Page 379 – Electric Literature

Imagining the Secret Queer Lives of Legendary Movie Stars

Posted on July 10, 2019September 16, 2019 by Jo Lou

In 1928, at a glamorous soirée in Berlin, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt takes a black-and-white photograph of Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl, immortalizing the three actresses before the height of their fame. This brief, shining moment, where the women’s lives intersect, is where Singaporean author Amanda Lee Koe begins her sweeping, richly imagined debut novel Delayed Rays of a Star.

Image result for Delayed Rays of a Star: A Novel — Buy the book

Spanning eras and geographies, from Weimar Berlin to Los Angeles Chinatown to the Bavarian Alps and modern-day Paris, through the rise of Hitler and World War II: Delayed Rays of a Star follows the three women as they move through the world in their different ways, in pursuit of art, ambition, fame, and love, while navigating thorny issues of identity, ego, and integrity in turbulent times. They all want to be, as Leni expressed in the book, “the reason for things.”

And evolving around them, sometimes intertwined with them, are a secondary cast of characters. Among them, a Chinese housemaid beginning to intuit the ways of a woman of the world, a German-Turkish-Kurdish young man struggling with his multiple identities, and a German soldier on leave from North Africa grappling with a secret love. Amanda Lee Koe brings each of them to life in deeply specific, textured detail, so that their dreams are no less bright, and their desires no less fervent. Like the three actresses, they’re feeling around, sometimes blindly, for a heightened existence.

I’d enjoyed Amanda Lee Koe’s debut short story collection, Ministry of Moral Panic, which made her the youngest person to win the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014, at the age of 27. And in a way, her debut novel also feels like a tapestry of short stories, with a dazzling rolodex of characters, including cameos by JFK, Davie Bowie, and Hitler. In her hands, even in a pithy exchange between two people, you can sense their burgeoning humanity, the multitudes they contain.

Emily Ding: First, let’s talk about that photograph. What about it captured your imagination? What drew you so completely into this world?

Amanda Lee Koe: It was a photograph that was so unlikely, one that opened up many questions. To see pre-Hollywood makeover Marlene, early flapper-styled Anna May, and pre-Nazi propaganda Leni together, it was like a Pandora’s box.

To see pre-Hollywood makeover Marlene, early flapper-styled Anna May, and pre-Nazi propaganda Leni together, it was like a Pandora’s box.

Not just as a writer but as a person, I’m always looking for the intimate gap in history, the lateral wormhole in time. These were three women who would soon all be pioneers in their own ways; here they were at a party, being coy for a man’s camera. If you know Marlene at all, you’ll know that once she became that blonde femme fatale we all know her to be, she wouldn’t be caught dead smiling so sincerely and guilelessly for the camera. Once she had her star image in place, it was something she was very aware of performing for the camera.

Marlene meant a lot to a younger, half-formed version of me. I grew up with a gigantic poster of her on my wall, and I think in some invisible, personal way, she must have helped me to grow into the adult I wanted to be. So I guess it’s fitting that, eventually, I somehow managed to create an aesthetic universe that was capacious enough for her to exist in.

ED: What did she mean to the half-formed version of you?

ALK: As a teenager in socially conservative Singapore, I had no epoch-appropriate idols, but Marlene was someone I had chosen out of time and space because she gave no fucks, was so publicly bisexual, knew how to work a pair of pants the same way she knew how to work a dress. I never got to see any of that. I grew up with literally zero visible queer role models, to the point that I thought oh, maybe there were no gay grownups in Singapore. From the age of 13 to 16, I was in an all-girls school, and they sent me to corrective counseling when they found out I had a girlfriend. To remember that Marlene was so free and unapologetic decades ago made me feel that I could not only survive, but laugh my way through whatever I was going through.

And it wasn’t just Marlene either, it was the whole milieu I became enchanted by. At 19, I felt a great affinity for Dada, Surrealism, even tried to study German as an elective language. But after three levels, my school didn’t offer anything higher than that, so I’m still stuck at toddler-vocab probably. Eventually, as with all idols, I forgot about Marlene, or rather, she became dormant in my life with the passage of time, and I hardly thought back about her at all. When I came upon that Eisenstaedt photo of the three of them in 2014, the year I moved to New York, it was like seeing an old friend again.

ED: A central theme of your book and the thing that ties most of your characters together—including the more minor ones that revolve around the three women—is that they have dual/secret selves, and there are schisms between their inner and outer lives. This usually poses the question of authenticity, but you have the Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg, a creative and romantic partner of Marlene’s, speaking of a “lust for bothness,” and I’m struck by what you have Anna May thinking, about “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” Can you speak to this a bit more?

ALK: A commitment to duplicity, or multiplicity, is a form of authenticity too. Anyone who’s a whole human being, who’s being honest about their humanness, will be able to locate this sort of breach between their inner and outer selves. It could be a small rift or a large one. By way of a simple example, people are often surprised to learn that I’m an introvert, because I am not at all shy; in fact, I am quite bold. But this constant tussle—any tussle between two seeming opposites—this lack of holistic consistency, is what’s specific and truthful about being human, is what leaves room for fictional characters to evolve in a way that isn’t programmatic.

“Living truthfully under imaginary circumstances” is actually something I picked up in an acting class. The only time I got stuck in the writing of this novel, I took an eight-week seminar at an actors’ studio in Manhattan focusing on Meisner, Strasberg and Hagen to try to understand that process more for my characters who were professional actresses.

ED: Something else I’m thinking about after reading your book is how a more interconnected world lets us try out new identities: We’re permitted to be different people in different places, or, even if we don’t end up somewhere else, to think about ourselves as someone from a different place. This sort of internal freedom seems especially true for Bébé, the Chinese immigrant housemaid—I love Bébé as a character, by the way!

ALK: Everyone loves Bébé! Have you seen the Hou Hsiao Hsien film Millennium Mambo? With Bébé, I was partially trying to capture the innate innocence of Shuqi’s character in Millennium Mambo, who has been through a lot, but has such purity in her reaction to seeing snow for the first time.

ED: Yes, but along with that purity, there is a delicious sort of creeping knowingness too? I especially liked the part where, when she’s questioned by a French immigration officer, Bébé repeats a story a blacklisted Chinese publisher had told her about young Chinese peasant women reading Madame Bovary underground and took it as her own. What I liked about it, I think, was that it suddenly hinted at depths and complexities you might not have associated immediately with her, and also, I think it’s a testament to the power of ideas—how one, seemingly innocuous little thing revealed to you can change how you think about the world, how you think about yourself and your place in it.

I grew up with literally zero visible queer role models, to the point that I thought oh, maybe there were no gay grownups in Singapore.

ALK: That’s one of my favorite bits of the book as well. I had a friend, a Chinese political scientist, who was a boy during the Cultural Revolution, and he told me many things that gave me deep insights into China’s modern history. I think the tendency is for a lot of Anglophone writers to approach the traumatic parts of Chinese history with a Western liberal lens, and I was interested in trying to show something else. This episode, with Bébé using Madame Bovary and the Tiananmen crackdown essentially to commit asylum fraud for personal rather than political reasons, was a wink at acknowledging the existence thereof, but also reversing the latent cultural superiority inherent in the ways “third-world” migrants and refugees tend to get written and thought about, as if they can only suffer, as if they can’t scheme and dream just like everyone else, too. The part where the French lawyer tears up and says: “I can’t imagine they read Madame Bovary in China” still cracks me up. And the best thing is that this was historically factual, too. Bourgeois European novels in translation, which had been banned by the Communist party, were all the rage amongst literate Chinese youth. I just nudged the historicity a little further.

ED: We were talking about the freedom of trying out new identities. Do you think a person has any obligations to their “origins”?

ALK: I think the question about obligations and origins is one that needs to be reconsidered in our globalized, wired age: What are origins, in the first place? So often this gets conflated as place of birth, or color of skin, but what does that really mean today? For example, I might be racially read as Chinese, but what does that even mean in my middle-class, Anglophone context, where my first language is English, and I grew up reading Virginia Woolf?

The assumptions that we might make are natural, but they’re also limited by a failure of imagination. Most readers might be likely to assume that I identify most with Bébé or Anna May in the novel, because I’m Asian and female. But what if, in fact, the character I personally most identify with might actually be Josef [von Sternberg]? The bit where he goes off on a tangent about code-switching depending on whether he’s in Europe or America was a bit of a hehehe for me.

The idea of personal reinvention, liminal identities, and its linkage to the ever-changing metropolis, is of great importance to me. Particularly perhaps because I grew up in Singapore, which is less than two thirds the size of New York City (the city, not the state!) but is its own country. This is like growing up in a big city that is also a small town. Infrastructurally and economically we are a big city; socially and emotionally we are pretty much a small town. In a small town, it’s harder to evolve, to try on new behaviors and identities that might be more intrinsically in line with who you know or want or have gradually or suddenly discovered yourself to be, because you’re hemmed in by the cultural context, the class bracket, the social norms you were born into, and expected to perform within.

ED: It sounds like you had discovered for yourself an eclectic range of influences, a whole different other world, to fill in the gaps of what you were feeling while growing up in Singapore.

ALK: I was someone who really did not fit into the Singaporean education system, and I had a lot of free time because I hardly ever did any homework. I only did my homework if I had a crush on the teacher! Because nothing felt like a good fit, I had to learn to build my own private universe from scratch to feel like it was worth my while to wake up, go to bed, on repeat. Autodidactism is fantastic because it is so bespoke.

I didn’t ever feel like I belonged in contemporary Singapore. I needed very deeply to believe that I was not wrong, I was only in the wrong time and place.

I’m sure that I projected a lot of my own baseless fantasies onto Weimar Berlin, but as a teenager growing up in a repressive culture where there’s so little push back from the populace, the mirage of the famed sexual freedom and decadent amorality of Weimar Berlin was like a mirage of an oasis in the desert for me. Didn’t matter if it was real or not, I just needed it to go on.

Because I didn’t ever feel like I belonged in contemporary Singapore, because in my formative years people were always telling me I was wrong, or abnormal, or that I had to change, I think that to stay alive on the inside, I needed very deeply to believe that I was not wrong, I was only in the wrong time and place. That there would have been a space and time in which I would have felt at home. In which I would have been right, for once.

ED: Though much of your novel is set in previous decades, it also feels very current at the same time, and resounds, I think, with our present anxieties about gender and race and representation, and moral responsibility. Was this something you set out to explore with your novel?

ALK: The funny thing is that when I first started on this novel, people thought it was an obscure, historical anomaly that would appeal only to a niche audience. That was pre #MeToo, pre-Trump, pre-Crazy Rich Asians, pre mainstreaming of female empowerment (of course I believe in actual, intersectional female empowerment, but also a lot of the real issue around gender equality is now being used as a marketing sideshow), pre-Lucy Liu getting her very well-deserved star on the walk of fame. But when it came out that my manuscript got sold before I graduated, then the same people who’d written me off as an experimental nutcase writing myself into a niche started saying I was a trendy writer with commercial appeal. Neither of these contexts and characterizations have anything to do with me and why I write, so they didn’t affect the vision I had for the work.

Race, gender, and representation are issues that I think all good artists today deal with, in one way or another, some more personally than others, some more covertly than others, but I do think that there are traces of the anxieties of every generation that occur congenitally within our collective work. The challenge, I think, is to not have a didactic approach, and to not overthink the relation—if it’s there in you, it will appear on its own in the work; and if it isn’t in you, it’ll never be there, or it’ll smell phony if you force it.

ED: You’ve spoken about your dilemma of choosing a voice performer with an appropriate accent for your audiobook, and how you settled for a “midatlantic” sound. How did you create the right tone for the novel in order to inhabit all the different characters and eras and milieus, but that could still feel specific to each character? Like when Bébé described one man’s ass cleft as “the color of unhulled beansprouts”!

What are origins, in the first place? So often this gets conflated as place of birth, or color of skin, but what does that really mean today?

ALK: I might have a certain disadvantage that’s also a happy advantage, which is that although I’m a native English speaker (we were schooled in English in Singapore, Mandarin is a second language) from a former British colony, the syntax and idioms I grew up with have absolutely nothing to do with English, or even Germanic or Romance languages. My syntax and idioms come instead from a messy broth of Singlish (Singaporean English), Mandarin, Chinese dialects, and assorted Southeast Asian polyglossia (I can speak market Malay). And I love it, I love every last weird noun and sound of how that has turned out for me. Love isn’t a word I’d use lightly.

What I realized was that I didn’t want to lose the spirit of the polyglossia I am used to, even though obviously I was writing in English, and also that the tone shouldn’t have to be a slave to an era or character or milieu, because then I would be locked into just one thing, and I wouldn’t be able to be ambidexterous or polyamorous enough to tell the story—the stories—I wanted to tell. I just had to find a tone that reflected the newness of my physical millennial shell and the mental octogenarian oldness that lives inside.

ED: On your Instagram account, you sometimes make up stories about imaginary characters—basically yourself in different guises (this caption made me laugh, because I feel like I must know an aunty like that)—that are often funny and moving. What’s the impulse behind that?

ALK: Hahaha I can’t believe someone would notice that and think to ask this question! Now that I’m looking through my feed, it’s true, those characters do crop up more regularly than I thought. To be honest, I have no idea what drives that impulse, it’s so throwaway for me, I’m just having fun, being frivolous, but if I had to guess, perhaps a strong sense of play, and wanting to be many things at once?

Play is super important to me. So much of writing is being able to play well on the page. When I was nine, as the oldest sister to two malleable toddlers, I used to dress them up as wuxia characters, and we would go on adventures together… Monkey God, Dongfang Bubai, the Eight Immortals… I was always the lead character, not just because I was the bossy eldest child, but also because these adventures actually had contiguous plots from day to day, and the lead character is the one who shapes the action. There’s huge craft and technique to good playing.

And, it’s something we all knew how to do once! I think it’s a huge shame that playing and imagining were driven out of most of us with conventional modes of learning, just because it can’t be quantified and tested as useful. I hated the rote education I received and rebelled against it in the smallest and stupidest of ways—too many ear piercings, spelling my name backwards, arguing for Mercutio as the most interesting character in Romeo and Juliet when we were supposed to write an essay on oxymorons—because I needed to show myself that I was still alive in this fucking bog. And then what? Finally you get out of school, where they tried to beat all the play out of you, then you start hearing the sort of language the corporate marketplace is using, that co-opts playing and now places a premium on it: “Sandboxing,” “thinking out of the box,” whatever. I spit on their graves.

The New National Literature of Canada Is Being Written by Women

Posted on July 10, 2019July 9, 2019 by Kelly Luce

As an American-born literature scholar and writer who became a permanent resident of Canada last year, I’ve spent a lot of time recently wondering how to differentiate between American literature and Canadian literature. Growing up in the 1980s, I saw these two nations as not just contiguous but porous, and they were; back then, my mother and I would drive over the Canadian border for day trips, without passports or any form of identification. (The one time a border officer spared a glance for anyone inside the car was when we were accompanied by her Iranian grad student. “Are you American?” the officer asked. The student nodded, and we were ushered back into the U.S.) We are all painfully aware that borders are being tightened around the world. In this climate of hard stops and blocked-off countries, then, is it any easier to discern the traits of a national literature?

Pinpointing the quiddity of one is tricky, but if I had to do so, I would argue that Canadian literature has traditionally been concerned with negotiating the tension between tightly-knit communities and vast expanses of space. The idea of who is part of the group—and even more importantly, who is not—has always been central to that negotiation. Yet we see this tension in American literature too, and it’s worth remembering that one of the novels speaking most strongly to our current moment in the United States is The Handmaid’s Tale by Canadian author Margaret Atwood.

In this climate of blocked-off countries, has it become easier to discern the traits of a national literature?

However, in this newly partitioned North America, a more definitive Canadian literature seems to be emerging. Based on my recent reading, one aspect of it is noteworthy: The women are talking.

Up until a couple of years ago , my exposure to Canadian lit was largely limited to Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, and Robertson Davies. Atwood, of course, has proven to be a protean predictor of our future as a species and as readers. When Munro’s Nobel Prize was announced, I was thrilled that the committee was honoring an author who spent her life chronicling small-town women and girls. Davies’ Deptford Trilogy presents academia as a raucous hero’s journey—part Rabelaisian, part Jungian. Ondaatje’s The English Patient is one of the supplest historical novels and meditations on identity that I know. In the works of these authors, the story is often about who controls the story, who gets to speak, how stories throw up their own borders and desires. Like the texts of many national literatures, they probe contested or attenuated authorship and the dangers of repressed language and memories.

I still love all of these writers, but as I put my ear to the ground of my adopted country, I long for new voices—indigenous authors, writers of color, women speaking to experiences hidden from common view. Recent books by Katherena Vermette, Tanya Tagaq, Esi Edugyan, Sheila Heti, and Miriam Toews have fed this urge and suggested to me that one quality intrinsic to Canadian literature, at least in its most recent iteration, may be its emphasis on women’s speech and the act of listening.

Before I settled in Canada, I was ignorant of residential schools and the damage they wrought. From the mid-nineteenth century until the last one closed in 1996, First Nations children were torn from their families and communities, and placed in government-run residential schools for the purpose of “assimilation.” The mortality rate and frequency of all kinds of abuse in them were obscene. From 1928 to 1972 in some provinces, legislation even allowed residential schools to sterilize any child in their care.

Vermette’s The Break and Tagaq’s Split Tooth both reckon with this toxic legacy and transgenerational trauma. The Break, which was published in 2016 in Canada and last year in the United States, is a chamber piece for a tortured orchestra, with each chapter narrated by a different character from one community. Its central mystery is a horrific crime: a Métis teenage girl (someone of mixed indigenous and European ancestry) is sexually assaulted, glass found inside her afterward. As the novel unfolds, the various strands of the story knit more closely together. Women of all ages who at first seemed disparate are shown to either be related by blood or to have played roles in each other’s lives, with the daughter of a woman who was impregnated through rape perpetrating abuse in turn. The novel pivots on the motif of assembly in its content as well as its form. In one scene, a character reflects on how she pieced together the story of her mother’s death in an alley: “Stella learned all the facts. She gathered them like bits of debris and glued them together as if they could stick again.” A different character says of her sister, “She was stitched back together, but there was always a scar.” Narrative, in this context, is one of the few ways to bind torn bodies, memories, psyches, and histories. Vermette, who is herself of Métis descent, doesn’t explicitly discuss residential schools, yet the structure of her novel enacts their great crime of ripping apart communities; the female characters who might be able to heal if they communicated with each other are severed by chapter breaks. Only the reader hears the full story.

Narrative, in this context, is one of the few ways to bind torn bodies, memories, psyches, and histories.

By contrast, Tagaq’s Split Tooth indicts residential schools in the fiercest terms. Fitting for a woman best known for her otherworldly throat singing, Tagaq, who is Inuit, screams at the sky with this story. It is more an unleashing than a traditional novel, a long wail of Arctic magic realism. Its protagonist is ravished by the northern lights and destined to suffer for souls in hell, but her trials are softened by love and tenderness. Interwoven throughout are songs and odes in prose to the landscape of Nunavut, the largest, northernmost Canadian province and where Tagaq grew up: “the air is so clean you can smell the difference between smooth rock and jagged.” The book’s natural refrains advocate for listening not just to other women but to the landscape itself, which according to recent reports is under attack as much as any of us, with Canada warming at twice the global rate.

This sentiment finds good company in the bestselling, award-winning Washington Black, written by Esi Edugyan, who lives a stone’s throw from where I teach in Colwood on Vancouver Island. The daughter of immigrants from Ghana, Edugyan’s cinematic novel starts on a nineteenth-century slave plantation in Barbados before traversing the world. There is even a dreamlike stop in northern Canada, where Tagaq’s characters would feel at home. In one extraordinary scene, the hero encounters an octopus underwater:

“When I came forward to touch it, it sent out a surge of dark ink. We paused, watching each other, the grey rag of ink hanging between us. Then it shot off through the water, stopping short to radiate like a cloth set afire, its arms unfurling and vibrating. There was something playful in its pause, as if it expected me to ink it back.”

This interspecies communication is its own form of listening; if we cannot convey our truths through human speech, we must observe one another closely. Throughout the book, in fact, Edugyan demonstrates how human dignity can be reclaimed by paying close attention to the natural world. Similar to Split Tooth, it espouses a poetics of extreme vigilance, of listening with all the senses, not just the ears.

Other Canadian authors focus on the importance of listening to ourselves. Across the country, in Toronto, Sheila Heti harkens to her mind and attempts to divine her future in Motherhood, an inventive memoir that questions not just whether she wants to have a child but whether it’s possible for a childless woman to mother the world. One of the surprises of Motherhood is that it ends up being as much about Heti’s relationship with her own mother, a successful doctor who skimped on time with her children, as it is about her decision of whether or not to conceive. Heti muses:

“Is attention soul? If I pay attention to my mother’s sorrow, does that give it soul? If I pay attention to her unhappiness—if I put it into words, transform it, and make it into something new—can I be like the alchemists, turning lead into gold? If I sell this book, I will get back gold in return. . .When the gold comes in, I will go to my mother’s doorstep, and I will hand it to her and say: Here is your sadness, turned into gold.”

Interrogating her motivations and choices, Heti flips coins in a version of fortune-telling based on the I Ching; how the coins land determines whether the answer is yes or no. The answers are sometimes heartrending, sometimes hilarious:

“Is there a male equivalent to this, well, barrenness?

Is there a romantic female figure that equals those male, romantic, artistic figures?

yes

Women artists with children?

yes

If I have children, will I be like those women?

no”

Despite the question hanging over its project and the hundreds of queries that alight from its pages like a fleet of balloons full of hot air, the book crackles with insistence—the insistence that living with honesty is about asking the right questions and listening for the answer without expectations or preconceptions.

Playful and searching, Motherhood is a philosophical inquiry into personal freedom. In this one respect, it echoes Miriam Toews’ Women Talking, which was published last year in Canada and just came out in the U.S. Before I moved to Canada, I’d never heard of Toews, but she’s a national treasure here, based on anecdotal and other evidence; when I was out in public reading Women Talking, several women came up to me to enthuse about it and say they’d read all her books. With a recent glowing profile in The New Yorker and this unsettling, gorgeous, timely novel, Toews seems poised to get the recognition she deserves across the border as well. Though it draws on real-life crimes in Bolivia, where women and girls as young as three were drugged and raped at night by the men of their remote Mennonite community, Women Talking is a joyful novel. It is not a police procedural; it doesn’t dwell on the crimes. But neither does it shrink from the terrible violence and trauma these women have endured. We as readers bear witness not to their suffering—which, necessarily, was always postponed, belladonna having rendered them unconscious during their attacks—but to their excruciating yet exhilarating seizure of agency, as they debate whether to stay in the colony or flee.

Reviewers have rightfully compared Women Talking to a play, given its chorus of voices and the predominance of reported dialogue, but there are strains of the epistolary novel in it too. The narrator, August Epp—who is nearly as disempowered as any female in the community, and a mess besides—is taking the minutes of a secret debate between the Mennonite women, but his confessions and interjections read at times like a diary. His notes of the women’s conversation are interpretation as much as faithful record:

“A translation note: The women are speaking in Plautdietsch, or Low German, the only language they know, and the language spoken by all members of the Molotschna Colony . . . I mention this to explain that before I can transcribe the minutes of the meetings I must translate (quickly, in my mind) what the women are saying into English, so that it may be written down.”

As powerful a statement as women’s speech can be, when their spoken words are written down, something is always lost in translation.

The novel’s chorus builds to a piercing aria at its end. It should not be forgotten that Toews’ novel, which celebrates female articulation, is narrated by a man, and his epiphanies swell the final pages. Epp’s lyrical supernova speaks for the women of his community, yet his words are not appropriation but grace—for the women, for those left behind, and for August most of all. He realizes that Ona, the woman with whom he has been in love all his life, asked him to record their words not because she and the women need to remember them but because he needs to listen. This should have been obvious to him from the beginning, given that the women won’t be able to read his words in English. But the revelation, and what it hints at, is still glorious. That is, women talking can save not just themselves through this transgressive and liberating act, but everyone around them.

The book’s natural refrains advocate for listening not just to other women but to the landscape itself

At the close of Women Talking, August considers, as he writes a list of things for the youth of Molotschna to cherish, that the word “list” derives from an old word for “desire.” But used in another way, its origins link back to “borders.” The words “list” and “listen” are also connected etymologically. Within this quasi-list, then, my desire to discern literary borders and truly listen to and through these Canadian women’s texts finds its natural expression. But as I trip along those borders, I caution myself. Women are talking in Canadian literature, yes, but we still need to make an effort to hear what they’re saying.

This Novel About the Publishing Industry in 1987 Shows How Little Has Changed

Posted on July 9, 2019July 9, 2019 by Jo Lou

Eve Rosen is an aspiring writer. She’s an editorial assistant at a literary imprint, but the office seems far friendlier to WASP-y men than to Jewish women like her. When her boss’s star writer, the longtime New Yorker reporter Henry Gray, invites Eve to spend the summer of 1987 as his research assistant in Truro, Cape Cod—a town where both he and Eve have long vacationed, though in spheres separated by religion and class—she jumps at the chance.

Image result for last book party karen dukess — Buy the book

The Last Book Party is at once delightfully gossipy and intellectually serious, an ode to literature and a warning against hero-worship.

Like Eve, both Karen Dukess and I have gone to Truro every summer of our lives, thanks to her mother, Mona, and my grandmother. They met at Mount Holyoke in the era of Jewish quotas, when the few Jewish women on campus had to live and socialize together—but in their case, it stuck. As far as I know, they’ve talked on the phone every day for fifty years.

While Karen and I talked about family, Jewishness, and female ambition in The Last Book Party, I thought often about Mona and my grandmother, two women just as ambitious as Eve.

Lily Meyer: The Last Book Party is a balance between Eve’s vacation and her real life, so to speak. To what extent do you want Truro to feel like a vacation?

Karen Dukess: I thought of Truro as Eve’s better life. She has a better sense of who she is there than in New York, or in her suburban childhood. Even when she begins looking at Henry’s literary Truro world, she’s thinking: “This is the life I want to have. This could be my better self.” It’s what she hopes her real life might be.

LM: Did you always intend to write about literary Truro, or WASP-y Truro?

KD: Not at all. The Last Book Party began as memoir. I was working in publishing at the time, and once I wrote about it, I kept writing—and then it turned into fiction. After that, I decided I wanted to write about a young woman who’s looking at another world, and idealizing it, and making a lot of assumptions about it. Eve thinks that if she enters Henry’s world, she can be who she wants to be, and then she discovers how wrong she is.

LM: What was it like to work on a novel about publishing that’s set in the 1980s with editors and publicists who are working in publishing in 2019?

KD: What surprised me the most was that when the novel was on submission, time and again, people kept telling me I’d really captured publishing. I thought, “What? I’m writing about 1987! Has nothing changed?” But several people told me that their editorial assistants related to the book, and to Eve. I was surprised to find that, at a certain level, not much had changed. Sadly, somebody told me that even the part in which Eve gets passed over for promotion in favor of a handsome, WASP-y guy could happen today.

LM: Recently, I’ve read a lot of books that address the maleness of media, most notably Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry. Both touch Jewishness as well, but I did wonder: Is it harder for Eve to be Jewish in publishing, or to be female? Which do you think is the reason she got passed over?

The writing scene in college was very male. It seemed impossible that a suburban girl like me could be a writer too.

KD: I think it’s harder for Eve to be female. She’s very conscious that her workplace is male-dominated, and that the writing world is, too. This really draws from my own life. When I was in college, the writing scene—students, professors—was very male. To me, the men were the writers on campus. It seemed impossible that a suburban girl like me could be one, too. And Eve really feels the same way.

As far as Jewishness goes, Eve barely knows how to think about it. She’s so assimilated that she’s not conscious of it, beyond knowing that she’s attracted to the difference of Henry’s WASP-y world. Jeremy, the Jewish writer she gets to know in the book, comes from a less assimilated background, and he notices subtle anti-Semitism much more than Eve does.

LM: Did you need Jeremy in order to make the book more explicitly Jewish? Or to deal with anti-Semitism?

KD: I really wanted to have somebody from another Jewish background. Jeremy has a complicated relationship to his family, and to Jewishness. Eve thinks her suburban Jewish family background makes her not literary; Jeremy doesn’t want to deal with the grief of being the son of Holocaust survivors. They’re both running away, and that impacts how both of them try to become writers.

As far as anti-Semitism goes, I was more interested in exploring the subtleties of difference. For instance, Henry’s wife, Tilly, assumes that Eve won’t eat bacon. That’s not anti-Semitic—though she later makes comments that are—but it does show a lack of familiarity with Jewish people, or with the nuances of being Jewish. That said, an editor did say to me, “Oh, you really captured the subtle anti-Semitism of that era in publishing.”

LM: In one scene, Jeremy compares himself to Neil Klugman in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, and Eve lives in fear of turning into the title character from Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar. I love that—and I love how many books you invoke in The Last Book Party. Are there any books that felt especially important? Was there one you always had on your desk?

KD: I didn’t plan to put so many books in! I was somewhat astounded by how many turned up at the end—over fifty—but Eve lives in books more than she lives in life. It made sense that she’d talk about books so much.

As far as important books go, the novella Goodbye, Columbus informed this book both in content and form—not just the Neil Klugman references and the storyline of someone pressing their face up against a different world than the one they’re from, but also in that Roth’s novella takes place over one summer. I re-read it while writing The Last Book Party, and I also wrote out the first sentence of each chapter to see how Roth structured this story in such a tight timeline.

Jane Eyre and Rebecca were both very important, too. I love the sense of a person entering a world she’s not quite up for and making wrong assumptions about it. Both The Last Book Party and Rebecca have big costume parties that are big disasters and lead to a lot of revelations—I borrowed that, and I love the Gothic-ness of it. Eve’s life is much less Gothic than Jane Eyre, but I do love that sense of over-the-top upset-ness.

LM: That’s how it feels to be in your twenties! I see that tendency in myself and my friends, and I appreciate that Eve has it, too.

It wasn’t until seven or eight years ago that I accepted that to be a writer, I just had to write.

KD: Sure! Life feels heightened when you’re in your twenties and you have no idea which choice will have dramatic meaning, or will change the path of your life. People often have a sense of urgency as a result—who am I? what is my life going to be? —and I think it can be overwhelming. It can make you grasp for answers.

LM: There’s a certain stereotype that millennials have no idea how to treat each other, as if our lives were an eternal episode of Girls. I appreciate that the young people in The Last Book Party, who are not millennials, all treat each other just as badly as millennials supposedly do.

KD: Well, they’re all so competitive! Eve and Jeremy are always circling each other. I think that reflects a certain insecurity. They see something similar in each other, and don’t like that, since each is trying to move away from where they’re from. Both want to join the WASP-y literary world, and both hate being reminded that they’re strivers.

LM: At one point, Eve asks how a life like hers could result in a story worth telling. Did writing The Last Book Party help you answer that question?

KD: I had to own the idea that I could tell a story—and that I could tell this story. I loved writing as a child, and I remember that when I wanted to write but got stuck, I’d always describe a girl who wanted to write a story. I had to get back to that story. In college, I was so intimidated by the “real writers” that I fled to journalism and speechwriting. I thought I didn’t have a story to tell, and that I couldn’t be a writer. It wasn’t until I joined a writing group seven or eight years ago that I accepted that to be a writer, I just had to write.

Which Looks Better, Hardcovers or Paperbacks?

Posted on July 9, 2019July 10, 2019 by Intern Electric Lit

We That Are Young by Preti Taneja

The cover on the right is gallant with a golden fist against a red background, but maybe EL readers couldn’t stop thinking about that urban legend about the woman who was painted gold and DIED. They preferred the childlike drawing of a three-headed tiger, symbolizing three daughters made to compete against each other by their successful, megalomaniacal father.

WINNER: Paperback

All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdevi

One of the most celebrated books of 2018, All the Names They Used for God is a genre collection as much as it is a short story collection. A mermaid on the paperback hints at one story that is a concoction of magical realism, but readers may have felt that the fragmented pressed flower collage on the hardcover does a better job of suggesting the other genres being played with: science fiction, horror, and more.

WINNER: Hardback

Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson

A finalist for the 2018 National Book Award, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a coming-of-age story about two Native American teenagers who connect in the foster care system. Both versions of this book cover feature the same bird of prey: one’s head and wings are shown at the bottom of the paperback and one floating with a single feather falling off on the hardback. The more grounded image won Instagram followers’ hearts—they like their birds at rest.

WINNER: Paperback

The Strange Connection Between Detective Fiction and Union Busting

Posted on July 9, 2019July 8, 2019 by Jess Zimmerman

In the summer of 1892, members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steelworkers (AA) union and the Carnegie-run steelworks in Homestead, Pennsylvania were squaring off in a labor dispute when matters came to a head: factory management attempted to bring in armed militiamen along the river abutting the plant, resulting in a battle between the hired gunmen and the strikers that killed ten and left a number of others injured. Today, the Homestead strike––sometimes referred to as the Homestead massacre––is widely remembered as one of the bloodiest moments in American labor history and represented a major blow to the AA’s unionization efforts throughout the United States.

Though typically referred to as detectives, employees of the Pinkerton Agency would perhaps more accurately be described as paramilitaries.

The armed forces who faced the strikers on the river at Homestead were members of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private security force frequently hired by the robber barons of the era to investigate unioneers, infiltrate labor meetings, and instigate violence against strikers. Though typically referred to as detectives, employees of the Pinkerton Agency––whose logo of an ever-open eye and motto of “We Never Sleep” create a strong impression of menacing hypervigilance––would perhaps more accurately be described as paramilitaries. Amongst labor activists of the Gilded Age, Pinkertons were widely despised; in an essay on the Homestead strike, socialist organizer Eugene V. Debs referred to them as “a motley gang of vagabonds mustered from the slums of the great cities; pimps and parasites, outcasts, abandoned wretches of every grade; a class of characterless cutthroats who murder for hire; creatures in the form of humans but as heartless as stones.” Given its prominence as a cultural force, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the Agency exerted a strong pull on the imagination of many early icons of the detective fiction genre, some of whom admired the organization and some of whom vilified it.

One early pioneer of crime fiction to write about the Pinkertons was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who met William Pinkerton (son of the Pinkerton Agency’s founder) while the two were on a trans-Atlantic journey together. During the voyage, Pinkerton regaled his new companion with stories of Pinkerton agent James McParland’s recent exploits infiltrating a group of Irish Catholic miners in Pennsylvania known as the Molly Maguires. Conan Doyle was so impressed that he wrote McParland into the final Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear. In that book, a Chicagoan Pinkerton agent by the name of Birdy Edwards recounts his attempts to bring a villainous group known as the Scowrers to justice. Conan Doyle also included a Pinkerton agent in “The Adventure of the Red Circle,” referring to the fictional detective as “the hero of the Long Island cave mystery.” Conan Doyle’s stories depicted the agents as professional and effective. In his admiration of the Pinkerton Agency’s sleuthing skills, Conan Doyle seems not to question––or even register––the organization’s politics. Yet for other early writers of detective fiction, that reality was evident––and became a shaping force in their writing as well.

One such author was Dashiell Hammett, whose classic The Maltese Falcon came out in 1930, fifteen years after Hammett (a school drop-out by the age of 13) joined up with the Pinkerton Agency. Not long after, the young Hammett was dispatched to Butte, Montana, at a time when the mining town was roiling. Earlier that year, 168 workers had suffocated when an underground fire had consumed the oxygen in the shaft, the deadliest hard-rock mining disaster in American history. Now, miners striking for better safety regulations, higher wages, and an end to abusive labor practices were meeting with violent suppression from their bosses.

Dashiell Hammett would later claim that as a Pinkerton, he had turned down an offer of payment to kill a union organizer.

Hammett, along with other Pinkerton agents, was sent to Butte in order to halt the ongoing industrial action. Attempts to quash the strike were violent: Hammett would later claim that he had turned down an offer of payment to kill Frank Little, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World who was lynched for his role in the strike and in anti-war activities. Whether that particular story is true or not, there is no doubt that Hammett returned from the strikes jaded and deeply marked by the anti-worker violence he saw. Later in his life, he would join the Communist Party and be elected president of the Civil Rights Congress. When called to testify in 1951 about a bail fund established by the CRC to aid those accused of political subversion, Hammett refused to reveal the names of its donors and was imprisoned for contempt. Two years later, his unwillingness to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee led to him being blacklisted.

The seeds of Hammett’s later politics can be found in his 1929 debut novel, Red Harvest. The novel’s protagonist, a nameless figure known only as the Continental Op, is dispatched to Personville (a Butte stand-in nicknamed Poisonville by its residents) after an industrial magnate’s earlier attempts to enlist militiamen to quell a strike has descended into a lawless turf war between competing bands of hired guns. The Continental Op, cold-blooded and calculating, observes the killings around him with little reaction. Quite the opposite: his part in orchestrating the deaths of the people he’s been hired to eliminate causes him to go “blood-simple,” relishing the spectacle of violence instead of abhorring it. Far from Conan Doyle’s praiseful accounts, Hammett’s own fictionalization of the Pinkertons––one rooted not merely in hearsay tales but in his own first-hand experience with the agency––zeroes in on callousness and cruelty.

While Russia’s love for Pinkerton novels didn’t diminish with the Russian Revolution, their politics became something of a problem for a socialist state.

The literary influence of the Pinkertons extended beyond the United States as well. In Russia, where there was a craze for illustrated detective paperbacks, such books were collectively known as “Pinkerton novels,” or Pinkertonovshchina. One of the most popular protagonists of these books was a savvy investigator by the name of Nat Pinkerton, a clear homage to the American union-busters. While Russia’s love for Pinkerton novels didn’t diminish with the coming of the Russian Revolution in 1917, their politics became something of a problem: for a socialist state, the idea of idolizing an individualistic American hero with origins in violent anti-unionism was absolutely anathema. Yet there was no denying the books’ enduring popularity. In the 1920s, prominent Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin (by all accounts a fan of thrillers himself) called for the creation of the so-called “red Pinkerton,” a detective story that would capitalize on the preexisting success of the genre to teach socialist values. In a 1922 speech delivered to the Russian Communist Union of Youth, he justifies his push for red Pinkertons by noting, “Marx, as is generally known, read crime novels with great enthusiasm.” Red Pinkertons like Marietta Shaginian’s Laurie Lane, Metalworker and Mess-mend, or Yankees in Petrograd (both penned under the pseudonym Jimmy Dollar) aimed to teach socialist ideas and capture the imagination of young readers, inspiring them to throw themselves into the revolutionary struggle. But the genre faced severe criticism from Party members who thought that the detective novel was inescapably enmeshed with bourgeois values, and debates about the genre quickly became a proxy battle for deeper internal rifts among the Bolsheviks. By the end of the 1920s, Bukharin had been forced to abandon his calls for the creation of a Soviet Pinkerton novel.

Though the red Pinkerton phenomenon was short-lived, its existence testifies to a growing global awareness of the ways in which mass media––including detective stories––could be harnessed for propagandistic purposes––an awareness that was latent amongst the authors who wrote about the Pinkertons from the beginning. Perhaps the strongest testament to the Pinkerton Agency’s skills in secrecy is the way it dropped off the cultural radar in the decades after it captured the attention of Conan Doyle, Hammett, and Soviet officials: though it no longer makes its way into major detective novels, the Agency still exists, repackaged as a corporate risk management firm after the growth of municipal police forces and the creation of the FBI took over much of its old territory. The history section of Pinkerton’s website, which claims that the company’s agents have long served “as guardians and protectors of organizations around the world,” makes no mention of its union-busting days. Its logo remains the all-seeing eye.

The Literature of Cootie Catchers

Posted on July 8, 2019January 16, 2024 by Jess Zimmerman

There are soothsayers in the back of the school bus. Their hands move in familiar patterns: they fold a piece of notebook paper in half, then again, tuck the corners toward center and crease. As they work, a small apparatus manifests, pleated and primped. It begins to move. It opens. It closes. It reveals your future.

Perhaps it’s been years, decades, since you’ve enacted these motions yourself: first, choose a color from the outside flaps, and the soothsayers speak the letters aloud while widening and shutting the device’s pointed mouth, a soft crinkling of paper swishing through the hushed air. Now choose a number from the inner folds. Five? Alright, whisper the soothsayers, one, two, three, four, five, they count, as their hands twitch in tandem. Pick again. Seven? The flap levitates open, and there, hidden beneath the innermost paper petal, lies your fate.

Yes, this is familiar. A dream or a question, just on the edge of your memory: the nostalgic step by step ritual of playing with a paper cootie catcher.

You may have known the device by another name— “fortune teller” is the most common alternative, though certain regions also favor salt-cellar, whirlybird, chatterbox, or snapdragon, among others. There’s Poland’s “niebo-pieklo,” Germany’s “himmel und hölle,” Italy’s “inferno-paradiso”—all of which translate into some form of “heaven and hell.” “Cootie catcher,” itself, refers to one particular style of decorating the apparatus, in which small, scattered dots, or “cooties,” would be drawn on half the second-tier flaps, so that opening and closing the catcher would reveal or swallow them.

Regardless of its title, chances are you’ve used the cootie catcher just the way I did: as a two-person game designed to tell brief, randomized fortunes. Like most folk traditions, evolving and adapting under the influence of many thinkers and makers throughout time, the catcher’s true origins are unclear, with some accounts tracking them all the way back to 17^th-century Europe. We do know that the device was popularized in the United States during the 1950s. From there, it bloomed into one of the nation’s most popular children’s folk traditions, right up there with Bloody Mary in the mirror and “light as a feather, stiff as a board.” Traveling onwards between friendship-braceleted hands, stuffed into pockets, and torn from diary pages, the cootie catcher spread across the world. And, as a child mystic requires only a single sheet of paper and a writing utensil to conjure one of these fold-up fortune tellers into existence, the toy was available to children of all income levels and classes. By its very design, the tradition could survive in any community, could manifest in any child’s hands.

I had nearly forgotten about cootie catchers until three winters ago in New Orleans. It was a friend’s 25th birthday, and we had (in a youthful burst of exuberance) transformed her shotgun apartment into a labyrinthine series of blanket forts. Lace and golden string lights were draped over chair backs. A tunnel led from the front door into the main quilt-muffled chamber, forcing party guests to make their entrance by squeezing into the room on hands and knees. As dusk slipped towards midnight and the wine ran low, we found ourselves recalling the blanket forts of our childhoods—and the strange occult happenings that shimmered inside them. Someone took out a piece of paper, tore it into a square, and began to fold.

Girls have long been drawn to games of chance, of luck, of peering into a future that seemed to already have been decided for them.

The cootie catcher is primarily associated with girlhood, a gendered tradition passed hand-to-hand at sleepover parties and in schoolyards. Like so many divinatory games, young women have long been the keepers and practitioners. In our patriarchal society, young men have been emboldened to select their own paths, to determine who and what they wanted to become—leaving boys with no true need for fortune telling or luck. Why bother with divination when you can control the future? Adolescent girls, however, were never afforded this promise. Thus, girls have long been drawn to games of chance, of luck, of peering into a future that seemed to already have been decided for them. If they couldn’t control the future, at least they could get a preview of what’s to come.

As a writer by trade, I’ll admit that I was immediately intrigued by the narrative qualities of the cootie catcher. Relying on a sort of “choose-your-own-adventure” storytelling format, the secrets hidden within the innermost flaps can be read in any order, as selected by the players themselves. The game-play relies on spelling (counting letters in a given word), as well as full sentences of language. Unlike visual mediums like palm reading or tea leaves, the cootie catcher is an outright literary form of fortune telling. And the catchers’ creators take on an authorial role, composing unique, original text to fill each fortune.

The further I examined this intersection between divination and literature, the more I found intrinsic ties between them. Countless examples of literary divinations began to unfold, not unlike (dare I say) the many layers of a cootie catcher. For example, take bibliomancy, in which a book (often a bible) is dropped and whatever page falls open portends the future. Or fortune cookies, containing tiny, prophetic koans. Or automatic writing, where a pen-toting medium allows a message to flow onto the page without conscious effort. All of which is to say—language is given extraordinary social and psychological power. This is beyond “the pen is mightier than the sword”: writing serves specifically as an occult power, a supernatural tool that must be wielded delicately. And the implication? Language can transcend time, slipping past us to peer into the future. While we’re trapped in a single moment, tied to our mortal bodies, words can scurry on ahead of us. And oddly, this makes sense—already, writing is viewed as a sort of time travel. Through language alone, we can meander through the mind of a long-dead author, accessing ideas and images from prior centuries. If writing can carry us into the past, can even transcend death, then why shouldn’t it carry us into tomorrow, too?

When the tarot was first popularized in Europe during the mid-15^th century, it was not used for divination, nor for psychological insight. Like a standard poker deck, the tarot was simply a set of cards used in game play. Over time, it shape-shifted. The cards were shuffled and dealt and passed hand to hand, until they had transformed into tools for premonition. What was it about the tarot that allowed such a dramatic re-purposing? I’d argue that the tarot’s magical root is as simple as this: every card tells a story.

If something can tell a story, chances are that it can tell your story. The Fool who steps into the unknown… the Three of Swords bearing heartbreak… the patient, dangling Hanged Man… As any good writing teacher can tell you, the microcosm contains the macrocosm— within the tarot, we view an individual illustration and immediately it expands, jumpstarting associations with similar images in our own lives. And so, through these archetypal narrative images come tales. And tales lead to questions. And questions lead into the future.

If something can tell a story, chances are that it can tell your story.

The tarot and the cootie catcher are far from the only divinatory forms that succeed as not only literature, but as games as well. The Ouija board—a form of automatic writing— contains similar traits, yet evolved in the opposite direction of the tarot: it began as an occult tool called a “spirit board,” used by professional mediums during the American spiritualism movement. Only later, after Hasbro patented the first “Ouija board” in 1890, did it transform into a party game. Ouija provided a rare opportunity for young men and women to be intimate in public, unsupervised, as game play required users to sit close, knees touching, with hands overlapping on the planchette. Cootie catchers, too, involve partnership to operate, as does the tarot—all telltale traits of gaming form. And I believe it’s no coincidence that the Ouija board relies on the written word, spelled out letter by letter, to reveal its powers. Once again, language and divination find themselves hand in hand.

Remember the game where you open a can of soda and toggle the tab back and forth while reciting letters of the alphabet? Whichever letter the tab snaps loose on marks the first letter of your future spouse’s name. Similar patterns are seen in children’s jump rope games, where letters are counted off, and wherever the jumper trips up marks their future sweetheart’s identity. As with the cootie catcher, these are both traditionally feminine games– and as such, focus on one of the greatest, most influential unknowns young women faced: marriage.

It seems that everywhere we look, from the psychic’s velvet draped, neon-signed shop front, to Pepsi vending machines, to the foggy mythos of our own childhoods, language has been playfully divining our paths for centuries.

Of course, this inspiration can go both ways. Authors have often repurposed divinatory forms directly into works of literature. Pulitzer-winning poet James Merrill used a Ouija board to write his epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. Italo Calvino wrote his novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies though tarot cards, which his two characters display to recount their tales. Lily Hoang’s book Changing was written using the I Ching. I found myself wandering a similar path at that ethereal blanket fort soiree in my friend’s New Orleans home, wondering how the cootie catcher might be re-worked into a storytelling tool. Over the course of the next few years, I collaborated with an illustrator to create a spooky tale told exclusively in a series of cootie catchers, each liftable flap bearing new narrative secrets and revelations. (If this sounds like your kind of thing, the bizarre and illustrious Ninepin Press has agreed to publish this miraculous object-set in its entirety—you can take a peek here).

Whenever I purchase a new journal, I flip through the blank pages cautiously. I can’t help but be suspicious of them. Soon, those pages will fill up with intimate, documentary words, boiling over with memories I haven’t yet lived through. The journal will contain so much I cannot yet know. In those early moments when a new journal is clean, crisp, unsullied by ink, I can’t help feel that the pages already sense what they’ll eventually hold. I squint over them, as if trying to read a note written in lemon juice. What does this paper know of the future that I cannot? How can I read past the limitations of my own body, into the writings I’ll scrawl tomorrow?

“Reading” is an essential act in divination. Even non-linguistic divinatory forms that focus on image or symbol rather than words are still spoken of like, well… literature. A seer doesn’t watch or glance or speak a palm—she “reads” it. Fortune tellers “read” tea leaves and tarot, despite the fact that these are all visual mediums of soothsaying, not word-based.

At its heart, divination is rooted in story.

The consistent use of “read” implies something important. It suggests an intrinsic link between divination and literature. At its heart, divination is rooted in story. And even if the tools being used are illustrations, or Earl Grey, or the wrinkles in your own hand, at the end of the day what matters are the stories these symbols tell us.

There are always new soothsayers in the back of the bus. There are always children peering forward from the beginnings of their lives, hungry to know what the vast future will bring. There will always be stories, and there will always be new ways of reaching past our own, mortal forms into the flickering future. However, each individual cootie catcher itself will not stand the test of time. These are no hardbound books, nor precious documents sealed away in museums. A cootie catcher is ephemera. It begins to dissolve in the very hands that create it. These art objects, these literary devices, these vital pieces of literature authored by young women are doomed to slip away just as quickly as the years themselves. They tear at the corners. They’re abandoned in schoolyards and tossed into wastebaskets. Far from treasured heirlooms, they exist in a moment of strange, supernatural ritual before being unceremoniously abandoned. Perhaps this is the cootie catcher’s greatest poignancy— as the school bus soothsayers grow and age and yearn towards womanhood, into the futures they dreamt of, their paper fortune tellers fall behind. Time gallops on. And as the predicted storms and joys arrive, the very objects that once envisioned these fates no longer exist to see it.

Time and Gravity Hit the Open Road

Posted on July 8, 2019July 7, 2019 by Kelly Luce

Equations of a Falling Body

Time drove down the street in her vintage Volkswagen Beetle, her best friend Gravity in the passenger seat. The top was down even though it was January. Their hair slapped their cheeks and got caught in the corners of their mouths and pulled against their scalps. They yelled over the top of a Black Flag song, destroying the lyrics.

Gravity laughed at the women on the sidewalk, who didn’t see the Beetle but felt a strange sense of self-consciousness overtake them. Gravity made one girl wobble in her high heels and fall into the arms of a married man. Time grinned and froze the tableau just long enough for his wife to come out of the shop. The girl in heels scraped her knees in the snow, the wife towering over her like a mad titan with mad titian hair. The husband twisted and twisted his ring.

At the next light, the Beetle rolled to a stop next to an old man in a Toyota Corolla. His gray hair brushed against the tips of his big ears, and when he turned to look at them, it started to rain. He had eyes filled with starlight. He remembered them in their cradles, and they wanted to forget.

Gravity pulled up Google Maps, and Time punched down on the gas.

II.

They blasted out of Boston, the blue Beetle wheezing beneath them. It was too cold, and the Christmas lights kept burning out, and the city air – flavored with asphalt and baseball and salt and sprawl – crusted their throats.

Dusty and lukewarm, El Paso wasn’t any better. The women were in tank tops; they accessorized with sunglasses and sweat. The men gazed into their half-drunk beer bottles, waiting for wisdom or unconsciousness.

Time pulled into a dive bar on the south side, vaulting over the driver’s door in ankle boots and short shorts, while Gravity took her sweet sweet time sliding from the car to the asphalt, her eyebrows as low as her neckline.

The bar was a smoke-dark lung that pulled at Gravity. The air clung. She was used to that, but the eyes lit up like wolves’ eyes as she slinked toward a booth at the back. She wanted to return to invisibility; she tugged at the hem of her skirt.

Time was hours ahead of her, slamming her sixth shot down on the cracked brown bar, her laughter arrowing through the dark and waking no one. At the scattered, scarred tables, the whiskey-worn patrons sniffed, their throats rumbled, but they didn’t move closer. The air around Time was a latticework of electricity and don’t-fuck-with-me. Gravity watched her back.

III.

Seattle: Gravity was hungry. Every smile she attracted was bone-thin and braced against the cold night. No one had candles for eyes, or stretched their fingertips toward her under the cloud-broken moon. They hurried past as though she were nothing special.

Time sat on the Beetle’s hood, watching the snow soak into the skin of her arms. She didn’t make it fall faster, only let it take its course. She could be a merciful god, sometimes.

IV.

Theoretically, the universe belongs to them now: Gravity pulling, Time propelling. The rest of the old gods – ghost-artists, dust-engineers, planet-mechanics, carbon-masons, silence-miners, fire-defiers, mothers – are lost in their own stories, can’t be bothered.

Time catwalks all the silences between stars in glitter-green ice skates, her umbrella inside-out. The comets swish their tails and streak the sky, uninterested in being pets. Gravity trudges behind. Her tutu droops with rain from Io, diamonds from a nameless place, rust from Mars. Her cigarette smells of silicon-petrichor from Saturn; she can’t light it out here; she slides it back behind her ear.

Time longs for the people with her whole body, which is the whole universe, which balances precariously in her belly, which is a ewer of wishes and endings.

The beginning (there is only one) is so far away now, not even Gravity can grasp the corners. She dons a knee-high pair of boots, and the very last parachute. Time drifts out but Gravity belts her back in. If they’re together when they fall, they always fall toward home.

7 Novels Set in Deserts

Posted on July 8, 2019June 24, 2019 by Jo Lou

I come from Moreno Valley—brown valley—in an area of California known colloquially as the Inland Empire, located three hours from Vegas, and two from the border. In the 80s and 90s, when I was growing up there, the I.E. was a constellation of freeways connecting deserts and meth labs and good dogs and medium people. It holds no relation to the David Lynch movie of the same name.

A Prayer for Travelers by Ruchika Tomar — Buy the book

The Inland Empire is where I first fell in love with dry, barren landscapes and got to know them as the kind of beautiful, brutal places that will grow you right up. We—by which I mean my friends and I—lacked this perspective at the time. We ditched our classes and wore blue mascara daily and fell silent when the principal announced over the PA system that another student died huffing anti-freeze. In eighth grade, our friend’s mother’s meth lab blew up, and the announcement made a 2”x2” square in the back pages of the local paper. In high school, we shared a memorable year in the company of a twitchy ex-con named Worm—but that ended, inevitably, in his violent return to prison.

We spent the rest of our time in Palm Desert and San Bernardino and Indio, dancing the night away at various Indian casinos; we went to sleep in parked cars; we woke up to the sun frying us like eggs in our tin cans. We drove east to Vegas and north to Death Valley, crossing Reno in winter, stopping on the side of the road to buy blankets and fruit. When I finally left the desert, it was very much on purpose, so you can imagine my disappointment when I started writing a novel, only to realize that a part of me longed to return.

They say you can never go home again—and I think that’s true—but artists have always loved the desert for the inescapable fact that it’s blank and pitiless and full of possibility. What is nothing if not the most keenly seductive invitation to anything? It’s the absence of place that honors our most elemental self; it’s the desert’s famine that allows for all sorts of creatures to evolve as brutally and singularly as they must. Perhaps that’s why the stories that often emerge from deserts are often outlaws too, breaking traditional forms and narratives structures, unafraid to invent desperate risks. Many of us are blessed to be in driving distance to the Chihuahuan, the Sonoran, the Great Basin, or the Mojave—and if you are, I hope you’ll visit them while we still can. But if you find yourself out of reach of a great desert, you can always pick up one of these brilliant books and bring the desert home to you.

Image result for yuri herrera signs preceding the end

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Hererra

On the first page of this slim, powerful novel, we meet our sixteen year old narrator, Makina, who’s charged with hand-carrying a note from her mother in Mexico all the way to her brother in the United States. “I don’t like to send you, child,” Cora tells her, “but who else can I trust it to, a man?” Nope! So Makina sets off alone, first to gather intel for her journey from a series of local jefes, and then, with their blessing, she departs into the desert alone, picking her way towards our inhospitable border, hazarded by numerous mortal and political obstacles on the way. The division of family and the question of true reunification is one Hererra wants us to ponder, while Makina’s heartbreaking passage exposes the vulnerability of bodies and the violent schisms between men, women and country.

The Quick & the Dead by Joy Williams

Alice, Corvus and Annabel are three young women coming of age in a small town in the Arizona desert. The girls spend their time stalking cats, blowing shit up, and being embarrassed by their parents, respectively—pretty true to life, in other words—but the novel’s more crucial enterprise is Williams’ devastating reflection on the banality of death. Among the girls, Alice is the guerrilla environmentalist, Corvus is the grave and solemn orphan grieving over her parents’ death, and Annabel is the late-to-town transplant whose arrival incites our tour of the town’s eclectic personalities and pedestrian violence, a place where roadkill leaves a “rosy kiss on the pavement,” elderly men and women wither “like iguanas” in a nearby nursing home, and vengeful, backtalking ghosts materialize with unsettling aplomb. Williams’ prose is artful and precise, the story is comic and outrageously clever, and the starkness of Williams’ narrative ecosphere exerts an intense pressure on her female characters to transmute their surroundings and become “extraordinary.”

On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl

Shannon Pufahl’s On Swift Horses is an elegant, powerful novel about Muriel, a deceptively coy San Diego newlywed (by way of rural, postwar Kansas), and her shrewd brother-in-law Julius, a rambling cardshark betting his life on luck’s mercurial bidding. The two gamblers share an early connection before their fates diverge—Muriel becomes involved in the aggressive, male-dominated universe of horse-racing at Del Mar, and Julius flees to the old Las Vegas, that glamorous, mafia-orchestrated oasis whose surreptitious thrill was once a provisional lapse of repressive post-war social conventions. One of the unique pleasures of Pufahl’s seamlessly-researched novel is the momentary return to a less-excessive American excess —when the purchase of an ocean-proximate California home by regular, hardworking Americans wasn’t a laughable possibility; when Las Vegas had yet to be rebuilt into a 24-hour landlocked Royal Caribbean. It’s the kind of nostalgia that can only be enjoyed from the safe distance of (arguable) progress, especially by all those who were never been invited to partake in America’s middle class comforts. On Swift Horses is a solemn reminder of the resilience of generations of Americans who survived our country’s violent past, a timely reminder of the modern consequences of failing to relinquish its dogged shadow, and a heartbreaking elegy to those who never made it out.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

A novel in three parts: first, “Mexicans Lost in Mexico,” written in epistolary form by the aspiring poet Juan García Madero, who begins his diary with his decision to take a writing workshop at his university. It’s there he first encounters Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, two second-generation visceral realists, following in the tradition of the original visceral realists, “a Mexican avant-garde group [of] . . . writers or painters or journalists or revolutionaries.” Madero is seduced by Lima’s literary talent and wants to joins the group, despite remaining somewhat unclear who exactly the men are. As he gets to know Lima, Belano and their friends, Lima’s fascination with the original visceral realist movement and it’s founder Cesárea Tinjero evolves.

The second part of the novel is “The Savage Detectives,” comprised of variegated recollections from an array of characters who come in contact with Belano and Lima during their travels from 1976-1996. The third and final section of the novel, “The Deserts of Sonora,” returns us to Madero’s diary in 1976 as he, Lima, Belano drive into the Sonora Desert to search for Cesárea Tinjero. Bolaño loves to play with themes of recursion and doubling, often echoing personalities and settings across his works, and The Savage Detectives can be seen in many ways as the literary precursor to Bolaño’s subsequent masterpiece 2666, but while the two works share some literary preoccupations, The Savage Detectives is singularly concerned with the elliptical nature of time and the purpose of art in the politicized framework of Latin American history. A compulsively readable, structurally innovative novel told in Bolaño’s signature exuberant, roguish prose.

Image result for john mcphee encounters with the archdruid

Basin and Range by John McPhee

A stunning work of non-fiction, I can’t imagine more essential reading for our times than John McPhee’s legendary, lyric survey of the United States written through the prism of geological history. McPhee, a prolific journalist whose expertise on a broad range of topics won him a Pulitzer Prize, focuses this particular inquiry on the Western desert “with its welded tuffs a Franciscan mélange (internally deformed, complex beyond analysis), its strike-slip faults and falling buildings, its boiling springs and fresh volcanics, its extensional disassembling of the earth.” McPhee guides his readers through millions of years of “deep time” that have fashioned our most familiar Western landmarks through the pitching shifts of tectonic plates, eroding river currents and massive extinctions of plant and animal life that remain fossilized in our earth’s crust. You’ll leave this book with a deeper appreciation for our ancient planet and her centuries of gracious shelter.

Point Omega by Don DeLillo

I admire Don DeLillo’s work so much that I’d be happy to move inside his intellectually rigorous, doom-obsessed brain for five hours straight—which is, coincidentally, how long it took me to read this slim, dense novel in one sitting. If you’re the kind of person who gets turned on by intelligent, evasive repartee between two loquacious men committed to deploying their own emotional smokescreens, you’ll enjoy this novel that focuses on a scholar-turned-national-war-strategist Richard Elster and a documentary filmmaker, Jim Finley, who wants to make a film about Elster’s role in the (mis)management of the Iraq War.

Shortly after the novel opens, we learn Elster has been elusive about his willingness to be filmed, and Finley has been persistent, so Elster invites Finely to his desert hideaway, alone, so that he can unofficially consider the project. Because Finley is a man, he somehow doesn’t immediately find this request creepy or foreboding, despite the fact that Elster is described as wearing his long grey hair in a single braid, and frequently holds forth on a number of subjects at intense length, including the quality of the desert landscape they’re isolated in together, a place he feels is abortive of natural time, “the minute-by-minute reckoning” of city life. Elster argues that in the desert, “Day turns to night eventually but it’s a matter of light and darkness, it’s not time passing, mortal time. There’s none of the usual terror. It’s different here, time is enormous, that’s what I feel here, palpably. Time that precedes us and survives us.”

By the time Elster’s daughter shows up, you’ll be wondering how many different ways this situation could implode, but you won’t be able to look away, because DeLillo’s sentences always mange to build in on themselves at the same time they bridge out to the reader, collapsing into a singularly momentous experience the reader can’t forget. The usual terror is never DeLillo’s long game—but in Point Omega, as in all his works, DeLillo makes sure to serve up a uniquely American nightmare.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

Arguably the most famous of Michael Ondaatje’s novels, this story opens with Hana, a young Canadian nurse stranded in the bombed-out ruins of an Italian villa during WWII. Hana has remained in the villa long after everyone else has fled to provide care for the English Patient, as he is rather arbitrarily named, a man burned beyond recognition, without face or country, who can recall nothing about who he is beyond a fractured key of memories—a violent plane crash and its subsequent blaze; the dry North African desert where he wakes bewildered and nearly blind, salvaged from the wreckage by Bedouin tribesmen who dress his charred body and carry him between them in a makeshift hammock they move across the dusty landscape.

Hana listens to the patient’s fragmented evocations of the desert as the pair is joined by two other stragglers from the war—Kip, a British Sikh sapper disillusioned with his time in the army, and Carvaggio, a charming criminal and former friend of Hana’s father. The novel’s setting is poignantly charged and the cast of characters are rich and diverse, their discordant backgrounds clashing to reveal the most surprising harmonies—and it’s only Ondaatje’s lush, lyric sentences that feel exotic, begging to be read aloud. This is a novel that meditates on loss, but what it interrogates is identity—who are we without our families, our pasts, our nationalities to shape us? How are we made, and how must we survive? The English Patient maps the delicate bonds and limitations between friends, and explores the “physical and spiritual sense of loneliness” that haunts all human experience.

6 Video Games That Feel Like Reading a Novel

Posted on July 5, 2019July 3, 2019 by Jess Zimmerman

Video games aren’t just about shooting zombies or jumping on mushrooms. A lot of them are downright literary—as in, the game revolves around reading text or making dialogue choices, and also, the mood and ambiance stay with you after you finish playing in the same way as a haunting novel. Plus, games offer opportunities for immersive storytelling that books can’t achieve (at least not yet). You want to talk about being drawn into the story? Try reading a story where you control the dialogue, change the outcome, or solve puzzles to move the plot forward. We’ve collected six atmospheric games for book lovers.

Device 6

Playing Device 6 doesn’t just feel like reading a story—reading a story is the actual game mechanic. You begin by reading about a woman named Anna waking up in a mysterious castle, but the text itself quickly becomes the setting: a sentence that describes Anna walking down a hallway may move straight across the screen, then make a sharp left while describing Anna turning a corner. You might have to turn your device around multiple times to follow the text as Anna makes her way through the castle, or figure out how to open a locked door in order to read the next chapter. Puzzles and plot are embedded in the text and illustrations in a way that truly makes the story come to life.

Kentucky Route Zero

The spare visuals of this story-driven adventure game contribute to its air of surreality and light menace. You start out playing as a trucker named Conway who’s searching for the eponymous highway, a road seemingly outside of time and space. As Conway travels (including down a mine shaft, on the back of a bird, and yes, along Kentucky Route Zero) and meets new people, the player occasionally inhabits his traveling companions, learning more about their histories and the strange alternate Kentucky where they live. The atmospheric narrative feels a little like reading Flannery O’Connor by way of Welcome to Night Vale with a heaping dose of David Lynch.

Night in the Woods

You’re a cat named Mae whose best friend is an alligator named Bea, but don’t let the cute talking animals fool you: Night in the Woods takes on some heavy topics, including mental illness, the troubled American economy, and oh yes, mysterious chthonic cults. There are no puzzles to solve, but your choices affect Mae’s experiences and relationships with her old friends as she returns to her hometown and struggles with the ways it’s changed. You know how books that are ostensibly geared towards young adults are often the ones with the darkest themes, including casually bizarre magical realism? That’s what it feels like to pilot a cartoon cat through heart-to-hearts about her nervous breakdown and the town’s string of kidnappings.

Oxenfree

How much more disorienting would it be to read a story about time loops if you were actually experiencing them? In the beautifully illustrated Oxenfree, you explore a haunted island, make dialogue choices that affect your relationships with other characters, and yes, experience time travel, loops, and even a spot of possession. Exploration gives you knowledge you can use in your showdowns with the island’s resident spooks, which determine the outcome of the game, including who lives and who (if anyone) gets erased from existence. It’s like reading a supernatural mystery, but with stakes that feel higher because you’re guiding the action.

Gone Home

The setup—your viewpoint character arrives at her parents’ house to find the place unexpectedly dark and deserted—feels like it’s setting up a jump scare around every corner. Instead, as you navigate your childhood home you also make your way through a multimedia, intertextual story, told in notes and diary entries and mix tapes. The first-person perspective feels like Doom or other shooter games, but the actual gameplay experience is more like an archival research project: you’re piecing together a story, and it turns out to be as emotional as any novel.

Firewatch

In this beautifully illustrated mystery game, your viewpoint character is a fire lookout who’s isolated from the world, in contact only with your supervisor Delilah over radio. When strange things start to happen, seemingly connected to an old unsolved disappearance, that walkie talkie and your relationship with Delilah—which the player can affect through dialogue choices—may be the only things keeping you tethered to reality. Like an (eerie) epistolary novel, the game centers on how two people talk to each other, even as the plot erupts around them.

Navigating Chicana Identity Through Poetry

Posted on July 5, 2019July 3, 2019 by Jo Lou

When I began reading Sara Borjas’ debut collection of poetry, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff, I related to the way that she wrote about family, cycles of misogyny and abuse, and the struggle to find accountability and healing when conversations around these cyclical systemic problems are confined only to the page. This had been my experience for most of my life—that if those who hurt us won’t listen, then writing was the only way to grow, and heal. My grandmother Ines was an unpublished poet who wrote about her grief at losing her son in Vietnam, about my grandfather’s infidelities, and about the love she had for her children. I learned from her that sometimes writing poetry is the best means of survival.

Image result for heart like a window mouth like a cliff — Buy the book

I recognized in the poems the navigation of being Chicana, which means living as women of Mexican-American descent, but also the work Borjas does to use political Chicana discourse to reflect on the systems that would limit us. Even in her reclamation of the word “pocha,” referring to Chicanx peoples who don’t speak Spanish and who are thought to be disconnected from their Mexican culture, the poet illustrates that there is power in seeing oneself for who they are without judgement or shame.

Sara Borjas and I recently spoke about how writing about love, home, and the wounds that remain open like a broken window have helped her to claim an identity as a “pocha” poet that crosses boundaries and opens doors.

Leticia Urieta: I’d like to start by asking where this book, as a first collection, began for you?

Sara Borjas: I feel like this book had multiple beginnings. The first beginning was the questions I had about how to love people and what kind of love is healthy but also circumstantial. I was trying to investigate relationships with a boyfriend, with my parents, with other women and what is progressive. Part of this was understanding where I am at and how to move forward as an individual and as part of a community and a culture. When I started working on the book more seriously with Carmen Jimenez Smith and Blas Falconer, I began to ask myself, “what am I accountable for?” As a woman, as a Chicana woman, what am I accountable for in my actions and my own relationships, but also what am I capable of, what am I not capable of, and what can I ask others to do that is reasonable, given the circumstances? I telescoped in the further I went along.

LU: I think that does speak to what is naturally coming through in the book. In the epigraphs, you reference Audre Lorde and Cherrie Moraga, two writers who have addressed oppression in the lives of women of color. The quote from Cherrie Moraga, “Home is a place, for better or worse, we learn to love,” seems to speak to the struggles that this collection is in conversation with. Specifically, I was thinking of “We Are Too Big For This House,” which takes on one of the more experimental forms in the collection. Can you talk about how that poem, and others in the collection, address this contentious relationship with home?

SB: When Juan Felipe Herrera blurbed the book I found it interesting that he said,”it’s not nostalgia.” It’s a returning but not a returning. It’s coming through and saying what things really are. There’s a lot of coded language that we use in our familial homes that we use to protect each other but I think what we are ultimately protecting are these oppressive systems like Audre Lorde says.

As a woman, as a Chicana woman, what am I accountable for in my actions and my own relationships?

When I think about going home in the book, or trespassing on my home, or going into my mother’s life or beyond her, it’s a way of showing respect to the struggle. That’s why I say that the first beginning of this book was a false beginning because I was not holding my home accountable and so the push and pull is necessary for clarity and respect, for accountability, and in the name of love. You have to go back to clean up each act you do. I wasn’t going back to say, “we’re all fucked up!” I was going back to see what happened to my mom and dad and what they are capable of confronting right now and moving forward from there. I’ve learned writing the book, and through therapy, that it is not beneficial to call someone out. Because of that, I think the push and pull of the collection is trying to find a way to evolve and be a better family, a better daughter and a better partner.

LU: Let’s talk about the word “pocha.” Mexican American and Chicanx folks often have a contentious relationship with the word “pocha” because it is often associated with shame. It comes up several times throughout the collection, including in “Pocha Cafe,” where being “pocha” is a label that is wrapped in shame, despite the realities of this identity. However, in “Pocha Heaven,” which I felt was a wonderful mirror of “Pocha Cafe,” that poem addresses the sexism that often goes unspoken in Mexican American homes. I wondered, what does being “pocha” mean to you as a poet?

SB: [Pocha] is the only identity that feels real. I wish it was a scholarly move that I was making, but it’s really the only reality that I have ever had and it is the closest word that I have to work with. When I started using it, I never did feel intense shame around it. The only reason I think that is is because the person who called me a “pocha,” was a friend who I loved, and for two years I never even knew what it meant. I didn’t speak Spanish well enough and I was too embarrassed to ask what it meant. When I finally learned what it meant I thought, “well, she’s not wrong.” In the moment it didn’t feel like shame because I knew that my friend loved me, and also because she’s kind of pocha. This is why I emphasize going back and examining things in my past so that I can reconfigure that foundation to go forward. When I do that with the word “pocha,” I consider that these are folks who were colonized, whose indigenous language was erased and replaced with the colonizer’s language, and now they are shaming me for not speaking what I think is the colonizer’s language. I am not ashamed of that. I’ve had to find ways to say that to people who are really proud to be Mexican, or who are proud to speak Spanish in a way that is respectful to them, but also to insist that they not shame me.

LU: Do you feel like that aids you as a poet?

My poetic landscape is the house. It’s the kitchen, the linoleum floor, the grout my mother can’t get clean.

SB: It aids me in that the only place that I feel comfortable is not knowing anything. I think that is a good thing for a poet in this stage of my life to know and accept. For so long, I was trying to say what I knew. Now, I reach younger poets and they are writing poems that are so self-righteous when in reality, they are bad poems, and I was writing bad poems too. The fact that “pocha” is such a place of nothing, of crossings and that is my root and identity as a poet makes me feel good. I’m always going to be looking-I’m never going to be confirming or affirming or satisfied with answers. As a poet, it is good to be pocha in that I am not idealizing craft, which I sometimes think is code for “whiteness,” and I am not rejecting it either, but rather I want to examine how these tools are being used. We have to turn them inside out and wield these tools that is more than mimicry.

LU: The speaker in several of the poems mourns the relationships with men that could have been. I really appreciated that there were several poems that did the opposite, or that illustrated the solidarity and protection that women can find with one another, such as in “Pocha Heaven” and “The Island of Raped Women.” Why was this something you were interested in addressing?

SB: I think that some of the poems, like “Imagined Variation on Order” and “Love Triptych” were from the first beginning. And so the poems about the relationships between the speaker and men were old ways to that I used to love people. As I wrote, and loved, I realized that there was such a power imbalance and imbalance in respect, not just between couples, but between friends and family. In Chicanx families, we value labor. If you are not putting in labor, you are not worthy of respect. I had to look at those relationships and what ideas they were rooted in so that I didn’t perform that way. I feel most validated when I am in a room with a bunch of women and they are not gaslighting you, but listening to. It wasn’t a conscious choice to balance those two conflicting sensibilities, but I think it was an organic evolution of insight that being with women creates.

LU: Some of these poems also imagine what it would be like to not have to worry about having relationships with men. One of the series of poems that I found most interesting in the collection were the Narcissus poems. Could you talk about why you gravitated towards this Greek myth and why you chose to feminize the character?

Building community means to uplift our own people wherever we are.

SB: I started thinking about self-annihilation in a class I took about Sufi mysticism and poetry with Reza Aslan. I was very interested in the idea of dying to become a true living being. Along the way, it reminded me of Narcissus. I imagined if Narcissus were a poet. Narcissus died because he thought he was so cute, but as poets we are always looking inward and I felt that when I had this introspection, parts of me were dying, such as ideas I had or the way I did things. And rightly so. I’m glad that I moved on. That’s why I gravitated towards that myth, and also because I was experimenting with making European stuff “pocha;” not mimicking it, but playing with gender and other elements of the story. I am not sure that Narcissus is a woman in these poems. I use the pronouns “she” but I have never been strictly feminine, and so I don’t think they are either. I’ve always been hard in a lot of ways and this always made me feel outside of women but also shared with women. I liked the idea of using a traditionally male character and feminizing him and not really having to choose. There’s a lot of Narcissus poems that didn’t make it into the book, but I also liked the idea that Narcissus gets stuck by seeing themself in water. In the myths, his mother is a river; talking about alcoholism, about dying in water, about this system that is continually flowing was very appealing to me. This was a device that I was able to use to reveal energy transfers that were already going on. Sometimes you choose a metaphor because it sounds cute, but sometimes it helps you see things you couldn’t see before.

LU: Mirrors and reflections come up a number of times in this collection, and also windows—which can be mirrors, but also doors. These motifs played a number of roles.

SB: When I think of where my poetic landscape is, I consider, “is it nature?” But no, it isn’t. My poetic landscape is the house. It’s the kitchen, the linoleum floor, the grout my mother can’t get clean. I’m not trying to change that. That’s why I like the organic flow of the Narcissus myth and the river as reflection, which does mirror the house, which is the landscape that I am most comfortable in. It expands the scope of the tensions happening through those doors, and through those openings.

LU: You have talked about how other poets have been instrumental to the development of your work. How has being a part of a poetic community like CantoMundo [an organization that supports Latinx poets] been important in shaping your work?

SB: I didn’t feel that I was doing anything real until I had people around me who won’t lie to you. CantoMundo is not a place where everyone goes to perform. Everyone is just trying to shed. So when you go into that space where everyone is shedding something, you are able to have exchanges that make you feel real, and like your most exposed self. Going to CantoMundo and talking with that group for writers was affirming for me. No one said, “go out there and write a book!” It was more like, “go out there and stop lying to yourself!” Everyone asks “what is your relationship to Latinidad?” I got to see a lot of different ways to be Latinx and that was very nurturing, and really empowering, especially because it is cross generational-some poets are older, younger, have no books, have ten books, from all over the place, and that range made me feel more possible.

Now I’m having a conversation with other Latinx poets to see how we can proliferate these resources to use what we gain from these spaces for others. I have been thinking about how, if we use tools of whiteness in the same way, then they will continue to function in the same way. Building community means to uplift our own people wherever we are.

Alternative Remedies for Loss by Joanna Cantor

Social Creature by Tara Isabella Burton

Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa

Open Me by Lisa Locascio

All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

Hippie by Paulo Coelho

America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

Good Trouble by Joseph O’Neill

So Much Life Left Over by Louis de Bernières

A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza

Everything Here Is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee

Transcription by Kate Atkinson

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

The Falconer by Dana Czapnik

A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley

The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling