Nathan Englander on Juggling Fatherhood and Writing

Posted on by Jo Lou

A new book by award-winning author Nathan Englander is always a literary event. But his latest, Kaddish.com is a special treat: Englander’s fifth book is coming out only one year after the release of his previous novel Dinner at the Center of the Earth.“Trust me, I’m as surprised by it as anyone,” he says when I ask. “I saw Joyce Carol Oates recently (we both teach at NYU), and I was like, “Joyce, I’m turning into you!”

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Englander’s earlier books were more reasonably spaced. His first novel, The Relief of Unbearable Urges, for which he won thePEN/Faulkner Malamud Award, came out in 1999. The Ministry of Special Cases followed in 2007, and in 2012 he returned to short stories with What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Kaddish.com is a slim and fast-paced novel, the kind you might delightfully devour in a sitting or two, and it has Englander’s signature humour and wit all over it. It is also a moving portrayal of a man starved for connection and meaning, a meditation on the tensions between tradition and modernity, and a gripping mystery story. Shuli, the protagonist, is a lapsed orthodox Jew. After his father dies, his observant sister, Dina (who lives amongst “these southern, Memphis, Grace-Landian Jews”) expects him to take on the responsibility of reciting the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. Shuli vehemently refuses, which Dina views as unforgivable, a selfish act that could keep their father’s soul from achieving “a truly radiant afterlife.” “Why can’t you do it, Dina?” Shuli asks his sister. “Fix your religion.” Eventually, Shuli comes up with a creative solution to his predicament. He goes online, finds a stranger, based at a yeshiva in Jerusalem, and pays him to pray for his father.

I chatted with Englander over email about novels and short stories, about parenthood and writing, and about Israel and Hebrew and literary translation.

Ayelet Tsabari: After Dinner at the Center of the Earth was published last year, you said at an interview with LitHub, “The joke that I am dining out on is that for Knopf’s 20 years of supporting me, I’ve written a book that is finally not about a rabbi eating toast.” Would you say that your recent book, kaddish.com, is a return to the rabbi-eating-toast genre?

Nathan Englander: There’s no better place to begin than with the self-deprecations of interviews past! I stand by the joke, but not the genre. My last novel, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, was a kind of magic-realist, literary thriller. It was a huge departure, and it got me to thinking about — and missing — the world I started out writing in. So I went back there for kaddish.com. And I kind of feel that the quest that consumes Shuli, the main character, gives kaddish.com more velocity than anything I’ve ever written. Still, back to self deprecation, what do I know? But, yes, we’re here to talk about the new novel, and so, it’s about Shuli getting himself caught up in a crazy situation and risking everything to try and put it right. Along the way we end up pondering technology and tradition, faith in the age of the Internet, sex and guilt, identity and transformation, and a host of things that I feel safe saying make this the opposite of a ‘toast’ driven book.

AT: You write beautifully about the experience of Orthodox Judaism, with humor and heart, and kaddish.com is no exception. I was fascinated and taken aback by your protagonist’s transformation, who begins the book “radically secular” as you once described yourself, and then returns to the orthodox lifestyle he had once rejected. To be completely honest, I was momentarily saddened, because I liked Larry and his “Larryness.” I felt the way I felt when people I knew became religious, a fear of losing them. But then, of course, Shuli (the name Larry goes back to) remains as loveable a character as Larry was, maybe more. I thought that was so well done. Was that a difficult thing for you to write? And what role does faith and religion play in your life and in your writing?

NE: I get teased a lot for how bad I am at being secular. Despite all my claims to the contrary — my friends (my wife!) they all think I’m harboring a religious zealot inside, just waiting to burst free. And that’s one of the ideas that sparked this book: What would it take to send someone like me swinging back the other way, to send me back to the religious world with the same kind of vengeance with which I left it.

You ask about faith in my life, and I can tell you, I’ve got plenty. That’s what a writing life is — an act of faith. It’s so vulnerable-making and so out of one’s control, and the swings are so vast, the creative swings, the ups and downs of career, of one’s own sense of self, it’s really a brutal kind of existence, one that I’m thankful for every second of every day, even when I’m banging my head against the desk. So, even when one can’t see one’s way forward, in the writing, or in the writing-world, it’s that deep-seated faith that tells you to keep writing on.

That’s what a writing life is — an act of faith.

AT: You lived in Jerusalem in the mid-90s, you attribute your secular awakening to arriving in Israel at nineteen, and you write about Israel all the time, including in this novel, in which you are going back to Nachlaot, the neighborhood where you once lived. “Of all the beautiful neighborhoods in the world,” you write, “is any as lovely as Nachlaot in the early light of day?” The journey to Jerusalem transforms Shuli, as it did you. 

As someone who was born and raised in Israel and is now back to living there (after 20 years away), I’m fascinated by your experience with Israel. I suppose I’m also just fascinated by the relationship so many American Jews have with Israel. Like you write in Kaddish.com, “this is how it is for so many in their community, back and forth to Israel, as if it’s nothing, as if one could take the Lincoln Tunnel and find Jerusalem on the other side.” What drew you to Israel, originally? Why do you continue to write about it? Would you ever consider going back? (And, not to rub salt in anyone’s wounds, but it is 68 degrees and sunny all week).

NE: What drew me to Jerusalem originally was my college roommate saying, “Go get a passport, we’re going.” And that was already a wild thing to do. My family, we didn’t travel or vacation, we didn’t have that kind of lifestyle — it was already a big deal when I went away to college, that was already a stretch. I think, tracing one line of the family tree, I can go straight back to a great-great-grandparent coming to America from Europe as the last time anyone had crossed an ocean. So, yes, just being abroad was mind boggling. 

As for Jerusalem, the idea — or, better, the ideas of that place that I showed up with were really deep-rooted and gigantical in my imagination. So when it came to laying that imagined city over the city that I found, that contrast really transformed me as a person and as a writer — it was life changing. After that year, I kept going back, and then I moved there after grad school to be a part of the great historical moment that was in full swing. I wanted to be a part of the peace process, and to witness the two state solution, and to explore the new, peaceful Middle East that was being forged — that was unstoppable and inevitable — and which has long since come crashing down.

AT: You said to Haaretz once, “I wanted to live my life in Hebrew.” That’s a pretty huge statement for a writer to make (and one that interests me especially, as someone whose first language is Hebrew, but writes in English). Did you ever think you might write in Hebrew? Does the Hebrew language inform your work in any way?

NE: I just loved living life in another language. I think that’s a real gift for a writer — to spend a day speaking and reading and thinking in one language, and then to compose their work in another. I feel like I’m a different person when I’m speaking Hebrew, that the way the language works, affects the way I work within it. And I also like a challenge that seems impossible — so it was really fun, as an adult, to crawl toward fluency until, say, I really would find myself just thinking in Hebrew, that my brain had a choice, to think or, at night, to dream in one language or another. As for writing, there must be a bad Hebrew poem somewhere, but I think I always knew books would get built in my native tongue.

AT: You’ve translated Etgar Keret’s Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, and the New American Haggadah, a literary translation of the Passover texts, created in collaboration with Jonathan Safran Foer. I find translation to be an interesting form for someone who’s also a writer; it is a good exercise in letting go of ego (and I’d imagine it would be more pronounced in the case of the Haggadah, which is an ancient and sacred text.) What are your thoughts on the act of literary translation? Do you plan to do more of it? And were you involved in your own translations into Hebrew?

NE: Aside from the Haggadah, my literary translation experience consists solely of translating some of Etgar’s stories, a job for which I was paid back in kind — that is, instead of writing out some sort of contract, Etgar just translated some of my stories into Hebrew in return. The whole experience made me really happy and I still try and come up with two other living writers who have translated each other.

I have no plans for any more translation, beyond the fact that I’d love to do some more Etgar stories if the timing ever works out. At this point, I’m pretty rusty anyway; I’ve been back home for near twenty years and only speak the language when Etgar calls. As for my own Hebrew translations, I’ve given notes a couple of times, but I mostly stay out of their hair.

And to the first part of your question, I’ve always respected literary translation as writer and reader. How could I not? Most of the books I love are books I only know through a translator’s voice. But after trying it for myself, getting to pretend to be Etgar in English, and spending a couple of years on the Haggadah, I’ve added a whole lot of wonder to the mix. It was an absolute education. What it did, was give me the chance to ponder the meaning of specific words at astonishingly inefficient lengths, to unpack, to obsess over language — over someone else’s choices — in such an extreme and highfalutin and thinky way that I couldn’t help but bring that back to my own work. It changed the way I write.

Most of the books I love are books I only know through a translator’s voice.

AT: You started out, like many writers, with short stories, (The Relief of Unbearable Urges) then after your first novel, you went back to short stories (What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank). How differently do you approach writing short stories and novels? Did you find the transition challenging? What do you (secretly) prefer?

NE: Each book is always the hardest and most all-consuming in its way (even if some parts go more smoothly than others, as noted above). So, I wouldn’t break it down by form, just by the task at hand.

My first novel was published eight years after the one before it, and kaddish.com is coming out a year after Dinner, so I feel comfortable saying that the individual books make their own demands. For me, with each new project the approach to writing changes as a whole. That’s probably what keeps it feeling brand new on this end. To me, every book feels like it’s the first book, like I’ve finally got an idea about how to work, about how to write. With kaddish.com, it honestly felt like I was finally ready to write after a lifetime of writing. Prior to this book, I’d have said that the brain holds a short story differently than it holds a novel. But for kaddish.com, the experience — it was really clear at the time, really distinct and sharp — but this is the first novel that I wrote in the way I’d write a short story. It just had a different kind of genesis in my noggin, somehow bridging the two forms for me.

As for choosing a (secret) favorite? I learned this lesson when I wrote my first play, “The Twenty-Seventh Man.” Whatever I’m committed to at the moment turns into the supreme form — that is, at the time, I believe it to be the ultimate, in a real way. I thought a lot about that, sort of interrogating myself, and I decided that it’s not disloyal, or deceptive, to let my brain do that. It’s not the same as swapping out a Yankees hat for a Red Sox hat depending on who’s winning. I just think when you’re wrestling with a certain form, when you see the potential, how could you not fall in love with it? You can’t do the work if you don’t believe — and you surely couldn’t expect that belief to translate to the reader or theatergoer without that commitment on the writerly end. And, since we’re talking about the novel, I can tell you unequivocally that the novel truly is supreme — the ideal. Simple. And if you come back to me when I’m in rehearsals for my next play, I’ll tell you, there is nothing that holds a candle to live theater. It’s not me lying, it’s just me being bowled over by enthusiasm for the power of a given form.

AT: You said before that you write intensely, six days a week, allowing for one day for Shabbat. From my experience, such schedule tends to change dramatically as we become parents. How do you manage your time now?

NE: I manage it better, that’s how I manage it. Being a parent has been a real blessing for my work. I basically lost all my ennui time, the hours spent on my fainting couch with an arm thrown over my eyes, and clutching my smelling salts. Simply, the framing of time, the extreme limitations parenting puts on the work hours in a given day (if you have any control over your work hours), was something I was really determined to turn into a positive for myself. So when I get started, I kind of roll up my sleeves differently, and start typing differently, and see the time I have differently, in a way that has been really creative-making and efficient-making, despite the fact that I’m naturally super slow in all ways. What it also means is that, with my teaching at NYU, and the dog to be walked, and the gym as something that I don’t want to give up on, that I see a lot less of, well, everyone. And, also, I do a lot of night rounds after everyone has fallen asleep. When I was on deadline for kaddish.com, my wife was on deadline for her dissertation, and there was a period there that was really bananas, with the two of us tapping in and out like tag-team wrestlers, seven days a week. You take two hours. I take two hours. Back and forth until the work was done.

The extreme limitations parenting puts on the work hours in a given day was something I was really determined to turn into a positive for myself.

AT: What are you working on now? Does it involve Jews and Israel? Will it be published next year? Is it about Rabbis eating toast?

NE: With the back-to-back books, I think this is the first time in years and years that I’ve been starting from scratch. So I’ve got a million things cooking. I have a play to rewrite that looks like it will open a year from now (it’s an adaptation of my story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank”). And there are some stories I want to spend time on, and some book ideas to unpack. My head is basically spinning right now, and as soon as something gains traction, I imagine I’ll disappear into that — that’s what I dream about, getting lost in the work. When I’m not with my family, that’s where I love to be.

7 Novels About Sex in Suburbia

Posted on by Jo Lou

When people ask me to describe my novel, White Elephant, I tell them it’s about a developer who moves into an established community, starts tearing down homes and ignites a fuse — which leads them to assume it’s a book about real estate. And arguably, it is. The book opens with a character thinking about her husband’s feud with the neighbor who’s building oversize houses in their neighborhood — but she’s also thinking about sex. Sex is actually her first thought, as sex is higher on her priority list — while construction is higher on her husband’s.

The character — Allison — might be just a tad obsessed with sex, possibly as a result of her husband’s priorities. She entertains herself during her many dog walks through her neighborhood by imagining the sex lives of her neighbors. Good sex. Bad. Energetic. Kinky. She imagines who has fun in bed, and who will divorce a few years down the road.

As a former suburbanite, I can relate. While I didn’t play that particular game, I did find myself imagining the lives lived within the houses in my neighborhood, with their tightly sealed garages, and action-hiding window treatments. Judging by the number of books about suburbia, books that often focus on the sex lives of its denizens, I have to guess Allison and I are not the only ones with this preoccupation. The following are a few of my favorites.

Summerlong by Dean Bakopoulos

While most of these stories take place in fictional towns, Summerlong takes place in Grinnell, Iowa, where, it appears, having sex and smoking weed are the primary pastimes. The story begins when the town realtor, Don Lowry (“It’s your home, but it’s my business!”), finds a young woman beneath a tree whom he believes to be dead. She’s not. He winds up spending the night with her, not having sex, but smoking lots of weed. Have no fear: there’s plenty of sex yet to come — plenty — along with skinny dipping, house breaking, wild parties, infidelity, references to Madam Bovary and questions of life and death in this story of a strange, firefly-filled summer.

Little Children by Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, also pays tribute to Madam Bovary — it’s the book being read in the town book club. No coincidence there. The book posits many charged questions: Will Sarah, the stay-at-home mom who is surprised to find that she’s a stay-at-home-mom, sleep with Todd, the stay-at-home dad dubbed “The Prom King” by the other moms? What will happen to the sex offender who lives down the street? And what about Sarah’s (creepy) husband’s sordid little secret? Little Children is darkly funny and compelling — and was made into a great movie starring Kate Winslet.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Which brings me to another novel of suburbia that became a terrific movie starring Kate Winslet along with Leonardo DiCaprio. Revolutionary Road manages both to be extremely dark and extremely funny, and is one of the mostly acutely observed books I’ve ever read (and re-read and re-read). Sex is conniving and dangerous, the antithesis of April and Frank Wheeler’s thrilling plans for the future, in this book about a desperate couple seeking to break out of the confines of suburban life.

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

Sex is the engine that drives Rick Moody’s dark comedy The Ice Storm, set in the affluent Connecticut suburbs in the early 1970s. Everyone from adult to teenager is preoccupied with it, sneaking off to bedrooms and basements to partake. Alcohol and drug abuse, too, know no age limits. The climax, as it were, comes during a winter storm on the night of the partner-swapping key party in this dark comic novel about isolation and boredom in mid-century America.

The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer’s The Uncoupling is a little like A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, only just the opposite.Instead of magic that causes people to fall in love with the first person they meet in ancient Athens, magic causes the women to completely lose interest in sex in Stellar Plains, New Jersey. The play within the novel is Lysistrata — Aristophane’s play about women withholding sex to end the Peloponnesian War — which is in rehearsals at the high school. Before the no-sex spell is cast, there’s sex though, both teenage and middle aged. The denouement arrives on the night of the play’s performance.

The Arrangementby Sarah Dunn

In Sarah Dunn’s The Arrangement, sex is not just a subplot, but the main event. A couple decides to give each other a six-month pass — the eponymous arrangement — during which they are allowed to have sex with pretty much whomever they please. They draw up the rules on a piece of paper with an orange sharpie and off they go. There are fun subplots that involve chickens and camels and men in skirts. A terrific story of love and marriage that is thought provoking in addition to being absolutely hilarious.

The Position by Meg Wolitzer

The Position, also by Wolitzer, starts on the third floor of a house in Wontauket, New York in the 1970s, where the four Mellow children have discovered the bestselling sex book their parents not only have written, but have modeled for. Yes, shudder. Thirty years later, everyone’s still traumatized. The Position is by turns funny and sad, and sometimes sweetly hopeful.

Dave Eggers Thinks Privacy Is Dead

Posted on by Jo Lou

Two men are tasked with building a road in an unnamed country recovering from a recent civil war. Most other details remain undisclosed in Dave Eggers’ new novel, The Parade. What we do know is that one man, referred to as Four, is determined to finish the road on time and according to procedure, regardless of the locals they pass by begging for help or the misfortune they see along the way. His coworker, called Nine, knows the local language but is lacking when it comes to an awareness of their employer’s policies. They clash; Four doing all he can to stick to schedule while Nine shirks responsibility in order to engage with the community.

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With a perceptive eye, Eggers uses fiction to investigate patterns, both political and sociological, that exist around the world. In What Is the What, he critiques American immigration policy by recounting the story of a Sudanese refugee that he met in Atlanta. In The Circle, he explores the pitfalls of social media’s intrusion into our everyday lives. With The Parade, Eggers continues to offer insight into humanity with his characters and the way they interact, or fail to interact, with the situation in which they find themselves.

I talked to Dave Eggers about economic imperialism, the socio-politics of labor, and the future of social media.

Frances Yackel: What was the genesis of your novel?

Dave Eggers: The idea goes back more than a decade. I’d seen so many odd instances of contractors in unfamiliar contexts that I started taking note. The first instance was seeing a Swedish road crew in rural South Sudan. It just seemed so incongruous and counterintuitive that I was fascinated. Why a Swedish crew? Why import all this equipment from so far, when surely there would be road-paving technology available from, say, Uganda or or Kenya. I thought about the implications of the pavers’ work, and whether or not the laborers on the ground had any inkling about the socio-political context in which they were working. That was the first catalyst for the idea, but since then I paid attention to these sorts of contractors, whether it was Chinese pipeline-builders in Africa, or Filipino electricians in Saudi Arabia — and began to think a bit about their motivations and inner life.

FY: The protagonists of your novel are impeccable representations of opposing ethical codes. On the one hand, you have a man who believes staunchly in following the procedures implemented by his superiors and you have a man bent on fashioning his own rules. The former ignores the immediate cries for help surrounding him in order to finish his job on time while the latter allows his mercy to distract him from the task at hand in order to help the people he can.

Four and Nine are examples of two opposing extremes; do these opposing extremes represent a more subtle divide in humanity? Do you think you could pick out a person and ascribe them to one side versus the other?

DE: Well, the times I’ve visited NGOs in the developing world, I’ve seen a fairly stark divide between the practical-minded staffers and the more flighty adventurers. The adventurers can be very problematic. Very often they have a love for the world and an interest in all humans, but they proceed without caution and without regard for consequences. They drop in and when they leave — they always leave — they leave a trail of chaos. In contrast, the more businesslike workers get things done, but without contemplation, in many cases, for the larger context or implications of their work. And both types of visitors can be, and are often, subject of manipulation; they become tools to advance motivations beyond their reckoning.  

If everyone really contemplated the implications of their lifestyle, billions would be paralyzed by self-doubt and even shame.

FY: Four and Nine are employed by the same company, but their reasons for doing this work are vastly different. Could you talk about the differences between motivations in Four and Nine’s decisions to take on this as an occupation? Do they overlap at all?

DE: They overlap in that for both of them, ultimately, it’s a job. They are road pavers. They’re contractors and their presence is transitory. Four, the more capable and responsible of the two, would just as soon be paving roads in his home country. But he’s found himself valuable to his company, and they trust him with the complicated tasks abroad. He has, though, chosen to eschew looking left or right; he’s focused only on the point in the distance where the road will be finished. I’m intrigued by characters like this, because they are necessary to the functioning of the world. Nothing at all, anywhere, would get done without some vast majority of people keeping their heads down, ignoring the ultimate consequences of their labor. If everyone really contemplated the implications of their lifestyle, or the work they’ve chosen, billions would be paralyzed by self-doubt and even shame. So I don’t fault Four or Nine for their place in all of this. It’s the position all humans occupy for much of our lives.

FY: Four cares deeply about the completion of the road, which helps him to pay such close attention to the details of his job. He seems to pay less mind to the ultimate purpose of the road and his journey; the growth and development of the country recovering from civil war. Are there meant to be broader implications of this lack of sentiment surrounding the country itself?

DE: All over the developing world, as we speak, foreign companies are creating roads, deep-sea ports, railways and pipelines. Sometimes, in the case of China, for example, they take an ownership stake in, say, a port in Malaysia. So there’s economic imperialism at play there. Other times, it really is a case of a foreign contractor simply completing a task and leaving. Many years ago I saw a Swedish company building a road in South Sudan, and thought that was very odd and very intriguing. Why not a Kenyan company, for example? There’s something advantageous, for the commissioning government, about bringing a contractor in from so far away — free from any local politics, and disinterested in regional power dynamics. This way, they can be trusted to do the work without getting otherwise involved, and without being too concerned with the ultimate motivations behind the project in the first place.

FY: After finishing the novel, the journey appears to have a Sisyphean undertone. Could you speak more to the supposed futility of  their job?

DE: For Nine, the work might have been futile. Then again, maybe Four sees it as far beyond his purview. The work was done, he was paid, and he moves onto the next project.

Most of the world is moving toward a complete evaporation of privacy. Regular people are creating our own surveillance state.

FY: I’d love to ask you about the Circle. Your 2013 novel feels eerily timely and prescient in our era of mass privacy breaches, never-ending Facebook scandals, and Instagram influencer culture. What is your view on social media now? Do you think we’ve given up too much of ourselves over to social media? Do you think one day we’ll all stop using social media altogether?   

DE: I think it’s continuing to morph, which is overall a positive thing. Younger people, those under 20, aren’t using Facebook at all, and that’s a good indicator for the planet. There is, rightfully, almost universal distrust of Facebook, because their culture is not one built on trust or respect for users, and yet billions still willingly give the company much of their most personal information. High schoolers, though, have altered their behavior radically — they want to communicate with friends, but directly, using WhatsApp, for example. The movement is away from public sharing and into more private communication. Consumers’ behavior and preferences will drive what happens with social media in the next five-ten years, and I dearly hope the teens will lead it all into more sane territory.

FY: The pendulum tends to swing both ways. Do you envision that this movement toward private communication as opposed to public sharing will be a permanent one?

DE: Obviously most of the world is moving toward a complete evaporation of privacy. We get temporarily upset, for example, about the cameras on planes, but there will be cameras everywhere on planes within a few years. It’s a version of Moore’s Law — as cameras get ever-smaller and cheaper, they proliferate without resistance. Within a decade, they’ll be everywhere, certainly in every public place. Every neighborhood, whether urban or suburban, will have hundreds of cameras to detect any perceived threat or deviance. In concert with the Nextdoors of now and the future, this will lead to an unsettling future, where any departure from the norm will be sound an alarm, and all interlopers or supposed strangers will be suspected.

Regular people are creating our own surveillance state. It’s insane, of course, and represents a radical evolutionary shift, but it’s pretty clear that the vast majority of the world doesn’t care so much about any semblance of everyday privacy. The omnipresence of cameras will make us slightly safer, probably, but anyone on camera tends to behave differently, so we’ll become a different species — we already are, in so many ways. This is what I was trying to explore with The Circle — whether or not living an on-camera life made us more obedient, more acquiescent to what I like to call microfascism — where digital mobs punish those deviating from social norms — and overall less interesting as a species.

FY: In addition to your writing, you also founded 826 National to help young children with literacy and writing skills. Could you talk about this relationship? How does your advocacy work influence your writing?

DE: Speaking of that — we’re about to publish a book called True Connections, which will feature teens’ thoughts on social media and the digital world. And the vast majority of the students have written very worried, and worrisome, essays. None of them are settled and content with their relationship with digital media. That lines up with Jean Twenge’s studies showing a stratospheric rise in teen depression, tied directly to the rise of social media. So the book gives teens the chance to tell it straight.

The only hope we have of turning the tide is with the teens who grew up in the shadow of the monster we made.

FY: Do you have advice for teens and young writers with concerns about these topics? What is the best way to get those voices heard?

DE: With the International Congress of Youth Voices, one of our missions is to help teen voices get access to mainstream platforms like newspapers, news networks and the like. So we were able to help Samuel Getachew, a brilliant young writer from Oakland, place an op-ed [about 21 Savage’s ICE arrest] in the New York Times a month ago. And Salvador Gomez Colon, one of our delegates from Puerto Rico, wrote for and appeared on CNN, to talk about conditions there after Hurricane Maria.

Legislators concerned about digital issues, and how they affect teens, need to talk to the teens themselves. They tell it to you straight, and they’re far more clear-headed about the topics than most adults. My generation created and empowered most or all of the worst tech tools, and the only hope we have of turning the tide is with the teens who grew up in the shadow of the monster we made.

Amy Hempel on Turning Survival into a Story

Posted on by Jo Lou

Amy Hempel’s Sing To It is her newest short story collection and her first in over a decade. Each piece is precisely honed and crafted with associational thoughts orchestrated into brevity to intensify, not lessen, the complexities behind emotions, memories and motivations. Rhythmic and tip-top language, punctuated by images and unrivaled metaphors, are tools she uses to destabilize her narrators while mobilizing readers into a cleft of curiosity and compassion. Far from being a minimalist, Hempel is a writer who magnifies a mind in motion. Her narrators swerve toward us with a muscled complexity of vulnerability, not a state of victimhood. Concise wording rivets a reader to the raw and recognizable intimacy of narrators’ interior voices that leapfrog from one thought to the next. The structure of these fifteen mirroring-life stories leaves one suspended without a safety net. 

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Five of Hempel’s one-page stories, (Sing To It, The Orphan Lamb, The Doll Tornado, The Second Seating and Equivalent), read like an entire novel while “Cloudland”, the 62 page closing story, is a crafted artwork of resiliency that thrives within a cyclone of ever-present pain. Hovering above Sing To It’s shoreline of stories is the book’s dedication to Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper, who said, “Once you accept life is a tragedy then you can start living.”

Amy Hempel and I corresponded via email about what drove this collection — personal elements woven into fiction — and talked about the importance of associational thinking in her writing process.

Yvonne Conza: What drove this collection? And, how does it differ from your previous works?

Amy Hempel: Always, there is an image or a moment of illumination, or a wonderfully skewed sentence that comes to mind — these are the beginnings of the several short-short stories in the book. But that is not new for me. I think what is different from earlier work is the stance, a kind of attitude in the narrators. These narrators are more knowing, they’ve been around the block, as the expression goes, but they are still vulnerable. My friend Bret Anthony Johnston talks about the difference between vulnerability and victim; it’s a big difference, and I don’t feel these narrators are victims.

YC: How important is associational thinking in your writing process? Do you feel that the processing of information, through patterns, seemingly unrelated elements and contextual relationships, imparts greater layering and progression to the work?

AH: Associative thinking and memory are key to what I’ve done in this book. There is a leap of faith necessary as thoughts and recollections accrue — you have to trust that there is a reason they are occurring when they do, and you will, at some point, understand it. It’s an exciting way to work because of the discovery inherent in it. Patterns proceed from the accrual. It’s a humbling way to write, and it’s different from planning, something I’ve only done once, and that story, “The Chicane,” took thirty years to write.

Non-linear thinking is the only kind I do in real life, so it’s not surprising that it shows up on the page, as well. I don’t see life in terms of beginning, middle, end, though I suppose you can chart certain relationships in this way. Joe Brainard’s I Remember is a book that is close to my own way of thinking on the page, and of course Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever was, and still is, influential in its accretion of seemingly small, odd moments that turn out to be central and essential.

YC: In Reasons to Live, your first collection, followed seven years later by At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, you made reference to “branching out of grief to fear.” What is Sing To It branching out of?

AH: I think there is a larger concern with external threat — the threat to the natural world. So the stories, particularly “Cloudland,” fix a gaze towards the damage done and the damage to come unless current behavior, both individual and governmental, changes dramatically. There are many other serious threats, of course, notably the way people with power treat people without power. That is also present and addressed in“Cloudland”and other of the new stories.

The stories fix a gaze towards the damage done and the damage to come unless current behavior changes dramatically.

YC: The personal elements in your material — suicides, dogs, accidents, friendships — are cycled through a fictional transaction. In “The Dog of the Marriage” a doorman rings up to let a wife know that a beagle returned home without her husband who was hit by a car. This brought to mind the tragic experience of Abigail Thomas. (Full disclosure: I know Abigail.) In “A Full-Service Shelter,” reference is made to the narrator being afraid of the Presa Canarios, the molossers bred in the Canary Islands. That made me think of Diane Whipple’s murder by two Presa Canarios in 2001 and I thought that perhaps you had a personal connection to Whipple. Also, the woman of immeasurable kindness and talent in “Cloudland” suggests Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper. Are these elements representing both truth and fiction, or perhaps a kind of narrative toggle that morphs into the early metaphor in the opening story of Sing To It — working as “hammocks” for the stories?

AH: You are right to think of Abigail Thomas in the title story “The Dog of the Marriage.” In fact, Abby and her husband adopted the dog I called “Beagleman” in that story, with tragic consequences. I wrote that story as a prequel to Abby’s brilliant and shattering essays about what followed. And, yes, you’re right — I was referring to the Presa Canarios who killed Diane Whipple in San Francisco. Though in fact I did not know her, had just met her once. And the woman of immeasurable kindness and talent in “Cloudland”is Gloria Vanderbilt. I really like your idea of these facts in the fiction working as “hammocks” for the stories, after the image in the story Sing To It. I saw no reason to change certain facts just because they appeared in a work of fiction.

Sometimes there is no improving on what really happened. Though at the same time, a story will go where it needs to go, if you let it. I’m more interested in where something taken from experience veers off into a new mythology.Since the reader doesn’t usually know whether something in a story comes from something similar in the writer’s experience, I think that what matters is whether the story works or not on its own terms, convinces with no other input. On the other hand, there is certainly a tradition of readers thinking an “I” narrator is the author.

YC: In your 1996 interview with Sharon Olds you asked: “Do readers still ask if a poem about a father is about your father? Prior to the question, you quoted Galway Kinnell as saying, with regard to being daring, “going into the center of the intimate experience of a life, not just telling a story” is to “open yourself to interpretation of the poems as expositions of your personal life.” In interviews, your family and personal experiences get mentioned but never elaborated upon, yet both operated within the material. How do you feel about opening yourself up to interpretation that the stories in your collection expose your personal life?

AH: I do understand the interest in this aspect of writing fiction. I don’t much care what readers might think based on what they read. The people who know me know what’s what, and you can only go on record with what you want to say, to reveal, with no means or need to correct the views of other readers. It can be interesting to watch this play out. I often tell students about the reviews of a story in my first book that features a father and his children out for the day. There is no mention of the mother at all, yet some reviewers wrote of the “divorced father,” and others wrote of the “widowed father.”

There is no mention of the mother at all, yet some reviewers wrote of the ‘divorced father,’ and others wrote of the ‘widowed father.’

YC: Bret Anthony Johnston stated in an interview: “To know a character, I have to understand what they want and what they’ve lost.” Do you feel similar to Bret?

AH: I agree with what Bret said about needing to know what characters have lost. It is some of the most defining information about anyone, both on and off the page. He said another thing I find accurate about writing: Don’t write what you know is true, write about what you’re afraid is true.” I also feel that knowing what someone can do without is useful, not only what they want.

YC: Since endings of your stories leave an advancement of new beginnings, is there a narrator within this collection that you might revisit in a future story? There’s a completion to your stories but never a bow-tie ending.

AH: Thank you for finding my story endings “leave an advancement for new beginnings” — I hope to convey that, so I’m glad you saw that in them. I patrol stories — my own and my students’ — for bow-tied endings. They always sound fake, and it’s never a goal to tie off what people are up against. I can’t predict what might happen in the stories I might write next, but my fundamental concerns are likely to be the same.

YC: How do you feel survivorship works within this collection as a theme? And, is performance a necessary quality or dynamic of survivorship?

AH: I feel it is crucial to most of the stories here. In some, there are people who do not survive, and one is left to reckon with how to continue in the face of this fact. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” there are dogs who do not survive, and suffer along the way to their end. How does someone who loves them go on without imploding? It’s why I read so many memoirs, the need to know how people manage, given what they have come up against.

Everyone survives something. Or they don’t. Some people are able to live a reconfigured life after trauma, and some are destroyed in one way or another. And is a stranger’s suffering available to us? I had an interesting talk about this question with Sharon Olds years ago for an interview in BOMB Magazine. She talked about how she found her way to be able to write about this, but she went through a process of giving herself permission. Sorry to sound like a dope, but I don’t understand “performative” in relation to it as a quality of survivorship. Can you say a bit more about this?

YC: I felt, that in your collection, performance does not mean “acting” but, for me, a kind of choreography linked to survivorship. For example, The “Cloudland” narrator’s day-to-day existence/choreography has a performative movement to it, with hovering information about her past and associational thinking that leads her from one thought to the next. She says: “I left the profession of teaching English in high school — a good, private school for girls in Manhattan — in a denouncement of ambition. That is the way I tell it.”The “that is the way I tell it” part captures what I’m referencing as performative quality to survivorship. She survives and knows what to say and what to leave out — how to keep alive and live within the world. I might be overly projecting — but I do think anyone that has lived through tragedy, especially someone like Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper, can appreciate and gain from the vulnerability crafted into this collection.

AH: Thank you for clarifying, by example — “That is the way I tell it” — the “performative” movement in a story. In “Cloudland” the memories are associative because that is what memory feels like to me — it’s never a linear progression of personal history. I always had Gloria much in mind while writing these stories, particularly “Cloudland.” Her resiliency is astonishing. Her many kinds of strength inspired a good deal of what is in this book. It goes behind surviving to become thriving, though of course with the pain ever present. To manage both of these conditions at once is instructive.

YC: Would you like your writing in this collection to be viewed as short fiction, prose, poetry, or something floating within a newer landmark of, say, associational fiction? Or, are you less interested in the “label” of genre?

AH: I am not that interested in labels for kinds of writing, one reason I so appreciate and admire Bernard Cooper’s first book, Maps To Anywhere. Parts of it turned up in Best American Essays, parts are anthologized as prose poems and short-short stories, parts are memoir, and it won the PEN/HEMINGWAY Award for best first fiction the year it was published.

I patrol stories for bow-tied endings. They always sound fake, and it’s never a goal to tie off what people are up against.

YC: Who are the emerging writers of short fiction that you reading?

AH: My favorite question! But I will open it up to favorite writers of memoir too, because I am filled with admiration for Casey Legler’s memoir, Godspeed, that came out this year. In fiction, there’s the debut collection of stories coming from Kimberly King Parsons, Black Light. And There There by Tommy Orange, and Friday Blackby Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and individual stories by Dan McDermott and Nini Berndt, by Amber Caron and Karen Keats and Cally Fiedorek, Jane DeLury’s The Balcony, and A Key To Treehouse Livingby Elliot Reed, and This Is Where I Won’t Be Alone by Inez Tan, and my apologies for those I’m leaving out!

Of the newer writers I’m very keen on, most of them came to me through friends.A mutual friend gave me a galley of Casey Legler’s memoir, and another mutual friend sent me a photo of Kimberly King Parsons showing where she had tattooed a line from one of my stories on her arm! I’d liked a couple of her stories in literary magazines, and there was no way I was not going to read more after that! Sometimes reviews play a part, as with the widespread acclaim for Tommy Orange’s There There. I’ve also been reading for some prizes, and that is why I’ve fallen behind in reading literary magazines; I can’t stay current in both. Though I will certainly miss Tin House, a longtime favorite.

YC: Have you ever considered writing a memoir?

AH: The three or so personal essays I’ve written took too large a toll. There is not going to be a memoir.

YC: What is your hope for Sing To It?

AH: There is a charming story about Susan Sontag as a very young reader writing in the margins of book, “I too have had these thoughts.” I don’t know if it’s true, but I like that response.

I Remember You Were Made of Dark, Warm Wood

Posted on by Halimah Marcus

Blowjob in a Car Wash 
Eating peaches over the kitchen sink, 
a second mouth opens beneath my chin 
to catch the juice that trickles off. 

Deep in machine-assisted sleep I dream
of farewell banquets in carpeted ballrooms, 
the silverware twinkling in projector-light. 

This too will pass, like carside-window grass, 
as if a reel of film sped up, 
unwinding on a loop of desert waste. 

Sifting through the strata of a drawer
I find a pen printed with the name
of the hospital where I was born.

Now, by twisted strands of fate rejoined, 
I stoop to lance a fallen grape 
that has rolled beneath the oven.

Six P.M.
I can read the hour from the street corner
with the stop sign as my gnomon. 
Its shadow is taut as a kite string, 
arcing in the gale of light. 
Lifting my eyes to the horizon, 
this Illinois sunset flattens me. 

Embracing you, I descend into a cellar. 
My vision softens in the darkness. 
And I can only see the halo of your head, 
and feel the schema of your limbs. 
You become the idea of yourself.

If I could, I’d live in endless six p.m., 
the sun’s position fixed at the horizon. 
Only in this hour can I see you clearly, 
before the veil of night lowers between us, 
and I no longer know you, 
although I knew you once.

Silverfish 
Tonight I’m lonesome enough to write a letter
addressed to a Florida key. I bend my thumb
to squeeze the silver from a silverfish, 
and in its ink I fix my signature. 
Branches reach toward my window to take my hand, 
but I am inconsolable. I stomp down
the stairs like playing “Chopsticks” with my feet. 

I remember you were made of dark, warm wood— 
or do I still? 
At least I feel a warmth and see a darkness. 
We cut our hair alike and walked the streets
as if our limbs were bound together, chained
like galley slaves on the Aegean sea. 
It’s true that I remember less well than you, 
and so I remember it better, even good; 
in the dimness of my memory you gleam, 
receding to a single point of light.

Welcome to Electric Literature’s New Website

Posted on by Halimah Marcus

Welcome to the new Electric Literature website! No, you’re not lost. This is the same Electric Literature you know and love, only with a new outfit designed by the talented folks at CMYK.

Yesterday I told a writer we were launching a new website and he said, don’t you already have a website? I said we do, only now it looks different. Anyone who has ever gone through a web redesign knows that this is both true and an oversimplification. To prepare the new site to be as reader-friendly as possible, we’ve sorted through over 5,000 articles dating back to our first post (September 2009), considering what we’ve offered readers in the past, what we want to offer you in the future, and how we can arrange everything in an intuitive way. (It should be pretty intuitive! Weekly literary magazines The Commuter and Recommended Reading under Lit Mags, essays under Essays, etc. We also have a much-improved search function and author pages if you’re looking for something specific.)

Relaunching the site has given us an opportunity to contemplate all the different faces of Electric Literature over the astonishing ten years we’ve been around—from our self-described “ragtag” lit blog The Outlet (get it?), to our literary events coverage blog The Dish, to the first days of Recommended Reading and, last year, the addition of a second weekly lit mag, The Commuter.

To prepare the new site to be as reader-friendly as possible, we’ve sorted through over 5,000 articles dating back to our first post in September 2009.

What we’ve learned from this trip through the archives of a (knock wood) long-lived literary website is this: It’s not enough to be smart, or committed, or scrappy, or any one of a number of laudable traits that haven’t saved other great sites from oblivion. You also have to be extremely adaptable—and at least a little bit lucky. We’ve been incredibly fortunate in our devoted readership, which has grown from a couple thousand to hundreds of thousands. You’ve seen us through any number of changes we’ve made in order to stay on top of the times, the technology, and the needs of the community. This new site is the most recent, but if our luck holds, it won’t be the last.

(One more note on that storied history: We’ve imported thousands of pieces of content to the new site, some of which date back to several websites ago. If an older piece looks a bit weird, please keep it close to your heart as evidence of our evolution, and assume we know and are working on it.)

If you are going to be at AWP in Portland next week, please join us for our 10th birthday party with fellow 10-year-old The Rumpus: It’s My Party, I’ll Cry If I Want To. We’ll have cake, free drinks courtesy of our sponsor Aevitas Creative Management, and readings on the theme by Kaveh Akbar, Marie-Helene Bertino, Ryan Chapman, Bonnie Chau, R.O. Kwon, and Talin Tahajian.

EL and The Rumpus 10th Birthday Flyer

The White Owl
1305 SE 8th Ave
Portland, OR 97214
Friday, March 29th
6:30 – 9 PM

So what will we be doing for the next ten years? In many ways it seems we are approaching, or have reached, peak internet. On the other side of that peak, I hope the frenzy of our lives online will reach an equilibrium, and the internet will become (or go back to being) a place where we can find what we are looking for, rather than one that takes over. That’s the dream: a more reader-friendly version of online. An internet that looks more like what Electric Literature has always tried to be: thoughtful, well-read, irreverent but not cynical, and interested in a better world.

But people have been wrong about the online future before. Even if the internet doesn’t slow down, we’ll be here, adapting—finding ways to deliver that thoughtful experience in the midst of the digital din. Whether it’s settling into absorbing, long-form fiction, being amused by an irreverent comic, or having your mind changed by an intelligent and personal piece of criticism, I want Electric Literature to be a place where you can stick around for a while. We plan to.


Who Gets to Be All-American?

Posted on by Jo Lou

Mitchell S. Jackson’s Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family is unlike any other book I’ve ever read. Survival Math is, on one hand, a historical and cultural expedition into Black Portland, a city that has seemingly hidden away its Black population in exchange for white hipsters, gentrification, and a facade of liberal open mindedness. On the other hand, it is a deep dive into Jackson’s family history, self-examination, and how history and the world at large overtly and subliminally motivated the “re-visioning” of Jackson’s life. Just as Erika Taylor wrote in her review for NPR, I too am wary of being too effusive with praise for Jackson’s innovative, intense, and intimate collection of essays for fear of coming across as insincere, but I assure you, the praise in this case is well deserved.

The excellence of Survival Math is not at all surprising. Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years won a Whiting Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. Jackson has received fellowships from the Cullman Center of the NYPL, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, New York Foundation for the Arts, and The Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Guardian, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is a Clinical Associate Professor of writing in Liberal Studies at New York University.

Mitchell S. Jackson and I chatted about Black Portland and who gets to be all-American. 

Tyrese L. Coleman: I’ve been dying to ask you about the men on the cover of Survival Math. Who are they and what is your relationship to them?

Mitchell S. Jackson: Those men are my kinfolk. They include my brothers, uncles, cousins, grandfather, and a nephew. They are the men whose stories compose the Survivor Files.

Survival Math book cover
Purchase the book

TLC: Part of what I find striking about the cover are these black and white images of Black men and then the book’s subtitle “Notes on an All-American Family.” It reminds me of a tweet from Tayari Jones where she said that the question she is asked the most is why she titled her book An American Marriage, “because it is confusing for someone like me to use ‘American’ without another word in front of it.” But, you do add another word in front of it: “All.” Your family feels very American to me but I imagine there will be some readers who will question why you included those words in the book’s title. Can you talk about that?

MSJ: Well, I guess I could start with pointing out something others have: if you don’t fit into the dominant group, you often get hyphenated: Asian-American, Hispanic-American, African-American. Those hyphenates seem a part of the great project of othering. A part of me calling them all-American is challenging the idea of who is American. In “American Blood” I claim that the people who are subjugated, oppressed, disenfranchised — and despite those harms, maintain some sense of national pride — might be the most American. The all of the subtitle is a shorthand way of asserting that claim. I want readers to question why it’s there, which is simultaneously an invite to challenge their perception of Americanness of citizenship of belonging, which as I see it, also an invitation to assess their perception of the value of a human being.

If you don’t fit into the dominant group, you often get hyphenated. Those hyphenates seem a part of the great project of othering.

TLC: The book is separated into four different sections: “Who Are We?” “What Have We Learned?” “What Have We Endured?” and “How Do We Proceed?” but within each section, there is even more structure, with poems and essays that reflect the nature of each section, and then at the end of each section, are Survivor Files. Can you talk more about the Survivor Files? Where did they come from and can I assume that the Survivor Notes correspond to the pictures preceding them?

MSJ: The Survivor Files include the portraits of the men on the cover and also a short narrative about a personal crucible. To obtain that story, I asked each of them the same question: What’s the toughest thing you’ve survived? I wrote the stories in the second person because I think that POV is dynamic in that is assumes the character of a first-person narrative but also invites the reader to imagine themselves as the protagonist of the story. Just who is the you? There’s something else about the stories: there’s a nod in each one of them to the past and the future. I mention something that happened to them before whatever is the central conflict and something that happens to them after the central conflict. That started with the first file I wrote which is also the first file in the book. And since I did it with the first one, I challenged myself to be consistent. My old mentor Gordon Lish used to counsel, “What you do once, do twice.”

TLC: You write about growing up in Portland, Oregon. I’ve only been to Portland once, but will be going back soon for AWP. Coming from the D.C. area, I simultaneously loved and hated the city. I’m no expert (obviously) but it felt like a place that wanted to rise above American conservatism while embracing fascism, as if those two seemingly opposing ideals went hand in hand, part of a “free-thinking society.”

Your book paints a city that feels utterly Black, but when I was there, it felt completely the opposite. I noticed a lot of nods to white supremacy and white nationalism. There were people working in certain shops with Nazi tattoos. And I also could not stop thinking about the May 2017 attack on the light rail where a white nationalist killed two men who were protecting two black Muslim women. But I couldn’t tell if I was just paranoid about being in such a white place.

Seeking to reconcile the portrait of Blackness you paint of the city and my feelings about the place, does my intuition have any merit? What are your feelings about Portland in regards to the place you grew up in and now when you may visit, but no longer live there?

MSJ: I think your intuition is right. I wouldn’t even call it intuition if you’re seeing Nazi tattoos. Oregon was formed with the explicit intent to exclude blacks and 162 years later the virtual monolith of whiteness in Oregon, in Portland, is the fruit of that telos. When I was growing up, I spent most of my time in the city’s small Black neighborhood: Northeast Portland (the NEP). Since the NEP was essentially my world, I didn’t feel the blatant racism that I might’ve experienced had I lived outside of the neighborhood. I was also ignorant of the state and city’s racist history. Now it seems that both liberals and white nationalist think Oregon and Portland a dandy place to live. The question is, how could it be bastion for groups who hold, at least ostensibly, radically different ideologies? What is it that links to those groups?

Oregon was formed with the explicit intent to exclude blacks and the virtual monolith of whiteness in Oregon is the fruit of that telos.

TLC: Survival Math felt very familiar and accessible for me. I think this is because of the voice. I felt as if we were sitting across from one another and we were just vibing and you were using the same language you would use in conversation, but more poetically eloquent. It gave me the impression that this is a book written by a Black man for a Black audience with no apologies made for anyone who may not catch on to certain turns of phrase or other culturally specific references. I’ve been seeing writing from other Black authors who I feel are almost deliberately eschewing the impulse to write for a more “universal” audience or understanding. Personally, I do. Was that your thought as you started drafting the pieces in this book? Or did the voice come more unconsciously than that? Should a writer, especially a Black writer, ever bow to the impulse of writing in some “universal” voice?

MSJ: One of my favorite essays is James Baldwin’s essay “If Black English Isn’t a Language Then Tell Me What is.” In that essay, Baldwin writes the following: “It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identity: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity.” I agree with Baldwin that language is the most essential part of one’s identity because it’s how we describe ourselves and the world. I’m always trying to find language that asserts my identity. Like everyone else, I contain multitudes, so the language must capture the different aspects of self, must reflect my residence in what has often felt like disparate worlds, must illume that I’ve known what it’s like to run from the police with a pocketful of crack and also what it’s like to chat it up in a Brooklyn brownstone with Pulitzer winners.

TLC: In your essay “Exodus” you talk about the tradition of leaving, of an exodus, for your great grandparents from the South to Portland, but also your own exodus from Portland to New York and the less than straight way you made it out. As I was reading, I kept noticing the aspects of your grandparents’ life that felt very familiar to me, a Southern Black woman. Exodus means to leave or change, but I am struck by what remained, what travelled with the traveler — God, food, comforts of family, traditions. When you made your exodus, what traveled with you?

MSJ: What traveled with me on my West to East exodus was the feeling of having been tested, of having come out — alive — on the other side of trials. I needed that because New York is not an easy city to navigate. There were lean times, particularly in the summers, because I was an adjunct professor for so long and refused to get a job that was outside of the literary life. I also carried with me the belief that community was important, which fueled my desire to build community especially with other writers, once I arrived. Even now, I have been organizing and hosting the Harlem Renaissance Fete for Writers of Color for what will be five years. I hosted it with writer Jacqueline Woodson and editor Tracy Sherrod for several years and this past year, with writer/editor Jennifer Baker. The whole reason for the party is to create community for writers of color, particularly Black writers. One other thing that I brought with me on my exodus was the language of home. I never did conform to the argot of New Yorkers. I wanted to maintain the language of home because I needed it to maintain a sense of self and my for the distinctiveness of my work — I’m committed to writing about home — because I didn’t want to cede the place I loved for a new place, a place that could’ve very easily consumed a huge part of what has grounded me in the world.

The people who are subjugated, oppressed, disenfranchised   might be the most American.

TLC: Your piece “Apples”…whew, where to start? First, I think this may have been the first time I’ve read a Black man articulating what Black women have, generally, felt regarding the idealizing of white women by some Black men. But there was something more brutal, less bitter, coming from your perspective. You say in the section titled, “Myths, Fairy Tales, and Legends,” that the apple, which is a metaphoric term you use for white women that incorporates the enticement and temptation they possess for some Black men, that “The apple is part myth….The apple is part legend.” But in some ways, would you also say, that the apple is part reality? Especially when considering what white man have done to protect them, as you say, “in the name of chivalric and paternal protection of the women they’ve invested (burdened?) with the expectation of piousness, who they’ve weighted with lifetime roles as the incubator and progenitor of the white race”? Legend and myths hardly get people killed on the regular. So is some aspect of the apple reality?

Additionally, the apple feels very much a reality in my eyes being a Black woman who has lived in the shadow of this white myth, fairy tale, and legend. Reality in respect to the threats she creates.

MSJ: Yes. The apple is absolutely a reality. A part of was I trying to say was that white men had mythologized their women so that they could perpetrate corporeal oppression. Of course, Black men and Black women were featured targets of that oppression. It’s hard for me to imagine a group more keen, more intelligent, more perceptive, more strong, more resilient, more resourceful, more forgiving, more loving, more sensual, more, more, more than Black women. How could that not be seen as a threat to those intent on subjugating Black folks, which is also another way of saying, to those intent on the project of dehumanizing all those that don’t belong to their so-called race.

TLC: I have a lot of questions for you after reading “The Scale,” where you discuss your “crimes” against women and examine the root, or at least a few roots, of your behavior and what affect that behavior had on women you mistreated, but mainly, I want to know, what happened? What made you decide to do this self-examination? And what did you gain from it?

MSJ: I read an essay years ago in Esquire magazine titled “Why Men Cheat.” It was a candid essay that detailed the rationale and rules of cheating for a single man. He was unapologetic about it too. For obvious reasons, he never identified himself. I was struck by that essay. I didn’t agree with all of his rationale, but I also recognized some of my pathologies in it. The author wrote, “If you cheat, you must believe this much: that fated love is a lie, and monogamous love a deception. If you cheat, these two sentiments are your guiding light. Doesn’t mean you’re incapable of love, doesn’t mean you don’t want what love — or even marriage — can offer. It’s just a paradox. You have what you believe, and it is never the lie. You train your sentiment to fit inside the lie. Your rules fit right inside that sentiment.”

While I didn’t agree wholeheartedly with his thesis, I did recognize my aversion to deep, unguarded love and also the ability to hold paradoxical ideas concerning women. But I also recognized problems with the essay. One stark problem was that the writer never stopped to examine the genesis of his thinking. He seemed resigned to call it a paradox and leave it at that. That is understandable in some sense, since his thinking wouldn’t stand up to reasonable scrutiny. Another glaring problem with the essay was that he didn’t talk at all about the fallout of his deeds. After reading it, I asked myself, what would happen if I endeavored to examine my relationships with women, my pathologies? What would happen if I was honest about the fallout of my deeds?

Later in my thinking — I began writing the essay in 2011 — I also was very much interested in trying to track the historical and philosophical genesis of womanizing. But I also challenged myself to do it without the cover of anonymity. It seemed like if I was sincere about the effort, that I had to own it all the way. And I tried as best I could to cast myself in the most critical light. What I gained from it was a fuller understanding of the harms I’d caused. Fearing what I suspected might be paralyzing guilt, I had long avoided considering the consequences of my actions as much as I could. But in writing the essay, I had to lay them out, not only that, but read them over and over. I also got a chance to speak with some of my former partners about our relationships, and speak to them at a time when the pained I’d caused wasn’t so acute. That again gave me more perspective. I also hope that if any of them choose to read the essay it gives them a sense of understanding. I would hope that it doesn’t act as a trigger for them or any other woman, but I also realize that that’s a risk. To anyone that receives the work in that way, I apologize.

It’s hard for me to imagine a group more keen, more intelligent, more perceptive, more strong, more resilient than black women.

TLC: Also in “The Scale,” you write very candidly about your own egotism, saying “…the crux of my motivation: that, almost always, was the need to satisfy my ego, to prove to myself that I was still capable, that I hadn’t lost the power to, as we say, ‘make it happen.’” And I wonder if the choice of memoir (for you, for me, being that I am also a memoirist, and for others) is an exercise in egotism. The basis of the self-awareness needed to examine oneself has to be rooted in some form of egotism, right? If not (or in addition), where else does the memoirist’s desire to write about themselves come from? What made you write this book?

MSJ: It’s interesting because I never intended to write a memoir. I intended to write essays. My definition of a memoir is this: a narrative composed from experiences. My definition of essay is this: prose focused on a particular subject or idea. Some readers might apprehend the major sections of the book as chapters of the memoir, but I see them as essays. Because I don’t want the essays to be solely or overwhelmingly expository, I ground them in personal experience. Some of that is my experience, but in many cases in the book, it is the experiences of others: my mother, uncles, dad, etc. But again, I always imagined their stories in service of an idea. The idea that poor people might be our greatest patriots, that idea that the chosen people are the righteous that choose themselves, the idea that long-term addiction can be viewed as a long-term marriage. So, I’m not sure if this book evidences the ipseity of a conventional memoirist. I do, however, think my experiences are valuable, but I guess one of the points I’m making in the book is that mine are not the only valuable experiences, not necessarily the most valuable experiences either.

Satisfaction seems like a dangerous place for a writer to reside, one that discourages the motivation one needs to keep going and going.

TLC: In “Revisions,” you use a quote from Toni Morrison, “Endings I always know, because that’s always what the book is about. The problem is getting there.” And you write, “…gleaning the differences between a start and a beginning is crucial to revising one’s self. Starts are beholden in some respect to time. Beginnings are a harvest of timing.” Your exodus was your beginning, but I feel as though all of Survival Math is your start. Are you done revising yourself now? Have you reached a satisfying ending to your story?

MSJ: I hope that me re-visioning my life continues until I die, that I am constantly looking back to inform where to go. While I am proud of completing this book, I’m also relieved that I don’t feel like I’ve reached a satisfying ending. I would actually be scared if I did. Satisfaction seems like a dangerous place for a writer to reside, one that discourages the motivation one needs to keep going and going. The minute I start to believe I’m done revising, I’m in trouble. One could argue it would be the first moment of the end producing strong work. That said, I don’t think I’ll revisit my family in the way that I have in this book. I did it in The Residue Years in fiction and now in Survival Math in nonfiction, and though I’m sure there’s more to say, I don’t see myself reflecting on them in such an explicit and sustained way.

In that sense, Survival Math is the start of me moving into a phase in my writing life where my and my family’s personal stories aren’t the crux of the work. That’s both an exhilarating and frightening prospect for me because I place so much on ethos, so much on the authority one gains from being intimately connected to the content. Luckily, my next project is a novel about a black cult leader in Oregon, and I happen to be close with a couple of people who were in the cult.

6 Books Made of Weird Materials

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

You know what a book is: 200 or so sheets of paper inside a cover, right? But why not 200 or so sheets of… cheese? Or fabric? Or glass?

These artists have taken their book-loving to a new level, using non-paper materials to create their own interpretations of books. A book isn’t just paper and ink, which opens the conversation to the future of bookmaking. What are the opportunities that can come from using different materials? Is it a genius reawakening, or an expensive gimmick? And does this change how we understand books?

Here are a few of the interesting books that show the creativity, ingenuity, and humor of different artists to expand beyond the standard practice of paper bookmaking. Some of these books are important considerations, even if they would never fit on my own bookshelf. Though, if I had a book? It would definitely be made from chocolate.

https://twitter.com/MariaLai_/status/514720676348182528

Fabric

Various sewn books are made from textile materials and stitching. Maria Lai, an Italian fiber artist, embroidered books entirely from thread and cloth. Much of her art was interested in the lives and voices of Sardinian women and their domestic and social practices.

Invisible

Reddit user cuddlebadger created an “invisible” print of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man using 1/16” Lexan sheets and fishing line. This clear copy is the perfect example of form meeting content and reminiscent of Super Terrain’s heat-sensitive copy of Fahrenheit 451, which has to be burned to be read.Buy a Copy of Fahrenheit-451 That Can Only Be Read If It’s on Fire
For a mere $451, you can now own a limited-edition heat-sensitive copy of Ray Bradbury’s bookelectricliterature.com

https://www.instagram.com/p/BpJX2UVnkuO/

Cheese

Ben Denzer’s 20 Slices consists of 20 plastic-wrapped Kraft singles. His other works include a book of 192 one dollar bills à la Andy Warhol that was sold by the Whitney Museum in 2018; 20 Sweeteners, made of 20 Splenda packets; and 5 Ketchups. Heinz, of course.

Waterproof

Mary Anne Mohanraj’s Aqua Erotica is a waterproof anthology of erotic short stories made from polypropylene, a thermoplastic polymer. This is the perfect book to bring to the beach or in the bath, though be careful. Aqua Erotica is not protected from all liquids. According to some readers, it doesn’t hold up against wine or beer, so drink beforehand. Cheers!

https://twitter.com/delight_monger/status/421317169993904128

Ice

Artist Basia Irland’s “Ice Receding/Books Reseeding,” a series of book-shaped ice sculptures frozen with seeds and other plant materials. The books are left to melt along rivers to reseed the local ecosystem with new life and raise awareness of climate disruption and watershed restoration.

Glass

In 2013, Icelandic-Dutch artist Olafur Eliasson worked with Ivorypress to create “A view becomes a window,” an edition of nine leather-bound artist books made of glass and light. The pages, created from hand-blown glass of various colors and opacities, can be read when light reflects and refracts through the glass to create brilliant illuminations.

What Science Can Learn from Constipated Dogs

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

The first time I picked up Gulliver’s Travels, I was working in a protein production lab. I’d just gotten home after a painfully long day, half of which I’d spent on an experiment that mysteriously failed at the last minute — not a good thing when the deadline to get data is fast approaching — and I was more than a little stressed. Gulliver’s Travels happened to be the book nearest to the armchair into which I’d gratefully collapsed. But in spite of my mood (or perhaps because of it), Jonathan Swift’s imagination, his worlds in all their layered absurdity, fascinated me enough to read well into the night.

A similarly frustrating week would pass before I got to Book III of the Travels, where Gulliver travels to a city of people devoted to studying mathematics, but who can’t even build their houses level. A grand Academy, built for the brightest minds in the country, stands in the city center and is occupied by a motley of projectors (investigators, that is) who do things like try to determine the color of paint by touch and smell, or turn ice into gunpowder. Their attempts are met with approval by the city’s inhabitants, and only Gulliver feels there’s something ridiculous going on.

Maybe it was my irritation with the work I was doing, but in reading Swift’s satire on the science of his day, I could see the spitting image of modern scientific practice.

Admittedly, my response wasn’t typical. Almost 300 years separate our world from the one Swift lived in, and for most people, the Academy of Projectors Gulliver visits seems at first glance a crude caricature of today’s multi-billion-dollar research institutes and university science departments. The instinctual reaction is to scoff — surely modern science doesn’t involve some crackpot squirreled away in a lab waving fistfuls of test tubes, right? After all, advances in science since the 18th century have been responsible for everything from the eradication of smallpox to the launch of the International Space Station.

But first impressions aren’t always perfect. It’s worth pushing through that initial reaction and thinking through the similarities between the discipline of science that Swift saw and criticized, and the science of today. The two have more in common than first meets the eye. Even now, three centuries on, reading Gulliver’s Travels can give us insights into modern science and its relationship with the world.

We just need to know what to look for.

I’ll start by saying something about what makes Gulliver’s Travels effective at delivering its criticisms. Throughout the novel, the protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver, repeatedly encounters worlds which seem completely alien to the one he knows. On Lilliput, he meets a race of people one-twelfth the size of regular humans, living in tiny villages and cities. In Book IV, he comes face-to-face with a breed of talking horses and their vaguely humanoid slaves.

Swift hides his satire behind a veil of fantasy, and it’s only when we look closely that we see the mirror he holds up to society.

Swift hides his satire behind a veil of fantasy, and it’s only when we look closely that we see the mirror he holds up to society.

The Lilliputians may be tiny, but their capriciousness and cruelty easily match the extremes of which humans are capable. The talking horses might appear to be objects of slapstick humor, but they spend their days actively plotting genocide.

Time and time again, the worlds Gulliver visits and the beings he meets come to embody the worst of human nature and society, and Swift is so effective at leveling his criticisms because he withholds recognition of that humanity for as long as possible.

By presenting the familiar wrapped up in the exotic, Swift makes us, as readers, first experience, then intuit, and only then recognize and think.

It’s no surprise, then, that Gulliver’s Travels is often seen as one of the first science fiction texts in the English canon. After all, Swift is using a technique that in the years after him science fiction has come to perfect: burying the narrative’s relevance in a world so completely unknown that we can’t rely on our previous experience to recognize it. Darko Suvin, one of the best-known sci-fi literary theorists, describes it like this:

SF is… the space of a potent estrangement… [it is] a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.

“The presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition.” In other words, Swift goes out of his way to make the worlds he builds strange and unfamiliar, which causes us to bypass the fog of experience and see them afresh. And then cognition kicks in — then, once we’ve judged them properly, we can realize how similar they are to what we know, and hopefully come to a much more sober reflection on our own society.

All this brings us neatly back to Gulliver and the Academy of Projectors. By now it should be clear that here, like everywhere else, Swift gives us situations that we’ll first judge as ridiculous, and only then start to recognize. So Gulliver’s first encounter is with a scientist in the Academy who

had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, he should be able to supply the Governors Gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate…

Mostly, this is funny because it’s incongruous — because the certainty with which the projector speaks doesn’t match up with the absurdity of what he’s suggesting. But for the more astute of Swift’s 18th-century readers, there would be a spark of recognition following the smirk.

An illustration by Milo Winter of a projector extracting sunlight from cucumbers
A projector extracting sunlight from cucumbers

By the time Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726, the Royal Society of London, established 126 years earlier to bring about “the improvement of Natural Knowledge,” was starting to be viewed with a bit of skepticism. Partly, this was because its achievements at the time weren’t quite as numerous as people had hoped, but it’s also clear that Swift, like many others, saw some of the society’s activities as rather ludicrous.

In a 1937 essay, critics Nicholson and Mohler showed that the majority of the projects in Swift’s Academy aren’t really that far removed from what the Royal Society was working on at the time. The “sun-beams from cucumbers” idea, for instance, probably came from actual attempts at using plants to convert sunlight into gas, and experiments in bottling and selling regional air.

But that was then. How relevant is Swift’s idea about the absurdities of 18th-century science to the science of today?

Well, in one sense, the discipline has changed a lot since 1726 and has many more accomplishments to speak of. Science has certainly benefited from the process of institutionalization, and the persistent efforts of scientific organizations and the scientists in them have led to humans living longer and healthier lives. They’ve allowed us to manipulate the world in unbelievable ways, to build skyscrapers and airplanes. Science has cured diseases and saved lives, explored everything from the microscopic cell to the frontiers of space.

And it’s important to remember that toying with absurdity has played a crucial role in all thisIt’s important to remember that many of these advancements would never have come about if scientists weren’t willing to entertain the seemingly absurd — after all, the methodology of science has always been to take small steps in the direction of making the absurd a reality. As sci-fi writer Arthur Clarke put it, “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

But at the same time, the inexorable, institutional pursuit of science has some troubling consequences. As our scientific knowledge has grown over the years, it has become increasingly segmented and stratified. To take one example, my field of study, genetics, was all but unknown until a century ago. In the seven or so decades since the structure of DNA was discovered, the field has split into literally dozens of sub-specialties. Many of these, like evolutionary genomics and pharmacogenetics, are as alien to each other as completely different branches of science.

The inexorable, institutional pursuit of science has some troubling consequences.

We have to pause and consider what impact this segmentation of knowledge may have. Swift’s projectors in the Academy are ridiculous (and pitiful) partly because they’re so engrossed in their research that they have no ability to look up, step back and see the bigger picture. And as humanity’s wealth of scientific knowledge grows, it’s getting more and more difficult for researchers and students alike to maintain a sense of perspective. Already in many universities, science programs allow little to no scope for exploring other disciplines like the humanities.

It’s increasingly the case that in science, one has to learn more and more to become an expert in less and less. This trend cannot be good for our development as individuals, and it should worry us a great deal more than it seems to.

One of the reasons we don’t often think about such things is that our society, generally speaking, doesn’t like criticizing science. I don’t mean in the sense of climate change deniers or the rabid anti-vaccination movement — we’ve got plenty of those, unfortunately. I mean that serious methodological debate about science as a whole isn’t something we’re comfortable with.

This, too, was a problem that Swift identified early on. During his tour of the Academy, Gulliver meets a projector whose task is “an operation to reduce human excrement to its original food,” and that wonderful interaction starts off in a striking way:

I went into another chamber, but was ready to hasten back, being almost overcome with a horrible stink. My conductor pressed me forward, conjuring me in a whisper to give no offence, which would be highly resented; and therefore I durst not so much as stop my nose.

This is one of the most revolting scenes in the entire novel, and Swift uses that repulsiveness to demonstrate the cult-like reverence the Academy has generated for itself. Such is the power of the institution that the danger of offending its practitioners supersedes all other concerns — even ones of basic hygiene.

There’s a serious point here: in observing the institutionalization of science in the 18th century, Swift saw the very real danger of it becoming an increasingly inaccessible, incontestable, and monolithic discipline. And unfortunately, it looks like his fears were justified.

Just last year, I met a student at the University of Edinburgh who told me that philosophers have no place commenting on the dealings of science. That only scientists have the right to judge science. Sadly, this is a common view, coupled with a growing belief that science is the only useful way of interpreting the world and gaining knowledge about it.

“What are you studying that for?” is a reaction I get regularly when I tell people that I study English literature as well as genetics. Sometimes it’s subtext. Sometimes it’s not.

Because of the very visible scientific achievements that have made our lives so much better over the years, people are forgetting that there are some questions about our existence science in principle can’t answer. Important questions, like “How should one act in order to be a good person?” and “What can we do to understand the experiences of others?” Questions that we cannot afford to lose sight of.

But the scientific mindset is at risk of overshadowing the forms of inquiry that are best suited to probing these questions, and that worries me greatly. When funding is cut to university departments, it is invariably historians, literature scholars, sociologists, artists, and anthropologists that suffer first, rather than physicists, mathematicians or computer scientists. Once upon a time, philosophers were the most esteemed members of society. Now, largely because of a lack of job funding, the vast majority of philosophy majors will never work in their chosen discipline.

And it’s a shame, because science is at its most beautiful and extraordinary when it shares the stage with other disciplines. When the insights it generates supplement other modes of thinking. When it steps into dialogue with philosophy, law, medicine, history.

The scientific mindset is at risk of overshadowing the forms of inquiry that are best suited to probing these questions.

Incidentally, the prestige of scientific authority that Swift saw as an emerging problem isn’t just something that affects the status of other fields. It’s also a reality that scientists themselves have to deal with.

Before he published a single word on evolution by natural selection — what would become the most successful scientific theory in biology — Charles Darwin spent 20 years gathering data, repeating his studies and thinking through his ideas. “You know what would happen to me if I did that?” an evolutionary biology professor from my university once told me. “I’d lose my job within a year.”

The drive to actively contribute to the prestige science commands — to further the cause of science — has led to a “publish or perish” culture in the field. Researchers are spending less time than ever reflecting critically on their work and much more time writing grant applications and publishing papers. Increasingly, quantity trumps quality.

Add to this the fact that many scientific journals are reluctant to accept negative results, and it’s no surprise that science is in the midst of an unprecedented reproducibility crisis. A 2016 article published by Nature found that of more than 1,500 researchers surveyed, over 70% had tried and failed to replicate the results of another study. In cancer biology, a 2012 inquiry estimated that as few as 11% of published results are actually reproducible. This is a major problem whose scale we’re only now starting to realize.

And broadly, this was exactly Swift’s point. If we consider the methodologies of science as a discipline to be beyond criticism, if we invest in it to the detriment of other human attempts at understanding the world — if we never step back and see the broader picture — there will be very real and devastating consequences.

If we invest in science to the detriment of other human attempts at understanding the world, there will be very real and devastating consequences.

Gulliver’s trip to the “practical” side of the Academy ends with a visit to the resident doctor, who first outlines his ingenious idea for treating colic — pumping and then sucking air through the rectum with a pair of bellows — and then demonstrates it: “I saw him try both experiments upon a dog… the animal was ready to burst, and made so violent a discharge… the dog died on the spot, and we left the doctor endeavoring to recover him by the same operation.”

The shock value is strong here, but the graphic imagery also reveals an unrecognizably, unfathomably barbaric side to science. And as always, there’s a deliberate delay for us to respond emotionally before we start to think about how accurate this depiction is — whether the science we know and trust really has the capacity for such harm, literally or otherwise. The answer isn’t easy to come to terms with.

So Swift’s final image of the dog and the doctor becomes a sad metaphor for a terrifying possible future — for a discipline scrambling in vain to repair the untold damage done in the wake of its unchecked and unquestioned progression.

In spite of all this, it’s important to remember that Gulliver’s Travels wasn’t an anti-science book. Jonathan Swift didn’t have a beef with the idea of science in principle — after all, he was writing during the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment. The very fabric of his satire, as we’ve seen, only works if people think.

Swift’s problem was with the way science was being practiced, and especially with the people who would preach it to the exclusion of everything else. By relying on rationality in his criticisms, Swift actually showed his support for the underlying principle of good scientific practice: careful and considered reason. It’s just that science shouldn’t be allowed to eclipse other modes of thought.

Three centuries on, we would do well to heed his warnings.

Spring 2019 Horoscopes for Writers

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

In spring, all things are made new — but this is also an opportunity to review the intentions we set at the beginning of the calendar year.

In April, outer planets station retrograde, where they will be for the entirety of the summer, into autumn. This isn’t going to be quite like last summer, where practically every planet in the sky was retrograde, leading to a sloggish summer where all we did was turn over the same soil. This time around, it’s just three retrograde planets: Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto. How we expand and where we find our faith, how we work within and create structure, and where we are undergoing transformation are all up for review. You may be most familiar with retrogrades via your Twitter friends blaming every kind of wackiness on Mercury being in retrograde, but retrogrades are normal, and are just one kind of energy to work with. When it comes to astrology, knowledge is power: if you know it’s happening, you can use it to your advantage.

Meanwhile, Venus, the planet of love and value, will zip through four different signs — and four different areas of your life — asking you to consider how you bring beauty to your life, how you value different parts of yourself and those you love, and how you take the time to nurture your creativity.

At the very end of spring, just as the summer solstice approaches, Jupiter, the planet of expansion, and Saturn, the planet of responsibility, will both connect with Neptune, the planet of vision and dreams, offering blessings in kind, asking how we are going to work with the dream this summer. Jupiter (by then retrograde) amplifies the dream; Saturn asks us whether and how the dream needs revising.

This is a time of preparation. The summer will bring more eclipses, and more rooting out. Spring is a time for renewal, a time to work with retrogrades, a time to bask in the varying Venus energies, a time to use Aries fire, Taurus seed sowing, and Gemini fast-flying energy to your advantage.

Aries symbol

ARIES

Feeling energized lately? Spring is your season, a time of new beginnings, new ideas, planting seeds and breaking free after the long winter. The vernal equinox on March 20 ushers in Aries season and with it, your birthday: new year, new you.

This is a time to harness as much of that fiery, buoyant energy into your creative projects as you can. On April 5, a new moon in Aries offers you the opportunity to set powerful intentions for this new zodiac year, and for your own birthday season. New moons are all about new beginnings and new projects: what have you been muddling through this winter, having difficulty getting off the ground? Now is the time to put some fire behind that idea. (Also, this new moon will be at 15 degrees — those of you with your sun, ascendant, or other personal planets or angles within one to three degrees of the moon will be particularly impacted.)

On May 15, Venus goes into Taurus, where she is at home in its earthy sensuality — and in your house of resources and value. While Venus is in Taurus, she brings a touch of grace and nuance to how you handle your resources (as well as how you value yourself). Now is a time to pay extra attention to the give and take of the flow of money and time and exchange of resources in your life.

Writing Prompt: What project have you been meaning to get to, and just putting off? Brush it off, and make a date night with yourself to work on it — perhaps around the new moon.

Taurus symbol

TAURUS

The big news for you in the early months of this year was Uranus, the planet of change and revolution, going into your house of self and identity. It’s going to spend the next seven years here, turning over the soil. While Uranus can take a minute to get going, if you’ve got planets or your ascendant at early degrees (check your birth chart), you may be feeling these effects early. What does that mean for your writing? Uranus coming through this particular part of your life shakes up how you conceive of your very identity. That could mean what you write about, or how you think of yourself as a writer. The key is rocking and rolling with the changes Uranus throws your way: stay flexible. Not always your first instinct, Taurus: you like comfort; you like to root down. You like stability. You are an earth sign, after all.

Your birthday season kicks off on April 20. There is a new moon in your sign on May 4; a time for planting, growing — everything that Taurus loves to do. Use this energy to really focus on gathering and growing those seeds that you kicked off in Aries season, and put them down in the fertile Taurus earth. Saturn, the planet of responsibility, will have just gone retrograde a few days before; this project may, in some way, have to do with reconsidering or revising an aspect of an old project idea. The next few months under Saturn Retrograde are a ripe time for revising and re-envisioning, for making all things new.

Writing Prompt: Uranus wants to change up that topsoil and sift through, finding what still serves you — and what doesn’t. What parts of your identity are calcified — what is past its expiration date? What is it time to let go of? How does this letting go affect your creative self, your work?

Gemini symbol

GEMINI

If winter was all about working with your long-term goals, spring is all about digging in to your community and, ultimately, taking care of yourself. The season opens with planets hanging out in your house of friendships, social consciousness, and the internet: social networks like Twitter are playtime for you, and a gathering like AWP offers you the chance to truly shine. In March and early April, don’t lose the threads of new, budding relationships you are building with people. Winter can be cold, and SAD is real, but keep those new flames burning. The people you’re meeting right now will be good for you (and vice versa).

Gemini season — your birthday season! — arrives on May 21, heralding with it the winds of spring, spreading new ideas and inspiring people to travel, to share, to connect. Gemini is ruled by Mercury, the messenger, who can zip around the world and also dive beneath to Hades’ realm: Mercury is surefooted, and able to chameleon into any environment they need. This ability to adapt is a gift, but be sure that, as your season unfolds, you are standing on solid ground. When you feel rooted, your work is more rooted, as well. There is a new moon in your sign on June 3, offering the chance to set new intentions and put new plans into place.

With both Venus, the planet of love and value, and Mars, the planet of action, lighting up your house of self and identity, you’ll attract attention in a good way. This is an excellent time to continue to nurture and invest in your creative communities: Gemini delights in sharing ideas, and Venus and Mars work to put extra wit in your words.

Writing Prompt: Think of the last few gatherings you were a part of where other creative people were present. They could have been centered around writing (like a literary reading), or not. What did you like, and what did you not like? Now: how can you cultivate — and seek out — the things that you liked, the things that were nurturing, in your creative communities, moving forward?

Cancer symbol

CANCER

Summer will be here before you know it, and with it, your birthday season — and some powerful eclipses. Utilize the energy of this spring to lay track for the train that’s coming.

This spring is a time to take stock of what’s working in your life, and what isn’t. Who is working in your life, and who isn’t. In April, both Saturn and Pluto will begin a retrograde in your house of committed partnerships. These planets are in serious, empire-building Capricorn — your opposite sign, which shares similar values as you do when it comes to things like security and long-term planning. While this part of your chart governs committed romantic partnerships (certainly, something that affects the creative life), it also governs committed business partnerships — say, with an agent, an editor, or a writing partner. Writing is considered a solo enterprise, but we know it’s not. The people we love, and the people we are in this business with, significantly affect how we approach the work: what we write about, when we write, how much we get for our writing, our general emotional state. Saturn and Pluto are both heavyweights that deal with life’s responsibilities and transformation, respectively, and they are here to help you clear out any patterns that aren’t working to your highest good.

Your career gets a boost from Venus, the planet of love and value, which travels with the sun through Aries and your house of public image and fame early in the spring. Here, Venus is fiery, brazen, and no-nonsense, helping you to trust yourself — to value yourself — and to feel confident about the choices you are making in your work and how you are putting it out into the world. Venus in Aries is Wonder Woman energy — and after this winter, you could do with some Wonder Woman energy, Cancer.

Writing Prompt: Venus asks us to consider our worth, to look into the mirror and say I am worthy. I am worth it. Do you believe your work is worthy and worth it, Cancer? How have you struggled with seeing the value in your work this past year?

Leo symbol

LEO

You love spring, Leo. It’s light, independent, sunny — much more your speed than winter, when the world is resting. Spring feeds your energy, and no wonder: Aries is your fellow fire sign, a kindred spirit. This spring, the sun and Venus travel together in Aries, lighting up your house of travel, philosophy, and long-term plans. For you, this is the time of year when all the world’s a stage, full of new life and possibility, just waiting for you to be not only the lead, but also the producer, the writer, the director. For you, this time of year is about the vision. So get out the vision board — or the notebook. Go on a walk. Take an impulsive weekend trip somewhere that’s outside your normal surroundings. Get out of your head, and tap into that big heart. You may not like the word manifest, but that’s exactly what you’re good at doing, and it’s exactly what can happen for you right now.

Meanwhile, your daily routines are about to get an upgrade. Saturn, the planet of responsibility, and Pluto, the planet of transformation, are hanging out in your house of health and day-to-day work stuff: decidedly not long-term vision, but the kind of chores and routine scheduling that helps those big plans get accomplished. We have to pay attention to the little details, too, and these major planets are about to spend the entire summer (and some of the fall) in this part of your life, turning over the soil and making sure that your habits are serving you for the better. (Have you been meaning to start ordering a meal service so that you eat better — or even just purchase wrist support for your desk to help with carpal tunnel? This retrograde is gonna bring all of that up for review.)

Writing Prompt: Write out a typical daily schedule for you, then a typical weekly schedule. What parts of this could stand to be upgraded? What do you wish you had the time to improve, or to add in? (You might be surprised what the next few months bring.)

Virgo symbol

VIRGO

Where do you find your creative inspiration? Over the next few months, Saturn, the planet of responsibility, and Pluto, the planet of transformation, will be sifting through your creative consciousness, encouraging you to dive deep into your reserves. This spring, these planets will be reviewing (and perhaps also revising) how you typically find entry points into excitement. This is the part of your life that is creative, but also flirtatious and romantic — a part of your life that’s about being inspired by life’s joys. If your emotional well has started to feel stale lately, spring will bring new opportunities for change: but you might need to put in the effort. Saturn and Pluto are in Capricorn, after all: earthy energy that requires effort to build something new that lasts.

You understand how to utilize earthy energy, Virgo. You’re comfortable with the harvest, with the end of a season, but perhaps less so with the new beginning. And Aries — the fiery start of the zodiac year — strikes at a particularly deep part of your chart, in your house of intimacy. This is introspective energy. You’re comfortable in the details: with organizing, with a mind toward healing. Aries’ single-minded, laser focus on the parts of yourself and your work that you would rather not lay bare to the world? That’s less comfortable. But sit back, and consider: what discomforts is this season bringing up for you? What parts of yourself do you prefer to keep hidden — from yourself, from your professional network, from intimate partners? What is okay to keep to yourself, and what might be worth taking a second look at? Confession to others may not be the solution to everything, but self-awareness and a bit of journaling (or therapy) might be.

Writing Prompt: What parts of your life has 2019 brought up for review so far? What has felt comfortable — and what hasn’t?

Libra symbol

LIBRA

Aries is your opposite sign: the individual to your balanced, relationship-focused scales. Libra craves harmony and delights in its ability to see (and debate) all sides to an issue. You take your time, patiently researching and assessing the information before deciding your mind. Ruled by values-driven Venus whereas your sister Aries is ruled by action-driven Mars, you truly are two sides of the same coin. You kick off the autumn; Aries starts the spring. Opposites, in every way.

So what is a Libra to do during Aries season? Well, enjoy full moons, for a start. Yes, you read that right: moons, plural. The spring starts with two full moons in Libra, on March 20 (at 0 degrees) and April 19 (at 29 degrees). Having two full moons in one sign is a relatively unusual occurrence, so enjoy this double dose of your energy! Full moons are about releasing, culmination, fulfilling. What projects or ideas have you been fulfilling, personally, lately?

Aries also governs your house of committed partnerships. This isn’t just romantic; it’s also business. The sun and Venus will both spend time in this house, highlighting what you want in the long-term (are you happy with your agent, your editor, your writing group? Are these things you’re looking for?). This spring, your relationships are up for review — even as the sun and, then, Venus go into Taurus and your house of intimacy — and those relationships continue to deepen and unearth the most uncomfortable parts of your psyche. Are you bringing people into your creative life who share your vision: who are compatible with you on personal and professional levels, and who can work with you for the long term? Time will tell.

Writing Prompt: What kinds of people most rejuvenate you, creatively? What kinds of events, what kinds of engagements, what kinds of partnerships?

Scorpio symbol

SCORPIO

Your big story, Scorpio, is that your writing and short term projects are getting major shakeups this spring. Buckle in. Saturn, the planet of time and responsibility, and Pluto, the planet of transformation, are leisurely sifting through this part of your life, and when they turn retrograde come April, they will bring all kinds of long buried things up for review — and revision. You may quite literally end up revising an actual project over these next few months: specifically, its boundaries or your time commitment (Saturn) or even its very essence (Pluto).

In a similar vein, spring kicks off with rather literal spring cleaning. In your chart, Aries is your house of health and daily routine — all that day to day stuff that makes up the big picture. But the little things have to be in order in order for the big picture to flourish, yes? Use the Aries new moon on April 5 to set intentions around health, wellness, and a daily schedule this season. In many ways, your body is your instrument, and it’s important to take care of it.

Finally, you have a full moon at 27 degrees of Scorpio on May 18. Full moons are for culminating, for releasing, for letting go. This full moon is highlighting your house of self and identity — what aspects of yourself have you been working on over the last six months, and what are you ready to let go of?

Writing Prompt: What parts of your life (or creative life) feel like they’ve been undergoing a spring cleaning?

Sagittarius symbol

SAGITTARIUS

Have you been feeling lucky, expansive, like nothing can touch you? It might be because Jupiter, the planet of expansion, has been hanging out in your house of self and identity. Jupiter is home: Jupiter rules and loves Sagittarius, where its yearning spirit that craves intellectual stimulation and new experiences can go wherever free-roaming Sagittarius fires off to. In April, Jupiter goes retrograde. Keep in mind, retrogrades are a regular occurrence and they aren’t a bad thing! Just a time to do anything with a re- in front of it: review, revise, rethink. Because Jupiter is going to be retracing its steps over this part of your chart, this spring might bring up ideas or beliefs about yourself and your life path that you thought you had figured out, just for reconsideration. Jupiter is a joyful, bounteous friend and is on your side — they’re just going to sit with you for a little while and make sure that you’re sure about the next steps.

In that vein, Jupiter will square off with Neptune, the planet of dreams and all things subconscious, on June 16. Jupiter blows up anything it touches, and since Neptune’s energy is nebulous on a good day, when it connects with Jupiter, whew — watch out. At best, this energy is dreamy, allowing you to ideate without commitment. Mark your calendar for a bubble bath or maybe a creative, “wander the streets (or the woods) with yourself and see where it takes you” date. But keep a skeptical mind about people coming out of the woodwork with opportunities that seem too good to be true.

The next day, June 17, there is a full moon at 25 degrees of Sagittarius. Full moons are completing energy, and they are also excellent times for releasing. If the spring, and Jupiter retrograde, have brought up issues that you thought were long since resolved, this might be a good time to have a night in, treating yourself to some take-out and Netflix (and perhaps some journaling, too). Whatever helps you to let go, and know that you are walking on the right path, even when the journey curves unexpectedly.

Writing Prompt: What goals did you set for yourself at the beginning of this year? What have you achieved so far? What are you still working toward? What needs to be revised?

Capricorn symbol

CAPRICORN

You’re comfortable with the serious side of life, Capricorn: with making a plan, with keeping a schedule, with committing. You understand how to finish things. But even for someone like you, having Saturn, the planet of time and responsibility, and Pluto, the ever-so-slow moving planet of transformation, rock and roll and retrograde through your house of self and identity, over and over and over, can be tiresome. Are we there yet?

No, unfortunately. Your relationship to yourself — how you conceive of yourself (how you conceive of yourself as a writer, how you write about yourself) — is shifting, dramatically, with these planets hanging out there. They are digging and planting and harvesting and sifting again, a farmer with a plow. There is fruit on the other end, if you work with this and really lean into experiences you’re having and the lessons you’re learning. You might not write about them right away. This might be one of those “five years from now” essays. Be present in your body, be present with what you’re feeling, and (for once) don’t try to take the clay that’s molding you and form it into art too soon.

Of course, you’ve still got irons in the fire and creative energy to spare. Use the new moon in Taurus on May 4 to set intentions around your new ideas and projects this spring. Taurus energy feels more playful and heady, more sensual and grounded, and this part of the spring will be a particularly fruitful time for you.

Writing Prompt: Make a list of those “five years from now” stories and essays that you know you’ve got in you, that you can feel yourself working toward. And now: what feels doable now? Make that list, too.

Aquarius symbol

AQUARIUS

For you, Aquarius, spring is literally about new ideas and writing a new essay or a new story. Aries season, ushered in by the vernal equinox, lights up your house of communication and short term projects, inspiring you to take action and get shit done with those projects that have been, perhaps, on the back burner this winter. Mark your calendar for the Aries new moon on April 5, an auspicious day when the juices will be flowing: an ideal day to get a new project off the ground.

Even if projects have been a little slow to pick up speed this winter, you’ve definitely been meeting a lot of people and making exciting connections — or at least, have had the opportunity to do so. Jupiter, the planet of luck and expansion, has been blowing through your house of friendship, social consciousness, and the internet — a big ol’ party-hardy tumbleweed. Look who I want to introduce you to! It’s on you, of course, to actually pick up what Jupiter throws down — to make that coffee or drinks date, to DM that person, to follow up — but if a few folks have floated in and out of your orbit, you’re about to get the chance to get a do-over. Jupiter goes retrograde this April, offering you an opportunity to reconnect and redo. Who has popped up who you missed the first time around? Who have you been too intimidated to reach out to? Now’s the time, Aquarius. (And if you’re going to AWP, all the better: don’t let them pass you by!)

Meanwhile, Saturn, the planet of responsibility, and Pluto, the planet of transformation, are sifting through your house of rest, spirituality, and unconsciousness. Not the most comfortable place for these heavyweights to hang out, you know? If you haven’t, spring is an ideal time to get into therapy, book a reiki session, or schedule that mini personal retreat. At the very least, start blocking out intentional alone time for yourself.

Writing Prompt: Something else that comes up during a Jupiter retrograde in your house of, umm, the internet? Your online presence. Time for a quick reevaluation of your Twitter brand, of the platforms you’re using, of your website. How is your online presence serving you? Is it working for you, or against you?

Pisces symbol

PISCES

Pisces energy carries us out of the last recesses of winter and into the heady dawn of spring. Fresh off your birthday season, you go into Aries more energized than most, renewed in your self and identity and ready to translate that personal rejuvenation into value, both internal and external. Aries season brings multiple planets — the sun, Mercury, and Venus — into this part of your life and chart, which for you is about understanding how you value yourself and how that extends into material value in your life. Mercury, the planet of ideas and communication, inspires you to imagine new paths for revenue streams, while Venus, the planet of love and value, asks you to both ask for what you’re worth and intrinsically know your worth.

We live in a white supremacist, heteronormative, patriarchal capitalist society, where the monetary value of creativity and ideas are ever shifting, and the very idea of attaching money to art and people can be problematic at the best of times. But this spring, the energy in the air is pushing you to take the steps to ensure that you and yours are provided for, to the best of your ability, and that that provision comes from a place of self-assurance and self-worth.

This energy carries you through the entire spring, into Taurus season, where those seeds of value you planted in Aries time are nurtured into literal manifestations of new projects: new stories, new essays, new newsletters, perhaps even new a new job in writing and communications. Who knows? The energy is yours to work with (or not): ultimately, you are the arbiter of your own life.

Writing Prompt: There is a new moon in Taurus on May 4, a moon that will provide excellent energy for starting a new story, essay, or other project. So your prompt is this: begin at the beginning.