Now, I’m not an astrology girlie—which I think is technically a finable offense here in Los Angeles. But I do think the stars performed some elaborate cosmic choreography to ensure I shared a timeline with Rax King. Underneath her name, her email signature declares her the “Unofficial Writer-in-Residence at The Cheesecake Factory”—which confirms that we were also destined to become friends.
The James Beard Award-nominated writer and author of the wildly celebrated and critically lauded collection Tacky has bestowed upon us mere mortals a new banger. In Sloppy, King dives headfirst into the gloriously complicated parts of life: addiction, heartbreak, ADHD, grief, sex work—all the things (to quote my favorite musical, Chicago) we hold near and dear to our hearts. From her parents’ deep commitment to 12-step sobriety to her own indulgences like shoplifting from Brandy Melville, she explores the tangled web of addiction, impulsivity, and mental health with unvarnished honesty, sharp humor, and a refusal to tidy anything up for the sake of comfort.
A messy blessing sent from above, Rax King reminds us that embracing the mess is the truest form of grace.
Greg Mania: Like ‘“tacky,” I’ve always identified with “sloppy”—and I don’t see that changing, no matter how therapized, financially literate, or otherwise “grown-up” I get. How has your own relationship to tacky evolved alongside your claiming of sloppy? And what’s it been like to reconcile both as permanent parts of who you are?
Rax King: Well, “tacky” and “sloppy” are both words with somewhat negative connotations. Tacky things are understood to be in poor taste, while sloppy ones are understood as dirty or messy. These are two qualities of mine that I used to wish I didn’t have. I wanted to be the sweet, thoughtful, ladylike person, which is very funny to remember now—I can’t even picture myself as ladylike in my imagination. I probably could have become that person if I had the willpower for such a significant character overhaul, but we both know I don’t. It was either change or reconcile and, predictably enough, I picked the easier option.
Whatever flaws are in me, I now have to accept they’re inescapable.
GM: You call reconciliation the “easier option,” but it feels like there’s deep work in claiming these identities. Besides writing this book, what did that reconciliation actually look like for you—and do you still find yourself having to reconcile with those parts of yourself?
RK: Reconciliation of my, shall we say, less admirable traits is certainly an ongoing process. Actually, sobriety has helped a lot because, without substance abuse to fall back on, I have nowhere to hide from myself. Whatever flaws are in me, I now have to accept they’re inescapable. In practice, I’ll admit that means I spend a lot of time groaning and squirming, feeling mortified as I triage old memories that I never dealt with, but it’s better this way than living in a constant cycle of blackouts and hangovers.
GM: You and I both write about the messy truth of things—obsession, sex, desire, heartbreak, identity. But Sloppy feels like such a confident deep-dive into that territory. When did you know this was the book you had to write next?
RK: I quit drinking, and it was as if that “messy truth of things” had been waiting for me to sober up before it beat the shit out of me. In active addiction, it was easy to either glamorize my constant self-sabotage, or to numb myself from its effects before they could really wound me. In sobriety, all I could do was try to understand those ugly tendencies so I could repair the damage they’d done. So I guess Sloppy is me presenting my findings—the sloppiness undergirding all my choices, good and bad, and the changes I’ve had to make in order to live with it.
GM: Did sobriety change how you write—not just what you write about, but the actual process?
RK:I definitely had to find some new processes in sobriety. We tend to mythologize the roustabout writer who can only access his genius under the influence of his chosen drug, and that mythology allowed me to mask my self-destructiveness behind this guise of nobility, as if it were actually brave and appropriate for me to only write mid-blackout. These days, maybe because the inside of my head is quieter, I also demand that my workspaces be quieter—dead silent, ideally. It’s the only way I can retreat inward the way I think most of us have to do in order to write well.
GM: The first chapter hit me hard—I also lived with undiagnosed ADHD until adulthood, and getting that diagnosis made my whole childhood and adolescence click into place. I was diagnosed two years ago, and I’m still figuring out how to live with it. How is your life with it now?
RK:Oh, it’s great! I’m completely fixed! No, I mean, it’s a relief to at least know something is wrong with me—not something nebulous and impossible, but this specific, knowable, treatable thing. But at the end of the day, even if I can treat the problem, I can’t make it go away. They say that when you’re sober, you really need to watch your sobriety, because your addiction is out in the alley waiting for you and doing push-ups. A similar thing is true of ADHD for me. I have to make it a priority to hold it in check as sternly as possible, because the second I let my guard down, ADHD will come for me—and it’s stronger than I am.
GM: Another thing we have in common: taking our clothes off for money—and stepping into a persona to do it. You were a stripper; I was a go-go dancer. What did that version of you teach you about performance, identity, or control? And how do you relate to persona now?
My biggest takeaway as a stripper was that men are disappointingly easy to manipulate.
RK: Honestly, my biggest takeaway as a stripper was that men are disappointingly easy to manipulate.I think I had been in their thrall until then, desperate for their attention, miserable whenever I felt like I was losing it. And a big part of what made those early relationships with men so hypnotizing was that I kept thinking of them as creatures essentially unlike myself. Like, they fell for me for reasons I didn’t understand, and lost interest for equally unknowable reasons. But in strip clubs, you learn how to effortlessly push their buttons—you have to, your income depends on it. Those jobs demystified men in a way that was mostly good, because it was a huge time suck to be constantly in the throes of one incomprehensible heartbreak or another, but there was also an element in it of learning that Santa Claus wasn’t real or something.
GM: Let’s see—drugs and alcohol, sex and messy relationships, service industry jobs, money chaos… all things I’ve also lived, and all things you write about with so much heart, humor, and clarity. But before Sloppy took its final shape, were there times you wrote just to process—before you knew what was publishable? And what did that kind of writing teach you about what belonged in the book?
RK: I’m always writing just to process, so the answer to that question is yes, sort of—but the writing I do to process almost never makes it to publication. Oddball pieces might, like if I happen to generate a good sentence while I’m sob-writing, but it’s mostly important to me to maintain a firewall between therapeutic writing and the stuff I share with the world. I always tell my students that it’s inadvisable to write from an open wound. Good personal writing always feels like the author is exploring some dark corner of herself, trying to shine a light into it so she can map it out properly, but before I show people the fruits of that exploration, I want to make sure the dark corners are safe to investigate!
GM: How do you know when writing has crossed the threshold from therapeutic to ready for readers?
RK: I tend to maintain a fairly strict firewall between writing-as-therapy and writing-as-offering-to-readers. Some of the therapeutic stuff does cross that threshold, but it happens almost by accident—like, in trying to heal myself, I tell myself things I didn’t know I knew, and some of those insights feel book-ready, and others feel like things I really should have learned sometime in the anonymous LiveJournal years.
GM: You also write about grief—how memory can live inside the background noise of an object, like your father’s ashtrays, which suddenly become so present they feel almost haunted. When did you feel ready to write about that loss? And as a writer whose voice is naturally funny, do you feel like you need to metabolize grief with humor before it can live on the page?
I tend to maintain a fairly strict firewall between writing-as-therapy and writing-as-offering-to-readers.
RK: I started writing about my grief for my dad before I even got his ashes back from the funeral home, and I can’t even reread those early words about it, that’s how full of pain they are. At this point, he’s dead seven years—the grief isn’t gone, it’ll never be gone, but it’s not so lacerating that I can’t face it with humor by now. Although, that said, my grief vented itself through humor pretty frequently in the weeks after he died. I used to tell people very bluntly that my dad was dead, and then I’d burst into hysterical laughter for no reason I (or they) could understand. It was wildly inappropriate, which only made me laugh harder. Nothing was funny, but that made me feel like everything was.
GM: If Samantha Irby is my mom, you’re absolutely my sister. Who else would you cast in our literary family tree of funny writers?
RK: Aww, I love this idea! Definitely Kristen Arnett is on the family tree, and Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and Mattie Lubchansky. And I’d be quite remiss if I didn’t shout out the great Tommy Pico, who made me cry laughing when he read at Franklin Park about a million years ago.
GM: Tommy Pico—interesting, I’ll make a note to check out his work later tonight… when I go to his apartment… where I pretty much live… because I’m sleeping with him. Seriously though, how does writing alongside these and other writers shape your voice and your work?
RK: Most of the writers I admire, their voices are reminiscent in some way of the way they actually speak. That’s been hugely influential for me, this idea that the sound of one’s own natural voice can be transmitted to the page without passing through too many layers of self-conscious manipulation, and that’s the way I try to write.
GM: Sloppy is a love letter to messy, complicated personhood. What’s something you’re still learning to claim or embrace about yourself as you move forward?
RK: Ha, wouldn’t you like to know! If you’re reading this, I want you to assume I’m fixed and therefore normal now.
About two months ago, my 6-year-old daughter asked me, “Dad, if you could have any superpower in the whole world, which would it be?” The ability to fly immediately popped up and why wouldn’t it? It would be sublime. But after some consideration, I answered, “I’d like to have the ability to talk to animals.” She asked why, and I told her I want to know how they feel and what they think about everything. It’s become a recurring topic of conversation between us since.
Animals play an integral role in my novel Habitat. The book is made up of nine linked narratives and the closest thing to a recurring character throughout is the clones of a celebrity dog that stars on a science fiction television show, and the descendants of those clones a century later. I was listening to a Neil Young song, “Like an Inca,” around the time the book began gelling together. The beginning of the song sat with me while I finished writing the book and it serves as the epigraph. It involves two animals from different species discussing the downfall of a human civilization. The lyric helped me perceive animals as not only the victims of humanity in the world of Habitat, but also our observers, those historians who survive us, forever watching us rise and fall, again and again.
This is a list of books that engage with animals in different ways, probing their behaviors and our relationship to them, our sympathies for and atrocities against them. These books attempt to think about animals as they naturally exist and encounter the world. And, if the first selection on the list stands out, know that I chose it for personal and autobiographical reasons—it was an early and confusing reading experience. Who knows, it may have even jumpstarted my interest in the portrayal of animals in fiction.
I read this book nearly forty years ago, when I was too young to be reading it. I was at an age when any novelization of a film or franchise that I loved was paper gold, a glorious reincarnation of the movie. While a shark does play a large role, the novel spends more time with the non-shark hunting lives of its characters, exploring their alcoholism and extramarital affairs. The mayor in both the film and the novel is hellbent on keeping the beaches open for the summer surge. However, in the novel, he’s being pressured by the mafia, who have invested heavily in the Amity Island beach community. This may have been the first reading experience in which I felt like the book “isn’t really about” the shark, a childhood realization that, in retrospect, prepared me for novels like Moby Dick. Still, at the time, Jaws bewildered me.
An epigraph precedes this short story (originally published in Recommended Reading!)…
“They knew me as the one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose.” -Leonard Michaels, “In the Fifties”
And then the first line: “They knew me as the one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose—and liked it.” This beginning puts the reader into the perspective of an animal-loving narrator and sets up a story that focuses on the feelings, the fears, and the allegiances of the dogs in this high-kill shelter. Each paragraph begins with either “They knew us as…” or “They knew me as…” The result is ten heart-breaking and heart-warming pages for anyone who’s ever cared about a dog, or any animal for that matter. It chronicles the ups and downs of caged dogs who are likely to be euthanized. It’s a story that speaks for them, loves them, and expresses profound confusion in the face of a world that allows them to be killed. I often revisit this collection when I need some help jumpstarting a day of my own writing.
I’ve never encountered a book by Stephen Graham Jones I didn’t like. Every book is a new departure in horror writing, exploring subgenres, and experimenting with plot and structures. The Only Good Indians is broken up into three sections and centers around an incident from ten years earlier when four friends, all adolescent boys, illegally ambushed and shot a herd of elk, including a pregnant mother elk. Ten years later, tragedies start befalling the grown men and those close to them. At the same time, they begin to have visions of a vengeful elk. Throughout the novel, Jones weaves in Blackfeet culture and questions about violence against women and the natural world. The Only Good Indians can be read, from a human perspective, as a horror novel, but through an elk’s eyes it might be read as an action revenge story about a magical elk spirit with “a very particular set of skills.”
Vasko Popa (1922-1991) was a Serbian poet who incorporated surrealism and Serbian folklore into his modernist style, exploring the significance of the wolf and the relationship between the Serbian orthodox church and earlier folkloric beliefs and traditions.
This collection, which I adore, is broken up into eleven parts, featuring several series of poems that touch upon the figure of the wolf. St. Sava, the founder of the Serbian orthodox church, is shown both reconstituting the wolf in service of his religion and being himself transformed by the symbol of the wolf.
In one series of poems, “Wolf’s Earth,” a father and son debate whether the wolf that they witness intertwined with the Earth is attempting to devour the Earth or protect and admire her: “Does he have a sweet tooth/For her bitter flesh/Or is he just praying to her beauty.”
The figure of the wolf in these poems is beyond our control or understanding—a symbol of a past that cannot be rewritten or forgotten despite the many ways it must contend with the present.
A few years ago, I wouldn’t have thought I needed a study devoted to the raccoon, but after reading Justice’s book, I came to understand the impactful role the animal has played in our planet’s global and cultural history. It’s part of Reaktion Books’ Animal series, which has published over a hundred such books about the natural and cultural history of different animal species. Raccoon is an incredible examination of the animal that delves into its natural history, symbolism and cultural origins, appropriation to perpetuate racial stereotypes and hatred, and myriad other ways it has impacted the human world.
One of the many illuminating takeaways about the raccoon is its resilience and adaptability. The raccoon of today lives in a world that, if we were in its paws, would be in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Its natural habitat has been largely destroyed by the bottomless expansionism of human civilization. And despite this, the raccoon has adapted and learned to survive. With powerful physical dexterity, an omnivorous appetite, and an evolving intelligence, raccoons have an innate ability to create new and thriving homes in the wake of loss and exile. We could learn a lot from them because, as Justice considers in his epilogue, the future may be raccoon.
The Bees immerses the reader in the dystopian tale of an authoritarian regime in transition. The protagonist is a bee named Flora 717 and the story is set almost exclusively inside of a single beehive, which imposes a strict hierarchy on its members. Bees of the upper castes are named after specific plants, but those born of a lower caste are all named Flora. Most Floras are relegated to sanitation for their entire lives, removing waste and dead bees for the hive. But Flora 717 is assigned to different jobs throughout the novel: working in the nursery for the Sage (a group of priestesses), a stint in sanitation, and then making her way to foraging. These reassignments allow the reader to explore both the physical spaces of the hive as well as the architecture and motivations of the different castes, uncovering the ruthless political agendas ever-present in a hive whose Queen is ailing. The more we see of the hive and its bees, the more the novel reveals itself to be as a much a story about the real lives of bees as it is a metaphor for the fascist machinations of human power struggles. A political thriller in a beehive, a compelling protagonist, and an author whose extensive research seamlessly holds together all its parts—I couldn’t put it down.
Of all the books on this list, Ed Yong’s exploration of animals’ senses brings me closest to the experience of communicating with them. Yong begins by imagining a human joining an elephant, mouse, robin, owl, bat, rattlesnake, spider, and mosquito in a room, and then describes the sensory experience of each animal. While all occupy the same space, their individual experiences highlight the different ways in which they sense an environment and alter our understanding of how they might feel.
An important distinction Yong makes concerning what we understand and don’t understand about animals’ behavior and senses is that while we may be able to discover, biologically, how an animal “reacts to what it senses,” we don’t know “how it feels.” In the chapter on “Pain,” Yong writes: “Imagine your entire body became delicate to the touch whenever you stubbed your toe: That’s a squid’s reality.”
For anyone seeking a better understanding of how animals experience the world—not how we experience animals in a vast network of ecologies making up a world that we think belongs to us but how they might feel—I can’t recommend An Immense World enough. It’s a wondrous journey.
I first read Denton Loving’s latest collection of poetry, Feller, shortly after the sun rose, on my back porch. It was one of those seasonally cool summer mornings. The wind was stirring. Branches were gently swaying. Squirrels and chipmunks were mingling below my birdfeeders out in the yard, and a couple of blue jays, in conversation, were making use of one of the old birdbaths. They were nourishing the weeds below as much as they were themselves. My dog was in my lap, taking it in. It was the perfect kind of reading experience for Feller, a collection of poetry that beautifully observes the life of the natural world. Often, it feels like an ode sung to Appalachia.
In Feller, Loving explores many of the complexities of our shared experience. There are poems here, like “The Moon Was Only a Rumor,” that make me feel connection, that ineffable thing we’re always looking for. Another poem, “Returning,” one of the book’s standouts, does the same thing for the idea of home. I could feel that too. At other times, Feller shifts to explore longing—which pops up again and again—and love, such as in the exquisite “The Octopus School of Poetry.” This is a book that you feel as you read—even when you put it away, its images and moments linger.
Loving and I were able to connect and discuss the progression of his work, poetic warmth, place, and more.
Bradley Sides: I’m sure many readers will come into Feller having read your previous collection, 2023’s Tamp. I’m always curious about the process of closing one book and beginning another—and how the two works are in conversation with one another. Can you talk about what shifted you into Feller and how you see it as both separate and similar to your previous book?
Denton Loving: I always have a lot of projects going on at the same time. In the case of these two books, Tamp and Feller, I was moving back and forth within the same period of years, writing poems about my dad and my grief after his passing, and then switching gears to write about whatever else was on my mind.
The poems that eventually became Tamp came out of me trying to process my grief. I never set out to write a book about my dad, but there was a point when I realized I had enough poems about my dad to make a book. A bit later, I suddenly knew that Tamp was finished. It wasn’t that I had written all I had to say about my dad or about grief. I could write a dozen books about my dad. But perhaps the intensity of my loss had subsided.
It was only after Tamp was completely finished—when I could take a long look at all of the poems that were left—that the shape of Feller emerged. My process is to be as organic as possible and let the book reveal itself to me.
In comparing the two books, I think my voice is fairly consistent. I think there are threads that overlap in both books, for instance, my attention to nature and particularly to the place where I live. Tamp was a very personal book, but Feller feels personal in a different way, perhaps more deeply revealing. Many of the poems in Tamp were things I wanted to share about my dad and our relationship. Many of the poems in Feller come from a more private place, and express emotions I didn’t want to write about. But the poems called for it.
BS: When Electric Literature hosted the cover reveal for Feller a few weeks back, I was really intrigued by what you said about the title: “Feller won out because I was playing with the word’s multiple meanings, and I loved that the word is so colloquial and brings with it a feeling of intimacy. It was through that framework that I could most imagine a reader diving into these poems, hopefully finding and applying layers of meaning as they read.” I love that idea of a title helping with a book’s intimacy. Outside of language, what are some of the other ways you gain intimacy with your readers in Feller?
DL: When I teach poetry workshops, I often start the sessions by talking about how I like to think of a poem as a secret. It’s a secret that is being shared widely. But it’s coming from somewhere very deep inside the poet’s being. That’s how my more successful poems are, anyway: deeply personal but bursting to escape.
Another way to think of this is to allow myself to be vulnerable. That means, for me, that I have to sometimes put away the idea of publishing the poem. When I’m writing, I don’t want to give space to worrying what people will think when they read certain things. So sometimes I convince myself that I won’t publish the poem, that I just need to write the poem for myself but don’t ever have to show it to anyone. By the time the poem is finished, I usually come around to sending it out into the world. Because it’s exactly that piece of vulnerability that usually makes the poem succeed. And if you can’t allow yourself to be vulnerable in the poem, then what’s the point?
Many of the poems in Feller express emotions I didn’t want to write about. But the poems called for it.
BS: Do you ever worry of being too personal or too vulnerable—or is that just not really a thing as far as you are concerned?
DL: On a personal level, yeah, I definitely worry about revealing too much. Like I said, I almost always convince myself to send those poems out for publication, but some poems make me feel really uncomfortable to share. I felt that way about everything I wrote when I first started thinking about publication, many years ago. My philosophy ever since the beginning has been to embrace that uncomfortable feeling. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Now let me answer from a craft angle. In thinking about my own drafts and the rough drafts I’ve read from friends and students, I think poems that are exceptionally vulnerable are usually very tied to our emotions. If the poem hasn’t had time to cool down, those emotions come out of a vulnerable space and can come across as melodramatic. So that’s an argument for giving the poem whatever time it needs,and for revising your work, and for finding really good readers who will help you know how the poem is coming across.
BS: As Feller opens, you give us a series of poems—“Bluebird Dreams of Red Fox,” “Bluebird Dreams Red Fox Has Wings,” “Bluebird Flies Too Close to Red Fox,” and “Bluebird Removes Red Fox’s Tooth”—that explore the natural world, while also tackling topics such as desire and closeness. I want to hone in on the natural world first. It is abundantly apparent that you have a special bond with nature. Has that always been the case?
DL: I can’t say that I was one of those kids who lived in the woods and knew all the birds and trees, etc. I wasn’t. I was more of an indoor kid, living a very interior life, inspired fairly equally by television and books. But even so, the natural world was always really present for me, both physically and psychologically.
One reason is because my parents made a conscious choice to raise me in a rural setting, on a farm near the woods. There were animals there, both wild and domesticated. We raised big gardens and planted an orchard. All of that was important to my parents, especially my dad. He really had been one of those kids who spent most of his time outside. I still marvel at the way he could identify trees by their bark.
It took me a long time to fully appreciate everything my parents taught me, but as I’ve grown older, I’m more observant and more interested in what’s around me. I’m also just more interested in the connectivity of the natural world, especially in the fraught age we live in where the environment is changing in drastic and dramatic ways.
BS: I previously mentioned “desire.” As I was reading, I kept marking poems that explore this topic in some variation—we see it from humans, animals, and just the world. “Thirst” and “Breach” are examples of two that come to mind, but there are many here. Is it the universal shared experience of desire that makes you explore it? Or something else altogether?
DL: I started my writing career with fiction, where I was taught that every character should desire something. It can be as small as a glass of water, but it is desire in whatever form it takes that motivates character and creates action. So maybe I’ve carried that into my poetry. You mentioned “Thirst” which literally is about the desire for water. But metaphorically, it’s about a past relationship, and how the brain obsesses over what’s absent. I think you’re right, I am interested in writing about desire. It’s universal. I’m also interested in the many different ways desire manifests. Sometimes it’s about romantic love, sometimes about friendship and basic connection. The poem “Returning” explores a conundrum I often have in life which is centered around place. There are so many times in my life when I’m home that I’m plotting to leave. I love to travel and explore, and there are so many places I want to visit. I want to go see my friends who live all over the country. And yet, when I’m traveling, I get homesick. I often just can’t wait to get back to my house and my boring routine. And that’s something I’m especially interested in when it comes to desire and wanting—the way our desires twist us up and play games with us, and the way we want things that we know are bad for us or won’t work.
If the poem hasn’t had time to cool down, those emotions come out of a vulnerable space and can come across as melodramatic. That’s an argument for giving the poem whatever time it needs.
BS: Traveling is one of the things that inspires my writing the most. Since you mentioned it, I’m curious how else traveling impacts your work, if it does.
DL: Travel just generally opens our minds, right? As a writer, it so often yields new material, in both directions. There’s the material that comes from entering new spaces and learning new things. And, on the other hand, being away helps me appreciate home more, which I think leads me to some important moments of wonder. I see the place I’m from in different ways after returning from somewhere else.
BS: You live in Appalachia and your work is often classified as part of the Appalachian literary tradition. Your poetry respects the place you know, and at the same time you are also able to expand that place. The result, for me, is that your poetry feels both of home and of the bigger world, too. In one poem, for example, you plant us under a chestnut tree. In another, we are in “sticky Kentucky,”and among the songs of the whippoorwill in a third. But at other times, you also allude to Mount Athos, Xanadu, and Montañas de San Miguel.
I’m curious how you view place and its impact on writing. Is it ever limiting? Is the way we write about it a gateway to understanding something or connecting with someone beyond the regions from which we write?
DL: Place is foundational to all of my work, both my poetry and prose. Just this weekend, I taught a workshop about writing place-based poetry. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about—I live by Eudora Welty’s words: “One place understood helps us understand all places better.” That doesn’t mean that I claim to understand everything about this place where I live—neither the eighty acres of farmland and orchard and woods where I literally live, nor in the larger sense, this corner of Appalachia with its complex environment, history and socioeconomics. But it’s my place, and it’s a gift to understand it to the extent that I do. No one else is positioned to know it in exactly the same way. So it feels almost like a duty to honor that in my writing. But not in a limiting way. As a younger writer, I struggled to understand why anyone would care about this place, which maybe felt less glamorous or less interesting to a younger me than nearly every other place. Now I see it as endlessly fascinating. And as a differentiator, or as I said before, a gift. Addressing sense of place in my work allows me to share this place with people who don’t know it. Likewise, I feel entranced when I read work that helps me know places that are unfamiliar to me. It’s definitely more of a gateway than any kind of limitation.
BS: I love that: “Addressing sense of place in my work allows me to share this place with people who don’t know it.” Who are some of the writers you think of that present place really well?
I don’t consciously set out to observe the world. But I’m in the world, and I find it impossible to ignore everything in motion around me.
DL: This is a dangerous question because there’s no way I can include everyone. I’ll say that Maurice Manning’s work has been an inspiration and a model for me since I first started writing poems. Everything he writes is shaped by place in one way or another. Ron Rash, also. Some of the other poets I met early in my career who inspired me to try poetry are George Ella Lyon, Anne Shelby, Jane Hicks and Jesse Graves. All four of them write so well about place. Joy Priest, Annie Woodford, John Davis, Jr., Kari Gunter-Seymour, but there are so many others. And I’m limiting myself here to poets. There are so many fantastic prose writers whose work is inspired by a sense of place. I’ll end this list with Jennifer Stewart Miller, who is another poet who consistently inspires me and has taught me so much. Her poem, “This poem has a highway in it,” is the first example I always teach in my workshops about writing about place.
BS: Feller ends with “Rosy Maple Moth,” which is such a beautiful poem about moths and life. Truly, I’ve probably read this poem a dozen times. I’m so moved by it, and it’s absolutely the perfect poem to end the book. Reading it makes me realize how like, my goodness, this world, when we look hard enough, is full of small wonders, but we have to take the time to look.
I want to close by asking you about your own relationship to the act of observation. How much time do you spend just looking and listening and seeing our world?
DL: I don’t consciously set out to observe the world, or not as much as I should. But I’m in the world, and I find it impossible to ignore everything in motion around me. Today, for example, the farmers in my community were rushing to put up the first cuttings of hay before rain sets in, and the smell of fresh cut and curing hay was everywhere in the air. In the mowed fields, vultures combed through the piles of hay searching for the snakes and rodents that get caught in the mowing. An indigo bunting flew across the gravel road, its blue feathers shining in the June sun as it swooped down in front of my car and back up before it disappeared into the trees. I saw a fox slink out of the woods behind my house, and a mockingbird was divebombing the little fox, warning it away from its nest. There is always something happening around here, and that’s true for all places. We just have to be open to seeing it. The rosy maple moth is a great example. I spent the majority of my life never coming into contact, or more likely just never noticing these moths, and then one day, they appeared in front of me. And they refused to be ignored.
Tato’s package arrived yesterday. My birthday was two weeks ago, but it doesn’t matter. A banged-up cardboard box covered in American stamps always arrives at the post office a few weeks after my birthday, my little brother Yuri’s birthday, and Saint Mykolai. Yuri turned eight in April. Tato sent him a stuffed crocodile. The crocodile has big pointy teeth, so Yuri named it Arkady Petrenko, after our dentist. Arkady came with a postcard from Florida, where real crocodiles live, crocodiles without beady eyes and olive-green fuzz and tags that read “wash with like colors.”
I wonder if Arkady will be cold when winter comes here in Ukraine.
For my birthday, Tato sent art supplies. He sent colored and graphite pencils, pastels, conté sticks. They all came in their own wooden box with a latch that makes it look like something a pirate might bury on a desert island. He sent tortillons for blending and smudging lines, and sticks of charcoal made of the world’s blackest black.
Best of all, he sent a sketchbook. It’s leather-bound with a strap and a buckle and one hundred thick, deckle-edged pages. It’s heavy and feels ancient in my hands, like some sacred relic unearthed from the ruins of an ancient city. The cover is decorated with the silhouettes of skyscrapers, the skyline of the city where Tato lives. He inscribed the inside cover in his messy handwriting: Now you can draw here instead of your math homework. Don’t forget—I love you!
Nothing I can draw could possibly match the sketchbook’s grandeur. But I can’t just leave the pages blank either. So I decide to draw only the most important things in the sketchbook—one hundred important things.
Tato knows that I love to draw. I’m good at it, and I’m proud to be good at something. My art teacher, Lyudmila Mikhailivna, compliments me after every lesson. Art is the only class where I earn good grades—tens and elevens. My Ukrainian grades aren’t terrible, sixes and sevens, but I don’t care for anything we read, all the old dead poets, and when I don’t care for something I can’t pay attention. In history and geography, I’m always looking out the window or sketching something inside my textbooks. Our class teacher, Antonina Romanivna, scolds me, and I earn fives, fours, even threes.
I sit at the back of class 6B by the window and share a desk with my best friend, Viktor, whose grades are even worse than mine. We distract each other constantly, whispering until Antonina Romanivna shouts us back into silence. And when we have to keep our mouths shut, I draw—on the backs of corrected worksheets, on the desk and on my left arm. I bring my drawings home to Mama, and I slip at least one in every package we send to Tato in America.
Now, in our apartment, I stare down the sketchbook’s first blank page. Its perfect snowy whiteness challenges me, taunts me. While Mama is at work, there isn’t much in our apartment to draw—just our bedroom and our fat old calico cat, Monya, who spends her days in a pool of sunlight beneath the kitchen window, curled up in a lumpy ball of fur and flab. I’ve already drawn her over and over. So my brother Yuri and I go for a walk in search of something important to draw.
We pass Varvara Tykhonivna and Oksana Ivanivna, the two babusi who spend every day on the same bench in the courtyard—even hot August days like today, and even in the winter snow—gossiping about everything that goes on in our corner of Chernihiv.
“You could draw them,” Yuri suggests. I consider it for a moment, then shake my head. They would never pose for me. I don’t think they like me. I hang out with Viktor and I know they don’t like Viktor, because he’s a troublemaker, and everyone knows it.
We walk further down Nestayko Street. We live at number thirty-six and Viktor lives at number thirty-eight. Our apartment building is the one with the giant chestnut tree in front of it, and Viktor’s is across the courtyard from ours. Viktor and I once tried to hold a conversation by shouting to each other from our bedroom windows, and it worked until some killjoy opened his own window and yelled across the courtyard that it’s two in the morning, go the hell to sleep.
Yuri and I cut through the Chernihiv City Garden, past the Ferris wheel, the statues of dinosaurs and squirrels, the carnival games where you can win a stuffed animal if you shoot close enough to the target.
“I want to play,” he says.
“I don’t have any pocket money,” I tell him. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”
We turn left onto Shevchenko Street and cross the Red Bridge over the Stryzhen, the creek that slices the city of Chernihiv in two. When we were little, Mama used to bring us here to feed the ducks. We pass the sushi restaurant where we celebrate the last day of school every year. We walk along the ancient ramparts of the city.
“One, two, three, four . . .” Yuri counts aloud as we pass the twelve cannons, their shining black barrels pointed toward long-dead invaders. Mama once told me that when she was young, before she met and married Tato, she rejected men who asked her on dates by offering to meet them at the thirteenth cannon.
“You don’t want to draw any of this?” Yuri asks as we pass Saint Catherine’s Cathedral, its five golden cupolas shimmering in the summer sunlight.
I shake my head. It’s all beautiful, and it’s all home, but it doesn’t feel important enough to take up space in my new sketchbook. The sketchbook is now the most precious thing I own. It came from Tato. His handwriting is still warm.
Yuri rolls his eyes. “Are you sure you like to draw at all?”
For weeks, I leave the sketchbook blank. During our math lesson, I hand the sketchbook to Viktor, open to the first page.
“Just draw something,” I tell him. “I can’t take the pressure.”
“Artem, chel,” Viktor whispers, sliding the sketchbook back across our desk to me, “you know I can’t draw.”
“Vovchenko, Haidenko!” shouts our teacher, Antonina Romanivna. “No side conversations!”
“You should draw Antonina Romanivna,” Viktor whispers. “Make sure to get all her chin hairs.”
When we take a trip to the village, Vasyukivka, to visit our grandfather, Did Pasha, he suggests that I draw some of his animals. He has a sow named Manuna that screeches when you get too close to her pen, and a billy goat named Zhora who likes to be scratched between the stubs of his horns. When I open the sketchbook, Zhora pokes his snout over the fence and tries to eat the paper. I yank it away from his fuzzy lips and scold him, but he keeps on smiling.
The August heat sticks around late into September, and every window in Chernihiv gapes wide open, begging for a breeze. Mama takes me and Yuri for one last swim in the River Desna before the end of summer.
Yuri and I race each other up and down the path through the woods to Golden Bank Beach, our sandals slapping the soles of our feet. Mama lags behind and times us.
“Who won?” Yuri asks when we come panting back to her.
“Artem,” Mama says, “but just by a hair.”
I stick my tongue out at Yuri.
“Just by a hair,” Yuri reminds me.
At the beach, grandmas sell cups of fresh strawberries and raspberries. Men drink beer and bite off tough, salty chunks of dried fish. Mama finds a place to spread the blue blanket she always brings from home, the only one that’s allowed to get sandy. A place for us to eat sandwiches and dry in the sun when we’re done swimming. Yuri and I pinch our noses and squeeze our eyes shut as Mama sprays us with sunblock. We rub it into our chests and calves, the tips of our ears and the bridges of our noses.
Even in September, the River Desna still carries the memories of last winter. The chill of the river offers a sweet respite from the heat. Yuri and I wade up to our bathing suits, chests, shoulders, shrieking in delighted agony when the cold water laps up onto our hot skin. We snatch in vain at darting minnows. We sink down to the bottom of the river, kneel on its silty belly. Underwater, Yuri smiles at me, sticks out his tongue. I make a face like a monkey, and he laughs a cloud of bubbles around both of our faces. Down here, the whole world disappears. It’s only me and him. The sun filters through the surface of the water and paints us with spiderwebs of light.
And then it hits me. I know what Tato would want me to draw in his sketchbook. I know what’s important enough for the first page.
Just before bedtime, Yuri and I sit together on the windowsill in our bedroom. He sits still, and I stare at his face.
“Turn a little to the right,” I tell him.
He fidgets as he waits, bouncing his right leg. Only the scratch of my pencil breaks the silence; only the occasional scrub of the eraser, the brushing away of dust.
We used to fit together in this windowsill comfortably, but we’ve both grown, and now we have to fold ourselves up to make room for each other, our knees by our chins.
It’s raining, but we keep the window cracked open. Our apartment is always a little too warm, even in the winter. Whenever Mama notices that we’ve opened the window, she shuts it and tells us, “Better too warm than too cold.” She’s afraid that we’ll catch colds from the draft.
She likes to remind us that she grew up in the village, in Vasyukivka, in a house that Did Pasha warmed with a wood-fired furnace, and she didn’t know the sensation of warm toes until she was a grown-up living here in Chernihiv. I always tell her that she doesn’t have to sleep beside Yuri, whose body could heat the entire city through a blizzard. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning the sheets cling to my sweaty skin.
Yuri stays still for me. I reach past him and switch on our table lamp. The light illuminates his stack of comics and books about Greek myths. It illuminates the row of toys that he has accumulated over the years, the toys the cashiers hand out at Silpo with every ninety-nine hryvnia you spend on groceries. Beside the toys, there’s a Zhivchik soda bottle filled with coins we’ve picked up from the sidewalk, and there’s Yuri’s geode—another souvenir Tato sent from America. A dun and dusty rock, split in half to reveal a secret, gleaming crystal heart.
I make gentle, noncommittal strokes with my pencil, waiting for my brother to burst into clarity on the paper.
With the lamp on, I can see Yuri’s face properly. The side of my left hand is gray-black now, my fingers smeared with graphite. I make gentle, noncommittal strokes with my pencil, waiting for my brother to burst into clarity on the paper. His fidgeting right foot jostles my sketchbook, and the line I’m drawing veers off to the left.
“Oi, lokh.” I seize his ankle and hold his foot in place like an animal I’ve trapped. “Hold still.”
He wiggles his toes, trying to escape. I grab his foot with both of my hands.
“I’m working on your nose right now,” I tell him. “Want an elephant trunk instead?”
He sighs, rolls his eyes. “Fine.”
Rain falls, and the chestnut tree outside our window rustles in the wind. That tree is older than we are, older than Mama, older than the apartment blocks that surround it. Yuri and Viktor and I once climbed it to see if we could reach our bedroom window from the courtyard. Viktor and I were too heavy for the weaker branches, but Yuri was small and fearless. He almost made it all the way to the top; he only came down when Mama noticed and yelled at all three of us. She yelled at him for climbing too high, and she yelled at me and Viktor for letting him.
Beside the chestnut tree stands a telephone pole, and atop the telephone pole sits a stork nest, two meters tall and shaped like an old chimney. When we were little, Mama told us that our people had always loved storks, and storks had always loved us back. She told us that, in the winter, the storks and all the other birds and insects fly south to Vyriy, the land of eternal summer and giant ferns and warm wells that bubble with healing water. She always watches for the return of those white feathers and sharp orange beaks, legs as thin and gangly as the twigs from which they build their nests.
When I finish, I turn my sketchbook around to show Yuri. He takes it and examines it closely, his brow furrowed. The top half of his face was the easy half. The dark and unruly locks of hair that cover his forehead, his eyes that disappear into his smile, his ears that tend to stick out of winter hats.
“It’s good,” he says. “But my mouth isn’t right.”
“Because you’re always talking,” I tell him, turning the sketchbook back around. “Or eating.”
I know he’s right. The bottom half of his face is still under construction, covered in the faint ghosts of lines that I drew, thought better of, and erased. Yuri has buck teeth that Mama calls “charming” and Arkady Petrenko—the dentist, not the crocodile—calls a “severe overbite.” I can’t draw his mouth right, not without making him look ridiculous, like a caricature of himself. Someday, maybe soon, Yuri will need braces. I can’t imagine him with neat, orderly teeth. Braces would change his entire face.
There’s a knock on our bedroom door. Mama steps in without waiting for an answer.
“Bedtime, boys,” she says. Her hair—wavy and so black it shimmers blue in the sun, just like Yuri’s, just like mine—is tied up in preparation for sleep. “Yuri, go brush your teeth.”
“Five more minutes?” Yuri asks, which never works.
“It’s late,” Mama says. “Go. Quick like a bunny.”
Yuri rolls his eyes. From our bedroom, I hear the familiar, irritating noises of Yuri getting ready for bed—spitting his toothpaste theatrically into the sink, the clink-clank of the toilet lid and seat hitting the tank, pee hitting toilet water, the sounds that accompany the funny faces he makes in the mirror.
Mama sits down next to me on the windowsill. “What did you finally decide to draw?”
I show her my sketchbook. She leans in close. On her breath, I can smell the lemon tea she drinks throughout the day.
“It’s not done yet,” I tell her when she doesn’t say anything.
“You’re headed in the right direction,” she says. “Work on that shadow there, next to his nose.”
Mama has always been the best artist in the family. When I was little and I wanted to learn to draw real people, not just stick figures, she taught me how to make heads look more like heads and less like eggs with ears. When I mastered that, she showed me how to shade with the side of my pencil, to crosshatch, to convey light on a page. The shapes and shadows all come to her effortlessly. They arrive in her head prearranged into pencil strokes. She knows exactly which line should go where, how hard she should bear down on the pencil. I used to beg her to erase the bad parts of my drawings and redraw them herself, but she always refused. She says that she would never erase my work, that I just have to keep drawing until I am even better than her. As if that’s inevitable.
Yuri returns to our bedroom at a sprint in his underwear and belly-flops onto our bed. I undress and brush my teeth. I hate sharing a bedtime with Yuri. Viktor is an only child and gets to stay up two hours later than I do. Sometimes he sends me texts late at night and I don’t find them until morning.
Mama kisses Yuri’s forehead, then mine.
“Good night,” she tells each of us. “I love you.” And we answer: “I love you.” She turns the lights out, and our door creaks shut. The day is over. Our bedroom is dark except for a thin sliver of light from the hallway. I pull the comforter up to my shoulders, shut my eyes, and lie on my side facing away from Yuri. We always fall asleep like this, with me on the left edge of the bed and Yuri at the right, separated by a warm neutral zone of mattress and duvet. But usually I wake up in the morning with Yuri close to me, his arm draped across my chest.
“Tyoma,” he whispers, a nickname only he’s allowed to use. He bumps my leg with his foot. His toes are cold on the skin of my calf. I give up and roll over to face him. When he breathes, I smell the blue mint of his toothpaste. He’s holding Arkady the crocodile against his chest. “Tell me a story.”
“Not now. It’s late.”
“I’m not tired.” He bumps me with his foot again. I know I’m not going to win this argument. So I tell him the story Tato always tells. I stop the story halfway through, when I’m sure he’s asleep. I know when he’s pretending and when he’s really asleep because he always jerks once as he drifts off, as if he’s driving in his dream and he just hit a speed bump. Then his whole body flares with heat.
Sometimes Yuri is still small, and an eternity lies in the three years that separate us. Still the squirmy bundle Tato introduced me to at the very beginning of my life, the first pinprick of light in the murkiest depths of my memory. I remember Mama lying in the hospital bed with messy hair and a shiny face, Tato holding Yuri to his bare chest. Tato beamed at me, said: “Look—your little brother.” I watched Yuri wriggle and cry and thought: this thing cannot possibly grow into a person.
“He only gets one big brother,” Tato told me that day, “so you have to promise to be the best big brother you can. Promise to love him and keep him safe.” And I did. I promised.
When Yuri was tiny and fat-cheeked, everyone fawned on him, even strangers. Mama and Did Pasha would spend hours discussing who Yuri resembled, attributing his facial features and the expressions he made when he needed to burp to various family members whom I had never met. I found myself vying for attention with someone who could not speak. A cow-eyed, drippy creature, fragile despite all his padding. Mama would praise my drawings briefly and then cast them aside. Sometimes I loved him only because I promised Tato.
It became easier as he got older. One day at Golden Bank Beach I taught him to stand on his head. The River Desna was still dripping from our bathing suits. He toppled over every time. On his fifth try, I watched him teeter, his bare feet skyward. Just before he fell, I grabbed him by his ankles. He laughed, screamed and squirmed, begged me—Let go! Let me fall! But I held on.
Now, Yuri is old enough for Mama to slip twenty-five hryvnia in his pocket and send him to the market on his own to buy her an onion. We used to read picture books together and I would help Yuri sound out words. Now, Yuri helps me with my math homework, which I’ll never admit to anybody, not even Viktor.
Yuri is growing, and so am I. Sometimes we grow so quickly that we don’t know how to adjust to each other. A few weeks ago I swung open the kitchen cabinet and the knob hit Yuri in the face. “Sorry,” I told him. “Your head didn’t used to be that high.”
I turn on the bedside lamp, open my sketchbook and erase the night’s sketch. It’s all wrong. I look at Yuri, and a weight settles in my chest.
Someday, without knowing it, we will sit together in our windowsill for the last time.
We’ll keep growing and growing. Someday, without knowing it, we will sit together in our windowsill for the last time. We will grow up, and we will grow old. We will sleep in separate beds, separate bedrooms. Maybe separate cities. We’ll live with the families we created, not the one we were born into. I always knew this, in one way or another, but tonight I know it differently than I’ve ever known it before, as if it’s just around the corner. Even though we still have years.
I set down my sketchbook and turn the light off. The weight in my chest doesn’t lift until the birds chirp and the edges of the curtains glow.
Every evening for years, Mama has handed me and Yuri her phone. She whispers: “Tato.” On the screen, the flesh-colored pixels of our tato shuffle around, attempting to arrange themselves into facial features. Our internet connection is slow, and the picture is never clear enough to make out the specific details of him—just the vague shape of his face widening into a smile.
Our conversation usually goes something like this: I would say “Hi, Tato.” And he would say “Hi, zaichik.” Little hare. His voice would sound distant and tinny. “Is your brother there?” he would ask. I would turn the phone camera around, and Yuri would look up from his book—something like The Legends and Myths of Heracles—and wave. “Hi, kotik,” Tato would say. Little kitty. “Good. Both of my boys are there. How are you guys? What are you doing right now?”
Tato would always ask us that question. What are you doing right now? He once explained that he wanted to paint an image of our lives in his mind, that it was as important to know our day-to-day as it was to know our big days, our birthdays, and first days of school.
So I would set the scene. “We’re sitting on the windowsill,” I would say. “I’m drawing. Yuri’s reading one of his Greek books.” I would stand up and swivel the phone camera around to show our room, my sketchbook splayed out on the windowsill where we sit, open to a work in progress. “We were listening to music,” I would say. I would hold our earbuds up to the camera. Yuri and I share a pair; I take the left earbud, and Yuri takes the right. Then Yuri would stick out his tongue, go cross-eyed. Tato would laugh, and his laughter would come through the phone just a moment late. Something like that.
As I got older, I began to notice the desperation that churned beneath the surface of Tato’s voice. At first, when Tato was working seventy hours a week on construction sites, we never heard from him. He called Mama late at night, long after we had fallen asleep, because of work, because of time zones. Yuri and I had more conversations with Tato through postcards than over the phone.
When he found a job that let him work fewer hours for more money, we started talking on the phone every evening. At some point, Tato decided that we should switch to video chatting instead. It didn’t bring him any closer. We can see his face now, and he can see ours, but that doesn’t mean he can live our lives with us. Sometimes it feels like a chore to call him and tell him about our day. I feel guilty admitting it. There are basic facts of our lives he doesn’t understand because, as much as he wants to be, he isn’t here for the little moments. We’ve grown in his absence, thought up inside jokes, forged traditions. He left a four-year-old and a toddler in Ukraine, but they are gone. When he left, Yuri was just starting to crawl; now, Yuri can ice-skate for hours and never fall down.
Sometimes Tato tells us a bedtime story. He never reads us bedtime stories from books. He tells his own stories, stories he makes up as he goes along. His stories always start like this: “Long, long ago, in the deep, dark woods . . .” And then his stories always end: “. . . and they lived happily ever after, for as long as the mist lived in the mountains and the stars lived in the night sky.”
His stories take place in the Carpathians, in the west of Ukraine, where he grew up. In his stories, Yuri and I aren’t people but animals. Sometimes we’re storks who live in a cozy nest atop a telephone pole, where no evil spirits can find us. Sometimes we’re beavers who huddle together in the warm darkness of a dam.
His stories involve spirits from folktales. Our favorite is the Chugaister. The Chugaister is the protector of the forest, a man who stands five meters tall with a beard made of moss and a body made of wind. He lures those who threaten the forest into the shadows and kills them with their own chainsaws.
“Is the Chugaister real?” Yuri asked one day.
“Of course,” Tato said.
“Real like the Ancient Greeks thought Zeus and Poseidon were real?” Yuri asked. “Or real-real, like you and I are real?”
“I’ve shaken his giant hand,” Tato said. “I felt the hair on his knuckles.”
Sometimes we don’t know what to talk about; we only understand that we need to keep talking, that we need to keep the sounds of our voices in each other’s ears.
“Isn’t it after midnight for you?” I might ask.
“So what? I can’t call my boys any time of day I want?”
“No, you can’t.” I would smile. “It’s illegal. You’re going to jail.”
“Well, I hope you come and visit me in my cell,” he would say. “Bring me some of your mama’s cherry varenyky.”
“Come get them yourself,” I would say. “When are you going to come back to visit?”
Then Tato would pause. His image would stay still on Mama’s phone screen. I might hear him take a breath. “Maybe not for a while, zaichik.”
He would explain what he had already explained to me so many times before: That he couldn’t leave America until he got his green card, that he’s filled out the paperwork over and over but it never seems to make it from one end of the system to the other. That the system was slow in the first place, but the pandemic has made it ten times slower. That if he could choose anywhere in the world to live, it would be in Chernihiv with his boys.
And our conversation would go on like that until we had to go to school, or until Tato had to go to work in America, or until Mama needed her phone back to call Titka Natasha and gossip about the Honchar lady in apartment twenty-seven, who was clearly up to something.
I barely remember the years when Tato lived with us. Our family long ago ossified around his empty space. Yuri and I are far from the only boys at school whose tatos live abroad; Nazar Lutsenko’s tato works in Germany, Lev Demchenko’s in Poland, Daniil Marchuk’s in Norway. Yet occasionally there is something amiss without our tato. His absence sits on our living room couch wide enough for four and sleeps in the unoccupied half of Mama’s bed. It speaks in the silent moments at the dinner table conversations, when the three of us have nothing to say and our conversation gives way to the scrape of silverware on dishes.
He sends dozens of postcards over the years—vast expanses of desert, snow-capped mountains, the shimmering skylines of faraway cities. We keep his postcards pinned to the wall next to our bed. And he sends birthday gifts, Saint Mykolai gifts. Most kids find gifts under their pillows in the morning on Saint Mykolai, but ours come a few weeks late, and they arrive in cardboard boxes at the Nova Poshta office ten minutes away. The day after Saint Mykolai, when my classmates brag about the gifts their parents gave them, I have to concoct stories of fake, lavish gifts like giant gaming computers whose existence I don’t have to prove because they’re too big to bring to school. And Viktor knows the truth, so he stares at me while I lie and he tries not to laugh.
I wonder whether I or Yuri resemble Tato more now. I know what his face looks like—I see it on the phone screen every day—but I know that family resemblance shows up in the way you hold yourself, the gestures you don’t realize you make until somebody else points it out. The phone screen can’t capture that.
One day, Tato calls Mama while we stand in line at the grocery store, Silpo. Mama drags me and Yuri there every few days. We wait around as she examines and palpates each apple and pear. In the summer, she buys fruits and vegetables from the outdoor market, beautiful fruits and vegetables borne of rich black Ukrainian soil—but in the winter, she buys wan carrots and mealy apples shipped from faraway lands where it’s never winter. Sometimes when we’re at Silpo she sends me and Yuri to find something, and we always come back with the wrong brand of it, or not enough, or too many. Worst of all, she likes to leave us and the shopping cart in the checkout line while she grabs one more thing she “almost forgot.” When the line moves, I pray for her to get back quickly because she has all the money and the babusi behind us already look angry.
With every ninety-nine hryvnia you spend at Silpo, the cashier gives you a toy called Stikeez. Somehow, Yuri has become obsessed with collecting them all. The toys are figurines of different characters, each with their own names—a frog named Zhabbo, a giraffe named Zhorik, a weird monster named Benya who looks like a lime-green, floating eyeball with cat ears. They’re all sticky on the bottom, and Yuri sticks them onto our bed’s headboard—a platoon of tiny soldiers keeping guard, watching over us as we sleep.
We’re in the checkout line when Mama’s phone rings. Instead of just vibrating, it plays a jazz tune, which means it’s Tato calling.
She picks up. “Hello?”
I hear Tato’s voice over the supermarket music, but I can’t decipher any of the words. Mama breaks out into a smile. She turns the shopping cart around and walks out of the line.
“Mama?” Yuri chases after her, and I follow. “Where are we going?”
“Watch where you’re going!” scolds the babusya behind us.
Mama sits down beside a display of watermelons stacked on top of each other in a pyramid. Yuri and I sit down on either side of her. Mama turns on speakerphone.
“Seryozha,” she says. “Say that again so the boys can hear.”
The Americans are finally giving him his green card. That means that he’ll be allowed to come back and visit, once he has all his paperwork in order and the last coronavirus restrictions are lifted and the border opens. He’s buying plane tickets now, he says. He’ll come next summer. We cheer. Yuri and I stand up and knock the watermelons over. They topple one by one and roll across the floor.
That night, Yuri and I look up how long we have to wait until Tato’s arrival at eleven o’clock on the first of next July.
“Two hundred and eighty days!” I read aloud to Yuri.
He peers over my shoulder. “And thirteen hours, twenty-five minutes, and thirty-nine seconds. Thirty-eight, thirty-seven . . .”
I stare at the timer on my phone in frustration. Why are the borders still closed? Why does paperwork take so long? Why must I wait so long?
Mama comes into our room and tells me to put away my phone, because it’s almost time for bed. I retrieve my sketchbook and pencils from my backpack. I draw Tato’s arrival—the four of us, together at last. As I fall asleep, I imagine myself with a time machine, turning the days to hours, the hours to seconds, bringing Tato closer and closer until I’m at the airport, running toward him.
What if a man, much lauded in his community, isn’t who he proclaims himself to be? What if the stories we tell ourselves, even within the privacy of our own minds, are laced with falsehoods?
So begins the premise of Fox, the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Joyce Carol Oates. The book opens with the discovery of a dead Francis Fox, a much beloved middle school English teacher, in the rural community of Weiland, New Jersey.
Fox’s body is found in his car, partially dismembered by carrion birds, at the bottom of a ravine in the Pine Barrens wilderness. Immediately there is speculation amongst the community: a drunken accident? A suicide? But as the novel unfolds, a darker story emerges. Fox used his post as an elite prep school teacher to abuse many of his female students and his death wasn’t an accident; it was a murder.
The novel, Oates’s first attempt at a classical whodunnit, is told in close-third, through multiple viewpoints. There’s Fox himself; P. Cady, the supercilious headmistress of the Langhorne Academy, where Fox was a teacher; Martin Pfenning, the hapless father of a Langhorne student; Demetrius Healy, a working class man who assists his father, one of Langhorne’s janitors; Detective Zwender of the Weiland PD; and of course, the voices of a few of Fox’s female students: Mary Ann Healy and Eunice Pfenning.
The strategy allows Oates to circle the central crime, highlighting various character’s unreliability and the falsehoods they tell to protect their own reputations. Fox and others repeatedly incriminate themselves and it is shocking how even those most appalled by his actions eagerly cover up his crimes. It also gives voice to the victims of Fox’s predation, something Lolita, perhaps the most famous example of a novel about a pedophile, fails to do.
Oates and I corresponded via email this July and discussed how communities can enable predators, the novel’s multiple points-of-view, and how the limits of official records and histories are ripe for interrogation.
Courtney DuChene: I was struck by the failures of the adults in the novel. They fail to identify the predator in their midst, but more than that, they seem to protect him even when confronted with evidence of his crimes. What made you want to examine not just a predator, but the community that upholds him?
Joyce Carol Oates: The phenomenon of predatory behavior is usually only possible through “enablers”—a fact that seems to have been only really discovered and discussed in recent decades.
Usually, a sexual predator or serial killer has been envisioned as a loner—a “lone wolf”—without a family or friends; but that is actually mistaken in many or most cases. There are apparently “normal” family men who have secret lives as predators—their wives, partners, or relatives may be vaguely aware that something is not right, but they have no wish to investigate. Incest within a family is often linked to the same phenomenon: denial, complicity.
The phenomenon of predatory behavior is usually only possible through ‘enablers.’
This is not a matter of “low-information” persons; it can be found in presumably highly educated families, as in the startling/shocking case of Alice Munro in longtime denial of her own young child’s abuse at the hands of Munro’s second husband.
CD: How did writing the novel in close third, from multiple points of view, help you convey the charismatic effect Fox had on the community, which allowed him to get away with his abuse?
JCO: For me, the challenge and excitement of writing is dramatization: showing how a story unfolds, how people interact, not merely summarizing scenes or alluding to behavior. It is always my intention to bring readers into a scene in a kind of deep immersion. Each character has his/her specific language, subtly differing from the others.
Francis Fox is the most ironically “aware”—“alert”—of all the characters because he is the predator; like a fox, he has to stay ahead of others’ knowledge of him; he is just naturally more cunning. (Not more “intelligent”: “cunning.”)
CD: Many of the women in the novel are charmed by Francis Fox, but other characters, men in particular, seem corrupted by him, drawn into his world and succumbing to dark thoughts. Can you speak to this dynamic?
JCO: In a community, some individuals are just naturally more popular, more “charismatic” than others. Because Fox is a Skinnerian [a follower of psychologist B.F. Skinner], he understands how readily people can be conditioned, even or especially intelligent persons who trust their own “instinct”— not knowing that they are being manipulated.
It is true, I was definitely thinking of our political situation in which political leaders lie, exaggerate, and misinform multitudes, but are so persuasive, telling some part of the populace what they want to know, that they are rarely repudiated; in fact, their admirers become fanatically attached to defending them. However, Fox is set in 2013, before our current era.
Fox is based upon a specific individual, a middle-school teacher who groomed his vulnerable girl-students for many years; he was exposed but never punished. The character of Francis Fox himself is fictitious; it is the behavior, the acts, of this person that resemble Fox’s behavior. (I often write about behavior, specific acts and events; but rarely write about actual people. Even my Norma Jeane Baker, in Blonde, is 99 percent invented.)
CD: Francis Fox’s voice is enthralling—it has an ethereal, timeless quality, while also being clearly unreliable. There’s echoes of Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, and they both make references to Edgar Allen Poe and Lewis Carroll, though Fox repeatedly disavows Lolita. How do you see the two texts, Fox and Lolita,as being in conversation with one another?
JCO: Fox is especially enthralled by the dreamlike portraits of Bathus, and by the dreamy wraith-like figures of E.A. Poe, rather than the less ethereal figure of Lolita. The girl in Nabokov’s novel is only 12 initially, really a child; while Fox’s “Kittens” are prepubescents, just a few years older. Though it may not seem significant to a normal person, there is a considerable difference.
As Fox observes, most girls that age are “shy” around men, not fearless and bantering.
Odd events in American history often raise more questions than can be answered.
Where Humbert Humbert is the sole narrator of Lolita, definitely I wanted girls and women to have their voices as distinct as Fox’s; plus other points of view. Lolita is just a single voice, basically in its rhythms and puns it is Nabokov’s voice, and Humbert Humbert is his mask. But in Fox, Fox’s voice is just one of many viewpoints and ultimately, Fox is cast off, as other voices are heard and his is extinguished.
It is appropriate that the last voice we hear is the voice of Fox’s killer. By this time, he is totally silenced.
CD: Nested within the novel is this family legend about the Hindenburg disaster. Several characters reference it and we see how it varies based on their point of view. As a reader, it made me think about how this community passes down stories about strange or eccentric individuals. We also see characters considering Francis Fox’s legacy. How do you think Weiland will look back on Francis Fox? Do you feel that’s hinted at in the book?
JCO: Yes, many communities and families have largely unexamined “legends” in their history—tales people spin to make themselves more important, their families more colorful. There are parts of the US, like Oklahoma, where most families claim Native American ancestors—it’s just part of family lore; but if examined, probably most of these ancestors never existed.
Odd events in American history often raise more questions than can be answered, and the Hindenburg disaster is one of these. When I researched the “accident” it seemed to me very peculiar, and the reason for the explosion very vague. Soon then, the U.S. entered World War II against Nazi Germany, so there was never any thorough investigation of the event.
It is altogether possible that the Hindenburg was sabotated by someone anti-Nazi and quite possible, if not probable, that a reclusive person in the Pine Barrens region took a shot at the dirigible drifting overhead like a figure in a Magritte painting.
You didn’t inquire about the structure of the novel which was a primary interest for me: the classic “whodunnit” with a body discovered in the first chapter, a complicated backstory, characters with motives, a detective, his investigation, “clues”—all dramatized along a time-line—with a definitive ending, conclusion. For me, it was a hugely challenging experiment which I would probably not try again, following soon after my collection of thematically linked short stories, Zero-Sum, written during the pandemic and months of quarantine.
It is my belief that we are often given explanations for events—“official reports”— but these are likely to be limited, and sometimes misleading; so, the epilogue to a mystery would likely require new evidence not known or suppressed at the time. “Cold case” mysteries are solved sometimes decades later when more evidence is discovered.
It would always be said at the Langhorne Academy that Francis Fox was an exceptional teacher, a “prize winning poet with a national reputation” who died in an unfortunate accident; but just a few people know the real story, and they will never tell.
Of how many of our revered heroes might this be said? Our national, celebrated heroes? Persons whose likenesses are on U.S. postal stamps? One does not have to be a cynic, but rather a neutral observer with a sense of humor, to ask such a question.
I am writing to share the tragic news that Electric Literature’s former Deputy Editor, Jo Lou, passed away on July 8, 2025, at the age of 33.
We are all shocked and devastated by this sudden loss. Jo started at Electric Literature in 2017 as an intern and held many roles; including Assistant Editor, Interviews Editor, Books Editor and Deputy Editor. Over the course of her seven years at EL she formed lasting bonds with dozens of colleagues and hundreds of writers, and went above and beyond for each and every one of them. She was a cherished member of our community and we are all heartbroken.
During her time at EL, Jo edited over 1,000 interviews and reading lists, including some of EL’s most popular and impactful articles. Through her editorial work, she fought for the vulnerable, the underdogs, and the overlooked. She was unafraid to tackle difficult subjects. At key moments in history, she edited literary guides to antifacism, decolonizing your bookshelf, and understanding Ukraine, and organized a roundtable of Palenstinian poets to discuss the role of art in fighting genocide. After the sudden closure of Small Press Distribution, she quickly put together a list of indie presses in need of support, and regularly compiled resources for writers, such as lists of helpful newsletters and low-cost residencies. She was also always looking for creative ways to engage new readers and knew how to make books fun, from spearheading widely popular book cover contests to “guess the book by the emoji” games.
Jo was passionate about supporting emerging writers and diverse voices, and began tracking the demographics of EL interviews to ensure EL featured the widest range of authors possible. She was a generous mentor and gave special effort to making sure every single one of EL’s many interns felt cared for and appreciated during their tenure, and kept in touch with them after they graduated from the program. One intern, Kristina Busch, noted, “After my time as an intern came to a close, she sent me a thoughtful handwritten note that I still have taped up on my fridge. I will not forget her kindness.”
Jo had an insatiable appetite for literature and read widely, with a particular affinity for work in translation. Some of her favorite books were Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, Quicksand by Nella Larson, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet by Amara Lakhous, and Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan. Jo’s style as an editor was visible in every aspect of her daily life; she took pride in her rainbow bookshelf, where she color-coded her collection of hundreds of books, and she was always impeccably turned out for every literary event, from publicity luncheons to galas. (In an office full of women, we all had great fun when she announced she would be wearing the “Fleabag jumpsuit” to Electric Literature’s annual Masquerade.)
Before Covid, when EL still had an office, Jo spoiled the staff with delicious baked goods, which became increasingly complex as her talents grew. (To celebrate EL’s 15th birthday at the 2024 Masquerade, she schlepped a decadent buttercream cake all the way from Queens to Brooklyn.) Her adorable dog Billy was the office mascot, and spent many afternoons napping on the laps of editors.
It is impossible to quantify the impact Jo had on writers’ lives and careers; what she meant to our community cannot be measured. Below is a compilation of remembrances from EL staff and contributors. Her dedication, work ethic, and devotion to literature was unparalleled, and she will never be forgotten.
With deepest sympathy,
Halimah Marcus Executive Director, Electric Literature
EL will hold a private, virtual memorial for Jo on August 7, 2025 at 11 am ET. Please email editors@electricliterature.com if you worked with Jo and would like to attend, or to add your tribute to this article. The memorial will be recorded.
I want to thank Jo for three things. First, Jo made our small Brooklyn office, a tetris of galleys and shared desks, feel more like a clubhouse I never wanted to leave—she transformed the galley stream into a library, brought baked goods she was always perfecting, and shared Billy, the dog who knew how good he had it with Jo, and rarely left her side. Second, Jo made me feel like I could be a writer and editor—she offered me opportunities to interview my favorite authors, cohost events with her, and edited my writing in a way that always encouraged me to keep going. And the third thing I want to thank Jo for, is that Jo did this confidence- and clubhouse-building thing for everyone she worked with. She showed up for writers in big and small ways, and she did this work every day. She made Electric Lit a place you never wanted to leave. What I am trying to say, without being too over the top, is that you made publishing better, Jo. Thank you. – Erin Bartnett, former Senior Editor
I was very lucky to work with Jo remotely over the course of six months and in person one day last fall, volunteering at the Brooklyn Book Fair. From the beginning, Jo was incredibly kind, supportive, and encouraging toward me, and really made an effort to make interns feel included and supported. I will always remember what a kind and thoughtful person she was, her words of encouragement toward me and how excited she was to meet me in person, and everything she brought to Electric Lit. She was truly a special person who made my internship experience immeasurably better. – Eliza Browning, former intern
Jo was someone who always had good gossip and a freshly baked treat whenever I saw her. Every time I talked to her, she made me feel so safe and less crazy when we regaled each other with accounts of microaggressions we experienced as Asian American women working in literature/publishing. It meant everything to me. It means everything to me.
It was always a delight to see her and get together for meals, including a truly delicious one that she cooked for me in her warm, wonderfully book-filled apartment on Long Island City. To say that Jo was supportive is an understatement. She was an extremely generous editor and I’m sorry that people who didn’t get the chance to work with her won’t get to experience that. All she did was uplift writers and met everyone, especially writers who came from “nontraditional” backgrounds, with so much consideration. She helped me with my first bylines, supported my reading series from the start, and always looked extremely glam and put together. She was such a good mom to Billy and Liam. I can’t believe that we didn’t get to say goodbye or see each other one last time. I’m so sad that I didn’t get to read more of her writing.
Looking at the photo of us at the EL Halloween Masquerade at Littlefield in 2019 brings me so much joy. I will miss you and think about you forever, Jo. – Ruth Minah Buchwald, former intern
I worked with Jo often during my internship, and I quickly grew to admire her, her work ethic, and her invaluable insight. After my time as an intern came to a close, she sent me a thoughtful handwritten note that I still have taped up on my fridge. I will not forget her kindness. – Kristina Busch, former intern
I loved writing for Jo, and the knowledge that I’ll never do so again hurts my heart. She was a kind, intelligent editor with a sure hand, who made everything I wrote better, who gave me confidence in my writing style, who championed books that weren’t on everyone’s radar. Pitching an idea to her was a joy; if it wasn’t something she wanted for Electric Lit, she’d often come back with another title, and I never said no to her, because it always turned into a great assignment, and I would have been happy writing cereal box summaries should she have wanted them. It was simply wonderful to collaborate with her, and I admired her so much, on so many levels.
I am so grateful to have known her. I will miss her so much.
My deepest sympathies to everyone at Electric Lit, and all her friends and family, who are feeling this loss keenly. I wish I had better words to share what’s in my heart. Jo would have made this note so much more eloquent.
– Mandana Chaffa, writer
Electric Literature’s former Deputy Editor, Jo Lou, has passed away, and it’s shocking. Many of us cut our interview teeth pitching pieces to Electric Lit, and we kept coming back because the editors made us feel truly seen — Jo Lou especially.
She was a stickler for a strong peg. I still remember staring at my screen for hours, trying to work up the nerve to admit I didn’t know what a peg was. When I finally did, Jo Lou didn’t judge me. She explained, gave examples, and showed me this business could be about guidance, not gatekeeping.
Her turnaround from accepting a pitch to polishing edits to hitting publish was quick, but always careful. When a piece went live, she’d send you the link and remind you to invoice, proof she believed writers should be respected and paid. At every step, Jo Lou made you feel your words mattered.
I never imagined there’d be a time she wasn’t with us. Some people you tuck into your writer’s journey Rolodex knowing they’ll be there rooting for you when your first book finally arrives. For me, Jo Lou was one of those people. Her professionalism came with a rare kind of kindness that can’t be taught.
Her passing still doesn’t feel real. Once, at the Brooklyn Book Festival, she told me about her photography, a small, generous glimpse of the person behind the emails and edits. Others knew her more closely than I did, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say Joyce Yijia Lou mattered. To writers, to readers, to an industry that needs more people exactly like her. She was one of the good ones. I’ll always be grateful our paths crossed.
– Yvonne Conza, writer
I had the pleasure and privilege of working with Jo during her time as Interviews Editor at Electric Literature. To say she shaped my literary path would be an understatement. Under her editorial guidance, I found and refined my voice as an interviewer.
Jo was warm, encouraging, and deeply committed to uplifting underrepresented literary voices. In our last conversation, as she prepared to step away from her role at EL, we promised to keep up with each other’s work. I imagined we’d reconnect every few months, trade stories from our literary lives—maybe even finally meet in person.
I’m heartbroken that her name will no longer appear in my inbox.
Rest in peace, Jo. You’ll remain in my prayers, and in the hearts of all those you inspired. – Bareerah Ghani, writer
Jo made me feel so welcomed, comfortable, and excited to join Electric Lit when I started as an intern. Throughout the internship, I loved working with her. She was a thoughtful editor and a kind person. She treated every writer’s work with care, which inspired others to do the same. She will be greatly missed and dearly remembered. – Vivienne Germain, former intern
Jo was as thoughtful an editor as she was a person. From finding opportunities she thought were aptly suited to me as an editorial intern at EL to following everything from my travels to my career in the years since, she was exceptionally kind, encouraging, and dedicated. I will miss her opening up about her days in London on rainy book fair days and comparing earrings while getting ready for masquerades – she was graceful and warm in every moment. A loss for the book world, and a loss for us all. – Lauren Hutton, former intern
Jo immediately welcomed me into Electric Literature, and by extension the wider literary and publishing world, with an unforgettable warmth. Though incredibly excited when I started out as an intern, I was of course nervous to be working for such a renowned organization like Electric Literature. But Jo helped make EL feel like the home it remains to be for me now. She’d regularly send me notes of encouragement and gratitude, making sure that I knew my contributions to Electric Lit were appreciated. Her presence was kind and disarming — she had a knack for making meetings feel more comfortable. And she was incredibly dedicated to her work, always offering the most clear-eyed insight during our conversations and while editing. I feel honored to have known Jo, and to have been in her presence while she devoted herself to uplifting many budding writers like myself. Though our time together was brief, Jo will always be remembered so fondly. Thank you again and again, Jo. I miss you. – Jalen Giovanni Jones, Social Media Editor
I was thrilled when Jo accepted my first pitch to Electric Lit, and loved working with her. The feeling must’ve been mutual because after we wrapped up edits together, she asked if I’d cover another book—and then again, after I’d turned in that assignment. I’d never had a publication ask me to write for them, and Jo’s enthusiasm and belief in my work meant so much to me and my writing career. I always loved working with her; she was so warm and friendly. I’m devastated to hear of her passing as it’s such a loss for the literary community: she was someone who truly championed literature and writers. – Rachel León, writer
While I didn’t often work directly with Jo, we shared many years together on staff. I remember laughing over everyone’s outfits for the “Dress Like a Book” promotion she coordinated, one of many activities that boosted staff camaraderie. She was full of good ideas and helped problem-solve on a dime around important issues, like when a contributor, for their safety, needed to immediately change the name under which a piece was published. I recall several times she went to great lengths to find a translator for an important story or interview so that the ideas therein wouldn’t go unrecognized simply because they weren’t in English. And she made sure we credited the translator front and center upon publication. Jo was judicious about sending me material that might be of interest to TC, and her taste was spot-on. When she sent me something, it usually WAS of interest. – Kelly Luce, Editor of The Commuter
In an industry full of gatekeepers, Jo astonished me with her generosity and openness the first time I reached out to ask if she’d be interested in publishing an interview I did with a Filipino-American author in 2021. She told me she was already running an interview of that particular author, and this could have been the end of our email exchange. But instead of letting it end there, she invited me to interview another Filipino-American author, setting into motion our years-long collaboration that spanned many articles and interviews. As a freelance writer who has pitched and written for various outlets in the past, I can say that editors like Jo are a rare breed: she was the kind of editor who looked to open doors for writers who would otherwise have little opportunity to write for outlets with as wide a reach as Electric Lit. As a writer based outside the US, it has been difficult for me to catch big breaks, but Jo was there to solicit another article from me for EL, even when it would have been easier for her to let me fall off the radar. She was the one who thought of asking me to create lists of artists’ residency programs after she learned that I was writing to her from Storyknife Writers Retreat in Alaska, and when she learned that I was putting out my first book, she was the one who invited me to write a reading list to help promote it, even if my book was being published by a small and fairly unknown press in Australia. For my second book that was published by a university press in the US, she generously invited me to do another interview and reading list for EL—never mind if my work wasn’t getting the backing of a Big 5 press.
She seemed to be the kind of person who valued her privacy, and our exchanges were strictly professional. Seeing now, in her obituary, that she was an immigrant to the US makes me understand why she was so generous to someone like me who was filing my articles from the Philippines. She is a great loss to the community and I hope people remember her for her life-changing kindness. – Monica Macansantos, writer
I had the pleasure of working with Jo since 2019. At the time, I’d only been writing author interviews for about a year and didn’t have many clips to share, but I knew I wanted to write for such a staple outlet in the literary community. Her enthusiasm to work with me—even though I was still relatively new to the field—was unforgettable. As so many writers, especially freelancers, know, getting a response to a pitch—let alone an acceptance—is rare.
Jo was nurturing from the start. She always encouraged me to put my own spin on interviews, never asking me to hold back my voice. At the same time, she helped me learn how to balance that voice with the task of uplifting others—how to let the author shine, while casting that light in a shade of my own design.
I’ll forever be grateful for her guidance, her generosity, and her passion for literary citizenship. I know I’m not alone—anyone who had the joy of working with her, or even just crossing paths with her online or off, unequivocally feels the same.
Thank you for everything, Jo. You’ll always have a space in my heart, the same way you always made space for me. – Greg Mania, writer
I will miss Jo. Even working with her remotely as a nervous intern, she had a unique way of making me feel welcomed, included, and valued. She helped me feel like I was part of EL from the moment I joined. Of course, I wanted to write an article and was scared and excited to do so. But it came as a huge surprise when, without my saying a word, she gave me my first assignment. I was flabbergasted by the casualness of it…but of course it wasn’t casual at all because she supported me the whole way through. She knew I could handle the piece, and giving me the assignment was her way of showing me that she trusted me. I could feel it and, in a lot of ways, that trust was what I needed then. I don’t know if she knew that, but it seemed like she did. I think confidence and trust are one of the greatest gifts an editor can give a writer and Jo had an unbelievable capacity to share that with so many. She taught me a lot, and I’ll miss her. – Willem Marx, Assistant Editor
Working under Jo during my internship was a true pleasure. Her sharp editorial eye and generous spirit encouraged me to stretch myself and grow as a writer and editor during my internship. She always had a kind word and a smart piece of feedback for anyone who needed her. I know her memory will live on with myself and a whole generation of writers. – Skylar Miklus, former intern
When I started at EL as an intern, I was excited and embarrassingly eager. I was, after participating in my first editorial meeting, also extremely intimidated by Jo. I would learn later that she had a preternaturally warm heart, but for the first 30 minutes of our relationship, what I registered was her poise and flawless self-presentation. Jo didn’t say much in that meeting—she didn’t say much in most meetings, an outgrowth of her innate interest in others and desire to listen rather than opine—but after the meeting, she immediately messaged me with an enthusiastic welcome and a burst of friendly questions about myself. Over the next several weeks, she used my answers to those questions to find me projects and assignments that fit my interests.
After we’d worked together for some time, Jo took a leave of absence for medical reasons. When I was invited to cover her responsibilities until she returned, I knew “filling her shoes” was not a possibility; however, I know I ended up doing a decent job because Jo spent her recovery time cheering me on instead of convalescing. Despite my pleas to relax and indulge in some bad television, Jo never stopped checking in or sending me helpful emails and words of encouragement, often from a doctor’s office or en route to an appointment. Jo made me feel special, but after years of working with her, I realized I wasn’t—she championed so many others tirelessly, especially writers and EL staff, and I was neither the first nor the last person to benefit from her thoughtful attention.
Jo was an unusual combination of characteristics. She was one of the most private people I’ve ever met but, during my first year at EL, when it became clear we didn’t have the organizational funds to cover both my airfare and my lodging for an annual event, Jo invited me to stay at her place. I’d known her only a few months, and we’d never met in person. She also sent me a birthday card every year, shared spot-on recommendations for books and movies, and regularly messaged me with invitations to attend events/meet people/work on something new. Jo was never the first to speak but I suspect she was regularly the most knowledgeable person in the room. Her knowledge of EL, especially, was encyclopedic. In my experience, it was always easier and faster to message Jo with a question—Have we ever published an article on X topic? Has Y writer written for us before? What month did we post Z in?—than to do an internet search. Jo was, quite simply, a powerhouse, and her exceptional work ethic was matched only by her immeasurable kindness. We are less without her. – Wynter K Miller, Managing Editor
When I began working at Electric Literature, I realized very quickly that I was going to have to earn Jo’s trust in my leadership. In the world of EL, she was a true elder states(wo)man, and had played an integral part in helping the journal become the literary juggernaut that it is. She loved EL in the way that a leader, or a founder, always hopes someone will love their workplace, which so rarely comes to fruition—she loved EL as though it were her own. It became a real pleasure to work alongside someone with whom I felt I could trust the wellbeing of both the site, and staff, so implicitly. Jo had a strong moral compass, and she brought that to work every single day. It greatly influenced our editorial meetings, especially in the face of controversial articles or topics we sometimes had to address, and even in decisions around staffing, where I relied heavily on her council. Her institutional knowledge of EL’s history was extraordinary and frequently came in handy, and her deep understanding of our audience and readership was an enormous influence on my own. Which is to say that Jo deeply influenced the way I work at EL, arguably more so than anyone else.
I also want to give a quick shout out to her love for her dogs, and all dogs. Jo’s love for Billy was enormously influential to my my decision to adopt my dog, Hughes, and soon after I did, Jo spoiled him with treats and pets for hours on end when we were tabling at Brooklyn Book Festival, and she even sent me extra treats and toys, and gave me key advice on helping me navigate his anxiety. Some of my fondest memories of her are not work related, but rather are times we sent Slack messages back and forth about our fur babies, sharing tips and recommendations for food, toys, training, and even, when she was ready to adopt her second dog, Liam, the agency she rescued him through—Hearts and Bones rescue, from where I’d adopted Hughes. Jo is, and will continue to be deeply missed by myself, and by our entire staff. I’m grateful to have known her, and worked with her. I’m sending my deepest condolences to her family, friends, loved ones, and Fredrik, Billy, and Liam.
– Denne Michele Norris, Editor-in-Chief
Jo was incredibly supportive, thoughtful, and generous with her time. I was able to take risks, gain confidence, and stretch the form of my work in new ways because of her encourage. She has had a profound impact on my life as an artist and writer as a result. I will miss her very much! – Coco Piccard, writer
Jo had one of the best literary minds I’ve ever met. When I first started as EL’s social media editor, Jo’s encyclopedic brain for all things EL and literary was invaluable to me. I would’ve been lost without her popping into my messages to tell me it was Shakespeare’s birthday and also somehow knowing everything we’d ever posted about Shakespeare. She helped me build out my own knowledge through collaborating with her, and bouncing ideas off of one another sharpened my eye and truly helped me find my stride. Her encouragement, advice, and belief in the value of my ideas and my voice pushed me to grow ever-more confident in my role and beyond it.
Jo was someone who was never without a fresh idea and had endless energy when it came to the things she cared about, especially pulling together important, exciting, timely pieces when she felt it would be valuable to EL’s readers. She genuinely loved championing authors, and especially valued shining a light on small press titles that would most benefit from being highlighted. As an editor, she was someone who always made time for her writers and colleagues: to send them notes of encouragement, to think up articles that might be a good fit for them to work on, to make space in her extraordinarily busy calendar to lend her mind and heart to the writers she cared about so deeply. She paved a path for me to learn how I might do the same. The impact she had on the literary world is incalculable—but it is deeply felt. It will continue to radiate outward through the work she brought into this world and the people she made better through it. – Katie Henken Robinson, Senior Editor, Electric Literature
I know Jo was an integral part of EL and I always admired her intelligence, poise, work ethic, and kindness. When I moved to NYC, she was such a warm presence, thinking of me for comp tickets to literary events and inviting me to volunteer at EL events like the Brooklyn Book Fest and the Masquerade. When we worked the Brooklyn Book Fest together last year, it was raining and freezing cold, a real bummer. But even so, she was out there all day, offering up EL stickers and Masquerade fliers. She told me to go enjoy panels when it was slow. Her dedication to her work was clear as day as something I really admired.
She was a connector too, introducing me to other interns and always genuinely building relationships. She told me about reading series and bookstores and I felt like I could talk to her about the realities of publishing, good and bad. I loved talking to her about books, it felt like she’d read everything and knew all the writers to know, and she was someone who seemed so authentically invested in the careers of interns. I still remember how she gave me a thorough walkthrough of WordPress during my internship, and I was so appreciative of her attention to detail and how I knew I could go to her with any questions, without judgment. After I left EL, she carried on the Indie Booksellers Recommend list, and I know so many people appreciated that list and also so many of the other creative, smart ideas she had.
I am shocked by this news. I hope her friends and family know how beloved she was and is by the literary community. I hope the EL team feels this love too. – Laura Schmitt, former intern
When Jo Lou started as an intern, her creativity and brilliant literary mind were immediately apparent–intimidating, even! She read and thought deeply, and really listened to people, whether she was interviewing an author or propelling the office discussion. Her ideas were always full of life and vitality. Jo was a wonderful shepherd of literature; as both writer and editor, Jo worked with sincerity and patience, generosity and openness. Her lovely dog Billy sometimes came to work and his gentle, contented nature told you everything you needed to know about how Jo Lou approached the world. Joyce Yijia Lou, thank you for your work and your humanity. You will be greatly missed. – Lucie Shelly, former Senior Editor
It would be difficult to overstate the quiet yet profound impacts Jo Lou had on my entry into a literary world career. Her enthusiastic feedback on the first few interviews I did for her as an intern gave me the confidence, that I don’t know how I would have found otherwise, to pursue a range of high profile interview opportunities in other contexts over the years to come, which in turn has had an enormous influence on my understanding of how storytelling works. When I traveled to New York to meet the Electric Lit team in person for the first time, after a year of working together remotely, Jo warmly opened up her home to me—inviting me to stay with her, her partner, her dog Billy, and her iconic rainbow bookshelves filled with color-coded ARCs she’d collected over the years, which I realized were sometimes at least two shelves deep against the wall. Whether or not I was at EL, Jo regularly reached out to offer opportunities she thought I would find exciting. But what I most admired about her was the deeply principled and rigorous ethical sensibility she brought to the literary world. She was the rarest of guiding lights through some of the most morally complex and emotionally fraught situations I have ever had to navigate. I will be forever grateful that I had her light to follow, for a time. – Preety Sidhu, Associate Editor
I worked with Jo on the very first author interview I published, a conversation with Rachel Heng. Jo was the sort of editor I most admire: kind, organized, seemingly unflappable, and deeply thoughtful about who she was making space for. She was graceful in rejecting my pitches she couldn’t give a home to and a pleasure to be edited by on those she accepted. Her passing is a loss for the literary community. – Marisa Siegel, writer
Jo Lou was a caring and thoughtful coworker, a sharp and thorough editor, and one of the best bakers I have ever met. She made it actually fun to table at book festivals, and I still think about the hojicha cake she baked and brought to keep up our spirits and blood sugar levels. I was constantly inspired by her dedication to literature and the true joy she found in helping writers. She really showed me what it meant to care about the literary world and how to change it for the better. – Alyssa Songsiridej, former Managing Editor
Jo was a lifeline for me. It’s hard, being a writer from the South, disconnected from the literary scene, especially since, like Jo, I don’t enjoy living online. Over the 27 plus interviews we worked on, Jo connected me to so many thinkers whose work helped broaden my mind, like Ibram X Kendi, David Mura, and Mona Eltahawy. She encouraged me to interview Amanda Oliver about her library polemic, Overdue, a piece Jo titled “America’s Public Libraries Reflect the Systematic Failures and Social Inequality of Our Country,” where, for the first time, I began addressing why I left the public school library. Jo assigned needed conversations with Seyward Darby (“How Women Prop Up the White Nationalist Movement”) and Mychal Denzel Smith (“The American Dream Is Dead, What Do We Do?”) in the darkest days of the pandemic. She proposed interviews with fellow Southerners Lee Cole and Wright Thompson, and with novelists Dana Spiotta, Cleyvis Natera, and more. Jo also assigned my first book list, about librarians who are also writers.
I tried via email over the years to explain to Jo how much I appreciated her. How she helped me through my recovery, during the pandemic, and later, when I was helping care for my beloved father-in-law. When I was about to lose my mind trying to get my memoir published, she gave me a reality check, reminding me that almost every writer she knew was struggling to publish in this climate.
Jo was the consummate editor, causing me to believe in myself, making me realize what I had to offer. Multiply that gift times hundreds of writers, many of whom were tackling controversial subjects. I tried to tell her so many times how much I appreciated her, but I don’t think she ever knew how much she meant to me, to us all. – Deirdre Sugiuchi, writer
Jo was so warm and so kind and so patient, and I’m grateful to have known and learned from her. She made such an impact in the short time that we worked together, and I know that this is true, too, for a myriad of writers and editors who crossed paths with her at Electric Lit. – Chris Vanjonack, former intern
Though I never met Jo in person, she was an integral part of my life without really knowing so. She was the editor I worked with the most when I started covering writers and books. She was always kind, smart, and generous with her time. Without her, I would not have grown into the interviewer I am today, and my current path in life wouldn’t exist. In a way, I owe her everything. – Adam Vitcavage
Jo will be so missed. She was an incredible mentor to me when I was an intern at EL. Jo always made a point to ask for my feedback or to invite me to interview authors, always making me feel included and valued. I remember being awed by her voracious reading habits and careful attention to literature, I feel like Jo had an opinion on almost any book! She was an incredible person, editor, and community member. – Bekah Waalkes, former intern
Jo was a role model and a true inspiration to me at Electric Literature. She was the first editor I ever worked with, and I couldn’t have asked for a more incredible, open, and considerate person to introduce me to the world of writing and publishing. She was a great reader and writer with an impeccable eye. But more than this, she had a kind and caring soul. Outside of work hours, she would often forward me emails about new books she thought I might be interested in. She was always right. I took Jo’s words and recommendations as gospel. She was amazingly intuitive and, as an editor, knew how to help all of us convey what we wanted to say better and more concisely than we knew how to express it. She showed me how to find a voice and how to carve out real meaning behind a wall of language. Extremely gifted, she shared her talents with us selflessly and consistently. After working on an article together, she would often generously send me screenshots of kind comments or messages she received about the piece we’d published. It was heartwarming and unique for an editor to go so above and beyond in her encouragement. Jo was supportive and instrumental in motivating me, as a young intern, to keep writing and diving deeper into stories. She was a guide and a mentor, and I will remember her always as the giving, loving, and wonderful person she was. She will truly be missed. – Kyla Walker, former intern
Jo was the first person I worked closely with as an intern at EL. She was everything you could want in an editor—intelligent, interested, enthusiastic, kind. She knew how much your work mattered to you. It mattered to her too. Every word choice was mulled over, each picture scrutinized. When we were not working, we talked about our favorite books and our shared fear of wisdom teeth surgery. Long after my internship ended, she sent along publication opportunities and tickets to literary fairs. We talked about getting drinks together someday, if I ever found my way to New York. In the meantime, she asked, had I ever tried sweet corn pizza? She was kind and real. I will miss her. – Lisa Zhuang, former intern
Writers are supposed to avoid cliches, but in sad times everyone reaches for the comfort of familiarity. So my first thought, when trying to talk about Jo, is “still waters run deep.” She was when I knew her, and I assume remained, very quiet and reserved. But when you got to know her, as I was lucky enough to do during her very early tenure at Electric Lit, she was determined, principled, perceptive, curious, generous, and genuinely funny.
Jo started at EL as an intern, and I wasn’t at all surprised to hear that she ascended to deputy editor—the challenge was always getting her to work less, to rest, to let things be good enough. She just held so much brain, heart, and conscience in that quiet package. This is a profound loss to the literary community and the world at large. – Jess Zimmerman, former Editor-in-Chief
The strange fate of translated books is to be published multiple times and for multiple audiences—sometimes years after their initial publication—as though for the first time. Often, this shift in context is obvious, sometimes it’s jarring, but occasionally I read an English translation and struggle to imagine the book being written at any other time but now. It’s that vital, that fluent, that present. The Dance and the Fire by Daniel Saldaña París, originally released in Spanish in 2021 and available in English as of July 2025, is a prime example of this phenomenon. It’s a story of friendship and love, growing up and failing to grow up, the romantic yearning to be an artist and the genuine effort of making art. All this is set against an apocalyptic backdrop of wildfires, water shortages, and rampant conspiracy theories in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The fact that The Dance and the Fire is also one of the rare books to have been published in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic while, coincidentally, dealing with questions of plagues—in this case, the “dancing plagues” that swept the 16th and 17th centuries—makes it all the more astonishing.
With The Dance and the Fire, París takes experimental leaps—juxtaposing voices, tones, and literary styles to tell the story of three childhood friends from Cuernavaca who find themselves there again. Natalia and Conejo never left, but Erre went to Mexico City to make it in the movies, only to move back in with his parents when his already unstable life fully crumbles. In the heat of a city that’s flooded with fire-and-brimstone preachers and one strong breeze away from being subsumed by wildfires on the horizon, the book gives equal space to each of the three voices. They examine themselves, their past and future longings, and then project those inner lives outward onto the world around them. It’s a heady novel of relationships and ideas that has not left me in the months since I first read it.
I had the distinct pleasure of talking with Daniel over Zoom about all this and more. We discussed his pandemic publication, the history of Cuernavaca, bringing physicality to writing, and the desire and sexuality that informs his third novel.
Willem Marx: The Dance and the Fire has three voices and three corresponding parts. That structure brought triptychs to mind. The number three is interesting because it invites comparisons between its constituent elements but also complicates attempts to define or draw clear oppositions between them. How did you come to three voices, three parts for the book?
Daniel Saldaña París: I work a lot with triptychs as a structure in general, but in particular for this book, it seemed fitting because of the love/friendship triangle between the three main characters. The three-part structure mirrored the complexity of the relationship between the three voices. But I wanted a triptych that wasn’t exactly a continuous line. The second narrator picks up the story from a point a little before where the first one leaves it. There’s continuity, but there’s also overlaying.
I was reading a lot of personal diaries and journals at the time—I’m still reading them because I teach a class on diaries—and I see each of the three voices in the novel as an example of a different kind of diary. Natalia’s diary, or Natalia’s section, has more to do with the creative journal. She’s writing about her work and her choreography, but also about her personal life. The second part is more a diary of the body, and the third is more chaotic, more loose and playful. I wasn’t exactly replicating the format of a diary, but there is a hint of it in each section.
WM: The three characters each have elements of the artist—particularly Natalia, who’s a choreographer and dancer, but also Erre, a failed filmmaker, and Conejo, who treats conspiracy theories almost like an art form. Setting them against an apocalyptic, wildfire-raging environment, questions kept surfacing for me about what an artist does when the world’s falling apart around them. How does an artist respond to a fire burning their city down? Natalia seems to lean in and make art while the other two pull back in different ways.
That’s also the beauty of art—it comes from the inadequacies and awkwardness.
DSP: It’s true that the three of them have an artistic sensibility. I wanted to talk about the marginal place that art occupies nowadays. In Mexico, artists used to have a more prominent role in society—it was similar to the French model in the way that artists became public intellectuals and would inform the public discourse. I feel that was left behind in the 20th century. Now, it’s unclear where the artist operates within society. I wanted to talk about that uncomfortable place, but with an optimistic twist. Even though we cannot really affect society or shape public discourse, we can still provide a way forward within the imaginary world. We can imagine possible futures. We can imagine different ways of loving each other, different ways of creating links and communities that are still relevant. Now, with the meltdown of communities and societies, we can still find ways to relate to each other in art. There’s a very dark side to the novel, but it also has a sliver of hope.
WM: I was struck by passages where Natalia describes her artistic process. She has a line about the experience of a project coming together, when connections between things proliferate: “The world ceases to be the hostile place it almost always is […] and becomes an endless meadow.” It’s a beautiful, hopeful image, especially in contrast to the actual world around her and the other two characters who largely fail to find beauty in their surroundings. I felt the book saying that it is possible to create meaning in art, even in an apocalyptic world, but that it’s a fragile possibility, one that can easily be lost. How do you think about this idea of meaning making in art?
DSP: Maybe because I come from the world of poetry—I started writing poetry in my early 20s or even before—I have this sense of literature and art in general, as an almost mystic experience. It has a spiritual undertone. There’s nothing more marginal than poetry, so it’s a strange place to be speaking from, but I truly believe that poetry connects us with something. This sense of intuiting coincidences, of everything coming together, seeing the connections behind reality and starting to understand how things relate to each other in less obvious ways is part of a poetic attention to the world.
At the same time, if you see it from outside, it appears very similar to mental illness. It’s a kind of paranoia where things seem to be connected when maybe they are not exactly connected. I wanted Conejo to have this fascination with conspiracy theories because the artistic process is similar—it could be mistaken for something conspiratorial—but it’s different. In art, there’s an attention, a way of pausing and absorbing the world that connects us with something deeper.
I had imagined an end of the world that had a lot of physicality, a lot of presence of the body. It was all about bodies, whereas the end of the world that we were experiencing was disembodied.
WM: I’m thinking about the way Natalia’s choreography ultimately plays out—she describes an awkwardness in the movements. The dance isn’t smooth or fluid, the pieces don’t fit together like in Conejo conspiracies. There’s a kind of blockiness to it, which might be beautiful but is not a beauty everyone sees.
DSP: That’s true. The difference is that in art, things aren’t perfect. It’s not possible to understand art as a linear narrative like conspiracies. It’s way more subtle, there’s something kind of off, and I think that’s also the beauty of art—it comes from the inadequacies and awkwardness.
WM: I hear the book’s triptych structure resonating—the overlapping, uneven borders between the three parts manifests this idea of art’s beauty and awkwardness.
On a different note, there’s an apocalyptic energy in the book. Beyond the wildfires, it’s very much about a specific kind of plague—and it was released in Spanish in the middle of Covid-19. On the one hand, I wonder about the experience of publishing a book in that environment. And on the other, what was it like to hit the moment on the head in such a strange way?
DSP: It was really strange. I had this fellowship from the British Library to do research in order to write a book, so I was in London in March 2020, reading a lot about epidemics—medieval dance epidemics, laughter epidemics, these episodes of mass hysteria—when the pandemic started. I flew back to Mexico City before everything collapsed—the library was already closed so it didn’t make sense for me to stay in London—and I finished writing the book in Mexico in the first weeks of the pandemic. I was in lockdown, so it was perfect for me to finish the draft. And then, because I submitted the book to the Herralde Prize, it came out shortly after. I didn’t have a long time to revise it…in Spanish language publishing, books are published much faster.
It was interesting because, in the book,I had imagined an end of the world that had a lot of physicality, a lot of presence of the body. The whole thing with the dance and the pain that Erre suffers. It was all about bodies, whereas the end of the world that we were experiencing was disembodied. It was all Zoom calls and being away from each other—in a way, it was the opposite pandemic. I was writing from my mom’s house in Cuernavaca and craving more physicality, more presence of the body, so I would go to the garden and dance by myself. I would film myself dancing and then write and describe some of the movements. It was important for me to incorporate movement and dance and my own body in the writing. I was sick sitting in front of the computer and typing.
WM: Had you used dancing and physicality to inspire your writing before, or did the book inspire that idea?
DSP: It was the book, and now I’m doing it more. Well, walking has always been a method for me. I’m obsessed with the French Situationists so I do a lot of dérives in Mexico City and other cities. I write a lot while walking—I take my notebook or a voice recorder and go out into the city.
WM: What brought you to look at the medieval epidemics—the laughter and dancing and other plagues that you were researching?
DSP: I learned about them many years ago, when a friend of mine pitched a brief essay about mass hysteria. I was working as an editor for Letras Libres magazine. The idea stayed in the back of my mind for years and didn’t do anything with it. Then, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis—I had been in a lot of pain for five years. After that, I went back to dance, to theater, to doing things with my body and I remembered these episodes of dance epidemics and started reading about them. I was reading a lot about the context of the dance epidemics in the Middle Ages, there was always an environmental aspect to them. They usually happened after long droughts, after periods of famine and other disease epidemics. It seemed to me that there were a lot of echoes with the present: We are living through an environmental crisis, a societal crisis, the power of organized religion and the oppression that comes with it is more and more present.
I was also thinking a lot about the rise of Protestant churches in Latin America—during the Cold War, the CIA had programs to send evangelical churches to parts of Latin America where left-wing politics was associated with Catholicism because of the theology of liberation. In Cuernavaca, we had a left-wing bishop who was connected to liberation theology and close to a lot of revolutionary movements. It seemed to me that the way evangelical churches were growing in Latin America echoed with the way the Catholic Church exerted power in Europe in the 1500s and 1600s. I wanted to establish that parallel.
WM: We see Natalia doing a similar level of research in approaching her choreography. There’s a layered feeling in the prose, I could feel the density of ideas underpinning her words.
DSP: Natalia’s section is the more autobiographical part of the book. I wanted to convey the feeling of writing a book and the feeling of how this very book that you are holding was written.
I would film myself dancing and then write and describe some of the movements. It was important for me to incorporate movement and dance and my own body in the writing.
For a novel, I always end up doing a lot of research that doesn’t end up in the book.I use writing as an excuse to read and study and go deeper into a specific subject. I have more fun if I do it that way.Of course, if I were to put all the research in the book, it would be impossible to read. It would be too heavy and cerebral, but I want to believe that there’s a hint of those readings and of those reflections behind it.
WM: At the level of streets and geography on the page well, Cuernavaca is vivid. It’s also a place you know very well. In writing about it, was there a desire to say something about the city?
DSP: I am very interested in the way cities are organized in layers—there’s this layer of fiction. You superimpose the readings and fictions you know about that city onto the city itself. When I’m in New York, it’s obvious because there are so many movies and books about New York. You see the city and recognize places you’ve seen in movies and read in books. But there are less books about Cuernavaca. Of course, there are a few. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which gave me my epigraph, is one of the books most commonly associated with Cuernavaca. It also has a friendship/love triangle between two male characters and a woman—I wanted to replicate that, but make it current, bisexual, more complicated, and apocalyptic.
Cuernavaca is also a good example of many social problems Mexico faces, be it narcoviolence or the greed of companies that are using up all the drinkable water. There are a lot of fights around water in Cuernavaca. That was interesting to me because I traced it back to the conquistadors and how Hernán Cortés, when he took Cuernavaca after taking Tenochtitlan, built the first sugar cane plantation. He basically cut down a whole forest north of Cuernavaca. That has had an effect on the climate ever since—It has an effect on how we perceive the climate in Cuernavaca now. The decimation of the natural environment in Cuernavaca started with colonization.
WM: How are you involved in the translation process of bringing your books into English?
DSP: Now, I’m pretty involved. Christina MacSweeney is an amazing translator, I’m very lucky to have worked with her from the beginning. We don’t see each other often, but we correspond a lot and she’s very good at posing questions. Now, I send her my books before some of my friends—I want her reading. So she’s become more of an artistic collaborator of mine. I am a translator myself—I translate from English into Spanish—so I think I am attuned to her work and to the challenges of translation. I read her translations very thoroughly and try to give more feedback even than she asks for. It’s a very nutritious process.
I use writing as an excuse to read and study and go deeper into a specific subject. I have more fun if I do it that way.
WM: Finally, I want to ask about desire in the book. There’s a lot of it. Beyond the specifics of the love triangle, there are so many lines that treat desire in this gorgeous, elevated register. Conejo calls desire the “god capable of assuming any form.” Erre says, “Only love can quench the fires.” I was interested in the way desire feels mythical, almost unreal, but also like a possibility of salvation.
DSP: I think there’s an autobiographical explanation to that. I had been in a heterosexual relationship for a long time and it wasn’t really working. I have been a bisexual man since I was a teenager, but I was not very much in touch with that. At some point, I brought it up within my relationship and it was not something I could explore in that frame or moment of my life. I feel that frustration in the book. It has to do with this mythical aspect of desire you were talking about—for me, desire is directly related with the mystical. The fire in the novel is a destructive element but it’s also an element of purification. A force that attracts and repels the characters, the way some of us experience desire. And it also has to do with belonging, the sense of belonging to a community, which is something I felt very strongly when I was a teenager. For the first time in my life, I felt that I had found a group of people that had similar interests to me. Of course, later on you have responsibilities, you distance yourself from that way of interweaving your life with a community. I was seeking that feeling in the fiction.
My favorite painting by Kira Simonian is called “Hard Cell #2.” At the bottom of the canvas: rectangles with rounded corners rendered in terra cotta browns, blacks, gray-blues, mint greens. They look like a drift of human cell clusters swimming in the eyepiece of a microscope. These blobs are painted upon a photograph of a partially demolished building, its front blasted away. So much of Kira’s work uses this same photographic image, cells oozing out from the building’s rubble. In her project statement about these works, she wrote, “I want my paintings to show the merging of the human body with the rest of the world. We are so afraid to be a part of nature that we disguise our bodies, hiding all evidence of animal behavior. We make our bodies into buildings, insulating and isolating ourselves.” But life is insistent, or art is: The cell-bricks run, unruly, from the wreckage and at times look like the only things still holding up the structure, keeping it from falling totally into ruin.
On the morning of June 29, 2007, Tim’s cell phone rings. The number is from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where Tim has just finished his first year in the MFA program. He holds his phone in the air while we look at each other, doing a sort of telepathic guessing game. Financial aid? A professor? Studio manager? Admissions?
“Hello?” he says. “Oh, hi!” I watch his face, his expression perplexed until it changes utterly: his muscles slacken, and he goes pale. The conversation is short. “Thank you for calling,” Tim says. Behind him, our cats in squares of sun. They are hairless, so we have to put sunscreen on their wrinkly heads to keep them from turning red. In this apartment, especially: so many windows, so much bright sun.
“That was the dean,” Tim says. “Kira Simonian was murdered yesterday in her apartment.”
When a tragedy occurs, its effects move outward in concentric circles. Where you are in those circles, your distance from the center of the tragedy gives you certain unspoken rights in others’ eyes: the right to mourn, the right to tell the story. In the middle of that circle is the victim, the next ring out is family. In terms of emotional proximity, when Kira died, there was not much I could claim.I never met her. While Tim was in his first semester at MCAD, I lived in dusty Oklahoma at a one-semester writer-in-residence gig, lonely and listening to Samuel Beckett audiobooks on the elliptical at the university gym. He made friends with his cohort of classmates in my absence. They all shared warehouse studio space, a rogue’s gallery of types I’d hear about over the phone. Willow, who made stuffed creatures and whimsical fabric installations; a lesbian performance artist; a goth photographer. He made fast friends with New Jersey Doug, a sound artist. At their first critique, Doug ambled up to one of Tim’s paintings. “Christ, not birds,” he said. Kira was a painter, this was what I knew of her, a painter and from suburban Chicago, like Tim and me. But we were not in that close concentric circle. Not friend friends, not people who had known Kira long. Still, we were somewhere far closer than the strangers in the city, in the country, on the internet who would speculate on the case, closer than the makers of the Investigation Discovery program about her murder, than the people who consumed that program, than the girl who published a short story online about Kira that cannot be described as anything other than a kind of Dead Girl fanfic. It’s a strange place to float, this circle. How could I claim grief over this woman I never knew?
According to the Washington Post, Americans are most likely to point to the year when they were eleven years old as the moment they feel society peaked. Averaging the results from questions like “When do you feel American film was at its best? American politics? Music? Society?” researchers discovered that eleven is kind of a golden age of development, too young to be jaded or hyperaware of global politics, old enough to participate in pop culture and to watch historical events as they unfolded on TV. A few weeks after I turned twelve, an eleven-year-old girl was murdered in Waukegan, a far-north exurb of Chicago, and the hometown I share with Tim. Holly Staker and I were born about six months apart, alike in our hairsprayed early nineties bangs and our saturated pink-and-teal wardrobe, alike in navigating our hardscrabble city. My mom and I were watching the news—it was summer, and our storm door was open to the glowdown of late day. The reporter on the screen told us the girl had been raped and stabbed to death while babysitting. The two children she was watching were unharmed. They said the name of the street; it was the same one my best friend lived on. Who was I seeing when I saw Holly’s photo on television, fine-boned and smiling, blonde where I was dark? Was I seeing her or was I seeing myself? My mom didn’t let me babysit or stay home alone yet, but apart from those details, what kept Holly from being me? And why did I feel so guilty that my mother was wrapping her arms around me and putting her mouth to the top of my head, saying, “Oh that poor baby.” Did we deserve to feel relief that we had been passed over? It felt selfish. There but for the grace of God, I had heard grown-ups say. But what did that mean for the dead girl? I felt sure that there was nothing I had done to deserve grace, and nothing Holly had done not to. I stared at the television, shots of the exterior of the house, brown with two stories, yellow police tape, summer trees in green leaf, a row of bushes in the front yard. It was the first time I really felt that the world, the adult world, had no special wisdom. Holly’s story would spin and spin and spin, outsized and mythic, changing with time, but I am older now than my mother was then, and still no one knows who killed Holly Staker.
In terms of emotional proximity, when Kira died, there was not much I could claim.
When Tim gets off the phone, we go to the Internet to see if there is news footage or website info. We watch the clip from KARE 11 news, which shows Kira’s apartment building, very near MCAD on the south side of the city. The camera shows close-up footage behind the police tape of a first-floor window whose corner has been pulled from the frame. A green plastic chair has been propped below the window. Through a voiceover, we learn that just inside that window, Kira lay on the living room floor dressed in a t-shirt and panties covered in stab wounds. The reporter notes that Kira’s husband, Matt, had been away in New York on a business trip at the time.
Tim and I watch the clip on the KARE site a few times.
“So someone climbed on the chair to break through the window, found Kira alone and killed her?” I say.
“It looks like it,” says Tim, standing behind my shoulder watching the computer screen.
Tim’s phone rings again. It’s New Jersey Doug. “Dude,” he says. “This is fucking fucked.”
New Jersey Doug and his girlfriend, Jen, come for beers; the four of us sit on our balcony grimly looking out into the street below. Next door is a church that is now someone’s private residence—the chouse, we call it—and a party is gathering there like storm clouds. Every weekend, cathunking techno emanates from the chouse, and multicolor lights flare and pulse. Tim and I are never invited.
Tim and Doug discuss a time they went bowling with a few of the MFA cohort at Bryant Lake Bowl before I moved to Minneapolis. Willow the puppet maker had been at the bowling alley. Catherine, Kira’s next-door studio neighbor and fast friend. Kira and her husband Matt. I want to know what they were like together, what Matt is like. These people had been characters to me in Tim’s stories over the phone when we lived apart, but reality now urged me to take them in more fully. But Tim and Doug both shrug, frown, as if to say that a deep impression hadn’t been made.
“He has this fancy marketing job at Target. He looks like a corporate business guy. Not really…” Tim begins.
I look around—two grad students in art, me and Jen scraping by with a combination of freelance and temp gigs, all four of us years away from a foreign concept like a salary.
“Not really like us,” I say.
Talk turns to news of the crime. I’ve been pathologically Googling for information on Kira’s murder. The MPD is saying almost nothing, so I tell myself I’m taking matters into my own hands.
“Apparently,” I tell everyone, “Kira’s apartment building has been dealing with a peeping Tom. So it seems like the neighbors are pretty sure this guy crossed the line from looking in the window to going through the window.”
“Maybe,” Jen says, “he saw Kira’s husband leave for the business trip and knew she was alone in there, so he broke in. Maybe she put up a fight so he killed her.”
“And do we know if she was—” I cut myself off; I am about to ask if she had been sexually assaulted, but this is not the path I want to go down. I start over. “If the neighbors have been comparing descriptions with each other of what this peeping Tom looked like, why haven’t the police released a description or a composite sketch? Or at least a warning? Is this not a big deal to them?”
“You know what all my friends in New York City said when I told them I was moving here for school?” Doug says. “‘You’re moving to Murderapolis’? That’s what people call it. Murderapolis.”
When Matt flies back to Minneapolis from his New York City business trip, he can’t go back to his apartment, so he stays with Catherine and her husband, Billy. The two couples—Catherine and Billy, Kira and Matt—grew close quickly, and Catherine and Billy are protective of Matt. They serve as our conduit for news. We learn that on the day Kira’s body was discovered, police had difficulty reaching Matt on his cell phone. Not knowing yet that he was out of town, they reached out to Kira and Matt’s friends to see if they knew where he was. In this way, word spread about Kira’s death quickly through the MFA cohort, and I can’t shake the haunted feeling that we may have known that Kira was dead before Matt did. We also know from this same lightning-speed information network that Matt’s been going through round after round of police questioning. I’m haunted by this, too: the idea that, on top of grieving his wife, he has to be subjected to another ordeal. But crime stories tell me this is routine: the cops need to rule people out. They need to build their narrative. I’m trying to build one, too.
But the media reporting still tells me too little. Kira died of “complex homicidal violence,” having been struck with a hammer in the head, strangled, and stabbed. Her body was found on Thursday evening when her landlord came to install new locks at Kira’s request.
In the absence of official information, I find message boards. True crime internet forums have been around since the earliest days of the Internet, but the concept of the cybersleuth—the armchair detective who scrolls missing persons’ photos in their spare time, attempting to match them to forensic sketches of unidentified remains—has not widely entered the public consciousness in 2007. But there are other people like me obsessed by the single question I cannot put down: Who did this? It isn’t that I’m waiting for punishment or justice—whatever those abstractions mean—but I am beside myself with a lack of knowledge. I tell myself I just want the truth, but I also feel I can scour these forums and discover a reality that others are unable to see. All I ever wanted to be was a writer, from the time I was four years old. A story, even a true one, could be arranged artfully enough to make sense in a way that reality did not. As I grew up, I cultivated those traits in me that made me a writer: clear-eyed assessment of others’ characters, a distrust of cliche or conformity. But what I don’t realize is that in this instance, I have my own feelings that muddy my ability to be objective: A hypervigilance in the wake of Kira’s death that leaves me imagining a stranger crawling up to our balcony in the night and jimmying open a window. I fear Tim could be accosted, mugged, stabbed to death, left for dead outside the pool of weak light that shines down at night from the MCAD studio building where he often works late. These fears aren’t new: When we were newly married, we lived in New York, and I used to meet him at the Starbucks in Astoria when he closed well past midnight, so scared of something happening to him on the ten-minute walk home that I insisted on showing up to accompany him. None of this was rational. But by the time I find the message boards about Kira’s death, I’ve practiced so much magical thinking about protecting the people I love from harm that I could have earned a degree in it. I can’t see in the moment how these fears color my obsession with finding the truth.
As the cyber-conversation unspools in the first few days of July, it’s clear that the commenters are divided between the idea that a stalker or stranger killed Kira, and those whose suspicion falls on her husband. These camps trade information and speculations back and forth, sometimes in a kind of mild theoretical tone, as if they’re smoking pipes like Holmes and Watson in a drawing room. I hate this. It feels like a game, like one I’d attended as a preteen—not long, actually, after Holly Staker was killed—where I played a femme fatale character-suspect at a murder mystery birthday party. My mother had done my eyeliner. I wore a black beret and a black blazer, smoking a fake cigarette. I can’t remember now whether I was the guilty party.
There are other people like me obsessed by the single question I cannot put down: Who did this?
Very quickly, the exchanges on the message board turn ugly, the divisions between the two broad camps (pro-stranger, pro-Matt) growing starker, those concentric circles rippling out. There are MCAD classmates of Kira’s, Illinois friends of hers, friends of her sisters. There are many people who live in Kira’s neighborhood. A person who claims to be the landlord’s best friend is described by someone else on the forum as “wacki.” A person who claims to live in the quadruplex with Kira and Matt. Many Minneapolis residents looking to understand if they are safe from harm, commentators who don’t hesitate to name registered sex offenders who live near Kira’s address, encouraging us all to Be On the Look Out. Many posters who just love unsolved mysteries, sifting through the clues and claiming an interest partly due to their opinion that the case is being underreported, possibly headed for cold-case status. There appear to be a few factions from within the MCAD community, all jockeying for their particular positions, bickering with each other and with those who were in further circles than themselves. They go by handles like @mcad, @Julia @anotherfriend, @d, @de. They leap to Kira’s defense when strangers invent a persona for her based on her scant online presence or her angular hipster haircut:
JM wrote:
I wonder if [Simonian] was as mean and condescending as she wanted her Friendster account to portray her? This woman didn’t seem to be overflowing with the milk of human kindness. I don’t know, maybe it was an act to give her art school cred. Anyone know her personally?
Wednesday, July 4, 2007 at 7:03 am
friend wrote:
JM …you are sick, you have No idea who she was.
Also, people who claim to be her friends, who are you? @Mcad, D, OM ….who are you? If you were really her friend, you’d know who I am, I am a grad student and Kira & Matt were featured in my work…that’s all I should have to say for you to identify me. If you’re serious, email or call me and we need to discuss a few things. Most importantly how NOT to fan this sick flame! I’ll say again, all those who are saying they know something CONTACT THE POLICE!
Sunday, July 8, 2007 at 9:16 p.m.
Many strangers respond to “friend,” explaining to them that this is a dedicated space for speculation. People are working together from their different corners to piece bits together to create a bigger picture. One person points out, gently, that strangers might be able to see things more objectively than the people who were close to the couple. Another poster suggests that anyone who knew Kira and Matt personally should find other spaces. The cybersleuths want the right to steer the conversation in the ways they see fit; our emotions are getting in their way.
eloise wrote:
Those of us who DID know Kara [sic] and Matt are desperate for answers and desperate to understand who would take her from us. The police are not doing anything, or at least are not saying anything and there is SO MUCH contradictory info that I appreciate coming to this blog to remind myself that people are still fighting to keep the discussion of this murder alive […] I think this speculation is a way–no more unhealthy or healthy than any other coping mechanism–to grieve for Kira and to assuage what fear we can, and I don’t think you should make anyone from the MCAD community feel bad about that.
Sunday, July 8, 2007 at 10:22 pm
I’m unable to connect any of the posters to people in real-life, even those who say they are part of Tim and Kira’s cohort. Whenever we are together in person, we don’t confess to being on the forum, don’t out ourselves as being behind this or that handle. It seems the least important thing to talk about when we are face-to-face. Seventeen years later, when I rediscover these posts through the Wayback Machine, I’m caught by the name “eloise.” I have no clear memory that I posted at all on these forums. But Eloise was my great aunt’s name, and it’s when I read this particular response—a bit formal, a bit imperious, distorting a connection to Kira as a way to defend against the terror and obsessiveness at the heart of visiting and posting on the blog at all—that I am certain that Eloise is me.
Some MFA students are questioned by the police. Catherine, Billy, others. During the earliest round of questions, police want to know about Kira and Matt’s relationship. How did they seem together? Was Kira afraid of him? Did she ever mention being hit or hurt? Law enforcement heard that Kira originally planned on accompanying her husband on the business trip to New York but backed out at the last minute. Any idea why?
During the second round, their questions shift slightly: Did Kira mention she was concerned about security in the apartment building? Did she mention she and her husband had been bugging their landlady to fix some shoddy locks? Did she mention having trouble with a front window screen? Did she mention whether she slept with a knife under her pillow?
A what, the MFA students say. No. No, of course she didn’t.
In mid-July, there is a candlelight vigil for Kira. Matt is planned as a speaker; community members will walk from Fair Oaks Park to Kira’s apartment carrying candles. The vigil has been spearheaded by a bunch of Tim’s classmates. It’s a remembrance of Kira, and a public show of support for Matt. There is a feeling between Tim and me that we must decide whether or not to go, and in so doing, we are making some kind of decisive statement.
A few days before the vigil, Tim runs into Willow the fiber artist and puppet maker. Willow lived alone just down the street from Kira’s apartment and has now moved in with another MFA student after the murder, afraid to live alone in the wake of Kira’s killing.
“Are you going to the vigil?” Willow asks Tim. They are in the large main hall of the MCAD building: grand staircase, high ceilings. Sound carries easily through its cool halls. She keeps her voice low, unsure who else is around. This is the way conversations are carried on now.
“I don’t know,” Tim says.
“I went to the funeral,” Willow says. “And that seemed like the wrong choice. Too intimate.”
“I’m wondering about that here, too. For myself,” Tim admits.
“I haven’t felt like I can talk about this with anyone,” Willow says. “But the more time I spend around Matt, the more uncomfortable I get.”
Tim reports this to me. I’m holed up at home watching a Civil War documentary. I’ve recently become obsessed by the idea that I have no knowledge of history, that my history education is lacking due to a series of boring high school and college classes, and I’m trying to make up for it now by forcing myself to sit through films with titles like The Ten Most Decisive Battles of the American Civil War. When I pause the screen to talk to Tim, a photograph of Antietam freezes in place. The image is bodies and bodies and bodies, so many bodies that it is impossible to tell where one begins and one ends, heaps of cloth and barely-shaped shapes, almost indistinguishable except for their organic irregularity from the stones and dirt and trenches and ruts of the landscape. I turn off the TV. I know in that moment I will return the DVD with the rest unwatched.
“What do you think she means?” I ask Tim. “Uncomfortable how?” Uncomfortable can mean so many things. I want to know the quality and source of this discomfort: whether it’s because of Matt’s grief, or because she isn’t sure who did this, or because she feels out of step with the cohort and unable to voice her doubts. I think about the message boards, the way the loudest of the MCAD posters fiercely snap like guard dogs at speculation about Kira and Matt’s life together, shutting down rumors and conjecture by people who didn’t know them, who never will. Sometimes, online, I forget that I am among this latter group. But I am anxious not to overstep in person.
“I’m not sure,” Tim says. “But is it ok if I don’t go to the vigil?”
“Of course,” I say. There is no question of me going without him. We stay home and watch a movie—not a documentary, nothing with any death at all.
another thought wrote:
Was there competition for the art gallery showings that Kira was a part of this summer? Did some artists’ work not get picked over hers? Were there individuals who repeatedly could have felt like Kira’s talent was a threat to their own?
Thursday, July 12, 2007 at 3:57 pm
The thought comes to me powerfully: I have never seen a person who is so ill at ease
The show at the Chambers Hotel was curated before Kira’s death, and it is decided that it will go forward in the wake of her murder. Tim is in it, as is Kira, and as he works to hang the show in his role as gallery assistant, he is struck by the changes in Kira’s most recent paintings, the ones she completed right before her murder. Like her old work, this work features photos of demolished or crumbling architecture. Instead of painting cell-like shapes onto the photos, these works pop into the third dimension: spray foam insulation springs from them like a biological nightmare, insides coming out, a building like a decomposing body. It’s a step beyond the other art I’ve seen from her, the painted cells. More evidence of animal behavior, signs of something shifting in her thinking. Would I find it so dark if she were alive? I’m not sure.
The mood at the show opening is somber, but aren’t openings usually, people walking around with a tiny cup of something aloft in one hand, and the other hand tucked under their elbow—somehow the universal gesture of art appraisal. People talk low, shuffle about; outside, the July sun sinks and grows amber, but in the track lighting of the gallery, we all look pale and furtive. I never drink, so I bring a little cup of water to my mouth nervously as Tim and I chat with a rotating cadre of people, until someone—Catherine—sidles up to us with a blonde, stooped man in a suit and tie. “Colleen,” she says, “this is Kira’s husband.”
Matt has a very high forehead, hair receding at the sides. His eyebrows are so light, his face looks almost absent of them, making his eyes appear darker—starker—than they really are. He seems frankly miserable, sweat beading beneath his bangs, his eyes darting around the room.
We shake hands. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I say.
He nods fitfully, automatic. “Thank you,” he says.
I gesture to the walls with Kira’s work. “You must be so proud of her,” I say. He blinks, as if he has not considered this.
The thought comes to me powerfully: I have never seen a person who is so ill at ease, so nervous, so skittish. He fidgets like he hears a heart beneath the gallery floorboards. This is exactly how I believe I would act if I weren’t sure if any stranger I met might suspect me of murder. His behavior makes clear, perfect sense to me.
“Yes,” Matt says. “I am.”
At the end of July, the peeping Tom spotted at Kira’s quadruplex is identified. He was in a halfway house at the time of Kira’s murder and is eliminated as a potential suspect. “There goes my idea,” @SuziQ writes on the forum.
After Holly Staker was murdered in 1992, Waukegan police got a tip from a prisoner that his cellmate had confessed to knowing who murdered Holly. The cellmate, Juan Rivera, claimed to have been at a party on the night that Holly was killed a few blocks away, and that another man at the party kept leaving and coming back, at one point returning with scratches on his face and blood on his clothes. The police questioned Rivera for days without an attorney, pointing out inconsistencies in his story. Finally, during one interrogation session, Rivera began crying and admitted that he himself had murdered Holly. He claimed that she had seduced him (with her babysitting charges nearby—the two-year-old in the house and the five-year-old playing outside) and when he was unable to get an erection, she laughed at him, enraging him to the point that he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and then stabbed her while sexually assaulting her. Holly was eleven; Rivera was nineteen.
Rivera went on trial. Experts testified to the high likelihood that Juan’s confession had been false, noting his history of mental illness, a post-confession psychotic break, and an IQ of 79. (Waukegan police had to write Juan’s confession for him, as he was unable to.) The jury repeatedly told the judge they were at an impasse, with many members of the jury feeling that, without any physical evidence tying Rivera to the crime, they could not make a decision about his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The judge insisted they continue deliberations. Eventually, they found Rivera guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison. What followed was a yearslong cycle of appeals and retrials: Rivera’s sentence was overturned on the basis of new evidence, but he was tried a second time and found guilty. When DNA evidence finally excluded him as the source of the semen found in Holly’s body, his sentence was overturned a second time, but in a third trial, prosecutors were able to convince a jury that Holly was sexually active on the basis of testimony that she had been molested by friends of her brother. In other words, they convinced a jury that Holly had had sex with another person shortly before being killed by Juan Rivera. The DNA evidence, then, said the state, was not exculpatory. The jury agreed. Rivera had now been tried and convicted for Holly Staker’s murder for the third time.
Amid the DNA results, the growing understanding of false confessions, and compelling evidence that Waukegan police had planted Holly’s blood on Juan’s sneakers (they failed to check if the sneakers they chose had actually been manufactured at the time of the murder), the Illinois Appellate Court overturned Rivera’s conviction a final time and barred the State of Illinois from ever putting him on trial again. He had spent nearly twenty years in prison. To date, the $20 million dollar settlement Rivera received as compensation is the largest wrongful conviction payout ever in our state. Holly’s murder is unsolved; Holly’s family remains convinced that Juan Rivera is her killer.
lackman wrote: Matt was arrested today and is in the Hennepin County jail. Wednesday, September 5, 2007 at 9:28 pm
MHC wrote: …didn’t want to believe it. So sad. Wednesday, September 5, 2007 at 9:46 pm
We learn afterward that police immediately suspected with a high degree of certainty that Matt had killed Kira. Although they began canvassing the neighborhood after Kira’s death and heard the Peeping Tom story from multiple neighbors, they also learned that a fight had been overheard around 5 a.m. on Wednesday, June 27, with a man shouting, “Do you love me?” and a woman screaming twice. Around 5:30 a.m., a cab picked Matt up to take him to the airport for his flight.
Police could also see from the dust on the window, the one with the plastic chair beneath it, that no one had entered the apartment from the outside. The blood evidence showed that Kira had been attacked in bed with a hammer, had stumbled her way to the kitchen, moving toward the block of kitchen knives, and then struggled with Matt there, perhaps over the weapon. Blood was smeared across the kitchen cabinets. She made it as far as the front door, and even grasped the doorknob, before she fell to the ground just inside the entrance, where the landlord found her the next evening.
When police picked up Matt from the airport from his business trip, he arrived without luggage. He had shipped it to Chicago, rather than bringing it home to Minneapolis with him. When the results of forensic testing were done, late in the summer of 2007, Kira’s blood was found on his clothes in the suitcase, inside a watch. Questioning him in Minneapolis, police noted Matt had bruises on his arms and scratches on his legs. His DNA was under her nails.
Matt was arrested, according to Minneapolis police, “at the home of friends.” I imagine the faces of Catherine and Billy as he was handcuffed and put into a police car. What did they think? What did they feel? I don’t know. We never spoke of Matt again.
Like an historian, I can trace the competing stories unfolding on those forums, all of us tugging in the direction we believed was correct until the passage of time unfolded truth, or a version of it. I can see myself there, believing as I stalked those threads that my writerly clarity could keep me and my loved ones safe, that I was helping by seeking a narrative that might be more difficult for others to see. But this was also a failure of vision, a fear of obvious narratives so profound that I felt compelled to reject the husband-did-it arc as if it were a movie pitch and not someone’s life. And underneath it all, an understanding that by refusing to consider that Matt could have harmed his wife, I was protecting against something far more terrifying (and more statistically likely) than a stranger climbing in my window or Tim being mugged at night—the idea that someone I cared about could hurt someone else I cared out. That people who are supposed to love each other are more likely to hurt each other than any act of violence perpetrated by an unknown person. This was not a trope I could reject; it was the way history repeats, repeats, repeats. The way the human animal behaves.
Maybe clarity fails most of us in the face of immense or proximal violence: Catherine and Billy, shielding Matt in their home. Holly’s family, like so many families of victims who ignore evidence or facts to hold tight to the soothing certainty of an answer. Juries, lawyers, police. Strangers on podcasts and message boards who are unafraid to speculate—usually wrongly—and name real, living people in the world as killers, as if testing a clue to a crossword puzzle with a permanent marker. I thought I was different because I could put aside ideas of justice or punishment or vengeance; all I wanted was to see to the center of the circle, to the pure truth at the heart of the tragedy. But there was wrong-headed “eloise” insisting that speculation was a healthy coping mechanism instead of another form of injury. And there was me shaking the hand of a man who took his wife’s life from her just weeks earlier; I looked into the eyes of a man who beat his wife with a hammer and stabbed her to death, thought, he’s acting like a killer, then explained it away. The shame I felt, feel—that part is my story to tell.
There was not a trial. Though indicted on first-degree murder, Matt took a plea deal, pleading guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for a lesser sentence. Anyone hoping for a more complete narrative of Kira’s story—which was most of us, especially her family—could only guess at his motives; at his sentencing, when the judge asked Matt if he would like to make a statement, he declined.
When Matt was released on supervision from prison in the fall of 2023, I saw his page on a job-related social media site with its professional photo and carefully curated work history. If I believe in this as his right—the right to re-narrativize his own life, the right to start again, though with the weight of that time in the carceral system around his neck—I also believe that Kira’s voice should be out there, too, renewed somehow in the ways it can be.
I’m convinced Kira was just starting to figure something out in her work, shown in the changes it was undergoing just before she died: the bursting rot coming forth in 3D from those paintings, destabilizing buildings, uncontainable by the rigid system of architecture. Where before, she had asked us to consider her work as an admonition against hiding all evidence of animal behavior, now it seemed that the ungovernable, the base, was threatening to overwhelm the paintings. No matter how strict the facade, they seemed to say, some things refuse to be contained. I imagine another timeline, a different story, in which Kira’s paintings whispered to her: go, go, go.
Kira, through her art, reaching at a brutal truth and being taken away before she could touch it. Me, so many others, turning our heads. What Kira knew: that it is a human impulse to ignore animal behavior. She asked us to not to, even when, especially when, it was ugly. Mankind was my business, I hear the ghost saying to the villain in one of my favorite stories.
This story is my own crumbling structure, overtaken, overrun with disorderly things, but built with my own striving toward clarity, toward some kind of wholeness. It’s what I have to give her.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of What Mennonite Girls Are Good For by Jennifer Sears, which will be published on November 25, 2025 by the University of Iowa Press. You can pre-order your copy here.
At the heart of What Mennonite Girls Are GoodFor is Ruthie’s lonely search for love and a truth she can believe in. A minister’s daughter raised in a community driven by ethics of pacifism and self-sacrifice, Ruthie and her identical twin sister Rachel find themselves in Asuncion, Paraguay, for them a vibrant tropical world filled with missionary songs. But Ruthie already senses something darker she is not being told, a possibility that the god she’s been promised may not even exist.
In each of these eleven connected stories, Ruthie gives away part of herself in exchange for new understanding as she finds her way in the world outside of her community and the rules she’s been given. Leaving people and places again and again, Ruthie gains a sense of herself but only through reckoning with what she’s lost. Ultimately, these stories explore how faith and identity intertwine—until they don’t. And how the haunt of memory may be what brings us back to ourselves.
Here is the cover, designed by Trudi Gershinov:
Jennifer Sears: Soon after learning What Mennonite Girls Are Good For won the John Simmons Short Fiction award, I was asked to complete a standard author questionnaire, which included suggestions for cover ideas. Still in shock at having won the prize, I filled out the form describing a girl with a quilt wrapped around her anorexic shoulder blades, inspired in part by the striking image chosen for “Foragers,” which was originally published by Electric Literature.
A month later, I received the first round of cover samples and saw the designer’s rendering of my first idea. I realized my suggestion was not just complicated, it only evoked one section of the book. But I also saw what had to remain: the quilt.
Quilts have a subtle presence in What Mennonite Girls Are Good For. They are thrown onto beds, folded in closets, stashed in vehicles, carried on mission trips to be spread onto beaches. These familial quilts contrast with the cheap quilts Ruthie encounters in hotel rooms.
In the Mennonite communities I come from, quilts are communal works of art meant to be used. Quilting is still largely a female tradition. My mother is a quilter. Generations of my aunts and grandmothers are quilters. That scraping sound of the wooden frame opening to stretch the fabric, the sight of women gathering around quilts in homes or church basements, and the time spent beside these women with their critical eye on my never-close-enough stitches are vital moments from my childhood. My mother’s quilts keep alive pieces of our family’s past––cut up cheerleading uniforms, childhood dresses, abandoned embroidery projects, scraps found in my aunts’ stashes after they died, even beloved t-shirts.
Piecing together a collection of short stories can also feel this way.
As I scrolled through the third round of cover options, which experimented with a log cabin pattern, I immediately saw the blue theme was the one. The color suggested a melancholy that haunts this book, reminding me of Ruthie’s preoccupation with the empty sky amid her growing certainty that there is no heaven. The quilt pattern offers a sense of tradition and endurance, but there is enough deviation in the designer’s skillful adjustments to suggest a maze, nodding to Ruthie’s misalignment as she seeks her own way out.
When this collection solidified into its current shape, the book and the character became something different. Ruthie’s quest for love became sadder, more vulnerable. And more honest. In one story, “Sins and Symbols,” the Shroud of Turin becomes a provocative symbol for Ruthie as she wraps herself in silk she can’t keep. A book cover isn’t a shroud as what’s inside remains a living thing. But it does contain an imprint, a suggestion of what lies beneath.
Trudi Gershinov: The University of Iowa Press’s production and design coordinator, Meghan Anderson, sent me the cover to design for this title. As the liaison to the author, Meghan shared that Sears wanted to avoid literal depictions of bonnets and crosses and other easy symbols to convey these are stories about Mennonites. Instead, the main character, Ruthie, was to be portrayed wearing a traditional Mennonite quilt. The team at Iowa also suggested I pursue the classic direction of Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior and Darcey Steineke’s Suicide Blonde.
Based on that information, along with familiarizing myself with Sears’s stories, I created several designs. Though liked, the author decided to go in a different direction that was less figurative, more typographic and still, using a quilt. This opened a door to the thematic heart of the book. By offsetting the type and creating depth with the layered variations of blue in the quilt, I feel I was able to speak to Ruthie’s internal conflicts by casting a beloved object in cooler, dark tones. Being able to show this tension in the design made my part in the process rewarding.
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