In the early aughts—when I was in high school—my friends and I often chose Claire’s as our meetup location at the mall. We perused the accessories and sometimes could even afford to buy a trendy charm bracelet or puka shell necklace. One humid summer night in Cleveland, a copper arm band caught my eye. It was the kind of thing I imagined Cleopatra might have worn, curled several times around the upper arm, each end adorned with the ruby-eyed head of a snake. The ornament looked out of place hanging from a shelf in Claire’s, as out of place as I felt standing there in a polo shirt and loose cargo shorts, gawking at it. I tried it on, walking around the store, glancing in every mirror. My friends were running late. After a few minutes I stood in front of where I’d found it, considering if I’d really wear it if I purchased it.
“It’s fine for you to try that on as long as you don’t buy it.” A saleswoman had crept up behind me. She was Black, with graying hair pulled back into a tight bun, and she wore stockings, and the sensible, kitten-heeled shoes of a woman who never missed her Sunday church service. I didn’t know her, and yet I knew her very well.
“I’m sorry?”
“You wouldn’t actually buy that. You’re not a girl; it’s not for you.”
She had clocked me.
“No, ma’am, I guess not.”
I typically felt invisible, but with one glance, one comment, this woman let me know that she could see me for what I was—and what I wasn’t.
I placed the arm band into her outstretched hand and rushed from the store, my eyes lowered to the ground as I frantically texted my friends to meet me elsewhere. I was angry and embarrassed, but mostly I felt exposed. I’d been standing by myself in a store meant for teenage girls in a suburban mall in middle America. I typically felt invisible, but with one glance, one comment, this woman let me know that she could see me for what I was—and what I wasn’t.
A year later, a friend and I visited a different mall, a fancier mall, one that didn’t even have a Claire’s. We walked around, he and I, deep in conversation about sexual identity and stereotypes, when he asked me quite calmly, if I had ever considered the idea that I might actually be a girl—one who’d simply been born into the wrong body.
I considered his question. His tone was gentle, but his query was sharp, pointed, and it lodged itself inside of me. I was aware of their existence—because of the T in the acronym LGBT, and because I’d seen episodes of The Nanny and Will and Grace—but trans people had always been, to me, more theoretical than real.
Being “trans” seemed an unthinkable way to move through the world. I was already Black, and gay, and the son of a well-known Baptist minister. I was a high-school senior who had somehow managed to survive at a deeply conservative all boys prep school. Soon I would be a freshman at a progressive liberal arts college outside Philadelphia. I had worked hard in school, convinced that leaving Cleveland and never looking back was the only answer if I wanted to live my best Black queer life. This college—a campus where The Princeton Review said it was easier to come out as queer than as a Republican—was my reward. I wanted to step into the freedom of the real world, and distance myself from the context in which I was raised. I was not looking for further marginalization.
I told my friend that I was not transgender, but his question punctured me like a bullet that wouldn’t, or couldn’t, be removed.
I first had the idea for an essay series centering trans and gender non-conforming writers of color in the fall of 2021. I had recently been named the Editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, a groundbreaking digital literary magazine with an annual readership of more than 3 million. A few months earlier, I’d publicly disclosed my identity as a trans woman, something I’d been preparing to do for two years in response to a question I’d been asking myself for sixteen. When I was named to this new role, I was widely celebrated as the first Black, openly transgender woman to helm a major literary publication.
Around this time, the comedian Dave Chappelle released a new Netflix special, The Closer, in which he pitted the Black community and the LGBTQ community against each other, arguing that queer white people are better off in contemporary American society than Black people and often participate in the racist marginalization of Black people. The role played by different marginalized groups in each other’s oppression deserves a richly considered and nuanced conversation, but instead, Chappelle completely erased the existence of those who live at the intersection of Black and queer identities.
Around this same time, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie published an essay which doubled down on an evasive response she gave when asked whether or not a trans woman is a woman: “…My feeling is that trans women are trans women.” This puzzled me. As a woman who claims to be in alliance with the LGBTQ+ community, her choice to write the essay felt like an intentional anti-trans dog whistle to her global army of supporters, many of whom are self-identified terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).
For all the dialogue surrounding trans identity, the loudest voices in this conversation were never trans people, and in particular, never trans people of color.
But Chappelle infuriated me. The popularity of his special, and the conversation it ignited, remained a major talking point in news media for weeks. Netflix defended the special, resulting in a walkout by their trans employees. Over weeks of social media and news media discourse, what I noticed was this: for all the dialogue surrounding trans identity, the loudest voices in this conversation were never trans people, and in particular, never trans people of color. We were the existential center of a cultural boiling point—and our voices were almost nowhere to be found.
From my fury was born Both/And, a series of fifteen essays published online by Electric Literature, with the goal of elevating emerging trans and gender nonconforming writers of color to a national literary platform. But there was one key distinction—these writers would have the unique opportunity to be edited by a trans writer of color. Electric Literature quickly fundraised to support the series, meeting and then exceeding our goal in just one week, proving that writers and readers alike were hungry for these essays. The popularity of the series, which was published on electricliterature.com in 2023, as well as the ever-growing far-right political targeting of the LGBTQ+ community, further proves how necessary these essays are.
A few nights ago, Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, during which Republicans spent hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads. As I watched the results, my heart fell from my chest. I knew what was coming, and predictably, less than twelve hours later, I tuned into morning shows where I saw political pundits—from both parties—blaming the trans community for the election results. Early analysis saw folks saying that the Democratic party was out of touch with the majority of American voters, that it was too woke, that American families didn’t want grown men playing sports against little girls. The absurdity of that statement aside, I kept thinking to myself, But I’m an American voter, too.
What followed was a profound sense of displacement, politically speaking. While my values are progressive, I have always been a voter motivated by pragmatism and harm reduction. I was raised in a Black, middle class family of churchgoers by parents born between the silent and the baby boomer generations. I was raised to vote in every election. And I was raised to vote without attaching a grave sense of preciousness to that vote. It wasn’t necessary to agree with everything my chosen political candidate said, in part because voting wasn’t supposed to be the sum of my political engagement. It was a chess move, a means to an end, and it was the bare minimum. More simply put, I have always been a registered voter, and I have always voted for the Democratic ticket. Given my values, this means I have also, always, held a deep sense of frustration at the party’s continued pursuit of moderate white voters.
I have always worried that when it comes to policy, measures that affirmed and protected my existence would end up on the chopping block.
Being Black, and being queer, I have always worried that when it comes to policy, measures that affirmed and protected my existence would end up on the chopping block. And very often, that’s exactly what happened. But in recent years, public opinion has shifted. Marriage equality, for instance, has been legal for nearly a decade, and folks have largely realized that their heterosexual marriages were never in danger. Perhaps it was the optimism of youth, or the stability of democracy, but I never looked into the future fearing what it held for me, or my community. When faced with the possibility of a rebooted Trump administration, I felt strongly that Kamala Harris needed to win if I was to maintain any sense of safety.
Whenever progress is made, there’s corresponding backlash. Right now we live in a time of unprecedented targeting against the LGBTQ+ community, and yet we stand on the precipice of an even darker era. Being a writer, I turn to literature in times of darkness—the writing of it, and more importantly, the reading of it. In the face of a political class that, at best, hesitates to stand beside us, and at worst works to bring about our ruin, I introduce you to the brilliant writers in this anthology, all of whom live at the fraught intersection of race and gender identity.
Each of these essays is a wonder, something taken from the heart of its writer and flung, with delicious abandon, into this world. Each essay leaves an imprint, promising to reverberate inside the reader. There is Akwaeke Emezi, who meditates on what it means to be beautiful across gender, and Tanaïs, who writes about the fantasy of making feverish love to another femme, to mark the occasion of a landmark birthday. Meredith Talusan remembers a casual hookup that awakened the woman within, and Gabrielle Bellot travels to Hawaii with her wife, where the eruption of a volcano inspires her inner goddess. These are just a handful of the essays that turn their gaze inward, and backward, straddling—and sometimes weaving—what it means to be man or woman, masc or femme.
There are also essays that turn their gaze fearlessly forward, conjuring the sort of tender, loving future we so rarely get to live. Zeyn Joukhadar considers what it means to be part of a future their ancestors never lived to see. Kaia Ball dreams about their estranged father coming out as trans, and finding a way to accept them. Jonah Wu brings the reader along as he jumps from the proverbial cliff into the world of hormone replacement therapy, embracing a more masculine future. And A.L. Major considers the cost of creating the life, and family, of their choosing.
Historically, trans people have been forced to imagine, or conjure, representation of ourselves into existing narratives that never sought to include us, often using the stories and fictional lives of canonically cishet characters as foundations for possible trans stories. Both/And is unabashed in its portrayal of the fullness of our lives. These essays consider imagination and fantasy as real-world liberation, the heightened visibility and invisibility of trans bodies, trans joy, laughter and love, and trans rage, revenge, and loss.
My community is under vicious attack on every level, but we refuse to disappear, and I refuse to allow our stories, and our lives, to be erased.
At Electric Literature, we believe that literature has the power to shape public consciousness. Storytelling breaks down barriers in numerous ways; perhaps the most powerful being the building of empathy. My community is under vicious attack on every level, but we refuse to disappear, and I refuse to allow our stories, and our lives, to be erased. The time is now for trans and gender nonconforming writers of color to amplify our own voices on our own terms. While the culture is obsessed with us, that obsession has been weaponized in an effort to legislate us out of existence. But it simply won’t work because we’re already here. We’ve been here, telling our stories in our own words, our voices rising to the rafters, ringing so loud that we’re impossible to ignore.
We’ve all heard the groaning, whether in reviews, in books and articles, or on social media: The writer-protagonist is out of touch, navel gazing, insular, unimaginative…The critiques go on and on. These days, any book that features a writer as the main character seems to face this blanket assessment before the spine in question has even been cracked.
Sometimes the critique is valid, but I’d argue that we also need protagonists who are writers, that some stories can only be told through a writer. The writer-protagonist in a novel might be the engine of the book, its central obsession. Or they might be used as a frame that expands the world of the central story. Or they could be a single brushstroke at the end that changes what you’ve just read. To me, the possibilities seem almost endless, and each writer-protagonist offers nuance to the elements of fiction.
My debut novel, Atomic Hearts, is about a writer. The book follows Gertie at two points in her life. In the first, she’s sixteen and spending a secret-filled summer in Sioux Falls with her father, who is struggling with an opioid addiction. She finds escape in the pages of a fantasy novel she’s trying to write, about a girl transported to another world. In the second, when Gertie is thirty-one, we find her trying to find a way, through her novel-in-progress, to reconcile herself with that fateful summer. Teenage Gertie struggles with the ever-darker worlds of her life and her fantasy novel, while adult Gertie’s rejection of fantasy becomes a barrier to inspiration. But it’s through Gertie’s writing that she learns, in different ways, to define what’s real, what’s imagined, and to know when the boundary between the two should be blurred. The books on this list—and many others that fit this theme—were an inspiration to me as I wrote Atomic Hearts. They loom large in my imagination, showing why, and how, writer-protagonists can dispel common knee-jerk reactions to become a tool of versatility in a novel.
On Christmas morning in Mind of Winter,Holly Judge wakes up with the scrap of a line of a poem in her head. She feels, for the first time in years, a physical urge to write. From there, a single snowy day unfolds in a nightmarish spiral as Holly moves from room to room preparing for the arrival of company, searching for the time to write, and wondering at her daughter’s increasingly odd behavior. The book’s ending changes everything, but it’s Holly’s internal musings about poetry and the sense that there is an invisible, physical forcefield keeping Holly from sitting down to work on a poem that make the story vibrate with an odd electricity. That Holly is a poet becomes a tool of mystery in the novel. We feel her muscles twitching toward a pen, but she never quite gets there. It’s discomfort (in a good way) from beginning to end.
As Yoli’s sister Elf tries again and again to die, Yoli is trying to write “the real book.” Yoli, best known for her Rodeo Rhonda series, is in financial straits after her latest divorce, and meanwhile Elf begs to be taken to Switzerland—a place where she’d have the right to die. As Yoli’s resistance to Elf’s idea deteriorates, she starts to wonder how she might pay for such a trip. The answer is to furiously, in a span of days, write another installment of Rodeo Rhonda. All My Puny Sorrows is of course about so much more than the economics of writing, but Yoli’s financial maneuvering—in a way, to save her sister by helping her kill herself—is a devastating, unglamorous, desperate look at the writing life as a means to make money for ourselves and our families.
The year in which Parable of the Sower begins (2024) has come and gone, but its message and predictions are increasingly true. Lauren Oya Olamina, the novel’s first-person protagonist, lives in a walled neighborhood outside of Los Angeles and imagines a philosophy that defines God as Change, which she eventually calls Earthseed: The Books of the Living. Passages from Earthseed frame each chapter, but the novel is also told through Lauren’s journal entries. Lauren also suffers from hyperempathy, a disorder where she feels the physical pain of those near her—which is fitting, for a writer of philosophy, to experience so closely the feelings of others. Following the devastation of Lauren’s neighborhood, she heads north with a group of survivors—and she brings her belief system, which reshapes not just the post-apocalyptic world she lives in but also the idea of God and faith. The blend of formal philosophy and personal writing connects us intimately to Lauren while expanding our view of what survival really means. Parable of the Sower shows how hope begins with words, and how one can transform words into change.
The narrator of Red Pill leaves his family in New York for a three-month residency at the Deuter Center in Germany, ostensibly to work on a project called “The Lyric I”—but he realizes soon that he has no interest in working on this project; in his words, he just “wanted a break.” So, instead of writing, he binges a cop show called Blue Lives alone in his room—which is antithetical to the Deuter Center’s philosophy of communal work spaces. As he binges, he comes to feel his writing is meaningless, and he grows increasingly paranoid that someone is watching him. When by chance he meets the creator of Blue Lives, Anton, he’s certain that Anton is “red-pilling” his viewers. The narrator also feels he’s meant to expose Anton and save the world from Anton’s alt-right worldview. Is the narrator insane, or is what he fears true? Is it possible to know the difference in a world driven by madness? (Adding to the nightmare is the fact the Deuter Center is located across a lake from the villa where the Final Solution was planned.) But threading through Red Pill’s grim, triumphless plot is an autofictional layer: It’s not just the story of a writer; it’s a story the narrator is writing down for us, the readers. Though relentless in its study of our political danger, Red Pill still holds on to the idea that through writing we can try to tell our stories, even if the madness of the world feels both like it’s been with us forever and like it’s just getting started.
Fangirl starts on Cath’s first day of college at the University of Nebraska, but we learn that for years she’s been writing fanfiction online for a wizard series under the name Magicath. Many readers are likely drawn to this YA book for the romance between Cath and her roommate’s ex-boyfriend, Levi, but what I loved was the way storytelling, for Cath, plays crucially into her formation of self as she takes her first steps into adulthood. Cath clings to the idea she can keep writing her fanfiction, even as her college fiction class—and, more and more, her own identity as a writer—encourage her to expand into her own imagination. Fangirl is by no means a perfect novel—fears (and jokes about) sexual assault by random strangers on a dark sidewalk are so exaggerated they end up making the real everyday threats faced by women and girls, and perpetrated most often by the men they know, seem unserious. But in its approach to the development of a young writer, Fangirl is a touching journey. We see writing as a means of coming of age, and by the end we glimpse the beginning of one writer’s quest to find her own voice.
One night in 1935, when Briony is an imaginative 13-year-old, she accuses the son of her family’s servant, Robbie, of committing a crime he’s innocent of. In general, Briony has a natural inclination toward storytelling; and in particular her mind on that night is influenced by a moment she witnessed between her sister, Cecilia, and Robbie earlier that day. In 1940, Cecilia is a nurse and estranged from her family. Robbie’s enlistment is a condition of his release from prison. And Briony, a nurse-in-training, is still a writer. (In a rejection letter from a periodical, with an appearance by Elizabeth Bowen, we read a critique of a scene recognizable as one we’ve read earlier in the book.) While writing is central to Briony throughout the novel, it’s Atonement’s extraordinary metafictional twist of an ending (which I dare not give away to readers out there who don’t know) that to me emphasizes the lengths we’ll go, the detours we’ll take, in life as in writing, to try to find the right ending. It’s a book whose metafictional elements make it so famous it feels almost unnecessary to include it on a reading list 25 years after its publication, but it was probably the first book I read, back in college, that made me realize just how important metafiction can be to a novel.
It’s made clear at several moments in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale that the first-person narrator known to us only as Offred is offering the reader a story. (“Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.”) We know from Offred’s telling that before her capture and conscription as a handmaid to one of Gilead’s “commanders” she worked in a library. She loved books when she was still allowed to have them. While perhaps not professionally a “writer,” Offred is certainly a storyteller with a literary sensibility, one whose voice the architects of Gilead are trying their hardest to silence. In the book’s epilogue, set in 2195 at an academic conference, a Professor Pieixoto of Cambridge University delivers a keynote address on the subject of his discovery and transcription of a collection of thirty cassette tapes found in a footlocker in what used to be Maine, which his partner academic has coined “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which is an intentionally vulgar pun on tail: “That being, to some extent, the bone, as it were, of contention, in that phase of Gileadean society of which our saga treats.”
Near the end of his keynote, Professor Pieixoto scolds Offred for not describing more of the “workings” of the Gileadean empire, or better yet, printing off pages from Commander Waterford’s computer. From this epilogue we learn, for certain, that Gilead has fallen; that Offred was able to record her story, and possibly make it as far as Maine in her escape; and that the world after the fall of Gilead is just as misogynistic, that the academics have little regard for their “anonymous author,” and that Gilead’s worldview was not eradicated, just made, once again, latent.
This postscript changes one’s reading of the pages before it, but to me Pieixoto’s callous critiques enhance the feeling that Offred’s voice is her own. She tells her story as she wishes, and as she is able in her circumstances to tell it. And in Offred’s time, as in our own, telling one’s story is an act of resistance.
My husband and I first met our reproductive endocrinologist (RE) on a cool, weakly lit March afternoon. He sat behind a large desk with a tropical fish tank that spanned the length and height of the wall behind him. I’d come straight from a class and was wearing a jean skirt and leather boots because I needed him to know how sexy and alive I felt. Only in pregnancy is thirty-five considered “geriatric.” At thirty-three, I was still fertile and open to possibilities. Unlike those other women in the waiting room, I wasn’t desperate. I didn’t really need him. I would portray an image of strength. My voice wouldn’t crack, I wouldn’t cry.
Sitting there, I realized I found the doctor attractive. Short, compact and muscular, he pulsed with a sexual energy, as if he could compact the world’s energy in his hands and BOOM, produce a baby. He could definitely help us.
He started with a long series of questions about my health history and our fertility struggles. I did most of the talking with Scott adding details here and there. Each time I spoke, the RE seemed a little impatient, as if he’d heard it all before. He wanted to know how long we’d been trying to have a baby (three and a half years), how old I was when we started trying (twenty-nine), how long it had taken to achieve the first pregnancy (about a year) and then, the second (another year). I tried to focus on what he was saying instead of the brightly colored fish that swam behind his head.
“And the first pregnancy ended—?” He paused. “I’m sorry. I have to ask,” he said.
I was glad for his sensitivity, but that didn’t make it easier.
“About seven weeks,” I said. No matter how often I went over these losses, I was surprised by the depth of emotion that still pooled beneath the surface. Strange details, a secret history. The bathroom I stopped at after teaching my class on the morning the bleeding had started, the old, ugly yellow tiles on the floor at my feet, the shuttle I’d taken up the hill to the parking lot and how sure I was that the student who got on after me could see the pain and fear on my face.
No matter how often I went over these losses, I was surprised by the depth of emotion that still pooled beneath the surface.
“And what happened then?” he said, gently.
I told him how I’d called the doctor’s office and a nurse had suggested rest. How the bleeding had continued and I’d ended up in the ER because I didn’t know how painful a miscarriage would be. I said I’d had a fever and threw up. I didn’t say how the doctor in the ER had put his hand on my leg and said he understood how hard it was, or how I’d appreciated that tenderness.
I looked around the room and tried to focus on the facts. Paper, fluorescent lights, folders, desk, black dress shoes poking out from underneath the desk.
I told him we’d started trying again a few months later and that I’d gotten pregnant for the second time about eight months after that. I said that for two years I’d gone to acupuncture, watched my diet, tried to relax, gone to yoga, tried not to worry, tried to forget how important this all was. I wanted him to see I’d been so, so good.
“And the second pregnancy—what happened then?”
He looked up and pushed a box of tissues toward me.
“I’m sorry, but this is important.”
“We were so happy when we heard a heartbeat at the first ultrasound around eight weeks,” I began.
Scott squeezed my hand.
“I’d been really nauseated the entire time. Then, right around the twelve-week mark, the nausea disappeared. I thought it was normal.”
I pulled a tissue from the box and wiped at my nose.
“We had the second ultrasound in the thirteenth week,” I continued. “We went in thinking everything was fine. That we made it through. But then there was no heartbeat.”
That one sentence conveyed so little about the actual moment. It seemed my clear-eyed strength could not save me from the sudden flood of memories: the OB’s cold instruments and her magenta dress, the way the air had suddenly flattened when she said she couldn’t find a heartbeat. How I’d thought she was wrong at first, that she was mistaken or talking to someone else, how her eyes had filled with tears.
It wasn’t this doctor’s job to care about all that. I held my breath, afraid that if I breathed, it would all come rushing out.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, softly.
We went through the rest quickly. The D & C after the second miscarriage to see if we could determine what had gone wrong and how the tests were inconclusive, and then, later, more remedies, tests and procedures.
“We’ve never had any answers,” I said.
At the end, he took me in for an ultrasound. As he moved the transducer wand around inside of me, he announced that my uterus looked good—really good.
“Nice, smooth lining here,” he said. And I felt proud and happy, as if I were responsible for my fine-looking uterus, as if it were a sign.
Back in his office, he scratched a few more things into my chart and when he finally spoke, it seemed he wanted me to understand the seriousness of my situation.
“At 33, with your history of two miscarriages and no pregnancies in the two years, things don’t look great,” he said.
I stiffened, skeptical. Wasn’t it his job to scare us, to make us believe the only way forward was with his help?
“But what are our chances of conceiving on our own?” I said. “I mean, considering I’ve gotten pregnant twice already?”
“I’d say between 1-2% each month,” he said.
That math didn’t compute. I realized I’d been half expecting him to say that we didn’t need his help. That we should just keep trying on our own and eventually it would happen. Fertility treatments were for couples with a diagnosed problem. We didn’t have a diagnosis, which I wanted to believe meant it would eventually just happen. But now I realized this doctor with all his tests and data had the upper hand. He had the precedence of the hundreds of women he’d worked with before me. Numbers don’t lie. Perhaps, he knew my body better than I did.
He said that IUI, or intrauterine insemination, would be a good place to start. Since we’d managed to get pregnant twice already, maybe we just needed a little help, and IUI was cheaper than IVF. He knew neither procedure would be covered by our HMO insurance. I’d start on Clomid to encourage the production of more egg follicles, and we could try a few rounds.
I studied the family portraits that lined the walls above his head. His beloved wife’s hand on his shoulder, their four beautiful children arrayed around them. I saw now that they had procreated in the bloom of youth. His triathlon calves and lush head of hair, her satisfied smile, said all this. I imagined their mansion and pool, the elite private schools for their children and a Porsche parked along their rose-lined driveway.
I saw now that they had procreated in the bloom of youth.
I thought of our dirty old house and felt a flush of shame. There was the kitchen faucet that sprayed water from the handle and our overgrown lawn. The dusty, unpaved alley, our cheap flooring and windows that leaked whenever it rained. Comparatively, our life decisions suddenly seemed misguided. The way we’d sought meaning over money, our teaching jobs and dreams of art, our sensible shared car with its 150,000 miles. The picnics, camping trips and thrift stores. I saw it all so clearly now. We needed more money, and we needed our youth back. We needed better plans, better hair, better teeth, clean countertops. But it was too late now.
That spring, Scott and I had completed a series of foster-to-adopt classes and an adoption home study, which meant we were almost certified to become foster and adoptive parents with LA County. After three and a half years of trying to get pregnant, it seemed it was time to move on. We’d always agreed that we would adopt if we were unable to conceive. But instead of feeling excitement as we neared the end of our certification process, I’d begun to wonder what if. What if we adopted a child and that journey was full of uncertainty and loss, and what if we encountered special difficulties with our adopted child, would I wonder what might have happened if we’d tried fertility medicine? I didn’t want to live with regrets.
I also couldn’t seem to shake a longing to experience pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, to see what our biological child would look like, whether this imaginary child would have Scott’s sense of humor or endless curiosity, my pessimism or shyness. I have trouble explaining this desire even now, how overpowering it was, and why, instead of waning, it had only intensified over the many years we’d tried and failed to conceive a baby. Maybe it was simply about not getting what I wanted. Maybe it was a compulsion to keep striving for something that always seemed just out of reach, a stubborn belief that my hard work and persistence would be rewarded. Maybe it was simply that I had always pictured myself as a mother someday, or at least having the power to make that choice, and I couldn’t yet accept that my body couldn’t do it.
Before that meeting at the fertility clinic, we’d been planning to spend the summer in Mexico where we would attend language school and travel. After the meeting, we decided to keep our Mexico plan but instead of becoming foster-to-adopt parents upon our return, we’d begin fertility treatments.
We’d thought one last fling before adopting a child would be fun, but we were also hoping, I think, that I might get pregnant while we were away. Maybe in Mexico it would be possible to forget about getting pregnant, which many of my friends and family still believed was the answer. Just relax, they said, which was more than a little annoying –it felt impossible. I couldn’t forget how badly I wanted a baby after three years of trying for one. I felt as though they were reducing a real medical problem to an issue of positive thinking, essentially blaming me for my failure. The problem was, I so easily fell into the same magical thinking too.
For four weeks, Scott and I studied Spanish and lived with a host family in the city of Oaxaca. After class each day in the afternoon heat, we wandered the cobblestone streets. In the town zócalo, a teacher’s strike was playing out. Soldiers rode around in the backs of pickup trucks, their guns pointed out toward the sidewalks where we walked. We stopped at bookstores and museums. We sat under trees. We ate tlayudas and tacos on the street. We went to the annual Guelaguetza arts festival and were delighted when Lila Downs took a seat in front of us.
After the month was over, we travelled to the Yucatan. In Tulum, we stayed at a small hotel and caught taxis to the beach. We waded into the turquoise water and slept under the shade of a palapa. The heat was all-consuming. In the afternoons, moody clouds gathered overhead while parrots, parakeets, Yucatan jays and blue-crowned Motmots called out from the jungle. Sometimes, lightning and thunder broke across the sky and then rain fell in great torrents like waterfalls.
A small soaking pool sat in the middle of the courtyard at our hotel. The pool had smooth concrete walls, white tile and an arbor with a vine of flowers for shade. We’d sit there in the afternoons, usually just the two of us, ordering drinks from the bar and watching the other guests. The hotel was half-empty in the middle of hurricane season, and I felt empty too—empty and aimless, but also, free. I sat close to Scott in the cool water, book in one hand, my other resting on his muscular thigh or grazing his swim trunks. When we returned to our room, we were hungry, sick with lust and love. Afterward, I’d feel salty and ironed-out lying next to him under the fan, still heavy with need. I realized I didn’t care about babies anymore. The rest of my life, I decided, I just wanted to feel this way. I wanted pleasure, not pain. I wanted to be in my body and fully in the world.
I wanted pleasure, not pain. I wanted to be in my body and fully in the world.
At dusk, we trekked to town, mud splattered across our calves from the wet streets. I wore dresses that came off easily. We played cards and drank beer, cracking jokes and people-watching in hot, humid bars. We gossiped and practiced our Spanish, and forbade each other from speaking of children. We’d spent years trying to conceive a baby, years that now felt wasted. Away from home, I saw the possibility of forward momentum. Yes, there was a melancholy in my life that wasn’t there before, but here, my sadness took on an exquisitely breakable quality like pain that becomes pleasure, like exoskeletons crushed to sand. Outside of me somehow.
But when the summer ended, we came home to our regular lives. I still was not pregnant. My best friend was about to give birth to her second child, and I helped throw a baby shower for her. I’d started thinking about getting pregnant when she gave birth to her first child, and now four years later, she was having her second. The familiar longing returned. I wanted to know what my friends and coworkers knew, what my sister, mother and cousins knew. It was inexplicable, this biological pining, an unshakeable baby fever.
I was also newly hopeful. I now had a secret weapon that my friends knew nothing about. Baby showers were difficult. I always felt like an outsider as I listened to the incessant talk of breastfeeding and childbirth, sleepless nights and teething toddlers. But now I had science and technology on my side. Surely, my turn was coming.
A package of medical supplies arrived sometime that fall after three failed IUI’s and we’d made the decision to move on to IVF. When I unpacked it all, my medications consumed half of our kitchen table. There were bandages, alcohol swabs, sharps, a sharps container, syringes, folic acid and baby aspirin. There were vials of Menopur for injections that would hopefully stimulate extra egg follicles, boxes of Endometrin and Estrace to strengthen the lining of the uterus. The side effects, I noticed, were all the same: breast tenderness, headache, nausea, irritability and drowsiness. They were also signs of pregnancy, which meant, I realized, that I’d be obsessing over whether treatments were working or if it was simply the hormones.
I texted a photo to Scott. I thought this might be the beginning of a series of photos documenting the life of our child. Look! I’d say to our future child. Isn’t it funny this is how you were conceived?
I made the hormone injections Scott’s job because it was something he could physically engage in after all this time. He hated causing me pain, but his discomfort gave me some small pleasure—maybe now he would understand how hard this had been for me.
One night I had to do the injection myself because I was teaching late and the timing of the shot had to be exact. Ten minutes before class, I unlocked the faculty restroom and entered, glad to find it empty. Inside a stall, I sat with my back against the wall facing the toilet. I removed my supplies from a paper bag and arranged them on a paper towel that I laid on the tile floor: swab, syringe, needle, vial of follicle stimulating hormones. The nurse had shown me how to attach the needle to the syringe, puncture the bladder, turn it upside down and pull the solution into the syringe. I flicked it with my fingertip to remove the air bubbles. I unzipped my pants and pinched an unbruised section of skin on my belly. The bruises didn’t have time to heal between injections, but still, belly was better than thigh—more than once, a jolt of pain had exploded through my leg when Scott had hit a nerve. It wasn’t the idea of pain that bothered me now though. It was my uterus and ovaries somewhere behind the skin, a fear that the needle would reach all the way inside of me. I took another breath and poked my skin with the needle. It bounced off, and a bright dot of blood appeared. I can’t do this, I thought. But not doing it was not an option.
I took another breath. This time I jabbed with more force and like that, the needle slid right in. I laughed out loud as I watched as the fluid disappear under my skin. I’d done it! This one impossible thing that would make other things possible.
A couple of weeks later, I found myself back in my RE’s office to see how many follicles I’d grown. The more follicles you produce, the better the chances of IVF success. Scott couldn’t get away from work that morning, so my best friend had come with me. When the doctor walked in, I felt suddenly foolish. Grown women shouldn’t need hand-holding, his face seemed to say. I should be able to take things in stride. I should be witty, warm, sensitive, self-aware and mature, possessing the wisdom that comes with age, but also a youthful optimism and energy, all while maintaining my sense of humor. In other words, good. Deserving of motherhood. And yet here I was, weepy and weak, a big baby, with my hand-holding friend.
I tried to decipher the images on the computer screen as he measured each follicle and wrote down numbers in my chart.
“Well, I don’t see too many,” he said, finally. “I’m surprised. I’d expect to see more for a woman your age.”
He looked up, saw that I was crying and handed me a tissue.
“It’s not bad though,” he said. “Fine, really. We have enough to continue.” He paused. “Hey, you have a plan, remember? If this doesn’t work, you’ll adopt.”
I nodded. But I hated his tone of pity. And I hated how it sounded as if he’d already given up.
IVF makes you feel like you are finally getting close. After months or years of going about it the old-fashioned way, you feel powerful enlisting the help of science. When I was ingesting all those pills, making appointments and preparing syringes, showing up at the clinic several times a week for blood draws or ultrasounds, I felt like I was working toward something. And after the veins in my arms became sore and bruised, and even after the time a nurse who was filling in for the phlebotomist one Sunday morning couldn’t find my vein and stabbed the needle over and over into the crease of my arm, I didn’t give up. I felt grateful to be doing something measurable and exact.
And yet here I was, weepy and weak, a big baby, with my hand-holding friend.
I wondered if my real problem was one of class and race. Were I not a white, middle-class, American woman with a sense that I was entitled to certain things in life, would I have been so surprised by my bad luck? I might have been forced to move on because other options were out of reach. Perhaps it was selfish or emblematic of my privilege that I spent so many years obsessed with having a baby, so much time and money spent chasing something that just wasn’t meant to be. But in the clinic waiting room, I saw a demographic that matched that of my neighborhood in Southern California. It was a racially-diverse group of working- and middle-class women, all of us accompanied by sisters, mothers, aunts and friends, boxes of tissues nearby, our anxious partners staring at the screens on their phones. They were women like me. I realized that the desperation of wanting a baby and being unable to have one is universal, even if solutions are not.
When the holidays came, we waited for the results of a blood test to see if our first round of IVF had worked. We were in Texas visiting my family, a trip I’d hoped would be a distraction during the two-week wait, which is the period of time between embryo transfer and pregnancy test. Every microsecond of those two weeks had been consumed by doubt and uncertainty, excitement and despair, every twinge a cause for extended analysis. I compared each bodily sensation to what I could remember from my two pregnancies. Were those implantation cramps or period cramps? Was I extra hungry? Were my boobs extra sore?
We were staying with my sister and her husband and though they knew that we were waiting for our IVF results, my parents didn’t know. My parents had driven back to Dallas after Christmas, and I was glad. My mother hadn’t inquired about my fertility treatments since the first time I’d mentioned it, and I didn’t bring it up. I think she viewed it as a private matter, and I felt relieved to not have to talk about it.
After my first miscarriage, she’d cried softly into the phone.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I just don’t understand. None of the women in our family have had trouble getting pregnant.”
I felt a familiar clenching in my chest, like something twisting or breaking. It was a comment that recalled all the ways she thought I’d failed at womanhood, something I’d heard from her before. I was different from my older sister and different from her. As I was going through puberty, she’d mused out loud, more than once, about why I was so tall and flat-chested, or why I was so sensitive and shy. And now, why I couldn’t have a baby.
After my second miscarriage, she’d asked about the tests we’d had.
“Did they find out what’s wrong with you?” she’d said over the phone.
Even though I’d learned in adulthood to love all my imperfect body was capable of, to love the pleasure it gave me and others, the experience of going through infertility had revived all my old insecurities, and my mother’s questions hit this raw, tender place. Perhaps my infertility was a sign that my womanhood was flawed, that my mother had been right all along. There was a natural flaw that I couldn’t fix, some innate stubbornness or immaturity, and it was also, somehow, my fault.
My mother was trying to deal with her own shock, I think. She was trying to understand. She wanted me to know she was concerned, that I was loved. But I wanted her to tell me it was going to be okay, that I’d done everything right, that there was nothing wrong with me. That I’d make a great mom someday. I wanted to be mothered.
On the day of the pregnancy test, I woke up early. Scott and I dressed quickly and drove thirty minutes to a medical clinic that would do blood work on New Year’s Eve. A few hours later, my cell phone rang. I sat down on the bed in my sister’s guestroom and answered it, Scott sitting next to me.
“I’m sorry, Kathleen,” the nurse said. Suddenly, every piece of bad news I’d ever had blew in all at once, like a crack of thunder.
That afternoon, we walked for a long time. The suburban streets of my sister’s neighborhood were empty and quiet, and the winter trees looked arthritic in the cold dusk. I shoved my gloved hands into my pockets and wiggled my fingers in the holes of the lining in my coat.
My dictionary tells me that the word pitiful means deserving of or arousing pity, something lamentable or mournful. Despicable, contemptible or miserable. But none of these seem exactly right. I felt pathetic. After five years, my situation had become redundant. I wondered if listening to me had become burdensome. Surely, I was exhausting to my friends and family. A pitiful version of a woman, a faulty link in the ancestral line. But maybe what I hated most was needing everyone so badly.
That spring brought another failed round of IVF with frozen embryos leftover from the first round, and then a third and final round with fresh embryos. Since money was an issue (i.e., credit card almost maxed out), my cousin, who happened to be in the middle of her own IVF struggle, generously offered me all of her leftover medication. Her excellent health insurance had paid for fertility treatments so she could get more medication. My doctor found a way to work her medication into my protocol and also enrolled me in a study that would help cover the cost of the remaining drugs. He said we’d be more aggressive with the medication on this last round, which would hopefully stimulate more follicles.
But I did not grow more follicles and after laboratory fertilization, we ended up with four embryos, exactly the same number as the first round. The doctor scheduled my last transfer at 5:00 a.m. on a Sunday to fit it in around a triathlon he had later that morning. My acupuncturist, who’d seen me every week for two years and had listened to me on some of my hardest days, agreed to meet us at the clinic at that early hour. The acupuncture treatment would cost another $400 hundred dollars, but since it had been proven to increase IVF odds, it seemed worth it.
I felt pathetic. After five years, my situation had become redundant.
The office suite was quiet and dark when we arrived, and a nurse led us to the transfer room. The acupuncturist put on some drumming music I liked and gently began tapping needles into my skin. One between my eyes and another on the top of my skull, which were my favorite points because of the intense and immediate release of pressure in my head, like steam from a vent. She placed a few needles on each leg near my shins and knees. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe.
Afterward, Scott came back in the room. The three of us cracked jokes about the doctor showing up in running shorts with sweatbands on his wrists and forehead. Scott made increasingly ludicrous suggestions about the doctor’s potential attire and what else he might demand of his staff at 5 a.m. It felt good to laugh. I was optimistic: we had four good embryos, and I felt healthy and hopeful.
The doctor came in looking spry and healthy and shook each of our hands in turn. At our first embryo transfer, his question about whether we wanted to transfer one or two embryos had surprised us. It was not a question Scott and I had discussed and for a moment, we’d felt triumphant. Not only would I get pregnant, I’d have twins! This time, sobered by experience, we said we wanted to use all four embryos.
I lay back on the table, and the doctor threaded the catheter through my cervix. I felt a slight fluttering sensation when he released the embryos into my uterus and then, it was over. Compared to other treatments and tests I’d undergone to become pregnant, this was the gentlest. I felt almost nothing. No passion, no pain. I tried to enjoy it. I was a receptacle, an empty room, a vessel. Afterward, we followed protocol and waited for twenty minutes. I remained lying down on the table and Scott held my hand. We were quiet.
When I can no longer write about this, I spend the morning going over my old charts, and I begin to see myself the way I suspect my RE saw me. I become a patient, a body, a problem, columns of numbers in a chart. White blood cell count, red blood cell count, hemoglobin, hematocrit, MCV, MCH, MCHC, RDW, platelet count, absolute neutrophils, lymphocytes, basophils. I read his terse, practical notes from our first meeting: infertility, SAB x 2 SAB, discussed treatment option, Plan 01 +/- IUI, Heparin in pregnancy.
It’s my experience he recorded there but devoid of all emotion. If only it could have been so straightforward, if only I could have been an efficient machine, scientific, neutral and predictable. But I see the intangibles in between the lines of my chart. His desire to make my dreams come true, my own emotions and embodied experience, and the grand, existential mystery of conception.
In the old files, I also find a computer printout of our embryos in pyrotechnic color.Colored in aqua, hot pink, red and yellow, they looked like bulbous, tropical fruits. My first round of IVF had produced just four viable embryos. Some women get as many as eight or nine. Embryos are graded on a scale of one to four, four being the highest. The grade is based on how many cells have developed by day three and how distinct the cells look, i.e. whether the edges show fragmentation. A “perfect” day three embryo has eight cells, no fragmentation, and evenly sized cells. I’m not sure what grade mine received, but I knew they weren’t perfect.
When I examine them now, I notice two that look pretty good with six cells each, blooming on top of each other like little chrysanthemums. But even these good ones have smaller blobs breaking free from the main mass. The other two have just four cells and show a lot more fragmentation, little breaks and uneven edges, crevices and dark creases.
In the old files, I also find a computer printout of our embryos in pyrotechnic color.
On another printout I see the two frozen embryos we used in the second round that were in even worse shape. They look sad and featureless. One is collapsed on one side, like a deflated balloon. Another is wrinkled and lopsided with dark spots like tiny moons circling the main clump. Despite all this, I’m struck by a sense of possibility. For all those years of trying to get pregnant, I’m reminded that we could make embryos. And suddenly, I feel an inexplicable sliver of hope.
It was June when we found out our last round failed. Almost a year had passed since we’d started fertility treatments. In that time, we’d endured six failed treatments between IUI and IVF, and we both knew we’d come to the end. The hormones had made me unbearable to myself and to Scott. We were out of money, patience and emotional reserves. After taking four containers of sharps to the hazardous waste facility and then vacuuming under all the beds, after clearing out the hand-me-down maternity clothes I’d been stuffing in closets for the last five years and throwing out all the extra syringes and empty pill bottles, the house felt empty. School was out, and both of us were off for the summer. With no more IVF appointments or acupuncture, I suddenly had so much free time.
I’d never wanted to call myself infertile. Infertile meant you’d never have kids. Infertile meant you had a diagnosis. Infertile meant you were incapable of getting pregnant. I’d struggled to accept I was any of those things. But that was what I’d become: broken and imperfect, infertile. Barren.
I felt sad and moved slowly, as if I were swimming underwater. I wandered the rooms of our house, angry and irritable. In the evenings, Scott and I lay wrapped together on the couch watching violent, fantastical TV shows. Vampire shows and detective shows and serial killer shows. I liked feeling a manufactured fear in my chest. I spent hours at the library enjoying the air-conditioning and checking out novels. At night, I stayed up late, stretched out on the couch with my books and a gin and tonic, crying over the plotlines.
And yet. After all the injections, blood draws and anesthesia, after all the hormones, charting of temperatures, giant pills and bitter Chinese herbs, after all the appointments and scheduling and the years of monitoring of my caffeine, sugar and alcohol intake, there was an immense relief running alongside this sadness. And the depth of this relief surprised me. This period of waiting had been burning me up. Now, the burning would stop.
I decided to paint a wall in our living room and spent days putting up sample patches of paint: dandelion, tangerine, sky blue, sage. Scott knew to steer clear of this project. Nothing seemed right. I sat on the couch staring at the bright colors, as if there were an answer there. I liked standing at the sink to wash the paintbrushes, and I liked feeling the cool water that ran over the bristles and how the paint flowed out, lighter and lighter, until it was clear.
After I finally settled on a mushroom color and painted it on, I sat and stared at the new wall. I felt fragile and hollowed out, but there was also a small flutter in my belly. I recognized it as lightness, maybe even joy. I wondered that something as small and pointless as painting a wall could fill me with such a sense of possibility. For years, I’d been at the mercy of a powerful, unknown force. It’d been a long waiting period full of ambiguity. It’d been so long since I felt any sense of agency over my own life. But now I realized I still had choices.
I would not get pregnant, or experience my body being everything for my child.
Even on the question of children. If I even still wanted children, which I wasn’t sure that I did, it wasn’t going to be the way my friends had done it. Instead of panic, I felt a small sense of acceptance at this thought. So my children would not look like me. So I would not give birth. I would not get pregnant, or experience my body being everything for my child. I would live with that grief the rest of my life. Well, so what—so fucking what? The end game had always been parenthood, not getting pregnant. I could still become a parent. I’d always known that, but now I felt it in my body.
Somehow too, Scott and I had remained partners. We still loved each other. We basically still had everything: our health, our dreams, our home, our jobs, our friends and family, our community. Yes, I’d struggled. Yes, I’d wanted to move toward what I saw as more love and more life. There’d been harrowing detours and blockades, but I could keep moving.
I had to accept that my body was fragile, infertile and tragic. But I saw it so clearly now: it was also profoundly, and gloriously, alive.
Even at the loudest parties—say one of Gatsby’s, with the grotesque and glittering abundance, the “salads of harlequin designs” and “floating rounds of cocktails”—it’s often the private conversations and murmured asides that move a story along. Equally thrilling are dinner parties of an entirely different scale: a tense group of couples at a modest table, or the family holiday during which the lacquer of politeness cracks and the truth seeps out. Among my favorite things about reading fiction is how many parties I can attend without having to leave my house.
In my debut novel, The Other Wife, one of the ways I came to understand the characters was to place them in social situations in which they were supposed to have fun. The desire to be seen as a “really fun person” drives many of the narrator’s decisions. As I wrote about her time in college, I noticed how often the appearance of joy, especially at parties, demanded her effort and calculation. I started to wonder more about the way party scenes work on the page. Parties, I realized, demand two distinct registers—a broad sense of the event and a narrow focus on the interpersonal—and offer writers a great opportunity to create a mess.
As a reader, I’m not especially interested in the parties that go as planned. In the books listed below, each writer uses a party’s celebratory chaos as a backdrop for something important, whether dramatic conflict or quiet realization, to brilliant effect. The party is a tool that puts characters under pressure—to impress as hosts, to perform as happy celebrants. In the hands of these skilled authors, parties build to become spectacular displays of literary talent and social insight.
Haroutunian’s collection of linked stories focuses on friends Taline and Valerie (“Tal and Val”) as they navigate college and the years that follow. In “Twenty-One,” the opening story, an egg strikes Val in the temple as she and Val make their way to a Halloween party, presaging more extreme events to come. Once they finally arrive, the festivities themselves take a surprising and violent turn that will haunt Val for years. Haroutunian’s precise, understated prose sets up the questions that expand in the fourteen stories that follow: what does it feel like to grow older, to mature? How do people grapple with ambition, both artistic and personal? How do the relationships of early adulthood evolve? How does one salvage the pleasure and wash away the rest? That last question is top of mind for Val in “Twenty-One” as she cleans her face: “I want to remove egg, retain glitter.”
Taylor’s second novel, set in Iowa City, follows a range of people at various stages of financial, professional, and artistic success. Fear of debt and the fact of debt cast a shadow over this landscape; the financial preoccupation feels especially vivid when Fyodor, who works in meat processing, attends a party at a gallery. Gazing at his fellow party attendees, Fyodor thinks: “They were anonymous, elegant people who seemed part of a different species […] Nothing in his life had anything to do with this place.” Fyodor’s anguish leads to a public outburst. In a gallery at a party, Fyodor becomes—unwittingly, and unbidden—his own temporary installation, a thing to be observed. Later, in the car, he asks his (sometimes) boyfriend, Timo, “‘Did you have a good time?’” The question reads as both perfunctory and absurd, and Timo’s response: “‘No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t,’” is unsurprising. This brief exchange holds several of the novel’s overarching questions, as does the landscape of the party itself: questions of money and pleasure, public behavior and private sorrow.
This story collection, winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize, is chock-full of parties; one wonders how many times the word “gin” appears. There are fundraisers and dinners, vacations and holidays, often set in the suburbs of New York City, and there is always a sizzling undercurrent of desire—sometimes for another person, sometimes for escape from the party, sometimes, somehow, for what is already there. Under the sparkly décor and chiming glass, these stories are piercing, haunting, and deeply melancholy. Cheever’s masterful ability to build tension allows seemingly cheery exchanges (“‘Why, thank you for coming!’”) to introduce a worrisome chill to the sprawling gatherings. Insincerity blazes as brightly as the jewelry at these endless social events. This quote from “The Children” says it all: “It was not the Mackenzies’ idea of a good party. Helen Jackson tried unsuccessfully to draw them into the circle of hearty, if meaningless, smiles, salutations, and handshakes upon which that party, like every other, was rigged.”
Shipstead’s debut, set in an East Coast island town, follows the Van Meter family—Winn, Biddy, and their daughters Daphne and Livia—over the course of Daphne’s wedding weekend. The novel is playful in its treatment of the Van Meters’ extensive wealth and avoids deriding it. Shipstead takes care to truly develop these characters, both acknowledging their material comfort and exploring the limitless hunger for more that persists despite all they have. For Winn, this desire includes a reckless, if often comic, desire for Agatha, one of Daphne’s bridesmaids. The beauty of the Van Meters’ world is rendered without excluding its fissures and flaws; a glossy aspirational tale this is not. As he prepares to join his family on the island, Winn is wary of what lies ahead: “[N]ot a straightforward exercise in familial peacekeeping and obligatory cheer but a treacherous puzzle, full of opportunities for the wrong thing to be said or done.”
One of Strout’s most complex and unforgettable characters, Olive Kitteridge anchors the majority of these linked stories set in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine. Olive is jarringly blunt, but she is also consumed by compassion for her neighbors, and is often the voice, or offers the literal hand, that hauls people out of despair. At her son’s wedding reception, Olive finds even the slightest sensory detail to be antagonistic: other people’s clothing, the sound of a door closing, the odor of a guest’s perfume. Against the backdrop of the wedding—a “smallish, pleasant affair”—and the reception that follows, Strout reveals that beneath Olive’s gruff refusal to play along is deep-seated fear. Of the newlyweds, Olive has an astonishing flicker of silent insight: “They think they’re finished with loneliness.” Overwhelmed with conflicted feelings for her son—her desire for his happiness, and her doubt that he may have found it—she hides away from the party in his bedroom. Even lying on a bed in the middle of a party, she cannot achieve the solitude or peace she’s seeking—people keep coming to the door. Strout uses the chatter and fragrance of the party, the niceties and rituals, to put Olive’s thoughts about love and fear in sharp relief.
Friends of the Museum is a gorgeous and very funny whirlwind of a novel, packed with characters aplenty—there are enough of them to justify a “Cast of Characters” list before the novel begins. This is just right for the occasion at hand: The hours preceding a fundraising gala at a New York City museum. Pivoting rapidly from one character to the next, McGowan drums up the frenetic energy required to pull off such a magnificent event. The novel’s commitment to such a range of voices—from the Curator of Film to the Chief Security Officer—reflects the enormous volume of labor and planning behind these major events and institutions. As McGowan intuitively knows, they are also the perfect, insular setting for scandals, of which there are many, all exacerbated by the fact of the gala itself. The demands of the party push each character to their limit; the occasion drains them of pretense and forces their secrets into the carefully curated light.
Barrett’s novel follows two superb story collections (Young Skins and Homesickness) and features a cast of unnerving, violent, clever characters. Dev Hendrick—quiet son of an ill, absent father and dead mother—agrees to let his home serve as a satellite for criminal enterprise. Barrett presents the story out of chronological order, and deepens the painful suspense—what will happen to Doll English?—by describing the party at which Doll is kidnapped in exacting, granular detail. Excruciatingly, Doll spends several minutes at this ill-fated gathering describing an earlier party, in which his brother “‘did tear the lobe a bit’” on another man’s ear. In the world Barrett creates in these pages, social activity is always laced with potential danger.
Set in an ever-changing, beautifully rendered San Francisco, Edgarian’s novel is the story of Charlie Pepper and Lena Rusch and their family, friends, and colleagues. Within minutes of meeting Lena and Charlie, the reader is ushered into the first of several parties, a New Year’s Eve celebration hosted at the Pepper/Rusch home. Edgarian uses the event to introduce a rich and varied group of characters and circumstances, including the crucial conflict: Charlie, a surgeon who needs funding for a medical invention, secures that funding from Lena’s wealthy, paternal uncle, Cal. Lena happens to detest Cal for his long-ago affair with her mother; worse, Cal employs Lena’s ex. A second party, in honor of Cal’s daughter’s engagement, brings Lena and her ex together, raising the stakes and complicating Lena’s life and marriage.
On the news a man holds an alligator like an infant. In his home there is a jacuzzi tub in the living room for the alligator to water-rest while the man watches Gilligan’s Island or MacGyver. At one point he puts the gator’s face to his own and smooches it all over like unexpected rain. The gator blinks his thin lily lids in reception. In considering affection, I think first of touch then of obsession — I do not know softness without longing, and although the alligator is far from soft, his entire constitution communicates love. My lover collects . . . perhaps the sentence stops there. I too extend myself through objects though mine is most of a gathering, some of a worshiping — talismans that remind me of my mother or the saint I believe my mother to be, martyred and mine. I take a midterm this week in the form of an office conversation — just the two of us talking ego, waxing God. The balance is off, the power in his favor, and every gland of my body sweats in shame of my self-centered approach to artmaking — how I see myself inside and in-middle, very little Lord. He says there is no inside/outside, no self- separate, that if I am in right relation, if I am in gift-giving, (and this he encourages, but softly) then I too love beyond physicality. The alligator could be my child — Frankenstein’s monster my chance at grace. I believe my precious things are material tethers to acts of creative and saving gestures. I did not say this first, the professor did during the midterm, and because I hoard quips, sentiments, heart-moments, perspectives, and the rest — a compulsion to know so much from so many somatic spaces — I become the light-echo of a star that died billions of salty years ago. It makes no sense really no sense no sense since too much light resurrects the dead, and if the dead come back, what do I do with my blasphemous treasures? Where does the grace go? And who will tuck the gator in at night?
Now, I’m not an astrology girlie—which I think is technically a finable offense here in Los Angeles. But I do think the stars performed some elaborate cosmic choreography to ensure I shared a timeline with Rax King. Underneath her name, her email signature declares her the “Unofficial Writer-in-Residence at The Cheesecake Factory”—which confirms that we were also destined to become friends.
The James Beard Award-nominated writer and author of the wildly celebrated and critically lauded collection Tacky has bestowed upon us mere mortals a new banger. In Sloppy, King dives headfirst into the gloriously complicated parts of life: addiction, heartbreak, ADHD, grief, sex work—all the things (to quote my favorite musical, Chicago) we hold near and dear to our hearts. From her parents’ deep commitment to 12-step sobriety to her own indulgences like shoplifting from Brandy Melville, she explores the tangled web of addiction, impulsivity, and mental health with unvarnished honesty, sharp humor, and a refusal to tidy anything up for the sake of comfort.
A messy blessing sent from above, Rax King reminds us that embracing the mess is the truest form of grace.
Greg Mania: Like ‘“tacky,” I’ve always identified with “sloppy”—and I don’t see that changing, no matter how therapized, financially literate, or otherwise “grown-up” I get. How has your own relationship to tacky evolved alongside your claiming of sloppy? And what’s it been like to reconcile both as permanent parts of who you are?
Rax King: Well, “tacky” and “sloppy” are both words with somewhat negative connotations. Tacky things are understood to be in poor taste, while sloppy ones are understood as dirty or messy. These are two qualities of mine that I used to wish I didn’t have. I wanted to be the sweet, thoughtful, ladylike person, which is very funny to remember now—I can’t even picture myself as ladylike in my imagination. I probably could have become that person if I had the willpower for such a significant character overhaul, but we both know I don’t. It was either change or reconcile and, predictably enough, I picked the easier option.
Whatever flaws are in me, I now have to accept they’re inescapable.
GM: You call reconciliation the “easier option,” but it feels like there’s deep work in claiming these identities. Besides writing this book, what did that reconciliation actually look like for you—and do you still find yourself having to reconcile with those parts of yourself?
RK: Reconciliation of my, shall we say, less admirable traits is certainly an ongoing process. Actually, sobriety has helped a lot because, without substance abuse to fall back on, I have nowhere to hide from myself. Whatever flaws are in me, I now have to accept they’re inescapable. In practice, I’ll admit that means I spend a lot of time groaning and squirming, feeling mortified as I triage old memories that I never dealt with, but it’s better this way than living in a constant cycle of blackouts and hangovers.
GM: You and I both write about the messy truth of things—obsession, sex, desire, heartbreak, identity. But Sloppy feels like such a confident deep-dive into that territory. When did you know this was the book you had to write next?
RK: I quit drinking, and it was as if that “messy truth of things” had been waiting for me to sober up before it beat the shit out of me. In active addiction, it was easy to either glamorize my constant self-sabotage, or to numb myself from its effects before they could really wound me. In sobriety, all I could do was try to understand those ugly tendencies so I could repair the damage they’d done. So I guess Sloppy is me presenting my findings—the sloppiness undergirding all my choices, good and bad, and the changes I’ve had to make in order to live with it.
GM: Did sobriety change how you write—not just what you write about, but the actual process?
RK:I definitely had to find some new processes in sobriety. We tend to mythologize the roustabout writer who can only access his genius under the influence of his chosen drug, and that mythology allowed me to mask my self-destructiveness behind this guise of nobility, as if it were actually brave and appropriate for me to only write mid-blackout. These days, maybe because the inside of my head is quieter, I also demand that my workspaces be quieter—dead silent, ideally. It’s the only way I can retreat inward the way I think most of us have to do in order to write well.
GM: The first chapter hit me hard—I also lived with undiagnosed ADHD until adulthood, and getting that diagnosis made my whole childhood and adolescence click into place. I was diagnosed two years ago, and I’m still figuring out how to live with it. How is your life with it now?
RK:Oh, it’s great! I’m completely fixed! No, I mean, it’s a relief to at least know something is wrong with me—not something nebulous and impossible, but this specific, knowable, treatable thing. But at the end of the day, even if I can treat the problem, I can’t make it go away. They say that when you’re sober, you really need to watch your sobriety, because your addiction is out in the alley waiting for you and doing push-ups. A similar thing is true of ADHD for me. I have to make it a priority to hold it in check as sternly as possible, because the second I let my guard down, ADHD will come for me—and it’s stronger than I am.
GM: Another thing we have in common: taking our clothes off for money—and stepping into a persona to do it. You were a stripper; I was a go-go dancer. What did that version of you teach you about performance, identity, or control? And how do you relate to persona now?
My biggest takeaway as a stripper was that men are disappointingly easy to manipulate.
RK: Honestly, my biggest takeaway as a stripper was that men are disappointingly easy to manipulate.I think I had been in their thrall until then, desperate for their attention, miserable whenever I felt like I was losing it. And a big part of what made those early relationships with men so hypnotizing was that I kept thinking of them as creatures essentially unlike myself. Like, they fell for me for reasons I didn’t understand, and lost interest for equally unknowable reasons. But in strip clubs, you learn how to effortlessly push their buttons—you have to, your income depends on it. Those jobs demystified men in a way that was mostly good, because it was a huge time suck to be constantly in the throes of one incomprehensible heartbreak or another, but there was also an element in it of learning that Santa Claus wasn’t real or something.
GM: Let’s see—drugs and alcohol, sex and messy relationships, service industry jobs, money chaos… all things I’ve also lived, and all things you write about with so much heart, humor, and clarity. But before Sloppy took its final shape, were there times you wrote just to process—before you knew what was publishable? And what did that kind of writing teach you about what belonged in the book?
RK: I’m always writing just to process, so the answer to that question is yes, sort of—but the writing I do to process almost never makes it to publication. Oddball pieces might, like if I happen to generate a good sentence while I’m sob-writing, but it’s mostly important to me to maintain a firewall between therapeutic writing and the stuff I share with the world. I always tell my students that it’s inadvisable to write from an open wound. Good personal writing always feels like the author is exploring some dark corner of herself, trying to shine a light into it so she can map it out properly, but before I show people the fruits of that exploration, I want to make sure the dark corners are safe to investigate!
GM: How do you know when writing has crossed the threshold from therapeutic to ready for readers?
RK: I tend to maintain a fairly strict firewall between writing-as-therapy and writing-as-offering-to-readers. Some of the therapeutic stuff does cross that threshold, but it happens almost by accident—like, in trying to heal myself, I tell myself things I didn’t know I knew, and some of those insights feel book-ready, and others feel like things I really should have learned sometime in the anonymous LiveJournal years.
GM: You also write about grief—how memory can live inside the background noise of an object, like your father’s ashtrays, which suddenly become so present they feel almost haunted. When did you feel ready to write about that loss? And as a writer whose voice is naturally funny, do you feel like you need to metabolize grief with humor before it can live on the page?
I tend to maintain a fairly strict firewall between writing-as-therapy and writing-as-offering-to-readers.
RK: I started writing about my grief for my dad before I even got his ashes back from the funeral home, and I can’t even reread those early words about it, that’s how full of pain they are. At this point, he’s dead seven years—the grief isn’t gone, it’ll never be gone, but it’s not so lacerating that I can’t face it with humor by now. Although, that said, my grief vented itself through humor pretty frequently in the weeks after he died. I used to tell people very bluntly that my dad was dead, and then I’d burst into hysterical laughter for no reason I (or they) could understand. It was wildly inappropriate, which only made me laugh harder. Nothing was funny, but that made me feel like everything was.
GM: If Samantha Irby is my mom, you’re absolutely my sister. Who else would you cast in our literary family tree of funny writers?
RK: Aww, I love this idea! Definitely Kristen Arnett is on the family tree, and Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and Mattie Lubchansky. And I’d be quite remiss if I didn’t shout out the great Tommy Pico, who made me cry laughing when he read at Franklin Park about a million years ago.
GM: Tommy Pico—interesting, I’ll make a note to check out his work later tonight… when I go to his apartment… where I pretty much live… because I’m sleeping with him. Seriously though, how does writing alongside these and other writers shape your voice and your work?
RK: Most of the writers I admire, their voices are reminiscent in some way of the way they actually speak. That’s been hugely influential for me, this idea that the sound of one’s own natural voice can be transmitted to the page without passing through too many layers of self-conscious manipulation, and that’s the way I try to write.
GM: Sloppy is a love letter to messy, complicated personhood. What’s something you’re still learning to claim or embrace about yourself as you move forward?
RK: Ha, wouldn’t you like to know! If you’re reading this, I want you to assume I’m fixed and therefore normal now.
About two months ago, my 6-year-old daughter asked me, “Dad, if you could have any superpower in the whole world, which would it be?” The ability to fly immediately popped up and why wouldn’t it? It would be sublime. But after some consideration, I answered, “I’d like to have the ability to talk to animals.” She asked why, and I told her I want to know how they feel and what they think about everything. It’s become a recurring topic of conversation between us since.
Animals play an integral role in my novel Habitat. The book is made up of nine linked narratives and the closest thing to a recurring character throughout is the clones of a celebrity dog that stars on a science fiction television show, and the descendants of those clones a century later. I was listening to a Neil Young song, “Like an Inca,” around the time the book began gelling together. The beginning of the song sat with me while I finished writing the book and it serves as the epigraph. It involves two animals from different species discussing the downfall of a human civilization. The lyric helped me perceive animals as not only the victims of humanity in the world of Habitat, but also our observers, those historians who survive us, forever watching us rise and fall, again and again.
This is a list of books that engage with animals in different ways, probing their behaviors and our relationship to them, our sympathies for and atrocities against them. These books attempt to think about animals as they naturally exist and encounter the world. And, if the first selection on the list stands out, know that I chose it for personal and autobiographical reasons—it was an early and confusing reading experience. Who knows, it may have even jumpstarted my interest in the portrayal of animals in fiction.
I read this book nearly forty years ago, when I was too young to be reading it. I was at an age when any novelization of a film or franchise that I loved was paper gold, a glorious reincarnation of the movie. While a shark does play a large role, the novel spends more time with the non-shark hunting lives of its characters, exploring their alcoholism and extramarital affairs. The mayor in both the film and the novel is hellbent on keeping the beaches open for the summer surge. However, in the novel, he’s being pressured by the mafia, who have invested heavily in the Amity Island beach community. This may have been the first reading experience in which I felt like the book “isn’t really about” the shark, a childhood realization that, in retrospect, prepared me for novels like Moby Dick. Still, at the time, Jaws bewildered me.
An epigraph precedes this short story (originally published in Recommended Reading!)…
“They knew me as the one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose.” -Leonard Michaels, “In the Fifties”
And then the first line: “They knew me as the one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose—and liked it.” This beginning puts the reader into the perspective of an animal-loving narrator and sets up a story that focuses on the feelings, the fears, and the allegiances of the dogs in this high-kill shelter. Each paragraph begins with either “They knew us as…” or “They knew me as…” The result is ten heart-breaking and heart-warming pages for anyone who’s ever cared about a dog, or any animal for that matter. It chronicles the ups and downs of caged dogs who are likely to be euthanized. It’s a story that speaks for them, loves them, and expresses profound confusion in the face of a world that allows them to be killed. I often revisit this collection when I need some help jumpstarting a day of my own writing.
I’ve never encountered a book by Stephen Graham Jones I didn’t like. Every book is a new departure in horror writing, exploring subgenres, and experimenting with plot and structures. The Only Good Indians is broken up into three sections and centers around an incident from ten years earlier when four friends, all adolescent boys, illegally ambushed and shot a herd of elk, including a pregnant mother elk. Ten years later, tragedies start befalling the grown men and those close to them. At the same time, they begin to have visions of a vengeful elk. Throughout the novel, Jones weaves in Blackfeet culture and questions about violence against women and the natural world. The Only Good Indians can be read, from a human perspective, as a horror novel, but through an elk’s eyes it might be read as an action revenge story about a magical elk spirit with “a very particular set of skills.”
Vasko Popa (1922-1991) was a Serbian poet who incorporated surrealism and Serbian folklore into his modernist style, exploring the significance of the wolf and the relationship between the Serbian orthodox church and earlier folkloric beliefs and traditions.
This collection, which I adore, is broken up into eleven parts, featuring several series of poems that touch upon the figure of the wolf. St. Sava, the founder of the Serbian orthodox church, is shown both reconstituting the wolf in service of his religion and being himself transformed by the symbol of the wolf.
In one series of poems, “Wolf’s Earth,” a father and son debate whether the wolf that they witness intertwined with the Earth is attempting to devour the Earth or protect and admire her: “Does he have a sweet tooth/For her bitter flesh/Or is he just praying to her beauty.”
The figure of the wolf in these poems is beyond our control or understanding—a symbol of a past that cannot be rewritten or forgotten despite the many ways it must contend with the present.
A few years ago, I wouldn’t have thought I needed a study devoted to the raccoon, but after reading Justice’s book, I came to understand the impactful role the animal has played in our planet’s global and cultural history. It’s part of Reaktion Books’ Animal series, which has published over a hundred such books about the natural and cultural history of different animal species. Raccoon is an incredible examination of the animal that delves into its natural history, symbolism and cultural origins, appropriation to perpetuate racial stereotypes and hatred, and myriad other ways it has impacted the human world.
One of the many illuminating takeaways about the raccoon is its resilience and adaptability. The raccoon of today lives in a world that, if we were in its paws, would be in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Its natural habitat has been largely destroyed by the bottomless expansionism of human civilization. And despite this, the raccoon has adapted and learned to survive. With powerful physical dexterity, an omnivorous appetite, and an evolving intelligence, raccoons have an innate ability to create new and thriving homes in the wake of loss and exile. We could learn a lot from them because, as Justice considers in his epilogue, the future may be raccoon.
The Bees immerses the reader in the dystopian tale of an authoritarian regime in transition. The protagonist is a bee named Flora 717 and the story is set almost exclusively inside of a single beehive, which imposes a strict hierarchy on its members. Bees of the upper castes are named after specific plants, but those born of a lower caste are all named Flora. Most Floras are relegated to sanitation for their entire lives, removing waste and dead bees for the hive. But Flora 717 is assigned to different jobs throughout the novel: working in the nursery for the Sage (a group of priestesses), a stint in sanitation, and then making her way to foraging. These reassignments allow the reader to explore both the physical spaces of the hive as well as the architecture and motivations of the different castes, uncovering the ruthless political agendas ever-present in a hive whose Queen is ailing. The more we see of the hive and its bees, the more the novel reveals itself to be as a much a story about the real lives of bees as it is a metaphor for the fascist machinations of human power struggles. A political thriller in a beehive, a compelling protagonist, and an author whose extensive research seamlessly holds together all its parts—I couldn’t put it down.
Of all the books on this list, Ed Yong’s exploration of animals’ senses brings me closest to the experience of communicating with them. Yong begins by imagining a human joining an elephant, mouse, robin, owl, bat, rattlesnake, spider, and mosquito in a room, and then describes the sensory experience of each animal. While all occupy the same space, their individual experiences highlight the different ways in which they sense an environment and alter our understanding of how they might feel.
An important distinction Yong makes concerning what we understand and don’t understand about animals’ behavior and senses is that while we may be able to discover, biologically, how an animal “reacts to what it senses,” we don’t know “how it feels.” In the chapter on “Pain,” Yong writes: “Imagine your entire body became delicate to the touch whenever you stubbed your toe: That’s a squid’s reality.”
For anyone seeking a better understanding of how animals experience the world—not how we experience animals in a vast network of ecologies making up a world that we think belongs to us but how they might feel—I can’t recommend An Immense World enough. It’s a wondrous journey.
I first read Denton Loving’s latest collection of poetry, Feller, shortly after the sun rose, on my back porch. It was one of those seasonally cool summer mornings. The wind was stirring. Branches were gently swaying. Squirrels and chipmunks were mingling below my birdfeeders out in the yard, and a couple of blue jays, in conversation, were making use of one of the old birdbaths. They were nourishing the weeds below as much as they were themselves. My dog was in my lap, taking it in. It was the perfect kind of reading experience for Feller, a collection of poetry that beautifully observes the life of the natural world. Often, it feels like an ode sung to Appalachia.
In Feller, Loving explores many of the complexities of our shared experience. There are poems here, like “The Moon Was Only a Rumor,” that make me feel connection, that ineffable thing we’re always looking for. Another poem, “Returning,” one of the book’s standouts, does the same thing for the idea of home. I could feel that too. At other times, Feller shifts to explore longing—which pops up again and again—and love, such as in the exquisite “The Octopus School of Poetry.” This is a book that you feel as you read—even when you put it away, its images and moments linger.
Loving and I were able to connect and discuss the progression of his work, poetic warmth, place, and more.
Bradley Sides: I’m sure many readers will come into Feller having read your previous collection, 2023’s Tamp. I’m always curious about the process of closing one book and beginning another—and how the two works are in conversation with one another. Can you talk about what shifted you into Feller and how you see it as both separate and similar to your previous book?
Denton Loving: I always have a lot of projects going on at the same time. In the case of these two books, Tamp and Feller, I was moving back and forth within the same period of years, writing poems about my dad and my grief after his passing, and then switching gears to write about whatever else was on my mind.
The poems that eventually became Tamp came out of me trying to process my grief. I never set out to write a book about my dad, but there was a point when I realized I had enough poems about my dad to make a book. A bit later, I suddenly knew that Tamp was finished. It wasn’t that I had written all I had to say about my dad or about grief. I could write a dozen books about my dad. But perhaps the intensity of my loss had subsided.
It was only after Tamp was completely finished—when I could take a long look at all of the poems that were left—that the shape of Feller emerged. My process is to be as organic as possible and let the book reveal itself to me.
In comparing the two books, I think my voice is fairly consistent. I think there are threads that overlap in both books, for instance, my attention to nature and particularly to the place where I live. Tamp was a very personal book, but Feller feels personal in a different way, perhaps more deeply revealing. Many of the poems in Tamp were things I wanted to share about my dad and our relationship. Many of the poems in Feller come from a more private place, and express emotions I didn’t want to write about. But the poems called for it.
BS: When Electric Literature hosted the cover reveal for Feller a few weeks back, I was really intrigued by what you said about the title: “Feller won out because I was playing with the word’s multiple meanings, and I loved that the word is so colloquial and brings with it a feeling of intimacy. It was through that framework that I could most imagine a reader diving into these poems, hopefully finding and applying layers of meaning as they read.” I love that idea of a title helping with a book’s intimacy. Outside of language, what are some of the other ways you gain intimacy with your readers in Feller?
DL: When I teach poetry workshops, I often start the sessions by talking about how I like to think of a poem as a secret. It’s a secret that is being shared widely. But it’s coming from somewhere very deep inside the poet’s being. That’s how my more successful poems are, anyway: deeply personal but bursting to escape.
Another way to think of this is to allow myself to be vulnerable. That means, for me, that I have to sometimes put away the idea of publishing the poem. When I’m writing, I don’t want to give space to worrying what people will think when they read certain things. So sometimes I convince myself that I won’t publish the poem, that I just need to write the poem for myself but don’t ever have to show it to anyone. By the time the poem is finished, I usually come around to sending it out into the world. Because it’s exactly that piece of vulnerability that usually makes the poem succeed. And if you can’t allow yourself to be vulnerable in the poem, then what’s the point?
Many of the poems in Feller express emotions I didn’t want to write about. But the poems called for it.
BS: Do you ever worry of being too personal or too vulnerable—or is that just not really a thing as far as you are concerned?
DL: On a personal level, yeah, I definitely worry about revealing too much. Like I said, I almost always convince myself to send those poems out for publication, but some poems make me feel really uncomfortable to share. I felt that way about everything I wrote when I first started thinking about publication, many years ago. My philosophy ever since the beginning has been to embrace that uncomfortable feeling. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Now let me answer from a craft angle. In thinking about my own drafts and the rough drafts I’ve read from friends and students, I think poems that are exceptionally vulnerable are usually very tied to our emotions. If the poem hasn’t had time to cool down, those emotions come out of a vulnerable space and can come across as melodramatic. So that’s an argument for giving the poem whatever time it needs,and for revising your work, and for finding really good readers who will help you know how the poem is coming across.
BS: As Feller opens, you give us a series of poems—“Bluebird Dreams of Red Fox,” “Bluebird Dreams Red Fox Has Wings,” “Bluebird Flies Too Close to Red Fox,” and “Bluebird Removes Red Fox’s Tooth”—that explore the natural world, while also tackling topics such as desire and closeness. I want to hone in on the natural world first. It is abundantly apparent that you have a special bond with nature. Has that always been the case?
DL: I can’t say that I was one of those kids who lived in the woods and knew all the birds and trees, etc. I wasn’t. I was more of an indoor kid, living a very interior life, inspired fairly equally by television and books. But even so, the natural world was always really present for me, both physically and psychologically.
One reason is because my parents made a conscious choice to raise me in a rural setting, on a farm near the woods. There were animals there, both wild and domesticated. We raised big gardens and planted an orchard. All of that was important to my parents, especially my dad. He really had been one of those kids who spent most of his time outside. I still marvel at the way he could identify trees by their bark.
It took me a long time to fully appreciate everything my parents taught me, but as I’ve grown older, I’m more observant and more interested in what’s around me. I’m also just more interested in the connectivity of the natural world, especially in the fraught age we live in where the environment is changing in drastic and dramatic ways.
BS: I previously mentioned “desire.” As I was reading, I kept marking poems that explore this topic in some variation—we see it from humans, animals, and just the world. “Thirst” and “Breach” are examples of two that come to mind, but there are many here. Is it the universal shared experience of desire that makes you explore it? Or something else altogether?
DL: I started my writing career with fiction, where I was taught that every character should desire something. It can be as small as a glass of water, but it is desire in whatever form it takes that motivates character and creates action. So maybe I’ve carried that into my poetry. You mentioned “Thirst” which literally is about the desire for water. But metaphorically, it’s about a past relationship, and how the brain obsesses over what’s absent. I think you’re right, I am interested in writing about desire. It’s universal. I’m also interested in the many different ways desire manifests. Sometimes it’s about romantic love, sometimes about friendship and basic connection. The poem “Returning” explores a conundrum I often have in life which is centered around place. There are so many times in my life when I’m home that I’m plotting to leave. I love to travel and explore, and there are so many places I want to visit. I want to go see my friends who live all over the country. And yet, when I’m traveling, I get homesick. I often just can’t wait to get back to my house and my boring routine. And that’s something I’m especially interested in when it comes to desire and wanting—the way our desires twist us up and play games with us, and the way we want things that we know are bad for us or won’t work.
If the poem hasn’t had time to cool down, those emotions come out of a vulnerable space and can come across as melodramatic. That’s an argument for giving the poem whatever time it needs.
BS: Traveling is one of the things that inspires my writing the most. Since you mentioned it, I’m curious how else traveling impacts your work, if it does.
DL: Travel just generally opens our minds, right? As a writer, it so often yields new material, in both directions. There’s the material that comes from entering new spaces and learning new things. And, on the other hand, being away helps me appreciate home more, which I think leads me to some important moments of wonder. I see the place I’m from in different ways after returning from somewhere else.
BS: You live in Appalachia and your work is often classified as part of the Appalachian literary tradition. Your poetry respects the place you know, and at the same time you are also able to expand that place. The result, for me, is that your poetry feels both of home and of the bigger world, too. In one poem, for example, you plant us under a chestnut tree. In another, we are in “sticky Kentucky,”and among the songs of the whippoorwill in a third. But at other times, you also allude to Mount Athos, Xanadu, and Montañas de San Miguel.
I’m curious how you view place and its impact on writing. Is it ever limiting? Is the way we write about it a gateway to understanding something or connecting with someone beyond the regions from which we write?
DL: Place is foundational to all of my work, both my poetry and prose. Just this weekend, I taught a workshop about writing place-based poetry. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about—I live by Eudora Welty’s words: “One place understood helps us understand all places better.” That doesn’t mean that I claim to understand everything about this place where I live—neither the eighty acres of farmland and orchard and woods where I literally live, nor in the larger sense, this corner of Appalachia with its complex environment, history and socioeconomics. But it’s my place, and it’s a gift to understand it to the extent that I do. No one else is positioned to know it in exactly the same way. So it feels almost like a duty to honor that in my writing. But not in a limiting way. As a younger writer, I struggled to understand why anyone would care about this place, which maybe felt less glamorous or less interesting to a younger me than nearly every other place. Now I see it as endlessly fascinating. And as a differentiator, or as I said before, a gift. Addressing sense of place in my work allows me to share this place with people who don’t know it. Likewise, I feel entranced when I read work that helps me know places that are unfamiliar to me. It’s definitely more of a gateway than any kind of limitation.
BS: I love that: “Addressing sense of place in my work allows me to share this place with people who don’t know it.” Who are some of the writers you think of that present place really well?
I don’t consciously set out to observe the world. But I’m in the world, and I find it impossible to ignore everything in motion around me.
DL: This is a dangerous question because there’s no way I can include everyone. I’ll say that Maurice Manning’s work has been an inspiration and a model for me since I first started writing poems. Everything he writes is shaped by place in one way or another. Ron Rash, also. Some of the other poets I met early in my career who inspired me to try poetry are George Ella Lyon, Anne Shelby, Jane Hicks and Jesse Graves. All four of them write so well about place. Joy Priest, Annie Woodford, John Davis, Jr., Kari Gunter-Seymour, but there are so many others. And I’m limiting myself here to poets. There are so many fantastic prose writers whose work is inspired by a sense of place. I’ll end this list with Jennifer Stewart Miller, who is another poet who consistently inspires me and has taught me so much. Her poem, “This poem has a highway in it,” is the first example I always teach in my workshops about writing about place.
BS: Feller ends with “Rosy Maple Moth,” which is such a beautiful poem about moths and life. Truly, I’ve probably read this poem a dozen times. I’m so moved by it, and it’s absolutely the perfect poem to end the book. Reading it makes me realize how like, my goodness, this world, when we look hard enough, is full of small wonders, but we have to take the time to look.
I want to close by asking you about your own relationship to the act of observation. How much time do you spend just looking and listening and seeing our world?
DL: I don’t consciously set out to observe the world, or not as much as I should. But I’m in the world, and I find it impossible to ignore everything in motion around me. Today, for example, the farmers in my community were rushing to put up the first cuttings of hay before rain sets in, and the smell of fresh cut and curing hay was everywhere in the air. In the mowed fields, vultures combed through the piles of hay searching for the snakes and rodents that get caught in the mowing. An indigo bunting flew across the gravel road, its blue feathers shining in the June sun as it swooped down in front of my car and back up before it disappeared into the trees. I saw a fox slink out of the woods behind my house, and a mockingbird was divebombing the little fox, warning it away from its nest. There is always something happening around here, and that’s true for all places. We just have to be open to seeing it. The rosy maple moth is a great example. I spent the majority of my life never coming into contact, or more likely just never noticing these moths, and then one day, they appeared in front of me. And they refused to be ignored.
Tato’s package arrived yesterday. My birthday was two weeks ago, but it doesn’t matter. A banged-up cardboard box covered in American stamps always arrives at the post office a few weeks after my birthday, my little brother Yuri’s birthday, and Saint Mykolai. Yuri turned eight in April. Tato sent him a stuffed crocodile. The crocodile has big pointy teeth, so Yuri named it Arkady Petrenko, after our dentist. Arkady came with a postcard from Florida, where real crocodiles live, crocodiles without beady eyes and olive-green fuzz and tags that read “wash with like colors.”
I wonder if Arkady will be cold when winter comes here in Ukraine.
For my birthday, Tato sent art supplies. He sent colored and graphite pencils, pastels, conté sticks. They all came in their own wooden box with a latch that makes it look like something a pirate might bury on a desert island. He sent tortillons for blending and smudging lines, and sticks of charcoal made of the world’s blackest black.
Best of all, he sent a sketchbook. It’s leather-bound with a strap and a buckle and one hundred thick, deckle-edged pages. It’s heavy and feels ancient in my hands, like some sacred relic unearthed from the ruins of an ancient city. The cover is decorated with the silhouettes of skyscrapers, the skyline of the city where Tato lives. He inscribed the inside cover in his messy handwriting: Now you can draw here instead of your math homework. Don’t forget—I love you!
Nothing I can draw could possibly match the sketchbook’s grandeur. But I can’t just leave the pages blank either. So I decide to draw only the most important things in the sketchbook—one hundred important things.
Tato knows that I love to draw. I’m good at it, and I’m proud to be good at something. My art teacher, Lyudmila Mikhailivna, compliments me after every lesson. Art is the only class where I earn good grades—tens and elevens. My Ukrainian grades aren’t terrible, sixes and sevens, but I don’t care for anything we read, all the old dead poets, and when I don’t care for something I can’t pay attention. In history and geography, I’m always looking out the window or sketching something inside my textbooks. Our class teacher, Antonina Romanivna, scolds me, and I earn fives, fours, even threes.
I sit at the back of class 6B by the window and share a desk with my best friend, Viktor, whose grades are even worse than mine. We distract each other constantly, whispering until Antonina Romanivna shouts us back into silence. And when we have to keep our mouths shut, I draw—on the backs of corrected worksheets, on the desk and on my left arm. I bring my drawings home to Mama, and I slip at least one in every package we send to Tato in America.
Now, in our apartment, I stare down the sketchbook’s first blank page. Its perfect snowy whiteness challenges me, taunts me. While Mama is at work, there isn’t much in our apartment to draw—just our bedroom and our fat old calico cat, Monya, who spends her days in a pool of sunlight beneath the kitchen window, curled up in a lumpy ball of fur and flab. I’ve already drawn her over and over. So my brother Yuri and I go for a walk in search of something important to draw.
We pass Varvara Tykhonivna and Oksana Ivanivna, the two babusi who spend every day on the same bench in the courtyard—even hot August days like today, and even in the winter snow—gossiping about everything that goes on in our corner of Chernihiv.
“You could draw them,” Yuri suggests. I consider it for a moment, then shake my head. They would never pose for me. I don’t think they like me. I hang out with Viktor and I know they don’t like Viktor, because he’s a troublemaker, and everyone knows it.
We walk further down Nestayko Street. We live at number thirty-six and Viktor lives at number thirty-eight. Our apartment building is the one with the giant chestnut tree in front of it, and Viktor’s is across the courtyard from ours. Viktor and I once tried to hold a conversation by shouting to each other from our bedroom windows, and it worked until some killjoy opened his own window and yelled across the courtyard that it’s two in the morning, go the hell to sleep.
Yuri and I cut through the Chernihiv City Garden, past the Ferris wheel, the statues of dinosaurs and squirrels, the carnival games where you can win a stuffed animal if you shoot close enough to the target.
“I want to play,” he says.
“I don’t have any pocket money,” I tell him. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”
We turn left onto Shevchenko Street and cross the Red Bridge over the Stryzhen, the creek that slices the city of Chernihiv in two. When we were little, Mama used to bring us here to feed the ducks. We pass the sushi restaurant where we celebrate the last day of school every year. We walk along the ancient ramparts of the city.
“One, two, three, four . . .” Yuri counts aloud as we pass the twelve cannons, their shining black barrels pointed toward long-dead invaders. Mama once told me that when she was young, before she met and married Tato, she rejected men who asked her on dates by offering to meet them at the thirteenth cannon.
“You don’t want to draw any of this?” Yuri asks as we pass Saint Catherine’s Cathedral, its five golden cupolas shimmering in the summer sunlight.
I shake my head. It’s all beautiful, and it’s all home, but it doesn’t feel important enough to take up space in my new sketchbook. The sketchbook is now the most precious thing I own. It came from Tato. His handwriting is still warm.
Yuri rolls his eyes. “Are you sure you like to draw at all?”
For weeks, I leave the sketchbook blank. During our math lesson, I hand the sketchbook to Viktor, open to the first page.
“Just draw something,” I tell him. “I can’t take the pressure.”
“Artem, chel,” Viktor whispers, sliding the sketchbook back across our desk to me, “you know I can’t draw.”
“Vovchenko, Haidenko!” shouts our teacher, Antonina Romanivna. “No side conversations!”
“You should draw Antonina Romanivna,” Viktor whispers. “Make sure to get all her chin hairs.”
When we take a trip to the village, Vasyukivka, to visit our grandfather, Did Pasha, he suggests that I draw some of his animals. He has a sow named Manuna that screeches when you get too close to her pen, and a billy goat named Zhora who likes to be scratched between the stubs of his horns. When I open the sketchbook, Zhora pokes his snout over the fence and tries to eat the paper. I yank it away from his fuzzy lips and scold him, but he keeps on smiling.
The August heat sticks around late into September, and every window in Chernihiv gapes wide open, begging for a breeze. Mama takes me and Yuri for one last swim in the River Desna before the end of summer.
Yuri and I race each other up and down the path through the woods to Golden Bank Beach, our sandals slapping the soles of our feet. Mama lags behind and times us.
“Who won?” Yuri asks when we come panting back to her.
“Artem,” Mama says, “but just by a hair.”
I stick my tongue out at Yuri.
“Just by a hair,” Yuri reminds me.
At the beach, grandmas sell cups of fresh strawberries and raspberries. Men drink beer and bite off tough, salty chunks of dried fish. Mama finds a place to spread the blue blanket she always brings from home, the only one that’s allowed to get sandy. A place for us to eat sandwiches and dry in the sun when we’re done swimming. Yuri and I pinch our noses and squeeze our eyes shut as Mama sprays us with sunblock. We rub it into our chests and calves, the tips of our ears and the bridges of our noses.
Even in September, the River Desna still carries the memories of last winter. The chill of the river offers a sweet respite from the heat. Yuri and I wade up to our bathing suits, chests, shoulders, shrieking in delighted agony when the cold water laps up onto our hot skin. We snatch in vain at darting minnows. We sink down to the bottom of the river, kneel on its silty belly. Underwater, Yuri smiles at me, sticks out his tongue. I make a face like a monkey, and he laughs a cloud of bubbles around both of our faces. Down here, the whole world disappears. It’s only me and him. The sun filters through the surface of the water and paints us with spiderwebs of light.
And then it hits me. I know what Tato would want me to draw in his sketchbook. I know what’s important enough for the first page.
Just before bedtime, Yuri and I sit together on the windowsill in our bedroom. He sits still, and I stare at his face.
“Turn a little to the right,” I tell him.
He fidgets as he waits, bouncing his right leg. Only the scratch of my pencil breaks the silence; only the occasional scrub of the eraser, the brushing away of dust.
We used to fit together in this windowsill comfortably, but we’ve both grown, and now we have to fold ourselves up to make room for each other, our knees by our chins.
It’s raining, but we keep the window cracked open. Our apartment is always a little too warm, even in the winter. Whenever Mama notices that we’ve opened the window, she shuts it and tells us, “Better too warm than too cold.” She’s afraid that we’ll catch colds from the draft.
She likes to remind us that she grew up in the village, in Vasyukivka, in a house that Did Pasha warmed with a wood-fired furnace, and she didn’t know the sensation of warm toes until she was a grown-up living here in Chernihiv. I always tell her that she doesn’t have to sleep beside Yuri, whose body could heat the entire city through a blizzard. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning the sheets cling to my sweaty skin.
Yuri stays still for me. I reach past him and switch on our table lamp. The light illuminates his stack of comics and books about Greek myths. It illuminates the row of toys that he has accumulated over the years, the toys the cashiers hand out at Silpo with every ninety-nine hryvnia you spend on groceries. Beside the toys, there’s a Zhivchik soda bottle filled with coins we’ve picked up from the sidewalk, and there’s Yuri’s geode—another souvenir Tato sent from America. A dun and dusty rock, split in half to reveal a secret, gleaming crystal heart.
I make gentle, noncommittal strokes with my pencil, waiting for my brother to burst into clarity on the paper.
With the lamp on, I can see Yuri’s face properly. The side of my left hand is gray-black now, my fingers smeared with graphite. I make gentle, noncommittal strokes with my pencil, waiting for my brother to burst into clarity on the paper. His fidgeting right foot jostles my sketchbook, and the line I’m drawing veers off to the left.
“Oi, lokh.” I seize his ankle and hold his foot in place like an animal I’ve trapped. “Hold still.”
He wiggles his toes, trying to escape. I grab his foot with both of my hands.
“I’m working on your nose right now,” I tell him. “Want an elephant trunk instead?”
He sighs, rolls his eyes. “Fine.”
Rain falls, and the chestnut tree outside our window rustles in the wind. That tree is older than we are, older than Mama, older than the apartment blocks that surround it. Yuri and Viktor and I once climbed it to see if we could reach our bedroom window from the courtyard. Viktor and I were too heavy for the weaker branches, but Yuri was small and fearless. He almost made it all the way to the top; he only came down when Mama noticed and yelled at all three of us. She yelled at him for climbing too high, and she yelled at me and Viktor for letting him.
Beside the chestnut tree stands a telephone pole, and atop the telephone pole sits a stork nest, two meters tall and shaped like an old chimney. When we were little, Mama told us that our people had always loved storks, and storks had always loved us back. She told us that, in the winter, the storks and all the other birds and insects fly south to Vyriy, the land of eternal summer and giant ferns and warm wells that bubble with healing water. She always watches for the return of those white feathers and sharp orange beaks, legs as thin and gangly as the twigs from which they build their nests.
When I finish, I turn my sketchbook around to show Yuri. He takes it and examines it closely, his brow furrowed. The top half of his face was the easy half. The dark and unruly locks of hair that cover his forehead, his eyes that disappear into his smile, his ears that tend to stick out of winter hats.
“It’s good,” he says. “But my mouth isn’t right.”
“Because you’re always talking,” I tell him, turning the sketchbook back around. “Or eating.”
I know he’s right. The bottom half of his face is still under construction, covered in the faint ghosts of lines that I drew, thought better of, and erased. Yuri has buck teeth that Mama calls “charming” and Arkady Petrenko—the dentist, not the crocodile—calls a “severe overbite.” I can’t draw his mouth right, not without making him look ridiculous, like a caricature of himself. Someday, maybe soon, Yuri will need braces. I can’t imagine him with neat, orderly teeth. Braces would change his entire face.
There’s a knock on our bedroom door. Mama steps in without waiting for an answer.
“Bedtime, boys,” she says. Her hair—wavy and so black it shimmers blue in the sun, just like Yuri’s, just like mine—is tied up in preparation for sleep. “Yuri, go brush your teeth.”
“Five more minutes?” Yuri asks, which never works.
“It’s late,” Mama says. “Go. Quick like a bunny.”
Yuri rolls his eyes. From our bedroom, I hear the familiar, irritating noises of Yuri getting ready for bed—spitting his toothpaste theatrically into the sink, the clink-clank of the toilet lid and seat hitting the tank, pee hitting toilet water, the sounds that accompany the funny faces he makes in the mirror.
Mama sits down next to me on the windowsill. “What did you finally decide to draw?”
I show her my sketchbook. She leans in close. On her breath, I can smell the lemon tea she drinks throughout the day.
“It’s not done yet,” I tell her when she doesn’t say anything.
“You’re headed in the right direction,” she says. “Work on that shadow there, next to his nose.”
Mama has always been the best artist in the family. When I was little and I wanted to learn to draw real people, not just stick figures, she taught me how to make heads look more like heads and less like eggs with ears. When I mastered that, she showed me how to shade with the side of my pencil, to crosshatch, to convey light on a page. The shapes and shadows all come to her effortlessly. They arrive in her head prearranged into pencil strokes. She knows exactly which line should go where, how hard she should bear down on the pencil. I used to beg her to erase the bad parts of my drawings and redraw them herself, but she always refused. She says that she would never erase my work, that I just have to keep drawing until I am even better than her. As if that’s inevitable.
Yuri returns to our bedroom at a sprint in his underwear and belly-flops onto our bed. I undress and brush my teeth. I hate sharing a bedtime with Yuri. Viktor is an only child and gets to stay up two hours later than I do. Sometimes he sends me texts late at night and I don’t find them until morning.
Mama kisses Yuri’s forehead, then mine.
“Good night,” she tells each of us. “I love you.” And we answer: “I love you.” She turns the lights out, and our door creaks shut. The day is over. Our bedroom is dark except for a thin sliver of light from the hallway. I pull the comforter up to my shoulders, shut my eyes, and lie on my side facing away from Yuri. We always fall asleep like this, with me on the left edge of the bed and Yuri at the right, separated by a warm neutral zone of mattress and duvet. But usually I wake up in the morning with Yuri close to me, his arm draped across my chest.
“Tyoma,” he whispers, a nickname only he’s allowed to use. He bumps my leg with his foot. His toes are cold on the skin of my calf. I give up and roll over to face him. When he breathes, I smell the blue mint of his toothpaste. He’s holding Arkady the crocodile against his chest. “Tell me a story.”
“Not now. It’s late.”
“I’m not tired.” He bumps me with his foot again. I know I’m not going to win this argument. So I tell him the story Tato always tells. I stop the story halfway through, when I’m sure he’s asleep. I know when he’s pretending and when he’s really asleep because he always jerks once as he drifts off, as if he’s driving in his dream and he just hit a speed bump. Then his whole body flares with heat.
Sometimes Yuri is still small, and an eternity lies in the three years that separate us. Still the squirmy bundle Tato introduced me to at the very beginning of my life, the first pinprick of light in the murkiest depths of my memory. I remember Mama lying in the hospital bed with messy hair and a shiny face, Tato holding Yuri to his bare chest. Tato beamed at me, said: “Look—your little brother.” I watched Yuri wriggle and cry and thought: this thing cannot possibly grow into a person.
“He only gets one big brother,” Tato told me that day, “so you have to promise to be the best big brother you can. Promise to love him and keep him safe.” And I did. I promised.
When Yuri was tiny and fat-cheeked, everyone fawned on him, even strangers. Mama and Did Pasha would spend hours discussing who Yuri resembled, attributing his facial features and the expressions he made when he needed to burp to various family members whom I had never met. I found myself vying for attention with someone who could not speak. A cow-eyed, drippy creature, fragile despite all his padding. Mama would praise my drawings briefly and then cast them aside. Sometimes I loved him only because I promised Tato.
It became easier as he got older. One day at Golden Bank Beach I taught him to stand on his head. The River Desna was still dripping from our bathing suits. He toppled over every time. On his fifth try, I watched him teeter, his bare feet skyward. Just before he fell, I grabbed him by his ankles. He laughed, screamed and squirmed, begged me—Let go! Let me fall! But I held on.
Now, Yuri is old enough for Mama to slip twenty-five hryvnia in his pocket and send him to the market on his own to buy her an onion. We used to read picture books together and I would help Yuri sound out words. Now, Yuri helps me with my math homework, which I’ll never admit to anybody, not even Viktor.
Yuri is growing, and so am I. Sometimes we grow so quickly that we don’t know how to adjust to each other. A few weeks ago I swung open the kitchen cabinet and the knob hit Yuri in the face. “Sorry,” I told him. “Your head didn’t used to be that high.”
I turn on the bedside lamp, open my sketchbook and erase the night’s sketch. It’s all wrong. I look at Yuri, and a weight settles in my chest.
Someday, without knowing it, we will sit together in our windowsill for the last time.
We’ll keep growing and growing. Someday, without knowing it, we will sit together in our windowsill for the last time. We will grow up, and we will grow old. We will sleep in separate beds, separate bedrooms. Maybe separate cities. We’ll live with the families we created, not the one we were born into. I always knew this, in one way or another, but tonight I know it differently than I’ve ever known it before, as if it’s just around the corner. Even though we still have years.
I set down my sketchbook and turn the light off. The weight in my chest doesn’t lift until the birds chirp and the edges of the curtains glow.
Every evening for years, Mama has handed me and Yuri her phone. She whispers: “Tato.” On the screen, the flesh-colored pixels of our tato shuffle around, attempting to arrange themselves into facial features. Our internet connection is slow, and the picture is never clear enough to make out the specific details of him—just the vague shape of his face widening into a smile.
Our conversation usually goes something like this: I would say “Hi, Tato.” And he would say “Hi, zaichik.” Little hare. His voice would sound distant and tinny. “Is your brother there?” he would ask. I would turn the phone camera around, and Yuri would look up from his book—something like The Legends and Myths of Heracles—and wave. “Hi, kotik,” Tato would say. Little kitty. “Good. Both of my boys are there. How are you guys? What are you doing right now?”
Tato would always ask us that question. What are you doing right now? He once explained that he wanted to paint an image of our lives in his mind, that it was as important to know our day-to-day as it was to know our big days, our birthdays, and first days of school.
So I would set the scene. “We’re sitting on the windowsill,” I would say. “I’m drawing. Yuri’s reading one of his Greek books.” I would stand up and swivel the phone camera around to show our room, my sketchbook splayed out on the windowsill where we sit, open to a work in progress. “We were listening to music,” I would say. I would hold our earbuds up to the camera. Yuri and I share a pair; I take the left earbud, and Yuri takes the right. Then Yuri would stick out his tongue, go cross-eyed. Tato would laugh, and his laughter would come through the phone just a moment late. Something like that.
As I got older, I began to notice the desperation that churned beneath the surface of Tato’s voice. At first, when Tato was working seventy hours a week on construction sites, we never heard from him. He called Mama late at night, long after we had fallen asleep, because of work, because of time zones. Yuri and I had more conversations with Tato through postcards than over the phone.
When he found a job that let him work fewer hours for more money, we started talking on the phone every evening. At some point, Tato decided that we should switch to video chatting instead. It didn’t bring him any closer. We can see his face now, and he can see ours, but that doesn’t mean he can live our lives with us. Sometimes it feels like a chore to call him and tell him about our day. I feel guilty admitting it. There are basic facts of our lives he doesn’t understand because, as much as he wants to be, he isn’t here for the little moments. We’ve grown in his absence, thought up inside jokes, forged traditions. He left a four-year-old and a toddler in Ukraine, but they are gone. When he left, Yuri was just starting to crawl; now, Yuri can ice-skate for hours and never fall down.
Sometimes Tato tells us a bedtime story. He never reads us bedtime stories from books. He tells his own stories, stories he makes up as he goes along. His stories always start like this: “Long, long ago, in the deep, dark woods . . .” And then his stories always end: “. . . and they lived happily ever after, for as long as the mist lived in the mountains and the stars lived in the night sky.”
His stories take place in the Carpathians, in the west of Ukraine, where he grew up. In his stories, Yuri and I aren’t people but animals. Sometimes we’re storks who live in a cozy nest atop a telephone pole, where no evil spirits can find us. Sometimes we’re beavers who huddle together in the warm darkness of a dam.
His stories involve spirits from folktales. Our favorite is the Chugaister. The Chugaister is the protector of the forest, a man who stands five meters tall with a beard made of moss and a body made of wind. He lures those who threaten the forest into the shadows and kills them with their own chainsaws.
“Is the Chugaister real?” Yuri asked one day.
“Of course,” Tato said.
“Real like the Ancient Greeks thought Zeus and Poseidon were real?” Yuri asked. “Or real-real, like you and I are real?”
“I’ve shaken his giant hand,” Tato said. “I felt the hair on his knuckles.”
Sometimes we don’t know what to talk about; we only understand that we need to keep talking, that we need to keep the sounds of our voices in each other’s ears.
“Isn’t it after midnight for you?” I might ask.
“So what? I can’t call my boys any time of day I want?”
“No, you can’t.” I would smile. “It’s illegal. You’re going to jail.”
“Well, I hope you come and visit me in my cell,” he would say. “Bring me some of your mama’s cherry varenyky.”
“Come get them yourself,” I would say. “When are you going to come back to visit?”
Then Tato would pause. His image would stay still on Mama’s phone screen. I might hear him take a breath. “Maybe not for a while, zaichik.”
He would explain what he had already explained to me so many times before: That he couldn’t leave America until he got his green card, that he’s filled out the paperwork over and over but it never seems to make it from one end of the system to the other. That the system was slow in the first place, but the pandemic has made it ten times slower. That if he could choose anywhere in the world to live, it would be in Chernihiv with his boys.
And our conversation would go on like that until we had to go to school, or until Tato had to go to work in America, or until Mama needed her phone back to call Titka Natasha and gossip about the Honchar lady in apartment twenty-seven, who was clearly up to something.
I barely remember the years when Tato lived with us. Our family long ago ossified around his empty space. Yuri and I are far from the only boys at school whose tatos live abroad; Nazar Lutsenko’s tato works in Germany, Lev Demchenko’s in Poland, Daniil Marchuk’s in Norway. Yet occasionally there is something amiss without our tato. His absence sits on our living room couch wide enough for four and sleeps in the unoccupied half of Mama’s bed. It speaks in the silent moments at the dinner table conversations, when the three of us have nothing to say and our conversation gives way to the scrape of silverware on dishes.
He sends dozens of postcards over the years—vast expanses of desert, snow-capped mountains, the shimmering skylines of faraway cities. We keep his postcards pinned to the wall next to our bed. And he sends birthday gifts, Saint Mykolai gifts. Most kids find gifts under their pillows in the morning on Saint Mykolai, but ours come a few weeks late, and they arrive in cardboard boxes at the Nova Poshta office ten minutes away. The day after Saint Mykolai, when my classmates brag about the gifts their parents gave them, I have to concoct stories of fake, lavish gifts like giant gaming computers whose existence I don’t have to prove because they’re too big to bring to school. And Viktor knows the truth, so he stares at me while I lie and he tries not to laugh.
I wonder whether I or Yuri resemble Tato more now. I know what his face looks like—I see it on the phone screen every day—but I know that family resemblance shows up in the way you hold yourself, the gestures you don’t realize you make until somebody else points it out. The phone screen can’t capture that.
One day, Tato calls Mama while we stand in line at the grocery store, Silpo. Mama drags me and Yuri there every few days. We wait around as she examines and palpates each apple and pear. In the summer, she buys fruits and vegetables from the outdoor market, beautiful fruits and vegetables borne of rich black Ukrainian soil—but in the winter, she buys wan carrots and mealy apples shipped from faraway lands where it’s never winter. Sometimes when we’re at Silpo she sends me and Yuri to find something, and we always come back with the wrong brand of it, or not enough, or too many. Worst of all, she likes to leave us and the shopping cart in the checkout line while she grabs one more thing she “almost forgot.” When the line moves, I pray for her to get back quickly because she has all the money and the babusi behind us already look angry.
With every ninety-nine hryvnia you spend at Silpo, the cashier gives you a toy called Stikeez. Somehow, Yuri has become obsessed with collecting them all. The toys are figurines of different characters, each with their own names—a frog named Zhabbo, a giraffe named Zhorik, a weird monster named Benya who looks like a lime-green, floating eyeball with cat ears. They’re all sticky on the bottom, and Yuri sticks them onto our bed’s headboard—a platoon of tiny soldiers keeping guard, watching over us as we sleep.
We’re in the checkout line when Mama’s phone rings. Instead of just vibrating, it plays a jazz tune, which means it’s Tato calling.
She picks up. “Hello?”
I hear Tato’s voice over the supermarket music, but I can’t decipher any of the words. Mama breaks out into a smile. She turns the shopping cart around and walks out of the line.
“Mama?” Yuri chases after her, and I follow. “Where are we going?”
“Watch where you’re going!” scolds the babusya behind us.
Mama sits down beside a display of watermelons stacked on top of each other in a pyramid. Yuri and I sit down on either side of her. Mama turns on speakerphone.
“Seryozha,” she says. “Say that again so the boys can hear.”
The Americans are finally giving him his green card. That means that he’ll be allowed to come back and visit, once he has all his paperwork in order and the last coronavirus restrictions are lifted and the border opens. He’s buying plane tickets now, he says. He’ll come next summer. We cheer. Yuri and I stand up and knock the watermelons over. They topple one by one and roll across the floor.
That night, Yuri and I look up how long we have to wait until Tato’s arrival at eleven o’clock on the first of next July.
“Two hundred and eighty days!” I read aloud to Yuri.
He peers over my shoulder. “And thirteen hours, twenty-five minutes, and thirty-nine seconds. Thirty-eight, thirty-seven . . .”
I stare at the timer on my phone in frustration. Why are the borders still closed? Why does paperwork take so long? Why must I wait so long?
Mama comes into our room and tells me to put away my phone, because it’s almost time for bed. I retrieve my sketchbook and pencils from my backpack. I draw Tato’s arrival—the four of us, together at last. As I fall asleep, I imagine myself with a time machine, turning the days to hours, the hours to seconds, bringing Tato closer and closer until I’m at the airport, running toward him.
What if a man, much lauded in his community, isn’t who he proclaims himself to be? What if the stories we tell ourselves, even within the privacy of our own minds, are laced with falsehoods?
So begins the premise of Fox, the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Joyce Carol Oates. The book opens with the discovery of a dead Francis Fox, a much beloved middle school English teacher, in the rural community of Weiland, New Jersey.
Fox’s body is found in his car, partially dismembered by carrion birds, at the bottom of a ravine in the Pine Barrens wilderness. Immediately there is speculation amongst the community: a drunken accident? A suicide? But as the novel unfolds, a darker story emerges. Fox used his post as an elite prep school teacher to abuse many of his female students and his death wasn’t an accident; it was a murder.
The novel, Oates’s first attempt at a classical whodunnit, is told in close-third, through multiple viewpoints. There’s Fox himself; P. Cady, the supercilious headmistress of the Langhorne Academy, where Fox was a teacher; Martin Pfenning, the hapless father of a Langhorne student; Demetrius Healy, a working class man who assists his father, one of Langhorne’s janitors; Detective Zwender of the Weiland PD; and of course, the voices of a few of Fox’s female students: Mary Ann Healy and Eunice Pfenning.
The strategy allows Oates to circle the central crime, highlighting various character’s unreliability and the falsehoods they tell to protect their own reputations. Fox and others repeatedly incriminate themselves and it is shocking how even those most appalled by his actions eagerly cover up his crimes. It also gives voice to the victims of Fox’s predation, something Lolita, perhaps the most famous example of a novel about a pedophile, fails to do.
Oates and I corresponded via email this July and discussed how communities can enable predators, the novel’s multiple points-of-view, and how the limits of official records and histories are ripe for interrogation.
Courtney DuChene: I was struck by the failures of the adults in the novel. They fail to identify the predator in their midst, but more than that, they seem to protect him even when confronted with evidence of his crimes. What made you want to examine not just a predator, but the community that upholds him?
Joyce Carol Oates: The phenomenon of predatory behavior is usually only possible through “enablers”—a fact that seems to have been only really discovered and discussed in recent decades.
Usually, a sexual predator or serial killer has been envisioned as a loner—a “lone wolf”—without a family or friends; but that is actually mistaken in many or most cases. There are apparently “normal” family men who have secret lives as predators—their wives, partners, or relatives may be vaguely aware that something is not right, but they have no wish to investigate. Incest within a family is often linked to the same phenomenon: denial, complicity.
The phenomenon of predatory behavior is usually only possible through ‘enablers.’
This is not a matter of “low-information” persons; it can be found in presumably highly educated families, as in the startling/shocking case of Alice Munro in longtime denial of her own young child’s abuse at the hands of Munro’s second husband.
CD: How did writing the novel in close third, from multiple points of view, help you convey the charismatic effect Fox had on the community, which allowed him to get away with his abuse?
JCO: For me, the challenge and excitement of writing is dramatization: showing how a story unfolds, how people interact, not merely summarizing scenes or alluding to behavior. It is always my intention to bring readers into a scene in a kind of deep immersion. Each character has his/her specific language, subtly differing from the others.
Francis Fox is the most ironically “aware”—“alert”—of all the characters because he is the predator; like a fox, he has to stay ahead of others’ knowledge of him; he is just naturally more cunning. (Not more “intelligent”: “cunning.”)
CD: Many of the women in the novel are charmed by Francis Fox, but other characters, men in particular, seem corrupted by him, drawn into his world and succumbing to dark thoughts. Can you speak to this dynamic?
JCO: In a community, some individuals are just naturally more popular, more “charismatic” than others. Because Fox is a Skinnerian [a follower of psychologist B.F. Skinner], he understands how readily people can be conditioned, even or especially intelligent persons who trust their own “instinct”— not knowing that they are being manipulated.
It is true, I was definitely thinking of our political situation in which political leaders lie, exaggerate, and misinform multitudes, but are so persuasive, telling some part of the populace what they want to know, that they are rarely repudiated; in fact, their admirers become fanatically attached to defending them. However, Fox is set in 2013, before our current era.
Fox is based upon a specific individual, a middle-school teacher who groomed his vulnerable girl-students for many years; he was exposed but never punished. The character of Francis Fox himself is fictitious; it is the behavior, the acts, of this person that resemble Fox’s behavior. (I often write about behavior, specific acts and events; but rarely write about actual people. Even my Norma Jeane Baker, in Blonde, is 99 percent invented.)
CD: Francis Fox’s voice is enthralling—it has an ethereal, timeless quality, while also being clearly unreliable. There’s echoes of Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, and they both make references to Edgar Allen Poe and Lewis Carroll, though Fox repeatedly disavows Lolita. How do you see the two texts, Fox and Lolita,as being in conversation with one another?
JCO: Fox is especially enthralled by the dreamlike portraits of Bathus, and by the dreamy wraith-like figures of E.A. Poe, rather than the less ethereal figure of Lolita. The girl in Nabokov’s novel is only 12 initially, really a child; while Fox’s “Kittens” are prepubescents, just a few years older. Though it may not seem significant to a normal person, there is a considerable difference.
As Fox observes, most girls that age are “shy” around men, not fearless and bantering.
Odd events in American history often raise more questions than can be answered.
Where Humbert Humbert is the sole narrator of Lolita, definitely I wanted girls and women to have their voices as distinct as Fox’s; plus other points of view. Lolita is just a single voice, basically in its rhythms and puns it is Nabokov’s voice, and Humbert Humbert is his mask. But in Fox, Fox’s voice is just one of many viewpoints and ultimately, Fox is cast off, as other voices are heard and his is extinguished.
It is appropriate that the last voice we hear is the voice of Fox’s killer. By this time, he is totally silenced.
CD: Nested within the novel is this family legend about the Hindenburg disaster. Several characters reference it and we see how it varies based on their point of view. As a reader, it made me think about how this community passes down stories about strange or eccentric individuals. We also see characters considering Francis Fox’s legacy. How do you think Weiland will look back on Francis Fox? Do you feel that’s hinted at in the book?
JCO: Yes, many communities and families have largely unexamined “legends” in their history—tales people spin to make themselves more important, their families more colorful. There are parts of the US, like Oklahoma, where most families claim Native American ancestors—it’s just part of family lore; but if examined, probably most of these ancestors never existed.
Odd events in American history often raise more questions than can be answered, and the Hindenburg disaster is one of these. When I researched the “accident” it seemed to me very peculiar, and the reason for the explosion very vague. Soon then, the U.S. entered World War II against Nazi Germany, so there was never any thorough investigation of the event.
It is altogether possible that the Hindenburg was sabotated by someone anti-Nazi and quite possible, if not probable, that a reclusive person in the Pine Barrens region took a shot at the dirigible drifting overhead like a figure in a Magritte painting.
You didn’t inquire about the structure of the novel which was a primary interest for me: the classic “whodunnit” with a body discovered in the first chapter, a complicated backstory, characters with motives, a detective, his investigation, “clues”—all dramatized along a time-line—with a definitive ending, conclusion. For me, it was a hugely challenging experiment which I would probably not try again, following soon after my collection of thematically linked short stories, Zero-Sum, written during the pandemic and months of quarantine.
It is my belief that we are often given explanations for events—“official reports”— but these are likely to be limited, and sometimes misleading; so, the epilogue to a mystery would likely require new evidence not known or suppressed at the time. “Cold case” mysteries are solved sometimes decades later when more evidence is discovered.
It would always be said at the Langhorne Academy that Francis Fox was an exceptional teacher, a “prize winning poet with a national reputation” who died in an unfortunate accident; but just a few people know the real story, and they will never tell.
Of how many of our revered heroes might this be said? Our national, celebrated heroes? Persons whose likenesses are on U.S. postal stamps? One does not have to be a cynic, but rather a neutral observer with a sense of humor, to ask such a question.
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