‘Severance’ Is the Apocalyptic Millennial New York Immigrant Story You Didn’t Know You Needed

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Here’s how Severance, Ling Ma’s stunning debut novel, begins:

After the End came the Beginning. And in the Beginning, there were eight of us, then nine — that was me — a number that would only decrease. We found one another fleeing New York for the safer pastures of the countryside. We’d seen it done in the movies, though no one could say which one exactly. A lot of things didn’t play out as they had been depicted on-screen.

We’re with Candace Chen, the novel’s narrator, in the aftermath of the outbreak of a deadly viral fever that has killed almost everyone in the US. Although this opening passage may seem to launch a survivor story — one that’s looking to subvert the conventions of the genre — the jacket text describes the novel as “a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire in which the end of the world gets put in its rightful place.”

Is it possible for a novel to be all of these things? In Ma’s hands, the answer is an ambitious, elegant, and playful “Yes!” — Severance meets and exceeds the promise of this exciting description.

In many ways, Severance is a novel of ideas — it artfully blends/bends genre, it boldly indicts global capitalism, consumerism, and materialism — but every one of its intellectual aims is deeply grounded in the richly felt experiences of the narrator. As a reader, this novel made me dizzy with fear for our world, today, and at the same time, it made me worry about the well-being of the compelling Candace Chen and her companions. And it made me laugh. It made me laugh a whole lot.

Ling Ma and I corresponded over email and discussed the deadliness of global capitalism, surviving a life of nine-to-five office jobs, and weaving together an apocalyptic millennial coming-of-age in New York immigrant story.

JS: One of the many things that I admire about this book is the elegant way in which it tracks several narrative lines, each in its own mode — the novel is simultaneously an apocalypse survivor story, a millennial New York coming-of-age story, and an immigration story. How did you weave together these three seemingly disparate narrative lines together?

LM: One thread led to another. Severance first began as an apocalyptic short story. Initially, the impetus for writing anything apocalyptic (it was already cliché, even by that point) was just about enacting this dumb, destructive glee. As I kept writing, I realized that this glee stemmed from a certain anger, in this case associated with work. The narrator, Candace Chen, works as a production coordinator of Bible manufacture. She lives in New York, but takes business trips to China, where Bibles are being printed and put together. She doesn’t believe in her job but at the same time, doesn’t have a clear sense of what she wants to do. This is a feeling that I think all of my friends felt after college, that sense of disaffection, of resignation almost, when you’re partaking and contributing to capitalist systems that you can’t really change. So this story had to incorporate an office storyline as well. It had to speak to that specific sense of powerlessness.

And, as I inhabited Candace’s perspective, I struggled to figure out why she kept working a job she disliked, or at least didn’t believe in. It’s not like she has any dependents or is paying down a mortgage. So what keeps her there? The answer came slowly. There is a very specific pressure amongst the children of Asian immigrants to succeed, to keep running on this imagined achievement track. It’s a deeply ingrained thing. So I knew that the story would be incomplete without incorporating that aspect of her immigrant background.

In the sequence of my process, the apocalyptic thread led to the office storyline, which led to the immigrant narrative.

JS: Where/how did this novel begin for you?

LM: I started writing this at the office, ha. I was working at a company whose Chicago office was being consolidated with their LA office, and as a result, there was a huge wave of layoffs. Employees who had worked there for three decades were being let go, sometimes unceremoniously. There was this collective sense of anger and frustration among the workforce. Lots of people left because they could see the layoffs coming. Actually, everyone saw the layoffs coming, but not everyone was lucky enough to successfully transition to another job. Especially the senior employees who’d been there for decades. It was very eye-opening to see the way upper management treated loyal employees.

On the day that layoffs at my office were announced, I remember reading about Maurizio Cattelan’s retrospective at the Guggenheim, titled All, how the artist took his entire oeuvre of artworks and strung them up from the ceiling like a public hanging. It should seem mournful, but the show felt incredibly exuberant and liberating. This coincided with his (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) announcement that he was quitting art. Around that time, I had started writing Severance. For me, the Cattelan show was about this outsized gesture that you can walk away from everything you once cared about.

I started writing Severance at my desk in the last month or so of my job. I remember taking these long walks during lunch, just thinking up new ideas for this story (it was still a story then, not a novel). It was a very intense, heady time, and the idea that I would not have a job soon was weirdly liberating. My ideas of what “success” looked like were upended. I purposely did not look for a new job. I got on unemployment and called it my arts fellowship. Then I ended up applying to MFAs, got accepted to Cornell University, and completed this novel there.

JS: In most zombie pop culture, the zombies are plagued by a flesh eating disease that renders them into monstrous cannibals. But the Shen Fever is a “disease of remembering” that renders its victims zombie-like, doomed to “[mimic] old routines and gestures they must have inhabited for years” until their bodies decay. Can you talk more about why you choose to frame the disease this way?

LM: I was inspired by working at nine-to-five jobs. I felt like I would keep repeating the same routines — taking the same public transit routes, ordering the same coffees, making the same water cooler small talk — until I expired. If not this job, then another job. A lot of people feel this way, that they’re looping into routines around meaningless jobs. Shen Fever simply expedits this process.

Some readers mentioned that they wondered whether Candace Chen was fevered herself. I like that interpretation. The line between who was fevered and who wasn’t was meant to seem blurred.

I don’t mean to say that routines are bad in and of themselves. On certain days, I really enjoyed my work routine; it gave my life structure and anchored me when I felt otherwise aimless. Complacency feels easy and kind of good. On other days, I felt scared by the end game, or the lack of. And, in order to last at a job long-term, you have to mentally distance yourself from it a bit. You have to numb yourself just a bit to get through it. Perhaps Shen Fever also encapsulates that self-numbing effect.

JS: How did setting the novel in a post-apocalyptic frame shape the way you were thinking about the experience of being a young woman surviving in a city? Why does this feel important to you?

LM: I’m a sucker for that coming-of-age-in-New-York genre, which like any genre has its particular tropes — including the self-absorption of its characters. In a sense, Candace Chen is also pretty self absorbed. She has a certain willful blindness as the city breaks down and she continues to stay there, trying to keep a status quo that is no longer. And one could argue that in order to work the job she works at, which contributes to an unsustainable global economy, she also has to maintain a certain willful blindness. The conflict for Candace: She is very perceptive, and some of her perceptions are actually at odds with how she lives her life.

JS: Severance offers a sharp critique of globalism/world capitalism — from one character’s lack of empathy toward factory conditions to the role of fashion in Candace’s life to the survivors’ enduring consumerism — and does so in a beautifully organic and character-rooted way, with every indictment coming from the ground up, not the top down.

Candace works at a publishing company in Manhattan that outsources the manufacturing of novelty Bibles to China; we find out that factory workers in China are dying of lung disease to mine the cheap semiprecious stones used to embellish the books, but for the publishing house, this is an inconvenience. This isn’t fiction, of course: a lot of poor factory workers in the developing world making slave wages have died because of dangerous working conditions, all so the developed world can wear a $20 H&M shirt. Were you hoping that readers would reflect on the way that their shopping habits (or their workplaces) contribute to this toxic culture? Was the real apocalypse capitalism all along?

LM: I’m not an economist or a political theorist, but I wanted to capture what global capitalism feels like on the individual scale, down on the ground floor. I wanted to show the ambivalence of an employee working at a job that contributes to an unsustainable system, and yet feels tethered to and even takes pleasure in her work routine. She works out of New York, while the manufacture takes place in China. It’s out of her line of sight, mostly. Even when Candace calls the publisher about the gemstone polishing effects on dying laborers, it is still an abstract concept to her, something she has to Google beforehand.

As virtually every space in our world is commodified, including online spaces, most readers are already well-informed consumers. Cheap foreign labor is something we all know about. But like Candace, we tend to understand it as a concept, something abstract. To live in this era of globalism, in which causal links between production and consumption are not immediately clear, everyone lives with a certain willful blindness. I wanted to accurately reflect how we move in the world as it is now.

I also wanted to explore Candace’s conflicted feelings as a Chinese American immigrant in light of her job, going back to those factories in Shenzhen on business trips, and her personal memories about China.

In order to last at a job long-term, you have to numb yourself just a bit to get through it.

JS: What do you see as the relationship between fiction and politics?

LM: I don’t think fiction or any art form can be used as a force to enact sociopolitical change. It can, however, make readers see from a different or expanded perspective, and that’s valuable. If you were to try to harness that in a directive way, however, it would just be propaganda. In my role as a writer, I have to be faithful to Candace and the other characters first. She is able to see and perceive very accurately, such as how her job fits into the global economy, but she doesn’t do much to change it. She is unremarkable in that way, and like anyone else I know.

JS: Candace, the main character, is our first person narrator throughout. It’s such a pleasure to feel her voice evolve, subtly, from section to section — for instance, there’s a moment late in the book when she’s talking about her family, and it’s almost as if she vanishes as a character; when she returns, the effect is powerful. What did you find particularly challenging and/or rewarding about writing this novel in first person?

LM: Instinctively, there was no question that I would write this in the first-person singular. Although I didn’t articulate it to myself so clearly at the time, the intention was to show what globalism feels like on the ground floor, from the close perspective of an individual character. And despite the novel’s implicit criticisms, I wanted the act of working a job, with its office routines and business travel, to feel sensuous. I wanted the memories to feel sensuous. The first-person voice felt right for that.

More generally, as a writer, I have always been fascinated with the first-person voice. While it can be induced to tell you the truth, I think it resists that.

JS: I’d love to hear more about the nature of the first-person voice’s resistance to the truth (and your truth-induction methods!), especially in the case of Candace.

LM: When I worked as a journalist, whenever interview subjects would easily lay out their stories in front of me, I knew that was not the real story. It might be factually correct, and they themselves may believe in it, but it’s not the real story. I don’t think the real story can surface without a bit of blood and struggle.

Candace has the ultimate sob story — an orphan of deceased immigrants, cut off from her original language and culture — but she would be the last person to elicit sympathy from others. Because she is so alone in so many ways, she needs to believe she is very capable. I knew she would eventually address her background, but we had to talk around it for a bit. We had to circle the drain a bunch of times, getting a bit closer every time. And I suppose that’s how I saw the process of getting Candace to address her story, by circling the drain.

To live in this era of globalism, everyone lives with a certain willful blindness.

JS: Once you established this novel’s three main threads, did an exciting discovery made in one ever wildly alter the weave of another?

LM: Chapter 16, which delineates the immigration of Candace and her parents to the US, deepened how I saw Candace, and in turn, it affected how I approached later revisions and edits. I knew the novel needed to delve into her background, but as mentioned above, Candace herself is not the most forthcoming character. What do you do when your narrator doesn’t want to talk about something that you know the story needs to address? Maybe it’s not that she doesn’t want to talk about it, but she doesn’t know how. She’s not used to it.

In my case, I began the chapter by removing Candace entirely. I began with the immigration of Candace’s parents to Utah, which occurs in the 1980s, when cultural and economic pathways between the US and China begin to open up. Candace’s father is a scholar who travels to Salt Lake City on a scholarship. And Utah is a strange place of entry to America. It has always struck me as a spiritual place, with its dizzyingly majestic landscapes and history, its Mormon legacy. The chapter also addresses the role of religion in Candace’s parents lives, the role of Christianity in immigrant communities. Of course, Candace later surfaces again in the chapter and takes it over. I tried to make the story carry itself for awhile, before handing it back to the narrator.

JS: What was your MFA experience like? And how did (or didn’t?) it help you develop this novel?

LM: I once attended a Michael Chabon reading where an audience member asked him for advice about applying to MFAs. His response was that whatever the program, it should fund you to write without the distractions of a demanding course load or teaching load. The funding should also free you from having to take on extra jobs waiting tables or bartending, etc. That sounded supremely reasonable: An MFA program is valuable insofar as it gives you time to write. So at Cornell, I just wrote a lot. On a personal level, I was pretty miserable, though that’s another story. I made some close friends there, including my future husband. The fiction faculty was, overall, very supportive. The program invited a parade of fantastic writers, who came to read and lecture. Plus the embarrassingly generous appetizer spreads at their post-reading receptions.

Ultimately, though, writing is a solitary act. I still feel that you learn more by doing than anything else. The summers, when we had no teaching obligations, were really the best times to write. Certain nights, I felt that sleeping was just a distraction from writing, which sounds crazy now. But having worked a string of office jobs after college, I wanted to make the most of my time, when I was getting paid without having to hold down a “real” job. I just didn’t see myself having that opportunity again.

JS: What writers and works have influenced you — and Severance — in a big way?

LM: When writing Severance, I often thought back to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day as the ultimate office novel. As you know, it’s about a butler who’s spent his entire life working at an English manor, as it’s changed owners. You can tell by the way he discusses his job that it’s provided structure to his existence; its routines and habits have carried him. There’s a part of him that really believes in the profession, and he wants to represent its pinnacle, even as it’s a declining profession. But at the edges of his narration is the question of whether he’s wasted his life. That really gets to me. That’s the question we all ask of ourselves.

Kafka’s writings have always been a touchstone. His work gives on many levels. His perceptions about power, how it moves and functions, are just so clear and unflinching, everything from his journals to his letters to his fiction. I can’t overstate how much his work has meant to me, how much it has comforted me.

Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs To You, particularly the second section when the narrator discusses his relationship with his father, helped me wrestle with a specific chapter when I really needed it. And Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle really helped me feel less self-conscious about writing. This is not an insult, but its sloppiness, its seemingly dashed-off quality, its straightforwardness, is its best asset — something rare in contemporary fiction. It’s like spending time with someone with the armor of self-consciousness removed. There’s a craft to it that doesn’t feel like craft. Same with Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Willa Cather’s My Antonia.

Trading the American Dream for the Promise of a New China

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As someone who has spent their life going between two countries, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to be “at home” somewhere. When home isn’t a given, it reveals itself to have many elements: language, social norms and cues, cooking methods, standardized routines for days and seasons, and several million intangibles that come under the umbrella of “this is how we do it here.” In my experience, the U.S. does and does not allow for multiple identities. On the one hand, hyphens are rampant, and more often than not the “American” part is the secondary. On the other hand, a lot of people spend a lot of time focusing on differences in others that feels less like an appreciation of those differences and more like an accusation. You look different, you talk different, where you belong — where your home is — is somewhere else.

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Lucy Tan’s new novel, What We Were Promised, explores the concept of home through husband and wife Lina and Wei, their daughter Karen, their maid Sunny, and Wei’s enigmatic brother Qiang. Lina and Wei were born in the same village in China, were promised to each other by their fathers, and left for New York after they got married. We meet them after they’ve returned again to China for Wei’s job, their daughter Karen with them for the summer from her American boarding school. After years absent with no explanation, Qiang reappears in their lives. The family changes shape again, old histories are revisited, revealed to be misunderstood. In many ways, Lina and Wei have moved back to a China that has moved far beyond anything familiar. After years working to fit in in America, they are foreigners in their homeland.

Whether it’s by choice or, terribly, if it’s not, if you do “go back” to somewhere, I think a feeling of dissonance with that place is inevitable. It’s not just that you and the place have both changed. It’s that you’re forced to examine the other pillars of your identity; they’ve been contoured by your experience away, but they are inextricably rooted to the now unfamiliar place you return to. Your understanding of your role as a woman, of your sexuality, of your socio-economic status, of your place in your generation, even of how to communicate, get a new old framing.

It’s a lot to reckon with, but Lucy Tan’s new novel does a beautiful job. Weaving together a group of characters who are reacclimating to their country, and in many ways, to one another, What We Were Promised tells a contemporary story of China, and an ageless tale of how we grapple with the notion of “home.” From my desk in Ireland, I spoke to Tan about how she conceives of “homecoming,” and how she explored her characters’ struggle to self-define. And yes, before you ask, rather appropriately, this conversation about occupying multiple identities did begin thus: “Hi. Is this Lucy?” “Yes. Is this Lucie?”

Lucie Shelly: This story brings together a lot of different identities and experiences: immigration, repatriation, China and the U.S., dual identities. Did you have an audience in mind while working on the book?

Lucy Tan: The audience that I immediately thought about reaching are the newly international Chinese and their descendants, because I haven’t seen many of their stories told.

When I think about it more broadly I also wanted readers to have an idea of what modern China is like now, and there’s not that much that’s been written in fiction that covers the time period and the place covered in my book. So that was my hope, to add to the cannon of Asian American fiction by telling the story in a more updated way in a more updated setting.

I do hope that the end product had a wider appeal than I initially intended because ultimately, it’s a story about very human experiences with family, love, and the road not taken.

LS: This did feel to me like a newly contemporary story of China and the return of ex-pats, one I haven’t read it very widely in fiction. Do you think that is in part because literature is catching up generationally?

LT: Yeah, I think so. My parents caught the tail end of the cultural revolution, and my grandparents were deep in it. I feel as though I have inherited a wealth of family stories that they were unable to share. In my parents’ generation many Chinese came to America as immigrants. They were busy trying to establish themselves and find financial stability. I think of my generation as the generation that really gets to choose what do they want to do with their careers and lives. We have the privilege of thinking: Given that I have this stability, given that my parents came here and provided these opportunities for me, what do I want to do with that? Telling my family’s stories is one of the things I want for my career.

My parents are part of a group of people who came to America in the ’80s for graduate school and achieved success and stability here. Thirty years later, families like theirs were moving back to China, whether because there were more opportunities there or because they wanted to go home. What We Were Promised is about this kind of family — one that also wants to consider how they can then reinvest in their homeland and ally themselves with that nation again.

I’m telling the story of family that wants to consider how they can reinvest in their homeland and ally themselves with that nation again.

LS: When you’re examining the changing family unit and the economics of contemporary China versus your parents’ generation, do you think there is something that fiction can illuminate more than reportage and journalism?

LT: There are so many sensationalized stories coming out of China. When I was in China in 2010, sometimes I felt like I was reading these English-language blogs reporting crazy stuff, stories that were so reductive, and seeing everything through a very Western lens. I wanted to present fuller characters than those who appear in the news — to give a voice to the kinds of people you read about in these sensational stories. I think maybe that is what fiction can do, although long-form journalism can do that, too.

LS: I agree with that. Sometimes fiction feels like it brings you one degree closer into the person.

I’ve spent my life between Ireland and the United States, and for me, the experience of leaving and returning can be a heady and conflicting emotional process: sometimes I find I’m searching for a sense of “homecoming” in a place that doesn’t feel like my home, or the inverse, I’m working to see my home with a fresh, excited perspective. But I’ve never had a language barrier, and I think a language can weave you into — or isolate you from — a culture in a very complete way. I thought you brought out something so interesting about the experience of expats and repatriation in the moments when the language changed. Can you talk about how you mixed Chinese into your text, and how you explored what your characters felt about moving between languages?

LT: I was back in China in 2010, and at that time English was especially valuable. Karen, the American-born and educated daughter, knows this instinctually, and it comes out in a scene where she uses it to her advantage. There was this idea that if you could speak English, you were a person of the world, and if you could speak Chinese you were a person of China. You were rooted there, and you couldn’t go far beyond that.

As a writer, as someone who relies very much on my ability to communicate artfully, it was a very different experience being in China where my vocabulary was limited. My pronunciation was pretty good, but there are common nouns and phrases that I don’t know, and I can’t speak formal Chinese, and I can’t read very much, so when I was there I felt myself being put in the position of an observer more frequently.

When I was trying to speak to people in Chinese about this book, it was really frustrating because I wanted to come across as someone who knew what they were doing, but I didn’t have the language skills to communicate that. It was really difficult to handle interviews by myself. I always had to have a parent there. I think that that’s definitely a big part of living abroad. For my parents too, because of the years they spent in the states, their Chinese was rusty when they went back. It took a few years for them to have full command of it again. When I think about their experience, I wonder at how that must feel to be caught between two languages and to not have one that they can use to express themselves fully.

There are certain words in Chinese that just don’t have a direct translation in English, and the same goes for English to Chinese. Often times in my family when we speak to one another, it’s Chinese littered with English phrases or vice versa. That’s part of why I used Chinese words in my book the way that I did. That fusion or lack of complete understanding as a reader of one language is not that dissimilar to what it’s like to know both languages — because neither one is one hundred percent accurate. You’re kind of caught between these two languages.

I thought I had to figure out a strict logic for when I was going to use Chinese, when I was going to explain terms in English, and when I wasn’t, but I never came up with one. Most of those decisions were guided by instinct.

LS: Moving in a slightly different direction towards the characters themselves, Qiang was the character who, even though he was portrayed as selfish, I had the most sympathy for.

LT: Oh I love that! I have heard such a range of reactions to the different characters. I think that’s a rare reaction.

LS: I really did. I think it was something about his implacable search for love wherever that might come from, wherever a safe place might be. I really felt for him, particularly when I learned his history. I’d like to talk about how he functions as a character because I’m interested in the transition in the way we perceive him: from this lone-wolf, bad boy to this child who was passed around to different parents before he was old enough to realize it. Was there anything you were trying to say there about family, or family units, or family love? How did that narrative come about?

LT: I should first say that I didn’t know from the very beginning that this was where Qiang’s story was going. Things are revealed to me as I write, but I do think the entire time I was circling around the question of “what is love?” This word that we use incredibly often that is extremely ambiguous and means something different to every person. I think that Lina is someone who has just had so much love thrown her way her entire life that she is spoiled with it. I thought that it would be interesting to have her story alongside someone who has had a lack of love from a very young age.

Qiang says to Lina at the end (spoiler alert), that she should appreciate the love that her father showed her and her mother even if it wasn’t exactly the type of love she was expecting. I think what Qiang was saying is that we don’t all love each other in the right ways and we don’t expect to be loved in the same way. Maybe happiness comes from widening your idea of what that means. I think the book in general is about coming to terms with yourself and the past and just trying to do better.

My parents’ generation came to America as immigrants, so they were busy trying to establish themselves in America and find financial stability. I think of my generation as the generation who really gets to choose what do I want to do with my career and my life.

LS: Oh I like that. Another character who had a lack of love in her life was Sunny, the family’s cleaner turned nanny. She was interesting to me because of a different parallel she shares with Lina: the arranged marriage she has to Qiang’s brother, Wei. Obviously, Sunny’s goes quite differently. Did you want to write that parallel from the beginning, or did it emerge? I wondered if it was a way of exploring how the experience of an arranged marriage differs for men and women.

LT: That was definitely part of it. It’s really sad. In so many ways there’s been progressive moves in China. Mao wrote at one point “Women hold up half the sky,” and this seemed to spur a new way of thinking, but when you fast forward decades later, Lina is still the one who has followed her husband, Wei, abroad, she’s followed him back, and now she is a stay at home mom. It’s not that she is less capable than he is by nature, so how did this happen? She’s had every opportunity. And this is a character whose father was once a professor, so he is maybe the most liberal of the entire cast of characters. When you compare her family to someone like Sunny’s family, Sunny’s are far more traditional. So there are clearer gender roles there as well.

I guess I should be easier on Lina. Those years in America were hard. A lot of her identity, too, is wrapped up in what it meant to be an immigrant and what it meant to find her way. In America, Wei was the one who was making money and making friends at work, but she was the one who was learning American culture. She was learning how to help her family assimilate as well as they could. When she carries her skills back to China and sees that the game is entirely different, that shakes her up.

So I did want to show the unfairness of expectations women are still forced to deal with today in China. The pressure to get married, the pressure to have a child — all of these emotional and physical requirements — and the idea that their potential for happiness is so tied to these requirements — is extremely frustrating to me. These pressures exist for men, too, but it’s just not the same.

LS: There are some passages about Lina and Wei trying to fit into the U.S. that beautifully captured the little moments of dissonance, for instance the detail about how odd they found holiday candy and buying the wrong kind for different occasions. But to be in an arranged marriage is a larger-scale difference. How common nowadays is arranged marriage in China?

LT: I wouldn’t say that it’s common, but if you go to a public place like People’s Square, often you will see desperate mothers of people of marriageable age trying to commune with one another. They’ll pass out flyers with their children’s stats on it because they are so anxious to get them married off. In those cases I guess you could consider them — I wouldn’t say arranged. It’s more like matchmaking. I think that parents have a stronger hand in match-making in China than they do in let’s say America, but arranged marriage is not common.

My audience is newly international Chinese Americans, which sounds very niche, but they are the people I was writing this for because I haven’t seen their stories told.

LS: I’d like to talk a little bit about Sunny choosing her name — on the one hand it could be read as an empowering moment, but it’s also a little sad to me that she has to effectively renounce her given name. I think it’s Wei that says the family, who she works for and are of course Chinese, didn’t even know her Chinese name. She still chooses to go by Sunny, which is an interesting moment.

LT: LT: I think that in a sense, Sunny is so much tougher than many of the other characters in this story, and she’s become this way because she’s learned to protect herself. I don’t know what it feels like to be permanently in a servile role days and days and days on end, but I imagine I’d want to separate the person I am when I’m at work from the person I am when I’m by myself. I imagine that Sunny treats her name like a uniform — something she can take on and off at will. By keeping her real name from her employers (and the reader), she is drawing a boundary. She’s saying, “This part of my identity you have no access to.”

LS: The last thing I wanted to ask you about is the love triangle between Lina, Wei, and Qiang. I thought it got at something so interesting about the way we can have both a clear and accurate understanding of someone, and be projecting a fantasy version of them onto the real person. You live out a reality and a fantasy with the same person.

I felt that Lina had very real experiences and feelings for both Wei and Qiang, but it was like she needed both men in order to have either reality with both individuals. Can you talk about how you evolved the love triangle? I’m particularly curious about the imbalance of information: spoiler here, but Qiang knew the whole time that Wei, the man Lina was promised to and ends up marrying, was not really his brother at all, but neither Lina nor Wei are privy to this.

LT: I do think that Lina understands something vital about Qiang, which is what makes her attraction to him more than just fleeting, more than something where she just thinks this is something in her past, but I do think there were some projections going on. There was a time when she was happy with Wei where she had moved on. It was just coming back and having their relationship be different in this new China that makes her wonder what would it have been like if she had been with Qiang. For her, part of it is that she is in this fever dream where Qiang coming back into her life may present an opportunity that she had given up on so long ago. There is some level of confusion on her part there, but it doesn’t contradict what she knows about him as a child.

While Qiang loves her, he’s moved on. He’s not going to make any big moves. When she understands the situation for what it is, I think she also understands the ways in which she has been foolish and consumed by these thoughts of possibility. Those ideas came out of problems in her own life, which are still in her power to fix.

9 Books on the Complexities of Mother-Daughter Relationships

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After I became pregnant, after I gave birth, after I nursed, I felt as if I’d stepped through a threshold, into another world of emotion, of ideas, of experience that I hadn’t known and was eager to explore in my writing. While I might have been able to pull off the voice of a parent before becoming one myself, motherhood has expanded my view, opened my heart and my fiction in ways I didn’t foresee.

Purchase the book

I’d never before shape-shifted like that, and had never been so aware of my animal body than in the violence of birth, in the struggle to breast-feed, and in the sleep interrupted again and again. But the experiences were more than visceral. The curiosity and wonder of my children — experiencing rain for the first time, playing with language to express themselves — made the world new for me again. Becoming a mother also made me reconsider my own childhood and my mother, and what she had to weigh in the choices she made.

My debut novel, A River of Stars, examines motherhood, immigration, and identity through the lens of a pregnant Chinese woman who makes her way to California to stake a claim to the American dream. What follows here are works that also explore the complicated relationships between mothers and their children, in all the sacrifice, struggles, and joys.

Brass by Xhenet Aliu

Fierce, funny, and unforgettable, mother Elsie and daughter Luljeta attempt to make their way in a world that circumscribes them again and again. Their double, working-class coming-of-age stories resonate with each other. Even when they make questionable decisions, you cannot help but root for them in every moment.

Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Chula, a sheltered young girl, and her maid, Petrona, each have secrets they are keeping from their mothers — secrets that in turn forge the bond they have with each other. But secrets will also tear their world apart, in this story told in a lush, distinctive voice.

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

A deeply engrossing memoir about adoption and motherhood and the meaning of family. When Chung is expecting her first baby, she wonders what questions her daughter will have about her their family’s history and heritage — prompting her to search for her birth parents, a process painful, beautiful and ultimately hopeful.

Grace by Natashia Deón

A mother’s love endures, even after death, when Naomi, an escaped slave, watches over her daughter Josey — and later on, Josey’s children. Much violence, but much tenderness too, about an era whose injustices resonate today.

Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li

A big-hearted novel with a multigenerational cast that centers around a Chinese restaurant famed for its Peking duck. The relationship between the manager, Nan and her dishwasher son, Pat is by turns tender and tortured and hilarious, and so too the owner Jimmy Han with his mother. The characters are skillfully rendered, empathetic but revealing of their foibles too.

The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling

With her Turkish husband in limbo overseas, unable to return to their home in San Francisco, Daphne flees with her daughter, Honey, to a remote secessionist stretch of California. With wit and wonder, Kiesling writes about the intense love that Daphne has for her toddler, but never shies away from depicting the frustration and tedium of parenthood.

The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon

Phoebe Lin is haunted by the death of her beloved mother. Her boyfriend, Will Kendall, who struggles to help on his own, becomes obsessed with Phoebe even as she falls ever deeper under the spell of a mysterious cult. It’s an aching and lyrical book about loss and love and faith, a page turner that will have you spell-bound, and that you’ll find yourself immediately re-reading.

We Should Never Meet by Aimee Phan

Eight powerful interlinked stories about families torn apart by the evacuation of thousands of orphans from Vietnam to American at the close of the war. Unforgettable, poignant and clear-eyed, and timely as we consider the latest refugee crisis and the separation of families at the border.

One Child: the Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment by Mei Fong

In this fascinating investigation, Fong, a journalist, uncovers the impact of massive social engineering and how the one child policy has shaped China, with heart-wrenching stories of women caught up in policies that restrict their reproductive freedoms.

The Evite Made it Sound Like a Normal Party

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Hospitality

I was the one in charge of the needs of the guests. There were four of them now and one of them was missing a foot.

Where’d your foot go? I said.

The guest shrugged, then said: How am I supposed to know that? I’m just the guest.

I’m very hungry, another guest said. It was the guest with the large belly reading a baby-names book. I’m eating for two, she said. I need to eat, like, an hour ago.

Sorry, I said. I can probably whip up some sandwiches in a sec.

She huffed. We can’t all be geniuses, I suppose, she said. Then she said out loud to everybody: Nobody will mind if I play some Mozart? I’m going to play some Mozart. I’m going to play it for the baby because that is a good thing for the baby.

Music that sounded like little naked nymphs gliding through the grass played. For a moment I wished I were the baby before I began feeling sorry for the baby. It still had so much to do yet in life: practically everything… yes, a lot of work ahead for that baby. I felt tired just thinking of all the baby had to accomplish still, so I watched its Mozart-playing mother lumber around the room, semi-gracefully.

Aren’t I a great dancer still? she said.

Then she said: I don’t mean to be harsh, but you’re kind of the worst host.

The other guests agreed by nodding their heads. The one guest said, I lost my foot under your hospitality! Only he said ‘hospitality’ as if whatever I had offered him was the opposite of ‘hospitality.’

I felt overworked, drained, bad at everything. A failure, and painfully conscious of it like the spot where I bit my tongue earlier. I felt all these things. Here were these guests and they were not appreciating my efforts! I could not make them happy.

I was trying.

I was.

I was considering making brownies. Everyone loves brownies!

Then: almost at the precipice of it all, before falling over the edge into despair, two more guests showed up, separately, and upon seeing the other said they were sexually attracted to one another. It was love at first sight, they said.

Odd as it sounds: they emanated with it. It was as if they were their own brownies.

It was strange to hear the guests declare their love like that, and lovely too. A change occurred in the air of the room. I felt little elevators full of drunk and happy people run up and down my body. It made me feel good I could provide a space for these two people to find each other in. The Mozart played on. The pregnant guest began dancing with the footless guest. I was feeling like I had done a good job… a decent job. A job. Having guests means letting them fall in love from time to time. I was immensely happy. The pregnant guest, turning her head at me, kept saying I looked like an idiot, but I beamed from ear to ear and would not stop. I made some brownies happily and everyone seemed grateful for the company.

Later, I saw everyone to their rooms, where they cozied themselves and rested. I lingered and listened outside the room of the two in-love guests doing in-love things. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be in that room. In the morning I knew I would wake up feeling like I had been dreaming of love.

About the Author

Shane Kowalski was born outside of Philadelphia. He is currently a lecturer at Cornell University. Work of his appears or is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, The Offing, Funhouse, Hobart, and elsewhere. He is also the author of the short prose chapbook, Dog Understander (Frontier Slumber Press).

“Hospitality” is published here by permission of the author, Shane Kowalski. Copyright © Shane Kowalski 2018. All rights reserved.

Reading a Book Takes Time—Deal With It

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I f I had a nickel for every time I thought “I wish I could just spend the whole day reading,” I’d buy myself a new bookshelf for all the books I haven’t had time to read yet. But it seems not everyone wants reading to take up more of their time. Last week, Vox reviewed Serial Box, a subscription-based publishing platform which uses the structure and logistical scaffolding of TV production to publish “better than binge-watching” serial books. They promise to deliver “fiction that fits your life,” according to their website.

Here’s how it works: the books are released in serial seasons, like a TV show, and written by teams of writers, like a TV show. The serial season is released in “episodes” (i.e. chapters) which you can buy separately, or you can buy a subscription to the whole “season” (i.e. novel). Each book is written by several authors who each contribute 30,000 word chunks to the season. Once the season is finished, it’s bound and printed like a novel.

The founders argue that the inspiration for their company model came from the serialized forms of fiction in the 19th century a la Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, but they also make it clear that they are trying to make books more efficient. Serial Box turns the book into a quick, consumable, commute-sized commodity: each “episode” in the serial season is set up so it only takes about 40 minutes to read, in order to line up with the average back-and-forth commute time. As Molly Barton, one of the founders of Serial Box, told Vox: “I was aware that for many people, reading a book can feel rather slow and daunting compared to other media forms at this point. It’s harder to fit into your life.”

I say malarkey. You only have 40 minutes to read a book? Get a bookmark! Don’t worry — the book will still be there when you get back. Reading is supposed to be slow. And it’s okay if it’s daunting. Books take a long time to write, and the good ones deserve more than a morning commute time to fully digest and understand. Books also have the capacity to take you out of time and space and make you miss your subway stop, and that’s a good thing, too. The right story give us permission to get lost when we need to. Indeed, Constance Grady reported the Serial Box books she’s read did not enchant: “I couldn’t lie on the beach and lose myself in it because it actively did not want me to do so.” Is our obsession with hurrying up getting in the way of our having fun?

You only have 40 minutes to read a book? Get a bookmark!

Even worse, is it making us forget that reading was supposed to be fun in the first place? Choosing your reading material because it fits your commute turns reading into an efficient, productive use of commute time, another experience forced to bow down to the god of efficiency. In other words, reading becomes a task. Are we reading because we feel we “have to?” Or do we feel guilty about taking time for leisure and pleasure, so we need our leisure and pleasure to be measurable like the rest of our lives? Finishing a book does feel like an accomplishment, and I wonder if Serial Box and other companies like it are feeding on that feeling. Does getting through a 40-minute “episode” of a “season” of reading make us feel like we’ve achieved something, like we’ve gotten through a task, and therefore makes us feel validated in taking the time to read?

Serial Box is, at least, invested in creating something new, but there are other companies fully devoted to shaving down the time it takes to get through books already in circulation. The mission for these businesses belies the reality that people want reading to feel more like a knowledge download. For those who want to be “well-read” but simply don’t have the time for all that reading, there’s Instareads, which boasts 15-minute summaries of bestselling titles so you can “Instantly unlock the knowledge contained in the world’s best nonfiction books” and “Be Efficient.” And BookRags (among other relatives of Cliff Notes) promises to boost your intellectual brand with summaries of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power and Isabel Allende’s City of Beasts available for only $9.99. There are independent publishers like Book Summary on Amazon with 30-minute book reviews available for $2.99 because “your time is precious.” They boast: “We have done all the hard work for you, all you have to do is benefit from it! To your success!” As Riane Konc writes, these zippy summaries may be a great solution for books with 15 minutes worth of ideas — the kinds of books that no one needs to read in the first place — but they are not going to bring anyone any closer to enlightenment.

Can You Speed-Read Your Way to Happiness?

Don’t get me wrong—I’m fully in favor of short fiction, and serial fiction, and other approaches to storytelling that break out of the mold of the doorstopper codex book. I’d love to see more adaptations of the serial form — I’m even down with the concept of episodic storytelling delivered by Serial Box and other companies like it. For example, Tap by Wattpad incorporates text messages, phone calls, and other interactive elements into the digital series of stories they create. And DailyLit delivers books to your inbox in installments, to help you make the time for the books you’ve never thought you had time for. I also think hybridized concepts for storytelling that use existing forms of media to make something new are really cool; a lot of podcasts playing with the boundaries of the form come to mind, like Serial, Welcome to Night Vale, and The Message, and Limetown. It’s exciting to think about how the ways we read will change over time. Let’s keep messing with the concept of reading and storytelling even more!

But please, quit trying to sell me books that are specifically geared towards making reading take up less time. Let’s be bold and admit to not reading a book when we haven’t had time to read it yet, rather than pretend we’ve read a book when we’ve scrolled through a 15-minute summary. Let’s be willing to admit that some books simply aren’t worth our time, too. Because the truth of the matter is — there are a lot of books out there, and we are all busy as hell. But not everything should be digested, processed, or experienced within the window of a morning commute. Go pick up a book , maybe even a heavy one — read a few pages now, get lost in it for the day, or read it over the course of the next six months. Go back and reread the stuff that didn’t make sense the first time around. It’s okay to take your time.

Here’s Your First Look at ‘The Wife’

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I f you’ve ever navigated publishing-world sexism, family resentment, the exquisite self-inflicted pain of being a writer, or the terrible bargains we strike to support the people we love, congratulations: you’re finally being played by Glenn Close in the movie of your life. Oh, sorry, it’s the movie The Wife, but still: from the exclusive preview below, it looks like Close’s character will strike close to the bone.

The Wife, based on the novel of the same name, focuses on Close’s Joan Castleman, who’s been letting her literary ambitions come second to her husband Joe’s (Jonathan Pryce) for 40 years. Now Joe is about to win a Nobel Prize, and Joan is reflecting on a life spent seeing her talents and dreams subsumed by her marriage, her domestic responsibilities, and the sexism of the publishing industry.

“Meg’s novel tells a story that is so subversive about what it means to be a female writer,” says Jane Anderson, who adapted the screenplay. “I was thrilled that she was willing to entrust me with her wonderful book, but when I first wrote the screen adaptation fifteen years ago, no male star wanted to be in a film called THE WIFE instead of THE HUSBAND. The culture in Hollywood has changed since then.” The culture in publishing has changed too, but not so much that The Wife doesn’t feel relevant. “The film is coming out at an unusual and highly charged moment, one in which we are squarely facing some of the issues between men and women that have been around forever,” says Wolitzer. “Joan’s rage feels particularly pointed and relevant right now.”

The Wife is in theaters August 17.

Brooklyn’s DIY Literary Spaces

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The Brooklyn Letters project is a series of oral histories of literary Brooklyn from 1999 to 2009, presented by Electric Literature with support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

This is the sixth installment of Brooklyn Letters. You can read earlier oral histories here.

Popularized by punks and artists decades ago, the “do-it-yourself” ethos runs in the veins of countless independent publishing houses and magazines, but we fail to realize how it most often shows its true self in the form of literary events and reading series. People yearn for a sense of belonging—or maybe they just want to press the palm of someone who can get their book published. Either way, readings and literary events both reflect and arise from the greater literary community. Literary Brooklyn in the late ‘90s to early 2000s was still sparse, but the aesthetic and energy was already there, waiting for the right voices.

In part two of our oral history focusing on the do-it-yourself ethos, we take a look some the literary climate in Brooklyn around the turn of the 21st century, with the launch of efforts like the Franklin Park Reading Series, curated by Penina Roth, a monthly literary reading event that has outlasted so many others to become one of the city’s most popular and recognizable series; Shortwave, the bookstore and event space run by Richard Nash and Soft Skull Press, home to countless impromptu readings and literary events; and the Fort Greene Park Lit Fest, an annual event presenting local writers reading from their work. Prevailing through the stories told and travails endured is that DIY spirit, the passion and enthusiasm that brought so many of us to literature in the first place.

Penina Roth [founder of Frankin Park Reading Series]: Because of family obligations, I couldn’t really leave the neighborhood, so I wanted to establish a literary scene/community close to home and bring famous writers to us. I really was frustrated because I wasn’t free to travel to all of the great readings I was reading about in Time Out that were in the East Village and the Lower East Side, because there was a lot going on. Everything was on the Lower East Side, East Village, all a lot of the clubs, maybe 75% have closed, because gentrification intensified there. But that’s where the scene was. That’s where you had the Happy Ending Music and Reading series, you had Mixer there; in the West Village you had Sunday Salon. There was stuff in Williamsburg, like Pete’s Candy Store; in Red Hook there was Sunny’s.

I was a community news reporter who had lived in Crown Heights for 14 years and I noticed the neighborhood was changing, and I’d seen in Time Out, late 2007, they were interviewing people about — so-called hipsters — basically they were interviewing hipsters about where they were finding cheap rent or something and somebody was talking about Crown Heights. I had an editor at one of the newspapers I wrote for and she was like, “I heard Crown Heights is going to be the next hot market.” All of a sudden, Spring 2008, these new businesses were opening along Franklin Avenue that were clearly catering to a different demographic and one of them — the very first in April 2008 — was Franklin Park.

I didn’t realize that you could have literary events at bars. I thought it was a great idea.

I was writing a story, or stories about the transition, the transitioning neighborhood, I interviewed these new merchants and one of them was the owner of Franklin Park. First, I published a real estate article in the New York Sun and we had a mutual friend who connected us and then I became friendly with the owners. I started hanging out in the courtyard and the beer garden for hours, interviewing people — new transplants — trying to get a sense of what was happening to the community. I noticed a lot of the new transplants were very well educated, “creatives.” These are recent college grads, a lot of them were grad students. I would always see people reading. And at the same time, I had become friendly with David Goodwillie; he was kind of a mentor of mine and I had been attending a lot of his readings. And one of them in, I remember exactly where it was — April 2007, KGB Bar, and before that I had never really been to a bar. I didn’t realize that you could have literary events at bars. I thought it was a great idea.

Richard Nash [former editor-in-chief of Soft Skull Press and founder of the Shortwave bookstore and event space]: The Brooklyn thing happened because of everything going down. When the store was first created in Tonic, before we got kicked out — they wanted that space where the bookstore was to become a green room for the musicians. Don Goede, who led that, knew this little architecture firm and they made one massive metal object which was the key to it all. I think it got called the “book cage.” It was basically a series of straps that curved up and away so that it was affixed to the wall and then bent out into a C-curve then bent back around again. The whole thing was a shelving unit. You took a vertical shelving unit and bent it twice. You bent it at the top so that it bent around and you could bold it into the wall, and then it curved around at the bottom and extended out so that you could actually run canvas maybe, or wood, so that you could actually sit in it. It became a bench. The top of it was basically storage where the books sat spines up, because at that point it was parallel to the ground. The long part was classic display shelving, and the bottom part was a bench so you could sit inside a cave formed by that C and read. The fabulous, fabulous unit, the second it shifted from being just a book store to a book store and a publisher, the publishing operations went into the cave, so the people didn’t sit there and read anymore.

Instead they got there and laid out books and emailed editors. When we moved to Brooklyn, we disassembled that unit, shipped it to Brooklyn, and reassembled it with the exact same setup: books in the front, publishing in the back. In order to spread the word, both of the bookstore and as a part of being an active publisher in the world, we started a reading series every Sunday. It wasn’t a monthly, it was a weekly reading series. In some ways, you’re right in your overall architecture of your oral history to make sure to include reading series in the rubric because they really were a big part of how clusters got created in Brooklyn, of how things shifted from being an atomized series of places where people lived into a place where people could meet.

I would say in some ways it’s hard for a publisher to create communities rapidly because of the life-cycle of a book. It’s a year after you’ve decided to publish it that it comes out. There’s a real lag time, but a reading series allows you to be immediately present.

[The name Shortwave is] evocative of ham radio, the ability to communicate directly, the idea that there is a disparate network of people who share an interest. But yeah, we went where everyone goes. We went to Brooklyn.

We went where everyone goes. We went to Brooklyn.

Roth: In Crown Heights, you’re kind of straddling three worlds, and in the beginning, there were only two — Hasidim and Caribbean-Americans. I was very excited because, as a journalist, I was learning about these changes that are happening and they’re very subtle. It’s like things always move east from Park Slope. If you imagine the hub of gentrification in central Brooklyn was Park Slope in the mid-’90s, then you get Prospect Heights. Then moving east, you get the Crown Heights, throughout the outer edge of Crown Heights, Franklin Avenue. That’s where there were new businesses starting up. Most of the new businesses, maybe 3 out of 5 were started by people who were from Caribbean immigrant families. Vanderbilt is the big Prospect Heights commercial strip; the guy that started all that was Toly Dubinsky; he opened the first bar on Vanderbilt, Soda Bar. His customers, he was finding customers who were living in Crown Heights. They were pioneers and they complained. They were like, We have to walk so far to get to your bar; can you open a bar in our neighborhood? So they started looking on Franklin Ave. They found this old mechanic’s garage which was a drug den. Like people sitting there shooting up. They basically chased the drug dealers away so they went around the corner to Franklin Ave. They renovated this garage and opened Franklin Park in April 2008 and, of course, it was an instant hit because there was nothing else around; there wasn’t any competition. It becomes very popular — popular with the Caribbean American residents, people from neighborhood families. It’s popular with other longtime residents, like young Hasidim, and it’s popular with the new transplants.

Through Goodwillie I started meeting writers. And talking to the Franklin Park owners, subsequently, about a piece I was writing for The New York Times, I learned they were opening a larger space in addition to their courtyard and small bar, and as the weather turned colder, they wouldn’t have as much business because their business was centered around the beer garden outdoors. They were in a position where they needed to draw people to the bar, and I had these friends who were writers. Exactly three published friends, and I thought, “well this would be a great opportunity to showcase my friends” and I’d been meeting all these people from the community. So, here I have these constituencies that I’m trying to unite or bring together, kind of helping to build community and kind of bring together for an event. I just thought it would be fun, and then when I got an article about the bar published in The New York Times, it got me in with the owners, and so I approached them and they agreed to try it.

It was only supposed to be a single reading because I didn’t know what I was doing. I had not been involved in the literary world. I had three friends who were writers.

The Franklin Park Reading Series was only supposed to be a single reading because I didn’t know what I was doing.

We did the event and started planning it December 2008 right after my New York Times article came out and David Goodwillie, my mentor, was in France for the first few months of 2009, so I couldn’t start it until March. He was very involved in the literary community. Very well connected, so at our first event, even his editor showed up, so we already have kind of a literary world getting involved. Jami Attenberg, another one of my idols, showed up. She was a friend of David’s. I was like, “Oh my god: there’s a celebrity at my event.” I’m pretty sure I had like 40 people there. My friend Matthue Roth, a performance poet that refers to himself as a punk author, taught me a lot about the basic production of the literary reading; he was a part of that “DIY scene” spoken word scene. He had also been part of Sister Spit, the only male member in a troupe.

He told me you need to have drink specials. The bar agreed to drink specials so we had cheap beer. We had decent attendance, enthusiastic response from the community. They sold a lot of beer. The Franklin Park owners did not know what a reading was, they thought it was a book club. I had to explain what it was, they didn’t know that there was money that could be made in literary events, and then kind of because of me, they started having literary events at other venues they own. One of the owners, Matthew Roff, gave me the idea to make flyers. So I made these flyers, I started dropping them off on Franklin Ave, talking to all the merchants and getting them to promote the event to customers. They were very helpful; they used to put the flyers in their windows. Matthew, who had become my mentor and encouraged me during my journalism career; he’s like one of the pioneers of the whole 5th Avenue scene. Southpaw, which he owned, was the first rock club in Brooklyn. They used to design flyers for their events. He told me, “Oh, you should go around and drop off all these flyers at all the coffee shops.” I also spread flyers around Prospect Heights and Park Slope; whatever was near Crown Heights. It definitely brought out a lot of people.

Elissa Schappell [co-founder of Tin House Magazine]: I think we were among the first people to arrive. It felt like there were reading series and stuff like that but it still felt to me very much like what was, at the time really happening, would have been happening somewhere else, like on the Lower East Side. But a lot of that would have been uptown. It was definitely in Manhattan. So when we came we were still doing, I mean still certainly thinking about the city and I do think that there were people who thought that by moving to Brooklyn in some way you weren’t going to be as ambitious. Or you didn’t want it as much. Or you didn’t want it to be — it wasn’t a serious project. That in some way it was kind of DIY, like we’re going to be making a zine because we’re in Brooklyn.

We could have continued to work in our publisher’s apartment. It would have cost us nothing. I think a lot of what we did, when we were having readings — we did do readings at places in Brooklyn, but a lot of that was still forming. But it was just absolutely — the vibe is different in the city. It was just — and maybe it was leaving The Paris Review — it just felt old and done to me. And if you’re going to work in a business that you’re passionate about, and you want to make change and you want to be part of something — you don’t want to do it someplace where the land is already been gone over, where everything’s been done. You’re not making a lot of money, that was a fact. But you get one life. You have to do the thing you want with this life. Why not lean in hard to taking some chances?

You have to do the thing you want with this life. Why not lean in hard to taking some chances?

Roth: I was maybe one of the only journalists reporting on Crown Heights because journalists hadn’t really moved there yet, but that didn’t last long due to the great access to transportation, Brooklyn Public Library, Botanical Gardens, Prospect Park, all that. Early on you were having grad students and publishing people and journalists moving in. But really what happened was, I became busy with the reading series, and I wasn’t really involved in journalism anymore. This famous blog, run by Nick Juravich, I love Franklin Ave, used to promote my events so much on the blog. Back then it was really widely read because people would come to Crown Heights and need to find things — art events and things to attend. He would talk about them. My mission from the beginning was to feature authors the represented the community. It was very important to me to have diversity, to have Caribbean-American authors.

Johnny Temple [editor-in-chief of Akashic Books]: Before the mid-2000s, Brooklyn residents had to cross the East River to see most of their favorite authors speak publicly. In 2018 it’s totally different — this borough is packed with literary offerings. And the publishing business has started following the authors to Brooklyn. I think the Brooklyn Book Festival and the emergence of vibrant new independent bookstores like Greenlight, Word, and more recently Books Are Magic are an important part of this cultural evolution. The good people at Melville House Books have credited the Brooklyn Book Festival with helping lure them from Hoboken to Brooklyn. I had moved from Washington, DC, to Fort Greene in November 1990, and over the years I saw at least two unsuccessful attempts to open a bookshop in the neighborhood. But Fort Greene just couldn’t quite support the stores enough to keep them open. Writer Jennifer Brissett opened Indigo Café & Books at 672 Fulton Street in 2000, but the business had shuttered by the end of 2003. When Greenlight opened on Fulton Street in 2009, the neighborhood was finally able to support a bookstore. And while the store’s success is undoubtedly linked to the ongoing gentrification in the area, Greenlight has become a role model for how bookstores can become deeply engaged with their surrounding communities.H

Nash: I would say that Soft Skull was not so much a hub, well it might have been a small hub, but it was certainly a node. It was a big node. It was less like there was that one transformative moment when somebody came to the store as it was those repeated encounters, a number a which though not necessarily all of which happened in the store. A large percentage of them happened within a five mile radius of the store. The first way I came to know Lynne Tillman was because she read at the store.

It’s that iterated sense of ubiquitousness; you think of people’s social lives operating where they go out on their Saturday nights and stay in the other nights, but my life is the exact opposite. People don’t do readings on Friday or Saturday nights because everybody is out. You do your readings and book parties on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. My entire social life was being out those days and recovering quietly indoors on Friday and Saturday.

Temple: We also staged some wonderful public events, including a memorable discussion about [Richard] Wright’s legacy in October 2002 at the South Oxford Space featuring Nelson George, Kevin Powell, and Hazel Rowley. Several years later, my wife Kara Gilmour and I joined Aaron Zimmerman and the kickass team at NY Writers Coalition to stage the Fort Greene Park Lit Fest, an annual event that presents young neighborhood writers reading from their work alongside heralded authors like Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Jhumpa Lahiri, and many more. From the first festival in 2005, the community response was very positive.

All of these endeavors were precursors to my role as cofounder of the Brooklyn Book Festival, a much larger and more ambitious undertaking that launched in 2006. A year or so earlier I had met then–Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and his staffer Carolyn Greer at a celebration for Cakeman Raven — one of New York City’s best bakers of red velvet cake — across the street from my home in Fort Greene. I gave Marty and Carolyn a copy of Akashic’s recently published collection Brooklyn Noir edited by Tim McLoughlin, and proposed that we discuss the possibility of starting a big book festival in Brooklyn. With the enthusiasm of Carolyn and her Borough Hall colleague Liz Koch, and a green light from Marty, we soon began making plans.

Roth: A lot of devoted attendees of Franklin Park Reading Series live within four or five blocks of the bar. They go and have no idea who the authors are; they go for the drinks and to discover writing. To demonstrate how incredibly dedicated, sophisticated, and literary our audience is, in 2012, Sam Lipsyte read in an amazing lineup including Catherine Lacey and Gary Lutz. Towards the end of the night, around 9:30pm; Lipsyte gets up there and he reads a story from The New Yorker. A new story. You know how long New Yorker stories are, and he’s abridging it, and it’s a very packed house. We used to let people sit on the floor back then, like right in front of the mic, right in front of the reader, so you have people sitting on the floor, this crowded room. And he reads for 45 minutes! You could hear a pin drop. Literally. It was so silent; they were so respectful, and even though, yeah they get like rowdy, they’re very enthusiastic. A.M. Homes read once and she had just been on tour for May We Be Forgiven. She’s like “Where were all you people in San Francisco?” The poet Mike Young read once and did a call-and-response with the audience, having them call out a refrain from one of his poems when he indicated it, just like a band at a concert. It exemplifies how the series is often so fun and captures an uncanny energy. Famous established authors go on book tours and they end up reading for very small rooms, so they appreciate it and it’s just kind of gratifying to get that response and the cheering and the laughter and people come to test out new work. People are bold enough and they trust us.

Brooklyn Letters is supported by a grant from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

‘Jaws’ is a Film Full of Queer Intimacy You Never Noticed

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I ’ve known that I like women since my Sporty Spice obsession at age six, but the feeling was one that I’d mostly ignored until I watched Jaws. My dad gave me a Target gift card for my twelfth birthday, and while shopping for my own present, I was drawn to the blue, metallic sheen of the double-VHS 25th Anniversary Collector’s Edition. The cover image was iconic: a blonde woman swimming naked, an enormous circle of teeth reaching up from the depths, the name of the film in blaring red letters. It seemed scary, dangerous, and a little bit sexy. I watched it perched on the edge of my bed. I was enamored with the elusiveness of the shark, how you couldn’t always see it but you knew it was there. I laughed at the jokes and tensed up at the scary parts, shrieking when Ben Gardner’s head rolled out of the broken hull of his boat. The movie overwhelmed me with feelings I’d never had before, one of which was a breathless tingle in my abdomen, a trembling that excited me as I watched Brody, Hooper, and Quint cooperate, laugh, and argue on the boat.

In the mainstream, queerness is tolerated when masked with straight performance, or an appearance that could be coded as straight. Queer films like Fried Green Tomatoes are widely enjoyed in part because it’s possible to read them as straight. Likewise, Jaws is a straight film that can be read as queer, and this is the reading I choose.

People don’t read me as queer either. I have only come out to a couple members of my family. My brother knows, and when I told my father when I was a teenager, he said, “Okay,” and we never spoke of it again. Coming out to my grandmother is out of the question.

It was more than a decade ago that she made her pronouncement. I was driving her home from grocery shopping, the backseat brimming with food. The whoosh of the air conditioning flapped the plastic bags, fwip-fwip-fwip. The lettuce wilted in the heat, and the carton of ice cream sweat icy droplets.

“Being gay is fine,” she said. “A person can’t help that. But being bisexual is gross. Just pick one! You shouldn’t double-dip.” I imagined myself as a broccoli floret, dunked twice into a tub of French onion dip at a party.

“Why is that gross?” I asked. I pressed the accelerator, and my grandmother grabbed the door.

“Would you want to have sex with a man who has had sex with another man?”

I had begun to see queerness everywhere, in myself and in others, in real life, in books, in movies.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. At that age, I had begun to see queerness everywhere, in myself and in others, in real life, in books, in movies. I looked for it as if finding it would help me decode the puzzle of my own sexuality.

I haven’t had to come out to my grandmother because all my partners who stuck around long enough to be invited to Thanksgiving dinner have been men. I am able to hide my queerness, a privilege that is convenient and gives me safety that some other queer orientations don’t have. Yet there is a guilt nestled underneath that relief, a sense that I am not participating. By not coming out and declaring myself, I have the clinging feeling that I am not being queer enough.

Jaws is can be read as queer even though the men don’t “look” queer to an outside eye. My queer reading stems from two aspects of covert communication: the gaze and innocuous touch, both classic indicators of desire. Historically, queer interactions were dangerous — and often still are. The looks and touches between the men in the film signal an intimacy that is easy to overlook, particularly when the touches occur in jest; in the midst of arguing with Mayor Vaughn about the seriousness of the situation, Hooper places his hands on Brody’s stomach and pats him to punctuate his irritation. It’s easy to orchestrate these touches so that they seem natural, because the characters are often standing in close proximity to one another. Spielberg frames the water and the characters in the same way, very close. The technique makes their bodies and faces take up the screen. The distance between the men seems negligible, the possibilities endless.

This moment of vulnerability is the climax to the explorations of their bodies, because even homoerotic touch is less intimate than the baring of Quint’s trauma.

Touching hands is significant in queer intimacy. As with the examples mentioned above, it is a touch that is erotic yet can easily be perceived as casual. Upon meeting for the first time, Quint says to Hooper, “Let me see your hands.” He takes Hooper’s hands in his and pulls Hooper toward him. The contrast between Quint’s hands and Hooper’s is an analysis of class (Quint claims Hooper has “city hands” and it’s obvious from his hands he’s “had money all [his] life”), but it is also a touch that is personal. By examining Hooper’s hands, Quint is examining Hooper and his history.

Closeness between the men’s bodies becomes even more pronounced when they board The Orca, Quint’s fishing boat aptly (or ironically) named for she shark’s only natural predator. The small space of the boat and the great nothingness of the sea requires the men to remain physically close. The greatest moment of intimacy occurs at night when the work has stopped, and they are drinking inside the boat. Hooper and Quint compare scars. Quint shows a fake tooth and then leans across the table so Hooper can touch a lump on his head. Hooper reveals a jagged scar on his arm from a moray eel. Quint rolls up his sleeve to show Hooper he can’t extend his bicep all the way. Hooper scoots along the booth closer to Quint, rolls up his pant leg, and stretches his leg out to display a scar on his calf. He places his leg on Quint’s hand, and Quint turns to Brody off screen and grins. Quint rubs Hooper’s leg playfully and then moves closer, rolling up his own pant leg and placing it over Hooper’s to present a scar from a thresher’s tail. Brody, standing off to the side, asks, “Thresher?” and Hooper, annoyed, explains that a thresher is a shark, a move that subtly excludes Brody. Quint and Hooper look at each other and smile, an inviting look I cannot read as anything other than erotic. Quint asks Hooper if he wants to drink, and Hooper says they’ll drink to each other’s legs. As they cackle and down their alcohol, Brody lifts up his shirt to show his own scar. He pauses, as if he’s considering inserting himself into the intimate exchange, and ultimately decides against it.

The one-upping of scars is a safe form of touch. It’s a competition, but it’s also a test of boundaries, both physical and emotional, and the climax of this intimacy among the three men is Quint’s famous monologue where he describes the horrifying experience of surviving the greatest US naval disaster in history. The root of Quint’s obsessive sharking is revealed as he describes waiting three days in the water, dehydrated and starving, warding away the frenzied sharks that dragged the sailors away one by one. This moment of vulnerability is the climax to the explorations of their bodies, because even homoerotic touch is less intimate than the baring of Quint’s trauma.

As a child, I always wanted to touch my girl friends. Playful touch was a way I could explore my relationship to other girls and the feelings that came with it, but only if it did not cross a line — a line I didn’t always see. My grandmother came to pick me up from soccer practice when I was in first grade. She waited in her car next to the field. A girl named Jessie and I ran across the grass, spanking each other and laughing hysterically. When I reached my grandmother’s car I said goodbye to Jessie and climbed in. “What the hell were you doing?” my grandmother hissed. “Running around spanking each other like that. What will Jessie’s mother think of you?” I sat silently in the backseat and tried not to cry, letting the shame wash over me, shame I hadn’t even known I should have.

I’ve been told that I am like a piece of spaghetti: straight until wet, my orientation whittled down to a joke. Or that I wasn’t really bisexual, just horny. I am, in other words, straight until proven gay.

Viewers may be tempted to write off the queer intimacy between Brody, Hooper, and Quint because of their history of straight relationships. Brody is married to a woman and has two children and Hooper makes a passing joke about an ex-girlfriend; some might point to these details as evidence of their straightness, as if there’s only gay or straight, and no way to exist outside of that dichotomy.

Using sexual history as the sole indicator of orientation is detrimental and damaging, and it’s why I struggle with my pansexuality, often feeling guilty for calling myself queer while not being more queer. I’ve not been with many women, and for some, this means my queerness is not valid. People, mostly straight men, have made comments like, “You’re not bisexual, you’re just bi-curious,” or “You just kiss girls because it makes guys interested in you.” I’ve also been told that I am like a piece of spaghetti: straight until wet, my orientation whittled down to a joke. Or that I wasn’t really bisexual, just horny. I am, in other words, straight until proven gay. These are all small things when they are looked at in isolation, but when examined together, they become a series of moments that attempt to delegitimize my identity.

Homosexuality is constantly contrasted with heterosexuality as if they are mutually exclusive. As a result, same-sex pairings are sometimes regarded as reactionary responses to heterosexuality not working out: lesbians date women because they hate men or because they experienced trauma at the hands of men and can now only feel safe with women, or men sleep with other men when there aren’t women around (think prison stereotypes). Culture works to delegitimize queerness, to rationalize away the gay. In the context of Jaws, homoeroticism can flourish because women are taken out of the equation. But the implication isn’t that the men are sexually drawn to one other due to a lack of women, (Hooper and Brody have undeniable chemistry throughout the film, even at the dinner table with Brody’s wife), but rather, eroticism is given room to grow because the experience is not continually contrasted with straightness. The men are isolated from expectation, from the civilization that is Amity Island, and all that exists is themselves.

Our sensuality was a sort of performance art: although we were there, making love in front of our male friends, the sensations I felt with her were intimate and invisible.

Many of my sexual experiences with women as a young adult were within threesomes that included a man. While it disgusts me now to think about my queer desire as fuel for a straight man’s fantasy, the context of threesomes provided a “safe” way of exploring my love of women. There was a security in pretending that making love to a woman was really just me catering to what the man wanted, and I freed myself of any responsibility I had to be “good” at lesbian sex. One night in college, I went down on a female coworker at a party in my apartment. I pushed her up against the wall and licked and tore at her body while the men watched. Our sensuality was a sort of performance art: although we were there, making love in front of our male friends, the sensations I felt with her were intimate and invisible.

In queer intimacy, the presence of a person of the opposite sex does not negate the sexual experience between the queer lovers. Likewise, having a wife or girlfriend in the case of Brody or Hooper does not make the characters straight. While we might wish to place Brody, Hooper, and Quint into neat categories, the on-screen evidence of the gaze, of touching, of standing so close together, points to a queer intimacy that refuses to be contained within the binary. The fact that there are three men instead of two is a subtle dismantling of the binary view of sexual orientations. There is a sexual power in threes in general, such as with the predominance of love triangles in narratives, and Jaws is no different, even if the love triangle isn’t explicit.

There is much written about the physical dangers of the pussy, particularly the mythical fanged pussy. The vagina dentata, a popular image in folklore, now runs rampant in horror films: the extraterrestrial monster in Alien, Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors, the whole premise of Teeth. Jaws is another example that some people feel embodies this monstrous feminine presence. Like a mouth, the vagina is an organ that devours. I remember flipping through The Joy of Sex as a kid and reading a paragraph that described the vagina as frightening because it accepts the strong, masculine penis and then regurgitates it once it is limp and inert.

…the mouth is a reminder of the ever present hum of desires, of wanting, of pursuing things that might potentially harm or undo us entirely.

The vagina and the mouth bear similarities. Both can experience hunger and want, both can experience sensation, pleasure. Consuming food, having sex, chewing gum, masturbating, picking teeth with a tooth pick, all of these are responses elicited by the desires of the body. When I watch Jaws and see the beast’s dorsal fin pierce the water, I see the drive of desire, not the monstrous feminine. When the shark breaches the surface and grins its terrible grin as Brody chums the water, I feel exhilarated by its hunger. It is a similar feeling to the one I have when Hooper offers his leg to Quint or when Quint brushes up against Hooper in the narrow quarters of the boat. The mouth is not a feminine symbol come to destroy male camaraderie. Instead, the mouth is a reminder of the ever present hum of desires, of wanting, of pursuing things that might potentially harm or undo us entirely.

What I like about the sexuality in Jaws is the ambiguity. There’s an in-betweenness there in which the men are not gay nor straight but are instead neither or both. My place on the spectrum of sexual orientation doesn’t seem to stay in one spot. Sometimes I’m more attracted to men, sometimes I’m more attracted to women. Sometimes I’m attracted to nobody. Sometimes I’m attracted to all genders equally. Often, I feel the shame of being not queer enough. But I feel comfort watching Jaws and seeing characters that defy labels. It helps me check the impulse to use labels on myself that I know are false or incomplete.

There’s a particular moment in the film that brings me to tears each time. After Brody’s son goes into shock after witnessing the shark tear apart a fellow boater, Brody sits up and looks out at the water. The camera pauses on that shot, the strings of the score soaring as the great expanse of the ocean opens up in front of the viewer. The ocean is not just one thing. It is both the livelihood of the island and the destruction of it. It is both beautiful and terrifying. It is knowable and unknown. As Brody gazes out into forever, I think about how the sea is not just one thing, and neither am I.

How to Build Your Own Small Press in Brooklyn

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The Brooklyn Letters project is a series of oral histories of literary Brooklyn from 1999 to 2009, presented by Electric Literature with support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

This is the fifth installment of Brooklyn Letters. You can read earlier oral histories here.

You’ve got an idea for a small press, or maybe a literary magazine. Maybe a few people have your back, even if the enthusiasm is their primary contribution. Motivation’s what you’ve got. Money’s what you need (when is it not?). Still, why wait? Nobody else is doing this, so why not build your own? The same DIY ethos that paved the way for grassroots arts movements informed many of Brooklyn’s independent presses. From Akashic to Tin House, Soft Skull Press to Brooklyn Arts Press, so much of Brooklyn book and magazine publishing owes its existence to the urge to dive in and do it yourself.

Richard Nash helped revive Soft Skull Press from financial failure, moving it to Brooklyn and quickly building an impressive roster of writers. Elissa Schappell and Rob Spillman decided to give Wyn McCormack’s offer to start a literary magazine a shot, even though they were skeptical. Fast forward to the present day, Tin House has become a bastion for great writing and books. Johnny Temple treated Akashic Books like a hobby while tending to his own musical endeavors; however, all it took was the inclination and urge to invest in risk and give it a shot. Akashic Books is one of Brooklyn’s literary mainstays. Joe Pan, having received numerous roadblocks and rejections, decided to self-publish and began using the knowledge he gained to publish other poets’ work.

Together we spoke about the perils of being at the helm of a startup, the surprise of seeing a community forming around your efforts, the earnestness in taking big risks, and how the smell of pies makes the effort of publishing worthwhile.

Elissa Schappell [co-founder of Tin House Magazine]: From the beginning, which was a long time ago (circa 1997), Wyn McCormack — he started The Oregonian magazine and was one of the early founders of Mother Jones — he was working at The Nation and decided he wanted to start a literary magazine. I had been the senior editor of The Paris Review for a while and I was on maternity leave. He got in touch with me and said, “Would you be interested in this?” I asked Rob [Spillman] — he had just recently left The New Yorker — if he would be interested because I thought, “God, I don’t know if I want to do this again; I could just go back to The Paris Review, why would I not just do that?” I ended up saying, “No, I don’t think so.” McCormack came back to us and said, “No look, let’s just meet, let’s talk about it.” Over the course of a couple of months he persuaded us and we decided to give it a shot. The idea was he wanted us to move to Portland and do it there but we had just moved to Brooklyn and there was no way in the world once we arrived in Brooklyn that we were going to live in Portland.

Richard Nash [former editor-in-chief of Soft Skull Press]: Soft Skull Press started in 1993. The founder, Sander Hicks, had a novel that he wrote in a creative writing class at The New School. He printed it out and no one took it. He was working at a Kinko’s with his girlfriend Susan Mitchell, and she had learned Pagemaker. They worked the night shift, which meant there was no manager around. She basically did book layout using Pagemaker, printing on 4×1 and 8.5×11 paper. They used the tape binder at the Kinko’s, and over the course of a bunch of shifts, they printed over 400 copies of his novel. For many publishers, certainly many desktop publishing companies that began in the 90s and even early 2000s, it goes back deep, to the impulse to publish a book by the person involved, the person who becomes a publisher. A self-publisher, you could say, is just a publisher who ended up not becoming a publisher.

A self-publisher is just a publisher who ended up not becoming a publisher.

Johnny Temple [editor-in-chief of Akashic Books]: Akashic was a hobby while I was playing bass guitar for years in the band Girls Against Boys. (We still play on occasion.) The first two years, 1997 and 1998, we published three books. At some point I became more interested in publishing books than making music full-time. About four years into publishing, I started playing music less, and publishing more.

Joe Pan [founder and editor-in-chief of Brooklyn Arts Press]: Brooklyn Arts Press started with a manuscript I’d written while at Iowa. I came close with some big prizes but honestly didn’t want to keep spending 25 bucks a pop for contest fees, so I calculated how much it would cost to put the book out myself. I imagined what it would take to create the entire thing, from cover art to font stylings. I was making a lot of weird art at my day job, literally hiding it under my desk at this ad agency, so the idea of just making a book fell in with this idea of myself as someone who considered himself an all-around artist. Nothing was off-limits. The DIY aspect appealed to me. I did all the math, and it would turn out to be wildly wrong, much more complicated than I imagined when I tried to scale up, but at the beginning, that didn’t matter, I just had what I felt was an accomplished manuscript and a drive to get it out into the world. And it worked. Despite a few friends telling me it was terrible for my career, and what did I know about publishing? I asked this lovely woman I would soon marry what she thought and she said do it. She said, “I love that you make things happen.” It’s important to pull close those who inspire you to create and live openly. I published the book and sent it off to famous writers I loved. I have postcards from Don DeLillo and C.D. Wright on my bookshelf, saying nice things about my poems. I’d written and published a book I made, and I was delighted. I felt it tied me to a long history of poets who’d done the same, and a greater history of artists who took matters into their own hands.

Rob Spillman [co-founder of Tin House Magazine]: It was at a time when literary magazines were kind of really stodgy and considered almost like castor oil. They were supposed to be good for you like medicine. There was no design, there were no pull quotes, it was very flat. Non-designed. Like, when we had pull quotes people were like, “oh god, they’re lightweight, they can’t be serious.” But it was kind of in the air. McSweeney’s, the first issue came out six months before us. So we came out right at the same time — and Dave Eggers was living on 9th Street at the time. I was living on 5th Street out here and we would kind of compare notes and he did a couple of fundraisers out here. Eggers and I worked at slick magazines and [tried] to bring in a little more slick sensibility and having fun with that form.

Schappell: Brooklyn felt immediately like home to us. This was a time in Brooklyn when, I don’t know, there was a lot of interesting and smart people there looking to do some great things. I mean I guess there always has been, but at the time, it felt new, refreshing. We got to Brooklyn and we were just like, “this is the place to be, this is awesome.” And when it came up to do the magazine, we didn’t say “oh, we want to do it in Brooklyn,” but that was how we were feeling. For a short period of time, like a year and a half I think, we operated out of our publisher’s apartment on the Upper East Side which is what we had been doing at The Paris Review forever because The Paris Review used to be in George’s — George Plimpton’s apartment. So there was something kind of, a nice little symmetry there. But that’s not what we wanted. We really wanted to have our own office, to have our own space. We ended up getting a place over on 4th Ave. It was totally shitty. We had no money. I remember when our poetry editor, Brenda Shaughnessy, showed up for the first day of work; we had her putting together terrible IKEA furniture with those horrible little pegs. That was her first day of work. It was a terrible shitty little hole but you had the smell of baking pie coming up through the floorboards all the time, which was quite lovely. We were going to be something very very very very different. The Paris Review was all about history and all about gravitas and all the things that really were, and are, important to me… but Tin House had to be all about us. It had to be something very different and it was really important that it be in Brooklyn because Brooklyn was all about taking risks and getting out there and doing it yourself.

It was really important that it be in Brooklyn because Brooklyn was all about taking risks and getting out there and doing it yourself.

Nash: It wasn’t so much the idea of it being a press. It was the idea that we were inventing an internet start-up that happened to be a press. At the time was working at Oxford University Press, not because I had any aspirations vocationally in publishing. It was just a way of getting health insurance, given that theater wasn’t how you got health insurance. So I started learning stuff about publishing, not much, but I was learning some stuff around publishing. In particular, I was learning about digital publishing and electronic publishing because Oxford had some of the first things that were formerly part of print publishing like reference texts that were starting to go online. Encyclopedias and dictionaries, of which Oxford published a great deal, were some of the first stuff for people to figure out they could make a business out of the first dot-com boom in ’98, ’99 to 2000. I had a little bit of money at the time, so I actually became an investor. I invested $5,000, largely foolishly.

But yeah, Soft Skull was in deep, deep, deep financial shit. Although I didn’t have much of a formal role at Soft Skull other than being an investor and a volunteer in a whole bunch of different ways, I offered to help out. At that point Soft Skull had three somewhat-paid employees ranging in age from 20 to 23. I was 31. I was a fucking grown-up, so I basically started negotiating with the printers and the authors about all the unpaid bills. I had to persuade them to keep working with us, and in the case of the printers continue to extend us credit, even though we already owed them a bunch of money and hadn’t really be forthcoming with the circumstances around why. Over a period of time, I fell in love with the Sisyphean task of making it work.

Pan: I had no fancy ideas of what publishing meant or didn’t mean when I started. Brooklyn Arts Press was almost Manhattan Arts Press, as I was sort of between Williamsburg and my girlfriend’s place in the West Village, where I’d eventually go live for a few years. I knew a bunch of poets and some artists and thought putting their work out would be fun, enjoyable, a form of collaboration that ended with an object in the world and a party. About this time I’d gone in with two friends on a gallery up in Beacon called GO NORTH, so I was scouting artists in Brooklyn for shows and did a bunch of studio visits, which is how I found Jonathan Allen and Anne Beck. Anne was teaching at Pratt, Jon would introduce me to the Lower East Side gallery scene and Lu Magnus and he actually already had ties to the poetry world — he did a bunch of book covers for poets early on. And I ended up doing a book that’s basically one big interview with one of my GO NORTH co-curators, Greg Slick, about his work. And just about this time I also hooked up with Hrag Vartanian, who had just founded Hyperallergic, his and his husband’s art blog, and they were living down the street from me in Williamsburg and had started reviewing BAP books on the site. He’d offer me a job as their first poetry editor in 2012. I’m bringing all this up not just as a history but to show how sort of free-flowing entrenched you become in these scenes, and how for me publishing was just one aspect of who I was as an artist. I wrote poetry and fiction, primarily, but I also made art and published art and poetry books, and was in daily life an editor, which is at certain times the most valuable of artists, in my opinion, as a collaborator and shaper. I was being inspired by what people were doing around me, in ways that didn’t feel like direct competition, even if it was, but which felt more like “Hey, we’re alive and doing cool stuff and flying hard under the radar and nobody gets to dictate our art but us.”

Spillman: We were doing all this work to discover writers, so why not? We wanted to have a workshop where we could use people who don’t necessarily teach all the time. So we had Joy Williams and Kelly Link, people who aren’t primary teachers come in and teach. So it’s less academic it’s more toward craft intensive. That was the impetus. We were looking for new voices and almost every issue we would discover a new voice and it would get signed up by somebody and get a book contract. And we were like wait, we’re doing all this, why don’t we just publish them ourselves? That was the initial impulse.

Temple: In April 2003, I was selling Akashic offerings at a table at the National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College in Crown Heights, when I had a chance encounter with best-selling Jamaican writer Colin Channer. After a lively conversation, we realized we lived right across the street from each other in Fort Greene. This led to many collaborations, with Akashic publishing several of Colin’s books, and him inviting Akashic authors to appear at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica, which he cofounded with Kwame Dawes and Justine Henzell. Akashic authors have appeared at every Calabash since then, and I have been fortunate to always attend. This unplanned, life-changing exchange with Colin at the National Black Writers Conference was Brooklyn to the core.

Pan: I arrived in Brooklyn in 2003. I had no idea what the lit scene was like. I knew about only a handful of small presses. Ugly Duckling, Hanging Loose. Futurepoem. I just assumed they’d all started off as DIY projects and built themselves up. It didn’t seem impossible. I used to live across the street from North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston Salem, and a whole group of modern dancers I knew from there who moved to New York started their own dance company — VIA Dance. I had a filmmaker buddy start his own film business for his first feature length. Another friend from Florida who started his own sand-sculpting company, and he’s spent his life traveling the world doing what he loved. In my circle of friends, funding your own artistic projects and inventions for display was never a sign of failure or some maudlin display of ego, it was how you got shit done. I tried to remember this when I’d tell people what I was doing and with some have to withstand their “blank with internal eye-roll” expression. I tried not to let it get me down. There was more relief once I’d published six or so books, when I had a catalogue and my book was one of many. I’ve always really hated the term “vanity press.” What a myopic elitist term to throw at hard workers who didn’t luck out on the right editor. I mean, we’ve all seen shit books, and maybe you like me know editors who have turned shit books into bestsellers. And eventual movies…. Editors are the photoshop of publishing, in certain respects. Good stories and well-written books are often passed on because they’re judged to be unmarketable in the current climate, or due to some lack of personal resonance with an editor or more often now because the writer lacks a sufficient platform or loyalty base for audience engagement. It’s a crap shoot. There should be no shame attached to a diligent writer turning her accomplishment into a salable work via Createspace and building up an audience. None. Most visual artists I’ve known in Brooklyn are forced to self-promote on the open market without gallery support, and only the very worst snobs would attach any shame to their hustle. The rest recognize the situation and the initiative.

In my circle of friends, funding your own artistic projects and inventions for display was how you got shit done.

Spillman: I did physically distribute the first year, all of the issues, to the NY bookstores. In my Subaru Outback would drive to St Mark’s Books, drop ’em all just to make sure that they had them. I remember the second or third issue I drove into Manhattan and dropped off issues at St. Marks — like 30 issues — they were our biggest supporter right from the start, they were great. And dropped off 30 issues, got home; the manager called me up and said Molly Ringwald just came in and bought all 30 issues; “Can you come back with 30 more?” And I was like, “Are you kidding me? What’s up with that?” It turned out she had just started dating a writer I published — Panio Gianopoulos—and that’s how I found out they were dating. They now have three kids together. That was like a really weird early call to get.

Nash: There is one sense of it being very grassroots, and then there is another, of critical mass that more easily allows the larger world to create a new category in their brain called “edgy publishers.” It becomes a kind of a cycle. The vast majority of people in the world who identify with Soft Skull were not going to go to a huge amount of effort to participate in it. Their participation was largely reading and writing, and reading and writing are not lacking intensity, but they don’t require that you do a lot of the shit work actually required to run a publisher. If you were doing a tour to promote your book, we were one of the people the publishers called to say, hey, this person is in town in three months, or hey, that person is in town.

I remember one sweet thing: Paul Muldoon read in the middle of a fucking blizzard, and that was very cool. He had to schlep back to New Jersey. He could have canceled so easily, but instead he drove in from Princeton and he drove back to Princeton. By having a store, it implies a certain openness. You can’t walk right into Random House. It was a highly permeable membrane between us and the world. A lot of times publishing gets claimed as a matter of taste, a matter of personal taste of the editors. Editors’ tastes are divine and poised, and elite by the insiders. That may be true in some instances, but what independent publishing is much more about is that it is a tacit community where the people who run it are not deciding what the community wants but trying to infer what the community wants. We are a conduit through which the community expresses itself. My role and the role of the folks who worked with me was to listen as attentively as possible to the community. We searched for Soft Skull-ness. We found Soft Skull-ness out in the world.

We are a conduit through which the community expresses itself.

Temple: While sitting in Fort Greene Park in 1938, Richard Wright completed Native Son, which went on to become the first nationally best-selling book by a black author in this country’s history. That book was an important piece of my own social and literary education and in the shaping of my interests first as a reader, and later as a publisher.

In the early 2000s I teamed up with the Fort Greene Park Conservancy, African Voices magazine, and Griot Reading Programs to found the Richard Wright Project, with the goal of publicly celebrating his work. On October 18, 2001, a Richard Wright Commemorative Bench was unveiled in Fort Greene Park as a result of our efforts.

Schappell: I think this is something every generation has to do, to be the one to create — everyone needs that art, that magazine, that movement, and you don’t create a movement, or you don’t create a different form if you continue doing the same thing. I think that’s something so exciting about what everyone’s done in Brooklyn. All these people arriving and managing to do their own thing. You don’t feel like — or really I don’t feel like any of the things that come out to Brooklyn are just a pale imitation of something else. I mean look at A Public Space [a literary magazine founded by former Paris Review editor Brigid Hughes]. A Public Space is amazing! And it’s not The Paris Review. So I really do think that’s one of the things that’s cool about Brooklyn. I do feel like we have this outside influence. Brooklyn itself has impacted the art world. But certainly the people that move here are arriving with the same ideas and desires, to have things changed in the same way.

Brooklyn Letters is supported by a grant from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.