Anyone who works in a library, in particular an academic library, knows that knowledge is not neutral. The own-the-snowflakes cry of “facts don’t care about your feelings” is not merely rude: it is untrue. A library is not just a repository of knowledge: it is a repository of certain kinds of knowledge, presented in particular ways, and constantly rejigged to be aimed at particular audiences. Over the twenty-odd years since I first started working in libraries I have been regularly surprised by the speed with which academic trends and interests change, and the ways in which a good library is reactive, almost alive, in how it can respond to shifts in the kaleidoscope of opinion or academic fashion.
My two collections of short fiction, Lost Objects and Out of the Window, Into the Dark, both recently published by Calque Press, collect most of the stories I have written over the past decade. With no prior planning, it turns out that a number of my protagonists are librarians and archivists, repository and museum curators, work on planet-sized libraries and in academic settings. Apart from the planet-sized libraries (one can always dream…) these characters reflect what I have worked at since entering the job market. It’s no wonder that my experience as an institutional librarian and library assistant informs the topics I am interested in exploring as a writer.
This isn’t just a roundabout way of saying that I can pull together a kickass display for Black History Month, or that I can support academics who suddenly get a yearning to look at trade routes in medieval Central Asia. It is more that the disconnect between what a library looks like to its users (shelves, order, classmarks, Spanish to the left, German to the right) and what a library looks like to the people it is entrusted to (the materials shifting like the walls in the movie Labyrinth, huge deposits of just-in-case ephemera, the constant fight against entropy and mission collapse) is something I find artistically and intellectually productive. Some of my favorite books—as the following list of genre-leaning fiction reflects—engage with what I see as a library’s yin-yang nature: order shored against chaos, chaos containing the seeds of its own regulation.
Twenty years after its publication in English in Lucia Graves’s delectable translation, The Shadow of the Wind hasn’t lost any of its charm, and remains a classic of the “secret library” sub-genre of books (such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s El Club Dumas and Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith) which imagine the library as the physical shape of occult or mystical desires. Its young protagonist, a bookseller’s son, becomes obsessed with Julian Carax, an obscure, cursed author, and starts investigating what could have happened to him along with his vanished bibliography. When the young bookseller’s life becomes intertwined with the truths he starts to discover about Carax, reality and fiction are shown to be different sides of the same coin. At its heart, this engrossing novel is an ode to the transformative power of books and storytelling, masterfully articulating that wondrous moment of discovery we’ve all experienced when finding the book that turned us into readers. But The Shadow of the Wind is not simply about books—the library at its centre, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, serves as a heart-wrenching metaphor for all that was lost under the long shadow of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, and in particular for the shameful “pact of forgetting” that the democratic transition imposed on Spanish citizens, removing the possibility of restorative justice around the horrors of Franco’s regime. This is a novel that became a modern classic for all the right reasons.
A body is found in a London museum dedicated to the interwar years. Adam Dalgliesh, a senior police officer and respected poet, is sent to investigate along with his team. Then another murder occurs. The two crimes don’t quite emulate, but seem reminiscent of certain murders exhibited in the museum’s own “Murder Room,” where artifacts relating to famous crimes are presented to the public in their historical context. If a museum functions as a dark mirror to society, then this chamber of horrors and its curated psychoses develop into a horrid mise-en-abyme where Dalgliesh can trace the woes of all those connected to the crime. For a writer of P. D. James’s talent, this set-up brims with possibility: under the guise of a cozy murder-mystery, she passes a lens over UK society at large, dissecting class, domestic arrangements, loneliness and aging, the changing nature of the London landscape, and even the sorry state of the National Health Service and care system. All this furthers the question at the novel’s core: what is a museum actually for?
Many of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books poke serious fun at the academic life: the wizards who run Unseen University are venal, petty, aggressive rung-climbers, gathering power for themselves over the bodies (living or dead) of their rivals. Unseen Academicals is in many ways more of the same, and should be treasured for its queasily recognizable portrayal of the power struggles and rivalries over unimportant matters that infect so many institutions. But, as always, Pratchett looks at different sides of the issue with compassion and empathy. The plot of the novel involves the university faculty having to play a football match in order to keep hold of a large endowment—enough to cover eighty-seven point four per cent of their food budget (“Three cheeses isn’t a choice, it’s a penance!”). Of course, this offers scope for parody and broad satire, but, underneath the impotent babbling of the academics, Pratchett gives us a portrait of life below stairs in a large institution, and makes his key point—that everybody deserves a chance, not for who they are but for what they can be—with economy and heart.
Ropa Moyo has a gift: she can see the dead. We’ve all read stories with this premise, but don’t be dissuaded: this novel, the first in a series, offers a refreshing take on the trope. This is a world where ghost talkers and the supernatural are part of society and the bureaucratic world, while the Edinburgh depicted feels realistic, gritty, and recognizable. Add to that a setting on the verge of apocalypse, where an “incident” of some magnitude has already taken place, yet normal life is still more or less intact—a delicate balance that I find far more interesting than a full-blown post-apocalyptic world—and you find yourself with a rare thing, a novel that is as subtle in its approach to worldbuilding as it is kick-ass in its plot. This fast-paced supernatural mystery contains many entertaining subplots: vanishings, family dynamics, a terrifying haunted house, and more. But leaving the action and the protagonist’s unquestionable charm to one side, Huchu’s writing shines when interrogating major questions that are brought to the reader’s attention almost via sleight of hand: servitude, gatekeeping, or even which magic (a.k.a. knowledge) is more “proper.” This is an atmospheric story that asks the right questions and packs the right punches.
The Alkane Institute doesn’t make an appearance until mid-way through Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction classic, Nova, and yet its presence is ubiquitous in the book’s plot and worldbuilding. When Captain Lorq van Ray decides to challenge physics and enter a nova, he is less interested in gaining the tons of Illyrion that he expects the adventure will provide him than in settling a long-standing score with his childhood frenemies, Prince Red and his beautiful sister, Ruby Red. Delany’s vibrant imagination brings science-fiction topics about the struggle for resources, mass migration, and humanity’s relationship to technology and places them alongside Tarot readings and other occult mysteries. The central library, the all-powerful Alkane, is a massive, dome-like institution, whose influence is felt over the galaxy—it’s a larger-than-life centre of learning that encompasses all the knowledge of Delany’s multi-system universe Today, Delany’s SF classic feels more prescient than ever (“Oh, for the rebirth of an educational system where understanding was an essential part of knowledge”), and acts as a window for imagining what the heritage politics of the future may look like centuries from now.
There’s always room for one out-and-out fairytale, and Murakami’s brief, beautiful book joins the list on those grounds. Like all the best fairytales, it reads as though it is being made up on the hoof, and yet follows an internal logic to which we cannot but consent. Our unnamed narrator goes to the library to return some books and take out some new ones, only to find himself imprisoned by a vicious old man and tasked with studying a number of thick books about taxation in the Ottoman Empire so that the old man can eat his newly-educated brains, “because brains packed with knowledge are yummy.” How he escapes—of course he escapes—is a story that fits neatly into traditional narrative structures: loyal animal-ish sidekicks, shapeshifting girls, a touch of Robert Louis Stevenson, a pinch of Borges. But the final few pages offer us a twist that recontextualizes everything that has come before, and the story about being kidnapped turns into a narrative of grief observed: a sideways punch that you should see coming but which will floor you nonetheless. The book is illustrated throughout with collages and found images, which adds to the impression that we are reading not just a text found in some archive somewhere, but a text which is itself that archive: a beautiful object as well as a moving story.
One of the reasons jokes work is said to be that they offer us sidelong ways into things that, if contemplated seriously, would drive us mad…or to tears. I put Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog very firmly into this category—it’s one of the funniest novels one could ever read, yet the air of melancholy, of climate grief, that stands behind its best scenes gets me every time. We begin in the ashes of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a bombing raid in November 1940, with a group of time-travellers sent back to find various McGuffins that their patron, the impossible Lady Schrapnell, needs to fulfil her unnecessary plan to rebuild the cathedral as it was before the Blitz. But what sets the novel’s plot in motion is a sharp dig at the perpetual state of academia—the projects that can only get underway because of external support (for Schrapnell read Sackler), and the way in which use-value is prioritized above everything else when money is concerned. The main body of the novel, a reworking of Jerome K. Jerome’s perfect comedy, Three Men in a Boat, takes place with this disastrous future always lapping at its edges: a bittersweet reading experience.
The Legends of River Song by Jenny T. Colgan, Jacqueline Rayner, Steve Lyons, Guy Adams, Andrew Lane
Professor River Song is, arguably, one of the most beloved characters in the Doctor Who universe. The wit with which she comments on clothes and lipstick, while rejoicing in intellectual matters and her own research, are among the sides of her charm that any bookish girl can rejoice in. She comes into this list as a triple threat: the character first appeared in the now-classic episode, Silence in the Library; at least one of the stories in this book takes place at a museum, Madame Tussaud’s in London, and of course Song also happens to be a scholar, a Professor of Archaeology, and “the acknowledged expert on the long-extinct precursor races to have evolved in the galaxy.” River Song has been gifted with more than one book of adventures, audio-plays, etc—used to great effect within the larger Doctor Who universe to fill in the gaps of her multi-layered narrative—but this little volume of five tales is one of my favorite outings. The pocket-sized adventures it contains read like little jewels, even miniature episodes; and, even if they are written by different people, the stories are not jarring: each one of the authors has managed to convey River Song’s voice, the pizzazz and deadpan retorts that are the character’s trademark. Expect the usual adventures—heartbreaking time-loops that last an eternity and realities that warps in on themselves. The stories here also give us a glimpse into Professor Song’s life in prison, instances in which she makes use of her scholarly knowledge to save the day, or moving musings on topics such as possible parenthood with The Doctor, or the trials and tribulations of having the time lord as a boyfriend/husband. This is an enjoyable read for Doctor Who fans anywhere.
Everyone was given a path. There were shifters and sweepers, sorters and feeders. There were pickers and porters and air drivers. There were loaders and unloaders, ramp workers and water spiders, grounders and stowers and freighters.
Emmett was declared an unloader. Third shift, where they always “needed bodies.” He signed the paperwork, wrote the word “VOID” on a check.
The woman who gave his interview said there were levels to every path, opportunities for advancement, for greater benefits. She made it sound like a game you could win.
Nothing’s binding, she said. People bounce around, find their niche.
Emmett came to realize, as she spoke, that your path meant nothing, really, except the position where you started. It was only a piece of jargon.
I don’t have a permanent address at the moment, he told her. But I will soon.
That’s fine, she said. You’re not alone.
There was nothing but farmland where they built it, and it rose up now from the fields of dead corn like a vast anomaly. A dozen warehouses, two runways. A parking lot fit for a stadium. It looked, from the window of the shuttle bus at night, like a lonesome galaxy in the borderless dark. The sodium lamps in the lot gave off orange coronas, and the fainter beacons of the taxiways arranged themselves in trembling constellations.
The people on board the shuttle were too visible in the harsh light, the shapes of their skulls apparent in their faces. They tightened the Velcro straps of back braces, ate strong-smelling soups and curries from Tupperware, struggling to reach their mouths with their spoons as the bus shook and jounced. They watched porn on their phones—slack-faced, mouths ajar. They played word games, poker, Candy Crush. They spun the reels of cartoon slot machines. They rubbed at scratch-offs with pennies. They stared with glassy resignation at absolutely nothing.
The guard shack was chaotic, men with wands shouting over the high-pitched keening of the metal detectors, herding the workers. The guards were not TSA, belonging instead to a private security firm, and they looked to Emmett like Neo-Nazis who’d recently finished prison sentences—Viking braids, bleached goatees, tattoos of Iron Crosses on their forearms.
He sat with the other recruits in an office annex, listening to Scott, their “Learning Ambassador,” break down the workers’ basic duties and the company’s expectations. He was a small and energetic man, pacing to and fro, his lanyard ID badge swinging pendulum-like. Broken blood vessels lent his cheeks a rosy appearance, and he had a little boy’s haircut, his bangs clipped short in a perfectly straight line.
You might think of this place as a warehouse, he said. But here at Tempo, we like to think of it as a ware-home.
They were made to click through a series of training modules on computers from the early aughts. They watched video clips, wherein a softspoken female narrator highlighted recent company achievements over a soundtrack of jazzy Muzak. The clips underscored Tempo’s ethical commitment to creating a better world. But if Emmett learned anything from them, it was the extent to which the company’s maneuverings had touched all realms of commerce. They were in the business of both fulfillment and distribution, shipping their own parcels—the orders boxed and sorted at smaller regional hubs—along with the parcels of anyone willing to pay. They’d begun to build retail warehouses, in competition with Walmart and Target. They’d been buying regional supermarket chains, and would use their network of distribution centers and their fleet of trucks to deliver groceries directly to the doorsteps of eager customers. In the video, a Tempo delivery driver in her familiar evergreen uniform handed a paper sack of bananas and grapes and baguettes to an elderly woman, who smiled and waved as the green electric truck pulled away.
Officially, it was called the Tempo Air Cargo Distribution Center, but Scott called it simply “the Center.” It was Tempo’s largest distribution hub, and had been built here in Nowheresville, Kentucky, because of its geographic centrality. Some of the workers commuted from Bowling Green or Elizabethtown, but most came from the forgotten hamlets of the surrounding counties, places with names like Horse Branch and Sunfish, Spring Lick and Falls of Rough. There had once been coal mines and tobacco stemmeries in that area, auto plants and grist mills. But all those enterprises had fled or shuttered. Now Tempo had arrived to take their place.
What we’re doing here is regional rejuvenation, Scott said. We’re creating long-term opportunities.
The recruits were called upon to introduce themselves and offer a “fun fact” about their lives. When Emmett’s turn arrived, he said he spent his free time writing screenplays. Really, there’d been only one screenplay—an evolving, never-ending autobiographical work that he’d abandoned and revived a dozen times. But he feared that admitting this would make him sound insane.
How bout that, Scott said. We have a screenwriter in our midst. What are they about?
Just my life, he said. They’re autobiographical.
Hey, I better look out, Scott said. Maybe one day you’ll write about this. Maybe one day we’ll see it on the big screen.
Then he called on the next recruit, whose “fun fact” was that a miniature horse had kicked him in the head as a young boy, leaving him without a sense of smell.
Emmett moved to the warehouse—the ware-home, rather—and began what Scott called the “Skill Lab” portion of training. An enormous digital clock hung near the entrance, red numerals burning through the haze of warehouse dust. Beneath it, a scanner and a flatscreen monitor were mounted. You held your badge to the criss-cross of lasers, and when the system read the barcode, your image appeared on the screen. They’d taken the photos on the first day of orientation, the trainees backed against a blank wall, unsure whether to smile. They looked like mugshots. When you saw yourself appear onscreen—the past-self who’d taken this job, who’d embarked on this path—and you gazed up at the red digits, measuring time by the second, you knew, unmistakably, that you were on the clock. It was the only clock, as far as Emmett knew, in the warehouse.
On the wall, near the break room door, a large sign read: WE’VE WORKED 86 DAYS WITHOUT A LOST TIME ACCIDENT! The number was a digital counter. Emmett wondered what had happened 86 days ago. Each night, the number rose—87, 88, 89—and whatever had caused this loss of time receded further into the Center’s collective memory.
It was a huge, hangar-like structure, an intricate maze of conveyor belts, all churning and chugging at once. The racket was like a subway train perpetually arriving at the platform—the clattering rhythm, the screak of friction. Bays for trucks took up one side; on the other: loading docks for planes. The floor was studded with steel ball bearings and rollers, so the shipping containers—”cans”—could be towed easily from the docks to the belt lanes. It was all so labyrinthine and vast that Emmett felt what he might begrudgingly call awe. He’d never gazed at the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral, sunlight turned to scattered jewels by stained glass, but he imagined the feeling might be similar.
When it came to the work itself, there was not much to learn. If they remembered nothing else, said Scott, they should remember the Eight Rules of Lifting and Lowering.
Approach the object, feet shoulder width apart, bend at the knees, test the weight of the package, grip opposite corners, lift smoothly, pivot or step without twisting, use existing equipment.
Unloading the containers of air cargo onto conveyor belts was the one and only dimension of his work, the same task repeated, ad infinitum. They showed him how to latch the cans into the lanes, how to break the yellow plastic seals. They showed him the little hydraulic knob that lifted and lowered the conveyor belt. (This was the “existing equipment” mentioned in the last of the Eight Rules.) They showed him the “small-sort” belt for loose envelopes and small parcels, and the “irreg” belt for unboxed freight—tires, axles, machine parts, etc.
And that was it.
It’s a simple job, really, said Scott. Put boxes onto a conveyor belt until the can is empty, then bring over a new can. Do the same thing. Rinse and repeat.
Most nights, as he left, he saw the Blood Bus—an RV outfitted by the Red Cross to function as a mobile blood donation center. A fat man stood outside, calling out to the workers as they spilled from the shuttles. Hop on the bus, give your blood to us! he shouted. Hop on the bus, give your blood to us!
The man was always slick with sweat, his face purple and gorged from the exertion of shouting. No one ever seemed to enter the bus, and Emmett wondered why they came here. The last thing he’d want to do, leaving his shift hungry and aching, was donate blood. But there must be a few, he thought, to make the blood man’s efforts worthwhile. Those who heard the call and said, What the hell? They were already spent. Why not open their veins, give a little more?
He met his supervisor, a man named Jason Flake. Everyone called him “Flaky.” He was younger and much taller than Emmett, his arms too long and skinny for his frame. He reminded Emmett of a praying mantis. You could tell the supervisors from the union workers by the clothes they wore—Tempo golf shirts tucked into pleated khakis—and by their radios, shoulder mics clipped to their collars. In the beginning, Flaky kept a close eye on Emmett. Turn your badge to face out, bud, he’d say, and Emmett would rotate the laminated ID badge Velcroed to his upper bicep. They were supposed to unload twenty boxes per minute, and the supervisors knew the precise average of each package handler. The boxes placed on the conveyor passed through a bright, mirrored scanner, each barcode logged in the system.
You’re at 18.3 per minute, bud, Flaky would say, without looking up from his iPad. Try to pick it up a little.
Each night, as his shift wound down, Flaky came to Emmett’s lane, stood in the doorway of the can, and asked him to recite the Eight Rules of Lifting and Lowering. When Emmett had gone through them, Flaky would scribble something on a clipboard and ask Emmett to sign. He came to realize, gradually, that the Eight Rules were an insurance policy; this is why they mattered so much to management. All the other safety protocols—hazmat handling procedures, what to do during a tornado, etc.—would so rarely come to any use that their presence in the modules was almost a formality.
But the Eight Rules—they governed the only sanctioned movement of Emmett’s body on the clock. And if you understood the Eight Rules—if, in fact, you signed your name to a piece of paper attesting that you understood them—then you could never be injured in such a way that blame fell on the company. If you ruptured a disk in your back, or blew out your knee, or crushed your fingers, it would be because you’d failed, in some way, to follow the Eight Rules.
There was a village within walking distance from the shuttle pickup—an “unincorporated community” called Middle Junction with a motel. This was where he’d been living, paying a weekly rate. He’d lived in New Orleans before, had lost his job there at an Outback Steakhouse, and come home to Kentucky knowing that Tempo would hire anyone. He had not yet told his mother, Kathy, he was back. But his money had nearly run out; the motel life was not sustainable. He called her after six months of near silence, sprawled out on the bed’s pilled comforter in the tiny room that stank of cigarette smoke.
I’m home, he said.
Emmett? she said. Are you okay? Where are you?
I’m home, he said again.
In Paducah?
No, I’m in this nowhere town—out past Beaver Dam.
What in the world are you doing there?
Getting a job, he said. At the Tempo hub. I’m almost through with orientation.
What happened to New Orleans?
It’s a long story.
Where are you living?
In a motel.
Well, that won’t do, she said. That won’t do at all.
She made him promise to come home, said she’d buy him a Greyhound ticket. I’d fetch you myself, she said, but your brother and his wife are coming this weekend.
Joel was Emmett’s half-brother, but Kathy never made the distinction. He lived in New York, where he taught “cultural studies” at a small college—a subject Emmett had never been able to make heads or tails of. He’d published a book a couple years earlier and had married his wife, Alice, right after. The last time he’d seen them was at their wedding.
I don’t know, he said. Spending time with Joel had a way of making him feel sorry for the state of his life.
This is a blessing! Kathy said. Both my boys home—we’ll have a family reunion!
The next day, he waited for the bus as twilight fell. The town was little more than a crossroads: a gas station, a farm supply store, a Dollar General with Amish buggies in the lot. Beside the Greyhound stop, in a patch of grass, someone had put up three flagpoles and a gazebo, and there were white wooden crosses in rows, bearing the names of locals who’d died during the pandemic. Emmett waited alone, reading the names, hearing the rasp of wind in the dry corn, the faint melodies of country music drifting from the vacant gas station.
The bus arrived and took him west. He drew a book from his backpack, a manual on screenwriting. It was called The Eternal Story: Screenwriting Made Simple. He read for a while by the light of the overhead lamp till he grew tired. Tinny music came from the other passengers’ headphones. When he closed his eyes, his dreams for the future played like movies. New York, Los Angeles—he’d never seen them in person, only in images on screens.
Traveling by Greyhound had a way of inflicting realism on even the most ardent dreamer.
He watched the scrolling world and thought about his life, how he’d gotten to this point. The Center. One thing he was sure of: they were far from the center. One saw this, clearly, from the window of a Greyhound bus. One saw the brushstrokes of irrelevance in the landscape itself. The rhyme of towns, the patchwork fields. The illusion of movement. Most of America was like this, though Emmett sometimes forgot, spending so much of his life in fantasy. Traveling by Greyhound had a way of inflicting realism on even the most ardent dreamer. One saw, as Emmett saw now, the glowing corporate emblems, the names and symbols hoisted on stilts. One saw prisons that looked like high schools. High schools that looked like prisons. One saw the blaze of stadium lights above the tree line, heard the faint echo of the anthem, of military brass and drums. One saw the salvage yards of broken machines. The mannequin of Christ pinned to a cross. The moon-eyed cattle, standing in smoky pastures at dusk. One saw huge flags rippling above car dealerships. Combines blinking in fields at night. One could see all this, unreeling frame by frame, and understand, as Emmett understood, the immense bitterness of exile.
His mother greeted him at the Greyhound depot. Kathy was a small, sinewy woman, her hair in a silver bob that grazed her chin. The back of her Town & Country minivan was heaped with clothing.
Don’t mind that, she said. That’s all going to consignment.
She hugged Emmett and pulled back to get a good look at him.
The prodigal son returns, she said. You look tired.
I’ve been on the night shift all week.
Your eyes—you look like a raccoon.
It’s good to see you, too, Emmett said.
Kathy lived in West Paducah, between the mall and the old uranium enrichment plant. Much of the farmland there had been subdivided. What had once been tobacco and soybeans was now crowded with lookalike homes and sun-parched lawns, where not even the constant chittering of sprinklers could keep the grass from browning in summer. There was a billboard above I-24—MCCRACKEN COUNTY DREAM HOMES, with a number you could call. This is what Kathy had, a vinyl-sided prefab, much like all the others on the street. They delivered your Dream Home to you in pieces, fitted them together, and then you had a place to live. There were thousands going up like that in Kentucky, more respectable than a mobile home, if only slightly. MAKE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE, said the billboard, and that’s what everyone seemed to think they were doing. Their dreams were readymade and easy to assemble. They cost very little and were worth almost nothing when you were done with them.
She let him sleep in the next day. He woke at noon and sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee left over from breakfast he’d warmed in the microwave. Kathy fixed a cup for herself and sat with him. They looked out the sliding glass doors at the backyard. Though it was only August, the walnut trees over the patio had begun to drop their fruit, green husks the size of tennis balls thudding against the cement, some already black and rotting, some floating like buoys in her tiny koi pond. He was glad to see his mother, to be here in the Dream Home, even if it signified another defeat in his life.
So, Tempo, she said. They pay good?
Not really.
Benefits?
Emmett nodded.
Do you miss New Orleans?
The answer was complicated. Though he’d liked New Orleans, he hadn’t really had the money to live in the city itself. He’d lived in Metairie, near I-10, where he’d worked at the Outback Steakhouse. His dream of the French Quarter, of a brightly painted Creole cottage, a banana tree in the backyard, had been just that—a dream. Faraway and unattainable.
It wasn’t a city where I could reach my full potential, he said.
You can reach your full potential working at Tempo?
That’s just to pay rent. What I really want to do is screenwriting.
Like writing movies?
Or a TV show. Whatever.
What happened to becoming a songwriter? Kathy said. That was the last thing you decided you’d be. Before that, it was professional chef. Before that, it was stand-up comedian.
He hated to be reminded of his failed creative pursuits, his veering from one passion to another, but he could always rely on Kathy to bring it up.
Those were naïve goals, Emmett said. I can see that now. But with screenwriting, there are steps. You just follow the steps.
You’re like a kid sometimes, she said. One day, he wants to be an astronaut. The next, a baseball star. The next day, a cowboy.
A screenwriter is hardly the same thing as a cowboy.
Well, I wish you’d go back and finish school.
You can’t major in screenwriting.
You could start with basics at the community college. You could live here.
I plan to live near the Center.
The Center?
Tempo. That’s what they call it.
She made a fretful sound, blew on her coffee, and took a sip. A walnut dropped on the metal roof of the garden shed outside, sounding like a gunshot. They both startled and turned their heads to look.
So what’s Joel coming home for?
He’s doing a lectureship at Murray State, she said. Just for the fall semester, as I understand it.
Are they leaving New York?
It’s up in the air, Kathy said. But Lord, I hope so. I pray every day they don’t get shot or stabbed or blown up.
He’ll never come back to the South.
I have so much to do before they get here, she said, ignoring him. I have to clean the house. I have to fix your brother’s cake.
What cake? Why does he get a cake?
It’s a homecoming cake, she said, as if it should be obvious.
Where’s my homecoming cake?
Well, how was I to know you were coming home? You vanish and reappear. You never call.
Even if you’d known, there would be no cake.
Why shouldn’t I celebrate Joel’s successes? He’s very accomplished. I wish you’d talk to him more. You could ask him for advice, about writing and whatnot.
I don’t need his advice.
Well, can I give you a piece of advice then? she said.
He sighed theatrically. I’m listening.
Write down your goals. Take a sheet of paper, write “My Goals” at the top, then put everything down. That way, you have it as a reference point. You can’t betray yourself. You can’t let yourself off the hook.
Emmett wanted to ask what her goals had been at twenty-eight, if she’d aspired to anything more than raising her children in this town where nothing much happened and no one expected it to. Instead, he said all right, he would write down his goals, and this seemed to satisfy her.
Emmett’s car had broken down in New Orleans. This had precipitated, in part, his decision to leave. His grandmother, Ruth, was too old to drive. She was too old to do anything except watch Fox News. She had a 1997 Mercury Mystique with a lineup of Beanie Babies in the back windshield, and she told Emmett she would sell it to him for a dollar.
Kathy dropped him off, and he found her in the backyard with Lijah, the exterminator. There had been a long-standing issue with groundhogs, her little house abutting a wooded creek where they bred. They gnawed through the lattice surrounding her deck and tunneled beneath the foundation. Lijah was a church friend. She’d been calling him for years to set traps in the woods, snaring rabbits and cats as often as groundhogs. It came to be their habit, over time, that after he’d discharged his official duties, she’d invite him to sit a spell and drink coffee.
She saw Emmett coming and went to greet him. Her hair was dyed coal black, her eyes as small and dark as currants. An intricate crazing of broken blood vessels had turned her nose and cheeks purple.
Lijah’s spraying dope, she said. Lijah, you remember Emmett, my grandson?
Lijah waved. He stood beside her garden shed, holding a sprayer wand attached to a backpack tank, his gray hair tied in a ponytail. His T-shirt said CRITTER KILLERS—the name of his company—though he seemed to be the only killer of critters on the payroll.
The traps were empty, so I’m fixing to spray, he said.
Spray for what? Emmett said.
Lijah shrugged. Anything.
It’s a constant battle, Ruth said. Varmints, termites, snakes. They all try to get inside. Then you’ve got prowlers. Dottie Driscoll down the street caught a prowler in her backyard.
Fraid I can’t spray for that that, ma’am, said Lijah.
What prowler? Emmett said. Who was it?
How should I know? Dottie’s grandson ran them off. He’s a sheriff’s deputy. Her grandchildren visit her every day.
I doubt that.
Emmett is Joel’s brother, Ruth said. I’s just telling Lijah I’ve got me a famous author for a grandson.
I’s just telling Lijah I’ve got me a famous author for a grandson.
I always wanted to write a book, Lijah said, squirting poison along the base of the shed. Problem is, I never liked writing.
That would be a hurdle, Emmett said
When you’re done, I’ll warm us some coffee, Ruth said.
I’ll be covered in dope spray, ma’am. You don’t want me tracking all that in.
Never mind that, Ruth said. I’ll show you my copy of the book.
The smells of her house—her White Diamonds perfume, her geriatric ointments, the jar of congealed bacon grease by the stove—brought Emmett back to the boredom of summer mornings when Ruth would keep them, his mother at work, Joel entertaining himself with the World Book Encyclopedia. The days had seemed so long, his life so long ahead of him.
Down the hallway, in the bedroom, Emmett and Lijah stood before her bookcase. There were three copies of his brother’s book, wrapped in plastic, wedged between Erma Bombeck and Nora Ephron. It was called Going South: The Descent of Rural America. She took one down with great ceremony and placed it like a fragile artifact in Lijah’s open hands.
Going South, he said. Well, I’ll be.
We always knew, didn’t we? Ruth said, squeezing Emmett’s arm. Our Joel was special. He used to recite the presidents. Five years old.
A memory: Joel with his bowl cut and secretive smile, standing on a chair, surrounded by adoring faces and the remnants of Thanksgiving supper. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison. . . .
He was always reading, Ruth said. And Emmett was always watching movies.
I don’t suppose you became a movie star? Lijah said.
Emmett’s still finding his way, she said. Aren’t you?
Emmett managed to smile.
She returned the book to its place and asked Lijah how a cup of coffee sounded.
I’d never turn it away, he said.
Tell you what, I’ll make a fresh pot.
They’d started to leave when something caught Lijah’s eye. He went to the old laundry chute in the corner and crushed a spider on the wall with his meaty fist.
We’ve got a problem here, he said. He opened the chute door and peered inside.
I never use that thing, Ruth said. It’s been blocked for years. You put something in and you never see it again.
It’s a breeding ground, Lijah said. They love the dark. I’ll spray before I leave.
When Lijah had gone, she led Emmet down to the carport and showed him the Mercury Mystique. The Beanie Babies were still arrayed in the back windshield, their colors sun-faded. Do I get to keep the Beanie Babies? Emmett said.
Oh sure, Ruth said. They were supposed to make me a lot of money but they ain’t worth a cent now.
They sat in the living room after, eating Danish cookies from a tin, dipping them in coffee. Fox News was playing. It was never turned off, only muted. They were interviewing the recipient of a face transplant. The man had been disfigured by an accident, and now he wore the face of a dead man like a mask. It was convincing, though his mouth did not work quite right, and you could see where the sutures had been along his forehead.
Ruth was half-deaf. She leaned forward, straining to hear. They took off his face, she said, and gave him another man’s face?
A dead man, Emmett said.
She bit one of the stale cookies in half and shook her head at the marvel of it. They do everything now, don’t they? she said.
She relayed the latest gossip. He learned who of his cousins was pregnant, who was getting married, who was headed for divorce. She sometimes mixed up the names, but Emmett knew, more or less, who she meant. Once the family gossip had been covered, she moved on to the deaths. Grandma Ruth kept a relentless mental catalogue of all the strange and grisly deaths in McCracken County.
A man in Symsonia got himself killed on a four-wheeler, she said. Two boys drowned at Kentucky Lake last month. Two foreigners shot each other at a bar. Let’s see, what else. Oh! There was the man who caught himself on fire.
He what? Emmett said. When Grandma Ruth said the word “fire,” it was like the word “far,” and it took him a moment to catch the meaning.
Fire, she said. He pulled up at the filling station down the street, covered hisself in gasoline, and lit a match. They showed the footage on the TV.
Jesus. Why’d he do it?
He was protesting.
Protesting what?
She bit another Danish cookie and shrugged. Just life, I guess, she said.
She excused herself to the restroom, and Emmett went down the hall and stood before the shelf that held Joel’s books. He looked at the cover: a caved-in church in a field, the stacks of a coal-fired power plant in the hazy distance. He’d read it a while back, though perhaps it was more accurate to say he’d skimmed. The essays were about Kentucky and the mechanics of what Joel called “rural despair.” The running theme throughout was the privatization of mental health. He used terms like “neoliberal” and “post-Fordist,” the meanings of which Emmett understood only foggily, and argued that depression was not simply a chemical imbalance, but a normal human response to the vulgarity of late capitalism.
The book alternated between abstract theory and a more personal style. One of the essays explored Joel’s relationship with their mother and her spiral into QAnon conspiracy theories. Emmett had always felt it was unfair; it exaggerated her views and made her seem like something, or someone, that she wasn’t. Now Joel had some money and a job. He had his smug-looking photo on the jacket of a book.
In a flush of sudden anger, he took all three copies of Going South from the shelf, opened the laundry chute, and let them tumble from his arms into darkness.
The first place he drove, in his new Mystique, was the Kmart parking lot in Lone Oak. The Kmart was no longer in business, though you could still see the pale impression of the letter K on the stucco where the sign had been. Now it was a place where people bought drugs. The only dealer Emmett knew was a grade school acquaintance called Fuzzy. Hed hit puberty at nine years old and grown a thick pelt of reddish fur on his back and arms. The nickname had followed him ever since.
Fuzzy pulled up in a maroon Buick LeSabre and Emmett got inside.
How you been, Fuzzy? Emmett said.
You know me, bro, he said. Stuntin to keep my grind strong.
On one level, Emmett had no idea what this meant; on another level, he sort of did.
Fuzzy complained about the recent legalization of pot in the state of Illinois. People don’t come to me no more, he said. They go across the river.
He wore a flat-bill cap and a T-shirt that said AFFLICTION with a skull on the front. There were snakes writhing out from the mouth and the eyes of the skull. He was as hairy as he’d ever been.
You wanna hear my latest verse? Fuzzy said.
Sure, Emmett said.
Fuzzy put on a beat, the subwoofer in his trunk so forceful that the sound vibrated deep in Emmett’s bowels. The verse was about no one understanding him, how one day he would prove everyone wrong and release a multiplatinum album. This was all part of the ritual. If you wanted weed from Fuzzy, you had to listen to him rap. Then, when it was over, he would say you were his favorite person.
You’re my favorite person, man, he said. I mean that.
Thanks, Fuzzy.
Fuzzy gave him a quarter ounce of brick-pack weed and said, Hey, love you, homie. Keep that chin up.
Emmett found himself saying, I love you, too, and when the Buick pulled away, he stood absolutely still for a few minutes in the too-bright sun, a warm wind blowing napkins and fast-food trash across the lot.
At home, he found Kathy in a frenzy of preparation—vacuuming, mopping the linoleum, standing on a stepladder to dust the fan blades. Emmett cleaned the toilet and the tub, wearing yellow dish gloves, pausing now and then to drink from a can of beer. It seemed like overkill, but Joel had always been their mother’s favorite—her firstborn, her college graduate. It would not be obvious to anyone from the outside, for they argued fiercely about everything. But this fierceness stood as proof of their bond to Emmett. It was like they desperately wanted to save each other. She wanted to save him from worldly pursuits. He wanted to save her from right-wing politics. And when neither made progress on these fronts, they took it as evidence of insufficient commitment to the war effort, and entrenched themselves further, holding fast to the vain hope of victory.
They were supposed to arrive by suppertime. Kathy made fried chicken, black-eyed peas with ham hock, cornbread in a cast-iron skillet—all of Joel’s favorites. Frying the chicken had been onerous and left the counter dusted with flour, the stovetop spattered with buttermilk and oil. She’d made a hummingbird cake, normally reserved for Joel’s birthday. It was a dense cake with banana and pineapple and layers of cream cheese frosting. Emmett had never had a taste for it. She set the table and displayed it on a cake stand of cut crystal, the engraved patterns in the glass catching sparkles of sunlight.
Is this the only dessert? he said.
Well, yes. It’s Joel’s favorite.
What’s my favorite cake?
She pretended not to have heard this and hurried over to stir a decanter of sweet tea, the wooden spoon clinking against the glass. I’ve got butterflies, she said. My heart’s going a mile a minute.
They’re not foreign dignitaries. It’s your son and his wife.
You’re not helping, she said.
In the guest room, he crumbled the weed on a sheet of notebook paper and put some into a glass bowl. He opened the window, took a hit, and coughed softly. Lawnmowers were buzzing in the distance, the scent of cut grass wafting on the breeze.
Kathy had two lifelong obsessions: Elvis and Hawaii, both of which were reflected in the guest room’s décor. She’d been to Hawaii once with a church group, years ago, and had longed to return ever since. There were carved statuettes of the goddess Pele, velvet paintings of Diamond Head. Glossy shards of volcanic glass in souvenir ashtrays. A poster of the 1961 film Blue Hawaii hung over the bed, Elvis in tiny pink shorts and a pink lei, surrounded by fawning women.
Feeling anxious, wishing to distract himself, he swept the powdery kief from the notebook paper and wrote “My Goals” at the top. He thought for a minute, then jotted down the first few that came to mind. Find apartment, Make money, Pay off debts, Meet someone new. He wrote down, Buy a car, just so he’d have something to mark off. Then he thought for a moment and wrote, Do something creative, something meaningful that will leave a lasting legacy and allow you to face mortality without fear.
Emmett took his old Bible from the bookshelf. It was the copy he’d been given as he entered Youth Group at age twelve. On the cover, a skateboarding kid, mid-kickflip, made the universal gesture of “rock on.” It was called The Bible: For Teens!
He stretched out on the brass bed with The Bible: For Teens!, his bare feet warmed by a square of sunlight, and thumbed through the onionskin pages till he found the parable of the prodigal son. He’d forgotten the prodigal son had asked for his inheritance up front, to spend on prostitutes and wild parties, and had come home penniless. It relieved Emmett to read this, for he had asked for nothing up front. He was not like the prodigal son at all.
In “The Uses of the Erotic,” Audre Lorde writes “Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.” The Dry Seasonis born of this scrutiny, a project empowered by the erotic and all its infinite wisdom.
Picking up chronologically in time after her first two books, the memoir Whip Smart and memoir-essay collection Abandon Me, The Dry Season charts Febos’ year of celibacy as she takes stock of her past. Celibacy is not an act of deprivation but a beginning, an opportunity to experience the body and its knowing in a new way. Febos contemplates past relationships, celebrates enduring friendships, and finds joy in things as massive as the Sappho painting on the cover and as modest as a cold pickle.
Bringing us into what she calls a “course of study,” Febos weaves a rich body of research into her personal narrative. But the research breathes with the intimate story. It feels false to separate the two. As Febos puts it, she was studying “[t]o build a lineage beyond those who shared my weaknesses.” Febos transcends time and space pulling twelfth-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, the medieval beguines, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler (to name a few) into a feminism defined by “a prioritization of justice, the wisdom of lived experience, and a critical examination of social roles that deems any life practice ‘feminist.’” The fifth book in Febos’ utterly transcendental body of work, The Dry Season shows us we are always arriving at a new beginning.
As Febos so fully immerses the reader in a world, it felt surreal to finally hear the voice that had been in my head. We chatted about what celibacy can teach us about divesting from patriarchy, creating personal and social change, and the pleasure of this work. We also chatted about this SNL sketch but, in SNL tradition, it had to be cut for time.
Nina Sharma: When I began reading your book, Quincy [my husband], would ask, “How’s The Dry Season going?” And I’d say, “it’s actually kind of wet.” Then he’d keep asking me and I’d say “still wet,” and then I started calling it “The Wet Book.” I was joking at first but I realized it’s not a joke. You write about the quality of the air and it has a sensuality to it. At one point you say, a celibate life is a “renouncement of sexuality not sensuality.” I was wondering if you could talk about that more.
Melissa Febos: I got to a real bottom in my love and sex life and it seemed like sex was the thing on the timeline that was connecting everything. Very quickly, I realized sex wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I had located so much sensuality and eroticism and just so much of my energy in the practices that surround sex and seduction and attachment. It was yet another way of putting myself in a box. Instead of thinking: What is sensuality? How do I experience it? I had sort of located it in individual people, which is so much smaller than the sensual world. By hyper focusing on individual people, I was actually imposing a tragic limitation on my experience of the sensual world. It is the great lie of dependency and of all compulsion and addiction. The lie being that we need one particular finite source of something that is actually much more spiritual and universal and inherent to all life.
NS: It’s so interesting because getting to that infinite space seemed like a game of inches. There is that pivotal scene where you describe this budding new way of being as having the “thinnest advantage” over the old way. The whole book seems to cherish that. What was it like to write from there?
MF: It seems so much easier and sexier to have a big revelation but a big revelation contains no instructions for actual change. Writing a manifesto does not a society change, right? It’s what you do with a revelation or clarity or an ideology or your will—the very small, humble ways you apply it. A lot of my work is about raising my own consciousness. This book, in some ways, is about raising my consciousness, but it’s also about the work that follows that, which is how to make those micro behavioral changes that accumulate into habits that change who you are in the world and what your impact is in the world. It’s not a grand statement or a resolution. It’s just trying to do one small thing differently.
In my experience, I only ever have a very thin advantage over the old way of doing things. Especially because I’m a person of such strong instincts and habits and compulsions. The momentum, the inertia of what I have done in the past is so powerful. I can only ever sort of edge over it, and that has to be the big win because I’m just not capable of anything else. It takes reading a lot of feminist thought, having a community, having a fucking fleet of therapists, sponsors, and like a baker’s dozen of 12-step program memberships. And with all of that, I can just edge out the old behavior to try to get a foothold and purchase on a new way of being.
It’s a very sort of humble, rigorous, relentless practice, but it is miraculous in the way that longitudinally over time it works.
NS: That reminds me of the scene where you pick out a pickle from a fridge, you are talking about your change in eating habits in celibacy and relishing eating this pickle, which may seem small but is a choice that broke from other habits.
By hyper focusing on individual people, I was actually imposing a tragic limitation on my experience of the sensual world.
MF: I think when you stop the work of differentiating between your own tastes and desires and wishes and hates and the ones that you’ve internalized—it’s really hard work—it makes the possibilities for that kind of sublime experience, for that sensual experience of, oh my God, cold, crispy pickle in the middle of the night, exactly when I want it. It’s like ecstasy, you know? Like having your first orgasm.
NS: That’s how I read it. That’s why I was like, this book’s still wet. It really felt like, has she gone feral? What was amazing to me is that celibacy became an act of heightened senses. And you could feel that insistence on the senses early on. I’m thinking of the women’s love and sex addict recovery meeting. You watched woman after woman pledge to abstain from masturbation in their celibacy. You did not. Can you talk about that choice?
MF: For a lot of people in that kind of recovery, masturbation is part of it, at least in their early period. It’s like a detox period. And for me, I had an initial sort of revulsion to that idea. It didn’t feel like the protectiveness with which I resist letting go of something I’m addicted to. It felt like self-protection. And so, it sent me down this path of really thinking what is this about? I thought: what’s the difference between how I act in an auto-erotic relationship or in an erotic relationship with another person? And it was really obvious to me that the answer was performance.
I felt that there was a role I had to fill with other people that I didn’t with myself. I could enter into my auto-erotic relationship with curiosity or whatever mood I was in. I didn’t have to minimize or contort myself. But I have felt very constrained by meeting the needs or desires of another. That was an incredibly clarifying moment. Like, okay, this isn’t really about sex at all.
Sex is a stage for this other more problematic dynamic, which is also how I think of sex in a more positive light too—that sex is a stage for different kinds of intimacy. It’s a place where we connect and enact all sorts of things, right? I don’t think it has an inherent value or purpose necessarily. I think we use it for all manner of things.
NS: I love this idea of not assigning value to sex in either way. It makes me think of the research that helped you name “this other problematic dynamic.” You brought in the voices of celibate religious women, mystics, and saints, alongside radical queer feminists. What was it like to pull all of these varied people into a shared liberatory space?
MF: It wasn’t a strategy. I was like, I don’t really know what’s happened in my life. I don’t really know what this project is. I just know that I need to stop what I’m doing so I can try to figure it out. For me, that often means starting with feminist thinkers, particularly women and queer, or genderqueer people throughout history, who voluntarily chose celibacy or divestment, not just from sex but from sexual economies. Maybe saying it’s a feminist choice is an overstatement, because they definitely make it for a lot of different reasons, but in a practical way, it is a kind of feminist choice. It is to step outside of the power structures that subjugate women, primarily. And it makes other things possible, because you’re not producing in that economy.
What broadened my thinking was reading about feminist separatists. They are deeply problematic in their ideology and in their practices, and that’s why they failed. They particularly fail women of color, trans women, and anyone who’s not like a cis white woman. But I do think there is a wisdom in that misguided practice, which is that you have to step outside of a system in order to see it, in order divest inside yourself.
So I thought, what other women were doing that? And what were they doing with the space it created where they weren’t tending to men or jockeying with them in whatever way we have to when we’re participating in sexual economies. That brought me to the nuns, obviously, and to some semi-cult, spiritual leaders. And all of these women over the course of centuries who were doing all of the things that they were prevented from doing when participating in sexual economies. They were making art, they were doing science, they were politicians, they were activists, they were preaching, they were doing stuff that was literally illegal for women to be doing and certainly that they wouldn’t have time to be doing if they were reproducing incessantly, you know? And I thought, oh, this is really interesting.
I had another sort of light bulb moment when I was reading about young medieval girls of a certain class, who were looking at sainted women, who were the only women with any kind of power that they could possibly see. These young girls began to exhibit behavior that would hopefully be seen as a kind of training, as if they would be called to be saints. They would be going on hunger fasts, whipping themselves with nettles and just doing insane things. There is this great book, A History of Celibacy by Elizabeth Abbott, and she compared them to competitive child athletes who are working with the rigor that few adults can bring to any activity…in order to try to become saints?! It was more likely than being in the Olympics.
NS: Wow, that’s where my mind went!
MF: It was so obvious that there were no routes for women to be self-actualized in any capacity. They were like, “My one route is to become a saint.” There’s something tragic about that. And there’s also something really comforting. Like me, my friends, my mom—I could total all the women who have powerful intellects, big ideas, creative impulses. Where would we go? What would we do with it? If there was a one-in-a-million shot, I would try. I would be whipping out the nettle and drinking the pus of the cancerous. I too would have done it.
NS: This sounds like a comedy sketch but it wouldn’t make it on SNL. Too real.
MF: Totally. Like “girls’ competitive nettling.”
NS: Lineage is kind of like a listing practice—a list is important here, a list of past lovers. Why was it important to you to make that list and what was it like to return to characters and themes from previous work?
MF: It was very clear to me at the outset of this process that I needed to do something different and I also knew that the experiences I described in Abandon Me had dramatically undermined my own trust in my perspective of my behavior and patterns in romantic relationships. So this list was really a way for me to take stock and rewrite and find a truer narrative of my history of love. Like, what actually has been going on here? What actually happened? I wasn’t the hero that I thought I was.
NS: Did you feel that it would contradict previous writing or did you feel like what you wrote was coming at it from a different angle?
MF: A little bit of both. That’s always how progressive thinking moves in my experience. It changes. And I think that doesn’t necessarily contradict.
I really tried to write this book without revisiting the relationship I describe in Abandon Me because I don’t want to go there again. It was hard enough the first time. Unfortunately, my early readers were like, “sorry bro.” This, to some extent, happens with everything I’ve written. There’s always something I want to skip over. It was interesting because I didn’t include a lot about it, but I had to include some. When I did revisit parts of that relationship, I could just feel the contours of how I had changed in relatingto it. When I wrote Abandon Me, it was still so hot, like I was writing that book while I was still in the relationship. And I finished it rightafter it ended. It was very fresh. That’s almost 10 years ago now.
NS: I feel like that’s a good way of describing it. I don’t see the stories contradicting, but I see the heat signature being different.
MF: Yeah, it’s very different. There’s an urgency when it’s hot. The stakes feel high. That encouraged me to look at certain parts of it—the parts that I had been reluctant to name and I needed to name which included the harm that happened in that relationship.
Now I feel healed from it and pretty distant from it, and I feel safe, you know. I’m not worried about reenacting that kind of experience again. So I can look at parts of it that might have felt threatening or lower priority at the time. I can really step back. In this book, I was able to look at it more systemically. I liken it to an actual maelstrom, there’s a confluence of factors. It was easier for me to look at that larger systemic truth when I didn’t still feel like I was a character in the drama.
NS: And I think in turn those people on the list weren’t characters either. It was more like research.
MF: Yeah, that’s right. I think in some ways I was functioning as a kind of detective, trying to figure out a truer image of who I had been and how I got here. I wasn’t reliving the dramas of those relationships. I was looking at them in a kind of diagnostic way. Like, what happened here? Trying to divest from my own ego’s stake in whatever form of story I had about what had happened and who I had been. The nuns and the other research subjects are actually the other characters in this book, along with the friends in the present timeline, Ray, Nora, and Caitlin. Those felt like the characters. Those were my companions. If this book is a kind of love story, those were the beloveds—my friends, my community, and the women who made up the lineage that I was belonging to.
NS: It’s so powerful to insist on that lineage as being an animated part of our life. Thinking about a lineage across your books, you’ve always had powerful things to say about bodily autonomy, but I was wondering if this experience brings other things to mind.
MF: There were so many little micro ways that I realized I had been cowing to what other people wanted and had missed out on knowing myself and knowing my own body. Of course, that’s in some ways the whole project of patriarchy, right? It keeps us very busy looking at and tending to and trying to mind read, being inside of the consciousness of men for our own safety or goodness or whatever so that we miss out on the whole experience of being.
If this book is a kind of love story, those were the beloveds—my friends, my community, and the women who made up the lineage that I was belonging to.
My experience of bodily autonomy and raising consciousness and liberation of the mind is that it never ends. Even in the year or two since I finished writing the book, I was like, Oh! And once again, the great revelation becomes a preface to the further work…
NS: I had that kind of feeling when I worked on my book. I actually picked up Abandon Me, I had already read Girlhood, and I realized there’s always a space for us to keep doing this rigorous, thoughtful work.
MF: Yeah. One of my favorite things about this book—that I think is more true than anything I’ve ever written—is that it really demonstrates how the work is a pathway and not discreet from joy. Like, I don’t do the work because I believe in the work. Eww. I don’t care about that. I do the work because I want to experience joy and intimacy and pleasure and freedom, you know? I want it all, and if you want it all you have to do the incremental work to get there.
The day after the election, November 6, having spent the previous evening cooking and consuming a healthy meal of grass-fed beef and roasted green beans and quinoa as a form of self-care, I sat at the kitchen table eating every single piece of our leftover Halloween treats. KitKats whose wrappers were red as the electoral map. Bags of popcorn labeled, preposterously, Lesser Evil. Coconut-chocolate bars called Unreal.
Around lunchtime, deep into this apathetic-apocalyptic sugar binge, I opened my email and saw a new Substack post from Patrick Nathan, an excellent writer and an especially astute critic of all the ways—both explicitly and implicitly—our country has embraced authoritarianism. America, he writes in his newsletter, not as a country but as a mythology and set of unifying ideals, is dead. It’s clearer than ever, he says, that “there is no ‘we’ on a national level, and there won’t be anytime soon.”
And yet, writes Nathan, “if America is dead, our communities survive.” If our national politics has become little more than farcical theater, our towns and city councils and neighborhoods are where real change can be enacted. There, he says, we have a voice. And while Nathan’s talking mostly about local politics, I’d like to include you all, the readers of Electric Literature, as a community that can and must survive. Our books and our bookstores, our libraries, our writing groups, our literary magazines, our review columns, our interviews. Our stories.
“Part of what’s intrigued me, over the years,” Nathan writes, “in thinking about social media, entertainment, and corporate influence, is how agency sits at the heart of it all.” There are so many forces working to pacify us, including the entertainment we often turn to; call me romantic (or delusional), but I refuse to believe that reading literature is one such force. I’m not so naive as to think that books are the way out of this or even through it, but I do think there is true power in sharing stories—not just those we’ve written but those bravely put to paper by others.
So let these new books be a reminder: even in the face of despair and erasure, we’re still here—reading, writing, and refusing to disappear.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I’ve been growing just a bit weary with the degree to which stories about queer women are centered on youth and coming of age, as if desire simply dies with time, as if we are most alive before our lives truly take shape. The cheekily titled Motherlover, from an award-winning webcomics and video game artist, is here to remedy that, placing at its center the romantic entanglement of two middle-aged women navigating motherhood and new love.
No joke: Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky, often cited as the quintessential “dad rock” record, is one of my desert island albums, a pleasurably frictionless blend of blues and alt-country centered on the difficulties of contentment (how queer!). So I was thrilled upon learning that one of the internet’s foremost commentators on the relationship between gender and music uses this much-maligned music label to explore questions of desire and transition.
Ostlund rightfully garnered a lot of acclaim for her 2015 novel After the Parade but I first fell in love with her fiction with her 2009 collection The Bigness of the World. Happily, Ostlund, an astute chronicler of the queerness of mundanity and the mundanity of queerness, returns for her first book in ten years with a book of short stories full of “guns, god, and gays.”
I remember cracking open Night Sky with Exit Wounds and secretly hoping Ocean Vuong would write a novel—not that every poet must turn to prose at some point!—and I remember getting to the end of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and hoping he’d write another. So I, for one, am glad for the existence of this follow-up, a heartwarming tale of friendship between a teen boy and the older woman who intervenes during his suicide attempt.
Believe me when I tell you I was wrecked before the end of this book’s prologue. Queer and trans people are taught that our desires are private, and if that’s true, Faye laments, then “we are culpable for our own feelings of lovelessness.” We are locked out of—exiled from—the traditional realms of happiness and comfort, left alone with our unworthiness. But of course this memoir-in-essays, from the author of The Trans Issue, argues the fairly obvious but no less revelatory point that we are indeed worthy of loving and being loved.
Sometimes the universe sends you a book written by someone else that feels like it’s been written just for you. As a former basketball player myself, Crane’s follow-up to I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is an alley-oop from the literary gods: perfectly pitched and right when it’s needed most—at a time when the profile of women’s basketball is higher than ever. Full of beauty and brawn, the book centers on Mac, a straight-shooting, Iverson-worshipping basketball star going into her senior season of high school—a year that begins with the death of her father and the arrival of an alluring and talented new teammate. Fans of films like Personal Best and The Novice shouldn’t hesitate to jump into this story about the complicated give-and-take between queerness and ambition and how, for better or worse, the body always seems to keep the score.
Drawn in a style that so perfectly captures the kind of angular awe of being young in New York, indie cartoonist Katie Fricas’s debut graphic novel centers on Lou, an aspiring comics artist—her work in progress portrays a battalion of carrier pigeons that help turn the tide of World War I—whose fortunes change when she lands a dream gig at the Society Library. It’s a love letter not just to the city but to the institutions and people committed to the preservation of stories, and a deeply personal portrait of the ways in which stories can both drive us insane and save our sanity.
After falling down the stairs during a night out, poet/lawyer Max, having just turned thirty, wakes from her hospital bed with a desire to become, for all intents and purposes, a trad wife. With her debut novel Bellies, Dinan emerged as a fresh voice on contemporary queer intimacy, the ways in which wants and needs shift, how histories can so often interfere with futures. Disappoint Me, following Max as she navigates the comforts and complications of dating a cis man with his own bumpy past, does not at all disappoint.
I just want to take a second to shout out Autostraddle, the publication I first heard about this book from, firstly because they’ve done the (gay) Lord’s work for decades and also because it’s important to support independent media. British author Elizabeth Lovatt unearths the hidden yet undeniably significant history of the Lesbian Line, a UK-based phone line in the mid-90s that connected queer women looking for advice and kinship to one another. As Lovatt herself writes in the book: “What I am interested in is lesbians. There’s no need to play it cool. I think lesbians are worthy of our attention. I want to tell their stories, and I think they need to be heard, not just for me but for others, too. And to do that I need to share their stories, to lift them up above the noise of the world, at least for a moment.” Indeed.
Melissa Febos is straight-up one of the most essential memoirists today, each of her books a deeply profound exploration of the mind and the body and the complex relationship between them. Whip Smart, her first, more than lived up to its title and delivered a dexterous, piercing meditation on addiction and the things we sometimes do to and with our bodies, while Girlhood—genuinely one of those books that would vastly improve the world if everyone were to read it—chronicles the physical and psychological harm done to our bodies from youth to adulthood. It’s a testament to Febos’s incredible skill that a book centered on celibacy features some of the most erotic writing she’s ever put to paper—and if you’ve read any of her work you know that’s saying a lot. Of course, Dry Season is not just about celibacy; it’s a treatise on listening to and trusting our corporeal instincts, on finding authentic forms of pleasure independent from hegemonic scripts. It’s a book that is itself a pleasure.
I’ve long followed Piepenburg’s writing for the New York Times—especially his column highlighting new-release horror movies worth streaming—and so was thrilled when I saw he had a book-length work of reportage forthcoming. Here, he dishes on the diners and dives that have kept the queer community nourished for decades, serving readers an entertaining and enlightening smorgasbord of personal and cultural history alongside the drag brunches and disco fries.
In an unfortunately not-at-all-distant 2044, Mason Daunt is rich enough to ignore the crumbling world outside—until an apocalyptic event threatens to crash the over-the-top baby shower he’s throwing with his partner in their LA mansion. A gore- and sex-fueled satire from the author of Yes, Daddy, this novel skewers privilege and denial with bleakness and hilarity.
Set in 1970s Australia, this genre-defying debut asks: what happens when you choose queer desire—and what happens when you don’t? In parallel timelines, we follow two versions of the same young woman: one who’s cast out and finds chosen family in a radical queer commune, and another who buries her feelings and walks a more conventional path. Sweeping across decades and tracing love, loss, protest, and survival, A Language of Limbs is an achingly beautiful meditation on identity, fate, and the countless lives we carry within us.
After a boundary-shattering performance tanks her music career, indie folk singer Joan Vole retreats to a teen writing camp in rural Virginia, hoping to escape scandal—and herself. I adored Conklin’s short story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, which won acclaim for its emotionally honest and idiosyncratic tales of queer people just trying to make it through the day; they’re so good at laying bare the everyday chaos of queer life.
Set against the sun- and ocean-soaked backdrop of a not-so-distant future version of Florida that’s partially underwater, Flahive’s delightfully chaotic debut novel follows a seventy-something woman over the course of her last day on Earth. She’s decided to host one final party, an occasion to revisit the highs and heartbreaks of her life, holding out hope for one last reunion with the woman whose love she lost decades ago. Steven Rowley, author ofThe Celebrants, calls it “A riotous novel about a farewell party that celebrates all of life’s emotions—big and small—while marking the arrival of an exciting new voice in fiction.”
No bones about it: Schwab’s 2020 novel The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is one of the best books I’ve read in the past 5 years, a fantastical and heartrendingly rich tour de force about a woman “blessed” with eternal life and cursed to be forgotten by everyone she comes into contact with. The author’s latest is just as capacious in both scope and emotionality, following three generations of women—all of whom are lady-loving vampires. Don’t wait to sink your teeth into this one.
Set amidst the squalor and splendor of 15th-century Florence, Melanson’s first novel weaves the stories of young gay painter Leonardo da Vinci, a priest whose skin is deemed too dark, and a rising Medici banker into a tale brimming with art, danger, and ambition. It’s got all the gorgeous detail of a meticulously researched historical novel, but with a very contemporary pulse. In their review for the book, Kirkus called it “proudly lusty,” and honestly, sold.
It’s 1993, and film geek Walter has kinda-sorta followed his kinda-sorta lover from Ohio to the gay Mecca of San Francisco. The undefined “friendship with benefits” leads to him feeling adrift—that is, until he meets a gender-bending couple with whom he forms a kinda-sorta throuple. Winner of the 2023 J. Michael Samuel Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Tradowsky makes an auspicious debut with this tenderhearted coming-of-age story that is both a love letter to the pre-internet Bay Area and to the personal and communal power of movies.
Personal note: I’m a sucker for a second-chance romance. It’s my narrative weakness, especially when it’s done with the kind of lucid dreaminess Rutkowski taps into here. Emily has the perfect Upper East Side life, at least on paper, but when her high school girlfriend—now a world-famous Olympian—reappears, old wounds and long-buried feelings come rushing back. What follows is an emotionally rich story of rekindled first love, personal risk, and the fragile line between who we were and who we’re allowed to become.
In the summer of 1996, best friends—and secret lovers—Hannah and Sam hit the road, leaving behind Long Beach, New York, and the heavy grip of Hannah’s devout Orthodox Jewish mother for the queer promise of San Francisco. But freedom, of course, isn’t so simple. To pay their way, they start stripping, a job Hannah comes to hate until she meets an older butch who might whisk her away from it all—including Sam—and both girls are forced to reckon with their own desires and identities.
From the two-time Lambda Award-winning author of the charmingly fun Skye Falling comes another heartfelt romp, this one about a religious seventeen-year-old in 1960s Georgia, Doris Steele, who flees to Atlanta, at the suggestion of her favorite teacher, in order to get an abortion. She gets swept up in a whirlwind weekend full of queer joy and civil rights icons who’ve become celebrities, people unapologetically living their truth. And now Doris needs to learn what hers is.
Amy Bloom has practically patented this kind of grand dreaminess, her stories—including White Houses, which fictionalized and brought to vivid life the love between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok—epics spun out of intimate memories. Her latest is a sweeping, decades-spanning novel about love in all its unruly forms and the ways in which families are made and remade.
Grace has always been an outsider in her crumbling Oxfordshire estate, but she’s quietly mastered the art of painting—and forgery—while dreaming of a life far from her chilly family and their secrets. When a long-lost cousin resurfaces and claims a stake in the family fortune, Grace is pulled into a gothic swirl of deception and inheritance. Stevens’s first novel, Briefly, a Delicious Life, was a haunting yet lovely novel about a teenage ghost who watches over and falls for the writer George Sand, known also as the partner of Chopin. It’s a fun and exquisite novel, quite…um, well, original. The author’s followup promises even more candlelit suspense.
“This book is dedicated to the uterus,” writes Becker, a medical sociologist, in the author’s note to this incisive exploration of bodily autonomy. “Though only the size of a fist, it’s been turned into a capacious receptacle, forced to hold impossibly large societal questions and controversies.” Get It Out is appropriately capacious, an excoriation of the ways in which America’s healthcare system—not to mention the culture’s preoccupation with policing “right” and “wrong” expressions of gender—deprives both cis and trans people of the fundamental right to control their own bodies.
In this sharply honest memoir, Women author Chloe Caldwell sets out to write about infertility—but ends up charting a far messier, more unexpected transformation. What begins as a chronicle of trying to conceive becomes a reckoning with betrayal, queer desire, and the question of what it actually means to build a life.
Electric Literature’s first book is a must-read. Edited by Editor-in-Chief Denne Michele Norris, the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication, the anthology features unforgettable essays from seventeen trans and gender nonconforming people of color, from major voices in literature like Akwaeke Emezi and Meredith Talusan to activists and celebrities such as RuPaul’s Drag Race star Peppermint to up-and-coming literary talent. Inspired by EL’s groundbreaking essay series, Both/And is full of essential and transformative trans stories that we need now more than ever.
James Baldwin wasn’t just one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century—he was a moral force, a cultural critic, and a voice of searing clarity on race, sexuality, and power. In this richly intimate biography, Nicholas Boggs brings Baldwin’s private world into sharper focus, tracing the relationships that helped shape his singular voice—from lovers and muses to artistic collaborators. Drawing on new archival material, Baldwin: A Love Story deepens our understanding of a towering figure whose work remains urgent and relevant.
It is not easy to write a book or get published. I’ve been a literary agent for almost 20 years, and I’ve written six books myself, most of which are tucked away in a drawer. As an agent, I receive hundreds of query letters every month, all vying for a spot on my list and a chance to go out to editors to see if they’ll get published, too. It’s daunting to say the least.
The first battle is figuring out what to write. Clearly everything has been done before, no? I see familiar concepts and tired storylines every day. But if there’s nothing new under the sun, how can writers stand out to agents and editors while also giving readers what they want and maybe taking advantage of trends?
There’s so much to say on this topic that I basically wrote a whole book about it. Writing Write Through It: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life helped me better understand how writers can navigate the weird, opaque, and confusing publishing landscape. There are no shortcuts or sure things, but my bird’s eye view of the industry has given me some insight, starting with what to write.
Way back in 2017, I wrote about the novels literary agents see all the time. No more zombies, I said back then. Now, times have changed! You can write a zombie novel if you want! It’s time for an update. I’m back to tell you about 10 novels that fill agent’s inboxes these days, but also how you can make yours stand out from the crowd. You can write anything you want. The key is to think about the reader, too.
Thinly Veiled Political Satire Listen, I can’t believe what is going on in the world either. Writing fiction about it might make you feel better and that’s great. Publishing it probably won’t change the world the way you hope, unfortunately, and everyone recognizes that character named Pylon Dusk. If you want to change the world, you can fundraise for mutual aid or canvas for candidates, and then write something else. Readers are not flocking to books that recreate our news feeds, just with funny names.
Sigh Cli-fi This science fiction subgenre focuses on climate change in a noble attempt to sound the alarm. But often they’re preaching to the choir. Most readers who like these books already know we have to act yesterday. If you want your cli-fi to reach the unconverted, what can you bring to your story that is not just HURRY UP THE PLANET IS DYING? The reader that should read your book will be the very last to do so, because then it would feel like homework.
The Witches of Everywhere We’ve seen so many different witches in books: historical, contemporary, good, evil, goofy, scary, teen, crone, highbrow, lowbrow. It feels like the post Twilight days when vampires flooded the market. If you’re plotting a witch book right now, you can put it on the backburner until it comes back around again (which it will) or make sure your witches offer something new. You have to go deeper than my witches have white cats or other surface-level attributes. It will take some serious inventiveness and character development to turn a reader’s head with a witch book these days.
Hello Fellow Cool Kids I often see YA novels where the main character’s primary motivation is to be popular. And honestly, (and thankfully) I don’t think kids today feel this as strongly as the adults writing those YA novels did back then. Plus, it makes me ask why those characters want to be popular. What will it get them? What will it protect them from? I think kids these days want to be safe and seen, not crowned prom queen, and a book about wanting to be popular needs to explore that desire more deeply in order for readers to connect with it.
AI Run Amok I see science fiction about AI more than any other trope, and like with cli-fi, the authors are preaching to the choir. The robot overlords have been a bad idea since Hal closed the pod bay doors. If you’re writing about AI, ask yourself what you want the reader to come away with, and then ask yourself if you think they already feel that way. How can you make the reader question their own beliefs? How can you surprise them?
I’m Coming Out We need more queer and trans stories in the world, not fewer, especially now. And while coming out is a formative, important, sometimes traumatic, sometimes joyous moment, it’s only one aspect of a queer person’s life. Queer stories are so much more. What else can you share? What about joy? What about love? What about everything else?
Picture Books with a Lesson My advice to all picture book writers is to read 100 of them published in the last five years and then start writing. You’ll find the ones that attempt to teach kids a lesson, whether it’s don’t pull the cat’s tail or share blocks at school have been done a thousand times or are not that enjoyable to read. Kids know when they’re being talked down to or lightly scolded. Instead of a lesson, can you tell a story, with a beginning, middle, and end? Can you show a character that learns, grows, and changes? It’s tough to do in so few words. This is one of the hardest genres to be published in for good reason.
A 12 Book Series The New York Times bestsellers list is full of novels that are part of a series. As a writer, I too would like to park myself in a world and write about it for years. But not all successful series were planned that way (as you can often tell by book four or five). If your new project is something that will only make sense to the reader after the third or fourth book, you aren’t going to get very far in today’s publishing climate. I mean, how many second TV episodes have you failed to watch, no less second books? Focus on making that first book a uniquely satisfying read, and with some success, you might find yourself in a series down the line.
It Happened One Night Many main characters suddenly find themselves in the middle of things—a mystery, a romance, an intergalactic war—and it makes me ask, does this character do anything, or do things just happen to them? If your main character is the recipient of the plot instead of actively engaged in it, the reader will start asking their own questions. Why don’t they just leave? Why do they have to solve this mystery now? Why is this battle theirs to fight? Make sure your main character wants something and goes out to get it. If it’s compelling enough, the reader will want to see what happens next.
It Happened to Me Writing is hugely therapeutic. That writing, though, doesn’t always fit in the publishing world. While you’re not trying to publish your diaries, sometimes when we’re too close to our subject matter—in both fiction and non-fiction—we can’t see how the reader will interpret things. Just because it happened doesn’t mean there needs to be a book about it. Just because you wrote about it doesn’t mean it needs to be published. It has value whether someone else can buy it in a store or not.
It took me years to get my first book deal as a writer. I wrote picture books and a middle grade novel and an adult novel with no luck. It wasn’t until I wrote a non-fiction book based on my newsletter that I found success. What made the difference for me? I thought about what the reader would want, not just what I wanted to say. This alone can help troubleshoot your ideas. Assume your reader is smart and has little time and money to spend on books—because it’s true. You want the reader to say ohhh, I’ve never seen that before. Because at the end of the day, the reader is always going to ask, what’s in it for me?
Author’s Note: Some names in this essay have been changed to maintain privacy.
On my phone’s notes app, I keep a list of all the people I’ve ever kissed. It started in March, 2022, when I made out with my friend Neeharika in her bedroom, and Shivani hesitantly snapped a photo. It was my first kiss; it needed to be remembered. Since then, The List has grown to include thirty people. There’s Isa, the hook-up I lost my virginity to while insisting that virginity was a social construct. There’s Sharan, the boy I made out with for all of two seconds at a club, and Raj, who I kissed right after. There’s Martin, the white man from Mexico who could tell I was on antidepressants because my eyes were out of focus, and who never texted me back because I didn’t have sex with him.
Asfiyah constantly pokes fun at me for The List, insisting it’s a fuckboy thing to do, but I swear to her it’s not a hall of fame. Its purpose is not to brag about my sexual exploits or stroke my own ego. “I have this obsession with not forgetting things,” I explain, as we walk through the glistening lanes of Bandra. In the rain, my white ballet flats turn murky brown. We stop to take solo pictures of each other on an old digital camera I found in the drawer of my television unit a few days ago, a Nikon Coolpix from when I was thirteen, which I’ve been taking everywhere since. We pose together for a few, squealing when a rat races past us into a gutter. Then we snap a photo of our shoes in one frame, the toes of my white ballet flats pointing towards her grey Converse. Looking through the photos when I return home, I realize something: It’s not that I’m obsessed with remembering things. It’s that I have a fearof forgetting.
I must have been nineteen when I learned that memories warp a little each time we recall them. The notion terrified me. When I’m present in a moment, everything seems so clear, so easy to return to whenever I feel like it. The gentle drizzle of rain as Asfiyah and I pose for photos. The droplets on my eyelashes. The pavement, darkened by rainwater. Yet, when I look through the photos from that evening, the pavement is completely dry, as are our shoes. My ballet flats are pristine, shining white, unchanged by the puddles I remember having splashed through. Was it not raining, then? Is nothing I remember accurate? Will I never be able to recall this present moment, exactly as it is?
Will I never be able to recall this present moment, exactly as it is?
Invariably, every time I think about the fallibility of memory and how untrustworthy our brains are, I realize, in a rush, the little details around me that I’ve taken for granted all my life: the exact green of the couch we’ve had since I was a child, the floral patterns on my grandmother’s curtains. The smell of my mother’s rotis in the kitchen, the smooth texture of the bedroom tiles. I never bothered to memorize these details because I’ve always had access to them, because I’ve presumed I always will have access to them. But tomorrow, we could throw away the couch and curtains, change the tiles, move out of our flat. Tomorrow, my mother could decide she never wants to make rotis again. With the object gone, my memory of it undependable, will I be left with no way to preserve that piece of my childhood exactly as it was?
In Siân Hughes’ Pearl, the protagonist deals with a similar distortion of memory as she grapples with her mother’s disappearance years ago. She recalls her mother reading Charlotte’s Web to her when she caught chickenpox as a child, keeping her “scabby hands” away from her face—until she finds out that she only caught chickenpox after her mother’s disappearance. She remembers throwing her mother’s high-heeled shoes into the garden, then searching for them in the torchlight—but her father says her mother never owned any high-heeled shoes.
I wonder how many such things I’ve forgotten, mixed up. How much will I never remember again? At a friend’s house recently, her grandfather fondly referred to me as bete, child. The word made me straighten up; a sharp jolt in my chest. Since my Nanu had passed away, no one had called me bete. For twenty-two years, almost every day, he had called me bete gently, softly, in his velvet voice. In just one year without him, I had forgotten the word. What other things about him had I forgotten? What other details did I take for granted, presuming I would always have access to them, presuming he would always be around?
I’ve always been afraid of things slipping away. Since I was a child, the fear of my loved ones dying would keep me up at night. Before sleeping, I would ask god to protect every person I knew, then list each name, fearing that if I forgot someone, they would perish the next morning. One night, seeing my younger sister asleep, covered head to toe in a white sheet, I raced to my parents’ room, unable to breathe, convinced the sheet was a shroud. When I got my first phone at 12, I began to record family members: stories, phone calls, videos of them cutting their birthday cakes. Nothing could disappear. Upon my own death, I couldn’t disappear—so I started to write. It was the only way I knew to capture a moment in time and share it with the world. If cameras were cheaper, maybe I would’ve been a photographer for the same reason.
Samar is second on The List. By the time we met, I had already become frantic about documentation: Instagram stories, diary entries, photographs on Parnika’s digital camera, videos on my phone. For years, I had been secretly audio recording my grandparents every time they told a story. I liked remembering significant dates: last year this time Dadu was hospitalised, last year this time Amatulla told me she had feelings for me, last year this time I bought my first drink.
When we were first getting to know each other, Samar and I were both struggling with alcoholism. I was also on medication for depression and anxiety, and had to strain my brain to remember details from hours ago. If a classmate asked me if I’d had breakfast that morning, I wouldn’t have an answer. I’d forget details from an anecdote as I was narrating it. On mornings after drinking, I would listen in amusement as my friends told stories that seemed to be about someone who vaguely resembled me, someone who said and did things I never remembered saying or doing. I trusted my memory less and less.
When I was drunk, details, conversations, feelings escaped me far too quickly. The past fell away. Every moment felt like a reset, like I was being reborn again and again throughout the night. When I was drunk I was okay, for once, with forgetting; in fact, there was nothing I wanted more than to be a new person. The morning after, I fretted over everything that had slipped away. Hours of my life gone somewhere, never to be found again except in the details from my friends. After every party, I would text Parnika, demanding photographs, then dump them all on my Instagram: proof that it had happened, ticked off a checklist.
Despite all of this, I rarely took any photos of or with Samar—I felt embarrassed to ask. In romantic entanglements—especially an undefined one like ours—wanting to document our time together felt like an admission of being more interested in the other person than they were in me. Why else would I want to remember something? The explanation about my compulsive documentation felt like a silly excuse.
Once, driving around the city, Samar and I stopped the car in a dark alley to make out. We were near my grandparents’ house, something he made a joke about, before we kissed. In just a few seconds, we realized the alley wasn’t quite as dark as it had looked—we could feel eyes on us as people walked past. I suggested we look for another lane, and he nodded, before squeezing the car out of the parking spot. Years later, when Asfiyah and I went for a walk through the same lane, I pointed the spot out to her: “That was where we made out for a bit.” Then, a few seconds later: “Actually, I’m not sure if that was it. Maybe it was up ahead.” Then, a few minutes later: “Maybe it was the next lane, actually.” When we walked past the next lane, I sighed, “No, it was definitely that last lane.”
Recently, I’ve found thatthe more I focus on a memory, the blurrier it becomes. It’s like reaching for something and finding it scatter, disperse, spread everywhere until it’s so thin it barely exists. When I lose a silver bracelet, I know I have no hope of finding it because I remember wearing it last to a party but was I even wearing it at the party or did I decide my outfit looked better without a bracelet? If, say, I did wear it to the party, did I remember putting it in my bag after I took it off? Maybe I did take it off and put it in my bag but actually didn’t wear it to the party, and the last time I wore it was three months ago. And so it goes. The capricious memory sprints further and further away, jumping over obstacles, ducking into narrower, unknown lanes, until it’s slipped away. My silver bracelet, gone. An entire conversation, vanished. It’s why there is one man on The List whose name I do not remember. I have put him down as Twin Guy.
The more I focus on a memory, the blurrier it becomes.
What I do remember about Twin Guy:
I met him at Bonobo. It was the 4th of August.
He was studying in the UK.
Neeharika’s schoolmate Sahiba was with him.
He had a twin brother.
I remember the exact moment when, standing by the bar, I asked him his name. I’d already had six drinks by then and the moment he said it, the name slipped away, lost in the chaos of the night. I woke up the next day with blue lips and alcohol poisoning.
It has always bothered me that I don’t remember Twin Guy’s name. I’ve begged my friends to help me look for it, checked Bonobo’s Instagram stories, even googled the words “Indian twins in the UK.” His name feels like a missing puzzle piece, a Cinderella story; once I know it, that last night of revelry before I decided to be sober will appear before my eyes, complete again.
Some months later, I saw Sahiba at a cafe in Bandra. She was with her mother and had no reaction to seeing me. Awkwardly, right as she left, I called out her name. She turned around, confused. She did not remember me. “This will sound really weird,” I said, pulling her aside, “But last year at Bonobo, I hooked up with a friend of yours. And I just can’t remember his name.”
Together, we bent over her phone and scoured her photographs. I gave her all the information I had: the date, the UK, twin brother.
“I don’t know any twins.” She frowned. “Maybe he lied to you about having a twin brother?”
“No,” I insisted. “I met his twin, too.”
We reached August 4th, 2023 in her camera roll. She showed me all the photos and videos from the night, watching my face earnestly. Finally, in a video of a dancing crowd, I saw him, right in the front, pumping his fist.
“That’s him!” I said, relieved he wasn’t a figment of my imagination.
Sahiba’s face fell. “But I don’t know him.”
“But he was with you, I remember,” I said, beginning to doubt my words even as they came out of my mouth. “You introduced me to him.”
“Maybe he’s my boyfriend’s friend,” she said, after a few seconds. “I’ll check with him.”
I knew, in that moment, that I’d never find out who he was.
My issue with remembering is really a philosophical one. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If something happened but no one remembers it happening, did it really happen? Do moments also die when the last person who remembers them forgets? Do things even happen if you don’t remember them?
What I don’t remember (what I never remember):
What did she say when she touched me?
Where did her hands go?
How long did I freeze for?
In July 2021, Amatulla told me she had feelings for me. I felt like I was letting her down when I told her I didn’t feel the same. A month later, she touched me when I didn’t want her to. We were at a friend’s birthday party, surrounded by people playing a drinking game around the table, but no one saw her hand creep up my waist. I forget now if I had a drink in my hand. I forget where exactly she touched me, what she said as she did it. I didn’t know how to ask her to stop, so I pretended someone was calling my name. I stood up and left her sitting alone on the floor, presumably drunk and tearful. I didn’t look back.
In my bed that night, I resolved to forget it had happened at all. Forgetting meant I could remain friends with someone who was important to me. Yet even as I decided this, I dreaded waking up the next morning, doubting my memory. There was no evidence it had happened: no Instagram stories, no diary entries, no photographs on Parnika’s digital camera, no videos on my phone. No one had seen. Amatulla, hungover, didn’t remember anything the next morning.
Over the next few months, when the people around me questioned if I was telling the truth, I questioned it too. But even when I forgot the little details, I remembered the way my stomach hurt for days after. I remembered the fear of forgetting that pain.
Documentation was how I made sure no one ever had to fill in those gaps again. That everyone knew what really happened, that I didn’t make it up, that I’m not going crazy. Maybe I am obsessed with documentation because it’s the only way to make sure I am believed.It’s the only way I believe myself.
Maybe I am obsessed with documentation because it’s the only way to make sure I am believed.
When I was a child, my fear of death made me an expert at memorizing physical touch. Even four years after my Dadi and Dadu’s deaths, I can remember exactly how their hugs felt. I remember how Nanu’s hand felt in mine, so clearly that I don’t even have to close my eyes to return to another time in my life. The memory of touch is called a haptic memory; it falls under sensory memories. I do not remember what Amatulla’s hands on my body felt like.
In May 2024, I visited Samar in the mountains, where he had moved for a music course. In the week we spent together, I discovered he had forgotten—or mixed up—many significant moments of our relationship. He thought it had been five years since we met, not two. He remembered me meeting his family, but I never had. He had no memory of when, irritated by my brashness when I was drunk, he stopped speaking to me for seven months.
For the first time in my life, I felt envious of someone’s weak memory. Over years of deciding to not let anything disappear, so many difficult moments and residual feelings have not only stayed with me but are practically stuck to my skin, impossible to get rid of. I remember obscure, upsetting details from years-old interactions: the exact last words of a lengthy apology text from Amatulla (“in the spirit of moving on, i would really appreciate if this is the last interaction between us”), the time Samar stood me up after I’d spent an hour waiting for him at Prithvi Theatre, the time he forgot I’m a vegetarian, the screeching voice of my eighth grade Math teacher stopping me in the school corridors for wearing a cropped top.
I began to question what these memories were even adding to my life. Was it good to remember things, if those things ultimately held me back? Did I really need precise memories, or did I need to stop living in the past? After all, Samar was living in the present, and he seemed to be happier than I was.
Despite my fear of death, there is one thing about it that has always comforted me: scientists state that the brain is active for approximately seven minutes after a person dies. In this time, the “brain wave patterns… are similar to those occurring during dreaming, memory recall, and meditation.” Scientists theorize that these seven minutes may be a replay of one’s life. The thought fills me with relief. At the end of my life, will I finally remember everything?
“Do you think the memories we see in the replay are objectively accurate?” I ask Asfiyah. “Or do you think they’re the same warped versions we carry with us throughout our lives?”
Our guesses do not matter. There’s only one way to find out.
If I know I cannot retain everything I want to, that my memories will fade despite my meticulous documentation, maybe the only thing to do is live in the present. Already, some of the names on The List evoke no memory; I cannot even put a face to them. Why waste time and energy preserving something that I know will eventually disappear anyway? Shouldn’t I be focusing, instead, on simply living in the moment, free of worries about taking photographs, recording audios, or trying to memorize the color of a couch?
Recently, as I read Anita Desai’s Rosarita, something remarkable happened. The story revolves around a young woman from India, studying in San Miguel, Mexico. I too had spent eleven months in Mexico as a student. When I left, I promised myself I wouldn’t forget my Spanish; I would practice, continue to listen to Latin music and watch Mexican shows on Netflix. For a while, I remained fluent in the language, nursing hopes of returning to Latin America in the near future, but six years on, I was slightly less hopeful and significantly less fluent. I struggled to string together a sentence and had to google translations for words like banana, left, and forgot. And then came Rosarita. The novella only had a few Spanish words, sparingly sprinkled across 94 pages. Chiclet, iglesias, ahora, mercado, tienda. Words that I had once used almost daily, and now that they were no longer crucial to my survival, forgotten. As these words appeared on the pages, though, their meanings came back to me instantly, naturally, as if they had never stopped being a part of my vocabulary.
The other day, as my friend and I sat on the floor of her house, looking through old photographs from school, the same thing happened. The names of my classmates—names that I once said or thought about nearly every day, names that had faded away since I left school—came back to me with no effort. “Lavesh Chib, Drishti Ahuja, Prerana Shetty,” I spouted automatically, sliding my finger across the class photograph.
Maybe we never completely forget anything. The things that have to come back to me, the things that are important, will return at the right time. It’s like swimming or riding a bike. Maybe the memories that return will be accurate; maybe they won’t. But is accuracy the point of a memory? Isn’t it enough to remember exactly how it felt? To have lived through something that deserves to be remembered? The protagonist in Siân Hughes’ Pearl agrees. “I claim all that I can rescue of the time before,” she declares, “Even if someone tells me the details are wrong, or in the wrong order. Because it is mine.”
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover ofThe Seven Daughters of Dupreeby Nikesha Elise Williams, which will be published by Scout Press on January 27, 2026. You can pre-order your copy here.
It’s 1995, and fourteen-year-old Tati desperately wants to know the identity of her father. Gossip flies fast and loose in her mother Nadia’s basement salon, but when it comes to family, she’s tight-lipped. Tati’s grandmother, Gladys, won’t tell her either; nor will Gladys tell Nadia the real reason she fled Land’s End, Alabama, in 1953. These are the first of many secrets in the matrilineal line of Dupree women. There’s Jubie in 1917 who failed to pass for white when she had a dark baby, Ruby. Ruby’s insatiable lust for Sampson in 1934 that leads to a baby of her own out of wedlock. And that night in 1980 that Nadia so desperately doesn’t want to talk about. Dupree women can only have daughters, a malediction passed down because of the suffering by the first of their line. None of the women know their ancestor’s enslaved or given name, only the legend of how she died: They cut off her head because she ran. THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF DUPREE is a novel about the secrets kept between mothers and daughters, and how the actions of one generation ripple through the next. This sweeping epic about seven generations of Black women echoes Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing or Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois. Readers will journey with Tati to uncover the identity of her father, while learning the truth of her lineage, still whispered at kitchen tables and murmured in basements, where the ritual of pressing hair happens every Saturday night.
Here is the cover, designed by Danielle Mazzella di Bosco, with artwork by Jim Musil:
Nikesha Elise Williams: I didn’t really have a concrete idea for the cover of The Seven Daughters of Dupree. I created a mood board last summer, and looking back on it now, I’m sure the designers were thinking, “She’s a mess.” However, two things on that board that do come through in this final design are the use of color with emphasis on the color white.
I really love bright colors, and when I first saw this Jim Musil painting used for the cover, I was immediately attracted to the vibrant use of color even though the scene is soft and idyllic. However, the painting alone wasn’t enough. I’m so grateful to my editor, Alison Callahan, for encouraging my honest feedback and advocating for the cover we have today, which includes a young woman walking down this dirt road in a white dress while birds fly above her.
Those additions were everything because in my mind it’s a pivotal scene pulled straight from the novel and come to life. However, I also think it’s a point of intrigue or mystery because you don’t see the woman’s face. You don’t know which daughter it is, where they’re going, or what they’re going to do, just that they’re walking down this road with intention and purpose. While I’m of the belief it’s one specific character, it could be any of them and I think, I hope, that’s enticing to a future reader. My hope is that when readers see the cover and read the title they wonder, “Who is that?” And, then, say to themselves, “Let me get this book and find out.”
As for the color white, it is a color of healing as well as of angels and ancestors. In my family, when someone passes we wear white. I have friends who have been initiated into Ifá, who for spiritual reasons go through rituals of wearing white. In the novel, some of the women practice hoodoo, some of the women are midwives, and so when they wear white they’re working and communicating with both this plane and that of the other side.
The birds flying off in the distance was a suggestion by my editor and she pointed out to me that in the flock there are seven together and then two more a little further from the group. In a novel entitled The Seven Daughters of Dupree, the significance of the seven birds in the flock is obvious. The themes of generational heritage, history, lineage and legacy are all bound up in the title and those birds. I believe the two on the side represent the possibilities for this line of women as loosely evidenced by this line from the novel, “…if burdens could be passed down, surely blessings could move up.”
Danielle Mazzella di Bosco: From the beginning, we knew we wanted the cover to reflect the heart of the book—something that spoke to seven generations of Dupree women, legacy, and quiet strength. An epic novel about the secrets kept between mothers and daughters, and how the actions of one generation ripple through the next, we focused on a visual that was more uplifting, brighter, and expansive to convey hope. The artwork is a landscape painting by Jim Musil, chosen for its warm, timeless feel. Musil’s painting, with its bold brushstrokes, vibrant colors, and open sky, captures a sense of memory and place that pairs beautifully with the novel’s tone. The lone figure in a white dress represents strength and reflection—she could be any one of the Dupree daughters, carrying the weight and wisdom of those before her. The final design brings together story and setting in a way that feels both classic and emotionally rich—drawing readers into a world shaped by generations of women.
Leigh Sugar’s debut poetry collection, FREELAND, is equal parts gripping love story and confessional. With narrative, lyrical, and structurally experimental poems, Sugar offers a rare, nuanced take on the prison landscape as only one intimately acquainted with it can. Throughout the three formal sections of FREELAND, which are further split into their own micro sections, she shows us the claustrophobic, charged interior of a Michigan state prison visiting room with her incarcerated beloved and the overwhelming unknowns and possible futures for her life on the outside.
Posing and grappling with questions of identity, connection, timing, and time itself, FREELAND offers insight into the political, social, and physical divides distinctive to the U.S. mass incarceration machine. Sugar’s account is generous and refreshing in its honesty and straightforward advocacy, and invites us to reconsider all we’ve been taught about crime, punishment, and justice. By sharing her personal relationship to the merciless carceral system, she also reveals important truths about love realized, deferred, and transformed by circumstance and choice.
Sugar previously interviewed me for Electric Literature about my debut memoir in verse, Disappearing Act, which detailed my own experience navigating a loved one’s incarceration. It was a privilege to continue the conversation and shine a light on the captivating story behind FREELAND.
Jiordan Castle: I was moved by many of our shared experiences: the microwaveable cheeseburgers in the visiting room, how funds and wages work for (and against) incarcerated people, and the automated warning before a time-constrained phone call ends. How did you decide what snapshots of the prison landscape to share and what to leave out, or save, for yourself?
Leigh Sugar: I think a lot of FREELAND is the result less of decision than of urgency and intuition. There are so many recurring memories, so much recurring scenery in the experiential dirge of prison; the violence of unending repetition, and the confusing comfort of it. So many aspects of the visiting process are predictable—not just the security process, but also the sounds, visuals, and even feelings. The specific imagery is what comes to mind—and into my imagination—first and most readily when I think of going to the prison. The snacks in the vending machine were generally always the same, and certain foods are more popular than others. I very explicitly remember Gold Peak brand iced tea, and still can’t buy a bottle. More general items like tables and chairs—though clearly “institutional” in the prison setting—are less vivid in my memory, as they are more ubiquitous in my life beyond prison.
I also tried, as much as possible, to maintain the perspective of FREELAND as my own; to not attempt to adopt the experience of someone actually incarcerated—which I’m not, and never have been. This feels important given the power differential between myself and those who are incarcerated. More specifically, I know many incarcerated folks who are writers and artists themselves, and they are the ones who should write and share their experiences (if they want to). FREELAND can only account for my experience, one as a “free” person who has statistically-unusual access to some of the goings-on in prison. The images and moments I chose to include, like the phone call, are the ones that felt most oppressive to me in their persistence and predictability. They also felt most provocative and ripe for probing.
During the initial drafting of many of these poems, “craft” wasn’t necessarily a determining factor in “choosing” imagery. More so, I followed my gut, my memory, my recurring dreams. Architect Mies Van Der Rohe is often attributed with the term “God is in the details,” and often us writers are encouraged to focus on detail, rather than general references, in order to get at what may in fact be more universal. Perhaps in this case, the inversion of Van Der Rohe’s epithet is more fitting: “The devil is in the details.” At any rate, these “details” were a matter of instinct, and then when it came to assembling the manuscript, observing recurring moments and figuring out how to piece them together into reappearing images and themes became more clear.
JC: I love the work different fantasies are doing in this collection. The speaker’s, that of the speaker’s beloved, and all those fantasies that stem from the physical and psychological fact of incarceration. Why is fantasy essential (and sometimes painful) in prison life and for those who are prison-adjacent?
LS: I have a very active “what if” life in my mind. I am often ashamed of this (cue all suggestions to “live in the moment”) but the process of writing FREELAND, and subsequently reflecting on it, has revealed the self-preservation instinct behind many fantasies. Without imagination, how can we achieve change? Imagination allows us to picture a reality different from the one we experience, and I find it to be a critical skill in service of reaching toward a more just world.
Without imagination, how can we achieve change?
I don’t think I realized at the time how heavily I was relying on fantasy to propel not only the romantic relationship, but also my engagement with the legal system as a whole. At the risk of seeming naive, the legal system is vast and inextricably connected to myriad other oppressive systems, but if I focus too much on the largeness of the system and my own smallness, any effort feels futile. What else can I do but believe that what I, we, say matters? The stories we tell. The futures we imagine, even when imagination reveals the painful distance between current reality and a more humane possibility.
JC: In FREELAND, you don’t shy away from sensuality, sex, and romance as confined to the visiting room and phone calls. Historically, I think it’s been a bit taboo to write about sexuality as it relates to incarcerated people. In large part, I believe, because of the sexual violence associated with prison. Why was it important to share that part of your experience?
LS: Honestly, when writing the individual poems, this didn’t even occur to me. I felt I was documenting our experience, which had an inherent sexually charged tension. An instructor actually, in the early stages of this manuscript, suggested I hold back on some of the sex, saying it was getting to be a little “too much.” It made me quite self-conscious at the time. Now, years later, I’m curious about this feedback. What was “too much”? There is sex, sexuality, intimacy, graphic descriptions of sex—and all the feelings and situations surrounding it—in so many poems and collections. Why was the sex in mine striking this instructor as “too much”?
Was it boring? Did the tension become stale when the sex could never be fully realized in a normative sense? Was it uncomfortable to think about an incarcerated person expressing their sexuality and sensuality (to the extent that they are “allowed” and able)? Or to be confronted with the realities of what an intimate relationship between an incarcerated person and a non-incarcerated person might entail? Why?
JC: It felt to me like a kind of reclamation. I appreciated the truth of being a body in the world, especially when someone’s physical world may be confined within a prison.
LS: Though the topic is still taboo, it is much less taboo for me—a white, petite, non-incarcerated person—to write about my sexuality than it is for an incarcerated person, particularly an incarcerated person of color. Especially given the social correlations between incarceration, white supremacy, and the associated bigotry of Black male sexuality.
JC: We mentioned the phone call between the speaker and the former beloved, but what’s perhaps most telling is that it takes place right after the 2016 election. You deftly showcase the privilege of having access to varied news sources while trying to sympathize and advocate for someone who doesn’t even retain the right to vote. With FREELAND taking place largely in the past but being published early on in a second Trump term, how do you contextualize that phone call now?
LS: The phone call was a pretty straight transcription from our actual conversation, with some stylistic shaping. I think I knew instinctively that something interesting was happening in our dynamic, but at the time couldn’t quite identify what that was. When I look at it now, I sense a lot of tension in the speaker’s desire to connect with the beloved about the fear and desperation she, I, was feeling, while simultaneously realizing that, first, he didn’t have access to any news sources beyond select TV news channels, and thus was not privy to experiential “feel” of the city, nor direct stories from friends and acquaintances. And second, that this lack of access was upsetting to me, not because it was his fault but rather another consequence of the state’s system.
JC: In both of our books, you and I give select insight into the crimes our loved ones were charged with. It’s a difficult move, but an important one, I think, if only to show that there are no “perfect” crimes or prisoners, only an imperfect system. How did you determine what you were allowed (or allowed yourself) to disclose?
LS: I started writing the poems that would become FREELAND over ten years ago, so my relationship to the work now is very different from when I began. In recent months and years, I started to notice an unsettled worry—that I did not consider the feelings of the family, friends, and the beloved that appear in the collection.
However, when I recall the writing process, I remember how careful I felt in navigating this space; how worried I was about portraying someone in an unsavory light. I tried, as much as possible, to make the book about me: my relationship to prison—as well as a bit of the history and context that created the environment for me to be involved in prison work—rather than about anyone else, particularly the beloved. He and I had many conversations throughout FREELAND’s evolution and editing. He’s read all the poems and granted permission to publish, which felt like the most important permission to request.
In general, I found it important to self-implicate; not represent myself as “bad,” but show my very honest belief that we are all capable of doing—and receiving—great harm (to paraphrase adrienne maree browne). One of the most important tenets I’ve come to believe is that I am not different, fundamentally, from a person who has become incarcerated.
JC: You also edited the 2023 anthology, That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It, which contains poetry and prose from writers who’ve taught workshops in U.S. carceral institutions. There’s a lot to consider in both collections about resisting the “savior” trope. Did you take anything away from editing that anthology that helped shape the final version of FREELAND?
LS: It’s much easier to gawk at horror stories than to confront the possibility that we are, or that I am, capable of some of the same behaviors. We are all people. I’ve caused harm. I’ve been harmed. One of the projects of incarceration is to separate and invisibilize large swathes of the population. In order to do so, the incarcerated must be “othered.”
JC: Your book reminded me how acutely the future can become something to fear or even deny in order to survive the present when someone you love is in a place where time stands still. Did the relationship with your former beloved, incarcerated throughout the course of your romance—and after the fact—inform how you think about or experience time?
LS: Woof, this is such a big and observant question, because my experience of time is very impacted by this experience and by my work in prisons. I’ve worked with people who were released from prison at 36, already having served 20 years. I’m 35 as of July; this is young. My sense of “expected” timelines and milestones has been completely subverted. I’ve witnessed the way a person can step out of prison after decades, never having seen a smartphone, and within 5 years be married with a college degree and a mortgage.
So much fear of the future is fear of the unknown; what the future will be, or what it won’t be (i.e., a future in which dreams aren’t realized).
JC: We’re both white women of Jewish heritage, and as such, not one of the demographics most commonly and consistently affected by incarceration. Who, what, are we serving by sharing our stories?
LS: Like Solmaz Sharif’s quote, “There is nothing / that has nothing to do with this,” I really do believe that we are all connected, and that whether or not I hold a certain historically oppressed identity, I am never a “witness.” Witness suggests a continuation of the “other,” that there is a person or group that is enduring a given situation (in this case, incarcerated folks), and that the rest of us who are not incarcerated are just outside of the issue. This is not true.
Witness suggests that the rest of us who are not incarcerated are just outside of the issue. This is not true.
The United States’ mass incarceration system—any carceral system, really—only benefits from this false sense of division. It is easier to stomach, or perhaps forget entirely, the knowledge that tens of thousands of people exist in our very human, very fallible, very racist-classist-ableist-heteronormative-patriarchal-capitalist – communities—when they are simply locked away and invisibilized. Especially when we feel there is some grand difference between people who are incarcerated and people who are not. Division and separation are carcerality’s tools and props.
Understanding—and accepting—that is critical to my understanding of hegemonic structure in general, and the once quieter (and now not at all quiet) fascism that has always run this country. There are reasons why, say, my former beloved, or others I’ve met in prison, are incarcerated and I am not. But these reasons are based on systemic and institutional racism, classism, and other oppressive systems. It would be far more uncommon for me—a white, educated, non-immigrant, cis-gendered woman, who for all intents and purposes satisfies “normative” expectations of citizenship—to be incarcerated. The facts of my access to financial and legal resources (combined with my race, appearance, family history, and other factors) would render a serious case with the justice system very unlikely, even though I am disabled, neurodivergent, and experience mental illness.
JC: The collection ends with a final reflection in the form of the poem, “Revision.” You write: “I thought abandoning the reach / meant longing won…” Did writing and publishing FREELAND change how you see the version or versions of yourself that lived these poems?
LS: “Revision” is actually the last poem I wrote (in a workshop with Leila Chatti!). It, like several other poems in the collection, radically changed my understanding of myself, the relationship, and my writing. I did not know what was going to happen as I wrote the poem, and when the end revealed itself, I knew immediately this was the end of the book.
I am a very obsessive person; this relationship was a perfect receptacle for obsessive thought and action, as the possibility for fantasy, imagination, and future-tripping was endless. I never ran out of possibilities or scenarios to consider. However, by the time I wrote “Revision,” two years had passed from the end of the romantic part of our relationship, and about the same amount of time since I’d even looked at the manuscript. It felt fitting that the final poem turns back inward—to serve as a reminder that many of the extremely intense feelings I experienced in the relationship weren’t entirely due to the prison’s separating force; that feelings of longing, loneliness, and sadness may be universal, and wouldn’t be “resolved” by a climactic release from prison and the ability to “start our lives for real.” This is our life. This is not to downplay the role of prison, but more to acknowledge the parts of me that have always been present. Simultaneously critical and exacting, while also deeply empathetic and concerned about the world and my place in it. Furthermore, the poem seemed to tug at threads that other poems in the book certainly touched on, but perhaps didn’t fully explore. My experiences of loneliness and feeling misunderstood—these are my experiences, with or without the prison. The prison had become a great and obvious object on which to project these feelings, but they still remained once I was in a different situation.
Now, this does not negate the reality that I “got” to leave, or could choose to go, while the former beloved—and everyone else incarcerated—cannot. This is, again, where I return to my intention with the book: to remain, as much as possible, in my own vantage, my own life. This was my experience. This is not the experience, necessarily, of someone getting out of prison. This is not the experience of the former beloved. It was my own journey in understanding some core aspects of myself that I had previously been able to attribute to the forces of prison but ultimately couldn’t deny that these were lifelong obsessions of mine that would persist regardless of my life’s specifics. This, too, helps me conceptualize and believe in the connectedness between those of us in prison and those of us outside of prison. The experiences and feelings from the relationship were real, and I would’ve struggled with feelings of loneliness regardless of the circumstances. This is not to take power away from the oppressive force of the prison, but more to acknowledge the universality of experience.
JC: Prison takes. Does it give anything back?
LS: Oof. This feels a bit like a trick question. If I say “yes,” am I endorsing something about prison? Am I suggesting that what it may “give” makes it “worth it”? No. Nothing is worth the carceral system.
And, given that our current world does operate a carceral system (many carceral systems, but the scope of FREELAND is limited to the state prison), I’ll answer in the context of this reality. Prison, if understood through a lens of social control, can remind us that the lines between good and bad, right and wrong, are far more blurry than many of us care to admit. To fully realize this blur forces us to account for the harm we ourselves have caused, and consider what is the difference between that and harm (and punishment) that has been legislated by the state?
Are there possibilities for allowing each other, and ourselves, to live freely that we haven’t yet explored? Or that are masked by the seeming inevitability of prison. Once we start asking these questions, a whole world of possibility opens. Perhaps I’ll leave it there: the existence of prison can serve as a stark object against which we—as a national community all the way down to our relationships with ourselves—can measure our own capacity for acknowledging harm and devise ways to address it that both honor the survivor (or a victim’s family) as well as continue to recognize the humanity of all involved. A terrible reminder of how far from the prison system we hope to—and can, I believe—move.
“Some sex expresses love, / Some expresses hurt. / Sometimes, hate. / Sex can bring sparkling lightness, / Or incredible darkness. / Sometimes, both…”
These are lines transcribed from the “superdoom supermoon” at the beginning of my new novel Venice Peach. The spectrum of sexuality has always been vast; the fact that all means and ends can lie within human sex acts, eternally confusing. Humanity as a whole has clearly never been able to fully wrap our heads around the myriad different directions in which our sexuality can drive us. In truth, we have seen more hate spawn from lack of understanding than education and evolution. This could certainly be considered yet another way in which we appear to be “superdoomed” as a species. However, we must never lose hope—and sexy books featuring queer sex scenes can help us keep our mojo and spirit alive and thriving. As with all subjects, the keys to empathy and better understanding can always be found in books—but there is more to these steamy sex scenes than initially meets the eye.
Over the last few decades, we’ve undoubtedly been able to make some progress towards reducing sexual stigmas, but now we’re entering a stage of vicious backlash and reverse movement. It feels like the dawn of one of the unsexiest times in human history, but it’s imperative to remember it won’t always be like this. That theme is at the “dark heart” of Venice Peach. Set in Venice Beach in the not-too-distant future, it’s a savagely playful celebration of the carnival of sexuality; an optimistic-yet-fatalistic vision/version of things coming back around from the oppressive and destructive rule of a reality TV star president. The book depicts a sexual renaissance of sorts. Everyone is getting it on—or at least trying. There are elements of horror, sci-fi, satire and magical realism. Towards the end, there’s a particularly graphic threesome between a virgin, an un-dead woman, and a shape-shifting canal creature named Bobobo. It is a giant melting pot of madness to match the times.
This is a list of seven other reads that wave their freak flags unabashedly and indulge far past the usual cutoff point in literary sex scenes. But that doesn’t mean these books are all pleasure. As the world we live in wobbles around on weary legs, some of the most searing queer sex scenes written of the recent past come coupled with dark and ominous undertones. The “freak” treatment of “deviant” sex in both real life and literature is closely intertwined with the demons and dysfunction that haunt the misunderstood and marginalized. There’s a lot of pain in this list, some blood and death, as well as undercurrents of grim warnings that may or may not be received. Still, it feels important to present a collection of books who are as bold in their “undress” as they are in their portrayals of the past, present and future of alternative sex and love.
One part psychedelic masterpiece, two parts revenge horror, this 120-page novella sizzles so hot you can read it in a late night’s sitting. Beginning with the classic scene in which our lead sees their ex with someone else, the book builds on the theme of trying to make an unhealthy, unsustainable relationship work in ways that I’ve never seen done before. With crescendos that include a dog morphing into a demon and sweeping tsunamis through the streets of New York, the blood and guts bits are done just as masterfully as the surreal. The freakiest part is at the end, in a standalone short piece entitled “Write My Eulogy on The Gloryhole Bathroom Stall,” in which a character gets hooked on a very horny and sadistic god who lives in a glory hole on 4th and Broadway. You may never look at glory holes in the same way again, and it somehow feels strangely cathartic.
The New Lesbian Pulpedited by Sarah Fonseca and Octavia Saenz (August 2025, Feminist Press)
This entire volume of multi-faceted erotic pulp fiction sizzles hotter than this summer’s climate-change sun. This collection will make your brain break in a good way, and many of these short stories are so vivid and engaging that you’ll be angry they aren’t longer. The one that will really knock your undergarments off is “Cottonmouth”by Ella Boureau, a tale of kissing cousins that turns into an unexpected threesome… I won’t spoil the surprise third, but this is by far the closest scene I’ve found to the one in my own Venice Peach that inspired this list and is reason alone to purchase this buffet of gritty, gutsy, bloody, and lusty sapphic short stories.
Silicone God is a hot and heavy broken love letter to a past that may never be reckoned with; a feverish, frenzied, fragmented fun house of the highlights and horrors of the sex-obsessed. We are thrown into the dark and twisted world of simultaneously being both a mistress and a queer trying to come out. The mood sticks to you, as things with tentacles tend to do, wrapping around your insides and squeezing tight. If you’re into sea creatures—specifically tentacle-infused sex scenes—and phallic mushrooms, and silicone strap-ons that take on their own life, this book is absolutely for you. The main character, Shea, is a serial mistress from the future, a world in which there are many mistresses and their mission is considered sacred. Full of mystery and sexual prowess, Shea is a character we never fully get a grip on—and that’s exactly the point. Too slippery for any one genre, this is a vivid portrait of a seductive, silicone-based future.
This book reads along the lines of a queer literary version of Bojack Horseman, and as someone who can claim that show as a reference for my own work, this book was at once beloved to me. A modern tale of an awkward and famous “femme fatale type” Eagle Rock-based lesbian novelist named Astrid Dahl—not related to Roald—this scent-drenched novel’s top notes are satire, edge, and darkness. Astrid was both writing and partying on her own trademark drug cocktail she coyly calls the “Patricia Highsmith,” but now she is trying (and failing) to cut back after being “cancelled” due to a misunderstood interview in which she claimed she doesn’t “vibe with dykes.” Astrid is a singularly original yet utterly relatable LA character: self-deprecating, self-obsessed, and witty as hell. She falls into a tumultuous toxic relationship with a red flag “metallic orchid-smelling” woman named Ivy from her Zoom writing group while simultaneously denying falling in love with her older, foxy artist neighbor who has an unfortunate proclivity for patchouli. Many sizzling sex scenes to be found here, but the hottest is one in which—are we surprised?—perfume makes it into the bed.
Sayaka Murata’s work has been making a lot of lists lately, and it is absolutely well deserved. Vanishing World will haunt you as much as it will make you laugh. A clever and prophetic combination of Handmaid’s Talemeets Twilight Zone, Murata paints a future centered around the disintegration of family as a societal concept. Nearly all pregnancies are by artificial insemination, society calls sex between married partners “incest,” and people who are not asexual primarily fall in love with fictional/manga characters. The sex scenes in this book are bizarre, unique, and seem to spell superdoom in their own queer ways: The main character Amane has sex with herself while imagining it to be actual sex with the anime characters she’s obsessed with. She also initiates strange and clumsy sex with multiple virgin men because “actual sex” is a “relic.” As the world she lives in becomes more insistent on doing away with all sexual urges, Amane increasingly loses sight of her own desires, culminating in her having the most dark and socially deviant form of sex at the end of the book, in a climactic tone much darker than that which the book began. Peppered with incredible one-liners such as, “Normality is the creepiest madness there is…” and, “Is there any such thing as a brain that hasn’t been brainwashed?” I will definitely be reading everything else available from Murata.
This is one of the most truly kaleidoscopic sex-fueled books out there. Featuring a fantastic-yet-realistic human protagonist who can morph genders including sex organs upon command, we follow Paul all over the country, propelled by his seemingly-unquenchable lust for nearly everyone. Paul’s a true player whose sexual preferences stretch across every color of the proverbial rainbow, even bragging at one point about possessing the skill of being able to find anyone attractive. “I’m not a man,” Paul says when in discussion with a gay roommate in San Francisco, heartbroken from the throws of an intense lesbian relationship in which he changed into female form for almost a year in efforts to make it work. And it’s true that Paul does not know how to identify. We feel for Paul, unable to locate himself without better vocabulary, as it was in the nineties. There are plenty of wild sex scenes in here, but the most standout is when Paul is in his female form and uses a strap-on as a top for the first time, a true gender-bender moment.
Ending this list with a big ol’ bang, we have The Sluts—a book not for the delicate—but then, none of Dennis Cooper’s work is. Labeled “the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction” by Bret Easton Ellis, Cooper’s ability to shock and compel you with a window into the savage hearts of horny, dysfunctional, and deranged men is at large here. Plunging immediately into the storyline with an online review of a potentially underage twink escort known only as “Brad,” we fear for Brad but never expect just how insane it will get for him. The novel is composed entirely of web-based reviews, discussion groups, phone call transcripts, and emails centering around this deep, dark plotline set in the early days of the internet. The Sluts is a tale of one escort becoming the center of vicious fantasies, lies, projections, and exploitation. The freakiest sex scenes are the ones for snuff films—and may cause more repulsion than appeal.
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