His Mystic Poetry Is Generating the Earliest AI

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the change was also apparent elsewhere.

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

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

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

“Hotshot” Is a Fiery Take on the American Western

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Within the prose itself, I was undermining my authority.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friendship Is My Writing Process

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by EL Assistant2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If My Mom Was So Angry Around Me, I Must Have Been the Reason

Posted on by EL Assistant2

“Queen Bee” by Flavia R. Monteiro

BEES ARE CREEPY

I watch the sun-rays dance at the bottom of the pool, impossibly blue, and I dip my toes just to goosebump my skin, delighting in the light buzz of a carefree moment. Until, a bee. 

She flies maniacally around my ankle, like she’s strapping an invisible rope to my leg. Every now and then she lands, perching on my skin, sniffing. She doesn’t find what she’s looking for, doesn’t stop looking either. I can feel her anger building. As she turns a corner around my heel, she jiggles her striped ass to warn me, Don’t move. Don’t move, or I’ll sting. 

With bees, to raise a shield is to invite an all-out attack. 

Her jiggly ass is equipped with a built-in weapon, always ready to pierce my skin with her venom. She seems more fragile than me, and in fact, is more fragile, weapon notwithstanding. But it is precisely her fragility that scares me. I’m scared to scare the bee. Between the two of us, I have to be the chill person. Because if I lose my shit, she loses her shit. And if she loses it, we both get hurt.  

To be fair, I get hurt; she dies. Arguably, she’d have it worse. But I would be doomed to keep on living, now with a throbbing toe and the feeling of guilt over the bee’s death.

Had you been chill, this bee could’ve lived another 37 days, my pillow will whisper at night.

A BEE STORES VENOM IN HER BODY 

Like a bee, my mom kept her anger inside, always an instant away from discharging, but never discharging, until it did. It shot out in my direction, a venom-filled spear lodging under my skin. The anger was hers, but its management was mine. It was my responsibility to predict and avoid her breaking point.    

BEE VENOM IS DEADLIER THAN COBRA VENOM

When snapped at by my mother, my instinct wasn’t to snap back, but to calm her down with a note.

My siblings and I were emptying mom’s house so we could rent it out. Cupboards were gutted, boxes were opened, dusty piles of paper were lifted, all sorts of memories surfaced. From a drawer spilled a heap of recipes and postcards, and underneath them, a crinkled note. Unfolding it, I recognized my wiggly handwriting in colored pencil. At the top of the page there was a heart, and at the bottom, the date: August 21, 1990.

Mommy,

I like you a lot, 

and never want you to talk like this:

“I hope you die.”

Because I adore you.

Keep this card.

Bye

I imagine it’s not uncommon for a mom of a six-year-old to wish her kid dead, in that split second that separates her exhaustion from her consciousness. A wish that dissipates almost before it exists. What I cannot imagine is this wish making its way into words, and being shot out at the child. I can’t imagine six-year-old me being pierced with that sentence.

Yet I must’ve been, because the venom from that day is still stored in me. That explains how my body now, thirty years later, reacts to otherwise harmless interactions. It explains the swelling in my throat when the person behind me on the sidewalk harrumphs. Or the sudden redness on my skin when the cashier taps her fingers. Or the nausea when the Uber driver growls. My veins carry the conviction that I am to blame for anything that erupts, especially other people’s temper. 

After all, if my mom was so often so angry around me, the reason must have been me. I must give off a smell that awakens people’s rage; people’s rage, in turn, is a sign I may be in serious danger.

Already at six, when snapped at by my mother, my instinct wasn’t to snap back, but to calm her down with a note, a heart, an adore-you. Already at six, I knew that if I lost it, she’d lose it. And if she lost it, we’d both get hurt. 

BEES HAVE SILENT WAYS TO COMMUNICATE 

A rice bowl was passed around the table—along with the beans and the farofa—between my parents, my siblings, and I. Everyday menu, everyday conversation. Until my mom mispronounced the word CD-ROM, her tongue crumpling as she spit out a rolled R. The shiny discs, along with their acronym, were just arriving in Brazil, were alien to her, fluent neither in English nor in computers. I laughed at her pronunciation, the mean yet innocent laughter of a ten-year-old who was as young as the foreign machines; too young to consider there had ever been a world where words like modem mouse microsoft weren’t part of the Portuguese language. I laughed; she left. She stood up mid-lunch and locked herself up in her room. A reaction by then so familiar, I saw it in slow motion: the chair scratching the floor, the stomping, the slammed door, the silence that followed for a whole day. After she left, the whole family turned to me with a head-shake. You should’ve known better, I read in their bugged-out eyes.

I should’ve known she was so fragile; her fragility stung. 

A BEE MAY BE UNABLE TO NOTICE A FLOWER JUST INCHES FROM HER 

But she will notice every microscopic bump on the surface of a petal. Bees are peculiar in the way they read the environment around them. My mom, too, would sometimes disregard the larger picture and get hung up on the slightest detail. Her anger wasn’t fueled by long traffic jams or high interest rates, but by a misplaced laughter.   

BEES ARE DEFENSIVE

My mom would never—has never—apologized. So I did, every single time.

A Fanta bottle was sitting on the table, halfway empty, its ribbed glass opaque from wear. Tiny me was looking at it, my legs dangling from the chair. The sun snuck in from the side and drew a yellow triangle on the table top. All was peacefully golden. Until a bee landed on the bottle’s sticky mouth. I freaked out, arms flailing. From above came a soothing voice, one of the adults explaining the trick was to sit still: The bee won’t do you harm unless she feels threatened by you.

On that day, I began to understand that my safety depends on how I make others feel. I can’t  recall how old I was, and whether that was a new lesson, or a recap. 

THE QUEEN BEE SETS THE MOOD OF THE HIVE  

My house had a heavy wooden door that protected us from outside danger. I opened and closed this door, never giving it much thought. My biggest concerns were MTV and PMS and ICQ. Until my father, my brother, and my sister all walked out that door, within months of each other. One divorce and two marriages, and over the winter we went from a five-person household to a household of two: a teenage daughter and her fragile mother. Danger was now inside. I’d been left alone with the bee.

Every night, and sometimes all night, my mother and I had agonizing fights. Those fights bled into the wee hours, zig-zagging between accusations, until it wore us down and we simply split to our bedrooms. Our arguments had no resolutions, only respites. We lived in a permanent close-up of the microscopic bumps on the petal: she got worked up if I went out or if I stayed in or if I talked or if I was quiet or crying or laughing or nothing.

After those fights, there’d be the expected scratched floor, the stomping, the slammed door—but things wouldn’t get any better after she left her bedroom. In the following mornings, a dark cloud hummed over the house. We avoided the subject and we avoided each other’s eyes, until the hum became too loud to bear, and only an I’m-sorry punctured that hum. My mom would never—has never—apologized. So I did, every single time. 

I can only take so many apologies, she often said. Once I give up on a person, there’s no turning back. 

I sensed I was always treading too close to her breaking point. At every fight, I prayed it wouldn’t be the last. The last fight, I feared, wouldn’t end the conflict; it’d end the relationship. 

A HONEYBEE CAN ONLY STING ONCE 

But unlike a bee, my mom could sting over and over. A bee’s  stinger has blades like a screw anchor—once in, it can’t be pulled out. It’s attached to the bee’s lower abdomen, and if she flies away from the victim, the stinger stays, and with it a string of her internal organs. She stings; she becomes hollow; she dies.  

A BEE CAN STING ANOTHER BEE TO DEATH

A quiet truce—or rather a tense silence—followed our previous fight, as it did all our fights. The morning-after was made of our ghosts, exhausted, gliding through the house, eyes glued to the floor. Until I stirred up the hive by saying I was sorry, I—  

Do you know what it’s like to taste a gun with the roof of your mouth?

Her question pierced me. I was fourteen. I held the hem of my oversized t-shirt, frozen by her confession. This time, it was not me she wished would die, as she had when I was six. It was herself.

Much like when I was six, nothing happened. She didn’t find the courage to do it. But like I’d recorded in that note, in my childish  handwriting, she’d found the courage to say it. She wanted me to know she’d put a gun in her mouth. She wanted me to know what followed the scratching, the stomping, the slamming; what went on inside her bedroom, inside her mind. 

And she wanted to remind me I had provoked this. I’d either cried or laughed or moved in a way she wasn’t expecting. Careless, I had released her anger. She lost it, I lost it. We both got hurt. Only this time, what had been a sting to me, could’ve been her death.  

She wanted to warn me. I have a weapon. Don’t make me feel threatened. Don’t  make me feel threatened, or I’ll sting. And die. 

BEES REMEMBER  

Under the fluorescent light of a university lab in London, a scientist called Lars was placing robot-spiders on certain flowers. If a bee landed on those flowers, the robot would grab her and then release her unharmed. The bees, Lars learned, could keep a memory of the encounter, and so they started inspecting the flowers for robot-spiders before landing. Some of them, though, started not only avoiding the actual threats but also avoiding flowers where there was nothing. Scared by false alarms, maybe by alarms ringing inside their own minds. The bees, Lars learned, can develop PTSD.

BEES CAN BE TRAINED TO SMELL EXPLOSIVES

After the gun conversation, whenever my mom hurt me, I knew better than to respond.

After the gun conversation, whenever my mom hurt me, I knew better than to respond. I did my best to appear innocuous. I dropped my shoulders, I wore my most tamed voice, I rushed an apology; my mouth spilled nothing but honey. Still, every time I came home from school or from the pool, I froze with the possibility I’d done something wrong, irreversibly wrong.

Had you been chill, your mom could’ve lived another 37 years, the front door whispered every time I slowly pushed it open.

ANY FEMALE LARVA HAS POTENTIAL TO BECOME A QUEEN BEE 

I’m talking about my mom in the past as if she died. She didn’t—not from suicide, not from other external threats. She lives a quiet life, wandering along the flower beds of a nursing home, her inside hollowed out by advanced-stage Alzheimer’s. No stingers left now that words have lost all meaning to her. 

That’d be a great time for forgiveness, say friends and therapists. The fighting’s finally over; my mother’s finally harmless.  

They ignore that certain harms cannot be contained in the past. Stored in our bodies, harm seeps into the present, will eventually seep into the future. Though her venom has dried, I’m not free from it. Her rage is still here. It lives inside me, in my own stinger. More often than I’d like to admit, I find myself replicating her fuckedupness. I, too, have become an angry woman. I, too, expect others to manage my anger. 

I want to yell at the bus driver who’s stuck in traffic. I want to yell at the lifeguard who does nothing about the rain on a Sunday. I yell on the phone that I need my package delivered now, while on the other end the robot repeats, unmoved, that I can press one to schedule a pickup or two to track a shipment.

 I went from sucking on guilt at fourteen to regurgitating it at forty. 

BEES ARE CREEPY  

I watch the shadows of the monstera leaves dance on the ceiling, a lazy feeling, and I let some Brazilian jazz softly pour onto the living room floor. My husband sits across from me, and between us there’s just our Manhattans in stem-glasses, our sweet banter, the occasional laughter.

Until.

Suddenly, the living room is buzzing with tension. Leaning forward, I’m spitting out barbed words. I can see my spite already piercing through my husband’s skin. He must’ve said or sighed or whispered something, and I’ve yanked out all my rage in his direction. I feel hollow, dead almost, but there’s nothing I can do to stop my venom from spilling now. I have no idea how to contain my anger. My husband, shrunk in his seat, is distressed yet striving to keep chill. Behind his dilating pupils, I can see the exact words he’s thinking. 

If I lose it, she loses it. If she loses it, we both get hurt.

7 African Novelists in Conversation With Their Literary Ancestors

Posted on by EL Assistant2

I cannot think of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart without thinking about yams. So when one of the students in my Global Cultural Studies class mentioned yams as one of the main intrigues of the novel, I nodded and laughed. Yes. Great point! For Achebe, yams were not just a convenient plot device; they reflected the way his characters saw and understood the world. In Igbo culture, the harvest of yams is immensely symbolic; it charts the rhythm of the year, almost like a calendar, and it signifies the blessings of ancestors. 

In my debut novel, This Kind of Trouble, a story that spans an entire century, I attempt to create a similar narrative motif using the Uchu river. Essentially, the river is my way of enacting what Achebe does with yams—a cultural homage that draws on an object’s spiritual and social connotations while refusing to get bogged down in anthropological explanation. This native-object symbolism is one of the many things I picked up from Achebe—a sense of cultural attunement that helps my story find historical texture without being overburdened by historical facts.

I am often drawn to these questions of tradition and lineage in craft, what T.S Elliot described as the way a writer carries in his work, the “presence of the past.” When I pick a book I love, especially a book by an African author, I want to know the ghosts of our literary elders lurking behind the pages. This is not a simple undertaking, it leads me to struggle with other questions, such as, what it means for the African novel to sing with the voice of its dead while being written in a language that has rendered its ancestors marginal to the Canon. While it’d be correct to say that I owe a lot to Hemingway and Updike—and especially to Morrison, and Marilyn Robinson—I owe much more to the golden age writers of African descent who brought their alienation and placelessness into literary form. The writers I claim here are not defined by geographic or national boundaries, since the idea of a homogenous Africa is itself a fiction. Instead, I embrace a literary archive of shared colonial histories, currents of Black Atlantic world-making, and diasporic relations to the continent. Many of these writers—from Lagos to Antigua, from Achebe to Selvon—worked within and against the Western canon in a language that was either adopted or imposed. Without references or frameworks, they wrote characters that were seemingly unrepresentable. It is in the work of these early novelists, in their legacy that This Kind of Trouble found permission to be itself. In honor of these elders, this list collects some of my favorite contemporary African novelists and puts them in conversation with the older African-Atlantic literatures they call to mind. 

The Edge of Water by Olufunke Grace Bankole

Bankole’s debut novel reads like a soulful meditation on fate, ruptured ambition, and the inevitability of endings. It follows the lives of three women, separated across generations, and a prophecy that appears to seal their destiny. Moving from Ibadan to New Orleans, America morphs from its promise as a place of reinventions to a place of fragmented returns. What I love most about The Edge of Water is the way it echoes with Yoruba traditional lores, the inescapable weight of the supernatural on the lives of its characters. It is a deeply moving novel that draws on the epistolary form and explores the domestic sphere as a site of gendered suffering and disillusionment in a way that reminds me of Mariama Ba’s 1971 novel, So Long a Letter.

The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohammed Mbougar Sarr

Sarr’s meta-literary novel follows a young scholar turned novelist as he becomes obsessed with a fictional writer, T.C. Elimane, a mysterious literary genius who seems to have denounced literature and then vanished. I don’t think of Sarr as an upcoming talent—he’s already won France’s most prestigious literary prize—but I include his work for its intellectual scope, and the way it grapples with this question of African literary lineage. His prose moves from confessional intimacy to historical digressions, and his self-reflective style and philosophical treatise are reminiscent of J.E. Casely Hayford and his 1911 novel, Ethiopia Unbound. While Hayford, like many writers of his time, was more occupied with political emancipation rather than literary survival, he and Sarr share a sharp eye for dialogic discourse and meta fictionality.

Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh

In Ibeh’s Blessings, we follow Obiefuna, an adolescent coming to terms with his queer identity through a string of charged, often transgressive relationships that occur in his home and seminary boarding school. As the novel builds towards its critique of the 2014 anti-gay laws in Nigeria, Obiefuna must reckon with the cost of existing in a society that criminalizes queer desire. Ibeh’s bildungsroman reminds me of Tsi Tsi Dangarembga’s 1988 Nervous Conditions, which dwells in the same quiet, compelling interiority of a young protagonist who, in Dangarembga’s story, must contend with the small betrayals of a family insistent on defining her place in the world. 

The Tiny Things Are Heavier by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo

Esther Okonkwo’s debut, The Tiny Things Are Heavier, follows Sommy, a woman who has just arrived in Iowa for graduate school. Her early brush with America has none of the usual wide-eyed fascinations that grateful immigrants have. Instead, Sommy carries the weight of a relationship rupture; her brother, recently deported from Norway, has attempted to harm himself. This familial uncertainty sends Sommy careening into desperate sexual encounters, first with her roommate Bayo, and then her boyfriend, Bryan. The novel carries a particular Nigerianness in its dialogue, and this in turn gives it a spirited nostalgia. It reminds me of the 1977 novel Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo. Where Aidoo’s protagonist, Sissie, is sharp-tongued and more lucid in tracing the mires of the African condition abroad, Okonkwo’s Sommy carries a quiet, understated mode to carry out her exploration of young womanhood and the search for her place in the world.

What Napoleon Could Not Do by DK Nnuro

At forty, Jacob, handsome but unmarried, still lives with his father. Nnuro’s What Napoleon Could Not Do, a braided narrative about immigration and the trope of the American dream, draws from Jacob’s endless rejections, the latest of which is his failure to secure a visa to join his long-distance wife in America. It also turns to his sister, who lives in the U.S. but has spent a decade awaiting a green card despite being married to an American citizen. I especially love Nnuro’s shimmering use of irony and quiet humor to tell this story. Jacob’s arc calls to mind V.S. Naipaul’s 1961 novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, another portrait of a man seemingly thwarted by the circumstances of his birth. Nnuro shares Naipaul’s eye for weaving local lore into the everyday life of his characters. His dialogue, especially between Mr. Nti and Kwame Broni, is wicked, sharp, and a dazzling reminder of Naipaul’s brilliance on the page.

The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan

Khan’s novel has been described as spooky and gothic. It follows Sana—who describes herself as “un-mothered”—as she and her father move into a strange, haunted mansion in Durban. On the surface, it is a ghost story about a grieving Djinn and Sana’s discovery of the mansion’s long buried secrets. But at a deeper level, it is a story of loss, absence, and the unfinished work of mourning. Dead are everywhere in the novel’s landscape: a dead sibling taunts Sana, the Djinn follows her around, and the mansion itself—decrepit with its fluttering bulbs and broken plumbing—creates an underworldly aura. Khan adds a cultural and emotional specificity to gothic tropes that makes the novel particularly relevant in an African literary archive. I think of the enduring legacy of Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard, a 1952 novel which subverts the natural order of place-making and imagines a world where humans and ghosts can exist on the same terrain, one in which the supernatural is not a departure but a way of unearthing the secrets of the natural. 

A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo

In Nigeria, madness is not always understood through a clinical or diagnostic lens. It can be a kind of colloquial shorthand, a way to capture misbehavior or everyday excess—wanting things that are just beyond reach, leaning towards the impossible, even the absurd. Uche Okonkwo captures this sentiment beautifully in her collection, A Kind of Madness. Her characters—a young woman with dreams of an international marriage; a boy hoping his family will adopt a chicken; teenage girls navigating the excitement and pessimism of puberty and boarding school—are piercingly perceptive, yet ordinary people. Okonkwo brings a sharply ironic clarity to narrating her characters that remind me of Annie in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John. It’s that piercing gaze of youthful innocence as it watches its personal world collapsing around it. This is a book to cherish.

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Fat Swim” by Emma Copley Eisenberg

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg, which will be published on April 28, 2026 by Hogarth. You can pre-order your copy here.

An electrifying collection of linked stories following a cast of characters navigating bodies, queerness, power, and sex—with radical results—from the bestselling author of Housemates.

With a brash and stylish voice that implicates and confronts the reader, Emma Copley Eisenberg wades into the contradictions, joys, and violence of a modern world shaped by looking and watching, examining how our hungers can both hijack and crack open our lives. In the title story, a young girl looks to a group of fat women at her local pool to teach her about her changing body. In “Swiffer Girl,” a woman agrees to try for a baby with her partner, only to suddenly find herself haunted by the viral sex video that made the rounds during high school—a video indelibly tied to her own sense of self. In other stories, an obscure fat makeup vlogger’s strange friendship with a middle schooler forces her to reflect on her past life at a toxic beauty startup, a boomer retiree tries to understand her nonbinary child’s gender and polyamory, and a trans librarian takes a job as assistant to a famous science fiction writer only to find himself screening hookups on his octogenarian employer’s behalf.

For better or for worse, these stories counsel, none of us can leave our bodies behind: they remind us what it is to be alive. As the characters in Fat Swim dance into and out of each other’s lives—and through and around Philadelphia—they seek connections and experiences that remind them of that fact, culminating in a reality-bending, tour de force finale, “Camp Sensation.” Eisenberg, whose fiction “should be studied by every contemporary author as the finest departure from the fatphobic hellscape of fiction that exists” (Electric Literature), has a singular vision, and Fat Swim is her most incisive and provocative work yet.

Here is the cover, designed by Elena Giavaldi:

Emma Copley Eisenberg: I’m absolutely in love with this cover. The large yellow inflatables are joyful but also a little unsettling, suggesting the ways that what is inside our bodies is always straining to get out and could pop at any moment. Pools and water are a strong presence in this book, offering buoyancy and respite but also the threat of exposure and drowning. It’s a layered cover that offers both brightness and despair, possibility and constriction, which feels very right for the characters in Fat Swim.

Elena Giavaldi: When I started working on the cover for this collection of stories, I first gathered input from the author, who had a strong vision. She imagined a bright yellow, or possibly a yellow-and-blue combination for the cover.

I knew the design needed to feel bold and a little edgy, just like the stories themselves, so I explored both typographic and photographic directions. In the end, we went with a typographic approach, using a painting by Lynne Jones for the background—the texture of painted water felt more dynamic and visually engaging than a photo.

To contrast the painterly texture, I used a bold, inflatable-style font for the title, paired with handwritten type to bring in a more personal, human touch. This was a fun and challenging project, and it was really rewarding to find the right visuals that brought the author’s vision to life.

This Guilt Is 100% Renewable

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

The Endstate of History

For us, it’s over the moment that energy companies learn how to burn history. I won’t pretend to know how it works, no matter how many times you explain about “massive potential energy stored in past events” and “low boiling points in metaphysical space.” We’re told it’s cleaner than nuclear, solar, wind. Maximum impact, minimal consequences. Who needs to know whether life originated in deep-sea vents or shallow ponds, anyway? 

In the metaphysical realm, companies keep samples of everything they burn “just as a safety precaution,” like we don’t all know about the dementia-riddled geologists, and you—you get me an Archivist job. Which I’m grateful for. On my first day, you kiss my nose beside the huge, gloaming portal before hurrying to a press conference a few floors up, your sneakers squeaking. I watch the recording after I clock out, since there’s no 7G in the domain of first principles. You lean into a horde of microphones, addressing what we privately call the “Marty McFly Fallacy” for the umpteenth time. The past has already happened. We aren’t going anywhere. Even on the tiny phone screen, your eyebags are enormous. Reporters argue with you like they know anything. Tonight, you’ll hurl a plate against the linoleum and apologize before the shards stop spinning. It’s okay, I’ll tell you, reaching up to wipe your tears. Forget about it.

Back when we were younger, we argued a lot (was my Classics degree useless, should you take that Tokyo post-doc) and fucked even more. Now, the energy’s flowed out of us. We snuggle on the couch in the dark, and I wonder if the CEOs and CFOs and C-who-knows are aware that their pet Nobel physicist devours Love Island. They expect new miracles during every walkthrough, like you aren’t the woman who set history alight to keep us warm. 

If everything goes tits-up, you say when neither of us can sleep, We’ll release the archived material, and everything will go back to normal. Probably. I listen to your fast-beating heart, let the “probably” pass. You’re still a scientist, even if you use much more definitive language at press conferences. 

My commute from the Meta-1 archives takes two hours, the first navigating shadowy interstitial spaces, the second nudging the car through traffic made dead-silent by chronobatteries. By the time I get home, most of what I labeled and boxed and shelved that day goes blank, though trilobites’ calico-striped shells emerge in quick gleams. While lifting spaghetti, I recall tentacles spooling around my wrists, a coworker wrestling Goniatites bohemicus into its crate, and I think of a joke to tell you: Not looking forward to Allosaurus! But it’s gone once you come home, and you’re tired again anyway. We spoon on the couch. Onscreen, another dating show host laughs, his teeth sharp. The Allosaurus joke resurfaces. I share it, eager. The TV’s changing light flickers over your frown. You’ll be long-dead by the time we hit the Jurassic. I would disagree—two years ago, we were shaking Snowball Earth’s ice crystals into envelopes, and now everyone’s booking overtime for the Cambrian Explosion—but I don’t remember this until I reach my desk the next morning. 

If all of Earth’s history were a 24-hour clock, humans would only appear in the last twenty seconds. The companies say it like it’s comforting, but inside the archives, we’re glancing at our watches, running calculations. 9:38. 9:39. Outside the archives, people are comforted. We’re always just seconds into the day. 

In the twilit interstices, we smell smoke, hear turbines churning. Time passes. Nothing changes. My officemate’s daughter has a soccer game on Saturday. 

I never remember forgetting. I stumble out of the portal, whole, and then, I crumble. I’m driving home to cook dinner. You’ll be there late. You’ll fall asleep midway through an episode, and I’ll study your face, pale in the TV’s glow like a beloved’s death mask. In natural history museums, all the bones are still there, but guests’ eyes slide past. Once, I call you as soon as I emerge: Maybe we should release some archival material? I hear a keyboard clacking, and you say, What? Why? And I know it has something to do with old bones, so I say, Do you remember that summer I volunteered with the natural history museum? And you say, God, that was boring, and I lose the thread and say, I guess so. But on Monday, I think of our midnight picnic beneath the Mosasaur skeleton, and I sob in the archive’s angiosperm wing. 

In the end, it’s a Hylaeosaurus that deals the first fatality. I don’t know the species exists before that day. It’s the first thing I’m glad to forget. 

I am grateful for the job, I tell you. I am. But I think you should come in and see the archives for yourself. You refuse—too busy. A week passes, and I ask again, and again, and again. Stop putting this off! I snap. You look at me with distant disgust. You can’t expect me to remember everything. 

Appalachia. Water bears. Mycelia. Moss. Ferns. Tiktaalik. Amniotic eggs. Gingko trees, magnolia flowers. Mosasaur. The furcula’s gentle swoop. The K-T line’s bright quartz. Purgatorius. Eohippus. Lucy and all her kind. Footprints in soft clay. Ochre pigment. Seed-gathering. Bone-setting. Burial practices. Dogs. Weaving. A line from Sappho over my desk: Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time. 

Remember this: on our first date, you asked the waiter for a pen and tried to diagram spontaneous processes on a napkin. We were both drunk already, impatient undergrads, frustrated but giggling as equations escaped you. Happy hour margaritas melting into lukewarm juice. Freezer-burned tropical fruit, tequila’s gasoline sear. At some point, you give up on the napkin, scrunch it into my hand, hold your sweaty fingers over mine. You tell me about endstates, thermodynamic equilibrium. You say, Entropy is highest when nothing can change. You say, Sometimes there’s no going back.

9 Books About Female Friendship in Every Decade of Life

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

As a child in Brooklyn, my spirits rose and fell on the tides of a girl named Susan’s moods and disposition. We met in 1958, when both of us were three, our mothers both pregnant with unwanted (by us) younger siblings. We were inseparable—soulmates, I would have said, if I’d known the word—for years. Eight years, to be exact. And then my family moved a half-mile away, into a different school district. 

Susan was only the first of a lifelong parade of best and near-best, second-, third-, and close-but-not-best friends (I often maintained a deep bench). I think about them all, whether we’re still close (Hula) or not (Ronnie). Whether we are still in touch or not—whether they are still alive or not. I think about them all—Maria, Amy, Vicki, Debra, Marly, Kathy, et al.—far more often, and with far more feeling (sadness, gladness, longing, love, regret, nostalgia—and, in one case, hurt and grief) than I think about any of my ex-boyfriends. 

The truth is that even in my youth—my boy-crazy teens, my heat-missile-seeking 20s/early 30s—my friendships have always been more crucial to me than the romances that came and went. These were the relationships I knew I could count on (until, once in a while, I couldn’t—and then it was more shattering, and harder to get over, than a failed romance). It’s no surprise that I have gravitated all my life to good stories that center friendship. Or that I’ve been writing about friendship since before I published my first story in 1979. My latest book, the essay collection If You Say So, is dedicated to the friends who’ve come into my life in the last decade. It is also populated by them—a whole community that I lucked into in my 60s, a time when it’s supposed to be practically impossible to make new friends. The title essay is about one of them. Others sweep (and spin and leap) throughout. (This is not a metaphor. We take dance classes and perform together, and much of the book takes place in the dance studio.) And since stories about women’s and girls’ friendships—unlike those about romantic love—are not a dime a dozen, here’s a list of books in which it’s friendship that matters most, in every decade of a woman’s life.

In Childhood

The Betsy-Tacy Treasury by Maud Hart Lovelace

I’m cheating a bit with this first one, as the Treasury includes all four of the first books in the Betsy-Tacy series—four of my favorite books of all time. Written in the 1940s, set in the last years of the 19th century, the depiction of friendship may be the most accurate, authentic, loving, nuanced one I’ve ever encountered. In these first four, the girls are five through 12 years old. The books chart their adventures and discoveries—their imaginative play, their lives at school and at home, their differences in temperament, the way they help each other understand the world. Light on plot, rich on characterization, insight, and emotion, these semi-autobiographical novels include moments of gravity and great profundity–including a scene, late in the first book, that dares to reckon with a child’s death. It’s a scene I’ve returned to again and again over the years–it is that beautiful, generous, and comforting.

In Their Teens

Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

This extraordinary novel is narrated by the now-adult August, an anthropologist whose research on customs and practices around death takes her all over the world. The slow reveal of her mother’s suicide by drowning, nearly three decades before—and August’s yearslong refusal to believe that her mother is dead—gives the book its shape; the story of her friendship with Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi—four Black girls in 1970s Bushwick holding onto one another for dear life—is at the book’s heart. The narrative weaves in and out of past and present, circuitously tracing August’s childhood from its start, on a decaying family farm in Tennessee—and the coming undone of her mother after the Vietnam war death of her sensitive, artistic brother, August’s Uncle Clyde—through the move to Brooklyn and the years August spends growing up there, “sharing the weight of growing up Girl” with her three best friends. In terms of pages, August and her friends’ teenage years are a small part of this slim, lyrical novel, but they are the book’s focal point, and it is only after the intensely close friendship between the four girls comes to an abrupt end when they are 15 that August acknowledges her mother’s death. (The novel opens with the line, “For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet.”) 

In Their 20s

Absolution by Alice McDermott 

Absolution is a looking-back novel, too, but of a different kind. It’s mostly written in direct address, as if in letters—or one very, very long letter—by Patricia, to the daughter of a woman who had been her friend six decades ago, when they were young wives and “helpmeets” in Saigon: two white American wives—Patricia, naïve, newly arrived, desperate to have a child, and haunted by an earlier friendship, and Charlene, careless mother of three, recklessly determined, driven by what she fiercely believes is altruism. The narrative, in the first and third parts of the novel, is such that one often forgets Patricia is writing to anyone: whole scenes unfold, in vivid and eventually searing detail, along with Patricia’s thoughts and feelings at the time. The periodic reminders (“the little girl, of course, was you”) serve to gently turn what might have been a more conventional first-person narrative (not that there’s anything wrong with that) into something warmer and more intimate. The epistolary form also complicates the narrative’s intention, as Patricia’s feeling about Charlene—then as well as now—are complex and contradictory, and her avowed purpose in telling this story to Charlene’s daughter Rainey is to help her understand her mother. (The middle third of the book is from Rainey’s point of view.) The story Patricia tells is, as the title suggests, one of absolution. But it is also about friendship—the way it changes us, the way it reverberates long after it is over.

In Their 30s

Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey

The friendship between Alina and Laura in their mid-30s, in Mexico City, is rendered through Laura’s eyes. Part of what has long united them, as other friends from their 20s have fallen away, is their shared conviction that motherhood is off the table for them. When they come to what might have been—what the novel prepares us to expect to be, and what at first seems to be—a crossroads that will separate them (Laura reveals that she’s had her tubes tied—a decision made final; in return, Alina confesses that she has been trying to have a child), Laura surprises us—she surprises herself—by ultimately drawing closer to her friend. What follows is a deeply moving, subtle, and engrossing portrait of a friendship that sustains the two women in it, even as each of their own lives are challenged, even as they find themselves changing in ways they could not have foreseen. Alina’s storyline made me think of Heather Lanier’s beautiful memoir, Raising a Rare Girl (which I recommend as an excellent companion read to Still Born), and the story that unfolds in parallel to it, of Laura’s growing attachment to the troubled child of a neighbor who is too depressed to properly care for him, is so unexpected yet believable and affecting, the empathetic energy that’s generated makes reading this novel a transformational experience. 

In Their 40s

Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell

Here’s an outlier: a memoir, not a novel. I had to sneak it into this list because it’s one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read, and the only book I know of, in any genre, that does full justice to what having a best friend in middle age can be like. Caldwell was in her 40s when she met the writer Caroline Knapp (Pack of Two, Drinking: A Love Story, and other books—all of which are also well worth reading), and the two women—and their respective dogs—fell deeply in friendship-love almost at once. Caldwell writes: “Apart, we had each been frightened drunks and single women and dog lovers; together, we became a small corporation.” The two writers are inseparable: ferociously, determinedly independent women, devoted to their dog companions, holding onto one another for dear life, in continuous conversation. We know from the start that Knapp’s death (far too young, from stage IV lung cancer) is coming: the memoir opens with this information. Yet when the narrative brings us to her diagnosis, the blow is devastating. This chronicle of a once-in-a-lifetime friendship—in a way, the Platonic ideal of friendship—is imbued with so much tenderness, drawn with such lyric precision, it is something like the prose equivalent of a love sonnet.

In Their 50s and 60s

What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez 

This is a short, fierce novel sharply focused on a friendship (just as Nunez’s previous novel, The Friend, was). The two women in What Are You Going Through, both writers, are at the tail end of middle age—rough waters for us all. They have been friends for a long time, but it is only now that they’ve become particularly close—so close that one of them, who’s dying, asks the other to help her die, to go away with her and stay with her until she’s ready to take the pills that will end her life before cancer takes her “in mortifying anguish.” The narrator (of most of the novel, I hasten to say; there is a brief, wry, utterly perfect first-person account by a cat of its early, terrible life) reckons with the knowledge that saying yes and saying no are both morally perilous. Empathy, love—friendship—wins. 

In Their 70s

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood 

Now we’ve reached old age and we must brace ourselves (I just turned 70 myself; I’m happy to be your navigator). If the 50s and 60s are still euphemistically called “middle age,” there is no fooling oneself in the seventh decade of a life. Now we are old, like it or not. The friends in The Weekend—Jude, Wendy, and Adele—gather at the beach house that belonged to a fourth friend, Sylvie, who has died. They are in mourning and in full Marie Kondo-mode as they clear out the house, at the same time releasing long-buried old grievances against one another, but they are also worried about their careers, their bodies, lovers who won’t text them back, children and childlessness—in short, all the same preoccupations of women decades younger. This novel came out in 2020 and it thrilled me—I read it in the early days of lockdown, grateful for the company of women older than I (I had just turned 65), pleased beyond measure that these women and their friendship were being given their due. I’d never read anything remotely like it.

In Their 80s

Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark 

Until two years later, when Dark’s novel was published. It’s a very different kind of novel—a thick, sprawling one that grounds big philosophical, political, sociological, and psychological ideas in individuals and tackles its big subjects in dramatic ways (there is a big plot to match—not usually my thing, but in this instance it captivated me). What it has in common with The Weekend is how seriously it takes its main characters, Agnes and Polly, who have been friends for 80 years—since they were babies. There is nothing sentimental or cute in the portrayal of either their relationship or their old age. Agnes is a solitary, never-married, irritable, famous writer of children’s books with a secret identity as the author of a best-selling series of novels skewering the thinly disguised women of her social class—a feminist and conservationist who has been seething with anger for years at her friend, Polly, whose devotion and attention to her husband, Dick, infuriates her, both on principle and because Agnes wants to be (don’t we all?) the most important person in her best friend’s life. There are too many complicated plot lines to describe (trust me: they’re fascinating), but a secondary pairing—a cross-generational friendship that develops between Agnes and an indomitable 27-year-old editorial assistant named Maud—is a powerful force in the novel too. And just as in the great novels of the 19th century that I love most—Middlemarch and War and Peace and Anna Karenina—everything, remarkably, comes together in the end.

In Their 90s

Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories by Lore Segal 

No round-up of books about women’s friendship would be complete without this one by Lore Segal. Brilliant, witty, fierce, full of surprises, this book was published a year almost to the day before her death, in 2024, at 96. (Full disclosure: Lore Segal and I were longtime friends.) If you don’t know her work, I urge you to read all of it, but there’s no reason not to start with this final collection, most of which is about a group of friends, now in their 90s, who’ve been close for decades. They meet regularly for lunch, where they tell each other everything. “We are the people to whom we tell our stories,” one of them tells the others. And so, when they can no longer meet in person, they talk on the phone and over Zoom—they persevere. As Lore Segal did.

In Cleyvis Natera’s New Novel, a Luxury Resort Is a Microcosm of Capitalist Society

Posted on by Katie

What happens when you realize all you worked for is meaningless? When you are this close to achieving your goals, only to realize that you have betrayed everything you cherish? Cleyvis Natera’s second novel, The Grand Paloma Resort, explores these questions and more through the relationship between two sisters, Laura and Elena, as well as the staff and guests of a luxurious resort in the Dominican Republic. 

Laura, a local woman from an impoverished community in the Dominican Republic, has risen by sheer determination to become manager of the luxury resort encroaching on her family’s home and is on the brink of a promotion she’s been working for all her life. But when Elena, who already doesn’t meet her sister’s high expectations, makes a fateful error, Laura decides to teach her a lesson—one which has repercussions not just on the two sisters or the resort, but on the community at large. Set over seven days on the coast and in the mountains of the Dominican Republic, menaced by an approaching hurricane, The Grand Paloma Resort is a searing exploration of how late stage capitalism impacts race, class, families, and communities, if not our very souls. 

I first met Cleyvis Natera at a residency at the Virginia Center for the Arts when she was working on her debut novel, Neruda on the Park, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, among other accolades. The two of us bonded over our love of the Dominican Republic, where Natera spent her early years, and where I was imprisoned during my adolescence at a now-defunct religious reform school. Since then, Natera has gone on to win awards and accolades including the International Latino Book Award, and fellowships from Pen America, Bread Loaf, and Kenyon. She’s also a Fulbright Specialist, and teaches at Barnard and Montclair State University. We spoke in the early summer over Zoom, a few weeks before Natera announced Ballantine will be publishing a sequel set in the Paloma Resort universe. We discussed writing about class, how selling the book on proposal changed her writing process, and allowing stories to end with hope.

Deirdre Sugiuchi: How old were you when you left the Dominican Republic, and how has your experience visiting the Dominican Republic changed since then? 

Cleyvis Natera: When I left, I was 10 years old. My family didn’t have very much money. We weren’t people that were going to the beach or going to hotels or vacationing. The first time I saw a beach was after my mother traveled to the United States—my first conscious memory was going with one of my mom’s friends, when I was seven years old.

The next time that I went to the Dominican Republic was after college. I was in my twenties, and, when I went, I wanted to go to a resort. I love resorts—I love being in a place where everything is tailored to your needs. The pool is there, the beach is there, the food is there whenever you need it. Massages on demand. What is there not to love? 

However, being a local, I think, and because my class has changed so much since I left the Dominican Republic, very often when I travel to these resorts, I’m aware of the class distinction and who is serving versus who’s vacationing there. I’m also really aware, oddly, about the fact that had I not immigrated, I’m not convinced that I would be able to partake in that kind of activity. There’s something that feels subversive about the fact that my immigrant dream enabled me to live a life in the Dominican Republic that probably wouldn’t have been available to me.

I travel a lot to the Caribbean with my husband, not just to the D.R. I love talking to workers. I find myself often interviewing and talking to people casually or more formally about what it’s like to work in the resort, and what it’s like to tend to tourists and to rich people. Some of those conversations really aided in me writing this book. 

When I travel to these resorts, I’m aware of the class distinction and who is serving versus who’s vacationing there.

DS: You have a number of characters all related to this resort somehow. But at the core it’s two sisters…and they’re really complicated. Why are you drawn towards writing complicated people? 

CN: After writing my first book, Neruda on the Park, I realized I’m obsessed with relationships and the way that grief and loss affects people. One of the things that I’m most interested in is the way grief turns people into monsters, and sometimes lingers in such a way that it deteriorates the person’s personality, or even the potential of who they could have been. I also was thinking about the ways in which love can sometimes be the only thing that can save you, but it can also be the thing that can harm you, if you’re not very careful.

It took a while for me to realize that this [was about] two sisters. I wanted to test these two women who have very different ideals, and put them on this pressure cooker of this resort…and put them into a situation that would force them to reckon with both their relationships and who they are in the world, and who they want to be in the future. I realized that in order to do service to what I’m trying to do in this book, which is really to talk about the complex of a resort as a microcosm of the whole world of capitalism. And the only way you can do it is to have this kind of multiphonic narrative. You couldn’t really do it with one or two characters. It has to keep shifting. One of the things that I was committed to was [not] compromising on their complexities. I think all of us are very complicated and contradictory, and there’s ways in which I think life also makes us complicated depending on our station.

I think we don’t talk about how, in some ways, wealth can enable you to have almost a more stable personality, or to be very different and live more up to your ideals or values. I think about that a lot, the ways in which wealth and my station in life has changed so drastically from the time that I was a child in the Dominican Republic, and the ways it has enabled me to do amazing things like write books and even talk to you. 

DS: Obviously this book’s in conversation with The White Lotus, but from a completely different perspective. Can you discuss?

CN: In 2020 I had finished writing Neruda on the Park. [My agent] PJ [Mark] was ready to send it to market, but we realized we couldn’t because there was a pandemic, and the publishing industry had screeched to a halt. So, I started writing these short stories from the perspective of employees in a resort. I knew that the central thread of the story was the fact that they were all in service to the resort in one way or another—and then in 2022, when the first season of The White Lotus came out, I was so upset! I was like, “They beat me to it. They stole my idea!” And I remember talking to my agent and he was like, “This is not a bad thing.”

I actually sold this book as a novel proposal. I hadn’t finished writing the whole book. In some ways, I think the fact that the book is so clearly in conversation with this social phenomenon that has become The White Lotus, but is very centrally concerned with privilege from a different perspective, aided in the speed with which the book was picked up by my editor. 

DS: You teach writing. Did writing this book on proposal and selling it on proposal change the way you wrote the book? Do you think you’ll teach differently afterwards?

CN: Yes, to both. I had never outlined a book before and so it gave me a lot of comfort to have an outline because every time I came to my laptop I had a job to do—my first book was a 15 year journey, and if there was one thing I wasn’t going to do, it was take another decade or more on my next book. But I think I also learned that even when you want to force a story to do something, the narrative has its own heart and its own energy. 

The best plot moves through the character

After writing this book with an outline, now I understand not just that plot is critical, but in some ways the best plot moves through the character—it isn’t two separate things. Making the outline made me think about character motivation and character desire and instinct in a different way. With my first book it was almost an iterative process, where you lay down the foundation of the book and then you inject some propulsion and some tension. With this book, I think just by the nature of me having a strong sense of where I wanted the story to go, I became a lot more capable or maybe more competent in injecting some of those elements into the character. What’s activating the plot is the character and not the story.

DS: This book is inspired by current events in the Dominican Republic, particularly how the troubles in Haiti impact the Dominican Republic. There was a scene—and this is not a spoiler, but a moment—where you describe Black people, Haitians, being picked up and thrown into vans to be deported. It was so similar to things happening here.

CN: I feel like really good fiction that is concerned with telling the truth about whatever it is that we’re obsessed with is always going to resonate with a present moment in the future. For example, the first time that I learned about the Parsley Massacre of 1937, where tens of thousands of Haitians were massacred at the command of the Dominican government, was through Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones. I was in my twenties. And now, I think about the fact that I went to school until fifth grade in the Dominican Republic, and my grandparents, and my father, who was much older than my mother, had all lived through Trujillo, yet at no point did I learn about [the massacre] through my family or through my schooling. It was through literature that I came to understand this really important aspect of my country’s history. I also learned that as an immigrant in the United States. 

When I started traveling back from the United States, I would often see my country through the eyes of that book. In some ways it made me more empathetic to what I was witnessing. I think sometimes when you live through injustice and the horrifying treatment of people, you are desensitized. You almost don’t see it. I think Danticat taught me to pay more attention as a human being, which has really aided me as a writer.

One of the things I thought about when I decided I was going to write this book was that I couldn’t write without talking about what’s happening to Haitian people in the Dominican Republic. It’s a horrifying situation there, especially when you think about the deportation of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Birthright was removed as a right for Haitian people in the Dominican Republic—and that just happened in the last decade. Every time I would go to the Dominican Republic, I would think about [The Farming of Bones] and about how far and also how close we were to the incidents that happened, and the way history has a way of remaining alive, taking over the present moment unless you’re really vigilant. 

DS: Yes. We’re seeing it right now. However, the question I want to end on is: Can you discuss the role of hope in your writing?

CN: Oh my goodness. Thank you for that question. I feel like I’m such a hopeful person in real life. Sometimes it is very difficult to be hopeful in literature because literature requires us to be really truthful about logic in a way that’s not like real life. I think hopeful people, optimistic people like you and I, often diverge from reality to remain hopeful. Ending this book on a hopeful note was probably the hardest thing I could do. 

I knew the way I wanted to end the book, especially as it comes to these two women who have suffered so much loss, yet who also make decisions that are just so disturbing. But then I also was thinking about how important hope is in this story, especially because I’m also cognizant of fiction coming out of the Caribbean, and especially the way in which I think many of us [writers] are being truthful to the realities of locals in our islands, when it comes to privilege and tourism, class, and money—it’s sometimes difficult for our stories to end on a hopeful note. 

In a way, for me, it was like, challenge accepted: There has to be a way in which I can find redemption for these characters. There has to be a way in which I can bring that optimism and hopefulness that is part of my life, the way that my life is guided by this idea that the impossible can be possible, that beautiful things are ahead, even during the most ugly and difficult times.