Ten Questions About Teaching Writing with Colin Winnette

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I n our monthly series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we talked to Colin Winnette, author of The Job of the Wasp, a creepy gothic coming-of-age mystery (yes, it’s all those things, and Winnette pulls it off). He’ll be teaching a six-week advanced fiction workshop starting on November 28. It’s an online class, so if you’ve always wanted to take a Catapult course but you’re not based in New York, now’s your chance; submit a writing sample to claim a spot.

What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

The opportunity to be taken seriously when there was no real cause for anyone to do so.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

A sense of self-importance.

What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?

That I would never be rid of self-doubt, but I could get it to sit in the backseat, rather than let it drive the car.

Does everyone “have a novel in them”?

That feels like asking if everyone is capable of murder. The answer is probably yes, but some people are much closer to performing the act than others, and the fact that we have it in us does not a murderer make.

Does everyone “have a novel in them”? That feels like asking if everyone is capable of murder.

Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?

If they really wanted to stop, I’d support it. But if it’s something you want, you never should.

What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?

I’m more interested in what caused a reaction and why, rather than if the reaction was positive or negative.

Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?

If they intend to publish, it’s something worth thinking about. They’re different things, to write and to write something that’s meant to be read.

Crystal Hana Kim Thinks Worrying About Publication Kills Creativity

In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?

  • Kill your darlings: Very Practical Magic, and we saw how that worked out!
  • Show don’t tell: Why can’t you follow your own advice, maxim!
  • Write what you know: I guess it’s better than guessing.
  • Character is plot: Then what’s the point in defining either?

What’s the best hobby for writers?

Writing.

What’s the best workshop snack?

Hunger.

How Beating People Up Helped Me Find a Less Toxic Way of Being a Man

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Part memoir and part anthropological study, Thomas Page McBee’s Amateur reads like a boxer skillfully deflecting a jab, only to land an stinging uppercut of his own. While the book’s nominal subject is amateur boxing — hence the title — McBee’s attempt to be the first transgender boxer to fight in Madison Square Garden becomes a foil for his investigation of fraught masculinity, both his own and in American society at large.

After Amateur was short-listed for the U.K.’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, McBee and I caught up over tea in Brooklyn the day after Brett Kavanaugh’s inauguration, an opportune time to mull over the continued perniciousness of toxic masculinity in America, as well as his continued fascination with monsters, fictional or otherwise.

Meredith Talusan: So, I am talking to you the day after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and I guess, when I read Amateur, I feel like so much of it addresses masculinity with a certain type of empathy and compassion. In the environment that we’re in right now, what is the value and what kind of space for empathizing with masculinity can and should be had?

Thomas Page McBee: I had to trace back in a genuine reported way, to “How did we get here? Why are men behaving like they’re behaving, and why am I feeling, as part of my socialization, an expectation to not show emotion or to not ask for help or to not be vulnerable? Or all these other messages that I’m getting? Where is this even coming from?” And so, it wasn’t that I necessarily set out to be compassionate to men broadly, but in asking that question, I got pretty quickly to boys, and how we socialize boys. And boys don’t have a choice about how they’re socialized because they’re children, so looking at the research, especially the research around development psychologist Niobe Way’s work with adolescent boys, male friendships are disrupted around adolescence by toxic masculinity. Around 14 years old, boys from very close male friendships will suddenly stop talking about their male intimate friends. Around the same age, they’ll start showing those dominant behaviors that are typical of toxic masculinity. And they’ll talk about how heartbroken they are to lose those friendships, but they still stop having that intimacy with boy friends. And they will say that the reason why is that they don’t want to be perceived as girly or gay.

Around 14 years old, boys from very close male friendships will suddenly stop talking about their male intimate friends. And they will say that the reason why is that they don’t want to be perceived as girly or gay.

So they’ll move away from that intimacy and what Niobe Way calls “the things that make us human” in order to act like men. So, for me, learning that, it wasn’t so much that I was looking for a reason to be compassionate, but I felt like, “What a heartbreaking thing that that’s happening to children.” I have empathy for the boys in that situation. I don’t have empathy for men from whom this aspect of masculinity isn’t limiting to them, who aren’t then being accountable or choosing to look at themselves, but I think a lot of the way dominant masculinity works is that you’re always shielded and protected from that truth so that you can keep upholding this system of masculinity and power related to it. It’s a whole toxic system we’re all in, and a lot of ways that men and women and people of all genders are never disrupting it is by never questioning it.

MT: And it seemed like boxing in the book functions as a space for physical confrontation, yes, but also ultimately becomes so much more about camaraderie.

TPM: Yeah. It’s literally that because that’s the cover of violence. The men in the boxing gym, their masculinity is not under threat at all. I think it gave them room to be intimate, vulnerable, physically affectionate. And part of what’s surprised me so much about fighting was that the people I was training with were asking me constantly about my mental state, my spiritual state, my physical body. They were affectionate, physically, in ways I’ve never experienced with men, and it was a time in my life where I had just lost my mom. So, I was having this community of men who were, in some ways, giving me what I needed than the people in my life otherwise because I, in my male body, wasn’t getting touched as much, and I needed that as someone going through grief. But it made me sad that the reason why that was possible was because no one’s masculinity was being questioned because we were fighting.

The men in the boxing gym, their masculinity is not under threat at all. I think it gave them room to be intimate, vulnerable, physically affectionate.

MT: So then coming from that perspective and also being in the unique position of being female-assigned and having these experiences, do you have specific ideas about how we can not just raise boys but also cultivate a more generally compassionate culture in terms of gender relations?

TPM: I wrote the book really trying to think about questions rather than answers, though I think asking the questions actually is part of the concrete solution. I have a few ideas. One is I didn’t realize that genuinely so many people who aren’t trans and aren’t women don’t know that they have a gender. Like, knowing you have a gender is kind of important because — it’s like knowing you have a race. It’s like white people often don’t realize that we have a race, and if you don’t understand that you have a race, then you don’t understand how that operates in the world. And it turns into an intellectual experiment for you to think about race versus realizing race is a structure.

And then, I think, doing the quieter work of asking, “How does masculinity affect me?” and how are you restricted by your own identity. Almost every guy I talked to for my book told me some tragic story about boyhood and a moment where they had to totally change something about themselves in order to fit in, something crucial to who they were, to fit into stereotypes of what a man is supposed to be. And I think a lot of men feel like that trade is just a part of being a person, and in fact, it’s the opposite of being a person.

And so, then, for me, the next step was like, “Well, exactly what is this? What does this mean, and how is this showing up in my life?” So, for example, with sexism at work, some basic things I learned were like, everything that I felt from a feminist place before my transition had been useful was now the opposite of useful. So, I often was very assertive, often bringing my opinion forward and really advocated on my own behalf, in terms of meetings or with superiors or whatever, and actually, that was the opposite of useful for women on my team, for example, when I [did that], in this body, just because people listen to me more. So what was more useful is advocating on behalf of the women on my team or making room for their voices or being quiet or doing emotional labor or all the stuff that [it] makes sense was not in my wheelhouse, because I learned to do the opposite before my transition.

In Praise of Tender Masculinity, the New Non-Toxic Way to Be a Man

MT: I was really interested in those moments in the memoir when you confront your own male socialization. Do you think men have incentive to engage with the way their masculinity is oppressive, when they’re on top of the totem pole? What’s in it for them?

TPM: I think that goes back to your original question about compassion and in a way for me it’s like my own story is the way I can explain this or understand it. I transitioned when I was 30 and I spent those first four years, first of all very aware of the privileges I was experiencing because obviously, just to be clear, I had incurred an incredible work trajectory very quickly. I was very aware in small moments that when I spoke, people would listen or lean in or I could silence rooms with my voice. All of that was true. I walk down the street at night and would not be afraid. Not only not be afraid but women would cross the street to avoid me because I was now a threat. Everything about my life in certain ways, and in really important ways, became a lot easier and not just because I was a man, but because my gender was legible and prior to this I was androgynous, people didn’t know what to make of me. That all was true, but also at the same time I was very aware that almost I was becoming an island. When I was by myself I felt happy in my body but I would leave the house and I felt more and more isolated. The ways I was meant to behave felt very constricting and I was getting that message constantly. It was in so many ways that were small it was hard to totally put my finger on.

For example, I did notice that people stopped touching me except for people I was having sex with. I just felt almost radioactive. If I talked about how I was feeling about something, I could feel the way people would create space rather than have a conversation about anything vulnerable. I felt like I was losing things about myself from before my transition that I actually really liked, things I guess you would call feminine traits though they’re not actually gendered really. They’re what we reward in women and what we don’t reward in men. All of that was happening but is was subtle and it was making me uncomfortable and making me sad but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I felt like I was losing things about myself from before my transition that I actually really liked, things that we reward in women and we don’t reward in men.

Then after my mom passed away very suddenly, I think being in grief just really threw that in very stark relief because when you’re in grief you need support, you need to be able to express yourself. I think that combines with the fact that this was 2015 now, so this is like four years after I started testosterone, I felt in myself a lot of anger and I felt in the culture a lot of anger. And that was when I got in to a bunch of near street fights with men. I think that was the crossroads for me where I was like I need to figure out what’s going or I’m going to become one of theses angry fucking white dudes. I’m just marching in a direction despite my politics, despite everything else, the way I’m having interact with the world feels like I don’t have any space to be my whole self.

MT: Is it tough for you to be a man right now at a time when women are so embattled, especially as a person who has shifted from being perceived as a woman to being perceived as a man? Is there any kind of loss of community? How are you engaging with the fact that so many people are so angry at white men right now?

TPM: I think part of it is understanding that I’ve lost community and part of why I think I’ve been going through all this is to actually find where my place is within the human family again, because I know it’s not just with cis men who are behaving badly. That’s not where I want to line up my energy. On the other hand I pass as a cis man. So in many ways that means when I look at myself I feel happy because that’s how I wanted to feel. But when I leave my house, again, I feel like all the markers and identity things that made me very visibly queer prior to this don’t translate any more. Nobody knows that I’m trans most of the time. I think understanding that privilege for what it is and seeing the benefits means understanding that maybe I don’t always get to be my whole self in every situation.

Yesterday, I was walking down the street. I took a long walk from Manhattan to my home in Williamsburg and I was crossing Williamsburg bridge and this woman just came, yesterday was a hard day, she came plowing forward. I could tell she was in a mood where she was like “I’m not fucking moving over for any guy. I am not.” I like, fell into the bike lane ‘cause she was just storming ahead. She knocked me off my path. Not that I was storming towards her, I was actually trying to be very “I’m going to move out of every woman’s way today, more than normal.” I felt the anger. I felt being the target of it. I understood why she was angry and I see that I must’ve blown up something that makes women angry and they don’t need to know me or my politics or understand me.

I don’t need to walk around every day and have everyone get that I have this experience. I think a lot of trans people [who] pass, we don’t get to signal that to everyone and that is okay. If I’m a passing trans man and people don’t get that I’m having this rich and nuanced experience and they’re strangers on the street, well, that’s fine. I’m getting a lot of privileges for being a passing trans man. The justice of that is equaling out to me. I think being more clear on what the fuck is going on and actually having more of an engaged relationship to my own gender and getting to find a way to advocate for the things I believe in through this body, it feels like I’ve found a lot of community in a new way through that way of thinking and speaking.

If I’m a passing trans man and people don’t get that I’m having this rich and nuanced experience and they’re strangers on the street, well, that’s fine.

MT: Speaking of being socialized in a gender, I was really affected by the idea in your book that you have to learn how to want to hit somebody, which I had never thought about. I grew up very much with pacifist values. That’s something you really have to get over.

TPM: I’ve been thinking about [that] a lot because even at the time, my coach kept calling it “coming forward.” At the time I thought it had to do with masculinity in some sort of way. You know, like men are taught to be more aggressive and what does that mean, or is it testosterone, which it’s not. But lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how powerful it was to learn to come forward, especially when you’re not socialized to do so, because learning how to fight is really an important part of being human. I think that people who aren’t socialized to fight, learning the way to do it in ways that are helpful and productive or at least consensual, as in this case, is actually really important part of being a person. I also was a pacifist so this is a really strange thing to learn, but now that I know it it actually feels like, wow, women in general need to be taught how to do this, trans people in general, and people of color and all kinds of folks need to, if they don’t have the skill set this is actually really important not just for the physical ability to do it, but for the way it makes you feel about yourself.

MT: Do you think this investigation of masculinity is going to continue? How is your thinking evolving coming out of this book and what are your other current things you are interested in?

TPM: I’m thinking a lot about monsters, especially in relationship to trans people and the media narratives around us. Just how the stories, not just about trans people but all of us, the stories we tell about people are who they become or how we come to see them. We often lack real nuance or ways to understanding people who are marginalized at all in our culture and it becomes very easy to moralize about bodies, and we’ve done this throughout time and monster narratives are great way to look at that.

It’s the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein, which is one of my favorite monster stories. I think I love that story so much in part because Frankenstein is an invention of this guy. Like the guy who invented him was the monster. In fact Frankenstein’s monster is a very empathetic figure if you reread the book. He just wants to be part of the human family and in fact everyone who’s rejecting him is the monster. His monstrous behavior only comes from realizing that he won’t ever be able to part of the world and he’s going to be completely alone and isolated. He’s not monstrous to be evil, he’s just mad and he feels lonely. I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we blame people for natural reactions to being cut off from basic human needs and then the way they behave in response to that.

Then also I’ve been thinking a lot about people who live in rural communities who are not our expectations of who lives in rural communities. It’s all about binaries. When we are committed to a binary understanding of each other, only bad things happen.

When we are committed to a binary understanding of each other, only bad things happen.

Many urban people think only urban people have the right perspective on the U.S. and where the U.S. should go and rural people are X way and they don’t know anything or whatever the story is. Or about the Trump election — West Virginia in particularly was framed as the problem when in fact the don’t facts back that up, the ground zero for Trump voters ended up being pretty standard with the rest of the country in terms of Republican districts. But West Virginia held this shame of everyone. In fact there are plenty of queer people in West Virginia doing amazing work that nobody knows about. I’m just really interested in stories where our notions of what people are or who they are are binary and require no nuance and allow us to prop ourselves up, but actually spending some more time really understanding would give us the tools to be more thoughtful, maybe learn something and talk more and deeply about what’s happening in this culture right now.

Don’t Bring Nightmares To the Breakfast Table

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“The Breakfast”

by Amparo Dávila

When Carmen came down to breakfast at the family’s usual hour of seven thirty, she hadn’t dressed yet, but was wrapped in her navy-blue bathrobe with her hair in disarray. This wasn’t all that caught the attention of her parents and her brother, though; it was her haggard face, with hollows around the eyes, like the face of someone who’s had a bad night or is very ill. She said good morning in an automatic way and sat at the table, nearly col- lapsing into her chair.

“What happened to you?” her father asked, studying her carefully.

“What’s the matter, dear, are you sick?” asked her mother in turn, putting an arm around her shoulders.

“She looks like she didn’t get any sleep,” commented her brother.

She sat without responding, as if she hadn’t heard them. Her parents shared a glance out of the corner of their eyes, extremely puzzled by Carmen’s demeanor and appearance. Without daring to pose more questions, they began their breakfast, hoping that at some point she’d come back to herself. “She probably drank too much last night and what the poor girl’s got is a tremendous hangover,” thought her brother. “Those constant diets to maintain her figure must be affecting her,” her mother said to herself as she went to the kitchen for the coffee and scrambled eggs.

“Today I really will go to the barber, before lunch,” said the father.

“You’ve been trying to go for days now,” his wife remarked.

“But it’s such a pain just to think about it.”

“That’s why I never go,” the boy assured them.

“And now you have an impressive mane like an existentialist. I wouldn’t dare go out on the street like that,” said his father.

“You should see what a hit it is!” said the boy.

“What you should both do is go to the barber together,” suggested the mother, while serving their coffee and eggs.

Carmen placed her elbows on the table and rested her face between her hands.

“I had an awful dream,” she said in a small voice.

“A dream?” asked her mother.

“A dream’s no reason to act like that, sweetie,” said her father. “Come on, have breakfast.”

But she didn’t seem to have the slightest intention of doing so, remaining immobile and pensive.

“She woke up in a tragic mood, what can you do?” her brother explained with a grin. “These undiscovered actresses! But come on, don’t get upset, they can give you a part in the school theater…”

“Leave her alone,” said their mother, sounding annoyed. “You’re just going to make her feel worse.”

The boy didn’t press his jokes any further, and started talking about the rally the students had held the night before, which a group of riot police had broken up with tear gas.

“That’s exactly why I get so worried about you,” said their mother; “I’d give anything for you to stop going to those dangerous rallies. You never know how they’re going to end or who’s going to end up hurt, or who’ll get thrown in jail.”

“If it happens to you, nothing you can do about it,” said the boy. “But you’ll understand that a person can’t just sit calmly at home when other people are giving everything they’ve got in the struggle.”

“I don’t agree with the tactics the government is using,” said the father, spreading butter on a slice of toast and pouring himself another cup of coffee. “However, I don’t sympathize with the student rallies, because I think students should apply themselves simply to studying.”

“It would be hard for such a ‘conservative’ person like you to understand this kind of movement,” said the boy ironically.

“I am, and always have been, a supporter of liberty and justice,” his father replied, “but what I don’t agree with…”

“I dreamed that they killed Luciano.”

“What I don’t agree with…” the father repeated — “That they killed who?” he asked suddenly.

“Luciano.”

“But look, dear, to act like that over such a ridiculous dream, it’s as if I dreamed that I embezzled money at the bank and I got sick because of it,” said the father, cleaning his mustache with his napkin. “I’ve also dreamed many times that I won the lottery, and as you can see…”

“We all dream unpleasant things sometimes, and other times lovely things,” said the mother, “but none of them come true. If you want to read your dreams according to the way people interpret them, death or coffins mean long life or a prediction of marriage, and in two months…”

“And what about the time,” Carmen’s brother said to her, “that I dreamed I went on vacation to the mountains with Claudia Cardinale! We were already at the cabin and we were getting to the good part when you woke me up, remember how furious I was?”

“I don’t really remember how it began… But then we were in Luciano’s apartment. There were red carnations in a vase. I took one, the prettiest one, and I went to the mirror,” Carmen began recounting, in a slow, flat voice without inflection. “I started playing with the carnation. Its smell was too strong, I kept on inhaling it. There was music and I wanted to dance. I suddenly felt as happy as when I was a little girl and I would dance with Papá. I started dancing with the carnation in my hand, as if I were a lady from last century. I don’t remember how I was dressed… The music was lovely and I abandoned myself to it. I had never danced like that before. I took my shoes off and threw them out the window. The music went on and on, I started to feel exhausted and wanted to stop and rest. I couldn’t stop moving. The carnation was forcing me to keep dancing…”

“That doesn’t sound like an unpleasant dream to me,” her mother commented.

“Forget your dream already and eat some breakfast,” pleaded her father again.

“You’re not going to have time to get dressed and go to the office,” her mother admonished her.

As Carmen didn’t show the slightest sign of paying attention to what they said, her father made a gesture of discouragement.

“Saturday’s the dinner for don Julián, finally. I’ll have to send my Oxford suit to the dry cleaner, I think it needs a good ironing,” he said to his wife.

“I’ll send it today to make sure it’s ready for Saturday, sometimes they’re so unreliable.”

“Where’s the dinner going to be?” asked their son.

“We haven’t decided yet, but most likely it’ll be on the terrace of the Hotel Alameda.”

“How elegant!” the boy remarked. “You’ll love it,” he assured his mother. “It has a magnificent view.”

“I have no idea what I’m going to wear,” she complained.

“Your black dress looks great on you,” her husband said to her.

“But I always wear the same one, they’re going to think it’s the only one I have.”

“Wear a different one if you like, but that dress really does look good on you.”

“Luciano was happy watching me dance. He took an ivory pipe out of a leather box. Suddenly the music ended, and I couldn’t stop dancing. I tried again and again. I desperately wanted to fling away the carnation that was forcing me to keep dancing. My hand wouldn’t open. Then there was music again. Out of the walls, the roof, the floor, there came flutes, trumpets, clarinets, saxophones. It was a dizzying rhythm. A long rough shout, or a jubilant laugh. I felt dragged along by the beat, getting faster and wilder. I couldn’t stop dancing. The carnation had possessed me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop dancing; the carnation had possessed me…”

The three waited a few moments for Carmen to continue; then they traded glances, communicating their puzzlement, and kept on eating breakfast.

“Pass me some more eggs,” the boy asked his mother, and he looked out of the corner of his eye at Carmen, who was sitting absorbed in herself, and thought: “Anyone would say she’s stoned.”

The woman served eggs to her son and picked up a glass of juice that was sitting in front of Carmen.

“Drink this tomato juice, hija, you’ll feel better,” she pleaded.

When she saw the glass her mother held out to her, Carmen’s face distorted completely.

“No, my God, no, no! That’s how his blood was — red, red, thick, sticky! No, no, how cruel, how cruel!” she said, violently spitting out the words. Then she hid her face in her hands and began to sob.

Her mother, distraught, stroked her head. “You’re sick, dear.”

“That’s right!” said her father, exasperated. “She works so much, she stays up every night, if it’s not the theater it’s the movies, dinners, get-togethers, and look, here’s what happens! They want to use it all up at once. You teach them moderation and it’s ‘you don’t know anything about it, when you were young everything was different’ — well, it’s true, there are lots of things you don’t know about, but at least you don’t end up…”

“What are you insinuating?” His wife’s voice was openly aggressive.

“Please,” their son butted in, “this is getting unbearable.”

“Luciano was lying on the green divan. He was smoking and laughing. The smoke veiled his face. All I heard was his laughter. He blew little rings with every mouthful of smoke. They went up, up, and then they burst, they broke into a thousand pieces. They were tiny beings made of glass: little horses, doves, deer, rabbits, owls, cats… The room filled with little glass animals. They settled all around, like a silent audience. Others hung in the air, as if they were on invisible cords. Luciano laughed and laughed when he saw the thousands of little animals he was puffing out with each mouthful of smoke. I kept dancing, unable to stop. I barely had space to move, the little animals were invading the room. The carnation was forcing me to dance, and more and more animals came out, more and more; there were even little glass animals on my head; they nested in my hair, which had become the branches of an enormous tree. Luciano roared with laughter like I’d never seen before. The instruments started to laugh too, the flutes and the trumpets, the clarinets, the saxophones, they all laughed when they saw I didn’t have room to dance, and more and more animals came out, more, more… A moment came when I could hardly move. I was just barely swaying back and forth. Then I couldn’t even do that. They had me completely surrounded. I looked miserably at the carnation that was demanding that I dance. There was no carnation anymore, there was no carnation — it was Luciano’s heart, red, hot, still beating in my hands!”

Her parents and brother looked at each other in confusion, not understanding anything now. Carmen’s disturbance had burst in on them like an intruder breaking the rhythm of their lives and throwing everything into disarray. They sat in abrupt silence, blank, fearful of entertaining an idea they didn’t want to consider.

“The best thing would be for her to lie down for a bit and take something for her nerves, otherwise we’ll all end up crazy,” said her brother finally.

“Yes, that’s what I was thinking,” said her father. “Give her one of those pills you take,” he ordered the mother.

“Come on, dear, go upstairs and lie down for a bit,” said her mother, overwhelmed, trying to help her daughter to her feet, though she herself lacked the strength to do anything. “Take these grapes.”

Carmen lifted her head; her face was a devastated field. In a barely audible murmur she said:

“That’s how Luciano’s eyes were. Static and green like frosted glass. The moon was coming in through the window. The cold light shone on his face. His green eyes were wide open, wide open. They were all gone now, the instruments and the little glass animals. They had all vanished. There wasn’t any more music. Just silence and emptiness. Luciano’s eyes stared at me, stared, as if they wanted to pierce through me. And I was there in the middle of the room with his heart beating in my hands, beating still… beating…”

“Take her upstairs to bed,” said the father to his wife. “I’m going to call the office and tell them she’s not feeling well, and I think I’ll call the doctor too.” And he searched for approval with his gaze.

Mother and son nodded yes while their eyes thanked the old man for carrying out their most immediate desire.

“Come on, dear, let’s go upstairs,” said Carmen’s mother.

But Carmen didn’t move, nor did she seem to hear.

“Leave her, I’ll bring her upstairs,” said her brother. “Make her some hot tea, it’ll do her good.”

The mother walked to the kitchen with heavy steps, as if the weight of many years had suddenly fallen upon her. Carmen’s brother tried to move her, and when she didn’t respond, not wanting to do violence to her, he decided to wait and see if she would react. He lit a cigarette and sat down next to her. Their father finished on the telephone and dropped into an old easy chair, observing Carmen from there. “Now no one’s gone to work today, hopefully it’s nothing serious.” The mother made noise in the kitchen, as though she were stumbling at every turn. The sun came in through the window from the garden, but it lent no warmth or cheer to that room in which everything had come to a standstill. Their thoughts and suspicions lay hidden or veiled by fear. Their anxiety and distress were shielded by a desolate silence.

The boy looked at his watch.

“It’s almost nine,” he said, just to say something.

“The doctor’s on his way; luckily he was still at home,” said the father.

“The Last Time I Saw Paris” began to play when nine o’clock struck on the musical clock they’d given to the mother on her last birthday. She came out of the kitchen with a cup of steaming tea, her eyes red.

“Go on upstairs,” her husband said to her. “We’ll bring her up.”

“Let’s go upstairs, Carmen.”

Father and brother lifted her to her feet. She made no resistance to being led, and slowly began to climb the stairs. She was very distant from herself and from the moment. Her eyes gazed fixedly toward some other place, some other time. She resembled a ghostly figure drifting between rocks. They didn’t make it to the top of the stairs. A pounding on the door to the street halted them. The brother ran downstairs, thinking it was the doctor. He opened the door and the police barged in.

The Annual Book Sorting Competition Is New York’s Nerdiest Sporting Event

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On November 9th, at the 6th Annual Book Sorting Contest against Seattle, New York City’s book sorting team gathered together to take back the title of champion sorters in the United States. The race took place on both coasts, beginning with New York’s course at the Library Service Center in Long Island City and then the King County Library System’s course, several hours later, outside Seattle. Each machine would run for exactly one hour, zealously sorting books, getting them out to the numerous libraries in the area and ultimately into the hands of the patrons.

New York had been training all year for this day, the results of which would determine whether New York would receive Seattle’s Best Coffee, a prize worth fighting for. (In the event of a Seattle victory, New York would be required to provide the winning team with New York cheesecakes.) As one of the largest and busiest library systems in the United States, serving over 700,000 cardholders, the King County sorting system may be the only one in the country that holds a candle to that of New York’s. The outcome was nearly impossible to predict, given the comparable stats of all the key players.

The King County Library System’s machine, nicknamed “Tin Man,” serves all 49 libraries in the county. At the last competition, it came in first place with a record of 12,572 items sorted in one hour. Installed in 2005, the “Tin Man” is the first of its kind and has influenced library systems around the globe to imitate its groundbreaking technology, including our very own library system in New York City. The New York sorter reached 12,371 items at the last competition, a reputable performance, though not enough to gain national bragging rights. Installed in 2010, the New York sorter now serves 150 locations in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Bronx and Staten Island, and sorts an average of 620,000 items every month.

Seattle was the first to install a sorter, and since then has updated and upgraded its system, fearing that New York would sneak up from out of the dust to reign over United States’ library systems as the fastest in the country. Having lost the last competition by only 201 books, New York was holding its breath for this race. We had won two competitions to Seattle’s three, meaning this one would bring the two champions to a tie.

At 10 a.m. on November 9th, librarians and book lovers alike gathered around the New York sorter to watch the events unfold. To get to the sorting machine, we were led down to the lower level of the Library Service Center, to the 238-foot conveyor belt that sorts an average of 9,000 items every hour with the help of the sorting staff.

The morning began at 9:45 a.m., just fifteen minutes before the competition was to take place. The team of book sorters huddled around Salvatore Magaddino, the director of BookOps, a technical services collaboration between Brooklyn Public Library and New York Public Library. After introducing the spectators to the event — making the bold claim that every other sorting system “pales in comparison” to that of New York’s — Magaddino began psyching up the team.

Photo courtesy of NYPL

“We’re down 3 to 2,” he said, referring to Seattle’s wins. “We’re better than that, we’ve got a stronger team than that.” The team nodded in agreement. The spectators shuffled around, glancing at the piles upon piles of books, both new and old — Crazy Rich Asians stacked on top of The Great Gatsby.

“Half of the team has never participated in this event before — I was a little worried about it,” Magaddino continued. “But once we started practicing and I’d seen you guys coming together, I saw you guys gel. I am proud to be a part of this team.”

It was 9:55 a.m.; cheers erupted and Kanye’s “Stronger” began blaring through the speakers as the team members made their way to their starting positions — hands hovering over the piles of books, Gatorade within reach. One sorter pulled his hair into a ponytail, another rolled his shoulders and cracked his knuckles. “If your fingers get sore, keep going,” Magaddino had warned them.

At 10:00, the machine sprang to life, the conveyor belt cruised before them, and for the next hour they sorted books amid applause from the spectators and a succession of out-of-date pop songs. At the end of the hour, the belt came to an abrupt stop towards the end of Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind” and the sorters, T-shirts drenched in sweat, made their way back to the coach to hear the results: 12,330 books sorted in one hour, to King County’s 10,007. New York will be getting Seattle’s Best Coffee after all.

How Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Is Reinventing the Sherlock Holmes Story

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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar spent decades proving his prowess on the basketball court. Season after season he skyhooked his way to becoming the National Basketball League’s all-time leading scorer. After his retirement, he has become a fixture in the media as well as bookstores. He teamed with seasoned screenwriter Anna Waterhouse in 2017 for Mycroft Holmes, a book about the older, and smarter, brother to Sherlock Holmes.

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Mycroft Holmes presented Mycroft in a light that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work never did. Abdul-Jabbar and Waterhouse rounded out the character and made him a complex main character in a thrilling detective tale. Now, the duo returns with a sequel to the work that brings the brothers together to solve a crime. Mycroft and Sherlock adds yet another wrinkle to the Holmes-canon that is equally refreshing and a return to classic Holmesian mystique and intrigue.

I corresponded with the NBA Hall-of-Famer and the seasoned screenwriter via email about their detective sequel, tackling such a famous canon, and tried to get them to predict the 2018–19 NBA champion.

Adam Vitcavage: The first novel focused on solely on Mycroft Holmes. Why introduce Sherlock as such a pivotal character?

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: We were extremely curious about their relationship because in the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle books, they are polite and Sherlock is certainly admiring of his older brother’s genius, but neither is in the other’s social circle(s) and if they spend leisure time together, we are not informed. We began to wonder how two people who should have so much in common are instead little more than polite strangers. Since we begin Mycroft’s “life” at 23 (in Mycroft Holmes), we have some leeway as to who their parents are and what the dynamics are. Then we stipulate, from what ACD tells us about Mycroft, how he and Sherlock would naturally gravitate to different interests. Finally, we put them together…and watch them combust!

Talking to NBA Legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar About His Sherlock Holmes Novel

AV: Was there ever a time your second book would just follow Mycroft without Sherlock?

KAJ: Was there ever a time that we didn’t think of including Sherlock? No. He’s too big a fictional character to marginalize him. And frankly, he has too many fans. We also were anxious to show their myriad differences, and it was easier to do so when they were side by side.

AV: Sibling dynamics are my favorite relationships in literature. What was the most important aspect of exploring Mycroft and Sherlock’s brotherhood?

KAJ: Their family. Their father, and in particular, their mother. We allowed ourselves free rein, since the only thing ACD tells us is that they were “country squires” — not exactly a limiting option. How would two boys (moving into manhood) go about protecting a fragile parent? What sorts of obstacles would they face? How might it intensify a natural sibling rivalry?

AV: I was very intrigued by Cyrus. He is such a unique point of view for the time period. How did he develop for the first novel and continue to evolve for this one?

KAB: To be frank, we weren’t interested in writing the typical Holmesian pastiche (or any sort of pastiche) that did not include people of color. There were many living in Victorian England but you’d hardly know it from the writing of the time. Mycroft’s passion and search for fine cigars (especially in Mycroft Holmes) would lead naturally to his meeting people from varying backgrounds. And, because of my family origins in Trinidad, we knew this particular person “of varying background” could hail from there.

We also knew we didn’t simply want someone whose primary function was to say, “And why is that, Holmes?” Which meant that we had to formulate a real personality, real opinions (sometimes contrary to Mycroft’s), and real and believable affection between the two. Lucky for us, some characters spring forth fully grown, like Athena from the head of Zeus (we wish!), and that’s what happened with Douglas. He is, to use another literary reference, Mycroft’s Jiminy Cricket.

Sherlock Vs. Sherlock: What Two New Sherlock Holmes Pastiches Tell Us About the State of Fan Fiction

AV: Whodunnits can seem to be formulaic, yet this novel seems so fresh. What other mysteries and detectives outside of Holmes have inspired you both?

KAJ: Both Anna and I are inordinately fond of Joe Ide’s detective Isaiah Quintabe. It’s brilliant writing. We also like Laurie R. King’s series on Mary Russell and Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk.

AV: Writing is often a solitude task. How do you to manage to collaborate in such an effective way?

KAJ: By remaining in solitude! Seriously, it’s a great way of working. I like plotting. I have a certain knowledge and love of history. Anna is great with dialogue and is a researcher by nature. We both like social commentary (when appropriate), and we have the same vision about the big picture: how a story set in Victorian England can show us where certain problems and issues were first birthed. After the initial pass where we construct the story, we will pass a chapter back and forth until we’re passably happy with it — and then move on, though we’ll often go back and add or change as necessary (because plots aren’t static…they have a sneaky way of changing on you).

Our vision was to show a story set in Victorian England where certain problems and issues were first birthed.

AV: What have you two learned about each other through writing these two books together?

KAJ: I think there’s a separation between the personal and the professional. I don’t think we “learned” anything in particular about each other’s personalities. I couldn’t tell you the first thing about her interactions with her family and friends, for instance, and she would have no idea about mine. But in every subsequent book, it’s easier to trust each other’s abilities. We’re both opinionated, but we’re also both team players: we don’t fight for an idea just because it’s “ours.” We’re looking out for the book.

AV: What’s the future look like for Mycroft Holmes books?

KAJ: We’re finishing up a third one. We’ll be handing it in, in the next few weeks. If all goes well, it’ll be out next year. With every book, we have an eye out for ACD’s description of Mycroft Holmes in his 40s (obese, sedentary, co-founder of The Diogenes Club) and are very aware that it’s the bullseye we will eventually have to hit.

AV: Anna, you have worked a long time as a screenwriter. Any upcoming projects we can look forward to?

AW: Thanks for asking. I finished a feature film based on the kidnapping of General James Dozier by the Italian Red Brigades — an absolutely wild story that I first read about in Time Magazine. Phoenix Pictures and the wonderful Mike Medavoy are producing the film. I’m also working with Robert Towne on a limited series based on a book by James Crumley called Dancing Bear.

AV: Kareem, you have joined the Veronica Mars writing room after a long history with Hollywood (your cameo in Troop Beverly Hills remains a favorite). What has it been like in writing for television?

KAJ: A very different beast. I’m used to either writing alone or with a single co-author. But television writing involves brainstorming and writing with five other writers, all of them brilliant, witty, funny, and very fast on their feet. It’s like running a fast break without ever being able to slow down. I find it very exhilarating but also very challenging.

AV: Finally, Mycroft and Sherlock are the masters of deduction. Who would they deduce has the best chance to dethrone the Warriors as NBA Champions?

KAJ: They would be stumped until they could observe the two teams and get a sense of what their strengths and weaknesses would be. I don’t think they would be rabid fans, since their attention would focus mainly on crime and other circumstances that cause crime.

Tana French’s “The Witch Elm” Is an Exploration of White Male Privilege

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The protagonist of The Witch Elm, Toby Hennessy, has been lucky his whole life. A young good-looking white man, he’s got money, a loving family, a girlfriend he worships, every kind of social privilege a person can have. Until he surprises two burglars in his apartment, that is. They beat him nearly to death, and he wakes up a different person — not lucky, as he sees it, at all.

The Witch Elm by Tana French

Toby goes to recuperate at the Ivy House, the family home where he spent summers with his uncle Hugo and cousins Leon and Susanna. He expects the Ivy House to be idyllic, but in this way, too, his luck has run out. He’s in the middle of a murder investigation, and he’s far from ready to cope.

Tana French’s first stand-alone novel (her others have been part of a series about Dublin murder detectives), The Witch Elm combines questions of luck, privilege, guilt, and responsibility with a murder investigation, a big heap of family drama, and crystal-clear Irish prose. It’s as gripping as it is thought-provoking, as intelligent a novel as I’ve read in years.

I spoke to French via Skype about people who are too lucky for their own good, how we can all learn to see our own privilege, and what happens when you find a skull in a tree.

Lily Meyer: What was the first spark of The Witch Elm? Did it begin as a novel about privilege or luck?

Tana French: Mainly, I was thinking about the connection between luck and empathy. If we’ve been too lucky in one area of life, that can stunt our ability to empathize with people who haven’t been that lucky. For example, I was lucky in that I had a pretty happy, loved childhood, and that meant that growing up, when I was a teenager, if somebody told me about having a terrible childhood, there was a part of me that was going, “Surely it can’t have been quite that bad! They’ve got to be exaggerating a bit.” It wasn’t that I didn’t believe the person, but it was so far outside my frame of reference that I couldn’t quite take it on as a reality. Of course, I grew up and copped onto myself, and realized that I needed to shut up and listen.

That kind of inability to empathize with something outside our frame of reference spreads across a whole lot of categories. I started thinking: What about somebody who’s been lucky in every possible way there is? Here’s a guy who’s white, male, straight, cisgender, from an affluent family, from a loving, stable family, physically and mentally healthy — what would that do with his ability to empathize with people who haven’t been that lucky, and to accept that they’re living in a completely different reality from his, and their experience is still real.

If we’ve been too lucky in one area of life, that can stunt our ability to empathize with people who haven’t been that lucky.

LM: In a lot of ways, The Witch Elm is about ableism. The book starts with Toby getting beaten up in a way that has serious consequences — brain damage, PTSD. How did that inform your writing?

TF: When Toby’s physical and mental health are taken away from him, this is something he absolutely can’t process. He considers his physical and mental problems to be alien things imposed on him, and he refuses to find a way to operate within these new parameters. I wanted to examine what happens when your luck in a certain area is suddenly ripped away from you. When you find yourself, overnight, on the other side of the coin, how do you reconstruct your view of yourself? How do you reconstruct your view of the world?

LM: My empathy for Toby changed constantly over the course of the novel. Sometimes I felt for him, and sometimes I was furious at him. How did your own feelings toward Toby change?

TF: My attitude to Toby is that I hope you occasionally want to give him a good kick, but I hope you never hate him. I never wanted him to be a jerk. I didn’t want him to abuse his luck to deliberately make other people’s lives difficult, or to take advantage of his power. I wanted him to be one of these people who are just bopping happily along, completely oblivious. He’s a nice guy! He’s generous; he’d go out of his way to do someone a favor.

The problem with Toby is that he does not — and will not — consider the fact that other people are living in a world that’s different from his own. But he’s not an asshole. There will always be assholes, and there’s no point having a conversation with them. That’s not where change can take place. I’m more interested in the oblivious person bopping through life, since we’ve all been oblivious to other people’s experiences at times. It’s when figure out that we’re oblivious that the questions emerge: what is our duty to others? How aware are we supposed to be?

LM: Toby particularly struggles to empathize when his cousin Susanna brings up the fact that women in Ireland have no right to abortion while pregnant. (The 1983 Eighth Amendment in Ireland’s Constitution gave pregnant women and fetuses equal right to life, criminalizing abortion under essentially all circumstances; the exact conditions in which abortions can legally be performed have historically remained opaque.) Since you finished The Witch Elm, Ireland has voted overwhelmingly to overturn the Eighth Amendment, which will enable pregnant women to have autonomy over their bodies. What was it like to see that vote happen?

My attitude to Toby is that I hope you occasionally want to give him a good kick, but I hope you never hate him.

TF: It was pretty amazing. You know, the vote on the Eighth Amendment was presented as an abortion vote, but it was much more than that. The amendment affected every pregnant woman. It was quite a frightening thing to be pregnant in Ireland and know you were, legally, not a person. So it was quite amazing to realize that Ireland had become a different place for women. I’d been involved with the campaign a lot, and this was a pretty big payoff.

LM: How did it feel to write Toby compared to the Dublin Murder Squad detectives?

TF: I really enjoyed this. I had a lot of fun writing this book. I’d looked at the process of a homicide investigation six times from a detective’s point of view, and I kept thinking about the other perspectives involved. For detectives, investigations are a source of power and control. For For everybody else, the murder investigation comes barreling into your life and turns your whole world upside down. It’s got to be terrifying. I thought that deserved a voice.

LM: How did you come to write a book so skeptical of the police? Susanna, especially, doesn’t trust them in the slightest.

TF: Like a lot of people in his position, Toby has an unthinking faith in authority and the system, since the system is set up for middle-class, affluent white men. He expects it to do well, and do its job. I thought you needed a balance to that in the book, especially in order to understand how Toby’s view of the system will change once he is no longer in perfect health. After he’s attacked, he is no longer the ultimate reliable narrator. He’s pretty mentally fragile. He’s got some damage going on, and as a result, people no longer see him as intrinsically trustworthy.

LM: How did you work with the contrasts between the book’s two main female characters, Toby’s girlfriend Melissa and his cousin Susanna?

Toby has an unthinking faith in authority and the system, since the system is set up for middle-class, affluent white men.

TF: Melissa was interesting to work with because Toby sees her so unrealistically. He sees her as an angelic saint, almost a Madonna figure, who is so wonderful and self-sacrificing for staying with him. Once he has to see her in terms of herself, it turns out that she’s not self-sacrificing. She loves him, and she’s there because she wants to be. But when he does something that she considers to be unacceptably destructive, her whole perspective on him changes. She has her own boundaries and breaking points, and Toby sees that.

To a certain extent, the same dynamic is going on with Susanna. Toby sees her as his quirky little cousin who’s become Mrs. Mom and purees green beans for fun. That’s his initial perspective on her. Over the course of the book, he realizes that she’s never been that person. It’s the same process as with Melissa, but in a very different way. He has to learn to see them on their own terms.

LM: We first meet the murder victim as a skull in a tree at the Ivy House. Is this a Hamlet reference? Or Garden of Eden, like a really horrible apple?

TF: The Garden of Eden reference was totally subconscious, but it’s there — somebody pulls this thing out of a tree, and suddenly Paradise is ruined. Hamlet was an undercurrent throughout, especially the Ophelia line I used as an epigraph: “Lord, we know what we are, but not what we may be.” That line has always fascinated me. It’s terrifying. Toby’s got a speech like that in the middle of the book, about how what’s terrifying isn’t his physical and mental damage: it’s the fact that he’s different now. He could wake up tomorrow as a mathematical genius, or a Star Trek fan. Day to day, he could be anything.

LM: Toby is the only character in the novel who can’t cope with death, even though he almost dies at the beginning. Do you think his refusal to think about death is a way to hold onto his belief in luck?

TF: Absolutely. He’s holding onto his perception of himself as the one in control, too. From birth, he’s been positioned as a definer, a decision-maker. He decides what gets to happen and how, and the idea that death has shown up in his family home without his say is outrageous and devastating to him.

What happens when all your privilege ripped away overnight, how do you reconstruct your view of yourself?

LM: How did you plot The Witch Elm? How did you know there would be a skull in a tree?

TF: I was bouncing around the idea of the guy who’d been lucky all his life until suddenly, one night, he wasn’t. While I was thinking about that, my brother sent me a link to a story about four kids in 1943 who found a skull in the trunk of a wych elm, which, of course, led to the whole skeleton. It was a woman, and to this day, no one knows who she was. My brother sent me this story with a note saying, “This sounds like a Tana French book,” and he turns out to have been right.

The skull down the tree combined with the guy who’s been lucky until he isn’t, and then I started writing. After that, I had no idea. I’m in awe of those authors who have outlines, but me? I tend to have the basic premise, the narrator, and a core location. From there, I dive in, follow my nose, and hope I’ll find a book there. I had no idea who the skull was or who put it there, but I figured I could work it out.

LM: When did you know who the murderers would be, and how did you then conceal that knowledge?

TF: A lot of rewriting! Once I start figuring things like that out, I always have to go back and rewrite. The funny thing is, though, your subconscious is doing half the job while you write. Sometimes, when you figure it out — “Oh, my God, that’s who done it!” — you realize you’ve actually been planting clues already. Before you even knew what you were aiming for, you already have a lot that fits just right.

LM: What were you happiest to discover in this novel? And what felt most compelling as you wrote?

TF: Toby does something right at the end of the book that, at the beginning, he would never have believed he would do. When I realized that was clearly where the book was going — that his complete transformation, and his inability to deal with that transformation, were taking him to this event — I knew it would be massively difficult to write. It was an oh-shit moment, because if I hadn’t pulled that event off, the novel would have fallen flat on its face. But it was a really exciting moment, too. It was great, thinking, “Oh! I see! That’s where he’s headed.”

Why Has Ursula K. Le Guin Inspired So Many Musicians?

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Mow the Glass, the latest album from Oregon’s The Lavender Flu, rests on the uneasy boundary between garage rock and psychedelia. This is an album that can evoke haunting musical fragmentation with a deftness equal to its more straightforward rock numbers. Depending on the listener, it can come off as either retro or timeless: the sort of music made by like-minded eccentrics at any time over the last few decades.

That air of timelessness is only accentuated by the album’s liner notes, which open with a line about “Ursula K. Le Guin whispering to James Tiptree Jr. in heaven.” While that can be read as a tribute to one of the greatest writers to hail from the band’s home state, it’s also indicative of a running theme in many a left-of-center album in recent years: the emergence of Ursula K. Le Guin as a bona fide musical influence.

Le Guin’s ethos has found a number of devotees willing to translate the ideas and themes of her prose into music across a variety of styles and genres.

2018 has abounded with surreal cultural moments, ranging from the inspired to the genuinely awful. On the delightful side of that surrealism is the fact that Ursula K. Le Guin received an 8.3 on Pitchfork for a new edition Music and Poetry of the Kesh, an album she made in collaboration with Todd Barton as a companion piece to her novel Always Coming Home (which is itself getting a deluxe reissue next year). And while the music on Music and Poetry of the Kesh itself may not have its own lineage — at least, not yet — Le Guin’s ethos has nonetheless found a number of devotees willing to translate the ideas and themes of her prose into music across a variety of styles and genres.

Bands drawing upon literary influences isn’t anything new, from the prog rock of Uriah Heep (named after a Dickens character) to the intense emo of Straylight Run (Neuromancer) and Gatsby’s American Dream (you definitely get this one). But what makes Le Guin’s musical influence more noticeable is its subtlety. This isn’t a case of a band naming a song after a minor character in A Wizard of Earthsea (although there’s some of that, too) — it’s about grappling with the same themes and motifs that Le Guin worked so memorably into her own writing.

Baltimore dream-pop duo Beach House released their seventh studio album, 7, earlier this year to abundant critical acclaim. While not a case of an artist reinventing themselves, it does stand apart from the rest of the band’s discography, in part due to the involvement of musician Sonic Boom from beloved experimental groups like Spectrum and Spacemen 3. In an interview with Pitchfork about the making of the album, Beach House’s Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally both citied Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness as having informed the album.

“There’s a certain amount [in our imaginary mood board for the album] that is not sci-fi, per se, but some kind of pre-apocalyptic unrest,” Legrand said in the interview. “Glamour and destruction mixed with youth and nighttime and black cars and The Left Hand of Darkness. If you tie the Warhol Factory to these kind of more abstract and futuristic things, there’s some crazy hybrids that you get.”

The blissful and often narcotic pop of Beach House isn’t the only musical configuration for rock bands inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s writings. A number of heavy metal bands have found her work inspiring, including the jazz-influenced Norwegian outfit Keep of Kalessin, which takes its name from Le Guin’s beloved Earthsea series of books. That influence has also gone deeper for certain artists–in 2017, Noisey profiled the Oakland metal band Ragana, describing them as “a black metal band that loves Courtney Love and Ursula K. Le Guin.” Earlier this year, the band posted a moving tribute to Le Guin on their Facebook page, including a reference to Always Coming Home. The tribute called Le Guin “a true earth witch, a true visionary human, illuminator of inner worlds.”

Like The Lavender Flu, Ragana has roots in the Pacific Northwest — specifically, Olympia, Washington, about two hours north of Portland, where the group first met. Lyrically, they evoke Le Guin at both her most pastoral and her most galaxy-spanning. Musically, they veer from harrowing blends of guitars and screams to more restrained, blissful passages. It’s not the first music that comes to mind when thinking of Le Guin’s writings, but it’s not far removed from it either.

San Francisco’s Cold Beat represent an entirely different application of Le Guin’s works to a musical setting. Songwriter Hannah Lew has spoken about her fondness for Le Guin’s writings. In an interview with Vol.1 Brooklyn (which, full disclosure, I conducted), Lew noted, “I really like her ability to imagine totally different realities and possibilities. She puts out philosophical what-ifs that are really valuable to consider about gender and the way societies work in general. It’s always good to imagine something really different.”

Cold Beat’s music has also veered into the explicitly science fictional: they’re a postpunk band with a retrofuturist aesthetic and, as such, make the tension between the organic and technological aspects of their songs a key element. In a 2013 interview with Rookie, Lew spoke about science fiction as a lyrical influence for her. “The landscape of what I write is in this weird, other place — definitely sci-fi, but it’s weird space poetry,” she said. “I think sci-fi allows us to imagine things we don’t want to admit in real life.”

Science fiction has inspired an expansive range of music: everything from Janelle Monáe’s concept albums about androids living in repressive societies to Rush’s dystopian 2112 to Planetarium, a collaborative work from Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, and James McAlister. But Le Guin’s aesthetic is distinctive for a number of reasons: it’s one that explores borders, boundaries, relativism, and intimacy in notable ways. It’s not surprising that these themes have drawn in lyricists over the years.

Le Guin’s aesthetic explores borders, boundaries, relativism, and intimacy in notable ways.

In an interview conducted four years later with Bandcamp, Lew continued to make the case for science fiction’s relevance to her music. “As an artist, I’m always working with narratives as a way to broaden my vocabulary about what reality is,” she said.

Shortly thereafter, she spoke about the potential of science fiction to offer a glimpse of a better world. “When we broaden our vocabulary and learn more, there’s a lot out there to discover,” she said. “I think it’s inspiring, especially when we’re getting down. It’s really healthy to remember that there’s a lot more out there.” It’s the same kind of thought experiment that one might see in an Ursula K. Le Guin essay or story — albeit in the process of being transfigured into a catchy and propulsive song. And while Le Guin’s own foray into music hasn’t necessarily spawned a legion of sound-alikes, the fact that she felt compelled to create such a work suggests that she left room in her writings for music—a gateway that this group of musicians has passed through, creating memorable work as they go.

7 New Books That Continue To Prove Women are Funnier Than Men

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“Women aren’t funny. Ever heard that ridiculous statement? As Tina Fey retorted in her indisputably hilarious book 2011 Bossypants, “It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.”

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Not only are women obviously funny, they’re capable of being many different kinds of funny. From silly and absurdist jokes to wry and erudite satire, we love books that showcase their unique voices, diverse forms and mastery of wit. These 6 books are of course a mere sliver of what we could have included from the last year alone.

As the co-authors of the book New Erotica for Feminists: Satirical Fantasies of Love, Lust, and Equal Pay, we’re so proud to add our own voices to this proud pantheon, with our satirical vignettes that subvert tired porn and cultural tropes to feminist (and funny) ends, imagining a world where women get what they really want: equality. Until that day comes, we’ll continue to tirelessly celebrate and amplify funny women like the ones on this list.

How To Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings: Non-Threatening Strategies for Women by Sarah Cooper

Sarah Cooper’s fierce and funny collection of satirical work advice for women everywhere could sadly be interpreted as genuine advice by a terrifying number of human beings. Cooper, an ex-Googler, has written a pointed and poignant examination of expectations for women in the workplace. This book will leave you on the floor laughing — but also crying, because it’s 2018 and we haven’t gotten far enough. Featuring fun illustrations by the author herself, anti-inspirational sayings like “Your imposter syndrome will never be good enough,” and Men’s Achievement Stickers (example: “Stopped Myself From Explaining Something I Didn’t Understand), How To Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings proves that women’s anger about workplace inequality can be channelled into smart, satirical humor.

Hey Ladies!: The Story of 8 Best Friends, 1 Year, and Way, Way Too Many Emails by Michelle Markowitz & Caroline Moss

If you’ve ever gotten an email with the subject line “Hey Ladies!” you know what you’re in for — an increasingly expensive bachelorette party planning chain that devolves over the course of several hundred emails. Born out of a popular column on The Toast, writers Michelle Markowitz & Caroline Moss hilariously detail the emails between a group of eight friends in the year leading up to one of their weddings. In between all the logistics are pitch-perfect satirical details about each character, snarky side texts between them responding to the main threads, and lots and lots of heightened moments you’ll recognize (and probably cringe at!) from your own life. You can read the entire book in one laugh-filled sitting, then go back to pull out your favorite sections to savor later — maybe each time you get another email?

10 Satirical Covers for the Terrible Books You Can’t Get Away From

The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature by Viv Groskop

Have you ever read Russian literature and thought, “Wow, this is actually filled with really good and not terrible life advice?” Journalist, critic and comedian Viv Groskop, who has studied Russian literature for 20 years, is the one person who did. So she wrote The Anna Karenina Fix, a clever, funny and truly helpful self-help memoir hybrid, filled with lessons learned (or not learned) by characters in Russian novels and their authors. It is a joyful read that you’ll love if you’re into Russian literature or even if you know nothing about it. And if you’re in the latter camp, you’ll want to read some immediately. Only a true master of words, culture, life and comedy could write this, and we’re so glad Viv did.

Everything’s Trash, But it’s Okay by Phoebe Robinson

Like much of the best humor since the dawn of time (and all of the books on this list), comedian Phoebe Robinson’s second collection of essays is as funny as it is necessary. Robinson finds the funny in the darkest of times and themes (one particularly notable essay covers hiding her large amount of debt from her parents until after she’s paid it off), and seeing her unique perspective on comedy, work, and the current state of the world inspires and educates. These are dark times, but thankfully Everything’s Trash is like a stuffed animal — in that will make you feel all right and you’ll throw a tantrum when you can’t find your copy.

Amateur Hour: Motherhood in Essays and Swear Words by Kimberly Harrington

Kimberly Harrington is a noted copywriter and satirist whose skilled words make brands or break blowhards, but in her debut book Amateur Hour, Harrington looks inward as much as outward. Musing on everything from how her love for social media can lead to potentially problematic parenting conundrums to the often lonely tragedy of miscarriage, Amateur Hour is a feisty, arresting collection of essays that bring intimate laughter and tears often in the same breath. In a world of endless mommy tell-alls that feel like the literary equivalent of house chardonnay, this is top-shelf whiskey.

Decorating a Room of One’s Own by Susan Harlan

This beautifully laid out and illustrated book is an incredibly funny, detailed homage to the homes in some of our favorite stories. Harlan, a college professor at Wake Forest University, has turned her discerning eye and lovely prose to a very funny premise that combines an Apartment Therapy-esque voice with the narrators and characters of classic literature. Some of the gut-busting chapters include “Jay Gatsby’s Desperately Sad McMansion of UnFulfilled Dreams,” “Stella and Stanley’s Not Overly Welcoming New Orleans Walk-up,” and an interlude centering on a conversation of underwater living between Grendel’s Mother and the Sea Witch from the original fairy tale version of The Little Mermaid. Harlan’s prose is as vivid as the comedic pictures she paints, and putting this book on your coffee table shows off your command of design elements as well as the narrative structure of Moby Dick.

Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist by Franchesca Ramsey

Franchesca Ramsey unwittingly stumbled into celebrity — and activism — when her YouTube video, What White Girls Say…to Black Girls, went mega-viral. Ramsey’s charm is that she’s not afraid to own up her mistakes — and she admits in this book that she’s made a lot (like, a lot-a lot.) This collection of humorous essays covers everything from her in-defense-of-“sluts” showdown with Jenna Marbles to natural hair to her “accidental” activism. Though the topics aren’t light, Ramsey’s easy-breezy delivery is. Toward the end of the book, she takes it a step further and supplies a glossary full of not-so-simple concepts like white feminism and ableism, along with an activism primer. Read this if you want to laugh and change the world.

Growing Up Poor in One of the Wealthiest Nations in the World

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A s a Midwesterner who has lived on the East Coast for decades, I find myself constantly struggling with simplified versions of the Midwest as well as outright erasure. I’ve followed Sarah Smarsh’s work since I first learned about her, eagerly reading in her words a complex and thoughtful perspective on Midwestern life that I have found too seldom told. Smarsh’s evocative essays, such as “Poor Teeth” among many others, blend personal experience with research and analysis to convey and to explore what it means to be poor and working-class in the rural Midwest.

Her new book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, takes on the intertwined themes of class, work, gender and sexism, violence, healthcare, education, race, political agency, and above all the way those outside the Midwest have written their own agendas and stories onto the region. This matters for Midwesterners, of course, but Smarsh powerfully argues that these stereotypes and misconceptions matter for the fate of our country as a whole — that those stereotypes about the region and its people are part of what is driving the political polarization that now threatens our democracy. The urgency of these issues is being heard, thankfully, and the book recently landed on the New York Times best sellers’ list.

Smarsh addresses these themes primarily through her own story, which includes a tumultuous upbringing as her parents each tried to stabilize themselves in the face of economic uncertainty. She tells the tale through the dialect and point of view of her family, with added perspective from research. The voice in the book comes from home, not from a policy document, and throughout the book she weaves in asides addressed to an unborn and imagined daughter, August, using this most intimate personal conversation to summon the truest things she can say about herself, her family, and the land that formed her.

Sonya Huber: You present a theory that stereotypes of poor white people held by those outside the Midwest helps to shape the conservatism of those poor white people. Do you feel as though your book might help those outside the Midwest understand this? What would change this dynamic?

Sarah Smarsh: I hope so. My journalism for the last few years has also been focused in that direction of challenging the idea that a whole swath of our country could be a political or cultural monolith. Most “good liberals” like myself would be reluctant at this point, hopefully, to do that about most groups. And yet there’s sort of this ironic willingness to look at the middle of the country or rural America as all white, all conservative, or even as all male. I wouldn’t dare to hope that my book could work against a cultural tide that powerful, but I do know that the individual connections that I’m making are powerful. Even people from privileged coastal experiences are saying that they felt like their eyes were opened in some way about the complexity and nuance and diversity of the place I come from. Even if the book doesn’t change things in the big picture, I know that it is changing some hearts and minds at the ground level. And that’s good enough for me.

SH: The overgeneralizations about such a huge chunk of the population is one of the big mysteries I wrestle with since I’ve been away from the Midwest. Do you think it’s partially caused by people not going to the Midwest and not having real experiences and encounters with that complexity and nuance and diversity?

SS: That’s absolutely it. You can even hear it in our language; we say “flyover country.” As I say in the book, that suggests that it might be dangerous to walk there [laughter]. And there is occasionally an earnest effort by New-York-based or coastal media outlets to “explore” these regions, but it’s framed as a safari or a journey into a war-torn landscape…

SH: Like [scary voice] “Welcome to Meth Land.”

SS: Exactly! It’s presented as a vaguely dangerous and miserable vision. That is not really a failure of the individual — that’s just human nature. It is a class and regional parallel to how we are also tribal and fearful along racial lines or other aspects of diversity. If people don’t know human beings from a group, they’re more vulnerable to stereotype and caricature. That is an outcome of the economic tide of our country. Since the Industrial Revolution, so for more than a century, this has been an increasingly urbanized country, and the economic imperative has been toward urban centers on the coast. There are some beautiful national parks in between the coasts, but there has not been a sense of places like my home as a destination in any sense, and maybe rightly so, depending on your set of values. People have no reason to go there. A kid like me would have occasion to go to New York City but it often doesn’t work in the opposite direction.

If people don’t know human beings from a group, they’re more vulnerable to stereotype and caricature.

SH: In various times of my life outside the Midwest, I would get nostalgic and say to a friend, “Oh, I miss how pretty the Midwest is in the spring.” That was always a complete conversation stopper. It wasn’t an idea that many people could comprehend, that there might be beauty there.

SS: I was thinking about this because I recently went to the Wichita Art Museum to see a photography exhibit about contemporary farmers in their 40s, so roughly my generation, who care about things like sustainability, who are owning the mistakes of their ancestors and who are fighting against all economic odds to hold onto the land in the face of corporations and industrialized Big Agriculture. And this exhibit documents that. And I was so moved, because it occurred to me that I have never seen what feels like my home landscape validated or explored in the context of an art museum, other than the Dust Bowl, which feels like the last image of the region in the popular imagination. Wherever I go, I get “Dorothy” jokes [from The Wizard of Oz] and I’ve had people literally reference The Grapes of Wrath with no sense of irony or self-awareness. It boggles the mind. It’s a testament to how powerful a strain of contempt for particular regions of the country have proven to be in our collective framework.

SH: Along the same lines as the photography exhibit, I wanted to ask you about the language you use in this book, which by and large, is written in the conversational tone of “home.” I stopped for a full minute when I was reading and hit the phrase “warsh bin,” which almost moved me to tears. I have never seen that in print when it was not presented either in quotes or in italics. Seeing Midwestern dialect on the page without apology really affected me. But you also present research and move in and out of that manner of speech. Did you deliberate about that, and how did you decide on the balance?

SS: For me those decisions about language have something to do with how the book operates at the sentence level but it also plays a role in the literal theme and the reconciliations offered by the book, a balance between the two worlds I occupy in class terms. None of that was necessarily done with a heavy hand or any overt intention, but there was a decision along the way where I thought, I’m going to write this with the language that is natural to me. That for me is a kind of an integration, with the vernacular and turns of phrase of my home and also a more formal version of English that I come to by way of higher education. That’s kind of how language operates in my mind, as this thing melded together. I speak two types of English: “country” and “fancy.” In some contexts I am very mindfully employing only “fancy,” if you know what I mean. The book felt like it could have both of those forms of expression.

It is the case that having a sense of working hard and not receiving support is a sadly universal American experience at this moment of historic wealth inequality.

SH: The book also uses that language — and the gaps between those two forms of English — to narrate a realization about politics and political orientation. You describe in the book a revelation that occurs in a sociology class in college, where you suddenly see how the odds are stacked against you and your family and your entire community, and that alters your politics away from an individualized sense of judging individuals for their economic failings and more toward a liberal analysis of how class operates. Is there something about the Midwest or rural life in general that acts to suppress the awareness about one’s own context or about class divisions?

SS: That is a complicated question. While I describe that moment in the book as a kind of a political awakening, I was already pretty socially liberal, but economically less so. Yes, that moment was a kind of leftward shift, but it was less about a movement from right to left than it was about a politicization in general. Most of the people I come from don’t vote, especially when I was a kid. Now I think in the country as a whole there’s much more of a sense of political identity, even if it’s in a negative direction, as in tribal identity.

When I was a kid, no one was walking around saying “I’m a conservative.” Those same people might have been voting for Reagan, but I was not around people who were discussing politics, and that came in large part from a sense of removal from the places that made decisions about policy. And frankly that also came from a lack of information. I hesitate to use the word ignorance because that has a negative connotation, but a real lack of information because of the burden of class. If you’re out in a field all day, and you left school in the 9th grade, and you can’t access the language national discourse harnesses to parse the economy and politics…it’s not for lack of intellect or sense of civic responsibility, it’s the default for that place and that class to not have the knowledge, awareness, or language to begin to be engaged — let alone the time.

I think that moment when I woke up to these vague assumptions I’d been holding that were moderately economically conservative, and I saw through what were to my mind now the falsehoods, I guess I became aware of the gulf between the assumptions I had inherited and the facts. For one, it just pissed me off. I thought that if the people where I’m from knew this, they’d be pissed off too. And I was always kind of a rabble rouser in high school. If a kid suffered an injustice with the principal, they’d come to me and ask me to lead a walkout. I’ve always been that person, but I was in the context of a largely apolitical and maybe even disenfranchised place. Once I was on a college campus and started getting the straight dope about things work in this country, you could say it radicalized me, which is a commonplace experience for that to happen.

SH: And then as the Internet and social media became more widely accessible, there’s been a shift more toward claiming right-wing politics as a kind of identity in the places where we are from.

SS: Yes. The Right has been very artful and successful with harnessing and claiming the touchstones of my home and culture.

SH: Interesting. So the Right has appropriated the markers of that culture, in some ways.

SS: Yes. I think it is. And it’s a way to signal, falsely and successfully, to people and to say, “We see you, and we validate your place.” Whether or not people know the details about what the Republican Party really stands for these days, there’s something primal to being seen and recognized. For decades, unfortunately, the Democratic Party failed to do this.

SH: And then unfortunately what many on the Left do is to take all the cultural markers and signs of that place and identity and disparage them, lumping them in with those right-wing politics. So that the culture itself comes to falsely stand for those political views.

SS: Yes! So that makes it kind of an Ouroborous, the image of the snake swallowing its own tail.

I’m a writer and I believe in the power of story to transcend the political divisions that are at the fore today.

SH: You mention that when you were in college, your mom had voted Republican, but then over time her beliefs shifted too. Was your slow discovery of politics a factor in how your family members’ politics changed? What do you think in the larger political timeline caused their shifts?

SS: That’s an interesting question. I just went to an event here in Wichita about how people form their beliefs and why they hold onto their beliefs. Researchers were validating what I always suspected, as someone who came from a small town, where most people were vaguely calling themselves Republican in the ’90s, even though it isn’t the Far-Right thing that is going on now. Now that I’m in the media and most of my close friends has college degrees, I see how it’s a function of group and social belonging in some senses. I’m sure it’s possible that the information I got ahold of in the spaces that otherwise my family wouldn’t have had access to might have influenced my family.

But I think my mom was the first one other than me to have what my biases would call an awakening to the bullshit of the Right. For me it happened about 2001. A year prior I had voted for George W. Bush in my first election, and then I took the sociology class that blew my mind. For my mom it came a little bit after that, with the revelations about the falsified Weapons of Mass Destruction narrative that had been used to justify our military actions in the Middle East. She is someone who always read the news and tried to sort things out the best she could. At that time there wasn’t the social media information silos we have today. In 2003 my mom was reading the newspaper and watching the nightly news, and finally she said, “I don’t care who I voted for a couple of years ago, this is BS.” I feel like she made that shift on her own. My other family members — I suppose it might have influenced them that I was saying, “Hey, come caucus with me,” and get involved.

Stop Dismissing Midwestern Literature

SH: Is your book in an implicit dialogue with Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? What were you thinking as you read that book?

SS: The book was not conceived or constructed in response to any book. But that book was a big piece of political culture. I respect Thomas Frank a lot, and I have written for a magazine he founded, The Baffler. And we have very similar politics. I don’t really like the framework that was seized from that book and that America kind of ran with, which is the idea of “people voting against their best interests.” I’m not sure that he’s the one who articulated that specific phrase, but I do feel like that was the book that made that idea the go-to explanation or mystery. While I might agree with that assessment, it is just by definition a flawed and confounded way to begin seeking to understand people’s behavior. First of all, there’s an inherent condescension, an assumption that someone must be an idiot for doing what they do. Second of all, to me it also suggests that people in some states and regions are voting “correctly” and others are voting “incorrectly.” It suggests that there are essentially different kinds of people in different places. But what I know to be true from the political journey that you and I just talked about is that we are a product of our experiences, which I would think any good liberal would agree with. For someone who is casting a ballot from Thomas Frank’s vantage, which I believe is New York City where he’s lived for decades, it might clearly be a vote against their best interests. But in the context of their own experience, they have their reasons and, heck, maybe it’s misinformation, but it’s not stupidity. I can tell you that.

SH: Are you finding as you travel and read from the book that people are connecting personally with the stories you tell?

SS: I am finding that, and it’s been very humbling. My hope against hope was that that would be the case. I find myself in the role of commentator because of the topics I write about, but at my heart, I’m a writer, and I love language, and I believe in the power of story to transcend the political divisions that are at the fore today. I’m writing about a space and a class that has been stereotyped and maligned, perhaps even scapegoated, that demographic, for our country’s woes. I worried that that might keep people from connecting to the story. It turns out that no matter what city I’m in, whatever context, people from all different walks of life — not necessarily poor, not necessarily rural — connect with the story. I think that might have something to do with the subtitle of the book (“A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth”). It’s a sad state of affairs, but it is the case, that having a sense of working hard and not receiving support — whether it be healthcare or having time off or support to have a child — is a sadly universal American experience at this moment of historic wealth inequality, even if one’s experience wasn’t so extreme as mine.

Inflame Your Loins With The Desire for Equality

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Issue №38

His hand trailed across her breast, tracing a shape with his finger.

“I’m so glad that they didn’t make you wear a scarlet letter after all,” Arthur said. “I mean, you thought your husband was lost at sea. It was an honest mistake.”

“It definitely was,” Hester said, running her fingers through his surprisingly silky hair.

“I’ve also been thinking — your embroidery is so exquisite and the people here don’t appreciate it. Want to move to New York and open a shop? I was thinking it might be nice to hire shunned ‘fallen’ women so they have livelihoods.”

“YES,” Hester cried, falling into his arms and starting the arduous process of removing nine petticoats. Then they had really hot sex, by Puritan standards. So, just missionary with light kissing.

“What are your fantasies, Pierre?”

He took a deep breath, nervous to share his dreams with her. She smiled encouragingly. I can trust her, he thought to himself.

“It would be a beautiful thing, a thing I dare not hope, if we could spend our life near each other, hypnotized by our dreams: your patriotic dream, our humanitarian dream, and our scientific dream.”*

“Well, darling, I meant more like ‘Are you into dirty talk?’ but that sounds amazing too,” Marie Curie said breathlessly. “Let’s do it.”

And they did! Marie and Pierre went on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics together in 1903. Then Marie won a second Nobel Prize, for chemistry, in 1911 — no man required.

Oh, and their daughter ALSO went on to win the Nobel Prize, because we all turn into our mothers eventually.

*Actual quote from Pierre Curie, as he was trying to persuade Marie to marry him.

The firefighters arrive almost immediately and begin battling the blaze ignited when one of my dogs knocked over my pizza- scented candle.

Once safely on the front lawn, I cry out over the roar of the flames, “My dogs! My beloved dogs, Tina Spay and Amy Pawler, are still inside!”

“It’s too dangerous — don’t risk it!” yells my white male neighbor named Chad or Kyle who has probably never had to overcome adversity of any sort.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’d rather die than let cute dogs named after my favorite comedians slash authors slash Golden Globe hosts perish,” replies a shredded fire-fighter who looks like a genetic mash-up of Idris Elba and danger.

He rushes into the inferno. Agonizing seconds tick past — we’re sure he’s lost to the blaze. Until — oh, yes! In the heat, his sculpted outline reappears with Tina Spay and Amy Pawler safely draped over his shoulders, snuffling him in doggie kisses of gratitude. His shirt has been artfully burned away by the flames to reveal a rippling, burnished torso, but — what’s that tucked in his oh-so-very-slim fireman suspenders? He retrieves it and hands it to me.

“I couldn’t help but notice you have some really rare first editions. You can replace your house, but you can’t replace a signed 1970 copy of Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”

About the Authors

Caitlin Kunkel, Brooke Preston, Fiona Taylor, and Carrie Wittmer are comedy writers and satirists whose work has been featured in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and many other outlets. Together, they cofounded and edit the website The Belladonna, which responds to today’s culture, news, and politics with comedy and satire written by women and other marginalized genders.

From NEW EROTICA FOR FEMINISTS by Caitlin Kunkel, Brooke Preston, Fiona Taylor and Carrie Wittmer to be published on November 13th by Plume, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. copyright © 2018 by Caitlin Kunkel, Brooke Preston, Fiona Taylor and Carrie Wittmer