A love affair, or a blow to the solar plexus. A ticking bomb that must be allowed to explode. A rebus. A nautilus shell, a string of boxcars, a filmstrip, a scene viewed the wrong way through a telescope, a pond, a snow globe. A magic trick (the sort performed by stage magicians, not sorcerers). A diorama in a natural history museum, with painted backgrounds and half a moose and forced perspective. A piece of photorealistic origami. A magical realist photograph.
What I don’t know about short stories could fill a book. Two books, actually, so far. When I teach, I’m always striving to explain what a short story is, usually by comparing it to something it surely is not. As a teacher (as well as a writer), I love metaphor, which might not speak well of me. It’s like talking to someone who won’t stop doing impressions. I love impressions, too. I love all imitations of greatness. A short story is a single instrument upon which any piece of music may be played; a novel is an orchestra, every song and every sound. A short story is the fin cutting the ocean’s surface that lets you feel and fear the shark beneath; a novel’s the entire Atlantic. A short story is an optical illusion: the hag and then the young beauty and then the hag again, the hag eyeballing you uncannily, the beauty always turning away. Or a vase, and then two faces in profile about to kiss and never getting there. A novel — well, it’s any number of old hags and young beauties and old beauties and young hags and, chances are, a fair number of kisses.
A short story is an optical illusion: the hag and then the young beauty and then the hag again, the hag eyeballing you uncannily, the beauty always turning away.
When I was young, it wasn’t uncommon to hear in MFA programs that short stories were apprentice work. You completed something small to learn how to complete something big, something real. As a grad student I must have written the first 40 pages of half a dozen theoretical novels before giving up, but if I began a short story I finished it. Then, with four stories, I landed a contract for my first book — this was in the olden days, by which I mean 1990, when it was still possible to sell a collection on the strength of four unpublished stories, written by a nobody — and for the first time in my life I was writing for publication. Not in hopes of publication, but for actual publication, with a deadline and a waiting editor. The first few stories I had to write under this particular gun felt all right, not so different from writing for a deadline in school, but I grew to dislike it, and there is at least one story in my first book which, when I remember it, not often, I think, Poor half-formed thing: you were the child of a deadline.
Once I’d finished that first book I began writing novels. I wrote two in a row and declared that I was no longer a short story writer: I had stretched my imagination out of shape and couldn’t go back. Short stories, I explained, were much harder than novels: they showed missteps. Novels were baggy and forgiving; stories had to be both art and perfectly constructed. Harder to mimic real life in a short story, easy to be hokey or overly epiphanic or both. No, I said, I was a novelist now.
There is at least one story in my first book which, when I remember it, not often, I think, “Poor half-formed thing: you were the child of a deadline.”
Then I began to write novels that didn’t go so well, and I rushed back to short fiction. My first story after about nine years of abstinence was pulled from the wreckage of a failed novel. What I’d forgotten: the way I could hold a short story in my head for the entire composition of it, how the first mysterious intimations — a sentence, an image, an exchange of dialogue — were still there when I typed the last line.
When I was young, I scrambled for stories, scavenging through the world looking for scraps. By world I mean stories my friends told me, newspaper articles I read on microfilm, my parents’ family lore, conversations overhead on Greyhound buses, even occasionally the work of other, better writers. There’s a scene in a story in my first book that I only years later realized was stolen from Tobias Wolff’s “Hunters in the Snow.”
Older, I realized that I could will short stories into being. That is, I could decide to write a short story and go picking around my mental debris for a topic, then settle on characters and narrative and structure, and write the thing. Novels — impossible. Novels required an obsession with material and people and a great deal of uncertainty. But short stories required no more obsession than I already had stored up in my brain. Will felt like exactly the right word: I was willing stories into existence. I could work my brain like an electromagnet in a junkyard, turn it on, dip it into the heaps of my own mind, and pull something out. Perhaps not everything picked up was fiction-worthy, but some weird remnant would catch my fancy, and I could build a story around it. This felt like an extraordinary revelation.
I realized I could work my brain like an electromagnet in a junkyard. Not everything picked up was fiction-worthy, but some weird remnant would catch my fancy, and I could build a story around it.
Then, not long ago, I reread Allan Gurganus’s essay “Garden Sermon.” Allan was my first teacher my first semester of graduate school; his work means everything to me. “Garden Sermon” is about, among other things, novel writing, his own first (and great) book Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, gardening, AIDS in the 1980s, taking care of the dying, the importance of taking things personally, heredity, teaching, compassion. Allan gave a public reading of it when I was his student in 1988.
There in the essay, these words:
“I tell my students: they can will the subject of a story but, a novel? no.”
Not even my revelation was original. I wasn’t ready the first time I heard it; time and other ideas covered it up; then a new wind gusted through the junk heaps, and the idea landed glintingly at my feet. And I thought, mine.
Pictured: a short story.
I change my mind about what a short story is nearly every day. So, then: a short story is that junkyard magnet. The form itself attracts. All the pieces of a short story — characters and lines of dialogue, events and images, setting, wild ideas — have been forged separately. Now they’re here, clinging to the one thing they have in common. In the junkyard itself, they mean nothing, a jumble. They are refuse. But once the magnet passes over they jump up and hang together, hub cap to hub cap to old pipe to wrenched-off refrigerator door. You see how they fit together, how they make a shape different from any other collection of scraps. Some of them don’t even touch the magnet: the current runs through the whole assemblage and holds it together. That story your parents always told about the early days of their marriage; the insult that ruined one of your oldest friendships; the morning news of 1962; other people’s writing; your worst memory of fourth grade. Turn on a magnet and watch them fly together.
There is a ferocity to the Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin’s stories that made me, I have to admit, slightly afraid to speak to her. When her bewitching short novel Fever Dream was released in English in 2014, Jia Tolentino wrote aptly in the New Yorker, “A low, sick thrill took hold of me as I read it. I was checking the locks in my apartment by page thirty.”
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The English-language release of Schweblin’s short story collection Mouthful of Birds, beautifully translated by Megan McDowell, takes on the quality of a nightmare. Dark fields off a highway ripple with masses of screaming women. A pregnancy shrinks backwards to the size of a pill. Children disappear in a hole in the ground. There is — I’ll warn you — the murder of a dog that will set your teeth on edge.
About four stories in, I was struck with that rare, buoyant feeling that the strange world on the page was actually my world, that the narrator was actually me. The narrator in question is a newly divorced father whose daughter has developed a compulsion for eating live birds. This is not a situation I’ve come close to, thus far in my life, so I cannot quite explain my feeling. But it was like holding a magnet to the tray of metal dust at a children’s museum. The little metal dust pieces were pulled out from some distant part of me; suddenly they had something to hold onto.
Samanta Schweblin is very interested in that magnet feeling — in the mysterious mechanics that click into motion inside our heads, spurred by a word on a page. There are murky darknesses inside all of us that can be dredged up by fiction.
When we spoke over Skype, from my office in Brooklyn to her apartment in Berlin, Schweblin told me, laughing, that readers are often surprised to meet her in person. They expect someone dark and reticent: “They’re like, ‘Wow! I never thought you would smile so much!’”
I was surprised myself, and grateful for her warmth and generosity as we spoke about the violence of art, about cultural misunderstandings and societal strictures, and how strangeness in literature can let us see it all anew.
Alison Lewis: You’ve been living in Berlin for several years now. Do you miss Argentina?
Samanta Schweblin: I do, but it’s a nice nostalgia. I live in Berlin because I like it. It’s a city where my world became very small, which could sound sad, but for me it’s divine and perfect. In Berlin I live in the little bubble of Spanish speakers and Latin Americans, so it’s just that: my spaces are smaller, and I feel that it gives me more time for writing. And not only for writing — for discovering new things. Sometimes it scares me to think of myself six years ago in Argentina; I was overwhelmed with the effort to meet societal expectations, so I didn’t have the space to choose what I really wanted to do. When are you going to go out and look for something new if you are constantly dealing with what you already know? So Berlin gives me that space, that emptiness.
AL: Is there something to the feeling of being uncomfortable that lets you discover the new?
SS: Feeling uncomfortable or feeling alone — not even alone — it’s feeling that you have the time to go out and discover what is going to happen in your day. It’s beautiful! Not everyone has that possibility in their city. It’s significant that I live in Berlin as a foreigner. And I want to still be living as a foreigner in twenty years; it’s what gives me the distance with which to see things as if for the first time, or to see them without understanding completely. I don’t speak German, so I am an exile even in my own language here. And all of that I find very generative for writing.
AL: In the story “Heads Against Concrete” in this collection, there’s the phrase “the cultural gap” which comes up very painfully at the end of a friendship between an Argentine artist and his Korean dentist; they reach a point of misunderstanding that they cannot overcome. Do you have that experience of the cultural gap often in Germany? And do you think it is ever something we can overcome — or not?
SS: I don’t know if it’s something we can overcome. I wrote that story when I was in Buenos Aires because I knew that dentist. We became friends, and we had an agreement like the characters in the story, where he would clean my teeth and in exchange I would do a task he asked me to. In Argentina, there are a great number of Korean immigrants, but they live completely isolated; it’s very rare for an Argentine to have a Korean friend. So I was proud to have this Korean friend, and that we were able to really communicate. Then the cultural gap appeared. He said something offensive and generalizing — that all Argentines are lazy — and I realized he really believed it. And that injured the relationship permanently. There wasn’t a way to set it right. I don’t know, I think it hurts a lot and we don’t find a way to dismantle these things.
AL: I don’t know, but maybe through reading, through art…?
SS: Yes, well, I hope so, but I don’t know. It has to do with taking for granted the social norms and ideas that we grow up with; we think they are the absolute truth when they aren’t. What’s certain is that when something scares us or makes us distance ourselves or feel prejudice towards others, it’s because of a lack of information. It happens because we don’t understand. So in that moment, instead of taking a step back, we should take a step forward and try to see what is actually happening. But instinctively we want to protect ourselves instead, to surround ourselves with our people who think like we do. So that creates this space between the two cultures in which you cannot reach out to those on the other side because you’re so far away.
Living as a foreigner gives me the distance with which to see things as if for the first time, or to see them without understanding completely.
AL: That story, “Heads Against Concrete,” ends with the line “these are not good times for very sensitive people.” I feel like many of your characters could be described as “sensitive people”; even as some of them, like the narrator of that story, are capable of great prejudice and cruelty, they carry a certain weakness within them. Would you describe them that way? And what attracts you to those kinds of characters?
SS: They’re characters who haven’t been able to arm themselves completely, as if they’re crippled in some way. But if they were strong or perfect, I’d be working with archetypes. It seems to me that the things the characters lack, or their obsessions, or the little places where they hurt are what make them interesting. And we are all a bit crippled like that, aren’t we?
AL: Yes, it’s true! And we hide it.
SS: Absolutely. We are constantly trying to perform a kind of normality, to present ourselves as perfectly as possible in order to be a part, to integrate, to be admired. But there is a trap in that because, in the end, it seems to me that the most genuine connections we make with others come from places of weakness, of pain, of fear.
AL: That makes me think of the moment of connection between the two employees in the story “Olingiris,” which I loved. There is something so endearing about these two women who come from the country with their own histories, their own hopes, but they get swept up in the bewildering machinery of the city. How do you conceive of these women?
SS: Well it’s a common story, of coming to Buenos Aires looking for a better life, and they do succeed in finding work, but they never come to understand how the city works or what the work they’re doing actually is. The idea in this story was that a woman can go to an esthetician to get rid of her leg hair, but she could also go to an esthetician and pay to pluck someone else’s leg hairs. So these women’s job is to have their leg hairs plucked; it’s flipped, so we’re distanced enough to see that situation in which neither the consumer nor the worker understands what the work is for, or even what they are even doing. The only possible connection in any case is in that moment of complete misunderstanding, of not knowing what to do, and the two women meet each other frozen in that same place.
The things the characters lack, or their obsessions, or the little places where they hurt are what make them interesting.
AL: In that story, one of the women treasures a book of fish drawings, particularly a drawing of a fish called an Olingiris. She’s given a newer copy of the same book, which she feels is different from the original, but in reality, they are exactly the same. Is that what you’re saying about these women too — that within the context of the city, of their workplace, they are identical?
SS: I mean that they themselves are identical. It’s the disillusionment of not finding a single difference, thinking “something has to make me different” — and no, you are the same. It’s like realizing you are one in a series. It’s horrible. Where these characters find themselves, in such a dark situation, there is at least some gratification in thinking that you are unique in your bad luck, in your suffering; it’s worse for you than for anyone else. But no, it goes that badly for everyone!
AL: Oof, it’s so dark! But there’s also that moment when the two women are crying together.
SS: There’s contact. There’s someone who sees you for the first time. Which in the end is what we are all always looking for.
AL: Are there authors who particularly inspired you when were first writing these stories?
SS: I think as a writer first you have your great teachers, and then later on you have more like little illuminations. Mouthful of Birds is my first book of stories, so it’s very influenced by my first great literary loves: Ray Bradbury, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and many Latin American writers like Antonio di Benedetto, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, Sara Gallardo, Julio Cortázar. Today my references are completely different. It’s been several years now that I’ve been reading and rereading four American writers who I love: Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, Elizabeth Strout, and Amy Hempel. They astound me. Elizabeth Strout and Amy Hempel work in the space of realism, but everything is infused with doubt, with enigma. And Kelly Link and Aimee Bender have something of Latin American magical realism, where I feel most at home; they are at the very edge of the fantastic. Sometimes they even cross over the edge.
AL: Oh it’s true. They’re all authors who, after you read them, you return to the world and it looks just a bit different, doesn’t it?
SS: Yes, that’s what the literature of the strange achieves. Our brains are constantly cataloguing what we see: your brother comes in and you say “my brother just came into the house.” Everything is labeled and classified. But a monster comes in and you can’t say “this is my brother;” you say “what is this?” Its eyes aren’t where they should be, it’s not the right height or color — so you are forced to really look at it for the first time. When you can achieve that effect with real objects, it creates a distance from our everyday lives that’s extraordinary. The extraordinary exists in our gaze — not in the object we’re looking at, and not in the text.
That’s what literature does in the end: it takes something from the order of the real, and it rethinks it in a way that can produce a certain magic, or a certain darkness, or a discovery.
AL: So when you’re, say, walking down the street, do you see the extraordinary? Is writing for you a way of showing what you see, which is maybe a little different from what the rest of us see?
SS: I don’t know that I see things differently. It’s not that you go walking and see extraordinary things where they don’t actually exist. What you do is you search for them, and above all it’s an internal search. Sometimes it’s sitting down to think through a situation by writing about it, and in doing so finding something singular. That’s what literature does in the end, or at least the most realistic literature: it takes something from the order of the real, and it rethinks it in a way that can produce a certain magic, or a certain darkness, or a discovery.
AL: Do you generally discover where a story is going as you’re writing it? Or do you know from the start where it will end?
SS: In general I do have a pretty clear idea of where I’m going, but it’s not a clear idea of the plot; it’s an emotional space where I want to arrive. I can see very concretely and specifically the particular feeling of the ending. It took me a while to realize this; for a long time I thought it was the plot that was pulling me forward. The plot seems like the weightiest, most untouchable thing in a book, but actually it’s just anecdotal. I have a very specific emotion that I want to hand to the reader with the same specificity, the same weight, the same colors, exactly. I want to put it inside you. And the plot is only the bridge that gets you there; it could be any bridge of any form. When I realized that, it gave me a great deal of freedom in my writing. I could change the path, or undo everything and rewrite it — you can do whatever you want, as long as you cross that bridge.
AL: What is it that pulls you so often towards writing short stories, as opposed to novels?
SS: In the short story there is a sensation of velocity that is very special, and a depth that is reached in so little space. It does something physical to your body and your reality, like when you finish a sprint and you’re trying to catch your breath. You think, “What happened?” What happened? You just read two pages and something in your world changed.
AL: I felt that in so many of these stories, I have to say — it’s like a physical impact! There is a lot of violence in these stories, and often a correlation between art and violence. In “The Heavy Suitcase of Benavides,” the wife’s murdered body, which is stuffed inside a suitcase, gets displayed as a work of art. And in “Heads Against Concrete,” the main character has this impulse towards violence which he ultimately transforms into art. Do you think there is something violent in art itself, or in the artistic impulse?
SS: Yes, I think so. It’s inevitable to be contaminated with darkness, with fears and doubts. Those things touch you; they get inside your body like poison. And art is a way to distill the poison. At least for me, writing is what gets it out of my body. There’s something healing too that has to do with darkness in the abstract versus darkness as something concrete. I’m not sure what, but something gets healed when you make a material, physical work of art out of that formless darkness that was lodged somewhere, who even knows where, in your body.
Fears and doubts get inside your body like poison. And art is a way to distill the poison.
AL: A lot of the violence in these stories also occurs between the sexes, especially in the first story, “Headlights,” where there is this field full of women who have been deserted on the way to their weddings. It felt to me almost like a creation myth — like the first betrayal. Do you think of it in that way?
SS: There is something a bit theatrical in that story, like out of a Greek myth. I was trying to think not only of the personal tensions of each of the characters but also the tensions that all of society and business puts onto them. So I took them outside the context of the city, and put them all in one place. At one point everyone is getting married at the same time in this story. Everyone is frozen in the same place, each with their own personal disasters, but all in the same moment.
AL: This is a tricky question to ask, but do you think there is something insurmountable in the space between men and women that the battle of sorts in this story embodies? Do you see a “cultural gap” in gender relations too?
SS: Well, there’s a lot of tension, isn’t there? Especially in recent years. But I don’t think it’s specifically between men and women. I think we don’t understand the other in general. It’s not that, in this story, the characters make decisions that are solely tied to the sex into which they each fit — because of course there is no black and white when it comes to sex and gender. But there is a communal way of thinking that is black and white, and this story plays with that through common, shared spaces that bring out our social instincts — when you act for the group and not for yourself. The story is built on a series of conventions and social agreements, which in fact are not the most natural ways for us to relate to one another. These objects that mean so much to us — in the story “Toward Happy Civilization,” it’s money, or here it’s the wedding dress — when these cultural objects are taken out of context, we see clearly the stupidity of their importance. They’re nothing; they’re empty.
You can feel pain as you’re reading, but when you return to your life, you aren’t hurt.
AL: So many of the stories in this collection end with emptiness, with fear or desperation, but there is a beautiful and to me quite mysterious story, “A Great Effort” — about a father and son who start visiting a masseuse — which is a story of real healing. I wondered if you think literature can sometimes work like the massages in that story: that through symbolism, and a series of physical sensations, and whatever other mechanisms which evade our understanding completely, we are cured of some suffering?
SS: How lovely. Yes, yes, of course I believe it. I believe it because I feel it; it happens to me as a reader and as a writer as well. In the end, I think literature is a mechanism that allows you as a human being, as a citizen of this world, to pull out your worst fears, face them, and test yourself — almost as if you were playing a videogame — and return to your life with information that is vital. You can feel pain as you’re reading, but when you return to your life, you aren’t hurt. You can feel death, and when you return to your life, you’re not dead. I don’t know that there is anything else in our world that lets you work, in such an intimate and precise way, on your understanding of life itself. There is something so specifically personal about reading: no other art or technology can give you that unique reaction where a particular word invokes a particular image that is yours and no one else’s. If I say “teapot,” the teapot that appears for you is unique because you know that teapot. It’s your grandmother’s, or the one you wanted to buy but couldn’t, or the one you carried with you from your birthplace — you know how much it weighs, how it smells, where it’s stained. And all that from the word “teapot!” The fact that literature does that is precious, and irreplaceable.
Today, Roe vs. Wade turns 46 years old. The landmark piece of legislation may not see its 47th birthday, it spite of the fact that 71% of Americans support abortion rights and one in four people who can get pregnant will have at least one abortion in their lifetime. And whether or not Roe survives, the GOP will continue to decimate access at the state level, doing their best to ensure that reproductive freedom remains an economic privilege, afforded to their wives and mistresses. They’ll leave the rest of us to die.
Beginning about 20 years ago, evangelicals hijacked the discourse about abortion and redefined the terms: abortion is murder, providers are serial killers, Planned Parenthood has cornered the black market on baby brains. The pro-choice movement pivoted to the defense, and in doing so, lost the ability to advocate for abortion in any sort of compelling way. The price to enter the conversation as someone who has actually had an abortion became impossibly high. And until recently, the vast majority of pro-choice voices have declined to root their own convictions in any personal experience.
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In 2015, my own abortion disclosure ignited a viral outpouring of stories via the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion. Shout Your Abortion has subsequently evolved into a movement and a full-fledged organization, working to create places in art, media and real-life events all over the country for people to talk about their abortion experiences. SYA is not just for people who’ve had abortions, and people who have had abortions are not simply deciding to shout about them for their own personal empowerment; we’re doing this for everyone. The prevailing silence is toxic for everyone. And this whole country will go up in flames without abortion access. We’ll never be able to fight for it unless we learn to talk about it.
Legislatively, this hellscape does not match mainstream needs or values. Culturally, even those of us who are strongly pro-choice are often completely uncomfortable talking about abortion. The subject has been conspicuously avoided in art, literature, and in the conversations we have with the people we love. As a result, we’ve failed to develop any understanding of what abortion actually is, and how it works in peoples’ lives. Our collective perception lacks human touchstones, and people do not find empathy in theoretical exercises.
It’s a minefield of a conversation; they built it that way on purpose to keep us out. This reading list compiles work from my friends and colleagues intended to help you find your way in, and start getting comfortable with reality.
Dr. Willie Parker made his way out of southern poverty and became an OB-GYN with a faculty appointment at the University of Hawaii. A man of deep faith, Dr. Parker avoided performing abortions until 2002 when he had a revelation that lack of abortion care in the deep south was causing people to suffer. Today, Dr. Parker is one of the most vocal, visible providers in his field, guided by an absolute conviction that he is doing the Lord’s work and serving the most disenfranchised people in the country. Life’s Work is a philosophical memoir containing field notes from an unfathomably demonized profession. If you do Christmas with anti-choice relatives, give them this book.
The GOP has decimated access to abortion in recent years, and now, 46 years after its passage, Roe v. Wade is on the precipice of reversal and the Supreme Court will take a generation to un-fuck. How do we fight when things are this bad? Activist and writer Robin Marty breaks it down by walking readers through worst-case scenarios of a post-Roe America, and offering individualized, pragmatic paths to join the fight no matter what you’re working with. Marty doesn’t shy away from topics like self-managed abortion care, and how to avoid surveillance if you or someone you know is accessing abortion outside of federal regulation. The book includes an extensive resource guide with clinics, action groups, abortion funds, and practical support groups in each state.
Weeks before she submitted this manuscript, Lindy West and I inadvertently exploded the internet by talking about our abortions. I’m not sure if Lindy would have included “When Life Gives You Lemons,” otherwise, but I’m sure glad she did. Lindy writes about her relatively unremarkable abortion in a way that is typically disarming, entirely human, and totally normal.
In Like a Mother, Angela Garbes wonders why doctors don’t trust pregnant women enough to tell them the truth about what is really going on. Garbes is a journalist, a researcher, and a mother, who has terminated one pregnancy and who lost another one she was trying to keep. Her writing is visceral and gorgeous, and this book is absolutely singular, equally scientific and intimate, posing questions many of us have found ourselves wondering while feeling as though we were the only ones to wonder.
In this “historical romance,” Brautigan the librarian meets Vida, the most beautiful woman to ever live. He knocks her up and she has an abortion in Tijuana. When I read this book fifteen years ago, I thought it was the horniest, sweetest book I’d ever read. I’m never reading it again.
One cannot responsibly claim to have formulated an opinion on any reproductive issue — from abortion, to birth control, to IVF — without knowledge of the systematic medical abuse of Black women’s bodies in America. Roberts is a brilliant theorist and historian but draws cultural conclusions which feel as relevant and foundational as they did 25 years ago. White women who believe themselves to be fiercely pro-choice absolutely must develop a capacity for complex racial analysis and this book is critical context.
Another reason we need volumes like the above is because of treasures like this one. Zindel wrote problem novels — novels for young adults tied to social ills that delivered a pat, if not patronizing solution. Afterschool specials in book form. MDMH was noteworthy because it was the first time I remember reading about abortion, and abortion was the heavy-handed punishment dealt bad girl Liz for having sex with her boyfriend, Sean. Sean was all set to run away with Liz until his alcoholic dad counseled him to ditch her lest teenage fatherhood ruined his future (no mention of Liz’s life, naturally). Sean gives Liz $300, but doesn’t take her to the clinic (foreshadowing of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and so many other books and movies that underscored that boys were not to be trusted), and Liz misses prom, graduation, and nearly bleeds to death. The message was clear: I was on my own.
The segregation of blacks and whites was made illegal in 1954.
I have relatives who have had parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, that were no stranger to those times. These relatives are alive and well today. Like me, they are Mississippians.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how close I am to that time of segregation, to slavery. How close I am to that time, particularly, because I am a Mississippian, and I know all too well how stubborn this state is. How resistant it can be to adopt and enforce the laws needed to create a better, fuller, and more whole way of living for those who are outside of whiteness.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately, because as a writer, and as an idealistic person in general, I crave to write the happy endings for black characters, in black settings, in America — even though I am so close to those times. I am an infant, existing in the aftermath of America’s atrocities. I am new to this. I am the stranger. I am the test with no study guide, hoping that all goes well.
I am an infant, existing in the aftermath of America’s atrocities.
I crave the happy ending, though I still have relatives who teach, and who have taught me, the importance of never fully trusting a white person (lest they betray you). “They are snakes. They are devils,” they say with good intentions, as they recount past experiences at the hands of hate.
I crave the happy ending, though I am still self-conscious of being the only black person in an ultra-white setting. In restaurants. In stores. At school.
I crave it, though the presence of black lives is still thought of as problematic by those who find it so easy to take our lives. They are taken by people who shout, “Make America Great Again.” By people who burn and discard anything designed to challenge their way of thinking. By people who support idiotic leaders in order to hold on to their need for power and control.
I crave it, though the idea of freedom, and togetherness, and acceptance in America is still so very new.
The years that separate me from my ancestors who experienced slavery, segregation, and the worst period of American history, are so small, so short, that its proximity horrifies me. Did they ever dream of a happy ending? Was there ever any time to do so?
Yes, I want to write the happy endings despite all of the obstacles, and I am aware that happy endings for black people exist, but in many ways, they are simply conditional.
Conditional, until we are pulled over by the wrong kind of cop.
Conditional, until we walk into the wrong kind of restaurant.
Conditional, until happy endings that we have worked our ass off to obtain, are challenged by the despicable thoughts of others — “That house is too nice for a ________, I should call the cops.” or “There is no way this BLACK woman could be a doctor.”
Our happy endings are conditional until we say one wrong word, or do one wrong thing that could be deemed as rebellious or anti-American.
I want to write the happy black endings that exist fully without tragedy. Happy endings like the countless books that I have read by white authors, featuring white characters. But I want them to be written because they exist outside of fantasy. I want them to exist because they reflect reality.
I am asking. I am wondering. I am hoping for a day when that happy ending will be.
I want to write the happy black endings that exist fully without tragedy. Happy endings like the countless books that I have read featuring white characters.
When will it be accepted with full trust, and not thrust away like something alien, like some sinister distraction created to make us believe in a false testimony that will equate to our inevitable end? An inevitable end that occurred because we trusted that happiness too much instead of conditionally like we’ve all been taught to.
In my research, I am attempting to approach blackness as if I have not lived a fully-black life in Mississippi. I am learning how to do this at the hands of my treasured teachers — Zora Neale Hurston, Anne Moody, W.E.B. Du Bois, Lawrence Otis Graham, and Michelle Wallace. There are many other teachers on my list, and Richard Wright is my latest one.
Native Son was a story that I was slow to accept. It took me four weeks to finish, twice as long as I anticipated, and that is because its end was already secured after the first few pages. I was not ready to go on and confirm what I already knew, that this black man would die. That this story would not be one that ended happily.
Richard Wright’s Native Son is a novel set during 1930’s Chicago. Its main protagonist is Bigger Thomas, a young African American man who receives the job of working for a very wealthy, and prominent white family as a chauffeur. Yes, there is violence, and yes there is death, but at its heart, it is a story about what happens to the dreamer, and the dream, when it becomes distorted by reality and seized by madness.
Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas represented everything that my other teachers had warned me, either directly or indirectly, about. He was dark. Wildly masculine. Angry. Reckless. And too smart for his black and bleak circumstances.
Not only was I reluctant, but I was also angry with Bigger Thomas. Angry for his stupid crimes. Angry because I knew there would be no surprise ending, no deus ex machina to save the day.
There is something about books like this that get under my skin. That make me mumble words that are not of my character with each passing page and escalating conflict. If only he had learned to smother his frustrations, I think, if only he had learned to be an unhappy black man in happy white surroundings.
I wanted to distance myself from Bigger Thomas because he was an irrevocable black fuck-up who was beyond saving. But I knew that I needed to embrace his story. For research. To Learn. To help.
By the end of the novel, I was left with emptiness, and tears. This fictional black man had died, and non-fictional black men, women, and children were dying unnatural deaths in a non-fictional, American world. There seemed to be no escape, acceptance, or reprieve for blackness. Not in fictional settings, and especially not in non-fictional settings.
There seemed to be no escape, acceptance, or reprieve for blackness. Not in fictional settings, and especially not in non-fictional settings.
Bigger Thomas was not a hero. He was not an admirable or a good man, and even knowing how it would end, and even learning who Bigger Thomas was, there were small parts of me that rooted for him.
In my research, I am learning that blackness often consists of encouraging it, and its need to thrive, under almost any circumstance. It is accepting every character, the hero and the villain, simply because it contributes to the pool of our suppressed population.
I am learning that blackness is love.
It is the continued cheering of all our champions, chosen ones, monsters, and meddlers because in doing so, we ensure our existence, as opposed to the much more frightening option, our nothingness.
In the midst of our love for one another, there can also exist pain. Without escape, that pain only grows, becoming something bitter that takes away our breathes, and obliterates whatever peace that we have entirely.
Escape is what we, black people, dream of. Escape is what I often cling too when I read fictional works or watch fantastical movies. Escape is what made Jordan Peele’s movie Get Out so delightfully entertaining. But even Peele knew that in some way, the ending that he had provided, the one that would go on to make it to the big screen, would be questionable.
A man who is black wins. He burns down a home that is not his. He survives a setting that has been put into place to ensure his failure. He kills more than one of the characters who, at every step, have tried to physically and mentally invaded him like some unwelcome explorer. A black man wins through all of this.
Absurd.
In response to that absurdity, an alternate ending was issued. It is an alternate ending that reflects the true reality of blackness in America when forced to survive, and defend its basic right to live.
Of course, we lose.
In my research, I am learning that the way to survive blackness is to distance yourself from all characteristics that are deemed too black for their own good. If I want to live, I must remove myself from skin that is too dark. From hair that is too nappy.
If I want to live, I must eliminate and shun all traces of my unknown, untraceable African origins.
In my research, I am learning that is best to do all of these survival tactics, and more, but if is often not a guarantee of a happy ending to come. I am discovering that I can read all of the books, obtain all of the degrees, and speak and act in the most pleasant, professional way, but there will still be a probability of bullets finding their way into my body, obliterating the very last of my blackness like something that I could not see. Some bit of blackness that I had forgotten or overlooked, and like a favor, is wiped away by my white neighbor.
I can read all of the books, obtain all of the degrees, and speak and act in the most pleasant, professional way, but there will still be a probability of bullets finding their way into my body.
I. Am. Not. White. No matter how close I am able to obtain its aesthetic, and culture.
I feel like I am asking for impossible things for this time that I live in. I am too close to the time of segregation. Too close to the time of slavery. Too close to an era where hate for the other still exists. But I ask these things in order to remember, and keep in my heart, what I can do, and what can be done, to make the happy black endings an unconditional reality.
Inside, the emptiness that I was left with after reading Native Son, had shifted. I am a happy, bubbly, too-damn-idealistic-for-my-own-good black girl, I cannot deny it, and it is often hard for me to stay upset. Like Bigger Thomas, there is some subconscious understanding of myself, an ending that I can clearly see. As hope begins to thrive again, I decide that I will write the happy black endings, despite what reality says. I have made up my mind that if I am going to die anyway, by natural causes or otherwise, I will create what I truly want to. I decide that I will offer no alternate, more plausible ending for myself or my audience.
This idealistic, and happy ending of mine won’t exist for my reality, possibly, for my time, possibly, but it will exist for my children, and my children’s children.
When I am old, and my life is nearly at an end, they will ask me how I knew to dream for more, how I dared to write the worlds that demanded the best from humanity despite all the opposing evidence that it would not come into fruition. In response, I will say that I was psychic. I will say that I saw the future, and it was bigger.
Julia Wertz is a professional cartoonist, amateur historian, and part time urban explorer. Her books include Tenements, Towers, & Trash, Drinking at the Movies, The Infinite Wait, and the Fart Party. She is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. See her work at Juliawertz.com, her photography of abandoned places at Adventure Bible School, follow her on instagram, and read her diary comics on Patreon.
When I arrived at Bennington College as an undergraduate in 1996, I had almost no expectations for the type of education I was about to receive. What had drawn me there, to the other side of the country, was the promise that Bennington offered: that on this tiny campus that looked and felt more like a boarding school than a college, I would be surrounded by people who were passionate about something.
Personally, I was passionate about lots of things: about fashion history, folk dancing, choral music and hip-hop. But mostly, I was passionate about language. For as long as I could remember, I had been filling notebooks and diaries with words: scrawled stories, poems and journal entries that, when re-read, show someone tasting and testing and trying out language as I read and discovered new influences.
I was hoping that, at Bennington, someone would show me the right words to use — or tell me that my words were the right ones. I hoped someone would help me unlock the keys to my own greatness, and tell me that I was doing it right.
I hoped someone would help me unlock the keys to my own greatness, and tell me that I was doing it right.
My ignorance was as vast as my enthusiasm. When I signed up to take a poetry class with Mary Oliver, I was completely ignorant of the fact that I was signing up to do thoughtful, insightful, personal work with a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whom Renee Loth called a “living wonder” and whom Alicia Ostriker ranked as “among our finest poets.”
And perhaps it was better — for me, for her, for all of us who were her students — that I and so many of us entered her classroom in blissful ignorance, ready to show off, having been praised enough by our high school English teachers that we were assured of ourselves as something at least a little bit special.
We called her Mary, as if she were our friend, but we were not always friendly to her. Her task was to teach us to write poetry with meter, and with form, but for some reason — even though this was what we all signed up for — some of us fought her, angrily, stubbornly, turning in work that in no way resembled the assignments she had patiently given us.
She tried teach us about meter and rhyme — to convince this roomful of proud 19-year-olds that it was worth the effort to push our breathless ideas into these ancient vessels to discover what new shape they would take. We tried to resist.
I remember the sight of her: slight, serious, soft-spoken, taking up what seemed to be very little space at the end of a long, polished wooden table in an upstairs classroom in the Barn, Bennington’s main building for literature and history courses. I took all my classes in the Barn, cycling between just one or two rooms for almost my entire undergraduate career, but it was always a wonder to me how each of my teachers could transform the space into something new. In Mary Oliver’s classroom, we struggled. We struggled against the things she asked us to do; we struggled to grasp the structures of sonnets and the dictates of scansion. It felt hard, awkward, old-fashioned, strange to write long Shakespearean lines of iambic pentameter, or short, stumbling trochaic lines.
She gave us Shakespeare poems to scan, and although it felt clunky at first, I also slowly fell in love with the act of dividing each line into feet, my marks on the paper revealing a secret skeleton like an X-ray film.
Mary’s notes on my homework are written in soft red pencil, punctuated with urgent underlinings, dashes, check marks and arrows that, like her poetry, command the attention while somehow remaining quiet and calm.
“This is the marvelous thing about language,” Oliver told Stephen Ratiner in 1992 in an interview for the Christian Science Monitor. “It can always be done better. But I begin to see what works and what doesn’t work. I begin to rely more on style, which is, as I say, apparatus or method, than on luck, prayers, or long hours of work.”
In Mary Oliver’s classroom, we struggled. We struggled against the things she asked us to do; we struggled to grasp the structures of sonnets and the dictates of scansion.
The poems I wrote in Mary Oliver’s class largely make me cringe today (there is one titled “Passive Aggression” that I think I will go burn so that no one must ever read it), and they were painful to write at the time. I felt as awkward writing in trochaic couplets as I did in my French 101 seminar. My ideas came out like lumpen wrecks, lacking in sophistication or verve. I was sure that I was a failure at writing poetry.
Mary Oliver famously gave few interviews, but as sparing as she may have been with her words publicly, she was astonishingly generous with us, her undergraduate students. She did not baby or pamper us. What she did do was treat us as her intellectual equals: capable of understanding what she understood. Nothing she said or did ever suggested that there was a meaningful difference between us, her students, and her, the decorated poet.
She was almost unfailingly patient, even in the face of near-mutiny, as she calmly tried to convince the most stubborn of us that we had something to gain by crafting these lumpen wrecks of poems. And through her patience and her insistence, I finally began to understand that the struggle we were experiencing was not a problem, or a hurdle to be overcome, or a deficiency on my part.
The struggle was the point.
Through her patience and her insistence, I finally began to understand that the struggle we were experiencing was not a problem. The struggle was the point.
I had come to Bennington hoping to be given a key — or, if I was honest with myself, hoping to be given someone’s blessing. I wanted someone with more degrees and more prestige than my high school English teacher to tell me, “Yes, you’re good. You’re doing it right.”
Mary Oliver was generous with her praise. I will take to the grave with me a poem on which she wrote “Excellent” (and underlined it!) because it gives me a singular thrill every time I look at it. But it is not her praise I remember when I think about that class. It is the struggle. It is the thought of her, calmly, patiently helping us see that here was no point in doing the things that came easily to us — the things that were comfortable, or familiar.
“It’s a matter of trying everything you can try, just to see what will work for you,” Oliver told Stephen Ratimer.
What Mary Oliver did worked beautifully for her — and for so many of us who have cherished her words. She taught me what it actually meant to learn about writing — that it wasn’t simply a matter of this word or that one, finding the right adjective, or getting the line to break in just the right place. That I didn’t need her blessing, or anyone’s, on the work I had done, but that what I needed to do was to keep working.
She showed me that learning to write is about being uncomfortable, being vulnerable and pushing, hard, into unfamiliar places, because that’s where the good stuff is.
As we remember Oliver’s life and work, I am incredibly grateful to have had the chance to learn this most valuable lesson at the feet of an amazing writer — one whose generosity has enriched us all.
Are you a writer of memoir or autofiction? Do you think staring at an incredibly beautiful mountain would help your work? Well, then you’re in luck, because Electric Literature and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity have put together a program on autobiography and fiction. For two weeks this August, participants will have a chance to hone their craft with guest writers and Electric Lit editors—and perhaps more importantly, work on their manuscripts while looking at scenes like the above.
The program runs from August 12 to August 24 in Banff, Alberta, Canada. With guest faculty—Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner finalist Susan Choi and Meredith Talusan, executive editor of them.—participants will discuss fiction, memoir, places where the two overlap, and how to decide which is which. How much of your story are you obligated to tell in a memoir—and is there anything you’re obligated to withhold? How can you incorporate aspects of your life into fiction, and what are the ethical implications of writing fiction inspired by people you know? When does craft—or impact—take precedence over accuracy, and vice versa?
In addition to group and individual discussions led by the faculty, there will be two reading nights for participating students to share their works in progress, and a guest speaker event with award-winning Canadian writer Dionne Brand. Electric Lit editors Halimah Marcus and Jess Zimmerman will be on hand for manuscript consultation, and will lead a seminar on strategies for getting published. There’s also a gym, swimming pool, meals, and DID WE MENTION THE MOUNTAINS. (Please scroll up.)
Both emerging and established writers are encouraged to apply until March 27. There’s also financial aid available, for up to half the program cost. There’s also BEARS. Come join us, and then with the skills you’ve gained, expertly incorporate the experience into your novel about a brilliant writer riding a bear down a mountain!
I t’s no secret that women authors have been historically overlooked. If you read the New York Times’ column Overlooked, you’ll find an embarrassing number of very successful female authors who were not given obituaries in the newspaper because the editors (men) decided they weren’t important enough — Sylvia Plath and Charlotte Brontë to name a few. Many women have gone by male pen names so their novels would be taken seriously. Simone de Beauvoir probably wrote most of Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, but he’s the one lauded as the voice of the existentialists.
Feminist bookstores create a safe space for the literary community to convene, where women readers and writers are seen and heard. Here are 13 bookstores dedicated to championing the literary works of women and non-binary authors.
A.N. Devers is an author and rare book dealer who decided to open her own rare books store after she discovered the price discrepancy between male-authored and female-authored books. She told the Guardian in an interview, “I pulled two books of the shelf and gaped at the prices. The woman’s book was $25. The book by the man was hundreds.” Devers’ store specializes in rare books, modern first editions, manuscripts, and rediscovered works by women writers.
Persephone Books reprints literature by women from the 20th century that has been overlooked or forgotten. The proprietors find titles that have gone out of print and bring them back to life with an elegant jacket and a preface by a contemporary author. The most important criteria for the Persephone Books team is that they only publish books that they completely, utterly love. In addition to their unique publishing house, they have a shop located on Lamb’s Conduit Street in London.
Bluestockings Bookstore in Manhattan, New York
Located in the Lower East Side, Bluestockings is a collectively-owned, volunteer-powered activist bookstore with topics ranging from queer studies to dismantling oppression. It’s also devoted to maintaining a safe space for customers. In 2017, the store peacefully dealt with a group of alt-right provocateurs who attempted to plant their shelves with white supremacist books. Advertised on its website as 98% radical and 2% glitter, Bluestockings has a lot to offer including 6,000 book titles, zines, journals, menstrual products, and a cafe with “darn good coffee brimming with zapatismo.”
Cafe con Libros in Brooklyn, New York
Cafe Con Libros is a cozy little bookstore cafe owned by Kalima DeSuze, an Afro-Latinx woman veteran. Located in Crown Heights near Prospect Park, the bookstore “is a space explicitly dedicated to the stories of womyn and girls of all identities and, where lovers of said stories can come together to build community.”
Wedged between two large brick buildings, this bright, narrow store with an eggshell blue awning and a proudly displayed rainbow flag is a little oasis of feminist and LGBTQ+ books, both new and used.
A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin
A Room of One’s Own is an independent bookstore with a wide variety of genres and a focus on women’s studies and LGBTQ+ fiction. The space is often used as a meeting place for community events and small discussion groups.
Women and Children First in Chicago, Illinois
Ann Christophersen and Linda Bubon were studying literature in university and had trouble finding women authors in their local bookstores and libraries. They decided to take things into their own hands and opened Women and Children First in 1979. This feminist bookstore has since become a staple in the literary community of Chicago, hosting incredible voices such as Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou, Alison Bechdel, Eve Ensler, Hillary Clinton, Margaret Atwood, and more.
Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, houses a literary refuge for women at The Women’s Bookshop. In addition to its extensive collection of feminist literature, it has become the country’s go-to bookshop for therapy and counseling books.
Womencrafts provides its customers with a “welcoming space that lends itself to partners embracing and kissing, intimate stories being shared, and staff often crying and reaching for tissues.” Although the books in stock are largely LGBTQ+ focused, the genres range a wide selection of carefully curated titles all written by women.
Antigone Books in Tucson, Arizona
Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus in Sophocles’ plays, a resilient and virtuous character who maintains her values in the face of adversity. This bookstore was named after the ancient Greek character and fashioned its mission after its eponym. The store enriches the community with a variety of workshops and book groups, and a devoted staff that frequently shares advice on what to read next with their recommended reading lists.
Montreal’s féministe bookstore, called L’Euguelionne, is difficult to pronounce but thankfully offers a helpful mnemonic device on its website: “ler-gay-lee-onn — you can think of a gay lion, even though it’s not what it means.” L’Euguelionne offers feminist literature in all forms, from magazines and art books to essays and textbooks, with an emphasis on celebrating diverse authors.
The South’s oldest independent feminist bookstore offers an array of specialized sections on important topics that seem to have slipped through the cracks of the more corporate bookstores. Subsections cover topics from coming out to domestic violence, and political reading lists include “Understanding and Dismantling White Supremacy.” And if you think it can’t get better than that, think again; the store hosts a weekly yoga class.
In 2000, two sisters, Janifer and Kori Wilson, opened Sister’s Uptown Bookstore in Harlem, which has since expanded into the cultural center that it is today. This Black-owned indie bookstore provides “resources for members of the community to nurture their minds, hearts and souls with present and past works of gifted African American authors and other great authors and intellectuals including masters of spoken word.”
With some 687 million books sold in the U.S. in 2017, book-selling has been on the rise since taking a dive following the 2008 recession. Still, there’s the odd politician, religious group, or police institution eager to advance an agenda by labeling a particular book persona non grata — or, since it’s a book, “liber non grata.” In recent months, South Carolina’s Charleston County Fraternal Order of Police vowed to “put a stop” to the sentiment behind Angie Thomas’s young adult novel The Hate U Give, urging the book’s banning from a summer reading list; the story follows a black teenage girl who takes up activism after a white police officer pulls over the car she rides in and brutally murders her childhood friend in front of her. In November 2017 the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City demanded that an independent bookstore chain “publicly rescind their support for P Is for Palestine,” an alphabet children’s book highlighting Palestinian culture and liberation under Israeli occupation. Earlier that year Arkansas Rep. Ken Hendren proposed an ultimately defeated state legislature bill banning all writings by radical historian Howard Zinn’s published between 1959–2010.
Invariably civil libertarians jump to the fray to condemn such measures, rightly, as censorship, like when the New Jersey ACLU challenged the state’s prison system on its decision to restrict Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow from reaching prisoners’ hands, leading to the ban’s reversal in January 2018. Ironically in many cases, the censor’s intended goal has the opposite effect, because book sales often increase under the threat of a ban, as happened in the Zinn-Hendren case and others throughout history. Mark Twain, always his own shrewd publicist, was thrilled when the Concord Public Library banned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnweeks after publication, thanking them for the “generous action” that “doubled its sale” and swelled readership.
When state or civil authorities blacklist books, the act is correctly labeled censorship. But what is the word when parent corporations act out political or ideological dissatisfaction by ordering their subsidiaries to snuff out information in the form of books, magazines, newspapers, radio, television, movies? There isn’t a word or phrase that fully captures this form of censorship, at least not a negative phrase.
When state or civil authorities blacklist books, the act is correctly labeled censorship. But what is the word when corporations order their subsidiaries to snuff out information?
On the other hand, it’s not hard to call to mind examples of civil or government censorship, all perceived nefariously. Like me, you might think first of all the states that notoriously organized public book burnings — from Nazi Germany to South Africa. Next are the states throughout the world that continually ban books to try and stop offensive ideas from taking root in people’s minds. In the U.S., this type of censorship is closer to home. For example, the Tucson, Arizona public school district tried to terminate its astonishingly successful Mexican American studies program, which looked at history and art through the viewpoint of Mexican American contributions, on the basis that it encouraged “ethnic solidarity.” (This is the actual phrase written into state law Arizona Revised Statutes 15–112 — “Prohibited courses and classes,” under the subcategory of “enforcement.”) I’ve written elsewhere about how the “cultural genocide” committed by Arizona’s statewide ban on a partly Maya-based Mexican American studies (also Nahuatl-based) in high schools relates to the U.S.-backed physical “acts of genocide,” as defined by the U.N., against Mayan groups in Guatemala in the early 1980s. These state-directed book bannings and burnings are thankfully near universally condemned, with some exception such as when the same Tucson district successfully banned Middle East Studies in 1983 under false anti-Israel bias allegations. In January 2018, a federal judge issued a permanent injunction against the Arizona law that banned Mexican American Studies from ever being enforced again.
But many times book censorship still succeeds without a whimper. This kind of censorship is largely disregarded and often tacitly tolerated and self-induced among editors: corporate censorship. On the surface, there’s a logic in corporate censorship that may seem at least arguable. When corporate executives at, say, Netflix cancel your favorite shoot-em-up action show or a boy-meets-boy love story, seemingly without cause, there’s a knee-jerk feeling of dissatisfaction that eventually gives way to complacency. Just as corporate executives giveth us the stories we like, so can corporate executives taketh them away. They can do what they want; it’s their property.
But not so fast.
Is it — or should it be — a universal right for corporations to censor their so-called property in all cases, under all circumstances? One case from the 1970s may command some second thoughts on a corporate safe zone cordoned off by copyright laws and cultural misconceptions, one that calls into question the entire endeavor of corporate censorship.
Two social critics and media analysts, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, wrote several books together. Their first book about U.S. state and media representation of global massacres, Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda, was, in 1973, set to publish by an academic publisher, Warner Modular Publications, then a subsidiary of Warner Communications (now WarnerMedia). Former Washington Post managing editor Ben Bagdikian’s 1983 book The Media Monopoly covers the scandalous affair that ensued from Warner Modular’s attempted publication of the Chomsky-Herman book that brought about the publisher’s fatal downfall. An enterprising journalist, Bagdikian was the messenger of the 1971 Pentagon Papers leak by former military analyst Daniel Ellsberg that spurred public outrage over the secret, expanded war effort in Southeast Asia as well as the fact that the government had known for years that the war was unwinnable while costing thousands of U.S. soldier deaths alongside millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and others.
The literary conflagration began to smolder in August 1973 when a Warner executive, the company’s chief of book operations William Sarnoff, glanced at an advance mock-up advertisement for the Chomsky-Herman book set to splash across the Nation, the New Republic,New York Times, New York Review of Books, and Saturday Review. Alarm bells went off in Sarnoff’s mind as he imagined more government leaks that would embarrass President Nixon and, by association, the Warner parent company. Given that Warner’s corporate officers had contributed to Nixon’s 1972 presidential bid and the aptly acronymed Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), Sarnoff was surely on edge about anything that could trigger more political incendiary under Nixon, then under intense media, congressional, and legal scrutiny over the Watergate corruption scandal. In May, the Nixon administration had lost its aggressive pursuit of Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker, whom Nixon’s national security advisor Henry Kissinger called “the most dangerous man in America.” Now, the Chomsky-Herman book’s provocative title and marketing was enough to spur Sarnoff’s fears of another government leak that could embarrass the company.
Sarnoff phoned the publisher of Warner Modular in Andover, Massachusetts, Claude McCaleb, demanding an explanation. McCaleb tried to assuage his boss’s concern by clarifying that the book was not at all a document leak. The title merely carried critical analysis by two academic professionals — from the Wharton School of Finance and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — of publicly available material. Two hours later, Sarnoff called again, ordering McCaleb to New York immediately to hand-deliver him copy of the book to his Rockefeller Plaza office. McCaleb dropped off a copy of the book in the morning and headed to an academic convention where more advance copies of the book were to arrive. At the convention booth, he received word from Sarnoff: “Report at once.” McCaleb could only wonder what was in store for him once he arrived, which nineteen years in academic publishing didn’t prepare him for.
Bagdikian, who died in 2016, boldly took on corporate censorship first-hand from his experiences working in the belly of the beast of corporate monopolists; he named the cabal, collectively, the “new Private Ministry of Information and Culture,” a riff on George Orwell’s sci-fi dystopian novel 1984. “A corporation dependent on public opinion and government policy,” Bagdikian writes, “can call upon its media subsidiaries to help in what the media are clearly able to do — influence public opinion and government policy.” And while it’s not always necessary or possible for media subsidiaries to benefit their parent company’s public image, they can at least refrain from publicly criticizing them, which is the line of orthodoxy that guided William Sarnoff in his quest against the publication of Counter-Revolutionary Violence.
It didn’t matter to Sarnoff that, not 20 years prior, co-author Noam Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar turned 2,000 years of scientific understanding about human language on its head. Or that Chomsky would go on to rank on the Arts & Humanities Citation Index as the highest-cited (living) source on earth next to Shakespeare, the Bible, Freud, Karl Marx, Cicero, and others. Such accomplishments are no match for a corporation’s public image perceived to be at stake.
As soon as McCaleb stepped into Sarnoff’s corporate office after being summoned from the convention hall, Sarnoff flew into a rage. McCaleb patiently reminded Sarnoff of the agreement they made when he and his staff were hired: Warner Modular enjoys discretion to publish the titles they choose, and their sales would reflect their success or failure. It’s unclear whether Sarnoff read the copy of Counter-Revolutionary Violence that McCaleb delivered when he berated the book as “a pack of lies, a scurrilous attack on respected Americans” and an “undocumented” book “unworthy of a serious publisher.” Despite the defamation charges Sarnoff levied, he agreed with McCaleb that the book was not libelous. Sarnoff veered to other complaints that Warner Modular published too many left-wing writers. McCaleb pointed out that his catalog included right-wing writers like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.
Sarnoff responded to McCaleb’s overall line of reasoning not with concessions or further discussion of possible compromise but, instead, by canceling all the ads for the book and the entire first print run, which had already begun coming off the press.
But destroying the book wasn’t enough. Sarnoff shut down Warner Modular completely, annihilating the publisher as an institution and all the books in its catalog, in order to prevent this one book from being published.
Sarnoff annihilated the publisher as an institution and all the books in its catalog, in order to prevent this one book from being published.
And the fate of the books themselves, the 10,000-volume print run that had started? The books were all “pulped” — literally liquidated by tossing the books into “the hogger” that swallows and digests books whole, turning them into a milky cellulose substance that is remolded into clean paper. In a way, pulping books is more effective than burning them, since books are like bricks and require a lot of overhead to destroy them completely.
Ideas, by their nature, do not seem containable. But in the curious Warner Modular case of corporate censorship, they were. Imagining the demise into liquid pulp matter, I think of the ending scenes of James Cameron’s action classic Terminator 2: Judgement Day when the fearsome T-1000’s seemingly unbreakable poly-alloy body dies screaming and thrashing in an industrial melting pot of liquid fire before disintegrating quietly into a bright, burning saffron eternity. To this day, Counter-Revolutionary Violence is out of print and largely unknown.
This past October I met Chomsky in his cozy, well-lit University of Arizona office at the end of a long, dim, narrow hallway with exposed piping running along the ceiling. All these years later, Chomsky looks at the Warner Modular episode with a fresh sense of derision — as if it was just yesterday that Sarnoff secured the publisher’s undoing with one fell slam of his phone. “It was interesting that virtually no civil libertarian thought there was any problem with [destroying Warner Modular to stop the book from being published] because it’s not state censorship,” Chomsky said. “It’s just corporate censorship.”
The fate of Counter-Revolutionary Violence is not an exceptional statistical error but the reigning rule of thumb among owning-class corporations. Filmmaker Michael Moore, while at work on his celebrated 1989 documentary, Roger & Me, about General Motors’ destruction of Flint, Michigan, reviewed several cases of corporate censorship, each as outrageous as the Warner Modular affair. The examples describe the bitter ruination that follows when books, as paper-bound bundles of ideas, conflict with business interests and get sent to the hogger under all the crushing weight that corporate executives, and the culture that precedes them, can apply.
When the first edition of The Media Monopoly hit bookstores in 1983, some 50 corporations dominated the scene, and the biggest merger at that time was $340 million. Bagdikian put the social math this way: “The 50 men and women who head these corporations would fit in a large room.” Yet by each book edition that followed every few years, the number shrank nimbly as corporations merged and concentrated themselves among few owner hands but stretched their power and influence across an ever-expanding blob of subsidiary companies. By 1990, in time for Bagdikian’s third edition of the book, 23 companies reigned over the industry. Today, all of six firms control the media scene where the biggest merger to date, AOL Time Warner, was $350 billion — 1000 percent higher than what media owners in 1983 could manage to do.
This isn’t to suggest a media conspiracy among corporate parents and subsidiaries all headed by the William Sarnoffs of the world that control, by force if necessary, every editor’s move. “Instead,” Bagdikian writes, “there is something more insidious: a system of shared values within contemporary American corporate culture and corporations’ power to extend that culture to the American people, inappropriate as it may be.” That culture creates a system that is at least as effectively governed as the rule of force, or even of official censorship, if not more canny.
Bagdikian eloquently describes what’s at stake here. “Americans, like most people, get images of the world from their newspapers, magazines, radio, television, books, and movies. The mass media become the authority at any given moment for what is true and what is false, what is reality and what is fantasy, what is important and what is trivial. There is no greater force in shaping the public mind; even brute force triumphs only by creating an accepting attitude toward the brutes.”
For Bagdikian, who feared more than corporate profits and domination, “the gravest loss is in the self-serving censorship of political and social ideas.” In truth, the occasions of official censorship by executives like Sarnoff are rare and “most of the screening is subtle, some not even occurring at a conscious level,” Bagdikian writes, “as when subordinates learn by habit to conform to owners’ ideas.” Taking one area of media, he cites an American Society of Newspaper Editors survey, which found that 33 percent of editors admitted they wouldn’t publish criticism of their parent company.
In an American Society of Newspaper Editors survey, 33 percent of editors admitted they wouldn’t publish criticism of their parent company.
The phenomenon is also not unique to the United States. When George Orwell’s fancifully satirical novel Animal Farm was set to be published in England in 1946, his preface titled “The Freedom of the Press” discussed what drove his invention of the book, observing that the “sinister fact” about censorship in England “is that it is largely voluntary,” and adding: “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.” In the case of corporate censorship, “voluntary” almost seems a vulgarly mild, if not outlandishly inaccurate, term to describe the act of killing a book’s publication, not to speak of its entire publisher. Although Orwell’s main point regards the way self-censorship functions as “intellectual cowardice,” which is “the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face,” later in the preface Orwell touches closer to the structural business interests that also governed one end of the publishing world in his country: “The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain topics.”
In a twist of original “Orwellian” irony, Orwell’s preface itself remained suppressed for decades, down the “memory hole” he coined in 1984, until it was discovered posthumously among his papers, and proved his argument by ensuring that his ideas about reality, which served the basis for his fiction, wouldn’t be read by the public.
A woeful effect of the monopolist system and its free-censorship culture firmly in place is that official acts of corporate censorship are hard to track, and the prevalent cases of self-censorship are perhaps impossible to identify or prevent. And, to top it off, the encompassing shield of copyright law ultimately protects the censors as the legally untouchable owners and operators of censorship — so much so that the word itself appears as Orwellian “doublethink” where, thanks to effective indoctrination, two contrary beliefs are accepted at the same time. In other words, censorship clearly is at play when executives like Sarnoff blackout their McCaleb editor underlings before they might criticize the parent company, until the McCalebs learn to censor themselves so the Sarnoffs don’t have to. But simultaneously, none of it is really censorship in the end because all the conflicts occur within the corporate dominion that legally owns it. This at a time when corporations already enjoy far greater liberties than individuals. As Chomsky has pointed out elsewhere, so-called “free trade” agreements are really “investor rights agreements” because they can sue governments for loss of profits and move freely, unregulated, across borders, causing economic crisis for small farmers and workers in Mexico and Central America, when border industrial surveillance regimes are heavily built up to staunch people’s mobility.
Meanwhile, the more familiar cases of censorship by states and civil institutions are easier to grasp, so we focus on them. The result: an almost imperceptible politics of censorship emerges that blurs — indeed divides and separates — the lines between what we may call “worthy” and “unworthy” kinds of censorship. In a way, corporations wield the censorship that dares not say its name.
In a way, corporations wield the censorship that dares not say its name.
Media mergers and conglomeration accelerated under Reagan, and continued apace under Clinton through the present day. As corporate conglomeration has skyrocketed, the means and scope of corporate censorship have grown more powerful. Bagdikian foresaw the danger early on: “If a small number of publishers, all with the same special outlook, dominate the marketplace of public ideas, something vital is lost to an open society. In countries like the Soviet Union a state publishing house imposes a political test on what will be printed. If the same kind of control over public ideas is exercised by a private entrepreneur, the effect of a corporate line is not different from that of a party line.”
As media mergers have grown very rapidly over a single generation’s time, the power of Bagdikian’s observation has reached its direst point of caution today. Disregarding this history legitimizes the delusion that things have always been that way. Too often there is a one-sided conversation going on where corporate censorship subordinates state censorship as a kind of scapegoat or red herring while the business end of ideological control proceeds as usual, unchallenged. Until the same gut rejection of state censorship broadens to include its powerful corporate counterpart, the conversation on censorship remains limited, and ultimately unfinished.
Rabeah Ghaffari has had an exceptional career. She’s an actor, documentarian, and film editor who has worked with Shirin Neshat and Tony Kushner, and, most recently, written a screenplay for Sex and the City costumer Patricia Field. She’s told many stories in many forms — but when she began thinking about a retired judge and his wife in pre-Revolution Iran, holding their family together from the center of an ancient orchard, she knew this story was different. Ghaffari began writing a screenplay, which morphed into her debut novel, To Keep the Sun Alive.
To Keep the Sun Alive is an old-school family saga, lush and many-voiced. Her characters argue about Iran’s religious history, its government corruption, and what path the nation should take forward, but Ghaffari keeps her own focus squarely within the family. She’s interested in how Ghamar, a prickly mother approaching middle age, interacts with her teenage daughter Nasreen; how Nasreen and her secret lover Madjid teach each other both love and idealism; and how two brothers, a judge and a cleric, become intellectually distant as they age.
I spoke to Ghaffari about translating film experience to the page, turning ideas into characters, and the delights of writing a novel, which she described as a joyful experience. Reading To Keep the Sun Alive is equally joyful. Even at the novel’s saddest moments, it’s a delight.
Lily Meyer: Reading To Keep the Sun Alive made me constantly hungry. Your writing about food is so wonderful, and you keep it at the novel’s heart. Did you intend to build your story around meals?
Rabeah Ghaffari: I’ve heard that from so many readers! Writing about food wasn’t conscious on my part, but food is such a big part of culture. Wherever you go, you engage first with food. But I didn’t think about it. It came naturally to talk about what the family in To Keep the Sun Alive eats — the rice, the tahdig, all the dishes at their first big lunch.
LM: Did you watch the episode of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat where Samin Nosrat and her mother make tahdig? What did you think?
RG: She did such an extraordinary job. Every episode was incredible. My mother lives in Mérida, where the second half of the Mexico episode takes place, and I loved watching it. Mexican cuisine is so complex, and she did such a beautiful job. There was something so earthy and empathetic and beautiful about that documentary. All the artisans and practitioners she engaged, all the people for whom cooking is a tradition — I found so beautiful and moving. And the tahdig at the end! I’m sure every Iranian watched that and was like, “I can make a better tahdig than that.”
LM: I’d love to hear about your own work as a documentarian and a film editor. To Keep the Sun Alive is such a visual book. How did you use your experience in film to create visual detail on the page?
RG: The book was originally a screenplay that I wrote in 2006, after returning to Iran for the first time. I was working in film then: making documentaries, cutting films, working at a production company. I trained as an actor, too, so I was doing theater and acting in films. A screenplay was the logical thing for me to write, though I didn’t consider myself a writer, only a reader. The screenplay got me to the Sundance Lab and the Berlin Festival, and that gave me confidence in my writing. But trying to get a film made is a Herculean task. It requires an immense amount of capital, and so I started turning the story into a novel because I could. I could finish a novel without a production staff. So that was how it became a book.
I started turning the story into a novel because I could finish a novel without a production staff.
Having worked as [a video] editor helped me immensely once I began writing. When you edit documentaries, you get hours and hours of footage. You have to cut those hours into a story. That experience taught me to create a structure. It taught me how to enter scenes, and what moments to juxtapose. Having trained as an actor helped, too. It helped me develop characters, helped me write dialogue, helped me observe what happened when characters interact. You know, writing a novel is the same as making a film, in some ways. A novel and a film have the same elements, but novelists do it all. You’re the actor, the director, the set designer, and you’re doing it alone in your head.
LM: Was working alone liberating for you? Or lonely?
RG: I loved it. Writing this book was a joyful experience. I want to do it again and again — to keep writing novels as long as I can. Maybe I loved it because I had no structure. Nobody expected me to write a novel. I had no school, no support, no expectations, which was exhilarating. Plus, to get a scene or chapter or paragraph right is exhilarating. While I was working on the book, it gave me a certain sense of meaning. I had this constant feeling of accomplishment, which was funny, because if you tell someone, “I wrote a great paragraph today, and I was so happy because I got it right,” they don’t understand. But it felt great. Incredibly difficult, though. I have a lot of blind spots. I had to rewrite the book, dismantle it, put it back together over and over. Still, it was a joyful experience.
LM: Could you talk more about those blind spots?
Nobody expected me to write a novel. I had no school, no support, no expectations, which was exhilarating.
RG: Some were simple: I’d over-write, or under-write. I had no idea how to bring a person into the room. I never knew how much to explain. Or there were flat characters, ones who needed color. There was so much re-working. It took me a while to get comfortable writing badly, too, because I have this intense desire to have the first try be perfect. I had to get comfortable with showing people drafts that were a mess, which, Lord have mercy. That was really hard.
LM: And yet you emerged with a beautifully structured book. To Keep the Sun Alive cycles between present-day Paris and Iran right before the Revolution in a way that feels formally perfect. How did you create that structure?
RG: I wrote the main story chronologically, then added the Paris sections, but I knew the story’s structure from the beginning. I wanted to compress time by bookending the novel in one day, starting in the morning and ending at night. It’s a cinematic structure, almost. It helped that I was never concerned about suspense. The novel opens with Shazdehpoor alone in Paris in 2012, and three pages later, you meet his whole family in Iran. After that, you have to wonder: What happened? Where is everybody? I hope that alone creates a sense of dread.
Another structural component are the three stories within the story, each of which take you to past historical moments. I included those because I wanted to evoke history that might foreshadow, or explain, the revolution that is to come — but I didn’t want to give the reader a history lesson. I didn’t want footnotes. I had footnotes, actually, and when I began working with my editor, she told me to take them all out. I was thrilled. The book shouldn’t need footnotes or explanations. It should pull readers into a place and time that are distant from their own, and it should make that distance not matter. Those are the reading experiences I love most. Like when I was reading Pevear and Volokhonsky’s Anna Karenina! I’d bounce into bed at the end of the day, needing to know what happened next.
LM: The story’s biggest event is the Revolution, which you convey through a short sequence of letters from the novel’s protagonist, Madjid, to his family. How did you decide to write the Revolution through letters rather than dramatizing it?
RG: There were two factors at play in that decision. One was that I wasn’t there. I left Iran with my parents several months before. I talked to family members who were there, I read, and I looked at documentary footage, but I wasn’t there. The other factor was that I didn’t want to make the Revolution the novel’s central point. I wanted to keep it almost in the background. I think books should talk about the Iranian Revolution, and I hope more people write about it, but not me. I wanted to look at it from a bird’s eye view. I wanted to show, in a short span of time, the euphoria — those utopian six months — that so quickly gave way to dread.
LM: Though Madjid is the novel’s protagonist, I was struck by how many female archetypes you include in the novel, and then complicate. How did you pull that off?
RG: I made Madjid the protagonist naturally. Like most of the characters in To Keep the Sun Alive, he’s based on someone I’d heard of: a young man who was married to my aunt and was killed in the Revolution. I never met him, but the story of his death always stayed with me. It broke my heart to think about how much he trusted the system that took his life. Thinking about that led to thinking about Madjid.
The female archetypes weren’t intentional at all. I only saw them later, once I’d developed the female characters’ relationships with each other, with men, and with society. I wanted to watch women with diverse experiences and backgrounds — and women of different ages, like Ghamar and her daughter Nasreen — interact. I’m very interested in how people relate to each other, and I’m particularly interested in the antagonistic relationships between women. Also, I have a sense that when people outside Iran think about Iranian life, they take a monolithic view. In no way do I want to diminish the issues Iranian society has, or that individual Iranians have with the state, but it’s a complex society like any other. You can’t only say that men are aggressors and women are victims, and I think the family is a perfect place to dramatize that. Families are like their own little states. The power struggles within families are, I think, universal. Certainly the family is a perfect place to explore these archetypes of gender, and to ask fundamental questions about how we relate.
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