In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This time we’re talking to Lilly Dancyger, editor at Narratively and author of the forthcoming memoir Negative Space. Lilly’s next Catapult class is an online nonfiction workshop about how to make your messy life into a neat life story—but she’s got another nonfiction workshop immediately after that one, and another one after that. Check out her upcoming classes here.
What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
I did a weekend workshop with Lidia Yuknavitch at the Corporeal Writing center in Portland, and she talked about how we all have core metaphors that we return to over and over again in our work. The way she talked about examining the same concepts or images from different angles—potentially forever—made me realize that I wasn’t returning to the same things in my writing over and over because I was bad and stupid and had limited ideas… But because I’d discovered my core metaphors and was writing into them, discovering something new each time. It was such a nourishing and affirming thing to hear, and it really shifted my perspective on my own work. I actually wrote about that workshop and everything it unlocked for me in my memoir, Negative Space (which is forthcoming from the Santa Fe Writers Project in 2021! This is a plug!).
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
You know, I can’t really think of anything! I’ve always been good at identifying when advice is not useful for me and immediately flushing it out of my mind. So I’m sure I’ve gotten bad feedback or advice in classes and workshops before, but I’ve intentionally and completely forgotten it!
What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?
Your only task for a first draft is to put words on a page.
I am constantly reminding students (and myself) that first drafts are supposed to suck. If you’re self-editing along the way it’s almost impossible to ever finish anything! Your only task for a first draft is to put words on a page. Try to resist judgement, and just get something down so you have something to work with—then you can hack it to bits and find the soft spots and rearrange it and do all the fun and grueling work of writing.
Does everyone “have a novel in them”?
Eh, no. Or maybe yes, but they don’t all need to come out.
Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?
I don’t think I could bring myself to do it. Even if what they’re doing right now isn’t working, or I don’t see how it’s working, I don’t think highly enough of myself to believe I have the authority to tell someone to stop trying. I do sometimes push students to consider what they’re trying to accomplish, whether they’re in the right place at this moment/working with the right material to accomplish it, etc. I will encourage them to shift their lens, try a different approach, but I don’t think I’d tell anyone to quit.
What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?
Both are valuable—sometimes you really are on the right track and just need that affirmed by someone who’s not personally invested in your work (friends telling you you’re doing great is so easy to doubt and disregard). But most of the time you’ll get more out of honest criticism than you will out of general, bland praise. Asking for feedback and hearing only “it’s great!” is so frustrating and useless. I respect my students enough to tell them the truth and challenge them to get better.
Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?
I think that depends on where they are in their development as a writer. If you’re just getting started and getting a feel for a new genre or for writing in general—try to just play for a while. It can take some time to find your voice and get comfortable. But if you’re a little further along than that and you’re taking a class to push yourself or hone specific skills, then I think having a particular publication in mind can really help clarify what you’re aiming for. It can provide models to work from, and a goal to work toward, both of which can be so helpful.
In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?
Kill your darlings: I don’t kill my darlings, I just banish them to a scrap document from which I may or may not someday rescue them for a future project.
Show don’t tell: An oversimplification that’s too often treated as gospel. It’s useful because for many beginners telling is the first instinct, and they need this reminder as a way to nudge them toward balance—but the goal is balance, not all showing and no telling.
Write what you know: Sure, but also write to discover.
Character is plot: This one feels fiction-specific, so I can’t really speak to it. I have only ever written one piece of fiction and it was godawful and will never see the light of day.
What’s the best hobby for writers?
When I get tired and fed up with writing, drawing something, even badly, feels like such a treat.
I love switching to something else creative that doesn’t involve words—when I get tired and fed up with writing, drawing something, even badly, feels like such a treat and can get my brain working again.
Also anything that gets you out of the house once in a while, I guess! I used to play a lot of pool, but that fell off since I don’t hang out in bars anymore. Maybe I should start going to pool halls during the day…
What’s the best workshop snack?
I have severe misophonia so the sound of people eating is actual torture for me. I can’t hold onto a thought while horrible wet smacking and squishing sounds are happening, so I ask students not to eat in class when I’m teaching in person. Sorry! But when I’m writing at home alone I eat a probably/definitely unhealthy amount of peanut butter pretzels and chocolate.
My friend and I have come to the Yellow Brick Road Casino looking for a good time. We are not optimistic about this, but we think it might be a laugh. Neither of us are gamblers. We have both set ourselves a twenty dollar budget because we value our money and because we do not trust ourselves.
I have been driving by this casino in Chittenango, New York for almost two years. It is painted emerald green and has a wide yellow awning. Above the awning, the Yellow Brick Road sign’s neon bricks blink in a spiral. I am hoping that, inside, the YBR will have a little bit of Oz-y magic to it. You’ll think this is naïve of me but I am hopeful because I used to know the Wizard of Oz. We were in communication for many years. I had my eye on the casino because when the wizard died he left me short on a kind of magic I’ve been looking for ever since.
The thing my granddad loved most was The Wizard of Oz, and when I was a child he convinced me that the Land of Oz was real.
In any given room, my grandfather would find the smartest, strangest child and put himself in league with them against the adults. He loved: handbuzzers, trick horses, fake vomit, squirting daisies, cowboy curses, knock-knock jokes, and scatological humor of all kinds. On grandparents’ visiting day in the third grade, he promised every child at my lunch table a strawberry shortcake bar, against the wishes of their parents. Instead of simply handing out the ice creams, he gave us each a dollar, so we could feel the power of exchanging currency ourselves.
I thought of him as a kind of wizard. This is not a metaphor. The thing my granddad, Ed Joyce, loved most was The Wizard of Oz, and when I was a child he perpetrated an obvious but persuasive prank upon my little sister and me in which he convinced us, methodically and across multiple media, that the Land of Oz was real.
Is it fair to call it a prank if he never hoped for a gotcha moment? If he hoped we’d believe in him forever?
Inside, there is nothing Oz-like about YBR at all. It looks like clipart of a casino. Worse, it has been so long since I last gambled that everything about how a casino works has changed. At the problematic Disneyland that is Mohegan Sun I’d once been given a velvety pouch of chips, heavy with possibility. On a riverboat in Natchez, Mississippi that looked like the set of Maverick, I’d received a Styrofoam cup of golden tokens with a lovely jingle to it. There’d been a kind of magic in the transubstantiation of money into these new currencies which had the power to multiple and divide themselves into something more.
This is not the case at YBR. At the info desk, we are given loyalty cards with our legal names on them. We take these to the slots, which are mostly digital: Lobstermania, Snow Leopard, Sexy Viking Lady— none of them Oz-themed. I put my card into a slot and try to load money onto it, only to discover it does nothing other than earn rewards points at a local gas station.
I approach a pair of nicely dressed workers who are milling about the floor, to ask them how I’m supposed to give the casino my money. The workers, it turns out, are called, I shit you not, munchkins.
The munchkins tell me that YBR is now a state-of-the-art casino, just like Atlantic City, just like Vegas.
What does that mean, I say.
It means, the munchkins say, you can put your cash directly into the machine.
My friend and I return to the digital slots, which it turns out are boring. You press a button to pledge your dollar amount, and the digital wheels spin.
The analog slots are better. Their tumblers roll and glow: bar, cherries, dollar sign. Is it the hefty thunking of the machine that appeals, or is it that I have seen people win money this way in a movie? Or is it maybe that this machine has, not a button, but a handle? It takes some heft to pull it, you have to try, and there’s even some technique to it, I tell myself. I develop a slow then quick maneuver that gets me closer to the triple cherries than I’ve come before.
I’ve put in my time with this machine and America raised me to believe that time invested will always pay off.
I like how the old gen machines make it seem like maybe I’m a tiny bit in charge of my own fortunes. I can decide how to pull the bar, and how hard, and each time I feed the machine a dollar I become a little more convinced I’ve got my technique down.
Soon, I’m going to pull the handle and the triple cherries will come, because I’ve earned this. I’ve put in my time with this machine and America raised me to believe that time invested will always pay off, no matter who you are. I lose again. I find myself in the space where the image of the Self-Made Man and the truth that The House Always Wins collide.
My grandad’s Oz origin story was the Depression. He was the son of a deeply charming military war hero and ex-con called Cap who, when his Arizona dude ranch went bust during the depression, took his family on the road. My grandfather spent many of the early years of his life living out of the family car as Cap joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and ran a wild west magazine. My grandfather often found himself parked at the library of whatever town they landed in, where he found his only friends: Dorothy and the Scarecrow and Tik-Tok and Polychrome and the whole cast of characters in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. He told himself that someday, if he ever had any money, he would buy all the Oz books. The 13 originals written by Baum, and 26 further written by other authors in the series.
As it turned out, as an adult, he did have money. Quite a bit of it.
The story of how this happened is the sort of “up by his bootstraps” American Dream tale people can’t resist, and it was as ubiquitous in my childhood as the story of Oz. Ed Joyce went from being a child of the depression living out of a car to working in radio. He hosted a jazz program as Jazzman Joyce! (exclamation mark included). After that there was a live children’s television show, which featured a pet monkey named Cookie. There was an interview show, The Talk of New York, where he brought on guests like Malcolm X and Timothy Leary. When he moved into hard reporting, he was responsible for covering the story of Ted Kennedy at Chappaquiddick. He became the president of CBS News in the ‘80s, where he gained a reputation for being so simultaneously brutal and charming that he was known as “the velvet shiv.”
Across these years and successes, he went about acquiring a complete set of the Oz books in first edition. He read them to his own children, and growing up he read them to my sister and me. We all lived in the same small Connecticut town.
There was nothing I loved more than these stories. He had a radioman’s flair and performed the chapters as a madcap, polyphonic one-man show. I can tell you exactly what the Nome King, and Princess Ozma, and Tik-Tok are supposed to sound like.
The Oz readings were only briefly discontinued when my grandparents retired back west to a horse ranch in Santa Ynez, California. I was seven and my sister was four. The radioman’s solution to the distance, of course, was recording.
Every day, after school, my sister and I checked the mailbox for a padded mailer with a cassette tape inside. An Oz chapter. My granddad included photocopies of the illustrations that went with the reading. He set the scene at the beginning of the tapes—telling us where he was sitting and whether any of his dogs were around. At the end he always let us know what he was doing next, normally feeding his horses, and then he told us to be good to our parents and stay “frisky and jolly.”
This was when my grandfather truly began convincing us that Oz was real.
Has he told the kids that Oz is real? Oh no, no he hasn’t yet. But he will, when the time is right. Goodbye, wizard.
There is one bit of tape that survives to this effect. In the recording, he receives a phone call, the line bleating stagily in the background. He apologizes for interrupting our reading. “I think I have to take this…” he says, and pretends to turn off the tape. Then he says: OH HELLO, WIZARD in a tone of absolute delight. He proceeds to makes a date to hang out in a poppy field, assuring his caller, thefucking Wizard, that he has indeed been practicing the magic he’d taught him so he could perform tricks for us kids that coming Christmas. Has he told the kids that Oz is real? Oh no, no he hasn’t yet. But he will, when the time is right. Goodbye, wizard.
When my sister and I first heard this bit of tape we turned to each other and said nothing. Not one fucking thing. Because to even repeat what we had heard would break the spell.
It was possible to believe. Because my granddad did do magic tricks. He pulled scarves from his nose and guessed the color of dice in secret boxes and erased images from coloring books with flourishing gestures.
Why wouldn’t we think he was in league with the wizard?
With each trip to California, the illusion grew. He took us to Figueroa Mountain and led us waist deep into a legitimate poppy field. He pretended he could talk to animals (in Oz, animals talk) and taught his own horse to nod and stamp responses to his questions—an old dude ranch trick learned from his father. He hid gemstones around the garden, insinuating that the Nome King had left them there and would be very angry if we took his treasure. We always took the treasure, and often found notes in the same spot a day later threatening, thrillingly, to “stomp our curly toes off.”
My granddad was the sort of man who was always pulling your leg while simultaneously doing real things too amazing to be believed, so where the truth might lie was hard to parse. Back then, I think I knew I was supposed to believe… but only halfway, the way a good scene partner might. Instead, I believed it desperately, recklessly, as if asking too many questions might scare the fantasy away.
I had my reasons for wanting to believe that the world my grandfather was spinning for us was possible. I was a very ordinary girl who feared I might never become anything different, and in the Oz books even very ordinary girls from Kansas could be whisked away from chores and schoolwork to have adventures with robots and queens. It didn’t matter that Dorothy wasn’t remarkable—she could still do incredible things. Back then, I made no distinction between believing in Oz and believing in an American Dreamish world where the poor son of an ex-con cowboy could rise through the ranks of American life. America would see something in you that no one else did and give you a chance at whatever marvelous future you aspired to! Oz was for everyone! 2019 is not a good moment for believing in either of these kinds of magic.
As an adult, the real world often disappoints me. I am a person who prefers to live in my head, in books and fantasies where everything shines slightly brighter than reality. I’ve often wished to go back to the times when the Nome King’s rocks might appear on my front stoop, when some animal would speak to me its secret.
The first cracks in the illusion came in the sixth grade, when we were asked to read a biography by a significant person. It is perhaps telling that, in my Oz-mania, I did not choose to read a biography of Baum and instead read Little Girl Lost: The Life and Hard Times of Judy Garland by Al DiOrio, Jr., which my mother had helped me locate at the local library. We were meant to come to school on Biography Day dressed as the subject of our chosen book and to report to the class about our lives in the first person, in character. We would then go on to mingle with our famous compatriots at a “Character Brunch.”
I was horrified and obsessed by Garland’s tragic biography and was determined to bring her truth to the people. And yet, in a totally warped choice, I chose to appear at school that day dressed not as Garland, but as Dorothy. I was all pigtails, glitter-glue heels, and blue ankle socks when I stood in front of my fellow six-graders and introduced myself as “Judy, Judy, Judy.” I told the class that the rigors of my film shoots required me to take “uppers,” which were drugs, which also helped me lose weight, which was “good for Hollywood,” and about the difficulty I then had sleeping which required “downers,” (also drugs!) and this cycle of uppers and downers eventually killed me. I then whispered that there were rumors that my death wasn’t really an accident but a suicide.
When the bell rang, my teacher suggested I play-act as Dorothy instead of Garland at the impending character brunch.
Can I at least tell people about Carnegie Hall? I asked.
Sure, she said.
I understand now that I was meant to read and report on something uplifting, to behave like the other children who’d come dressed as Jackie Robinson and Marie Curie and whose families had presumably found them biographies that did not dwell on the other black and brown ballplayers who were robbed of the chance to make good on their talent or the effects of radiation exposure. We were all meant to be Dorothy and not Judy that day—to recite the shiny, Oz-y dream version of our biography’s subject. I love fantasy, but I hate a lie, and even then I knew there was a difference between the two. That day in sixth grade, I was pretty sure which one I was dealing with. I smelled a rat.
Hi Grandad, I was Dorothy at school this week, I told him on our regular phone call.
How did it go? he asked.
Not too great, I said. Not too great at all.
When I told him what had happened he positively cackled.
I once spent an entire semester accidentally calling the American Dream “The American Myth” to undergrad literature students in Florida. It was November before one of them, a Cuban-American woman I’d grown close to, gently corrected me.
“What an embarrassing and strange thing to get wrong,” I told the class.
“I mean you were wrong but you’re not wrong,” she said, plonking her copy of Winter’s Bone on the desk. We all laughed. It was funny but it wasn’t funny.
I suppose something about the word “dream” doesn’t sit right with me.
In Baum’s books, Dorothy’s adventure with the Wizard is only the first of many times she goes to Oz—later, she even brings her family with her, an uplifting example of chain migration—and these return visits make it clear that Oz is a real and literal place. The movie sends a different message—because in the end, Dorothy wakes up. It was all a dream, her family tells her. “But it wasn’t a dream,” Garland says, “it was a place.” All the Gales’ farmhands are gathered around her bedside when Dorothy claims she saw them in Oz. And yet here they are, Haley and Bolger and Lahr, with their gorgeous faces, now in the reality of black and white; they are dressed sensibly, the dirt of their work on their faces. They are still down on the farm.
Were men like them ever in such a place?
Oh no honey, their looks say, not us, we never got to go anywhere like that.
I’ve always hated the way the movie gave us the promise of Oz only to snatch it away in the end, and the three friends break my heart most of all.
I’ve always hated the way the movie gave us the promise of Oz only to snatch it away in the end.
I’ve taught undergrads at five very different schools over the past decade. I am essentially an optimist and I earnestly believe in my students’ futures. Some of the students I’ve taught came up rough like my grandfather, some of them were middle-class kids who never doubted they’d get a degree, some of them were farm kids, some of them survived lifetimes of hardship and were finally going back to school in their sixties, some of them were veterans, some of them had escaped gangs, some of them came from intense privilege, and many of them were first generation Americans. I know that all these different kinds of students wound up in my classroom in no small part because they had bought into an American Dream that promised a college degree would open professional doors. And maybe this was why my belief in the dream crashed and burned. It is easy enough to believe a dream for yourself, and quite another to speak it out loud to a room of students who trust you to tell them the truth.
These days, I cannot bring myself to sell my students any kind of American rhetorical goods which claim to be equally available to all of them. I cannot bring myself to tell them about the technicolor future, to say, I see you there, and I see you there, because there is a chance that even if I see it, and I believe in it, someday we’re all going to wake up and I will have betrayed them by dreaming too vividly at the front of the room.
I think my mouth said myth when it couldn’t say dream because to describe our collective American story to students as an available goal and not as a fantasy, bordering on a lie, makes me feel like I am back in the sixth grade, Dorothy on the outside but Judy on the inside. Like I am smelling a rat, and the rat is me.
Most of the current day town of Chittenango is on Oneida, or Onyota’a:ká, lands. Chittenango is also the birthplace of L. Frank Baum. Presumably, it is for this reason that the Oneida Nation decided to name its casino Yellow Brick Road, and its adjoining liquor store the Tin Man’s Flask.
Had I read a biography of Baum, instead of a biography of Garland, back in sixth grade, I would have learned what I found out the morning before our casino journey, when I looked up his Chittenango connection.
At the top of my search results was this, from a recent NPR story: “L. Frank Baum, before he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ran a newspaper in South Dakota. This was in the early 1890’s during the Indian Wars. When Baum heard of the killing of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee, he wrote editorials calling for killing each and every last Native American. From his Sitting Bull editorial:
The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.
Why would the Oneida Nation create a casino inspired by the work of the man who’d published this monstrous op-ed? I’m dumb enough to hope someone decided turning Baum’s world profitable for native people would be a satisfying irony. Dumb enough to hope maybe no one knew. I have the good sense not to call the Oneida Nation or the casino and ask. To spare whoever I’d get on the other end of the line my awful question and to instead ask myself what I’m supposed to do with all this.
I ask myself: why, if I’ve called myself an Oz-freak all these years, a super-fan, have I never googled Baum?
Perhaps I knew better than to try to look for the man behind the curtain.
Stories of someone rising up are usually at the expense of someone else we don’t talk about.
I’m sure my grandfather wouldn’t have been surprised by the facts of Baum’s life and prejudices. There are inconvenient truths behind the curtain of most American Dream stories. Capitalism seldom offers a free balloon ride. Stories of someone rising up are usually at the expense of someone else we don’t talk about. That’s the wizardry of most lovely stories—the sleight of hand, the misdirection, the look over here not over there.
I think these were ideas my grandfather understood. He was the wizard who broke Chappaquiddick and took the shine off Kennedy. His father had traded with tribal members across the United States to sell ad space in his cowboy magazine for mail order rez crafts.
As it happens, I do own a biography of Baum. The Real Wizard of Oz by Rebecca Loncraine has sat unread on my shelf since my grandfather gave it to me, years ago. When I flip it open, my grandfather’s inscription reads: “I know you thought I made up all those stories. But this is really the guy. Love, Grandad.”
I don’t know what to do with Oz anymore. I want to tell you that it was real when I was small, when my grandfather was alive, but that would mean that it was only real so long as it was easy to believe in. So long as my granddad and most of the greatest generation were alive, performing for us reenactments of their greatest magic tricks, it was easy enough to believe in the American Dream.
I want to tell you Oz was real when I was small, but that would mean that it was only real so long as it was easy to believe in.
But so many of them are gone, and now it’s harder to believe. Without my granddad around pulling silks from his ears, hiding quartz in the garden, coaxing horses to nod and stomp with sugar cubes, the illusion falls flat and the chances of American-Dream-Style success in this world begin to feel dinky, random.
And yet, even though there’s nothing beyond the façade of the Yellow Brick Road casino that promises any kind of Oz, here we are in Chittenango, on Oneida land, in Baum’s birthplace, feeding our money directly into those state-of-the-art machines.
We call it quits and put on our winter coats. It is November and there is snow on the ground. On the way out, I ask my friend to take a picture of me. In the parking lot there is a larger-than-life emerald green mural of Dorothy’s friends: Scarecrow, Tin Man, Lion. They are rendered almost like the old illustrations I knew. My friend backs up and backs up, almost all the way into the road to take the picture.
When I look at it the next day, I realize what a stupid idea the photo had been. The Oz folk are simply too large, and I am lost in the shot. A puny thing who can’t compete with the storybook people behind me.
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We’re closing in on the holiday season, which if you’re lucky means a few days to drink some nog and catch up on your reading. This tumultuous year produced some great books, and while they’re mostly not cozy per se—there’s a nonzero amount of eldritch ritual, war-torn countryside, menacing secret police, and cult abuse—they can still be a vital part of your winter hygge. We polled current and former Electric Lit staff and contributors about their most-recommended novels of the year. Here, in ascending order, are the results.
This 2019 National Book Award finalist for translated literature follows three siblings who must take their father’s body from Damascus to Anabiya. Though it’s only a two-hour drive, the trip between these Syrian cities becomes an odyssey through a war-torn country full of death and danger. Read our interview with Khaled Khalifa here.
A multigenerational story spanning over a hundred years, this novel explores the relationships between three Zambian families living in a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. After a mistake threads the families together, they remain linked as conflicts are reignited and the future is confronted. We interviewed Namwali Serpell about transcending time, genre, and binaries.
When a Taiwanese immigrant family living outside of Anchorage, Alaska loses a daughter, the family quickly spirals into grief. They each feel the loss differently, and the rural landscape heightens the family’s emotions until a lawsuit threatens to blow apart everything they’ve built. For more, read an interview with Chia-Chia Lin or an excerpt from The Unpassing recommended by D. Wystan Owen.
Perdita lives in London with her mother, Harriet, a baker who makes magical gingerbread. When a teenage Perdita decides to visit her mother’s home country, she learns that her mother’s life is more extraordinary than she ever could have imagined. Read our interview with Helen Oyeyemi about fairytales, gingerbread, and family.
A Sri Lankan inmate has locked himself in a prison computer lab while a riot rages around him—a riot caused by a poem in The Holding Pen, the prison’s highly-regarded literary magazine. He’s writing his final Editor’s Letter for the magazine, and in doing so he’ll tell his life story, explain his connection to the riots, and maybe vindicate himself along the way. Check out our interview with Ryan Chapman about teaching writing.
The Memory Police are causing things to disappear, and only a select few people can remember what. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from this dystopian police force, she decides to hide him under her floorboards and the two must face the oncoming threat of loss while working to preserve their past.
When quiet, unpopular Marianne and well-liked Connell start secretly dating in high school, they don’t imagine how much their relationship will impact their lives. Following Marianne and Connell from high school to college, as their social roles are reversed and their traumas are revealed, this thoughtful novel explores the difficulties of growing up and being in love. Read Carrie V. Mullins’ essay about how Rooney’s literary genius is subjugated to the genre of “chick lit.”
Even though Samantha Mackey feels like an outsider in her MFA program, she accepts an invitation to a mysterious Salon run by the “Bunnies,” the wealthy, obnoxious members of her fiction cohort. As Samantha becomes more involved with the Bunnies, she slips into a dark world of magic and rituals, where the things she writes can become nightmarishly real. Here’s our interview with Mona Awad.
Adam Gordon is a high school senior, debate champion, and the son of two brilliant parents. Everything seems to go his way—until he invites a troubled new boy into his social scene, and Adam’s world begins to collapse.
A cultish acting class run by a teacher with questionable methods, an intense romance, and an event that flips the plot completely on its head: the winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction is a dynamic and exciting novel about students in a prestigious performing arts high school. This book will keep readers guessing about the truth until the last page. Here’s our interview with Susan Choi, as well as an excerpt from Trust Exercise recommended by Julie Buntin.
Ever since she was a child, Kate has been plagued by dreams that she’s a woman named Emilia in Elizabethan England. But when she starts waking up to an altered present, Kate and her boyfriend, Ben, must struggle with whether or not these dreams are real, and whether they can affect reality. Check out our interview with Sandra Newman here.
Eight Mennonite women in a hay loft have two days to make a decision that will affect every woman in their colony. It’s been discovered that a group of men in the colony have been drugging and raping the women nightly for years, and now this all-female congregation must decide whether they will stay in the only home they’ve ever known, or escape to save themselves. Read our interview with Miriam Toews to learn about the historical events that inspired this novel.
Jessa’s family is torn apart after her father commits suicide in his taxidermy shop. As their lives warp towards grief and absurdity, Jessa is forced to reckon with her family, her identity, and her relationships, all while finding a way to keep the shop running. Check out our interview with Kristen Arnett for more about taxidermy and queerness.
When news leaked out of Viet Nam that Old Hell and Hardtack Mackenzie had shot down an angel, every newspaper in the world dug into its morgue for the background and biography of this hard-bitten old warrior.
Not that General Clayborne Mackenzie was so old. He had only just passed his fiftieth birthday, and he had plenty of piss and vinegar left in him when he went out to Viet Nam to head up the 55th Cavalry and its two hundred helicopters; and the sight of him sitting in the open door of a gunship, handling a submachine gun like the pro he was, and zapping anything that moved there below—because anything that moved was likely enough to be Charlie—had inspired many a fine color story.
Correspondents liked to stress the fact that Mackenzie was a “natural fighting man,” with, as they put it, “an instinct for the kill.” In this they were quite right, as the material from the various newspaper morgues proved. When Mackenzie was only six years old, playing in the yard of his North Carolina home, he managed to kill a puppy by beating it to death with a stone, an extraordinary act of courage and perseverance. After that, he was able to earn spending money by killing unwanted puppies and kittens for five cents each. He was an intensely creative child, one of the things that contributed to his subsequent leadership qualities, and not content with drowning the animals, he devised five other methods for destroying the unwanted pets. By nine he was trapping rabbits and rats and had invented a unique yet simple mole trap that caught the moles alive. He enjoyed turning over live moles and mice to neighborhood cats, and often he would invite his little playmates to watch the results. At the age of twelve his father gave him his first gun—and from there on no one who knew young Clayborne Mackenzie doubted either his future career or success.
At the age of twelve his father gave him his first gun—and from there on no one who knew young Clayborne Mackenzie doubted either his future career or success.
After his arrival in Viet Nam, there was no major mission of the 55th that Old Hell and Hardtack did not lead in person. The sight of him blazing away from the gunship became a symbol of the “new war,” and the troops on the ground would look for him and up at him and cheer him when he appeared. (Sometimes the cheers were earthy, but that is only to be expected in war.) There was nothing Mackenzie loved better than a village full of skulking, treacherous VC, and once he passed over such a village, little was left of it. A young newspaper correspondent compared him to an “avenging angel,” and sometimes when his helicopters were called in to help a group of hard-pressed infantry, he thought of himself in such terms. It was on just such an occasion, when the company of marines holding the outpost at Quen-to were so hard pressed, that the thing happened.
General Clayborne Mackenzie had led the attack, blazing away, and down came the angel, square into the marine encampment. It took a while for them to realize what they had, and Mackenzie had already returned to base field when the call came from Captain Joe Kelly, who was in command of the marine unit.
“General, sir,” said Captain Kelly, when Mackenzie had picked up the phone and asked what in hell they wanted, “General Mackenzie, sir, it would seem that you shot down an angel.”
“General Mackenzie, sir, it would seem that you shot down an angel.”
“Say that again, Captain.”
“An angel, sir.”
“A what?”
“An angel, sir.”
“And just what in hell is an angel?”
“Well,” Kelly answered, “I don’t quite know how to answer that, sir. An angel is an angel. One of God’s angels, sir.”
“Are you out of your goddamn mind, Captain?” Mackenzie roared. “Or are you sucking pot again? So help me God, I warned you potheads that if you didn’t lay off the grass I would see you all in hell!”
“No, sir,” said Kelly quietly and stubbornly. “We have no pot here.”
“Well, put on Lieutenant Garcia!” Mackenzie yelled.
“Lieutenant Garcia.” The voice came meekly.
“Lieutenant, what the hell is this about an angel?”
“Yes, General.”
“Yes, what?”
“It is an angel. When you were over here zapping VC—well, sir, you just went and zapped an angel.”
“So help me God,” Mackenzie yelled, “I will break every one of you potheads for this! You got a lot of guts, buster, to put on a full general, but nobody puts me on and walks away from it. Just remember that.”
One thing about Old Hell and Hardtack, when he wanted something done, he didn’t ask for volunteers. He did it himself, and now he went to his helicopter and told Captain Jerry Gates, the pilot:
“You take me out to that marine encampment at Quen-to and put me right down in the middle of it.”
“It’s a risky business, General.”
“It’s your goddamn business to fly this goddamn ship and not to advise me.”
Twenty minutes later the helicopter settled down into the encampment at Quen-to, and a stony-faced full general faced Captain Kelly and said:
“Now suppose you just lead me to that damn angel, and God help you if it’s not.”
But it was; twenty feet long and all of it angel, head to foot. The marines had covered it over with two tarps, and it was their good luck that the VCs either had given up on Quen-to or had simply decided not to fight for a while—because there was not much fight left in the marines, and all the young men could do was to lay in their holes and try not to look at the big body under the two tarps and not to talk about it either; but in spite of how they tried, they kept sneaking glances at it and they kept on whispering about it, and the two of them who pulled off the tarps so that General Mackenzie might see began to cry a little. The general didn’t like that; if there was one thing he did not like, it was soldiers who cried, and he snapped at Kelly:
“Get these two mothers the hell out of here, and when you assign a detail to me, I want men, not wet-nosed kids.” Then he surveyed the angel, and even he was impressed.
“It’s a big son of a bitch, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. Head to heel, it’s twenty feet. We measured it.” “What makes you think it’s an angel?”
“Well, that’s the way it is,” Kelly said. “It’s an angel. What else is it?”
General Mackenzie walked around the recumbent form and had to admit the logic in Captain Kelly’s thinking. The thing was white, not esh-white but snow-white, shaped like a man, naked, and sprawled on its side with two great feathered wings folded under it. Its hair was spun gold and its face was too beautiful to be human.
“So that’s an angel,” Mackenzie said finally.
“Yes, sir.”
“Like hell it is!” Mackenzie snorted. “What I see is a white, Caucasian male, dead of wounds suffered on the eld of combat. By the way, where’d I hit him?”
“We can’t find the wounds, sir.”
“Now just what the hell do you mean, you can’t find the wounds? I don’t miss. If I shot it, I shot it.”
“Yes, sir. But we can’t find the wounds. Perhaps its skin is very tough. It might have been the concussion that knocked it down.”
Used to getting at the truth of things himself, Mackenzie walked up and down the body, going over it carefully. No wounds were visible.
“Turn the angel over,” Mackenzie said.
Kelly, who was a good Catholic, hesitated at first; but between a live general and a dead angel, the choice was specified. He called out a detail of marines, and without enthusiasm they managed to turn over the giant body. When Mackenzie complained that mud smears were impairing his inspection, they wiped the angel clean. There were no wounds on this side either.
“That’s a hell of a note,” Mackenzie muttered, and if Captain Kelly and Lieutenant Garcia had been more familiar with the moods of Old Hell and Hardtack, they would have heard a tremor of uncertainty in his voice. The truth is that Mackenzie was just a little baffled. “Anyway,” he decided, “it’s dead, so wrap it up and put it in the ship.”
“Sir?”
“Goddamnit, Kelly, how many times do I have to give you an order? I said, wrap it up and put it in the ship!”
The marines at Quen-to were relieved as they watched Mackenzie’s gunship disappear in the distance, preferring the company of live VCs to that of a dead angel, but the pilot of the helicopter flew with all the assorted worries of a Southern Fundamentalist.
“Is that sure enough an angel, sir?” he had asked the general.
“You mind your eggs and fly the ship, son,” the general replied. An hour ago he would have told the pilot to keep his goddamn nose out of things that didn’t concern him, but the angel had a stultifying effect on the general’s language. It depressed him, and when the three-star general at headquarters said to him, “Are you trying to tell me, Mackenzie, that you shot down an angel?” Mackenzie could only nod his head miserably.
“Well, sir, you are out of your goddamn mind.”
“The body’s outside in Hangar F,” said Mackenzie. “I put a guard over it, sir.”
The two-star general followed the three-star general as he stalked to Hangar F, where the three-star general looked at the body, poked it with his toe, poked it with his finger, felt the feathers, felt the hair, and then said:
“God damn it to hell, Mackenzie, do you know what you got here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You got an angel—that’s what the hell you got here.”
“Yes, sir, that’s the way it would seem.”
“God damn you, Mackenzie, I always had a feeling that I should have put my foot down instead of letting you zoom up and down out there in those gunships zapping VCs. My God almighty, you’re supposed to be a grown man with some sense instead of some dumb kid who wants to make a score zapping Charlie, and if you hadn’t been out there in that gunship this would never have happened. Now what in hell am I supposed to do? We got a lousy enough press on this war. How am I going to explain a dead angel?”
How am I going to explain a dead angel?”
“Maybe we don’t explain it, sir. I mean, there it is. It happened. The damn thing’s dead, isn’t it? Let’s bury it. Isn’t that what a soldier does—buries his dead, tightens his belt a notch, and goes on from there?”
“So we bury it, huh, Mackenzie?”
“Yes, sir. We bury it.”
“You’re a horse’s ass, Mackenzie. How long since someone told you that? That’s the trouble with being a general in this goddamn army—no one ever gets to tell you what a horse’s ass you are. You got dignity.”
“No, sir. You’re not being fair, sir,” Mackenzie protested. “I’m trying to help. I’m trying to be creative in this trying situation.”
“You get a gold star for being creative, Mackenzie. Yes, sir, General—that’s what you get. Every marine at Quen-to knows you shot down an angel. Your helicopter pilot and crew know it, which means that by now everyone on this base knows it— because anything that happens here, I know it last—and those snotnose reporters on the base, they know it, not to mention the goddamn chaplains, and you want to bury it. Bless your heart.”
The three-star general’s name was Drummond, and when he got back to his office, his aide said to him excitedly:
“General Drummond, sir, there’s a committee of chaplains, sir, who insist on seeing you, and they’re very up tight about something, and I know how you feel about chaplains, but this seems to be something special, and I think you ought to see them.”
“I’ll see them.” General Drummond sighed.
There were four chaplains, a Catholic priest, a rabbi, an Episcopalian, and a Lutheran. The Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian chaplains had wanted to be a part of the delegation, but the priest, who was a Paulist, said that if they were to bring in five Protestants, he wanted a Jesuit as reenforcement, while the rabbi, who was Reform, agreed that against five Protestants an Orthodox rabbi ought to join the Jesuit. The result was a compromise, and they agreed to allow the priest, Father Peter O’Malley, to talk for the group. Father O’Malley came directly to the point:
“Our information is, General, that General Mackenzie has shot down one of God’s holy angels. Is that or is that not so?”
“I’m afraid it’s so,” Drummond admitted.
There was a long moment of silence while the collective clergy gathered its wits, its faith, its courage, and its astonishment, and then Father O’Malley asked slowly and ominously: “And what have you done with the body of this holy creature, if indeed it has a body?”
“It has a body—a very substantial body. In fact, it’s as large as a young elephant, twenty feet tall. It’s lying in Hangar F, under guard.”
Father O’Malley shook his head in horror, looked at his Protestant colleagues, and then passed over them to the rabbi and said to him:
“What are your thoughts, Rabbi Bernstein?”
Since Rabbi Bernstein represented the oldest faith that was concerned with angels, the others deferred to him.
“I think we ought to look upon it immediately,” the rabbi said.
“I agree,” said Father O’Malley.
The other clergy joined in this agreement, and they repaired to Hangar F, a journey not without difficulty, for by now the press had come to focus on the story, and the general and the clergy ran a sort of gauntlet of pleading questions as they made their way on foot to Hangar F. The guards there barred the press, and the clergy entered with General Drummond and General Mackenzie and half a dozen other staff officers. The angel was uncovered, and the men made a circle around the great, beautiful thing, and then for almost five minutes there was silence.
Father O’Malley broke the silence. “God forgive us,” he said.
There was a circle of amens, and then more silence, and finally Whitcomb, the Episcopalian, said:
“It could conceivably be a natural phenomenon.”
Father O’Malley looked at him wordlessly, and Rabbi Bernstein softened the blow with the observation that even God and His holy angels could be considered as not apart from nature, whereupon Pastor Yager, the Lutheran, objected to a pantheistic viewpoint at a time like this, and Father O’Malley snapped:
The plain fact of the matter is that we are standing in front of one of God’s holy angels, which we in our animal-like sinfulness have slain.
“The devil with this theological nonsense! The plain fact of the matter is that we are standing in front of one of God’s holy angels, which we in our animal-like sinfulness have slain. What penance we must do is more to the point.”
“Penance is your field, gentlemen,” said General Drummond. “I have the problem of a war, the press, and this body.”
“Penance is your field, gentlemen,” said General Drummond. “I have the problem of a war, the press, and this body.”
“This body, as you call it,” said Father O’Malley, “obviously should be sent to the Vatican—immediately, if you ask me.”
“Oh, ho!” snorted Whitcomb. “The Vatican! No discussion, no exchange of opinion—oh, no, just ship it off to the Vatican where it can be hidden in some secret dungeon with any other evidence of God’s divine favor—”
“Come now, come now,” said Rabbi Bernstein soothingly. “We are witness to something very great and holy, and we should not argue as to where this holy thing of God belongs. I think it is obvious that it belongs in Jerusalem.”
While this theological discussion raged, it occurred to General Clayborne Mackenzie that his own bridges needed mending, and he stepped outside to where the press—swollen by now to almost the entire press corps in Viet Nam—waited, and of course they grabbed him.
“Is it true, General?”
“Is what true?”
“Did you shoot down an angel?”
“Yes, I did,” the old warrior stated forthrightly.
“For heaven’s sake, why?” asked a woman photographer.
“It was a mistake,” said Old Hell and Hardtack modestly. “You mean you didn’t see it?” asked another voice.
“No, sir. Peripheral, if you know what I mean. I was in the gunship zapping Charlie, and bang—there it was.”
The press was skeptical. A dozen questions came, all to the point of how he knew that it was an angel.
“You don’t ask why a river’s a river, or a donkey’s a donkey,”
Mackenzie said bluntly. “Anyway, we have professional opinion inside.”
All were agreed that the angel was a sign—but what kind of a sign was another matter entirely.
Inside, the professional opinion was divided and angry. All were agreed that the angel was a sign—but what kind of a sign was another matter entirely. Pastor Yager held that it was a sign for peace, calling for an immediate cease-fire. Whitcomb, the Episcopalian, held, however, that it was merely a condemnation of indiscriminate zapping, while the rabbi and the priest held that it was a sign—period. Drummond said that sooner or later the press must be allowed in and that the network men must be permitted to put the dead angel on television. Whitcomb and the rabbi agreed. O’Malley and Yager demurred. General Robert L. Robert of the Engineer Corps arrived with secret information that the whole thing was a put-on by the Russians and that the angel was a robot, but when they attempted to cut the flesh to see whether the angel bled or not, the skin proved to be impenetrable.
General Robert L. Robert of the Engineer Corps arrived with secret information that the whole thing was a put-on by the Russians and that the angel was a robot.
At that moment the angel stirred, just a trifle, yet enough to make the clergy and brass gathered around him leap back to give him room—for that gigantic twenty-foot form, weighing better than half a ton, was one thing dead and something else entirely alive. The angel’s biceps were as thick around as a man’s body, and his great, beautiful head was mounted on a neck almost a yard in diameter. Even the clerics were sufficiently hazy on angelology to be at all certain that even an angel might not resent being shot down. As he stirred a second time, the men around him moved even farther away, and some of the brass nervously loosened their sidearms.
“If this holy creature is alive,” Rabbi Bernstein said bravely, “then he will have neither hate nor anger toward us. His nature is of love and forgiveness. Don’t you agree with me, Father O’Malley?”
If only because the Protestant ministers were visibly dubious, Father O’Malley agreed. “By all means. Oh, yes.”
“Just how the hell do you know?” demanded General Drummond, loosening his sidearm. “That thing has the strength of a bulldozer.”
Not to be outdone by a combination of Catholic and Jew, Whitcomb stepped forward bravely and faced Drummond and said, “That ‘thing,’ as you call it, sir, is one of the Almighty’s blessed angels, and you would do better to see to your immortal soul than to your sidearm.”
To which Drummond yelled, “Just who the hell do you think you are talking to, mister—just—”
At that moment the angel sat up, and the men around him leaped away to widen the circle. Several drew their sidearms; others whispered whatever prayers they could remember. The angel, whose eyes were as blue as the skies over Viet Nam when the monsoon is gone and the sun shines through the washed air, paid almost no attention to them at first. He opened one wing and then the other, and his great wings almost filled the hangar. He exed one arm and then the other, and then he stood up.
On his feet, he glanced around him, his blue eyes moving steadily from one to another, and when he did not find what he sought, he walked to the great sliding doors of Hangar F and spread them open with a single motion. To the snapping of steel regulators and the grinding of stripped gears, the doors parted—revealing to the crowd outside, newsmen, officers, soldiers, and civilians, the mighty, twenty-foot-high, shining form of the angel.
No one moved. The sight of the angel, bent forward slightly, his splendid wings half spread, not for flight but to balance him, held them hypnotically fixed, and the angel himself moved his eyes from face to face, finding finally what he sought—none other than Old Hell and Hardtack Mackenzie.
As in those Western films where the moment of “truth,” as they call it, is at hand, where sheriff and badman stand face to face, their hands twitching over their guns—as the crowd melts away from the two marked men in those films, so did the crowd melt away from around Mackenzie until he stood alone—as alone as any man on earth.
The angel took a long, hard look at Mackenzie, and then the angel sighed and shook his head. The crowd parted for him as he walked past Mackenzie and down the field—where, squarely in the middle of Runway Number 1, he spread his mighty wings and took off, the way an eagle leaps from his perch into the sky, or—as some reporters put it—as a dove flies gently.
Is your attention span ravaged by living in our hellscape of a modern era? Good news: 2019 brought us plenty of brilliant short fiction. We polled current and former Electric Lit staff and contributors about their favorite collections of the year, and their picks include debuts, National Book Award finalists, posthumous anthologies by overlooked masters, and the latest from some of the titans of the craft. The results are in ascending order, so read to the bottom for our #1 pick.
Alexander Chee, recommending Wang’s “Days of Being Mild” for Recommended Reading, writes that this collection about young people in China “marks the arrival of an urgent and necessary literary voice we’ve been needing, waiting for maybe without knowing.”
The fictional town of Cross River, Maryland, where these stories take place, is “a masterpiece of true imagination, art that reminds me of the work it takes to make a meal from scratch,” writes Tyrese L. Coleman in her interview with Scott.
Maizes’ stories are all about outsiders, deftly writing not only to the humanity of her characters but also the ways in which we, too, have all been outsiders at some point of another. Recommending “A Cat Called Grievous,” EL executive director Halimah Marcus calls it “domestic realism with a wrench in it.”
“In the months that it took to put Where The Light Falls together, I have often asked myself how we could have turned our eyes from a writer of such precision and strength,” says Lauren Groff, who edited this posthumous collection, recommending “The Bubble.”
In a debut that interviewer Sarah Neilson describes as “weird, eerie, and sublimely beautiful,” stories of characters all longing for lives just out of reach fully immerse readers in their minds and their longings. Read a story recommended by Aimee Bender here.
Blum follows characters and communities from the margins in sparse, yet devastating prose. Read “The White Spot,” recommended by Deborah Eisenberg, to see it in action.
In Jac Jemc’s interview she discusses empathy, her grandparents, and the shades of gray that make up human nature. Her short stories are mini character studies preoccupied with the same themes.
Brian Evenson is a master at crafting stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia. His stories take you into the twisted depths of human obsessions only to abandon you in the middle of the labyrinth.
Nearly forgotten when its author suddenly disappeared from public view, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage restores a voice that chronicles 1970s Chicago with a sly, joyous humor.
Hempel’s first short story collection in over a decade is a study in magnifying minds in motion, Yvonne Conza writes in her interview with the author. Hempel’s narrators “swerve toward us with a muscled complexity of vulnerability, not a state of victimhood.” Rick Moody recommended a sad story about dogs from this collection.
Maria V. Luna thinks that Fajardo-Anstine’s greatest strength is her courage. “[She] reveals all this through acts of social and cultural justice in literary form. She does not tread lightly upon truth, instead she brushes away layers of dirt and deception.” Read the rest of our interview with the National Book Award finalist here, read Ruby Mora’s essay on how Sabrina & Corina represents a new generation of Latinx literature, or read an excerpt from Sabrina & Corinarecommended by Mat Johnson.
Ted Chiang is specializes in inventive speculative short stories that engage with deep questions about human nature—even when they’re also about time travel, AIs, or sentient parrots. “No matter the species of a story’s protagonist, no matter the universe that forms the story’s setting, the subject is always us,” writes Tochi Onyebuchi of Exhalation in his interview with Ted Chiang. “The Great Silence,” published in Recommended Reading all the way back in 2016, is one of the stories included.
“There are murky darknesses inside all of us that can be dredged up by fiction,” writes Alison Tate Lewis in her interview of Samanta Schweblin, and these surreal short stories do the trick. Sarah Rose Etter also interviewed the translator of Mouthful of Birds about what it takes to bring a book like this into another language. The title story ran in Recommended Reading back in 2012, but with a different translator, so you can compare notes.
The word “community” is so overused as to become almost meaningless, but Washington manages to do it justice in his stories about the various communities within Houston. Candace Williams delves more into this in her conversation with Washington, and you can read the title story from Lotin Recommended Reading, where recommender Aja Gabel says that Washington’s “restrained but unctuous” writing “reliably knocks me over.”
Karen Russell is a master of the weird, and Orange World is one of her best yet, full of indelible stories about parasitic trees, long-dead bog bodies, echolocating gondoliers in post-deluge Miami, and strange little devils that live on breast milk. Throughout, says Erin Bartnett in her interview with Russell, there’s an odd kind of optimism.
Told in poetic bursts, Heather Christle’sThe Crying Book paints a complex, personal, and far-reaching picture of the universal and under-explored phenomenon of crying. Previously, she’d written four books of poetry, and she writes with the precision only a poet can achieve.
Heather Christle and I talked on the phone about white women’s tears, how to navigate depression in a world that seeks to police women’s emotions, and why you should google that lump in your throat.
Katie Simon: Your background is in poetry, but this is your first nonfiction book. On the first page of The Crying Book, you wrote that you wanted to map every place you cried. Was your decision to write about this map idea via a nonfiction book intentional?
Heather Christle: No, it was a very different desire. What was really at the core was not so much a desire to actually map that out, because that wouldn’t reveal all that much—it would just show every place I’d ever cried. But what it did lead to a series of conversations with friends where I would bring up this idea, and we would begin talking about places that we had all cried. And people would start to sort of share their own experiences of crying and it made me realize that this was a conversation that felt rich and meaningful and like it connected to a lot of other things that I might be interested in thinking about. But I still didn’t know it was going to be a nonfiction book.
I sort of sat down one morning, and just started writing, thinking maybe it was a prose poem, maybe it was just getting some things down that wouldn’t be anything around crying. And it felt like there was more to say. It felt like I had more questions. And I started to do some research just for the sake of my own curiosity and began to incorporate some of that into what I was writing. And then I found myself with more questions and started to look into some databases and realized that you could put crying into any database, any subject, and something really interesting would come up and. It became apparent it was probably going to be a book. But it’s very much shaped by the material. It wasn’t that I said, I’m going to write a nonfiction book. What should I write a nonfiction book about? It was much more of a process as I think this the content revealing the form.
KS: Many of the themes of the book, like women with mental illness or women expressing emotion, and how women are perceived and judged, are in the zeitgeist. How do you think your book fits into the larger public discussion? And do you feel like our culture is changing in a direction that allowed you to write this book?
There are forces that seek to limit our imagination and to hold it down into a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy space.
HC: Part of what I wanted to do in this book was to investigate patterns around crying, and around how people respond to it, in all kinds of contexts. But then, so many of those patterns are harmful—men dismissing the tears of women or white women’s tears being weaponized to incite racist violence. I wanted to note those patterns, but not to reinscribe them; to find ways of intersecting with them differently, of constellating behaviors differently, and noticing all of the many other possibilities that exist. I think that there’s a lot of beautiful work happening, and has been happening for a long time. But I think, particularly right now, it feels to me that there is an increasing urgency in the mood to shift these patterns and to imagine other possibilities. And for me, that’s not only in the case of looking at women crying, but it’s looking at access to mental healthcare. It’s looking at the possibilities of prison abolition. It’s looking at the possibilities of access to reproductive healthcare and justice. So I hope that my book can be a part of the shifting of those patterns.
KS: Did you find that you were writing in defiance of expectations in some way, of how you’re “supposed” to write about these things?
HC: So one of the things that I love about writing poems is the way that it feels possible for them to resist some of the forces that limit our imagination. They have this sort of anti-gravity to them that I think is exciting and full of possibility. It’s harder for me to maintain that kind of propulsive imagination through prose and through a book-length nonfiction project, because there are these forces that seek to limit our imagination and to hold it down into a space that can easily exist in white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. It is possible, but I had to work harder at it and there were many times where I would write and then I would notice that I was succumbing to those forces in one way or another. And then I would put that aside and I would try again. I think I found it.
KS: When a woman writes a book in which there is a romantic relationship, there’s this pressure to categorize it as a “marriage” book or a “relationship” book, or a book exclusively about women’s feelings. That’s obviously not what this is, but I did find myself really connecting with your writing about your marriage, like when you write “One of the ways Chris loves me is that he waits while I cry. He tells me it will pass. He does not leave. And when the fog lifts, he makes space for me to write.” After reading those sentences I texted them to a friend because I was like, this is what I want for myself. Like please, Heather, write my dating profile! I’m curious how that relationship found its way into the book—was it always going to be there how you mentioned friendships were so central?
HC: So much of this book is about relationships between people and between ideas, between texts that might want to speak to one another. Of course, my relationship with my partner Chris is tremendously significant to me, though I didn’t want to center it above the other relationships—I think it exists as one thread within this knotting work that I was doing. But I never really thought to write it out of the book. There were times when it was difficult, as any relationship is difficult, and the representation of any relationship is difficult, but I ended up feeling that it fit within the broader framework.
KS: Was there anything that came up in your research that you got really into, but didn’t actually manage to find its way into the final book? Something cool we should all be googling?
One of the best things that I did was to stop writing. I had to periodically tell myself that it was okay if I didn’t publish the book.
HC: There is! There’s so much that could have gone into this book. But there came a point where I was like, I have to just stop now. There are only so many pages. It’s not meant to be exhaustive at all. So, you know, the sensation of a lump in your throat when you’re crying? It turns out that the reason for that is that when you’re in emotional distress, your body creates this physical physiological reaction where it tries to get as much oxygen from the air as possible because you may need it. And in order to do that the muscles of the throat hold themselves open. When you try to swallow, you feel the resistance of those muscles and you experience it as a lump—a lump that is, in fact, an opening.
KS: Whoa. So It’s like the opposite. I’m always worried my throat is going to close up, but there’s actually more room! You just reassured me and probably a lot of other people that we are not dying.
HC: Your body is actually taking care of you in that moment.
KS: Like a form of self-care. I don’t think we discuss that enough in the literary world. There were a lot of heavy, personal threads in this book. How did you take care of yourself while writing?
HC: I think one of the best things that I did was to stop writing. I had to periodically tell myself that it was okay if I didn’t publish the book, that it didn’t matter that I had spent five years, eventually six years, writing it, that it would be okay for me to not publish it. It was the only way I could get through. It served as a kind of safety net.
KS: It sounds like you figured it out—taking breaks and resting. Did you ever turn to a residency to get the work done?
HC: I did do a sort of residency, though it wasn’t an official one. I went and stayed with a friend, a poet who was my professor at school. I went there to work on the second draft of the book. I had generated all this material, gotten all this feedback and then knew that I had some major cuts to make and some major rearranging to do and wanted to have the ability to be in another space to get that done. So she gave me her bedroom to stay in for a week. I woke up early every morning and drank coffee and chatted with her and then went upstairs and worked until the afternoon and then I napped. It was beautiful. I recommend it as a form of residency, to be with a friend. And I was near other friends that could go and have a drink with in the evening. So I was able to both have the separation and also the support.
And I think also, sometimes we get so caught up in imagining that institutions are the only way we can get things done. I imagine at some point I would like to go to a residency for my next project. But we can make these things happen for each other. We can be there for each other, and we don’t necessarily need institutions to make writing happen.
Riane Konc has done the impossible: written a book. Specifically the book Build Your Own Christmas Movie Romance, a choose-your-own-escapade that spoofs every Christmas rom-com ever made.
The book is not only funny, it’s actual fun. Readers pick their own plots and dramatic mix-ups, meet and settle for their own men, choose to throw wine or to avoid mom’s call, and “create the holiday love story of a lifetime.” Riane’s book gave me—if there is such a term—a reading boner.
In no way is Build Your Own Christmas Movie Romance a memoir about Konc, who’s a humor writer and essayist, frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times (though she lives somewhere in the middle of the country), and author of one viral tweet about the Winter Olympics.
Riane and I “met” in 2014 when I rejected her submission “e.e. cummings, Email Spammer” to my humor column “Funny Women” on The Rumpus, then later accepted and published another piece and entered into the eternal editor-writer bond. So I’m a Konc early adopter and believe she’s best described as the hypothetical love child of Jack Handey and Mary Oliver. Which is to say, she writes extremely funny humor pieces and extremely poignant essays, and she’s the kind of writer whose writing makes you feel bad that you don’t write like her.
I emailed back and forth with Riane (pronounced “Ryan,” it turns out) about “the writing process,” the Hallmark Channel, holidays and romance, and a lot more.
Elissa Bassist: How, exactly, does one write a book? Please be specific and leave nothing to the imagination.
Riane Konc: It is very simple. You simply must—and I cannot stress this enough—sign a contract. As far as my experience goes, this is the best and only way to force yourself to sit down in a chair and do it. I don’t know how else someone writes a book. I couldn’t do it until I was contractually obligated to do so. When I agreed to write the book (an editor reached out to writers in a private Facebook group to write this particular book), I was going through a period of severe writer’s block and then one day, in a total impulse, I signed a contract that stipulated I would have this book written within three months (to publish before the holidays). And then … I just had to do it. I would wake up in the morning like I had every morning—void of ideas and unable to write—and yet I had a signed contract. I didn’t know the consequences of breaking a contract, but I assumed jail or death penalty, and that is honestly, literally the only reason I completed a book. I cannot recommend contracts highly enough.
You write the funniest short conceptual humor (that sometimes goes dark), and you write the saddest personal essays (that sometimes go light). For you, what do comedy and tragedy have in common that pulls you to both?
RK: I could say something about the obvious Venn diagram overlap between funny people and sad people—like, is it your personality quirk or your way of viewing the world that makes you funny and that also makes you sad? Or is it more than humor is a desperate coping mechanism for a certain sect of the—and pardon me for being scientific here—clinically bummed out? I don’t know. I do know the link isn’t absolute: I know a lot of people who are extremely funny and extremely happy, and I wish them nothing but the worst. (Just kidding.)
(And here I want to give the disclaimer that believing sadness or mental unwellness is required for your comedy or your art is really toxic and dangerous and untrue, so … quit romanticizing that.)
I also could say that I think the two (sadness, humor) inform each other because whether you want your writing to make someone laugh or cry—underneath that you want the reader to feel a little off-balance. You never want the reader to settle in and get too comfortable, like, “Oh, I know exactly where this essay is going” or “I know the punchline that will follow this set-up.” The best way to experience a joke or a big feeling in writing, I think, is to have it appear out of nowhere and then slap the shit out of you.
Finally, I could say that there’s a metaphor here about how a french fry dipped in a chocolate shake shouldn’t taste amazing, but it does.
But my real answer is that I write funny pieces and sad pieces for the same reason that anyone writes anything: I need to. There is something inside of me that really, really wants to write silly, short conceptual pieces about John Steinbeck using Snapchat, and there is also something inside of me that really, really wants to write overly sentimental essays about all of the feelings I get by seeing a single bird. So despite all the compelling reasons to quit, I keep doing it.
EB: Rumor is you watched a lot of Hallmark Christmas-themed rom-coms to spoof the genre and its tropes as expertly as you do. What are your thoughts on the Hallmark heroine? It seems she follows in the footsteps of most heroines: begins as unlikeable (busy, bitchy, moody, barren, flying off every possible handle), then she’s utterly disabled (fired, dumped, impaled somehow), everything is taken from her to make her likeable/relatable…oops, my question became a rage spiral…
RK: I’ll go out on a limb and say that, as in most media, the made-for-TV Christmas heroine is generally—if I may be so bold—not great. It’s not only this genre’s fault: the “made-for-TV Christmas movie heroine” is a very specific, festive iteration of the myriad ways to reduce real women to caricatures that exist nowhere outside the imaginations of lazy and misogynistic writers. My book is primarily a joke-delivery vehicle that ends up satirizing how women are portrayed in … well, most movies. I’m particularly obsessed with the way that rom-coms in general—and Christmas rom-coms especially—absolutely hate women who enjoy working. That’s why my book’s protagonist is a business-obsessed woman whose core characteristic is that she hates Christmas (in this world, these go hand-in-hand: it’s a character flaw that predicates another character flaw). Our heroine has also made the unforgivable moral error of choosing to live in a big city, and in the world of Christmas movies, being a big city businesswoman is the worst thing you can be or do.
And yes, the rumors about my watching many made-for-TV Christmas movies for research are true. You probably heard these rumors from one of many librarians in Cincinnati, who, at different points in March and April, had to watch in horror as I stood all alone in line, checking out 10–15 Hallmark Christmas movies at a time. “I swear this is for work” is something that I said several times, though I am pretty certain that none of them believed me.
EB:Now I’ll ask a question that interviewers love to ask female novelists: is your novella in any way autobiographical?
I wrote it while on my period, clothed entirely in lace and whispers.
RK: “Novella” is such a masculine term. I prefer to call this book—as with all of my writing—a “public-facing diary entry.” I wrote it while on my period, clothed entirely in lace and whispers, and I took breaks from my lady scribbles to work on my other passion project: decoupaging ballerina music boxes in affirmations from Dove chocolate wrappers.
That being said, there is nothing autobiographical in this book except the feelings that Chrissy and her mom share for Sufjan Stevens, which only scratch the surface of how I feel about that gentle, magical singing man.
EB: Beyond bingeing Sufjan Stevens, it’s well-known by me that you watch a lot of TV. How do sitcoms help you write humor? Do you metabolize them in a special way?
RK: Wow, well, first of all, I think what you mean to say is that I spend my evenings drinking fine teas and puffing on the Queen’s cigars while reading a variety of leatherbound literary classics. “Books,” I say each night. “Simply and only books.” And then I do a little cigar smoke puff in the shape of the Penguin Modern Classics logo.
But yes, when I’m not doing that, I squeeze in situational comedies. What I absorb when watching TV or movies is the structure. For a book like this—and for short conceptual pieces—I crave structure. It’s something solid to play around on. And it’s a bonus if part of the gimmick of your book is (as mine is) making fun of a particular type of plot structure, because you get to make jokes about it and straight-up use it. Which is perfect, because: free structure!
EB: Did you have any party tricks from high school that you want to tell us about that ultimately informed your writing as an adult?
RK: I’ve since gotten rusty, but I once had all of Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” (I’d estimate there are between 1,500–2,000) so thoroughly memorized that any person could say one word to me—for example, “tree”—- and I could quote any “Deep Thought” that contained the word “tree.” I refer to this as a “party trick,” but the more accurate term is “trick,” because—as anyone reading this anecdote already suspects—I was absolutely not invited to parties.
EB: From experience I can tell you that you missed nothing at parties except fun and sex. Now here’s my favorite question to ask, especially on Tinder: what advice do you have for aspiring humor writers?
I now refuse to write any future books with fewer than seven separate endings.
RK: I don’t think most writers want to hear the truth: that the best advice is as boring as you feared, that you must read as much humor writing as you can, you must write as much humor writing as you can, that you must find people you trust to give you feedback, that you must learn when to take feedback and when to ignore it, that you must find a way to make peace with God (or your preferred God stand-in) about the inevitability of rejection, and that you must do this over and over until you die or get published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
What’s good to remember about humor writing—any writing—is that it’s both a gift and a skill. Everyone has different starting points, and it’s okay—even important—to acknowledge the “gift” part of the equation (that it comes easier and faster to some writers, and that some writers are more natural idea-factories than others). I’m never going to write as much and as well as some writers, no matter what I do, and I have to just … find a way not to be paralyzed by that. You can’t do anything about what you start with, but you can become a more skilled writer (even more skilled than someone more naturally gifted) by reading a lot, writing a lot, paying attention, and having an editor’s direct email address.
EB: Since we’ve reached the end of this interview, do you have any tips on reaching/writing the best ending in your book?
RK: John Steinbeck closed one of the most popular books of the 20th century with [SPOILER] a young woman breastfeeding an old man in a barn—and yet, when I read it for the first time, I found it so beautiful that I don’t think I fully stopped crying for six months? So I feel like conventional wisdom falls apart when it comes to endings.
With Build Your Own Christmas Movie Romance, I had the luxury to include several endings—there are seven in the final chapter. I got to do “the cynical ending,” several “winking at the genre” endings, “the weird ending,” “the abrupt ending,” and I got to do “the romantic ending.” I now refuse to write any future books with fewer than seven separate endings.
But I think that there is one correct answer to your question: the best way to end a story, no matter the genre or medium, is to slowly pull back to reveal that actually, the entire story has been taking place inside of a giant snowglobe this whole time. Imagine how much better A Little Life would have been if Hanya Yanagihara had done this. Imagine how much better The Wire would have been. And how much better this interview would have been. This is the only real way to end any story, and deep down, I think everybody knows it.
Before you go: Electric Literature is campaigning to reach 1,000 members by 2020, and you can help us meet that goal. Having 1,000 members would allow Electric Literature to always pay writers on time (without worrying about overdrafting our bank accounts), improve benefits for staff members, pay off credit card debt, and stop relying on Amazon affiliate links. Members also get store discounts and year-round submissions. If we are going to survive long term, we need to think long term. Please support the future of Electric Literature by joining as a member today!
This was a year when a lot of us wanted to escape into fiction, but courageous nonfiction authors—and readers—still devoted themselves to looking reality full in the face. We asked Electric Literature staff and contributors to vote for their favorite books of the past year, and here, in ascending order, are their 15 top picks for essays, memoirs, and reporting.
When Jeannie Vanasco was nineteen, her close friend raped her at a party; fourteen years later, she decides to interview him about that night. A necessary book in the #MeToo era, this memoir asks complex questions about sexual assault and accountability, and what trauma looks like. Jeannie Vanasco’s editor interviewed her about the book.
Diaz’s memoir tracks her childhood spent in both Puerto Rico and Florida, her mother’s struggle with schizophrenia, her friendships and depression and sexual assault, her time in the Marines and the breaking up of her family. Dynamic, moving, and full of life, this memoir is anything but ordinary. Read our interview with Jaquira Diaz about why she wanted to be “ordinary.”
This powerful book uncovers the way racism interacts with every facet of our society, and teaches readers to recognize and fight racism. Kendi uses history, ethics, law, and personal experience to expose the racism that is always present in our lives. Here’s our interview with Ibram X. Kendi.
In this self-proclaimed love letter to A Tribe Called Quest, Abdurraqib uses various genres to express what the rap group has meant to him throughout his life. While tracing the group’s career, Abdurraqib shows how the group affected both the musical and cultural scene of the 1990s, and how the group affected him personally. Find out more in our interview with Hanif Abdurraqib.
Miller’s memoir meditates on the nature of healing and the author’s quest to reclaim her life after a sexual assault. Although she was known as Emily Doe when she read her victim impact statement to Brock Turner, Chanel Miller uses this memoir to take back her name and shine a light on how victims of sexual assault are treated in America. Read an essay by Fiza Pirani about how Miller’s memoir teaches us about the value of staying in a traumatic moment instead of moving on right away.
Short-listed for the National Book Award, Forché’s memoir follows her 27-year-old self as she travels to El Salvador with a mysterious man. Once there, Forché struggles to make sense of the horrors she sees in a country on the brink of war.
In the 1970s, Harper Lee returned to Alabama to watch and report on a criminal trial. Furious Hours combines the drama of true crime with the attentiveness of biography, and offers an analysis of both the Deep South and one of America’s most beloved authors.
Saeed Jones’ memoir ruminates on the intersections of race, sex, and sexuality as the author comes of age in the American south. With haunting prose and deep thoughtfulness, Jones reveals the ways we create ourselves over the course of our lives.
This graphic memoir recalls the tense conversations that Jacob has had throughout her life. From her own childhood to the 2016 election, Jacob uses both humor and honesty to answer her son’s questions about race. We interviewed Mira Jacob about the book and she also recommended five books for our Read More Women series.
When Lara Prior-Palmer was nineteen, she entered the world’s longest, toughest horse race. With no formal training, Prior-Palmer spent ten days racing wild horses through the Mongolian grasslands, following a path carved out by Genghis Khan’s horse messengers, and became the first woman ever to win the Mongol Derby. Electric Lit executive director Halimah Marcus interviewed Lara Prior-Palmer.
In her debut memoir, T Kira Madden describes her charged upbringing as a queer, biracial teen in Florida, the only child of parents struggling with addiction. This memoir spans years in Madden’s life and wrestles with the contradictions, complications, and powerful women that were central to the author’s life. Check out our interview with T Kira Madden.
Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, this family memoir spans a hundred years and explores the lesser-known corners of New Orleans. In this book, Broom takes readers into her family’s home and shows them the magic, chaos, and power the house exerts over her and her history. Here’s our interview with Sarah M. Broom.
In her essay collection, Wang writes and unwrites about mental illness and how her diagnoses have affected her life. Both a personal memoir and an analytical work, this collection shows readers what it’s really like to live with schizophrenia. We interviewed Esme Weijun Wang about mental illness and disability.
This essay collection covers the big issues from the milieu of millennial malaise, such as reality TV, the internet, and the art of the scam. Tolentino dips into modern culture with humor and sharp insight, and returns with shards of wisdom. Read our interview with Jia Tolentino here.
Before you go: Electric Literature is campaigning to reach 1,000 members by 2020, and you can help us meet that goal. Having 1,000 members would allow Electric Literature to always pay writers on time (without worrying about overdrafting our bank accounts), improve benefits for staff members, pay off credit card debt, and stop relying on Amazon affiliate links. Members also get store discounts and year-round submissions. If we are going to survive long term, we need to think long term. Please support the future of Electric Literature by joining as a member today!
At 4, Chanel Miller could not lift a gallon of milk. She needed two trembling little arms to wet her cereal with “that white sloshing boulder.” And spillage was inevitable.
When exactly she began to carry the gallon of milk with ease, “one-handed, on the phone, in a rush,” she doesn’t know, Miller writes in her new memoir, Know My Name. But to get there, she must have had to sit in the mess for a morning or two.
“I believe the same rules apply,” she writes of the narrative the world will remember her by: her time as the Emily Doe of the infamous Stanford rape trial in which Brock Turner, found guilty of three counts of felony sexual assault, would serve only half of his meager six-month sentencing.
“One day I’ll be able to tell this story without it shaking my foundation,” Miller writes. “Each time will not require an entire production, a spilling, a sweating forehead, a mess to clean up, sopping paper towels. It will just be a part of my life, every day lighter to lift.”
We talk often about the rituals and societal expectations following the death of beloved people and animals: the anguish that accompanies physical loss, codified in curated stages of grief. But what of the intangible casualties? When we lose fragments of ourselves in trauma, what is the most appropriate bereavement treatment?
For months after the assault, Miller writes, it was too painful to be here, alive. Her mind preferred dissociation. The goal was to forget.
“It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing,” she writes. “It is about returning repeatedly to forage something.”
Foraging is a search in the wild for provisions, its etymology traced to the Anglo-French fuerre and the Old High German fuotar, both of which influenced the Old English term for fodder and later, food. When creatures forage, they make an effort to retrieve, collect and store the sources of energy and nutrients they find. The evolutionary purpose, scientists say, was to create a positive energy budget. Foraging theory states that to survive, we must balance out the energy we expend with the energy we gain.
But most of us are not actively foraging, at least not in the physical sense, not out in the wild. Instead, we forage for food more passively. We might experiment with new eateries and markets every now and then, but we ultimately do our surviving by retrieving prepackaged nutrients off grocery store shelves or assembly-line delis, mindlessly collecting the bounty in metal shopping carts and storing our earnings in kitchen pantries and refrigerators. Those of us in urban societies have evolved to expend little energy in our modern-day foraging, hoping to gain at least enough to get by.
Research shows that the same molecular and neural mechanisms involved in physically foraging for nourishment in the savanna or sea for centuries have evolved to help regulate our attention and retention.
To gain, she must remember. And to remember, she’ll have to sit in this mess for a while.
Less persistent, more inattentive and more passive foraging––whether the provision we seek is a tangible meal or more abstract food for thought––has been linked to a decrease in brain dopamine, the “happy hormone” responsible for controlling our mental and emotional reactions.
Low levels of dopamine reduce motivation and enthusiasm and increase the risk of depression, anxiety and other behavioral disorders. In the aftermath of trauma, low levels of dopamine further impair our ability to make sound judgments. If taken as prescribed, stimulants can increase brain dopamine levels until they produce that happy, rewarding and attentive effect.
When Miller says, then, that healing has less to do about moving forward and more to do with foraging, perhaps she understands that healing involves her attention. That it involves a repetitive return to the past to produce a somewhat sensical timeline from fragmentary scenes. Perhaps Miller understands that to heal, she must gain something to make up for the depleted energy stolen by the assailer; she must gain back the energy she lost before and after each court hearing. But to gain, she must remember. And to remember, she’ll have to sit in this mess for a while.
The act of writing, Miller says, taught her “to stay in the hurt, to resist leaving.” It placed her in the driver’s seat, in control of the once uncontrollable past. The more often she returned to the scenes leading up to and the scenes following the moment she was reported unconscious behind a dumpster outside a Stanford fraternity party, the more power she ultimately accumulated in crafting the meticulous details of her truth.
Eventually, Miller writes, she could come and go as she pleased, “until one day I found there was nothing left to gather.” And when there’s nothing else left to gather, then it’s time to pack up and move on.
This idea of returning and foraging to heal––foraging willingly––gripped me as someone with an ambiguously fleeting desire to live, someone whose rumination has proven to be more dangerous than fruitful.
Successful foraging requires return and reflection. It forces us to ask ourselves: Is it time we move on?
After reading Miller’s memoir, I understand the difference. To ruminate is to sit in the mess with no end in sight, no plan to return to the present and no real desire to find understanding. But successful foraging requires return and reflection. It demands an analysis of the environment and its resources. It forces us to ask ourselves: Is it time we move on from here?
The only way I’ve been able to move forward is by time-traveling backward, turning the machine off for a while and just sitting in messy memories past, sometimes alone and sometimes on the weathered leather loveseat in my therapist’s office, foraging through the brush clouding my brain for some understanding of how exactly I wound up wanting the end. Each time I make the return trip back to my present, my basket feels a little lighter, hinting at the horizon ahead.
Sometimes, after a long afternoon of foraging, Miller regresses, as do I. Healing is no linear feat, after all. There will be forest fires and predators, more competition in the wild. But to survive, we must eat.
There is a hymn on the first few pages of Shine of the Ever. Claire Rudy Foster writes in “The Pixies”: “When we’re together, we forget that we are hopeless. We are something else and we are part of each other. We will never fit. Why would we want to be like you?…My Velouria. The chorus comes and we are a mass of bliss and fury and love and pain and truth and sound. Finally through the roof. We are going to shake you loose.” This rebellious yet tender, frank yet lyrical yearning is what Shine of the Ever is. A collection of stories for the pixies, the punks, the lovers and the loveless. Shine of the Ever has the image of a mixed tape as its cover art but I want to call it a hymnal, a psalm, for those who have wanted to see themselves in fiction and felt ignored for way too long, for those who are ready to shake loose of the traditional constraints of society and literature.
In thirteen stories, Shine of the Ever is a collection of narratives with queer characters navigating Portland, Oregon—the city a character itself. Each character is searching for a sense of understanding and human connection while they continue the work of figuring their own selves out. What is special about this collection is that each story ends not on the stereotypical dreadful tone most stories about queer characters have. In Foster’s narratives, no one ends up punished for the way they live their lives. But rather, each story ends with a hint of hope, a sentiment very much needed in this era of Trump and the all out attack on LGBTQ+ civil rights.
Claire Rudy Foster is a queer, nonbinary trans writer who lives in Portland. Foster is the author of the short story collection I’ve Never Done This Before. Their writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Foster has been in recovery from alcoholism and addiction since 2007, and co-authored American Fix: Inside the Opioid Addiction Crisis and How to End It with activist Ryan Hampton. Their contributions to the recovery movement include speeches, letters, and articles and the recovery podcast “Addiction Unscripted.”
I spoke with Foster about why Portland is a popular place to write about, happy endings as a political act, longing and belonging, and if the world is ready for queer stories from people other than cis white men.
Tyrese L. Coleman: Of course, after reading your collection, I listened to the Pixies’ song “My Velouria,” which is where the line “shine of the ever” comes from. It’s funny, I never thought that a song could completely capture the feeling of a collection of stories in the way that this song does.
Claire Rudy Foster: The collection takes place in grunge-era Portland, and the Pixies were so much part of the sound and texture of that time for me. I love their lyrics: “We will wade in the shine of the ever. We will wade in the tides of the summer.” For my characters, as well as the city where they live, it’s the last days of summer: the last days of youth, when everything seems so important and vital and new. They’re all on the cusp of massive, difficult changes, but for the moment—it’s easy living.
TLC: Is this collection a result of the vibe, the longing, in this Pixies song or of Portland or of a mix of it all or something completely different?
CRF: I’ve heard others characterize queerness as a yearning. I connect with that. I often have the feeling of being outside, observing how other people live. I guess voyeurism is a kind of secondhand fulfillment. In Shine of the Ever, I really didn’t want to create another monument to a time that has passed. Portland has enough of those: memorials to the wonderful, weird culture that was pushed out by rapid expansion and gentrification. The narrator in the book’s title story remarks, “I had that feeling I was in a movie set of my own living room, where every object looked exactly like my personal possession but nicer, cleaner, and more appealing. I hate it. These designers put in a lot of effort to make things seem natural, but I think the only people who believe it are the ones who never saw the original. They don’t understand that this isn’t Portland anymore: it’s Portlandia. A theme park of the places we used to love.” Throughout the book, characters experience a longing that isn’t necessarily for another person, but for a moment in time that can never be recaptured. It’s a nostalgia that ripples into the present and continues to inform the things my characters desire, long for, obsess over, and crave.
TLC: You and Mitchell Jackson both write about Portland as this place that has been replaced with a fictional utopian veneer, though you talk about different communities within the city. It strikes me though that you both write about the city with a reminiscing tone—a love for the good bad old days. What is it about Portland that lends itself so well to characterization in the ways you and Jackson have written about it?
CRF: Portland wasn’t really a “city” until 20 years ago. Maybe less: ten. The condos appeared in the early 2000s, followed by an infestation of ampersands. Portland wasn’t always one of New York’s outer boroughs, where people all wear charcoal grey merino wool and drink artisanal lattes. Twee boutiques obscured the existing DIY culture, the punk scene, and the grittier places. Portland’s “charm,” which was played up by travel writers, tourists, and people who’d been pushed out of their own cities by insane costs-of-living. The city’s rapid overdevelopment happened almost overnight: within only 2-3 years, we were overrun by new residents, huge buildings that are out of character with the rest of the architecture, corporate headquarters, more cars on small roads, all that stuff. Institutions protected by money stayed, but the day-to-day stuff vanished. Almost every mom-and-pop store is now a gleaming, white weed dispensary. The landscape here was altered. For most cities, these changes happen slowly, or they already happened a few decades ago. The invasion of Portland is something I’ll never forget.
The “charm,” if you can call it that, is still more reminiscent of a town than a city. It’s a frontier town with a gory history and a lot of problems. There’s rich soil here for writers. Portland’s transformation features prominently in Shine of the Ever. Yet, in spite of these changes, the core parts of Portland remain the same. It’s a small city. The longer you live here, the smaller it seems. I think people write about it because it’s easy to fit it all into one book. It’s a fraction of the size of Los Angeles or New York or Dallas and significantly less socially complex.
TLC: You both also write about the drug epidemic in the city, but again, from different perspectives. You are not shy about writing and talking about your struggles with addiction. While I don’t want to make the assumption that any of the pieces are autofiction, can you talk about how your story influenced the pieces in Shine of the Ever, if they did at all?
CRF: First, I think all writing in every genre is autofiction of some kind. Writers draw from their own experiences, impressions, and sensations. An apple tastes like an apple. An apple that tastes like a pear is invented using the linguistic concepts that define taste, fruit, and eating. I think that, even when someone is writing high fantasy or science fiction, they’re still working within the lines of human perception: the writer, like the reader, is still human.
For Shine of the Ever, I was less concerned with historical accuracy than emotional precision. The book was born from my own attachment to a city that has been erased by time, and from my grief at watching its changes as it slipped away from me. This grief is selfish, of course. Many excellent things have come from these changes. But I think most people have felt displaced in one way or another, forced to start over, or disconnected from community. Displacement is part of Portland’s history: the ultra-white city is built on the traditional lands of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Cowlitz bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes. I can complain about Portland changing, but I am not a victim. I am merely inconvenienced. The white presence in Oregon is the result of an ongoing cultural genocide against Native people. The invasion I write about in my book is commercial, not cultural; I think it’s important to acknowledge the larger implications of that.
Heteronormativity erases us. Why replicate a system that wasn’t designed for you?
Addiction is part of more contemporary, urban displacement. Addiction is commercialized; it turns a profit. In my recovery, I’ve had to accept that nostalgia, the chronic and insatiable desire to reexperience the past, can be just as addictive as cigarettes, wine, or opiates. Returning to the same place, song, person, or emotion is not that different from picking up a drink: both of them feel good for a while, and they enable the person to depart from the here and now. Shine of the Ever was an indulgence of my nostalgia. Having written it, I wonder if I’m ready to move on.
TLC: The fact that this book has no sad endings is a political act. A political act as a commentary on what people think a queer story needs to be about and also a literary political act because, as we know, capital “L” Literature means sad and depressing.
CRF: If literature is synonymous with sadness, we need to change what literature means! One of the things I love about other genres—because, let’s be real, literary fiction is a genre, just like romance is a genre—is the joy and playfulness I read in them. My favorite authors, like Richard Chiem, Katherine D. Morgan, and Sam Hooker can make me laugh. It’s not hard to make a reader cry, but laughter is so much more intimate. When I was writing Shine of the Ever, I could easily have fallen into tropes and stereotypes that enact violence on the queer and trans body, especially in communities of color. I didn’t want that. I don’t want that for my characters. I thought to myself, “Fuck it. This is my city, my book, and my story. I can do whatever I want.”
The fact is, I’m a white nonbinary trans person who came out later in life. I’m 35, which is older than the average life expectancy of a black trans woman. I’m insulated by privilege in a liberal, predominantly white city. My transition, coming out as trans, all that stuff—it’s been hard. Devastating at times. But my problems weigh less than a grain of the struggle that many other people face. In my book, I give all my characters access to the same privileges I’ve had. Not all my characters are white. Not all of them are solidly middle class. They encounter issues with housing and income stability, access to medical care, real-world problems. But they are not in danger, as queer and trans people are often endangered in popular media. They have the luxury of making mistakes with minimal consequences. That’s freedom: to fuck up and be able to walk away intact. Or, as many white people do, fail up from their mistakes.
TLC: This book provides a counter narrative to the traditional queer “struggle story,” stories that are based on stereotypical struggles that marginalized groups face. A queer struggle story may involve some aspect of homophobia, self-hatred, tense family relationships, or the whole narrative would surround the protagonist coming out. Contemporary literature is shifting away from the struggle narrative—the kids have all come out if they want to, no one has time for homophobic people in their lives, etc…
But though I feel like your stories did not contain the traditional struggle narrative, I did notice that many of your characters still suffered with insecurity associated with their identity or sexuality or love life, a sense of unease and lack of trust. Where does the insecurity come from once we’ve gotten past the “struggle?”
CRF: I don’t think the struggle has changed, but the way we’re centering the queer experience has. Our voices are being heard because so many people, primarily queer and trans people of color, have led the way for trans rights. We have the right to be human and the right to be heard. If I have a voice, if I’m able to name myself on the cover of this book, I owe it to these elders and activists. The courage I have is a gift from them, and I try to live up to their generosity in my work.
Nobody’s safety should depend on whether we are lovable, appealing, or palatable. We are worthy of respect because we are human beings with equal rights.
Identity is a process of becoming, not of arriving. Practicing and experimenting with identity, gender expression and presentation, all those things—that’s a privilege. Coming out is always hard. Dealing with transphobic family members and friends will always be heartbreaking. There’s no way to eliminate those experiences, though I think we’re getting better at supporting people as they go through vulnerable transitions. I can’t speak for the entire community; in my experience, every challenge has another one after it. It’s heavy surf. You are never fully “safe,” and that insecurity can affect the happiness you have in the moment. The problems that LGBTQ people face can be blatant or they can be concealed in language or gestures. In either case, proximity to privilege determines how much systemic discrimination a person experiences. Struggle is relative: my writing attempts to dignify those struggles and weave them into daily life, which is how I encounter them.
TLC: There is also this theme of an “outsider” falling for someone who appears to be an “insider.” For example, in “Domestic Shorthair,” Amit, a nonbinary police tech deals with the unrequited love for a straight roommate. Amit is insecure, is not dealing with the trauma and sadness from their job, and is not able to maintain a relationship past dating whereas their roommate “knew how to work it.”
I use these terms loosely, but I’ve used the word “longing” multiple times in this interview and for me this is really what a lot of this collection is about: a longing for understanding, a longing for love, a longing to be seen. And then I think about the queer community and the continued fight, or longing, for equal and basic rights. What are the parallels here? The longing of your characters who appear to be on the “outside” and the longing for a community who wants inclusivity?
CRF: I’ve been out as queer since I was 15. That’s not new. However, I often felt like my identity was obscured, or reflected back to me in a way that was distorting and cruel. For me, my shame around my queerness was expressed by that longing. Like you said, the longing to be known. The refrain of those earlier years was, “Am I good enough yet? Do you love me yet?” I felt like I would never belong and that part of me would always be unacceptable. When I got older, I learned to give that love to myself—and found a community that accepts me unconditionally, too. Outside those spaces, my safety, individuality, security, and agency are all entirely dependent on whether cisgendered people tolerate me, or heterosexual people choose not to hurt me. The longing I feel now is not for myself, but for social justice. My safety, nobody’s safety, should depend on whether or not we are lovable, appealing, or palatable. We are worthy of respect because we are human beings with equal rights. We shouldn’t have to translate ourselves to those in power in order to earn our humanity.
Amit is on the cusp of that discovery. They don’t have the language yet to describe themselves. They are afraid to name their desires. They seek security in invisibility and gather crumbs of love. They are not ready to take the lead in their own life, and they won’t be happy until they become brave enough to claim it.
TLC: But it turns out that Amit’s roommate doesn’t have it all together, doesn’t know how to work it as well as Amit thought.
CRF: Yes, she’s a hot mess! Amit’s roommate is the closest person Amit has, but she’s not a model for how to live. She enjoys her relative social and sexual privilege. This juxtaposition demonstrates how ludicrous I think it is for queer and trans people to deliberately mimic cishet power structures—and why I think allies are important, but not an intrinsic part of our community. Heteronormativity erases us. Why replicate a system that wasn’t designed for you?
TLC: Do you feel as though the lit world is finally ready to embrace queer stories that are not by and about cis white men? What stories do you hope to see? Who are you reading?
CRF: I hope so, because there are plenty of us with things to say. Cis white men can be great, in their time and place, but the world is so much bigger and more interesting. I hope to see more work from queer and trans people of color, especially stories that center queer joy. I’m reading Everyday People: The Color of Life, an anthology by editor Jennifer Baker and really enjoying it. Trevor Ketner recently gifted me a beautiful copy of their chapbook White Combine: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg.
TLC: Your next book is going to be a memoir. Please tell me about it. Will it intersect in any way with Shine of the Ever?
CRF: My memoir, Mom-Binary, is about transitioning through my second adolescence as my son goes through his first. It includes some of the themes, landscapes, and voices from Shine of the Ever and will have excerpts from some of the essays I’ve published in The New York Times, Narratively, and other places. In a way, this book is also about queer victories. I have survived so much, and I refuse to let that trauma define me. Fuck no. I’ll define myself. Mom-Binary is about the reckoning of identity and the process of falling in love with being who you are. I hope you’ll read it; it’s very close to my heart.
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