Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things follows Jessa, a queer woman struggling to keep her family and their taxidermy business together in the aftermath of her father’s suicide. The novel is also about Florida (a place with a presence so big it’s essentially a character), messy relationships, and how we choose to remember people who have left us or died.
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Arnett’s work has appeared in The Normal School, Gulf Coast, Electric Literature, Catapult, The Guardian, and other places.Her debut story collection, Felt in the Jaw, was published by Split Lip Press and was awarded the 2017 Coil Book Award. Arnett is also a columnist for Literary Hub and a librarian.
Kristen Arnett and I discussed all things Florida, writing about the minutiae of queer domestic life, and how the art of taxidermy is like writing.
Deirdre Sugiuchi: I grew up in Mississippi but my partner is from Florida. Now I love Florida, but before I knew it, my impression was just strip malls and theme parks. It also seemed like there was nothing literary going on in Florida until the last ten years. Can you talk about Florida and the emerging Orlando literary scene?
Kristen Arnett: There are these preconceived ideas about how people view Florida but also even the parts of Florida. People think of Miami in a certain way. Panhandle is its own kind of thing. When people who are not from Orlando come to Orlando, there are these embedded ideas like strip malls or theme parks, things that are not necessarily in the day-to-day logistics sometimes for where someone from Florida functions.
Within the past decade or so Orlando specifically has had a group of people who have lived and tried to stay here and bring it up instead of kind of leaving and going to other spaces, taking the creativity and ideas with them. They stayed and tried to grow those things and cultivate it.
And with regard to the literary scene, the local Burrow Press has done a really good job advocating for the literary scene here. They’ve been bringing a lot of readers. They brought in Lauren Groff to magnify what we have, because Lauren is a Florida writer, so it’s like look, this is a big name but it’s also a big name Florida person. And the scene in Orlando has been able to grow more because of Burrow Press and the work that they’ve been able to do, not only with their literary series but also with the kind of books they are trying to put out. Susan Lilley, who was the first poet laureate of Orlando, has her poetry collection coming out from Burrow, and that’s the first poetry collection they’ve ever done.
There’s this idea that there isn’t culture here, that it’s a tacky kind of place that you go to vacation and leave, but there’s a lot here and there’s a lot of people are working really hard toward a bigger idea, a community that wants to support each other, and really radicalize the idea of what culture looks like in Orlando. It’s something I’m really passionate about and that I love to see because I love Orlando. I’m happy to see that other people love it like I do too.
DS: It’s like on one hand you’re driving down what I-75, and you are seeing Bible verses, and anti-abortion this and that, but on the other hand you have this really incredible lush writing scene, and also a queer writing scene.
KA: I also think it’s because it’s work where the queerness just happens to be embedded, which is exciting. I love to read and have the book I’m reading not necessarily be a coming out story. It makes me excited to read work where the people are queer but not necessarily something where we have to sit and unpack it.
DS: Which is what I loved about your book. Jessa’s queer and that’s what it is, just her life, and I love that that’s what you’re loving about other people’s work, because that’s exactly what you did.
The things about queerness that I want to read or write about are the day to day minutiae of going about the world being a queer person.
KA: That’s really good to hear, because that’s something that was really important to me. The things that interest me in queerness that I want to read or write about are just the day to day kind of minutiae of going about the world being a queer person and interacting in a household. Domestic dynamics in a household interest me, the physical acts of queer people. Sex is very important to me, or just like sex being a natural progression they’re not necessarily unpacking all the time, the emotional impact of sex, because sometimes people just like to fuck.
DS: Sometimes (laughs).
KA: That’s something I wanted to see in a queer book, that’s something I wanted to read, that was a thing I wanted to be part of the world I’m creating, and not like something I need to explain to readers. I feel like as a queer reader when I go in and read sometimes, and see something unpacked for me, I wonder who that’s for sometimes. That’s the stuff I want to read, the stuff I’m most interested in, how it happens to just be part and parcel of everyday domestic life and queerness.
DS: Can you talk to me about writing about Florida and how it affects you as a writer?
KA: I wanted to write about place in a way that if you took place out of it, it would not remotely be the same book. I wanted it to be completely incapable of separating the two. I wanted them to be entwined. I consider myself to be a regional writer, like a place writer. It’s very important to me in my work and what I love. I feel like place to me is embedded. The writers I get really excited to read are the writers who do that. One of my favorite books is Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. South Carolina is such a presence in that book.
Florida is such a big presence. It’s creeping constantly into everything that we are doing. It’s in our homes, It’s in our cars. We deal with the weather. You can’t ignore it, it’s part of everything that you are doing. You plan your life and your days around how it is to be and to live here. Writing about Florida to me it felt very natural, pun intended, to have Central Florida be an important character, a main character, to have a place that’s creeping into you all the time.
Florida is very broad and large. Different areas of Florida are wildly different from each other. So me writing about Florida is not the same as someone writing about Miami. There might be some similarities, but culturally it’s going to be different, not just physically. Even the insects or the plant life or what the air feels like pressed against you, those things are all different…
The other thing that’s in this book, and in some essays as well, is that things don’t have a permanence here, which is very odd because there’s also lots of other places you go where there is collective social memory of places that used to be there but here there’s…collective amnesia I keep calling it. Something used to be there and it’s gone and people are like I don’t remember it. There’s a paving over of places and people forget about them like they didn’t exist. Which is very interesting too, a thing I’m constantly trying to unpack. It’s not a thing I feel like happens in other places.
I’m third-generation Floridian and there are times when I ask my grandma about places because she’s lived here and she’ll be like “Oh I don’t remember.” How do you not remember it? Something was here 20 plus years and it’s wiped from your memory. You only remember the new thing that is there now! It’s very bizarre. It’s a very Central Florida thing to me and I’m always very interested in it.
DS: I struggle with that too. I’m seventh generation Mississippi Deltan, from a place where nothing is ever torn down, it just crumbles, and the area where I live now is rapidly gentrifying. I’m always like, “They just tore down that grove of pine trees and put up a strip mall!” and my partner, who grew up in Orlando, will say, “Well, that’s just how things go,” and I’m like “No, that’s just fucked up.” So is that just a writer thing?
KA: Well, there is that thing where we’re trying to preserve a specific kind of memory, which was interesting to write about in the context of taxidermy, because taxidermy is trying to do that same type of thing, preserve a specific memory. It’s what people are trying to do when we’re preserving ideas or memories. Nostalgia functions pretty much in that way. These kind of nostalgic memories of places, people, and important events in our lives. We try to preserve them in a way that is not necessarily true to how they are, because as the creator of those memories we get to have a say in how they get to be preserved.
Taxidermy is about preserving a created memory.
Taxidermy is doing a lot of that same stuff. Taxidermy is like, here’s the thing, but I want it to be fashioned or recreated to how I want to remember. Especially a lot of times with taxidermy, someone hunted the animal, then shot it, so their memory of how they shot it is not necessarily how that thing lived, but they get to have a say in how that thing is remembered, mounting it, and preserving it. They get to say this is my created memory, and that’s something we get to do with writing, and it’s something we definitely get to do with how we remember people. We get to keep the things that we want, or embellish the things that we want, or expand upon the things that we want. Sometimes the things aren’t necessarily accurate because that’s how memory functions. I can’t remember who said it but someone said a memory is only a memory of the last time you told it, which I find very fascinating as a writer.
Specifically in this book every other chapter is a memory. It’s not sequential but the past doesn’t work like that, so we get to bring a sense of sound, a picture, a scene, and it will trigger a memory for us. That’s how we remember things.
DS: I liked seeing how the taxidermy, particularly the mother’s taxidermy, changes throughout the book until it’s something that a taxidermist would think was a blasphemy.
KA: I was thinking about especially with the mother, with Lily’s work, the idea of the breakdown of memory. Let’s reconstruct it and take it apart to pieces, and that’s difficult for Jessa for multiple reasons. She sees taxidermy as a kind of specific art. She also sees it as an infallible, pristine thing that can’t be taken apart. To watch her mother be like “yes, we can take this apart, and reconstruct it in uncomfortable ways,” for Jessa that’s wildly uncomfortable because she’s very much a control freak who only wants to see the thing configured in the exact perfect way that she wants to construct it. To see it be taken apart for the pieces, or that it can be repurposed, is a very terrifying concept to a person who is like that.
DS: Did you have any experience with taxidermy? Or was this all research?
KA: I would say it’s like an amalgam of different things. I definitely had familiarity with being around taxidermy. There’s a ton of it in Florida. I never did any of it, but also because I grew up in a household with very strict gender roles, I never would have been allowed to do like any hunting or taxidermy. But I was always around it so it’s very familiar.
I started writing about it, a surrealistic short story, and it was the first time I wrote a short story that felt bigger than the story. It didn’t feel complete. I was still compelled to think about the characters. It was about a brother and sister and taxidermy and they fucked it up. I was also very interested in the family dynamics.
I also started researching taxidermy. I love researching things and I also love that it was very visceral and hands-on. I bought a million books. I watched a million YouTube videos. I went on a lot of web forums for people who were chatting with each other. I could spend years researching taxidermy and not really have a grasp of all the different kinds and hows and ways of doing taxidermy. A bird isn’t how you taxidermy a fish, which isn’t how you taxidermy a small mammal. Also it’s just different kinds of techniques and styles. It’s detail work.
The more I would read people discussing it, I realized “oh this is like art, this is not just a hobby, this is something they take so seriously, it’s dear to them.” No pun intended. It’s a craft. I’m also interested in domestic roles in the house and what does crafting look like there. Also what is art? What type of art do we allow to be high art vs. low art? What is specifically different kinds of domestic female art vs. what is masculine?
DS: Ialso love when you are discussing queer relationships because the core of the story is betrayal by Brynn, but it’s also super fucking double messy because the person Brynn betrays Jessa with is Jessa’s brother. Can you talk about writing a messy relationship like that?
KA: Relationships are just messy. Emotions are not very clean. We don’t get to choose how we feel. We don’t get to choose who we love. We don’t get to make those decisions, a lot of times they’re uncomfortable or disorienting. I also think it’s just how intimacy functions.
We don’t get to choose how we feel. We don’t get to choose who we love.
I was looking at a lot of queer relationships, and how so many of those can be confusing, specifically if they involve friendship because friendship is so intimate. There’s an intimacy in friendship that borders on the romantic a lot of the time with people. It’s like, “Oh, you’re as close to me as anyone in my life and I would kill someone for you, or bury a body” is like the level of intimacy that’s there. But that becomes even more confusing when the relationship turns romantic, because it’s got this friendship element, and what if it’s a person that’s deeply involved with your family, there comes a way different level of intimacy and those things are very hard to untangle, and can be confusing.
I also think that sometimes too we like things that are messy. Sometimes I think that we like the ecstasy or the sadness or just the completely desperate kind of feeling. I think that’s a draw too, it’s a kind of passion that’s very large and difficult to dislodge. I don’t think all relationships have to be messy but I do think there’s a mess to them. I think we’re human beings, we’re messy, unless you’re just robots in a relationship.
DS: Who are your favorite Florida writers?
KA: Karen Russell is fantastic. I love Lindsey Hunter’s stuff. She lives in Chicago now, but she’s just such a central Florida kind of person. A person who I also love who writes Miami is Jaquira Diaz. Her book (Ordinary Girls) comes out in October. She’s such a gorgeous writer. I can’t wait to read that collection. T Kira Madden just came back down here. She’s from Boca. Her memoir that came out in March, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is such a beautiful kind of Florida book.
DS: A lot of the writers from Florida right now that really interest me are women.
KA: There’s also more queer Florida writers too, which is excellent.
DS: Agreed! Could you talk about that?
I am very specifically a queer writer. It’s part of my writing, the way being from Florida is part of my writing.
KA: Yes, because I’m interested in Florida but I’m also a queer writer. I put that first in my biography and when I introduce myself. I am very specifically a queer writer and my writing is queer. It’s part of my writing, the way being from Florida is part of my writing. It’s interesting to see other writers that do that. T Kira’s book is most certainly a queer book and Jaquira’s book is queer as well, and we’re all writing about different areas of Florida. That kind of queerness in Florida spaces, you’re getting to read place but also queerness in the spaces. That’s exciting because I feel like I haven’t been able to read that. I grew up here and as a young queer person to see myself represented, it makes me excited to think about other young queer people being able to read work and see that, it’s exciting to have work I’ve been longing to read, not just write but read.
DS: Can you talk about working with Tin Houseand what that was like? How did they help you shape this book? How did you decide to work with them?
KA: Well, I love Tin House very much. I got to know them from being at the workshop myself. I don’t have an MFA. I have an MLIS, my Master’s in library. I feel like it was very beneficial for me to go to that workshop for a lot of reasons.
You want a publisher who will work with you the way you need to work, and I knew they would be fine with me doing all of my 7-Eleven verbiage shtick, my humor, that they would be good with that. I also liked the idea that I knew all those people and like all of those people. I love the body of work that they put out. It felt the most right to me. It feels like a little family, a community maybe, and that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for how do I fit in this community space? Is this my community?
Maybe sometimes there’s this idea that you want a publisher that bad and somebody’s ready to take it, but maybe you have misgivings, but you really want your book published if people are willing to overlook some things, but for me, I wanted to feel really good about the people I was working with and what they produced and how they were going to treat my work. I knew I wanted the book to stay very queer and I knew that they would see that vision with me and that was very important to me.
Of the bedtime stories my parents told me, I took the most interest in the ones involving ghosts and spirits. These stories were often used to teach me lessons on how to behave and live; however, instead of malevolent ghosts looking to terrorize people for their misdoings, I was more interested in ghosts who haunted people with the intention of connecting with them. My parents often loosely improvised “scary” stories about ancient ghosts from the Hebrew Bible and old Korean folktales, in which spirits manifested themselves in ways that weren’t always malicious or evil.
These ghost stories had to do with diaspora—characters, living or not living, wandering the earth and navigating the conflicts of displacement. So these ghost-story novels and collections from Southeast Asian writers feel familiar to me: they deal with the same restless spirits and the same sense of displacement. Animism lingers in these selected Southeast Asian stories that center around “hantu,” the Malay word meaning “ghost” or “spirit.” Here are ten books in which ghosts manifest themselves in vampires, virtuous spirits, and more—all set in Southeast Asia and told by the prominent Southeast Asian writers of our time.
Beauty Is a Wound opens with the line: “One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years…” What follows is the story of the ghost of a sex worker who comes from the dead to visit her youngest daughter, told by one of Indonesia’s most celebrated writers. The writing in this epic about a tortured family, history, independence, and romance, with notes of magical realism and satire, has been compared to that of Márquez, Melville, and Gogol. Eka Kurniawan’s first book (of three) released in English and translated by Annie Tucker is a special debut to be celebrated.
Eka Kurniawan’s second English-language release is set in a small coastal Indonesian town, where the lives of two families and a young man, Margio, intertwine. After Margio murders his neighbor, he inherits both the spirit and body of a white female tiger from his grandfather. This translation by Labodalih Sembiring takes us on a journey in which the line between reality and fantasy are blurred and that makes us re-examine the crime genre by considering violence and betrayal in this post-Japanese occupation period novel.
Bangkok and its ghosts are the center of this debut. A cast of characters ranging from an American doctor to a pair of separated Thai sisters roam the aqueous city in multiple, interconnected vignettes from the nineteenth century to the future in Thailand.
A thriller set in Oakland and Las Vegas, Dragonfish follows police officer Robert, formerly married to Vietnamese refugee Suzy, who has mysteriously disappeared. After being blackmailed by her new husband to find her, Robert encounters her ghost, as well as the ghosts of the Fall of Saigon and present-day Las Vegas. Characters’ trust are questioned in this exciting and heartbreaking hard-boiled noir.
Kupersmith’s collection of ghost stories set in the aftermath of the Vietnam War explores the haunted lives of those who stayed and those who left their home country. The Frangipani Hotel in Hanoi is host to a beautiful young woman who shows up in an overflowing bathtub in the opening story in this eerie and modern collection, based on traditional Vietnamese folktales told to Kupersmith by her grandmother.
The debut of Singaporean writer Sharlene Teo centers around four women whose bodies are haunted by puberty, family, and illness. Szu, a lonely teenager, is berated by her cold and beautiful B-list actress mother, whose best known role was as Ponti (or Pontianak, a succubus in Malay folklore) in a 1970s horror film series, and who is now a medium who works from home. Once Szu meets Circe, a privileged classmate who has intentions to learn more about Szu’s mother, Amisa, things take a pivotal turn, as the past, present, and future converge in this story about isolation, horror, and relationships.
A feminist short story collection translated by Stephen J. Epstein, Apple and Knife delves into the lives of Indonesian people, both domestic and abroad. Fiction writer and scholar Intan Paramaditha transforms myths, fairy tales, and stories from the Quran and Bible by creating ominous atmospheres in seemingly normal settings in which supernatural powers interact with the personal and the political.
Malaysian writer Yangsze Choo’s first book uncovers colonial British Malaya and the Chinese afterlife. When the young Li Lan is proposed with a “spirit marriage” to a deceased son by his wealthy family, her nightmares and reality converge. The Ghost Bride is Choo’s fantastical take on a coming-of-age story that is currently being adapted into an original Netflix series.
An apprentice dressmaker by day/secret dancer by night joins forces with a young boy when they find a man’s accidentally severed finger, which becomes the epicenter of a mystery in Choo’s second novel. Also taking place in colonial British Malaya, The Night Tiger invites us into a magical, dark world where this unexpected pair has 49 days to bring the finger to its owner.
Published two years after The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first collection of shorts opens with the story, “Black-Eyed Women” (originally published in Recommended Reading!), in which a ghostwriter is confronted with loss and literal ghosts after taking up a memoir-writing job. Using elements of comedy and tragedy, Nguyen’s stories are scintillating examinations and tales of the displaced in Vietnam and in the U.S.
Bestselling author Jennifer Weiner was calling out biased books coverage before it was cool. (It’s cool now! We made it cool.) In 2010, she took a lot of heat for criticizing the media’s obsession with Jonathan Franzen, saying “I think it’s a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it’s romance, or a beach book—in short, it’s something unworthy of a serious critic’s attention.” She was right—and remains right—that reviews and coverage are slanted towards white men, and that books about women’s lives and concerns tend to be treated as less inherently literary. But at the time, she garnered criticism and caviling, including an accusation of “fake populism” from then-Paris Review editor Lorin Stein.
Nine years later, we have a whole series focused on authors who aren’t men. In Read More Women, presented in collaboration with MCD Books, we feature prominent authors, of any gender, recommending their favorite books by women and non-binary writers. Twice a month, you’ll hear about the five non-male authors who most delight, inspire, and influence your favorite writers. Jennifer Weiner’s picks are a range of recent books, from nonfiction to dystopia, plus one old fave.
Imagine Bridget Jones, only now it’s 25 years later, she’s British-Jamaican, her boyfriend has dumped her, and she’s dealing with online dating, a damaged mother, a bratty cousin, invasive grandparents, and every bad man in the world. The book gives you all the laughs and all the sexy fun of Bridget Jones’s Diary, but has a raw, honest edge when it considers how Queenie’s been impacted by her traumatic childhood. A book for any single lady who needs a reminder that, as RuPaul put it, “if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you going to love somebody else?”
A family of Korean immigrants opens an experimental medical treatment facility that holds out hope to everyone from autistic children to infertile couples. A tragic explosion leaves a mother and child dead. A courtroom showdown reveals that everyone has secrets, from the dutiful wife to the rebellious teenage daughter to the doctor being treated for his own health problems to the saintly mother of a special needs child. A twisty, timely thriller that will keep you guessing until the last page.
Jane and Nick meet in college, fall in love, and move to New York City to pursue their dreams of acting. Jane puts her career on hold and ends up an unhappy housewife, while Nick becomes a movie star, rich and famous beyond his wildest dreams. The story of a marriage, and the story of how our families and our history shape and mold us, and whether anyone can escape his or her past.
Have you ever looked across the room at your therapist and wondered what she was thinking? In this compulsively readable book, Laurie Gottlieb takes you into the therapist’s brain, describing her own post-breakup despair, and her own stint on the other side of the couch, as well as sharing the stories of some of her patients, including a young woman with a cancer diagnosis, a frustrated artist who’s estranged from her children and at the end of her rope, and a type-A Hollywood writer who hates everyone he meets.
In dystopian, not-too-distant America, where abortion, contraception, and fertility treatments are all illegal, four different women struggle with their lives, and the babies they either desperately do or desperately do not want. A terrifying and timely look at what happens when women lose agency over their own bodies.
An alternate tale of Cinderella has haunted me since childhood. A picture book in rich pastels, it told the story of a poor servant girl with a nasty step-family, named Yeh-Shen, who lived “In the dim past, even before the Ch’in and the Han dynasties” in China. This folklore can be traced back in writing to the T’ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), and shares remarkable similarities with that of Cinderella—she goes to a ball, loses a slipper, and is found by a prince by virtue of her small feet. But the oldest European version of Cinderella dates back only to 1634. “Cinderella seems to have made her way to Europe from Asia,” reads a note on the dedication page to Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story From China. The book was written by Ai-Ling Louie and illustrated by Ed Young, and it was first published by Philomel Books, a division of Putnam, in 1982.
Like the legend of Yeh-Shen, Ai-Ling Louie’s career has lived in the shadows of children’s book publishing. As an Asian American author who came of age during the ‘60s, her trials and tribulations are a sharp contrast to the creative careers of many Asian American artists working today. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College (where she and Vera Wang were the only Chinese Americans in their class of ’71), and Wheelock College, Louie aimed to write children’s books about successful, modern-day Asian Americans, but no publishers were interested. Louie switched gears to publish the legend of Yeh-Shen, but remained determined to see her passion project through. Between 2012 and 2018, she ultimately self-published the series under her own Dragoneagle Press. It includes biographies on Vera Wang, Yo-Yo Ma and his sister Yeoh-Cheng Ma, astronaut Kalpana Chawla, and most recently, U.S. Congresswoman Patsy Mink.
When Electric Literature asked Twitter followers to share the first book they’d read by an Asian American author during APA heritage month, I realized my answer was Louie’s Yeh-Shen. I then was thrilled to discover her more recent biographies for children—books I wish I’d had growing up. I talked to Louie about her struggle to put the series into the world, why she felt it was valuable, and what it was like to be an Asian American author during her time.
Cathy Erway: Were there many other Asian Americans in your school environment? And did this have an effect on you or your work?
Ai-Ling Louie: I’d like to start a little farther back than college and show how immigration laws affect the lives of real people. I was one of the few Chinese American children born in the U.S. in the 1940’s. Immigration laws discriminated against us, keeping immigration from China to 150 persons a year, while those from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany numbered over 104,000.
In 1954 when I was a kindergartener in a public school on Long Island in New York, I, alone, integrated my school as the only non-white in the entire building. The name-calling and insulting gestures and shunning I received were a shock to me. It was a good thing I came from a strong family, who told me I was to hold my head up and to use my wits to find a way around any obstacle.
Even if we celebrate the few who make it, we must not forget the many whose lives are stunted or whose minds are embittered by their treatment.
When discriminatory immigration laws are written and prejudice against one race or another is acceptable, I find there are many who suffer and only a few lucky ones who find a way to thrive. Even if we celebrate the few who make it, we must not forget the many whose lives are stunted or whose minds are embittered by their treatment.
I saw all around me the perception that Chinese girls are pretty and docile and Chinese boys are weak and unassertive. It warped my generation, and I still see these stereotypes around me. My family and I talk about them all the time. We see how it has negatively affected many of our Chinese American cousins, nieces and nephews. I set out to try to change these perceptions.
CE: What made you decide to share the story of Yeh-Shen as an illustrated book for children?
ALL: I wanted to write stories about Asians in America, but the ones I submitted to publishers were not being accepted. I decided to try to break in to publishing with a folk tale that my grandmother knew, Yeh-Shen. Sure enough, it was quickly accepted. I thought I could write my Asian-American stories after “Yeh-Shen” was published.
CE: How did you publish your series of Asian American biographies for children?
ALL: I spent many frustrating years trying to get a second book published. Finally, I realized I was going to have to find a way around this obstacle. I started my own publishing company, Dragoneagle Press, in 2007. My brother, Jonathan Louie, a graphic designer, is my partner. Children and teachers were clamoring for biographies of Asian Americans. May was designated as Asian American History Month. Libraries needed attractive books for their May displays. I decided to write a series, “Amazing Asian Americans.” It was my hope that someday the big publishers would pick up my series and distribute it across America.
CE: How do you decide on the subjects for these biographies? And are you working on any new additions to the series now?
ALL: When I got to Sarah Lawrence College, Vera Wang and I were the only Chinese-Americans in our class. She was the best-dressed, affluent daughter from one of the top private schools. I was the girl on scholarship, who had needed tutoring in French class. After graduation, I watched her career rise and rise and rise.
I spent many frustrating years trying to get a second book published. Finally, I realized I was going to have to find a way around this obstacle.
When I was a librarian in New Jersey in the 2000’s, I saw that the state had a large population of South Asian Americans, mostly from India. I learned that South Asian Americans were the U.S.’s latest and largest Asian immigrant group come to the United States. There wasn’t a single biography of a South Asian American on the children’s bookshelf. I knew there was a U.S. astronaut, who was originally from India, Kalpana Chawla. So, I set out to write a book about her.
Patsy Mink was the first congresswoman of color and the co-author of an important law, Title IX, which changed education and women’s lives in a big way. Yet Americans didn’t seem to know who she was, or why she was important. I found out her papers, 2,000 boxes of them, were stored at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and open to the public. I spent three summers at the Library, doing research, a job I find exciting.
I am not working on any new books for the series. I am happy that I accomplished what I set out to do.
CE: Why did you feel that this series was an important addition to children’s books?
ALL: After 1965, I saw the next generation of Chinese Americans come to the U.S. The new Hart-Cellar Law let more Asian Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, come to this country and to bring in their families, their sisters and brothers, to reunite families. There were more young students of color in public school classes. As an elementary school teacher and then a children’s librarian, I was getting to see children from China, India, Brazil and Egypt, all in the same school. There were many students who looked like me but came from Vietnam, Korea or the Philippines. And so, I began to see myself as an Asian American rather than just a Chinese American. These Asian American children needed books in their libraries that showed children like them. They needed to see a future for themselves as American citizens, capable of contributing to the country. Indeed, all Americans needed to see Asian Americans and other non-whites as full Americans. American publishers were slow to see this and change. The few books they were publishing were full of stereotypes. I knew I could do better.
There are more than 25 million refugees in the world—people who have fled their countries to escape religious persecution, war, violence, and other dangers so intense it’s worth giving up your home and often your family to get away. While there are a number of ways for people in stable countries to support the displaced—donating to refugee organizations, supporting politicians who welcome asylum-seekers—it’s also vital to develop understanding of and empathy towards people who are in an impossibly dire situation. For World Refugee Day, here are ten books that delve into the experiences of people displaced from home countries across the world.
In Crossing, Bujar and his friend-cum-lover Agim flee Communist Albania in a small boat across the Adriatic Sea to Italy in hopes of a better life. Finding xenophobia and hostility in Europe, Bujar hides his Albanian origins and invents a new self in every city he moves to. Author Pajtim Statovci fled Kosovo for Finland at 2-years-old during the Yugoslav Wars.
Dina Nayeri was 9-years-old when her family have to leave Iran because of religious persecution, eventually settling in Oklahoma after a couple of years in Dubai and Rome. In her memoir, Nayeri draws from her childhood and from the accounts of asylum seekers she meets in Greek refugee camps to explore what it means to be a refugee.
The Far Away Brothers recounts the true story of a pair of identical twins, Ernesto and Raúl Flores (as they’re known in the book). Facing violent threats from the MS-13 gang, the siblings flee El Salvador and cross the US-Mexico border with coyotes before finally reuniting with their brother in the Bay Area. Markham met the Flores brothers while working as a program coordinator at Oakland International High School and spent 11 years following them.
A little known fact is that Dadaab in Kenya was the world’s largest refugee camp for decades until 2017 when violence and ethnic cleansing forced almost 625,000 Rohingya refugees to flee Myanmar for neighboring Bangladesh. City of Thorns follows the lives of nine displaced people (and their families) in Dadaab refugee camp located near the Somalian border. The refugees live in FEMA-style tents and are not allowed to work or leave the camp (unless they voluntarily return to their home country). They spend their time (months, years, decades) waiting and fantasizing for resettlement when their “real lives” will finally start. There’s a word the residents of Dadaab invented for that longing for resettlement: buufis. City of Thorns is a heartbreaking glimpse into the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the refugees that the world has forgotten about.
In 2013, Iranian-Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani fled Iran after the office of Werya, the Kurdish magazine he worked for, was raided by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He made his way to Indonesia and attempted to reach Australia by sea. His boat was intercepted by the Australian Navy and he (and the other 60 asylum seekers) were detained on Christmas Island before being moved to a detention centre on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. The Australian government had implemented a zero tolerance policy against “illegal boat arrivals” and forced refugees into mandatory detention in offshore detention facilities. As of 2019, he is still detained on Manus Island. Written entirely on Whatsapp, Boochani’s memoir is a searing and heartbreaking account of Australia’s cruel and inhumane immigration policies.
Lauren Hilgers met Zhuang Liehong, an activist leader in Guangdong province, while she was a political reporter stationed in Shanghai. Several years later, they reconnected when Zhuang and his wife sought asylum in the U.S. Hilgers chronicled both Zhuang’s experience as a political dissident and the couple’s attempts to establish themselves in Flushing, Queens—navigating language barriers, supporting themselves, applying for asylum, and attempting to reunite with the child they left behind. The result is a deeply-reported portrait of a man, a family, a neighborhood, and America’s byzantine asylum-seeking process.
In the aftermath of the Sri Lankan Civil War, the cargo ship MV Sun Sea was intercepted by the Canadian navy near Vancouver. Onboard were about 500 Tamil asylum-seekers fleeing Sri Lanka–two of them a father, Mahindan, and his six-year-old son. Their hope for starting a new life is questioned when they, along with the other Sri Lankans, are thrown into a detention center for suspicion of involvement with the Tamil Tigers. In Sharon Bala’s debut novel, the Canadian government’s equivocations on refugees are exposed through the accounts of Mahindan, his lawyer, and an adjudicator with a substantial amount of power over Mahindan’s fate.
The past and future clash for one family after the fall of Saigon in Thi Bui’s debut graphic memoir. With striking visuals, Bui recounts her family’s journey from South Vietnam to a Malaysian refugee camp and finally the Bay Area. The sacrifices she must make as an immigrant and new mother are uncovered in this family tale that questions what makes a family, especially in times of crisis.
Edited by Pulitzer Prize–winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Displaced features essays about exile and dislocation by 17 refugee writers from around the world. 10% of the book’s cover price is donated to the International Rescue Committee.
In 1994, 6-year-old Clemantine Wamariya and her older sister Claire fled Rwanda and made their way through 7 countries, hoping to find refuge and reunite with their family. The Girl Who Smiled Beads isa powerful memoir about surviving the Rwandan genocide.
Dear Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Media Disruption,
On the first day of our concern, I was in Principal Shurmur’s office. My twin sister, Annette, who is disabled, was in her wheelchair beside my regular chair. Principal Shurmur was across from us, at his desk.
Principal Shurmur: “I want to know what, exactly, you meant to express with your little stunt.”
Me (technically Charlene Babineaux, but please refer to me as Charlie): “We.”
At that, Annette gave me a look. It was one of her bad days, where she couldn’t quite turn her head, so I had to feel the look telepathically. And I did.
“We?” he asked, his eyebrow arching.
“We did it together,” I said. I am not a good liar, which may be useful for your admissions committee to know, though I will do it in the service of societal progress. So I looked at the other office chair, instead of Principal Shurmur’s face. He had clumsily dragged it out of the way, apologizing a lot, when Annette didn’t have the space to roll inside. “Annette and I.”
I could feel him looking at me. “The security footage clearly shows one person on the roof and—” here he paused, blushed. “The person climbed. Up the fire ladder.”
In moments like this, I wished Annette would be angrier. But she was not. She never is. I feel, sometimes, that I have to be double-angry, angry for both of us. This was one of those times.
“So?” I said.
He seemed to decide to abandon this point—the climbing point. Instead he picked up my write-up slip, and read: “‘Student poured a tub of blood into the air conditioning duct.’”
This was your applicant’s first attempt at Media Disruption for this essay. I told Shurmur I obtained a tub of porcine blood via the dumpster behind the Whole Foods, but the truth was that I had only made imitation blood: corn syrup and food coloring. I subsequently decanted the blood in the duct above the AV room while Kyle Lafferty and Marissa McBride—who had failed to stifle a laugh the week prior while reading my suggestion for the Winter Formal theme (Climate Apocalypse)—were filming the morning announcements, therefore disrupting media.
“Well,” I said. “If it was one of us, how do you know it was me? Not her?”
Principal Shurmur looked at me queerly.
“We’re twins,” I said, pointing to Annette. “Identical.”
Consequently, I became suspended. Annette, who does not like the identicaljoke, didn’t speak to me when she got home from school, unsuspended, or later that night.
You are probably thinking, Wow. That is a bit extreme, Charlie. But please let me explain some things about my actions and my suitability for your program.
First: Westlake High School serves approximately thirty-five dismembered bovines and porcines per day for lunch (according to calculations made by Annette and C. Babineaux), despite the pamphlet sent to the PTA by your applicant’s mother about the contribution of meat-eating to global warming;
Second: Westlake, Ohio is, in my opinion, the most boring and least disruptive place in America;
Third: Media Disruption occurs only when “people of vision deliberately break, pervert, and offend the content consumers and barriers to entry” (Bezos, Jeff; TED Talk). The barriers to entry, in this case, being literal, since the AV room is not wheelchair accessible.
Media Disruption occurs only when ‘people of vision deliberately break, pervert, and offend the content consumers and barriers to entry.‘
Thus, I accepted Annette’s anger and my punishment. I accepted my mom crying in the van on the way home, even though it made me feel bad, because I saw the greater goal (more on this later).
Even as this episode concluded—Mom ceasing crying, the school paper writing a small article about what happened (attached here for your reference)—I knew it was not disruptive enough to gain admission into such a prestigious and discriminating program.
That night I went into Annette’s room and tried to induce her forgiveness.
She was painting. She is right-handed, but in recent years her right hand has become somewhat claw-like, as it suffers from intention tremor.But the left one is okay. She paints with this hand, her non-dominant hand, for hours at a time, longer than I do anything, even though it hurts her arms and spine and neck, even though she is often soaked with sweat when she’s done. I used to watch her, but recently I have stopped. When I used to watch, every time she dropped a brush I would rush to pick it up, resulting in me feeling sorry for her (which she hates) and her yelling at me to just leave them on the ground! So now she has like a hundred brushes in a jar on the easel, and the carpet in that corner of her room is covered in a floral sheet, spotted all over by triangular brush printings.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Move,” Annette said, because I was standing in front of the window. Her painting was of the van. Mom’s pea-soup-colored Dodge Caravan. Souped-up, Mom says, cringily, of her van. Both because of the color and because of the stuff she has added, like Annette’s wheelchair ramp and hand controls on the steering wheel so she can drive on days when I am morally objecting to the consumption of fossil fuels. For three months Annette had been doing paintings of the van. They were stacked in a corner of her room like old pizza boxes. Every time she painted the van it looked exactly the same, and every time she insisted it was different.
Annette peered out the window at the green-black Westlake nighttime. She then turned back to the painting, her hand rocking back and forth like a wooden chair with rounded feet, and finally poked the canvas with her brush.
I squinted at her painting. If the brush-poke had changed it at all, I couldn’t tell. But Annette fell back in her chair, her body relaxing, and looked satisfied.
I took her posture as an invitation to speak.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, a little less nicely. I added: “It would have been really cool if it worked.”
(The fake-pig-blood disruption hadn’t quite gone according to plan. I’d figured that the blood would flow through the duct like a downhill mountain stream, thereby spilling out of the vent and onto the desk/heads of the morning announcement anchors, Kyle Lafferty and Marissa McBride (see above). However, when I had last been in the AV Room—delivering my wheelchair ramp schematics—I had failed to see that the vent was relatively non-sloped, so the blood just sort of pooled, for several hours, and then stank, plus bugs.)
“Cool,” Annette said. “Cool how?”
I ignored this. As the Latin proverb says (translation via Magistra Hughes), There’s no accounting for taste.
“Do you hearme?” I, now irritated, said somewhat snippily. “I’m trying to apologize.”
She snorted. “This is you apologizing? Like everything else you do, Charlie, you certainly make it complicated.”
“I know you don’t like the identical joke. I shouldn’t have said that. And I know you have this weird friendship with Principal Shurmur—”
“Just write a normal college essay, Charlie. Christ.” She aimed one more stab at the painting, but, perhaps because I was still there, thought better of it, and put the brush down. “Everybody else writes essays without getting expelled. There must be some other way to tell MIT that you must be the center of attention at all times. Think of something else to write. Or there’s always self-immolation.”
I didn’t (yet) know what self-immolation was, but I’d understood her tone. That had been enough to let it slip out.
“Easy for you to say.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Coward,” she said. “You were going to say—what? If only you had a disability to write about? If only you had a hardship? Was that it?”
I know how bad this exchange must look. However, I hope that the committee would understand, as briefly referenced above, that certain actions have been taken by your applicant which may appear selfish or cruel but actually are in service of the greater good. In Mrs. Mullaney’s class we learned about utilitarian ethics, which is when right and wrong are determined by outcomes. If a seemingly bad small action causes a bigger good result, it is ethical. Like: if the guy who invented Ziplocs had a dungeon torture chamber that was very expensive to run, and you mobilized your followers to destroy the Ziploc factory, so the CEO of Ziploc no longer had any money to torture, that’s an ethically right action. Even with the breaking-in and burning. This is just one example.
What I’m trying to say is: yes, that was what I was going to say. I had nearly blurted out the cruelest thing I could have said; and yes, Annette saw straight through me.
I kicked over her painting of the van. It fell with a flat thump to the carpet. Mom has made me scrub the stain in Annette’s carpet three times hence, but there is still a ghost of the van.
“What about me?” she yelled, as I stormed out. “Aren’t I your great big hardship?”
You should know that Annette has been in her chair her whole life. She can stand, sometimes, if she has something to brace herself against; she can walk, too, with a walker, though she hardly ever does anymore. All of it—the chair, the physical therapy, the day-separated plastic containers of pills—it is something she is used to. She is used to old ladies practically bursting into tears when she rolls by. She is used to the way people at movie theaters or hotel desks or Mom’s Christmas party lean in and speak at her in slow, loud, enunciating voices, smiling so hard that their faces are painful to look at. She is used to people saying she is brave, when they really mean that they are sorry that this happened to her, which really means they are glad it didn’t happen to them.
She is used to all of it. She has jokes.
THEM: You are so brave!
ANNETTE: Brave?! I peed my pants when I saw The Shining! Matter of fact— *here she makes expression of concentration*—I’m peeing my pants right now!
THEM: My cousin/aunt/neighbor’s stepson has cerebral palsy, too.
ANNETTE: Of course! I saw him at last year’s convention!
THEM: You are truly an inspiration, young lady.
ANNETTE: *twists face and makes Chewbacca sound*
The jokes are a “defense mechanism,” (Mom—Nicole Babineaux, 41; nurse; nice, tired) but that phrase, in my opinion, is sort of misleading. It makes me think of animals, how small things evolve to survive. Annette’s jokes aren’t like that, like a porcupine’s spines or a skunk’s excretions, because the jokes aren’t natural, and they aren’t easy for her to make. I know this not because I am her twin, but because our bedrooms share a wall, and for years I could hear her practicing the jokes as she got dressed. Over and over, for hours, until she got the tone just right.
Annette’s jokes aren’t like that, like a porcupine’s spines or a skunk’s excretions, because the jokes aren’t natural, and they aren’t easy for her to make.
Not applying to college: that is a defense mechanism, too. Of course she would get in. She would get in to places whose SAT ranges are so high they’d give me nosebleeds.
But how could she go? Would Mom quit her job, get some crappy wall-to-wall carpeted apartment nearby, in case Annette’s health suddenly went bad? Would she get a service dog again, like she had for ages 8-11, constant sneezing and runny noses of her allergies be damned? Could she be the girl in the wheelchair without us? Without me?
There was community college, of course, or Shawnee State. If she went there she could live at home. But the only time I saw Dad mention either of these options Annette closed her face up like a fist and left the room. I understand it, even if Mom and Dad don’t: those places, they are consolation prizes. They are so much less than she deserves, so far below what she has earned. She’d rather just blow the whole thing up.
So she didn’t apply at all. All those years of Student Government. All that SAT tutoring—all for nothing. The applications Mom had printed went from a pile on the kitchen table to a pile in Mom’s office to, presumably, the recycling bin.
And then, like everything else, she made it a joke. Annette University. When Mom pointed out her grades are slipping, she said, they don’t mind over at Annette University! When Mom was frowning her way through my philosophy capstone (Diamond Handcuffs: The Delusion of Monogamy by Charlie Babineaux), Annette, grinning, said, dumb and slutty—perfect for AU! Free morning after pills at the student union!
Because that is how she deals with things: she laughs, and then later she goes quietly into her room alone and forces herself to get over them. I will be honest and say that although sometimes I wish I was in her room with her, most times I am glad I am not. Either way the sight of her closed door makes me feel lonely, in a way that is hard to explain. It’s like: I feel lonely for Annette, that she needs to close everyone off, but I also feel lonely for me.
I know that is selfish to admit. She is the one with the disability—I am able-bodied and healthy. But there was a time that I can almost remember, when we were babies, before we were old enough to understand why her little baby-fists didn’t unfurl like mine, or why the left side of her face looked sort of blurry, or why she couldn’t wink—when we were still the same. Still twins, still connected.
Ergo: the reason I am explaining all of this is that several weeks after my suspension, something happened that Annette couldn’t get over, couldn’t laugh off.
Here’s what I know. She had a meeting scheduled with Principal Shurmur. In the meeting, they were going to talk about the Winter Formal. (Annette is student body Vice President. The current student body President, Heinrich Beasmore, is in Colombia on a very snooty service trip. Thus, Annette is in charge of Winter Formal planning.) She went to said meeting after school on Thursday, and then proceeded to fail to pick me up from Ultimate practice at Barrett Field. I stood at the gazebo getting chomped by mosquitoes until it got dark. I had to walk home. My phone told me the walk was 3.4 miles. By the time I got home, to use a Dad phrase (Peter Babineaux, 42; husky but not fat; funny; away on business), I was royally pissed.
But when I got there, I saw the van in the driveway. The ramp door was open, so all the lights in the van were on, but no one was inside.
I hurried into the house. It was dark. I walked through the kitchen (empty) and the mudroom (no sign of Annette’s coat), and went upstairs, turning lights on as I went. I had that scary-movie sensation, when your guts feel like they’ve been double-knotted.
Annette’s bedroom door was open. I flicked on the lights. The window was open: the breeze and the night-sound of traffic on I-83 pushed inside. And there was Annette’s chair, empty, between the window and the stack of old paintings.
I went to the window and carefully climbed out. There is a narrow stretch of shingles outside the sill, a foot, maybe, wedged there between the sill and the gutter. When we were younger, and we fought less, we would come out here at night; I’d help Annette onto the ledge, and then she’d press forward onto her hands and knees and sort of army crawl up the slope of the roof, into a sitting position. We’d sit and smoke the cigarettes that Mom hides in her sock drawer, talking about nothing, only crawling back inside when dawn started showing, working on the black line of the horizon like an eraser. But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been out on the roof. And even then, with my help, it had been dangerous trying to get Annette out there. Thinking about how hard it must have been for her to climb out on her own, how close she might have come to tumbling over the edge—all of a sudden I felt seventeen years’ worth of guilt for every time I hadn’t been there, every time I’d acted like I had the night before.
She was there, halfway up the roof, where the incline of the roof-shingles makes an armpit with the window-shingles. She saw me coming and wiped her face. Her cheeks were shining in the dim orange of the streetlight. She’d been crying.
You have to understand something. Annette and I have different fingerprints. I bet you’re surprised. Our whole lives, in a way, are about division. Divergence is maybe an even better word. We were one egg in the womb, and then, poof, there were two eggs, two of us. From that moment we were on separate paths. The different parts of Mom’s womb that we touched changed our fingerprints. I came out first, eleven minutes before Annette, and by the time she did, the air in the room was different. The temperature, the smell. The chemicals in my mother’s body, after delivering a baby. Only eleven minutes later, but everything was different. And so it has been, on and on and on.
Annette’s life, the doctors explained to Mom, who later explained to us—it would be hard to predict. They told Mom that Annette might die before she ever left the hospital, but she didn’t. That she might die before she turned five, but she didn’t.
One doctor, I remember, used the phrase 50-50 shot. I never got it out of my mind. Fifty-fifty. What he’d meant was that it was a coin flip, whether Annette would survive another year—but what I heard was: Two equal parts. Two halves of a whole. Me and Annette. She could have been me. I could have been her.
And always, every year, when we sit there blowing out two cakes, Mom doing a bad job hiding her crying, I have this tiny, awful thought: what if we weren’t meant to be two people at all, but one? We were once a single zygote. What if the split wasn’t 50/50 at all? What if things haven’t been equal from the very beginning?
Two equal parts. Two halves of a whole. Me and Annette. She could have been me. I could have been her.
That’s what I think, in that moment while the candles are flickering, everybody is holding their breath so they don’t accidentally snuff them out. And some part of me knows: it isn’t equal . It never has been. Of course not.
She was up on the roof, and she wiped roughly at her face where the tears had left streaks. All around us, peepers and crickets yammering. Me half-hanging out the window, feeling like, utilitarianism aside, I would have dumped myself straight out onto the front lawn if it would have gotten her to stop crying. But I didn’t say that. We don’t say things like that to each other. Not anymore.
Instead, Annette sniffed. She nodded, as if answering something I’d forgotten I’d asked. And she said, “You figure out a new plan for your essay yet?”
We climbed back into her room (Annette allowing me to help her) and started brainstorming.
Something had changed after her meeting with Principal Shurmur. She wasn’t pushing me away, or hurrying me out of her room. Now she wanted to help.
With no explanation, she started telling me what Shurmur had discussed with her, the plans for the Winter Formal. She unrolled, on her desk, a big blueprint-y drawing of the layout of the dance. I am sure I don’t need to tell you this was top secret stuff.
The Winter Formal, she explained, was to be Winter Wonderland themed. (Please see earlier, where I explained Westlake’s staggering boringness.) There would be little glittery snowflakes dangling from the gymatorium ceiling on glittery strings; there would be several frosted plastic Christmas trees on the stage; there would be papier-mâché penguins as centerpieces on all the white-table clothed tables. And so on and so forth.
She also explained that there would be a big presentation at the beginning of the dance. Shurmur was going to make remarks, sort of a toast, give an award—Annette seemed vague on the details. But—“that,” she said, “that’s where you come in. When everyone is stopped. Watching and listening. That’s your moment.”
Instantly, disruption ideas appeared in my mind: We hire a locksmith and lock everybody inside the gym. We drive a car to the gym and park it on stage. We rearrange the marquee letters above the stage—WESTLAKE HIGH SCHOOL into: WE HATE SCHOOL. WEAK HIGH SCHOOL. Or STALE TALK SHOW. COOL LAKE WHIGS. We fill the penguin centerpieces with blood—
“Jesus, Charlie,” Annette said. “Why is it always blood! No blood!”
It wasn’t all blood, I told her. But she was right. I had done the blood thing before, and I don’t need to explain that to you, admissions committee, about the daunt of your 11% acceptance rate. I felt itchy and frustrated, sitting on the floor of Annette’s room, worrying that I had a great opportunity but not the creativity to seize it. I thought of self-immolation again—but, no. No use getting in to MIT if I was dead.
Something else was bugging me, too. Annette.
“Was it this meeting?” I asked. I tried to stare at the floor, but I had to look at her. “What was it? That made you so upset?”
But she just looked away.
“Anal fissures,” she said. “Now go. Go plan your stupid thing.”
Here I will fast-forward past a few weeks that are not super-relevant to our story. Things that happened:
Dad came home and the three of us went to a Browns game. On way home after game:
Dad: “There is no better argument for nihilism than the Cleveland Browns.”
Annette: *laughed*
Me: Looked up nihilism on my phone.
At Thanksgiving, relatively good time had by all, except when Mom overcooked turkey, proclaimed it petrified. Hard to disagree. Dad went back on road next day.
Crazy Jeff Garbo at school was rumored to have shoved sharpened pencil into eye of Trevin Lutz. Lutz indeed seen with eyepatch. Garbo, however, was neither expelled nor in jail; day after rumor, he was spotted at school; it was soon revealed that Lutz had a contact-lens related infection. Disappointment.
I finished four college applications: DePaul, Ohio State, University of Pittsburgh, Loyola Chicago. (Since these were listed on p. 4, I assume it will not hurt my admissions chances to mention them. They are just safeties.)
Me and Mom at dinner table one night working on Common App essay.
Annette (at open door of pantry): “We’re out of Puffins.”
Mom (not looking up from essay draft): “Well. The keys are right there and there’s gas in the van.”
Annette: “I don’t want to go to the store.”
Mom: “Annette, shh. We’re trying to work here.”
Annette: “I just don’t understand why we don’t have them if I put them on the grocery list.”
Mom: (put down red pen, crossed arms)
Annette: “I’m just saying.”
Mom: “Annette Marie. You are an adult woman, perfectly capable of buying groceries for yourself. And I am not your maid. You better fix your attitude—“
Annette: (slammed pantry door) “Fuck this.”
Mom: (stood up so fast her chair tipped over) “Go to your room! Right now!”
Annette: (did not go to room; picked up keys) (*in fake-nice singy voice*): “Anybody need anything from the store? I need to go so I don’t disturb Charlie’s college applications! Because I’m an adult woman who better learn self-sufficiency! But Charlie needs Mommy to check all her commas and periods! Oh well! Once Charlie is off getting a 1.5 GPA in her American Studies degree at Buttfuck State College at least I’ll have had lots of practice going to the HyVee!”
Annette: (went out kitchen door, slammed it, started van, drove away)
Mom: (crying, stood up, went upstairs, closed bedroom door quietly)
With two days left before the Winter Formal, I was starting to freak out. The bolt of inspiration I awaited had not yet electrified. Every night after school I scoured the blueprint Annette had given me, and I googled best senior pranks and media disruption and cool ways to make anarchist statement + high school + not technically illegal, but I kept finding the same stuff. Toilet-paperings, car/parking lot stuff, prank phone calls to the principal. Etc. I knew I would come up with something better eventually, but I was running out of time.
I hope that the committee will consider this next part with the following qualifications in mind:
I did not actually 100% go through with it (more on this below).
I conducted plenteous internet research and two controlled backyard experiments.
I am willing to bet no one else in your application pile showed this kind of commitment.
If you recall, earlier in this story Annette made a snarky half-joke about “self-immolation,” which means to “set fire to oneself, especially as a form of protest or sacrifice” (Google). After I looked it up that night, the idea kept bugging me, poking at my mind for weeks like a stone in my shoe.
Although I couldn’t really watch the videos of the Buddhist monks self-immolating in the 1960s without crying, I thought that was also a pretty strong indicator of how powerful the spectacle was. I did not want to actually burn myself—I hope that is obvious—nor did I want to be seen as “culturally appropriating” something so serious, so I found what I thought was a good middle-ground:
I would steal the Westlake High School mascot suit (the Proud Bear);
I would set up a Kiddie Pool full of water on the wings of the Winter Formal Stage;
I would douse the mascot suit—with myself inside it, carefully ensconced in Dad’s flame-retardant onesie (from his yearly trip with “college buddies” to “NASCAR camp”)—in lighter fluid;
I would set the suit on fire, run across the stage blazing and screaming something impactful (Impactful Statement TBD) and dive into the Kiddie Pool.
Westlake High School’s janitor, a 74-year-old man named Dexter Higgins, has been an unwitting accomplice to all my disruptions. Dexter is very nice. He has one eye that long-ago detached from its roots and thus points down and to the right, at nothing. He is good at his job in the sense that the school is pretty clean and the trash cans are usually emptied on time, but he is bad at his job in the sense that he has not remembered to lock the big industrial delivery door for—this is a guess—twenty years.
I couldn’t take the van—the Souped-Up Van is well known around Westlake—so I started the long walk to the school at midnight and got there at quarter to one. I went in through the auto shop door, ignoring the cameras (which are all fake/turned off), and made my preparations. I stole the mascot suit from Coach Gerrity’s office. I went into the gymatorium and inflated the Kiddie Pool, dragged it to the wings of the stage, filled it with water and covered it with a sheet from the school’s production of Sweeney Todd. I had also brought a small bath of my fake blood, just in case, so I tucked my industrial bucket beneath the tablecloth skirt of table number six.
But then I heard something behind me. I stood up too quickly, cracked my head on the table, and whirled around.
It was Annette. She was between tables seven and eight. On her lap, the bear’s head, which I had apparently dropped while dizzily pumping up the Kiddie Pool with my breath. The bear’s head looked spooky, there in her hands, its big meshy eyes black and empty.
“You followed me?” I said.
She didn’t answer. She scratched the bear’s fluffy ear.
“The pig blood thing,” she said. “You stole that from Carrie.”
I thought about this. It occurred to me that it was possible that Carrie, a Stephen King book-cum-movie which, without spoiling too much, involves a girl having pig’s blood dumped on her at a dance, had subconsciously influenced some aspects of my disruption.
“You shouldn’t do this,” Annette said. “You don’t even have a reason.”
This annoyed me. “You’re the one who suddenly wanted to help me.” Except, there, in that moment, I couldn’t remember exactly how she’d helped at all. What inside information had she even given me? Who cared that the theme was Winter Wonderland. But she had encouraged me, hadn’t she? She wanted me to do something.
But before I could ask, she said, “I know. I know that I told you about it. I know that I helped. I just wanted… I can’t explain it now. But I changed my mind. You can’t do it. You might get expelled.”
I snorted. The sound echoed weirdly in the empty gym. “I won’t get expelled.”
“You really might,” she said. “You’ve already been suspended three times.” (NB: the other two are addressed in Supplemental Essay #1: Miscellaneous Disciplinary Concerns.)
“What do you care?” I said. “You probably want me to get expelled. That way I can’t go to college. So I have stay home with you.”
Annette looked at me for a long time. Like I said, I was upset. I was confused. I felt guilty. I had accidentally scorched a toenail during a controlled backyard experiment that afternoon and my foot was throbbing so bad it was like it was trying to tell me something. I was surprised Annette had followed me there—she doesn’t like to do rule-breaking things. And as I looked at her, looking at me, feeling the whole swirl of confusing feelings… for one of the first times in our life I had no idea what she was thinking. We share 99.6% of the exact same genetic material and yet we are very different people.
“You can be a real idiot sometimes, Charlie,” she said. She put the bear’s head on the ground. And then she rolled out of the gym, and I heard the van start up, and for the second time in a month, I walked home in the dark.
Winter Formal day. I got up and felt pukey. Mom had already taken Annette to school for the Student Government meeting at six, so when she came back to give me the van and then carpool with Bev to the hospital, she was too tired and too focused on work to notice I was acting strange. She just gave me the keys and kissed me on the head and left.
I drove to school in silence. No Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, nothing. In the back seat, I had my black duffel, stuffed with the necessary implements for all my potential disruptions: Dad’s jug of Kingsford Lighter Fluid; Dad’s floppy flame-suit; three Bic lighters; band-aids and Neosporin and aspirin; and the tattered friendship bracelet Annette had made me during our first year at sleepaway camp.
The school day passed without incident. No one was talking about pranks, or if they were, no one suspected me. Is it silly to say I was a bit disappointed? I do not, as Annette has sometimes suggested, do everything for the attention—I do things for the societal benefit. But the attention is a not-bad byproduct.
In sixth period, I asked Mr. Holster for a pass and he signed one, yawning. I went to my locker and got the duffel (my locker reeking like a grill). I went to the girl’s locker room, waited for Sadie Jorgenson and Ashley Wu to finish re-straightening their hair, and then changed into the mascot suit. I slipped into the gymatorium—decorated and dark—and ducked underneath table six, where I found my blood bucket, undisturbed from the night before.
The dark, quiet space underneath the table felt like the inside of the igloos I would make for Annette and I when we were kids. I had five hours until the dance started, and for the first four, nothing happened.
I played games on my phone ‘til it died.
I looked at the gym floor and tried to guess where I was on the basketball court by the weird hieroglyphs of tape on the ground.
I laid on my back and stared at the green and pink landforms of gum adhered to the bottom of the table, wondering who had chewed them, thinking about how teeth are almost bones and our whole bodies are just bags of bones and cables and goop.
I don’t usually genuflect so deeply, to tell the truth. But I was nervous. Actually, I was, to use a Dad phrase, “pants-messing scared.” The self-immolation suddenly seemed offensive and misguided. Even if it wasn’t, it was not impossible I would get expelled. It was not impossible I would die, or at least burn my arms/face/scalp irreparably. And for what? These disruptions were not MIT-worthy. They were just stupid pranks. The Charlene Babineaux show, as Annette would say. I could practically hear her voice in my ears. Why did I do any of the stuff that I did? Did I even believe in any of it? Anything I did? The veganism? The demonstrations? The sit-in at the Rowley IndiePlex? Everything I did suddenly seemed empty. It was all spectacle.
I was crying again, quietly. I decided to leave. To pull the plug on the whole thing. I would go home and take the MIT bookmark off my browser and finally let Dad teach me how to be a fucking accountant.
But just as I went to climb out from under the table, the double-doors opened, and I heard Principal Shurmur and Vice Principal Mack, and then a cacophony of voices, and the whole class of 2019’s shoes squeaking on the gymatorium floor.
I was trapped.
Within minutes, it got hot under the table. All those bodies, throbbing with hormones, excreting their weird heat in the air. I was sweating in the mascot suit. I had to take the bear head off, which was bad, because if anybody peeked under the table, or if I went for it and fled, I would not have a disguise on.
And then, after who-knew-how-long, I heard the music fade out, and the sound of somebody tapping on a microphone.
“Hey, all right,” Principal Shurmur said, with maximum lameness. “How we doin’ tonight, Seniors?”
A few mild woops.
“I just want to say thank you to our teacher chaperones—Ms. Bachelder, Mr. Link, you guys are looking very spiffy this evening.”
Some clapping.
“And to all our student government representatives, let’s get a round of applause.” Genuine clapping. “Yeah, right? What a great night. Everyone being safe, enjoying themselves. You guys did a great job planning this.”
For some reason, my stomach clenched. Strangely, I was feeling that tingly twin feeling. The onset of telepathy. But then again, maybe I didn’t realize that then. Maybe I only see it now, looking back.
Shurmur cleared his throat.
“I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight one particular member of our Class of ’19 student government. This student has been an elected rep for four years. She has done it all—planned events, mediated student disputes, fund-raised.”
I belly-crawled to the front of the table and lifted the tablecloth. It took my eyes a moment to adjust, but when they did, I could see Shurmur on stage, and behind him, an easel, with a big rectangle perched on it, covered by a black cloth.
“This student,” he said. “Is someone I really admire. Not just as her principal. But person to person. She is—oh man, she’s going to kill me. She really didn’t want to do this! But I have to embarrass her, I’m sorry. Listen, I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say her bravery, her energy, her spirit… she is an inspiration. An inspiration to our whole community.”
The crowd clapped, murmured. I heard people muttering, whispering. Somebody sneezed.
“We want to dedicate a scholarship to this person. This pillar of our community. So that we can all remember her impact on this place.”
And he reached over and pulled the curtain off the easel. Underneath was one of those huge novelty checks.
ANNETTE BABINEAUX MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP, the check read.
And right then it all clicked.
Her meeting with Shurmur. Why she’d been so upset. The vague stuff she’d said about a presentation, an award.
He was doing the two things she hated most. One: all those barfy words about her bravery, her integrity, what she meant to the community. And two: pretending she was already dead.
He turned to back to the microphone, and he was about to say her name—and all of a sudden I had my reason.
Admissions Committee Reader, the reason is not always one thing. This is what I learned in my disruption—this is what I will know for the rest of my life. When I graduate from your program. When I get my first job. When I get old and have kids. When Annette’s 50/50 finally comes up the wrong way. When I have to pull over on the way to work to write down her old jokes to make sure I still remember them. When I visit Mom alone. When June 11th is no longer our birthday, it is only my birthday.
I was under the tablecloth, sweating through my bear costume and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. But then I saw Annette on the side of the stage, the left wheel of her chair and the scuffed-white toe of her left Converse, and the twin-telepathy feeling was crashing like cymbals in my ears—and I lifted the tablecloth, and I went.
Please find the attached pictures of my disruption. There are three.
In the first, you will see Principal Shurmur pulling back the black cloth on the novelty check that is propped on an easel. If you squint, you can see the end of the To: line of the check —BABINEAUX MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP. If you squint, you can see Shurmur glancing to his left, his eyebrows knitted in surprise or confusion at what he is seeing. Also there, at the side of the stage, you can see Annette, just starting to roll out from the wings. Her back is to the camera. She is still partly obscured by the curtain. And yet—though I am biased, though I know her better than anybody—I bet you can tell how horrified she is. You can feel it, just looking at the photo. The tension in her neck, the way she grips the wheels of her chair: her titanic embarrassment. Her panic. The SOS signal she was sending, that only I could hear.
In the second photograph, Annette has emerged from the curtain. She is making her way across the stage. She is craning her neck, turning back to look at something, something behind her. She still has not made it to the edge of the spotlight that is illuminating Shurmur and the mic stand and the check, so even though she’s out on the stage, she is still semi-shrouded in darkness.
Behind her, a headless Westlake Proud Bear has clambered onto the stage. In the bear’s arms is a bucket. The bucket is swinging; a wave of extremely believable fake blood is cresting. The bucket is tilting; the corn syrup is reaching the lip of the bucket, just about to fly. Because of the angle of the camera, you cannot see the bear-person’s face—only her sweaty pony-tail, the Utah-shaped birthmark on the back of her left ear. You can only see, in other words, the moment before the real moment.
But before that—before the blood hits, before Principal Shurmur is covered, his suit sticky, his toupee gloopy and lollipop-red, his doofy novelty check ruined—before the eyes widen in the faces in the crowd, before the chaperones rush to the stage—you can see it. Frozen in a photograph, Attached here as proof.
Look at Annette. She is pretending to be shocked. She is pretending to be oblivious. But look at the corners of her mouth, her cheeks, her eyes. Something is changing. An expression is forming. It is like: pre-delight.
The space of the graphic novel allows a “coming out” process that is uncompromising and by definition “alternative” (like a great underground ‘zine). This glorious, sometimes eerie space is where characters curse, fuck, gesticulate, poop, live. Right in your face, showing you fear, desire, often humor. This diverse list of 10 queer graphic novels features characters who challenge sex roles, gender identities, class hierarchies, capitalism and other systems, corruption and exploitation of various kinds.
Book 1 of the Locas series (part of the indelible comics classic Love & Rockets) was the first time I ever saw brown women, Latinx women of L.A., at the center of a “comic book” (my term for it then!). Maggie (Margarita) and Hopey are friends, rivals, lovers, confidantes, political sisters. They observe the world and each other with major “side eye.” In this start to a still-ongoing series by the graphic novel pioneers Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Maggie’s adventures around a crashed spaceship in the jungle intersperse with romantic and lustful letters back home.
Lisa Maas’ debut graphic novel was recently named a Stonewall Honor Book for the Barbara Gittings Literature Award by the American Library Association. The book delves into the specificity of “white lesbian cultures,” specifically in Victoria, Canada (Pacific Northwest), weaving the details of this world (mullets! Indigo Girls! Cats!) with a traditional “rom-com” scenario of a two people who “gave up on love” finding each other with an awkward, authentic excitement.
The winner of the 2018 LA Times Book Prize for best graphic novel, this book makes an inevitable appearance on every “queer comics” list for the sheer haunting beauty of its images. Walden, a manga-influenced comic artist who was also a former figure skater (and who has written a graphic memoir, Spinning, about this experience) makes use of a lyrical, understated style to tell a story about rebuilding the world on a new planet. Mia, a crewmember, once fell in love with a girl named Grace, and wants to help the rebuilding crew in part to recover this lost love.
This sweet, sexy graphic novel, by queer black woman artist and disability rights activist Tee Franklin, deserves to be turned into a star-ensemble movie. A decades-long love story between two women who meet as young adolescents at a bingo parlor, fall apart when their families demand “straightness” from them, then come back together in a relationship that lasts, Bingo Love is one of the few graphic novels that offers bold queerness without “youth” as a prerequisite.
Ignatz-winning illustrator Tamaki’s episodic story set in a school for superteens can be read as a cross-over YA graphic novel, sort of like an edgier, multicultural, existentially-themed Twilight, or maybe more like the sensibility of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (2019 extremely gripping, risqué, scary version, not the benign sitcom schtick of Melissa Joan Hart, whose character would’ve been killed off in the forest in the first episode of the all-new Sabrina). At SuperMutant Academy, problems involving witches and monsters are juxtaposed with anguishing but universal problems—like unrequited love.
When I first encountered Kari, by Indian graphic novelist Amruta Patil, I thought it might be too grim for me—the stark black and white images were so unsettling, and echoing some of the most disturbing images in religious comic books I had grown up with. But in the end, the book leaves you breathless, and extremely glad to be alive. Kari explores the aftermath of an attempted double suicide by two women lovers, herself and her lover Ruth, and the titular character’s subsequent survival (and rebirth) in the shadow community of the gutters of Mumbai and against the challenges of the 2008 recession as it affected the city, including during terror attacks in fall of that year.
Wet Moon portrays a compelling goth scene, in some ways following the tradition of the Hernandez brothers’ Love & Rockets (which introduced the idea of the punk rock scene as multiracial and as available to Latinx women as it was to white women). Body positivity of very diverse shapes is celebrated in the book. The story starts in the town of Wet Moon, focusing on Cleo Lovedrop and friends Trilby Bernarde, Audrey Richter, and Mara Zuzanny, all art students. There is courage in the portrayal here of sexual violence and its survivorship.
Co authored by two American Library Association Stonewall Honorees, Luisa: Now and Thenis a particularly delightful and precisely-drawn graphic novel about a 32 year old artist/ photographer being brought in dialogue with her teenage self on the streets of 1990s Paris. What more could you need?
Starting with the elaborate, gilded cover art: the work is gorgeous and intricate, fashioning a kick-ass marginalized rebel heroine, Maika Halfwolf, who could eat Katniss Everdeen for breakfast (literally). Nudity, fury, revenge—what women are finally able to be like, when free of the confines of “the likeable woman” expectation guiding much of commercial literature.
Winner of an 2018 LGBTQ Lambda Literary Award in the Graphic Novel award, this story centers on a 10-year-old queer girl, Karen Reyes, as she investigates the death of her Holocaust-survivor neighbor against a backdrop of the monsters she imagines herself as being, like the drawing she makes of herself as a werewolf chasing a village of women. This book, because of its juxtaposition of a “comic” story arc with reproductions of works from the Art Institute of Chicago and elsewhere in the city, is considered to have elevated the graphic novel genre, but come at a great physical cost to the artist, who labored over the book for years while recovering from hand and arm paralysis from West Nile virus. Ferris is also an inspiration in that she began this debut work only after the age of 40.
Tyrese L. Coleman’s How to Sit: A Memoir in Stories and Essays, follows a young Black woman’s coming of age in America. A finalist for the 2019 Pen Open Book Award, How To Sit blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction. In some sections, it is clear one is reading about the author Tyrese as she analyzes her DNA results, navigates a predominantly white institution, and endures a high risk pregnancy. In other selections, the protagonist is nebulous. Throughout Coleman’s voice is raw and real and powerful.
In addition to being an author, contributing writer at Electric Literature and the reviews editor of Smokelong Quarterly, Tyrese L. Coleman is also a wife, mother, and attorney. We spoke about writing as escapism, the benefits of acknowledging shame, and the perks of publishing on small presses like Mason Jar.
Deirdre Sugiuchi: In the author’s note, you write that How to Sit “plays with the line between fiction and nonfiction as it explores adolescence, identity, and grief, and the transition between girlhood and womanhood for a young black woman seeking to ground herself when all she wants is to pretend her world is fantasy.”
In some ways How To Sit reminds me of bell hooks’ Wounds of Passion. Can you discuss the decision to play with this line? Did you have any models?
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Tyrese Coleman: I don’t know if it was a conscious thing, a switch where I decided at some point that this was what I was going to do. I was just starting to write professionally, or rather, more than just for myself and my own self-enjoyment, and what came out were these pieces of auto-fiction or essays that related to these topics of identity and maturing and childhood. When the first couple of iterations of this book wasn’t going anywhere, two things happened: one, I discovered that there had been collections from famous writers that included fiction and nonfiction in the same space. And second, I was reading The Things They Carried for the millionth time and realizing that what I was creating was similar.
Ultimately, though, I really wanted to create a version of Jean Toomer’s Cane, which has always been my favorite book because of the risks Toomer took in writing something seemingly inaccessible, dense, and genre-bending. A modern version of that, for me, was Citizen by Claudia Rankine. When I realized that, yes, I do want to play with what the word “memoir” means and what is fiction and what is non-fiction, those were the two books that I carried around with me everywhere—the things I carried (sorry, couldn’t resist). Those were my models.
DS: Can you talk about the need the narrator has to pretend that the world is a fantasy in order to survive?
TC: Other than the obvious feeling of wanting to be someone other than yourself, the escapism from books, television, movies, art comes in the brief exodus from whatever is happening in the outside world. The escape is where the pleasure lies, at least for me, and it’s a world that I often think is better than reality, even if I’m reading a dystopia. There is the reassurance that you can get up and walk away from your consequences. If you are in the hands of a capable story-teller, then it’s almost as if you are being cradled, like a child secure in their parent’s embrace, there are no worries, and in this space, you don’t look like you, you aren’t poor, you aren’t traumatized, and at any moment, when those things start to happen and the tension becomes too much, you can close the book until you are ready to deal with it. What a wonderful life that must be! I want that. I want to be a part of a story. Or rather, I want to be the character in the story that is being read. Because there is the option to dip in and out of the stakes. Real life is continuous stakes. There are no page breaks, no white space, no chapter endings and a brand new scene on the next page. You must deal. Sometimes you have to go through life pretending that, in the morning, there will be another scene.
DS: You write about the sexual abuse of young girls, particularly young black girls, and the continuing impact of abuse on a woman’s life. It’s something I think about a lot, the impact of trauma, both as a survivor and as a public school educator. You created art out of horrific situations. Can you talk about the importance of breaking this silence and your process?
TC: I don’t know, I don’t want to talk for everyone, but for me, my trauma is a part of who I am. I carry it around in my body because it happened to this body and this is the only body I have. It was never about breaking a silence, because everyone who knows me understands this about me. My friends have known this since we first met. I’ve been talking about it for years. It’s one of the first things I told my husband when we started telling secrets. I am not ashamed of what happened to me because I understand it is not my fault, though, that revelation took time and years of me punishing myself in various ways.
I am not ashamed of this body and everything it has suffered.
But, yes, I am not ashamed of this body and everything it has suffered so what is it but a thing for me to speak about it or write about it. This is fact. I was molested. For other women who do feel shame, though, that is what I would challenge them to confront first, rather than the idea of breaking the silence. Because if you aren’t addressing the shame, then speaking on it isn’t going to be from an authentic source or frame of mind. And then, in essence, you’re going to perpetuate the same trauma on to yourself. You have to be able to confront the bold-faced truth of what happened to you in the most frank terms. And then understand, that you did not do this to yourself. Someone did this to you. Then maybe, you can talk about it.
DS: At your AWP panel, “My Memoir’s First Year,” you mentioned that one of your goals in writing was to create art. Can you expound on this?
TC: Like I mentioned briefly, Cane is my favorite book. It’s hard to read, at least it was for me. I didn’t understand it, really, until I’d read it many many times. It was one of the first books that required that much work from me. And I immediately recognized that it wasn’t for every one. I always wanted to create something that felt special in that way. It is my own skewed interpretation of what art is. A beautiful piece that gives you something new with each enjoyment of it, though it may not be to everyone’s taste.
Small presses are putting out the work that the big publishers were afraid to back.
Art, though, is not commercially viable because it is not universally palatable. I knew that this book was going to be that, especially since I never told people whether they were reading fiction or nonfiction. I knew that people would be like, “what the hell is a memoir in stories and essays?” or “no, honey, that’s just a collection of stories and essays, it is not a memoir.” This was the goal for this book, but it may not be the goal for another project.
And, I hope I haven’t walked myself into a corner with this, because I don’t think that just because a lot of people like something it cannot be art or artistic. I just think I want to write something that withstands universal taste, that can be read at any time and any place and be relatable in some respect. I hope that is what I did.
DS: At that same panel, you said that “Small presses are really doing the hard work of diversifying literature.” Can you discuss this?
TC: When I first had the concept for this book, an agent asked me “but, what shelf would that go on?” and I knew that attempting to publish through the traditional route would be a waste of time. One, this is a book that discusses sex, masturbation, health, bodies, grief, and reads very very Black. Two, it is lyrical. I’ve never seen a book like mine ever commercially available and the closest I’d seen to it was published by an indie press.
When I took a survey of who was publishing what, I saw my friend Donald Quist publishing with a small press. I saw Feminist Presspublishing our voices. I knew Roxane Gay’s and Alexander Chee’s first books were with small presses. And I realized that small presses were putting out the work that the big publishers were afraid to back because there is no guarantee that the risk would be worth it. Most of us publishing with small presses are used to rejection. I’ve learned that a lot of times when things are rejected, it’s not based on quality, but rather the “I don’t get it.” To me, when those are the words they use when rejecting you, it means you are doing something innovative and special. Those folks rejected with the “I don’t get it,” are the ones small presses embrace. They get it.
Now, I will say that there are risks. We all know what just came out about Curbside Splendor not paying royalties. And that is not the first instance of a small press being called out for not paying their writers, so we do have to be cognizant of who we give our art to. And, because small presses are publishing writers who are from the most vulnerable groups, it is even more important to be diligent when it comes to these matters. Join a local union, hire an attorney if you don’t have an agent, question the contract, damn it, READ the contract and know what is up and what is owed to you. Don’t just be grateful that someone is publishing you. Expect to be published. Look, the white lady being served poorly is going to call the manager. Damnit, we got to learn not to just be happy we’re getting service. We need to learn how to ask for the manager too!
DS: Social class is often ignored in America, but you do an incredible job of highlighting social class differences throughout How to Sit. Can you discuss writing about social class?
TC: I grew up on a dirt road in a house that was smaller than my first apartment out of college with three generations of my family. I found a mouse in my shoe once, a snake in my drawer, and many a bird would fly into our home. There were times we had to boil water for washing and for a long time, my mother made below the poverty line though she had and still works for the same company for many decades. You know, when you live in this world, you don’t know how bad it is until you experience something else. So, does that mean it was bad at all? I didn’t have a whole lot, but at the time, it wasn’t as big of a deal, so was it actually a problem? Yes and no, I guess is the answer to that. Yes when I need to go to the doctor and almost fall out from walking pneumonia because we couldn’t afford a doctor bill. No when I had a roof over my head, food to eat, and water to drink.
Real life is continuous stakes. There are no page breaks, no white space, no chapter endings and a brand new scene on the next page. You must deal.
When I left the country, went to college and saw the world I grew up in with fresh eyes, that is when I saw what others must’ve seen. This is when I saw what I saw…what I was starting to think about that world and the people I left back home. At some point, I had to admit to myself that I became judgemental, became “cute” and “bougie” and all the things other people had called me in the past when I did things they deemed stuck up. I gave into those class distinctions. It allowed me to write from both perspectives after the fact. I am ashamed of the college version of me who felt shame over where she came from and thought she had lived enough to judge anybody. But, because I thought those things, I was able to translate them into my stories. And I think it takes removal from the situation in order to write about it honestly.
DS: V-Day was such a powerful essay! I wanted to hug you and tell you “It’s not your fault!” I’m a mother too. I constantly feel guilty. Can you discuss writing about mother guilt?
TC: Parenting is just an exercise in overcoming daily guilt. As long as I’m a parent, I will always have a well of guilt to pull sustenance from. I’m the type of person who would rather confront these things than let them linger. Every parent feels guilty about one thing or another. Might as well talk about it.
DS: Who are your favorite authors? What writing excites you?
This is a book that discusses sex, masturbation, health, bodies, grief, and reads very very Black.
TC: I have like 8 million favorites, but I am partial to Southern writers like Kiese Laymon and Jesmyn Ward. Heavy and Sing Unburied Sing were two books that made me feel simultaneously overwhelmed by jealousy and so inspired that I needed to write something immediately. I’m excited by voice and my ability to relate to the text in some ways. I am also really into Romance these days. I highly recommend pretty much every book written by Alyssa Cole.
DS: Can you talk about your next project and your shift to fiction?
TC: I don’t know if its a shift to fiction. I’ve always written fiction. Maybe a shift to less autobiographical fiction, though, I’m sure when my book comes out people will find a way to ask me whether or not its based on my life because, well I’m a woman and that’s what they do to us. But, I am working on what I like to call a “literary romance novel.” My goal is to write a book that makes you happy at the end of it, but isn’t dictated by genre. As you can tell about me, I hate rules.
I want to write a book about love, about race, about grief, about family, about the South and about good sex (because goddamn, why is sex so damn awful in literature outside of romance novels…?). So, that is what I’m going to do.
I like to think that I’ve become more whole having written my first novel If I Had Two Lives. After moving to the United States at twelve years old, I’ve not lived anywhere for longer than five years, moving from one state to another. My connection to place is tenuous, my relationship to people transitory due to geographical circumstance; my ability to hold together the various fragments of my identities loosens with time. I am perhaps lucky to have lived more than one life, yet as my life experiences gain in layers and textures, my sense of self grows all the more opaque.
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If I Had Two Lives is a work of the imagination that has autobiographical consequences. I wrote it in bursts and out of order. When I had all the crucial moments, I began stitching them together, writing into the empty spaces, between voids, assembling coherence. Meaning is the magic potion that unites seemingly random series of events. Narrative gives meaning. I’ve not suddenly become surer of myself, but I’m more comfortable living with stitches, breathing in the seams.
Below are seven works of art that investigate powerful psychic ruptures. Often it is the protagonists themselves who undergo this split. They are not easy books and they shouldn’t be. Like most great works of literature, they ask difficult questions⎯How does a psychic split happen? Can a person survive it? How many masks can one wear before getting crushed beneath their weight? Is coherency an illusion?
An accident burns off the face of a scientist. Disfigured, he loses his connection to his wife and the world. To find his way back into society and win back his wife’s love, he creates a mask⎯a dangerously convincing mask that manifests its own destiny. An intellectual exploration of what it means to lose one’s identity and the perils of living with a crafted identity.
Nadia and her husband Ange are bewildered to find that they are loathed by everyone, their neighbors, their friends and family. Their world begins to deteriorates physically and mentally. The more they seek the reason for their ostracism, the more punishing their reality gets. As Nadia retraces her steps into the past, it becomes apparent that she has been keeping ugly secrets⎯lies that are soul-severing.
The trilogy follows twin brothers Claus and Lucas who were torn apart in World War II as were Western and Eastern Europe. The brothers abuse as much as they are abused by others. Cruelty is weaponized as a survival necessity. This postmodern saga dives into the ruthless products of psychic fracture and the consequence of political division in private lives.
Missing Person by Patrick Modiano, translated by Daniel Weissbort
A psychological detective novel. Guy Roland, a detective who has no memories of his own past, is on a search for a man named Hutte. Guy follows directories, yearbooks, photographs, clues that lead to other clues, birthing more mysteries than conclusions. As Guy chases the trail of another man’s life, he meanders deeper into the mazes of his own repressed memories.
In this dystopian world, there is a cure for those who have lost the will to live. Like children, suicidal patients will be born again without past pain and disappointment. A voluntary amnesia⎯their memories are erased so that they have another chance at a life they might actually want to live. The novel asks potent questions about the nature of memories, and the cost of forgetting as well as remembering.
Dandelions by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by Michael Emmerich
Ineko suffers from somagnosia, a condition that makes her unable to see the bodies of others. Her mother and her boyfriend commit Ineko to a mental hospital. This final and unfinished work by Kawabata who himself committed suicide is a philosophical contemplation on the nature of madness and the disappearing self.
Oba Yozo always wears the pasted smile of a clown. He has learned this trick early on in his childhood and realizes its power to fool those around him. Yozo’s inner life is starkly different from the face he shows everyone⎯anguished, resentful, alienated from others and from himself. Yozo’s mask serves as powerful reminder of a person’s inner and outer self, which when lacking congruency could prove deadly.
The road to hell is a lengthy passage in Hadestown, but the journey of Anais’ Mitchell’s re-envisioning of ancient Greek myths to Tony-winning victory on Broadway seems even longer and more transformative. Somehow when diving into the two of the most well-known tales from the ancient Greek canon, the singer-songwriter discovered new truthsin the timeless dramas. Stories of doomed love at first sight became sprightly duets of flirtatious teasing, while Hades himself was transformed into an imposing politician and businessman in Mitchell’s self-proclaimed “folk opera,” one of the most inventive scores to play on Broadway in years.
It’s hard to describe exactly what Hadestown is. It’s two Greek myths—Hades and Persephone and Orpheus and Eurydice—adapted into a musical.It’s a classic story with startlingly modern themes. It’s an ancient tale told in one of the most inventive new musicals Broadway has seen in years. It is also the only musical of the 2018–19 Broadway season directed by a woman and written by a woman—one of the few women ever to have written the entirety of a new musical, both book and score, on her own.
The best Broadway musical of the year had humble, DIY beginnings. It began performances in 2006 at acommunity theater in Vermont, with Mitchell herself playing Eurydice. In 2010 she released a concept album, featuring Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon as Orpheus and singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco as Persephone. (The album was released by DiFranco’s label Righteous Babe Records.)
Hermes presides over the meeting of Orpheus and Eurydice. Photo by Matthew Murphy
When Mitchell and Chavkin first met in 2012, Chavkin had heard Mitchell’s concept album, and Mitchell had admired Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, the wildly imaginative and unconventional musical Chavkin was directing Off-Broadway. They started collaborating soon after, combining their respective talents for songwriting and musical direction to develop Hadestown as a musical. Their work was first seen Off-Broadway in 2016 when Hadestown opened at New York Theatre Workshop. It then played Canada in 2017 and London’s Royal National Theatre in 2018, undergoing significant revisions along the way. The sets changed, as did the staging—from theater in the round to proscenium style—and Chavkin and Mitchell stroveto strengthen the story’s connective tissue—a challenging attemptfor Mitchell, who was encouraged by Chavkin to encourage the audience’s comprehension of the story by writing it into the text. It was tough, Mitchell admitted, to communicate in a “practical storytelling level”while still striving for the “mystical poetic level” of the story.
“[Rachel] often felt that if I truly wanted the audience to grasp something in the storytelling, I should put it in the text, which is all musicalized / underscored anyway,” Mitchell said. “That is, I shouldn’t assume that it could be represented or grasped visually. It really pushed me to go further as a writer than I ever thought possible.”
Hadestown, according to Mitchell, is set in a “set in a darkly political, Americana dreamscape.” Onstage, the story takes place in two distinct settings: aboveground and underground. Above, the characters converge in a New Orleans-style café inspired in part by the famous jazz venue Preservation Hall, whose aesthetics also inspired the costume designs, Chavkin said. Underground, Hadestown is dark, dreary and mechanical—a factory from which there is no escape.
Patrick Page as Hades and Amber Gray as Persephone. Photo by Matthew Murphy
Eurydice soon finds herself trapped in the wasteland underground. Finding herself lonely and hungry after falling in love with Orpheus, as her poetic husband strives to compose his perfect song, she is tempted by Hades with ideas of security and prosperity and travels to the titular factory underworld where she is locked in never-ending toil to build a wall surrounding the town.
The workers march in an endless circle, muscles strained and sweating, and their ruler delivers a speech on “Why We Build the Wall,” which Mitchell wrote long before Donald Trump had declared his campaign promise of a border wall.Thoughts of modern-day America are inevitable;Hadestown represents industrialization, climate change, and, obviously, a wall to shut out the impoverished.
The first audiences loved the music, Mitchell said, but they had trouble following the plot. To those unfamiliar with the ancient tales, it wasn’t clear what was happening and why.
“We were sort of assuming a lot of knowledge about Greek mythology on the part of the audience,” Mitchell said of the early stagings. “The idea that Persephone lives above ground for half the year and below ground the other half—there was nothing in the show to explain or indicate that to folks. They just had to come into the theater knowing it.”
To those unfamiliar with the ancient tales, it wasn’t clear what was happening and why.
So during workshops they introduced the character of Hermes, played in the current show by Broadway veteran André De Shields.Dapper in a shining silver suit, the god of oration welcomes the audience and remains onstage for much of the musical, a jaunty and impish emcee and narrator. Essentially, Chavkin and Mitchell solved the problem of audiences being unfamiliar with ancient Greek mythology by turning to ancient Greek drama: Hermes and The Fates—Jewelle Blackman, Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer, and Kay Trinidad, three sister deities—serve as a musical Greek chorus, keeping the audience aware of both the details and the stakes.
Jewelle Blackman, Kay Trinidad, and Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer as the Fates. Photo by Matthew Murphy
Even with Hermes available to explain the basics of the myth, though, there remained the challenge of bringing ancient characters into a modern context and giving them plausible emotional motivations. Early audiences didn’t understand why Eurydice, played on Broadway by Eva Noblezada, would fall in love with Orpheus, currently played by Reeve Carney. He’s an idealistic aspiring songwriter, and she’s a vagabond, a solo survivor wandering the Earth—what draws them together? What makes her love him, what takes her away from him, and what sends him to find her? In the myth, the answer is basically “that’s just how the story goes,” but audiences wanted more. Both characters underwent significant development as the show progressed, Mitchell said, especially when developing the motivation of the soulful, artistic Orpheus: “There has been a lot of digging in over the years to who this character of Orpheus is. What motivates him, besides his love for Eurydice? Finally it felt like it satisfied at both a story and a poetic level that he believed he could ‘bring the world back into tune’ with his music.”
Orpheus travels though that darkness to find Eurydice and bring her home, inspiring Hades with hissong to offer the young lovers a chance to escape andsetting in motion the inevitable tragedy.But their story isn’t over:The musical travels full-circle. After Eurydice is forced to return to Hades, the show immediately returns to its opening number, with Orpheus and Eurydice meeting each other again as if anew. “It’s an old song,” Hermes sings in the show’s opening moments, and again at the end. “And we’re gonna sing it again . . . Maybe it will turn out this time.”
‘It’s an old song,’ Hermes sings in the show’s opening moments, and again at the end. ‘And we’re gonna sing it again.’
Bringing the story full circle to its beginning first took root at New York Theatre Workshop but didn’t come to life, with the characters returning to the stage in their Act One costumes, until the London production—a technique that Mitchell said “really tugs [her] heart.”
This moment, moving from tragic loss to a glimmer of hope, inspired some gasps from audience members as the two characters doomed to spend eternity apart reappear and begin the story again. The promise of another chance also offers some insightinto the two lovers’ instant, otherworldly connection. Such immediate, intense love inspired skepticism to audiences watching the dreamer Orpheus romance the pragmatic Eurydice singing, “I knew you before we met/I don’t even know you yet… All I know is you’re someone I have always known.” Even less plausible is his decision, after learning she left him for Hadestown, to travel the road to hell to save her. But upon witnessing them meet again for the first time, a bittersweet truth is infused into their melody.
“That was an interesting evolution,” Mitchell says. “It felt like a very full-circle moment for the narrator to reflect on the meaning of having told the story and the sort of passing of the torch of hope from the artist Orpheus to the storyteller, who’s going to tell it again.”
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