All Literature Is Climate Change Literature

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

In his book-length essay The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh makes the case for a new literature of climate change. He argues that the modern novel is not up to the task of representing a vague, omnipresent threat to the survival of humanity. Fiction is too obsessed with the inner lives of its characters to survey a changing earth. What we need, he contends, is a full overhaul of what counts as “serious fiction”: a shift from close-focus domestic realism to a global view of environmental vulnerability. The criteria of literature must be adapted to make room for the aesthetic conditions of ecological catastrophe.

The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

Ghosh acknowledges that environmental apocalypse isn’t a brand-new literary concern; he cites several authors, including himself, whose work he sees as integrating “the unthinkable” of climate change in fiction. Finally, though, he believes that the catastrophe of climate change will require an artistic storming of the gates. “I think it can be safely predicted that as the waters rise around us, the mansion of serious fiction, like the doomed waterfront properties of Mumbai and Miami Beach, will double down on its current sense of itself, building ever higher barricades to keep the waves at bay.” If one function of fiction is to help us understand the world, Ghosh thinks the literature we have now is failing in the face of global warming. We’ll need new genres, structures, maybe even words.

In fact, climate change is far from a new subject for literature. On the contrary, the variable, impassive earth is a motivating image in many of the works we already celebrate. The scale of the incoming disaster is unprecedented; our vulnerability to the climate is familiar. We just have to recognize the theme for what it is.

Ghosh notes that the scale of global warming makes it difficult to grasp and therefore hard to write about, citing Timothy Morton’s term “hyperobject” for the phenomenon. But he doesn’t acknowledge the flip slide: Precisely because of its scale, the outline of climate change may be perceived everywhere. The real alchemy of meaning takes place not on the page but in the mind of the audience. In other words, the rumbling of the archaic voice of the earth is audible as long as the reader is alert to it. Ghosh’s idea that the “individual moral adventure”—John Updike’s definition of the novel— in fiction and the phenomenon of global warming don’t go together is too categorical. Even literature that is driven by individual characters and complicated moral growth is full of insights and premonitions of climate change.

The variable, impassive earth is a motivating image in many of the works we already celebrate.

In fact, much of “canonical” Western literature unites the individual moral adventure with a sense of collective responsibility toward the earth. Ghosh doesn’t deny this, but gives too much weight to contemporary fiction as shaping our view of the world, compared to the sort of texts that many people read in college. For example, Shakespeare’s Macbeth is thoroughly modern in its treatment of human psychology, but the language of climate is also everywhere in it (sometimes in the same sentence). Greed “grows with more pernicious root / Than summer-seeming lust,” and the prophecy of Macbeth’s fall hinges on the idea that a forest can rise up and do battle. One of the most remarkable nature lines is Macbeth’s own: “The earth was feverous / and did shake.” He imagines the earth as weak like a stricken child or elder, and realizes that he is a viral agent of the world’s disease. The land suffers when the people on it delight in cruelty. Dante Alighieri gives us similarly piercing metaphors in The Divine Comedy. In Canto IX of the “Inferno,” he writes, “That marsh, which sends out so much stinking breath, / surrounds on every side the weeping city / which we cannot now enter without wrath.” The image homes in on the secretions of the face, making a startling connection between carbon dioxide-producing breath and tears, what humans sow and reap. Substitute “that marsh” for “the factory,” and you have an indelible description of modern day Beijing.

A highlight of The Great Derangement is Ghosh’s analysis of the way that industrial arrogance and blinkered imperialism shroud our essential vulnerability to nature. But is a whole new aesthetic of fiction necessary to remind us of this? Here’s King Lear, exiled to the countryside:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’ever you are
That bide the pelting of this pitiless night,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides
Your looped and widowed raggedness defend you
From seasons such as these?

The sensation of cold rain on unprotected skin and the dull, insistent irritant of hunger were new experiences to the fallen King Lear, as they will be to us Europeans and North Americans when our infrastructure collapses to rising water levels. Like Lear, we’ll soon find out that no matter how stable the worlds we build around us seem, they are arbitrary and impermanent.

We will also learn to stop assigning benevolence to certain kinds of weather. Under the extremes caused by global warming, we will grieve for the rain during the heat and the sun during the storms. In The Aeneid, another classic story with the momentum of an individual moral adventure, Virgil was alive to a very modern worry, disease of the sun. He describes pale ghosts from “Down Below” being “exposed to the scaring light” (the translation is by David Ferry). Listen to the sound of that “scaring”: it twists the rays of the welcome sun into something ugly, modern, prophesying what now mutilates our skin.

Ghosh predicts that one of the first casualties of climate change will be our “uniformitarian expectations” about “the regularity of bourgeois life.” The one book in every standard hotel room can tell us much about that disruption. In the Old Testament, the chronicler describes a famine. The Arameans “laid siege against [Samaria] till a donkey’s head cost eight pieces of silver and a quarter of a qab of pigeon droppings five pieces of silver” (2 Kings 6:25, in the new translation by Robert Alter). It is a kind of nightmare shopping list, and not far removed from the reality of modern famines, as Yan Lianke’s 2015 novel The Four Books, about the Cultural Revolution, confirms. We also know that the poor will be affected most by climate change. This line from the Hebrew Bible evokes the persistence—even flourishing—of economic exploitation in times of bitter suffering.

In the new literature Ghosh imagines, writers will better understand how to situate people within the whole environment. Animals, rivers, mountains will also be actors in the upcoming apocalyptic drama; we will learn not to “arrogate all intelligence and agency to the human,” Ghosh writes. In the introduction to the Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio similarly points out the entanglement of human and animal life in times of crisis. “It was frequently observed, that things which had belonged to one sick or dead of the disease, if touched by some other living creature, not of the human species, were the occasion, not merely of sickening, but of an almost instantaneous death,” he writes. We share our destiny with everything else on earth. Boccaccio’s forceful language shows how perilous it is when we think we can unwind and separate our fates.

In The Great Derangement, Ghosh doesn’t mention the literature of the Flood, humanity’s great dress rehearsal for ecological catastrophe. This literature definitely isn’t modern, and is far removed from his understanding of the “serious,” realistic novel. Still, these are widely read, foundational stories that often feature singular heroes, and they accomplish much of what a new fiction could. In his Metamorphosis, Ovid describes the flood like this: “The rivers spread and swept away together / Crops, orchards, cattle, men, / Temples and shrines with all their holy things.” The gods are no match for rising water levels. Our secular objects of worship—especially, as Ghosh argues, beachfront real estate—won’t be either.

The ancient chronicler of Genesis writes of the flood, “All that had the quickening breath of life in its nostrils…died.” The adjective “quickening” is a profound statement on the shortness of human and animal life compared with the progress of ecological time, expressed with an almost magical compression typical of the Hebrew Bible. Another verse, from 2 Kings 2:19, thought not about the Flood, is equally concentrated when talking about the climate: “The water is bad and the land bereaves.” The construction “the land bereaves” might do the work of a hundred explicit climate change novels, if a fraction of the sheer interpretative power focused on the Bible was diverted to also consider its premonitions of global warming.

Perhaps most resonant, however, is the Epic of Gilgamesh. Sometimes it’s helpful to turn to another artist’s reading of a classic story, and the composer Gérard Grisey’s setting of text from the Gilgamesh myth from 1998 is, to my mind, the definitive interpretation. “I opened a window / And the day fell on my cheek,” a soprano sings, exposed to music that is gently waving, crystalline, hushed. You can hear the wind players gasping for breath during these long passages, as a person might who has narrowly avoiding drowning. “The dissociation…between the voice and the music is a sort of reflection of the situation of the human and the cosmos,” Grisey wrote in his journal in July, 1996. “Fusion and harmony or indifference and sterile struggle.” Gilgamesh imagines a place most climate change predictions don’t dare to go: a world not just of suffering, but possessed of a stillness beyond humankind.

We already have enough art to help us understand the threat of climate change. We just need to look at it with the appropriate paranoia.

The aesthetic goals Ghosh sets out in The Great Derangement are still worth pursuing. The point is that we already have enough art to help us understand the threat of climate change. We just need to look at it with the appropriate paranoia. Read Another Book, goes the meme about Harry Potter obsessives; when it comes to understanding global warming, I might instead admonish, Read Almost Any Book, and, if you are aware of the scale of the threat, you will be struck by prophecy. Besides, there are psychological reasons why we might get more from what Ghosh calls literature “that grapples with climate change avant la lettre.” Rightly or not, we tend to give more weight to predictions from the past. The disaster movie 2012 (2009) parlayed a dubious Mayan prophecy into a worldwide gross of around $750 million, when the real apocalypse is already here.

Sometimes it also seems like human imagination flourishes most when kept partly in the dark. Do we extrapolate a worldview from snippets of language better than we synthesize vast quantities of information on an issue like climate change? In politics, global warming is an all-encompassing problem that will require all-encompassing solutions. Ghosh imagines equally revolutionary changes in art. But I think that art works its wonders best through isolated moments, because the tiny lights that spark epiphany are everywhere.

We Cloned Charlotte Brontë from a Lock of Her Hair, and Chaos Ensued

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

A ring containing a lock of Charlotte Brontë’s hair was recently discovered on an episode of Antiques Roadshow that was filmed in northern Wales. The next step was obvious:

https://twitter.com/mollypriddy/status/1120422940401647617

We were so preoccupied with whether we could do this, we didn’t stop to think about whether we should. Below, a few scenes from Brontësaurus Park.

Dr. Alan Grant slowly stands to look out of the Jeep, while Dr. Ellie Sattler stares at the strip of lace she is holding, marveling. “This type of embroidery hasn’t been done since the Victorian Period,” she says. “This thing—”

Grant stops her, grabbing her by the head and turning it to make her see what he’s seeing. Sattler slowly rises to her feet, mouth agape. There, in the near distance, they see what appears to be a living, breathing Elizabeth Barrett Browning sitting at a table not too far from them, hunched over and scribbling in a notebook. “It … it’s a writer,” gasps Dr. Grant.

“Is … is she a novelist?” Dr. Sattler asks.

“No, no, not a novelist at all,” Alan reassures. “Just a poet. See? Look at the line length. We’re perfectly safe.”

Now from the Jeep rises another of their party. It’s MFA candidate Ian Malcolm. Staring at Browning, he mutters to himself, “He did it. That crazy son of a bitch did it.”

Grant and Sattler move closer to Browning, shielding their eyes from the sun, trying not to disturb the writer.

“This thing writes 25, 27 words per minute,” Grant exclaims.

‘You’ve got a Brontë?’ asks Sattler, gasping. ‘He’s … he’s got a Brontë!’

“Barrett Browning?” asks their thesis advisor, John Hammond. “30, easy. And we clocked Charlotte at 32 words per minute.”

“You’ve got a Brontë?” asks Sattler, gasping. “He’s … he’s got a Brontë!” She sits down.

“Say again?” asks Grant.

“We’ve got a Brontë,” replies Hammond. Grant is feeling faint. He sits on the ground.

Hammond strides out in front of them, and, looking out over the rolling fields and forests dotted with small cafes and parchment and quill shops, declares, “Dr. of Comparative Literature Grant, Dr. of Victorian Literature Sattler … welcome to Brontësaurus Park.”

Nedry, an adjunct, tumbles down a hill and into the mud, losing his glasses. It is night, and pouring rain.

“Where are my glasses?” he asks, digging through the mud. “I can’t afford new ones. I’m an adjunct.”

Just then, he hears a hooting. He sees a figure leap behind a tree, then more hooting. The figure flashes by again, and still, more hooting. Nedry looks around in a panic. Who is it?

Suddenly, she appears. A small, pale woman wearing full evening dress and a smart bonnet.

“Oh. Uh, nice girl. Nice writer,” he says, trying to stay calm. “I thought you were one of the Brontës. But you’re not so bad. No. Okay. Run along. I don’t have any Moleskines for you. What do you want? What do you want, food? I have nothing on me.”

He slowly reaches towards the ground and finds a #2 Ticonderoga pencil.

“Here,” he says, waving the pencil. “You want a quill? You want a nice ink quill? Here,” he says, throwing the pencil as far as he can. “Go get it. Get the quill, girl! Get the quill!”

The woman looks behind her, then slowly turns back to gaze upon Nedry.

“Ah, no wonder you’re without a husband,” he mumbles. “I’m gonna burn your manuscript when I come back,” he declares, before turning to climb back to his Jeep.

But the woman follows. Nedry turns around in fear, and a slow smile spreads across her face: then, she emits a horrifying shriek, as a large Tudor ruff quickly unfurls around her face. She screams, and then coughs a dark liquid all over Nedry.

She emits a horrifying shriek, as a large Tudor ruff quickly unfurls around her face.

Nedry claws at his face in a panic, and then stops suddenly, realizing something. With terror in his eyes, he looks slowly down at the white handkerchief he brought with him to diagnose consumption.

It’s just as he suspected. Covered in a spray of blood.

In the distance, through the rain, Tim, the TA, hears it: a subtle boom, boom, boom. If he had to guess, based off of books he’d read, he would guess it was the sound made by a woman stomping in calf-high, side-laced Adelaide boots. The idea is almost too terrifying to entertain. But then he hears it again.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Tim slowly leans over the front passenger seat, staring at the two mugs of mead sitting on the dashboard. For a moment, nothing. And then, across the surface of the mead: ripples.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Something crashes against the buggy with a loud bang, and they all leap back in horror: through the torrential rain, they see the gore. It’s half a manuscript, ripped to shreds, simply dripping with red ink.

Who threw it? Tim stares out the window and at last, spots it: a single white arm, covered in a pale lace dress glove. Slowly, Tim looks up, up, up, up, and for the first time, at last, we see her in all her brutal glory: it’s a real life, full sized Charlotte Brontë. She turns her head slowly to meet Tim’s eyes.

“What … what did you do with the man who was editing your manuscript?” Tim whispers.

A slow, vicious grin spreads over Brontë’s face.

“Don’t you know?” she asks.

Tim shakes his head.

“Reader,” she responds, cocking her head, “I buried him.”

Outside the Jeep, Brontë’s boot comes crashing down into the mud, leaving behind the kind of monstrous footprint you’d usually only see in a museum: a woman’s 6, maybe even 6 ½.

She is looking for Tim. He scrunches into a ball, trying to stay small, but she spots him. Her eye, big and yellow, widens. A symptom of untreated hyperbilirubinemia, most likely. There was only one doctor in the park, after all, and he was needed elsewhere, as the Baker girls had the croup.

Charlotte spots Tim and lunges at the Jeep. Tim scrambles away from her, but there’s not much room in the Jeep for him to move. Stretching towards the car, Charlotte Brontë opens her gaping mouth wide … and says, “I noticed you were alone. Is your family in want of a governess?”

Tim screams and kicks, while she cries that she has considerable experience and could be quite a helpmeet for a man of his stature, and she promises she won’t be a bother as she keeps her mouth shut and does what she’s told and, besides, she doesn’t require much, just room and board and perhaps a pint of scum pie every once in a while.

“Go away!” Tim screams, and kicks at her again.

“I do not think sir,” she says, huffing, “you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world that I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.”

But she cannot reach him, neither with her words nor with her arms, and so she backs away, sniffing, “Well enough. I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

She starts walking away, and then turns back to look at Tim. “I have as much soul as you,” she roars. “And full as much heart.” Then she turns and stomps away.

In her wake, a trail of those horrifying size 6.5 footprints, full to the brim with rainwater. With every retreating step she makes, the water quivers.

An unfamiliar woman—tall, peaceful looking—approaches Dr. Grant and the children where they are resting in their tree perch.

Lex scoots backwards in fear, screaming, “Go away!”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Dr. Grant reassures her as the woman tilts her head back and forth, examining them. “It’s a Gothic. It’s Mary Shelley. She’s perfectly safe. Look, see what she’s holding in her hand? Look at that. It’s a first draft. Can you believe it, Lex? We’re looking at a genuine Mary Shelley first draft!”

Lex slowly leans forward, closer to Shelley.

“Can … can I see it?” she asks, timidly.

Shelley nods, and reaches her long arm up to the tree perch to hand Lex her notebook.

“It is still a work in progress,” Shelley admits. “I haven’t quite landed on my final title.”

“What do you call it?” Dr. Grant asks. “If I may ask.”

Shelley nods. “For now,” she said, “I’m calling it Frankenstein: Life, Uh, Finds a Way.”

Dr. Grant shakes his head and smiles.

“Clever girl.”

A hoard of writers storm past Dr. Grant, Tim, and Lex.

“Tim,” Dr. Grant says, grabbing Tim’s shoulder. “Who are these people? Can you tell us what they are?”

Tim squints. “I think … they’re editors.”

“Can I talk to one? Are they safe?” Lex asks.

These are aggressive, living copy editors that have no idea what century they’re in.

“No,” Dr. Grant says, grabbing her arm. “These are aggressive, living copy editors that have no idea what century they’re in, and they’ll defend themselves and their view of the progressive passive, violently if necessary.”

As the swarm of editors rush down the hill and towards them, the three scramble behind a nearby fainting couch to stay safe and out of sight.

And that’s when they hear it: the all-too familiar boom that could only come from a certain size 6.5 woman’s boot. Dr. Grant peeks over the edge of the couch just in time to see Charlotte burst from the forest. She grabs one of the editors by the throat while the others flee.

“Life appears to me too short to be spent nursing animosity, or registering wrongs,” she hisses.

“I’m glad we agree—” starts the quivering editor.

“And yet,” Charlotte continues, talking over her. “It has been a fortnight since I have sent you my latest manuscript, and have as of yet received nothing in return but your most bitter silence.”

“But—” started the editor.

“No,” hisses Charlotte. “Stop. Hold on to your ‘but’s.”

It is morning now, and quiet. Weeks have passed since the surviving members of the team fled Brontësaurus Park by helicopter. The island is calm, still, mostly unchanged except for a reminder here and there: the torn fence, the ransacked kitchen, the Visitor’s Center where Charlotte fought against Emily and Anne, now in shambles.

We have forgotten how beautiful the island is. Look, here, a quiet stream, bubbling, winding through the forest. Follow the stream: watch it drop off into a waterfall. See the rocks at the base of the fall; see washed up on the muddy banks next to the rocks, a red, white, and blue-striped Barbasol can, torn open, empty. Look: see leading away from the stream and towards the forest, footprints. We thought we had seen horror before, but here, now, staring at impossible size 8 bootprints, we know suddenly that our horror has only begun.

Follow the footprints to just inside the forest, where a gruesome scene awaits: the remnants of what appears to have been a game of whist, violently disrupted, the chairs toppled, the cards scattered every which way. Outside of the wreckage, only one set of boot prints continue: onward, towards the center of the island.

Back at the base of the stream, the Barbasol can spilled open, empty. Crouch down: here, our only two clues as to the can’s previous contents: slivers of a shattered test tube, and a small identification tag, yellow, square, the type used to label scientific specimens.

A small, yellow, square identification tag upon which is typed, simply: J. Austen.

Credits roll.

7 Strange and Brilliant Holocaust Novels You’ve Probably Never Even Heard About

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Like many Australian Jews of my generation, I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My grandparents were survivors, the kind who fled to a faraway land where they wouldn’t have to speak of the horrors they had endured. I revered them, awed by the very fact of their survival, and did not dare ask questions. Instead, I sought some kind of understanding in the vast, overcrowded field of Holocaust literature. I began with the classics: the survivor memoirists and novelists around whom the canon has been built. From there, the pickings were endless. With every book I devoured, I recast my grandparents as the central characters, sending them back to their unspeakable, private hells.

Deeper into the labyrinth I ventured, hundreds upon hundreds of books, mostly novels. The more I read, the more I began to notice a disappointing sameness to many of them. In the 75 years since the Holocaust, much of its literature has come to fit into neat narrative templates. At best, we see variations on a theme, triumph over unimaginable adversity, usually riffing on recurring tropes that border on cliché. At worst, we get schmaltzy dreck that minimizes, sanitizes, or otherwise distorts what happened. Casual readers could be forgiven for dipping into a couple and moving on, convinced they’d read what they need to about the subject. But every now and then there will be those small few exceptions, novels so astoundingly original, so daring, that they will demand the attention of even the most seasoned, fatigued readers. Here are seven Holocaust novels that smash the template.

Mr. Theodore Mundstock by Ladislav Fuks

Mr. Theodore Mundstock by Ladislav Fuks

In occupied Prague, Mr. Theodore Mundstock sets up a mock concentration camp in his apartment to acclimatize to his fate. Accompanied only by his shadow (both Greek chorus and devil’s advocate) and some weird bird-like creature, he lays out a wooden board, practices stockpiling scraps of food and simulates assaults by over-zealous camp guards. He also acts as self-appointed bringer-of-hope to those around him, promising his neighbors that they need not fear deportation as the war will end before ‘the Spring”. It is as sad as it is calculated. Is he just mad or do these baseless promises help the others survive? Mr. Theodore Mundstock is one of the best, albeit strangest, novels I have read. With generous scoops of both comedy and tragedy, it confronts very difficult issues of morality and honesty in times of crisis, all the while questioning what amounts to rational action when the entire framework of rationality has collapsed.

The Dance of Genghis Cohn by Romain Gary

The Dance of Genghis Cohn by Romain Gary

Moishe Cohn was a small-time clown on the Yiddish burlesque circuit. Murdered at Auschwitz, his last and most glorious prank happened at the moment of death: he turned around and bared his butt at the firing squad. Twenty-five years later he is still up to his old tricks, albeit only in spectral form, possessing and messing with the mind of the man who killed him. Detective Schatz, formerly SS officer Schatz, is a high-ranking policeman in a small German town where he is enmeshed in an investigation into a series of murders. Gary mines this rather wacky setup to hilarious comic effect, but in doing so manages to tackle some very big issues—complicity, reconciliation, retribution and the absurdity of de-Nazification. It is as disturbing as it is funny.

Trieste by Daša Drndić 

Trieste by Daša Drndić

When Daša Drndić died last year, the world lost one of its finest and most challenging writers. Trieste is, without a doubt, her greatest work. A masterclass in documentary fiction, it seamlessly weaves photographs, maps, Nazi documents and transcripts from the Nuremberg trials into the narrative, to tell the story of Haya Tadeschi and her relationship with the Nazi monster, Kurt Franz. The novel begins at the end: Haya is sitting alone in a nursing home, sifting through old photos, awaiting the arrival of a son she gave away as part of the Lebensborn program and had long presumed dead. What follows is a complex and harrowing meditation on the sliding doors of history in which the conventional fact/fiction divide is blurred beyond recognition. At times, the documentary elements are used to staggering effect. One chapter is just a list of the 9,000 Italian Jews killed during the war. Dizzying.

Mendelssohn Is on the Roof by Jiri Weil

Mendelssohn Is On The Roof by Jiri Weil

The rank absurdity of the Nazi obsession with racial theories has never been so hilariously derided than in Weil’s 1960 novel set in occupied Prague. Acting Reichsprotector Heydrich is giving an architectural tour to a visiting German dignitary, waxing lyrical about the Baroque style and gothic features of the various buildings. Heydrich plans the tour to end at the opera house, and to prepare for this grand finale he orders that a statue of the Jewish composer Mendelssohn be removed from the roof. Of course, the SS men given the task have no idea which statue is Mendelssohn, so they revert to stereotype and try to smash the one with the biggest nose. That, it transpires, is Wagner. They eventually get it right, toppling Mendelssohn, but leaving him on the roof, from where he comes to life to seek revenge. It is all very Don Giovanni which, not coincidentally, is the very opera Heydrich and his guest are watching inside.

Ludwig's Room by Alois Hotschnig

Ludwig’s Room by Alois Hotschnig

Ghosts, both literal and metaphorical, haunt this extraordinary novel that reckons with one village’s collective responsibility for wartime atrocities. Kurt Weber inherits his great uncle’s country house and goes through the one door he was never allowed to open as a child. As with any good horror story, what he finds inside cannot be good, but here the frights come in the form of revelations—fragmented and hallucinatory—about his family’s involvement in the operation of a nearby concentration camp and their desperate attempts to bury the evidence afterwards. The deeper Weber digs, the more he comes to realize it’s not just his family but all his neighbors who share in the guilt. A damning indictment on the ease with which one slips from bystander to perpetrator.

The Hollow Bones by Leah Kaminsky

The Hollow Bones by Leah Kaminsky

The decaying pelt of a stuffed panda narrates a good chunk of this novel that reimagines one of the strangest episodes of the Nazi era. It’s 1938 and Ernst Schaeffer, unswervingly ambitious scientist and explorer, is tapped by the SS to lead an expedition to Tibet to discover the origins of the Aryan race. Nazi ideology swiftly poisons his worldview, as he sacrifices everything to ambition, including his fiancée, Herta. The Hollow Bones is a taut, if absurd, adventure that is unafraid to ask big questions. More conventional novels have explored similar ground—what happens when science and ideology collide—but few have used such an obscure and thrilling historical footnote to do so. And, for what it’s worth, you can even visit the panda at the Philadelphia Museum of Natural History if you happen to be in the neighborhood.

The Nazi and the Barber by Edgar Hilsenrath

The Nazi and the Barber by Edgar Hilsenrath

In terms of rank brutality, moral bankruptcy and the banality of evil, Hilsenrath’s extraordinary novel knows no equal. Breaking every template in the Holocaust narrative playbook, it tells the story of Max Schulz, a ruthless concentration camp guard who, after the war, assumes the identity of his dead childhood friend Itzig Finkelstein and escapes to Palestine. There he becomes a fighter alongside the very people he had been actively trying to exterminate, helping in their struggle to establish a homeland. Schulz is a truly grotesque creation, constantly seeking to shift blame and present himself as just a regular guy swept up by circumstance. It’s an uncomfortable and, at times, repulsive read. Yet, as a satire of German post-war reckoning, it’s also outrageously funny. Little wonder Hilsenrath, himself a Holocaust survivor, struggled to find a publisher in his homeland.

In “The Unpassing,” a Taiwanese Family Grieves in the Harsh Wilderness of Rural Alaska

Posted on by Jo Lou

Why do we leave home and country? If all unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways, then there might be just as many reasons for emigration. Some leave because they have to. I became an immigrant to the United States somewhere along the spectrum between chance and choice. Reading Chia-Chia Lin’s The Unpassing brought back with force all the self-doubt, second-guessing, and dithering that has been part of my own long process, by no means over, of leaving home. After more than a decade away, the lure of undoing the journey still beckons, even as I understand rationally that no true return can be possible.

Purchase the novel

In Lin’s novel, a family of five emigrates from Taiwan to Alaska because of the father’s ambitions. There, they are shortly joined by a sixth, the baby of the family. But tragedy strikes, and the youngest of them passes away just as the space shuttle Challenger disaster shakes America. What follows is narrated by Gavin, the middle child, himself fresh from a narrow brush with death. Lin’s evocative passages and brilliantly observed details place the reader in a landscape rendered at turns foreboding or desolate by the family’s calamities. There is much to savor in her deft ability to conjure atmosphere. Garth Greenwell raves: “Maybe once or twice a year, I read a book that’s so good I want to proselytize about it. […] When I finished it I felt like I couldn’t breathe.”

I talked to Chia-Chia Lin about her debut novel, exploration, and child narrators.

YZ Chin: I really admire the title. “Unpassing” is a word that can’t be found in Merriam Webster, but feels familiar enough that readers would have some idea of what they think it means, only to second-guess themselves. It perfectly captures the instability and precariousness that permeates the novel. Is there a story behind the title?

Chia-Chia Lin: I’d always thought titles might be the one eureka moment novelists get to look forward to — since, you know, writing a novel isn’t exactly a process overflowing with confidence and certainties. As it turned out, “The Unpassing” came to me about halfway into the first draft, but I kept fidgeting with it and trying out other titles. The previous title, which I’d held on to for over a year, gestured at scale — both small and large — because in that version of the novel, the narrator was obsessed with the infinitesimal while his father was gazing upward and outward, at the stars. But I became preoccupied by other explorations, and the title no longer fit. I do think there is something about the “un” in “unpassing” that made me eventually settle on it. It evokes instability, as you said. It also suggests a haunting. It’s not the same as a negation — there’s still a ghostly imprint left. Like the word “unspeak.” It’s not the same as not having spoken at all, and in fact it highlights the impossibility of undoing speech, of rewinding an action or taking it back.

YZC: How would you feel about sharing that previous title? Its ghostly imprint?

CCL: I would feel embarrassed, now that I’ve talked it up.

YZC: Another way “The Unpassing” intrigues me as a title is how it ties in to Gavin traveling to Taiwan near the end of the novel. It’s like he’s trying to undo the journey he was brought on by his father, an “unpassing.” How did you settle on Alaska as a counterpoint of sorts to Taiwan?

CCL: The first pages I wrote were set in the woods of Pennsylvania, where I spent a lot of my childhood, but they were missing a certain energy in the landscape — something I’ve realized I need, in all of my writing, in order to proceed. Plus, since the novel’s family had immigrated from Taiwan, as mine had, there were just too many similarities, and the story kept collapsing into nonfiction, which for me spells death.

Many years ago, I published a story set in Alaska (but in the interior, where it is wilder), and I’d grown dissatisfied with it. I’d lived in Anchorage for a short but meaningful time, about 15 years ago, and I wanted to explore what it was that kept the city so alive in my mind. So I changed the woods to a white spruce forest on the outskirts of Anchorage, taking a bit of license and creating a fictional community there, and as soon as I did that, resonances started to appear: Immigrating is a venture into the unknown, and so is pioneering. The mother grew up in a seaside village, and now she was walking a vastly different, but also strangely familiar, coast. When she dug for clams on the Kenai Peninsula, she was surprisingly in her element. And so on.

Immigrating is a venture into the unknown, and so is pioneering.

YZC: I wanted to talk to you about that, the mother character. In the novel, everyone else in the family has close calls with death (illness, falling tree, mudflats etc.). The mother seems to be the only one relatively unvisited by danger. She fishes, gets firewood, keeps everyone alive. She’s also the only one who actively tries to cultivate ties to their home country, making phone calls and telling stories about Taiwan. Would you say that’s her source of strength, given she doesn’t want to be in Alaska?

CCL: It might not be an overstatement to say I wrote the entire book trying to understand the mother. I wouldn’t say that her strength comes from her ties to her home country, but it may be true that this is what she thinks. In the beginning of the story, the narrator observes that she’s shy around strangers, especially when speaking in English, despite the fact that she’s a huge, dominating personality at home. As the novel progresses and the pressures on the family increase, I began to realize that the mother, regardless of what she herself might claim, is actually the character most well suited to the environment. There are times when she even thrives. Although she’s the one harping on a return to Taiwan, when she’s finally given the chance, she doesn’t take it. There’s a note of irony when you compare the father — the one who wanted to be a pioneer — and the mother.

YZC: Along the same vein, we see Taiwanese Hokkien quoted in original only in conversation between the narrator Gavin and his mother. As someone who understands some of the language, I read those scenes as Gavin using it to distance himself from her, which I found heartbreaking. When he’s rude to her in Taiwanese Hokkien, she almost praises him. But when he talks back in English, she says “Don’t talk to me like that.” Do you think we are potentially different people when speaking different languages? How does that affect the characters’ abilities to connect with each other?

CCL: When we grow up hearing a mixture of languages, we learn at a young age to distinguish which circumstances are appropriate for which language. We come to associate particular emotions with a language. In my own life, Taiwanese Hokkien has been associated with safety and familiarity (since I spoke it only when I was very young), but it was also what was used for the kind of fighting you would unleash only within closed doors. For me, Mandarin Chinese is sometimes spoken at a greater distance; it’s what I used when I traveled to mainland China for work, or to speak with my in-laws, and it’s a language I’ve studied formally.

Almost certainly when we speak in a particular language, we are falling back on unconscious patterns and associations. I think the result is that expressing ourselves in a different way using that tongue requires greater effort. It requires us to take down some walls. In my novel, the characters often do not do this, which I think is realistic and also fascinating, in the way that missed connections are fascinating.

YZC: That resonates with me, the habits enforced by languages. How would you describe Gavin’s relationship with English? On one hand, he comes up against the legalese of lawsuits and eviction notices, and on the other, he’s experiencing kindness from his Alaskan neighbors.

CCL: I think the impenetrability of the legalese has to do more with Gavin’s age than any issue of language. He thinks in English, so it’s a private as well as a public language for him.

YZC: The ten-year-old narrator’s vulnerability really lent itself to the atmospheric passages of the novel, and for me his vulnerability comes not from the simple naiveté of a child but a kind of suggestibility. Why did you decide to tell the story through Gavin? Does it have anything to do with him being a middle child and thus (as the stereotype goes) more overlooked, more unpredictable?

CCL: The middle child positioning is part of it. I wanted him to feel some responsibility — for his younger brother, for example — but I also wanted him to be a child rather than a teenager, to be an age when he was still relying wholly on others: his older sister, his mother, his father. I think his age is important. He’s ten in the novel. To me, this is an age that allows for full complexity of thought, but retains a world view that still feels separate from adulthood. I was wary, though, of presenting him in a way that would get him tagged as precocious. I love novels narrated by children, but I usually don’t love those types of novels.

Family migration is often spurred by one person’s choices that have huge ramifications for every other family member.

YZC: What are some of those novels narrated by children that you love? What did they accomplish that wouldn’t be possible with an adult narrator?

CCL: Family Life by Akhil Sharma; The Gangster We Are All Looking For by lê thi diem thúy; The Dream Room, by Marcel Möring (especially the first chapter — it’s only four chapters long; the last chapter is slightly baffling). These are wildly different books, I might add. But they examine family difficulties at a slant that makes everything seem new. It’s not wonderment — I hate that word. It’s more like how when you lie down on the floor, you notice different things about a room. The novels don’t sacrifice nuance simply because a child is doing the looking.

YZC: You said earlier you wrote the book to understand the mother. I love the idea of writers exploring what confounds them through writing. Were there any unexpected realizations from finishing the book?

CCL: I had a lot of insights into the characters that surprised me. I’ve had similar experiences while writing short stories, but nowhere at this level of magnitude. I think it’s simply the amount of time spent with the characters, the quantity of pages written and thrown away — you begin to see congruences and contradictions everywhere.

YZC: A cheeky question, but do you have a response ready for when people inevitably ask: How autobiographical is your novel?

CCL: No, I don’t have a response ready! Most of the facts are not autobiographical (by intention), but many of the emotional situations are. Was that obfuscating? I hope so.

YZC: Good for you! I think sometimes there’s this expectation that immigration novels feature a tussle, especially for second-generation characters, between the “old culture” and the “new culture,” with some kind of resolution at the end that’s a compromise between the two. The Unpassing is a departure from this arc. Was it at all your intention to write a different kind of immigrant novel?

CCL: Haha, I would never set out with an intention to write a different kind of anything, mostly because it would incapacitate me. But I do think I’m interested in an aspect of migration that I haven’t seen explored in depth in fiction (though if you told me it already exists I wouldn’t necessarily be surprised either). What I’m interested in is how family migration — when it’s a decision rather than an absolute necessity — is often spurred by one person, and how one person’s desires or choices have huge ramifications for every other family member. For children, who have no agency in the matter, migration thrusts them into a place where they may feel they don’t belong, and yet they may not have any other place of belonging, since they were often young when they left their country of origin. They’re lacking the memories and the history. And this leaves them floating, in a way. Searching.

17 Books by Queer Asian American Writers

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

To be queer and Asian is both a singular and collective experience. Our bodies become a reclamation in reconciling self-identity with communities that can, oftentimes, feel like they are against us. It’s a liminal space between celebration and danger; inside, we question the multiplicity of our consciousness. How do we exist? How do we generate love?

In a moment where the Supreme Court issued that it would oversee three court cases on LGBTQ+ protections, these questions seem more and more pertinent. There are no simple answers to understanding the self, but there are definitive actions that help the process and give greater access to these dialogues: Having the openness to listen. Being an ally. Creating and sustaining pro-queer rights in and out of the home. Being generous and kind to yourself. For me, creating this reading list.

With the existence of queer Asian American narratives, we are visible. These books represent the space each voice had to forge within their own cultural histories and normative society. They say we’re here, we’re with you. To write anything with a queer Asian identity is an assertion—in this long-term battle to gain community and safety and acceptance—that we will remain unafraid, even in difficult times. This is a fight we’ll win.

Marriage of a Thousand Lies by SJ Sindu

Marriage of a Thousand Lies by S.J. Sindu

Marriage of a Thousand Lies follows Lucky and her husband, Krishna, both of whom are gay and lying to their Sri Lankan families about it.  When circumstances cause Lucky to return back to her childhood home, Lucky asks herself what she is willing to walk away from when she rekindles love for her first friend.

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang

Starting with her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Esmé Weijun Wang provides a powerful look into what it’s like to have mental and chronic illness in this essay collection. The book examines everything, from institutionalization to the medical community, and comes back to the self.

Quarantine by Rahul Mehta

With humor and tenderness, Rahul Mehta’s short story collection moves through the lives of queer Indian American men, reconciling identity with cultural tradition in the larger scape of societal separation.

This Way to the Sugar by Hieu Minh Nguyen

Hieu Minh Nguyen’s debut poetry collection captures what it is like to be a queer Vietnamese American in the Midwest. The book manifests as written slam poetry, speaking truth to trauma, desire, sexuality, and identity.

Edinburgh by Alexander Chee

Edinburgh portrays twelve-year-old Fee, a Korean American soprano in the local boys’ choir. When he learns about how the director sexually abuses the choir’s section leaders, Fee must contend with his hurt, his silence, and what it means to forgive oneself after his friend’s death.

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

In this collection of essays, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha examines the politics of disability justice. This book is a celebration to sick or disabled queer people of color, and a call to arms toward giving greater access to the community.

Gutted by Justin Chin

In this book of poetry, Justin Chin renders his experiences with mental and physical health and looming death as he returns to Southeast Asia to care for his father, who was diagnosed with cancer, while dealing with his own illness. Chin passed away at the age of 46 from a stroke.

The Exilesby Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla

The Exiles, otherwise known as The Two Krishnas, evokes love and loss when a woman, Pooja Kapoor, discovers her husband has fallen in love with another man. The novel takes Hindu mythology and Sufi poetry to ask what it means to know someone.

Seasonal Velocities by Ryka Aoki

Ryka Aoki creates an intimate multi-genre collection of poems, stories, and essays with Seasonal Velocities. The book journeys through love and abuse in the trans experience—and more importantly, what it is to be human.

The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi

The Year of Blue Water is a book of poetry that moves through lyric and prose to explore the self. These poems converse with what it means to have multiple identities in this meditative search for self-knowledge.

The Incendiaries by R. O. Kwon

The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon

The Incendiaries follows Phoebe, a university student who gets further and further drawn into a cult whose leader has North Korean ties, and Will, the guy who loves her. Love, violence, and danger are collapsed in this powerful novel.

When the Chant Comes by Kay Ulanday Barrett

Kay Ulanday Barrett speaks to their experience with gender, race, disability, sickness, and politics in this poetry collection. These poems are unapologetic, embodying love for the body and spirit.

No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal

No One Can Pronounce My Name is a generational novel set in an Indian American community outside of Cleveland. The book explores what it means to be an outsider and find one’s place, through the lives of two people: Harit, a man who dresses in a sari at night to keep himself sane after his sister’s death, and Ranjana, a woman who has sent her child off to college and worries about her marriage.

Soft Science by Franny Choi

In this series of Turing Test–inspired poetry, Soft Science looks at queer, Asian American femininity. These poems move from cyborgs to slugs, erasure and agency, to explore the tangle of identity and consciousness.

After by Fatimah Asghar

After winds magic realism with the experience of living as a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim woman in America. This book of poetry dips into the strange and disjointed, as it frames life through a body that has felt unbelonging.

recombinant by Ching-In Chen

recombinant is a hybrid collection of prose and poetry that experiments with how poetry can be used to examine erasure and the reconstruction of community and lineage. Set in a speculative future, this book gives space to communal memory.

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden

T Kira Madden’s debut memoir chronicles her coming-of-age life as a queer, mixed-race teenager in Boca Raton, Florida, to the present-day mourning over her father’s death. This novel is an unflinching, loving journey of a young woman.

It’s All Porn and Cat Videos

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

“Horribilis”

by Amanda Marbais

One evening, I ran over a cat. Upon impact, its flat eyes reproached me, like it hadn’t known pain before. I got out of the car, stood in the headlights, and cried. It had a crushed skull and its bloody ID read “Sparkle-Motion, 5502 Ashland Ave.” I delivered it to an angry mother and a six-year-old, wearing Dark Knight pajamas, who gave me the devil’s look. I’m a vegetarian!—I wanted to say. He wouldn’t buy my sincerity. It was horrible. His reproach appeared in every human expression. My insomnia returned, and I went to my shrink.

My shrink was into alternative medicine. She had posters of people standing on cliffs, their arms raised in a V. Tuning forks lay on squares of bright orange cloth. Lamps were buried in large amber rocks. She wore blouses with choir-cloak sleeves and full-rimmed hipster glasses.

She had once been on Broadway, but never gave details about her roles. She assured me she was never hired for a lead, and eventually she grew tired of being poor. Her colleague had been a massage therapist for Kiss. This explained their lively office punctuated by flighty laughter. My shrink was laid back, and this appealed to me.

“You hit a cat. How horrible. I would be so upset.” She was never one to deny validation. She adjusted her glasses. “OK so how is your anxiety level?” She lit some incense.

“Terrible.”

Phobias are the most common mental illness, yet I had an uncommon number. They can be broadly classified as anxiety disorders, and this was my diagnosis.

“So which fears are bothering you?” she said.

“All. All the fears,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” she said. She broke out the tuning fork.

In my household, my shrink gained celebrity status the summer she helped my husband Eli through a job change. She was often called upon to assist in minor issues.

“So, do you want to go?” I said.

“Yes,” said Eli. “If you don’t mind.”

The need for a session arose from our enjoyment of a certain kind of pornography. It was about jellyfish and people getting stung during sex. These productions involved Magnum PI-type settings, bad acting, and then frantic jellyfish stinging. We had stumbled on to it, and while appalled at first, we just continued watching and were eventually turned on. We’d been watching it for weeks, doing it when the jellyfish stopped.

Yet there was a drawback to discussing sex. My shrink was like my mother.

I met Eli post-shrink, years after accepting a bad childhood. By even the most lax standards, my parents were not the Keatons, unless there’s an alternate universe where Steven and Elyse engage in all types of abuse: physical and emotional. My parents were absent any type of moral compass, even say a Jim Jones one.

When we arrived at the office, Eli took in the new posters, the aromatherapy candles, and the wish box, but said nothing. He and my shrink immediately caught up with banter.

Hitting the cat sent me into agrizoophobia, with a special fear about bears. We lived in the city but vacationed in national parks. Agrizoophobia rode my established neurosis like a pilot fish. While fixated on an object of fear, I’d repeat “motherfucker” like Samuel L. Jackson whenever I saw a cat, bear, or someone who looked like Lou Reed.

“Do you feel anxious all the time, or just uneasy in general?” She was opening a package of eagle feathers.

“It’s a real phobia this time—swear to god.”

Most people harbored a crumb of phobia regarding something—the roar of cars, fireworks, wormholes, sweating crowds at county fairs, spider webs, giant squid, etc. Once I had a phobia about manholes, a splinter of Cacohydrophobia.

My therapist specialized in anxiety treatments. Long ago, she’d studied with Francine Shapiro who had developed EMDR, a therapy utilizing REM. My shrink’s office was an anti-anxiety-lair equipped with gear—giant headphones and moon-shaped glasses, like those worn by Geordi La Forge. Patients chanted pleasant tropes while watching a sea green balloon float away.

She was hinky, but interesting. However, on my walks through Ravenswood to the train, I wondered if people could ever really know each other. Because, if anything, she knew me better than my mom. Of course, there wasn’t actual equality or shared experience. So, of course, we didn’t really know each other, which seemed surprising after sitting in her chair for six years.

Ailurophobia soon became an issue, and purring became a total detonator for me. We couldn’t visit our best friend, Michelle, because she had two cats. One was a Maine Coon the size of a bobcat, a motherfucker of twenty-eight pounds with a five-inch bat-tail. When it jumped, it shook the floor, and its meow resembled a drunk guy mocking a meow.

I developed a fear of true crimes shows, the ones deeply imbedded with the message “It really could happen to you.” I feared everything from an owl attack to a man waiting in the closet. I feared the kidnapping from the street, only to lose your cell phone before being thrown into an Oldsmobile trunk. I feared dismemberment.

On my way home, I saw a terrifying cat and swerved before going into hyperventilation. To have a cat phobia is to not be able to use the Internet. Eli looked up from his computer when I said this.

“It’s all porn and cat videos,” I said.

“Don’t I know it,” said Eli.

Someone posted a cat meme on Facebook, and I had become transfixed. “It’s horrible,” I said.“Horrible.”

He looked over my shoulder. “That’s because the cat is Photoshopped to look like Nicholas Cage. That’s both amazing and terrifying.” He closed my computer for me. “Who would do that?”

“I feel like I’m entering crazyland,” I said.

Eli and I shared one phobia. We went camping and because of the mild winter were beset by ticks. One gave Eli Rocky Mountain spotted fever. “It sounds more like a craft beer than a disease,” he said to the doctor.

He began taking antibiotics. The next morning as Eli held our dog, a motherfucker dropped to the floor with a wettish thud. It looked like a rock with legs, or what I imagined could be a polyp on a dying man. We found another twenty-six and disposed of seven at a time with tweezers and a jam jar. We both grew phobic about ticks but sharing made the fear surmountable.

But after six years of therapy, ultimately my fears grew worse. I made a catalogue: spoons, fireworks, dresses that don’t fit, bank lines, viruses, manholes, ink spots, trains, apple-picking, golf courses, Mary Lou Retton, bowling, Super-Soakers, lampshades, firearms, glass tables, etc.

On my next visit, my shrink shocked me by not asking about Eli. She had left our last appointment behind—one more proof she had a life. She stood below her “Hydration is the key to life” sign and filled her water bottle from her new pink cooler. She wore a knee-length smock embroidered with ferns. She quaffed her water bottle. “What about doing some inner child work?”

“Oh. Jesus. No,” I said. I stared at the hand puppets of Jung, Maslow, and Freud, the Tibetan singing bowl, and her reed diffuser. I wouldn’t look at her.

Really she was suggesting soul-retrieval. Good thing Eli wouldn’t be weirded out, because I would definitely tell him later. It would be more fun to laugh with him about it than to do it. Everything seemed a drag. “So we’re contacting the four-foot-tall cunt-bag?” I said finally.

My shrink lit some incense. “Now cunt-bag, that’s a name.”

Under full meditation, I focused on the memory of the woods. Its young trees and dry leaves obscured the ranch houses. The inner child jumped down from a low branch and bit my neck, and though spoon-like in bluntness, her baby incisors broke skin. “Motherfucker,” I said, but my eyes were closed.

“What’s happening?”

“She bit me.”

“She must be frightened.”

“Or she’s a bitch!” I looked at my shrink like she was crazy.

“Tell her it’s OK, that she can’t bite.”

“Don’t bite, bitch!” I said.

“I don’t think talking to her that way is going to help. Maybe you should ask her what’s wrong.” She waved more incense at me and smudged it with a feather.

“Bitch, what’s wrong!?” I shouted.

My shrink snickered. “Sorry,” she said. “Tell her if she comes out of the woods, you’ll give her something she wants, like a pony or something.”

“Really, is that good therapy? I can’t give her a pony.” Yet, secretly, I wanted a pony.

“It’s in your imagination. You can give her anything you want.”

We coaxed her past the neighbor’s house. There’s nothing worse than having to tell a kid, “You’re screwed. Whichever direction you go, you’ll be exploited. That’s your destiny, and you’ll hate it.”

“Now all we have to do is retrieve your soul,” said my shrink. Her embroidered smock made her dyed hair unusually red.

“Should we whistle for it?”

“It does sound funny doesn’t it?” She laughed.

“OK.” I told Inner Me the truth in a laconic, controlled way. But it was the pony that lured her to ride like She-Ra across an Indiana suburb, vaulting over the community pool.

“Do you feel better?”

“Somewhat.”

My inner child was supposed to settle into my apartment with an imaginary room, and the pony, in an imaginary stable. I’ve done this a good fifteen times. Soul-retrieval is the New Age-y name for it—I err on the side of Carlos Castaneda in his somewhat grounded anthropological days.

“Well, don’t be surprised if you feel a little more anxious this week.” She gave me an awkward hug.

On the drive to meet Eli at Michelle’s, I actively forgot everything.

“Just touch the cat,” said Michelle. She had the Maine Coon on a table, as if she were grooming it. “Seriously. Just touch it,” she said. It turned and growled.

“It’s fucking growling at me.”

“It’s just scared,” said Eli.

“OK. I don’t want to force you,” said Michelle. “I feel bad.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”

On the way to the party, our failed immersion therapy left me hyper-vigilant. I didn’t mention this week my fear was polio, which could explain my fever, stiff limbs, and back pain. It didn’t seem irrational. I considered it in aggregate of an hour per day: in the bath, on the train, walking to work. Polio. I knew I would die, so was I above deadly diseases?

On Monday, I became obsessed with shooters. My office building contained a catacomb of government branches. Last year, a man brought his seven-year-old to the Social Security office. He waved a gun and demanded Arnold’s Spare Ribs, a Barq’s, and seven hundred dollars in back Medicaid costs. The elevators were cordoned off and bomb dogs sniffed the bathrooms. My fear was not totally irrational. The guy was owed seven hundred dollars, because Social Security was wrong. But for days I pictured my office door bursting open and someone blasting my face.

I did not tell Eli as I slid into bed. It was raining. He had gotten us diner food and lit a candle in our kitchen nook, which overlooked the Oak Park street and a backdrop of Victorian houses.

He researched backpacks for a trip to Montana. He had gotten a raise and found a deal on flights. “We can camp up there, backcountry, then stay in this railroad chalet.”

“There’s more chance of bear attack in backcountry. You watched Night of the Grizzlies with me,” I said.

“You have more chance of being struck by lightning. I’m not giving you a hard time though,” he said.

My fear could be traced to obsessively watching Grizzly Man, a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, whose celebrity was derived from the infamy of his bear-related death.

“Well, we don’t have to,” said Eli. On the nightstand beside him were his pocket knife and the remnants of the strap he tried to repair.

On an alpine ledge, the chalet offered a view of archaically named natural phenomena—Gunsight Mountain, Lake Ellen Wilson, Bad Marriage Mountain, and Beaver Chief Falls. This place seemed appropriate for rail men, 1920s moguls on wooden skis hiding flasks of gin, and hikers. Eli clicked through the Flickr.

“I don’t want to be resistant to things because of fear,” I said.

“Maybe we need to go someplace where there are no natural predators,” said Eli.

“I can do it,” I said. But I couldn’t do it. There was no way. Months of therapy would have to prepare me.

I have a phobia about the world ending. I imagine a visit to my favorite news outlet will yield a slide show in which the world’s end is a horrifying photo available for five seconds. Thousands of birds will have fallen from the sky and bats will have lost their nocturnal radar and slammed into buildings. Magnetic fields will have disappeared, and an asteroid will be headed for North America. It will release thermal radiation. Everyone’s fingernails will fall off. Weather patterns will change. The water will be contaminated. It’s going to be in a streaming slideshow of death.

“How have you been feeling?” said my shrink.

“I’ve been thinking about the end of the world.”

“That’s dark.”

“Well,” I said.

“No one really wants to die alone. That’s probably your fear,” she said. “OK. More to the point, is she home safe?”

“Yeah,” I said.

I left feeling light-headed, and quickly walked to a bakery to buy a peanut butter Twinkie. Already I had forgotten my shrink, the event evaporating in the street. I resented having to deal with it. I resented her.

We planned our vacation to Sperry Chalet in backcountry. We flew to Kalispell and stayed one civilized night in a railcar, a restored caboose in which we took long showers, and then we lay out flat on the clean bed and watched the Amtrak pull up and the people get out with their packs and trekking poles in the extended dusk. Rested, strapped with backpacks, we hiked Gunsight Trail, tracing the cirque of remaining glaciers. The rivers became creeks below the mountainside. A John Ford movie landscape, boulders were the size of cars, cliffs exceeded skyscrapers, and meadows diminished us to ant proportions, as if we simply crossed a city park.

In a pine forest, we climbed through bear grass, monkey flowers, fireweed. We crossed a fast-rushing river where it grew narrow. In many spots, the river gushed, an open hydrant thickening to a waterfall cascading the hill. Eli talked loudly to scare off bears, then switched to whistling show tunes. I realized Singin’ in the Rain seemed utterly appropriate for scaring bears.

I knew the origin of this technique. Other than people with exotic pets, lone hikers were most susceptible to animal attack. A ranger warned us of silence, claimed running while listening to earbuds could lead to death.

We camped on flat terrain near the rushing river. Even black bears have attacked campers at night, ripping their tents and dragging them by the rib cage. “It’s rare,” said Eli. He patted my arm. I didn’t sleep well for the first hour, but with a Valium I was out.

Bears’ chiefly vegetarian diets comforted me. They were only violent if desperate, freaked out, or if they were just an asshole bear. They mapped their habitats, knowing every stone and every tree. They could walk a hundred miles from home in search of food and were still tough enough to return to their den in just a handful of days.

“Where did you hear all that?” said Eli as he climbed a hill in front of me.

“Animal Planet.”

“God. You’re cute,” he said.

“I am kind of embarrassed by my sources.” Still I went on. “They’re unpredictable though. And they’re smart. They know we’re not to be trusted. Did you know they can run up to thirty miles an hour?”

“We’re not going to see a bear.” He cupped his hands, shouted, “No bears.”

Cresting the hill, he turned and smiled, beautiful though damp with sweat.

Still I imagined wide-set eyes, elongated snouts, longer claws, and humped backs. But their specificity was sacrosanct. They could be all gradations of brown and black and above all elusive.

When we did see the bear, it was rust-colored. It vaulted the trail’s width, like a tumbling ball, disappearing in the brush as if chased. It filled me with joy and exhilaration, as I stared at the undulating brush.

The second one moved slowly, an explorer pushing aside branches as if peering—angry at the hubbub of people. When he moved into the trail, his head lulled, heavy with chuffing.  He filled the trail. He bobbed a “no” and then charged. My limbs floated. Everything slowed. I collapsed in the bear grass. Eli already lay in repose like a child, his face damp. Most of my life had been a string of phobias, and now I could think of nothing but bear grass. As I heard the bear gallop toward the hillside and dive through the brush, I thanked no one, but gazed at Eli in the silence.

Is Life Better in the West?

Posted on by Jo Lou

Before Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s first novel, Kintu, was published to sustained acclaim, the book had multiple rejections from British publishers who dismissed it as “too African” for their taste. The publishers feared the difficult-to-pronounce names of characters and places would jar the jaws of Western readers. What counts as African or “authentically African” is yet to hit the ground, but whatever it lands out to be will likely have no input from British publishers.

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Makumbi’s writing is largely inspired by the oral tradition of Ugandan storytelling. Her latest work, Let’s Tell This Story Properly, spins characters with stories that trek from Uganda to the United Kingdom and back. Revolving around Ugandans living in Britain, the twelve stories question the assumptions of better life that many immigrants associate with the West. To serve the book’s truths properly, Makumbi relies on humor, which is a vital element of Ugandan oral storytelling.

A lecturer of Creative Writing at Lancaster University, Jennifer Makumbi won the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her short story “Let’s Tell This Story Properly,” and the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.

I spoke to Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi about the perceptions and misperceptions of life in the West, finding inspiration in the street dogs of Kampala, and why she doesn’t write for a Western audience.

Kenechi Uzor: I’d like to begin with my favorite story in the collection, “Memoirs of a Namaaso.” I don’t think we can discuss this book properly without this story, without talking about Stow, the dog from whose perspective the story is told. It is still an immigrant story, but this time an immigrant story of a dog moving from Uganda to the UK, moving from being a pariah to a pet. Could you talk about the thoughts and intentions you had while crafting the story?

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi: Kenechi, you have no idea how happy I am that “Memoirs of a Namaaso” is your favorite story, that it works. I enjoyed writing it most. I was just laughing all the way. I did not worry about political correctness or offending any dogs! It was all from imagination. When I came to Britain and saw how the British love and pamper their dogs, I thought about the street dogs in Kampala; how would it feel if one of them came and it was treated like this? The possibilities were too enormous, too crazy to pass up on. I decided on a proud pariah, used to roaming the city at will, arriving in Britain and becoming a pet, limited to the house space, being neutered.

It is a fun story, it is not tasked by issues of what is the story doing, what is it trying to achieve? I made certain that anyone interpreting it does so at their own peril. The streets dogs in Kampala are unfortunately classified as pests by the city council. Often, they poison them to cull them off. However, Kampala street dogs are like the hyacinth weed on Lake Victoria: you kill these today and tomorrow new ones appear.

KU: Can you talk about the origins of the book? Where did this book begin for you creatively? Generally, what’s your process to create and write?

We Ugandans have had so much pain as a nation that we learnt to find humor in anything.

JNM: The obvious origin of the collection is my coming to Britain and settling in Manchester. But the major origin is the innate desire to write home and say, You people. I am out here but you have no idea of the reality. It comes from the knowledge of how Ugandans perceive Europe vs the reality. This is why I included an author’s note, to speak directly to people back home, to say that this is a letter and I have enclosed my pictures, like we used to do before email and mobile phones. The other origin is in a writing group I joined in 2013 that asked for a new short story every month. Creatively, I started with “Malik’s Door,” then “Our Allies the Colonies.”

In terms of process, I tend to create in my head first. I start with a character and her problem and let the story grow in my head for some time. When I cannot put it off any longer, I write. It took me a very long time to get the short story form worked out. I found it very difficult to pin down; it is rather slippery. I still cannot write micro fiction. One story took me four years to get right, another took me six months.

KU: Some of the stories in the collection deal with this real or imagined differences in blackness and the complicated relationship blacks have with other blacks, especially when they meet abroad. Zadie Smith’s novel, On Beauty, also touches on this uneasy tension among, for instance, black Africans versus African Americans versus Caribbean blacks versus Africans of mixed parenthood, etc. This tension exists even between newly immigrated blacks and blacks who’ve been immigrants for decades. What are your thoughts on this? How has this been in your experience?

JNM: It is a very complicated relationship. At the center of it is culture. While we’re all black we are culturally diverse. However, when we meet in the white world, we Africans tend to forget the cultural differences and imagine that we would all gel, just like that, in our blackness. It is worse with Africans who are born in the West but have similar names to ours. We see them as “acting” British or American at us until we realize that culturally they are not African.

KU: Franz Fanon wrote about the psychological trauma that many blacks suffer when they first come in contact with whites, a condition of profound distress that lead many blacks to wrestle and sometimes reject their Africanness. Katassi’s existential shock in “Manchester Happened” typifies this condition. Is it possible for an African to move to Europe/the West and not be changed, either like Katassi or like the intellectual types who, according to Nambassa in the same story, “turn aggressively African… in your face African”?

JNM: What can I say, Kenechi? I don’t know. Maybe if one has not been subjected to the colonial lies about the nature of whiteness and their world. Then there is the internalization of our apparent “ineptness”. But things are changing. With the internet, Africans are beginning to see things.

In 2017, my sister came to Britain on holiday and I took her on a bus ride. When we alighted, she was silent for a long time, then she burst out, How can you stay here, Jennifer? I said, why? She said, They don’t like us! They looked at me with disgust! I said what we say to every new arrival, Nooo, you misunderstood them! In my experience it is one, two, three people out of ten –  especially in the cities – who do that. Most British people try to compensate for that by smiling and being nice. But then it takes one disgusted look to make you chew yourself for the rest of the day.

KU: You’ve won some major literary awards. You mentioned somewhere that winning the Windham-Campbell Prize for you “is like having been working without pay for a long time and then someone comes along and says, ‘Will a salary for the past ten years do?’ Then you’re left speechless.” Can I assume you hold a favorable view of literary awards and the role they can play in a writer’s career? How has the award affected your writing?

In Africa, you are bombarded with images of a perfect life in the West, life of waste and no want. They never talk about their poverty.

JNM: I know of the ability of literary prizes to transform a career, especially for literary writers like me who, without a prize would sell only a few copies. But I am not unaware of the problems prizes create, especially when authors start to chase them. Often, choices made by judges don’t make sense, especially when we see a book we consider “more worthy” of highlighting being left out. It would also help if Africa had its own prizes with a global reach.

But as I have said before, winning a prize is someone saying, I like what you do, let me help you along the way. That does not mean you are the best writer in the world. A writer that takes themselves seriously after winning a prize does so at their own peril. Prizes have not affected my writing process. I still have many insecurities as an author. In fact, now that I have won some prizes, I am so worried about the reception of the collection and the second novel (if it comes out). With Kintu, my first book, I did not worry so much.

KU: I find it also interesting how the collection alluded to the often-neglected fact that many in Africa are not exactly poor and lead better lives in Africa than many people overseas.

JNM: Isn’t that the irony! A lot of middle-class Africans do not realize that they are far better off in Africa. But of course, it does not matter how much you tell them, no one will believe you. Same with people in the West; don’t bother talking about middle class issues in Africa or anything that indicates that you were well off in Africa – they’ll look at you sadly, like, why lie like a child? And so middle-class Africans keep coming to the West and find out too late they should have remained in Africa.

And of course, we who are out here don’t help matters when we go home and flash borrowed money and perpetuate the lie. And then in the West images of skeletal, fly-infested babies or skinny children drinking dirty water are flashed on screens by charity organizations. In Africa, you are bombarded with images of a perfect life in the West, life of waste and no want. Because the West is in control of the media, they never talk about their poverty.

KU: The stories are humorous. I found many of the book’s characters hilarious. What are your thoughts on humor in literature and how did you think about humor as a vehicle in terms of this collection?

JNM: I think of humor as something I inherited culturally. Ugandan stories, the way we tell them to each other, tend to be humorous, even when talking about death or suffering. I think we have had so much pain as a nation that we learnt to find humor in anything. The stories are critical of both the Ugandan and British societies. Criticism is best dispensed with humor and irony. lt is a tool that helps us talk about difficult subjects.

KU: There are very concrete details in the stories. I am thinking now about “Something Inside So Strong,” wondering how much research went into crafting Poonah the Aviation Security Officer, and all that vivid enactments of airport security drama.

JNM: Oh, I worked as an Aviation Security officer for a long time. And let me tell you, I have not written the outrageous things that happened on the search area; they read unbelievable. But Poonah is not me and Namuli is a figment of my imagination. What is not fiction is the fact that there are stories of middle-class Ugandans who have arrived in Britain, got jobs in a supermarket or cleaning, only to find their former maid, shamba boy, working as their team leader. Picture it right there! In fact, that is what the story was about in the beginning and it was called “Britain the Leveler” but in the end I shied away from it in case it had happened to someone I know.

KU: I noticed how, throughout the collection, Ugandan phrases and words aren’t italicized and certain cultural practices like the traditional marriage of Nnaava in “My brother, Bwemage” and Masaaba’s, circumcision in “Love Made in Manchester” aren’t overly explained. I know some authors face this dilemma of explaining or not explaining stuff to foreign readers. What do you think about this? Did you get any pushback from non-Ugandan first readers or editors about this?

I write for a Ugandan audience.

JNM: In Kintu I did not explain things a lot and relied on context. I did not worry about it in this collection. If readers understood Kintu, this collection is even easier. There is always google. The problem is that nothing kills the rhythm and the flow of the story like explanations. Once Africans see them, they presume you write for the West, especially as the West never explains its fiction to us. Besides, most readers find pleasure in working things out for themselves.

I did not italicize this time because of a discussion that happened a while ago. Personally, to italicize is to highlight. I would like my language to stand out on the page, but if most readers I write for are suspicious of it, so be it. Editors and proofreaders did not push back about my none use of italics. My collection was read by a British African editor who is gifted with “double-vision” so to speak. She would say, I am thinking of non-Bantu, non-African readers here; how do they understand this? This was a major process of this collection. And I could only afford this editor because of the Windham-Campbell prize. After her edits, I was able to push back to other editors.

KU: In terms of the book and also generally, how do you think about audience in your writing?

JNM: I write for a Ugandan audience. However, Uganda is diverse. We have over forty languages and such diverse cultures that if I can reach those diverse Ugandans, then I have covered the whole of Africa. This is not about marketing – I sell more books outside Uganda – this is about form. Writing for a Ugandan audience helps me focus, it determines the tone, the subject matter, the attitude, the diction, events I include and what I leave out.

The second story, “Our Allies the Colonies” was first written for a British audience. I rewrote it for a Ugandan audience and even gave it a new title. The difference between the two stories is staggering and shows the effects an anticipated audience can have on a story. Authors from the West never think about African readers, whether we would understand them, they write for themselves, but we still do. I am just doing the same.

The problem is that Western readers have been spoilt by glossaries, by certain aesthetics and have learnt to demand for them. But we can change that. And from my experience, most readers are up for the challenge. They would rather not be patronized.  I suspect that if I wrote for the world, my writing would be all over the place, disorganized. And how can I please the whole world? Best to focus on the Ugandan readers who I know and understand. Then I can speak to the world like a Ugandan.

KU: It’s not uncommon for the same book published in the UK to sometimes have a different title in its US edition. Your collection will be known in the UK as Manchester Happened and as Let’s Tell This Story Properly in the US, what informed this choice?

Western authors never think about African readers. They write for themselves, I am just doing the same.

JNM: That was down to publishers. I wrote the book under “Love Made in Manchester” the final story. The American publisher preferred Let’s Tell This Story Properly and that made sense because it is a title that says something about the Ugandan immigration experience being told properly because we perform success when we go home. However, that particular story is old in Africa. As a title it does not promise anything new to the readers back home. Manchester Happened is not only new but it highlights Manchester, my adopted city, as a character.

KU: What challenges have you faced with this book both in terms of the writing and getting it published?

JNM: I started writing it back in 2009 when I was so broke and had given up the possibility of being published. I was prepared for a life of a failed author and so I wrote what I enjoyed, and writing kept me sane too. I also hoped to get a few of them published in magazines and journals to create a literary footprint. But as soon as Kintu was published in Kenya, I started to work on it as a collection. When Kintu found an American publisher, they took the collection too. Same happened with the British publisher. Basically, the collection did not face the kind of rejection that Kintu and my first novel were subjected to. The major problems happened towards the end. Some of the stories were rejected and I had to consult with a few readers and editors about this. I was reassured that the stories were fine. And then, towards the end, with the intense scrutiny of editing, each story started to read like a novel. It was as if I was editing 12 novels. It was so exhausting I swore never to write a collection again.

KU: What about the joys?

JNM: Putting the dog story aside, it was a joy to create so many characters, especially the women. I fell in love with Nnakazaana and Nnalongo, I begun to understand Heather within history. I enjoyed discovering first Irish migration, then black people into Manchester. How the Irish and Africans came together under English prejudice and racism. It began to make sense why back then, Africans tended to marry Irish women. How Africans came to settle in Manchester after WWI. But I also suffered the anxiety of the two boys, Luzinda and Bakka, in “Christmas is Coming” and how claustrophobic their home was. I derived a twisted pleasure in taking Kayla the Scottish wife of a Ugandan to Mbale in Uganda and subjecting her son to adult circumcision in public.

How to Write a Fiction Podcast

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

There are things that audio drama—scripted fiction with no visual element, usually distributed via podcast—can do that no other medium can. Sound creates a unique bond with an audience, a sense of intimacy. There’s a specific rhythm to it. Characters’ journeys become sharper, horror becomes more terrifying, otherworldly vistas can be created in the mind’s eye. Writing for sound allows me to tell stories that wouldn’t work as a film or novel. And if you’re used to writing solely for text, you might want to try it.

I say this as someone who, a long long time ago, had a secret, kind of sad dream of becoming the next Ursula K. Le Guin. (This dream isn’t completely dead, just dormant as hell.) But listening to old episodes of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater on the Air, as well as the then-just-starting Welcome to Night Vale, demonstrated that sound could be a uniquely captivating way to tell stories. And there’s a whole bunch of exciting stories being told in audio fiction. Podcasts like The Bright Sessions and The Truth are doing some really cool things. And outside of the unique power of audio drama, they’re can be a good fit logistically. An fiction podcast can find an audience more easily than a short story or novel, and can be less complicated to produce than a TV show or web series.

Logo for new Archive 81 miniseries, Left of the Dial
This illustration by ANOBELISK, lead illustration by Lauren Kolesinskas, both used with permission

Have you been sold on writing an audio drama? Great. Congratulations. Welcome to the not-that-wide world of aspiring sound titans. Now for the bad part. Actually writing for audio drama can be really really difficult. And I’d know, as the co-creator of, and writer behind, Archive 81, a fiction podcast about horror, loneliness, family, and creepy tapes. Every time I brainstorm a new season with my lovely and talented producing partner Daniel Powell, every time I start a script for a new episode, every time I try and think of something engaging for a character to say… I still struggle to make the best possible use of the audio medium. It requires a different mindset, a different toolbox.

So here are some tips and tricks and stray flotsam I’ve picked up from writing a whole bunch of fiction podcasts. They’re not a roadmap or a bible, just things I think you might want to consider if you’re moving from writing prose or film to writing audio drama. Because writing audio drama might be uniquely challenging, but it’s also uniquely rewarding. Remember how I wrote at length about the power of audio drama? Yeah, I didn’t lie. Anyway, before I get too gushy, here are the tips and tricks.

Before anything else, think of SOUND.

This is the big one, the mountain spring which every one of these dumb tips flows. An easy way to think about audio drama is as television without pictures, but just writing a television script and expecting it to make a good fiction podcast is a terrible plan. The audience won’t know what the heck is going on and the whole thing will sound boring and lifeless. This is a super obvious point, but it bears pointing out: TV and film are visual mediums, audio drama is a sonic medium. So when you brainstorm your cool new fiction podcast… think of how it’s going to sound.

Just writing a television script and expecting it to make a good fiction podcast is a terrible plan.

Now, what does this mean in practice? It means making your characters, your setting, and your plot sonically interesting. Maybe you want to tell a story about a daring team of interstellar archaeolgists who gradually uncover the disturbing secrets of a long dead (or are they???) alien race. Cool! But it’s probably not going to be that cool if the archaeologists are trying to decipher an alien script. Consider instead having the aliens be a sightless species, perhaps leaving “singing” crystals that the very attractive archaeologists, accompanied by their silent robot pal, have to decode. Fun! And it gives you the opportunity to wow the listener with interesting, engaging sounds. That’s exactly what you want to do when you’re thinking of the overall plot of your audio drama.

Before you start writing, think of sounds that interest you, and let those shape the arc of your audio drama. When I was writing short stories, I often thought of a phrase or sentence that stuck in my mind, and I’d write my stories to get to those sentences. A screenwriter might think of a monumental image that they’d like to get to, and construct the plot to highlight that image. You can do the same with audio. Whether it’s a father coldly describing arcane rituals into a tape recorder, or eerie banjo music playing over a car’s stereo, I’ve found that thinking of interesting sounds, interesting sonic textures, and altering the plot to get to them, is a useful way to write.

Earlier, I gave the archaeologists a silent robot pal. But having the robot be silent probably isn’t the best idea in an audio medium. Instead, let’s give the robot a static-y voice, dripping with disdain. Or (if you’re not scared of being sued by Disney) let them respond to various situations with beeps and whirrs that all the other characters can inexplicably understand. Point is, give each of your characters unique, distinctive voices. When writing, think of what each of your characters sounds like, what separates them sonically from the other characters. This doesn’t just apply to archaeologist robots, this applies even if you’re doing a realist drama set in a coworking space in Gowanus. With no visual or textual context, it can sometimes be tough for an audience to distinguish between two characters when they sound similar. So… don’t let your characters sound that similar. This is about dialogue, but it’s also about natural voices: a more diverse cast (in gender, age, accent, etc.) will automatically sound more distinct from one another. That also has the added benefit of making sure your script isn’t filled with boring twenty-somethings with the exact same background. Also, when in doubt, write robot characters. They always sound cool.

Even when your characters all sound different, though, it usually isn’t a good idea to have more than four separate voices in a scene. Visually it’s easy to keep track of multiple characters. Textually it’s easy to keep track of multiple characters. Sonically… it’s tougher. I made this mistake a lot in Season 2 of Archive 81, and it made that entire season a lot more difficult for the audience to follow.

Once you’ve thought of ways to make your plot sonically interesting and your characters vocally distinct, it’s time to make your settings sound-rich. A lot of an audio drama’s sense of place, its worldbuilding, comes from the background atmosphere of a scene. The clatter of a 18th-century tavern, the cold beeps of an alien starship, the background radio and tire squeals of a long road trip. These are the things that make audio fiction come alive in a listener’s mind. So don’t just set your scenes in bog-standard living rooms; set them in places with background noise, places that feel alive. When the listener hears two characters talking, they should also hear the world surrounding them, so think about these sonic textures in the writing process. And give your audience an immediate sense of where they are—either through dialogue (“gosh, this diner sure is crowded”) or better yet, through sound design (SFX: the ceramic scraping and background chatter of a crowded diner).

Before I actually get down to writing, there’s a rule I like to consider: have something that sounds fascinating in each and every scene. However engaging the scene is on a plot and character level, don’t forget to have something going on that uses the potential of the audio medium. A kid walking by with a blasting boombox, the unearthly static of an alien device, the resonant hum of a record player that’s being turned on… the specifics don’t matter. It’s a useful challenge that helps me prioritize sound when I write scenes.

Let your audience’s imagination do the work for you.

Have I mentioned that audio drama is a sonic medium? For some reason, I feel like I’ve mentioned that before. Anyway, because audio drama is a sonic medium, your audience can’t see the weird monster, or 50’s bar, or elegant funeral that you want to convey. Thus, the temptation is to over-describe things visually, either in narration or dialogue. Don’t do that. Your characters shouldn’t spend a minute describing every glistening curve of the monster that’s attacking them or comment on every flying buttress of the church they’re sheltering in. Not only is this cruddy, unrealistic dialogue, it makes for poor visuals. Give your audience just enough information for them to paint a picture in their minds. Have the monster drip viscera onto a tiled floor and cause the scientist to mutter: “teeth, there’s too many teeth,” and your audience will create a monster far more terrifying than you could describe with a thousand words. Yes, different people are going to have different mental images of the monster or sexy interstellar archaeologist or coworking space in Gowanus… but that’s fine! There’s nothing wrong with that.

Read the dialogue out loud to yourself.

This is probably just good advice for whatever medium you’re writing in, but it’s especially vital in audio drama, where most of the information is conveyed in dialogue. If you’re moving from writing short stories and novels to writing audio drama, it’s important to make sure that the dialogue works spoken, not just on text.

Realize that some things just sound SUPER gross.

Next time you kiss your partner, close your eyes and really listen to the sounds. You’re going to be icked out.

Kissing looks romantic and can be described in super romantic ways. However, the audio of people kissing is… kind of off-putting and weird. (Next time you kiss your partner, close your eyes and really listen to the sounds. You’re going to be icked out, as evidenced by this truly harrowing piece of footage.) That doesn’t mean that you can’t write a good romance audio drama, it’s just something to be aware of before you write a climactic make out sesh. Sounds like vomiting, chewing, kissing, etc. will make your audience uncomfortable. This is great if you want to make your audience uncomfortable (I can proudly say that there was a metric shitton of vomiting in Season 3 of Archive 81), but once again, something to be aware of.

I could go on for much longer with all my audio drama advice and hang ups. (I’m leaving out a whole diatribe about narration in fiction podcasting and how to properly write action scenes) The main thing to remember, other than the fact that I most certainly don’t have all the answers and everything I write should be taken with a grain of salt, is to think deeply about sound when you write. To use the specific strengths of the medium to tell your story. Because there are a lot of audio drama stories that can be told, and you should most certainly get started.

How Can Our Mothers Ever Live Up to Our Expectations?

Posted on by Jo Lou

I remember first reading Michele Filgate’s essay “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About” on Longreads. It was a year and a half ago, October 2017. In the wake of sexual abuse accusations against Harvey Weinstein, the hashtag #MeToo had just begun to blow up. I remember being shocked and thrilled by that first raw blush of widespread openness from all kinds of women, famous and otherwise, who chose to share their stories. Against that backdrop I remember being struck—immediately, from the very first line—“Our mothers are our first homes”—by the thoughtfulness and honesty of Filgate’s piece, which was about her abusive stepfather, but focused on her relationship with her mother. By looking at the problem through a wide-angle lens, describing the environment and interconnected relationships that enabled her stepfather’s behavior, Filgate had written a #MeToo story that nevertheless transcended the genre. I remember thinking, This could be a book—and, pages later, This should be a book. So I was not the least surprised when I discovered, months later, that it would be.

With What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About the book, Michele Filgate, a longtime pillar of the Brooklyn literary community, has created an anthology of personal essays. Although it is named for her original Longreads piece, it is not limited by her subject matter. The roster of contributing writers is impressive. The range of subjects and styles is remarkable. It was a pleasure to speak to Filgate about the project.

Rachel Lyon: All of these essays are stunning, they all merit much more time and space than I can give them here, and this book cannot be easily summed up. That said, I think Lynn Steger Strong comes closest to getting at the heart of this collection when she writes:

“There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with mother as we believe it’s meant to mean and all it’s meant to give us. What I cannot tell her is all that I would tell her if I could find a way to not still be sad and angry about that.”

Tell me a bit about the process of creating the book. The idea for it began with your own piece, right? How did that piece come to be, and what happened after you published it?

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Michele Filgate: I started writing the title essay many years ago when I was an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire. Sometimes you need a lot of perspective in order to write about traumatic or painful events, and that was certainly the case for me. In the first draft, I focused on my stepfather. There was anger and resentment on the page. The core truth of this essay took a long time to show itself. What I needed to write about was how toxic silence can be. Silence can come in a lot of forms, but one of the worst versions of silence is denial. What I ended up writing about, in the end, is the fracture the abuse caused in my relationship with my mother. My essay is full of longing because I’m attempting to communicate with her, to set everything on the page that we can’t have a real conversation about. Originally my editor at Longreads (Sari Botton) scheduled the essay to come out around Thanksgiving. But once the Weinstein story broke, she moved it up and published it right away. I think the timing helped the essay go viral. I heard from many strangers who had similar stories to share.

RL: At the risk of getting caught up in semantics right out of the gate, I’m curious about the “don’t” in your title. When I worked as a copywriter at a marketing agency we called this the knowledge gap: with the word “don’t,” an outline is drawn; quite naturally, the reader expects it to be filled in by some kind of secret, or confession. But the book is not called, “What My Mother and I Can’t Talk About.” It’s not “What We Won’t Talk About.”

“Don’t” leaves a lot of room for a range of relationships and intentions—we could just have happened never to discuss it, or we could be intentionally avoiding the topic—and the essays in the collection reflect that range, I think. They are not necessarily confessional at all. Some, like Dylan Landis’s and Leslie Jamison’s, are investigative. Some, like Cathi Hanauer’s and Sari Botton’s, are humorous. Some, like Nayomi Munaweera’s and Brandon Taylor’s, are almost elegiac. Kiese Laymon writes, “I still desperately want to believe that a haphazard collection or cataloguing of cherry-picked confessions is what makes art last. I know it doesn’t.” Knowing from personal experience how hard it is to arrive at a title you love, I’m curious: how did you arrive at “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About?” And how is the confessional essay, as concept and genre, both embraced and resisted throughout the book?

What goes unsaid is often where the heart of the story is.

MF: Oh, this is a great story. My original title for the essay was “Lacuna” because a lacuna means “an unfilled space or interval; a gap.” I felt like that was the perfect word to express the longing I have for a better relationship with my mom. But Sari Botton pointed out that no one would ever click on this headline. I needed to think of something that would intrigue people and get at the core of the piece. So I came up with the current title. It resonates with so many people. Almost everyone I’ve talked to responds with a version of “I have my own story to tell.” I’ve also used it as a writing prompt with my students, and it turns out that a lot of people have something they can’t discuss with their mom. What goes unsaid is often where the heart of the story is. Why is it that we can’t discuss certain things, and what does the shame and weight of that do to us? What would happen if we made ourselves more vulnerable? How would this change our relationships?

As far as confessional essay, I really hate that phrase because it’s often used in a gendered or negative way. I brought this up during one of my Red Ink panels, and Lidia Yuknavitch said:

“Historically, we took on the word “confessional” to talk about women’s writing, in particular, and the moment that that word got pressed upon writers of color and women and LGBT writers, it robbed us of our own agency as people who make art…when women or anyone from those communities is writing about their bodies and emotive states and physical realities, they are being precise. Intellectually precise. And the historic tradition I use as a touchstone started with Whitman. So maybe interrupt the idea that women’s writing is confessional. That’s a market-driven label that has been pressed upon women writers that have been writing our hearts forever, and the only way to make it go away or change it is to simply begin to reject it and admit that women are participating in intellectual tradition and not off to the side, crying and weak.”

So I don’t think of these essays as confessional. I think of them as searing, powerful narratives that need to be told. The fourteen writers in this anthology all have different reasons for writing about their moms, but there’s a thread that runs throughout: an urgency that can’t be denied.

RL: There is such a beautiful variety of writers represented here. Every family has its own very particular microculture, and those microcultures grow up in the context of much larger macrocultures. Bernice L. McFadden writes about her mother’s time in a women’s detention facility in 1958. In what I felt was one of the most devastating pieces in the book, Nayomi Munaweera explores her mother’s struggle with borderline personality disorder as a Sri Lankan immigrant in Nigeria and the US. Kiese Laymon and Brandon Taylor both write about their mothers in the context of sexual assault in the African American community—though both of their essays are, I should say, about much more than sexual violence.

So the author’s relationship with their mother is not just subject matter here; it becomes a lens through which they can see, or a door through which they can enter into, other, broader subjects. Were you, as the editor, as stunned as I was by the variety and power of these writers’ responses to your prompt? Did any of them enable you look at your own work in a new light? Tell me how these pieces hit you.

Home doesn’t always represent a nurturing and safe environment. Home can mean a place you need to leave in order to save yourself.

MF: Absolutely! I’m glad you brought this up, because one of my main goals with this anthology was to include a wide range of essays about the mother/child relationship. The end result is more than I even hoped for. Read collectively as a book, all of the pieces speak to each other and form a kaleidoscopic picture of different experiences. And while the overall topic of this book is universal, there’s an intimacy and unique voice in every single essay. Editing this book (along with my superb editor at Simon & Schuster, Karyn Marcus) gave me permission to go deeper in my own work. I no longer want to shy away from hard truths. I want to examine everything with the precision of a poet.  

RL: I’m interested in the age differences here, as well as the cultural ones. Broadly speaking—and there are exceptions to this, for sure—I sensed a shift in the way the writers talked about their mothers, which seemed consistent with their age: the older writers seemed to have more of an arm’s-length, almost biographical interest in their subjects, while many of the younger writers seemed still to be grappling for perspective.

Cathi Hanauer, for instance, demonstrates a remarkable degree of acceptance of her own turmoil. And of all the mothers in the book, the mother who’s treated with the most perspective and objectivity is, I think, André Aciman’s. She’s a deaf Jewish Egyptian emigré born in 1924. Aciman approaches his mother with the compassion and curiosity of a biographer. Perhaps because of his mother’s disability, he had to reckon early with his frustrations with her: “Those of us who have lived with the deaf stop feeling sorry for them,” he writes. “Instead, one jumps quickly from pity to cruelty, like a pebble skittering on shallow water.” We all tend, sometimes, to “jump from pity to cruelty” when it comes to our mothers, I think, and some of the younger writers here seem still to be mid-jump. Carmen Maria Machado writes from a place of active anger at the mother from whom she is estranged. Brandon Taylor admits that, at first, “the thing that kept me from writing about [my mother], about grief… was that I lacked… empathy for her. I was so interested in my own feelings about her that I couldn’t leave room for her feelings or for what she wanted out of life. I couldn’t leave a space for her to be a person.” All these approaches are fascinating and moving, in their own right, on the page, but at 35 years old, myself, I felt like I’d made a real discovery: solid writerly proof of the idea that, with time, we might all gain perspective on our mothers. Did you feel that, too? Did you see any other patterns emerging as you assembled the book?

MF: Can I just say that you ask the best questions? Thank you for reading this book with such care and attention. I do think it’s possible to understand our mothers as we get older, but I also think it’s true that we might never really know the full version of them. Can we ever understand another person without living in their shoes for a day? But writing allows a person to try those shoes on, perhaps. Writing about our mothers can give us empathy for them, as was the case with Brandon Taylor. It can also lead us to articulate things we couldn’t necessarily say to their face. But good God, I hope that we all can gain perspective as we age. That’s what living is all about, right? We’re lifelong learners. As far as any patterns I noticed, I’d say that the main one is an attempt to reckon with mothers as three-dimensional characters. Who are our moms, and why are they that way? Can we ever really see them as they want to be seen?

RL: Striving for a certain degree of objectivity in the mother-child relationship seems to be a kind of theme that comes up here in different ways. Dylan Landis and Leslie Jamison both mine the idea of the mother-that-might-have-been by researching romantic relationships their mothers had with men other than their fathers before they were born.

In her masterful essay “I Met Fear on the Hill,” Jamison writes, “My mother before she was a mother has always lived in my mind as a collection of myths—half-invented, barely possible.” But elsewhere, she writes, “Perhaps it’s a way back into the womb, past the womb—seeking these stories of [my mother], from before I was born.” To continue this tangent, you yourself say, “Our mothers are our first homes,” and there is a recurring theme throughout the book of mother-as-home. Of the first night she spent without her mother after her parents’ separation, Melissa Febos writes, “I hadn’t known that she was my home.” Like Jamison, she weaves myth into her work (and defines it, beautifully: “A myth is the memory of a story passed through time”).

That tension in our relationship with our mothers, between a distance as faraway as myth, on one hand, and a proximity as safe as home on the other, feels to me like the essential tension of this book. Is that tension part of what drew you in to this subject?

We mythologize our mothers but we look to them for comfort and a good dose of reality, too.

MF: Yes! We mythologize our mothers but we look to them for comfort and a good dose of reality, too. And as I get at in the introduction to the book, how can our mothers ever really live up to all that we want them to be? I wanted to deconstruct the stories we tell about our moms while also allowing for space to honor them, too. And for some of the writers in the anthology (including myself), the stories about our mothers can contain so much pain that it’s almost too much to deal with. Home doesn’t always represent a nurturing and safe environment. Home can mean a place you need to leave in order to save yourself. But just because we leave doesn’t mean we won’t always think about it. I will write my way toward my mother for the rest of my life and hope that the meaning of home can change. Wouldn’t it be lovely if the mother as home had a good connotation for all of us?

RL: I want to return to the idea of not talking—but writing—about the most difficult things in our relationships. Many of the writers here grapple openly with the task and craft of memoir. Melissa Febos beautifully describes the memoirist’s tension between talking and writing:

I had made a choice to tell the world the things I couldn’t talk about. In doing so, I had forced myself to talk about them, though I still barely could with [my mother]. My choice revealed those things to her and simultaneously forced her to have a conversation with the world.

As primarily a fiction writer myself, I often find myself astounded by the magic tricks of memoir. It is so impossible to render the absolute truth in words: impossible to remember anything accurately, impossible to describe with as much vividness as one wants to, impossible to give enough context that the reader will understand as well as you do what you mean. On not remembering, Alexander Chee admits, “I could tell you I remember… but I’d be lying. …The borders around this conversation are like something hot was set down on the rest of the memory and it burned.” Bernice L. McFadden writes, “The mind is as wonderful as it is wicked; it can choose to save us from our memories or bludgeon us with them.” Julianna Baggott calls storytelling “a fight against forgetting, against loss and even mortality. Every time a story is told about someone who’s dead,” she says, “it’s a resurrection. Every time a story is told about the past, we’re doubly alive.” Brandon Taylor reckons perhaps most frankly of all your writers with the form:

I find it difficult to wrangle facts. I find it difficult to know what to do with them, how to organize them so they make sense and tell some sort of narrative. Truth is the thing that emerges from the careful arrangement of details. Fact is the word we use to describe a detail that has some particular relationship with the truth. But any group of details can be arranged so they seem to cohere into a truth—and when we have discerned that truth, we call those details facts, even if they previously were untrue. I had a difficult time with essays because facts always felt so slippery to me.

Is it even possible to tell a true story? How do you personally reckon with the relationship between truth and memory in your work?

MF: Essayists and memoirists can write the subjective truth. If you were to survey a bunch of people who were in the same room when something happened, I guarantee that something about each recollection would be different. Small details. Someone might remember that a person was wearing a blue coat, for instance, when it was in fact green. Truth in creative nonfiction goes deeper than recounting the facts–although it’s important to be as accurate as possible and aim for emotional truth.

Cheryl Strayed once said in an interview in The New York Times: “Memoir is the art of subjective truth, and while I feel a strong obligation to the truth piece of that, I also firmly plant that truth within the context of my own subjectivity. I didn’t write anything that didn’t happen the way I remember it happening, and yet I’m fairly certain there are things that others would remember slightly differently.” Truth is why I write in the first place. Even when I write short stories as I’m doing now at NYU, I’m aiming for the deepest understanding of the world and the people in it.