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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For many, the 2018 NXIVM court case, indicting NXIVM’s founder Keith Raniere and his associate, the Smallville television actress Allison Mack, was wildly entertaining click bait, a salacious tabloid story, complete with sex slaves and the language of self-improvement and greed, but when I came across this story, I had been waiting for the arrest; it had been a long time coming.
When I met my friend Daniella in 2010, we became fast friends during weekly chats while our young sons played soccer in Brooklyn. I was struck by her beauty and humor and complexity. Also: her storytelling. She was from Mexico City and had become entrenched in a cult called NXIVM a year or two before having a child. She’d suffered a breakdown while being isolated on the cult’s property and somehow managed to get out of there not only alive but without having sex with or being branded by anyone. Nevertheless, the experience had clearly exploded her life. She’d tried to explain how Keith Raniere was gifted at honing in on vulnerabilities, how he was a master manipulator. She’d been entranced by his intelligence, had wanted desperately to please him. I read all that was available about Raniere at the time, but then—and still—the news stories only hinted at the complex emotional and psychological terrain. Daniella’s story not only continued to stick with me over the years, but it worked its way into my imagination.
My most recent novelSt. Ivo is about two couples reckoning with the long-hidden secrets that have shaped their families. A cult makes an appearance. Or, more accurately, a cult and its ramifications reverberate through the story. Here, in no particular order, are some books that feature cults of one sort or another. All are completely and often scarily compelling.
This compassionate and razor-sharp novel seamlessly merges the 1980’s AIDS crisis with a 2015 mother in search of her daughter who’s been lost to a cult. As these separate stories unfold, populated by an admirably large cast of soulful and often funny characters, they merge into one deep investigation of humanity and simultaneously create indelible love letters to both Chicago and Paris.
When the popular Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country aired in 2018, I couldn’t go to a dinner or a party without the conversation veering into an animated discussion about the controversial Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (also known as Osho), his one-time personal assistant Ma Anand Sheela and their often middle-class, well-educated followers, who—on several communes across the globe—wore orange clothing and had lots of sex, while their children ran wild. Author Tim Guest was one of those children. His 2005 memoir recounts how, at age five, he was taken by his mother to live on an ashram in India, where they were given new names and promptly separated, as children on the Rajneesh communes were raised communally. Without trashing his mother or her fellow seekers, Guest writes unflinchingly about his own sense of abandonment, as well as the manipulations of Osho, whose utopian empire spectacularly crumbled into a swirl of laughing gas, Rolls Royces, tax-evasion…and murder.
This popular, page-turning ode to Dionysian rituals and beauty and the particular louche cool of Bennington in the mid 1980’s features Academia-as-Cult. A charismatic professor, Julian Morrow, improbably bewitches a group of elite students with his engaging teaching of ancient Greek. The names alone (Frances Abernathy! Bunny Corcoran!) are unforgettable, and as these characters become increasingly cut off from campus life, a glorious and harrowing unraveling ensues.
This 2013 National Book Award finalist for nonfiction is an exhaustive and wildly entertaining look at the famous celebrity-studded organization/cult/religion started in the 1950’s by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard and currently led by David Miscavige. The title itself is brilliant; “going clear” is how Scientology refers to the state of being freed from “engrams” which are “subconscious memories of past trauma.” Prepare to be amazed, especially if—like me—you know some practicing Scientologists or at least some Scientology apologists.
Perhaps the most sensational cult story out there (though it’s clearly impossible to pick just one), The Family does not disappoint with its examples of both a glittering charismatic leader and its downward spiral of abuse. Australian Anne Hamilton-Byrne is described as a “Kim Novak blonde”—wealthy, educated, radiant, and cruel. Her personal mythology drew from “Christianity, Hinduism, hatha yoga and New Age journeys into crystals, auras, light, color, LSD, and magic mushrooms, and even extraterrestrial life.” I admit I do wish she’d been around for Instagram. This story is shocking at every turn except one: the cruelty. And the ultimate destruction of innocent lives.
This much-lauded memoir tells the story of an American family-as-cult, with a charismatic father-as-leader. The Westovers (their names are pseudonyms) are Mormon survivalists living in rugged isolation on an Idaho mountain, which the author describes with unforgettable beauty and tenderness, especially in contrast to the abuse she suffered there. Despite receiving no formal education of any kind, Tara Westover, with the encouragement from one of her also-brilliant brothers, manages to study and take the ACT (a standardized test required for college admission), attend Brigham Young University and then the University of Cambridge in England, where she ultimately excels and graduates with a PhD. This story is so outrageous and yet completely relatable and left me pondering how all families—not just the abusive ones—can have their cult-like moments.
This was my favorite book of 2019. Though much of its well-deserved praise has understandably centered around elements of its dazzling meta-fiction, what lingers is the cult-like atmosphere of the theater program at the arts high school that Choi so sharply evokes. Having previously explored the world of cults (her 2004 Pulitzer Prize-finalist American Woman fictionalized the Patty Hearst kidnapping), Choi is no stranger to radical natures. There is menace in the 1980’s thespian atmosphere of Trust Exercise, but there is also profound humor and passion. Here’s one cult that’s not too difficult—at least for this reader—to imagine wanting to join.
In the bedroom of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, there’s a mural depicting a well-dressed crowd at a cocktail party pasted to the wall. Spencer’s granddaughter, Shaun Spencer-Hester, points to small black lines that outline the teeth of some in the crowd: a handful of them, chest-high or so, the only faces Shaun could reach when she “enhanced” the mural as a child. The artwork was installed to cover the random lists and thoughts that her poet grandmother habitually wrote on the wall. To get to the upper level where the family sometimes entertained, guests walked through the master bedroom; concerned about what visitors might think about the scribblings on the wall, Spencer agreed to have the mural installed. Shaun smiles as she points out the features of people in the crowd and names Harlem Renaissance figures she thinks are depicted in the painting.
Shaun speaks lovingly of her grandparents’ home, which—with its furnishings, Spencer’s favorite magazines, bed linens, toiletries, wallpaper, and letters from Harlem Renaissance writers—looks just as it did when she was a child. The poet’s house in Lynchburg, Virginia has been preserved as a museum: The Anne Spencer House & Garden Museum. To walk into the house is to step back to a time when the literary giants of the Harlem Renaissance gathered there for dinner or parties. It is to step back to a bygone era, to handwritten letters and tea sets, to the apron in the kitchen hanging in wait for the body whose shape it holds. And for me, it is to step back into another house altogether, to my paternal grandparents’ house in another town, another country. It is to hold on to a disappearing past, and ask myself over and over: What do we preserve of the ones who came before us?
I thought of what it meant for my grandparents—born some 70 years after the abolition of slavery in Jamaica—to own land and build a house they could pass on to future generations.
On the spring afternoon when I visited the Anne Spencer Museum, the details of my grandparents’ house, which they called “Hope View,” came back to me in a rush. This relic of another era conjured Hope View for me, not because my grandparents’ home was similarly preserved, but because I feared its loss, the permanent removal of a connection to my past and the erasure of my family’s roots in Anchovy, a little town eight miles uphill from the coast of Montego Bay, Jamaica. I thought of what it meant for my grandparents—born some 70 years after the abolition of slavery in Jamaica—to own land and build a house they could pass on to future generations. Instead of restoring Hope View with care, as Shaun has done with her grandparents’ home, my family has been planning for its eventual sale.
Hope View is the house my grandparents built when they returned to Jamaica in 1931 after spending a little more than a decade as migrant workers in Cuba. As a child I didn’t know they called it Hope View, didn’t think of it as a place that embodied my grandparents’ dream of the way they wanted their children to live: in hope of something better and with a view of what is possible.
The house is built into a hillside, and looks down on a sloped piece of land where my grandparents grew a range of crops. Banana, coffee, and coco yam, among others, grew alongside towering breadfruit, coconut, and avocado trees, which shaded the lower portion of the land. To the left was a single star apple tree, long gone now. The house itself is small, built so close to a rock outcropping that it looks like it rises out of the hillside. Two concrete columns hold up a small verandah and frame the door to the cellar. To the right of the columns, a set of concrete steps rises up to the red floor of the verandah and the aqua railing that hems it in. From the living room, you walk through a small and dark middle room, where, for much of my childhood years, the wood floor dipped as if set on springs. Grandma’s curio cabinet sat in that dark middle room untouched. Bedrooms branch off from the middle and dining room. The dining room, also dark and windowless, is a step down from the middle room, and the extended kitchen another step down from there. To the rear, the kitchen backs up to a small cliff, with only a sliver of space in which ferns and moss grow.
Specific scenes are etched in my memory: my grandfather in his undershirt standing at the railing and watching his son and family climb the hill; Sunday afternoon dinners of brown stewed chicken, rice and peas, and milky carrot juice; my sisters and me running down the slight slope to the right of the house, peering under the house at the chickens or cats hiding in the crawl space, and picking ferns from the back wall; standing by the side of the house drinking coconut water and waiting for an adult to slice through the coconut so we could get at the jelly inside.
When I was growing up, there was a set of black traveling trunks in the house, which I’ve always imagined as the trunks that carried my grandparents’ belongings to Jamaica when they came back from Cuba. The trunks are gone now, perhaps thrown out after my grandparents’ deaths when my father and his siblings readied the house for tenants. Gone, too, is the kitchen cabinet with chicken wire built into the doors. Gone is the curio cabinet and the shot glasses and spoons that marked the places to which my grandparents or their children traveled. Gone are the ancient books and magazines—some transplanted to my parents’ house after my grandparents died. Chickens no longer roam the yard. The cherry tree three-quarters of the way up the hill, the naseberry tree halfway up the hill, the towering coconut trees, and the large breadfruit tree under which my father often parked have long been gone.
I had already held on to Hope View the only way I know how: I had preserved it in writing.
A few years before I visited the Anne Spencer House & Garden Museum, my father and his siblings began talking about selling their childhood home. My grandparents were long dead and with their children aging and descendants living primarily in America and scattered around the globe, who would take care of the house and land? Theirs was a legitimate concern, but it didn’t ease the sadness of having my grandparents’ home disappear from our lives completely. My grandparents built that house and added to it over the years as their family grew, similar to the way Anne Spencer’s husband, Edward Spencer, designed and built their house in 1903, periodically modifying it over the years to accommodate his growing family and the family’s expanding social life. He found and recycled various materials—wooden banisters, a set of red leather padded doors that were originally part of the all-black Harrison Movie Theater and remain today as the door to the side porch. At the back of the house on the edge of the poet’s garden is her writing room, a separate space her husband constructed for her to work. Throughout the studio and the house are remnants of the poet’s life: bed linens and toiletries, magazines, photos, letters from Harlem Renaissance era writers, the mural.
With my grandparents’ house empty of their things, I don’t have Shaun’s tangible memories of her ancestors. But walking away from the museum and lamenting the personal connection I soon will no longer have, I realized I had something else. As a writer, I had already held on to Hope View the only way I know how: I had preserved it in writing. I set a portion of my latest novel, Tea by the Sea, not only in Anchovy but in my grandparents’ house. When I chose Anchovy as one of the central places where the novel takes place, I had in mind Hope View as it looked years earlier after a tenant had moved out. On the verandah, just above the steps, was a sheet left behind by someone surreptitiously using the empty house—or at least the verandah—perhaps for a night-time tryst. My father had forgotten the keys so I couldn’t walk through the empty rooms, couldn’t stand in the semi-dark dining room where we sometimes ate Sunday dinner or through to the side door that led to the fern-filled and mossy rocks at the back of the house. Instead, I only had access to a single room an uncle had remodeled and converted to a small apartment, complete with a kitchenette and separate entry from the rest of the house.
When the novel begins, Lenworth is on the run and has chosen the house in Anchovy as his refuge. He doesn’t expect that anyone would find him there. By the time he comes to the house, which has been in his extended family for years, it has been abandoned, left empty for years because the family members who would have rights to own it have all migrated to distant countries, and none, it seemed, had any intention of returning to the house and its old-world charm.
The fate of the abandoned house in my novel—and that of my family—is not a unique story. It is a story most every immigrant in America can tell of family land left alone too long or lingering in limbo, of migrants who had great plans to return home but who, after years abroad, find it hard to return to a place they’ve long left, a town empty of friends and family.
It is a story most every immigrant in America can tell of family land left alone too long or lingering in limbo.
The last time I visited Hope View, the grass was overgrown, so high it tickled my bare ankles and skin. Beneath the grass, the soil was muddy, slippery. There were plants hanging on the verandah, a little garden plot below the steps, and the steps—once a vivid red—were black with mildew and dirt. The house looked smaller. But it lived on in the family—saved from an imminent sale by one of my uncles who sees to its upkeep.
It is only a matter of time before the question of its fate rises again, before we hear an echo of what Lenworth thinks in Tea by the Sea when he chooses the abandoned house: “The line of children and grandchildren, who would have claim to the house and most of whom had migrated abroad, had no use for it—too small, too remote, too old, too generous with old-world charm (if it could even be called charming at all). Lenworth’s own father, who had migrated to England and never returned, had no use for it either.” Whatever happens, though, it will live on in my writing.
When I think of preserving Hope View forever in fiction, I also think of my own childhood home, a rambler on a hill. Somewhere along the way I heard that a river once ran along our street. Jamaica is mostly limestone rock, and over time the limestone weakens and the above-ground river eventually disappears underground. Sometimes I can imagine the ancient river winding its way in the valley between our house and the main road. Sometimes when the rain is sufficiently heavy, a pond forms in a flat area a half mile from our house. And I have imagined a story that incorporates this nameless river that went underground. But I haven’t found a way to incorporate my childhood home in a piece of fiction, or to accurately reflect the serenity of looking out across the valley to the main road leading into town, or looking across the eastern sky at the rain falling two towns over and guessing if or when it will reach our house. I haven’t found a way to capture the quirks of the house itself, the small nook near the front verandah built specifically for the piano I dreaded being reminded to play, the tinkle of the piano keys drifting down hill. But perhaps I won’t need to write about my childhood home. I don’t yet fear its loss.
“The Island at Noon” by Julio Cortázar translated by Suzanne Jill Levine
The first time he saw the island, Marini was politely leaning over the seats on the left, adjusting a plastic table before setting a lunch tray down. The passenger had looked at him several times as he came and went with magazines or glasses of whisky; Marini lingered while he adjusted the table, wondering, bored, if it was worth responding to the passenger’s insistent look, one American woman out of many, when in the blue oval of the window appeared the coast of the island, the golden strip of the beach, the hills that rose toward the desolate plateau. Correcting the faulty position of the glass of beer, Marini smiled to the passenger. “The Greek islands,” he said. “Oh, yes, Greece,” the American woman answered with false interest. A bell rang briefly, and the steward straightened up, without removing the professional smile from his thin lips. He began attending to a Syrian couple, who ordered tomato juice, but in the tail of the plane he gave himself a few seconds to look down again; the island was small and solitary, and the Aegean Sea surrounded it with an intense blue that exalted the curl of a dazzling and kind of petrified white, which down below would be foam breaking against reefs and coves. Marini saw that the deserted beaches ran north and west; the rest was the mountain which fell straight into the sea. A rocky and deserted island, although the lead-grey spot near the northern beach could be a house, perhaps a group of primitive houses. He started opening the can of juice, and when he had straightened up the island had vanished from the window; only the sea was left, an endless green horizon. He looked at his wristwatch without knowing why; it was exactly noon.
Marini liked being assigned to the Rome-Teheran line. The flight was less gloomy than on the northern lines, and the girls seemed happy to go to the Orient or to get to know Italy. Four days later, while he was helping a little boy who had lost his spoon and was pointing downheartedly at his dessert plate, he again discovered the edge of the island. There was a difference of eight minutes, but when he leaned over to a window in the tail he had no doubts; the island had an unmistakable shape, like a turtle whose paws were barely out of the water. He looked at it until they called for him, this time sure that the lead-grey spot was a group of houses; he managed to make out the lines of some cultivated fields that extended to the beach. During the stop at Beirut he looked at the stewardess’s atlas and wondered if the island wasn’t Horos. The radio operator, an indifferent Frenchman, was surprised at his interest. “All those islands look alike. I’ve been doing this route for two years, and I don’t care a fig about them. Yes, show it to me next time.” It wasn’t Horos but Xiros, one of the many islands on the fringe of the tourist circuits. “It won’t last five years,” the stewardess said to him while they had a drink in Rome. “Hurry up if you’re thinking of going, the hordes will be there any moment now. Genghis Cook is watching.” But Marini kept thinking about the island, looking at it when he remembered or if there was a window near, almost always shrugging his shoulders in the end. None of it made any sense—flying three times a week at noon over Xiros was as unreal as dreaming three times a week that he was flying over Xiros. Everything was falsified in the futile and recurrent vision; except, perhaps, the desire to repeat it, the consulting of the wristwatch before noon, the brief, pricking contact with the dazzling white band at the edge of an almost black blue, and the houses where the fishermen would barely lift their eyes to follow the passage of that other unreality.
The island was visible for a few minutes, but the air was always so clean, and it was outlined by the sea with such a minute cruelty that the smallest details were implacably adjusted to the memory of the preceding flight.
Eight or nine weeks later, when they offered him the New York run, with all its advantages, Marini thought it was the chance to end that innocent and annoying obsession. In his pocket he had a guide book in which an imprecise geographer with a Levantine name gave more details about Xiros than was usual. He answered no, hearing himself as from a distance, and, avoiding the shocked surprise of a boss and two secretaries, he went to have a bite in the company’s canteen, where Carla was waiting for him. Carla’s bewildered disappointment did not disturb him; the southern coast of Xiros was uninhabitable, but toward the west remained traces of a Lydian or perhaps Creto-Mycenaean colony, and Professor Goldmann had found two stones carved with hieroglyphics that the fishermen used as piles for the small dock. Carla’s head ached, and she left almost immediately; octopus was the principal resource for the handful of inhabitants, every five days a boat arrived to load the fish and leave some provisions and materials. In the travel agency they told him he would have to charter a special boat from Rynos, or perhaps it would be possible to go in the small boat that picked up the octopuses, but Marini could find out about this only in Rynos, where the agency didn’t have an agent. At any rate, the idea of spending a few days on the island was just a plan for his June vacation; in the weeks that followed he had to replace White on the Tunis run, and then there was a strike, and Carla went back to her sisters’ house in Palermo. Marini went to live in a hotel near the Piazza Navona, where there were secondhand bookstores; he amused himself not very enthusiastically by looking for books on Greece, and from time to time he leafed through a conversation manual. The word kalimera pleased him, and he tried it out on a redhead in a cabaret; he went to bed with her, learned about her grandfather in Odos and about certain unaccountable sore throats. In Rome it rained, in Beirut Tania was always waiting for him; there were other stories, always relatives or sore throats; one day it was again the Teheran run, the island at noon. Marini stayed glued to the window so long that the new stewardess considered him a poor partner and let him know how many trays she had served. That night Marini invited the stewardess for dinner at the Firouz, and it wasn’t difficult to make her forgive him for the morning’s distraction. Lucía advised him to have his hair cut American-style; he talked to her about Xiros for a while, but later he realized she preferred the vodka-lime of the Hilton. Time passed in things like that, in infinite trays of food, each one with the smile to which the passenger had the right. On the return trips the plane flew over Xiros at eight in the morning; the sun glared against the larboard windows, and you could scarcely see the golden turtle; Marini preferred to wait for the noons of the trip going, knowing that then he could stay a long minute against the window, while Lucía (and then Felisa) somewhat ironically took care of things. Once he took a picture of Xiros, but it came out blurred; he already knew some things about the island, he had underlined the rare mentions in a couple of books. Felisa told him that the pilots called him the madman of the island, but that didn’t bother him. Carla had just written that she had decided not to have the baby, and Marini sent her two weeks’ wages and thought that the rest would not be enough for his vacation. Carla accepted the money and let him know through a friend that she’d probably marry the dentist from Treviso. Everything had such little importance at noon, on Mondays and Thursdays and Saturdays (twice a month on Sundays).
Everything had such little importance at noon, on Mondays and Thursdays and Saturdays (twice a month on Sundays).
As time went on, he began to realize that Felisa was the only one who understood him a little; there was a tacit agreement that she would take care of the flight at noon, as soon as he stationed himself by the tail window. The island was visible for a few minutes, but the air was always so clean, and it was outlined by the sea with such a minute cruelty that the smallest details were implacably adjusted to the memory of the preceding flight: the green spot of the headland to the north, the lead-grey houses, the nets drying on the sand. When the nets weren’t there, Marini felt as if he had been robbed, insulted. He thought of filming the passage over the island, to repeat the image in the hotel, but he preferred to save the money on the camera since there was less than a month left for vacation. He didn’t keep a very strict account of the days; sometimes it was Tania in Beirut, sometimes Felisa in Teheran, almost always his younger brother in Rome, all a bit blurred, amiably easy and cordial and as if replacing something else, filling the hours before or after the flight, and during the flight, everything, too, was blurred and easy and stupid until it was time to lean toward the tail window, to feel the cold crystal like the boundary of an aquarium, where the golden turtle slowly moved in the thick blue.
That day, the nets were clearly sketched on the sand, and Marini could have sworn that the black dot on the left, at the edge of the sea, was a fisherman who must have been looking at the plane. “Kalimera,” he absurdly thought. It no longer made any sense to wait. Mario Merolis would lend him the money he needed for the trip, and in less than three days he would be in Xiros. With his lips against the window, he smiled, thinking that he would climb to the green spot, that he would enter the sea of the northern coves naked, that he would fish octopuses with the men, communicating through signs and laughter. Nothing was difficult once decided—a night train, the first boat, another old and dirty boat, the night on the bridge, close to the stars, the taste of anis and mutton, daybreak among the islands. He landed with the first lights, and the captain introduced him to an old man, probably the elder. Klaios took his left hand and spoke slowly, looking him in the eyes. Two boys came, and Marini found out that they were Klaios’ sons. The captain of the small boat exhausted his English: Twenty inhabitants, octopus, fish, five houses, Italian visitor would pay lodging Klaios. The boys laughed when Klaios discussed drachmas; Marini, too, al- ready friends with the younger boys, watching the sun come up over a sea not as dark as from the air, a poor, clean room, a pitcher of water, smell of sage and tanned hides.
Nothing was difficult once decided—a night train, the first boat, another old and dirty boat, the night on the bridge, close to the stars, the taste of anis and mutton, daybreak among the islands.
They left him alone to go load the small boat, and after tearing off his traveling clothes and putting on bathing trunks and sandals, he set out for a walk on the island. You still couldn’t see anybody; the sun slowly but surely rose, and from the thickets grew a subtle smell, slightly acidic, mixing with the iodine of the wind. It must have been ten when he reached the northern headland and recognized the largest of the coves. He preferred being alone, although he would have liked to bathe at the sand beach even better; the island impregnated him, and he enjoyed it with such intimacy that he was incapable of thinking or choosing. His skin burned from sun and wind when he undressed to thrust himself into the sea from a rock; the water was cold and did him good. He let a sly current carry him to the entrance of a grotto, he returned to the open sea, rolled over on his back, accepted it all in a single act of conciliation that was also a name for the future. He knew without the slightest doubt that he would not leave the island, that somehow he would stay forever on the island. He managed to imagine his brother, Felisa, their faces when they found out he had stayed to live off fishing on a large solitary rock. He had already forgotten them when he turned over to swim toward the shore.
The sun dried him immediately, and he went down toward the houses, where two astonished women looked at him before running inside and closing their doors. He waved a greeting in the void and walked down toward the nets. One of Klaios’ sons was waiting for him on the beach, and Marini pointed to the sea, inviting him. The boy hesitated, pointing to his cloth pants and red shirt. Then he ran toward one of the houses and came back almost naked; they dived together into an already lukewarm sea, dazzling under the eleven o’clock sun.
It wouldn’t be easy to kill the former man, but there up high, tense with sun and space, he felt the enterprise was possible.
Drying himself in the sand, Ionas began to name things. “Kalimera,” Marini said, and the boy doubled over with laughter. Then Marini repeated the new sentences, teaching Ionas Italian words. Almost on the horizon the small boat grew smaller and smaller; Marini felt that now he was really alone on the island with Klaios and his people. He would let some days pass, he would pay for his room and learn to fish; some afternoon, when they were well acquainted, he would talk to them about staying and working with them. Getting up, he held out his hand to Ionas and started walking slowly toward the hill. The slope was steep, and he savored each pause, turning around time and again to look at the nets on the beach, the figures of the women speaking gaily to Ionas and Klaios and looking at him askance, laughing. When he reached the green spot he entered a world where the smell of thyme and sage were one with the fire of the sun and the sea breeze. Marini looked at his wristwatch and then, with an impatient gesture, put it in the pocket of his bathing trunks. It wouldn’t be easy to kill the former man, but there up high, tense with sun and space, he felt the enterprise was possible. He was in Xiros, he was there where he had so often doubted he could reach. He let himself fall back among the hot stones, he endured their edges and inflamed ridges and looked vertically at the sky; far away he could hear the hum of an engine.
Closing his eyes, he told himself he wouldn’t look at the plane; he wouldn’t let himself be contaminated by the worst of him that once more was going to pass over the island. But in the shadows of his eyelids he imagined Felisa with the trays, in that very moment distributing the trays, and his replacement, perhaps Giorgio or someone new from another line, someone who would also be smiling as he served the wine or the coffee. Unable to fight against all that past he opened his eyes and sat up, and in the same moment saw the right wing of the plane, almost over his head, tilt unaccountably, the changed sound of the jet engines, the almost vertical drop into the sea. He rushed down the hill, knocking against rocks and lacerating his arm among thorns. The island hid the place of the fall from him, but he turned before reaching the beach and through a predictable shortcut he passed the first ridge of the hill and came out onto the smaller beach. The plane’s tail was sinking some 100 yards away, in total silence. Marini ran and dived into the water, still waiting for the plane to come up to float; but all you could see was the soft line of the waves, a cardboard box bobbing absurdly near the place of the fall, and almost at the end, when it no longer made sense to keep swimming, a hand out of the water, just for a second, enough time for Marini to change direction and dive under to catch by his hair the man who struggled to hold on to him and hoarsely swallowed air that Marini let him breathe without getting too close. Towing him little by little he got him to the shore, took the body dressed in white in his arms, and laying him on the sand he looked at the face full of foam where death had already settled, bleeding through an enormous gash in his throat. What good was artificial respiration if, with each convulsion, the gash seemed to open a little more and was like a repugnant mouth that called to Marini, tore him from his little happiness of such few hours on the island, shouted to him between torrents something he was no longer able to hear? Klaios’ sons came running and behind them the women. When Klaios arrived, the boys gathered around the body lying on the sand, unable to understand how he had had the strength to swim to shore and drag himself there bleeding. “Close his eyes,” one of the women begged crying. Klaios looked toward the sea, searching for other survivors. But, as always, they were alone on the island, and the open-eyed corpse was all that was new between them and the sea.
Having already established herself as a formidable poet, Cathy Park Hong turns her sharp, unflinching gaze on racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part historical survey, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning examines, as its title suggests, not unimportant feelings but ones that come with being “a minority”: “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” With humor and brutal honesty, Hong maps out a nuanced understanding of her relationship to the English language, shame and depression, and art-making, to reveal how people of color are conditioned to believe the lies we are told about our own racial identity.
During my interview with Hong, we delved into such topics as the pitfalls of autobiographical writing, researching Asian American history, navigating friendships with female artists of color, and hope.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: You mention early in the book that you never felt comfortable writing about personal experience through poetry because of the conventions of the forms. How did nonfiction help open that up for you?
Cathy Park Hong: That was key. In poetry, I use a lot of persona. The lyric is more a form for me to throw my voice. I guess I was a little bit both wary and scared of autobiographical writing. When I was done with my third book of poetry, it was a dare to myself to write personally, because I hadn’t done it before. What would it be like if I did? I think that was also why the poetry form was not working for me. I know a lot of poets write autobiographically, but for me, when I was trying to write autobiographically through the lyric form, it felt more like I was putting on a persona and I didn’t want to do that. Nonfiction was a more down-to-earth, inviting form for me to stretch out and be autobiographical. It was also lovely to be tonally wide-ranging. With the lyric form, there’s this kind of intensity and pitch to it, like singing a song, whereas nonfiction felt more comfortable for talking.
MCCB: You’ve established your career as a poet long before this book came out. What is it like to switch to writing nonfiction?
CPH: I basically learned how to write nonfiction from writing this book. Before this I published three books of poetry. I had some experience as a journalist in my 20s, and I also wrote occasional essays. So it wasn’t this completely new genre for me, but I wanted to write about race. I wanted to work on a poetry book that directly tackles the Asian American condition in a kind of blunt and satirical way that I’d never done before, and I realized that it wasn’t working. I even tried writing it as a novel. And then eventually it turned to nonfiction. I think the reason why nonfiction prose worked was that I just needed room to stretch my thoughts. For me, it was more about asking a question, and then following that question to its end. It just seemed to work better for prose rather than poetry. Even though I was writing nonfiction, I still wanted to encompass multiple disciplines: history and theory and memoir and cultural criticism. It was also important to me that it had poetic elements too, that not a word was wasted.
MCCB: You wrote: “In the past, I was encouraged to write about my Asian experience but I still had to write it the way a white poet would write it—so instead of copying a white poet, I was copying a white poet copying their idea of an Asian poet.” You also mention the turning point: “Myung Mi Kim was the first poet who said I didn’t need to sound like a white poet, nor did I have to ‘translate’ my experiences so that it had to sound accessible to a white audience.”
CPH: With poetry, it was more like using artifice to point out artifice, a performance with form using different voices, whereas with prose, it was easier for me to access my own interior thoughts because I didn’t have to worry so much about things like the line break. I could just focus on what I was thinking, writing a memory, unpacking it, and then analyzing it to death, which is harder for me to do with poetry. In that way it felt more personal.
MCCB: Minor Feelings includes so much history about Asians in America, such as the origins of immigration policies, the “model minority” myth, and even how the term “Asian American” developed. Can you talk about the research component?
I wasn’t thinking I was going to write a book that was about where Asian America is now. But then Trump got elected.
CPH: I wasn’t planning on doing a survey of Asian American history. I knew it was going to be about race, politics, and art, particularly institutional racism in the arts. I wasn’t thinking I was going to write a book that was about where Asian America is now. But then, after Trump got elected, I began thinking that there’s a lot of brilliant poetry and fiction and critical scholarship on the subject of Asian America, but there isn’t general nonfiction on Asian Americans. I thought I would just do it in my own weird way and give it my strange singular, very subjective perspective on the Asian American condition. But then I realized that I also have to give some context. A lot of people don’t know about the history of Asian America. There are so many historical moments that even I didn’t know about because it’s just not taught in classes. For example, I did not know about the lynching in Chinatown, Los Angeles until I started researching—these young Chinese boys and men were tortured and hung in the largest mass lynching in American history. I knew that it was necessary for me to put that in the book.
All of this information is out there, especially the history of Chinese American railroads workers, but the problem is that it’s in dry sociological language. I wanted to make it accessible for readers, and also to show that it’s so relevant to politics and race and capitalism in America now. When people think about Asian American history, there’s not much discourse about the history of racism and exploitation and indentured labor that a lot of Asians have to go through. It’s so essential to write about that.
MCCB: You give absolutely no quarter to anyone about how Asians have been situated to be both disappeared and pitted against other minorities. We’re both perpetrated against and perpetrators of through “stay-in-your-lane” politics. You also make a distinction between “speaking nearby” and “speaking about” certain racialized experiences.
CPH: Yes. It’s weird the kind of zero-sum game that we kind of get into, which is very capitalist. We’re vying for that spotlight, vying for that attention. In this age we’re living in, attention is a currency. I think there’s even more pressure to say, “This is my territory. Don’t come into my territory.” Why are we referring to ourselves in terms of real estate? It troubles me that a lot of it is generated from media and social media, which divides and polarizes us.
I think there needs to be a deeper, more nuanced discussion around writing about other people’s experiences.
It is important for writers to write about their own experience, but I think there needs to be a deeper, more nuanced discussion around writing about other people, and writing about other people’s experiences. It’s fraught just to write about your own experience. My Asian American experience has been told for me. There are expectations of how I should frame that experience, how I should highlight traumas in my life, and so forth. How then do I push back against those expectations and find a way to write about my experience that feels truer to me? These are the bigger questions that I’m asking.
MCCB: Speaking of other people’s experiences, I appreciate that you wrote about your craving for friendships with other women of color, and artists of color. You mention checking in with those friends to say you’re writing about them, and how you navigate their opinions about what you do or don’t include.
CPH: I was a rookie, because this is kind of treacherous territory when you’re writing autobiographically. You’re not just writing about yourself. You’re also going to talk about other people—family members, friends, people you encounter. That is an ethically thorny issue that I didn’t really think about until I collided with when I was writing the friendship essay. There was this constant negotiation with the friends I was still in contact with. One friend didn’t want to read the essay at all because she knew that her memories were going to be different from mine. I was writing about a very personal part of her life that I had to ask her about. She seemed to accept that it was time for me to write about her past, and then at the last minute she changed her mind. I panicked because I was about to turn this book in, and thought, “What am I going to do?” And then I decided I would just have a conversation instead, and actually I kind of prefer that.
It shows you the problems with writing memoir and taking from other people’s lives, and also highlights the current conflict between art-making and autobiography that I think a lot of women of color, people of color, have more difficult relationships with. I try to bring it up in the book that a lot of times your life is used to define your artwork, and my friend was really sensitive about that not happening to her. I’m kind of glad she told me that I wasn’t allowed to use it.
MCCB: There’s a very short line where you mention that your father wanted to be a poet also. Did that feel like added pressure to you as a poet?
I don’t want this book to be a multicultural kumbaya like ‘we’re all one.’ We are not that.
CPH: For me? No. He had given up that dream a long time ago. He was very happy for me…well, it wasn’t that he was happy for me so much that he thought it was funny that I chose writing without him prompting me. I didn’t know anything about his dream to be a writer or a poet until I started taking poetry classes. And he liked to say, “Oh, it’s in the Hong blood.” Sometimes he would give me advice that was a bit of a head-scratcher. Like, “You need to practice every day.” And “It’s all in your hands.” And I’d be like, “How is it all in my hands?” But he’s very proud of what I’ve achieved, and I’m very grateful to him, and grateful to my mother for giving me the space to do what I want, trusting me that I’ll find my way, and I think that the reason they gave me that trust was that they understood, or at least my dad understood, that kind of yearning in me to be a poet.
MCCB: At the end of Minor Feelings you quote Tom Ikeda, a Japanese internment camp survivor who protests the Japanese internment camp in Oklahoma that re-opened to fill up with Latin American children. He said, “We need to be the allies for vulnerable communities today that Japanese Americans didn’t have in 1942.” What do you hope as we move toward?
CPH: I really hope that we’re able to think about race in America, and America itself in a more nuanced and complicated way. It’s so important for me that Asian Americans read this book, but I also hope that other people of color, and white Americans read this book as well. I hope we really try to understand the common historical threads that tie us together while acknowledging the differences in conflict between us. I don’t want this book to be a multicultural kumbaya like “we’re all one.” We are not that. I think that we also have to acknowledge the divisions between us. It’s important that we recognize our struggles and other people’s struggles, and I hope that we can move forward in this pressure-cooker political time that we’re living in. For Asian Americans, I hope that they feel seen and recognized, and that this will open up more discussions and more alliances among people of color who are so often left out of racial discourse.
Chelsea Bieker’s dazzling, propulsive, and deeply affecting debut novel, Godshot, announces a remarkable talent. Fourteen-year-old narrator Lacey May is dealing with immense internal and external struggles: her mother suffers from alcoholism, and the two of them (along with almost the entire community of Peaches, their tiny, drought-addled town in California’s Central Valley) turn to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance and relief.
As you might suspect, things go from bad to worse under the pastor’s care, and just as he gives Lacey May a secret “assignment” to bring back the rain, he excommunicates Lacey’s mother from the church, leaving Lacey May alone in a filthy house with her widowed grandmother. Soon Lacey finds herself in a tremendously vulnerable position (“A gun in the face lets you know in an instant just how badly you want to live,” she laments) and an unlikely coterie of women comes to her aid. These circumstances are crushing and unthinkably bleak, yet in Bieker’s deft hands it’s Lacey’s strength, resilience, and hope that resonate.
The plot of Godshot is multi-faceted and compelling, covering topics as wide-sweeping as motherlessness, addiction, poverty, and adolescent yearning, but what sets this novel apart is the ambition, style, and grace of the prose itself. Lacey May’s voice is as urgent and darkly funny as a late-night phone call from your troubled best friend, but its Bieker’s skillful swerves and breathless rhythms that make the story gleam.
Chelsea Bieker and Leni Zumas, acclaimed author of Red Clocks, recently spoke about these masterful sentences, as well as resilience, friction, female friendships, arranging art around one’s family life, and more.
– Kimberly King Parsons Author of Black Light
Leni Zumas: I’m struck by so many kinds of powerful friction in this novel: emotional, familial, sexual, class-based, gender-based. Friction is not quite the same as conflict, to me—for one thing, a text might enact friction in subtler ways, even at the level of a single image or phrase. What do you see as the most vital sites of friction in Godshot, and why?
Chelsea Bieker: I love this idea of friction. The first thing I think of is my experience with the actual writing of Godshot in terms of place. The thrill of writing this barren and monochromatic droughted town of Peaches, California, and the way it bumped up against the more garish and unexpected details of the objects and people inhabiting it. Everything is dead, beige, dusty and dry, but the characters wear sequined capes and clear platform shoes with stars floating in them, they are shaving the tops of their heads to receive God’s messaging and adorning themselves in bright makeup and driving magenta hearses. One of the characters is setting out to make his fortune painting dead lawns neon green. This need for color and brightness and specialness amid the desolate landscapes was an important contrast for me, and really fun to write.
Another vital site of friction here is the way Lacey May, our fourteen-year-old narrator is forced to self educate about her body and sex through found materials—romance novels and the wisdom of sex workers and birth workers, and books and magazines smuggled around—because she is not receiving this education formally in school or church, or from her mother. There exists a friction between her initial understanding of her body (something of use to the church and to men) and then a new definition, the education she seeks herself.
LZ: Motherhood is at the core of your novel. You are a mother. How did your own experiences of parenting and of being parented come to bear on this book?
CB: The answer to this question is everything. My own experience with motherhood and my experience being parented formed the heart and soul of this narrative, which, after you strip away all the cult glitter and soda pop baptisms, is really about a young girl forced to raise herself and reckon with the living grief that comes when a parent deserts you.
The idea of mothering someone was spiritually daunting when I had felt so unmothered and abandoned all my life.
It was striking to me when I became pregnant with my daughter over six years ago, that I would need to conjure an unknown love. I knew on some practical level I would be able to do it, because I had broken many familial cycles before this one, but there was something spiritually daunting about the idea of mothering someone when I had felt so unmothered and abandoned all my life. It seemed I would have to perform a sort of imaginative magic to do it, some deep reach into myself to find a new strength and resilience in the face of such a huge life shift. And now, six years into mothering my daughter and son, feelings will come up to the surface as they reach the ages I was when certain things happened, and I’m forced to re-process my own loss and traumas all over again.
I knew I would have to write a book where the narrator is dealing with the grief that comes with being the child of an alcoholic and having a parent leave you but not die. The book is also about living in the simultaneous space of unresolved anger and sadness but also persistent love. I never stopped loving my mother deeply and I never will. Lacey, too, never will. I think there’s something beautiful about that but also really sad. I’ve learned that sitting with sadness and feeling its dark edges and then putting it away is something I can survive.
LZ: How does your identity as a mother most keenly inform, intersect with, and/or collide with your identity as a writer?
CB: First let me say how honored I am to be the mother of my children. Not a moment goes by that I’m not mowed over by my good fortune that they chose me, and I believe that love finds its way into my writing. On the other hand, being both a writer and a mother can be very difficult. I wrote this book pregnant and then ravaged and sleep deprived, nursing, bleeding, pumping, and then just as I was sleeping again semi-normally, I did it all again and through it all I grasped to my writing practice like it would save my life. Writing was all my own when nothing else was, not even my body. Even as I’m writing this, I’m interrupted by my child’s need for one more snuggle. There’s always someone’s needs to attend to, and to say that that is easy for me, is a lie. Loving them is easy for me. But the rigor of full time parenting on top of writing is intense. But I wanted and still want both hard things.
Recently, I heard someone describe my book in just one word: raw. I think that’s right. I’ll own that. Motherhood is raw. Loss and grief and addiction are really raw. I’m not interested in art that doesn’t reckon with that in some way.
LZ: For me, one of Godshot’s biggest pleasures is its nuanced exploration of friendships among women. How would you describe the role of female friendship in Lacey’s story?
CB: For Lacey May, female friendship is a crucial part of her survival. It’s her way out of her circumstances. The unlikely friendships she makes were a joy to write because usually when we come through trauma, we aren’t doing it all alone, and I wanted that to be painted here. When we are coming of age and looking for other ways to be and live beyond our own limited scope, friends can show us new truths. The role of Lacey’s friendships here move her and empower her, and force her to call into question the way she has always perceived the world. It’s also a source of happiness in her world, a source of hope. It’s healing too, when someone sees something in you you had never seen before. It expands your consciousness of what is possible for your life, and I think that happens to Lacey here.
LZ: Place is a crucial (and fascinating) ingredient of Godshot. How did your own ties to California’s Central Valley shape the book?
I’ve learned that sitting with sadness and feeling its dark edges and then putting it away is something I can survive.
CB: I grew up in the Central Valley and experienced so much formative trauma there that I spent most of that time imagining my way out. The reality of that place for me is chock full of difficult memories, but once I was away from it, a new curiosity formed and I was drawn in. I closed my eyes and saw the flat landscapes and the hazy blue sky. I felt the heat of summer in my body and in my own way, I became reacquainted with it. I was out of my trigger zone and able to explore it on my own terms through writing.
To me, the Central Valley is a fascinating place, full of contradictions. I wanted to explore these in this book, and how a place makes you. I’m not sure that the old adage wherever you go, there you are, holds up for me there. When I am there, I am not myself. I need distance from it to see it clearly. To be the person I am meant to be. In real life I don’t want to drive by the liquor store my mom used to frequent and be thrown into memory, but I feel compelled to write about it. That’s my way of loving a place that didn’t love me back. Though I do crave the way that particular sun looks setting over the fields, or the ticking by of rows out the window as I drive by an orchard.
LZ: What’s most important for you in the making of sentences?
CB: All sentences for me are rooted in voice. I hear the music of a sentence and I transcribe. It is as though I’m channeling characters speaking and I feel the buzz of their aliveness. Usually I abandon work on a piece when the sentences don’t seem to have that musical magic anymore. I like playing with variation, rhyme, and in revision of course, rewriting sentences to be more surprising and succinct, or winding and breathless. But there’s something energetic about that first burst of sound I hear with a story or a voice. I like to follow that and not question it.
LZ: In what ways did this book change as you were writing it? And in what ways did writing this book change you?
CB: Writing this book asked me to evaluate the things I was taught and (mainly) not taught growing up about my body and consent and sex and feminism. As Lacey May was self-educating, so was I. When I first began writing the book, it struck me that I was a pregnant adult and had never seen someone give birth before. Had never seen someone breastfeed. It had all been kept behind closed doors from me which just caused me to file it in with all the other shameful womanly acts. The energy of my rage over my own experience heightened as my rage over what Lacey May experiences in the book did. Each draft felt like a deepening of discovery, rage, and then, empowerment.
LZ: In Aja Gabel’s 2018 novel The Ensemble, which is about classical musicians, a composer says:
It had long been a dream of mine to do something like this, to arrange my life around the people I love, to create a shared life with every one of them. I think probably many of you have considered this at one point or another, but thought it impossible. I think many of us strive for community and family but often find it difficult to participate in because of, well, life gets in the way. But it is possible. It is possible to arrange your life around art, and to find, in that art, a kind of love that grows like corn, from way down here to way up here, that changes, goes away, comes back.
At this particular moment in your art-making life, how does the composer’s ambition resonate with you?
CB: What a beautiful book. I love Aja’s writing. I love the hope here. But it is possible. A life arranged around art and family describe my dream. I am lucky to have found both despite, yes, it not being a second nature for me to participate. That was a learned skill. In this current moment of physical distancing, I find my connection to other writers heightened. I find the exchange of stories and books ever more important as we find ways to survive our times. And when I think maybe things are hopeless, I can go back to the mantra of the composer: But it is possible. I love that spiritual nudging, that interruption of doomsday thinking. That delightful and staggering expansion of a possible beautiful and better reality.
I’ve always had a thing for disaster novels. When Gold, Fame Citrus—a drought apocalypse novel set in Los Angeles—was published in the fall of 2015, I immediately knew it was for me. I tore through it on flights between Los Angeles and San Francisco, while the water was running out and the dry brush around both cities was begging to be lit up. We seemed to be on the precipice of disaster then, but ultimately never fell off. Even when the wild fires burned in subsequent years and we made a run on N95 masks, we (in the cities) largely kept our innocence.
I often reflect on Gold, Fame, Citrus. The way in which Claire Vaye Watkins envisioned a starkly changed world has stuck with me over the years. Now that we are faced with a disaster—albeit one of a different nature—that is irrevocably altering the way we live, I find myself returning to it again, looking for solace as I watch my old existence of health and restaurants and meetings over coffee and gleefully dancing in crowds crumble around me.
While the shape of the particular disaster that the novel images may be different from our own, the details and logistics of it are ultimately irrelevant. Disaster is disaster, and the result is the same: our lives are upended, and we must navigate the wreckage. The emotional experience of finding our way through is what Vaye Watkins captures so compellingly, and it eerily mirrors the arc of what we are experiencing now:
Shelter in place. Fight boredom.
Console yourself with small, sensory pleasures left over from your old life. Overspend on specialty food.
Discover how deeply our world has been disfigured.
Today, we’re deep into phase one, and beginning to enter phase two. But waiting at the end of this crisis—whenever that may be—is phase three.
“Things went one-at-a-time in the lifeless waking world.”
The novel opens in Los Angeles, which has become a skeletal, abandoned city. The protagonist, an ex-model named Luz Dunn, and her boyfriend Ray are squatting in a movie star’s vacant home in the Hollywood Hills. Having decided to hunker down in the city after most of its other residents decided to abandon ship, they are essentially sheltering in place, doing their best to fend off boredom with an array of time-killing projects.
It was important to have a project, Ray said, no matter how frivolous. The Santa Anas winged through the canyon now, bearing their invisible crazy-making particulate, and Ray said she should try to keep her hands busy. She should try not to sleep so much. Some of Ray’s projects included digging out the shitting hole and siphoning gasoline from the luxury cars abandoned throughout the canyon.
Our self-quarantine began in earnest on Wednesday, March 11th. That was the day my partner stopped going into his office, in favor of working from home. The next day, rumors of a complete lockdown of New York City—no one in or out—circulated like a wildfire over text. Thankfully, it was debunked as a hoax. But it was enough to push us over the edge to leave the city that weekend. We decamped for rural Connecticut, where two friends are renovating a house.
Our friends are good at projects: tiling the kitchen, building furniture, hunting down toilet paper. I still struggle against the desire to sleep in. The first week of our quarantine here, I’d sleep until 10 am. I found it nearly impossible to apply myself to my work, which proved to be fine, because my work was dwindling. Clients put work on “pause.” Editors went dark. New business prospects put proposals on ice. Projects were evaporating and everything felt frivolous.
Things started getting better when I started forcing myself out of bed early enough to have breakfast with the rest of the house. When I didn’t have work to do, I occupied myself with the pantry: taking inventory of what we had, what we were running low on, and what we needed to make whatever it was I wanted to make. I kept a meticulous grocery list and volunteered to do the shopping.
“Tomorrow they would eat berries.”
To console Luz after a particularly rough day, Ray offers to take Luz to the “raindance”: a grotesque, moonshine-fueled party and makeshift illegal swap meet in the dried up, trashed Venice Canals, which feels like the Tenderloin in San Francisco, if the Tenderloin were transformed into Burning Man. Fresh berries, he suggests. Rumor has it that someone has brought a batch of fresh blueberries down from Seattle, where things still grow.
Now, dusk was coming to the dry rills of raindance. Luz followed Ray along the berm and, though it scared her, into a man-high rusty corrugated drainage culvert, where the berry man was supposed to be. […] From the darkness materialized a shirtless, ashy-skinned daddy-o, bald head glistening, tiny mouth gnawing on a black plastic stir straw. […] [He] held a drained cola can aloft in the darkness. “King County blues. One-fifty.”
Ray tries to negotiate the price down, but Luz is a dead giveaway that they have money—she’s wearing jewelry pilfered from the movie star’s house—and the berry man instead ups the price to $200. They pay it.
If you had an abundance of cash and nothing to spend it on, wouldn’t you too pay an exorbitant price for a taste of your old life? To moisten your dry, bored tongue with a few drops of familiar luxuries?
Ray took the can and examined it. He handed it to Luz. A handful of berries padded inside the aluminum. She put the can to her nose and thought she smelled the dulcet tang of them.
But the smell—or her belief in the smell—is a false promise. It’s only a projection of her desire. When she puts a berry in her mouth, she is dismayed to find it “a tasteless mucus.”
I have a Californian sentimentality about things like fresh produce. When I lived in San Francisco, I used to pay about $8 for a half a pint of fresh blueberries at the midsummer farmers markets. They were firm and delightfully sweet. I don’t think I savored them enough.
Have we savored anything enough? Restaurant meals—even the mediocre ones. Expertly made espresso drinks. Picnics in public parks.
Have we savored anything enough? Restaurant meals—even the mediocre ones. Expertly made espresso drinks. Picnics in public parks. Bread from the local bakery. A leisurely walk down the street to buy fresh produce. This year, I’ll miss the first ramps of the season at the farmers market. We might all miss the entire growing season. There are much greater things to be sad about in this pandemic, but these are the things I’m sad about right now. Desirous, impractical: I am Luz.
“This was no forest but a cemetery.”
Luz and Ray load into their car and flee the city. Some distance outside, they approach a forest of trees: yuccas, date palms. They stop to explore it.
The yuccas were white in the moonlight and some had holes bored into their shaggy trunks, holes so perfect the wind would have whistled through them, except there was no wind. […] “These are ancient,” said Luz. “They must be.”
They reach out and touch one, hold the leaf in between their fingers. Things are not as they seem.
There was a sound then, an incongruous sound, like the tearing of very delicate fabric. Gossamer, or cheesecloth. A crepe-ish rip, and the massive hairy yucca swayed, somehow. Luz and Ray staggered back and the tree fell between them, sending up a dry veil of dust. […] They investigated the broken stump and found it completely hollow, save for some dry, twiny marrow inside. […] “They’re dead,” Luz said. “All of them.” Dead, without moisture enough to rot.
A forest; a city. A hollow tree; a vacant building. What will our cities look like when the curve is flattened, the virus abated? Some estimate that 75% of independently-owned restaurants may never reopen. It has also been suggested that one-third of American museums may never reopen. Imagine: summer comes, restrictions are slowly lifted, but the fabric of our cities is irreparably ripped. The restaurants, bars, galleries, museums—all of the institutions we love—are but shadows in our memories, ghostly figments of our imagination as we walk through cemetery streets.
What will our cities look like when the curve is flattened, the virus abated?
Recession hits; unemployment skyrockets; even those who still have jobs take pay cuts. Will we continue to pay the price to live in the city? If the culture and lifestyle we fell in love with dies with this virus, can we justify the rent? Is home still home if it’s disfigured beyond belief?
There’s a new word for this: solastalgia. It refers to the emotional distress that we feel when the environment around us is being changed for the worse. It’s mostly been used in the discussion of climate change, but as the virus reshapes our urban landscape, it takes on a broader application. “[Solastalgia] is connected to ‘dis-ease,’ or a lack of ease due to a hostile environment that a person is powerless to do anything about,” medical journal The Lancet reports.
Ray and Luz trample the petrified forest. “Desiccation vibrated in their sinews, destruction tingled in their molars.” They are delirious with fear. For them, it’s a terrible omen of what awaits them on the coming pages.
Finally, they stood breathing in a clearing of their own gleeful debris, no night breeze chilling them in their sweat. A supernatural stillness overtook them, the fear they had tried to laugh away.
The next chapter hasn’t been written for us. Here, in quarantine, we’re in a prolonged moment of stillness, watching, waiting, hoping for the best. Maybe we daydream about all the things we’ll do when this is all over. But Ray and Luz’s misadventures in their radically altered world are a reminder: the world will not be normal when we finally return to it.
Luz believed only the most absurd Disney fantasies—the canyon menagerie, the Hollywood escape—so that their failure to materialize was proof that all things would always fail to materialize. […] The ultimate project: to believe.
There will be no Hollywood escape. The best we can do is obey the rules, offer whatever support we can to those who need it most, and hope that the rain comes to our cities before they completely dry up. That way, when the day comes—though some fermentation of will and time and miracle—that we emerge from this desert, we are able to find our way through the wreckage, having learned new depths of our humanity along the way.
I have a headache,
though with the SAD lamp’s magic glow and all,
I receive it like a gift.
opening my palms for that hollow
shock of recognition: the familiar whine of too much, too bright.
what’s artificial?
which rays will hurt me most?
sitting on a stool in the bookstore, looking up
at the artfully caged bulbs
standing in line at the grocery store, the CVS
all the string lights flicker, all these people
wearing their own
respective underwear & all these hands
holding things
tasting their own leftover mouths.
Keep & Touch
I got lost so much
today, looping in circuits of dark
streets, my maps and various brains
clogging up with the faster
and slower routes.
My frozen phone
pushed me over the edge.
I passed an ER and felt urged to enter
all, excuse me, I have an emergency,
I need to use your wifi.
I’m tired of walking
down all these narratives!
Sometimes I want
to sit around all day
and describe things.
Legs parallel
to the blue. Buildings rising
up to reach the nightclouds
who resist the turn
from day.
The heart not a heart,
but a clot stuck pulsing
through a chest full
of bone & wind, breathing
as if the body were not predetermined
to end.
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