Last year we all had a good time describing ourselves like a male author would (sample text: “I had big honking teeters, and I thought about them constantly”) and even created a handy chart for generating your own prurient prose. But honestly, male authors never needed our help, and they carried on regardless of mockery. Since May, the Twitter feed Men Write Women has been collecting the most egregious examples of the real deal: testosterone-fueled metaphor, icky plot points, and narrators who don’t appear to have actually talked to a woman for fifteen minutes, let alone lived as one.
You can learn a lot from spending some time with this Twitter feed, not least that you might be a better writer than you think. (“These are published authors,” the Men Write Women curator hastened to emphasize via email. “Someone wrote that and thought, ‘hmmm you know what? This sounds like a Very Real Description of a woman.'”) In particular, though, you can gain a lot of insight into female anatomy. Here’s what we now know about women, thanks to male authors:
Their breasts point directly upward…
“Small breasts pointing skyward like surface-to-air missiles”
Taking all of this into account, I have compiled the following sketch of A Woman, According to Male Authors:
Listen, we don’t like this any better than you do, but until male authors get their acts together, this is the artistic vision of women we’re stuck with. Fellas, we beg you: read an anatomy book. Preferably not one you wrote.
Writers, solitary creatures that we are, can have trouble connecting to other humans in casual social situations. These six new editions of classic board games, targeted to writers for the first time, provide the structure awkward writers need to interact.
These games can also inject new energy into your tired “I read half of it” book club, or your petty “I feel like this isn’t really a story?” writing group. So chose your piece, roll the dice, and may the most competitive writer win.
This grammatically correct guessing game asks players to identify authors by asking increasingly specific questions. “Did the writer offer scathing opinions of Joycean modernism?” “Is the author a post-structuralist working in the mode of Roland Barthes?”
Original photo by William Warby
Publishing Monopoly
First there were six, then there were five. Your mission is to reduce the corporate publishers to one conglomerate by buying up properties around the New York City board. The owner of SimonHachetteCollinsMacmillanPenguinHouse wins!
Original photo by Ian Hughes
The Game of Lifetime Copyright
The career of a writer is checked with many failures and few successes. Roll the dice to determine your path. Will you sell your first book in a “major deal” or be forced to self-publish? Will your contract grant you favorable royalty rates, or will you accidentally give away your masterpiece’s copyright? The winner’s best-selling novel gets turned into a prestige television show produced by Reese Witherspoon, the loser toils in obscurity and dies of scurvy.
This one’s subtle, sorry. (Original photo by Ashish Joy)
Sorry! I Stole Your Idea
Better to apologize instead of asking permission; that’s the motto of a true writer. Roll the dice to steal personal details, great and small, from your opponents’ lives. That clever remark they made over coffee? Fair game. The exact way your best friend’s mother died in that car accident? Use it. It’s all fine in the name of art, as long as you shout “Sorry!” as you barrel past.
On the one hand, write what you know. On the other hand, you grew up in a boring suburb and have never experienced adversity of any kind. In this board game, writers achieve world domination by appropriating cultures around the globe for the purposes of their own financial gain.
Revue
In this classic party game, players use context clues to pretend they’ve read canonical works and buzzy novels. Once a player feels they have collected sufficient evidence, they announce their opinion of a work they have not read to the group. The first player to formulate a plausible opinion wins.
Back in the summer 2017 Nicole Sealey started to feel like she wasn’t doing as much reading as she normally did. This was understandable, seeing as she was serving Executive Director of Cave Canem—an organization dedicated to Black poets and poetry—and promoting her debut collection, Ordinary Beast, at the same time. And so she set herself a challenge: read an entire book of poetry every day during the month of August. Thirty-one days, 31 books.
“The Sealey Challenge was, initially, just a conscious effort to return to the habit of reading poetry,” says Sealey, who has since stepped down as ED of Cave Canem. “I posted across social media to ask if anyone wanted to join me in reading a book a day in August. Folks did, and the challenge caught on. Now, it’s in its third year. Now it’s tradition.” Sealey is no stranger to building community—Cave Canem’s programming is all about creating a legacy of Black poetry through workshops, mentorship, readings, and support. So it’s no wonder the challenge has caught on like wildfire. Both poets and poetry readers alike use the hashtag #TheSealeyChallenge and post photos of the books they’re reading during the month, creating a storm of poetry on social media.
But reading one book every day isn’t easy. Are they meant to be read individually, so readers allow them to sink in, or do we go through a poetry collection as we would a novel? Sealey recommends that “Poems should be consumed as individual readers see fit. As a poet myself, I read for pleasure and/or to better my craft. During the Sealey Challenge, however, I read for enjoyment. There’s no hard and fast rule. Really, I’m thrilled that folks are reading more books of poetry, many of which are chapbooks, and doing so together.”
She adds that the books she selects are ones she’s been meaning to read for a while, but hasn’t yet. She has some suggestions to help those participating in the challenge:
DO select collections that can be read in one day (I’m a slow reader, so I tend to select books with no more than 100 pages).
DO use your time wisely (read on the train, during lunch, before bed, et cetera).
DO take your time—poetry is deserving of our full attention (if reading a selection carries over to the next day or the day after that, so be it).
DO read chapbooks—for every full-length, read a chapbook (chapbooks need audiences too and this will help us keep pace).
Lastly, DO return to and study these books between September 1st and the next year’s #TheSealeyChallenge.
We can DO it!
If you’re new to the poetry world, though, finding chapbooks and short poetry collections may be a challenge in itself. There is a lot of great work out there, and poetry doesn’t often get publicized as widely as other writing does. To help you along, I asked (read: straight up slid into their DMs) 31 poets to recommend just one book of poetry they’ve loved. Thirty-one poets, 31 collections. Maybe you’ll find your new favorite amongst these.
Damn, just one, eh. Pardon My Heart by Ohioan poet Marcus Jackson. —Nicole Sealey, author of Ordinary Beast
I’d recommend Harmony Holiday’s A Jazz Funeral For Uncle Tom, for how it blends lyric, imagery, and history to formulate a clear and striking narrative. —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune For Your Disaster (September 2019)
Sarah Gambito’s Loves You is a remarkable folksong and jubilee of the heart—and stomach. The connections of food, love, and landscape bubble and froth together here in a stunningly and dazzlingly original compilation. —Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic
Sara Borjas’ Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff. —Denice Frohman, co-organizer of #PoetsforPuertoRico
Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning. That book uses restlessness, in form, lexicons, languages, and styles to define a new way of living and thinking in otherness that is both homage to literary precursors as well as a treatise for healing and futurity for writers of color. —Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky With Exit Wounds
I love Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song. There’s so much beauty in that book. There’s also quiet in the book. You can hear the quiet between the lines. There’s also so much pain in that book. But the beauty overpowers all. It’s one of my favorite books of all time. —Victoria Chang, author of Barbie Chang
If you haven’t read J. Michael Martinez’s Museum of the Americas, you are missing out; this is one of my favorite collections of recent years for its lyrical inquiry into Mexican heritage and imperialism, and the Latinx body that emerges from that history of oppression and consumption. —Rosebud Ben-Oni, author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (forthcoming)
I would recommend John Allen Taylor’s chapbook Unmonstrous (YesYes Books). It is heart-wrenching and elegant, quiet and loud, recounting trespass, healing, and the beauty we find along the way. —Diannely Antigua, author of Ugly Music
Olio by Tyehimba Jess. Olio makes me wonder about the future of poetry and consider how it could thrive both on and off of the page. The theatrical way in which the poems of Olio and the physical text itself are presented–resist institution and convince me that contemporary poetry is on the verge of yet another exciting renaissance! —Faylita Hicks, author of Hoodwitch (October 2019)
Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey. An incredible experiment in quietness and solicitude. —Camonghne Felix, author of Build Yourself A Boat
The last book of poetry I read with deep interest was Jay Bernard’s Surge, which reckons not just with history but also literary tradition to call attention to the recursivity of social violence/ anti-black racism in the U.K. In Bernard’s hands, form and narrative are melded to produce a truly political poetry (in every sense of the political)! —Billy-Ray Belcort, author of This Wound is a World
Raquel Salas Rivera’s while they sleep (under the bed is another country) sees and distills centuries. As the aftereffects of the U.S.’s violent response to Puerto Rico, in the wake of Hurricane Maria, grow, this book, its nuanced analysis and use of language, is a tool for surviving the future. —Andrés Cerpa, author of Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy
Franny Choi’s Soft Science. This book reads like a cross between an lyric erotic memoir and a Isaac Asimov story. In these formally inventive poems, Choi explores the complicated mess that is the human psyche and find us all (America and beyond) both monstrous and beautiful. You should really read this book. —Jeffrey Thomson, author of Half/Life: New & Selected Poems (October 2019)
Joe Jiménez’s Rattlesnake Allegory: The lyric echoes & queer longing of Joe Jiménez’s Rattlesnake Allegory deftly deconstruct the space between the body & the environment it navigates. For Jiménez, the body itself takes form as “a nest braided in hush,” & desire a snake that coils within, & stays. —Matty Layne Glasgow, author of Deciduous Qween
I recommend everyone read Teeth by Aracelis Girmay. Girmay’s first book of poems is full of balms and rallying cries. It is a book to carry with you at all times. If you can read the poem, FOR ESTEFANI LORA, THIRD GRADE, WHO MADE ME A CARD, and not giggle to yourself with joy, then you might want to check your pulse. —José Olivarez, author of Citizen Illegal
I recommend Mend (The University Press of Kentucky) by Kwoya Fagin Maples. There are so many things to love and study here, namely how Maples beautifully uses both personal and persona poems to investigate what it means for black women to have (literally) made history but not be apart of it. —Malcolm Tariq, author of Heed the Hollow
Etel Adnan’s Sea and Fog: A quote from the book: “The forest is shaking terribly. Waves howl and break in jets of water. What beauty, this fury! Sea: It is because she is that we are, and when she disappears we’ll cease to be. It’s only in relation to her that we find some worth to our existence.” —Grace Shuyi Liew, author of Careen
Gabriel Ojeda-Sague’s Jazzercise is a Language: A friend thrust this book into my arms knowing what it would do to me and now I thrust it into yours. This book thinks, it sweats, it offers sweat-drenched leotards and leitmotifs of being doused in seltzer, it counts to a beat (one two one two, bodies impacting a floor) and inhabits/blows up the confounding — racialized, gendered, wild — language of FITNESS DANCE and its celebrities/practitioners/instructors — “when you’re smiling I know you’re breathing.” This is a fucking great book. Skip that cruel Richard SImmons podcast and read this instead. —Hannah Ensor, author of Love Dream with Television
Domenica Martinello’s All Day I Dream About Sirens (Coach House Books, 2019): All Day I Dream About Sirens by Domenica Martinello is an intoxicating debut. She braids diction from mythology and late stage capitalism into language that’s vibrant and slippery. The varying linguistic registers and tone shifts both critique and enact our age of flickering attention spans. Her poems are dazzling, exhilarating. —Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning
Alberto Rios makes use of magical realism in order to infuse our world—which is full of such codified notions as nationality and gender—with the often-unacknowledged mysteries of our own shifting and mutable identities. Every one of his books is a lesson in sorcery, but The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body is slaying me these days: “What I could not have, / That’s what I was / Inside, an ache / Coming as I stood / Too many places.” —Keetje Kuipers, author of All Its Charms
Jay Wright’s The Prime Anniversary (Flood Editions, 2019): With incomparable poetic vision, Jay Wright again reminds us of our sonic birthright. At the meeting place of Góngora and Ogotemmêli, his lines thoroughly reconfigure the perception of time and geography. With astounding lyrical precision—a music composed of fractions, infinity, proper names—The Prime Anniversary makes it desirable to inhabit the immensity beyond “this countable, nameable thing we call an individual.” Wright’s example allows us to rejoice in the justice that prevails in the present tense of what numbers know: “Nothing overcomes the radiant iambic; / no one forgets the geometry of lyric.” —Roberto Tejada, author of Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness
I recommend anything by Marosa di Giorgio (Ugly Duckling’s issuing of The History of Violets was my first introduction). Di Giorgio’s prose poetry locates and then often identifies with the perilous beauty of the natural world as it applies to selfhood, longing, ancestry, and eros. In her voice, I feel the coiled-up burgeoning of a lily caged because of its murder history, even as she praises its perfume. —Justin Wymer, author of Deed
Deciduous Qween by Matty Layne Glasgow: The poems of Deciduous Qween excavate the body and talk about it fearlessly, with exact attention. They rustle with honest statements that fall as they become part of a greater nature. They exist in a desert where loss and restlessness have come to play and be. You will find yourself attached to these funny, pensive and tender poems. They will follow you around helping you name what you were actually feeling, not what you think you should feel because others have said so. Read this when you want to feel free. —Analicia Sotelo, author of Virgin
The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi—I keep returning to this book and it keeps returning me to myself, in all these gorgeously unexpected ways. Within these pages, memory, dream, friendship, and the everyday are sites of rigorous meditation and imaginative reconfiguring. —Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List of Further Possibilities
View With a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems by Wislawa Szymborska—Nobel Prize winner, hotel soap stealer, beloved scientist-poet-philosopher, and Patron Saint of Perpetual Noticing, Szymborska illuminates the paradox and wonder of being alive like no one else. She’s funny as hell too. —Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay (2015): One of the healthiest books I’ve ever read, Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude has recharged my own commitments to studying/exploring the radical observations and critical challenges of joy. —Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler
Although listed as an essay collection, Lily Hoang’s genre-defying book, A Bestiary, is an absolutely groundbreaking tour de force that took my breath away and compelled me to read it in one sitting late into the night, and then many times since. With its objects, statements, poems, movements, gestures, essays, recollections, fairy tails or however you want to define them, one thing is certain: I don’t think I will ever be the same writer after having read this beautiful book. —Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of Cenzontle
Of Mrs. Dalloway, Michael Cunningham says it’s the “first novel to split the atom.” Mai Der Vang’s Afterland continues in that nuclear spirit: stretching line breaks, imagery, and syntax to ambitious extremes. These poems are testaments to memory, war, exile, and trauma; they never forget to remind us why poetry is a powerful vehicle for survival. —Roy Guzmán, 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow
It’s August, and your poetry should be as fierce as a NYC subway platform in a heat wave, so I recommend Beshrew (Dusie, 2019) by Danielle Pafunda. This snapshot-sized (4×6) feral book-length poem epigraphed with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 133 is love as crime-scene, duende, pleasure, and catastrophe. We are all on fire and these couplets roar through the ways in which we try to inhabit one another—the litany and ecstasy. —Erika Meitner, author of Holy Moly Carry Me
Natalie Shapero’s Hard Child (Copper Canyon, 2017) is brash and poignant and hilarious and upsetting. As a new parent and a misanthrope, I had never felt so seen by a poetry collection. Reading it was like hearing someone say the inappropriate thing that you’ve always known to be true but haven’t been able to articulate and you’re like OOOOOOH YEAH SAY IT LOUDER. My copy is dog-eared and the margins are thickly be-hearted. Next to the lines “It’s/ awful, to be a person” I have written “hi, yes.” You can too. —Claire Wahmanholm, author of Wilder
I would like to recommend Zaina Alsous’ A Theory of Birds. It’s a deeply rebellious, wild book that, like Dionne Brand’s work, attempts to map a radical vision of the world onto a girl’s body, give an Arab girl back her power to name the creatures, avenge those gone extinct, time travel. I’m thrilled by the formal experimentation and the referential nature of the work, using citation as a spiritual act to account for all the radical thinkers that made this debut possible. —Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, author of Beast Meridian
It’s difficult to imagine a time when defining yourself by an obsession with a movie, TV show, or celebrity wasn’t a natural part of life, like picking a favorite color as a child. In a time when the internet supplies a constant stream of celebrity news, takedowns, and an outlet for stanning, Old Hollywood seems impossibly mysterious and alluring. Even aesthetically it’s easy to romanticize—the meticulous hairstyling, tailored outfits, even black and white film, though plainly inferior to today’s technology, can be enough to beckon one in for a closer look.
What took place as Hollywood was being built from the ground up, both as a city and an industry, shapes so much of the way we interact with media today. These books present a nuanced portrait of show business as it was taking shape, reminding us of the people who had to combat the repugnant cultural attitudes of the time, the scandals that dramatically altered lives, and of course, the endless glamour.
Spurred by a real photo of three film figures—gender-bending performer Marlene Dietrich, Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, and Nazi propaganda director Leni Riefenstahl, Amanda Lee Koe’s Delayed Rays of a Star is a study of how the time we live in shapes who we are and how we live. It could be simple for a historical novel populated and led by real-life figures to coast on the novelty, or become so concerned with sticking to the facts that it remains superficial, but Lee Koe does neither. With great nuance, the novel documents the compromises necessary to reach one’s ambitions.
In Shawn Levy’s book about Los Angeles’s most mythologized hotel, Chateau Marmont serves as a portal to how much Hollywood has changed since the building was first erected, yet how precisely the structures (literally, in the case of the building) have remained intact. Levy turns his eye on the hordes of stars who’ve occupied the hotel and the infamous tales of what has occurred on its premises, but also less expectedly on the peculiarities of the building. Levy offers insight into West Hollywood in the 20s, and how exactly a site that is an emblem of sophistication managed to live through the 30s and a World War, while leaving its air of worldliness intact nearly 100 years later.
Scandals of Classic Hollywood by Anne Helen Petersen
It’s disorienting to read a book about a time before celebrity news and gossip became many Americans’ primary cultural engagement. Anne Helen Petersen adeptly tells the tales of how the lives of 16 different stars of Old Hollywood were consumed by the public. It’s sad to see the personal lives of others ravaged for all to see, but it’s especially disturbing to read about the cases documented in Scandals. These pioneers of the silver screen didn’t know quite they were headed toward, the moral salve of thinking “they knew what they were signing up for” no longer relevant. Petersen writes about the stars of the time in a way accessible to both the classic film obsessive and those of us who know about the bare minimum by carefully linking the celebrity culture of yore to its current-day counterpart.
Authored by Darcy O’Brien, the son of two actors, this semi-autobiographical novel presents a view of stardom we don’t often come across: that from the eyes of a celebrity’s child. With a wry sense of humor, O’Brien writes mercilessly of a boy’s childhood and teenage years made unstable by the narcissism of his parents. While this isn’t exactly an experience exclusive to the celebrity set, that context allows a little more humor—it’s more enjoyable to watch as a child is left to their own devices if it leads him to move in with a famous director, the father of a friend, who immediately opens him a checking account for his allowance. A Way of Life Like Any Other is both a peek into the ridiculous lavish lifestyle of the rich and famous and the melancholy of trying to return to one’s prime.
Though many of the key players in early movie-making were Eastern European Jews, few non-fiction books dive into the complex entanglement of the infancy of Hollywood movie-making and World War II like Salka Viertel’s memoir. In The Kindness of Strangers, Viertel recounts the experience of this intersection through the story of her own life. What we would now call a multi-hyphenate, Viertel took up post as an actress in her home country, a screenwriter, and a reviewer, among others.
Edgar Rice Burroughs is widely known as the creator of Tarzan, the book series he wrote between the 1910s and the 1940s, and this legacy lives on through Tarzana, the San Fernando Valley plot of land he bought and proudly named. Along with his countless sci-fi and adventure novels, he has a handful of books set in “the real world.” Recently reissued by the LA Review of Books is The Girl From Hollywood, a novel set in a town with physical descriptions that match Tarzana as it was at the time. The book follows Shannon, the titular girl, as she attempts to make her way in Prohibition Hollywood. The novel brings us to a period in time when the desire to work in film and become famous was less than popular—something that feels about as distant as Burroughs’s sci-fi when compared to our current day in age. As you might expect, there’s plenty of paternalism and moralizing as Shannon encounters the reality of the outside world.
The Battle for Beverly Hills is just as much a look at the physical making of the city as it is about the people who took part in its making. In the same way that it’s easy to take the structures of stardom for granted, it’s only natural to forget how townships, and in particular Beverly Hills smack in the middle of Los Angeles, come to be. The book captures the ridiculous capitalist attitudes that ran rampant at the time, most notably in how the town came to be, when its owners bought the plot of land that had already unsuccessfully been mined for oil with the hope that some would turn up the second time around. The Battle for Beverly Hills is a surprisingly dense history that marks one of the first instances of stars using their fame to lend attention to a political issue.
The Amazon review for my debut novel was glowing, including words like “compelling” and “fun.” And then there was this: “If you love historical fiction, you’ll love The Last Book Party.” Say what? How could my novel, which is set during the 1980s—a decade of my own youth—be historical fiction? How amusing that this blogger viewed my twenties through the lens of history. Did she find leg warmers as exotic as I did the paint-on hosiery of the 1940s?
Apparently, historical fiction is in the age of the beholder.
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When I started writing my novel, I wasn’t thinking about shoulder pads, step aerobics classes and other fads of the 1980s. I wanted to create a fictional version of what it was like to be a few years out of college, working in Manhattan in book publishing and feeling unsure about my future and my desire to write. But by including specifics of my life then—Dictaphones, progressive parties, Laura Ashley dresses, rolodexes and typewriter-written manuscripts submitted to publishers in cardboard boxes—I was conjuring a beloved, and vanished, New York.
As I wrote, I realized how much my plot was tied to that time, when the internet and Amazon were inching toward us, but still unknown, and unimaginable. My protagonist, Eve Rosen, obsesses about new people she meets, trying to figure out their histories and connections to each other, questions that today could be easily resolved by a Facebook search. But then the mysteries about these people would have been gone and with them much of my plot, which concerns Eve discovering how wrong she had been about everyone.
I’m thankful to that blogger for making me see that historical fiction isn’t all about corsets and hoop skirts. While The Last Book Party will be nostalgic for older readers, it offers younger readers a chance to immerse themselves in the 1980s, to imagine life when spinach dip in a bread bowl was a novelty and the best way to stay in touch with a college friend over the summer was to write a letter and put it in the mail. In that spirit, I offer up a book for each of the seven decades before The Last Book Party takes place, books that were so transporting for me that they felt like time travel.
I’ll never forget reading the first page of The Ice Storm soon after it was published in 1994. Listing all the things that were yet to exist at the time of the story in 1973—from caller ID to Frequent Flyer Mileage, computer viruses to perestroika—Moody’s novel made me realize both that I was old enough to have lived through an era that was gone and that I’d been shaped by that era. The novel’s myriad pop culture references may stymie readers with no visceral memories of the 1970s, but this story about unhappy parents and adolescents in an affluent Connecticut suburb is a devastating portrait of Me generation emptiness.
This memoir, which reads like fiction, convinced me how much I was not a child of the ’60s, even though I was born in 1962. Following three young women, including the author herself, who meet at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1960s, this book visits touchstones of the era—the early women’s movement, anti-war protests, group sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, and free speech. It’s a compelling chronicle that captures the exuberance and disillusionment of the era and how for three young women —a reporter, an activist of the radical Left and a member of the art world—coming of age meant looking back at their free-wheeling past with a new, sobering perspective.
How fitting that I was introduced to this dark novel about 1950s suburban life on the East Coast by the first book club I joined shortly after moving to the suburbs of New York City. Our discussion was passionate—not because everyone loved the book, but because this story of a young couple wrestling with their conflicting desires to be utterly conformist and yet find personal fulfillment gave us all a disturbing sense of the restricted and oppressive lives we might have lived if we’d been born before the women’s movement.
After this manuscript arrived in the mail at the literary agency where I was working in the mid-1980s, I pulled an all-nighter to finish it, swept away by this epic novel about World War II narrated mostly by women. The characters—among them a women’s magazine writer turned war correspondent, a female fighter pilot, a member of the French resistance and a Parisian Jew sent to safety with relatives in Detroit—allowed me to picture myself in the pages of history usually filled with stories of men. (It was also thrilling to see a novel I’d read in manuscript pages go on to become a New York Times bestseller.)
This novel about a seedy traveling circus bringing its illusions to an audience craving distraction captures the mood of the Great Depression. The story is told in flashback by Jacob, who as a young veterinary student found himself unexpectedly orphaned and penniless, hopped a train (how 1930s is that?) and encountered the circus. Jacob became the caretaker of the animals and fell in love with one of the star performers, the abused wife of the sadistic circus director. Not an uplifting scenario, but this novel is packed with detailed circus lore and vividly evokes a bygone era and mood.
The spirit, sounds, and structure of jazz infuses this novel about desire, love and the weight of the past. Set in 1920s Harlem and told in overlapping narratives, the plot focuses on door-to door salesman Joe Trace, who murders his 17-year-old lover, Dorcas, and on Joe’s wife, Violet, who barges into Dorcas’s funeral and attempts to cut the dead girl’s face. Challenging and inventive, Jazz at once brings alive the mood of the Harlem Renaissance and delves into the scars of slavery that continued to reverberate into the next generations.
There’s something magical about a book that made this privileged, suburban Jewish girl wish she’d grown up in a poor, immigrant Jewish family on the lower East Side of New York. I was one of three sisters in a secular Jewish family, but I spent hours and hours re-reading this book (and the sequels) about five sisters—Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte and Gertie—and their Yiddish-speaking parents. Their adventures were admittedly small in scale—a lost library book, a dress borrowed without permission and accidentally stained with tea, cleaning for the Sabbath, a visit to their Papa’s junk shop for peddlers—but it was high drama for me. And it gave me a rare and welcome opportunity not only to read about Jewish girls but to learn at a very young age that sometimes the most powerful way to learn about our own history is through fiction.
The belief that women should be small and unassuming is so culturally ingrained that it’s normal for women to force themselves to stop eating when they’re still hungry, to stay quiet while someone else in the room speaks up, and to question whether they deserve more; not just food, but money, sex, power, autonomy, and space. But what would happen if a woman spent her energy asserting, rather than minimizing, herself? How difficult would it be to reclaim her body and her desires as her own?
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Lara Williams confronts these questions in her debut novel, Supper Club, which tells the story of a young woman named Roberta who reaches her thirties “afraid and yet so desirous of everything.” For Roberta, fear typically wins—until she meets Stevie, an unapologetically brash artist who encourages her to reclaim her appetite. The two women start Supper Club, a traveling bacchanalian celebration where women can eat, drink, talk, dance—exist—in a completely uninhibited way.
Supper Club will resonate with any woman who has ever tried to pare herself down to fit society’s ideals, but it’s not limited to physical hunger; Williams embraces a range of timely issues from sexual assault to female friendship with engaging openness and humor. Supper Club also makes a case for the joyful side of indulgence with detailed meals reminiscent of Heart Burn by Nora Ephronor Sweet Bitter by Stephanie Danler.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Williams over email from her home in Manchester, England about how women inhabit space, air-conditioner bias, and the gendered way that public spaces are designed.
Carrie Mullins: In Supper Club, a group of women throw tremendous, bacchanalian feasts in rotating locations across a city. Where did you get the idea for the club?
Lara Williams: I knew I wanted to follow up on the idea of how women inhabit space, something I’d thought about in my short story collection A Selfie as Big as the Ritz, but to do this in a more focused way. And I was also interested in this sort of primal scream or exposure therapy theory of aggressively and almost hysterically leaning into something that makes you anxious. For a while, I have been convinced the cure to my very irritating capacity for shyness is to take an improv class. And I remember listening to the Kanye West album Yeezus a lot when it first came out, and thinking it was interesting it was written just before he got married. Like there was some necessity for this frenetic, libidinal but completely clear-eyed exorcism before he settled down. Supper Club is perhaps similar to that: this excessive embodying of something in order to achieve a more neutral relationship with it.
CM: Appetite is a key theme in this book. I often thought of Haruki Murakami’s line: “I never trust people with no appetite. It’s like they’re always holding something back on you.” At Supper Club, the women plan to indulge in food but end up letting go of all inhibitions. How do you think about this relationship between our physical appetite and our whole selves?
LW: I really like that quote. It reminds me of the short story “Starving Again” by Lorrie Moore, and there’s the quote: “That was the thing with hunger: It opened something dangerous in you.” The story is about two friends meeting over dinner and they are both these tightly wound balls of absolute need, having this nervy, truncated conversation, too afraid to order anything particularly substantial off the menu lest they reveal the almost deranged desperation and extent of their needs and appetites.
I think revealing an appetite for anything, really, makes you extremely vulnerable. But especially anything animal and basic, like food or sex or companionship. And I am perhaps a little suspicious of people who will not reveal any level of vulnerability, so I do relate to Murukami’s quote. It does sit a little at odds with his tendency to emphasize the slightness or wanness of his female characters, however.
CM: Roberta in particular struggles with the dichotomy between her “bottomless hunger” and her inclination to be unobtrusive. Likewise, she sometimes enjoys being in a more conventional relationship or her mindless fashion job and at others she feels dissatisfied by these things. You portray how complicated it is to navigate our own desires, especially as women, when we’re so surrounded by messaging that it’s not always clear what’s being forced on us and what we genuinely want. Was it important to you to embrace this conflict on the page?
LW: One essay I read while writing Supper Club, which really stayed with me, was “Hunger Makes Me” by [Electric Literature’s editor-in-chief] Jess Zimmerman, in which she talks about priding herself on being a low maintenance girlfriend. She talks about there being a strange shame attached to wanting effort from a man you are in a relationship with. And I feel like I wanted to explore two levels of desire in Roberta—her more primal appetite for food, sex, nourishment, companionship—but also a more intellectual or emotional need for a stable relationship with a man who treats her kindly, or for secure and rewarding work. She finds them generally incompatible, and finds both broadly impossible to ask for, and even shameful in asserting that’s what she desires.
CM: I recently read that most offices are air-conditioned to a temperature that is optimal for men and too cold for women. Yet while many of us have bemoaned the requisite summer office sweater, we don’t think about the AC as something that might be biased—or changed. In many ways, Supper Club is asking us to stop and consider our surroundings. Can you talk a little about engaging with the issue of space?
Revealing an appetite for anything makes you extremely vulnerable. But especially anything animal and basic, like food or sex or companionship.
LW: Yes, I am aware of the AC bias! When writing Supper Club, I was reading a bit into feminist geography and thinking a lot about how women engage with public space. There are statistics suggesting women make more trips on foot and cover more ground than men (and also use public transport more, except trains). And yet public space is rarely designed with women in mind, with inadequate lighting, narrow streets, not enough ramps for pushchairs, etc. An entirely well-meaning man recently gave me directions that involved using this dark, very lonely underpass, and I thought: a woman would definitely not have given me these directions without some kind of addendum. And even though it is most likely the underpass was perfectly safe, I felt uncomfortable and on-guard the entire time I was walking through it, which is ridiculous really. And I was also thinking about fatphobia and design, how public transport seats (and basically everything) are made with this presumed de facto thin sized person in mind. It was those kinds of frustrations that went into Supper Club.
CM: Supper Club made me laugh. I’m curious about your approach to humor and also your experience publishing a book that’s funny while also exploring serious issues. I’ve found that humor isn’t thought of as marketable in the same way for female writers as for men, though both genders have to contend with the same old cliché that literary books aren’t funny.
LW: I’ve always been interested in how women often package stories of sexual harassment or even sexual assault as, like, funny stories (myself included), and I wondered what the impetus of that is—is it subdued rage or packaging anger in a more amenable guise or trying to make people comfortable while still trying to communicate something uncomfortable? Though I sometimes worry humor is a concession, a way of sneaking in the idea that you are not taking yourself seriously, perhaps, so no one else should?
I’m currently drafting a new novel and I set myself the task of not writing any jokes in it, but within literally the first paragraph I had already failed. The majority of my favorite contemporary writing by women has humor woven into often seriously themed novels / stories – A Visit From The Goon Squad, Department of Speculation, Convenience Store Woman, Mary Gaitskill or Carmen Maria Machado’s short stories—though they’re not really contextualized as “funny” writers, which I also find revealing.
CM: Throughout the book you incorporate detailed passages about cooking, and I was reminded of Heartburn by Nora Ephron. What was your inspiration for these sections?
LW: The first passage I wrote was the section on caramelizing onions. I wanted to write something about the patient, slowed down, embodied experience of following a recipe, and to also spend time going into the methodical detail of this. And also almost testing the reader’s patience slightly in doing so in quite a laborious, meticulous way—which seems to be a somewhat male writerly trait.
But after that, I liked the idea of including not quite recipes, but either meditations on recipes, or embodied experiences of following a recipe. So for example, there is a description of Thai red curry, which is quite a simplified and anglicized version of that recipe, which comes at a point where Roberta is hurrying towards settling down and getting a sense of apparent normality with her boyfriend. It felt quite a domestic and slightly self-satisfied recipe, and also the sort of thing you might make to perform being an urbane, together grown-up. I wanted these sections to sit thematically with certain moments of the book.
I rent a small apartment in the belly of the city, far from where I grew up. I take my knot and my lessons and start again.
Each month, I send in the rent. The apartment is mine that way: I pay to keep my body there at night.
Each morning, I read the jobs section of the newspaper, black print fingers streaking my face and the white walls of the apartment. The headlines read:
LEGAL CLERK NEEDED
ODD JOB EXPERT DESIRED
POSITION VACANT
CAREER OPPORTUNITY
WANTED: PASSIONATE TYPIST
Let me tell you how the city feels to me: It is an orchestra of rusting metal, heaving trucks and sharp silver buildings, full of bodies, faces, color, electricity.
On the small squares of grass, there are small piles of dog shit. In each concrete corner, there is a small pool of urine. On the walls, there are electric scrawls of graffiti in a language I do not know.
At night, the skyline shoots out pinpricks of light and I am in awe. In the morning, I get trash caught on my ankles, greased Styrofoam making its sound against my skin. Even that is beautiful.
I get trash caught on my ankles, greased Styrofoam making its sound against my skin. Even that is beautiful.
On the streets, I blur into the population. I mix into the faces.
Here, no one notices my knotted body unless they get too close. They don’t even realize there is a pool of sweat in the largest crevice, into which one might toss a very small pebble, causing ripples.
“Got any change?” a man screams from a wheelchair.
His mouth hangs open, a single tooth protruding from the red of his collapsing gums.
“This world is pain!” screams a woman next to him.
Her eyes are bloodshot, watery, weary.
I slide a gold coin into each of their cups.
“What the fuck you looking at?” screams the woman. “Get moving, bitch! This isn’t a movie!”
I disappear quick, knot throbbing hard, into the smear of the city’s faces.
My apartment is up a wide flight of stairs. It is on the second floor, a small one bedroom with wide windows, dark wooden floors, white walls, a tiny kitchen. It is like the house at The Acres in this way.
I don’t have much: My clothes and books, a few rocks which glisten in the sun.
Outside, a constant chorus of noise: Breaking glass, trash trucks, arguments, a baby sobbing out all the tragedies of the world through its wailing.
The ad I choose from the paper says:
WANTED: PASSIONATE TYPIST
Can you type quickly and with passion? We want to add you to our vibrant, culturally dynamic office. We offer competitive salary, free water, and a positive workplace. To apply, please send a photograph from the neck up.
“And how would you contribute to the culture here in addition to typing up my daily notes?” the man in the suit asks.
The bald sheen of his head shines through several slicked, thin hairs. His skin is covered in strange red freckles, a blotching which travels beneath collar and shirt sleeve. The dead skin of his face is caught on his eye glasses, which are smeared with the thin yellow grease of his fingers and cheeks.
A stack of papers sits on his desk, many folders, an old mug of coffee. I picture myself typing up the notes every single day. Then, I picture my fingers in the brown sludge ringing his coffee mug, smearing it across my face like war paint.
I picture my fingers in the brown sludge ringing his coffee mug, smearing it across my face like war paint.
“I would smile pretty frequently,” I say, smiling. “I bring a positive energy to the workplace.”
“Excellent,” he says. “We don’t appreciate frowning here.”
“Absolutely,” I nod and smile.
“And as for your… condition?” he asks. He uses his eyes to gesture to my knot. “Are you with child?”
“Oh no, no. It’s just a knot. It won’t stop me from doing my job,” I explain. “It’s just how I look.”
“Fantastic. We like to give people opportunities,” he explains. “I believe in rewarding a hard worker, no matter the ah… circumstances.”
I shake his hand over the desk.
Each morning, I yank the stray hairs from my face, brush my teeth, apply my makeup.
Then I put on the costume for work: Black pants, white blouse, green cardigan, low-heeled black shoes.
Before I leave, I put in my false heart, which sits in front of my regular heart. The false heart is made of thin red plastic and covers my real heart, quiets the beating, an extra protection.
I walk slowly to the office. I have a short daydream about my body back home, in bed, in the warmth and sheets. The vision washes over me like a drug, what a pleasant pleasure just to imagine it.
At my desk, I type the bald man’s notes. My fingers buzz across the keyboard, letters kicked up like the black wings of crushed bugs.
“My god, you’re fast,” the boss says.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re like a goddamn automatic weapon,” he says. “What did you do this weekend?”
I go clammy, a bit of sweat on the brow, in the palms, beneath the arms.
“Nothing much,” I say.
A deep silence stands between us, my mouth a closed shell I pry open.
“…And you?” I tack on.
“Oh, you know, took the old boat out, a few rounds of golf, a nice steak.”
“That sounds lovely,” I say.
He offers a wink through his greasy glasses, upon which I note the specific swirls of his fingerprints.
“You keep typing that fast, that could be your life someday,” he says.
I picture it: My mouth full of steak, the steak in my mouth, the steak between my teeth, strings of fat in the molars, my jaw aching from always chewing, chewing and swallowing until I’m so full that my throat sews itself shut.
Most workers spend 1,896 hours per year at the office
The average office worker spends 50 minutes per day looking for lost files
Stewardesses is one of the longest words typed with only the left hand
A typist’s fingers travel 12.6 miles on the average work day
There is nothing to it, the motions, I go through them each day.
I build a new life out of minutes filled with small actions, my distraction techniques:
WASHING HAIR
SHAVING BODY
STARING THROUGH WINDOW
EATING
MASTURBATING
SLEEPING
I repeat and I repeat and I repeat. I inch toward death.
I repeat and I repeat and I repeat. I inch toward death.
Each night at home, I wash off the mask. Then, I place the false heart in a small black box on the dresser.
After, I make a simple dinner: Chicken, starch, vegetable. The meat tastes gray in my mouth.
The silence of the apartment swells. Later, in bed, my mind churns, my organs grind against each other, a swarm of bees thrum through my veins until I slide my hand between my legs, until the sweet pink rush before I sleep.
Each Friday, the boss carries a small black velvet pouch. This is called PAY DAY and it is marked on the calendar with a single exclamation point.
“Good job again this week,” he says. “Here’s what makes the world go ’round, am I right?”
He gives me a wink.
“The world goes ’round,” I say.
The pouch settles on my desk with a thud. I can hear the weight of it. I open it slowly, pour the golden coins into my hand.
I count the coins, one by one, into my palm where they glint briefly in the sun. Soon enough the coins gone, out into the open mouths of debt and food.
In the bar, bottles line the mirrored walls. I catch a glimpse of my eyes between their necks.
A man sits next to me. His nose is sharp, his eyes are deep green, his hair brown. His smell is my father’s same smell: sour, sweet, a thin layer of meat at the base of it.
“Hello,” I say.
“Hey there. You come here often?” he asks.
“No, I usually just stay home and cry in bed,” I say.
He lets out a laugh.
“What do you do?”
“I type the company notes every day,” I say. “What do you do?”
“I’m a law man,” he says. “I deal with the laws.”
“Oh.”
“Does that impress you?”
“I guess.”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handful of gold coins. He sits them on the bar. I smell him again, that deep smell, and I want his hands on me.
“Does it now?”
“Sure,” I say.
His hand finds my leg and squeezes. I let it happen, I want it to happen, I follow that feeling with him, out into the night, then into my apartment.
In the dim light of my small kitchen, he puts his hands on my shoulders. I keep my mouth on him. He tastes sharp.
“You smell so good,” he says into my skin, into my shoulder. His hands slide down my arms to my waist, where they discover my knot.
“Wha…” he asks.
“Oh, it’s just… I was born with it.”
“What the hell is it?” he asks, his fingers digging into the curves.
“It’s just this thing… my mother has it too, it’s a knot…”
“Your body is a knot?”
“Well just… my stomach, yes…”
“Show it to me, right now.”
I step back and lift my dress slowly, until his eyes can take it all in, my warped body.
“Look, you’re great. You are. But I don’t… I don’t think I can do this,” he mutters. “This isn’t for me.”
I drop my dress back down over the knot. I nod.
“It’s OK, I understand.”
A succession of sounds: Doors opening and closing, the car engine starting, tires kicking up loose rock from the asphalt, then the silence again, always only silence for me.
The break room at work is painted orange. The refrigerator is filthy white from our fingerprints. A low light buzzes above my head. I spoon my soup into my mouth, split pea green between the lips.
“Whatcha got there?” asks Brenda.
The pain still trembles through my knot, a pain Brenda cannot see or comprehend. Brenda has chopped brown bangs, watery brown eyes. Her shirt hangs sloppily over her thin frame. A small barrette holds back her bangs, giving a childlike appearance to her grown body.
“Soup,” I say, gesturing to the soup.
“Ooooh,” she says. “Soup! What kind?”
This is an attempt at friendship, a forcing, another labor among the current labor.
“I wish I had some soup!” she says, pulling her own lunch from her bag: A sandwich on square white bread with a limp piece of green lettuce between the crusts. She slides the sandwich between her thin lips, takes a bite, then speaks.
“You know, I know a guy who fixes that,” she says, her eyes on my torso.
The longer her eyes are on my knot, the brighter my rage glows. I stuff it down into my belly.
“Oh?”
“Yep, he’s even been on the local news,” she says. “His name is Dr. Richard Richardson.”
“Is that right?”
“Mhmm, he’s got these special injections to help girls like you. He’s a miracle worker. I went to see him for the corns on my feet. He fixed all 12 of ’em, they never came back. He froze them right off!”
I picture a dozen pieces of bad toe skin fluttering to the floor, one by one. She takes a pen from her back pocket and jots the number in black ink on a white napkin, which I jam into my back pocket.
I picture a dozen pieces of bad toe skin fluttering to the floor, one by one.
“Thank you.”
I wash my bowl in the sink, imagining her awful feet, the awful frozen skin of her toes fluttering to the ground around her, the shed petals of a dead flower.
“You were late this morning,” the boss says, standing over my desk. “I came looking for you and couldn’t find you.”
My hair is dirty. There are dirty half-moons beneath my fingernails. I notice the faint scent of filth wafting from between my legs. My blood is sand in the veins.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I overslept.”
“Work late,” he says. “Don’t let it happen again.”
A brief hallucination: I smash the windows out, scream until the metal cabinets collapse, until the fluorescent lights rain down on my face in a shatter of glass, blood streaking my face. Then I leave early.
Instead, I put my head down. I work. I sit at my desk, a good worker until the sun sets, until the clock’s hands touch a certain number.
In her book, God Land, published by the Indiana University Press, Lyz Lenz asks the hard questions about rural life and Christianity in America. Combining personal essay with interviews, Lenz explores dying small towns, booming megachurches, and experiences of people shoved out of faith communities. She maps death and revitalization not only of the faith communities she explores, but within her own search for a church (including starting one in her own house), and the end of her marriage. At times both raw and hilarious, Lenz doesn’t shy away from speaking about privilege and the often unspoken topics of gender, sexuality, and race with her interview subjects.
Lyz Lenz and I met via video chat for a conversation about faith, the current political environment, potluck recipes, and writing a book in a month (!).
Rachel Mans McKenny: How did you know God Land would be a book, not just an essay?
Buy the book
Lyz Lenz: In the book, I talk about a church [that I had started] that had ended in July 2015. In October or November, I pitched a story to Pacific Standard and I said, “Something is happening with faith in the Midwest. Here are some political implications. Here is how it seems to be changing.” I went overboard on the research. So often I emphasize stories that take place not where I am, but this was one of the few times where I could access it. It was published right before the caucuses and it ended up getting a good response. It wasn’t until March where I got an email from Indiana University Press and they said, “We think this could be a book.” I was really lucky that when we sketched out the outline it was really vague, because my life fell apart and that got incorporated into the book.
RMM: Talk about the structure of this book. It’s not a long book, but it arcs beautifully. How did the essays come together?
LL: I didn’t have a lot of time to write this book, and then when I did have a moment to myself I just cried a lot. I basically had a month to write this book.
RMM: Oh my gosh!
LL: Yeah. So when I sat down to write this book, I looked at the outline that I had and wrote, wrote, wrote. I was at this residency at St. John’s, and what I did was stacked my printed material and books by chapter in the outline. Then write, then next stack and next stack. But after I got it written, it occurred to me that there was a different sort of structure, and I could see in my mind that narrative arc. Someone called them episodic chapters. Someone called them essays, but I do think they flow into each other with the rising narrative of events, and I think they came to me in that way because of the way the personal narrative was intertwined. So thematically and research wise, things are definitely out of order. I’m working on my second book now, and I need to think about how it structures together.
RMM: You talk often about the dichotomy of the open palm and closed fist, in the weather, churches, marriages, and the Midwest in general. Do you think these opposing forces exist simultaneously or switch off?
I didn’t have a lot of time to write this book, and then when I did have a moment to myself I just cried a lot.
LL: I think they exist at the same time. It’s something that’s very much felt. Especially here, people can be very warm and inviting, but still closed off. My mother grew up in the South and still has that Southern ethos around hospitality, how you dress—a very high feminine ideal of what the world should be. I remember her frustration with moving to Minnesota because she would say, “Everyone is so nice, but nobody wants to eat dinner with you.” I remember her saying that. I think they exist together. A kindness and a closed-off-ness. Charity, but also reserve. It’s a hard tension, but it happens all the time. I think it’s a very middle-of-the-country thing. This is my theory, that the openness of the land—this might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever said—in a land that’s really open you’re always exposed, so you develop a reticence. I do often think that geography and destiny are so often intertwined. That’s why I kept coming back to that image. It’s frustrating, but it’s all around.
RMM: I absolutely get that. Much of your writing in CJR and elsewhere holds powerful men in media accountable. Was it different discussing the men whose power was more personally tied to your life: your father, former pastors, the men who started the church with you, and your husband? Did you have to approach that differently?
LL: I didn’t start profiling men in the media until I was writing this book. I had written an article about Chris Cillizza and then I got assigned the Tucker Carlson article, and there was a moment in editing it and I had felt it doing the research for the chapter on the Baptist Minister Rural Life training that was like, no matter how good you are and no matter how well behaved you are within the system created, you’re still going to lose.
And so I was thinking about that as I was writing the Tucker Carlson article because I didn’t want to get personal in it. In my life and in my writing, when I started being honest and raw about things, when I started writing this book, something just broke. A friend told me that, “The lesson of your life is that you can do everything right and still get it all wrong.” and I was like “Oh shit.” All of these reckonings in me started happening all around the same time. Up until very recently I had tried to operate well within the confines that I was given. “I will be Dad’s girl and impress him, and I will be a good wife, and I will make male editors happy.” Then I realized I’d been doing this for so long and not getting anywhere and I was just angry. Fuck it.
RMM: Building on that, in your essay for Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay, you talk about the idea of women’s anger not finding a home and flooding the streets. Do you find yourself more comfortable in homing that anger now?
When I started being honest and raw about things, when I started writing this book, something just broke.
LL: Yeah, I do. There’s this whole narrative that’s culturally getting pushed back against that anger is bad. Like “30 Days of Facebook Thanksgiving!” It’s that wide-eyed, gritted teeth, “Everything’s Fine and Everything’s Blessed!” And you’re like, “Girl, just punch a window.” Of course, culturally there is pushback against that, but I think that people individually aren’t comfortable with being angry.
In that essay, I talk about a women’s shelter that I work for. Its founding director and I were having coffee recently and she was like, “I don’t like to get angry but I know that’s your thing.” And I said, “Shouldn’t that always be our thing if we see justice and unfairness?” If you see something sad happen, you’re allowed to be sad. I also think that creating space for anger also lessens its power over you. Anger is a great motivator to get shit done.
RMM: Much of this book tracks your personal faith journey. You talk openly about your homeschooled, deeply conservative background and your more current struggles against institutions as you tried to find a church home. You talk about it as being in a “womb of faith,” which I like. Many women with more politically liberal views don’t often openly discuss their faith (Nicole Cliffe being a notable exception). Are you met with surprise when you discuss religion with people?
LL: More than other people being surprised, I’m always surprised by how deeply these conversations resonate with people. I was joking with a friend recently who was raised Episcopalian, and I asked, “What is that culture, healthy sex talks and your parents smoking pot with you behind the bleachers?” And she was like, “Kind of!” (laughs)
But even these conversations resonated with her. We’re a country where 80% of people still believe in a god, and so much of our cultural narrative is, “Faith is on the decline! Nobody cares about faith anymore!” But if you look at the statistics, the overwhelming majority of Americans still think about faith, still consider themselves spiritual, and are still struggling with it on a deeply personal level.
RMM: Which interview experiences from the book stand out the most to you today?
The overwhelming majority of Americans still think about faith, and are still struggling with it on a deeply personal level.
LL: Angela Harrington, from the “Church in the Air” chapter. I think about what a wonderful experience it was to sit down with this woman and have her open her whole life for me and see her struggle.
And the week with the Baptist ministers was deeply impactful, and it’s a week I think about a lot.
RMM: That chapter. I was riveted. I was so glad you got your own hotel room, because I could not imagine not having my own space to retire to.
LL: I needed a place to recover! I knew the Baptist ministers were not going to be happy with the chapter. I knew while I was there they wouldn’t be happy with the chapter, because they weren’t happy with me while I was there. I started to do extra-fact checking, and so I emailed them. I sent them sections of the chapter, and the email I got in response was very long and very detailed about all the ways I had erred. They ended by saying, “You’re the reason America is divided.” And I felt very bad until I told one of my writer friends, and she said, “Don’t flatter yourself and congratulations. Now you know you did it right.”
RMM: One thing I really appreciated that you addressed was the “pink ghetto” in church communities, which isolate women into nursery positions rather than leadership. In your new church, how do they foster women’s leadership?
LL: Women are leaders. That’s the thing. Less than 1% of head pastors across America are women. Our head pastor is a woman, Pastor Ritva, who has all the best lines in the book. You only have to foster women’s leadership if men are at the head pushing down. Let women be leaders. They already know how to do it. It shouldn’t be so radical.
RMM: No, you’re talking to a Catholic, so I get it.
Let women be leaders. They already know how to do it. It shouldn’t be so radical.
LL: But then the nuns are great, and there’s that whole radical arm of the Catholic faith that I love. Talk about interviews, this didn’t make it into the book but I went to a rural Catholic life retreat training Catholic ministers. I went in expecting it to be the Catholic version of the Baptist retreat. It wasn’t. They kind of just chilled and talked about Catholicism and we had wine and cheese every night. It was the greatest thing, but then it didn’t give me material. They were just Catholics. “I guess we’ll start some more Bible studies! More wine?”
RMM: What influences do you see in your writing lately, from other journalists, fiction writers, or poets?
LL: I don’t think it’s a surprise that I read Taffy Akner a lot. Fleishman is in Trouble. I’ve been reading her for a long time. She got started writing just a lot of personal essays. I think the way her pieces are structured deeply influences me. I’ve sat down and drawn maps of how she structures her articles. Her writing is a masterclass in how to intertwine research and the persona.
I love Jia Tolentino. She was an early editor of mine and she writes for the New Yorker. She has a book coming out. Her sentence structure is something I think about a lot. How she manages to be deeply funny and thoughtful at the same time.
I read Kerry Howley a lot. It’s amazing what she does with non-fiction. She does a lot of fiction moves with nonfiction and uses structure to break open narrative.
Dumbest thing: I read Milan Kundera all the goddamn time. I used to be like, “I want to write fiction like Kundera.” I had a writing teacher one time who told me, “You know, sometimes the problem is if you love somebody too much then all of your writing ends up being a cheap imitation of them.” Which was not a very nice way to tell me to knock my shit off.
RMM: In context of the 2020 Elections, do you think candidates have their own version of “rural education” that they try to do on the campaign trail?
LL: Yeah, like eating an ear of corn at the State Fair.
RMM: Right? Does our political system uphold some of the fallacy of rural-morality, or as you put it, “the power of the Midwest is the sanctifying myth of America”?
‘The struggle of rural America’ gets deified in the political process.
LL: You can just see them feeding into it. You come to Iowa, you roll up your sleeves, you eat some corn, you talk about Casey’s Pizza. The word “folks.” It’s this superficial pandering which lacks an in-depth understanding. If you had a deep understanding of what’s going on with, like, ethanol subsidies, you would say stuff that would piss people off here. “The struggle of rural America” gets deified in the political process. We get talked at the time, but I wish they would just listen. I also do like it that people come here and that they have to pay attention.
RMM: What would you have the candidates take from your book in thinking about their approaches to religious communities in the Midwest?
LL: The biggest picture of the book is: how do you come together? Is it possible? Sometimes it’s not, at all, and that’s okay. Sometimes it is and it’s beautiful. If, God bless, they read the book, I would want them to understand the difference between actual religion and cultural Christianity. That understanding, and the power of moral capital. Democrats will run on policies and positions that would make rural life better, but they fail to understand the pull of moral capital that makes some of their positions completely untenable. And that moral capital explains why a farmer that had his best years under Obama would willingly vote for Donald Trump, knowing that it would probably fuck him over. And it did fuck him over, and it’s only going to get worse and they know it. But they voted for him, and the reason why is the power of moral capital. What is seen as good and bad. I hope there is a vision of community in my book, but I don’t have practical how-to steps. It is possible to be a radically inclusive place and what that means, and politicians need that just as much as churches.
RMM: Last question. In your piece for Glamour, which I love, you talk about never cooking for a man again. But as one Midwestern lady to another, I have to ask, what is your go-to potluck recipe?
LL: I love cheesy potatoes, but with potato chips on top so they become party potatoes. My ex-mother-in-law gave me the blandest recipe and then I slut it up. It’s sour cream, cream of chicken soup mixed with hashbrowns and cheddar cheese. That’s the basic level. I put bacon in them, green onions or chives, top it off with sour cream and onion potato chips on top. Mix up the cheeses and play around with it so that it’s that molten pool of cheesy-potato goodness. It’s standard. Everybody loves it.
When I first moved to Iowa, I would try these crazy recipes from Ina Garten. “I made this tuna ahi whatever” and people wouldn’t even try it. I remember this watermelon, feta, and mint salad at a church potluck and literally nobody would touch it. Then I learned you can’t do that. Cheesy potatoes. I do a good deviled egg. Mac and cheese. Bring it, and nobody gets hurt.
My debut novel, Permission, is about love, loss, and erotic awakening in a Los Angeles coastal suburb. When Echo’s father disappears in the ocean, the failing young actress moves back into her childhood home, only to discover that a dominatrix named Orly is setting up her business in the house across the street. In writing about Echo’s experiences with Orly and her clients, the carefully articulated codes and parameters of BDSM play are set in contrast to the interactions she has in the outside world where power is an unseen current that demands you play along, under the implicit threat of annihilation: landing outside of a framework that pretends to hold you, but in fact cares nothing for you. BDSM offers Echo an avenue of liberation or at least a moment in which she can understand what it means to have agency. Of course, this erotic play still takes place inside a capitalist, patriarchal system that, though superficially beneficial to some, ultimately fails us all.
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I’ve often wondered how it came to be that I’ve spent my entire adult life working with sex as a theme. At first, I allowed myself to think it was frivolous: that I was simply aligning myself with a topic that was more often than not treated as a curiosity or sensationalized, and finding corners of it that other people didn’t like to touch. But that notion doesn’t account for how earnest I have been in this inquiry, and how much it has meant to me.
What we do with our desires and what our desires do with us are questions that go beyond the bedroom. They reach beyond the private realm and are in dialogue with the power structures that govern our lives. This is perhaps why sex games about dominance and submission can be so fruitfully used as metaphors in literature. The following are a set of books, new and old, that criss-cross between the forces that shape our lives and how those forces shape our desires. They also suggest strategies that can be used to contend with the powers-that-be and explore the ways in which we try to set ourselves free.
For an in-depth exploration of the pleasures, psychology, and structure of relationships, sexuality beyond the binary, power exchange, and leather culture, the six-part Marketplace series is a landmark of BDSM erotica that takes you into an underground organization that deals in the training and sale of sexual slaves. (Sidebar: One of the people whose work helps me think through the problematic terminology of kink and taboos is Mollena Williams-Haas.) I find the first Marketplace book particularly interesting to read while thinking about the forces that shape desire. In this sense, it’s a fascinating fantasy product of homo economicus and a culture in which we learn to speak of ourselves and our time in terms of commodities. Or as pornographer Stoya put it so well on Tina Horn’s Why Are People Into That? podcast: “[Antoniou] makes capitalism sexy…she has eroticized the main oppressive force in our lives.”
Rasmussen’s transgressive debut, among other things, looks at a wish for the erotic, that is sadomasochistic sex, to be a source of healing, the damage of broken social contracts, and the value of rituals of care. This challenging and poetic book focuses in on what it is to inhabit this narrator’s body, while coming to terms with the idea of us having infinite minds, but definite bodies.
In the late 2000s when I first read Musil’s brutal Bildungsroman set in a military school in Hranice, then in Austria-Hungary, published less than a decade before the start of World War I, my reading was mostly focused on the modernist elements of the text, the idea of amorality and the author’s depiction of the erotic as a medium through which to experience the webbing between thought and feeling. I remembering linking the interiority of Musil’s voice in his debut with Clarice Lispector’s in her debut Near to the Wild at Heart. Today the exploration of psychological abuse, bullying, authoritarianism, and sadomasochistic psychosexual dynamics have a different feel: Musil’s exploration of power perhaps most urgently offers us insight into the mindset that enables the rise of fascism.
This is the story of a psychoanalyst who has sex with some of his patients: the ones he wants to seduce he sees in a room he calls Spells, the others are seen in Drear. It’s his folly in thinking that by compartmentalizing, the two impulses can be kept apart that make this slim, potent novel such a sharp study of lust, desire and the abuse of power. The analyst delights in dropping hints of his transgressions to his artist wife Akiko, a woman in pursuit of beauty who shares a home with a man who delights in beastliness, but deliciously, the analyst is not as smart as he thinks he is.
This bombastic work of satire from 1968 has one of the funniest and most outrageous narrators I’ve encountered. It begins: “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess.” Plotting world domination from a room with a view of the Chateau Marmont, glamorous, delusional, Old-Hollywood-loving trans-woman Myra is set on destroying traditional masculinity in order to “realign the sexes.” As part of Myra’s radical bid for gender equality, she points out the poison of a particular flavor of masculinity and in doing so foreshadows the support such hypermasculine young men would give to “any attractive television personality who wanted to become our dictator.”
Using Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” as a touchstone, Pleasure Activism explores how pleasure can be used as a force to unravel oppression and living in a way that brings about social change. This book asserts the value of the erotic as a source of insight and the radical potential of pleasure. It has helped me think through my interest in sexuality in a wider context of politics and activism and along an axis of pleasure and pain.
What if we reorganized society based on the collective needs of the most oppressed? This is how the Combahee River Collective imagined that we would all get free. Looking at the legacy of this radical Black feminist group — whose 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement is thought to be the first to have introduced “identity politics” and “interlocking oppressions”—we can glimpse a vision of the world outside the structures that dominate our lives, creating space for us to imagine, if we were free, who would we be and what would our desires be then?
I’m a young writer who has spent the past three years learning to balance a full time job with writing. Last year I applied—unsuccessfully—to a few MFA programs. At the center of my personal statement was a writing group that has been an immense gift to me both as a writer and as a person. They were all saddened to hear that I didn’t get into any MFA programs, but one of the few perks of not getting in was that I got to continue being a member of this group.
Now, as I’m considering applying again, I’m stuck on something a friend, who has an MFA, said to me: that amateur writers are the enemy of MFAs (and by proxy, I read into this, the “professional” writers). This was said after the friend had read my personal statement and I couldn’t help connecting it to what I had written about the group. I know this was probably an offhand comment, maybe even a way of implying I was not an amateur, but in addition to making me feel a bit embarrassed for including a community writing group in my application, it’s made me think a lot about my professional aspirations as a writer. The problem is—I’m not sure they exist! While I love writing and see myself continuing to write all my life, I’m not sure if I see myself going the adjunct/teaching route and I know it’s extremely unlikely I could ever support myself through sales. I’m also struggling to find any writers who feel like career examples for me. For instance, over the past few years I’ve loved books and stories by writers like Kelly Link, Zadie Smith, Rachel Cusk and Alexander Chee, but none of these writers have career paths (opening a press, being a famous bestseller, professoring) I feel I could, or want to, follow.
I’m stuck on something a friend said to me: that amateur writers are the enemy of MFAs.
I’ve come to realize that the writers I actually see most of myself in are the other members of my writing group. Working professionals, a retiree, a journalist, a rabbi, a college student. All of them write around constraints. And while they achieve varying levels of success (one member’s first book was nominated for a Lambda award this year!) they are, in the scheme of things, small fry. Maybe I’d feel differently after years of unsuccessfully trying to get a book published, but part of me also feels okay with being a small fry, if it means I can write and share with at least a small community.
I guess my main question is: is it naive to think that I deserve a spot (and therefore implicitly a slice of the resources and support of the literary community) at an MFA program when I’m unsure if my future involves a long career in the literary world? When I don’t even know what kind of writer I want to be? Or do I need to get some career aspirations?
Maybe you can also point me in the direction of some writers who don’t fall into the traditional career paths of teaching or selling books by the ton and are, like me, out here winging it. Sincerely, Winging it
Dear Winging It,
No offense to your friend, but what? That comment about amateurs makes no sense to me. The people in MFA programs are by definition students, not professionals, and most people who are already making a living off their writing wouldn’t bother getting an MFA. Maybe your friend was using “amateur” in the secondary sense (dilettante? inept?). But that still makes no sense! If you’re committing years of your life and any of your money to a writing program, then you’re not a dilettante, and you’re committing that time because you want to get better. MFA programs are looking for writers with promise, writers who can benefit from study and development. There’s no expectation that everyone in an MFA program is already working at the absolute top of their theoretical game.
I see no reason whatsoever to be embarrassed about including your writing group in your application. MFA programs are basically institutionalized writing groups. The most valuable thing I got out of my MFA was a group of like-minded friends, people I’ve continued to talk about writing and reading with for years—we’ve gone to each other’s weddings and fortieth birthday parties; we’ve started presses and written books together. Your group sounds wonderful—cherish those people. If you don’t end up going the MFA route, they can provide you with many of the benefits you’d get from a program, for free.
There are many writers who don’t work in academia or qualify as ‘professional writers’ by typical standards.
That said, there’s no reason you can’t get a master’s degree, or should worry you don’t deserve one. These programs, especially the ones with funding, are competitive, and it’s not rare for writers to have to apply multiple times before they get a spot. Note, also, that to my knowledge, your writing sample is much more important than your personal statement. A great statement or letter of recommendation can give you an edge, but in completing your applications, you should be most focused on making your sample as good as you can make it.
I love that you’re looking to your group for models of how to be a writer. There are many other writers who don’t work in academia or qualify as “professional writers” by typical standards. I know a poet with a couple of full-length books and a bunch of chapbooks who is a partner in a law firm. I know a novelist who has a municipal job in a small town in Illinois. I know a poet and essayist who’s currently in medical school. I know a handful of writer librarians. And there’s me—I got an MFA fifteen years ago. Since then I’ve had a full-time, non-academic job. I teach a class here and there, but not for the money. Only in the past few years have I started making significant income from writing endeavors—but even so, it’s not enough to allow me to drop my other career. (It would take a lot to get me to leave it; it’s stable and lucrative and provides health insurance for both me and my husband.) I love writing so I work around work; nights and weekends are for my writing life.
For what it’s worth, none of my books have ever had more than one offer at a time. I’ve been lucky in that there’s always been one sucker willing to publish each one. But most of my books had to shop for a home for quite some time; some, like Bluets, were rejected all over town, despite my pleas to the world of mainstream publishing (well, my agent’s pleas) that it was PROSE and that it was GOOD. (Eventually I gave it to Wave, a poetry publisher, who did a perfect, beautiful job with it). Norton, who published The Art of Cruelty, passed on my next book, The Argonauts, so I had to move on from there as well. With the exception of The Red Parts, none of my books have sold for any money that mattered.
I recently looked at the Goodreads page for Bluets; that book has over 13,000 ratings. It has a higher average star rating than Hamlet. People love that book! My point is, there are different kinds of success. Nelson herself, in the same interview, says she feels “allergic to the word ‘success’” and cares most about writing good books. Nelson has been a useful model for me—as someone who bridges the worlds of prose and poetry, as an approachable intellectual. She does work in academia, but I don’t really care how she makes money; I’m interested in her books.
Basically, I think your friend was wrong and you should get their comment out of your head. Think less about your “professional aspirations” and more about your writing aspirations—your writing is your career. You can have a full writing career even if you make net nothing in terms of money from your writing. If you love Kelly Link and Alexander Chee, look to them as writing models and forget about their jobs.
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