baked did you know the Sticky Fingers story would connect to these moments?

AV: The ‘70s in San Francisco were frothy and dynamic; the ‘80s were intense. I knew the material would be rewarding. But I didn’t grasp from the outset how intricately the story of Sticky Fingers was interwoven with those historic moments.

EL: So, you began to discover more of their connections as you wrote and researched?

AV: Again, oral history guided the narrative. An interviewee would tip me off to a connection and I’d hit the books and newspaper archives to flesh it out. I kept having to pry myself out of tangents. My rule became that I could only write a given scene if an interviewee gave me a firsthand account, so I’d have something fresh to say about it. If there wasn’t a clear link to Sticky Fingers, I let it go, no matter how intriguing. Fortunately, the Sticky Fingers crowd had their fingers in a lot of pies.

For example, I didn’t find out until the penultimate edit that Cleve Jones had been an occasional customer.

EL: Wow! I’m so glad you were led to him. Reading about Jones, his contributions to celebrating the lives of those who died from AIDS (often without proper funerals) was incredibly moving.

AV: I knew him as a key figure in LGBTQ+ history but wasn’t planning to involve him. One interview led to another, and suddenly I was having a three-hour conversation with Harvey Milk’s protégé and the force of nature behind the AIDS Quilt. Cleve shared marvelous stories about Sticky Fingers and the greater community—cracking open historically vital scenes. I almost missed him!  

EL: The AIDS crisis comes to loom large in the narrative as the Sticky Fingers story progresses. The compassion your mother showed during this time, as she brought brownies to those who were suffering in an effort to alleviate some of their symptoms, while most of the country sat back and did nothing, was heartrending to read. At the time was the magnitude of the crisis clear to you.

AIDS was very real to me. I had nightmares about loved ones getting sick, and some of those dreams came true.

AV: An ACT UP activist named Vito Russo said, “Living with AIDS is like living through a war which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches.” Well, I was in the trenches as a child. AIDS was very real to me—and much more dramatic and serious than anything happening on the schoolyard. I had nightmares about loved ones getting sick, and some of those dreams came true. Keep in mind that, until 1996, there was no effective treatment. Diagnosis was a death sentence.

EL: Russo’s quote is haunting, both in retrospect and now viewed from the lense of our current pandemic. During the height of the AIDS crisis, when you were delivering brownies to those who were ill with your mother, did you know the great service she was doing or was it something that became clearer as you looked back while writing?

AV: I knew my mom’s role was positive. When she did home deliveries to folks who were too sick to go out, you could see the relief on their faces. A brownie wasn’t going to cure anyone, but it might get them through the day with less anguish.

What I didn’t grasp then was how profoundly the Reagan Administration abandoned the LGBTQ+ community. These beautiful young men were dying horrible deaths by the thousands, and the president refused to discuss it publicly for years—not until 20,000 people had died. Reagan’s press secretary mocked journalists for asking questions about a disease that affected “fairies.” I was scared as a kid; as an adult, I’ve become furious. 

It was also through research that I came to see my mom as part of a seismic shift in our society’s relationship with cannabis. Today’s trend of state legalization grew directly from medical-marijuana activism during the AIDS crisis.

I started this book as a story about an eccentric family—just navel-gazing. Through a decade of research and writing, the story expanded beyond my family, beyond my hometown, beyond its era. You can feel the reverberations today.

7 Books About Living Paycheck to Paycheck

Posted on by Jo Lou

Lately, so much talk has been focused on the more vulnerable populations in our society, including workers whose jobs don’t afford them paid sick leave. Many Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, and these jobs provide no safety net. This is a reality we often shy away from in polite conversation: poverty is so taboo as to render it unspeakable. When we do speak about it, it’s often in terms of what people did or didn’t do to earn their poverty; rarely is it given honest consideration. Yet for far too many, poverty is a reality we’re born into, and one that greatly shapes what opportunities we do or do not have in life.

The House of Deep Water by Jeni McFarland

In my novel, The House of Deep Water, Beth DeWitt moves with her two children back to the Michigan farming community where she grew up. The move is necessary due to financial trouble, and on the surface, it may seem as if Beth’s decisions led to this outcome, as she has lost her job. But there’s a deeper trauma lurking beneath, one related to the poverty in which Beth grew up. The only affordable childcare option for her family was to leave Beth in the care of her neighbor; as the story opens and Beth returns to the same Michigan community, the son of her old babysitter is arrested for unthinkable crimes, of which Beth was a victim during her childhood.

The following is a list of other books that work well to highlight the vulnerability of poverty.

Love War Stories by Ivelisse Rodriguez

These stories chronicle the woes of love, as told by young women in various walks of life. Running beneath these stories, though, is an undercurrent of vulnerability, what happens when you fall in love with the wrong guy, when you make the wrong match, the financially insecure match. From the aunt who pines for her absent husband—a  man who went off to work in America, to build a better life for his wife—to the woman who stalks her ex, watches him “overreaching,” trying to disguise his roots, these stories truly highlight the vulnerability so many people face when money is tight.

A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley

Like Rodriguez’s stories, A Lucky Man follows the lives of men and boys moving through a world of limited opportunities, each of them trying to figure out what masculinity should look like, even when their closest role-models are women. The writing is both down-to-earth and earth-shattering as we see these males strive towards something bigger than themselves, in a world where bigger comes with a price.

Little Fires Everywhere (Movie Tie-In) by Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

This novel, about a mother and daughter who move into a rental house and quickly become caught up in a local custody case, is underpinned by the choices available to the mother, and the opportunities that come with those choices. In many ways, the custody case echoes the mother’s own choices. The book raises a lot of questions regarding who has the right to raise a child, and how wealth, race, and privilege play into that.

Stealing Buddha's Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen

This memoir follows a family torn apart by war, the Nguyens move to a small town in Michigan to escape Vietnam, leaving behind the mother. In her new home, Bich Minh longs to fit in, like all children; “fitting in,” though, requires a level of wealth her family hasn’t acquired. Nguyen highlights these wealth disparities with food, especially the foods her family eats versus the foods the local Michiganders have on their tables.

The Ensemble by Aja Gabel

The Ensemble by Aja Gabel

This novel shows four friends in the classical music scene. Each performance deepens their loves, conflicts, and heartbreaks as they strive for success collectively and individually. These characters’ struggles come replete with notable differences depending on each musician’s familial background, portrayed with prose so lovely and real you feel you could reach into the page and touch these people.

First Cosmic Velocity by Zach Powers

First Cosmic Velocity by Zach Powers

This book focuses on the Soviet space race, chronicling the lives of cosmonauts hailing from poor villages in the Soviet Union. The cosmonauts live and work at Space City, an insular government-run installation where they are taught to toe the party line and tout the party story. Even in a novel where the people all operate under pseudonyms, which are often just job-descriptions, Powers manages to create characters who live and breathe on the page.

Image result for american marriage by tayari jones algonquin

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

This novel shows a love triangle reconfigured after a husband is wrongfully incarcerated. His extended absence exacerbates tensions caused by the asymmetry of each spouse’s socio-economic background. Try as they may, even his wife’s money and social ties can’t save him in time.