“Permission” Is a BDSM Novel That Is About More Than Sex

Posted on by Jo Lou

It starts like this: there’s a late-night radio show where nervous listeners call in with questions about sex and relationships: Is this weird? Is this okay? Am I okay? The psychologist, who’s heard it all before, reassures them that as long as what they want is safe, sane and consensual, it’s absolutely fine. 

And yet. 

“There was one thing he’d ask that made me bristle. Whenever a girl called in with a problem, he’d start off by asking, ‘Where’s Dad?’ Where’s Dad? As if that were the key to it all.”

Saskia Vogel’s debut novel Permission is framed through this slippery lens of so-called daddy issues, beginning with the sudden loss of twenty-something-year-old Echo’s father. As his body drifts undiscovered in the ocean, the narrator finds herself unmoored, undertaking a private search to find solid ground. She tells us early on: “Even as a child, I knew the landscape would not hold,” and when Orly, a dominatrix, moves in across the road, Echo is drawn into a complex world of desire, yearning and constant calibration.  

In language that’s as beautiful as it is precise, Vogel’s sparse narrative takes readers on a journey that shifts beneath our feet, featuring a cast of characters who resist easy definition: Orly, who holds space for so many people; Piggy, her submissive, who has spent his life searching for that space; Echo’s mother, caught between grief and resentment; and Echo herself, constantly renegotiating desire, memory and consent. 

There’s a moment in the novel when Orly tells Echo: “The hard part is that most people don’t know how to ask for what they want. They don’t think they’re allowed.” Without ever spelling it out, Vogel’s book ultimately gives us, its readers, permission.

I spoke to Vogel over the internet about desire, shame, sex, consent, and Britney Spears. 

Richa Kaul Padte: You write that the erotic is an exchange, but Permission shows us that this exchange isn’t always clear-cut. Even in seemingly demarcated relationships—like the one between BDSM dom and sub Orly and Piggy—there is something unstable and messy that permeates erotic encounters. What, according to you, is this something?

Saskia Vogel: Oh my. There’s the million-dollar question. It’s the messy quality that makes the erotic so difficult to navigate, right? On the one hand, it’s the thing that allows certain kinds of unwanted sexual attention to go unchallenged because it exists in grey areas. But on the other hand, it’s that quivering space of uncertainty and searching when mutual erotic interest sparks, and you flit between being sure and unsure of where you’re headed…all the while hoping you’re headed somewhere you both want to go. Because messiness is an inherent part of the pleasures of the erotic, it’s essential that communication is clear, honest and open. When we all feel safe, heard, respected and on the same page, that’s when the messiness flourishes. And it’s also when we can start to get a sense of what the instability or messiness [constitutes]. I think it’s unique to each instance of desire. 

RKP: There are so many things I love about Permission, but my favorite is that Britney Spears makes an appearance! You position her song (anthem, imo) “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman” as an expression of transition, which is a thread that winds its way through the novel: the characters are all in the process of becoming. For Britney, this journey seems complete only when she “turn[s] her back on the world that shaped her.”

But the narrator, Echo, often appears to seek being shaped—and I totally see her point too. She works as a life model, telling us: “The artists tried to find me in their clay…[and] I emerged, radiant in the logic of their architecture.” Is being molded by others as important to the process of becoming as molding ourselves? 

SV: I’m so glad you liked the Britney reference (and so much else!). That section went through a number of drafts, but I really needed to get it right. It roots the book for me in an exploration of power, patriarchy and the ever-shifting concept of womanhood. 

Something I think about often is a YA book by Jessica Schiefauer that I’ve been lucky enough to translate. It’s coming out in 2020 and I think it will be called “Girls Lost”; in Swedish, it’s called “The Boys.” It’s about a magical flower that turns three bullied teen girls into boys for one night at a time, allowing Schiefauer to explore how the gaze shapes us. Her idea of the gaze became part of my inquiry in Permission, and also helped me make sense of my own experiences. I remember how confusing it was to suddenly have breasts as a young teen. They brought a different kind of attention that I had no interest in or use for, but also the awareness that something was wanted of me. This fact impacted how I dressed and behaved, it required me to navigate the world differently. How people see us does indeed impact how we take shape as people.

RKP: Piggy is a middle-aged man who has lived most of his life terribly lonely, afraid of his own desires. You write, “He had an idea of, but not a language for, what he meant when he said he was looking for sex…[P]ervs, he concluded, borrowing a word. It made him feel uncomfortable and ashamed, but at least…there was somewhere he fit in.” 

I feel like this idea is intricately linked to what you name elsewhere in the book as “the science that makes sense of sex through pathology.” On the one hand, there are (scientific) words that demonize desires, but on the other hand, there are kinder words that give these desires space to breathe. What does it mean for Piggy to have access only to that first set of words; what does it mean for all of us? 

Imagine if we were all able to give our sexual selves the same consideration we give our sartorial, dietary, or career choices?

SV: What you’re saying recalls something that resonated with me in Lisa Taddeo’s recent reportage on female desire, Three Women. In it, there’s a woman whose husband likes to see her have sex with other people, so they have an open sort of marriage. But the woman herself only started to understand that her sexual life had a wider context when she read 50 Shades of Grey. It hadn’t even occurred to me that this character had felt isolated until then. I assumed that she was at least aware of an alternative erotic community because of the people they were bringing into their marital bed. But Taddeo writes: “Revolutions take a long time to reach places where people share more Country Living recipes than articles about ending female subjugation.” And I think that’s important to remember. 

We are living in a time where lexicons of desire and countless communities are at our fingertips…but also not. One might not think to go looking for them, not know how, not want to, not feel that we belong there — there are a million reasons why not. Part of the fear you identify is Piggy’s awareness of the risk he associates with trying to connect with people erotically the way he wishes to. He knows he might be shamed for his desires or thought aberrant. Nobody wants to feel that way. What I would like this to mean for all of us is an increase in compassion and understanding, and a willingness to embrace the complexities of our beings – a thinking of desire as part of us and our everyday lives, rather than something separate or as an aside. Imagine if we were all able to give our sexual selves the same consideration we give our sartorial, dietary, or career choices, you know?

RKP: You develop a really great interplay between stillness and action in the narrative. For example, during play sessions, the hovering of a hand or the beating of a heart feel deeply charged with motion. But then there’s this moment between Echo and celebrity agent Van, where he thrusts his dick in her face. She tells us: “I felt cornered, so I opened my mouth and gave it a suck. A reflex parallel to inaction. The thought that follows: it’s already done.” 

This scene was so hard for me to read, because it felt intimately familiar. And I think it might for other women too: that experience where doing something sexual feels less like action than resisting what you are expected to do. What makes some forms of erotic stillness seem charged and other moments of erotic action seem dead? Consent?

SV: Thank you for this observation, and I’m so sorry that scene with Van feels familiar. Unfortunately, it’s familiar to a lot of readers. For instance, the calculations one might make when in a situation like that: am I more at risk staying and just letting it happen, or might I face violence or other unwanted experiences if I decide to say no and end this right now? But to answer your question, sometimes that good, charged stillness is about being in a certain headspace. When you’re both on the same wavelength. Yes, consent is part of it. Respect is also part of it. I think Echo might have imagined that her and Van were meeting somewhat eye-to-eye, because each of them were at the dinner table with their own set of assets. But then the blowjob is such an act of dominance that I think Echo feels like the balance of power has unexpectedly shifted. The rug gets pulled out from under her. And suddenly she knows, but also does not know, where she stands.

RKP: I’ve just been reading Audre Lorde, where she describes the erotic as a “power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge…the open and fearless underlining of [a] capacity for joy.” I was thinking about this in relation to Echo’s grief at losing her father: the event which both sparks and frames the narrative. And how even if can be explained rationally, grief itself is nonrational: it follows its own course, sucking us into tides whose logic we can’t account for. Is the erotic a lifeboat for Echo because it mirrors grief in this way, allowing for a nonrational path towards joy?

Because messiness is an inherent part of the pleasures of the erotic, it’s essential that communication is clear, honest and open.

SV: Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic” was hugely important to me in the writing of this novel. My book was shaped by that essay, by Ellen Willis’s writings on pornography, feminism and consumer culture, and also by Pat Califia’s “Whoring in Utopia”—among other writings. I hadn’t thought about grief in the novel like this, but your question really resonates with me. At first I had thought of the dad as an organizing principle: the force around which the Echo’s and her mother’s lives are shaped, and what happens when that force is removed. What shape would their lives take on then? And in terms of the erotic and grief, I wanted to explore with BDSM in particular, the uses of the erotic beyond just pleasure. The meditative states that can be accessed, what happens when we move beyond the intellectual, the verbal. What we can access through sensation. [In other words,] the potential of the erotic when we allow it be integral to our lives and take it seriously in all its slipperiness.

RKP: Permission can be read as a book about sex, but for me, it was ultimately a book about care: about seeking the care we need, no matter how strange and unlikely its form. From Piggy’s home-blended salve to the soft love of Echo’s housekeeper to the deep attention required during play sessions, I came away from Permission feeling that “being receptive to an act of care” can be redemptive. Can it?

SV: I’ve thought a lot about how we give and receive love. And how sometimes they way a person offers us love might not feel like love to us. We might not be able to see it, and vice versa. Care falls into the category of “love,” but it isn’t just about loving in the way you know how; it’s about being attentive to the needs of others, understanding how they want to be loved, and also learning to see different forms of love. For instance, the dad expresses his love through labor — providing for the family — and the mom has a hard time seeing that as an expression of love. She wants him to be more present in the home. But they’re not really able to have a productive conversation about it, and this leads to conflict within the family. Opening yourself up to seeing and understanding different forms of loving can be redemptive, I think. At the very least, it helps us see and understand the people around us. And isn’t that what so many of us want? To be seen for who we are.

11 Highly-Anticipated Queer Books Coming Out This Winter

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Whether you’re a winter hater or a die-hard hygge practitioner, we can all agree that this is a great season for never leaving your bedroom. So while the darkness descends on the northern hemisphere, why not pick up a new book? And while you’re picking up a new book, why not support queer writers?

Here are 11 buzzy books by LGBTQ authors coming down the pipe from November to February. Whether memoir, literary fiction, short stories, poetry, essays, nonfiction, or some genre-bending mix of these, all of these books are more than worth the read.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (11/5)

Carmen Maria Machado’s highly anticipated memoir is unlike anything you’ve ever read. For one thing, it contains the story of an abusive queer relationship, which itself is rarely told. Queer and straight folks alike tend to want to believe that domestic abuse doesn’t happen in same-gender relationships. In In the Dream House, Machado herself grapples with not wanting to make queer women “look bad.” But if society is going to see queer folks as fully human, it needs to see everything, even that darkness. This book is dark—it often reads like a horror story, cold fear creeping up from the corners—but it is also a work of pure poetry, a study in language and form, a wildly successful use of second person, and a potent example of how we frame and re-frame and re-frame again the stories we tell others and ourselves. It’s gripping and gorgeous, one of the best memoirs to be released in years. 

On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl (11/5)

If you’ve ever thought it would be great to have a sprawling literary Western with queer protagonists, this is your book. Taking the reader through postwar California, Las Vegas, and Tijuana, the book centers on Muriel, a young newlywed, and Julian, her charming brother-in-law. Their bond configures them into a kind of family, even as they live apart—Muriel growing ever more interested in gambling and keeping secrets from her husband Lee, and Julius following his wanderlust to Vegas where he meets a romantic interest, Henry. On Swift Horses is dense and as sweeping as the Western sky, a bold story of characters who are experiencing the restraints of a nation claiming to be full of possibility. It’s a book that will engage the mind as much as the heart, worth savoring and perfect for a winter escape. 

Feed by Tommy Pico (11/5)

Tommy Pico is a titan of poetry, and this final installment in his Teebs series (following IRL, Nature Poem, and Junk) returns us to the world of Pico’s alter-ego, Teebs. Teebs is a queer Indigenous almost-nihilist: irreverant and funny, intellectual and playful, sexy and observant. This collection is perhaps the most epic of the series. Musing on music, texts, headlines, and yes, food, Pico writes stream-of-consciousness poetry that is profound on every level, not least because it’s unpretentious, witty, and full of vitality and emotion at once. 

The Life & Times of Butch Dykes by Eloisa Aquino (11/12)

This collection of illustrations of, and text about, women and nonbinary gender-defying warriors of history started as a zine series. Now, a single bound volume brings Aquino’s portraits and hand-lettered passages into one place. With a particular focus on people of color, Aquino renders her subjects with care, reverence, humor, and pragmatism. Not all of these figures—most of whom were working in creative fields like writing, film, photography, and music—were queer, but most of them were, and all of them actively defied gender stereotypes as they created art, created space for themselves, and profoundly influenced culture. From Audre Lorde to Gloria Anzaldúa to Jenny Shimizu and a plethora of others, this is a great book to use as reference and inspiration, and to return to again and again.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo (12/3)

The U.S. release of this illustrious saga with no fewer than 12 protagonists made news most recently when the Booker Prize judges decided to break its own rules and split the award between Evaristo and Margaret Atwood, but this book deserves a full spotlight. Not much has been said about the queerness of this novel, but it’s here, and it’s complicated, which is true to life. Exploring intersectional identity—Black, queer, gender nonconforming, British—on a grand, intergenerational scale, Evaristo uses poetry and poetic prose to craft her characters and stories in a way that makes the novel so captivating that you won’t even notice its nearly-500-page length. 

Homie by Danez Smith (1/21) 

If you’ve read Don’t Call Us Dead (which, if you haven’t, what are you doing?), you already know: Danez Smith creates some of the most magnetic, dynamic, shrewd, and saucy poetry of our time. Homie is no different in this regard. Functioning as a love letter to friends—an undersung relationship in most writing/music/pop culture—this collection shines with pain and triumph, brimming with love for the people who make life worth living despite and because of the dark inner and outer worlds we often inhabit. This is sure to make it onto pretty much every Best Books of the Year list, and with good reason. Especially for queer folks, friends can be life-saving family. Smith captures this in a way only they can.

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My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland (2/4)

Carson McCullers is perhaps best known for her novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding, but she was a prolific and well-connected writer in the 1930’s and 40’s. She was also queer. In My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Shapland, after encountering the love letters McCullers wrote to Annemarie Schwarzenbach, follows her gut and her heart into the depths of McCullers’s queer life: her childhood home, her Yaddo writing retreat, even her therapy transcripts. As she engages with McCullers’s archive, we see both how eye-opening and how limiting archives can be. What results is part biography, part memoir, part genre-less series of vignettes, part poetry, part queer manifesto. It’s about not only finding ourselves in literature, and in the writers who make it, but in making ourselves from it. This is a gorgeous, brilliant book that is all but guaranteed to resonate with queer folks, word nerds, and readers everywhere.

Verge by Lidia Yuknavitch

Verge by Lidia Yuknavitch (2/4)

Lidia Yuknavitch is one of the most celebrated contemporary writers. Her novels and memoir are bestsellers and have been used to teach craft in creative writing classes across the country. In her first work of fiction since 2017’s The Book of Joan, Yuknavitch returns with a collection of short stories that embody her unique blend of the unsettling and the delightful. The stories border on the fantastical, with visceral roots in the world as we know it. The characters are children and adults, living on the margins, building worlds and being torn apart by them. Fans of Yuknavitch’s sublime prose won’t be disappointed.

Something That May Shock and Discredit You

Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Mallory Ortberg (2/11)

It can fairly be said that Daniel Mallory Ortberg is a cultural figurehead: his previous books, Texts from Jane Eyre and The Merry Spinster, were bestsellers; he co-founded the now-defunct but ever-beloved online magazine The Toast; he is Slate’s Dear Prudence columnist. In this memoir-in-essays, Ortberg brings his signature humor and insight to exploration of gender, pop culture, history, literature, and ultimately, living life in the world. Like all of his work, Something That May Shock and Discredit You is a stand-alone pillar in Ortberg’s remarkable canon, one in which the lines typically drawn around topic and genre are obliterated, resulting in a wide-open field of possibility. 

Real Life

Real Life by Brandon Taylor (2/18)

(Full disclosure, Brandon Taylor is a senior editor of Recommended Reading.) This debut novel follows a young graduate student named Wallace, who is the kind of introverted queer person who is rarely portrayed in literature, and to whom many people (queer or not) will be able to relate. The fine line between introversion and isolation can be tricky, especially when introversion is a self defense mechanism, as in Wallace’s case. Wallace is a gay Black man in a Midwest town; his colleagues and friends are mostly white. This is a very real-life (no pun intended) aspect of higher education in America, and over the course of the book, Wallace must grapple with longing, desire, racism, loneliness and complicated connection. The prose is luminous, from the very first sentence to the last; it is ethereal and corporeal; it is a stunning novel that won’t be easily forgotten.

Here for It by R. Eric Thomas

Here for It by R. Eric Thomas (2/18)

R. Eric Thomas is a playwright, senior staff writer at Elle.com, and host of The Moth in Philadelphia and Washington D.C., so he’s no stranger to telling a good story. In his debut memoir/essay collection, Thomas tells his story of being a Black gay kid and a doing-his-best adult. He writes about code-switching: as a city kid in a white suburban school, in his Ivy League college, between his Christian and queer identities. He writes about what it means to be “other.” He questions what “normal” means, what the future holds, and why the heck do we even try? If that sounds dark, it’s only sort of dark—these essays are also hilarious. Thomas is one of the most revered pop culture writers working today, and this collection is a welcome addition to his abundant and admirable work.

Some Notes To Keep Your Rape Story Relevant

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

RE: Your Rape Story
by Elissa Schappell

FROM: LAUREN
TO: KATE

MONDAY, 4pm

Hey Kate,

First, I have to say, I love this piece so much!!! If it were up to me, I wouldn’t touch a word. But there are a few little things, questions mostly, totally on me, I’m sure I wasn’t clear at lunch. It was that Condé Nast special—rare burger, no bun, no fries, no fun, and two just-kill-me sodas. Ouch!

Anyway, it was so great talking to you. You were so honest—or maybe it was the tequila talking? (But wait, I don’t speak Spanish! lol.) Which is why I have to say, I’m a little surprised [and a tad bit disappointed] that a lot of the great stuff you told me isn’t in here, because I felt like we really connected.

And how crazy that you grew up just one town over! Some of my friends had older sisters and brothers so it’s totally possible we were at some of the same parties. Small world!

Actually, I used to babysit for a family in your town, maybe you knew them.

Okay—let’s jump right in. I know this deadline is INSANE and I’m sorry, but let me say again how thrilled I am that you’re doing this.

What would you think about rewriting the opening? You get it right? Stats are a total nonstarter. We all know the number of sexual assaults, rapes, nonreported rapes that occur every year is HUGE (omg that Mount Everest of untested rape kits—soooo grim), and that’s the problem, the numbers are so mind-boggling you can’t even wrap your head around them.

It’s incredible. For centuries women don’t want to talk about rape because they’re afraid of being punished, shamed, or having no one believe them, and then one day Harvey Weinstein comes along, drops his bathrobe and boom! It’s like magic. Suddenly everybody has their hand up, Me too! Me too! And a movement is born! Did you see the piece in the NYT about Boomer moms being triggered by classic rock in shopping malls, and what about that little old lady who was goosed by a porter on the Titanic?

So many…

You have to wonder if some women aren’t voting twice, jk!

No listen. If I could write this piece I would, in a heartbeat. The exposure you’re going to get!!! Not that you need it, or care, Ms. Army of 2 million Twitter followers. This will be easy money for you. (I know that money is a thing for you right now.) Just tell us what happened to you, and how you got past it. I am not saying the ending has to be uplifting, but you know.

Don’t hate me but I need this ASAP, like our real drop-dead deadline is next Friday.

FYI I wanted to do #MeToo months ago, but the editor in chief (you know him, right?) wouldn’t do it, swore it was a fad, it would never last. Did I mention that we’ve started calling him Oz? As in Wizard of… because he wants to have a hand in everything, total control, unless of course he’s mysteriously disappeared to go hot-air ballooning.

Now he’s freaking out that by the time the issue hits the stands #MeToo will be dead (like he’s been predicting for months), and it will be all about the #Backlash.

He is determined to be ahead of the curve on #Backlash. Seriously, we’re about to have our first meeting, I can’t tell you the number of times he’s said, joking/not joking, “One day this is going to come back and bite women on the ass.”

All my best,
L

P.S. Attaching that hilarious pic I told you about of the entire editorial staff in our pink pussy hats.

MONDAY, 5:30 p.m.

Oops, spaced on the contract. (If I only had a brain, a heart, some courage…) Sending ASAP and YES we do pay on acceptance not publication. I can expedite if you like. Sisterhood is powerful. Yay us!

WEDNESDAY, 3:33 p.m.

Dear Katie,

Oh my god, Please believe me, I didn’t mean to rewrite you! You have to believe me, It’s your story not mine. 100% yours.

I only revised that party scene so you’d get an idea of the kinda world-building details we want. See, I didn’t know if you were in college or high school. If it was one guy or two guys, and I don’t know how drunk/stoned you were. What happened? If you told me at lunch I blacked it out. Do you think maybe someone slipped you a roofie? Is it possible this could be a teachable moment?

I could have sworn you told me that you woke up with your underwear on backward. It sounds here like maybe you lost it? Forgot it? Clarify.

I know this is dumb, but what were you wearing? Ugh. I know, but the reader will wonder and it will help them better imagine the scene.

I know this is dumb, but what were you wearing? Ugh. I know, but the reader will wonder and it will help them better imagine the scene.

Also, did you report? That will be important to readers. Did you report? And no judgment if you didn’t!

I’d say that publishing your story would more than make up for it.

As a fellow English major, I appreciate that you’re trying to conjure a mood with that “heavy canopy of smoke over the dance floor,” but how about just “smoky”? Not so sure about details like “The slow oscillation of a fan moving the air like hands”? Or the motif of the red camp blanket with the print of hunters and the hound dogs on it. Worship all of it but in the interest of space we will have to lose some of it. I want to hear the throbbing bass of the stereo, smell that smoke—is it pot, hashish??

On another note, Amen to your comment about those privileged “ivory tower feminists with their Harvard degrees and peashooters” attacking women who complain about sexual assault, Grow up! and Stop whining!

I mean, what would THEY do if their boss exposed himself in the break room while they were trying to microwave Cup o’ Noodles? Quit? Slap him with a lawsuit? Slap him? What if he appeared out of nowhere and said it was an accident? Would it matter whether or not you were eating?

Love that you included that taxi ride with the “boy genius” editor (boy genius leaning back hard into his forties) who passed on your book because you wouldn’t let him grope you in the taxi. That line “your cunt is made of ice, frozen and impenetrable as Superman’s Fortress of Solitude” is priceless. Kudos to you for saying what no one else will, but unfortunately, we can’t use it even with ***s. It’s silly but the magazine doesn’t allow offensive language or profanity, even in dialogue.

Re: money. I promise I’m trying to get you $2 a word (times are tough but you deserve it)! You’re an established writer and a vocal feminist, and what a great platform this is for you, right? Just get the piece in—seriously knock it out of the effing park and cross my heart I’ll get you $2.

Also, Oz says feminists have no sense of humor. Maybe you could make this a little funny? Add a few jokes? It might soften him up…

Yours in the struggle,
L

P.S. I think the pussy hat pic is cute too.

P.P.S. Just sign the contract. Once the piece comes in—and he loves it—we’ll change it from $1 to $2.

P.P.P.S. Mea culpa, I know that joke about women “voting twice” was dumb.

FRIDAY, 5:30 p.m.

Hello friend,

Good news, I’m still at the office! I get that you’re stressed. I wasn’t suggesting you “throw in some rape jokes.” I would never do that. I was suggesting maybe you could lighten the mood, that’s all, if it wouldn’t kill you but clearly you think it’s a bad idea.

L

FRIDAY, 6:00 p.m.

Can I give you some advice? In times like this I always return to the master: Charles Dickens. Dickens says if you want to hook the reader and gain their sympathy you have to tell them a story. I’m not saying you’re Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, but ask yourself, because the reader wants to know: Are you or are you not the hero of your own story?

Are you or are you not the hero of your own story?

Screw nuance. It’s black-and-whit. No gray. Gray is for foreign movies with subtitles. You know, woman smoking a cigarette weeps silently at the sight of a bicycle with a flat tire.

Think about it. Anyway, hope this all makes sense. I am happy to talk it through with you. Sorry about the misunderstanding.

Also we should have some art soon, very excited to run it by you!

Yours in Solidarity!

P.S. You got this. Forget about getting that emergency root canal, sister. If you give us the kind of searing realism that gets people talking, Oz will buy you a fur coat. LOL. We will definitely go out and get white girl wasted.

MONDAY, 10:45 a.m.

Yes, confirmed. I got the contract.

Sigh. I see you stetted that “some women, some women” section. I know every woman experiences sexual harassment/sexual assault/rape differently. I know that “it’s personal,” it’s supposed to be a personal piece. Remember? That’s what we agreed on.

So, get personal. Get right to that “elbow-titting” thing those guys did in the halls of your high school. THAT’S GREAT. How did they get away with that? No, I know. It’s that You-should-be-happy-he-hit-you-it-means-he-likes-you thing, am I right? I hate that. Also LOVE the image of trying to dodge the ass-grabbing customers in that beach restaurant being like a game of Whac-A-Mole, the minute you escape one hairy varmint another pops up.

This is what I mean about funny!!! Maybe more humor would be good?

Someone joked the other day that girls who like male attention should wear a cute little button, like a wink emoji or Flirting Zone, to signal that they’re safe to talk to, compliment, hang out with, etc…

Here’s a crazy idea, maybe we should look at this from a service angle? Provide a sort of a visual, a chart (maybe in the shape of dress?) laying out what’s generally considered acceptable behavior and what’s sexual harassment/sexual assault/rape—not from the point of view of the law, but from a woman’s point of view.

Since you’re wed to the “not all women experience sexual harassment the same way” thing, the headline could be something like “Jane says bad behavior, Sally says sexual violation.” Keep it snappy.

At one end you’ve got the 100-year-old grandfather who pats you on the fanny and says, Va va va voom, then whistling construction workers, then strangers looking down your shirt on the bus, followed by coworkers who say, “If I told you that you had a nice body would you hold it against me?” or coworkers who sometimes rub your shoulders, then all the other stuff, you know, groping, date rape, all the way to being raped at knifepoint.

How’s that?

Question: Where on this scale would you put the father who every Saturday night, before he takes the babysitter home, parks his car around the corner from her house so he can feel her up?

Question: Where on this scale would you put the father who every Saturday night, before he takes the babysitter home, parks his car around the corner from her house so he can feel her up? All through middle school. I can’t write it for you, you’d have to figure it out.

Best,
XOXOXO

MONDAY, 4:27 p.m.

Hey, did you get my last email?? Are your ears burning?

They should be. We had our first #MeTooBacklash meeting yesterday and your name came up! Oz was not joking about being ahead of the pack here. He also asked me again when he could see your piece. There’s a lot of buzz about it here… I am stalling, but I can’t hold him off much longer. He said, “I want details,” I said he’d have to wait. But seriously, tick tock tick tock. We are running out of time.

We looked at possible cover art for #MeTooBacklash. Hey, can I run something past you? I know you’ve got a great eye. What would you think about either a woman in a neck brace, like “whiplash,” or a woman on a hill waving a white flag in surrender—and the white flag is a white miniskirt? Maybe off-base, just running it up the old flagpole.

(ha ha wink emoji)

Can’t wait to get your reaction to the attached art for your story.

Ugh… I do have some bad news. I’m sorry and I hate this so much, but zero percent chance we’d publish this without your name on it. No initials, no pseudonym. That’s the whole point. It’s you. Also zero percent chance for a kill fee now after all this.

But hey, let’s be positive! Ask yourself, WWGSD? What Would Gloria Steinem Do? Sisterhood is powerful!

Cheers!
XO

TUESDAY, 10:05 a.m.

Wow! Rise and shine girlfriend. Were you really up at 4 a.m.?

I am going to pretend you didn’t just send this back to me—again—without directly addressing my questions. I am going to pretend this didn’t happen.

Also, what about the chart we talked about? Grandfather, construction worker, knifepoint, babysitter being molested in the driveway?

Relax. I spoke to the art department about swapping out the image of Raggedy Ann in the mouth of the dog “wolf ” and they’re fine with it. Who knows where that image even came from, but you have to admit it’s arresting. It catches the eye. Danger!

Tell me the truth—is it the photo, or do you have a problem with Raggedy Ann personally? Personally, I love Raggedy Ann. I mean she’s the all-American “Every Girl” doll, right? Didn’t you have one?

Honestly, we’re all a little surprised at how upset you are by this image. Outside of Raggedy Ann being in a dog’s mouth no one here thinks she looks like “the victim of a violent assault,” or “traumatized… like she’s just going through the motions… putting on a happy face for her friends and family.” I don’t see how button eyes can project a “haunted stare,” but what matters is you do. You see “a mask of pain,” I see a poker face—and if she is putting on a happy face, is that the worst thing?

Don’t forget she’s smiling! 🙂 You can’t deny that big smile. Raggedy Ann is no one’s chew toy. Hell, I can think of a dozen photos of me where I am smiling like that. Of course I’m drunk, and she’s not, she’s a doll, but what matters is she/we are having fun. I think that’s the point. Even in the jaws of a dog Raggedy Ann continues to smile, she never loses her sense of humor.

Jean-Claude Phillipe, you know our art director, yes? He says what else could it be but a reference to Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf ? Is the wolf not the epitome of stranger danger? Danger!

They also say if the issue is the saliva, they can lose it. For the record, nobody here interpreted this as crying wolf = crying rape.

L

WEDNESDAY, 10:10 a.m.

Dearest Katie,

I just want you to know that of course, the minute you said that, I saw it. I don’t know how I missed it. Crying wolf. At this point I think I’m too close to this piece. I literally broke down crying twice yesterday. I had a dream that I was back in middle school and my mom and dad, and the mom and the kids I used to babysit for (but not the dad, he was somewhere else waiting for me), all morphed into star-nosed moles. I woke up crying and I couldn’t breathe. It felt so real. Now I have a stomachache—maybe I’m getting sick.

Yours truly,

THURSDAY, 8:00 a.m.

Kate,

I was hoping and praying I’d find your revise in my mailbox this morning.

I don’t know what to say. I’ve already lied and told Oz the story was in—and it was great, and I’m on my period so stop bugging me every five minutes.

I know that’s not your problem. That’s mine. If I get fired, that’s on me.

Just let me know? I feel like we’ve really gotten close these last few days, so just friend to friend, be straight with me. Also, just so you know, if you can’t deliver as promised, we’re going to be forced to swap in a photo spread of Woody Allen’s greatest hits—you know, “Can we still love Annie Hall?”

(Btw there’s a target between Mariel Hemingway’s eyes. It’s awful.)

Copyediting needs this by noon tomorrow. Drop-dead. Latest. Seriously. It’s Friday, you know people are heading for the country. I’ll stay as long as it takes—it’s not like I’m dashing off to the Hamptons like everyone else—but I don’t have a time machine.

I can’t do this for you. I mean, if I need to I will—I mean, I can if you want. I can do it. I will write it if you want me to, but I don’t think you want me to.

All I want is this: How old were you? Where were you? What time of day was it? What were you wearing? Skirt? Pants? Shorts? How dark was it? Was it before or after midnight? Were you wearing perfume? If so, what kind? When was the last time you’d showered? Could you smell yourself ? Could anyone else smell you? Was he older than you or the same age? Was he handsome? Did you laugh at his jokes? Was there anything going through your mind? Were you happy for the attention? How did you react? When did you react? Did you react? If not, why not? What were you thinking? Could you think? When did everything change? If you saw yourself, was it like looking through the wrong end of a telescope? If you said anything, what did your voice sound like? Like a cartoon mouse? Is it possible that before you knew what was happening, it was nice? At first was it as unremarkable as bending a straw? Does your life break down into life before and after?

FRIDAY, 9:30 a.m.

We’re almost there! Just one last thing—about the ending. We need some closure. Can you clarify, or simplify it?

You don’t want the people you love, who love you, who are proud of you, to know you were raped, because they will believe it, and they will be heartbroken and they will be angry and full of guilt and helplessness, and they will want to do something, anything, their hands balled up in fists, but what? Hire a hitman? There’s nothing they can do. They know it. And that will make them feel small and pathetic, and that pains you. You hate it. Their impotency embarrasses you. It will remind you of how small and pathetic and full of impotent rage you are. The fact that on top of all this, the people you love, who love you, who are proud of you, will also now feel awkward, possibly uncomfortable around you because you were raped when there’s no reason for them to feel awkward or uncomfortable, after all, this was the whole point of keeping your mouth shut! It will be all the small things. Your mother, your sister, your friend will immediately change the channel when a man threatens a woman on TV, apologizing for not knowing it was coming, as though this were her fault. Your father, your brother, your friend, will hesitate before putting his hand on the small of your back to guide you across a slippery patch of ice, because he is afraid of startling you, of taking some liberty with your body—these men you love, reduced to their gender! This was the whole point of keeping your mouth shut! You didn’t want the burden of their pity, or their guilt, or their sadness, or the burden of having to talk about it, you didn’t want to wonder who among them wondered—full of shame but unable to help themselves, how much of this was your fault. You didn’t want the responsibility of making everyone feel better about what happened to you. If you’re not saying, “I’m fine,” you are saying, “I’m sorry.” You never envisioned this life for yourself. You don’t know where you turned left instead of right, why it happened. All you know is that this is your story, and your story has a happy ending. This is a happy ending.

See what I mean, Kate?

The whole piece has been building to this moment! Come on! Just tell us the truth. Make us believe it.

We’re All Terrified of Turning Into Our Parents

Posted on by Jo Lou

Few are able to plunge the depths of familial complexity like Jami Attenberg, and even fewer are able to reflect the nesting doll of desires, secrets, and contradictions the individual becomes when put into the context of family. In her seventh novel, All This Could Be Yours, the New York Times bestselling author delivers her signature wit and emotionally powerful prose in a family saga set against the backdrop of a sweltering New Orleans summer.

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Victor Tuchman is, unequivocally, from the get-go, a bad man. The power-hungry real estate developer is also the nucleus of a family irrevocably altered from standing his imperious shadow. As his condition deteriorates in a hospital from a heart attack, his family is forced to reckon with the legacy he leaves behind. His daughter, Alex Tuchman, comes to New Orleans seeking answers about who her father was. Her mother, Barbara, who nurtures a perpetual need bordering on obsession for the material, remains tight-lipped as Alex tries to learn the truth about her father. Victor’s son, Gary, misses flight after flight, remaining in Los Angeles as his wife, Victor’s daughter-in-law, Twyla, is forced to contend with her own secret born directly from the misdeeds of Victor Tuchman. Attenberg charts what one man leaves behind, and questions if a family can rebuild, find forgiveness, and, ultimately, move on.

I hopped on the phone with Jami Attenberg to discuss her latest opus, toxic masculinity, legacy and how it’s passed down.

Greg Mania: I’m very much interested in talking about how family relates to identity, something you examine in your work, especially in The Middlesteins and All Grown Up. What is some new territory you explore in that regard in this book?

Jami Attenberg: Well, it comes down to physical proximity. In All Grown Up, [Andrea] lives in New York and sees her mother once every few weeks. In The Middlesteins, they all live within driving distance of each other. The kids in this book, Alex and Gary, have made a series of conscious choices in their life to physically move as far away from their parents as possible. They didn’t want to connect their adulthood to their childhood. Over the course of the book, they’re forced to contemplate their parents—their father is in the hospital, on the verge of death—and I was interested in seeing how these two characters, who have done everything they can to walk away from their family, consider their parents, again, and see if they’re anything like them.

GM: Even though Victor is in the hospital, unconscious, for the majority of the book, he is very much present, especially in the scenes that take place in the past. But it’s almost as though he’s more of an ominous presence rather than an explicit voice. Was this intentional?

JA: Yeah, that was a specific choice on my part. He appears in the first couple of pages, and that’s the only time you see a close third person. He wasn’t originally going to appear in the book. In the first three drafts, I just had no interest in him having his say. I just felt like men like him have had their chance. We’ve heard from that perspective many-a-time, and I’m tired of it. I just wasn’t interested in who he is. The book was only going to be these, at least, four strong female voices. But on the fourth draft, I realized I needed to put him in there, because his perspective was necessary to the book. I created him as a whole character, but from a sort of removed perspective. 

GM:The city of New Orleans is almost a character itself in this book. How has being a full-time resident influenced this story?

JA: I was nervous about writing a book set [in New Orleans], because I’ve only lived here for two years. I sort of had to give myself permission to write about New Orleans. I’m just very protective of it. I didn’t want to screw it up. The other thing was that I didn’t want it to be a love letter, like some sort of starry-eyed interpretation. This city is complicated. It has problems. It’s an incredible place, but it also has a crumbling infrastructure. But it’s also special. I feel happier here than anywhere else I’ve lived. I tried to write about it in a clear-eyed way, and I tried to make sure I didn’t talk about the clichés. And my trick was that, if I did mention a cliché, I had a character who didn’t really like it there. So Barbara was sort of forced to move down there, and it’s not really her scene. She’s sort of this cold, New England ice queen who isn’t interested in what New Orleans has to offer her. 

GM: She misses the sweater tied around her neck.

JA: [Laughs.] Yes, exactly. But there are plenty of love notes to the city tucked inside throughout the whole book. 

GM: I noticed that! You talk about the different types of flora in people’s gardens, the way Spanish moss drips from the old trees. I love your attention to detail, specifically how you also include the perspective of passers-by, like the CVS employee and the ferry operator. What was your intention with including these brief glimpses into other people’s lives?

JA: They just kind of showed up. My intention starting out was to write about these outsiders, in this case, the Tuchmans. That was my entry point. And then, as I was writing these voices, the ones of the native New Orleanians, they were insistent that they be heard. My first draft, as messy as it was, was this kaleidoscopic view. I just let these passing characters grow.

GM: This novel is very much set in the present. Even though you don’t explicitly mention Trump, we know who the president is. Why was it important to note the current political climate in this book?

JA: I just think it was impossible not to. I have thought a lot about how once Trump became president, someone could say he or him, and you’d know who they were talking about, which is just incredibly powerful. I hate to give him that power, but it’s true. And it’s not just him. He represents this existential threat overall, and I didn’t really have to do very much work to let the reader know what’s going on outside of the characters’ world. It’s really a way of inviting the reader into the conversation of the book. 

GM: There’s also an intergenerational perspective—we meet Victor’s grandchildren, Sadie and Avery. If this book were to continue, do you think Victor would have any influence on their lives? Would he loom over them like he’s loomed over their parents? 

The patriarchy is a fucked-up system, and I wanted to investigate what this can do to a family.

JA: I think the trail Victor leaves behind is one of the points of the book, which is that we have a fucked-up system, called the patriarchy, a system that is both broken and functioning at the same time, and I wanted to demonstrate and investigate what this kind of toxic male behavior can do to a family. I wanted to examine what Victor leaves behind, what his legacy is, and what it means. But, for the most part, I invite the reader to consider what kind of impact this man has on his family. 

GM: What came first: the character of Victor or what Victor represents? What it means to be abusive, powerful, manipulative? 

JA: I’m a character-driven novelist, so it doesn’t work for me if I’m just trying to be political. I always see these characters in my head first. But then whatever you care about or are thinking about at the time infuses itself naturally into the characters. I don’t think I’m a heavy-handed writer, maybe earlier in my career I was, but I’ve had to learn to let the characters talk, let the characters be. If I were to put him, or any of the other characters into a box, they just wouldn’t be believable or successful characters. My books are character-driven before anything else. 

GM: You put mortality through a humorous prism, which, to me, makes it more palatable. Is this how you’re able to navigate mortality on the whole?

JA: For sure. I used to be so freaked out about mortality. When I turned 40, all of a sudden I was like, “oh, I could die.” It just didn’t register for me up until that point. I thought about it for a lot for a few years. I have a friend who’s about six years older than me, and she told me that one day you’ll wake up and you just won’t be worried about it anymore. That’s just what happened. It’s like when you break up with somebody, and for a while you think that it’s the worst break-up ever, that you’ll never get over it, then comes a day you find out you’re just fine. You got over it.

GM: Kirkus Reviews called you the “poet laureate of difficult families,” what about the family dynamic do you hope to examine next?

JA: Well, my next book is going to be a memoir. And even though my mom is a reader for me—she’ll read a draft of a work-in-progress—I don’t always necessarily tell her what I’m working on in advance. I’ve been tweeting about it a little bit, and my mom, who follows me on social media, messaged me to tell me she’s seen my tweets about writing a memoir, and then proceeded to ask me if there wasn’t anything I wanted to talk about. [Laughs.] She was like, “am I going to be in it?” My mom and I really close, so this isn’t going to be Mommie Dearest. I’m writing about being a writer and a woman, so it’s less about family. But I have about three different ideas for the novel following this one. I think that it’s good for me to store up my feelings, innovate, and meet new characters. 

The Children of Latinx Immigrants Need a New American Dream

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

My mother believed in the American Dream when she had me, and she worked tirelessly in order to provide me with a great life with no worries about not having the basic necessities: food, a roof over our heads, and love. For her, and other immigrants of her generation, that’s what the American Dream meant: financial stability, no stress, the ability to provide for her family. But for the first-generation children of these true believers, it’s becoming clear that the dream is more complicated.

My Time Among the Whites

In My Time Among The Whites, Jennine Capó Crucet delves, via essays, into the experiences she’s had as a first-generation American child of Cuban immigrants who depended on the American Dream to survive and have a better life. In the essay “¡Nothing is Impossible in America!,” Crucet discusses the definition of the American Dream her parents knew and that she was raised with, along with the realities she discovered after believing it herself for so long. “The American Dream, commonly told: You can accomplish anything if you work hard enough for it,” Crucet proclaims. “All you have to do is work hard. My parents really believed this, and I believed it long enough to get me to college, where I learned to see this idea for the dangerous lie it is, one that doesn’t take into account many things like, for instance, history.” 

Millions of immigrants have striven for a similar American Dream. To drop everything you know and leave a place you once called home is a significant and unimaginably difficult decision to make, especially when it ends up being the only option to survive wars, protests, corrupt police raids, and other horrendous events caused by outside political, economic, or environmental reasons. This was a reality for so many Latinx immigrants who made that sacrifice and more, working long hours under strenuous conditions in order to be able to keep living in this new home. To go through that, they had to believe in the promise of America—and in some ways, Crucet points out, that dream was realized.  “We have privileges [our mothers and grandmothers] never thought possible,” she writes in “¡Nothing is Impossible in America!” “We are standing inside that privilege right here, talking about this. We have conjured the key not from nothing, but from their sacrifices and from the futures we glimpsed that sat just beyond the limits of their dreams for us.” Children of the diaspora, including myself, have had privileges of all kinds in result of what those who came before us have endured. 

Here’s what first-generation children have learned from the life our parents sacrificed to give us: The American Dream doesn’t apply to everyone.

But here’s what first-generation children have learned from the life our parents sacrificed to give us: No matter how sweet it might look or how close one might feel to achieving it, the American Dream doesn’t apply to everyone equally. My mother embraced the dream of financial success and stability when she had me. She believed in it so that she could provide me with a good life, a life where I wouldn’t have to struggle as much as she did. As a single parent, through working tireless hours and going to college when she didn’t previously plan on it, she was determined to provide me with as much security and love as possible. Growing up, I felt it was only right to aspire to the American Dream. 

But as I realized the inequalities my community and other marginalized communities face, I resented the American Dream that I grew up idealizing. The harsh truth is that it truly can never apply to me or those like me. Injustice towards marginalized communities in the U.S. spans across many groups, but Latinx immigrants and even those of the diaspora have been increasingly faced with racism, xenophobia, and violence. There also continues to be pay inequality between Latinx workers, both citizens and undocumented, and white workers. Even when immigrants (and their children) work an immense amount of tireless hours, they’re still further from the dream of financial security. 

Crucet forged her own path to get where she is now—a novelist and associate professor—without having to diminish her heritage. In her book, she discusses her parents’ confusion when they attend her readings and see the central role her Latinx identity plays in her work—and how popular her work is despite this, even among strangers, even among white strangers.. “While they understand that by many measures, I’m successful in ways they’ve learned to recognize,” Crucet writes, “they don’t totally understand how I did this while asserting–rather than muting–my ethnic heritage in my work. They don’t understand why I would do this work when they’d given me what they thought was a key to escape it, a way of avoiding the work entirely.” Just as Crucet learned about the major falsity of the American Dream, many Latinxs of the diaspora likely have learned the same, especially given the political and social climate within the U.S. since the 2016 presidential election. 

We have to force our way into the dream through constant struggle to survive.

The white-centered aspects of the American Dream continuously reinforce barriers that keep Latinxs, including myself, from having that big house, that picket fence, the job that promises financial stability. Because we’re not the country’s ideal, we have to force our way into the dream through constant struggle to survive. Crucet writes about how her parents’ version of the American Dream, the one they passed on to her, incorporated that inequality: “I am someone whose parents taught her that to survive and thrive in this country, I would have to work twice as hard as a white person,” Crucet stated. “They never took issue with the unfairness of this; they said that’s just how it is until the work itself leads to success that allows you to transcend the unfairness somehow.” I, too, have learned to sense the moments where I know that I have to push a hundred times more compared to others, but is this the way for us to continue living, to work and work just to still be seen as lesser in a country where its so-called universal dream never considered us in its origins? 

Considering this inequality, it’s no surprise that many Latinxs of the diaspora have more resentment towards the traditional idea of the American Dream than their parents or grandparents. After all, that American Dream wasn’t created with them in mind. The Latinx community has become a significant and crucial part of the U.S. population, but we are still not part of how America envisions itself. In the essay “Imagine Me Here, or How I Became a Professor,” Crucet discusses the resistance she practices in her position. “I teach as if I have nothing to lose, which helps me tell my students the truth–about why the faces in the room are mostly a certain color, or how we are all part of an oppressive structure perpetuating all sorts of bigotry just by sitting in that room,” she says. ”I don’t believe these institutions will figure out a way to solve their own problems. They were designed to do the opposite. When I speak at other predominantly white campuses, I’ve reminded the students of color and the women about this fact: This place never imagined you here, and your exclusion was a fundamental premise in its initial design.” The way higher education in the U.S. doesn’t truly make the initiative to consider the Latinx community and people of color as a whole in these spaces is a part of the wider inequality that spreads throughout the entire country: we weren’t and aren’t expected, imagined, acknowledged, and considered. Our ancestors, up to the recent generations that came before us, fought at different levels to make it possible for the Latinx community to continue to exist, especially in a racist, xenophobic country that continues to try to erase our existence.  

This shift from previous generations’ white-influenced idea of success to the goals and values of Latinx generations suggest that it’s time for a full overhaul of the American Dream—one that leaves room for more the Latinx community and marginalized communities in general. Perhaps becoming disillusioned with the American Dream is actually the first step to creating a more inclusive one. Crucet’s book offers us a blueprint for how this might look; she first embraced the general idea of success passed down by her parents, but then dissected it, interrogated its white-centered ideology, and finally took portions of it and made her own way to success. Is a wider interrogation and overhaul of the American Dream going to be the driving force to a better future for the Latinx community? One can only hope that the generations to succeed us face less injustice and inequality so that the U.S., especially as a new home to millions, can finally offer promise to us all. 

Finally, A Book About Miscarriage and Infant Loss for Women of Color

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Studies by the Center for Disease Control show that 15–20% of pregnant people in the United States will suffer a miscarriage, and 1 percent of U.S. pregnancies end in stillbirth. These are astonishingly high numbers for an industrialized country. Still more distressing is that the infant mortality rates for Black babies are more than twice that of White babies. I learned all this from the introduction to the anthology What God is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color, written by editors Shannon Gibney and Kao Kalia Yang. Before then, I had heard the numbers were grim but I didn’t know the degree. It makes the publication of this anthology even more urgent. Gibney and Yang are award-winning authors working in a variety of genres for a diverse range of age groups at the intersection of race, gender, class, family, power, and identity. Gibney is the author of the novels Dream Country and See No Color, and the textbook: Working Toward Racial Equity in First Year Composition. Yang has written a children’s book, A Map into the World, and the memoirs, The Song Poet and The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir.

The result of their collaboration is a ground-breaking array of perspectives that take us deep into  the prejudices and limitations of science and the medical establishment; the toll, the grace, the in-between where Indigenous women and women of color wait for miracles, and where we plunge in our grief at losing an infant or lose the possibility of an infant.

I have to admit I was nervous about opening this book, afraid of what it would bring up for me. At a time when we need our armor for so much that is fucked up in our world, this book would make me vulnerable. As the editors say eloquently in their introduction about their contributors: “Although their mode of expression was words, what they were really doing, what we were really doing, was expelling, processing, and addressing trauma.”

And I found they were right. The artfulness of each piece buoyed me along. This anthology helped me to the other side of grief. I had a chance to talk with Gibney and Yang about their vision and their experience working with writers handling difficult emotional material.

Jimin Han: How did the two of you come to work on this project together?

Shannon Gibney: Kalia and I had been friends for a long time, and had always admired each other’s work. I knew she had suffered a loss, and that she had talked about it a little bit publicly. After I lost my daughter and was living through the aftermath of little to no discussion of infant loss, stillbirth, and miscarriage in our culture and communities, I reached out to her about the possibility of putting an anthology together of Indigenous and women of color’s voices about the experience. Kalia got back to me right away and said, “Absolutely. This is vital work. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.”

Although we were friends before, the relationship was more collegial. Now, over the process of putting out the call for submissions, going through pieces and accepting and rejecting them, finding a press, editing and guiding writers through revision, examining proofs, organizing readings and events, and getting the word out about the book, we have become very close. I would say we are now dear, dear friends. Every Black, Native, Asian American, and Latinx woman writer should have at least one fellow BIWOC friend and colleague who they can bounce ideas off of, collaborate on projects with, get professional and personal advice from, or just call to vent.

Kao Kalia Yang: We chanced upon love, marriage, and children in the same span of years. When I had my miscarriage, I posted about it on Facebook to let my friends and family know that the baby I had been hoping for was no more. When Shannon experienced her stillbirth with Sianneh, I was at the hospital. The news of Sianneh’s birth via Facebook helped me make the decision to induce. In this way, we became more than just women out to push the boundaries of American literature, we became—in my mind and my heart—sisters in our grief. Some months later, Shannon wrote and asked if I’d be interested in working with her on a collection on miscarriage and infant loss by and for native women and women of color. I, too, had been looking and finding nothing reflective of my experience. I agreed but it was not until years later—after the stories of our childbearing years were through—that we both were ready to tackle the project. 

JH: You’re both accomplished writers with your own individual books. (Congrats, Kalia, on being a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize.) How different was the experience of collaborating on this anthology from working on your solo books?

We were asking folks who had already lived through incredible pain to dig back into their wounds.

SG: Neither of us had ever assembled an anthology, and certainly, neither of us had ever attempted to put together something as triggering as this. Throughout the entire process, we were both very, very clear, and had to keep reminding ourselves that yes, although this is a piece of literature, it is also a process and even a template for working through trauma. Although we definitely had a baseline for writing quality, and many of the contributors more than met it, we were also cognizant that in asking for first-person narratives of miscarriage and infant loss, we were asking folks who had already lived through incredible physical, emotional, and spiritual pain (and in many cases, had “put it behind them,”) to dig back into their wounds. Especially in the revision process, we became aware of just how much we were asking from them. So then, the question became, “How do we create the conditions and support for these women to get at the depth of their own truths while not creating any more unnecessary pain?” This became a delicate balance in terms of editing and revising. Luckily, our editor and the press were incredibly supportive throughout the entire process.

KKY: The experience of working on this book, even with such a wonderful partner, is harrowing. We both got ourselves on this rollercoaster and held fast, believing the track would hold, picking up more and more people along the way, knowing the train was getting heavier, knowing we were acquiring more strength. On a solo project, at this phase of a book, you’re looking ahead. On this project, we’re looking toward each other and the women on the train. It is a different set of responsibilities we’re tangling with this time. 

JH:  Where did you post calls for pieces and what was the response? And how did you decide what would go into the final collection?

KKY: We published an essay via Women’s Press on our individual and shared experience of loss and put forth the call. We wrote to different networks that we knew, reached out to Native women writers and women writers of color we respected, asking them to share it with their networks. We used social media (and received in return some horrible messages about how we were isolating white women in the process, being divisive by focusing on and culling forth particular voices only). We cast a net as wide as we knew how through the many relationships we’ve made on our individual journeys in our varied roles as writers, teachers, and activists. We received all kinds of pieces, poetry and prose, from men and women, white and non-white. We reviewed them all. We thoughtfully discussed what this collection means to us and the work we believed it would do in the world. No men. No white women. We sifted through and looked for the pieces that spoke to our hearts, pushed our boundaries of understanding, asked the hard questions of themselves and the world. We wanted to be as representative as we could be.

JH: Any thoughts about why it’s taken so long for an anthology in this area to be published?

The realm of creative nonfiction has always been dominated by white men and their stories.

KKY: The realm of creative nonfiction has always been dominated by white men and their stories, their truths, their perceptions of importance. I have many thoughts about why a collection like this has waited for us: you needed women, not just women but women of color. And you needed not just one, but at least two women who share a deep, living understanding of not only their own experiences of loss but other women’s. And then you needed these two women to be educated enough, formally and informally, to understand the context of such losses, and then to each have built a strong enough resume of work to show each other and the bigger community that they were trustworthy and able to carry such stories as contained in the pages of What God is Honored Here? to the bright light of day with sensitivity, care, and a measure or rebelliousness. Shannon and I are both anomalies, by ourselves and as a team. We had to come together, then we had to find a publisher who was interested and capable and willing to ride this fine line with us, and an editor who understood where this collection could stand and what it could do. 

JH: Being where you are in your careers and having the strength of many networks seems to have really worked for you in this anthology. Can you tell us more about your discussions? Specifically, what was most challenging?

KKY: For me, there were three parts. First: not responding to the inflammatory responses of white men and women who felt that we were denying them access through this collection. Two: learning how to cry for another woman’s experiences and then crying your way through the editing of their pieces. Three: writing my mother’s story of miscarriages was particularly hard, inhabiting them, addressing their outcomes. 

JH: Your inclusion of a variety of genres, from poetry to essays to fiction gave me some space as I was reading pieces that triggered memories for me. How did this decision come about and why did you choose to include a variety of genres?

KKY: We knew that the collection was going to be hard. We knew we needed to cross genre lines to give our readers reflection, contemplation, meditation room. For us, as writers, we’ve found those spaces, that generosity of breath–as you so beautifully put it–across genre lines. As importantly, these different genres exists because different writers find their truths in different forms. We didn’t want to limit ourselves, our writers, or our readers.

JH:  How has the experience been for you as advance copies of the bound book arrived?

SG: It has really been incredibly moving to actually hold the book in our hands. I mean, it always is, with any book you write, to see these years of labor, all these resources, all this belief and commitment finally come to fruition. But with this book, and all the sorrow it’s carrying, and conversely, all the potential it holds to deeply heal, it’s even weightier. The book feels like something significant we can offer to the world out of that deep well of sadness.

The bigness of the book grew when I saw it living in the hands of my children.

KKY: My children were as excited to receive the advanced copies as I was. We all walked around the house carrying copies close to our hearts. It wasn’t until I took a step back, watched my daughter and my sons holding the books that I felt—for the very first time—that the book was not only for me and Shannon and the women whose voices are inside, or the lives that were lost along the way, but also for those who did make it. This book was a celebration of life in its most precious form. The bigness of the book grew when I saw it living in the hands of my children.

JH: Have you heard from your contributors about their reactions as they received their contributor copies and see that the project is now real and will be received soon by a larger community?

SG: Reviews have started coming in—from established publications as well as everyday people. And they move you. When you hear that your story has made someone feel less alone in their grief, when a nursing instructor says that the book should be required reading for everyone in the OBGYN field. These are the things contributors have been hearing about the anthology and their pieces, and yes, they have told me and I can see that they find it incredibly powerful. At Minneapolis College, the institution where I teach, What God Is Honored Here? is already being taught in the Gender, Women, and the Environment class, and the Resisting Gender Violence class—and it hasn’t even come out yet! Contributors were thrilled to hear this.

KKY: One contributor told me that the book surprised her. She hadn’t expected to feel so deeply and connected to the other women in the book and their stories. Just today our editor told me when I asked him if he was happy with the way the book turned out, he said, “With other books, I can say yes, it is beautiful or it is so good, but this one: it is so big, Kalia, it carries so much.”

Grieving for Fascists

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

My father had been dead for almost seven years by the time I learned about his suicide, the amount of time it takes to have someone declared dead in absentia in the state of Massachusetts. I’m still not sure why his mother—and my mother, for that matter—kept me in the dark during that time. Before he left a note and walked into the ocean, he told me he was moving to Atlanta for a job. I suppose I had simply assumed that he wasn’t interested in keeping up a long distance relationship with me, his only child. 

I also don’t know why my mother and my father’s mother chose to tell me in the way that they did: His mother mailed me a manila envelope shortly before my 14th birthday. It contained a copy of his will, his suicide note, and his baby ring. My mother feigned ignorance when I read through the documents on our front lawn, just next to the mailbox. 

“Well,” she said, “at least we know where he’s been all these years.” 

His mother mailed me a manila envelope shortly before my 14th birthday. It contained a copy of his will, his suicide note, and his baby ring.

It wouldn’t be until I was getting ready for college, going through my mother’s safe for some financial aid documents, that I saw her file on my dad. She’d started it in the days after his note was found. Even though they had divorced five years before he decided to end his life, she was the lead in having his estate settled. But we never discussed it, not after that first conversation over the manila envelope. Around the topic, we lapsed into a dull and speechless state. 

“Dull speechlessness” is also the state Peter Handke describes falling into when he learned of his own mother’s suicide in November, 1971. Several weeks later, he began to write the taut, at times clinical work of autofiction A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (titled in the original German Wunschloses Unglück). 

From the outset, Sorrow resonated with me. I first read it when I was 25, about to get married, and just beginning therapy—the first time in my life I would begin to unravel the emotional tangle of my father’s death that I’d previously kept shelved. Prior to that, however, I’d plumbed the canon of suicide memoirs in high school and college. I didn’t have any emotional reactions to them, but I nevertheless devoured them the way other people scarf up every available celebrity gossip rag—compulsively and clandestinely, often with the same empty-calorie value. 

This sense of compulsiveness isn’t uncommon for children who lose their parents in this way. American psychologist Albert Cain, who has studied the topic extensively, places tremendous importance on the act of telling a child about their parent’s suicide. In keeping with the pace at which a child’s mind develops, it’s not simply one act of telling, but rather an act of telling and retelling over time. If the telling amounts to “a few brief, charged exchanges” that “put an end to overt questions,” the child is likely to be left “to his or her own constructions, patching together fragments of information and fantasy or joining an alliance of suppression.” In the absence of the internet, family communication, or any other real facts, I was using the grief of others to patch together my own information. 

With suicide memoirs, the results were mostly a disappointment for me, the tone consistently overly-emotional. After spending so many years divorced from grief, trying to process someone else’s was like trying to eat beef bourguignon after a weeklong fast. Perhaps that’s why Sorrow had such an impact on me: It was a work that, in under 100 pages, told and retold the story of a mother’s suicide without letting emotion take the wheel. As he pieces together information about his mother’s childhood in Nazi Austria, her unhappy marriage to an alcoholic, and the nervous breakdown that would be an omen of her eventual fatal overdose, Handke notes: 

The danger of all these abstractions and formulations is of course that they tend to become independent. When that happens, the individual that gave rise to them is forgotten — like images in a dream, phrases and sentences enter into a chain reaction, and the result is a literary ritual in which an individual life ceases to be anything more than a pretext.

This gave me a sense of comfort in the emotional bardo. It also allowed me to see my father’s death not from my own perspective, but from his. Just as Emile Durkheim examined suicide as a problem of society, Handke examined his mother through the world and culture that shaped her. More accurately, he looked at the role she was expected to fill in this world, and the increasing chasm between that role and her inner life. Through this, I was able to see my father and the role he was slated for as the first (and only) son born into a military family as part of the post-War baby boom. With what little I knew of him (aided by files and reports), I could see how he’d tried to cross the gap between his own sensitivities, his failed marriages, his depression, and his checkered career, and the role he was born to fill. I also came to see how easily that bridge can crumble. I felt I had Handke to thank for that. 

And then I fucking Googled him. 

Even before last week’s Nobel Prize in Literature announcement, Handke’s reputation as a genocide apologist couldn’t outrun search engine algorithms. The front page of Google included documentation of his denial of the Srebrenica genocide and his false claim that Bosnian Muslims staged their own massacres. What’s more, he didn’t seem inclined to bury these viewpoints, having spoken at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević (who died in prison, shortly before the conclusion of his trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide). Handke published an entire book on the country and the “purity” he found in the Serbs. It’s currently available used on Amazon for a minimum of $999.  

But in the last week, the spotlight pointed onto Handke by the Nobel Committee has only heightened the critical response — and rightly so. Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon dubbed Handke “the Bob Dylan of genocide apologists.” The press has been quick to reprint Jonathan Littell’s more succinct assessment from 2008: “He’s an asshole.” 

In general, I’ve always preferred to keep emotion at arm’s length, in favor of intellectual thought. I struggled with this instinct most acutely in my first few years of therapy, around most topics of discussion. My therapist would say she understood what I was saying, but not what I was feeling. Such prompts to get me out of my own head and into something more elemental or gut-felt were the first tentative bites of emotional nutrition. It was a kind, but rigorous, effort to break the fast. I would push back and shut down, she would refuse to honor the alliance of suppression. I imagine that, for her, working with me early on must have been like running into a brick wall over and over and expecting the result to eventually change. 

It was around this time that I also began to develop a taste for Wagner, thanks in part to reviewing the full Ring Cycle when a new, multi-year production premiered in 2010 at the Metropolitan Opera. Where Handke eschews beauty in his depiction of death, Wagner overdoses on it, creating what he called the Gesamtkunstwerk (literally, a “total-art-work”). I’d flirted with the composer’s works in the past, but always found them a bit too long, a bit too overblown. In Die Walküre, the second installment of the Ring Cycle, however, something shifted. From somewhere, an emotion was sparked. 

It’s the scene of a daughter recognizing her father’s suffering, begging to take it from him.

“Endless rage! Eternal grief! I am the saddest of all men,” Wotan moans to his daughter Brünnhilde in Act II of the opera. Even for the gods, the only truth in life is chaos. Ever specific with his stage directions, Wagner instructs Brünnhilde to lay her head on Wotan’s knee as she begs him to unburden his sorrows onto her. Wotan, in turn, gazes into her eyes “for a long while” while stroking her hair “with unconscious tenderness.” In a low, faraway voice, he wonders if his will would be broken if he were to do so. “Who am I if not your will?” Brünnhilde responds. It’s the scene of a daughter recognizing her father’s suffering, begging to take it from him, to inherit his burden as her own responsibility. (Wagner, too, struggled with depression and suicidal ideation.)

Such a response is uncomfortably familiar to children of suicide, who are likely to hold themselves responsible for their parents either in the face of a depressive episode or, after the fact, insist (in Albert Cain’s words) “in the face of therapists’ interpretations and reality confrontations, that it was their fault.” Seeing that moment play out on stage, I didn’t know if I was thinking about anything. But I was certainly feeling the desperate need to lay my own head on my father’s knee and beg him to give me his endless rage and eternal grief. To tap into these ideas through his art was to tap into my own grief. 

I didn’t need to Google Wagner. As both a Jew and a classical music critic, I knew about the composer’s well-documented and unabashed antisemitism. His essay “Jewishness in Music” is an unapologetic diatribe on “the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews, so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognise as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof.” It’s available on Amazon Prime for a sum that’s about one-one-hundredth the asking price of Handke’s book on Serbia. In an echo of Littell, Auden described Wagner as “an absolute shit.” 

This was a common reaction in the 20th Century as the trend of casual antisemitism wore off and the specter of World War II rose. Wagner’s legacy is rendered all the more discomfiting when you take into account that he was idolized by Hitler. “Out of [Wagner’s] Parsifal I am building my religion—the solemnity of the Mass without theological party-bickering,” Hitler once told Nazi Party lawyer Hans Frank. Fellow classical critic and author of the forthcoming Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music Alex Ross has spent years unpacking the Wagner complex. He referenced the Parsifal conversation in an August 1998 article for the magazine, “The Unforgiven,” wherein he also drew parallels between the opera’s text and three speeches delivered by Hitler between 1939 and 1942. Handke’s own mother lived through this era, and what came after it.

While Wagner could never have predicted the rise of Hitler and a genocide that defies all adjectives (as all genocides should), scholars and fans alike have spent the better part of the last century debating what to do with his music. It’s not simply that he inspired Hitler, but that the philosophy that Hitler shaped in Wagner’s image was made (in Ross’s words) “not by distorting Wagner but by taking his words literally… the manipulation of reality in the service of one idea, the blend of mysticism and hate.” 

Would Wagner have denied the Holocaust? Such questions and parallels seem even more pressing over the last week, not because of the Nobel Prize, but because of Turkey’s attacks against Syrian Kurds. I think about what Handke would say to this development. In the next breath, I think about my grandmother, a Syrian minority who was named for her slaughtered sister. I think and I struggle to feel. Other times, I feel and try not to think. 

In some ways, it’s easier to condemn the dead while still embracing their work. The buffer of history (“it was a different time”) acts as both a cushion and a dodge. Hundreds of books have been written about Wagner’s art and politics, with titles like The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art and The Trouble with Wagner. Some scholars have taken apart his works, brick by brick, to find musical representations of antisemitism, or read key characters from his operas as stand-ins for Jewish stereotypes. But we still perform his music. According to the website Operabase, over 150 productions of Wagner’s operas are scheduled around the world throughout the next year. Even today, Jewish musicians have made his canon central to their repertoire. Conductor Daniel Barenboim, in contextualizing Wagner’s world, writes: “It was nothing extraordinary to blame the Jews for all current problems, whether political, economical, or cultural.” 

We look to history as an explanation, even an excuse. But we’re also reckoning with the abhorrent behavior of living artists, like Handke.

We look to history as an explanation, at times even as an excuse for the behavior of the past that contradicts the values of the present. But currently, we’re also reckoning—on a public scale and in real time—with the abhorrent behavior of living artists, like Handke, who ought to know better. Caught in history as it’s unfolding, we’re not 100% sure what to do with each case. One group denounces Handke; another group (which recently struggled with its own allegations of misconduct) gives him one of the most prestigious awards a writer can get. 

For me, the art of others has always been a means of catharsis, an outward manifestation of my internal life. I can point to Wotan’s heartbreaking farewell to his favorite child at the end of Die Walküre as though I was pointing to my own reflection in a mirror. It’s beyond a reflection, in fact, as I myself never got a farewell from my own father. In this sense, art became a means for me to achieve. And yet, just when I think I have some sense of closure around the legacy of my father through a work like Sorrow (not a total, complete closure — I’m not sure any one work of art could do that — but at least some sliver of resolution), the legacies of those artists then leave me with more discomfort and uncertainty. 

I can’t defend Handke. I can’t even, in good conscience, defend his art at the expense of the man. But I also can’t immediately give up his works. I can’t ride into them as a hired assassin (as Patricia Lockwood recently did for the canon of John Updike), leaving blood on the ceiling in my wake. I don’t have the energy for the (justifiable) rage that others have over the Nobel Committee honoring a man who, when told that there were corpses to prove the Srebrenica Genocide, responded “You can stick your corpses up your ass!” I’m too exhausted from reliving the sadness that comes with being let down by yet another man who is old enough to be my father. 

My first instinct, as a result, is to bury my head; to wipe my memory clean of the headlines and essays on Serbian purity. In the absence of that, I can, at the very least, say nothing. I can stash my copy of Sorrow (which also houses a small envelope containing the only photos I have of my father) deep in the back of my bookshelf. But all of this feels like yet another alliance of suppression. As blissful as ignorance might be, I know from experience that the truth will eventually arrive, often in an unannounced manila envelope. 

Many recent pieces questioning what we should do with the great art of monstrous people invariably include the same Walter Benjamin quote: “At the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism.” I keep reading these articles, because it’s easier to think about this question rather than deal with the sense of loss that comes from works that once meant something to me, without any asterisk or caveat. This is its own form of complicated grief. 

This is its own form of complicated grief.

Benjamin’s quote is an explanation, but not an excuse. It’s a holding container for more thought and emotional contemplation, sitting with one of the most pernicious and uncomfortable emotions, uncertainty. Not only uncertainty about an asshole author or an absolute shit of a composer. It’s uncertainty about all of the artists I admire who haven’t been exposed as reproachable—but all of whom might be. 

It’s uncertainty about my father. For all I know, the image I have of him, a man I last saw nearly 30 years ago, is a false one. My conscious experiences with him constitute a handful of days in contrast to the 41 years he was alive. As far as I remember, he was loving and kind. But there’s a prisoner’s dilemma of synching this memory with the stories I’ve heard about him from others—that he was a deadbeat who couldn’t hold down a job, that he’s likely still alive since he would never have killed himself, that he was a shyster from a long line of Italian shysters. Perhaps, in the alternative universe where he is alive, I would hate him today. 

And here’s what really terrifies me: It’s uncertainty about myself. Realizing that this essay may be read, either in the future or right now, as morally reprehensible paralyzes me. My hands hover above the keys, afraid of triggering a landmine. I’m aware that the work I’ve done to process my father’s death was predicated in part on the work of terrible men, which may or may not render it invalid. I’m also even more acutely aware that I, too, will one day die and not be able to defend whatever remains of me to those who would call me terrible. 

We can’t outrun uncertainty any more than we can outrun our own mortality. Perhaps this is, in fact, the real takeaway of the good art/bad artist dilemma: that there is no answer, that seeking certainty and clarity only makes you more vulnerable. Finding closure to one grief opens you up to another grief.

Throughout all of this, I keep going back to a line from a poem by Sylvia Plath: “Every woman adores a fascist.” It’s both a comfort and a curse to know that I’m not alone in falling for someone on the wrong side of history. That person for Plath? Her father. 

9 Mind-Bending Books about Parallel Universes

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Tired of waking up every morning in the same old reality? Do you feel trapped by the physics of your world? Are you interested in hopping to a new world just for a change of pace? Have we got the book list for you. If you’re interested in magic doors, other worlds, time travel, and alternate realities, these books might fill a void in your life—or maybe they’ll open a new wormhole. 

A Darker Shade of Magic by VE Schwab

Only a select few magicians can travel between the three Londons—Red, Grey, and White—and Kell is one of them. He operates secretly as a smuggler between the worlds, but when he’s robbed by Lila, a thief from Grey London, the two come face-to-face with the dark side of magic. Lila convinces Kell to spirit her away to the other Londons, and a magical adventure between worlds begins.

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The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow

January Scaller feels trapped in the mansion of her father’s business partner, a man who collects magical and unusual objects. Until, that is, January’s father disappears and she discovers a mysterious book, and an even more mysterious door that can lead her to other worlds. 

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

Tess is a time-traveling rebel bent on destroying a group of time-traveling misogynists who want to strip women of their rights and autonomy. When Tess lands at a punk concert in 1992 California, she meets Beth, a normal girl looking for freedom. As the girls become closer, they must face the threat of war that reaches through their timelines, and defend the past in order to save the future.

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The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

The Light Brigade is the nickname for shell-shocked soldiers of the war with Mars. But what’s actually happening to these soldiers? When Dietz joins the war and begins to experience lapses in reality—memories that don’t line up with the platoon’s, orders that lead to nothing—the new recruit is forced to wonder what this war is really about.

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This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Red is part of a glittering, technological utopia; Blue is a member of an organic mass-consciousness. When Red finds Blue’s letter at the end of the world, it begins a correspondence that spans time and space, connecting the two through different timelines until the bitter end. While they begin as enemies, Red and Blue slowly realize that when you’re the last two humans on earth, the only people you can depend on are each other.

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The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

In 1931, Harper Curtis finds the key to a strange house with a list of girls names on written on the wall. Harper realizes the house allows him to travel in time, and he must traverse different decades in order to kill all the girls listed on the walls—until one of his potential victims begins hunting him in return.

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The Heavens by Sandra Newman

When Ben meets Kate at a party in 2000, he’s immediately drawn to her. But as he gets to know Kate better, he finds out that she’s plagued by dreams in which she lives in Elizabethan England as a nobleman’s mistress. Kate is convinced that these dreams are real, and that her actions in 1593 are affecting the present. As Kate becomes more convinced that her dreams are reality, Ben worries that he’ll lose the woman he loves to a world he doesn’t understand.

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The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

Nour grew up in Manhattan, but when her father dies of cancer, her mother moves their family back to Syria. After a bomb destroys their new home and nearly kills Nour, her family begins a search for safety that will take Nour through the Middle East and North Africa. During their flight, Nour takes comfort in the story of a fatherless girl from eight hundred years ago who follows the same path. The story follows Nour and Rawiya as they search for new lives hundreds of years apart.

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

When Mary confronts Mr. Fox one afternoon in 1938, he isn’t expecting to see her, mostly because he made her up. Mr. Fox is an author who kills off his heroines, and Mary is an imaginary muse with a challenge: Mr. Fox must stop murdering fictional women. As Mary and Mr. Fox begin rewriting classic fables, the lines begin to blur between creator and creation, author and vision, reality and alternate realities. 

Gabby Rivera Wants Queer Brown Girls to Feel Seen

Posted on by Jo Lou

Gabby Rivera’s YA novel follows Juliet Palante, a Puerto Rican teen from the Bronx, who is reckoning with her feminism and queerness. After coming out to her family, she goes to Portland to be a summer intern for her favorite feminist author, Harlowe Brisbane. Juliet believes this will be the summer that answers all of her questions and teaches her how to navigate life. 

Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera

Juliet Takes a Breath allows Juliet to learn, be free, and resist all at the same time. Once I read Juliet’s letter to Harlowe, full of curse words and jokes and the word pussy, I knew I’d have a great time figuring out who Juliet is, and who she’d become.

Gabby Rivera is a queer, Puerto Rican writer from the Bronx. She wrote the solo series AMERICA about the adventures of America Chavez, Marvel’s first queer Latina superhero. Rivera has also been named a top comic creator by SyFy Network, and one of NBC’s #Pride30 Innovators. 

I talked to Gabby Rivera about how white feminism won’t save brown people, reckoning with Evangelical Christianity, and thriving as a loved, supported queer adult.

Arriel Vinson: How did the idea for Juliet Takes a Breath come about, and how did it change in the reprinting of the novel?

Gabby Rivera: In Juliet Takes a Breath, Juliet is mesmerized by the [fictional] book, Raging Flower: Empowering Your Pussy by Empowering Your Mind. So much so that she snags an internship with the author, Harlowe Brisbane, and takes her newly out, round brown Puerto Rican self from the Bronx to Portland Oregon.

And that’s exactly what I did when I was nineteen. Navigating white hippie lesbian Portland as a Bronx Nuyorican was incredible and so damn ridiculous and funny. But I didn’t think about crafting a story about the experience until Ariel Gore, author of Hexing the Patriarchy, asked me to submit for her 2009 anthology Portland Queer. That anthology has the first iteration of Juliet Takes a Breath and it’s super autobiographical. Juliet’s family, her Bronx neighborhood, her crush on a super sweet and cute librarian, all of that is based off of my life. 

AV: The novel begins with Juliet writing a white feminist author, Harlowe Brisbane. This lets readers know that space will either be made for Juliet, or taken for Juliet and girls who look like her. Tell me more about this decision.

There’s this idea that if you’re not from the rich white suburbs, that your neighborhood isn’t good enough so you gotta get out.

GR: There’s this idea that if you’re from the Bronx or any neighborhood that isn’t the rich white suburbs, that your neighborhood isn’t good enough for you to flourish or find yourself in so you gotta get out. I heard that refrain all the damn time in the Bronx. People are either Bronx for life or just itching, waiting, and hoping to get out. It makes sense, it feels like there’s never a moment of quiet. The Bronx is jam-packed with people, city buses, sirens, beauty salons, Pentecostal churches, beef patties, graffiti, and baby strollers. Feels like there’s never a moment to honor the brave chubby round girls of color that are trying to navigate the world around them while catching the train to school and helping their baby siblings with their homework. 

Juliet writes the letter to Harlowe cuz she’s steeped in the myth that she’s gotta get out of the Bronx to be somebody, to figure out queerness and feminism. 

And yet at the very same time, Juliet Takes a Breath opens with a welcoming to all round brown girls encouraging them to take up all the space they need and to love themselves and each other. 

AV: When Juliet comes out, her family responds with anger/shock, then love, though resistant. Why did Juliet need those reactions instead of more positive ones?

GR: Hah! Juliet comes out at the dinner table after her Titi Wepa, who’s a cop, tells a story about her chasing down a perp by Yankee Stadium. So like the family’s already hype and laughing and at first they don’t take Juliet seriously at all. So she’s gotta fight for her space and then everything gets quiet.

It’s gotta sink in and again, Juliet’s coming out scene is similar to mine. I came out at the dinner table and was met with the deepest silence I’ve ever felt from my mother in my whole life. Like the wild silence right before a glacier breaks off on its own. My dad was chill, quiet, but still there. 

Not everyone in Juliet’s family is resistant. Her grandma offers her big love right away and so does her Titi Wepa. It’s Juliet’s mom that takes her coming out super hard and that felt right to me. Juliet and her mom are also trying to find their way back to each other.

AV: This isn’t only a novel about queerness, but a novel about stepping out of your comfort zone. Juliet grew up Christian with a Latinx family in the Bronx, a stark difference from what she saw in Portland. Why was this important for Juliet, and how does this mirror your life experience, if at all?

All you are to these white folks is some brown other who needs to be saved.

GR: So much of the Evangelical Christianity that I experienced growing up was about making sure women knew their place. Women had to be obedient to their husbands and let them lead the house. You know all that stuff. And of course the real deep homophobia, sex-shaming, and rigid rules about gender presentation. Women wear skirts and men were suits etc. All that stuff that’s designed to keep everyone in place cuz apparently God can’t handle it otherwise.

There’s a lot of guilt and fear that comes with being told that there’s only one acceptable way to be a girl, to be someone worthy of divine love. Lots of Juliet’s anxieties in the novel stem from that upbringing. She feels connected to God and is trying to also work through how being queer and a sin verguenza impacts her relationship with God.

AV: In Juliet Takes a Breath, themes of womanism and white feminism are present. How did this help Juliet understand her queerness and place in the world? Why did Harlowe need to disappoint for Juliet to gain a greater understanding?

GR: Harlowe actually kinda crushes Juliet. Juliet is convinced that this writer, this white lady feminist, that she looks up to actually sees her as a whole person and not just the stereotypes of her identities. And in one fell swoop, Juliet feels what so many people of color feel either in their classrooms, boardrooms, court rooms, that in this moment all you are to these white folks is some brown other who needs to be saved.

That shit is violent and it happens every day, under the radar or right in folks faces and Juliet needs to be able to develop the language to name what that is.

And via Maxine, Zaira, and their womanist circles, Juliet receives that real community love and understanding. Max and Zaire consent to offering Juliet that education and understanding of what it can mean to be a woman of color claiming her queerness and body and boriquaness and self. They urge her to find her own way. 

AV: All of the things that make Juliet Juliet, are also things that further marginalize her identity—her queerness, her race, her class, her body size, and so on. What made you create such a complex character?

GR: Um, this is me, I am her. Like, I am a queer Puerto Rican writer from the Bronx. I’m thick bodied, and my gender presentation is butch dyke papi so like hi, the complex character is me. It’s all my friends who embody the limitless possibilities of sexuality and gender every single day. Like we’re real people. And we deserve to see ourselves everywhere. 

AV: In an interview with Sarah Enni from First Draft, you said you wanted to be a responsible community member for the LGBTQ community. What does that look like for you, both in the novel and outside of it?

There’s a lot of guilt and fear that comes with being told that there’s only one acceptable way to be a girl.

GR: I am alive. I’m a thriving, loved, supported queer adult. I’m a fucking miracle. So many of us in LGBTQ communities don’t make it to see 30 or even 13. I’ve lost loved ones, kids in LGBTQ youth groups, all cuz the pain and rejection folks feel specifically for being LGBTQ is so damn horrific sometimes. And so my job is to offer all the love and care I can at all times to all the queer kids of color.

I gotta keep telling stories that uplift and offer as much truth and gentleness as I possibly can. I gotta listen to and offer access, resources, money, time, energy, hugs, to all the queer kids out in the world trying to live and live good.

In the novel, that’s Juliet getting loved on by her cousin Ava, her Titi Penny, Maxine, Zaira, and finally writing a love letter to herself. In real life, it’s me going to schools and talking to young people about how loved they are and how important their stories are. 

AV: What are you working on now? 

GR: I’ve got a new original series coming out with BOOM! Studios in December titled b.b. free. b.b.’s fifteen, ready to take on the world, and secretly manifesting cosmic powers that turn a road trip with her best friend into an epic eco-divine adventure! b.b. and Chulita take on the Fractured States of America, healing polluted earth and ocean while still just trying to figure out what it means to be fifteen.

Also, I have a podcast coming soon called Gabby Rivera’s Joy Revolution. So get ready to listen to me talk to my favorite revolutionary QTPOC humans and allies about how we maintain joy in a chaotic ass world.

Coming Out in the Home of the Brave

Posted on by Kelly Luce

Democracy Was

1. Democracy was being told by my mother that I shouldn’t marry anyone without first living with that person for a year. Compatibility, she said, was crucial to a good marriage. I wanted to ask her if she wished she’d lived with my father for a year before marrying him, but I didn’t. It was 1976, and I was eleven years old. She assumed, as I did, that one day I would marry a woman.

2. Democracy was watching Barney Miller with my family and laughing at the gay characters and at the way the straight cops reacted to them. My father laughed along with us, but he wasn’t amused when I started mincing around the living room the way the gay characters had. “You know,” he said, “they didn’t used to have characters like that on TV.”

“What about Mr. Mooney?” I asked, still mincing. “What about Uncle Arthur? What about Dr. Smith?”

3. Democracy was discovering, upon turning eighteen, that when I did my compulsory registration for the selective service, I could also register as a conscientious objector. I told my parents my intention, and my father became irate. Only communists and homosexuals were conscientious objectors, he said. My mother defended me, said the choice was mine to make.

4. Democracy was cowering with my college boyfriend in his dorm room while some of the other young men who lived on his floor tried to kick the door in, yelling that they would kill us both if they got the chance. They didn’t know us but had caught on. My boyfriend called the campus police and explained what was going on. The banging and shouting were so loud that he couldn’t hear the response on the other end of the line.

“Can you repeat that?” he asked.

“You’re just going to have to deal with this yourselves,” the voice said.

5. Democracy was coming out to my recently-divorced mother when I was twenty-three and having her cry and say she was worried I’d get AIDS. And coming out to my father when I was twenty-five and having him reply, without the slightest change in his expression, “I know that. I’ve known since you were eighteen.” When I asked him how he’d known, he said, “You’re not a communist.”

6. Democracy was telling my father, nine years later, that I’d been seeing someone named Fred, that it was serious, and that I was in love. “I’m not saying I understand it,” my father said, “but I want you to be happy.” I thanked him for that. He said, “You’re welcome.”

7. Democracy was arguing with my father about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” While I clearly had no intention of ever joining the military, I said, “You think that if I were in the Army, I should have to hide who I am from my commander?” The word commander felt ridiculous on my tongue. But it didn’t matter; we were having two different conversations. “What I’m saying,” he told me, “is I don’t think it’s healthy to have homosexuals and heterosexuals in combat together.” I pointed out that he’d never been in combat.

8. Democracy was one of our last conversations, not long before he died. He told me he thought the Defense of Marriage Act was reasonable. “How can you think that?” I asked. “I’m your son.”

“It should be left up to the states,” he said.

Appalled, I spun a scenario wherein Fred and I were on a road trip, and as we drove across state lines, we were married in one state and not married in the next. Married, not married, state after state. And let’s say we got into a car wreck in one of the anti-gay marriage states and I went to the hospital, and Fred wasn’t allowed to visit me because he wasn’t considered family. Was that okay?

“Don’t bully me,” my father said. “You don’t have to drive through those states. Who’s holding a gun to your head?” I left the question unanswered.