1. Norman, insurance salesman, thrice-married, for a long time carried his anger like a glove on his right hand, where he saw it every time he glanced down. But in his later years he came to think he didn’t need such a close reminder of his ire and resentment, so he pulled it off and slapped it onto his back, where he wouldn’t see it. This worked very well, he thought, and he wished he had done it long ago. However, while he wasn’t paying attention, it slipped into his spine. There it became very hard, and, unfortunately, not very straight.
2. Max, a second grader who disliked being told what to do, was supposed to be reading during reading period but instead he used a contraband Crayon to draw his anger onto a bit of construction paper. He was ready to throw it away, but there was no trashcan, so he shoved it in his pocket. Every time he reached into his pocket, his fingers brushed against it, a reminder. He looked around, but there was no trashcan nearby. Years passed; still, no trashcan.
3. Derek, a successful businessman, carried his anger as a head in the shape of his own head, but bigger. This larger head formed itself around his regular head—a large head on his shoulders that no one else could see. He liked it. It was distinctive. Of course many successful people had large heads, but his wasn’t ego or pride; it was his anger. Over the years it grew, and the larger it grew, the more he enjoyed its great, invisible shape, like one of the giant creatures that floated above parades. If only people could see, they would cower. Sometimes, in meetings, he sat faintly rocking, bobbing it forward and back, while everyone waited for him.
4. Perhaps you have met William, the small friendly man with a winning smile who carried his anger inside his penis? He was often horny, yet he hated for anything to touch his penis when it was burdened in this way, and so he was at odds with himself and very unhappy.
5. Jordan was motivated by his anger and wanted to never forget it. He shaped his anger into a little ball and put it in his mouth, where he chewed on it and his tongue played with it. After only a few days, however, he began to grow accustomed to this, and he stopped thinking about it. Then he jammed it into his nose, so he would be reminded every time he breathed. But, to his amazement, after a couple of weeks, again he began to forget. So he sharpened it to a point and set it inside his shoe, where it stabbed painfully at every step. This worked for about three months, but, again, even this he noticed less and less often. Finally, he shaped his anger into a blade, turned it in his hands, and drove it between his ribs, deep into his heart. Now he doubted if he could take it out if he wanted to, and to his great satisfaction every heartbeat struck with a rage impossible to ignore. But, as time passed, he began to wonder if there was actually any difference between always remembering, and always forgetting.
6. Aaron—who ran a very profitable high-end restaurant, but nonetheless was convinced that everyone thought he was a failure—shaped his anger into a stick for breaking things (crockery, mirrors, indifference), which he did in terrible frenzies that seemed to relieve a dreadful need. Afterward, however, he was haunted by the thought that the things he broke were not really destroyed but only rearranged, and so even in this he had failed.
7. Tyrone carried his anger in a silver bracelet on his wrist. One day, however, he came to believe that he was after all a peaceful and forgiving person, so he threw the bracelet into the sea. To celebrate he got a tattoo of his favorite mandala on his ankle. But he soon realized, to his horror, that he had only moved the anger from the bracelet to the tattoo. He liked the mandala very much, but he decided that nonetheless it had to be removed. They used a laser, and he felt relief as he gazed at the bleeding place where the tattoo had been. But presently he grew depressed. He wasn’t sure why. One day, as he trudged from house to car, a path he had followed many hundreds of times, he tripped. As he lay on the gravel, aching and defeated, he realized it had been a mistake to destroy his anger, that he still needed it. He pushed himself upright in a panic. He fell against the driver’s door with both hands. Gasping, he saw himself in the window. And he realized that his anger was not gone. It was still with him. To his relief, it was right there, in his haircut.
8. Toby was a thin, pale toddler who received little love. He seemed listless, but in fact he was working hard at forming his anger into an invisible sphere. The sphere floated around him at a diameter of precisely eight feet. Because he was so young he later had no memory of creating it, and because it was invisible he could not see it. He often wondered why other people never came very close.
9. Cooper carried his anger like a baby. It slept in a sling on Cooper’s chest, and Cooper gave it tickles and played peekaboo to make it giggle. If it whined or thrashed, Cooper stopped whatever he was doing to tend to it. Was it hungry? Was it tired? Was it bored? He could always quiet it down again. Cooper gave his anger his love, and for a time they got along very well. But one night it woke him and wanted to be rocked, for hours on end. This happened again the next night, and again the next night. His anger howled monstrously, demanding his attention in this way every night. In a sleep-deprived state, Cooper couldn’t focus. He stumbled into doors. He saw things (holes, eyes) that weren’t there. He felt like he was going mad. So one night he set his anger down on a table, cut it open, and flayed it. He tanned the skin and made it into a nice belt.
10. Perhaps you have noticed that many men carry their anger in their belly? Frederick was one of these. It swallowed his bellybutton and spilled over the top of his pants and went always before him. But one day he became determined to lose weight. He tried diets: low fat diets, low carb diets, liquid diets, color-based diets, a raw egg diet. He tried exercise: walking, biking, rowing, stairs, high impact, low impact. He tried yoga and aromatherapy. He tried herbal supplements and healthy thinking and hypnosis and ice baths. He tried a technique of his own invention that involved sandpaper and hose clamps. None of these worked. Finally, he went into the garage, took the crosscut saw off its hook, breathed a breath, and began to work. It went more easily than he expected, like sawing balsa wood or styrofoam. His anger detached with a last soft splintering sound. He carried it into the living room. His wife was watching TV. He said, “Will you hold this for me?” She took it, frowning. “What is it?” “Yes,” he said, nodding. He backed away. He turned for the door. “I’ll be right back.”
11. Of course no man can ever truly be rid of his anger; the question is where he will put it, in what shape, whether he will hide or show it, from himself or others, how he will remember it, which part of him will remember it. I think of George, the sort of quiet, steady, reliable man that no one thinks about very much. He carried his anger in his wallet, along with a little cash, a credit card, his driver’s license, some receipts, a library card from a town he no longer lived in, a photograph of his niece, an expired bus pass. When he opened his wallet he sometimes glanced at his anger, and he thought, well, if he needed it, it would be there.
12. And me? As you have probably guessed, I carry mine right here.
To write his latest novel, Nadeem Zaman had to steal away from his day job teaching at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, escaping from his peaceful surroundings to the quiet rebellion of struggles and survival that is life in his chaotic city of birth, Dhaka. In Up in the Main House and Other Stories, he tracks contemporary Bangladesh through vignettes of everyday life in its capital. These seven empathetic stories amount to an insightful introduction by an urgent voice to a city, a country, and a people that are largely absent in global literary discourse.
I spoke to this Bangladeshi American writer (Zaman stresses, “I am a Bangladeshi by birth and by heritage, a Bengali by culture, and an American by nationality and the place I call home now”) via Skype about the sabbatical in Dhaka that birthed his debut short story collection.
Ikhtisad Ahmed:Writers often take the scenic route in pursuit of their careers. You were on the supposedly traditional track of reading literature and creative writing at university, culminating in a doctorate, but traveled halfway across the world, in order to break through as a writer before returning to the U.S. What made you leave the U.S.?
Nadeem Zaman: What made me leave the U.S. was 1) I was completely and utterly tired of making the rounds of agents here that said they didn’t see the books selling to an “American” readership, whatever that means, and 2) because I wanted to be in Dhaka, where my novel takes place, to do the final revision. I needed to get back in touch after being away over two decades, as well as to authenticate my sense of the places and locations by visiting them. After Kanishka Gupta at Writer’s Side offered to represent the novel and Picador picked it up in India, it finally saw the light of day.
The short story collection had a separate journey. It was first published by Bengal Lights Books in Bangladesh, then discovered by Unnamed Press in the U.S. Indie presses take the risks big publishing never will, which is why they’ve grown so rapidly and promoted so many voices that we would otherwise not encounter. If there is such a thing as a unique journey in publishing, this, so far, has been mine.
IA: Quite a journey too! Did you feel like an American expatriate in Bangladesh, or a Bangladeshi returning home for a year, only to then resume your life as a Bangladeshi expatriate (or should that be immigrant?) in the U.S.?
NZ: Makes one reel just to get the designations straight, right? It’s along the same lines of white Europeans and Americans being expats when they relocate outside Europe and the U.S., but people from Asia, Africa, Latin America, in other words, brown and black and other people of color are immigrants. Nowadays, not even that. Refugees, displaced and unwanted, is the terrible truth. American is something I continue to struggle with attaching to my identity. Perhaps it’s because of the post-9/11 traumas inflicted on people like me, and the continuing legacy of that keeps this disconnect alive by the powers that be of what “American” is and should be instead of what it has, in reality, been continually redefined as throughout the history of the Republic.
I was a Bangladeshi returning to my birthplace after a long separation. That sums it up. Only this time I was there with a U.S. passport that required a Bangladeshi visa. Go figure. I do think there’s a marked difference between a writer of non-Bangladeshi heritage writing about Bangladesh and one of Bangladeshi heritage. The best part about the year I spent in Bangladesh, all of it in Dhaka, was getting to know the city in a way unlike I had ever known it when we still lived there. Of course, I was young, and my life contained within a set number of places and ruled over by parental dictates, but still there were places I’d only heard of and never seen. Going back as an adult, with all my time to explore as much as I wished, it was glorious. It changed the way I looked at my novel, for one, as well as reconcile images stuck in memory with where reality had gone. Yes, Dhaka is a “different city” from the one of my childhood, but it’s also not. I will say that by the end of the trip, I was happy to return to the U.S., not as an expat or immigrant necessarily but as the place I’ve known as home longer than where I was born. I don’t know how to live day-to-day in Dhaka because I became an adult in the U.S., and so my routines have to do with life lived and known here.
IA:The day-to-day life in Dhaka is, in many ways, what the stories in Up in the Main House are about. Yet, you wrote them while becoming an adult in the U.S. Did you revisit them in Dhaka? Did the year you spent there change how you viewed them, or change them?
NZ: That’s right. They were all written in the U.S. over two years. I didn’t revisit them in Dhaka, because by then the novel was the center of all my writing energies and focus. Also, I had put the book of stories together and felt good about where they stood, and figured I’d revisit them if and when they got published as a collection. As for the substance and the content of the book, no, the year I spent there didn’t so much change my view as reinforce what I tried to do in the book, that is, to show this upstairs-downstairs existence of Dhaka, which is more or less unchanged from when I lived there. I was very much part of the upstairs, and the people that were downstairs existed only in their capacity as servants and drivers and peons and caretakers. I never knew them to have a life otherwise. Writing these stories was a way to imagine it. They formed out of the bits and pieces I carried from childhood, snatches of conversations, interactions between them when they were not “on duty,” and filling in huge gaps with made up, but probable, trials and joys and ups and downs.
Indie presses take the risks big publishing never will, which is why they’ve grown so rapidly and promoted so many diverse voices.
As it happens, in the moneyed circles, in the realm of the rich and the elite, that upstairs-downstairs narrative not only is alive but is kept alive—the same mentalities of master and servant, privilege of birth, family pedigree, old money and old ways that refuse to let go or see the end of that era, you know, your usual set up of systemic privilege and inequities that’s the norm in the world we live in. Just in its own, specific Bangladeshi garb. I would even say South Asian. This is a similarity with India and Pakistan as we all come out of the same history and can trace back the lineage of these systems to the same roots.
IA:How much of that is a hangover from the colonial era, do you think? Where does this South Asian mentality fit in its postcolonial literature?
NZ: I think it’s all a hangover from the colonial era, along with a host of other qualities, and no small amount of status quo maintenance by the emergent social elites of the country. How about the obsession with “fair” skin? I’m a case in point. No one takes me for a Bengali when I’m there. Strangers will address me in English and have also called me a “foreigner,” in the sense that the word is used in Bangla to mean, usually, white Europeans or Americans. I think this is one of the foundations that drive postcolonial literature, so much of which is invested in reclaiming identity, rewriting misrepresentations and false representations, and turning the gaze on the colonial past by examining its follies for what they are and also to take stock of where things are because of them. Whether it’s “chutnified” fiction, or whitewashed stories about “assimilated” South Asians in the U.S. and U.K., the lineage is one and the same—the colonial era. In the case of Bangladesh, there was a second period of colonization under the military regimes of Pakistan, which reinstated those colonial-era worldviews of pedigree, bloodlines, and inherited privilege.
IA:That is difficult to disagree with. I would add that, at least as far as English writing from Bangladeshis goes, the focus is very much on the upstairs people, those with pedigree and inherited privilege. The downstairs people are as invisible or neglected in literature as in real life, but they are the subjects of the stories in your collection. Aside from the snippets from childhood you have carried with you, what made you write against the grain?
NZ: The mystery. I had no idea of these people’s inner lives, and as a writer that’s what we do, right? We write to discover, and my curiosity had to do with the downstairs life I didn’t see, I couldn’t know, and would never live. Upstairs was my life. That’s not to say there aren’t stories to tell about it that can’t be as engaging, full of humanity and conflict and trials and revelations, and everything else stories bring us; but at the time I was writing these stories, I was definitely specifically interested in the downstairs lives. Who knows? Perhaps an upstairs counterpart sometime in the future? It’s not in the works, I assure you. Not yet.
But you know, if John Updike can make rich white suburban American life the stuff of literature and create people that one can care about even if nominally at best—and by care I don’t mean human kinship but care about as characters experiencing life as they are—then Dhaka upstairs life is really not too far off in its ways and means. The parties, the drinking, the marriages that have one face in public and a crumbling reality in private, the illusions, the delusions, and the moments that can come out of all these complexities and find refuge and transformation in and through fiction. That’s where they become the writer’s domain.
IA:From In The Time of The Others to Up In The Main House, Dhaka has been your canvas. In the former, it was Dhaka before you were born, and in the latter, it was the city long after you had left it. What draws you to Dhaka? In writing about two periods separated by almost fifty years, what stood out to you about it?
NZ: You’re right to point out that in my novel In the Time of the Others, it is a Dhaka that existed before I was born. It’s the Dhaka of my parents’ youth and experiences, and it’s a Dhaka I know only through their stories and countless other stories of the Liberation War. In that regard, in the case of the novel, it was because of the subject matter that I revisited Dhaka. Of course, there are hundreds of stories of the war once it spread out to the countryside, but I was focused on what unfolded in the city because that was ultimately the center.
Dhaka is a metropolis, unmanageable for the faint of heart, exciting, dangerous, old and new, and bursting at the seams
In the case of Up in the Main House, again, you make the important point that I was writing about Dhaka after I’d left it and been away. Now it was my memory of the city that I was recalling. The first attraction to writing Dhaka in my stories came from the same place of realizing after reading Midnight’s Children that this can happen in fiction with people like me and my experiences; that is, I had this moment where I thought, writers like Rushdie and Vikram Chandra and Anita Desai, Rohinton Mistry and Suketu Mehta had been writing Mumbai for decades, and so (I’m sure you see where this is headed) the same not only could be but needed to be done with Dhaka.
For me, it was a new realization in the sense that I’d never written at length about Dhaka in any way. And suddenly, there it was. The catch was, I only had memories, having not been back at that point in more than two decades. Which served me very well, because I could concentrate on the stories and the people in them first, and have Dhaka be the canvas, their refuge, and the common factor in their survival. The difference? I don’t imagine much. Especially in the context of the stories. As we’ve already discussed, this class and socioeconomic hierarchy has long been part of the Subcontinent’s DNA. What stood out, to answer your question, was how unchanged it is. Really, that’s the heart of it. And then, when I finally went back in 2017 and lived there for a year, I saw more how that class structure is still alive and well. And Dhaka, the physical city, is the quintessential 21st-century postcolonial space—colonized by extreme capitalism and under assault of corporate and financial venality, foreign and local. Modernity is in a clash with barebones existence round the clock.
IA: If this Dhaka that you have discovered—or perhaps rediscovered?—had to be placed in the U.S., in your mind, where does it fit? How does today’s America react to this metropolis that is bursting at the seams?
NZ: Dhaka is indeed a metropolis, overcrowded, unmanageable for the faint of heart, exciting, dangerous, old and new, and, as you rightly say, bursting at the seams. Outside of the predictable U.S. cities like New York and Chicago and Los Angeles, Dhaka is absorbing within its city limits what the U.S. as a country has no choice but to accept: the influx and movement of people because they can no longer live in their homes, countries, cities because of war and climate change.
Bangladesh’s countryside is under direct assault by climate change, and so people are moving in huge numbers to the city. Bangladesh doesn’t have multiple city centers like the U.S. There’s Dhaka, the capital, and that’s it. America today—depending on the perspective, and order of importance—would likely have ideas about Dhaka that are either badly informed, inadequately informed, or not at all informed. Just as climate change deniers here, there will be uninformed views that will point to poverty in Dhaka but not accept all the reasons for it. They’ll see the inequities but not see the corporate colonialism (Suketu Mehta’s very apt term) that is a huge contributor. They’ll point to corruption, and rightly so, among the rich and the powerful, but not include the huge multinational corporate greed that adds to that corruption on a global scale.
There’s definitely need for better and more representation in world literature. I hope these stories contribute in ways that make for more complex conversations, raise questions out of more questions, and keep the space open not for answers but for ongoing exploration.
Before you go: Electric Literature is campaigning to reach 1,000 members by 2020, and you can help us meet that goal. Having 1,000 members would allow Electric Literature to always pay writers on time (without worrying about overdrafting our bank accounts), improve benefits for staff members, pay off credit card debt, and stop relying on Amazon affiliate links. Members also get store discounts and year-round submissions. If we are going to survive long-term, we need to think long-term. Please support the future of Electric Literature by joining as a member today!
We have just the antidote to brighten your tedious, soul-crushing commute: literary podcasts! It’s like joining a low-key bookclub with your wittiest and most intelligent friends, but minus the drama, the petty arguments about who was suppose to bring the brownies, and, you know, the actual book-reading. From a 5-minute a day poetry reading to craft advice to the low-down on literary scandals, we’ve curated a diverse selection of podcasts for every book person.
Huge thanks to Jennifer Baker, Erin Bartnett and Adam Vitcavage for their excellent literary podcast recommendations.
Generation veXby Stephenson Ardern-Sodje, Sharon Rose and Vanessa Fisher
Based in London, Generation veX is an exciting new British podcast that “focuses on books by people of colour, for people of colour.” Backed by Idris Elba’s production company and hosted by West End actors Stephenson Ardern-Sodje, Sharon Rose and Vanessa Fisher, Generation veX attempts “to navigate the confusing landscape of modern millennial identity, all with the help of some seriously good books.” Guests include Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo, Sara Collins, Derek Owusu, and Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.
Hosted by former booksellers Becca Younk and Corinne Kenner, The Bookstore is a weekly podcast with two really good friends discussing a diverse selection of books (from Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police to Dianne Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle) and giving the low-down on book news, authors feuds, and literary scandals.
The Slowdown by Tracy K. Smith in partnership with the Poetry Foundation
Don’t have time to sit through an hour-long episode? That’s fair. How about just five minutes? For five minutes a day, U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith introduces and reads a poem. Eric Silver calls The Slowdown “a literary once-a-day multivitamin to keep your body going a little bit longer.”
Ok ok, so this one isn’t strictly a literary podcast but it is hosted by authors Myriam Gurba and MariNaomi who are “bisexual, bi-racial/cultural and share a penchant for puns.” Acomedy-advice podcast, Gurba and MariNaomi discuss feminism, culture, sexuality while doling out wisdom about writing and relationships. Past episodes have touched on cis-het marketing to queers, the boundaries between being a fan and a stalker on social media, and periods (just to clarify it’s menstruation period, and not grammar period).
Malaysians Honey Ahmad and Diana Yeong host this delightfully nerdy and zippy podcast. From an insightful discussion about whether Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments is worth the hype to musings about the dreaded DNFs (do not finish books), Two Book Nerds Talking is a fun literary podcast that feels like sitting in a cafe with your best friend and having an animated discussion about the latest book you loved (or hated).
WMFA is a podcast for writers about “why and how we write.” Airing every Wednesday, episodes alternate between 30-minute conversations with authors about craft and 5-minute personal “minisodes” on creative issues. Past guests include Alexandra Chee on returning to humanity, Morgan Parker on telling hard truths, and Lisa Ko on fictionalizing real life.
Broads and Books is a funny feminist book podcast hosted by Amy Lee Lillard and Erin Johnston. Each episode revolves around a theme (Sex Stuff, Truth Bomb, Iowa Nice, and etc.) and four books are picked based on that theme. The lifelong friends “share embarrassing stories, unachievable reading lists, amazing business ideas, anecdotes about Podcat the cat and her latest attempts to kill them.”
Hosted by poet and visual artist Avren Keating, Waves Breaking is a podcast that highlights the work of trans, genderqueer, and other gender variant poets. Past guests have included Raquel Salas Rivera, Jayy Dodd, and Andrea Abi-Karam.
Weird Kids Wanted is “for alternative individuals who are tired of their cultural experiences being curated by normies for normies. Our podcast and blog disrupt the status quo of commercialized shit lit and provide a community for weird kids to flourish.” Hosted by roommates Miyuki Okamura and Zoe Darazsdi, expect bitchy literary gossip, poignant social criticism and anti-capitalist book reviews. From topics like queerbaiting in media to Jane Eyre’s guide to taking down fuckboys to dismantling stereotypes, Weird Kids Wanted is the wickedly humorous podcast that every outsider should listen to.
Hosted by librarians Gwen Glazer and Frank Collerius, The Librarian Is In is New York Public Library’s podcast about “books, pop culture and the literary zeitgeist, and the world of libraries.” Past episodes have featured stories of the curiosities in NYPL’s archives, a discussion of beloved dogs in literature, and special guests.
88 Cups of Tea is a podcast for writers, each episode delves into “how-to’s and step-by-step advice to encourage and motivate your way to creative success.” From YA author Angie Thomas talking about crafting powerful narratives and finding a writing community to Molly Jaffee discussing what it takes to be a successful literary agent, 88 Cups of Tea provides craft and entrepreneurial advice to help aspiring creatives navigate the publishing industry.
Author and NYU professor Rachel Zucker interviews poets and other people about “recipes, advice, lists, anecdotes, quotes, politics, phobias, spiritual practices, and other non-Literary forms of knowledge that are vital to an artist’s life and work.” Commonplace feels like listening in “on the kind of unexpected, intriguing connections that only happen when interesting people sit together in a small room and talk about their real concerns and ordinary lives.”
Mitzi Rapkin, the Director of Community Relations for the city of Aspen, started her weekly podcast 6 years ago. First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing features authors discussing their books and their craft. Past guests have included Karen Russell, Laila Lalami, Petina Gappah, and Tina Chang.
Culture critic Maris Kreizman speaks to writers about “the ways in which a wide variety of culture affects their work, because very few authors live in bubbles without TV and internet.” Past episodes have featured Lili Anolik talking about sending leopard-print Vans to Eve Babitz and John Hodgman on life as a very minor television personality.
Before you go: Electric Literature is campaigning to reach 1,000 members by 2020, and you can help us meet that goal. Having 1,000 members would allow Electric Literature to always pay writers on time (without worrying about overdrafting our bank accounts), improve benefits for staff members, pay off credit card debt, and stop relying on Amazon affiliate links. Members also get store discounts and year-round submissions. If we are going to survive long-term, we need to think long-term. Please support the future of Electric Literature by joining as a member today!
Wikipedia gets a bad rap for a website with so much cool, free information. Yes, it’s occasionally unreliable, but it’s a useful website for learning a high school essay amount about basically anything you might need to write a high school essay on. And Wikipedia really shines when it comes to niche information. The pages we’ve dug up here cover a range of topics, from fartists to emus to unidentified sounds. Hopefully one of them will inspire you to write something deeply bananas.
Tarrare ate live cats, poop, forks, eels, secret military messages, raw animal intestines, snake meat (his favorite), human blood, human corpses, and, allegedly, a toddler. Doctors studied him (read: fed him lots of weird stuff to see if he would eat it) but couldn’t find what was wrong with him. This novel could follow both Tarrare and the toddler he eventually eats, winding together the events of their lives until their tragic meeting. (Author’s note: Please do not write a Tarrare-themed cookbook).
When emus began attacking Australian farmer’s crops during the Great Depression, the farmers’ solution was to have the Australian government send in a military unit armed with machine guns to fight the birds. Unfortunately for the farmers (but fortunately for emu-enthusiasts), the emus proved very difficult to kill. We’re envisioning a heart-wrenching epistolary novel between a man on the front lines of the emu war and the child he left at home.
Part-way through the 1912 Olympic marathon, world-record-holding marathon runner Shizo Kanakuri fainted. When he woke up, he was so embarrassed that he left the race and went back to Japan without telling anyone, which caused Swedish officials to think he was missing for over 50 years. When it was discovered that he had been in Japan, he was invited back to Stockholm to finish the race 50 years after he began. This novel could take place entirely during Kanakuri’s final lap of the marathon, where he runs and remembers the events of his long and beautiful life.
True to his name, Mike was a chicken who lived for 18 months without a head. Overcoming all odds, he continued to do normal chicken things, like peck and crow/gurgle. We’re imagining an Animal Farm-style dystopian novel where Mike convinces other chickens to give up their heads in order to achieve real freedom.
This gives a whole new meaning to Brad Pitt’s eternal question “What’s in the box???” Yes, we’re talking about mailing the biggest package of all: your entire living body. Apparently there’s a bit of a tradition of people mailing themselves as pranks/to escape slavery/just to see what happens. This would obviously be a book of short stories, written from the perspectives of the mail carrier, the recipient, the pilot of the cargo plane, and the person in the box.
photograph by Dilaudid, distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license
Not for the faint of heart, this strategy involves allowing ghosts to dictate your next move in the board game Go, and might have caused the death of Go prodigy Akaboshi Intetsu. While rivals Hon’inbō Jōwa and Akaboshi were playing Go, a ghost allegedly told Jōwa which moves to make in order to win. When Jōwa won, Akaboshi vomited blood on the game board and died (been there). We think this would be a beautiful romance novel about a love triangle between two bitter rivals and a ghost they both loved.
image by Jahzcore, distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license
For one month in 2016, the town of Forest Grove, Oregon was occasionally plagued by a mysterious sound. The source of the noise was never discovered, but it was heard in many unrelated parts of town and described as a “mechanical scream.” What was making this noise? Could it have been the giant automaton that town leaders buried in the forest hundreds of years ago, finally awake and ready for revenge? Or could it be the giant automaton that town leaders buried in the forest hundreds of years ago, finally awake and ready for love? One thing’s for sure: it was the giant automaton buried in the woods.
photograph by Jesse Berry, distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license
These are trees grown from seeds that were taken into space and orbited the moon. While the trees weren’t actually grown on the moon, the name is whimsical enough to inspire some good stories. What if a new type of plant grew from the seeds? Or a tree that produces little moons? Maybe this could be a story about a girl who tends a lunar garden, or maybe all the moon trees can communicate with each other and they feel lonely among the earth trees. All these possibilities have us starry-eyed.
Looking for a Wikipedia article that uses the word sphincter in the first paragraph? Look no further than the original bag of hot air: this guy. Most people consider farting a hobby at best, but for Le Pétomane, farting was literally his career. He could fart on command, and he was so good at it that he performed at the Moulin Rouge. This piece would obviously be a sprawling, historical fiction novel charting Le Pétomane’s life and career from his childhood to his retirement from showbiz in protest of the violence of WWI.
In the 18th century, it was popular for rich people to have large gardens. If you were really wealthy and a little bit (or a lot) eccentric, your garden would be incomplete without a guy you paid to live in a little house in your garden, dressed like a druid and ready to offer advice and counsel—because nothing says “I have the wisdom you seek” like the old man you’ve been paying to stand in your backyard wearing a toga. This novel could be a series of journal entries from the garden hermit himself, except in this case he’s a woman in disguise who’s in love with the lady of the house.
Before you go: Electric Literature is campaigning to reach 1,000 members by 2020, and you can help us meet that goal. Having 1,000 members would allow Electric Literature to always pay writers on time (without worrying about overdrafting our bank accounts), improve benefits for staff members, pay off credit card debt, and stop relying on Amazon affiliate links. Members also get store discounts and year-round submissions. If we are going to survive long-term, we need to think long-term. Please support the future of Electric Literature by joining as a member today!
From the title, you might think that On Swift Horsesis about cowboys, horse wrangling, rural landscapes—and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Shannon Pufahl’s debut novel explores wide-open spaces and how people navigate them in a post-Depression, post-World War II, Baby Boomer era in Southern California where the land is steadily becoming ripe for the housing market, revealing a new world being built before the characters’ very eyes.
The story follows Muriel, newly wed to Lee, and her transient brother-in-law Julius. Their paths are not easy to navigate. The winding roads they take, both literally and metaphorically, reveal their methods of hiding who they are and what they want in order to fit in with societal expectations. For Muriel and Julius, gambling—at the race track and casinos, respectively—results in some hefty gains and unexpected losses. Muriel’s life is stationary but secretive; her trips to the track and her a life as a server and housewife seem good enough, until they aren’t. For Julius, a closeted gay man, his dismissal from the armed forces means stability is a fallacy, especially after he gets a taste of it. As their lives, fears, and desires rotate around one another in the narrative, the two rarely hold space in the same location, yet location is of utmost importance in the way Pufahl weaves a larger story of an ever-changing world and the people attempting to fit into it.
A Stegner Fellow and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Pufahl writes with confidence and unravels many layers, not just for the settings she describes but for the characters who inhabit them. She and I spoke a lot about locale and how it plays out in her work, the use of gambling as metaphor in On Swift Horses, and the ways in which vulnerability can play out for people over time.
Jennifer Baker: The occupancy of space is such an important thing in prose, especially in narrative. And you’re really putting readers in there from page one of On Swift Horses. Is [writing] setting more of your comfort zone?
Shannon Pufahl: I was just talking to somebody the other day and they were saying, “What do you want people to know about this book?” That I tried very much to create a world that people could recognize even though they haven’t been there. And I wanted to do that in the present tense and in that way without much exposition. The reader is sort of plopped into these spaces as if it were another world. A lot of what you learn about characters comes from their interactions with space and their physical gestures, right? So it’s not a book with a ton of interiority.
JB: Everyone is kind of operating within the space that they’re in due to comfort levels or even discomfort and expectations. You’re dealing with post-World War II; there’s so much expectation. But there’s also secrecy, too, and how the land kind of plays into that, especially for Julius who’s very nomadic. When you’re using land and space as well as time period, is that dictating more of your characters’ actions than you think?
I really wanted to write a book that was about queer life before there was really much public discourse about it.
SP: Oh yeah. I really wanted to write a book that was about queer life before there was really much public discourse about it. And certainly very little political language—and what little political language did exist was actually punitive or derogatory. So much of how you learn about the characters in the story comes from that place of not having very much language to describe what they want.
People with certain kinds of vulnerability find themselves very careful or very tentative in the spaces around them. In this book I wanted to get at what is it like as a man whose queerness is in some way evident to others, even if it’s not a thing that they can describe. And to be a woman in the mid-century in public places, and in places as an employee, and how that really did kind of create certain kinds of fragility and then dictate the way they interact in spaces. I think a lot of the things I learned as a kid about how to be around other people were largely protective. Protective of my not very feminine body. Or protective of what people drew out of me as a kind of “strangeness.” I think a lot of the desire to do landscape and physical gestures in this book had very much to do with having that kind of vulnerability.
JB: There’s also an element of invisibility. Particularly for Muriel as a woman to be hidden in certain spaces. I wondered: Do they feel protected, even in the performance space? They’re doing this to feel as though they won’t be objectified. I think it’s in the guise of safety, but they’re not safe because, like you said, there’s a level of vulnerability that’s always there.
SP: Especially for Muriel there’s a measure of relief when she is seen, however partially, by Julius. It’s a kind of desire for invisibility that’s a desire to prevent a kind of painful understanding. So when you’re someone like Muriel who is trying to figure out what she wants in a world that has limited opportunity for actualizing that, or even for finding the language for that, I think being misunderstood can be especially painful because you’re getting the kind of feedback from the world that doesn’t match your own internal experience. For Muriel it’s less about safety than trying to avoid being seen wrongly, which I think is how she lived most of her life. For Julius it is more about what are the ways I can disappear into a kind of sanctioned masculinity to avoid certain kinds of danger. Part of his arc is about working that out. Which I think is an arc that queer people have to work out in general. Of course there are many different experiences for being queer and some people have some opportunities for invisibility or visibility. But nevertheless I think part of the question for queer people especially is what parts are for me and what parts can be reasonably understood, what parts are for me and what parts are for a kind of political discourse, and negotiating all of those different languages.
JB: The past is always talking to the present and to the future. But when you’re a writer writing something that happened 70 years ago, do you see those things coming into play? And do you need to recognize that connection considering you’re writing from a contemporary lens?
SP: I was really interested in writing a historical novel from this period because I really did want to write about queer life before there was a political movement that made it visible and named. I mean there were always pockets of that. But I think in particular queer life outside of the urban centers of the time period where people had formed communities. So largely queer people from the rural working classes, who are my people. But I think it’s also these questions keep coming up and have kept coming up for 100 years in large part because we’ve not really found reasonable, social ways to deal with issues that have to deal with identity and disenfranchisement.
One of the little plots that exists inside this novel is about the displacement of lots of different people from Southern California during that time, and the way that if you were to look at a kind of time lapse of San Diego and L.A. you would just see increasingly marginalized communities shuttled off into places that are difficult to live in for one reason or another. I don’t think I make a lot of those [points] very openly. But I do think it is in the universe in which the story occurs. The sort of mounting changes that are brought by the interstate systems, the real first modern housing boom in Southern California, and the people who ended up redlined in other parts of the city that now look the way they look, which is largely, I suppose you might say, segregated. So to me that’s sort of where it starts. And that is definitely part of the story these characters are enacting.
JB: Let’s get into the casino life. Gambling is something I don’t read about often. I don’t know if this is by chance or if it’s not on my radar. But I haven’t had the opportunity to read too many books on gambling that also didn’t necessarily center addiction. In general and in the casino life characters like Julius take risks and great risks for various reasons. I liked this tether, the risk and loss of control plus that excitement and that fear in case you get caught. But the dramatization, especially in novel form, of gambling and especially gambling that isn’t about addiction.
There may not be that many books that deal intricately with gambling, but there are many that understand it as a metaphor for people’s lives.
SP: I love gambling. I’ve done a lot of it in my life. And I think I was really interested in what is actually like to be sitting in a card game, to be playing cards. And what are the stakes? And how do these things that most people don’t think about change the circumstances in which you’re playing that game? Gambling is a terrific metaphor. There may not be that many books that deal intricately with gambling, but there are many that understand it as a metaphor for people’s lives and what it is that they’re actually looking for and all of that. But I think one thing that interested me, and it shows up early in the story, is exactly that: Why would you win all this money and stick around? In what cases is it a benefit to stay in loss and in that way kind of upset fortune? How is that something that people do very often as a way of protecting themselves from whatever dangers they see in the world? That’s essentially Julius’s first scene, right, when he’s playing cards and he’s winning and he’s starting to realize that winning is dangerous in that context. So I’m very interested in that question, but I also think one of the things that’s important to me is to reaffirm the value of risk-taking. It’s a very difficult time that we’re living in, for various reasons, and it’s a very anxious time. One of the things I’m interested in in my own life is figuring out how uncertainty can be repurposed. In what ways can uncertainty be made into something that is vital and enlightening rather than something that seems like every day that much more ineffectual? But also the idea of leaving for the sake of some kind of social protection is something that a lot of queer people will understand. I think hopefully marginalized people in general, but I think queer people will. In what ways are you creating social spaces for yourself that may be to your kind of immediate detriment but are in the service of your protection in the longer time? That made sense to me as a way of thinking through the process.
JB: At the end of the day with these characters, do you feel—and maybe this is an unfair question—they get to a place of comfort?
SP: I think that for me I was so resistant to writing anything like a coming out story, which does kind of have that arc, right? Where it begins in discomfort and ends in comfort. Where it begins in darkness and ends in visibility. I think for lots of reasons there’s something conventional at this point about that story, which is actually a great thing that there’s kind of conventions around something so politically important. But, also, [On Swift Horses] is set in a time before that story really existed. It’s really not until the late ’60s and ’70s and movements in New York and San Francisco where coming out and making public declarations about yourself or your sexuality became the political tool that we understand it to be. What would that even look like in the mid/late ’50s? So instead of that kind of story, I was very interested in how is it these characters find a way to describe their own desires or to invent for themselves something that looks like a livable life. If I think about it that way, I think that the characters have found ways to have a livable life. And livable is not necessarily good or bad.
Before you go: Electric Literature is campaigning to reach 1,000 members by 2020, and you can help us meet that goal. Having 1,000 members would allow Electric Literature to always pay writers on time (without worrying about overdrafting our bank accounts), improve benefits for staff members, pay off credit card debt, and stop relying on Amazon affiliate links. Members also get store discounts and year-round submissions. If we are going to survive long-term, we need to think long-term. Please support the future of Electric Literature by joining as a member today!
My best friend growing up was my aunt Jessica. She was only eight years older, so we behaved like siblings—spending weekends together, playing rented video games or watching video cassettes, shooting basketball in the yard and, once Jessica could drive, riding around with no real destination or purpose in mind.
It was not her first car, but the one I remember most vividly was a four-door, champagne colored Honda Accord with creamy leather seats and a tinted sunroof I’d stand and wedge my head through while Jessica steered us along unlined country roads. Sometimes we stopped at a gas station that had arcade cabinets in back where Jessica’s friends hung out and smoked cigarettes they weren’t old enough to buy. I feared the older boys, loved the older girls. Other times we just cruised and listened to rap music.
Jessica loved rap music—and I loved what Jessica loved because she was so cool. She subscribed to the Columbia House Record Club, cussed, played football with boys, her three-point shot was true, she could beat video games I could not. She introduced me to Snoop Dogg, Tupac, Salt-N-Pepa, Notorious B.I.G., TLC, Arrested Development. Music that in no way resembled our rural Alabama existence, which was isolated both geographically and culturally. This was before the internet, before the South was glamorized in glossy magazines, before hip people in Brooklyn dressed like my father, a coal miner, and the other men buying snack cakes and soft drinks at our local gas station on weekday mornings.
I saw little worth in the rural South and, as a result, in myself. I only wanted out.
I remember my parents once asking what I wanted to be when I grew up. I couldn’t have been older than 10 or 11 at the time. My mother often took me to the public library and bought me mass-market paperbacks at the Walmart. My father brought home The Birmingham News and I cut out advertisements for films then taped them on my bedroom wall. I told my parents I wanted to be a writer. That’s not a job, they said. How could I argue? No one I knew wrote much more than their name on a check. The music I listened to, the books I read, the movies I watched, none of them sprung from the clay beneath my feet. Back then, I saw little worth in the rural South and, as a result, in myself. I only wanted out. Since I couldn’t leave, the next best thing was singing along with rap music, strapped in the backseat of my aunt’s car with an ice-cold Mountain Dew gripped between my pale legs, imagining a future entirely unlike my present.
Jessica, as always, was steps ahead of me. She’d begun reading and writing poetry. After high school she attended college in a city near the Gulf Coast. She sent missives back to me. Perhaps the most important was a novel by Larry Brown. It was called Dirty Workand much of its truth sailed over my head. But I loved this book in an elemental way. Partly because Jessica had given it to me, but also because it struck a nerve. Here was a story set in a rural South I recognized, written by a man whose slight grin and neat mustache resembled my father’s. According to my limited understanding of art and who made it, Dirty Work shouldn’t have existed. Maybe that’s why I embraced it so.
Eventually Jessica went to graduate school in North Carolina, studied creative writing and published her verse in a book. She got out. So imagine my surprise when I discovered all the poems she wrote were about our people, our home. I did not immediately take up the pen as well. This isn’t that kind of origin story. I wandered while Jessica counseled and watched. By the time I came back to Larry Brown’s books, he’d died of a heart attack at only 53 years old.
Since then Larry has been mythologized to the point his writing gets obscured by tall tales about the man behind it. I hope this will change in November when Algonquin publishes Tiny Love, a complete retrospective including every story from Larry’s collections Facing the Music and Big Bad Love, as well as several stories never published in book form.
Reading Tiny Love reminded me why Larry’s work mattered to a young man who, for a time, loathed the place he came from and resisted its influence. When people talk about Larry’s writing, they often use words like honest, gritty, dark, eccentric, heartbreaking, doomed. Words, I think, intended to encapsulate the idea that Larry Brown was an authentic Southern writer—whatever that means. There are many different Souths and the term “authenticity” is little more than a Rorschach test for whoever uses it.
My admiration for Larry has little to do with the authenticity of his take on the region I call home. I appreciate his specificity, how lovingly and unflinchingly he writes about the lives of particular rural Southerners. Take the new book’s title story, in which a man named Tiny works the line at a factory, operating a gigantic press that stamps out metal pieces for kitchen stoves. Tiny must watch where he places his hands or else lose them to the machine. But he has a lot on his mind, namely his wife’s drinking problem. Every evening on the way home from work, Tiny buys a half-pint of liquor for her. The Four Roses and Heaven Hill and Old Grand-Dad are killing his wife, and Tiny knows it. But she needs liquor and, in turn, she needs him. Brown writes, “[Tiny’d] hold her close and think, Lord, I love her, and then she’d ask for another drink and Tiny would get up and fix it.”
Larry understood that work is not a literary device, but something flesh and blood people do in order to survive.
Larry understood that work is not a literary device, but something flesh and blood people do in order to survive. He knew love was no clear-cut thing. Economic opportunity—or the lack of it—and heartache is the water in which his characters swim because that is what he often encountered in rural Mississippi.
In the foreword to Tiny Love, Jonathan Miles writes “The models for [Larry’s] characters were individuals, not types: the people he’d grown up with, that he’d worked beside, that he’d get to talking to at bars, that he’d rescued from crushed vehicles, that he’d listened to trading stories and gossip at the little country store he ran for a while in the eighties, that he’d see walking shoeless on the roadside with no easy destination he could imagine for them.” In other words, Larry wrote about the people he lived alongside—and he did so with a tremendous amount of responsibility and empathy.
As I became older, this aspect of Larry’s fiction gripped me. I’d tried many ways to set myself apart from my neighbors and family. I begged for a seafoam-green electric guitar I never learned to play beyond plucking a few notes of “Smoke on the Water.” At a beauty parlor I sat while my hair was frosted to resemble a character’s on a popular TV show. I convinced my father to give me money to buy expensive clothes that did not fit me like the slim models in a store window at the Birmingham mall. I talked shit on rednecks, who were, in my estimation, almost everyone I encountered on a daily basis. In Larry’s stories there was no stereotyping or sentimentalizing. Compassion was unlimited. I found nuance surrounding rural identity, class, shame. Where before I saw rednecks, I now saw individuals—human beings.
In “The Rich,” a story originally published in Facing the Music, we encounter a character struggling with class and shame. It begins, “Mr. Pellisher works at a travel agency, and he associates with the rich. Sometimes the rich stop by in the afternoon hours when the working citizens have fled the streets to punch their clocks… Mr. Pellisher keeps his punch clock carefully hidden behind stacks of travel folders, as if he’s on straight salary. As if he’s like the rich, free of the earthly shackles of timekeepers. He keeps a pot of coffee on hot for the rich, in case the rich deign to share a cup with him, even though Mr. Pellisher pays for the coffee himself.”
In Larry’s stories there was no stereotyping or sentimentalizing. Compassion was unlimited.
Larry worked many different jobs in his life. Of writing, he told the filmmaker Gary Hawkins, “I was just looking for a way to make some extra money. I was doing all these shit jobs, putting up chain-link fences for Sears, baggin’ groceries, running a country store. I thought, Ain’t there something better I could do?”
Turned out there was.
I never met Larry. But two summers ago a friend connected me with Shane Brown, Larry’s son. Shane and his brother Billy Ray run a dairy operation, which their father wrote about in a beautiful essay titled “Billy Ray’s Farm.” I was in Oxford, Mississippi, to discuss my novel at Square Books—the store that nurtured Larry and so many other writers from near and afar.
I met Shane in Yocona at the house where he grew up and his father died in 2004. Shane showed me The Cool Pad, a long and narrow room off the carport where his father wrote. Photographs of Larry and his friends were taped to the wall. Dust covered every surface—from an acoustic guitar to a pair of boots. Shane played me a message left on an old answering machine by the writer Harry Crews. Later, we got in Shane’s truck and drove around in “the gloam,” which, according to Jonathan Miles, is how Larry habitually described the day’s last hour. There was a cooler in back. While I fished for light beers, Shane pointed out places that had inspired his father’s writing. My head was on a swivel. After a while I gave up trying to take in everything. Larry’s characters often find escape with a bottle and an empty stretch of blacktop road. I leaned back, relaxed.
Eventually we arrived at Tula. Shane and I walked across a spillway his father had constructed one small trailer filled with dirt at a time to create a private fishpond. Larry wrote about this too. On the other side of the pond, tucked among tall pines and leafy oaks, stood the shack, Larry called it, meant to be his writing home away from home. He died before making much use of the place. A typewriter sat by the window, a rolodex on the desk. Shane told me I could take pictures, but I didn’t want a camera to intrude. I told myself to pay attention, though I doubted I’d ever write about this evening.
The twilight was noisy with crickets and frogs. Shane and I sat on a pier and shared another drink. Before full dark, we visited Larry’s grave. I knew he was buried at Tula and wondered how I’d feel upon seeing the site. I was not overcome with awe. This was my writing hero, but he was someone’s father, husband, son. A flesh and blood person like those in his stories. Looking around the property, I recalled a line from Larry’s essay “By the Pond,” which goes, “It’s one thing to have a life in a place, and to be happy in it is quite another.”
This was my writing hero, but he was someone’s father, husband, son. A flesh and blood person like those in his stories.
Back in Yocona, while the Brown grandchildren helped bottle fresh cow’s milk, Billy Ray grilled steaks and hot dogs and hunks of venison wrapped in bacon. We ate with our hands, drank cold beers. I stayed past midnight listening to Shane and Billy Ray tell stories about their father. Just like Larry’s writing, the brothers were generous and funny. I told them the greatest compliment I ever received was from a writer who knew their father and said he suspected Larry would’ve liked me too. The brothers agreed with this assessment. Had I not been so full of meat and beer, I might’ve floated on up to heaven right then.
I had a good buzz by the time I drove to my motel in Oxford—about ten miles distance. If you are not from a rural place, you may not understand the pleasure of puttering along an empty two-lane in such a gently inebriated state. I thought about calling my aunt Jessica, but it was late and she and I had grown apart. Another line of Larry’s returned to me: “You can’t pick where you’re born or raised. You take what you’re given, whether it’s the cornfields of the Midwest or the coal mines of West Virginia, and you make your fiction out of it. It’s all you have. And somehow, wherever you are, it always seems to be enough.”
If we are to believe the title of this new book, then the stories within are about love. Remember Tiny: “He believed in Social Security and he believed that he would live a long and healthy life and he believed that his job was a form of security as solid as anything anybody could ever hope for. Sometimes he longed to drive the forklifts. Sometimes he longed to be the foreman over the assembly line where fifty people put stoves together and drilled holes with drills and inserted screws with air-driven screwdrivers and sent them on down the line, because the press department was too loud for talk and almost too loud for thought, but Tiny had only two thoughts anyway and they were, Lord, I love her, Kentucky Tavern.”
Like Tiny, I grew up in a place where love gets shown in many different ways. My aunt passes along a certain book, my father asks if I saw last night’s Braves game, my mother tells me to pray that my sister does well on an exam. They say to love someone else you must first learn how to accept and love yourself. No other writer has helped me do that—and continues to—more than Larry Brown.
Before you go: Electric Literature is campaigning to reach 1,000 members by 2020, and you can help us meet that goal. Having 1,000 members would allow Electric Literature to always pay writers on time (without worrying about overdrafting our bank accounts), improve benefits for staff members, pay off credit card debt, and stop relying on Amazon affiliate links. Members also get store discounts and year-round submissions. If we are going to survive long-term, we need to think long-term. Please support the future of Electric Literature by joining as a member today!
Podcasts are now a fixture of popular media and while certain podcast genres consistently rank high on the charts — true crime and political commentary being the mainstays—there has been an increase in more creative styles of podcasting: the fiction podcast, sometimes called the audio drama. These stories use the medium to guide listeners through fictional sonic worlds, oftentimes laced with elements of horror, building stories that can readily blend fiction and reality. While a similar attempt at blending fiction and reality through a faux-documentary approach in horror movies, like the Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, were once considered genre-bending hits, they have now inevitably become a cliche. Viewers seem to lose interest once a handful of directors deployed the documentary approach well. On the other hand, radio dramas have existed for significantly longer than horror movies, yet their current podcast iterations are just as effective now as they have been in the past.
Audio drama podcasts come out of the long history of radio and the serialized narratives performed live for listeners at home. The most infamous example being Orson Welles’s October 30th, 1938 radio play based on H.G. Wells’s classic alien invasion story, The War of the Worlds. The play, which was only about an hour long, is most well-known for the hysteria it supposedly sparked among listeners, some of whom believed the invasion was actually happening in real time as the story unfolded over the airwaves. Though the rumors of widespread panic may be more of an urban legend, the broadcast reveals the medium’s potential for real-world impact on listeners. As Dorothy Thompason, a New York Tribune columnist, wrote of the play: “They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can so convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create nation-wide panic.”
We are aware that we are staring at a screen or a page of a book—but there are more ways to subtly trick the ear.
The listener response to Welles’ dramatized Martian invasion exemplifies the audio drama’s unique ability to blend fantasy and reality in ways other genres cannot. Although we might lose our sense of time or be wholly engrossed in a movie or book, there is less potential for slippage between reality and fiction. We are aware that we are staring at a screen or a page of a book—but there are more ways to subtly trick the ear.
Key to the effectiveness of Welles’s play was the structure of the broadcast itself. If listeners did believe Martians were attacking, they did so because the play was presented as regular radio programming, periodically interrupted by the fake newscasts detailing the invasion. If the listener happened to miss the show’s opening, which clearly introduced the play as fiction, then they would have little reason to believe that this wasn’t a real broadcast. By playing into listener expectation around radio conventions, Welles was able to manipulate listener experience.
Using established audio tropes as a springboard for more fantastic stories is an approach that still works today. Like Welles’s fictional use of newscasting, a common convention used in modern audio drama podcasts draws direct inspiration from the format of other popular podcasting genres, namely the highly produced reportage of shows like This American Life and Serial. When Serial premiered in 2014 it was an instant success, reaching 5 million downloads and streams in less than nine weeks. Its popularity impacted the entire podcasting community, creating what was dubbed “The Serial Effect,” where listeners of Serial also began listening to other podcasts in similar genres. Though podcasts were already gaining popularity across the board, Serial brought a noticeable bump in listener numbers for many shows.
Serial ushered in a slew of other shows tackling the topics, but it also provided a blueprint for fictional narratives. While programs like Welcome to Night Vale already took from community radio hours and added their own fantastical twist, 2015 and 2016 saw a rise in horror- or thriller-based fiction podcasts mirroring Serial-like reporting—but with a decidedly spooky bent. One early staple of the genre, The Black Tapes, follows the reporting of Alex Reagan, an investigative journalist for Pacific Northwest Stories profiling the paranormal investigator Dr. Richard Strand and his collection of unsolved mysteries housed on VHS tapes, dubbed “The Black Tapes.” The radio program, like Reagan and Strand, are completely fictional, but the charm of the show lies in its juxtaposition between the straightforward, slickly produced tone and the weird paranormal content. The format was so believable that quite a few fans bashfully reached out on forums, asking whether the story was “real.”
It’s precisely because listeners approach the story with preconceptions that it feels believable.
The serialized investigative journalism framing works well for these paranormal and thriller narratives because the form gives writers enough structure to explore fantastic elements while remaining grounded. No matter how bizarre the plot points get, listeners can still track the story. But more importantly, the format troubles the line between reality and fantasy in the same spirit as The War of the Worlds. It’s precisely because listeners already approach the story with their own preconceptions that it feels believable. A podcast that hits certain beats will unconsciously trigger certain responses because it plays off how we consume the media it is mirroring.
There are other ways for audio dramatists to blur the line between fantasy and fiction to trick the mind and ear of the listener without relying heavily on a specific structural trope. In Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, Neil Verma discusses the discourse among early radio dramatists as they tried to expand the narrative capabilities of radio. He writes,
Dramatists thought they were writing for a “blind man” and used speech to convey anything that would be silently visual in the theater. By the late 1930s, that preference had changed. Radio listeners became accustomed to recognizing purely aural rules that signified movement around the world of drama. For instance, around this time it became common for narrators to cut in and out at the end. Listeners learned that the longer the pause between scenes, the greater the distance traversed in the world of fiction.
Venma shows how listeners became familiar with narrative conventions over time, even when these conventions are not explicitly explained. Rather than relying on spoken exposition to position the listener in space and time, sound engineers conjure the scene using sound cues. Over time, specific sounds come to be linked to certain locales or affects based on usage, thereby situating the listener without relying on a narrator constantly explaining what is going on. Because an enjoyable audio drama isn’t just about tracking a linear story through sound; it’s about experiencing an atmosphere.
Marc Sollinger, the co-creater and writer for the audio drama podcast, Archive 81, writing about the art of effective podcast for Electric Literature, made a similar point about building a sonic world:
An easy way to think about audio drama is as television without pictures, but just writing a television script and expecting it to make a good fiction podcast is a terrible plan. The audience won’t know what the heck is going on and the whole thing will sound boring and lifeless. This is a super obvious point, but it bears pointing out: TV and film are visual mediums, audio drama is a sonic medium.
As Sollinger notes, developing an effective audio drama is not only about making sure that listeners know what’s happening. It’s technically possible to keep a story tightly structured, making sure that a listener knows precisely what is happening and when. But there is the secondary issue that Sollinger points out—that tight-fisted type storytelling, though precise and clear, will also be boring and lifeless.
Letting go of heavy spoken exposition creates the space for greater listener participation in the story, leading to a more immersive experience. The bustling sounds of a city—honking cars, revving engines, the rapid sound of many feet hitting the pavement—are enough to tell the listener what type of environment they are in, but the city appearing in the listener’s imagination is of their own design. Without visual stimuli providing corroborating information to go along with sonic information, the brain fills in the gaps on its own. This process is particularly effective when it comes to horror, as the area of our brain that takes in sensory information is also the same area that processes some elements of memory. Adding in just the right amount of narrative to lay the groundwork for the story, supported by carefully crafted soundscape, will allow the listener to fill in the rest with what scares them the most. Audio dramas, by their very nature, can take advantage of this auto-fill aspect of human imagination, providing enough material for the listener to get involved in the story, but leaving enough open-endedness to make the experience unique to each listener.
Without visual stimuli providing corroborating information to go along with sonic information, the brain fills in the gaps on its own.
But Sollinger’s point about the differences between building sonic worlds versus building visual worlds highlights the potential problem when a story is transcribed the other way: from podcast to television. While there are examples of this shift occurring for non-fiction podcasts—Lore being one of the most famous, along with other popular hits Dirty John and Crimetown—there is new interest in bringing audio dramas to the small screen. Yet the switch to visual media presents a unique problem for fiction podcasts. The ones that are well-crafted and innovative are successful because they push beyond the constraints of a purely sonic medium. It’s the very limitations of the format that can create truly spectacular experiences when they are executed well.
Sam Esmail, the director of the television iteration of the popular audio drama podcast, Homecoming, gestures towards something similar in an interview. In the first of four behind-the-scenes episodes Gimlet Media ran on the television show’s production, Esmail describes when he was first approached to direct the show: “I asked, is it any good? And they said it was great and I said well, then, why mess with it? I am not necessarily in the business of taking any great art and translating it into something else.”
Esmail ended up signing onto the project, but his statement should give us pause. When bringing these sonic worlds to life, are producers and writers approaching the process in the way Sollinger said not to do—simply thinking of the story in one medium and forcing it into the constraints of another—or are they considering ways to blend the advantages of the visual medium to enhance what was originally accomplished in the sonic medium? Whereas in an audio-only format there was freedom for listener imagination to fill in the gaps and make the fictional world our own, the visual medium threatens to concretize the images, monopolizing the narrative. The space we traversed in our imaginations on the wave of the audio drama’s soundscape now becomes a static, delineated image prepackaged to viewers on the screen. If these shows are made as studio cash grabs to take advantage of the popular buzz around them, then there is a high likelihood that they will lose the innovation that made them successful as audio dramas in the first place.
In order for these stories to translate from podcast to screen, writers and directors need to maintain the blurred balance between fiction and reality.
That isn’t to say that podcasts should not make the move into visual media—this might actually be a beneficial shift for the investigative journalism shows like The Black Tapes, Tanis, and Limetown. These shows can feel claustrophobic at times, as the reporter must feed listeners information directly and can only occasionally intercut the narration with other aural elements, such as interviews or recordings taken in the field. By opening up the fictional world to encompass elements beyond the cramped studio space and the voice of one character, viewers might have a richer experience of the fictional world. Regardless of which shows end up optioned for visual adaptations, navigating the aural to visual switch is something that writers should keep in mind as the number of podcasts moving to the television format increases as their popularity and critical acclaim grows. Two classics of the genre, Homecoming and Limetown, premiered in the last few months and adaptations of other podcasts, like Tanis, have also been in the works.
I don’t want to suggest that these podcasts should not make the move to visual media. But we should appreciate the ways in which audio is a uniquely effective medium for these shows, in order to recognize how easy it is to lose the spark of narrative ingenuity when audio dramas are carelessly translated to the visual realm. For those of us who have long enjoyed the podcast format, it is exciting to see larger media entities recognize the creativity and craftsmanship that goes into developing a strong fiction podcast. In order for these stories to translate effectively from podcast to screen, writers and directors need to maintain the blurred balance between fiction and reality, making sure to pick the right story and develop an effective visual language. Rather than forcing podcasts into a visual medium, with its pre-established conventions and structures, writers and producers can take a critical look at how to create the same blurring of fiction and reality, by developing a format that is as well-suited to visual storytelling as the horror and thriller podcasts are for audio drama. My hope is for the innovation that made these audio dramas popular will spill over into visual media, forcing those working on the show to think of their own craft in new ways to recreate the same sense of uneasy uncertainty about whether the story was reality or fiction.
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We lived in one of the poorest areas of one of the ugliest cities in the country: the Santa Julia neighborhood in Talcahuano. A port town that no one liked: gloomy skies, factory soot that turned everything gray, and air that famously stank of fish. But it didn’t bother us to live in a place people considered ugly; I, at least, felt strangely proud of it. We all—Pancho, Camilo, and Marquito Carrasco, and I—felt strong and satisfied. We enjoyed those days, sitting on the Carrasco brothers’ front stoop and looking out at the shacks that spilled down the hillside toward the sea, making plans and eating watermelon. That was how we spent the whole summer of 1997. We ate watermelon every day. Pancho and Marquito got a bunch of them from a trucker they’d hitched a ride from in Concepción. The trucker said it had been a long time since he’d laughed so hard, and he let them keep as many watermelons as they wanted. That afternoon, between the four of us, we carried fourteen of them to the Carrascos’ house. And when we finished, we sat at the foot of the steps putting half moons of rind over our faces to flash brazen grins at the ruinous place we called home.
I can see us clearly, our happiness on display in our pulpy watermelon smiles. Laughing in the faces of our neighbors, so tired and distraught. Especially that year, when the fishing industry was in crisis and no one had jobs, and unemployed people would wander the streets with servile and defeated expressions, as if they belonged to a vanquished battalion of soldiers.
But my father was the only real military man among them. After fifteen years at the marina, they’d laid him off. But even though it happened at the worst possible moment, it wasn’t the crisis that kept him from finding another job. In a way, it was his own decision. He didn’t want to start over.
Before summer break started, my parents had a sort of fight. I say sort of because, as was usual between them, there was no direct argument, or even—in this case—an exchange of words. This is another clear memory. The family—my parents, my two sisters, and me—sitting around the kitchen table. A bowl of hard bread in the middle, and a mug of watery tea for each of us. Food had been scarce in our house for days. My mother tells us she’d toasted the bread to soften it a little. No one responds. The bread had burned, and now, in addition to being stale, it’s black as coal. We drink our tea in silence. Suddenly, my mother stands up, grabs one of the rolls, and throws it against the wall, screaming. I see the rage in the movement of her arm, as if she were throwing a rock instead of hard bread. And when it hits the floor, it does sound like a rock. My sisters and I stare at the bread on the floor. My mother sits back down like nothing happened, but when she picks up her mug her hands are shaking. As soon as she takes a sip she stands up again, this time to go to her room. We can hear her sobbing. My sisters follow right behind her; they sit beside her on the bed—I can see them from where I’m sitting—and hug her.
My father, who has kept his eyes on his tea throughout the scene, keeps drinking it without a word. And I just sit there in the kitchen with him and drink mine, too. I stay with my father and not with my mother and sisters, but not because I’m taking his side. I’m not on anyone’s side. Back then I participated in family problems as if I were watching a movie. One whose unfortunate story couldn’t affect me beyond the seconds I spent looking at it, and that I could easily leave behind. I wasn’t worried by my father’s silence, or his empty face as he gazed at his tea. I was happy to remain on the sidelines. I was sure I could get along just fine on my own, with my friends.
That’s why I spent almost all day at the Carrascos’ house, where Camilo and Pancho lived. We had the place to ourselves. Their father was a miner in the north—the only dad of our group who had a job—and their mother spent the whole day at the Carrascos’ grandmother’s house with her newborn daughter. Pancho was the younger brother, and my best friend. His barely there neck, broad back, and short legs gave him a rigid look that didn’t correspond in the slightest with the torrent of energy he gave off. Ever since he was little, he’d had a talent for concocting adventures and getting into trouble. Nothing dangerous, just childish mischief.
Pancho and I were both thirteen, but there were seven months between us and I would turn fourteen soon. We lived just a couple blocks apart, and we had spent almost every day of our lives together. The Carrascos’ house was on Pichidegua, which means “Little Mouse,” and I lived on Malal, “Corral.” All the streets in the neighborhood were named in Mapudungun. Years before, Pancho and I and a classmate who was half Mapuche had translated the names of almost all the streets. We harbored the illusion that we were discovering meaningful names for those narrow dirt alleys we lived on—I guess we had the idea that Mapudungun was heroic. In the end they were mostly names of animals common to the region, but we still took a certain pride in our streets, especially if we compared them to the industrial neighborhoods around us, where the streets were numbered.
Talcahuano, “Thundering Sky,” was the only name that lived up to our expectations.
Santa Julia was born from a land occupation in Los Cerros de Talcahuano, and almost all of its houses had been built by their owners with wooden planks and metal sheeting. The Carrascos’ house was one of the biggest, with a second floor, concrete steps leading up to it, and cement walls enclosing the back patio. My house was very small, because my father had built it on the same plot of land as his mother’s house. He’d decided to live in Santa Julia rather than accept one of the houses in the Naval Village, which he had a right to as a marine. It’s not that he was ashamed of being in the navy—he, more than anyone, possessed the pride typical of military men— but he said he didn’t want his children to get used to that environment. Meaning, I thought, that he didn’t want any of us to end up in the navy like him. In addition to our house itself, my father made many of the things inside it, from the furniture to our toys. He liked to work with wood, but he could manage with any kind of trash he found lying around: bottles, aluminum caps, powdered milk cans, spools of thread. He used to say that if he’d had more options, he would have been an engineer. My mother used to try to convince him to start a workshop so he could earn some extra money. But he had always replied, in a serious voice, that he already had a job, and as long as he could feed his family, it was enough.
He already had a job.
Since I was little, I’d been used to people imagining my father’s job was something great. The neighbors, my mother’s family, my teachers, and my classmates all treated him with the utmost re spect. A respect that was born partly of admiration but mostly of fear—I suppose because of the dictatorship—and it imbued his job with an aura of excitement and mystery. Of course, for his family, his work possessed none of that intriguing darkness. We knew ex actly what he did.
Sometimes when I was little I’d go with him to the naval base, and he let me play in a warehouse full of torpedoes while he worked. I entertained myself with a simple game that could keep me captivated all morning long: bounce a plastic ball against the head of the torpedoes. That was it. The torpedo warehouse was the closest his job got to anything warlike or dangerous. As far as I knew, he had never even been out to sea. He’d gone into the service in search of opportunity—something to do—and he ended up working at Talcahuano Naval Base. Some nights as a guard, mostly as a waiter—“steward,” I think was his official title—in the mess hall. He washed and ironed his navy blue uniform himself, and he wore it under his white waiter’s apron with all the haughtiness of an officer.
I never knew why they laid him off. My sisters said it was because of a dumb accident in the mess hall, something about an altercation with a captain. Whatever it was, starting then, the resolute soldier’s gaze that had captivated so many people became blank and indifferent.
It was the middle of January when Pancho announced his plan to us. That morning, Marquito and I were sitting at the foot of the steps. Marquito was the Carrascos’ cousin. He was twelve, the youngest of the group. He lived close by, on Cahuello (“Horse”), and like me he spent all day at his cousins’ house. At first his mother had sent him there so her sister could watch him while she worked, and then he became one of us.
While we waited for the Carrasco brothers to wake up, we were trying to translate the lyrics of the Smiths’ song “The Head master Ritual” into Spanish.
Before the semester had ended, Pancho and I had stolen two English dictionaries from school. The idea was to translate the lyrics of our favorite bands over the summer vacation. Back then we were hooked on the Smiths. There was a music store in Conchester—our nickname for Concepción—and we’d spent so much time there looking and admiring without buying anything, the sales guy had offered to record whatever albums we wanted; we only had to bring him blank cassettes. We whiled away whole afternoons talking to him. He told us that Morrissey had named his band the Smiths because it was one of the most common and unrefined last names in England, and he thought it was time to show the vulgar side of the world. Our eyes shone when we heard stories like this. We wanted to be like Morrissey. We felt just as common and just as superior.
We wanted to be like Morrissey. We felt just as common and just as superior.
Pancho burst through the front door of his house. “I’ve got it all planned out,” he said.
Marquito and I turned and looked up at him. He was tapping his head with his index finger, repeating, “It’s all right here.” He was just waking up; his hair was tousled and his eyes bloodshot. He sat down beside us and looked straight ahead with that unhinged look he had whenever he was plotting something. Marquito and I put our dictionaries aside and waited for him to tell us what he had in mind, but Pancho said nothing. He just breathed deeply, as if trying to calm his thoughts.
“Where’s Camilo?” he asked suddenly.
“Wasn’t he with you, sleeping in your room?” I asked, and I picked up the dictionary again. I flipped to J to look up the word jealous, from “jealous of youth.”
“What?” asked Pancho, confused. He jumped up and went back inside.
A gust of air whipped up eddies of dust in the street, and I shielded my eyes. The wind never left Talcahuano, no matter the season. Pancho reemerged, this time with wet hair and some slices of watermelon that he handed out.
He took a couple of bites and then declared: “We’re going to steal the church’s instruments. I call dibs on the guitar.”
“I thought the plan was to translate songs,” I said.
“Now we’re going to do both,” he replied, not looking at me as he spat out some watermelon seeds. Pancho always wanted to do everything at once.
“Which church?” asked Marquito.
“Betsabé’s dad’s church,” replied Pancho. He stood up again. He went into the house and put on “The Headmaster Ritual,” the song we were translating. He turned the volume all the way up and started to dance, moving his arms like he was having an epileptic fit, and he took a running leap from inside the house to the street.
Betsabé was the daughter of the pastor of Talcahuano’s evangelical ministry, Blessed to Bless. We had played with her when we were little, until her father really embraced religion and became a pastor. That summer, Pancho had a crush on her. The truth was, we were both trying to woo her, but Pancho was more persistent than I was and he went to the pastor’s meetings—that’s what evangelicals called the kind of masses they held—just so he could see her. He’d gone to a meeting the day before, and that’s where he’d had the idea for the heist.
He told us it was like he’d had a mystical enlightenment while everyone was raising their arms to the sky, shouting Hallelujah and chanting, “He lives, He lives. He returned from the dead. He lives, He lives. We will celebrate.” That was when he started paying attention to the accompanying music played by a band on a small stage to one side of the pastor’s pedestal. According to him, he saw the instruments floating in the air without the musicians who were playing them: guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard. He felt that God was appearing to him and revealing a new mission; basically, God wanted him to steal the instruments. We had decided the year before that God didn’t exist, or that if he did, we weren’t interested in him. But still, it wasn’t strange to hear Pancho say such things. There was something about the evangelicals that just fit with his personality: the ecstacy, the delerium of fanaticism. You could imagine him as a Christian who converted after years of sinning, or as a self-proclaimed prophet who went into mystical trances in the middle of a small town plaza, surrounded by a small group of loyal followers—people like Marquito and me.
When Camilo appeared, Pancho still hadn’t managed to entirely explain his new plan. Camilo was a year older than Pancho. He was short like his brother, but thinner. He didn’t seem any older physically—or in any of his abilities—but he compensated by being more violent. He was prone to fistfights, especially with Pancho. He was wearing only the pair of sweatpants that he never took off, not even to sleep, and he held a slice of breakfast watermelon in his hand. He greeted us with a raise of his eyebrows and sat on the ground a little away from the three of us. He leaned his head grumpily against the wall of the house, as though to make it very clear he wasn’t at all interested in whatever Pancho was plotting.
With Camilo to one side and the three of us at the foot of the steps, we were finally all assembled. I can see us as the inoffensive gang that we were, each of us playing his role. Marquito the kid, Camilo the troublemaker, Pancho the impulsive agitator, full of crazy ideas, and me, the other side of the coin and his faithful sidekick—serene and quiet, thoughtful. We sit there listening to Pancho, who’s so enraptured with his plans, he stumbles over his own words and can’t finish one sentence coherently before launching into another, just like the surf down below us: before one wave can break, the next is on top of it. Marquito and I interrupt him every once in a while to ask him to get to the point.
The most important thing was that the instruments were stored in the church at night. That’s what the bassist had told Pancho when he went up to compliment the band and pump them for information.
At first, Camilo seemed indifferent to Pancho’s plan and his intensity. But then he asked, suspiciously: “And how are we going to divide up the instruments? Dibs on the guitar.”
That interruption led to a fight between the brothers that lasted, intermittently, until well into the afternoon. They finally agreed that Camilo would play drums, Pancho guitar, Marquito bass, and I would play keys. I liked the idea of playing keyboard. It seemed like an instrument that went with my personality—keyboard players tended to be mildmannered and intellectual guys. Although, had I been able to choose, I would have gone with the guitar.
By the end of that day we were all as excited as Pancho about the new plan, and we decided to go over the details in the following days. As I was leaving, I saw that someone had written on the curb with a piece of charcoal:
Give up education as a bad mistake.
Walking home, I felt excited as I thought about what the coming days would hold. I didn’t know how the whole matter of the heist would turn out, but thinking about it filled me with energy and confidence. Above all the uncertainty and adversity I could see ahead, there prevailed a feeling of invulnerability that lifted me up. I imagined us sneaking into the evangelical church at night and emerging triumphant. The goal of stealing the instruments was diffuse—I couldn’t exactly picture myself playing “How Soon Is Now?” on the keyboard. I just saw myself and the Carrascos having a ball with some instruments we would never have been able to pay for.
At home I was hit by the aseptic smell of bleach that had pervaded the house for weeks now. A new smell, and one that contrasted with the familiar scent of damp, burned wood that used to reign. My mother had been obsessed with hygiene and order ever since she’d gotten work cleaning houses for some families in Concepción.
Everything was dark except for my mother’s room, where she and my sisters were talking and laughing. She had never worked outside the house before, and I figured they were happy to get to spend some time together the way they used to. They were listening to a cassette of mine, by Los Tres. I heard how they laughed and sang: Quién es la que viene ahí, tan bonita y tan gentil. I stayed hidden in the dark behind the half-drawn curtain that served as a door. It was strange to see my mother cheerful. She looked especially young, almost like one more sister. My father wasn’t home. I spied on them for a while, and at a certain point my older sister, Carola, looked over to where I was standing. I thought she would call me out and say something mean—for a while now she had been constantly reproaching me, though I didn’t know for what—but instead she pretended not to see me. She started singing louder, almost shouting, and she snapped her fingers while she danced, shimmying in a ridiculously provocative way, making my little sister and my mother laugh and clap in encouragement. I stared at Carola, knowing that she knew I was watching, and for a second, watching her from the shadow, I remembered how much fun we’d had when we were little. I remembered how close we’d been back then, when it was just the two of us. I went to the bedroom then and lay face-up on the bed, and I listened to them sing and laugh until very late, when my father got home.
His key turned in the lock, and in a few seconds the house was silent. He walked straight down the hall. I saw his dark profile outlined in the bedroom doorway, his head high. He still had his marine’s haircut, shaved at the neck and smoothed to one side at the crown, his cheeks shaved close and his mustache meticulously trimmed, though he had nowhere to go. I could almost catch a whiff of his English cologne from my bed. But it was impossible to relate such a fresh smell to his flaccid face and listless expression. He didn’t greet me. Maybe he thought the room was empty or that I was asleep. Maybe he just didn’t want to say anything. I didn’t greet him, either. He took a deep breath and went into the bathroom. Then he left the house again, and I didn’t hear him come back.
The next morning Pancho was waiting for me, sitting on the steps with a pile of books beside him. He looked even more agitated than the day before, and he seemed to have gotten up very early or not slept at all. In an enigmatic tone, he informed me he’d had an amazing idea for the heist, and he’d tell us about it once we were all there. The books he had turned out to be encyclopedias and dictionaries, stolen from who knows where. Marquito arrived soon after with the bag of tobacco; he sat on the steps and started right away to roll a cigarette. Marquito had an innate talent for rolling. We collected the tobacco from cigarette butts we picked up in the street and stashed in newspaper. Marquito also took care of the rolling papers—he stole them from his mother’s purse.
Pancho took the cigarette Marquito handed him and took a deep drag, then said: “This is the last smoke.” He showed it to each of us, then brought it close to his face and looked at it as though saying a last goodbye, and he flicked it away with his thumb and index finger. “We’re going to have to make some sacrifices to get the goods.”
“And you’re going to make us?” Camilo suddenly appeared in the doorway. Pancho replied with a sigh and a condescending smile. “I never said this was going to be easy. But if you’ll just let me explain.” Pancho paused and filled his lungs with air. “We’re going to give up smokes because we’re going to start training for the robbery.” He stood up again and looked at us with his eyes wide, excited. “Because we’re going to train in the ancient Japanese art of espionage and guerrilla war: ninjutsu.”
“Ninjas?” said Camilo, laughing uproariously. “You want us to dress up like ninjas? Like the Ninja Turtles?”
Pancho’s eager smile vanished for an instant.
“Let me finish, Camilo,” he said, annoyed, but he didn’t explain any further. He was quiet for a moment and then he turned to me. “What do you think?” His eyes begged for approval.
“Yeah, what does our little brain think?” said Camilo.
“I don’t know . . . aren’t ninjas supposed to be the bad guys in movies?” I asked doubtfully. Pancho’s eyes lit up and his confident smile returned.
“And how are we supposed to just turn into ninjas from one day to the next?” asked Camilo, which led to another fight between the two brothers. Marquito and I took the chance to roll and smoke the cigarette Pancho had robbed us of.
Pancho had a talent for mixing things together and complicating them. He came up with one idea after another and didn’t follow through on any, although that didn’t take away from the marvelously authentic way he invented his schemes, fascinating in its unreflective spontaneity. It was as if, for Pancho, the world were a place specially designed to astonish him in particular. Even today I can picture him absorbed in thought, his face determined. I suppose Camilo envied him, and that’s why he used to make fun of him. Next to Pancho, everyone else seemed like a fraud.
Camilo sank his fist into Pancho’s ribs and said: “Okay, okay, what’s the plan? ”
Pancho explained that there really wasn’t much information about ninjutsu, so for now we would read what he’d found in some encyclopedias, and then we’d see what we should do next.
“And why don’t we try something else?” asked Marquito. “I took some kung fu classes at school.” Pancho raised his hands to the sky, as if to say “Finally.”
“We’re going to learn the art of ninjutsu because ninjas are like us.” His tone was so ridiculously solemn that even he couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Then he calmed down, hopping in place a couple of times, and looked at us with a seriousness that was comical for being forced. He nodded, as if agreeing or convincing himself of something, and then he couldn’t hold back any longer and burst out laughing again.
After reading what Pancho assigned me—some encyclopedias styled as newspaper facsimiles—I thought I understood what he meant when he said ninjas were “like us.”
Much of the information we managed to collect didn’t refer directly to ninjas, but rather used them as an excuse to talk about samurais; ninjas were reduced to foils, the samurais’ historical enemies. But as far as I understood, ninjutsu techniques and combat strategies had basically evolved from those of samurai warriors, and the main difference lay in the ideals that inspired them. The samurais were a military elite that governed Japan for hundreds of years, and their philosophy was full of values associated with superiority, honor, obligation, and loyalty. Ninjas, on the other hand, were mercenaries who always perpetrated their sabotage and espionage anonymously. Ultimately, all the differences that led them to take opposite paths in the art of war seemed to come down to this: to be a samurai you had to come from a certain caste; that is, you had to have a name and money. The only condition for becoming a ninja was that you had nothing to lose. They were poor, so they accepted all kinds of jobs, honorable or not. I supposed that was why they had so enchanted Pancho. And he was right, ninjas were more like us.
That night, as I was in bed reading about one of the ninjas’ classic modes of operation—infiltrate castles in disguise, hide until the moment is right, kill the guards and set the towers on fire, and then escape—I had a short conversation with Andrea, my little sister. For all I knew, she’d been watching me for hours from the bed next to mine, but I was engrossed in the encyclopedias. The three of us slept in the same room, a small bedroom that barely fit the bunk beds and a twin that my father had built. My sisters took the bunk beds, Carola above and Andrea below. I had the privilege of a construction one hundred percent my own.
“Day after tomorrow we’re going to Grandma’s,” said Andrea as I was underlining the phrase “flee furtively in anonymity.”
My maternal grandmother lived in Tirúa, Arauco, some four hours from Talcahuano. We used to spend vacations at her house in the country. My grandmother and my uncles grew wheat and oats, and their land was bordered by planted forest. When I was younger I liked to wander through the eucalyptus plantations with my mother and sisters. We always ended up losing our way among the thousands of stalks, all identical and planted the same distance apart. Of course, just then I wasn’t thinking about those days in the country; I barely heard what my little sister said.
“Shut up, Andrea!” shouted Carola from the upper bunk. “You’re such a bigmouth!”
“What?” I asked, never taking my eyes from the encyclopedia.
“Stop talking and turn out the light!” Carola protested again.
“Just wait a little!” I shouted. Her attitude with me recently had been exasperating.
Andrea spoke now in a quieter voice: “I said, day after tomorrow we’re going to Grandma’s house.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” I said. “Say hi to everyone for me.”
“You’re gonna stay with Dad,” she said, speaking even more quietly, a little hesitant, as if she was unsure whether what she was saying was a statement or a question.
“Andrea!” my older sister scolded her again.
“I guess,” I said, ignoring Carola’s interruption.
I put the encyclopedia on the floor and turned out the light. As I got used to the darkness I could see that Andrea was still in the same position as before, lying on her side and looking at me. I could see her eyes shining brightly, and they reminded me of that classic image of little animals hidden in the shadowy forest in animated movies. I smiled at her, thinking she could see me, but if she made a gesture in reply I couldn’t see it. I turned over, closed my eyes, and started thinking about ninjas again.
“Your dad was military,” Camilo said. “Doesn’t he have a gun or something we could use?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, uncomfortable. It was true, I didn’t know. I remembered how when I was little I used to play with bullets that didn’t have any gunpowder, but I’d never seen a gun.
“When’ve you ever seen a ninja with a gun?” Pancho asked his brother. “We’re going to use traditional weapons: ropes, chains, a lot of shuriken.”
Shuriken were ninja stars. I told Pancho I knew how to make them. My father had taught me to do something similar with a plastic bottle cap and five nails. We used to spend entire afternoons together, throwing them at tree trunks.
We were walking to the plaza to start our “training” when my mom arrived with my sisters. Each of them was carrying an enormous bag. “You guys moving?” joked Pancho. My mother greeted him affectionately and teased him, asking what he was plotting this time.
Again, I noticed she looked very young. Her black hair was loose. She greeted each of us with a kiss on the cheek, gave me a long hug, and said they were going to my grandma Clara’s. My little sister hung from my neck and told me she would miss me a lot, but Carola grabbed her from behind and pulled her away. “I want to say goodbye too” was her excuse, but she barely brushed my cheek with a quick kiss. She gave Camilo a few little pats on the cheek—he’d always had a crush on her—and she told my mom and sister to hurry up, they were running late.
We used Plaza San Francisco in Santa Julia for training. It was ideal because it had a playground built of metal and wood where we could exercise without anyone bothering us, since the equipment was so old and shabby that almost no kids ever used it. In the end we couldn’t find much more information about ninjutsu; so just like that, with a little knowledge and no sensei, we trained in the things our intuition told us were essential. Supposedly, ninjutsu meant “the art of stealth,” so we focused especially on learning how to slip away, how to make all our movements silent.
We practiced our balance on the teetertotter and climbed whatever was in front of us, from the playground equipment to the walls guarding houses or abandoned factories. Sometimes we used ropes, but most of the time we climbed using just our hands. To improve our speed we ran downhill, jumping any obstacle we came upon. The climbing, running, and jumping, though—those were the easy parts. We ended up covered in scrapes and bruises, but we were overflowing with energy, especially Pancho, who jumped higher than anyone in spite of his short legs.
What was really hard for us was learning to move without making noise. Ninjas were so silent that some castles had floors that were specially designed to squeak at the slightest contact. They were called “nightingale floors,” because the alarm they sounded was similar to that bird’s cry. We split up the day to work on the two skills: in the morning we ran all over, and in the afternoon, once our bodies were more tired and less anxious, we set ourselves to quieting our footsteps.
We cleared out the Carrascos’ bedroom—they slept in the living room during that whole period—to train on the wooden floor. We left our socks on so the cotton would muffle the noise, and we got into a single-file formation: whoever went first gave the orders and moved around the room with full freedom to make noise. The rest had to imitate his movements, but without making the floor boards creak. Like in a game of Simon Says, except we were raising our legs and walking carefully on tiptoe. The first one to make noise lost. Another exercise: we crouched down without leaning on anything, and competed to see who could stay in that position the longest. I almost always won, and Pancho was the first to give up. Last exercise: we blindfolded one person and put him in the middle of the room. He had to catch us while we moved around him, not breathing, in a kind of blindman’s buff. By nightfall we were exhausted, though we always had more energy for the next day’s work.
Some nights, or in free time when we weren’t training, I searched among my father’s things for a gun. I don’t know why, but I wanted to know if he had one or not. I went through his drawers, his clothes, some old suitcases, his toolboxes, even my mother’s things. All I found were pieces of wood, and that was strange for him. He had always been so orderly and meticulous, thanks to his military training. Eventually I realized there were bits of wood scattered all over the house. Different sizes and types, almost all useless: broken, old, or burned. I thought he must have been planning to make something, or maybe he was getting materials together to start the workshop my mother was always insisting he open.
As the days passed, he went on accumulating more and more unworkable wood. The house had been a disaster since my mother and sisters left for my grandmother’s; the only upside was that the smell of bleach had faded. There were also piles of old newspapers with classified ads circled in marker: “company seeks security guards . . . ,” “workers skilled in vibrated concrete . . .” Most of them were for jobs outside Talcahuano, in Santiago or farther north. My mother had bought the newspapers. She’d circled the ads and left them for my father on the table beside his breakfast. She talked about these opportunities in other cities, and how everyone was leaving Talcahuano. Until now, I’d thought my father had just thrown them away. One time he had yelled at my mother that he was never going to leave his house. But here they were now, all those newspapers, like one last chance, though I suppose they held more resignation than hope.
The ever-accumulating garbage in the house was the only sign of life I had from him in those days when I was training for the heist.
The ever-accumulating garbage in the house was the only sign of life I had from him in those days when I was training for the heist. Neither of us spent much time at home, and I saw him out only once, while I was training in the plaza with the Carrascos. He appeared out of nowhere and started to dig through the trash. He was wearing dirty clothes, his hair was a mess, and he had several days’ growth of beard. The Carrascos didn’t notice, and I didn’t approach him. I don’t think he saw me; he seemed really lost. He pulled a couple of boards and a bottle from the dumpster, put them into a bag, and walked off with his eyes fixed on the ground. I watched him go up the street, hunched over and dejected. He disappeared when he turned a corner, and then I remembered how when I was little I had also watched him disappear around the corner by our house when he left at dawn to go to work. I hadn’t been more than six years old, but when the alarm clock went off at five in the morning, I’d get up with him and keep him company while he ate breakfast and the rest of the family slept. When he finished, he got up from his chair and I imitated him, then I brought him his military coat and briefcase and followed him to the door. He’d give me a few pats on the head and leave. I would stay in the doorway and watch him walk off in the fog, and I stayed there even after he disappeared from my sight. I didn’t want him to go. And sometimes, after a few minutes, I’d see him return, rushed and a little annoyed. His rough hand would take mine, firmly but tenderly, and I would go with him to work.
As for the incredible acrobatics and fighting techniques that ninjas in the movies employed, we decided, after several arguments— especially with Camilo—that we wouldn’t spend too much of our training time on them. Not because of how difficult they were, but because we didn’t expect to have anyone to use them with, since according to Pancho there were no guards at the church.
After three weeks we’d acquired a certain dexterity, though surely nothing compared with real ninjas. At first glance our train ing sessions must have seemed poor and unorthodox. But I feel sure that we really did come close to the spirit, the idea that the fundamental thing was to be practical, to focus on the element that could save your life.
“TECHNIQUES ARE USELESS, INTUITION IS EVELYTING,” Pancho would say when he got bored practicing in his room. “EVELYTING IS A WEAPON,” Camilo would say, kicking.
Those were quotes from Masaaki Hatsumi, a legendary master ninja we had been able to find a little more information about.
What was an unquestionable fact was that we were prepared to flee without being caught. We were faster and more agile than when we’d started out. Still, in case anyone gave chase in cars, we made some spikes from the nails left over from our shuriken that we could throw down to puncture tires.
The plan was ultimately laid out as follows: we had one hour, between three and four in the morning, to break into the church and get the instruments out. Pancho would climb the wall and enter through one of the upper windows (framed by metal that was so old and rusty it never closed), some three or four meters up. Pancho’s firsthand reconnaissance told us the side door was locked with a padlock; he would use a bolt cutter to break it. Once that entrance was breached, the rest of us would come into play: we’d load up the instruments and get out as quickly and silently as possible. We would escape through the side door that let out onto El Piñón—a dark hill covered with pine forest, where the route back would be longer but safer. Once we were in the woods we’d divide up the booty. The most complicated part of the plan was transporting all the instruments in a single trip without any noise, especially the drums, which were by nature unwieldy and loud. Pancho and I sketched out on a piece of paper how we would do it: Camilo would strap the bass drum to his back with the tom-toms still attached, like a backpack, and he’d carry it like one; I would carry the snare and the floor tom tied to my back and the cymbals on my chest; Marquito would carry the keyboard on his back; Pancho would carry the bass and the guitar across his body in front and back. Camilo complained that his brother had gotten the easiest part, and Pancho argued that he had already done plenty of work planning the whole thing out. We would cover the instruments with the enormous dresses that the Carrascos’ mom used when she was pregnant. If there was time and space, we’d grab some cables and music stands. The amps were a no-go; we’d have to figure out how to get our hands on some smaller ones later.
We all thought it was an impeccable plan. At least like that, sketched out on paper, each of us was a ninja, instruments strapped across our backs instead of katanas.
The day of the heist, we felt the weight of the historic, dangerous moment hanging over us. It didn’t make sense to train anymore, and plus, just like athletes, we decided it was better for our bodies to be well rested. So what we did was use the morning to wash our sweat suits and lay them in the sun to dry, and then watch the afternoon pass, sitting at the foot of the steps and eating the last of the watermelon. Camilo asked Marquito to get the tobacco so he could smoke a cigarette. He admitted he was just too nervous, and even though Pancho scolded him for his lack of commitment, we all ended up smoking. I told them how that image of ninjas dressed in black was a myth. They used navy blue, because black shone in the darkness. Marquito said that meant our school sweat suits were perfect for this mission.
“Anyway, they’re the only thing we have,” added Pancho, blowing smoke. We all agreed, laughing.
Last details.
Since neither Marquito nor I have ski masks like the Carrascos’, we agree to use black shirts as hoods. The clock in the Carrascos’ kitchen says 10:30 p.m., and we’ve just realized there are a couple of tools we need that their father doesn’t have. They aren’t essential for the mission, but we can’t risk it. I say I think I’ve seen them in my father’s toolbox, and we decide Pancho will go with me to get them; when we return, all of us will go to keep watch at the church. We’ll start the operation at 3:00 sharp.
The street is empty, and Pancho doesn’t stop talking the whole way to my house. He’s more excited then ever. He asks me, over and over, if I understand what we are about to do. “Do you get it? Do you get it? ” he repeats, almost shouting. He walks fast, with determination, his eyes staring. But then he looks me straight in the eyes for a second and tells me that we’re going to strike big now, and after we do, nothing will stop us, we’ll be invincible. I look at him and reply with the same sureness that yes, I do get it, we’re really going to do it, it’s already practically done. We are invincible.
My house is dark when we arrive, and the first thing we see inside is my father stretched out on the sofa. His position gives the impression that nothing could wake him up. We also see a puddle of vomit on the floor. Pancho makes a gesture like he’s drinking from a bottle, and then cocks his head to the side, sticks out his tongue, and rolls his eyes back, imitating my father’s drunken face. I tell him to go back to the patio, where the tools are. Once he’s gone, I approach my father. I observe his body splayed out on the sofa, my grandmother’s old sofa that he had repaired himself using a couple of nails and then stuffed with wool. His face—in contrast to the room, so full of newspapers, wood, and garbage—is empty, expressionless. He looks old, old and useless. Looking down at him lit by the faint light that makes it through the curtains, I think how low he has fallen, and how different I am. And all that time I look at him, and all those thoughts and all that revelatory silence, makes it even more incredible and humiliating that I haven’t realized what is happening, and that it’s Pancho who, after trying to play a joke on him with the wrenches he’d gone to find, finally shouts that my father isn’t breathing.
I think how low he has fallen, and how different I am.
Days later, Pancho told me that he’d never run so fast, and that in the end all that training hadn’t been for nothing. I hadn’t even finished shouting for him to go for help when he jumped up and ran out of the house and up the hill. Of course, nothing that had to do with training, with our plan, with ninjas, or with Pancho himself made sense to me any longer.
It wasn’t his breathing—or lack thereof—that made me throw myself on my father and shake him, trying to bring him back to himself. It was the smell, the nauseating smell he was giving off. Not exactly of rot, but a strange blend of sterility and fermentation. Pancho had been mistaken, my father was breathing. But I didn’t have to bring my ear to his nose to realize something was very wrong. It was the stench, the stench that had been emanating from him the whole time I’d been standing there and that I perceived only when Pancho started screaming. The stench led me to stick my trembling fingers into his mouth to make him vomit. I was shaking, my hands and my knees were trembling. My whole body was convulsing in fear as with one hand I tried to make him retch and with the other I hit his stomach so he would spit out more of that bilious liquid that had been waiting for us from the start.
Bleach. My father had swallowed bleach. A liter and a half, a CocaCola bottle full of the bleach that a van came by to sell every week. There were cases of people who died from ingesting bleach, although it was almost always children who drank it by accident. Maybe my father thought he would be as susceptible as a child and that he could die that way. Or maybe it was the only thing he had at hand. It turned out he didn’t have a gun. No, he didn’t think about any of that. He thought only about my mother. He wanted to get her attention. He thought: I’m going to send her a message, I’m going to swallow her job, her stupid aspirations. Her ambition. I’m going to gulp them down and let them kill me with every sip.
He thought: I’m going to send her a message, I’m going to swallow her job, her stupid aspirations. Her ambition. I’m going to gulp them down and let them kill me with every sip.
Because after I waited hours in the emergency room to see him, the only thing he said was “Call Carmen.” After I tried to tell him not to worry, that she was fine, summering at my grandmother’s house, he said to me again, more harshly:
“Call your mother.”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Call her.”
“Yes, sir.”
And then it was as if I understood everything all at once. I didn’t call anyone, and I told the Carrascos’ mother and Pancho, who kept me company in the hospital with the others, that I would rather walk home alone.
But I didn’t go straight home. I walked along the water in my ninja sweat suit, and while I did, I imagined my mother far away, lost in the eucalyptus forest, and I knew she had left us. My mother was gone. She’d left me alone in the house, abandoned to my fate alongside a moribund man. They all knew it but me. Even my little sister knew and she’d tried to tell me, but I didn’t listen.
I reached the port and sat on the stairs to watch some sailors getting ready to embark. Years before, Pancho and I used to come here at dawn to watch the fishing boats set out. We dreamed of being merchant marines. We’d looked at the sailors’ faces, stiffened by the cold and laced with wrinkles, troubled and anxious as they went about their tasks before shoving off. We thought we recognized the faces of strong, tough men. Men who weren’t afraid of anything. But now, at daybreak and with the black sea behind them, the only thing I could see reflected in those sailors’ faces was sadness. A dry sadness that drove into their bones as deeply as the cold on the high seas. My whole life I’d thought that Talcahuano was a tough place, but the truth was, it was just sad. And then I thought of my father in the hospital bed, and I knew why he’d done what he had done. I could finally get a fix on him: my father was a wretched man, but he could still do damage. He could wound, even if it wasn’t his intention. I should have known it sooner, but I didn’t.
When my mother and my sisters arrived several days later, the house was just as they had left it. I had thrown out the wood and the newspapers and mopped up the vomit. Cleaned the house. That was the first thing I ever did for myself, for me. And maybe I did it in the hopes that my luck would change. Those first days I entered a state of numbness, and I became convinced that I had no choice but to think only of myself. It was as if the garbage my father had collected suddenly struck me as dangerous, as if it had me cornered, as if it could take me down with it and I wouldn’t even notice. All the garbage, and the poverty, and the afternoons with the Carrascos— it all suddenly became threatening. Not because of the mission; I wasn’t afraid we would start robbing banks. Most likely we would have gone on being a harmless gang, forever sitting at the foot of the stairs, or on some corner once we were older, dreaming up plans that would never come to fruition. Maybe that was precisely what made them threatening. I thought about how stupid I’d been all that time with the Carrascos, playing and bragging about how sly we were, without understanding what was really happening around us. And then the light that made Pancho shine for being so astonishingly him was extinguished, leaving the shadow of a stubborn, foolish, and insignificant boy.
The summer ended quickly, and winter came and brought more wind, plus rain and chimney smoke. I turned fourteen. My mother and sisters came back to the house for a while. My mother explained her version of events to me and promised me things would get better, that we would all start over again together, but I knew it couldn’t be like that, and in any case I didn’t care. When a person lives through intense experiences, he has the illusion of understanding many things. I thought I understood how life worked. When I finished cleaning the house I was exhausted, and I thought that I should keep going that way from then on: tire myself out and self-impose obligations in order to get ahead. I thought that would keep me safe. I wasn’t going to drift like my father, or fearfully wonder what would become of me. I was going to fight, to sniff out threats on the wind and build a life of my own. Who knows what fate awaited me alongside the Carrascos; I never found out. I left Talcahuano as soon as I could, first to work in the north with the Carrascos’ father—my last link to Pancho—and then in Santiago. I got rid of my family and the only friends I had. And I went into debt to study, and I worked twelve hours a day and spent two more riding buses, and I did all the things that people do to achieve a certain wellbeing, and I got tired, I became a tired person and I lived in Renca, in Recoleta, and in Quilicura, without ever knowing what the names of all those places meant.
Writers of literary fiction are supposed to disdain celebrity memoirs. They’re sucking up all the big advances and lowering the bar of what’s supposed to be Literature, right?
But I’ve got a dirty reading secret. I love celebrity memoirs, particularly by standup comedians (and not just because I was doing research for No Good Very Bad Asian, my novel about a fictive famed standup comedian named Sirius Lee). The best standup memoirs can be so raw and honest, revealing uncomfortable truths about life that even the best fiction rarely addresses.
Here are some of my favorites, a mix of books that I read while researching No Good Very Bad Asian and recent entrees into the genre.
“I became an ‘energy producer’ at Bar Mitzvahs. Energy producer is what white suburban people call a ‘hype man.’ I was basically the Flava Flav of Bar Mitzvahs.”
If I had to choose one book to read before going to my grave, I would choose The Last Black Unicorn over just about any work of literary fiction. The book alternates between serious chapters that detail her relationships with abusive, possessive men as well as her violent, brain-injured mother and hilarious chapters about Haddish’s romance with a disabled co-worker and her quirky friendship with Jada Pinkett and Will Smith. Haddish’s inspirational life story is one of overcoming filial abandonment and poverty. It’s legit one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
“Don’t perform in heels. It’s not worth your calves looking 20% better.”
This one’s just came out and like my novel, also happens to be framed as a series of scandalous letters of advice to the comedian’s daughters. Though we’re complete strangers, I swear she stole my idea! When I was doing standup, I would treat myself by going to Comedy Cellar and seeing the soon-to-be stars and Ali Wong was one of them, and believe it or not, she was even raunchier back then.
“It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances.”
Widely considered canonical in the genre, Born Standing Up was one of the first books I turned to in my research. Martin’s unique brand of absurdism made him the biggest comedian in the world for a time in the 1970s. Unlike many of his peers, Martin skirted the life-curtailing nighttime dangers of the profession, and the prose has a level of erudition you don’t typically find in standup memoirs. For instance, not many standups cite Lewis Carroll’s logic textbooks as comic inspiration.
“You haven’t lived till you’ve played Scrabble in a psych ward.”
If there’s one book that inspired No Good Very Bad Asian, it’s Too Fat to Fish. One of the traits that many standup comedians share is a lack of self-worth. This void drives them to the stage to seek laughter as an affirmation of their personal value and a temporary salve for their psychic damage. Lange’s memoir, which chronicles a difficult upbringing and an ongoing, harrowing battle with serial substance abuse, portrays the symbiotic relationship between comedy and pain.
“The expectation of happiness creates a lot of unhappiness.”
A comic’s comic, Davidoff is probably best known for being a character actor on TV shows like NBC’s Shades of Blue. But like the legendary Dave Attell, Davidoff is a bard of the dark and surreal existence of a road comedian. In Road Dog, he leans in on this life, with wild tales of drug-spurred trysts with fellow comedians and the sundry mistakes you can make when you don’t like being alone and have nothing but time by yourself in hotels, casinos, and bars after shows.
Soon to be a Broadway musical, The Bedwetter chronicles Silverman’s embarrassing childhood bladder control struggles with her trademark mashup of charm, pathos, and raunch. One of the strengths of the book is also her strength as a comedian: the ability to tell true Hollywood stories from the American celebrity stratosphere while remaining relatable as a regular person.
“The first time I showed my mom a scene from Silicon Valley, she said: ‘Jimmy, how many times do I have to tell you, don’t hunch your back.’”
Though he wasn’t born in America like my protagonist, Jimmy O. Yang’s rise to fame mirrors that of my protagonist Sirius Lee. Yang came of age in Los Angeles and disappointed his father by choosing to pursue comedy over becoming a financial advisor. Unlike No Good Very Bad Asian, Yang’s book has a happy beginning and end. Not only does Yang become a star, but his father fulfills his lifelong dream of becoming an actor as well, appearing in films like Patriots Day, thanks to a dearth of older Asian male actors in Hollywood.
Texas is a state known for many things: Beyoncè, The Alamo, South by Southwest. But these big city exports are only a small part of Texas charm. Attica Locke displays her small-town East Texan roots in Heaven, My Home, the followup to her acclaimed Bluebird, Bluebird.
The book focuses on African-American Texas Ranger Darren Matthews in rural Hopetown, East Texas, where a 9-year-old white boy, Levi King, has gone missing. Levi’s father is an Aryan Brotherhood of Texas member, and the tensions between white, Native, and Black Hopetown residents rise as Darren races against the clock to find out where Levi is and who’s responsible. Through Detective Matthews, we can see that although Hopetown isn’t a picture of racial harmony, Black folks deserve to make wherever they live a welcome place.
Attica Locke is a multi-award winning author and one of the few Black women recognized in mystery today. From the Edgar Award to the Harper Lee Prize to the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary excellence, she continues to ask big questions about race and the color line in America. I spoke with Locke about the magic and mastery behind weaving mystery into contemporary plots and how Heaven, My Home interrogates our understanding of forgiveness.
Maya Davis: How are you able to sow clues throughout Heaven, My Home? In the end I thought, “Oh, right here that was a clue.” But while a person is reading, the clues were right under the surface, so you don’t realize what’s unfolding.
Attica Locke: Practice! I learned how to do that by practice. When I pitched this series I called it “tightly coiled rural noir” so I want my books to be slim and packed. I don’t want them to be 350 pages. I find it in the writing and it looks like I did it so seamlessly but the truth is I go back in and lay in those Easter eggs. Sometimes they’re there for you as you’re writing, you know you’re leaving a clue. But other times you go back and make sure to find the right place to put it in so that it doesn’t tip anything off, but it’s memorable. It can’t be so buried that people are going “What? That came out of nowhere.”
MD: The question that I asked while I was reading was: Who is innocent and who is deserving of presumed innocence? On one hand we have Levi King who is a child, which society deems the most innocent of us. But he’s being raised in this cauldron of white supremacists and negative influences. And I thought about Rosemary King who pleads for her own innocence in saying that she had no role in raising her son, Bill [Levi’s father], to be a racist.
AL: I think over the course of the book, your feelings about some of them might change. Levi’s presented as kind of the innocent kid. And then you find, “Oh you’ve been burning shit down and writing n***** on stuff, wait a minute.” Ultimately you kind of come back around to: maybe there’s a way out for him and there really is an innocent soul somewhere in there that can be saved. In terms of Darren Matthews, there’s the confusion of: How do I mete out justice when half the time I can’t figure out who the bad guys are? Like how do I do this job? I’m making assumptions that I’m correcting justice by making sure that Mack is taken care of. I think all of those shifting sands provide a metaphorical look into what he’s struggling with in terms of who’s guilty. If you shoot somebody because they came onto your property and they’re a white supremacist, is that okay or not okay?
How can you forgive and move on if the injury is still recurring? How do you ever get past it?
It’s interesting when you talk about innocence, the thing that was so deeply in my mind was the issue of forgiveness. Is it safe or smart to forgive? I think there’s a line about that. Maybe it’s something like: Does forgiveness make Black folks saints or stooges? There’s a sense of psychological freedom within forgiveness. That you can free yourself from some of this pain if you can forgive and move on. There’s also a point at which—how can you forgive and move on if the injury is still recurring? How do you ever get past it? Everything that I’ve seen in the course of my life has been a trajectory toward what Dr. King said with everything bending toward justice. My parents marched. My grandparents fought. And here comes Trump now and I’m like: What just happened? And the feeling was one of “You know what? White folks, I was this close to forgiving y’all. We’re not gonna forget our history, we’re not gonna forget what you did. But I am willing to take the election of Barack Obama as a start toward something else.” And then that got ripped from under us and the betrayal I felt was profound. When Trump is gone: How do I live with my fellow citizens? How do I do this? Because I feel like I don’t know how to look into your eyes and know that you were okay with the breadth of racial violence that was being suggested and perpetrated as long as you had an economy you could live with. How do I go to church with you? How do I stand in line at the grocery store behind you? So I was really caught up in that and really trying to figure it all out.
MD: One of the characters in Heaven, My Home says, “Black people are the most forgiving people on earth.” For me, forgiveness and justice are somewhat like siblings. Oftentimes I wonder is it possible to forgive someone and still seek justice? Is forgiveness part of justice? Those kinds of questions were rattling around in my head because, Darren is trying so hard to figure out who’s innocent and who’s not, who’s deserving and who’s not. Part of forgiveness to me is trust. Once that trust is broken it’s really hard to seek forgiveness for someone. And it’s also hard to see where justice is. Because trust is a part of honesty, and justice is dependent on honesty as well. Are these questions you wanted your readers to be wrestling with?
AL: It took me after I finished the book to realize there was something that happened in my children’s life that had an impact on this. We live in Southern California. My daughter goes to a very progressive school with parents who have these values and education. We’re talking about a school where they do health and sex ed, they talk about what pronouns people want to be called by. A couple years back, one white kid at school called a Black kid the n-word. And I was stunned, stunned, because I had been lulled into my California dream. After it happened I had such rage at that kid. Like fuck that kid. Fuck his family, I can’t stand them. Whereas my daughter, she had the capacity to forgive him. She said, “Mommy, I feel sorry for him.” But she was not holding this thing that happened against this child, she could recognize something was going on in the home. So this whole thing of what to do with Levi King, that’s where it came from.
I remember the day of Trump’s inauguration, there was a school event that day. I remember I sat down, and I looked behind me and there was a mom with a Black child and I just burst into tears. That kid who used the n-word, he was there and his parents were there and between that and Trump being inaugurated, I thought about the times I was called the n-word and shot with a BB gun. I was like, I don’t have the luxury of forgiving that kid. It means something different. But also, does he really know? I was just so thrown that my child had a bigger and greater forgiving heart than I did as an adult. We probably had dinner table discussions about this incident 20 times. Twenty times. Because I was ashamed of myself that I was holding a child to a standard of behavior of an adult. All this stuff was stirring in me when thinking about a child and whether or not you lean into this optimism and hope that the child can be saved. Or that we can stop manufacturing white supremacists and terrorists, that there’s a way to stop this cycle.
MD: When I read about Levi King, I wasn’t mad at him. My rage was more towards Rosemary who was saying, “I didn’t raise a racist. I don’t know how he got that way.” I cannot muster forgiveness for that sort of criminal unawareness. Look at the seed that sprouted and grew from her raising that child. This is going to be an eternal question for so many people. The way Heaven, My Home presents it has so many sides. It’s not just this Good Black Ranger [Darren] and then this backwards trailer park white people. You’ve got him, you’ve got the voices of his elders, William and Clayton, in his head. You’ve got the DA, you’ve got his boss, you’ve got his best friend Greg. I love that there are so many voices in the conversation because that’s how it is in real life.
AL: Thank you for that. Thank you. I appreciate it.
A lot of country came from Blues. Which came from Africa. That’s ours too.
MD: In the book you mention Lightning Hopkins, Betty Wright, and Jessie Mae Hemphill. Given the rising star du jour, Lil Nas X, and Megan Thee Stallion, who is from Texas, there’s this wave of what Black, I guess Gen Z and Millennials, are calling the Yee-Haw Agenda. What do you think of this embracing of Black Country music, Black Country artists, and Black folks from this region of the country?
AL: I love it. I’m probably too old to listen to Lil Nas X all the time. But god bless him. I love everything that he’s doing. I’ve listened to Black country music since Charlie Pride, who is the OG of it all. Blues and Country are fraternal twins. They are of the same cloth. One wouldn’t exist without the other. A lot of country came from Blues. Which came from Africa. That’s ours too. I’m all into people reclaiming that. One hundred percent.
MD: I love all these people bringing out their cowboy hats and showing their pictures from the rodeo. It’s fascinating to me as someone who grew up outside of that environment. I truly love seeing all of my Southern, my Western friends, enjoying the moment.
AL: I get you.It’s only late in life that I’ve become this, but I wear cowboy boots every day. Mainly because it reminds me of home, it makes me feel grounded in who I am. There was a time I would’ve felt a little embarrassed that I liked country music. It would’ve felt so white or whatever. And also there are new country artists coming out now. Country was real existential and deep and interesting in the 60s and a little bit into the 70s. And then a lot of 80s, 90s, 2000s country, other than a few artists, became more about drinking beers and the flag and also dog whistles in ways to “real America.” There are a lot of newer artists coming up with the existential, the questions that blues and country music have that other genres don’t. Pop and rock don’t sit down on the front porch and contemplate life the way that country does. There are artists that are doing that again on the country side.
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