Free or Cheap Resources for Emerging Writers

Posted on by Jo Lou

For emerging writers, getting published for the first time can seem like a tremendous undertaking. Either you don’t know where to start, or no one wants to take a chance on publishing a newcomer. There is where you might ask, well, then how do you get published? To help ease the process, various writers, organizations, and other members of the literary community offer their own resources to keep you up-to-date and informed about any and all aspects of the publishing industry. From weekly newsletters to social media-specific tools, there is continued support to help you throughout all stages of your writing career.

Here are some of the free or cheap resources about where to publish, how to find agents, and details about contests, residencies, job opportunities, and more.

Community of Literary Magazines and Presses

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses is a great organization for both writers and publishers. For writers, CLMP offers a searchable database of magazines and presses and posts job opportunities with incredible publishers. As a member of the CLMP community, publishers receive consultations and a submission manager comparable to Submittable.

Duotrope

Duotrope is a subscription-based service that supplies writers with upcoming deadlines, statistics on various publishers and agents, a submission tracker, and searchable agent names. For $5 a month, these resources are compiled to give you everything you need in your literary toolkit in one platform. Check out their free trial.

Submittable Newsletter

Submittable’s newsletter, Submishmash Weekly, sends a curated list of writing news, opportunities, and podcast and book recommendations to those who are looking to commute in style. If you want to be regularly informed without the stress of mass unfiltered content, sign up for the newsletter.

Author’s Guild

Author’s Guild is a professional community for writers, advocating for authors’ rights. This organization helps writers learn about publishing, self-publishing, finances, publicity, and other aspects of the industry you might not know about. One of their most utilized features is their legal team, who can review any contracts to suggest recommendations and negotiation tips.

Study Hall

Study Hall is an online community for media workers. For 4$ a month, members access weekly newsletters of freelance opportunities, job openings, a weekly media digest, a Slack network, a listserve, and other helpful tools like a database of editors and a guideline to pitching outlets. If you’re a journalist/writer/editor of color, there’s a subsidized tier of 1$ a month.

Julia Phillips Writes

Writer Julia Phillips offers her calendar for funding deadlines, which includes fellowship, grant, and residency opportunities.

Minorities in Publishing

A 2019 survey by Lee & Low Books showed that “76 percent of publishing staff, review journal staff, and literary agents are White.” What does the lack of diversity mean for the book industry? Minorities in Publishing is a podcast, hosted Electric Literature contributing editor Jenn Baker, that features various writers, publishers, and members of the lit community talking about representation and race in the book world.

CRWROPPS

Originally a Yahoo listserv, this blog curated by poet Allison Joseph offers information on creative writing opportunities for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction writers. Posts include notices of calls for submission, upcoming writer awards, and other deadlines to help writers in various stages of their career.

Poets & Writers

Poets & Writers is a magical place, offering databases for writing contests, literary magazines, small presses, agents, conferences/residencies, MFA programs, and grants/awards/contests. Each of these databases allows you to narrow searches by various specifications, such as genre type, to give you the best and most appropriate options for what you’re looking for.

Who Pays Writers

The writing scene is challenging in terms of paying writers the full value of their words while sustaining the incredible work of literary journals in a system where there is little money to begin with. This is not to say only write for the publications that can pay top dollar; drying out meaningful and conscientious magazines would only hurt the literary ecosystem. For the writers who need to be financially mindful, Who Pays Writers compiles a list of publications’ pay per word and commentary from writers on their respective publishing and payment experiences. 

The Masters Review Blog

Every month, the Masters Review blog presents a list of contests, prizes, fellowships, and residencies that are open to submission for the month. Though no-fee entries do exist, the entry fees are generally higher for many of the opportunities provided. After cycling through the many ethical questions of submission fees, check out the postings and decide if the opportunity is worthwhile (and financially sustainable) for you.

Query Shark

For all your query needs, Query Shark is a great space to understand what differentiates a good query letter from a bad query letter. The website suggests tips, tricks, and constant real-world examples sent in from other writers learning how to submit queries. You even have the option of sending in your own query letter for critique.

Read Like a Writer

Electric Literature’s fiction magazine Recommended Reading has a new monthly series that offers writing advice on the craft of fiction. For “Read Like a Writer,” Recommended Reading editors Halimah Marcus, Brandon Taylor, and Erin Bartnett select stories from the archives “that illustrate a specific technique, style, or writing challenge.”

We Need Diverse Books Mentorship

For children’s book writers, We Need Diverse Books provides ten yearlong mentorships to the following book categories: Picture Book Text, Middle Grade, Young Adult, and Illustration. By helping emerging authors, WNDB hopes to support those starting in the industry with attention to diversity and inclusion. There is no fee application, so start assembling next year’s application.

Entropy Magazine

Entropy Magazine’s “Where to Submit” section details open submission periods for presses, magazines, journals, chapbooks, residencies, and other literary opportunities. The list is curated every three months by Justin Greene, which means it shows the very best of where writers can send their immediate work.

Manuscript Wish List

Manuscript Wish List is a website and Twitter account where you can search agents and editors by genre and topic. After writing your novel, you might be overwhelmed by the question of who to query. This resource is a great way to narrow down the search options to find someone who is suitable for your wants and needs. Don’t fret, though, finding the write person who understands your work is a process and should be chosen with care.

Binders Full of Writing Jobs

For the social-media savvy, you may already know about the “Binders Full of [Insert Here].” These are typically private community groups. Members of the community post job listings, pitches, and discussion posts. This Binders group, along with others more individualized to your writing needs or identity, is an accessible space to ask questions and be involved in the literary community.

Writers of Color Twitter

For any and all writers of color, this resource is for you! This public Twitter list shares an expansive array of writing opportunities, pitch openings, and jobs—not restrictive to publishing—to diversify the literary field and support the WoC community. Run by people who get you, this is an account where you can embody the crying laughter emoji with no shame.

Publishers Marketplace

Publishers Marketplace offers information about various literary agents and their book lists. The site also provides job listings on its Lunch Job Board, where a range of publishing jobs are posted regularly from large publishers like Penguin and New York Times to smaller literary presses. 

QueryTracker

If you don’t want to search the acknowledgments of your favorite books for agent information, search QueryTracker to see which literary agents rep your literary heroes. This resource is a great way to look for potential agents to query and see if there are common names or agencies popping up from established writers you admire or write in your bathhouse.

Translation Database

For emerging translators, Translation Database is a great resource by Three Percent and Open Letter Books to search for translated works via language, translator, publisher, or publication year. This is a great way to enter the translation field and see what new voices are emerging. Susan Bernofsky’s blog Translationista is also a great source if you are an emerging translator who wants to learn more about what’s happening in the field.

NewPages

NewPages offers searchable databases for literary magazines, writing contests, MFA programs, and calls for submission. The website posts recent opportunities with detailed information, such as what is published and various costs. You can whittle down the options by specifying by genre or publication type.  

Res Artis

Res Artis provides a comprehensive list of worldwide residencies in all art forms. Take a peek at what’s currently open for application or specify residency profiles based on location, fee, accessibility, or language. This can be a good resource if you have the opportunity to take deliberate time for yourself and your art.

Spreadsheet Template to Track Your Submissions

In Catapult’s Publish or Perish column, writer Tony Tulathimutte offers a free spreadsheet template to keep track of submissions, magazines, agents, and more. Feel free to download a copy, spread your literary wings, and fly free with courage and organizational prowess.

I Can’t Write About the Pandemic, But I Can’t Write About Anything Else

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

The Blunt Instrument is an advice column for writers, written by Elisa Gabbert (specializing in nonfiction), John Cotter (specializing in fiction), and Ruoxi Chen (specializing in publishing). If you need tough advice for a writing problem, send your question to blunt@electricliterature.com.

Dear Blunt Instrument, 

I have a few different book projects I’ve been thinking about. I was trying to figure out which one to start first when COVID-19 happened. Now I really don’t know what to do. None of the projects I want to write seem important, considering all that could happen. I was lost to start, and I’m really lost now. Advice? 

Best, 

Blocked and Thwarted

Dear B&T, 

Don’t feel as though you need to write about COVID-19. Not directly, not yet. Neither you, nor me, nor any of us have perspective on this thing—the crisis and the feelings around it are only just beginning to crawl down the well of our subconscious. Once they’re settled, clacking in the dark there, they will be a part of the water when we pull buckets up for years to come. We’ll set out, 20 years from now, to write a book about model trains and we’ll drink from that well and wind up writing about the feeling we have this afternoon. Art does not traffic in straight lines. Instant gratification is anathema. Art is done in the dark. 

The best writing is not a reaction to each day’s news as it happens. The best writing is the stuff we haul up years and perhaps decades later.

The best writing is not a reaction to each day’s news as it happens (what ages faster than front-page stories?). The best writing is the stuff we haul up in that bucket, years and perhaps decades later, mixed with all the pre- and post-crisis moments in our life, all the anxiety and relief, not segregated by timeframe or motif, the way childhood merges with the day before yesterday in dreams. Folks these days are sharing Katherine Ann Porter’s novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a story of the 1918 pandemic. What’s shared less often is the date of the story’s composition: 1939, 20 years after the pandemic had passed. Twenty years it took that crisis to settle deep enough in Porter’s mind that the particulars of her lived experience could be stripped off or alloyed with other impressions, people she met later, the weather. 

In college you may have read Tim O’Brien’s stories of the Vietnam War collected in The Things They Carried. Each year the moving, trick-box narratives of that collection more strongly cement their reputation as the English-language telling of the war, as the preeminent version (“if you’re only going to read one book about the Vietnam War…”). But note that The Things They Carried wasn’t written until the late 1980s, at least a decade after the war’s end, and wasn’t published until 1990, a good 20 years after O’Brien put his rucksack in a closet. 

People are writing about COVID-19 as we speak, of course: journalism, epidemiology, diary, hot takes. Journalists are doing noble work, but I don’t think you were asking about journalism. If you’re keeping a diary, good. Writing about the most striking thing you’ve encountered each day is healthy for your writing practice and your psyche. If you’re an epidemiologist, you should be pitching articles. And yes, there will be hot takes aplenty, but they won’t age well. 

The hot take is, unless deeply considered, cheap. We love Joan Didion, but the essays we love are not her moment-by-moment reports from political conventions (does anybody read them now?). We love her for her meditations on keeping notebooks, on leaving home, on the Hoover Dam 30 years after its construction (there she finds the hopeful architecture of “a tomorrow that never came”), on the meaning of a decade after most of that decade had passed. More than the colors she points out in the trees, we love what she hauls up from the well, what she doesn’t merely consider but reconsiders.

In 1917, 1918, and 1919, the years when WWI emptied its last cartridge and the pandemic flu made off with 50 million lives, what were the great writers writing? Katherine Mansfield wrote about the textures of childhood, the sounds of snapping sheets, the mystery of grown-up conversations in the next room (“Prelude”). Edna Ferber wrote a comic story about a blundering old bachelor falling over himself in search of love (“The Gay Old Dog”). Ryūnosuke Akutagawa wrote historical fictional about a trans man at a Jesuit mission (“The Martyr”). Sherwood Anderson invented Sherwood Anderson stories (we’re still writing them). Beatrix Potter kept writing Beatrix Potter stories. W. E. B. Du Bois began the first of three autobiographies. James Joyce kept puttering away on a long story about the connected events of a summer’s day in 1904.

Some of us won’t survive the coming months. This is reason, if ever, to ignore the market.

Which brings us to the question you were wrestling with before the plague: which project to take up. My advice is to avoid thinking like a careerist. We don’t know what the publishing landscape will look like when all this is over. We don’t know what books will sell. Use your creative time to escape the zeitgeist. Lower your bucket into the well of your subconscious and write the book that you most need to write. Some of us won’t survive the coming months. This is reason, if ever, to ignore the market. Instead, pick the project that makes you feel most powerfully, the one that cracks you open like an egg when you start typing into it. 

It was 1927 when H. P. Lovecraft wrote his story “The Color Out of Space,” about a strange color that lands from the sky and sickens everyone it comes into contact with, infects every surface, renders the landscape eerie. The phrase “Spanish Flu” doesn’t show up in the story. The word “virus” appears only once (“No bites of prowling things could have brought the virus”). If you’d asked Lovecraft where the story originated, you’d likely suffer a lecture about his Cthulhu Mythos, the sublimity of horror, the problem with Italians. If, indeed, the frightening, exotic virulence of the story had anything to do with the events of 1918, Lovecraft would have been the last to know. 

Wearing Rainbow at a Funeral

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

“The Appropriate Weight”
by Corinne Manning

My daughter fell apart while reading a poem. I sat in the back of the church because I didn’t want anyone to see me walk in, but at the moment she began crying I felt the strangeness of it, that if she were a little girl, I would be running to her side and catching her as she left the altar. But there was no way  I was going to run up the long aisle now, letting shame trail behind me (which I wore out of habit for those present). This was different from your kids growing up. There are things you lose the right to do when you are no longer the one married to the deceased.

My ex-wife Miriam’s current husband replaced my daughter at the pulpit. He was barrel-chested, wore a diamond ring on his pinky that caught the afternoon light and flashed at us like a satellite at night. He looked more con man than journalist. I didn’t know that was something my ex-wife would like: Neil Diamond tapes ringing through his Ford Taurus, gin and tonics and playing cards, and her legs straight up in the air as they fucked. That is one of the rights I’ve lost—thinking about my ex-wife in that way.  We mostly had sex missionary, but then, we were so young. I hadn’t had sex with anyone before, and neither had Miriam. No one told us much about what to do, so it felt lucky that we were able to figure it out and have orgasms. She orgasmed throughout our marriage, which, if I could give a eulogy, I would say. But that wouldn’t be for her benefit; it would be for mine. When her friends and family see me, they think about a life of not being loved, a life without any passion. They imagine me lying on top of her, my muscles tensed, unable to stay hard. It was never like that, but I realized in a bar bathroom late one night, in the final months of our marriage, that there  was an opportunity for a very different kind of passion.

Oh, you’re thinking, I get it now. Like her family members did. My inability to carve a turkey made sense to them, and my irritability with their boring stories, and my nice shoes, and her nice shoes, and our clean house, and our dachshund, Murray, who loved me best, and our one gay child, who I’m not certain thinks of me at all.

Miriam’s husband bowed his head, restrained a sob, and though I hoped to leave before he was done speaking, the church was so quiet that even the shifting of seats would be a disturbance. There was no movement, just the sniffs of those around us, which sounded eerily like shutter clicks. Imagine our grief as photo ops. For a brief period, that’s what it is, until a few weeks go by and we are still grieving, but there’s no place for it anymore. The sob escaped and Miriam was supposed to run up and hold him, but that wasn’t going to happen, which sent another sob through him. He stepped away from the podium, looking lost and small, like a child bobbing in the ocean. And though we were all grateful when a young man (maybe his brother or son) stepped forward and caught him in a hug, I knew that he was feeling only weight—too heavy because it wasn’t Miriam’s weight—and that this man who hugged him was lacking some dip that existed only on her lower back—not the masculine centre of the back—where he would prefer to put his hand. Thus, it was no comfort at all.

…a few weeks go by and we are still grieving, but there’s no place for it anymore.

I stayed for the recessional. I recognized Miriam’s brother as the head pallbearer and saw him look at me, then look away. A few friends acknowledged me grimly. Miriam’s husband didn’t see me, but my daughter did, and hers was the only face that looked grateful. She might not love me the way Murray does, but she loves me in some deep and tragic way, which doesn’t necessarily mean she wants to talk to me.

“Sal’s a cunt man, and he wants it all over him,” Miriam said to me on the phone soon after she started dating the journalist/ gangster, while we were finalizing some logistics around the divorce.

I imagined him slick like a seal, their bodies slipping off of each other—joyous in all their fluids—and the bed a mess. I, too, was learning that the best sex was not tidy: the shit and cum and odor were part of what felt so good—to be an animal, to be loved as an animal, to the full extent of your body, thus reaching your soul. The filth meant fucking on an energetic level. It’s because Miriam said things like “Sal is a cunt man” that her family thinks I was an icy ruiner. But she hadn’t awoken me either.

…the best sex was not tidy: the shit and cum and odor were part of what felt so good—to be an animal, to be loved as an animal, to the full extent of your body…

“I got a question for you, if I may,” she said.

I heard her take a long drag from her cigarette while I deliberated. Technically, we weren’t supposed to be talking to each other—our lawyers had suggested that all correspondence go through them—but we had been together for nearly thirty years and we couldn’t help it, like her fingers sliding to the pack for a cigarette before the current one was finished.

“Are you … I’m not sure of the term … Are you the man or the woman?”

I groaned, and she started to laugh.

“Don’t be so PC. Do you take it or do you give it?”

I hadn’t agreed to be asked the question yet, so I bought time by clearing my throat and taking a long drink of water.

“Don’t tell me you’re too shy to answer this.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said, “that a few fucks from a meathead made you a bigot.”

“Make me less of one,” she said. “C’mon, you know I mean well. I don’t know the terms.”

“The term’s ‘bottom,’” I said, “but it’s not always about penetration.”

I wanted to say more about what it meant to be opened like that, the vulnerability and the weight and the pain—at the beginning and sometimes still—and the sheer disbelief that I was a space for claiming and fitting. She would have understood, but I was never that blunt with her. It was always this way—her expressiveness with me, and my restraint. Why change it now?

I will recognize the sound of her inhale from a new cigarette when her spirit hovers over me on the day I die (unless the right of a final visitation has also been stripped from ex-husbands; I’m not certain of the rules).

She laughed and I heard the smoke hiss out of her lungs. “I know what you mean. It’s that way with us, too.”

I waited in my car in front of the restaurant where the backroom was reserved for the reception. It didn’t seem right that I should be the first one there, but neither did I want to enter a crowded room. I wanted to hug my daughter, shake hands with a few old friends, and then escape out the back, my mouth tasting of salami and olives. Boredom finally sent me out of my car and into the backroom, where the wait staff were just putting out the first finger foods. They are invisible in much the same way I was invisible in the church. It’s the term “wait staff” that does it, kind of like “ex” in my case. They bustled around and pretended not to see me. I hovered behind them and made myself a plate of provolone and salami and artichoke hearts. I placed my little plate on a table when a few people started to filter in, including two old friends, a couple we used to have over for dinner. The husband, who was the Latin teacher at the school where Miriam taught language arts, had aged in the ten years since I’d seen him. His fit body (yes, I noticed back then) had given way to something pouchy and loose. His wife kissed both my cheeks and the husband took both my hands in his.

I will recognize the sound of her inhale from a new cigarette when her spirit hovers over me on the day I die.

“We were hoping we’d see you today, but we weren’t sure.” The sound of his voice was like that inhale of Miriam’s cigarette. Standing with these two old friends in this new setting, with these new lives—I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Is your friend   here?” the wife asked, and her husband gave her a look, which I didn’t know how to interpret: We don’t know whether they are still together or It’s not appropriate for him to bring him? I had thought the latter and told Dale it would be best if he stayed home.

“Dale stayed back in New Hope,” I said, feeling like the place where I lived was a cliché of rainbow flags and late-in-life come-outs and bi-curious teenagers—which it was.

His wife gave me a look of pity. “It would have been okay to bring him.”

“I didn’t think it would be appropriate. Besides, he had to work.” The former a truth, the latter a lie.

They nodded and the talk was forced for a time, until either the husband or I said something that made us all laugh and we were great friends, minus one, and in the wrong setting.

Others arrived, including my daughter, who approached the three of us immediately. She looked like her mother had at her father’s funeral—her hair thin and pulled back tight, her face pale without makeup. The girls she dated always looked just like her—femme but in a softball-tour-bus kind of way.

Once, while she was in college, not long after she came out, she called me and asked, in the blunt manner of her mother: “Do you identify more with being gay or queer?”

A younger boyfriend had explained his version of the difference to me, after I told him that my attraction had less to do with genitals and more to  do with the way I was handled and what he called my expansive desire, and that I listened to Democracy Now. So I didn’t have to think about my answer to this question for very long.

“Queer,” I said.

She rolled her eyes, and I had to prompt her a few times before she’d say anything more.

“I shouldn’t get annoyed when you say it. Men can’t understand feminist liberation.”

I didn’t like that she called me a man, but I didn’t have the language then and don’t quite still.

“So you’re a—” and I waved my hand in the air a few times, waiting for the reveal.

“You can’t even say it,” she said, her voice trembling with hurt. “I’m a lesbian. You can’t even say it.”

I slipped my arm over her shoulders and she surprised me by wrapping her arms around my waist. I kissed her lesbian head, and my friends excused themselves to the buffet, plentiful now with baked ziti and meatballs.

“Where’s Dale?”

“Couldn’t make it,” I said.

I offered my plate to her, but she shook her head. So I took a bite of cheese and then offered the cheese to her and she took it. I took a bite of artichoke and then offered the artichoke to her and she took it. Certain rules, long  established, stay the same. One or two of Miriam’s family members came over to say hello, but they didn’t ask about Dale. While I made small talk with them, I continued to feed my daughter until all that was left was an olive, which I popped in my mouth because she doesn’t like them.

When my daughter stepped away to speak with Sal’s daughter—“Closeted,” she whispered to me, “I know it”—I was alone in the middle of the room, but I felt like I could pass through the people around me, that I didn’t look small and swimmy, as Sal had near the altar. Sal wasn’t there yet. I tossed my plate away and decided to make a fairly quiet exit through the back door. I hugged my friends goodbye, the oil from the salami and the olives fresh on all of our lips. I blew a kiss to my daughter.

In the parking lot I noticed the sun, and that my hand made contact with the stair railing but didn’t pass through it. Sal was leaning against the back of his SUV. He saw me, and I wasn’t certain whether I was supposed to see him, but I walked towards him anyway.

I’d had a fantasy on the drive to the funeral that a moment like this would happen. That we would be alone, and somehow we would end up in his car, which I had imagined was much like the car he leaned on now. Miriam and I had always been about the same size and I was curious to feel my body in that passenger seat, taking up her shape. And then something sexual would happen that neither Sal nor I would claim to understand but that both of us needed, as if we could swim through the fluids of our own bodies towards Miriam.

We shook hands, and I was surprised that my grip was much stronger than his. We each stated the other’s name. Murray often needed to be reminded of himself when I came home from work, and the shock of my hand on his ears or head always caused him to pee on the floor, as if through this explosion of fluid he could claim once again that he existed. Sal and I stood silently for a few moments, in our mutual existence.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said—a line from a script—uncertain what I meant by it, or what it meant, the words sounding like another language in my mouth.

“Thanks,” he said.

We stood there like people who have something in common that neither really wants to bring it up, until he tried. “My ex-wife is gay, too.”

“Okay,” I said.

Sal put his hand out again, and I waited until it was fully extended before I reached for it. Just before the building door creaked, I imagined his body, slick like a seal, in a tiny bar’s bathroom late at night, and I saw my body, split open and opening more than I could ever imagine, on a ruined bed.

And just before Sal pulled his hand away and trotted over to whoever was coming outside, I heard Miriam inhale, the smoke filling my lungs, and his lungs, and lucky for me, Dale’s lungs. He would exhale into my mouth when I came home and offer me the appropriate weight when I collapsed into his arms.

Your Memory Is Fiction

Posted on by Jo Lou

Jessica Andrews’s debut novel, Saltwater, is composed in numbered fragments. Andrews explained to me that one of the reasons she wanted a non-chronological structure was very much to do with memory as shrapnel. “I was interested in…how you carry your history, your lineage with you even though you’re not conscious of it all of the time.”

The protagonist in Saltwater, Lucy, moves to a cottage in the west of Ireland that was left to her by her deceased grandfather. Interspersed among the plot of Lucy’s time there are histories of her parents, the conception of a child, Lucy’s turbulent adult history in a chaotic London. The book is gestational. It reads as if it is building dimension rather than story, and at a languid, cellular pace. It’s about motherhood and memory; in other words, it’s about the fragmented self. “Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down…” wrote Virginia Woolf in Orlando. “We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments.”

Andrews wrote Saltwater while living in a cottage in the west of Ireland, left to the family by a late grandfather. The book draws heavily on autobiographical elements, which the author has been forthcoming about, and which is, in a way, part of the experiment. In both structure and subject matter, Saltwater asks: What is remembered and what is created and what, really, is the difference?

I reached Andrews at her current home in Spain to discuss womanhood, language, and most of all, the fictions and nonfictions of memory. 

Lucie Shelly: There’s a beautiful line in the book about “language as a place to put your feelings.” Figuring out how we feel about things is a means of controlling our feelings, I suppose. I’m interested in your thoughts on language as a kind of control. 

Jessica Andrews: I guess language is a form of control in that it allows you to name things. When you’re feeling things that you don’t have a vocabulary for, that makes them feel really difficult. As a writer, to be able to articulate my life or feelings has been really powerful for my mental health. As a reader, when you read something that resonates with you that maybe you haven’t been able to put into words, that’s a really illuminating thing. In the book, Lucy, the main character, has a brother who’s born deaf. My younger brother in real life was deaf. That gave me an interesting view of language from when I was very young. There was a really big emphasis on the importance of language and being able to communicate in my house. I have the sense that there must be some kind of connection there—now I work with words and language and that’s the thing that I’m best at. I feel there must be a link.

And I think as well, it’s really useful to be outside of somewhere in order to write about it, to get a different perspective. It helps to be removed from things, to be in a different culture and a different language.

LS: The book has this very apparent structure, it’s in numbered sections. In terms of organizing the language or narrative, or the communication of story, how did you arrive at that structure?

As a woman, my experience of the world very much comes through my body.

JA: I was interested in exploring this idea that you carry all of your experiences inside of you. Even though they’re not all happening at the same time, at every point in time you’re bringing all of those experiences with you. So that, and how you carry your history, your lineage with you even though you’re not conscious of it all of the time. That’s one of the reasons why I had this non-chronological narrative where you’re weaving in and out peoples’ lives. I wanted to emphasize the resonance of the threads. And also, it’s kind of to do with the body. I felt like, as a woman, my experience of the world very much comes through my body. It’s always the first thing that speaks or that I’m thinking about. If I wanted to talk about bodies to do it in a fractured way made the most sense. It’s not a smooth cohesive narrative and it doesn’t always make sense. I felt like the form reflected my feelings. 

LS: It’s interesting that you’ve brought up a sensation of fracturing in relation to the body—I felt the book explored the disconnects between mind and body. The theme of motherhood and the mother-daughter relationships circled some of these questions. The idea of producing a child, and then having to separate this thing that was once very much within the body. 

JA: Yeah, I was thinking a lot about the intimacy of a mother and child relationship, especially a child, and there’s almost an eroticism to it, you know, there’s so much skin and touch, and as you get older all these barriers come up. It was the end of winter and I had a t-shirt on, and she said something like oh I haven’t seen your arms for such a long time. Your parent knows your body so intimately for such a long time and then suddenly they don’t. My relationship with my mother is a very sensory one. The smell of her makeup or the product she uses or the freckles on her skin, it’s all these really microscopic, childlike details that you absorb so much during your childhood. And then as you get older, you are more distant and those things are so intangible, but there’s so much within your memory. I was interested in the sense of loss that comes with that.

My grandma died when I was very young and my mum always says things like, “your hands really remind me of her.” These really small bodily details that connect you to people, but we almost break that connection. 

LS: Moving away from motherhood and fragmentation, another theme I’d like to tease out is class. Do you consider yourself a writer voice of a certain class? Were you concerned with portraying the subtleties (and more tangible struggles/oppressions) of class difference in your novel?

JA: I grew up working-class and I am the first person in my family to go to university. I struggled at uni, both financially and academically, because I didn’t feel like I had anything of worth to say. It was only later, when I graduated and started reading more widely and meeting people who share my values, that I began to develop the vocabulary to understand that the ways in which I felt wrong were structural and systemic, and did not come from inside me. I wanted to give a sense of this in the novel by linking the ways in which Lucy feels wrong to bigger things outside of her, to try and reflect the intersection of the personal and the political. Writing about class is a delicate balance—it felt important to me to write about the joy of growing up in Sunderland, without romanticizing the struggles.

LS: You’ve mentioned a number of people in your family in relation to the story, and I’m afraid of going into lazy or narrow-minded territory here, but there is a significant autobiographical influence to the story. The book is a novel, it is fiction, but it contains significant histories of a mother, grandmothers, a grandfather. Did you feel conflicted about genre, about writing fiction or nonfiction?

JA: It’s fiction but it is very much rooted in my own life, and I feel like I’ve been quite honest about that. If I said that it was more fictional than it really is then I wouldn’t really be able to speak. I felt like I would be doing myself an injustice and I wouldn’t be able to speak about things like class or gender roles with the same transparency. One of the reasons it’s fiction and not memoir is because I felt like fiction gives you more power, perhaps. So much of the novel is about Lucy claiming her own power. You’re not bound in the same way with fiction, you can manipulate the world so that people can see it from your perspective. 

Your memory is a fiction, and your identity is a fiction.

I suppose if you’re thinking about memory as a narrative anyway, memory is how we make sense of our lives. To me, the novel feels true but it’s not. And I feel like to me now the number four is true but it’s actually not. All the things didn’t happen, but the emotions of the story are really close to the emotions of my life.

Another element of rooting a story in truth is to do with protecting people. That was something I found hard when writing. To what extent am I allowed to write something close to the truth. That was an interesting exercise for me as a woman, or absolutely in my particular family dynamic. Your role is often to protect people and to care for people and to look after people and to write something closer to the truth, felt like an exercise in being okay with, maybe I don’t have to protect people all the time. And maybe that’s more important than feeling like I have to protect people—that’s something that I see quite actively focused on in the book, how you can never really protect anyone. 

LS: I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about memory as fiction and even identity as fiction. We have to be a certain kind of person for certain people—as you say, sometimes that’s a protector, or even a mother on the days when we don’t feel like being mothers. 

JA: Yeah, your memory is a fiction, and your identity is a fiction. For example, when people talk about horoscopes. People talk about your star sign and you have these personality traits, and often you feel like they’re true, but you’re also just clinging to these markers of yourself because it’s difficult to get a sense of what your identity really is. So if someone tells you you’re very good, you’re sort of performing that thing. It’s self-fulfilling, you write a narrative of the way that you want to be seen. But in terms of memory, remembering—there is an episode in the book where a man shows his penis through the window. That’s actually something that happened to me when I was a teenager, but I was telling the story the other day to my partner and I told him the version that was in the book. So I was like, I was with my friend and this man drove up to the bus stop and showed his penis. But then, about five minutes later, I remembered that wasn’t actually what happened. In the real version of the story, I was alone, and I was really scared. And I’d forgotten, because I’ve written this other version. Then I was thinking, did I protect myself through my own memory. Did I give myself a version where I was with another person, and it was funny and it wasn’t scary.

LS: This also makes me wonder—if memory can be a kind of fiction or creation, how useful is the literary distinction of fiction and nonfiction? On some level, I find those distinctions superfluous or for the benefit of marketing and the critics. Did you ever find yourself hung up on those lines when you were writing, or afterwards?

My relationship with writing is that I will always write in a way that’s semi-autobiographical, because that has more resonance for me.

JA: I’m trying to write about this in my next book, actually. I’m interested in why something is seen to have more or less worth if it’s true? Why do we have those distinctions if the author doesn’t know what’s true anyway? My personal relationship with writing is that I will always write in a way that’s semi-autobiographical, because that just has more resonance for me and I can write about it in a more powerful way. I’m interested in interrogating that. The Why? 

LS: Absolutely. To say that something is purely imaginative is such a huge statement, you’re always writing from how you have seen the world. 

JA: It’s true, and if you write a memoir you manipulate things. You put it in a certain narrative structure. You emphasize things. It’s not the truth. I feel like I’m probably always going to be thinking about this.

LS: It’s strange that we never see poets having to contend with this question of, like, is it fiction or nonfiction, or how much is true? The work is just the work. Your structure is somewhat poetic, can you talk about your process for this book? And your writing process in general?

JA: I was writing a version of the story but at first it was much more fictionalized, there was much more distance from me. It just wasn’t really working, it didn’t have much life in it. So then I scrapped the idea of trying to write a novel, and I thought I’m just going to sit down every day and write what I feel like writing. I did that, and then I saw the story. I was writing in three separate strands. So I wrote a more chronological story of Lucy’s life in one section, and then I wrote the parts that are set in Ireland in another section, and then I wrote the more fragmented story about the baby in another section. Then, I was still in Ireland, and my neighbor had a wine business so he had this big industrial printer, so he let me print the whole thing out. And then I cut it up with scissors, physically. I had it all over his kitchen floor. And then I kind of put sections into piles, like this part is about this thing, and that’s kind of how I was able to find the structure. This sounds cheesy, but it was more like a piece of music rather than something with a straight beginning, middle, and end. It really helps me to see things, and have things physically printed out and

LS: In terms of your daily practice, are you writing in a similar way to how you were during the first novel? 

JA: I think I’m trying to. I’m trying really hard to reconcile the balance. All my emotional energy goes into a project when I’m in it, which was much easier before when I lived in Ireland I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have anything else to do but now it’s harder because obviously I’m doing other writing work I’m promoting the first book, I’m in a relationship now. So it’s finding the balance of still being able to have the space, but to also be able to balance things in your life. The first book was quite an extreme proces. I feel like, maybe until you write a second book you don’t really know what your processes.

How To Use Dramatic Irony for More Than Shenanigans

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

Welcome to Read Like a Writer, a new series that examines a different element of the craft of fiction writing in each installment, using examples from the Recommended Reading archives. Each month, the editors of Recommended Reading—Halimah Marcus, Brandon Taylor, and Erin Bartnett—will select a few stories that illustrate a specific technique, style, or writing challenge. 

In the first installment of Read Like A Writer, we discussed how to write an ending that is surprising yet inevitable. In this installment, we’re going to talk about another way to build momentum in narrative by thinking about how that “surprise” element can be turned into suspense. Alfred Hitchcock illustrated the difference between surprise and suspense by inviting you to imagine a bomb under the table. If neither the characters nor the audience knows about the bomb, and it goes off, that’s a surprise. If the audience knows about the bomb, but the characters do not, and the audience anticipates the bomb going off, that is the suspense. The key difference is dramatic irony, that old dusty literary concept we all learned in high school. 

If the audience knows about the bomb, but the characters do not, and the audience anticipates the bomb going off, that is the suspense.

But dramatic irony has much subtler applications than high school curriculum allows. Alice Munro opened my mind to the potential of dramatic irony and it’s painful pleasures with her story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.” In it, a woman named Johanna goes to work for a man and his teenage granddaughter, Sabitha. Johanna is an object of mockery for the Sabitha and her friend Edith because she lacks fashionable clothes and interests. Sabitha and Edith begin writing Johanna love letters that purport to be from the Sabitha’s’s father, and Johanna falls in love with the father through letters he did not write. Eventually, she writes that she is coming to live with him, packs up, and leaves.

I experienced this short story like a horror movie, my dread mounting, my palms sweating. My compassion for Johanna grew proportionally to my certainty that she would be heartbroken and humiliated. But Munro, the master, would never do something so predictable and cheap. When Johanna goes to live with the father (spoilers here), they fall in love and live happily ever after. 

Even when a story isn’t dealing with bombs, dramatic irony is often something that is set and later deployed. The dramatic irony in “Hateship, Friendship” is that I, the reader, know something Johanna does not, which is the true author of the love letters. Munro uses that knowledge to heighten the emotion of my reading experience, and then deploys it in a self-aware way that undermines my expectations. 

We can’t all be as good as Munro, but we can borrow a few tricks. Here are three stories from the Recommended Reading archives that deploy dramatic irony in complex and unexpected ways of their own. – HM

“A Beautiful Wife is Suddenly Dead” by Margaret Meehan

In Margaret Meehan’s “A Beautiful Wife Is Suddenly Dead,” Karen Roberts wants a made-for-TV life. A high school English teacher who cliff-noted her way through her own education, Karen prefers to imagine herself as a character in another story—a teacher whose “students might erupt into applause, hearts bursting, changed forever” à la Dead Poets Society. After school hours, she fantasizes about the countless, brutally murdered women in her favorite true crime shows, now suddenly beautiful and talented in the past tense. She opts for hair extensions, long red nails, and smooth, waxed skin. She has a husband and she tolerates him, but mostly she’s annoyed he’s not willing to play a more interesting role than “doting husband.” Karen is what some might call “basic,” and what others might call “unlikeable.”  

But from the very first line of the story, we know that Karen’s story is going to get less basic: “Karen Roberts is going to fall out the window.” It’s quintessential dramatic irony—we know Karen is going to fall, she doesn’t. In her introduction to the story, Halimah Marcus calls the opening line of the story a dare. It’s fun to think about dramatic irony as a dare. Like dares, which are performed for the cringing pleasure of others, dramatic irony often relies on a sense of dread. We know something terrible is going to happen, but the character is blissfully ignorant in a way that allows them to continue living out their lives. There’s a measure of schadenfreude fueling our progress from paragraph to paragraph. 

In “A Beautiful Wife,” the feeling powering our experience of the story may start off as dread, but as we get to know Karen, and her obsession with true crime shows, their “miraculous recasting of mediocrity in death,” our dread lifts into something more like delight. Who is Karen, this unapologetically vain woman who is kind of okay with being a beautiful dead one? Meehan subtly guides our attention by creating an unflinching portrait of an unlikeable woman who dreams of living at the center of a more dramatic life. We’re consuming her like she consumes true crime. But she’s not like those other true crime girls. The story dares you to care about Karen, to care about whether or not she gets what she wants. – EB

“PU-239” by Ken Kalfus

“Pu-239” by Ken Kalfus is about a disgruntled employee at a Russian nuclear power plant, who, after an accident, steals weapon-grade plutonium to sell on the black market. Timofey’s health has been compromised by the accident, which exposed him to radiation. He knows he will likely die prematurely, and he has nothing to leave his family. The money he makes from the sale will be his life insurance. 

Fiona Maazel introduced the story when we published it in 2013. “It would undersell the story to suggest it’s just a satire,” she wrote. “No, this fiction has the higher aim of ennobling stupidity — of recognizing its power and aptitude for destruction.” The stupidity she’s referring to here is, at least to start, Timofey walking around Moscow with plutonium stored in a coffee can, strapped to his chest. 

It’s not that knowing that Timofey will die that creates the dramatic irony—he knows that too, on some level. Even a person with the most cursory knowledge of nuclear physics knows how catastrophically idiotic Timofey’s behavior is. This tension between the reader’s commonsense knowledge and the character’s reckless actions—the tension encapsulated in Maazel’s phrase “ennobling stupidity”—is where the true dramatic irony lies. Knowing what’s going to happen won’t drive a story; dreading it does. – HM

“Alta’s Place” by Morgan Thomas

“Alta’s Place” charts Cory’s growing fascination with Alta, an enigmatic woman who appears one evening at the dry cleaner where Cory works with a coffee stain on her suit. Through their conversation, retold by Cory, we come to understand how Alta’s suit was stained during an asylum interview, and the circumstances under which Alta left her native Mongolia for Virginia. Her landlord discovered her living with another woman with whom she was in a romantic relationship and evicted her, an initial cruelty that had the ripple effect of forcing her to leave the country entirely.

In a subtle and masterful deployment of first-person point of view, the reader sees Alta as a kind of doubled. That is, we see Alta through her own words in scene and quoted dialogue, but we also see the narrator’s warped version of Alta. Morgan Thomas deftly reveals the ways Cory’s perception of Alta is curtailed by her own limited experience and by a tendency to objectify and exoticize. 

The dramatic irony that brings this story to its masterful and subtle conclusion stems from the gap between who Cory understands Alta to be and who Alta actually is. As a queer woman herself, Cory is alert to the realities of queer life in America, but she is at times inattentive to Alta’s reality and subtly invalidating of her experiences, eldiding them, wanting to make them smaller, more manageable than they are. Again and again, Cory references wanting to draw Alta. To touch her clothing. To eat her food. To become her, in a way. But Cory doesn’t question these impulses. She is unaware of this tendency in herself, but it is carefully wrought and visible for the reader, giving rise to a tension as we wait for it all to become clear to her. – BT

Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

More than two weeks into self-isolation, I am starting to wonder whether I will ever be able to come out. I don’t mean whether I’ll be legally allowed to come out—I wonder who the person that comes out will be. Stiller, more quiet maybe. More appreciative of the simple pleasures of everyday life, I hope. Even if I manage to keep my job, and my loved ones survive, even if I am among the fortunate few whose life returns basically to normal, will I continue to cook my meals at home, and Facetime with my parents multiple times a week? How long will it take before I’m eating out and stretching the time between phone calls? How long before I’m complaining about the subway and having too many plans and generally taking my freedom for granted? 

The question of what will change applies to everything from the mundanity of everyday to the very shape of history. Will we ever elect a careless an incompetent leader again, knowing what is at stake? Will we continue to systematically disadvantage the most vulnerable among us, and to degrade facts and science and statistics? And as for the positive changes being made or discussed—bipartisanship, direct governmental aid, paid sick leave—what will stick, and what will be forgotten? 

To answer these questions, I turned, as I often do, to books and the people who write them. And since I’m speculating, this time I turned to a master of speculative fiction, Ted Chiang. I’ve heard Ted Chiang speak exactly twice, and both times I’ve quoted him, or maybe misquoted him, for subsequent years. He generously agreed to correspond with me over email.

Halimah Marcus: Earlier this week, I shared a recollection of a Brooklyn Book Festival panel you did with Mark Doten and N.K. Jemisin. Your idea, as I recall it, was that in conservative narratives, there’s a disaster/problem/war. It’s resolved, and everything returns to normal. In progressive narratives, there’s a disaster, it’s resolved, and nothing is the same. Can you expand on that? It seems to me we are in a progressive narrative, and that this pandemic will fundamentally change our society. 

In real science fiction stories, the world starts out familiar, a new discovery or invention disrupts everything, and the world is forever changed.

Ted Chiang: On the panel, I said that traditional “good vs. evil” stories follow a certain pattern: the world starts out as a good place, evil intrudes, good defeats evil, and the world goes back to being a good place. These stories are all about restoring the status quo, so they are implicitly conservative. Real science fiction stories follow a different pattern: the world starts out as a familiar place, a new discovery or invention disrupts everything, and the world is forever changed. These stories show the status quo being overturned, so they are implicitly progressive. (This observation is not original to me; it’s something that scholars of science fiction have long noted.) This was in the context of a discussion about the role of dystopias in science fiction. I said that while some dystopian stories suggest that doom is unavoidable, other ones are intended as cautionary tales, which implies we can do something to avoid the undesirable outcome.

HM: What’s the relationship between disruption and doom? Would “the disruption is resolved and nothing is ever the same” qualify as a doom narrative? Or is doom a third kind of story, in which the disruption is never resolved?

TC: A lot of dystopian stories posit variations on a Mad Max world where marauders roam the wasteland. That’s a kind of change no one wants to see. I think those qualify as doom. What I mean by disruption is not the end of civilization, but the end of a particular way of life. Aristocrats might have thought the world was ending when feudalism was abolished during the French Revolution, but the world didn’t end; the world changed. (The critic John Clute has said that the French Revolution was one of the things that gave rise to science fiction.)

HM: For people who consider themselves politically progressive, it’s hard to shake the idea that a narrative with inherent progressivism must also be in some way a more enlightened story. But many of us are clinging to the idea that we’ll return to the status quo—that’s the story we’re telling ourselves, even as it’s clear that in retrospect that will not be the story of this time. Is there something inherently comforting about the narratives you describe as implicitly conservative? And should we be challenging ourselves to reject that comfort?

The people who are the happiest with the status quo are the ones who benefit most from it.

TC: The familiar is always comfortable, but we need to make a distinction between what is actually desirable and what is simply what we’re accustomed to; sometimes those are the same, and sometimes they are not. The people who are the happiest with the status quo are the ones who benefit most from it, which is why the wealthy are usually conservative; the existing order works to their advantage. For example, right now there’s a discussion taking place about canceling student debt, and a related discussion about why there is such a difference in the type of financial relief available to individuals as opposed to giant corporations. The people who will be happiest to return to our existing system of debt are the ones who benefit from it, and making them uncomfortable might be a good idea.

HM: Do you see aspects of science fiction (your own work or others) in the coronavirus pandemic? In how it is being handled, or how it has spread?

TC: While there has been plenty of fiction written about pandemics, I think the biggest difference between those scenarios and our reality is how poorly our government has handled it. If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire.

What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire.

HM: This pandemic isn’t science fiction, but it does feel like a dystopia. How can we understand the coronavirus as a cautionary tale? How can we combat our own personal inclinations toward the good/evil narrative, and the subsequent expectation that everything will return to normal?

TC: We need to be specific about what we mean when we talk about things returning to normal. We all want not to be quarantined, to be able to go to work and socialize and travel. But we don’t want everything to go back to business as usual, because business as usual is what led us to this crisis. COVID-19 has demonstrated how much we need federally mandated paid sick leave and universal health care, so we don’t want to return to a status quo that lacks those things. The current administration’s response ought to serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of electing demagogues instead of real leaders, although there’s no guarantee that voters will heed it. We’re at a point where things could go in some very different ways, depending on what we learn from this experience.

Even If the Full-Blood Family Don’t Claim Us

Posted on by Kelly Luce

Mixed

 
 I pray
 on my great GrandFather’s feathers

 —the ones you don’t respect— 
That you never dare call me

 Mixed

 when i have been a nigger anytime 
 you felt like it.

 I’m from an army of glowing yellow/black princesses 
 some of us indigenous. we know.
 
 even if the full-blood family don’t claim 
 us.

 We all one caste system away from 
 spiritual death.

 i’m mixed.
 ?
 
 I’m mixed with Moors and anybody from Alabama
 I’m mixed with kool milds & sometimes cigars

 british tea & southern comfort

 Apartheid & Jim Crow
 
 My shoe shine black
                                    no shield, no mask—nothing removeable.
 I’ve always taken my blackness to dinner
 Worn it in the shower, shared it with my lovers
 
 Never asked permission to be who I am
 Or changed my voice to fit the description
 
 land the job
 not scare away the boys
 
 body still recovering from the thunderous pull of
 a Jamaican crowd hauling me

 down into their sea of calabash eyes
 

 They tell me
 they feel my spirit
 in their Treasure Beach chest.
 
 I know you didn’t hear it
 Your seashell speaker remains broken 
 or maybe you just
 
 pretend

 not to hear my 
 leveed lips. Water 
 when it’s rising
 
 In winter black girls are bright super moons 
 waiting for you to notice.
 they glow
 twice as beautiful inside
 
 infinity
 
 a quiver of cold breath pushes out our bodies 
 It’s winter in america, again;
 
 the subtle sound of survival.
 a wolf howls at the indifferent morning 
 we are always mourning. in black.
 we don’t choose this pain. these colors.


 We swallow our ivory keys
 Our sharps & flats, an enharmonic black scream:
 
 Mixed.
 
 The way Ponchai Sankofa Wilkerson held a key 
 Under his tongue and spit it out
 before they executed him 
 We know freedom.

 Is just one fuck you
 Away from being this poem.

 We didn’t choose to scrape
 samples of our organs back together 
 sew what was left of America inside
 
 A matted flag
 woven beneath the delicate seams of 
 our children
 
 Born into this madness
 Our bloodline threads unbeveled 
 against each blue stitch

 I’ve worn these scars ’cross my face
 My entire life and when you asked how i got 
 Them, I said
 
 “An angel touched me.”
 
 I earned the right to my own damn mythology 
 What else do we have left
 our bodies reduced to all that matters 
 inside fragile feminism courses.
 
 There is zero removal of this 
 Nina Simone


 | Black. |
 

 My British born, Canadian raised mother 
 never asked me to
 
 So, why you?
 
 She raised a black girl 
 Who loved to read; put
 Alice Walker and Hansberry
 in my hands.
 
 I’m mixed
 
 buffalo & eagle 
 hampton & hooks
 Tear gas & Standing Rock
 Front line women & crooks
 
 mixed
 
 holocaust & genocide 
 horses & low-rides

 I survived.
 
 This poem is my proof of life 
 Your paperwork, never worked.
 
 I understand why you worry when 
 A drop of blood swims back to shore


 Moore babies
 
 |black|
 
 as
 
 me. 


From We Want Our Bodies Back by jessica Care moore. Reprinted with the permission of the 
publisher Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright © 2020 by jessica Care moore.
cover image for book We Want Our Bodies Back, title and three women

Queer Activists Take On the Most Homophobic Town in America

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Celia Laskey’s debut novel, Under The Rainbow, is a study in cause and effect, and reverberation. On the opening page, Avery the chapter’s protagonist, defines  a made-up term that frames much of her adolescence: “Hetero shame: fear of coming out as heterosexual to your lesbian mom who you know wishes you were a lesbian, too.” Avery’s story begins a wonderfully topsy-turvy narrative that hits the reader a bit like an explosion—its effects are deeply felt in every pocket of Big Burr, Kansas, a place commonly known as the most homophobic town in America.

In the face of an activist LGBTQ task force’s arrival, two-year appointment, and mission to transform small-town bigots into bastions of queer acceptance, we land in the hearts and minds of a community wrestling itself, and by turns rejecting and welcoming newcomers who present a different way of life. From the challenges of asserting queer identity while steeped in a homophobic high school, to navigating an open marriage in a place where other queers are few and far between, Laskey peels back all the layers. She takes familiar themes of queer stories—otherness, isolation, escape—and finds ways to twist them to fit the lives and circumstances of these characters and place. 

Celia Laskey and I corresponded about small towns and big ideas, literal and metaphorical queer escape, and writing a novel-in-stories with an ideal balance of chapters that carry significance that’s greater than the sum of its parts. 

Dennis Norris II: One of the things I enjoyed most was the way you inverted the trope here, queered the narrative so to speak, with Avery. She’s straight but afraid to come out to her lesbian-activist mom, and at school, she doesn’t want anyone to know her parents are a lesbian couple, or that they’re part of the task force. She feels othered in both places, which is new for her, having grown up in liberal, queer-friendly Los Angeles. What’s the genesis for her story, and this novel? 

Celia Laskey: The idea for Avery’s story came from me and some friends joking around about how maybe we’d have kids if we could guarantee that they’d also be queer. And of course we were completely joking, but then it got me thinking about if maybe there was a little nugget of truth in there—how queer parents aren’t so different from straight parents in wanting their kids to be like them. And then, like you said, I intentionally started thinking about flipping the idea of gay shame: what if a kid was afraid to “come out” to their queer parent as straight? How would that look different or the same as coming out as LGBTQ?

People are surprised when they find out I didn’t realize I was gay until I was 23—they assume I shot out of my mom’s vagina and was like, ‘no thank you, men.’

Everyone who knows me considers me to be the biggest lesbian who ever lesbianed, and people are really surprised when they find out that I didn’t realize I was gay until I was 23—they assume I shot out of my mom’s vagina and was like, “no thank you, men.” The reality is that realizing my sexuality was a really long, sad journey and for most of my life I was so closeted, even to myself, that it literally didn’t occur to me that I could be gay. Naturally, it had a lot to do with a lack of queer visibility in my young life. 

One day my wife and I were talking about this and I was like, what if there were these queer recruitment leagues that traveled around to all the small towns in the the country, to show everyone that queer people existed and moreover that it was okay to be queer? Once I started thinking through the logistics of this, book-wise, I realized it would be difficult to have a book that wasn’t set in one location, so I tweaked it to this one small town in Kansas, and an acceptance task force instead of a recruitment league. 

DN: Is there an actual nonprofit that you’ve based Acceptance Across America on? At first I found the idea of a volunteer task force picking-up and moving to Big Burr for such pointed LGBTQ advocacy a bit surreal. But as we moved through different voices and perspectives, this world really came to life. What drew you to diving into all the perspectives you wrote from, as opposed to sticking with one or two?

CL: You’re right that I had initially intended the idea for the book to feel kind of surreal—there wasn’t an actual nonprofit that I based Acceptance Across America on, but once I started doing research I found out about an HRC initiative called Project One America, which is a multi-year campaign to expand LGBTQ equality in Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas. So I read as much about that as I could, but there wasn’t a ton of information available, so at a certain point I just had to go back to how I imagined a situation like this would play out. How would so many different kinds of people’s lives change because of this? To really understand it, you’d want to see it from all sides: both task force members and townspeople, and all the distinct individuals who comprise those two groups. 

DN: That leads kind of perfectly into my next question. Among the townspeople, there are really varied reactions to the presence of the task force. I’m wondering about the responsibility you might’ve felt to write from all sides, and to portray characters like Christine with great humanity and empathy. Did you find that process different from writing Avery, for example, or David? 

CL: I think that when writing linked stories you do tend to feel more of an obligation to show all sides, as opposed to a novel from just one or two viewpoints. But I think, for a writer, it ends up presenting a really useful challenge because it forces you to imagine the inner life of people you normally wouldn’t. In my real life I have no interest in granting empathy to homophobes or people with any harmful prejudice. I don’t care to understand where their hate comes from, but for this book I had to—once you choose to write about “the most homophobic town in the nation,” you kind of have to write about one of those homophobes. 

That’s how I’m able to understand homophobia: they hate us ‘cause they ain’t us.

With every character, we’re trying to understand what makes them tick and why, and with Christine, I wanted to understand why this billboard drives her so nuts. I did a lot of reading about homophobia and its root causes and I found one study that said some people’s homophobia is actually rooted in jealousy—not that they want to be queer themselves but that they’re jealous of the freedom queerness can bring to a life: the feeling that you don’t have to get married, or buy a house, or have kids, etc. That it kind of frees you from expectations and conventions. And that’s how I’m able to understand homophobia: they hate us ‘cause they ain’t us (yes, this is a quote from the 2014 movie that no one saw, The Interview, lol). Then I feel able to give a character like Christine humanity and empathy because it’s not that she hates us, it’s that on some level she hates her own life. 

DN: This novel feels incredibly global. I mean this in the way you’ve handled complicated nuances between so many different characters and families and relationships, while also speaking to a larger localized sociopolitical context. I’m thinking of the intricacies of David and Miguel’s relationship, and how it might’ve been tempting to make every queer character’s inner life secondary to the cause, so to speak—in this case living in Big Burr, queer isolation, blatant homophobia and so on. 

CL: After I had written a few stories that dealt really centrally with the conflict inherent to the task force, I became interested in exploring quieter stories, where the task force wasn’t the main source of conflict and tension. I was thinking about how, even if you moved to the most homophobic town in the nation and were dealing with that every day, your other, more personal problems wouldn’t cease to exist. 

That’s where David and Miguel’s story came from—it doesn’t have anything to do with the task force at all. For me, it was sort of the inverse of Christine’s story. David thinks that by being gay and being in an open relationship, he can avoid all of the pitfalls of a traditional life, but then he’s presented with this issue of the aging parent, which is something so many couples have to deal with eventually, queer or straight. After David’s story, it came naturally to write some other stories where the task force wasn’t the focus, and I think that’s necessary for a book like this to not feel too one-note.

DN: Isolation is a theme throughout, and perhaps never more so than in one of the quieter chapters, Linda’s, when two of the most isolated characters connect, against all odds. Linda’s grief has taken over her life, and Jamal is the only Black person in town which gives him, as he notes, extra visibility. They also, given their context, couldn’t be more different from each other. How did their friendship come about for you, as the writer?   

I think grief is the first time that a lot of people feel really displaced.

CL: I wanted to feature friendships between the townspeople and the task force members in a couple stories and I was thinking about what could bring together two people who are so different. For Linda, I was thinking about what could make a cishet, white, able-bodied person feel like an outsider, and I think grief is the first time that a lot of people feel really displaced—so here Linda is in the town she grew up in, surrounded by family and friends, but the loss of her son has drawn this attention to her that she hates. She’s hyper visible but also feels completely alone, and that’s something Jamal really understands. So I thought this would be a good point of connection for the two of them, and for Linda with the task force as a whole. 

DN: In nearly every story, a character is engaging in some kind of escape with disastrous results. I think we often talk about escape as an especially queer endeavor, especially if we come from towns like Big Burr. I can’t help but think that escapism is a central theme: from relationships, from circumstances, from locale. Were you conscious of this during the writing? Is escape in any way a part of your queer landscape as well?

CL: That’s funny, I don’t think I was that conscious of the theme of escapism while I was writing, but now that you mention it it’s definitely there. I think about societal expectations all the time, and how people are either trying to conform to them or defy them, and I think a lot of the time that even people who want to conform to them feel really constrained. Everyone needs an escape from these expectations, whether they realize it or not.  

Escape is definitely part of my queer landscape. In terms of physical escape, even before I knew I was gay, I was like, I GOTTA GET OUT OF MAINE AND TO A CITY! Deep down I think I knew. Then in terms of mental/emotional escape, it’s a big reason why I’m a writer and a reader—I love living in realities that aren’t this one. And when I’m not writing or reading I’m usually watching TV, which is how I think most people escape their brains and their lives. I fucking love TV, and have probably watched most shows that exist. My all-time favorite is Mad Men, followed closely by The Leftovers and The Americans. 

DN: You’re from Maine? Maine has such a rich literary history, including one of my favorite writers, Elizabeth Strout. And similar to her, I think Under the Rainbow is an exemplary example of a novel-in-stories. Each chapter stands alone, and yet the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This can be a really difficult balance to achieve. Did you always know this book would be written as a novel-in-stories, or did that develop over the course of the writing?

CL: Elizabeth Strout is one of my favorite authors too! I definitely studied Olive Kitteridge time and time again while I wrote this book. (I just read Olive, Again and it was just as good as the original!) 

I did always know that the book would be a novel in stories. I think the form of the book was the first decision I made, before even the concept, because I didn’t feel prepared to write a traditional novel at that time in my life—this was right before I went to my MFA program, when I was about 29. I had only ever written short stories, and I soon learned that even MFA programs don’t teach you how to write a novel (which is something I could give a whole separate spiel about). I started with the thought of: What can I do, craft-wise, at this point in my life? Short stories. I could link them and call it a novel. And what kind of idea would work with a book of linked stories? And after that I eventually came up with the premise. 

Making the whole feel greater than the sum of its parts, as you say, is one of the biggest things I worked on with my editor after selling the book—we added way more linkages between all the characters, and plot points that would hopefully urge the reader to keep turning pages (like what happens at the end of Zach’s story), and we added Gabe’s final story as a way to bring everyone back together. 

7 Novels About Multicultural Families

Posted on by Jo Lou

Much of the inspiration for my novels comes from the idea of culture and how it impacts families. Perhaps this is because my own family history is deeply rooted in migration: my father moved during the Partition following India’s independence, my mother’s family migrated from India to Africa to set up an exporting business. After they married, my parents lived in the Middle East, Europe, and Canada, and I moved to the U.S.

All of these various cultures have imprinted me as an individual and our family dynamics. Culture is both an enriching and complicating dynamic. 

The stories I write explore the melding and clashing of cultures through adoption, immigration, bicultural marriage, and generational divides. My new novel, The Shape of Family, traces how a close-knit family finds their way back together after a tragic event, because of and despite their cultural differences. It is this complexity of culture in families that I’m drawn to in the books I most love. Here are a few of my favorites stories about multicultural families.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Two half-sisters born in Ghana in the 18th century live out different fates: one sold into slavery in America, the other in comfort afforded by colonial power back home. As the novel travels through several successive generations of each woman, we see the indelible power of place and culture on individual lives.

The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing by Mira Jacob

The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing by Mira Jacob

Spellbinding from the first page, this novel travels back and forth in both time and place, portraying an Indian family that has migrated to America and the trauma that haunts them all. The main character’s profession as a photographer introduces interesting themes of perspective and artistry, as she tries to unravel the family’s history and mystery.

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

The title character of this story is a young Nigerian girl who flees Africa under desperate circumstances for England, re-entering the lives of a married couple she knows. It illustrates the uncertain fate of refugees, the consequences of unchecked greed and power, and the best efforts of flawed humans to rise above their weaknesses. 

The Storm by Arif Anwar

This novel has one of the most elegant structures I’ve ever read. The 1970 Bangladeshi cyclone—in which a half-million people perished overnight—drives the narrative of five interwoven stories of love, parenting, war, colonialism, and religious conflict. Both natural and man-made disasters are at play, and the story truly swept me away, while being rooted in a regional history few of us know enough about.  

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

The perfect suspenseful story wrapped in a family drama. The Lees are a Chinese American family living in the American Midwest in the 1970s. The core of story is the mysterious disappearance of daughter Lydia, but what really kept me turning pages was the nuanced depiction of family dynamics imbued with cultural complications. 

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

I savored every page of this brilliant epic novel, which spans three continents and the lifetimes of twin brothers born of a secret union between an Indian Catholic nun and a brash British surgeon. It delves into so many fascinating ideas: the legacy of parents upon their children, the nature of forbidden love, the connection between siblings and twins and innovative advances in medicine, just to name a few.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Young lovers in Nigeria are separated when one travels to America to pursue her academic career. Their respective migration paths, experiences, and the political backdrop of their home country present challenges for their futures and their relationship.

Modern-Day Iran, Through the Eyes of a Prisoner

Posted on by Jo Lou

The novel Then The Fish Swallowed Him follows Yunus Turabi, a taciturn 45-year-old Iranian bus driver with a simple life: he loves high-quality black tea, has an obsessive love for the streets of the sprawling metropolis of Tehran, and has recently joined an underground reading group. All that changes when he is arrested in the wake of the 2005 Tehran bus drivers’ strike and sent to Evin Prison, notorious for its interrogations and torture.

Over a period of weeks, he is alternately questioned and beaten by his assigned interrogator at Evin, an older man named Hajj Saeed, and he spends extensive time in solitary confinement. None of it is easy to read, in part because of its accuracy; the scenes are based on Arian’s interviews with friends in Iran who have spent time in solitary confinement. In flashbacks, Yunus’s life is revealed to be less than simple—his parents both dead, his best friend betrayed—and his relationship with Hajj Saeed twists and turns towards its inevitable end of a forced confession.

Then The Fish Swallowed Him isn’t quite Amir Ahmadi Arian’s first book. In Iran, he’s published novels, short stories, and nonfiction, in addition to translating novels into Farsi and working as a journalist, but this book is his debut in English. The book’s gorgeous, unique turns of phrase—“a screaming, black chador,” “the noises snaked in from all sides, scarring the air”—show how Arian’s work as a translator influences his writing.

I met with Amir Ahmadi Arian to discuss the practice of writing inside and outside of Iran, solitary confinement, and the banality of evil.

Nozlee Samadzadeh: You’ve written about prison sentences and about the Green Movement in short stories in the past. What made you want to handle these subjects in novel form in Then The Fish Swallowed Him?

Amir Ahmadi Arian: There’s so much that’s not been told. The thing about stories of Iran in English is that almost all of them are written by Iranian Americans, people who grew up here. They didn’t have a first-hand experience of what transpired after the revolution. So when I was reading those books, I was constantly noticing this yawning gap. There are stories of post-revolutionary Iran that no one has told in any form, nonfiction or fiction. And they’re really great stories! They’re incredible stories in so many ways.

I’m by nature a political person, I’ve been a journalist for a long time and been involved in politics. And I love political novels. I’ve always been a reader of political novels—especially Latin American. I feel very close to that tradition. It’s almost like I naturally go to political themes. I’ve been involved personally with a lot of this stuff too. So I’m not done with them! They’re going to show up again.

NS: There are so many books in this book—a literal syllabus for the reading group of bus drivers—from Iranian authors like Jalal Al-e-Ahmad and Bijan Jazani, who I’ll admit I’ve never heard of, to Marx and Engels and Foucault and Fanon. If you could ask a reader of this book to read just one of those books, which one would you pick? Yunus’s favorite is the Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

There are stories of post-revolutionary Iran that no one has told in any form. And they’re really great stories!

AAA: I would say The Wretched of the Earth, that’s a book I really admire so deeply. It moved me so much, for so many reasons. And then I love Foucault’s book, actually. It’s not elaborated on in the study group, Discipline and Punish. That book really touched me, too. Funny thing is that when that book came out in Farsi, it kind of disappeared from the market because it sold out immediately. And it turned out that the police, the Niru-ye Entezami, had bought it.

NS: Just to make it disappear?

AAA: No, to read it! Somebody had read it in their system and decided that it was a good read for them.

But anyway, another thing that I wanted to highlight in this book is that when we talk about a worker’s strike or a worker’s union, the intellectual dimension of it is not widely known. I talked to a lot of bus drivers, and a couple of them were among the leaders of those unions. I was really surprised—and embarrassed, I should have known—but I was surprised at how well-read and knowledgeable they are. I didn’t make up anything about those lists. I heard it from them, I asked them what they were reading. They did have study groups, in different formats, and they read books every week and they sat around and discussed them. One bus driver told me that he always had a book by the window, in the front. He said that he found his wife through that, actually. One day a woman—he was reading, I believe, The Grapes of Wrath—a woman comes on board and notices that book and they start talking, and then they married!

Intellectually, it’s a very rich tradition, union activism in Iran. It has been from the beginning and I wanted to emphasize that.

NS: I’d love to know how you think about writing fiction in Farsi versus in English, particularly descriptions and dialogue. I thought it was so funny that we see Yunus’s mom pouring tea the traditional Iranian way (“My mom would pour tea from the teapot, then weaken it with the boiled water of the kettle”) without explanation. And at the bus drivers’ protest in the book’s opening pages, you don’t translate the word zolm in the main speaker’s speech.

AAA: I thought that the expressions and words, that you can kind of understand them from the context.

NS: Being Iranian, I wouldn’t be able to tell!

AAA: Yeah. I didn’t translate zolm—I don’t even know if it has a good equivalent in English.

NS: “Tyranny,” I guess? But it’s not quite…

AAA: Zolm is not inflicted by a tyrant, necessarily. It was a deliberate decision. There were actually more of those, but I took them out later. This book takes place in Iran, and everybody speaks Farsi, right? I’m basically translating something, and translation is never complete. So I wanted parts of it to kind of jut out.

NS: So we have “asshole” and then we have pedar sag (for non-Iranian readers: literally “[your] father [is a] dog” but metaphorically similar to “son of a bitch”), and just because neither can be directly translated doesn’t mean we can’t have both.

AAA: It’s good to have it sound a little alien to a native speaker in English. To remind them constantly that this isn’t happening in your language, it’s some form of translation—not literally, but a cultural translation.

NS: Did you feel responsible for representing Iran in a way that would or would not be misunderstood? What if someone reads this book and thinks, “What a horrible theocracy where adultery is illegal, that’s so messed up.” Did you worry about making Hajj Saeed, the interrogator, too evil?

AAA: I did. The character that I spent the most time on was the interrogator, not Yunus. In the news or many other books, you’ve got a simplified dichotomy of an evil government versus an angelic people. The established notion is that the Iranian people just want to “be like us,” they want democracy and Coca Cola and whatever. They want everything we want, but they’re trapped there under the thumb of this incomprehensibly evil government. They’re pretty evil, but it’s just not true, it’s not the fact. Iran is a very dynamic society, a lot is going on. If you leave the country for two years and go back—do you travel there?

NS: I’ve only been once, I was born here. I went as a kid, in 2000, which was at this point a million Iran years ago.

AAA: It changes pretty fundamentally in many ways. I have been living out of the country for ten years, and I’ve visited maybe every two years. Even I was surprised every time that there were things I needed to learn. It’s a society that is in flux all the time, and that dichotomy of Beauty and the Beast doesn’t work.

One thing that I wanted to really work on for this book was to show that the prison system in Iran is a bureaucracy. If I manage to get that across, I’ve done my job. There are a lot of bureaucrats. These interrogations are procedures that are devised and finalized before the interrogator comes into the room. They’re following a script, and all of this torture, all of this stuff is part of a bureaucratic system. It’s a form of the banality of evil that I wanted to execute in this book. And as a result, people who do it are just human beings.

NS: I thought it was so cool that you put those words in the mouth of Habib Samadi, a union activist who advises the bus drivers before their strike: “Your interrogators are human beings. They have strengths and weaknesses too. Be open to them and see them as humans. This can help you manipulate them.”

AAA: Absolutely. These are people just struggling in their own lives like everybody else, and that’s their day job. When they are done with their day job, they go home and watch BBC and American movies, they have a fight with their daughter because her scarf is not tied right, or she comes home late. It was very important to me to portray Hajj Saeed as a human without minimizing the pain that he is inflicting in the process.

NS: When did the comparison to the story of Jonah and the whale occur to you? (“Yunus” is what Jonah is called in the Quran.)

If you’re in Iran and involved in politics, you’ll be surrounded by all sorts who’ve spent time in solitary confinement.

AAA: The metaphor was kind of obvious, right? The experience of a solitary cell is reminiscent of what the Biblical story is about, of being in a dark, tight place on your own for a long time. Also a book that really affected me—I read it before I started this project—is In the Belly of the Beast, which is in the epigraph. The title refers to that. I found it to be a great metaphor. Also the whole journey of Jonah, or Yunus, both in the Bible and Quran, is similar to what this character goes through: getting involved with a political process, and getting almost excommunicated, expelled from the community, and having this period of self-reflection-slash-torture in a dark spot, and then getting spit out back into society. That was a pretty good metaphor for all that.

NS: I have to ask about solitary confinement. Your descriptions of the way he felt physically as well as mentally are at times difficult to read—I had close the book and take a break. You thank the Iranians you spoke to who had spent time in solitary confinement in your acknowledgments. Did you spend any time alone yourself?

AAA: I thought I would, but I didn’t end up doing that.

NS: I can see how it might feel disrespectful, to be like, “I’ll shut myself in my bedroom.”

AAA: And it’s not the same. I can sit in my room for five days, but it’s not the same at all. It was very difficult to talk to them—people don’t want to talk about that experience at all. I’m grateful to people who did. Another surprise when I was researching this book is how little literature we have about solitary confinement, actually, of any genre. When I talked to people, I realized why: people have a hard time talking about what happened to themselves. Because I wasn’t there myself, everything you read here about Yunus’s time in solitary confinement, I could basically have published as nonfiction too. They’re testimonies of different people that I combined into one character, but pretty much everything is according to testimony.

NS: That makes it even more horrifying.

AAA: Yeah, I know! It was very hard.

NS: How did you find them?

AAA: They’re my friends. If you’re in Iran, and you’re involved in politics in any way, you’ll be surrounded by all sorts who’ve spent time in solitary confinement. I know a lot of my friends who’ve spent time, from maybe twenty days to a couple of months in solitary.

NS: I’m asking you to project beyond the pages of the book here—we don’t see Yunus’s years in prison on the page, but it’s clear they’ve really changed him. One of my favorite passages in the book is about the distinction between solitude and what he’s experiencing in prison. He says, “compulsory loneliness was the opposite of the voluntary one I had cultivated.” Do you think that he manages to “wrest [his] solitude back” when he gets out?

A novelist should be a public intellectual too.

AAA: No, I don’t think it’s possible. It’s an irreversible experience. I don’t “think”—I’m quoting the people I talked to. Almost unanimously, they said the same thing. Scientifically, solitary confinement of more than 14 days is considered torture because your brain is basically rewired. You’re not the same person when you get out. No, I don’t find harbor any redemption for him when he gets out.

NS: You’ve been publishing more literary essays, like the piece in the Paris Review Daily about the concept of avareh, the Iranian concept of spiritual displacement, in addition to op-eds on current events in Iran. What is next for you after the publication of this novel?

AAA: It’s an interesting question because I’ve been asked that quite a bit. It comes from a totally different idea of who a writer is in Iran and here. In Iran, you can’t walk around and say, “I write novels,” it doesn’t make sense. A novelist should be a public intellectual too.

NS: That’s not as much the case here.

AAA: It’s not, there are professional novelists here, who, they don’t give a shit what’s going on around them. And they don’t write nonfiction, or they’re not involved in anything but fiction. That kind of figure really doesn’t exist in Iran.

NS: It’s French too, the idea of the public intellectual.

AAA: Yes, it’s very French, it’s Middle Eastern. In the Arab world, everybody writes everything. I grew up in that tradition, and I can’t really stop writing about other things. It comes to me immediately. When something happens I start writing—I feel responsible to do that. It would be interesting to do a statistical analysis of Iranian writers, of their corpus: how much of it is fiction, how much is plays, op-eds, essays, travelogues—they write everything—compared to a professional novelist in the U.S. You’d be surprised. Maybe people we know as novelists in Iran, half of what they wrote was nonfiction. I belong to that tradition, and it doesn’t make sense to me to just write fiction.