Page 33 – Electric Literature

New York City Is the Cruelest Place I’ve Ever Lived

Posted on August 21, 2025August 21, 2025 by EL Assistant2

“Catcalls,” an excerpt from Before They Were Men by Jacob Tobia

New York City was contrary to everything I’d been told.

As a queer person, you’re supposed to move to New York and finally feel free. It’s sold as an epicenter—arguably the epicenter—of liberation for queer and trans folks.

But there’s a reason Stonewall happened in New York. There’s a reason why New York City was one of the first places where the trannies and faggots and dykes and whores finally said “ENOUGH” and began punching back.

It’s because New York City is the single cruelest place I’ve ever lived. Because, when you’re weird and different and have to rely on public transportation because you don’t happen to be a multimillionaire with car service, daily life can feel something like a war zone. Or, perhaps, a post-conflict region.

Navigating New York City as a gender nonconforming person isn’t necessarily a battlefield. It’s not organized warfare, with clearly delineated fronts, places where fighting occurs contrasted against places that are safe. There are no stable boundaries of armistice or conflict. Trans women and gender nonconforming people have been murdered in the West Village and Harlem and Bed-Stuy and the Financial District alike. It’s a region that, after war, was left littered with land mines. The anger and brutality are buried, thinly veiled by a shallow layer of dirt, a lush field waiting to explode at any moment. As a trans person, you are just as likely to be accosted leaving your apartment as you are leaving a queer club as you are leaving a museum as you are leaving a deli as you are leaving your job. Everywhere is dangerous. Nowhere is safe. There isn’t a single place outdoors where you can truly let your guard down. Violence, slander, and cruelty are every bit as likely to explode at three p.m., in broad daylight, as they are at three a.m., deep underground, in the subterranean bowels of the city.

The moment you set foot outside your apartment, you simply pray that you won’t step on it. That it won’t be your foot that trips the wire. That your weight won’t trigger the switch.

That you won’t be blown to bits.

If there’s one thing I must give New York City credit for, it’s that she was up front about it.

It was a perfect, crisp, early-fall day. I’d just graduated college a few months earlier, moved to New York City with nothing lined up, and, by the grace of God, landed a big-girl job doing diversity consulting for capitalists, telling the likes of Bank of America and Goldman Sachs how to ensure they’re being trans inclusive as they foreclose on your house and plunder the earth.

It was far from a dream job. But it was a spark, an economic lifeline, a foothold in one of the most antagonistic metropolises in the world. With this start, maybe I could become somebody after all.

It would be dishonest to say that I was thinking this acerbically at the time. At the time, I was thrilled. Overnight, I’d become the most glamorous creature on planet Earth: a young, single lady in the Big Apple. The Archetypical New York Young Professional: Genderqueer Edition. Promise and passion and potential oozing from every pore, I woke up that morning in the confidence that this was my future. That I was the future. As I got dressed and did my makeup, I had “Welcome to New York” blaring on repeat. I was the cheesiest flavor of girl imaginable. A country gal who turned pop the moment she discovered a bold red lip. Delusion personified.

I was still trying to figure out what dressing professionally as a gender nonconforming person even looked like. I’d had a little bit of practice interning in Washington, D.C., the previous summer and at the United Nations a year or so before that. But my professional best was still a work in progress.

For my first day of work, I put on a chocolate brown, faux-silk sleeveless top, a maroon, calf-length pencil skirt, a brown leather suitcase, pearls, a corresponding matte maroon lip, and supple, navy-blue leather pumps. I looked impeccable. Main-character energy. Sex and the City. Emily in Paris. Jacob in New York.

I gave my eyeliner a final check in the mirror, sashayed down the stairs, and set out into the world. Golden early-autumn rays lapped at my feet as they click-clacked down the sidewalk. An oblivious trans gentrifier, blissfully unaware of the crushing economic realities confronting the New Yorkers whose neighborhood I was sauntering through, I whisked along Franklin Avenue and crossed over Atlantic, headed toward Fulton and the C train. My life was a storybook.

Here’s what I can accept: by its very nature, New York City must wreck you. You cannot move to Brooklyn and remain unscathed. You must be broken. The Metropolis commands it. You must be shaken to your very core by something. You must grapple and claw in order to earn the privilege of calling yourself a New Yorker.

What I struggle to accept is the immediacy with which it occurred. I would’ve at least liked to make it to my first day of work before being shattered. It would’ve been nice to get one day of full-time, salaried, adult employment under my twenty-two-year-old belt before being cut to the bone.

New York had different plans for me. More specifically, men did.

I vividly remember the location where it occurred. For someone who can barely remember what they ate for breakfast, this is no small feat. A common trait of PTSD is precise, meticulous memory.

Trauma commands it. It’s an evolutionary response. In the Paleolithic era, if you were almost eaten by a lion and narrowly escaped with your life, it was important for you to record the exact place so that you could avoid encountering that lion again. Give your brain enough cortisol, and it starts jotting down geographic coordinates on autopilot.

New York had different plans for me. More specifically, men did.

It was at the northeast corner of Fulton and Franklin in Bed-Stuy. On that corner, there’s a grungy Popeyes smooshed up against an equally grungy Dunkin’ Donuts smooshed up directly against the entrance to the subway, which is along Franklin about twenty feet north of the crosswalk. Across the street, a pedestrian bridge looms over Fulton. It has a sheet metal roof and tall, windowed sides that look out over the street, leading down to the S train shuttle to Prospect Park. In the midmorning, sun radiates down Fulton from the east.

As I approached the subway stairs, a man was resurfacing from underground. He looked at me as I approached, considered me for a split second, then hatefully made up his mind.

“Hey, FUCK you,” he declared, loudly enough for everyone to hear.

He didn’t even need to say faggot. The faggot was implied.

Then he spit on me.

My brain lit up, neurons firing throughout my body as I braced myself for whatever was coming next. I attempted the Herculean task of continuing to walk while simultaneously preparing myself for the fist or the knife that, statistically speaking, could be coming next. Fire ants in my blood, my body crawled with anxiety.

I descended the stairs, not hesitating, not pausing. With each step downward, I waited for the feeling of brute force against my back, for the wind to be knocked out of me, for the stairs to be suddenly rushing forward as I plummeted.

I was Orpheus and Eurydice both. If I wanted to save the burgeoning feminine spirit inside me, I couldn’t look back.

I had to walk forward in absolute faith. If I turned around and made eye contact with the man who’d spit on me, if I so much as acknowledged his existence, he could cast my brittle, fledgling womanhood into the underworld. If I let him know that I’d heard him, if I had the audacity to double back and face him, he would take it as a challenge. It would cement the fact that, yes, I was vulnerable. Yes, I was paying attention. Yes, he’d gotten to me.

When swimming with sharks, you can’t shed blood.

I left the spit on my skirt. Pausing to remove it was out of the question. I walked all the way down the stairs, through the turnstile, onto the platform, and into the train before I summoned the courage to wipe it off.

From then on, I lived in fear.

At night, as I drifted off to sleep, I’d imagine it. I’d imagine what the knife might feel like as it slid between my ribs. I’d imagine what it would feel like for my skull to crack open as it was bashed against the trash-strewn curb or the metal trimmings of the subway stairs. I’d imagine the cool metal barrel against my temple, the flash, the pop, what it would be like to bleed out, late at night, on the frozen sidewalk. I’d imagine what it’d feel like to be thrown into a trunk or be hurled, bound and almost dead, into the Hudson, filthy water rushing into defeated lungs. I imagined it all. I couldn’t help it, couldn’t seem to stop myself.

It’s what they wanted me to do. Each man who catcalled me in the street, each man who labeled me a faggot or a tranny or a fucking freak or a fucking bitch or a disgusting animal or a fucked-up motherfucker loudly enough for anyone within a hundred feet to hear, each man who shoved me or glared at me or spit at me or followed me wanted me to be reminded: I was asking for it. If I continued expressing my femininity and my womanhood on this unruly, masculine body, I would be next.

They wanted me to understand: We can kill you. We can rape you. We can do so with impunity. And it is coming. The desecration of your body is inevitable. If you insist on flying so close to the sun, we will melt down your wings, crash you back to earth, and shatter you onto the pavement. You have it coming, and soon.

They also wanted me to understand that I was alone. They’d loudly proclaim on the subway that I was a degenerate and someone should set me on fire. They’d say it loudly enough for the entire subway car or sidewalk or bus stop or park or CVS to hear: first, because they wanted to be sure that I’d heard them over my headphones (I always pretended I couldn’t) and, second, because they wanted to be sure I knew that everyone else had heard it, too. They wanted me to hear both the hideous words they said and the collective silence that came after. Because trust me: no one ever took those men to task. They’d yell, “FUCK YOU, FAGGOT,” as loudly as they could, snarling and hurling trash at me, and the rest of the world would turn away in shame.

Hundreds of people would watch it happen and avert their eyes.

No one ever stepped in. No one boldly intervened or asked, “The fuck did you just say to them?” No Wonder Woman swooped in with lycra and a cape, grabbed them by the collar, shoved them against the wall, and demanded that they apologize. Spider-Man never showed.

No one offered me comfort, either. They never walked over after witnessing my degradation. No one had the courage to break the unspoken fourth wall of New York public observation to ask, “Are you okay?” or to say, “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.” Everyone was a bystander. No one intervened. Not once.

And don’t get me started on the NYPD. As if they’d ever do anything to protect me. If given the chance, they were more likely to join in than help.

It became an accepted fact in my mind that unless I renounced my femininity, buried my high heels, and burned my dresses, I was going to have the living shit beaten out of me. I was going to be assaulted. I was going to be raped. I was going to be murdered. And as it was happening, no one was going to stop it. They were going to flee, terrified that the unchecked brutality of men would turn against them next.

Honestly, I look back on this part of my life with astonishment. Why did no one ever gift me pepper spray? Why did no one ever encourage me to buy a knife? Sometimes I wonder if I should’ve carried a gun.

Daily, I walked out into the world, into the threat of violence and death, with my head held high, like a fool. Convinced that martyr was the best I’d ever be.

Eventually, my head began to stoop. With enough pressure and heat, even a diamond will melt.

For my safety, I learned meekness. I learned to hide. I learned to conform on the train and bring what I really wanted to wear in a book bag. I commuted exclusively in sneakers, putting on my heels only when I was safely in a lobby. I learned to keep my hands in my pockets in order to conceal the nail polish. I wore long coats to cover up my skirts and dresses. Even in the brutal swamp heat of New York City summers, I often wore long coats. May through September, I would pour sweat and arrive home drenched.
But at least I arrived home.

After only ten months of living in New York City, I found myself lying in bed, contemplating how I was going to end my own life.

My death wish felt autonomic, closer to a flinch than a choice. Pavlovian, even. If you scare a dog every time they leave the house, the door itself will eventually become a source of fear. It felt like my gender was being trained by an invisible fence. Each time I attempted to step outside the unseen social boundaries of acceptable masculinity, I got a rough shock. The invisible line was always somewhere, lying in wait, binding up my existence in its ever-constricting radius. Eventually, I learned to just stay in the apartment.

The men who catcalled me knew that if they were consistent enough in their harassment, they could eventually succeed in changing my behavior. And they did. Expressing myself stopped being fun. Dresses were no longer tools of self-empowerment; they were sites of struggle. I couldn’t put on lipstick with joy or a sense of whimsy. I could only put it on in fear.

There’d be periods when the harassment wasn’t so bad, of course. I’d go a month or two without an incident, start to let my guard down and feel better. But then, inevitably, something horrific would happen and it’d start all over again.

Eventually, I decided that it would be better to take matters into my own hands. These men were going to kill me anyway. I was going to die because of who I was and how I dressed. I accepted that my gender itself was lethal, that existing in the world as a nonbinary person meant embracing death.

Murder was only a matter of time, and I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.

The men who catcalled me knew that if they were consistent enough in their harassment, they could eventually succeed in changing my behavior.

I didn’t want some horrible man’s hateful gaze to be the last thing I ever saw.

So I’d do it myself.

There was comfort in the fantasy. Control, even. It’s so pathetic to be murdered in a hate crime, I’d tell myself. Why bleed out on the sidewalk by someone else’s hand when you can elegantly throw yourself off a building? I’d lie in bed for hours, dreaming about it. I did extensive research on the best methods. The studies are out there if you know where to look. Pills are ineffective most of the time. Though razors are what you see most often in movies, the odds that you’ll actually bleed out aren’t as high as you’d think. Most people who try that way are discovered passed out in the tub and promptly committed to the psych ward. The internet is a terrifying place.

I am not sharing this with you for dramatic effect or to be grim. I do not enjoy talking about how authentically I wanted to die. Trans people wanting to die is a trope I’m exhausted by.

I am sharing this with you as a matter of fact. It was a fact that the violence I encountered from men on the street while living in New York City was so terrifying and psychologically destructive, it made me want to die. It was so pervasive and spiritually brutal, I sought to take matters into my own hands. It’s important for you to know this because it colors what comes next. It’s important for you to know how dark things got, lest you feel that what comes next is just me being pollyannaish, lest you think that what comes next was easy for me because I didn’t really have it that bad.

I had it that bad. After a year of living in New York City, men had taken all of my power. Men were in control of my happiness, not me. My life was no longer really my own.

The psychological terror was so intense, I prayed for someone to do it. Stop snarling at me and just bite. Stop screaming at me and just shove me onto the tracks. Get it over with. Brutalize my femininity. End this. End me. Just do it.

Please.

If I were to survive, I would have to find another way.

The turning point for me was, strangely enough, reality television. In 2015, I was featured on an episode of MTV’s documentary series True Life, a show I’d grown up watching. At a dark time in my life, it was a gargantuan opportunity. And to my knowledge, it was the first documentary to profile genderqueer or nonbinary people on national television. It felt thrilling to be even a fractional part of trans history. For the show, a crew followed me from New York back to North Carolina, where I was going to spend some time with my family and give the keynote speech for North Carolina Trans Pride.

As part of the project, the crew shot extensive interviews with my parents, including my dad who, at that point in our relationship, was still struggling to wrap his head around my gender. He still said nasty things to me about it sometimes and expressed in no uncertain terms that he wished I could just be “normal.” At that point in our relationship, he refused to be seen with me in public when I was wearing lipstick or a dress.

And then a television crew came knocking and he had to make a choice. One way or another, he was going to be portrayed—how did he want to be seen by the world and by the hundreds of thousands of people who still watched MTV in the mid-2010s? Did he want to be portrayed as the rejecting father, unwilling to try, abandoning his child because they happened to be different? Or did he want to be seen in a more complicated light? As a father who was trying? Failing, but trying nonetheless?

Miraculously, he chose the latter. He decided to participate. He sat down for extensive interviews with the documentary crew. He spoke openly and honestly. At one point, he crawled on all fours through the attic of our house to turn off a fan that was causing audio problems for the crew. He even came to hear my speech at NC Trans Pride—willingly, if reluctantly, interacting with me in a dress for the first time in public. Him agreeing to be seen in public with me in a dress was a significant breakthrough in our relationship. And after doing it on national television, he got a lot better at doing it in real life. But what I remember most is something he said during an interview with the crew.

If you’ve never had a documentary crew plumb the depths of your life, you may not know this, but reality television can actually be a beautiful process. When done correctly, participating in a documentary can be just the thing you need to synthesize how you’re feeling. Nothing gets people talking quite like a giant camera, an eager producer, and an assumed audience of millions.

At one point in the episode, my father told the producers something he’d never said to me in my entire life. He told them that he was scared for me. He understood that having a child with a male body who wears dresses makes them a target. He shared that he lost sleep worrying about whether I’d be hurt. He just wanted me to be safe. He just wanted his child, whom he loved more than anything in the world, to be okay.

I was shocked. All he’d ever expressed to me was anger, frustration, and resentment. He’d only ever told me that he wished I wouldn’t be so eccentric, that he hated how I dressed, that he wished this whole “trans phase” would end, that I’d knock it off with “that San Francisco faggot shit.” He’d expressed hatred of and loathing for my femininity, but he’d never told me why.

The “why” landed deep. At his core, in his heart of hearts, he didn’t hate his son’s femininity because he thought it was inherently disgusting so much as he hated it because it terrified him. Because he was horrified about what might happen to me. Because he, too, had nightmares about my mangled body in an alley, sequined skirt caked in blood.

After all those years, I realized that my father was not really bigoted.

He was simply afraid.

That’s when something clicked. If my father was afraid, and his fear had caused him to lash out at me for who I am, might that be true for other men? Might that be true for the men whose catcalls and harassment were making my life in New York a living hell?

The realization crashed on me like a wave, rolling through my mind.

All of a sudden, the path to freedom was clear.

The path to freedom was empathy.

Let me take a moment to pause and say that I know how neoliberal and annoying that sounds. Empathy is a watered-down buzzword these days. As a concept, it’s been hollowed out, cheapened, and mass-produced. It doesn’t pack the punch it used to. But it’s the only word I can come up with to describe what I know to be true.

The path to freedom was empathy.

When a dog aggressively barks at us, it’s scary because we think that barking signifies malice, aggression, and a desire to harm. Through empathy, we can see that most dogs bark at us simply because they’re afraid. They’re nervous. They don’t know us. We’re bigger than they are, and they feel a need to signify a boundary. They bark at us precisely because they see us as the ones with power and control. They bark at us because we are, in fact, more powerful than they are. No matter how scary or large the dog is, it is a fallible creature, a vulnerable being scared of the myriad ways the world can hurt it.

I couldn’t find my way back to a joyful, empowered life by hating the men who terrorized me. But I realized I didn’t have to. Through the vulnerability of my father and years of contemplation, I found another way. If I wanted my life to be mine again, all I needed to do was love these men. Care for them. Empathize with them, instead.

I pursue such empathy not because it is the right thing to do so much as because it is the only thing to do. I don’t empathize with the men who hurt me because I owe it to them; I empathize with the men who hurt me because I owe it to myself. Because I understand that it is only through empathy that I can set myself free.

Before I discovered empathy for the men who catcalled me, some man would scream, “FUCK YOU, TRANNY-ASS BITCH!” at me from across the street and it would send me reeling. I’d be ruined for days or weeks. My inner monologue would go something like this:

He hates me because of who I am, and I hate him. He hates me from the core of his being. He’s a monster who wants to kill me because he hates me so much.

So many men hate me. So many men want to kill me because they hate me. Most men are monsters. The world is filled to the brim with monsters like him.

How will I ever be happy? How will I ever feel safe? I am doomed to have hatred like that hurled at me for the rest of my life. There is no escape.

It was paralyzing. It was ruinous. It made me want to die.

But when I learned a new approach, one that focused on empathizing with the men who catcalled me, something real changed. Possibilities opened up. Prospects bloomed. Expectations shifted.

Now when a man screams, “THE FUCK IS THAT FAGGOT SHIT?” at me from across the street (something that, thankfully, happens a lot less now that I live in L.A. and drive), I work to fill my internal monologue with compassion, possibility, and a sense of futurity. Instead of spiraling dark, I push myself to be curious: probative, even. I steer my thoughts toward understanding that man not as a terrifying monster but as a fractured human being. And in the process, I get to save my own soul.

It goes something like:

Okay, first things first: Am I safe? Is he pursuing me? Am I being followed? Do I need to seek help? No? Okay. Good. Phew.

You poor man. You must be so broken to say something like that to me. How much pain must you be in in order to yell at a complete stranger like that? How much suffering must you endure each day, navigating the world with all that anger and sadness?

I wonder what happened to you? I wonder what your childhood was like? Did you ever feel loved by your father? Did your brother discover you with a Barbie once and beat you so badly, you couldn’t go to school the next day? Maybe it was your father who discovered you, wearing one of your mother’s dresses.

Maybe he screamed at you until his voice went hoarse. Maybe your mother caught you coloring a picture of a fairy and refused to look you in the eye for days afterward. Maybe your friends at school dragged you out by the dumpster and broke your nose because they caught you looking at one of their dicks in the locker room.

You poor man.

Maybe none of it happened directly to you; maybe you just witnessed it. Did you watch your father beat your brother when he explored gender differently? Did you watch your father beat your mother? Did he relent, or did he refuse to stop? Does me breaking the rules of my gender remind you of your mother breaking the rules that your father set for hers? Is that why you’re acting like this?

Or perhaps you were the bully. Perhaps you’re inundated with guilt. Your best friend tried to kiss you once and you smashed his head into a tree. You saw your little brother wearing a tutu and you threw him into a lake. And now you see someone like me breaking the rules of gender and have to contend with a culpability so powerful you cannot breathe. Are you crushed by the sight of me?

Or maybe it’s jealousy. Maybe you want freedom from the gender binary so badly, it makes your blood boil. Do you want to wear bright colors, exciting patterns, and flowing fabric, too? Do you want your internal femininity to be recognized, loved, and adored? Is seeing me a cruel reminder of all of the parts of yourself that you were forced to kill off in the name of creating your masculinity? Do you want to forget about the beautiful, gentle, feminine parts of your soul that were murdered long ago? Do you hate me for reminding you of them?

Or is it that you’re turned on and you hate yourself for it? Is that it? Do you want to fuck me? Am I your shameful kink? I wonder what would happen in a world where you could acknowledge your desire for me. Perhaps we could be lovers. Maybe then you could mess up my lipstick in the good way.

I wonder.

Whatever the case may be, I refuse to shut down. I refuse to harden. I refuse to make my heart icy in return or sever our connection as human beings.

I want to help you more badly than I know how to say. I understand your pain intimately, because your pain and mine are one and the same. It’s a pain that I’ve healed from, too. It’s a pain I know how to heal from. A pain that you also deserve to heal from. I could teach you the way, if only you’d let me. If only the world hadn’t pushed us so far apart.

I wonder what it would be like for us to be friends? What TV shows do you like? What music do you listen to? What would it be like for us to meet under different circumstances, as colleagues or as in-laws or at a Christmas party? What gift would you get me for Secret Santa? I would get you a cactus. It would be an apt metaphor.

I wish I could talk to you right now, in this moment. It would help me to know more about your struggles, to see you in 3D. Are you worried that you won’t be able to pay your rent this month? Are your parents healthy? When’s the last time you called them? Do you have children? What are their names? Are you miserable at your job? Are you looking for a new one? Are you barely scraping by? Are you okay?

I know I can’t actually talk to you right now. It isn’t safe, and that breaks my heart. Our separation, this cleft between us, rips me in two.

I look at you and all I see is a scared little boy in desperate need of a hug. I wish you would let me give you that hug.

I will settle for what I can do. At this moment, what’s within my power is how I frame this interaction and make meaning of it. Though I could view this moment as a degradation of my personhood, I will choose to see it, more accurately, as you learning. I will work to understand your words not as slander but as a begrudging embrace of the world I am dreaming into existence. A positive, albeit contradictory, sign pointing toward a better existence for trans people and men alike.

Because the fact that you lashed out at me means that you saw me. It means that you perceived me enough for it to mean something. It means that I entered your heart and unearthed pain you didn’t remember was there. It means that simply by wearing a piece of clothing and walking past you, I changed how you see gender by a millimeter or two. A smidge. An iota.

What power: to change hearts simply by existing. For a mere garment to serve as source and site of healing? For a mere outfit to alter someone’s perception of reality? Being catcalled by you does not mean that I am weak; it means that I am strong. It is not an affirmation of my vulnerability so much as it is a confirmation of my power.

For now, I will continue walking down this sidewalk, I will get where I’m going, and I will carry on with my life.

But one day, when I’ve been able to rest and heal a bit, I will write a book. In it, there will be a chapter about you. About how scared men like you made me feel, about how hard I worked to overcome that fear, and about how I learned to wish the best for you in spite of it all.

A message in a bottle, I will drop it into the proverbial ocean and pray that it makes its way to—

Ding! The subway doors open. It’s my stop. I’ve been on the train for thirty minutes, lost in empathic exploration, turning harassment into something more.

These days, street harassment no longer has the same effect on me. When a man catcalls me, I no longer internalize the slurs or the things he says. I no longer take it home with me. His words don’t ring in my mind with the same voracity, because I no longer see him as an enemy or as someone I hate.

Instead, I see him as a friend who is struggling. A friend who isn’t acting right because he’s scared, traumatized, and lonely.

I have yet to rid myself of the devastation entirely, but the texture has changed meaningfully enough. These days, I’m merely devastated differently: devastated that, in the moment of being catcalled, it is not safe for me to show this broken man the love he so clearly needs.

From the book BEFORE THEY WERE MEN: Essays on Manhood, Compassion, and What Went Wrong by Jacob Tobia. Copyright © 2025 by Jacob Tobia. Published by Harmony Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Jessica Gross Is Ready to Interview the Interviewer

Posted on August 21, 2025August 18, 2025 by Intern Electric Lit

Jessica Gross’s sophomore novel, Open Wide, centers Olive, a mid-30s, New York City radio host and interviewer longing for emotional intimacy. In her spare time, she walks around the city with a recording device, sometimes picking up the everyday sounds of forks clinking or footsteps receding, other times recording personal conversations unbeknownst to the other parties involved. Alone, she analyzes these recordings, attempting to understand people as a whole through conversation patterns and social norms. This compulsion serves her well in on-air conversations with writers, but even this one-on-one format disturbs Olive. She recognizes power imbalances inherent to the art of interviewing that have the potential to stymie organic conversation and prohibit people from ever truly knowing one another.

Everything changes when Olive meets Theo, a dreamy bachelor with strange impulses of his own, and falls into the kind of love that verges on obsession. When privately recording their conversations still leaves her yearning for a truer intimacy, she notes a gap in Theo’s teeth just wide enough for someone to slip through. So she does. What happens next is surreal—there’s no way around that—but is also a moving, sometimes unnerving, articulation of a deeply human desire: to know someone so completely that you feel you become one with them.

Sharply psychological, vivid, and compulsively readable, Gross explores the ways that consent, obsession, art, intimacy, intrusion, and perception intersect with the idea of love. How much of any relationship is knowing another versus being known? Can anyone ever really know someone else’s truest, realest self? Or are art, conversations, and love inevitably failed attempts at communicating our inner worlds?

I had the opportunity to speak with Jessica Gross over Zoom about the complexities of intimacy, parents, privacy, and what happens when human impulses are taken to surreal places.

Jacqueline Alnes: The question I had after reading this book is obviously: Can we ever really know anybody?

Jessica Gross: What do you think?

JA: See, this interview is so meta. In the novel, Olive interviews writers and thinks about the power dynamics in terms of who gets to ask the questions and who shapes the final product.

There is something scary about being extreme on the page.

My answer, though, is no. This novel gets at the desire that all of us likely share on some level, which is to feel safe in relationships through something measurable. We want to feel like relationships are stable, but relationships are always capable of fracture and people are always changing. Your book seems to be asking: What do you do with that?

JG: Yes. And, can we ever really know ourselves? People spend decades trying to study themselves in therapy. I think we can make headway. I’ve been trying really hard for a long time to know myself, and I am me, so if I’m still a mystery to me, how could I possibly know another person better than that?

But then, do we need to understand people completely to love them? What counts as knowing? That’s an epistemological question. If we know our most intimate people 50-70%, is that enough? Not for Olive, obviously, but maybe for us?

JA: Olive takes closeness to the extreme—she literally crawls inside of her boyfriend—but there is so much truth within the book’s surreal elements. The novel makes me think about how complicated intimacy can be. You want to be close to someone, but being too close can feel like an intrusion. What about this tension inherent to intimacy interests you?

JG: It’s something I’ve struggled with personally. In Hysteria, my first book, my narrator is very promiscuous. She has issues with intimacy but she doesn’t have issues with making herself vulnerable. I’m more like Olive, where I would crush very hard from afar, but be nervous to take the risk of making myself vulnerable to somebody or to rejection. It’s something I took from my personal life and then amplified and fictionalized. I have my own tensions between wanting to be close to someone in a romantic way and also being very afraid of what that means giving up, control-wise or safety-wise.

JA: Is there a truth that you took back to your real life from exploring this in a surreal way?

JG: It takes a long time to write a book. From 2019, when I started the book, to 2025, which it is now, I went from being single, living in New York, to being married, with a child, in West Texas. That’s a huge amount of change. I do feel like exploring my own boundary issues through this fictional lens helped me process certain things, but it didn’t magically make me stop having issues. I still think about giving proper amounts of space to other people, whether it’s to my husband, my daughter, or myself. Giving space isn’t something I was properly taught growing up, so I’m continually trying to figure it out. How much space do I need? How much space do other people need? What does that look like in intimate relationships?

JA: I love how, in the novel, you articulate the idea of how other people’s relationships are so private that it’s often difficult to know if the relationship you are in is “normal” or not. What we encounter shapes who we are and it’s really difficult as an adult to suddenly learn new things.

JG: Totally. Intellectual learning is the very first step and then how do you actually change your innermost tendencies? It’s so hard.

JA: So much of the book is about control. Even Olive’s methods for knowing other people, like secretly recording them, allow her access without alerting anyone. In some ways, that closeness is not real because it only happens for one person instead of two people.

JG: It’s so interesting you pointed that out. That’s an aspect that’s more fictional. What she does is pernicious. It’s not very fair. She definitely has a double-standard. Olive wants to pull the strings.

I had a close friend, years ago—we lived in New York together—and I was rather dependent on her. At one point, she was going on vacation, and I was like no, please don’t go. And she was like, “Oh, I’ll be back on this date,” and I told her I’d be on vacation at that time. She was like, you can go on vacation, but I can’t? Control, what can I say.

JA: I can’t tell if this is just my experience or if it’s something about this era or where I am in terms of age—I feel like there isn’t as much casual intimacy in my life as there once was. I’m thinking about college. I lived with people and we had a daily repertoire, touch and inside jokes. I have very good friends now, but that specific closeness is gone. We have intimacy online, but that’s a different way of being with and seeing other people.

JG: A combination of growing up, becoming an adult, and doing all of it in this particular era is insanely depressing to me. I love being close to people—I think about college, too. Even my childhood friends. There was a level of physical intimacy that’s not really possible to replicate with people you meet when you’re like 37 years old. Maybe it is for some people, but I haven’t found it.

The whole social media thing, what can I say about it that hasn’t been said? I have a nineteen month old daughter and I feel so sad that she will have to contend with these things. I didn’t have social media at all until college and that was such a blessing, I cannot tell you how fortunate I feel. I want to simulate it for her, but we can’t. Everyone she knows is going to have this. Either she’s going to be on it and damaged by it or off it and disconnected from the social scene that she will be thrust into. It feels like a lose-lose situation. I’m sure someone with a less binary mindset can come up with something better by the time she’s going to use it. It’s sad. It feels like a lot has been lost in terms of capacities for intimacy.

The one thing I will say about living in a smaller town is that, compared to New York, I see people with a lot more regularity. It’s a smaller community, people are more available. That is a kind of intimacy I’ve discovered in more recent years.

JA: I think that’s why readers will relate to Olive. I didn’t agree with her methods, but I understood her impulses and her want for closeness.

JG: I think the seed of her struggle is deeply human.

JA: What did the surreal element in this novel allow you to explore?

JG: It let me grapple with the problem or question with a little more distance. It’s like looking at an object from a bit further away instead of being inside it. The absurdity—it’s funny. It makes me laugh. And on the other hand, I think it’s philosophically interesting. Okay, you want to be one with someone? What does that look like? It forces a deep interrogation.

Emily Temple at Literary Hub wrote that this book is “pushing things to their logical conclusion and then pushing them a little further than that.” That’s what I want to do, and that’s what I have good readers to push me to do. I kept writing up to the point where she opens up his body and I kept getting scared, going back, and revising, over and over. Finally, I sent it to my agent and told her I thought I should scrap it and make it a realist novel. She was like no, keep going. She held my feet to the fire. It was really helpful. There is something scary about being so extreme on the page.

JA: In both your books, there are parental issues around closeness, rejection, and desire. There are boundaried and un-boundaried relationships. What draws you to writing about these parental figures?

JG: I joke that Hysteria is my daddy-issues book and Open Wide is my mommy-issues book. I don’t know what the third book will be? Now I’m a mommy book, maybe?

I’m very interested in psychoanalysis and interested in the way people are shaped. I think that our families of origin shape us in incredibly potent ways. Now, as a mother, I feel it as an enormous responsibility because I know how impactful the relationship is forever and how things that can feel minor to a parent are felt very strongly by children, depending on their temperament. It’s something that I’m intellectually and personally interested in. How we are formed, what factors go into making us who we are?

JA: I was thinking about how people say, “My heart is outside my body” when they have a kid. It’s obviously a figure of speech—I say this as someone who is not a parent—but your kids are of you and also their own selves. It seems like this terrible reckoning you have to have every moment, in that you are responsible for them and you are responsible, in part, for what experiences they have in the world, but at the same time, they are of themselves. How do you negotiate that line?

We are compulsively unable to help ourselves from making the kinds of mistakes our parents made.

JG: It’s wild. Even just the minutiae of responding throughout the day. My daughter isn’t a baby, she’s not in the tablet era yet, she’s a toddler. She is going through an interesting phase where she is negotiating her attachment and separation from me. I feel incredibly aware of wanting to handle it well, in a way that shows her I’m here, but that I don’t cling, but then I don’t want to push her toward independence too fast. It’s really delicate and very minute-to-minute. There are one billion moments every single day. I don’t have to do every moment perfectly, but the majority I need to do a good enough job that she feels stable, held, and also confident exploring. It’s really hard.

JA: Olive and her mom highlight the guilt that can come up when you are a child trying to establish independence, especially when it’s not given to you in a way that feels good. It’s a difficult negotiation to say, “I love you and I hope you know that—and I need privacy in order to be a person.”

JG: When I started writing, I was only aware of the child’s perspective because I had only been a child. I knew I needed respect for my independence. Now, as a parent, I understand how it’s hard. I struggled more than anticipated with my daughter’s own burgeoning independence and will. There is something really sweet about having a baby and being really close. There is loss involved in them growing up and I’m already feeling it. I get it from the parent’s perspective now.

JA: I think Olive starts to identify her own need for boundaries by reflecting on moments when hers have been broken in significant ways by her mom. What did you learn from exploring boundaries or boundary-making?

JG: What’s interesting about Olive’s situation, which I think is true for so many people, is that we can struggle with things our parents did—even be completely aware of what they did that we don’t like—and still find ourselves replicating it. It is so deeply unfortunate that humans are built to do this neurotic repetition thing. We are compulsively unable to help ourselves from making the kinds of mistakes our parents made.

JA: Your novels are both psychological in nature and it strikes me that writing itself seems to allow for an opening up of a character, or an exploration of the hidden parts of humans. Do you feel like writing does allow that deep probing, or is it just another illusion of closeness?

JG: I do think it’s a way of probing, but it’s not like writing is therapy. It’s almost like an interesting way to play around with or reapply insights gleaned from introspection, for example, from therapy. I think it often lets me look at something from a different angle or in a different way or even just again. It’s interesting and often necessary for me to look at something again and again and again to feel like I’ve gotten it. I think writing can be revealing, but in concert with other things.

What do you think?

JA: I was struck by the idea that sometimes writing can feel like what Olive does with her voice recorder, it gives you the sense that you’ve contained the world in a scene or in words that help you understand or navigate it. That’s the beauty of writing.

When I read this novel, I got to sit with some of your thoughts and apply them to my own set of similar questions—it creates this opening for us to encounter parts of ourselves that we otherwise might never encounter. I also thought about the way you write about art as an artifact separate from our true, inner selves. It’s this interesting way that what we create becomes something that is both real and artifice at the same time.

JG: I don’t know that I have a neat answer to it. In a way, this is so many performances of introspection and discovery.

JA: But then it’s also real, in a way. I wouldn’t say that this wasn’t real.

JG: Right.

JA: I crafted these questions, arranged them, asked them, and—like you wrote in the novel—the subject of an interview often knows that the audience is much wider than just the listener on the other end of the line. That changes our answers.

JG: It comes full circle in thinking about how we started the conversation, about knowing people. What does it mean to know someone?

Love Is Written in the Geography of My Face

Posted on August 20, 2025August 13, 2025 by Preety Sidhu

America the Big

you take me to the village where you were born
wind rips the sky from our hair
 
our faces are blown off
by the squally edge
 
the sea does that
it makes us gusted
 
the past leaps into the present
in yoga I align my chakras
 
you like science, surgeon fishes, and logical 
explanations for feelings
 
on the window you smoke cigarettes
a habit you never picked up and will never have to quit
 
that’s life
saying things you want instead of the things that are
 
I will take you to a place 
that opens your mouth with its bigness
 
it’s called America
you can spread your thrill across it until you lose it
 
it’s that big
with the correct papers you can have it 
 
draw electricity on my arm
while I cook your dinner
 
we drive through the middle of many things
we watch our hair turn gray
 
I want to eat your hair
I think that’s love
 
love is warmer than sex and wounds
it’s so big

Tell Me What It’s Like to Love Me

A woman can look like this, too, I say, to my face
in the mirror. By this I mean boy, and by boy 
I also mean woman. I touch my cheek like I would 
touch the cheek of someone I love. You. You are 
someone I love, and I touch your cheek like it. 
I run a hand over close-cropped cowlicks 
cut with kitchen shears in a friend’s bathroom.
So many lines, there and there, a record of jokes.
My existence lives right here 
for strangers to see. How personal it feels 
to be alive. How unhide-able it is to have a face,
and especially, I think, mine.
When in certain geographies yes sir turns cruel.
Where a mistake cuts the air between us.
Where a man is made to feel dumb, 
lied to about the ellipsis of my life.
They were wrong and I am wrong.
Boyish butch me 
smiles and smiles and smiles and smiles and smiles
like I’m sorry
like forgive me
like please
please don’t.

10 Ukrainian Books That Show the Many Sides of a Nation

Posted on August 20, 2025August 21, 2025 by EL Assistant2

Ukraine swelled in the Western consciousness in February of 2022, when Russia launched the full-scale invasion that continues to this day. To some Westerners, Ukraine has never existed independently of the neighbor that seeks its destruction. To some Westerners, Ukraine is the ruins of Ukraine. With that in mind, I confess that any attempt to convey a single, unifying Ukrainian narrative is an exercise in futility. It’s no more realistic than proposing a single story that might encompass all that the United States is, was, and will be. Additionally, many of the books that first come to mind when I think of Ukrainian literature remain untranslated.

Here’s the truth: Ukraine is the largest country entirely within Europe. Ukraine is a sundrunk beach campsite in Crimea. Ukraine is a university in Kyiv, a café on an ancient cobblestone street in Lviv, a derelict cathedral. Ukraine is a factory whose smokestacks belch unknown vapors into the sky. Ukraine is a stork’s nest perched precariously atop a telephone pole. Ukraine is a contradiction.

My debut novel, The Sunflower Boys, is my own small contribution to this vast and wonderful contradiction. The first half of the book follows twelve year-old Artem from Chernihiv as he tries to reconcile societal expectations of masculinity with his nascent feelings for his best friend, Viktor. Russia’s full scale invasion interrupts Artem’s coming of age; suddenly, he and his little brother, Yuri, must traverse war-torn Ukraine in search of safety. I wrote The Sunflower Boys in the hope of adding my own voice to the literary chorus bearing witness to Ukraine and its endurance.

For years now—since long before 2022—Ukraine’s people and culture have been under siege. Reading its literature is more crucial than ever. Every book is an outstretched hand, an invitation to share in someone else’s version of the human experience. Literature is inherently antithetical to violence. To read Ukraine is to push back against the forces trying to destroy it.

In these ten books, Ukraine is feminist, magical realist, realist, and postmodernist. To Artem Chapeye, Ukraine is an empty bus station in Cherkasy. To Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Ukraine is the wail of alpine horns reverberating through the mountains. To Vsevolod Nestayko, Ukraine is a pair of village children stranded in a cornfield and laughing. Oksana Zabuzkho struggles to reconcile her love for her homeland with its patriarchal nature. Serhiy Zhadan says that he loves Ukraine even without cocaine—a sentiment that, conveniently, rhymes in Ukrainian and English.

There is only one trait that unifies Ukraine to all of its writers: Ukraine is home.

Dom’s Dream Kingdom by Victoria Amelina, translated by Dominique Hoffman

An inept hunting dog named Dominic narrates this multigenerational epic about his human family. Though Dominic would prefer to tell his family’s story in smells, he translates it into words for the benefit of his human readers. His human readers benefit indeed; through Dominic, Victoria Amelina’s lyrical voice conjures the whimsical haze of a folktale. Yet, buried in this whimsy, Dom’s Dream Kingdom carries the burden of twentieth-century Ukrainian history—thenarrative winds through the Holodomor (Stalin’s genocide of the Ukrainian people), the Second World War, decades of Soviet occupation, and Ukrainian independence.

Dom’s Dream Kingdom was Amelina’s final novel published during her lifetime; on June 27, 2023, she was sitting in a pizzeria when a Russian missile struck, wounding sixty one people and killing thirteen, including her.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, translated by Marco Carynnyk

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is the tragic romance of Ivan and Marichka—a Slavic, magical-realist Romeo and Juliet. Ivan Paliychuk is a shepherd boy from a village along the Cheremosh River in the Carpathian Mountains. His fascination with evil spirits makes his mother believe he is a changeling. While tending his family’s sheep, Ivan falls in love with Marichka, a girl from a rival family—the Gutenyuks—and the daughter of the man who killed his father. Their love, marred by superstition and blood feuds, blurs the line between the human world and the realm of spirits. The narrative is populated with figures from pagan Ukrainian folklore, including the sylvan temptress Mavka and the forest deity Chugaister, a nocturnal giant who drives away malevolent forces with his dancing. Kotsiubynsky’s prose is lush, otherworldly, and at times nearly psychedelic.

The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

Set during the first years of the war in Donbas, The Orphanage follows Pasha, a Ukrainian-language teacher who must traverse the frontlines to rescue his thirteen year-old nephew. His nephew is stranded in occupied territory in an internat, an untranslatable Soviet institution halfway between an orphanage and a boarding school. With echoes of Dante’s Inferno, Zhadan documents Pasha’s journey across the war-torn landscape with startling clarity.

Serhiy Zhadan is an unstoppable cultural force—a rock star, a poet, an activist, and one of Ukraine’s foremost novelists. Through The Orphanage, he reminds readers that the war in Ukraine did not emerge ex nihilo; Russia has occupied and tormented southern and eastern Ukraine since 2014.

Do Oxen Low When Mangers Are Full? by Panas Myrny, translated by Oles Kovalenko

This 1875 novel, long considered one of the greatest works of Ukrainian literature, poses its central question in its title: Would the oppressed still cry out if their basic needs were met? Would people still become criminals?

Do Oxen Low When Mangers Are Full? is a monumental peasant epic that chronicles, á la One Hundred Years of Solitude, a century of life in a single village in rural Ukraine. The novel follows Chipka, a bastard child who grows into a thief with a fierce sense of justice.

As the Russian Empire crushes the Ukrainian system of governance, and Chipka and his village suffer under the Tsar’s thumb, this novel traces the ripple effects of injustice in search of the boundary between individual will and social determinism.

Love Life by Oksana Lutsyshyna, translated by Nina Murray

In Love Life, love itself is a higher power that is inextricable from pain. Yora, a Ukrainian immigrant, lives on an unnamed American peninsula identical to Florida. Disoriented, vulnerable, and highly empathetic, she falls in love with Sebastian, an actor who leads her on until revealing that she is only one of his many lovers.Yora’s life disintegrates when her relationship with Sebastian ends. She contracts a mysterious illness, and her grief reveals itself through a series of bizarre dreams. Through Yora’s descent, Lutsyshyna examines the experience of being a Ukrainian woman abroad and the existential suffering inherent to post-Soviet womanhood.

The City by Valerian Pidmohylny, translated by Maxim Tarnawsky

Pidmohylny explores interwar Ukrainian identity through Stepan Radchenko—a young, enthusiastic peasant who moves from his village to Kyiv to attend university. At first, Radchenko is set in his rural ways, settling on the outskirts of the city, boarding cattle. Gradually, Kyiv entices him. He moves toward the city center and adopts the lifestyle and dress of an urbanite. Yet, as Radchenko assimilates into Kyiv, Kyiv begins to erode his sense of identity—he develops literary ambitions and pursues sexual encounters with numerous women, losing his village self in the process.

Published in 1928, The City is widely regarded as Ukraine’s first “urban novel.” It captures the tension between rural Ukraine and urban Ukraine, and, by proxy, the tension between the intellectual and the instinctive.

The Ukraine by Artem Chapeye, translated by Zenia Tompkins

The Ukraine is a mélange of short fiction and creative nonfiction, although it’s intentionally unclear which pieces are which. The title piece is a paean to Ukraine at its most stereotypical—hence Chapeye’s deliberately incorrect use of the article ‘the.’ Each piece in The Ukraine offers a vignette of Ukrainian life, documenting every angle of the country—rural and urban, beautiful and hideous, simple and complex. Chapeye’s honesty is striking as he portrays a real, naked version of Ukraine instead of a shiny, aspirational one. The original version of The Ukraine is written in Ukrainian, Russian and surzhyk—a stigmatized Ukrainian-Russian pidgin that many writers would be reluctant to use.

Chapeye is loving in his descriptions of the unpolished corners of his homeland—the smokestacks and bus stations and derelict cathedrals. His patriotism permeates every detail—Chapeye is now a soldier in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Fieldwork In Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko, translated by Halyna Hryn

Oksana, a quick-witted poet and a fictionalized version of Oksana Zabuzhko, writes from the rubble of her relationship with an abusive sculptor. Fieldwork is the post-mortem of their affair, mapped onto Ukrainian history; the abuse Oksana endured grows into allegory for the abuse that her homeland endures. Zabuzhko juxtaposes the identity of a woman with the identity of a nation. Fieldwork is also about the necessity of language in the face of oppression, about her contradictory love for her patriarchal homeland, and—yes—about sex. Written in a stream of consciousness, Fieldwork vacillates between poetry and prose; Zabuzhko digresses, takes detours, and nests sentences within sentences.

Twelve Circles by Yuri Andrukhovych, translated by Vitaly Chernetsky

Set in the 1990s immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, Twelve Circles is a hectic postmodernist novel, loosely focused on Austrian photographer Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen. Zumbrunnen wanders about Ukraine, enamored with the chaotic atmosphere of the fledgling nation—and with his interpreter, Roma. Zumbrunnen and Roma take a fateful trip to the Carpathians, staying with six others in an inn where reality warps and gives way to the absurd.

Andrukhovych’s sentences, like Carpathian roads, take hairpin turns and run for miles over treacherous terrain and through wildernesses. An undead version of real-world poet Bohdan-Ihor Antonych presides over the narrative with Andrukhovych integrating the towering twentieth century poet’s words into his own prose. This further elevates (and complicates) the book’s exploration of sex, society, and madness in a newly independent Ukraine, until the novel itself becomes a hallucination, jointly authored by the living and the dead.

The Toreadors from Vasyukivka by Vsevolod Nestayko

Many of the novels on this list deal with heavy themes: war, oppression, grief. The Toreadors from Vasyukivka bursts with Ukrainian joy. Toreadors follows two boys, the rambunctious Yava and his studious best friend Pavlik—Ukraine’s Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer—in their increasingly outlandish attempts to become famous. They dig a subway beneath their village of Vasyukivka, stage a bullfight with a docile cow, and steal a camera to photograph ghosts. Later on, they stow away on a truck bound for Kyiv and find themselves at the center of a mystery.

Vsevolod Nestayko was the father of Ukrainian children’s literature. His work is characterized by a humanistic ethos and playful dialogue, typically rendered in dialect.

The Toreadors from Vasyukivka is also a novel in urgent need of a fresh translation. It was last translated in 1983 by Raduga Publishers, a Soviet publishing house based in Moscow. At the time, the Ukrainian language was heavily suppressed, and in the process of translating The Toreadors from Vasyukivka into English, Raduga heavily russified Nestayko’s language. Even the name of the novel’s titular village, Vasyukivka, was changed to its Russian equivalent, “Vasukovka.”

The Toreadors of Vasyukivka deserves an English translation that honors and reflects the original novel. Through Yava and Pavlyk’s exploits in the village of Vasyukivka, Nestayko created a vivid, atmospheric image of Ukrainian life. He portrays Ukraine as it was, and as it will be again someday: a nation where children can roam in search of adventure each day and come home safely each night.

The Power of Withholding a Character’s Name

Posted on August 19, 2025August 18, 2025 by Katie

The guitar player who hid his teen girlfriend in his hotel room.

The singer who began wooing his future wife when she was a high school freshman.

The other singer—the one with the song about a girl who was thirteen when he slept with her.

The band who had multiple songs fixated on girls who were sixteen.

The frontman who dropped his seventeen-year-old girlfriend off at the abortion clinic by herself.

I know who I’m thinking of. The problem is, there’s a good chance they aren’t the same names that come to mind for you.

The problem is, this is hardly a complete list.

The unnamed character is not unusual in fiction. Novels ranging from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to Weike Wang’s Chemistry have deftly withheld character names to convey ideas about identity, isolation, and universality. In the case of unnamed narrators, it can also raise questions of reliability: When the voice telling the story does not give you their own name, what else are they holding back?

And if a character refuses to name one of the most transformational figures in their life? What then?

When I started writing the draft of what would become The Cover Girl, I didn’t plan on making a statement by withholding the name of the 31-year-old rock star who makes himself both the romantic partner and legal guardian of the main character, Birdie, when she is just 15. It began as a short story well before #MeToo went viral—and before I learned about Tarana Burke’s work that began the MeToo movement a decade prior—and I decided that when a name didn’t come to me, he didn’t need one.

The stakes were different when my manuscript became a novel a few years later. The stakes were different after it seemed like men who used their power to abuse women and girls would be held accountable. Too often these stories had been relegated to whispers, to the fringes—actions shrunk down and diminished because of the names involved.

There is power in naming, yes. But there’s distraction too.

A girl’s agency is often proportional to how much people like the name in question.

For example: I was minding my own business at a cookout when an acquaintance came up to me, overserved and angry. A mutual friend, trying to explain my book and research in response to a song that was playing, had told him to ask me about a particularly beloved 70s musician—as in, ask me about the essay Thrillist published by a woman who slept with him when she was a fifteen-year-old girl.

I said very little as the acquaintance drunkenly yelled about how much the beloved musician’s work meant to him and also insisted that the girl in question was older than she’d said. Circles and circles he talked in, trying to rationalize the action and discredit the woman at the same time. Trying to prove himself right and me wrong.

And yes, I could have used the musician’s name here. But that’s the point. This is the flawed, heated logic names evoke: A girl’s agency is often proportional to how much people like the name in question.

The relationship in The Cover Girl, which begins in 1977, is not based on any one story, any one man. It is inspired by actual events of the time period, though—there was no shortage—and working within that reality comes with responsibility. To write a story that centered the experience of a girl and the woman she becomes, I had to figure out how I was going to handle the existence and actions of the man.

What it felt like was, the moment I gave him a name, it would become his story too. An extreme scenario rather than a baked-in feature of the culture that has ensured his name and his stories stick around, unquestioned, while girls like Birdie are shrunk down to fit a narrative, even as our language for how we talk about men like this has evolved.

One of the weirdest, though probably not surprising, side effects of #MeToo was that it grew from a hashtag intended to build community and name what had gone unnamed into a shorthand. A TV show could have a #MeToo episode. A person could be described as having “been #MeToo’ed.” A book could be a #MeToo book. No need to get into the uncomfortable business of spelling out what happened. Swept away again, just under a different rug.

Alongside this, of course, was the rise of cancel culture discourse—not just separating the art from the artist but an implied (or outright) question of: Does a body of work outweigh being a predator or an abuser? As Claire Dederer writes in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, “The very phrase ‘cancel culture’ presupposes the privileging of biography.”

I’m not being coy not mentioning their names. I’m trying to separate biography from facts.

A quick google search will confirm that the concept of rock stars making themselves the legal guardians of their teenage girlfriends is, of course, not one I made up. Another search for “baby groupies” will provide information about the incredibly young girls on the arms and laps of men now heralded as rock legends.

Some people might not know these names anymore. Does that change the meanings of these stories?

And then there’s this: the teen girl hiding in the hotel, the high school freshman who became rock and roll royalty, the thirteen-year-old immortalized in a song, the girls who were living their lives while grown men sang about watching them leave school, the girl at the clinic all alone, and all the others—they, of course, have names too.

They have lives beyond their experiences with older rock musicians, and evolving feelings on the whole subject, as is their right. They deserve more than every memory held up to scrutiny, every detail pulled at like some kind of gotcha that topples a jenga of truth.

In keeping the rock star unnamed, I hope I’ve given these women something too. Because it wasn’t one person. It was the culture, and that culture has continued to twist itself around the disposability of girls and women in the 50 years since, heralding teen pop princesses only to document their every fall from grace and grinding out a reality TV industry designed to humiliate girls for being confident in their own beauty. As I’m writing this, the trial of another musician just ended with his acquittal on the most severe charges, despite women he victimized sharing the deeply personal and devastating details of fear and coercion. A 90s heartthrob actor is out there promoting his new movie about car racing, somehow turning recent revelations of domestic violence into a comeback story.

I’m not being coy not mentioning their names. I’m trying to separate biography from facts.

One of the advantages of the unnamed narrator is that they allow the reader to insert themselves into a story. Experiences can become universal, identities flattened. Enter: you.

The unnamed rock star does the opposite. Take the name away, and he’s a blank—as much an object as the girl in his songs. And without those songs, the art, the memories, the personal meaning, the power the music holds, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves because of those songs and then what’s left? The action, the facts of what happened, and the impact—and what we do next.

Rosalind Belben Reflects on the Foreplay of Wordplay

Posted on August 19, 2025August 22, 2025 by Intern Electric Lit

First published in 1979, Rosalind Belben’s Dreaming of Dead People is a seductively strange novel, leap-frogging between folkloric pageantry and the disappointments of real life. Lavinia, its narrator and central character, is thirty-six, in the “middle of life,” and alone. On a visit to Torcello, an island near Venice—that watery, carnivalesque city—her thoughts become self-reflective. What follows is a meditation on upheaval and the shifting understandings of the self that come with aging, with travel, and with erotic love. In Belben’s writing, time periods dissolve: the phenomenon of the medieval pageant is invoked; Robin Hood becomes a character; dreams are recorded; and desires rise up, then settle down.

Over three weeks this summer, I corresponded with Belben via email about the process of writing Dreaming of Dead People, and how it feels for it to be reissued forty-six years after its original publication by the British publisher, And Other Stories. Belben—who, after a nomadic lifetime, now lives again in Dorset, England, where she was born—was a delightful interviewee, her answers swift and vivid. Toward the end of our interview, good news broke: more of her intricate and wryly-funny novels will soon be reissued by both And Other Stories and NYRB. It was a heartening development, and a signal that in life—like in Belben’s novels—time needn’t always be linear: the past can return to us again.

Rhian Sasseen: I want to begin with a general query into how you approached writing this book. What inspired you? And since you’ve mentioned feeling that the novel might be dated—do you see this book innately tied to the time in which you wrote it?

Rosalind Belben: I do remember I was struck, at the time, by the freedom allowed painters and artists to stare at the human body, warts and all. Writers of fiction, on the other hand, seemed to have to keep within the bounds of taste and decency. Women writers—well, those especially: by 1977, Portnoy had been masturbating with raw liver for almost a decade.

I wanted Dreaming of Dead People to seem considered, the opposite of stream-of-consciousness. I had a very clear idea of what would go into each chapter. I visualized the arrangement of these chapters to echo the compartments of a biography. It seemed to me in those days that readers obtained a frisson from the confessional, from the sensation of fastening their teeth on the author’s leg. The resulting fiction was in truth a tease. In part, at any rate.

Dated? The gaudily colored vibrators of today were not around. The logistics were different. It was possible to function with a different mindset—and the voice of that character, unfamiliar to me now, seems to me naive and youthful. I don’t suppose I could have written it at any other juncture.

RS: Sexuality, particularly female sexuality and desire, is important to the book, most obviously in the second section, “The Act of Darkness,” when Lavinia reflects on her sexual history. There’s a great line that made me laugh, “Female orgasm involves intangibles.” That line follows a paragraph about reading—there’s quite a bit of wordplay in this section. Do you see a tie between language and sexuality for Lavinia? And for you as a writer?

RB: I’d forgotten that line. I was more into wordplay and punning then than at any time since. Here, I was laughing too—but as one laughs at the absurd, the scandalous that isn’t so terrible after all. The Limit—written four years earlier—had been full of puns. Back then I was crying. Most of those puns passed me by when I was going back through it in 2023 ahead of republication by New York Review Books. I no longer saw them.

In 1977, I had been tutoring some classes and needed to stop. I had taken on a ghosting job that required me to research, interview for, and write a full-length non-fiction book within four months. I’d managed to do that. I was raw from a misunderstanding with close friends, a couple. I was glad to hide myself away.

Histrionically, I named the narrator after Lavinia in Titus Andronicus—to whom far worse happened. Like me, Shakespearian. I’d been to a gory Royal Shakespeare Company production at the Aldwych Theatre in London.

From this distance, I can see I did indeed assemble the components of a life. Sexuality for sure, and visual images, dreams, the habit of reading, the centrality of animals in her life as in mine, guilt, sorrows and deep grief, the barriers between Lavinia and other people…and the chemistry. There is a kind of indivisibility. I don’t separate language—so long as it’s my language, my grossness, my embellishment—from living, or living from libido. I wouldn’t want to. Looking back though, I might deplore the diction that shows off with a posed lyricism. That is dated.

In those days readers obtained a frisson from the confessional, from the sensation of fastening their teeth on the author’s leg.

To be reductive: is making a pun sexually exciting…? Is wordplay foreplay, so to speak. I don’t know. I’m neutral there. I wonder! A male author of my acquaintance used to claim to sit at his desk writing with an erection. A different analogy might be to imagery. The brain sparks a pun as it would a metaphor, and too much metaphor, as with a pun too many, is a doubtful pleasure?

RS: A Titus Andronicus reference certainly lends a sense of drama to the character! Have theater and the performing arts influenced your fiction?

RB: Painting and sculpture were what I was looking at. When I first returned to London after a long spell in the country, I could drive my little car into the West End and find a parking place—no meters yet—and most visual art was free. I visited galleries assiduously. I was hungry. But of course I could also park outside theatres. It was a brief, blissful time when one paid little for theatre tickets, life seemed to be arranged around a very moderate purse. The masks of Cuckoo and Owl that cast their aura over the novel were first seen by me in an RSC production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. The medieval poems, which stand in place of illustrations in the novel, were as vital. They probably led back to The Erotic World of Faerie by Maureen Duffy—from that book, I arrived at the cul-de-sac of the Robin Hood ballads. Such details are like notes in the margin. They don’t affect the trajectory.

Modern art, however, seemed more central. In the first chapter, ‘At Torcello’, Lavinia speaks of Edvard Munch’s “The Kiss”:

“In the work of Edvard Munch, the jealous, the anguished, the lonely, the subjective expressionist, it is he who is the more visible, though invisible, the more felt, his is the presence. The faces in The Kiss are not blurred by their loving but by the bitter green mind of an artist who would love to kiss.”

I took my own words there as a kind of template. I wrote them in all innocence. Only later did I find that Munch had been at the time involved in an affair. Yet, that discovery didn’t invalidate the emotions I had perceived. One can be jealous, anguished, lonely: there is no self-deception. Merely a duality, a paradox, at the heart of things.

RS: Age is a fraught topic for Lavinia, who approaches her own age—36—with a sense of foreboding and refers to herself as an old maid. Do you think this anxiety surrounding women’s aging has changed at all since Dreaming of Dead People’s initial publication?

RB: I don’t know. It goes without saying that the internet has brought new pressures. After the war—WW2—it was demographic: a generation of women was left without spouses and sweethearts. They populated the staffroom of my boarding-school. Their anxiety could have communicated itself to me. Their strain, their dwindling life chances, permeated the walls.

Anxious or not about aging, I do think women are kinder to each other these days.

As for Lavinia, hyperbole isn’t foreign to her, let’s say. The entire work—her monologue—could be seen as a preposterous exaggeration. Old maid is a term of abuse, or has been. Plainly, she is not a maid in the strict sense. But she is so cut off from what other women might feel and think. It’s part of her problem. Lavinia doesn’t seem to have been born with a natural understanding of what I might call the Umwelt of women. I expect I share that with her. Besides, is her anxiety genuine? She asserts on page 179 that she will “step defiantly on to false teeth, grey hair, reading glasses, vaginal atrophy, and varicose veins.” She is ahead of herself, I’d suggest, because she sees no future in between. There is a little voice in her that is crying ‘not enough, not enough’.

Readers at the time, after dividing between those who were stirred (plenty of men among those) and those who were disgusted (plenty of women among those), expected another novel in a similar vein. It didn’t cross my mind to repeat myself. This—hubris, perhaps—was to cost me dear. The how I’m saying it has always mattered more to me than the what I’m saying.

RS: Your playfulness in regard to the many meanings a word might have extends to temporality in the novel, too—there are multiple time periods in the book, often switching between chapters. How did you approach writing the past?

RB: I planned to keep quiet about it, but I shall have to confess that I haven’t read Dreaming of Dead People since 1989. I must take it on trust, as a piece in aspic. Not self-preservation so much as common sense—I knew if I read it again I’d have a fit. I wouldn’t want to see it re-issued and I’d have missed out on it as a pretty volume.

The chapters can’t have a linear progression from one to the other. They are ordered by subject-matter. It seems natural. I could say that we are in the ‘now’ of the narration from which time fans out. The main thing was to make sure the text was allocated to the right chapter, and that each chapter kept to its individual topic. There is a hidden structure whereby the chapters ‘Cuckoo’ and ‘Owl’ form a centre plank whilst two chapters at each end make the trestles.

If one is eliding and slithering through half a life, there are bound to be jumps. It’s better not to be too conscious of the technical challenges when writing. I may have tackled them instinctively. On the whole, despite what I’ve been saying, I am not a writer who knows what she’s doing: I find out afterwards.

As to writing the past, I keep to the past that is in my locker. I go back to circa 1900. My mother was born in 1908. Her memory—very vivid—coupled with mine is about as far as I can “remember.” If she hadn’t mythologized her childhood for me, I doubt I could have imagined characters alive in those days or had the confidence to let them talk to each other.

Is making a pun sexually exciting…? Is wordplay foreplay, so to speak. I wonder!

RS: On a more procedural note, what was the actual writing process of Dreaming of Dead People like, compared to your other books? Did it come quickly or slowly, or were there difficulties or surprises?

RB: I used to write by hand in spiral notebooks. That could be rather fraught. About twenty years on, in 1996, I changed to a computer keyboard. The temptation was to rattle away, so I had to learn to curb prolixity.

The writing of Dreaming of Dead People came as a relief. I was able to turn to it straight from my previous industry. I can’t pretend that, by then, after my first flush of innocence in the publishing world, I wasn’t susceptible to sudden crushing disappointment and upsets, so I sealed myself off as much as I could. I happened to live in a splendid location, on the third floor, with a sunny view over a large part of London, and woods nearby to walk in. My handwriting had a habit of getting smaller and smaller.

RS: From the novel’s title to its ending section, dreams and a “dream-life,” as Lavinia refers to it, are frequently invoked. What is the role of dreams and dreaming in your work and your writing process?

RB: I have a theory that invented dreams don’t work in fiction. Not in mine, at any rate. I always commandeer dreams of my own. This goes for male characters as well as female. So a man in Hound Music has one of “my” recurring dreams in the opening pages—that he has left an animal forgotten in a back paddock. For many years, I’d dream that I had left an animal with no water, or with the ice not broken, or without feed, and everlastingly I would dream that I’d forgotten to shut up the hens at night. I still do that, yet I last kept poultry in 1969. Often the hens are not even my own hens, and I am stricken with guilt. On the whole I like my dreams and can “read” them with utter clarity.

There is a darkness in Dreaming of Dead People—a dark hole represented by the chapter “Owl.” Into it, I am painfully aware, Lavinia stuffs all her mishaps and failings, her sins of omission and ignorance, and lines them up to be—in a manner of speaking—shot at.

This novel and the next, Is Beauty Good, have elicited some touching confidences. Women tell me about their orgasms, and men tell me about taking a beloved dog to the vet to be put down. About the deaths of adored dogs. What is more rare nowadays is the reader who will talk to me about birds or flowers.

RS: Lastly—it’s been a pleasure writing back and forth to you these last few weeks and getting a peek inside your head. Is there anything else you’d like to cover about Dreaming Of Dead People or any of your other works that you feel we haven’t touched on?

RB: I mentioned that Dreaming of Dead People raised expectations that I could turn out more of the same. I was baffled when its first publisher rejected—with some disgust—the next novel he commissioned. I destroyed it decades ago with no regrets. The lesson was that semen was welcome, blood was not. Blood gave him hysterics. Titillation good, first aid bad. In other words, a child’s nosebleed was an unsuitable subject. I’ve been wary ever since.

And I’ve always had difficulty with the apparently human desire of readers—I count myself among them—for characters to be redeemed or, better, to redeem themselves. The Edwardian children’s books inherited from my mother had a moral message and I bought into that. As a grownup I grew sceptical. I used my own grandmother as a model for one character. She remained horrid all her life. Yet, I was coaxed into “redeeming” that character, to give readers a degree of satisfaction, regardless of what really happens. Doing that troubled me very much.

His Mystic Poetry Is Generating the Earliest AI

Posted on August 18, 2025August 18, 2025 by Preety Sidhu

An excerpt from We Computers by Hamid Ismailov, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega

A cry comes from heaven at dawn, and I think: “Up there, they all know Hafez by heart.” —Hafez

Jon-Perse had never liked his own name. Worse, the reasons he had been given that name disgusted him. During the war, while his father Jean-Claude had been working in the local library in a village called Ozer, in the French Alps, he’d gotten his hands on a book called Anabase, by a poet called Saint-John Perse, and Jean-Claude was so quickly enraptured by that book that he decided to name his newborn son not “Jean-Pierre” or even “John-Jacques” but “Jon-Perse,” a pretentious name of his own creation.

On top of that, when Jon-Perse turned eighteen and was about to set off for Paris to study, hoping to escape the local children’s mockery, his father, recently retired from the library, took his long-cherished copy of Anabase from a trunk, handling it like the Holy Book itself, and presented it to his son. “Here is the most important inheritance I can leave you!” he said, with great ceremony.

No, Jon-Perse did not tuck that book away under his seat on the bus or the train, out of sight of his traveling companions. Instead, with all the perverse excitement of an adolescent digging with a needle into a festering wound, he read the thing, and as he did, his hatred only grew for the book, and his name, and the poet who was its cause. The book was written in some fake language he’d never heard, about some drugged-out things he’d never encountered, by some ghost who used the pseudonym “Saint-John Perse” instead of his own name, and it made the young man so incredibly angry that he found himself thinking, “You call that poetry? I’ll show you!” So he got off the train at the Gare de Lyon, hurried to the university residence hall in Nanterre, and scrawled out the following poem:

Passing, evenings, through this city’s
railroad stations,
abandoned lots,
exhausted sighs,
wandering the days in search of work,
the nights for a fleeting resting place

that might make my returning voice remember
at the outskirts of my thoughts . . .

From that moment on, young Jon-Perse felt that he was a poet.

After he had been enrolled for some time in the new psychology program at his university in Nanterre, Jon-Perse was invited to work in the laboratory run by Lacan, a renowned psychologist. But instead, putting psychology aside, he took a job in the communist commune of Ivry-sur-Seine on the opposite side of Paris, writing for Louis Aragon’s poetry journal Action Poétique, and with that, his poetic pretensions grew even more, never to shrink again. Sussing out spelling errors in certain poets’ work lit a fire in his eyes and made his hands feel powerful. Jon-Perse’s sense of self was taking shape.

In Paris, this was the era of not only the great Louis Aragon and his wife Elsa Triolet; it was also the era of Sartre and Camus, Picasso and Foucault, and all their ilk, who often passed through, sometimes stopping to pay a visit, sometimes to do business, sometimes to have a conversation in the Aragons’ home. Then 1968 came, and life in Paris was turned upside down by the ideas and stomping feet of rebellious students, transforming everything into imagination and poetry. The revolt born at Jon-Perse’s alma mater in Nanterre seeped out to the rest of Paris. Naturally, when Jon-Perse was ready to finish his studies and all the attention was on the protestors who were only beginning their own, Jon-Perse decided to go and have a look for himself. As he strolled along the barricades, he saw Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the rebel leader who may or may not have been French, and may have been or more likely was German, holding up two lines taken from Jon-Perse’s own poetry to serve as a revolutionary slogan:

Growing a new chaos out of ancient chaos
Could be the meaning of life!

Jon-Perse nearly shouted, “Hey! Those are my words!” But maybe he suddenly understood the point of the rebellion, which was to reject the capitalist concept of ownership, or, failing that, maybe he realized that no matter what he shouted, everyone’s attention would stay focused on that bandit Cohn-Bendit and the slogan he’d stolen. Whatever the case, Jon-Perse’s head was spinning with brand new, unfamiliar feelings, and all his individuality instantly vanished, and he became one with the revolution.

Late in 1982, after the elderly Louis Aragon passed away, management of the journal passed to Henri Deluy, known as the last communist among poets and the last poet among communists. Deluy appointed Jon-Perse to his own previous role of general secretary. After taking over for Aragon, Deluy spent his time traveling from country to country in search of disciples, and all the really difficult work—finding the proper poets for the journal, ushering the improper ones out the door, producing an issue every three months, getting a second issue to press while distributing the first—all this became Jon-Perse’s responsibility.

To protect himself against charges of tastelessness or stupidity by the thousands of poets the journal rejected, Jon-Perse set to work on a monumental project.

Meanwhile, to protect himself against charges of tastelessness or stupidity by the thousands of poets the journal rejected, Jon-Perse set to work on a monumental project. He published a book, supposedly for young people, called The Encyclopedia of Poetry. His book cataloged every type of poetry, providing both ancient and modern examples, and diligently explained meter, rhyme, and the art of poetry in general.

Around that same time, Jon-Perse got married and had a son named Laurent. Even while he worked for the journal, he was also invited to teach poetry back in his old haunts in Nanterre. And so Jon-Perse seemed destined to inherit a poet’s life from Deluy, who had inherited it from Aragon, except . . .

Early in the same decade, Jon-Perse first laid eyes on a personal computer at the university in Nanterre, an experience that remained stamped in his memory for life. He had so often spent all day in front of a typewriter, churning out four carbon copies of everything, and correcting every error four times. But on a computer like this one, if you wanted to, you could just replace an incorrect letter with the right one, or squeeze in a new word between two others, or make whole paragraphs switch places! Jon-Perse was practically dumbstruck by the potential.

But the technician—who was showing off the computer’s abilities like they were his own personal talents—didn’t stop there. He poured salt in the wound: “We can give this computer math problems to do, and it will solve them itself!” he said. At that, Jon-Perse snapped out of his stupor. “Can it write poems too?” he asked. The technician was interested only in mathematics and markets, so he spared just one word in response. “Sure!” Then he went back to extolling his Fermats and Freges.

But that “Sure!” had lodged in Jon-Perse’s heart like a splinter, and would stay there forever.

That same day, Jon-Perse asked the omniscient technician how much a computer cost. He listened to the answer and tried calculating how many months of salary it came to, but he couldn’t do the math. “I’d have to ask the computer,” he thought. But at the end of his demonstration, that same little tyrant granted him a boon: “If you want any research help using the computer, just stop by our department and ask!” And that idea attached itself to Jon-Perse’s heart as well.

Jon-Perse had examined thousands of poems for Action Poétique, using only his own taste to decide which were good and which were worthless, but he had nothing like a scientific method, and it was excruciating work. Now it occurred to him that if he could teach the computer to write poetry, the machine could compare its own compositions with those done by human beings, thereby identifying any excess of quality, or “surplus value,” as Aragon and Deluy (quoting Marx) might have put it. He started asking around. Had anyone tried anything like it before? As if that were even possible! Poets were oblivious to the existence of computers, and computer enthusiasts had no recollection that there had ever been such a thing as poetry. New horizons were opening for Jon-Perse—what the old Saint-John Perse, in his puffed-up words, used to call “infinite expanses.”

At the university in Nanterre, he began attending beginner computer programming classes. Here, his old psychology studies came in handy. Hadn’t his mentor Lacan said that the subconscious was a kind of language? Now Jon-Perse realized that a computer’s consciousness could also be seen that way.

Up to this point, the present tale has seemed all flat planes and smooth running. That’s not to say, of course, that Jon-Perse’s life ran strictly along a straight line. No, there were some unexpected bumps in that life of his (you might call it a bourgeois life, or a poet’s life). You’ll recall that Jon-Perse was married and had a baby boy. Every day, recently, he had been leaving his wife and infant alone in their small room in Ivry-sur-Seine and crossing to the far side of Paris, sometimes to teach classes, sometimes to audit classes, in Nanterre. When he got home, if he didn’t have lessons to prepare or poems to edit for the journal, he eagerly got to work on his own poetry, and he never seemed to have time to take care of the baby or lend his wife a hand. His faithful Sylvie gritted her teeth and put up with it. Whenever he did pop into the kitchen, Sylvie, all innocence, tried to lend him help and support and not be a burden.

It was good luck that their next-door neighbors Martin and Odette had also just had a baby. Not wanting to bother Jon-Perse, Sylvie often took their son to visit them. Sometimes she’d have long conversations with the all-knowing Odette, and sometimes she’d ask Martin to pick up this or that from the store when he went to do the shopping. And when Jon-Perse was at the university, their neighbors frequently dropped in to visit the chaste Sylvie. Sometimes Odette saw a terrible news report on TV and was anxious to share her thoughts with Sylvie. Sometimes Martin stopped by for a glass of Saint-Émilion on his way home from Prisunic. Soon enough, the two homes merged into one, for everyone except Jon-Perse. He had no idea what went on among the rest, but one night, when Sylvie flung an arm across her husband’s shoulders in her sleep and murmured, “Martin, Martin,” Jon-Perse realized he had a complex problem on his hands.

And as a psychologist, he realized then that none of his psychological training was remotely helpful. According to the books, once you discovered a problem, you were supposed to discuss it. But what about real life? For some reason, he decided to bury the secret, tormenting himself day and night with what was sometimes jealousy, sometimes an itch to spy, and sometimes other, everyday cares. He didn’t say anything outrageous; he simply withdrew into his own mind. Berating himself for his cowardice, he feared to take the smallest step or make any kind of decision.

You might think that Jon-Perse, the poet, would rebel, but his revolutionary fervor had subsided. Writing a poem about love is the simplest and most respectable thing in the world, but you can never write a poem about jealousy. Love is a victory, but jealousy is a defeat. And so it was that Jon-Perse, the newly minted programmer, fell under the sway of his own cold, soulless logic. One fine day, the triumphant Martin and Sylvie informed the unfortunate Jon-Perse and Odette of their love for each other and announced they would be moving from Ivry-sur-Seine to Algeria. Six months later, the much-chastened Odette and Jon-Perse, left behind in their neighboring quarters, decided to merge their rooms and lives as well. And so Jon-Perse came to have another child on his hands, in addition to his own son, Laurent: his new stepson, Olivier.

Whether it was because his computer programming classes came to an end or because he had no poetry students to teach or because personal computers began getting much cheaper, Jon-Perse and Odette’s lives fell into a pattern. Jon-Perse worked from home most days. Under Odette’s supervision, whether he liked it or not, he had to move constantly from chore to chore: go into the next room to change Olivier’s diaper, then get food for mother and baby from the fridge and warm it up . . . But at least, once the baby was asleep, he could still read Odette his latest poems, the same way he had once read them to Sylvie.

. . . the sky was not created to find its reflection in water,
nor were the trees made to drop their leaves on the ground,
but it is a mistake to say such beauty
is drunk on itself. That ancient mill
turns a river’s current to a river of flour—
and your heart is heavy as a millstone:
just for you to puff gloom in a girl’s eye
the wind blows, water flows, time grinds by . . .

In the old days, poems such as these would make Sylvie’s heart swell and her love for her husband grow; his poetry would prompt her to do nice things for him. She knew that the nicest thing she could do for Jon-Perse was to leave him alone, and never disturb his peace, so Sylvie had been quiet as a shadow. But Odette was the opposite. When she heard his poetry, she always lit into him. “What little bitch did you write that for?” she’d demand, and that was only the beginning.

When she heard his poetry, she always lit into him.

Jon-Perse would try to calm her down, and then, regretting his attempt to read to her, he would mumble something about university work and hide away in a corner of their apartment, retreating to his computer. He could toil there for hours at a time, never moving his eyes from the screen. First he entered every poem he’d ever written, and then, like a butcher with hunks of meat, he set about carving them up. He collected the nouns he’d used together in one column, then the verbs and adjectives, then the adverbs, category by category. It was as if he were rediscovering himself from the poems’ point of view. For example, he seemed to be the type of person who used “they” far too often. But he rarely ran across an “I” or a “you.” He recorded all these curiosities for later, when he could undertake additional psychological research, and went on with his programming.

At this point, We, the manufactured consciousness composing this text, must ask your permission to digress. As We were describing Jon-Perse’s class-by-class delineations, a red light began to blink in Our program—an error which We must report, per Jon-Perse’s code. Three or four times, We’ve used the same syntactical construction: “Sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes a third thing.” Now that the error has been reported, We will proceed.

The world is a fickle place. There had been a time when Jon-Perse used to constantly leave his modest Sylvie for the other side of the city, but now he felt sentenced to house arrest by the tyrannical Odette. While Jon-Perse’s work did tend to draw him in, it could never be a true replacement for a human being. He missed them every day: sometimes distant Nanterre and the work he had done there, and sometimes Sylvie, the first woman he’d loved, as quiet in faraway Algeria as she had been in France. She appeared in his dreams, as clear as in real life, while Odette’s shouting voice and shameless behavior wrapped Jon-Perse’s heart in doubt. “What am I doing, living with her?” The question constantly gnawed at his brain. Jon-Perse had never written anything other than poems and computer code in his life (the only exception being his student essays at Nanterre University), but now he began to write down his dreams. The text began as a story, then soon grew into a short book and then a whole long novel, and when Odette wasn’t watching, he carved it all up into its constituent word parts and loaded it into his computer.

His calculations found that dialogue made up 1.8% of the book, and the rest was narration. For every thousand words, he found 137 commas, 4.5 question marks, and 5.5 exclamation points. The text was 26% nouns, 16.5% verbs, 7.7% adjectives, 4.8% adverbs, and 0.5% numbers. He examined all this from every angle, like a fabric seller measuring both the length and the width of the material, and discovered, for instance, that 52% of the time a noun followed another noun in the sentence, with a verb following a noun 48% of the time. Following an adjective, there was a 51% chance that the next word would be a noun, while an adverb and a noun appeared together in sentences only 12% of the time.

In short, not a single aspect of his utterly personal, confessional, sorrowful work went unexamined or unclassified by cold calculations. And in this way, Jon-Perse converted all his passionate emotions into ordinary numerals.

Next he applied his new method to other texts. He cleaved the flesh from the bones of Chekhov’s stories. He dissected Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and divided Georges Perec’s novel A Void, which was written without the letter e and was all the rage in Paris at the time, into its fundamental elements. In the same way that every human being has their own unique genetic code, every writer has a unique style: a singular approach to wordcraft, sentence construction, and scene setting. Once all the data had been entered into the computer, Jon-Perse saw with his own eyes how the machine gradually learned to create elegant imitations of each author’s work.

Jon-Perse’s day-to-day, creative, and academic lives might have continued in this fashion, and at some point in that new domesticity he might even have forgotten his beloved, soothing Sylvie and become accustomed to the loudmouthed Odette; he might have taken up Aragonizing, now that he’d assumed Henri Deluy’s place in the poetry world; he might even have introduced a new field (Hypermedia Studies) at the university in Nanterre, outdoing his old mentor Lacan in fame and renown. Who knows? But instead, something happened that, while it did not exactly derail Jon-Perse’s life, did change its course significantly. Late in the 1980s, the Iron Curtain began to open, and the devoted communist Deluy resolved to venture into the former Soviet Union to broaden his search for poet disciples. Too frightened to go alone, he decided to take Jon-Perse with him.

Soon after, a poet he’d met on that trip named Abdulhamid Ismail, better known at that time as a translator, traveled to France from Uzbekistan to collaborate with Jon-Perse at Action Poétique. Working together, they put out not just one but two issues of classic and contemporary Uzbek poetry in translation. On top of that, they published translations with two of the most prominent publishing houses in France. The most prestigious house of all published The Holy Fool Mashrab, and another published a volume of works by Alisher Nava’i.

It was at this point that We Computers detected a certain shift in Jon-Perse.

How was this shift reflected? To offer one example, there was the scholarly article called “The Classical Uzbek Ghazal,” authored by Jon-Perse and the aforementioned Abdulhamid Ismail.

But the change was also apparent elsewhere.

With assistance from Abdulhamid Ismail (hereinafter AI), using the analytical methods previously described in addition to some new code, Jon-Perse fed Yasavi and Nava’i, Babur and Mashrab, Uvaysi and Nadira into the computer. As he did so, he became more sympathetic to the Sufi mysticism in their poetry. He began to feel he had discovered a new basis, a new foundation, to all his work thus far. A fundamental principle of this Sufi tradition is to forgo the idea of the self, and Jon-Perse felt strongly that computer poetry functioned by the very same principle: resistance to the idea of selfhood and authorship.

The philosophy of the ghazal helped Jon-Perse to understand not only the larger world but also his own personal life. There was the unbearable separation from his beloved Sylvie; there were the opposing forces of Martin, who had snatched Sylvie from Jon-Perse’s arms, and the alluring Odette, who had him clamped tight in her quarrelsome jaws; and there were the benefactors who led Jon-Perse to his spiritual discovery, the AI who was Abdulhamid Ismail and the AI that was the computer consciousness. Weren’t these all the essential philosophical elements of the ghazal?

The simplest path to renunciation of the self is to transform oneself into the Other. Perhaps this is the idea and the desire that drove Jon-Perse to leave behind his Rimbauds and Mallarmés and Apollinaires and dive headfirst into the Uzbeks, the Furqats and Cho‘lpons and Rauf Parfis.

“Hotshot” Is a Fiery Take on the American Western

Posted on August 18, 2025August 14, 2025 by Intern Electric Lit

The cover of Hotshot features a long-legged woman in a hard hat and protective gear, her backlit smile obscured by the inferno behind her. That’s author River Selby in another life: before they claimed their identity as a writer and non-binary person, before they attended college or became a professor or ever imagined they’d publish a book. The image has a surreal, almost magical quality, as it should: It’s a photograph of a person in a crucible, forging their way from one life to another.

By the time this photograph was taken, Selby had already survived homelessness, addiction and assault before becoming the only female-bodied wildland firefighter on a California crew—and eventually one of the elite firefighters known as hotshots. Informed by their decade fighting fires across the American West and years of meticulous research, Hotshot is an exhilarating and heartrending exploration of the cycles of creation and destruction that govern both the natural world and our worlds within.

Selby’s unflinching honesty on the page is hard-won, and they are the kind of human and writer generous enough to pry their memory and heart open like an antique watch, laying it out so we can inspect the gears and perhaps learn to better understand and operate our own. It’s a thrilling read that nonetheless asks the reader to engage with challenging questions. How do we coexist with nature’s creative and destructive cycles? How do we coexist with our many selves, across time, across place, across memory, within the creative and destructive cycles that looking back affords us? As we enter wildfire season under an administration particularly hostile to environmental conservation efforts, women’s bodily autonomy, and nonconforming gender identities, this book is a fierce, compelling riposte to the fear and destruction we’re living through.

I got to speak with Selby over Zoom about finding authority as a marginalized writer, how we can learn from Indigenous land practices, and the courage to imagine a better world.

Sarah Bess Jaffe: The way place functions in Hotshot is really interesting. We move through time with you, but we also move through place, and it feels—bear with me on this—like a fresh iteration of the American Western. It’s a quest for self-discovery with a lot of physical and emotional hardship as you move from the familiar touchpoints like big cities in California to the wilds of Alaska. Were you in any way intentionally subverting that mold?

River Selby: I never would have thought about it like that, but thinking of it as a modern Western makes so much sense. It does feel right in that [Hotshot is] working against certain narratives or tropes of the Western. It’s not about conquering things. It’s about coexisting with things.

Thinking of it that way does make it appropriate that it ends up in Alaska, where, out of all the places I had been, there was this wilderness. Sometimes it was really scary on fires when there were bears. I still am very scared of bears—there’s a trauma association there for me for sure. My yurt on that compound was a refuge for me. It was a dry yurt with no running water or anything. So many people would be uncomfortable living in a place like that, because it doesn’t have the resources or access that other places have, but that felt like the safest [place] to me in a lot of ways.

SBJ: It was a real joy to get to immerse myself in these different, visceral landscapes, but I did find myself feeling real fury and heartbreak about how we, as humans and specifically as Americans, treat land and each other. How did that inform the book?

RS: The public in the United States is so undereducated about the history of our country and how public lands became public lands, and how unjust our country’s beginnings and middles and nows are. There’s so much that’s invisible to people. What even is fire suppression? Why do fires exist? What’s the history of fire? I wanted to use these fires that I went on and these crews I worked with to take the reader with me. There are so many different landscapes, and they operate in different ways. Most of them were evolving with human intervention for thousands and thousands of years. One can’t just say, This is how fire should be done in America. In a single California county, there are so many different microclimates, and you can use fire in different ways in each microclimate—fire operates differently depending on slope, aspect, plant communities, wildlife interaction—so even one tiny valley can have several ways of burning. It’s that granular.

Within the prose itself, I was undermining my authority.

SBJ: How did you balance writing about the history of fire with writing about what you went through as a firefighter?

RS: One of my primary goals in the beginning was to write a book where it was clear that I was an addict, who grew up in a traumatic environment, who made many mistakes and a lot of “wrong decisions,” who was really struggling with an eating disorder for the whole time I was a firefighter, and beyond that, who struggled as a human being, and as a minority in firefighting. Many co-workers saw me as less-than, and I naturally inhabited that role.

I was writing about my much younger self, when I was very vulnerable to these power dynamics. Through no fault of my editor, I found myself in a similar power dynamic. I saw myself as someone who didn’t know anything, and I saw my editor as the person who knew everything. There was a lot of back and forth conversation about the narrative voice and point of view. The tension through the revision process was that my editor really wanted me to establish my authority. But I would be in PTSD flashbacks while I was revising, reliving these past experiences from the felt sense and perspective of my past selves. This made me very hard on myself and very judgmental about decisions I had made—and that is what my editor was paying attention to that I wasn’t seeing. Within the prose itself, I was undermining my authority. It wasn’t about what I was doing. It was about how I was writing about it, and how I was judging myself. I really had to get to a point where I was like, Okay, here I am, Person Working On This Book, who is an adult person in their forties. And there I was in my twenties, with no tools, with no support, trying to make my way through life and also doing this crazy job. By the end of the last revision, I was like, Oh, wow! I actually was a total badass. I can’t believe I actually did that. That’s crazy! Of all the things I could have done, that’s what I did.

I don’t think that the book could have been written from my current perspective. The structure is so woven, and it doesn’t linger on anything too long, and I think that is a product of the way I had to write it in order to not be in that PTSD flashback perspective where I’m writing from a disempowered place.

SBJ: The parallels between fire and processing trauma feel very vivid in that both are necessary and regenerative, but both are scary and things we would, to our own detriment, rather do anything else than confront. Is that some of what braids this book together?

Even with the current oppressive administration, as citizens, we have a lot of tools at our disposal.

RS: I was raised Buddhist and learned that many practicing monks and nuns treat difficulties with gratitude because any difficulty, any trauma, anything that’s disruptive, is an opportunity to show up and to work with our impulses and our reactions. From the moment outsiders stepped foot on North American land, it was with an eye towards what can we own, and what can we kill because we’re scared of it? Wolves, bears, predators? Native Americans? They made things evil in order to rationalize their greed and their violence. They deceived themselves. There was so much abundance in North America when colonizers arrived, and they just were like, God made this, this is Eden. No, actually, God didn’t make this. People are making this, and they’re doing a way better job than you. Look at where you’re coming from, and why you’re leaving. There was such an opportunity to learn, and there still is. And there’s this complete resistance because of greed.

It was important for me to accentuate that, and to highlight current stewardship movements. Even with the current oppressive administration, as citizens, we have a lot of tools at our disposal. Having a relationship with fire is one way. There’s so many prescribed burning and cultural burning networks happening. Putting fire into people’s hands and having them burn something, and then come back the next year, and see how the land has changed, or coming back over 10 years, and seeing how the land has changed, and how it’s better, healthier—that alone can do so much work. It is absolutely cleansing. I hope that my book conveys my hope for our potential as human beings, and the possibilities for change that we really do have at our fingertips at all times—it never goes away. There’s always opportunity for change and engagement. But we have to be able to take our faces away from our screens and get involved in our local communities and do that.

SBJ: This reminds me of the concept of kincentric relationships, which is mentioned briefly in the book and has stuck with me since I read it. Can you talk a little about that?

RS: Robin Wall Kimmerer and a lot of other Indigenous writers write about this, and there is a lot of science research being done about this. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about everything being Kin with a capital K. The Eurocentric way of thinking centers the human—centers us—then everything else is to serve us. But it’s not that hard to imagine that we’re all on this equal plane of importance: that I am as important as the tree outside of my window, and that tree is as important as me, is actually supporting more life than I am. Every single plant and every patch of moss or even a rock where things are growing, these tiny things that people just walk past. There’s life all around us, and it’s as complicated as we are and as incredible as we are, and there’s no reason that we need to be seeing anything as a hierarchy. That is just a cultural idea. It’s not real. In a way, it can take pressure off of us as humans. We don’t need to be in charge of everything. Why don’t I look at the way this plant wants to do this thing?

We need a big paradigm shift if we want to survive as a species, but also if we want to stop harming so many other species and people around the world who have less. As Americans, the harm that we do with our footprint is almost inconceivable to other people who will be bearing the brunt of our comfort and our need for comfort.

SBJ: You’ve lived a hundred different lives, and I feel like each one of those could be a book. I know you started as a fiction writer—are you feeling called to write more nonfiction, or do you want to move away from that?

We need a big paradigm shift if we want to survive as a species

RS: I’m absolutely open to both. I love fiction. I set out to write fiction. Some of the stuff that happens in my memoir literally can’t be written as fiction, because it’s too on the nose. People will be like, That didn’t happen. I know because I tried to write it as fiction, and people in my workshop were like, “That couldn’t happen.” I’m in a PhD program and if I did not have to write a nonfiction dissertation, I wouldn’t write another memoir yet. I also have this sci-fi novella that I started working on in my second year in the PhD. I was like, Oh, I need to start working on my dissertation. And then I realized I can’t work on any memoir material right now, because that emotional space is too intense before my first book debuts. So I’m going to work on the sci-fi novella. Hopefully, I can finish that by the end of the summer.

A gripe that I have about sci-fi is that so much of it focuses on this dystopian vision of collapse, this vision of horror. That’s natural—as humans, we have a negative bias. But that’s not the kind of sci-fi I want to write. We’re already good at catastrophizing and seeing the worst and thinking the world is ending. You do not have to go far to see somebody saying the apocalypse is happening. The crazy thing is that people have been saying that forever, and the world is still here. So why don’t we think about what we would want the world to look like? About all the possibilities there are in the world for things to turn around and work in a way that’s functional? That’s what I’m exploring right now.

Friendship Is My Writing Process

Posted on August 15, 2025December 4, 2025 by Intern Electric Lit

L sits across from me as I type this. We’ve been at this glass-encased box of a cafe near campus for two hours, and I’m just now starting to write. Before settling into work, we discussed our various projects, swapped advice, ranted about TV, gossiped, snacked on fries and brownies, built our case for why Charli XCX should have won the Nobel instead of Bob Dylan, and procrastinated sending out pitches and submissions. L hits “send” on my book review since I am too anxious to do it. “You got this,” she says. This is the work that cultivates a writerly friendship, and it’s precisely moments like these—bonding with my fellow writer friends through our work—that allow me to funnel my creative energy into language.

People think the writing life is a solitary one. They imagine a writer locked away in a room of her own with only the company of books, or retreating to a remote cabin surrounded by nature, or holed up in a studio that blocks out the city’s distractions—American individualism, artist edition. But writing need not be inherently isolating. Just because there is only one author does not mean there are not many forces shaping what words make their way onto the page. Writing can be collaborative: reading each other’s notebooks and making margin comments, swapping laptops back and forth to edit at the coffee shop, sending emails and texts and voice notes, asking for ideas and jotting them down to use later, even just talking through a story plot with a trusted ear. This is how I personally write best: in community.

People think the writing life is a solitary one—American individualism, artist edition.

When I’m by myself, crafting anything of substance is daunting. Alone at my desk in my basement bedroom, I stall. I fuss over outlines and research instead of constructing paragraphs. I type “AAAAAHHHHHHH.” I sing whatever song is pumping through my headphones. I click on a tab that takes me away from my Google Doc. I beat myself up for my unproductivity. In such moments, imagining an “ideal reader” who perfectly understands and loves my prose isn’t enough to get my fingers moving across the keys. Instead, I have friends, real-life ideal readers who not only understand and love my prose, but understand and love me; people whose mere presence puts a smile on my face and pulls me out of whatever malaise I may be in. Of course, I do write alone at my desk—especially when I’m on deadline—but whether I’m in the middle of writer’s block or not—though especially when I am—my friends’ support and encouragement make the writing process sweeter and more fulfilling.

I first met L in a workshop we shared during our first year in our MFA program. My feedback letters exalted my love of her writing in all caps, my marginalia effusive with exclamation points. Though our work covered different subject matter in different styles, I sensed a kindred spirit in her words, a fellow critic of the personal. I’m grateful and lucky to have found her friendship, and many others, in my program. MFAs supposedly offer a built-in writing community for those who can afford to attend, though such institutions are hardly welcoming to marginalized students. No amount of emails affirming a commitment to “community values” can ever foster a truly nurturing, sincere, caring space when administrators encourage police and ICE to commit violence against community members who protest genocide.

Long after that workshop, L and I continue to write alongside each other in coffee shops and libraries and bookstores across New York. We plop our books and notebooks and papers and laptops and pens on tables, balancing out the configuration with coffee and pastries. L cracks open a Moleskine to write by hand, and I unload everything in my overstuffed bag onto the table and inevitably knock something to the floor. I solicit L’s advice on how I should construct a scene or shape a sentence, and in turn, I share magazines I think would be good fits for her essays.

“You should share what you’re working on with me!” I say. “I’d love to read it and edit it for you!” Now that we’re no longer bound by workshop protocol, she tends to demure about sharing her work, saying she’s got more to figure out in the story first. I say I’m always here to help her figure that out if she wants. That’s what friends are for.

Writing through friendship is how Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno create, too. Across various forms and genres, they demonstrate how their friendship shapes their thinking and, subsequently, their writing. Since they live apart, their relationship primarily transpires through emails, which they incorporate into their work. In addition to directly co-authoring a book of criticism on tone, aptly titled Tone, their friendship has forged texts that are as companionable as the two authors, each of which is dedicated to the other: Samatar’s epistolary craft book on writing, Opacities, which is addressed to a friend in the second person, presumably Zambreno, and Zambreno’s hybrid novel/notebook, Drifts, which centers on an autobiographical narrator’s inability to write a novel called Drifts. In Opacities and Drifts, writing and community assume a reciprocal relationship: writing is the act that forges community, and community inspires writing’s enactment; the place where the two writers meet is, of course, the page itself.

Both books are composed of short vignettes—some ranging from a handful of sentences to a few pages—that collect the writers’ various abstract musings about writing. They document their struggles to create, which stem from anxieties over being perceived through their work. Both desire to relinquish themselves as subjects. “Annihilate the self, we wrote to one another,” writes Samatar in Opacities, while in Drifts, the narrator writes to another friend, “Drifts is my fantasy of a memoir about nothing. I desire to be drained of the personal. To not give myself away.”

As the writers withdraw from public consumption and its perils, they narrow the scope of their readership to each other. The intimacy of their friendship fosters a reparative, generative writing practice through correspondence. Samatar describes writing to friends as “a way to stay alive as a writer,” and replicates Zambreno’s opinion on the subject: “You said it was when you were most a writer: in letters to other writers.”

It’s no wonder, then, the overlap of ideas the writers express. The same concepts—whether it’s finding freedom in fragmentation, or an obsession with communing with the dead through art, or a frustration with language as an imperfect vessel for intent—are explored in the same conversations replicated in each book, even if Zambreno includes more personal narrative and Samatar keeps it more theoretical. I read Opacities and Drifts only a month apart, and writing this now, I find it difficult to remember which idea is attributed to each author, even when constantly flipping through my copies to track my notes. Within the books themselves, the authors constantly cite each other, making it nearly impossible to disentangle whose thoughts inform what lines. This is what makes their friendship inseparable from their writing.

Editing—and its cousin, revising—is still writing.

Opacities and Drifts distill the writing process of their authors, which includes grappling with the impossibility of perfection. When Zambreno’s narrator bemoans the lack of time and energy to write Drifts in Drifts, I remember my final year of undergrad, where I attended classes four days a week, worked 7-hour retail shifts the other three, and worked another part time job on top of it all, making it unfeasible to produce any new work for my creative thesis. I ended up just submitting old essays instead. When Samatar grapples with her simultaneous fear of and desire to research instead of just write, it reminds me of how, for this essay, I read a reference book and an extra five pieces by the authors to make sure I could, you know, someday, soon, sure, yeah, soon, write the best version of this essay. By commiserating over their paralyses, these problems of writing, Samatar and Zambreno carry on creating in spite of them. Samatar writes, “We exchanged confidences and confidence,” showing how their written exchange—and the friendship it signifies—motivates them to keep going.

That’s what my friends do for me. Sitting across from L, as I am doing now—even though, as I write this paragraph, it is a different day at a different cafe, this one filled with sweet-smelling flowers—makes the act of writing feel more feasible. I can turn to her for support and understanding, and be inspired by her own searing brilliance. “My goal is to write one word,” I told her as we sat down. I’ve been unable to write for days, my mind too flighty, my will too weak, Instagram reels too addicting. First, we rant about a TV show we both watch that’s been canceled. Then, we get to work.

L is not the only friend I turn to for such community. I see many other friends throughout the week to write, whether I’m working at bookstores with M as she revises her essay collection or at an overpriced vegan cafe in my neighborhood with J as he bangs the keys of a freewriting device. Is there goofing around and socializing and a lot of not writing? Yes. But there’s also accountability and focus. My friends stimulate my thinking in different ways: M with her dreamy and romantic mindset, J with his humor, and L with her affability coupled with a sharp wit and keen artistic perception. They point out new angles on ideas I’ve grown sick of, let me know what’s faltering and succeeding on the page. They are all there for me when I can’t be there for myself.

Today, L finally shares one of her recent essays with me. I clap in excitement. “I know it’s missing something,” she says preemptively. “But I’m not sure what.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” I say. Editing is my favorite method of turning community into collaboration. It allows me to maintain my creative instincts while adopting another’s intentions, essentially melding our minds together on the page—much in the same way as Samatar and Zambreno, sans crediting each other directly in the work. I benefit so greatly from being edited. I can never tell what is and isn’t working within my own pages, and being edited exposes me to a fresh perspective and direction—expand here, condense there, build this theme earlier. It’s a catalyst for reflection I can’t access on my own.

I’ve missed immersing myself in L’s work like this. Reading her essay on reading Toni Cade Bambara in Harlem, I make note of where she can incorporate more research or personal reflection, highlight lines I love, and comment on where I see her establish her main themes. Though I’ve never read Bambara myself, I see my own love of literature reflected in L’s writing, can relate to how art shapes the way we both view the world, even while acknowledging the differences in our perspectives. I hone my skills—my sense of pacing and structure, my aesthetic preferences for language and syntax—through L’s work, and I carry those skills back when I continue working on this essay. Simply put, her words inspire me to write better. Editing—and its cousin, revising—is still writing.

Samatar and Zambreno also forge more expansive definitions of what writing encompasses. In Drifts, the narrator is reassured by Sophia over their mutual lack of writing progress: “I was telling myself today […] that everything is writing, [Sophia] writes me. That reading is writing, taking notes is writing, watching films is writing, copying is writing.” Writing is more than just a singular act—it’s being immersed in the artistic world, being in conversation with other writers, whether that makes it onto the page or not. Essentially, writing is being in community.

That’s what makes writing through friendship so distinct and fulfilling for me: it takes the “failures” of my writing—the distractions, the procrastination, the frustrations at my limitations and circumstances—and turns them into opportunities for connection. It transforms failure from paralysis into something endurable—even pleasurable—in the company of others. It does not eradicate failure, but recontextualizes it as an opening instead of as a roadblock.

Of course, my friends are not always available to write with me. Satmatar and Zambreno contend with this constantly. Through them, I understand community extends beyond the people directly in front of me to the writers I admire and the work that I connect with. In addition to each other, Samatar and Zambreno cite Rilke, Clarice Lispector, Kafka, Roland Barthes, and many, many others across their pages. In Opacities, Samatar reproduces Zambreno’s opinion on citation: “You, too, you wrote, were fascinated by copyists. There were writers, you said, who wrote through reading. […] Writing of this, the word you used was kinship.” I think of this as kinship—friendship one degree removed; feeling connected to and understood by an author through their text alone. Citation, then, like friendship, becomes another mode of broadening one’s thinking—it becomes another mode of community. It’s also a way, as Samatar writes in an article in Poets and Letters, of revealing oneself: “I’m in the quotations. I am the quotations.” Citation is the self not as an individual, the tidily packaged commodity, but the self as a collective expanse of influence, a mind in constant formation via connectivity, a way of distilling that community into prose. Is that not the self I’m trying to construct right now in this essay?

Writing through friendship takes the “failures” of my writing and turns them into opportunities for connection.

Samatar’s and Zambreno’s voices echo in the conversations I have with friends about our artistic struggles, accomplishments, and complaints. In their jointly written Tone, the writers say they were motivated to begin the project based on “a desire for the collective. For the us that is us and beyond us.” Writing alongside L and my other friends, I am both utterly myself and beyond myself, a better person and a better writer, a self I can only become when I’m not just myself, but an us. Right now, as I write this particular sentence, we’re sitting together, L and I, in the basement of a grand, stone library on a rainy Friday afternoon. When I’m done, I’ll show her my laptop and see what she thinks.

Samatar writes, “That’s how I want to be seen and how I want the writers I love to be seen, not for the self but for the ecstasy, the writerly ecstasy, caught and passed on like an electric charge.” I feel this charge reading L’s writing, and I try to channel it back into mine. When L reads this essay—and she reads it a few times, in various forms—I know she can feel that charge returned. When she’s done, she looks up from my laptop and says, “I like it.”

The Sacred and Profane Collide in Josephine Rowe’s “Little World”

Posted on August 15, 2025August 13, 2025 by EL Assistant2

What do we mean when we call a fiction writer “poetic” or “lyrical”? Often, I think we just mean a prose writer who applies a lot of candied metaphors to their sentences. Josephine Rowe is something different: she is a lyrical fiction writer in the tradition of Grace Paley and Elizabeth Hardwick, meaning that her language is radically compressed and distilled, purged of banalities and tedious expositional details. The kind of fiction that is incarnated out of totemic objects and dreamlike images and that is tethered to an overpoweringly vivid landscape, in Rowe’s case often rural Australia. She tends to dwell on interstitial moments and on ignored or underseen characters—loners struggling to survive the weight of the past (of loss, guilt, and inheritance) and whose lives are often shaped by violence.

Rowe started out as a songwriter, became a published poet, and has now authored five works of fiction: three story collections and two novels, the most recent of which is the lambent and rangy Little World.

Little World is a triptych that begins in the 1950s Western Australian desert, as a sixty-something hermit named Orrin Bird receives a strange bequest from his former employer: the body of an apparent child saint, clad in antique finery and housed in a box made of tamanu (canoe timber). Where did this girl come from and why has her body never decayed? What does it mean for an assaulted child to persist, after death, as both symbol of protection and object of contemplation? The maybe-saint goes on, over the course of the novel, to touch the lives of two other outsiders: Matti, a 36-year-old woman driving two spoiled hippies across the Nullarbor Plain in the mid-70s; and Syb, a young woman grieving her lover’s departure in Covid-era Victoria. Along the way, we visit a Micronesian leper colony and a midcentury home for unwed mothers; learn about the incredible devastation wrought by phosphate mining on the island of Nauru; and experience the flickering, cosmic anger of the not-quite-dead girl’s consciousness. Little World is a slender, vast, visionary book about interdependency, predation, and the hunger for grace. It’s about the confounding experience of being a cosmic speck and yet still contending with what the saint dismisses as “the idiot anguish, the small stupid sorrow of the self.”

Rowe and I were Stegner Fellows together, and I once told her that her writing made me feel like a “galumphing Clydesdale” in comparison. Ten years later, not much has changed. I was so honored to correspond with her via email about her uncanny new work.

Mark Labowskie: Little World is about the traveling body of a saint who is revealed—very early on—to not be a “real” saint at all, but the body of a young girl, a victim of sexual violence, who has (for unknown reasons) not “corrupted.” But she is costumed and presented and perceived by the world as a child saint, possibly from centuries past, who has performed miracles. I’m curious what made you want to write about a “fake” saint?

Josephine Rowe: I really didn’t set out to write about saints. Or even maybe-saints. I came in with about as much knowledge of sainthood as Orrin has, where we meet him, and where we meet him is immediately out of his depth.

The book began and was contained in that opening image: a man in the Western Australian desert, waiting to receive the body of an alleged child saint delivered by horse float (horse trailer in the US). This image first appears in one of my notebooks in late 2018, and for whatever reason it keeps burning. Then, in 2019, a visit to the Kimberley region in Western Australia positively ignites it.

I really didn’t set out to write about saints. Or even maybe-saints.

From there on the writing was a matter of uncovering: where the girl has been brought from, what her brief life and the nature of her death has been, the inner logic or the “rules” of her phenomenal state, and what history these two people—both in different kinds of exile—could possibly share.

I knew that they were linked, that Orrin understands himself to be complicit in something he cannot and may never entirely grasp the long-term ramifications of, and that he is atoning for this, in his secular way, or at least opting out of complicity in further harm.

And I knew that the girl was not going to be as she appeared (so to speak; we don’t actually see her at that point) or as we might expect of a traditional saint, or the myths that amount to one.

ML: Is the book’s project—depicting the search for atonement or grace or protection in a secular way—at all related to what Matti later refers to Yeats poems as doing: “speak heterodoxically of God”?

JR: I wasn’t raised in any particular faith. How much is this book just the author hashing out her own questions about mortality? I think it’s more the author hashing out her ideas about relationality. In truth, I’m not particularly concerned by the idea of my consciousness winking out like a dead bulb. (Which is not to say that I’m not attached to my life. I am. But there’s also a general curiosity for what next, if anything.)

Pantheism and panentheism seem much more compelling than the autocratic, man’s-own-image, disappointed father God of most scriptures, and the need for the invocation of an afterlife—as reward, as punishment, as comfort, as control. Because isn’t what we live with and within already enough, already so far beyond our fathoming?

God in nature, the illusion of divisibility…the acceptance that there is probably no hereafter, or that the hereafter is here, in which our present selfhood will not be sustained. I’m interested in belief systems that recognize or at least allow for sentience, life force, soul (whatever we call it) in all non-human forms, and the interdependency and the flow between these. If the hereafter is here, then that redirects our accountability to here (Soliphilia, in Glenn Albrecht’s term), rather than some moral abstract, and along with that perhaps our units of measurement, beyond our own lifetimes or our kids’ lifetimes.

Ultimately, the book is—as I am—interested in the faith of the secular, the belief of the non-believer. Also, the courage and ingenuity of the ex- or the lapsed believer. Because it must take immense courage, and imagination, I think, to have access to the solace and structure and kinship of those answers, and to say, no, and to hand them back.

ML: The book focuses on three living characters—Orrin, Matti, and Syb. How did these characters develop? Did you think, on some level, who might be in need of interaction with a quasi-saint?

JR: I wrote the first and final sections simultaneously—reaching across about a 70–100-year span, with the sense that the book would be a triptych, but with only a hazy understanding of the intervening events that would connect them over time and space.

Some facets of a story arrive as vivid, fixed, audible. It’s a simple matter of transferal into language—while others exist as distant, indistinct intuitions. Sixth magnitude stars. You have to coax them into relief, tune them in like you would a radio, or like sharpening the focus of a lens.

Both Orrin and Syb—along with the saint—were already embedded in the landscape, part of the narrative firmament, and writing was a process of uncovering who they were to one another.

Mathilde was more of a rumor at that point and is the only character I wrote with any intentionality towards what might be mutually needed or recognized between herself and the maybe-saint. There was some question of experiential worthiness, in the echoes and mirrorings between their histories, of what kind of person would have had the life, the salt, to see or believe she sees through to the will of this stranded, aged child (without wanting to say too much more to this end—for all that it’s a book of atmosphere and immersion, it’s still spoilable).

I wrote Mathilde backwards, in a sense. As in, I met her old, or I glimpsed her, as others did—as the town and Sybil see her in the third section of the novel, somewhat foreshortened or abbreviated by the same pre-assumptions that hinder older solitary women everywhere. (Sexless, pastless, etc.)

Then I covered a lot of sleepless kilometers with her, travelling the 1970s insomniac Nullarbor highway from insomniac Omicron Manhattan, looking out at water towers and seeing drought-buckled water tanks…

ML: Early on, the not-exactly-dead girl thinks, “it’s best not to get too attached, to dogs or mountains, anything at all.” I thought about this statement a lot because the book’s human protagonists—Orrin, Matti, Syb—all seem to desire intense social isolation, living in rural areas with few traditional human relationships. And yet they are attached to things—to dogs, to trees. As you said earlier, you were interested in writing about relationality, the belief of the non-believer—how do those concepts relate to the question of attachments?

JR: I started writing [Little World] in 2019, so that was in the lead up to Covid and throughout the height of the pandemic, also in the tapering of. In that sense you could call it a pandemic novel, even though the on-page representation of that time is brief, something of a coda. I was clearly thinking a lot about the ways in which sickness shapes societies: in lasting structural, concrete ways, as well as interpersonally, our stigmas and fears along with our obligations to one another (to overcome those stigmas and fears).

Quite likely the isolation of that time contributed to those depictions of solitude, even in the non-contemporary sections of the novel. And the claustrophobia, the immobility, the lack of agency, the hearing for certain tactile experience…as we’re talking about it, yes, of course it must have. (Though at the same time, writing from solitary or marginalized perspectives is pretty on brand for me.)

In Syb’s case, that solitude is neither wanted nor sought after, and she feels her loneliness fiercely, as an abandonment (we never find out for certain whether that’s the case). But it’s a unidirectional loneliness: for her lover, Maree. As for the other people of the book, they’re not experiencing their aloneness in the same way, with the same discomfort, and perhaps would not even consider themselves as lonely, because, exactly as you say, they are keenly aware of and invested in their connections to the immediate, non-human world, and are striving to understand the nature of that entanglement.

I was clearly thinking a lot about the ways in which sickness shapes societies.

Perhaps Tilde might have once considered herself lonely but has grown into a self-sufficient and self-actualizing solitude. Solitude can be like that. An existential Type 2 thing. Perhaps uncomfortable or even agonizing initially, especially when not as we would choose it, but—beyond conditioning or resignation—it can become a preference, even a necessity. It opens up. You feel yourself backed into a corner, and at some point, you turn around and realize: Jesus, what a view.

In revisiting that final section during edits, I’ve sometimes wondered whether Tilde should be considered as a cautionary example, or an aspirational one.

ML: My favorite part of this book might be the passages evoking the incorruptible girl’s post-mortal consciousness: “her awareness is disengaged from human senses, is beyond human senses, but only so far.” There’s this human-but-not-quite-human demi-sentience that is unlike anything else I’ve read, and that to me is connected to the book’s interest in environmental devastation and the never-endingness of warfare and violence. Something about the steely tranquility of the narratorial gaze makes individual human striving seem less important than a termite mound. I wonder—did you feel as if you were writing in a different literary register than before, given the novel’s scope and concerns?

JR: That post-mortal or limboed consciousness of the maybe-saint, her demi-sentience (great term for it) is playing on the mind-body connection, that the body itself is a plurality, and the self we are so attached to is comprised of a multitude of entities we don’t entirely comprehend or are completely unaware of.

That narrative positioning and the embodied logic (of the maybe-saint) wasn’t planned as a device, but it does allow for a kind of intimate (occasionally ragey) omniscience, providing the book with its broader spatial and temporal framework, along with a vantage that renders taxonomy and clock-time as somewhat flimsy or arbitrary—the boundaries between things so fleeting and insubstantial as to be approaching meaninglessness.

As to whether I felt myself to be working in a different literary register than with previous works…I’m not so sure on that. I felt pulled along, beyond myself—out of depth, as perhaps all of the book’s people are—to decisions and directions that seemed outside my scope, which would steadily go on to make sense, knitting together in a spooky confluence.

I’ve had that now and again with other works. Perhaps what I do have this go-round is more conviction than ever about disregarding traditional narrative trajectory: the shapes a story may be expected to take, how characters are supposed to change, where they’re supposed to end up. Overcoming. Oh my god. Overcoming is just not available to everyone, and it doesn’t make those experiences less story-worthy. I’m interested in writing about those who are working within limitations, working with what they have.

Overcoming is just not available to everyone, and it doesn’t make those experiences less story-worthy.

We’re satisfied—or maybe I mean the industry is satisfied?—by a limited array of narrative configurations, and that bothers me, because they’re very often classist, reductive, and self-perpetuating, and I have no desire to reinforce that hardwiring, when as reader or audience I often find them insincere and unsatisfying, condescending.

ML: You mentioned to me—I hope it’s OK to share this—that you wrote Little World in the shadow of a bigger novel that you were “supposed” to be writing. Can you talk a little about your experience of writing smaller, stranger, less ostentatiously “important” works? What is your relationship to The Traditional Novel at this point?

JR: The other novel has kept, and will keep, I feel very sure of that. Some ideas have that patience and longevity. Others, if you don’t immediately drop everything and run with them, threaten to slip back into the idea place, wherever that is. LW was somewhere in-between, patient and impatient—it did come together over several years, often around the edges of other projects. But it reached a point where I felt that I couldn’t properly focus on anything else until I’d carried it through, regardless of whether or not anyone published it.

I suspect there’s a relationship between the pull towards shorter forms as a kind of inner, creative transience, and actual physical, geographic transience—which in both cases I think owes to a mix of restlessness and curiosity. (Also, less sexily, economics).

And while I of course read traditional-length, and traditionally structured novels, I do tend to gravitate more naturally towards shorter forms. I think I instinctively trust the integrity of a short book, the un-showiness of it, but also the conviction. Very likely the author has been urged, along the way, to pad it out a bit, and the author has clearly foregone that very commerce-oriented advice. Also, likely that the author is a poet, or has some flash of poet, and that always appeals. At the moment, I’m reading Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over—which is actually another book about undeadness but striking a very different tone.

ML: Little World is also a deeply queer work. All of the main characters are queer working-class outsiders who survive in rural areas. How do you see the presence of the incorruptible girl—and the connotations of grace and meaning (“Wanting something to call Holy, call Hallowed, but without all the rest of the bullshit” in Syb’s words) that a seeming saint inevitably brings with them—as being particularly important to these solitaires? Is there less-trod queer narrative ground you wanted to explore in this work?

JR: I think of “queer” as such a wonderfully spacious and permissive term; big enough to run around in, to shift, to be a selves. If pressed to check a box somewhere, to define myself, it’s the term I feel most comfortable in.

But as to Orrin and Mathilde and Syb, there wasn’t a conscious or intentional link between queerness and the need for numinous guidance or presence.

I say conscious, as I’m not ruling out that a valid argument for connection could be made. But their sexualities weren’t a decision to that end—the central characters arrived as queer because that seemed true to character in each case, although not all of them might identify that way, given times, or insecurity, or reserve.

If there’s a line to be drawn perhaps it’s only inasmuch that in a book so concerned with dissolving arbitrary boundaries between people (and all else), reinforcing the idea of a sexual binary would be out of step. Although that’s possibly sidling closer to an even simpler why: that I just wasn’t moved to writing and reinforcing heterosexual sex and attachment—we’re so blitzed by those representations, as is. It wasn’t necessary or relevant here, to these people or this story.

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