If you have a spare 35 grand or so, you now have a shot at a rare copy of the first book banned in America. Christie’s Auction House in New York recently announced that it will be auctioning a copy of New Canaan by Thomas Morton, a 1637 political satire that caused outrage among New England Puritans for its attacks on Puritan beliefs. As a result, the book was banned in America, and Morton became a celebrity overseas.
New Canaan was Thomas Morton’s revenge against Puritan colonists who had banished him from America. After attempting to start a free community in New England, Morton was arrested and sent back to England for inviting the native Alongquin people to a pagan maypole celebration in his new community. In response to his banishment, he wrote New Canaan, which satirized and reprimanded the colonist Puritans while elevating the morality of the noble Algonquin people. With the help of Ben Jonson and other literary figures of the time, Morton wrote and published his manifesto, which denounced Puritans and called for a diverse, free community called New Canaan to be settled in the New World. New Canaan made Morton a political celebrity, and was immediately banned in Puritan colonies.
This book’s material is a bit more forgiving than the Puritans were.
If you love the idea of getting your hands on a book that invoked the wrath of the Puritans, you might wonder what it takes to keep a volume like this in good condition. According to John Overholt, curator of the The Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson/Early Books & Manuscripts at Harvard, “The number one rule for taking care of rare books is that they want to live in the same space you do, not an attic, basement, or garage.” No matter how well a rare book might fit in your attic along with all your other haunted paraphernalia (dusty travel trunks, mannequins wearing moth-eaten ball gowns, strings of skeleton keys that don’t open any known locks), please remember that these books will do better in clean, temperature-controlled rooms. Luckily Mr. Overholt also states, “The good news is that when this book was printed, paper was made from rag fibers, not wood pulp like modern paper is. It’s usually very strong and soft—brittle, crumbly paper is more common in books from the 19th and 20th centuries.” This book’s material is a bit more forgiving than the Puritans were.
Ironically, the Puritans’ censorious attitude probably made this New Canaan sale a much bigger deal than it otherwise would have been. Mr. Overholt explains, “If there’s a campaign to destroy copies of a particular book or prevent it from being sold, that’s likely to mean it’s rare today, and often the things that made something forbidden in the time it was published make it especially interesting today.” While it’s not always true that every banned book is worth more, it’s certainly likely that taboo books will be more interesting to collectors. In the case of New Canaan, only two other copies of the book have been available at auction in the last 30 years, and this 1637 first-edition is valued at a cool $35,000–45,000. For reference, that’s about the cost of a decent-sized home in Cleveland, a tiny home in Sacramento, a month’s rent in New York, or roughly 700 tickets to Electric Literature’s Masquerade of the Red Death.
If you don’t happen to have that kind of money lying around, you can find the full text of the book on Project Gutenburg, or a digitized version on the Smithsonian Library website. If you’d like to see a copy of the book in person, visit the British Library’s English Short Title Catalogue for a list of libraries in Britain and North America with copies of New Canaan.
One evening in late July, I huddled in a Manhattan basement, battling radioactive creatures and trying to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic world. Afterward, my fellow survivors and I recapped the events over drinks at the karaoke bar upstairs.
For me, who avoids performing in public at all costs, spending time with people lined up to sing karaoke was far more unusual than fighting for survival in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Despite having never played Dungeons and Dragons or any form of live action role playing, coming together with relative strangers to survive a hostile and dangerous world did not feel that unusual to me. The Bunker—part immersive theater, part live-action roleplay and part tabletop game—felt eerily prescient of my future—and the world’s.
At the beginning of the evening, I was greeted the sidewalk by Ian McNeeley, artistic director of Broken Ghost Immersives and co-creator of the Bunker. Dressed in a hazmat suit, he led me down a steep, narrow staircase into an arts space called Wildrence. After introducing all the participants, McNeeley informed us of our circumstances: following a nuclear catastrophe, the world was uninhabitable and we had been kept in suspended animation for 114 years in a “deferred existence bunker.” Now we were awake—and running out of supplies. For us to survive, something had to change.
The post-apocalyptic situation felt familiar. But this time, I wasn’t reading or watching. I was part of it.
The situation felt familiar. There have been enough post-apocalyptic dystopian books and movies released in the past few years for me to read and watch until the real thing actually takes place. And given the current state of the environment, it might not be that long. But this time, I wasn’t reading or watching. I was part of it. Not only that, but I was a member of a group, and our group was in danger. Our bunker was stocked with some rations, but there weren’t enough for everyone and we were running out. There were 13 of us and just six hazmat suits.
I was nervous. I had walked into the room knowing no one, while almost everyone else had come in pairs and groups. I needed to find some allies, and fast. In situations like this, loyalties form quickly and just as quickly broken, and I was curious to see how these relationships would change as the night went on. I expected drama—fighting for survival would inevitably bring out everyone’s primal instincts. The question was: who would betray whom and how deep it would go?
The groups formed. Scattered throughout the room, which featured a couch, a few chairs and a table containing our rations as well as a place to create tabletop crafts, we began to plan. Some people ventured out of the Bunker wearing hazmat suits, seeking the supplies we needed to survive as well as fending off attacks from nearby bunkers. (The hazmat suits, as well as the supplies and most other important props, were represented by cards that we carried from place to place.) Different groups of survivors were scattered throughout the wasteland, communicating through electronic tablets. (The tablets were real.) One particularly hostile group informed us that if we did not meet their demands, we would be violently attacked. Reading threatening messages sent electronically, with no idea who it was writing them, was jarringly familiar, but interacting with the other survivors raised the stakes and brought us together. Nothing is more unifying than a common enemy. Even an epic catastrophe hadn’t changed that.
My actions could affect how this story ended and who survived. Did I really want that responsibility?
I had seen all of this before. I’d read it, too. But inside a small underground room, sitting next to fellow survivors on the touch, watching their faces and hearing their voices, was entirely different. It was more intimate, more dangerous—and I was a part of it. My actions could affect how this story ended and who survived. Did I really want that responsibility? And if I didn’t, could I really absolve myself of it?
Periodically the lights went out and the shelter’s artificial intelligence, DeBUNK, informed us that another day had passed, instructing everyone to consume another serving of the rapidly dwindling rations. Even though the rations, like everything else in the game, were extremely low-tech—the entire experience in the Bunker relied on one costume, tabletop game pieces, the tablets, and one computer—the atmosphere became more and more intense. As we lost members to mutant monsters and others returned wearing signs that proclaimed “HIDEOUS MUTATION,” informing us they now had missing limbs or newly-sprouted tentacles, the loss hit me hard.
I kept postponing my own venture out of the bunker, though I wasn’t entirely sure why. Being responsible for other people’s well-being made me cautious, and instead I found myself drawn to the notes that other “survivors” had left behind, most of them correspondence between two people. Another participant and I pored over them, seeking clues about how the disaster took place and how to survive. What had happened? Who had betrayed whom? What was this “goop” we so desperately needed?
Even in a make-believe apocalypse, I thought, I still want to tell stories. Sure, we might die, but I want to know why.
The clock ticked on, and the stakes were raised again and again. The more the risk, the more personal it became and the more uncomfortable I became. As I finally ventured outside (into the building’s hallway), I reminded myself that this was all a game but I was apprehensive. If I failed, who else would suffer? And would anyone help me, or would I be left to be eaten by the radioactive dogs?
The hallway hadn’t transformed, but the atmosphere had. Emotions were high as McNeeley, still dressed in his hazmat suit, informed everyone of their fates. Standing close and maintaining intense eye contact, McNeeley told me I had succumbed to insanity after witnessing the destruction throughout the world. I felt my stomach sink. Even as I thought, “That sounds about right,” I felt a sense of loss and even grief. All of the courage I had worked up to leave the Bunker had been for nothing. If I had stayed, I would have survived.
Rescued by pure luck, I rejoined my teammates for our final moments. Time was running out and we were about to lose power—and another Bunker was planning to attack us. I thought fights would break out, but everyone worked together peacefully as we evaluated our options. Why did I expect fireworks? I wondered. Perhaps I had been conditioned by entertainment or even American government to expect dramatic power struggles when the danger was imminent. Instead, even when two people of our group defected and attempted to run away with our getaway van, the group remained calm. There was no shouting or screaming, but the feelings of betrayal were real, as was the sadness when one member of our group was defeated in battle with a radioactive monster.
In this Bunker at least, peaceful, democratic decision-making could take place. If the apocalypse comes, it will probably feel a lot like this, I thought, listening to everyone talk. Participating in the Bunker didn’t include music, special effects or any real danger, but it was the lack of effects that heightened the tension and made it more real. In an actual dystopia, there wouldn’t be dramatic music or closeups of people as they give climactic speeches. There wouldn’t be costumes or gas masks; we’d probably all be dressed like we were tonight. In movies and books, you know when it’s the culminating moment, but here there was nothing to indicate that. It was up to ourselves to evaluate our decisions and their consequences. The weight of these decisions snuck up on us slowly, but there was hardly time to reflect on them as we continued to fight for our survival.
This is far more realistic than any book or movie, I thought. We’ll only know how important our decisions are after they happen.
This is far more realistic than any book or movie, I thought. We’ll only know how important our decisions are after they happen. A newscaster isn’t going to say, “This is what will cause the end of the world” or “The apocalypse begins today.” We’ll have to stop and think about what’s happening, weigh the consequences and make our choices—actions that often feel rare in a 24-hour Twitter-driven news cycle.
The night concluded with DeBUNK narrating how our story ended. Sitting together, listening to the story was charmingly old-fashioned, reminiscent of telling stories around a campfire—despite the story being told by a disembodied electronic voice—a throwback to the past but also potential foreshadowing of the future.
The Bunker left a lot to unpack, so our group climbed the stairs to adjacent karaoke bar to recap and discuss. Some were cheerful and some were unsettled. I was in the latter category. I joked that the group had been almost too mature and polite, and the lack of drama or power struggles resulted in the calmest dystopia I had ever heard of. I wondered if I had stumbled into a remarkably mature LARPing community, or had the state of the world caused everyone to take these situations more seriously.
Maybe the Bunker should be required for everyone as preparation for the future. The past three years have inspired so much fear about where the world is heading, but I hadn’t seriously considered how I would react if I was actually fighting for survival. The night had shown me some of what I could do, and what I was scared of. It also showed me that what could be my last day on Earth looked and sounded a lot like today did. It wasn’t going to be drastically different overnight—and because of that, it could sneak up without me or anyone else noticing.
Was The Bunker fun? In another time or political climate, I would answer yes without a doubt. Right now I would describe it as useful.
Note:Masie Cochran is Jeannie Vanasco’s editor for her memoir Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl.
“I’ll tell him: I still have nightmares about you,” Jeannie Vanasco writes early in her second memoir, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl. The “him” in question is Mark, a man who was one of Jeannie’s closest friends. But when they were both nineteen, he raped her at a party. Fourteen years later, Jeannie is still asking herself why. With this memoir, she extends the why to Mark—interviewing him on the record about the rape and its aftermath.
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When Jeannie and I first talked about her idea for this book, the follow-up to her 2017 memoir The Glass Eye, Trump had recently been elected and the #MeToo movement was building momentum. Both contribute to the story Jeannie tells in this book, as she explores the definition of rape; the ways women are socialized to tend to the comforts of men; the necessity of female support networks; and the many ways in which sexual assault is handled (and mishandled) in our society.
At the center of Jeannie’s book are a series of conversations she has with Mark—first over text and email, then over the phone, and then in person. There are no easy answers, but there is real power in Jeannie’s willingness to ask hard questions and dissect the language of sexual assault, pushing against its confines and unpacking its complicated history.
Masie Cochran: I’d like to start things off with the title, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl. Why do you think it is that we don’t discuss many of the issues you raise in the book? Do you think things have changed at all since you were a young girl?
Jeannie Vanasco: My undergraduates ask me the same questions I asked myself at their age: What counts as sexual assault? Was it bad enough to report? What’s the point of reporting if there’s no proof? And these questions usually come prefaced with “I haven’t told this to anyone else.” I wrote this memoir for a lot of reasons, but mostly I wrote it for my students—when I realized that, in a lot of ways, things have not changed. Men still overwhelmingly wield enormous power. I mean, a bunch of men added Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court when I was a girl, and now a bunch of men (including two who voted for Thomas) hurriedly made Brett Kavanaugh a Supreme Court justice instead of pursuing a substantive investigation. His nomination arrived after I finished writing this book, as did a white noise machine that I blasted while crying in my campus office as I watched him shout about liking beer.
#MeToo is about empowering and supporting survivors, and holding perpetrators accountable.
But my belief, perhaps head-in-the-clouds, is that some things have changed. Americans definitely seem more interested in talking about sexual assault—more so than when I was a girl. But a lot of us feel silenced when our thoughts and feelings clash with how we’re encouraged to think and feel. For example, the shame that I felt in 2003 when the rape happened and the shame that I felt in 2018 when writing this book made talking about the rape really hard—yet the shame existed for different reasons. In 2003, I felt shame because my behavior conflicted with popular portrayals of the good victim: I’d been drinking that night, I didn’t fight back, I froze. And then in 2018, I felt shame because my thoughts and feelings conflicted with those voiced by #MeToo supporters I admire: I didn’t hate the guy, I didn’t want him locked up, I didn’t even know if I could call what he did rape—and I actually wanted to talk to him, to ask him how the experience had affected him.
MC: As you mentioned above, your memoir dovetails with many concerns raised by the #MeToo movement. What do you think it means to release a book during this particular moment?
JV: #MeToo is about empowering and supporting victims/survivors, and it’s about holding perpetrators accountable. Some of us may disagree about what accountability looks like. But #MeToo is massive enough and sturdy enough to hold different points of view. It’d be pretty weird if every #MeToo supporter agreed with one another about important subjects, such as statute of limitation requirements. Reaching a common goal results from passionate, messy disputes—within a movement—about how that goal can be reached.
And now, having written this book, I’m interested in the different reactions that it will elicit. Not every reader will agree with my approach. And that’s okay. That’s healthy. Though it won’t be healthy for me to comb the internet for reactions—so I’ll probably unplug for a few months and stick to in-person discussions. Mostly, I want readers to come away from my memoir with a deeper understanding of how they consume and interpret someone else’s story of sexual assault.
MC: Your female friends also play a large role in the narrative. How did talking with them enable you to work through this material?
Some of us may disagree about what accountability looks like. But #MeToo is massive enough to hold different points of view.
JV: Their questions and critiques helped me interrogate my own motives and reactions as intensely as I interrogated my rapist’s. They read the transcripts of my conversations with him, and they pointed out instances where he was manipulating me, whether consciously or not. My friends—all strong feminists—also made me feel better about sticking with this project.
MC: You see yourself as a feminist, but worry in the narrative that you might disappoint other feminists. Where you do you think this worry comes from? What do you hope your book might generate in terms of conversations amongst women?
JV: My friends often talk about perpetrators as irredeemable. And statistics point to perpetrators as being repeat offenders. So my friends didn’t think it was a great idea to talk to the guy who raped me. And I understood their rationale. But I wanted to believe—still want to believe—that people are capable of change, or at least capable of remorse.
I hope, too, that the book reaches readers regardless of their gender identity. I hope it helps any victims/survivors who feel guilty about feeling other than how they’re “supposed” to feel or have been taught to feel. And it’d be great if men would read this book and talk about it with other men as well as with teenage boys. This reminds me: I was recently on a plane. I had a notebook on my lap and was staring off into space, and the couple next to me asked if I was a writer. I thought, Oh great. But I told them yes, and then they asked what I write. And we ended up discussing the topic of this book. And the woman was incredibly interested in talking about it. The man seemed interested, but then he said of his partner, “She’s really into #MeToo.” I wish he’d said, We’re really into #MeToo.
MC: Outside of your interviews with Mark, your partner, Chris, offers a male viewpoint. How might the book have been different if not for Chris’ perspective?
JV: Women are conditioned to prioritize the feelings and wellbeing of others. Chris encouraged me to focus on my own feelings. But my female friends also encouraged me to focus on my own feelings. So I’m not sure if Chris’s perspective was particularly gendered.
I wanted to put the focus on my rapist, instead of having readers focus on me, on any perceived unreliability, on what I could have done to prevent or stop the assault.
Chris’s perspective helped, though, because he could offer insight about memories that I’d forgotten. For example, when I began writing the book in January of 2018, I thought that my nightmares about the rape had happened mostly after the last presidential election. But Chris said they’d been happening when he and I started dating in 2009, and would happen every few months after that.
Now this part risks sounding retrograde, like when somebody’s response to a man pushing a stroller is “What a good dad,” but I’ll mention it anyway—in case it inspires other men to step up: while I drafted the book and taught, Chris handled what were otherwise shared domestic responsibilities, such as the laundry, the cooking, the cleaning, the groceries. A telling anecdote: our local grocery store did some remodeling while I was writing the memoir. After I turned in the manuscript, I went to the grocery store and couldn’t find the entrance.
MC: Your first memoir, The Glass Eye, was a consuming memoir that took you more than a decade to write. Both that book and this one address events from your teenage years, but in very different ways. Did you feel you had to write one before the other? Did writing The Glass Eye help you to write this?
JV: The Glass Eye was a deathbed promise to my dad, and writing it became an obsession. Anything else I tried to write transformed into writing about my dad. My grief for him caused me to push aside my feelings about the rape—and about pretty much everything else. I didn’t realize how much the rape had stayed with me.
And after publishing The Glass Eye, which covers my experiences with psychosis, I felt extraordinary pressure to seem reliable in this book—and I hate that that’s the case. But on my tour for The Glass Eye, I was asked about my hallucinations all the time—how did I know that what happened had happened? I didn’t want to go through those kinds of questions again. I wanted to put the focus on my rapist, instead of having readers focus on me, on any perceived unreliability, on what I could have done to prevent or stop the assault. I wanted him on record saying that yes, he knew what he was doing was wrong. I wanted him to confirm my memory of that night. Which is messed up, sure. But as a writer, I’m interested in exploring complicated desires.
We are wading out, the five of us. I remember this. The sun an hour or two from melting into the ocean, the slick trail of its gold showing the way we will take.
Ahead of me my tiny sister sits regal and unafraid in the middle of the raft that Fynn has built of packing foam and empty chemical buckets, lids fixed airtight with caulk. He’s already tested it out in our neighbors’ pool and declared it seaworthy, but if the thing falls apart he has promised to carry Sara himself. Fynn is thirteen, older than me by five years, and the only one of us three kids who has been out to the island before. Our mother had long hair then, and Fynn’s dad was still around, hadn’t yet skidded his motorbike underneath a roadtrain one rainy December night. My dad—Fynn’s dad now too, Mum constantly reminds us—shoulders a picnic basket filled with Sara’s favorites, Fynn’s favorites, Mum’s favorites, mine: cheese-and-apple sandwiches, salt-and-vinegar chips, slivers of mango doused with lime and chili, ginger beer. Enough food to last a week, though we’ll be crossing back to the mainland this same night, lit by a quarter moon and a two-dollar torch.
The people around us hardly seem like people. More like a muster of herd animals. They move steadily through the water in ones and twos, feeling for the slope of the sandbar underfoot, the treacherous edge where the ocean floor falls away. That’s how people—tourists, mostly—get themselves drowned, snatched off by rips.
The sea the sea the terrible . . .
Yep yep, we say, we know; Dad gets wordy sometimes.
There are other families, some towing small children on boogie boards, inflatable li-los, nothing so fine as Sara’s raft. Coolers bob alongside clothes tied inside plastic shopping bags, silver jellyfish-balloons with Day-Glo guts.
We’re lucky, Dad’s telling us. Today is a neap tide—safest time to make a crossing. The highest tide not as high as normal, the deepest part not so deep.
Farther out the island looks like a rough dog slouching up from the ocean, muzzle pointed northwest. What’s out there? A lot of putrid birds, Fynn’s already told me, and some all right caves, mobs of bogans sinking tinnies of lager. Nothing awesome. But tonight, after sunset, the shores around the island will be aglow with the visiting swarm of bioluminescent phytoplankton, on their anxious, brilliant way to who-knows-where. We’ll perch along the highest bluff in a sprawl of blankets while the waves crash iridescent against the rocks below, sweeping away to leave lonely blue stars stranded here and there, then charging back in to reclaim them.
It will be spectacular, an eerie sort of magic, and I will never see anything like it again.
It will be spectacular, an eerie sort of magic, and I will never see anything like it again.
But whatever, this isn’t the point. In the end, the island is just a dog-shaped rock covered with birds and sunburnt gawkers, temporarily surrounded by terrified dinoflagellates.
It’s this wading out that matters, this crossing: the bright, migratory-animalness of it. Going waist deep, chest deep, waist deep again. What matters is how, halfway over, Fynn looks back at us, then ahead again, and says to no one, or everyone, or maybe just to Sara:
I reckon this is how the afterlife must look.
I see Dad look at Mum and mouth the word: afterlife?
Fynn is the palest of us, lighter even than Mum; blond all the way to his eyelashes, the only one who crisps up in the sun. He looks adopted. A thing we all know but know better than to say.
Anyway. There it is.
Do I make it through childhood without staking every possible biological claim on the man who calls us both my beloved savage? I’m ashamed to say I do not. I’m content to share him only in his lesser moments: it is my dad who used to play bass in an almost-famous blues band, but it is our dad who, before the blues band, used to play clarinet in a high school orchestra. It is my dad who promises to buy us a pair of albino axolotls, our dad who reneges when Fynn and I neglect our goldfish duties and Skeletor’s tank is all slime and fug.
(There was a time, some years, where it was just Fynn and Mum, and this is maybe what I’m getting back at him for. Or else I’m getting back at him for all the names he isn’t called in school, the way no one ever asks where he’s from, whether his parents are reffos. Or else it’s the fact that, even though one of them is dead, he has two fathers, doesn’t have to share his, and is allowed to wander off without telling anyone, to give reasons like just thinking or just walking, getting soft looks instead of strife.)
Does my brother find some spiteful way of getting even, of undermining my full-bloodedness? He never does. Maybe he never feels the need to. Fynn takes these pissing contests for what they are. In actual pissing contests, there is no competition, and really no point. He gets halfway to the bougainvillea tumbling over the top of the fence, while I try (no hands) not to dribble on my runners.
At the deepest point of the crossing, the ocean reaches my lower lip, and I hold on to Mum. Feel my feet levitate from the shell grit below. Become cargo swinging from her strong gold shoulder, safe in her smell of coconut oil and warm bread as she pushes on towards the island.
Around us the ocean thickens to an algaeic soup that stinks of dead things; proof that the plankton are here, though invisible for now—it isn’t dark enough to give them away yet. This is the point where Fynn’s raft begins to keel, the empty buckets unhitching, and Sara responds with a lot of high-pitched wailing and clutching at salty air.
When the raft breaks apart, Fynn keeps his word, and Sara scrambles up from the wreckage to ride his bony shoulders, her little grabby starfish hands clenching fistfuls of his tawny hair. It must hurt badly, his face like a cheap rubber mask of itself, but he says nothing while trying to shepherd pieces of the debris ahead of himself.
Waves slap at his face, trying to get in through his mouth and nose. He screws his eyes shut, snorts water, while higher up Sara sings, oblivious, her stubby little feet hooked under his wrists.
Hey mate, Dad offers, I can take her. But both Fynn and Sara shake their heads, so Dad just cruises alongside in a coast-guard-ish sort of way, until the ocean finally slips from Fynn’s shoulders and leaves Sara cheerily marooned up there.
There are no photographs of this day. Mum dropped the disposable QuickSnap crossing back to the mainland, and though we groped and kicked around no one turned it up. Perhaps that’s why I remember it so vividly. Fynn stumbling through the breakers with Sara, delivering her safely to the dry sand and waiting until Mum had led her off to squeak into some penguin burrows before he doubled over and gushed out all that swallowed seawater into a patch of saltbrush. Fiery stinger marks striped his quaky legs.
Years later, somewhere into adulthood, I’ll decide that this is a story to one day tell at my brother’s wedding. Or else his funeral. Possibly both—as with a certain kind of suit, it seems workable for either occasion.
I’ll decide that this is a story to one day tell at my brother’s wedding. Or else his funeral. Possibly both—as with a certain kind of suit, it seems workable for either occasion.
Instead of the wedding and/or funeral speech (though sure, there’s still time enough for both) I’m delivering this story to my wife. Trying to wrest my brother back from what local mythology has made of him. Careless Idiot at best. Murderer at worst. Ti has been driving past those crosses at the shoulder of Highridge Road for years, since before we even met. Shedmade, white as desert-bleached bones. Coated with a fresh layer of paint every spring, strung with teddy bears, ribbons, other sentimental lark. Trinkets refreshed each September. The grandparents’ work, we suspect; the father too modest for that sort of rubbish.
This is all Ti knows of my brother. This, and the couple-three cards he’s sent, and the shedful of furniture he left behind; all gliding teak curves and high-tension wires. Mid-century harpsichord, Ti calls it, explaining how their father was a luthier when friends admire the coffee table, the only piece that makes sense with the rest of our house.
My father, I’ll sometimes add. My father was the luthier.
Why, Ti wants to know, would your brother come back here?
I ask myself the same.
After the hearing, depending on who you care to ask, Fynn either ran, slunk, snuck, crawled, choofed off, fucked off, hauled arse, or simply went to the Northern Isles of Scotland, where the Atlantic charges in to meet the North Sea, and where he got some shit-kicking work at a whisky distillery. There he puts in five or six shifts a week, making nothing that anyone could put his name to.
I still draw sometimes, he told me once, glitchy at his end of our sole Skype attempt. His face freezing then catching up with itself.
I still sketch out ideas for things I might make one day if I ever [garble].
Last year Mum and Dad retired to Norfolk Island, from where Mum phones every Sunday to talk politics and weather and to ask what the hell she did wrong. Sara is twenty-fve, working as an image and style consultant in Sydney. Who knows what she thinks; she’s less scrutable than a butchy boy. She doesn’t remember that trip to the island, or the raft, and I’m not sure she remembers a time when she liked either of us, Fynn or me. Her first memories start at five, and by then Fynn was sixteen, flakey as a box of Frosties, and I was a monster. Long gone are the days when she would laugh along with whatever jokes we told, not understanding but not wanting to be left out. Sometimes we would laugh just to make her laugh, tell jokes that weren’t funny, or weren’t even real jokes but had the rhythm of jokes. Just to test her, to watch her go. Now she doesn’t find anything funny.
I think you ruined her, Mum says down the phone one weekend. You and that brother of yours.
When did he become mine? is a question I do not ask.
When did he become mine? is a question I do not ask.
Fynn arrives on a Saturday morning with one duffel bag, his blondness gone to seed, hair brushing the collar of the bomber jacket he wears in spite of the January heat. Dead pine trees still line the curb, flung out for green waste.
My brother lopes across the scorched front lawn, looking even older than he did in court, older than I figured possible. Walking taller than he wants to be, ghosting up the morning. Out on the street there’s his rental hatchback, some hairdryer, crouching as though it, too, hopes not to be seen. As though six years might be too soon.
I’m waiting behind the flyscreen, feeling everything I’d neatly fat-packed springing up in me. I will punch him, I think. No, I will bring him in close. I will tell him . . . I don’t know what.
Yes, I might’ve picked him up from the airport, traveled that eighty K with him—school doesn’t start back till February, the course is all set, no one needs a thing from me till then. But I was thinking, To hell with it. After this long and this much silence he can manage, at least, to make his own way back here.
He’s turning silver gray at the temples, and when he finally looks up his blue eyes waver as though he is gazing at something unstill. He reminds me of those huskies that people, out of vanity or stupidity, see fit to keep as pets in this climate. Ti’s hands ball into little fists when she sees them, these bewildered, patchy-coated animals paraded around Perth’s richer suburbs, humiliated wolves.
Fynn is humiliated, of course. He is beyond humiliated.
Hey! I say. Then, like an idiot, Welcome back!
Raf, is all he says, putting his hand forward like I’m about to go and shake it.
I step out into the glare and grab him around the shoulders, and he stands there stiffly for a few seconds, finally relenting to the hug.
Still in the doorway he rummages through the duffel bag. Brought you a gift, he says, but he says it like geft, this new lilt in his voice. Your wedding, he says, handing over a fancy wooden booze box. Sorry I missed . . . Then he waves a hand to mean: Everything.
Sorry I missed . . . Then he waves a hand to mean: Everything.
It strikes me that this is what strangers do. Make offerings before stepping over the threshold of each other’s house. That this is what we are now.
Get in here, would you?
Inside he shucks off the bomber jacket. His skin is the bluish white of those axolotls Dad never bought us.
Six summers, he explains, like an apology. A lot to make up for—mind if I go photosynthesize? Then he spends the next few hours just lying in our backyard, stripped down to his undies. Ti will be at work a few hours yet, dislodging pieces of Lego from the throats of small stupid dogs, treating pissed-off cats for gingivitis. Fynn keeps his eyes closed as we speak about nothing much: Mum and Sara synching up their mid- and quarter-life crises; the Perth mining boom; the resulting ice boom; the inevitable rehab boom.
I rant about my students, mostly write-offs. Teaching them the difference between Rhizaria and Chromalveolata when it’d be more use teaching them the difference between papillomavirus and chlamydia.
All the while my brother’s face is turned directly towards the sun. I study the frail red and gray blood vessels on his near-translucent eyelids, limpid as rock pool creatures down there in the deep set of his skull. The drive from the airport would have taken him past those crosses, the gleaming reinforced barrier.
What? he says from behind his closed eyes.
Nothing. You’re burning, you know.
Beaut. Fine by me. Six bloody summers . . .
Yeah yeah.
My wife falls in love with him, of course. Not in any way that could really be considered dangerous, just in the way I knew she would, the way people have always fallen in love with Fynn; quickly and easily and faithfully. It is so so so good to finally finally meet you, like a record jumping, and suddenly the crosses planted at the shoulder of the highway do not stand for two tiny girls and their singing-teacher mother. They stand for small-town intolerance, grudges borne longer than is fair or necessary, nourished by the kind of rural oxygen a larger city would have starved them of.
The two of them stand at the kitchen sink, elbow to elbow, de-bearding mussels. Cracking up over something I don’t catch. In high school the couple of girls I managed to bring home laughed just as easily for him, like they were trying to rouse some sleeping thing. Fynn, my older, whiter brother, who never felt the need to take me down a notch. Who’s always had everything going for him. Why do I still think of him this way? And why is there a moment, a flash in which I also think, skulked, snuck, hauled arse… after all the defending I’ve done in the years between the accident and here. Especially in the first months, with people murmuring and shaking their heads in the tinned-veg aisle, though all I have in common with Fynn is some blood.
I’m watching them over the top of my beer, my brother and my wife, somehow knowing, before it happens, that one of them is going to slice the paring knife through their palm, and the other is going to have an excuse to come at them with Dettol and cotton wool, and that I’m going to have to sit here and watch this. Then Fynn goes Ah Christ! but the gouge isn’t deep, doesn’t need Ti’s attention, and he gets on with the job of scraping away the hairy tendrils that once anchored the mollusk someplace it thought sturdy.
Soon enough we’re sitting around the table, butterflying shells between our fingers, using the halves for slurping up the briny liquor, the house filling with a fragrant, kelpy smell.
Ti has a theory about labor-intensive food, the kind where utensils are a waste of time and attempts at grace just make you clumsier. This theory holds: the empty shells pile up between us and the talk spills easy, as if we’ve been doing this every Saturday for years, the three of us.
The work’s mostly just menial stuff, Fynn says. Bottling, labeling. Keeping the mice offa the malt floor. Things I can’t mess up too bad. No hand in the art of it. But it’s enough to be in that landscape—that old, that immense. Part of you just disappears.
All of you just disappeared, I think.
Got a little boat, he’s saying. Take it out for sea trout on my days off. Bay of Isbister, Inganess . . .
When he says these names it’s with that glint, as though the words have been kept in the wrappers they came in.
We drink all the wine that wasn’t used to steam open the mussels, and when that’s done we crack Fynn’s wedding present. I uncork the heavy-based bottle, and the North Sea rushes into the room. I slosh out three glasses and we lift them to the wedding. We lift the next round to Dad’s bypass, then another to the cousin whose dive gear let him down, and all the things that Fynn shouldn’t have missed but did and oh well what can you do he’s here now, hey?
Ti’s giving me that watch it look. Fynn clears his throat and unfoots a mussel with a twist of fork, then goes back to seducing her with northernmost Scotland’s beauty and gloom. The peat slabs cut and lifted out of the ground, snaked through with heather roots and reeking of time. The salt air and natural violence that make their way into the bottle. The ocean and how it differs, how the memory of Western Australia shrinks right down to a pinhole. Standing at the edge of the Yesnaby Cliffs, clouds of guillemots beating frantic overhead.
Like the very ends of the earth out there, Fynn says.
Like the afterlife . . . ? I edge in, and I can tell from how he looks at me that he doesn’t remember ever saying that, that he thinks I’m taking the piss. None of us are quite drunk enough to not be embarrassed by this, so I refill our glasses and we drink to our sister, whose sense of humor we incrementally destroyed.
The bottle makes seven or eight rounds before it’s drained, and by that stage Ti has tapped out, her sturdy brown legs drawn up beneath her on the couch, her dark hair curtaining her from our nonsense.
Without her voice to anchor us there comes a drift, a silence so big and awful that it could be holding anything, but I know what’s lurking within. I try to head it off with small talk, but Fynn just nods. Here it comes, I think. Here it is.
You’ve seen him around, I s’pose?
Who?
Fynn shakes his head, as if I’m the coward.
Yeah. I see him sometimes. Not all that often.
And?
Look. Fynn. There’s nothing I can tell you that’s going to make you feel less shitful about it. Last year I saw him at the Farmers’ Arms, and he looked like a man whose wife and kids had died five years ago. A few months back I saw him at the post office, and he looked like a man whose wife and kids had died six years ago. What else is there to say?
It happened in a heartbeat. In a glisk, Fynn has since said. Swerving to miss the dog that came trotting out of the scrub. Swinging his ute into the oncoming lane, into the oncoming sedan. Just a glisk, then. And the safety barrier just for show, apparently, eaten through by salt air and melting away like bad magic at the first kiss of fender.
I met a woman, Fynn says. Sweet clever type from the library. When I’d stay with her overnight, there’d be the sound of her kids running around the house in the morning. Sound of them laughing downstairs or talking in funny voices to the cat. It was too much, Raf. I couldn’t tell her. And I couldn’t stay.
I keep looking for something, my brother goes on. Something that’ll fill up this scooped-out place but drink doesn’t do it. Sex doesn’t do it. I walk, I walk a great fucking lot, and the wind there wants to rip you open, but it isn’t enough. I’ll think maybe I can lose it in a roomful of people, like it’ll be made to seem smaller somehow, but no, it’s like everyone can all already see it, smell it on me.
I make to recharge our glasses, then remember there’s nothing to recharge them with.
You want to know the best it gets? Really, the best it gets?
Come on, I tell him, get your stupid jacket.
I’m further over than he is but I know the last thing he wants is a steering wheel to hold. I climb in the driver’s side of Ti’s Golf, fix the mirrors while Fynn hides his eyes behind a pair of aviators.
You don’t want those. Anyway, you still look like you, just more of an arsehole. Everyone looks like an arsehole in aviators.
Right, he says, flinging them into the lantana.
Since Fynn left, some Perth kids came down and reopened the Kingfisher Hotel. The smoke-damaged collection of taxidermied birds that made it through the 2009 fire—suspected arson—are still roosting about the liquor shelves. The fiber optic thing is still there, the pool table is still there. But the bar’s been refitted, a big slab of reclaimed red gum, and behind it the top-tier stuff is seven tiers up, and the bartender has to put down his copy of the DSM-5 or whatever and hop a ladder to get to it.
These boys don’t know Fynn. These boys will pour him his drink without asking just how he likes being back home.
We take bar seats opposite a singed black cockatoo, its glassy eye on the rum selection. Fynn wins the wallet race, the leather split like overripe pawpaw, gaping fifties.
You need to carry all that around?
From the Travelex. I closed all my accounts when I left Australia.
You really weren’t planning on coming back, huh.
Guess I wasn’t.
There are Fynn’s hands, threaded mangrove-like around his glass. Roughened by work that has nothing to do with him, work that carries nothing of himself. In my shed there’s a second table and a set of chairs and a bookshelf. In February it heats up to a million degrees in there—six bloody summers— all the wood has buckled and split along the joins, the wires gone slack or snapped, all that careful tension ruined. I should have kept them in the house. I should have driven into Perth this morning, been there waiting when he hefted his bag off the luggage carousel. Now it’s all I can do to lift my pint glass and meet his.
Lang may yer lum reek, Fynn says, rs rolling all over the place.
And may the mice never weep in your pantry, or whatever.
Close enough—where’d you turn that up, now?
Oh, y’know. I shrug and swallow beer froth. Scooped it out of the punnet.
Fynn grins down into his collar. Can ya move the Camira? I need to get the Torana out to get to the Commodore.
And the laughter that finally finds us feels very frail, but true enough, an echo rippling from the thousand family dinners spinning off lines from the same stupid shows while Mum cracked up in spite of herself, and Dad threatened to drive us out into the bush and lose us.
Of course the guy was always going to appear, company cap pulled low, eyes shaded from the glare of pool table fluorescents. It takes him a moment—I see it, my brother sees it—to register that it’s really Fynn sitting here, and when he does it’s as if all the doors have blown open at once, the air pressure changes that fast. And if the glasses in their corral don’t shatter, and the stuffed birds don’t take fight . . . if the tables don’t upend of their own accord, it’s only because of the steadying hand someone puts on the fella’s shoulder, guiding him back to the game, to his shot, to the rip of felt as he jabs too hard with the cue, the crack of the white against the five and the grinding roll in the belly of the table as the ball is captured there.
’Shot, someone says.
Fynn is already fumbling at the zip on his jacket.
Sit down, I tell him. Finish your drink.
Raf, we can’t stay here.
Well, I’m finishing mine. I take a long, purposeful swallow to show him.
Fynn doesn’t reach for his. Is he looking?
Christ, I’m not looking to see if he’s looking.
I can’t just sit here and pretend like . . . I should go say something.
What’s to say? I told you, there’s nothing. Just finish your drink, for fuck’s sake. (When what I’d meant to say was: Brother. Be still. We’re okay here.)
Just finish your drink, for fuck’s sake. (When what I’d meant to say was: Brother. Be still. We’re okay here.)
Fynn sits down, visibly shrinking inside the jacket’s bulk. I watch this, and I don’t know what good I’m trying to force. Or even if it’s good.
Right, I tell him, setting my glass beside his. You’re right. Jiggety-jig.
The way home is all roadkill and future roadkill—scarpering night creatures—streaking through the high beams. Bundles of fluff and mashed feathers at the side of the road.
Acquitted, I remind him. Everyone knew it was not his intention to run three quarters of a family off a sandstone bluff. Everyone understood that. At least officially.
Okay, yes, it’s awful, it’s tragic, but it wasn’t your fault.
How much quiet is there before Fynn clears his throat and goes, Listen. Raf? There never was any dog.
I say, How do you mean, no dog? Because I had seen the dog. Just as clearly as if I’d been riding shotgun for that nightmare. Fynn’s described it a hundred times—that mongrely, greyhoundish thing, ribs on display through its sorry sack of gray skin. The way it skittered out of the scrub like a wraith. Looking over its scrawny shoulder, as though something back there had spooked it senseless.
There just wasn’t. I don’t . . . Can we leave it at that?
No, I think. No, we cannot leave it at that. But I drive the dark highway and keep quiet. Where had it gone then, the dog? Fynn had looked for it, in the first hundred versions of the story. He’d stood at the mangled safety barrier and dialed triple zero—that part is fact; that part is on the record—and wondered, moronically, he said, where the fucking dog had got to. Because I wanted to kick it. His right knee bloody and ragged from where it had been crushed up against the ignition. A BAC of 0.03. Two beers, sober enough. This is also on the record.
If not the dog?
I roll us in, silent, to the driveway. Past Fynn’s rental car, which has been tipped up on its side, exposing its shiny undercarriage. We get out and stand beside it without speaking for a moment, the air full of insect and sprinkler music.
Happens all the time, I lie. It’s what these kids out here tip instead of cows.
How many people would that take?
Probably doesn’t weigh much more than a cow. Should we flip it back?
It only takes a halfhearted shove. The car lands with a crunch that brings about a furry of curtain movement all up and down the street but nothing breaks and no one yells. The passenger door is scraped up and the wing mirror is cactus.
Insurance?
Fynn just breathes in long and deep through his nose.
No way it’s connected, this and the blokes at the bar. They were still there when we left. Just one of those freak coincidences. I’m saying all this to Fynn and he’s saying nothing.
Inside, Ti has left the couch made up with sheets and pillows, and laid the coffee table—Fynn’s coffee table—with a glass of water and a pack of aspirin.
Keeper, Fynn says, with a smile so pissweak I have to tell him g’night.
Ti gives a little moan as I slide in with her, fit my knees into the backs of hers. My chest against her spine, face pushed into her hair. Her hair smells like the ocean. I slide my hand between her thighs, not really to start something, just to be there, and we stay tangled like that, drifting nearer to and farther from sleep, until headlights flood the room.
It’s nearly 3 a.m. when he shows up, swaying out there on the lawn. The father, the widower. So drunk he’s practically dancing, a boxer or bear.
He pounds the door fit to unhinge it, but his voice is surprisingly soft when he says, It’s not right. It’s not right that it’s me coming to you.
No, I hear Fynn answer. I know it’s not.
There’s the click of the screen door as he steps onto the veranda, before I can tell him, Don’t. Don’t say shit. About the dog. About the complete lack of dog. He doesn’t need to know. Don’t say a damn word.
I drag the sheet with me into the hallway, holding it around my waist. Through the flywire I watch the two of them cross the lawn towards the street, then farther on into the night air, away from the house. Away from help. My brother wading out into the dark and the dark folding over the top of him like a wave. No right thing now, no best thing. Nothing so easy as lifting a child onto his shoulders and carrying her safely above the grabbing sea.
Did you know that there’s an entire genre of books dedicated to white people going to Nepal to find themselves? I didn’t either! But it’s not so surprising since the release of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love, and its 2010 film adaptation, which has caused an uptick in tourism to Asia. Here’s the narrative: a wealthy white woman travels to “exotic” (brown) locales in to “slum” it with other expats in ashrams, only to leave with an Instagram post using local people as props without an actual life-changing epiphany (beyond the whole tired “these people are so happy with so little” white guilt mantra).
Instead of reading these cliched (and boring) narratives of poverty tourism, why not pivot to books relaying the experiences of American people of color going abroad? Let’s take the narratives of people of color and see how their experiences—whether it’s discovering their ancestral homelands or starting afresh in a new country—translate into new perspectives.
Eat, Pray, Love had its moment, but it’s time to move onto these captivating novels about Americans of color traveling and living abroad.
This enticing novel about espionage and seduction takes place in 1986 and jumps from New York to Burkina Faso to Martinique. A young black woman who works in the FBI is assigned to a case involving the president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, whose Marxist agenda is seen as threatening to the American government. With her fearless voice, Wilkinson examines patriotism, nationalism and sacrifice on an intimate level.
Caramelo follows the Reyes’ family’s annual summer road trip from Chicago to Mexico City through the perspective of the youngest daughter and only girl, Lala. Lala’s problems range from dealing with six, rambunctious older brothers to living between borders, but those become minuscule when she discovers her misunderstanding of her grandmother’s life. Cisneros dissects storytelling, tradition, and family in her seventh book, published almost twenty years after The House on Mango Street.
A gifted mathematician from the Midwest is scrutinized for her mixed-race background in both her personal and professional lives. She goes on to be one of the few women graduates of MIT in the 1960s and then to complete a fellowship in Bonn, Germany, where she plans on solving the challenging Riemann hypothesis. Math, family, and legacy are beautifully explored in Chung’s most recent novel.
What happens when a Turkish American freshman at Harvard attempts to flirt with her crush over email in 1995? Quite obviously, she follows her unrequited love all the way to Hungary! The Idiot is a funny, poignant novel about a perceptive, yet sometimes clueless, young woman navigating her way in Cambridge and the tiny Hungarian village where she teaches English for a summer.
Also a story about fleeing Chicago, Black Deutschland follows a young Black man recently released from rehab who is heading to Berlin with the hope of starting afresh and staying sober. Lusting over the queer, dreamy life in Berlin he’s been envisioning, Jed is quickly doused with a splash of reality. While he does indulge in nightlife, sex, and love, he also deals with a city wrought with racism.
Darius the Great Is Not Okay is a candid and tender story about a biracial high school student with depression. Feeling isolated from both his family and white classmates in Portland, Darius expects no different when he goes to Iran for the first time. This changes when he meets Sohrab, the boy next door who integrates him into everyday life in Iran by introducing him to local games and customs and helping him understand real friendship.
Three American women living in Hong Kong make up the expat community of wealthy people living in the city-state. One of them, a Korean American who’s recently graduated from Columbia, hopes to start anew after a mysterious tragedy. Her life converges with those of a rich housewife and a woman wishing to conceive a child in this novel about grief, identity, and connection.
Sometimes a story is too large or unwieldy to fit in a single, discrete package. Maybe the narrative at hand is too far-reaching to be crammed into a single book, or even a series of books (or films or graphic novels or insert-medium-here); sometimes a story can only be told by weaving together multiple formats. Such is the case with Dalton Deschain and the Traveling Show.
Dalton Deschain and the Traveling Show is a story universe, a band, a series of novellas, and a narrative that is still unfolding at the time of this writing. The first part of the story to be released was Catherine (a bookand EP), followed by Roberta (a bookand EP), and this month they’re releasing their latest entry, Casey, which will be—surprise!—a joint book and EP.
The titular Dalton Deschain is both a character in the story and a real-life human person, the latter of whom I sat down with to discuss this latest entry in the DDTS universe and the nuts and bolts of writing a cross-platform story.
Calvin Kasulke: I’m going to ask that you account for yourself on the record. Can you explain what Dalton Deschain and the Traveling Show is?
Dalton Deschain: We are a band. I think that’s first and foremost. We call ourselves a “pulp punk” band out of an aversion to genre labels, but also because there’s the allusion to pop punk, which we kind of are, but with pulpy-horror-sci-fi lyrics.
We follow a musician who is possessed by a demon who takes control of a circus and is a real bad guy.
We play regular rock shows but they tend to have a more theatrical bent to them, because all of our songs tell one continuous story about an alternate-universe 1940s United States after we lost World War II. We follow a musician who is possessed by a demon who takes control of a circus and is a real bad guy.
It’s this big, sprawling ensemble piece about circus “freaks” in the freak show and a demon and this girl that he sort of entraps into his orbit and a psychic janitor on the east coast—all these wild sci-fi horror elements just put in a blender, and that story is told through the music. We also release novellas with our albums that give you the entire story from front to back.
CK:How do you decide what part of the story goes into a song versus what goes into a novella?
DD: One of the first things I decided is that the songs needed to be accessible on their own, so if you weren’t interested in the story concept at all, you could still like the music. I don’t want to demand this dedication from every person that listens to the music, so I really wanted to avoid getting too in the weeds with the lore in the lyrics. There are some concept bands out there whose lyrics are just incomprehensible unless you know the whole story, and I definitely didn’t want to do that.
It almost comes down to the difference in opera between an aria and recitative, right? In an aria, it’s more a contemplative piece on the emotion that they’re feeling, while your recitatives are your less melodic, more fit-in-the-plot kind of things. That’s kind of where I draw the line: that these songs should be about primarily whatever emotional experience this character is going through in the scene, and that it should always be grounded in my reality or experiences. So I take whatever is happening to the characters in the story—whatever they’re feeling in that moment—and sort of write a song about both of us.
At the same time, I actually try not to cover the same ground in the story. Like in “Rabid,” which is on the EP, it covers the dog man’s traumatic relationship with a girl when he was in grade school. That’s not in the story. It’s kind of alluded to, but the way I see it, that ground’s already been covered in another section. If you know the music—which you probably do if you’re reading the book—you’re like, “oh, that’s someone in the song,” but otherwise it doesn’t detract anything from the story not to know that. I don’t need to spend five pages telling that story when there’s a song that does it already. I think they can sort of live together while each exploring their own little corners.
CK: Did you come up with the story first, and that then necessitated the band and the novellas? What was the order of operations in terms of creating the story, band and books?
DD: They fed off each other until they grew into an unstoppable nightmare. (Laughs)
Technically the story came first. I was writing music in college. I’d always wanted to write a concept album, but I never thought I would have an idea for one—I was like, “I just don’t have ideas.” And then I had this terrible nightmare this one night when I was a sophomore, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I developed this story around it and I was like, “oh, I can make that a concept album.”
At the time it was way simpler. It was really two characters. It was Dalton and Catherine, and it was: Dalton is a musician. He gets possessed by a demon. He tricks Catherine into falling in love with him. He takes political power and hurts a bunch of people and something bad happens at the end. And that was it and I was like, it’ll be 12 songs and it’ll be done. I had the outline done, but I was in college and I didn’t have a band so I put it on the back burner.
When I came to New York I didn’t want to just drop 12 songs and be like, “oh, well that’s it, I’m done,” but have nobody listen to it because I hadn’t done any groundwork to get people into the story. So I started writing sort of auxiliary songs, and I would write a song and think, well how does this fit into the universe?
So I ended up writing about these characters and then the story got bigger. As I would write songs, new characters would work their way into the story and the story would grow and then they would introduce more new characters. Then they would introduce new songs and it all just kinda grew until I was like, “Oh I think I have like a very complete thing. I’m not adding onto it much anymore.”
The songs don’t actually tell the details of the story. They tell the emotional beats of the story.
As far as the books coming into it, that came in much later. Because the plan was still for it to all happen through music. It would just be a band thing. But as I said before, the songs don’t actually tell the details of the story. They tell the emotional beats of the story. And so people were interested, well, what is the actual story you’re telling?
I started writing these little journal updates I would send out to our email list—it’d be a little diary entry from one of the characters. But as I kept going, they kept getting longer and longer and longer until I was like, oh, this is too long for the mailing list.
But I was also starting to get more confident with every diary entry I wrote, I was like, well, actually this is much better-written than the one before. Maybe I can actually write this story. So that’s the idea for the EP trilogy that we’re concluding now, writing the novella for each of them, each focusing on a character—with the goal not yet to tell the entire story, but to introduce these characters. Once I was writing it, I was like, well this seems like the best vessel for it. We’ll write it like a series of novels.
CK:It sounds like everything you write helps inform the next thing you’re writing, not just in terms of the actual story, chronologically, but in terms of the structure of the next piece.
DD: Yeah, I’ve been figuring out the structure of this kind of as I go and every time I try something and I think it works, I go, “Oh we can keep going further in that direction.” I’ve definitely tried some things that didn’t work. The first email diary thing didn’t really work because it was too vague. People didn’t get a good sense of what it was.
Telling the story on stage has evolved a lot as well. We found a more narrative and engaging way of telling it that took years to find. I kept trying different weird little bits to try to make the storytelling palatable. And I kept trying to find obscure ways of doing it. I think I was afraid of telling it straight on. I thought I needed to find this abstract way of doing it, but it’s not what people wanted. Songs are the abstract way of doing it. People wanted to know, “Now just tell me the story, tell me what’s going on.”
CK: We should probably address that your name is Dalton Deschain, and also the villain of the story is named Dalton. When you had the initial dream in college, were you going by Dalton by then?
DD: No, I never intended to actually go by Dalton permanently. I named the character Dalton Deschain. As I was moving to New York, I was like, well, I should make that my stage name because when I perform, I have this character—not really grasping that when you move to a new city and start playing, there’s no wall between you and the audience. It was much easier for everybody to know me as Dalton, and so that just became the default.
Photo courtesy of Dalton Deschain
CK:Talking about concept albums, are there other bands or artists or other equally confusing nouns that are influences?
DD: I mean, I’m a David Bowie fan till I die. I always wanted to write my Ziggy Stardust. Probably the biggest obvious influence is Coheed and Cambria, who told their story over multiple albums, but also did the supplementary work, like releasing novels of their albums. My idea was to take that Coheed approach and focus it a little bit more. It always felt like they were music first, and tried different approaches to tell their story—a comic book with one album, a novel with another. I wanted to find a way to more consistently tell the story from beginning to end.
I had, it turns out, a story that was being told in two forms simultaneously. And I had one of those forms figured out and I didn’t know what the other one was, but I kept pushing on until it found itself.
CK:And it sounds like part of figuring out how to tell the story was audience feedback?
DD: At the beginning I wanted to be mysterious about it. David Bowie never came out on stage and was like, “This is the story of Ziggy Stardust.” It was all kind of ethereal, and I wanted to do the same thing where I could say, “The story is about these things,” but it’s all in the music.
And people wanted more, they were like, “Well, what is that about? Who is this character? What do they do like, what’s the thing that happened?” I really wanted to be mysterious about it, but what I thought was coming across clearly wasn’t coming across. If what I think I’m conveying is not being accurately conveyed, then I need to find another way for it to be delivered.
CK: I’ve got a nice question and kind of a mean question. Which one do you want first?
DD: The mean one.
CK: Why not just write a musical?
DD: No, this is a good question. This is the question I get most often. Literally everyone’s first reaction when they see the band is “you should write a musical.” And that’s legit. I would love to write a musical. But a musical is a different form, and I don’t think this story fits in that form.
It’s not one-to-one analogous with a rock show that has theatrical elements to it. Some things bridge that gap like “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” which is another work we’re very influenced by. But the story’s too long. If I want to tell this the way I want to tell it, hitting all these emotional beats and letting you follow these characters in this ensemble piece from beginning to end, we’re looking at 35 songs and that’s probably too big for a musical.
I want this to tell the story but also be a fun thing you will jam to in your personal life.
The songs have to serve another purpose as well. I want this to tell the story but also be a fun thing you will jam to in your personal life, and be at a rock show and dance to.
I like the idea of this being a surprise to people. I like people not knowing what they’re getting into—maybe they’re going to a show to see a different band, they’re not planning on a night at the theater. They go in and they’re just expecting a rock show and they get us. They get the fun high energy hooks and music and they also get this weird comic book thing going on, and there are props and there’s dialogue and things like that. That may translate to the stage in some version, but that’s not the primary thing we’re going for.
CK: The nice question is: What are the advantages and disadvantages to writing this way, in multiple formats?
DD: The advantage is, just on a superficial level, that it helps us stand out. There’s a lot of music out there right now, and with streaming you have immediate access to any song you’ve ever wanted. You can find a song you like on a playlist and that may be the only song you ever listen to from that band, because there’s no reason to really seek out more unless you’re really in love with it or you want to know more about that person or that band. You need to have something more than just the music now. We’re not just the songs we make, we have an entire universe that if you want, you can get lost in it.
The disadvantages are keeping it clean and organized in a way that’s accessible. I think we’re finally getting to a point where we do just have the music and we have the books, with the mailing list is as a bridge. You started one, you graduate to the other—but I think that can be confusing to people, where maybe they do discover us on just like Spotify and they’re like, what’s going on with this band? There’s a worry of being impenetrable, and finding a way to make it clear to people what it is that we do. You’ve got to find a way to make it cohesive across the board, that’s a disadvantage.
But I get to write anything I want in a bunch of different ways. It’s more freeing as a creative person to not just be like, “I have this next thing I want to tell, I have to make it a song. Let me find a way to make this a song.” Instead, I can make it a song, but maybe the idea doesn’t need a song. Maybe it’s just part of the book. Or maybe I just wrote a part of the book, and I’m really turning the scene over. Maybe then I’ll want to turn that scene into a song.
It’s almost like having a whole creative community in your own brain. You’re feeding off yourself. You’d be like, “Ooh, that thing you did is cool. Let me take a spin on that,” you know? But both people are me. It’s more avenues for creation, which can be overwhelming, but it’s also way more fun.
When Greta Gerwig’s Little Womenhits the screen this Christmas, it will mark the eighth time Louisa May Alcott’s beloved 1869 novel has been adapted for film since 1912. The story about four sisters has also been made into TV shows, plays, operas, and even two animeseries. Widely beloved for its plucky heroine and romantic realism, the tale has such staying power that the book has never been out of print in the 150 years since its original publication. Little Women has proven timeless in its appeal; the story conjures images of New England fall, the scent of gingerbread, and the cozy warmth of a crocheted blanket. But the writer behind the wholesome bestseller and the family she based it on were political radicals. While Alcott’s semi-autobiographical novel is charming, it’s also more revolutionary, and more relevant, than it may seem.
When Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers Publishers first asked Louisa to create a “girls’ story,” she was resistant, writing in her diary, “I don’t enjoy this sort of thing.” After the critical success for her Hospital Sketches, she typically wrote “blood and thunder tales” under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard. Eventually, though, she conceded: “Lively, simple books are needed for girls and perhaps I can supply the need.” And supply she did, by fictionalizing (and in some cases, sanitizing) her family, her town, and the events of her life. Despite Louisa’s initial misgivings, her “girls’ story” about four sisters living in genteel poverty in a small New England town became one of the most widely-read novels in the American literary canon. Little Women’s illustration of “the domestic sphere” has resonated with readers across centuries, inspiring authors from Cynthia Ozick to Ursula Le Guin. Today, literary scholars, fans of her oeuvre, and viewers of the screen adaptations recognize that this “girls’ story,” a complex portrayal of domestic mundanity and women’s interiority, is subversive in its own right. But the Marches were not nearly as subversive as the family they were based on.
We don’t tend to remember how much trouble the Alcotts were making in 19th-century Massachusetts.
“We don’t tend to remember how much trouble the Alcotts were making” in 19th-century Massachusetts, notes Pulitzer Prize winning Alcott biographer John Matteson in the Emmy-award-winning documentary, Orchard House: Home of Little Women. But Louisa’s parents, Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail “Marmee” Alcott, were political outliers even in liberal Concord and constantly challenged the status quo. Bronson was a teacher, philosopher, educational reformer, and failed-utopian-commune founder; he was the first educator in Boston to admit a Black student into his class, and we have him to thank for inventing recess. Abigail was one of the first paid social workers in Massachusetts, as well as a passionate suffragist. Both were Christians, transcendentalists, abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and vegetarians; it was with these beliefs that Bronson and Abigail raised their four daughters, affording them much more freedom and agency than young women at the time were generally given. As Matteson asserts, the Alcotts “were rocking the boat in a society that was, for the most part, really very comfortable with the idea of women being subordinate in the home, with the [idea] of slavery.”
Nowhere are the family’s radical politics better showcased than in Orchard House, their home from 1858 to 1877 located in Concord, Massachusetts; screenwriter Olivia Milch calls it “the epicenter of a great American intellectual tradition.” And, indeed, philosophers, intellectuals, and writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Ward Howe, and Margaret Fuller were frequent visitors at the renovated farmhouse. Jan Turnquist, creator of the aforementioned documentary and longtime Executive Director of the house museum, is eager to chat with me about the Alcotts, their beliefs, and Orchard House when we speak on the phone. “It is still just the way it was when they lived in it,” she says, mentioning that it is one of the first house museums in the country and one of the first dedicated to a woman. The Alcotts “moved around a great deal before they lived in Orchard House, but it’s where they lived the longest. They had already lived there ten years when Louisa wrote Little Women, so for her it was natural to use that house as the setting.” Turnquist points out that “visiting Orchard House is a little bit like walking through the book.”
The Alcotts acted as station masters on the Underground Railroad.
But in Orchard House, unlike in Little Women, there are indicators of the family’s radical beliefs everywhere. The walls of Bronson Alcott’s study, for example, are decorated with images of his intellectual contemporaries and friends: Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Franklin Sanborn, one of the “Secret Six” who funded militant abolitionist John Brown. In fact, a portrait of Brown himself hangs in the same room, evincing the Alcotts’ anti-slavery beliefs, which even in the North, were considered “extremist” in antebellum America. The Alcotts acted as station masters on the Underground Railroad and hosted fugitive slaves; Bronson started an anti-slavery society with famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; and Louisa volunteered as a seamstress and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War. Turnquist informs me that when John Brown was eventually hanged for treason and murder, Louisa published a poem in Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, memorializing the man whom she called “Saint John the Just.”
Throughout Orchard House, visitors will also find subtle reminders of the Alcotts’ commitment to women’s rights and their belief in equality. Louisa’s sister May’s original pencil drawings still adorn the walls (yes, she drew on the walls), and Louisa’s writing desk, crafted by her father, still stands in her room. Today, Little Women fans view the white, half-moon table where Louisa wrote her most famous novel as a kind of shrine—the place where the magic happened. But Louisa’s desk and May’s preserved sketches are more than just displays of the Alcott girls’ hobbies and talents; they’re evidence of parents who not only allowed, but also actively encouraged their daughters to draw, to write, and to think at a time when women weren’t encouraged to do much of anything.
Empowered by their parents and a community of literary and social revolutionaries, Louisa and her sisters broke down barriers.
Empowered by their parents and a community of literary and social revolutionaries, Louisa and her sisters broke down barriers and earned the respect of their male contemporaries. May, for instance, became a talented artist herself, and many of her most famous paintings can be seen hanging in Orchard House. She also tutored Daniel Chester French, who pursued art because of her teachings and went on to sculpt the Lincoln Memorial.
Bronson and Abigail didn’t just apply their beliefs about women’s liberation to their own family, and the proof of their impact extends beyond their daughters’ accomplishments. Both parents were advocates of college education for girls, women’s right to vote, and even equal pay, principles they passed on to their children; Abigail once said, “I mean to vote before I die, even if my daughters have to carry me!” She never made it to the polls, but Louisa became the first woman registered to vote in Concord in 1879 and regularly rallied other women in town to cast their ballots with her. In regard to the Alcott’s progressive views on gender equality, Turnquist offhandedly mentions that the family not only sheltered escaped slaves, but also abused women who had no legal recourse against their husbands. “Louisa doesn’t put any of that in Little Women,” she quips.
There was a good reason for that, Turnquist adds: “She wanted her books to sell.” Bronson’s controversial schools, which prioritized a conversational style of teaching and avoided physical punishment (the inspiration for Little Women’ssequel Little Men), were often shut down when parents discovered his “controversial” methods and labeled him a “fanatic,” forcing the family to relocate. As a result, the Alcotts were poor—it was the need for money that motivated Louisa’s writing career. Thanks to the Alcott daughters, who were willing to work outside the home, Bronson was able to pursue idealistic projects and rarely compromise his values.
Perhaps the best example of this is Fruitlands, Bronson’s short-lived transcendentalist commune. Co-founded by Louisa’s father in 1843, the utopian community was rooted in the ideals of environmentalist, morality, and selflessness. According to Turnquist, in order to avoid exploiting other living beings, the residents of Fruitlands abstained from nearly all “luxuries” of the time: They didn’t wear wool or cotton (in solidarity with slaves), or use soap, animal labor, or artificial light. Residents adhered to a nearly vegan diet. Needless to say, after seven months, the socialist commune shuttered and the family moved again. In Louisa’s Transcendental Wild Oats, a satire based on her experience living at Fruitlands, she critiques ventures fueled by male arrogance and (ironically) enabled by women’s exploitation. The old saying goes, “Behind every great man, there’s a great woman.” But in mid-19th century Concord, it would have been more apt to say “Behind every great man, there’s an Alcott woman.”
The Alcotts’ unwavering sense of morality propelled them to champion progressive causes.
Although the Alcotts’ views are well documented, it’s impossible to know exactly what they would think about contemporary politics, and Turnquist doesn’t want to speculate. But she notes that the family’s “radical” belief system really “boils down to kindness.” The Alcotts’ unwavering sense of morality, grounded in faith, propelled them to champion progressive causes and, in some cases, break laws that they deemed discriminatory. If the Alcotts have something to teach us today—maybe even obliquely through Gerwig’s movie—this is probably it: The importance of kindness not just as a personal value, but also as a political framework.
During this conversation, Turnquist remembers a quote by Bronson’s friend, William Lloyd Garrison. When once asked to be more “moderate” in his abolitionist beliefs, he exclaimed: “No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm.” “That level of immediacy and urgency is how the Alcotts felt” about all forms of injustice, Turnquist asserts.
In An Old Fashioned Girl, published a year after the second half of Little Women (Good Wives) hit shelves, Alcott wrote “Women have been called queens for a long time, but the kingdom given them isn’t worth ruling.” Louisa and her family strove to change this, to create a kingdom that was worth ruling, and not just by women, but by everyone. When Gerwig’s Little Women arrives in theaters this winter, let us not forget that the creator of this gentle story was a progressive firebrand, a suffragist, a proud spinster, and a passionate abolitionist. May the film provide us a much-needed escape from devastating news cycles, and the memory of Louisa May Alcott and her radical family inspire us to action.
On 15 July 2016, 26-year-old Qandeel Baloch was murdered by her brother in Multan, Pakistan.
In the years leading up to her death, Qandeel posted an array of videos on social media. In one, she playfully asked her friend in broken English: “How I’m looking?” (it became a meme). In another, she promised to strip on camera if Pakistan won their cricket match (they lost). In several, she declared her love for the cricketer (now Prime Minister) Imran Khan. In most, she dressed exactly as she pleased: skirts, swimsuits, shoulders on display.
Thanks to these videos, Qandeel acquired innumerable fans and haters across Pakistan, and rose to unprecedented online fame. Unprecedented, that is, for a teenager who escaped a violent marriage. Unprecedented for a girl who came from one of the least developed areas of Pakistan. Unprecedented, in other words, for a woman like her.
Sanam Maher’s debut book A Woman Like Her: The Story Behind the Honor Killing of a Social Media Staris a compelling work of sharp, empathetic reportage. In order to tellQandeel’s story, Maher deep dives into the lives of dozens of Pakistani men and women. From the investigator in charge of the case (one of the first women in her hometown to join the police force) to the preacher implicated in Qandeel’s murder (known as a “true preacher of liberal Islam”), A Woman Like Her is a portrait of Pakistan as much as it is a portrait of one Pakistani woman who refused the life set before her.
Here’s a moment that stayed with me.The area where Qandeel came from is one where women are visibly missing from the landscape; where, in fact, they are often not given any shoes. When Maher asks a local journalist why this is the case, he impatiently explains: “If you’re not wearing shoes and you walk outside, where will your eyes remain?”
A Woman Like Her is the story of women who look straight up.
Richa Kaul Padte: At age 17, Qandeel is in a violent marriage. After the birth of their child, her husband snaps at her: “You have a son, what more do you want?” You write of this incident: “Even six months later…the answers to her husband’s question beat within her like the maddening tick-tocking of a clock’s hand frozen on a minute in time. What more do you want?” In A Woman Like Her, you make so much space for women who are taught to want nothing. Or at least nothing more than a male heir. Was this your intention at the outset?
Sanam Maher: It’s such a powerful question, isn’t it: what more do you want? What space do we have for this wanting? Even if all you want is to be someone, to have people know your name—can we allow it?
We didn’t have the ‘perfect victim’ in a woman like Qandeel– she was ‘the national slut of Pakistan.’
When Qandeel was killed, something you would hear a lot of was, “What else did she expect?” After all, she put photos and videos of herself online, angering her brother and [community], so wasn’t she asking for it? I started out wanting to interrogate this response, but I didn’t anticipate that I would want answers to other questions too. For instance, when I met Qandeel’s mother, I was struck by her behavior and how she spoke about her dead daughter. I was using my own frame of reference. I thought: Wouldn’t a mother be totally bereft? Wouldn’t she be beside herself with grief? I expected her to behave in a way that made sense to me when we were dealing with a totally senseless situation.
But I realized that she was surrounded by people who were saying, “Your daughter was shameless, so if you mourn her, you’re equally shameless.” She was in a position where she was being judged for her grief. So then I had new questions for myself: how we even begin to understand this? Everything I’d seen about Qandeel in the media tried to present a straightforward story about who she was and what had happened. But you cannot tell a neat story about this kind of killing, when a family colludes against or tries to save one of its own for doing something so terrible.
RKP: Please can we talk about the phrase: “You’re like a daughter to me”? Every time I encounter it, my whole body cringes, because it’s a sentence that many brown women know intimately. For me, it calls to mind older men who put their hands on your back, on your thigh, on various parts of your body. Older men, like the Islamic preacher implicated in Qandeel’s murder, who later deny allegations under its comfortable guise: “She was like a daughter to me.” What, according to you, does this phrase hide? What does it reveal?
SM: I encountered that phrase differently. All my life, my mother struggled with her mental health, and any time I would hear someone—women, usually—say that I was like a daughter to them, it carried a whiff of judgment about my mother: of how she had raised me, of how they were now trying to “better” me. That phrase gave them an excuse for their judgment. But then I suppose that’s what it is in other contexts too—a free pass.
RKP: Sanam, you and I follow each other on Instagram, where you do an amazing job of chronicling print media censorship in Pakistan. A bunch of your posts and stories contain pictures of, say, the New York Times, a paper whose Pakistani edition is punctuated with blank white spaces, where images that were deemed unsuitable once lived. I thought of this a lot while reading your book, which explores myriad efforts to erase women’s stories and lives.
In turn, I feel like A Woman Like Her does the work of refusing this erasure, of filling in the blank spaces by allowing women like Qandeel to tell their own stories, in their own voices. Could you tell me more about your decision to intersperse the narrative with Qandeel’s unedited words, to allow her to “talk back” (another thing we brown girls are so often discouraged from doing)?
SM: When it became public knowledge that I was working on this book, there was already a lot of information out there on Qandeel, but none of it seemed to satisfy people’s curiosity. So I’d find myself at dinners and someone would ask, “So, was she really a prostitute?” “How exactly did she make her money?” But it isn’t my job to provide you with those details. It’s my job to ask why you need them.
When Qandeel was killed, something you would hear a lot of was, ‘What else did she expect?’
I started to become wary of journalists or sources who promised me “the real story of Qandeel Baloch.” Qandeel was a chameleon, and she presented different parts of herself to different people—as we all do. We’re different with our family, friends, partners or colleagues, and we’re different creatures on social media where we get to curate our images. Who has the right to say who the “real” you is? Even after all this time, Qandeel is still a cipher to me. With every new piece of information, every new interview, I would feel, “Yes, this is it, I understand her now,” only to learn something else and be utterly confounded again.
I felt uncomfortable having the platform to tell her story when she was never given that opportunity herself. When news broke that Qandeel wasn’t her real name, or that she had a child, those were “real stories” that had been brought to light by force. I asked myself if I wanted to contribute to the sickening way a person can be robbed of their agency. I never wanted to speak on Qandeel’s behalf, and I pushed to have her words appear verbatim throughout the book. In fact, there are many sentences where you might not be aware that you’re reading Qandeel’s words, not mine. I tried to keep intact the ways she spoke, and how she described herself or seemed to think of herself. It was a very small way for me to keep her voice in her story, to allow her to talk back to whoever is reading it.
RKP: A Woman Like Her is so minutely observed, and yet it is tremendously expansive, with a narrative that twists and turns in different directions. And one of my favorite places it arrives at is the question of digital rights. An administrator of a women’s university says of the challenge of keeping its girls safe: “I can tell them when to leave and when to come back, and I can tell them when to be in their rooms, but once they turn on their phones, they could be anywhere.” What a thought: online, girls can be anywhere! Why does the same idea that lifts my spirits frighten those in power?
SM: I think it has started to frighten me too, albeit for different reasons. We’re seeing that these spaces are being policed and monitored and we’re more aware of their limits now. It’s becoming harder to find safe spaces online and to make sure that the conditions that women and minorities are trying to escape in the “real world” aren’t spilling over into their online worlds. Just last week, I received a text message from the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority urging citizens to “report” anything they deem to be “blasphemy, pornography, terrorism and other unlawful content on social media.” I’ve noticed that I’ve started to become very cautious about what I choose to voice online— it’s one thing for me to get angry or abusive messages, but it’s quite another to have a totally subjective system in place that allows you to do more than DM me.
RKP: There are over 44 million social media users in Pakistan, but, as many of the people you interview believe, “they must [all] remember one thing: they are still rooted here in the land of the pure.” I’m interested in how this dance between purity and freedom plays out in women’s lives: both online and offline. Can a “pure” woman ever be free?
SM: Well firstly, what is “free”? You and I might have the same answer to that question, but I’m thinking of something the lead investigator on Qandeel’s case, a female police officer, said to me: “Of course women have the right to employment, the right to education, the right to good living standards. You can say you want to be totally unfettered, to have freedom, but is becoming Qandeel Baloch freedom?”
How should a Pakistani Muslim woman look, behave and think?
A question that Qandeel would get asked many times in interviews about her social media activities was, “What kind of woman would do something like this?” That demonstrates an anxiety—how should a Pakistani Muslim woman look, behave and think? There’s a fear around what could happen if a woman decides to answer that question for herself. The only kind of “free” I understand is the freedom from any consequences of not looking, behaving or thinking the way that a “good” or acceptable woman would.
RKP: Qandeel’s murder was claimed by her brother as an “honor killing”—a murder enacted to avenge shame brought upon a family, community or tribe. Qandeel died halfway through 2016, and in those six months, there were approximately 326 reported honor killings in Pakistan. 312 of the victims were women. The linking of women’s actions and bodies to a family or community’s honor follows brown women across the world: for example, between 2010 and 2014, there were 11,000 honor crimes recorded in the United Kingdom, including abduction, female genital mutilation and murder.
Qandeel says in despair, “No one tells me, ‘Qandeel, you have gone to war against a society, against a kind of place where men think women are as lowly as their shoe. The kind of place where it’s so common for a man to hit a woman, that if some man doesn’t hit his wife, people call him dishonorable.’ Why don’t people see that?”
From London to Karachi, from New York to New Delhi: why don’t they?
SM: We’re dealing with an interesting case here in Pakistan right now, where an actor’s wife has accused him of beating her. The wife, Fatima, shared photographs of her bruises on Facebook last week and since then, many have spoken up in support of her and condemned her husband’s behavior. He was largely ridiculed for holding a press conference where he called his wife “troubled”, saying she was “playing the woman card” to vilify him. A protest against domestic abusers has been called in Lahore, and a senator tweeted her support and promised to help Fatima.
This is all really great to see, but it makes me wonder how conditional this sympathy is. Fatima shared photographs of her bruised face and body, she has a small child, her family agrees that she should divorce her husband, and many neighbors and friends say they were witness to beatings over the years. I think about the reaction Qandeel got when she spoke about her abusive marriage, of her husband putting out cigarettes on her body, of her desire to leave him so she could continue her education and make something of herself. We ridiculed her for saying she wanted support herself after she left her husband. We didn’t have the “perfect victim” in a woman like her – she was trashy, fame-hungry, a drama queen, a woman who had left her husband and abandoned her child so she could become “the national slut of Pakistan.” So I think that we do offer support, but only when we’re comfortable with the kind of woman asking for it.
RKP: A BBC journalist once memorably called Qandeel “Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian” — a comparison that made Qandeel legible to global audiences (even though Qandeel, who came from one of Pakistan’s poorest areas, was unable to access the privileges and safety nets that Kim’s fame allowed her). You write in the book’s epilogue: “Qandeel is no longer ‘Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian’ — if anything, the women who follow in her steps, who aspire to the kind of fame she found…want to be ‘Pakistan’s next Qandeel Baloch’.”
This sentence gives me so much hope. Does it give you some, too?
SM: It does, and I hope that whenever we find our new Qandeel, we do a better job of celebrating her. Okay, perhaps that’s a tall order — I’ll amend that. I hope we’re better at tolerating her.
I’ve been hooked on tales about things that go bump in the night since I was in third grade. I cut my teeth on Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammel’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I was shepherded across the untidy years of puberty by Stephen King’s Loser’s Club and Anne Rice’s pansexual vampires, and I spent many a happy summer vacation working my way through Blockbuster Video’s horror section. It should come as no surprise, then, that I eventually decided to write a scary story of my own.
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That story, A Cosmology of Monsters, seemed like a simple enough proposition at the outset: a multi-generational saga about a Texas family running a haunted house and struggling with monsters both literal and symbolic. But as I began to write the novel and became acquainted with my characters, I realized that my story was in deep conversation with the tropes and history of horror. Since I’d always been more of a dilettante than die-hard horror geek, I knew needed to research my subject further. All this homework gave me (and by extension, my characters) a strong awareness of the horror tradition, and made Cosmology into a book that knowingly subverts and celebrates its antecedents.
During my research, I kept my eye out for new horror fiction at the libraries and bookstores I frequented, but I rarely saw much I hadn’t already heard of. There were the big names, like Lauren Beukes and Joe Hill, and a couple of anthologies in the sci-fi section, but I wanted more. Lord knew there were no shortages of mystery and sci-fi/fantasy paperbacks, so where was all the horror? Was it gone?
In late 2016, I stumbled across a list of the 2016 Bram Stoker Awards winners, the annual awards given out by the Horror Writers’ Association. I started looking up the titles and authors listed, and discovered, to my delight, that the horror world was alive and well, but coming mostly from smaller independent presses. It had left the chain bookstores and moved underground. I bought some books from the list, and, to my delight, found exactly what I had been missing in my reading diet.
Since we’re nearing Halloween, I thought it would be fun to share some of my favorite horror releases of the last several years. These books run the gamut from relatively well-known to downright obscure; their contents similarly range from heartwarming to moody to terrifying. No matter where your tastes fall, I hope there’s something here for you to read while you enjoy that pumpkin spice latte or bag of candy corn.
This short horror novel tells the story of the ghost of a failed writer trying to solve her own murder in grunge-era Seattle. I defy anyone not to fall in love with Greta, a narrator who is bracingly honest, wryly funny, and deeply sad.
Like Miskowski’s book, The Fisherman is also short, and helped along by an engaging narrator—an elderly widower on a fishing trip who is granted an unsettling peek behind the veil of our everyday existence. To say more would ruin the fun. This novel won the 2016 Bram Stoker prize for best novel, and it’s easy to see why.
Some cosmic horror writers set up camp in H.P. Lovecraft’s sandbox and play there for the rest of their careers. Laird Barron went a step further and created a cosmos of his own, hardboiled, mean-spirited, and deeply disturbing. All his books are worth reading, but this first collection of short stories is an excellent place to start your acquaintance.
If Marisha Pessl’s Night Film was your kind of book, you’ll love this found footage tale about a down-on-her-luck documentarian investigating the unsolved disappearance of Canada’s first female filmmaker. It combines great character work with an unsettling central mystery to create a compelling read.
This is more of a horror-adjacent coming-of-age story about a group of believers and skeptics who spend the summer of 1980 investigating their town’s local ghost stories and urban legends. For those who like their horror gentler (although still present) and with a lot of heart.
If you’ve heard of any title on this list, it’s probably this National Book Award-nominated (and Shirley Jackson Award winning!) short story collection, but I don’t think it’s possible to over-praise (or signal boost) this book. The opening story, “The Husband Stitch,” is a brilliant feminist take on a classic spooky folktale, and “The Resident,” is as good a modern example of the modern weird tale as I have ever read. If you haven’t read this book, read it. If you have read it, read it again. Also preorder the author’s forthcoming memoir, In the Dream House.
Ellen Datlow is the hardest-working person in the horror genre. She seems to edit multiple anthologies a year, and, in her lengthy introduction to each annual Best Horror volume, she also reviews every horror novel, collection, anthology, film, magazine, tv show, and work of visual art released that calendar year. In other words, she knows horror like nobody else, and always selects a terrific bevy of tales for her Best Of books. This year’s volume provides a great sampling of voices working in the genre right now.
I have a confession to make: I never listened to Tegan and Sara. This is strange because in the late ‘90s/early 2000s, when they first rose to queer icon fame, I was—from the top of my frosted tips to the soles of my Doc Marten boots—their exact target demographic. While every other queer teen was encountering the Quin sisters’ indie pop ballads on mix CDs from their crushes, I was still listening to Pearl Jam. Instead, I first heard of Tegan and Sara thanks to a stranger who thinks all queer women look alike.
I was at a thrift store—Beacon’s Closet in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—sometime around 2008, waiting to try on some clothes when another girl in line approached me and said, “You know who you look like?”
I had a few guesses. If my head was shaved I’d often get Dolores O’Riordan from the Cranberries. If I was wearing leather pants, it would be Joan Jett. If I’d let my hair grow in and was sporting a blazer I’d magically become the spitting image of Ellen DeGeneres. So I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone somewhere told me I looked like Sara Quin.
“Who?”
“From Tegan and Sara. The band.”
Every time I was told I resembled some gay celebrity I had the same reaction—an angry, painful, almost sickening visceral reaction.
When I got home I looked up a photo and rolled my eyes. Twin lesbian sisters playing guitars? Which one of them was even Sara? It didn’t matter because I looked nothing like either of them! Every time I was told I resembled some gay celebrity I had the same reaction—an angry, painful, almost sickening visceral reaction. This was somewhat hypocritical considering how gay I did in fact look, and in no way by accident. (How else was I supposed to get laid?) But I had been raised to believe lesbians were ugly. Ugly to look at, ugly to think about, ugly to be—even as I was clearly growing into one. That sickening feeling, that knee-jerk reaction of, “I look nothing like [your lesbian of choice here!],” came from a complicated self-hate that didn’t go away, no matter how alternative I got with my appearance choices.
So I didn’t start listening to Tegan and Sara’s music right then. I didn’t even give it a try.
Fifteen years later, this past May, I still hadn’t listened to their music. My friend and fellow book-person Megan was in town for an annual book industry expo. Megan asked if I was going to the event at Housing Works Bookstore Café & Bar celebrating Tegan and Sara’s forthcoming memoir High School. I may not have been a Tegan and Sara fan, but I had fifteen years of queer community and pride parades and ex-girlfriends under my belt, so I knew enough of their legacy to know that getting my hands on a book they’d written months before it reached the general public would be a coup. Yes, I wanted to go! But no, I had not been invited.
“Come anyway,” Megan said. “At the door just say you’re the third twin.” Thankfully it did not come to that. One polite email and a gracious reply later, I was on the list.
The event began with both sisters on stage, seated side by side. Each of them would read a section of the book, followed by a Q&A. In the years since that Beacon’s Closet incident I, too, have been on a few stages with a microphone in my face and a book in my hand. In fact, I’ve been on that exact same stage at Housing Works. When I achieved my life goal of becoming a published novelist I’d overlooked the amount of public speaking involved. My introvert’s approach to such extroversion has been to go into a fugue state while on stage and remember nothing afterward, so I’m never sure how I’ve performed or what I even look like up there under the lights. Now I realized: I probably looked like Sara Quin.
From my front-row seat in the audience at Housing Works, I could finally see the resemblance. We’re about the same size; we’re about the same age. Yes, she’s obviously way cooler than me but in our offstage lives we could, at least in theory, share T-shirts. As a five-foot-three, masculine-of-center female I can’t share T-shirts with many people who aren’t pre-pubescent boys—so I don’t take that lightly.
The experience of reading High School was just as surprising and comforting in its familiarity. Like the Quin sisters, I also cut my teeth on Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins. I even used to play guitar, back when I still had long hair. More significantly though, no other book I’ve ever read so perfectly captured what it felt like—what it really felt like—to come of age as queer in the late ‘90s, years before positive representations of nonconventional sexualities and genders could be found in mainstream newspapers or on broadcast television.
No other book so perfectly captured what it really felt like to come of age as queer in the late ‘90s.
The scenes in the book of Tegan and Sara fighting tooth and nail over their single landline telephone brought a knowing smile to my face, but also a lump to my throat. Tell a young queer person today, “We didn’t have cell phones,” or “This was pre-internet,” and you may as well be saying, “This was before we had electricity.” And it should strike them that way, because we were all in the frigging dark, straining to see who we were and who we wanted to be with so few visible models, while those that were visible were hassled, harassed, and made fun of.
High School’s cover is reflective like a hazy locker mirror, apt given how much reading it felt to me like catching sight of my past self. I was surprised at the pleasure it gave me to recognize my own experience in theirs, as I’ve only recently had any interest in seeing my past self. I was not an uncomplicatedly happy or proud teenager or traveler through my early twenties. I was anxious and depressed, and while I had a lot of fun and a lot of queer sex and many loving queer friends, I was still the product of my childhood home and ‘80s America. So I didn’t like myself very much. I definitely didn’t love or accept myself. I think people assumed, or maybe I just assumed, that if I knew I was gay and looked gay, I must also like being gay—or at least not hate myself. This wasn’t how it went for me. I didn’t want to relate to Sara Quin in my younger days, whether we looked alike, dressed alike, or were alike or not. Potential for connection doesn’t always create the desire to connect, nor does it necessarily lead to acceptance of oneself or the other.
What I understand now, but didn’t that day when I was thrift-store-shopping, is that you can build self-acceptance from recognition and identification. You can stare at an aspect of yourself that you are ashamed of in the mirror and seek out that component of yourself in others. The exposure can help ease your discomfort, amend your sense of commonality, and you can reconceive your identity through all that bouncing light.
You can stare at an aspect of yourself that you are ashamed of in the mirror and seek out that component of yourself in others.
Presently, Tegan and Sara and I are, all three, aging into elder-status lesbians who suffered through the ‘90s, drank through the early aughts, and today get to sit on stage at Housing Works and tell people in their twenties what it used to be like to be gay. This feels like something of a miracle. And it’s been a surprising joy to not just see myself in their present, but to see my past self in their past selves as well. “Recognition” means the act of knowing and remembering upon seeing, but it also means an acceptance that something is true or important—that it exists.
They have a new album coming out. It’s called Hey, I’m Just Like You. Ha, I thought. Funny. You are just like me, aren’t you? Or, I am just like you. I’ve already pre-ordered it, and before it arrives, I’ve been listening to some of their older stuff too, to get caught up on all those years of music I missed—and to remember with new affection things about myself I used to want to forget.
One last thing: After that Housing Works event in May I posted a photo to social media of Tegan and Sara on stage and half my relatives commented with Congratulations! and Good job! Did they think I was Sara and Tegan was the moderator? I have no clue. I simply said thank you.
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