The following story was chosen by Ottessa Moshfegh as the winner of the 2025 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. The prize is awarded annually by Selected Shorts and a guest author judge. This story will be performed by an actor this spring. To hear more great short stories performed by great actors subscribe to Selected Shorts wherever you get your podcasts.
Kestrel
You had to call it “The Community Orchard” or Abuela couldn’t hear you, professing deafness to words like co-op, and amnesia to childhood farm. Even if both titles were true. Maybe it’s just the way imagination gets stirred into memory. But I swear there was a time you could watch each tree tilting on its axis. Warming to the glow of her.
Most days after school, I’d drive to Abuela’s. She’d pass me a steaming mug of manzanilla and bundle a cardigan over her knees, though she always kept the house too warm. At any point in our conversations, she could find the exit ramp leading back to her own memories as a girl of my age. Then seventeen-year-old Abuela and I would poke at our manzanilla sachets and laugh about high school and the foolishness young couples get up to.
Now, a low sun squints through rows of crabapple. My hair goes suthering in the wind. Perched on my gardening glove, a small falcon bobs its tail, trills. Impossible sounds from its bird alphabet. Abuela named the kestrel Clementine after rescuing her from a fugitive kite string in a tree. She’d always bring Clementine to the orchard with a little leash and a bird harness. Clementine won’t wear the harness for me, so she clutches my hand.
The first time it happened, I found Abuela slumped over the lip of the bathtub. The CT scan revealed a stroke. Abuela was put on blood thinners and, until she could no longer contain herself, bedrest.
Now, Clementine pecks at my forearm. The smell of the new drainage ditch coats the back of my throat. Here, the soil remembers. A few rows down-slope, Abuela once held a cherry sunward, showing me the translucent flesh kindled red. She told me this was the spot where, long ago, a family witch had lifted a curse cast by a rival farmer. I remember where she used to mound the leaves each year, right where bandits were rumored to have hidden their loot. She’d cover me with the leaves, one by one, until the world went dark and warm. Then crying out that she’d struck gold, Abuela would dig me out again and fold me into her arms.
She discovered Clementine the week after her stroke. Looped up in kite string. The kestrel had no fight left to give her. Abuela simply twisted the string from the under-branches then plucked Clementine, “like a fruit,” she’d told me. The string had bitten into the flesh of Clementine’s wing, and there was ligament damage. The vet prescribed a sling, antibiotics, rest.
After school, I’d help Abuela feed Clementine and clean her roost. We’d talk and Clementine would add her klee-klee to the conversation. If she was hungry, she’d give a low, plaintive warble, a sound reserved just for Abuela, who would admonish her, saying that warbling was only for kestrel chicks calling to their parents. Over time, Abuela took over more and more of her care. Nurturing Clementine didn’t seem to drain her energy so much as rejuvenate it. By the end of the month, Abuela returned to the orchard. I took her return as evidence that the health scare was over. I told Mom about the improvement, and she asked “Who, Abuela? Or the bird?” and I thought, yes and yes.
The setting sun casts the trees in bronze. They give off an almost shadowless glow. As if the light is emanating from every surface. My ankles chafe with the scruff of ryegrass. Last week, community orchard hands found Abuela between the rows of pears. Arm cushioning her head. Like she might wake soon.
I watch now as the cherries burn. Bulbs of incandescent red. Clementine goes suddenly tense. She makes a sound I’ve never heard her make. A gentle, questioning coo. Her head and tail bobbing. Then with a lunge, she detaches from my arm as if from a branch. Her klee-klee sails over the crabapples and pears and the leaves and leaves and leaves while the sun goes to seed, and the wind floats her higher, forever out of my reach. Higher.
I was in high school when I first read Patty Hearst’s memoir, Every Secret Thing, in which she recounts the nightmare of being kidnapped by a group of urban guerrillas and coerced to join their cell. For a year and a half, Hearst committed a series of crimes with the Symbionese Liberation Army before being arrested and convicted for bank robbery. Reading this as a suburban teenager, my reaction was: God, if only something that exciting would happen to me.
With age, I understood this experience was actually a horrific trauma for Hearst, but I remained fascinated by the prosecution’s portrayal of her as a “rebel in search of a cause.” That fictional girl served as the inspiration for Séverine Guimard, the seventeen-year-old protagonist of my novel The Bombshell.
Séverine is the daughter of a French politician who’s been assigned to the Mediterranean island of Corsica. Lonely and bored, Séverine dreams of running away to Hollywood and making it big as an actress. Then one night, a trio of radical Corsican separatists throw her in the trunk of their rental car and abscond to a safe house in the island’s remote interior. When ransom negotiations fall through, they find themselves stuck with their headstrong hostage. They start Séverine on a diet of revolutionary thinkers, and it’s not long before she begins to sympathize with the group’s cause and see a shortcut to stardom. She decides to join the cell, and what follows is a summer of romantic entanglement, a media frenzy, and a near-revolution.
Séverine may fancy herself a budding intellectual, but she’s more impulsive than cautious, which creates conflict with her comrades. “You act like it’s so hard to change anything,” she reproaches the men, and indeed, inciting change seems easy for her, at least initially. Like Séverine, the women in these seven novels don’t resign themselves to injustice, desperation, inattention, or boredom—they change their circumstances. So what if their methods are technically illegal?
For a novel about spousal abuse, the Indian caste system, misogyny, and mariticide, The Bandit Queens is surprisingly delightful. Geeta’s abusive, alcoholic husband left her five years ago, but rumor has it she killed him. She’s never bothered to set the record straight, which becomes an issue when the women in her microloan group start approaching her to kill their own no-good husbands.
If the men in this novel are mostly straightforward villains (you won’t feel guilty rooting for their demise), the women’s friendships are refreshingly nuanced. “Women splayed the far corners, their cruelty and kindness equally capacious.” They’re not above sisterly bickering, manipulation, or even blackmail, but when men threaten the safety of the most vulnerable members of the village, they’re thereto support—and kill for—each other.
Millennials will remember Gawker’s relentless coverage of the “Hipster Grifter” Kari Ferrell, a scammer who predated Anna Delvey and The Tinder Swindler. Fifteen years after serving time for cashing bad checks, Ferrell has published an endearingly crass and self-aware memoir that oozes charisma; when she receives her prison-issued ID and first sees her mugshot, she muses: “It was a good hair day and the locks framing my face were giving off angelic cool-girl vibes. Was this… was this the best photo of me ever taken? I wondered if I’d be able to buy a higher-res print (I could and did!), because even in arresting times my vanity couldn’t be silenced.”
It’s not only a very funny, juicy account of her criminal escapades, but a deeply humane portrayal of her fellow incarcerated women and Ferrell’s journey coming to terms with her transracial adoption.
Twenty-one-year-old Morvern wakes one morning to find her boyfriend has committed suicide in their apartment. So what does she do? Tells everyone he’s left town, disposes of the body, and uses his bank card to book a Spanish holiday for her and her bestie. But the real crime is that she prints out her boyfriend’s unpublished novel—his only legacy, which he entrusts to her in his suicide note—and submits it to publishers having changed the name on the cover to her own.
Yet there’s an ingenuousness to Morvern that endears you to her, even as she’s chopping up her boyfriend’s decomposing corpse. The novel isn’t particularly interested in explaining why Morvern does what she does, only showing you how she copes with her hardscrabble life—by insisting on pleasure by any means necessary.
The plot seems simple enough: Two friends, Penny and Cale. Penny goes missing, Cale looks for her. But this novel is a labyrinth, and as you wend your way through the out of order chapters, bumping into hangman’s puzzles and images of tarot cards and serpents, the book itself begins to feel like an occult object. The crimes committed are far from the most unsettling thing about this story; a sense of disquiet pervades even the most anodyne interactions, and you realize there is nothing simple about these girls’ friendship, their desert town, and the reasons someone might disappear from there.
As quiet, bookish Cale searches for Penny, she encounters the dark sides of the people in town, including Penny herself. However, coming into contact with that darkness doesn’t merely destabilize Cale—in a twisted complication of the coming-of-age narrative, it empowers her.
Plenty of Agatha Christie’s novels involve a murderess, but in this Poirot mystery, not one but three women are suspected in the poisoning of painter Amayas Crale. His wife took the fall sixteen years ago, but before her death, she sent her daughter a letter avowing her innocence. The daughter appeals to Poirot to solve the cold case, and he narrows it down to five suspects, including Crale’s teenage sister-in-law, his young muse, and the governess. I won’t spoil this 80-year-old novel, but its inclusion on this list might give you a hint…
While writing The Bombshell, I often returned to this meditation on youth from Poirot as he contemplates Crale’s final painting, of his twenty-year-old lover: “What do most people mean when they say that? ‘So young.’ Something innocent; something appealing, something helpless. But youth is not that! Youth is crude, youth is strong, youth is powerful—yes, and cruel! And one thing more—youth is vulnerable.”
A woman using the alias Aimée Joubert travels throughout France offering her services to men who want other men dead. Not quite a hitwoman, not quite a conwoman, she kills for love of the game and of money. However, when she arrives in a new town that’s rife with corruption, she begins to develop a conscience—although it may be too little, too late.
As with Morvern Callar, the reader can only guess what Aimée’s thinking or feeling through her spare dialogue and actions, which are sociopathic in both their dispassion and unpredictability. Many “killer women” narratives justify their heroines’ murderous tendencies, but Fatale is glaringly lacking in morality. “SENSUAL WOMEN, PHILOSOPHICALLY MINDED WOMEN, IT IS TO YOU THAT I ADDRESS MYSELF.” So concludes this stylish, cinematic polar, a sentence that acts as a Rorschach test. Is it a warning to women who find themselves seduced by Aimée’s story? Or a call to action?
Vida Asch spent the late 1960s bombing corporate and government buildings with the Little Red Wagon collective, a Weather Underground-esque group that was supposed to bring about an age of peace and equality—but ten years later, she’s living an oft-monotonous, oft-stressful life underground, at the mercy of her dwindling network’s generosity.
She’s paranoid about being recognized—even a tampon run to the pharmacy must be strategized—although her new, much younger boyfriend believes she’s “living in a spy movie that’s over.” Is Vida’s cautiousness outdated, symptomatic of an outsized ego? Or is she correct to think the feds are still after her?
Vida is a realistic portrayal of a woman who dedicated her life to changing the world, yet as she ages, she finds the world moving on without her, in the wrong direction. It’s not a hopeless narrative, however; there’s still the occasional bubble bath, lover, glass of good wine, and glimmer of faith that her sacrifice was not made in vain.
Who doesn’t love dark academia? The malevolent architecture and forced proximity cut with the youth and ambition that sets it all aflame? Ever since chancing upon a marked-up paperback of The Secret History in the late ’90s, I’ve been obsessed with dark academia and all the micro-genres contained within it: gothic mysteries, boarding school thrillers, Neo-Victorian suspense, and my new favorite—what I’m calling art school academia.
There is no better place to find a particular kind of monster than an art school. Imagine hundreds of talented young people sequestered inside a prestigious institution, believing they’re there to master something sacred, only to realize that to be successful, they need to do more than just create. They need to be chosen—lauded by critics, signed by prestigious galleries, hung in museums. To achieve this, to be chosen, they must face public criticism, intense competition, and the ever-increasing pressure of gamesmanship.
My debut thriller, Tell Them You Lied, is partially set in such an art school. When I began writing, I wanted to understand who could succeed in such a pressure cooker—and how? And what happens when all that ambition and talent goes awry? Below is a list of eight of delicious books set in art schools, each with different, and compelling, answers to those questions.
A lush, literary novel about art, ambition, love, and greed set in the elite world of The Wrynn College of Art, where success is very often a zero-sum game. Louisa is both fascinated by and envious of her new roommate, the brilliant and beautiful campus star, Karina. As their friendship evolves into a love affair, they must contend with the fraught politics and grandiose personalities at Wrynn (and beyond) to find their place in the art world.
“What counts as art?” Painter asks in her memoir. “Who is an artist? Who decides? Over the course of several years, I learned the answers. The hard way. In art school.”
There are so many things to love about this true story about navigating Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of Art at age 63, after giving up a successful career in academics, and only some of it has to do with art criticism. Painter takes on heavy topics—racism, classism, ageism, pretty privilege, and what any of that has to do with ‘making it’ in the art world. With simple clarity, she describes the divide between talent and effort, goes deep into art theory, style, fatness, taboo, as well as run-ins with a bitter male professor (which, incidentally, helped me see my own college years in a new light).
As in all her books, Davis centers The Masterpiece on a Manhattan landmark—this time it’s Grand Central Terminal—and alternates between two timelines. In the first, it’s 1928, and Clara has rebelled against expectations, landing a teaching job at the prestigious Grand Central School of Art. Overlooked and dismissed as a mere “woman artist,” Clara must fight for every opportunity she has. Still, no amount of tenacity can protect her and her bohemian friends from the consequences of the Great Depression.
Fifty years later, newly divorced and financially devastated Virginia finds the remnants of Clara’s abandoned studio classroom in the now dilapidated Grand Central Terminal, along with an unsigned masterpiece. Virginia embarks on a quest to find the truth about the painting, and to save the masterpiece of a building along the way.
Consent is not a novel, but reads like one. In the 1970s when the author was a 17-year-old art student, she began an affair with her married, 47-year-old painting teacher whom she later married. After her husband died in 2016, the same year the #MeToo movement took off, Ciment began to understand the genesis of their relationship in a new and critical way. Her memoir is as much about painting and process as it is about power and abuse of that power.
“Anything could be a self-portrait,” according to Joey, an art student in San Francisco. She doesn’t fit in with her classmates—her family is too working-class, too rough and selfish—and she expends an amazing amount of effort to keep them secret. She tells no one when her sister ditches her baby and takes off, leaving their mother desperate for help. Joey grapples with her familial responsibilities and an assignment that might end her art career before it begins: How to create a self-portrait before you even know who you are?
Scott’s graphic novel takes us to the University of Hell, which is the best name for an art school I’ve ever heard in my life. Wendy is caught in that in-between time of your twenties—half-experienced, half naïve, and trying to navigate through the big stuff. She takes on art and relationships and addiction and ambition in a way that is both distressing and laugh-out-loud funny. Scott’s drawings are amazing, too.
After Zoe’s best friend at art school is murdered, she moves to Berlin to escape. There she befriends another American exchange student, Hailey, and they find themselves subletting the posh apartment of a famous thriller writer—who may or may not be watching them. The situation oddly suits them, though; these girls want to be seen. They decide to make their lives worthy of intrigue. What follows is a slow burn thriller, set in the captivating, art-filled world of late-00s Berlin.
Merle is an art student in at the Corcoran School of Art in 1978, more interested in cave-art and graffiti than getting her work shown in galleries. When she is kicked out of school and suddenly homeless, she wanders the streets of D.C., spray-painting graffiti as proof of her existence. In a secondary timeline, Arthur Rimbaud, a teenager in France a hundred years earlier, is also struggling to find his way—a runaway, jailed for vagrancy, also in need of shelter—until the two young artists meet in a flash of magic that will change both their lives.
Reeling from a bitter divorce and grieving the loss of her mother by suicide, Angelina Lee leaves the U.S. and her children for a summer to travel to Korea, her cultural homeland. Longing to rekindle a connection to a place that shaped her own history and to better understand her mother, Angelina instead finds herself feeling fractured and full of questions. Who had her mother been before moving to the U.S. from Korea? What grief had her mother carried for so many years of her life? Why was the history of their family shrouded in secrecy and a strict code of silence?
During her time in Korea, Angelina connects with an estranged relative who shares a secret so jarring that Angelina is forced to reevaluate everything she knows about her mother, her family, and even herself. Her mother’s sister, Sunyuh, had been kidnapped, kept captive, and subjected to sexual violence by the Japanese Imperial Army.
Told through the alternating perspectives of Angelina, her mother, Gongju, and Gongju’s sister, Sunyuh, Helena Rho’s Stone Angelsis a revelatory and important novel about a legacy of familial silence across generations and the way that one woman’s search for truth means bearing witness to a host of systemic silences and violences, many of which had previously been denied by governing bodies and excised from formal histories.
I had the opportunity to speak with Rho, who previously published the memoir American Seoul, about the power of testimony, the complicated love that exists between mothers and daughters, and the way that distances––whether geographic, emotional, or cultural––can strain relationships and also forge new understandings.
Jacqueline Alnes: A significant thread in this novel is that of Sunyuh, Angelina’s aunt who was subjected to sex trafficking by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. What drew you to this part of history?
Helena Rho: By the summer of 2006, I had already abandoned the practice of pediatrics and was in Seoul relearning the language of my ancestors at Konkuk University, just like my character, Angelina Lee. This was my first return to Seoul since leaving as a six year old. My father was a surgeon and had been recruited by Idi Amin, of all people, the notorious dictator in Uganda.
While studying at Konkuk University, I was trying to reconnect with my mother’s family. It was a really emotional time for me and that’s when I first learned about the victims of sexual slavery by Japan––that’s the formal terminology––during the Asia-Pacific War from 1931-1945. I was completely shocked that systematic, institutionalized sex trafficking by a government had occurred and that history had ignored these victims.
I was doing an MFA in nonfiction at the time, so I thought eventually I would write a longform piece about them. Instead, after my summer, I returned to Pittsburgh, where I was living at the time, and found myself crying every single day. I woke up every single day crying for a month. It might have had something to do with jetlag, but it was also emotional overwhelm. I did not research the history further until I was given a very special book, Can You Hear Us?It’s a collection of oral histories by the Korean victims that was published and translated into English. These twelve harrowing narratives took me a year to read. I became so overcome, at times, that I had to put the book away.
JA: The language used to describe Korean women subjected to sexual violence by the Japanese Imperial Army during the war varies, as you write in the novel. For instance, terms like “comfort women” versus “sexual slavery” versus “enslavement” reflect which perspective we are receiving information from.
The violent reality of these women’s lives was masked or softened by terminology, which allows characters, like the Japanese soldiers in the novel, to believe that the women had chosen to be there. How did you consider this language while writing?
HR: I’m a writer. Language is important to me. How language is used is important. Language can be used as propaganda, but language can also be used in story. I get emotional when I talk about this. There are so many narratives on YouTube, testimonies by these women, and at one point I thought about abandoning the Sunyuh storyline because it was too dark.
I wanted language in its most honest form to depict how the victims talked to each other about what was happening to them. I used quite graphic language to talk about the sexual violence that had been perpetrated upon them. But, I also wanted to show, and I’m so glad you picked up on this, that language was used to soften this horrific trauma, to hide it, and to blame the victims. They were not pure, they allowed themselves to do this for money, which is so untrue. They were assigned debts—as I tried to put in the novel—for their living expenses, clothes, toiletries. Most of them never made money.
I wanted language in its most honest form to depict how the victims talked to each other about what was happening to them.
They were called “The Girl Army” because they literally were dragged into battlefields. Anywhere that the Japanese soldiers had a garrison or a tent on a battlefield, they were dragged there. They were called “The Girl Army” before they were called “comfort women.” And, thinking back to language again, the “comfort women” started because that’s what the Japanese called them. In some ways, at least the Korean comfort women have reclaimed that name in a way. They want to be called Halmoni, which means grandmother, because that is what they would have been, if they had lived normal lives and had married and had children and grandchildren. They don’t want to be called “sexual slaves” because their generation carries so much shame. It’s too blunt and direct, so they prefer to be called Halmoni.
Of course, there isn’t a single story for all the victims. I tried to show that in the novel as well.
JA: Your novel made me think, on a wider scale, about the systemic way that Japan sought to erase the existence of these women, both bodily, through murder, and in testimony, by destroying any records related to the women. What was it like to try to break open that silence?
HR: I was afraid of writing this story because there are so many history deniers in Japan and, surprisingly, in Korea—there were a lot of collaborators who worked with the Japanese colonial government that stayed in power after the U.S. took over the occupation. These history deniers are very vitriolic. At times, I wanted to abandon this story, but I saw the scholars and historians still toiling away in this field, trying to make the truth known to the world.
In 1996, there was a report by the Special Rapporteur to the U.N. on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. She mentioned, very specifically, that we don’t know everything because the Japanese government is still hiding records. I was convinced that there was a record of these girls, their names, where they came from, how old they were. After all, the Nazis kept records of their victims. And then, in 2023, when I was doing the last bit of research, I was like, please tell me that we are eventually going to get these records. One of the historians told me the records did not exist, but still, I persisted. I thought it was just one historian’s view. Then, a Korean scholar, Dr. Han HyeIn, I’m so grateful to her, explained that they weren’t human to the Japanese, these girls were things, and the records had been destroyed.
There is a treasure trove of documents that the U.S. government took back with them to the National Archives. Some Korean historians went to try to look at these, and they said there was a giant room with documents filled up to the ceiling, not arranged or organized in any fashion. They said it would take years to go through these documents. They were documents without names, documents in which the Japanese Ministry talked about how these girls were so important for the morale of their troops, documents that show this is what they did. Still, the Japanese government has stuck with the lie that it was private citizens who recruited these girls. And recruited sounds so benevolent. How about coerced or lured.
JA: Again, the importance of language. Hearing this emphasizes to me, which comes through in the novel as well, the way that the silence around this is another form of violence.
HR: Yes. These victims have been so brutalized by the Japanese, by their own government, by their own country, by their families, by the U.N. Even though the U.N. did a report in 1996, these victims still do not have an apology, and what they want is so simple. They just want a governmental apology from Japan, acknowledging their war crimes and an offer of reparations. That’s what you should do when a government has done something this terrible. People might say that several Japanese government officials have apologized, but all of the Japanese Prime Ministers were specific that these were personal apologies, not government apologies or an acknowledgement of the war crimes committed.
Germany has, however imperfectly, acknowledged its role in the war crimes that the Nazis committed. It is educating its citizens. On my last visit to the House of Sharing, a museum and nursing home for some victims, I met a Japanese student there who happened to be studying in Korea, and had never heard of the victims of sexual slavery. These were victims in the hundreds of thousands, all across the Pacific. We first learned about this history because of a woman named Kim Hak-sun, in 1991, who came forward with her story. It was televised and people were shocked, but not really, I think, because there had been rumors of what was happening. People just wanted to deny that. When Kim Hak-sun came forward, the Japanese government said she was making it up and that she was a liar.
JA: A line that stood out to me in the book, in relation to this silence, is when Angelina’s cousin Una says, “You are not Korean. You do not understand. For our grandmother, having a daughter who was a sexual slave for the Imperial Japanese Army is worse than a daughter who died.” I wondered if you could talk about the way that shame influenced the silence around this history.
HR: Again, there is no single story, but I think it was very prevalent in that generation that women were supposed to be pure. If they brought dishonor on themselves, it meant that they tainted their families. I really leaned into my mother’s personal experience. She is one of five siblings and she is the only one who came to the United States. She divorced my father. She could not even tell her family she was divorced, because of the stigma. And this was divorce. She couldn’t tell her family. She basically cut herself off from her family and would not contact them, because she would not bring that shame on herself or on them. Her own mother, her own sister, her brothers, she couldn’t do it. I was basically an Americanized Korean living in this country and I didn’t understand. How do you do this? This is your family. They will support you. But she wouldn’t do it.
JA: There are several significant threads about mothers in the book––mothers who experience unfathomable losses, mothers who do not pursue their dreams because of their role within the family, mothers who are shunned because of their inability to bear male children. I appreciate that you allow motherhood a complexity in this novel—one character describes her role as a “suffocating burden.” And then there’s Angelina, who leaves her children for a month to study in Korea. What did you learn about motherhood through writing these different characters?
HR: Thank you for picking up on the fact that I was writing about motherhood! It’s such a rich and complex statehood. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but there is no single story about motherhood. As a younger woman, I bought into this idea that motherhood should be idyllic, easy, and lovely, and that I should be grateful for every second with my toddler, even when I am bored out of my mind. I just thought, I’m really tired of just one story of motherhood being out there. I wanted complexity. I wanted Gongju to have this suffocating sense of motherhood with the obligations and duties that it brought her, without any reward, and how that impacted her daughters. Angelina, I wanted her to have more agency. I did go to Korea in 2006 and left my children for 8 weeks, so I wanted her to do the same.
I think that when women sacrifice and don’t think of themselves, they are not just hurting themselves, they are actually hurting their family. It’s okay to be selfish, it’s actually a good thing to think of yourself. I think I’ve only started to lean into that as an older woman.
JA: The way you weave together timelines—one set in 2006 from Angelina’s perspective, one set in 1960 from Gongju’s perspective and one set in 1945 from Sunyuh’s—means that we witness a sister, mother, and daughter move through the world in very different ways. Despite their best attempts to remain connected, we start to see distances forming between characters, whether due to geography, time, upbringings, or culture. What about those distances intrigues you?
When women sacrifice and don’t think of themselves, they are not just hurting themselves, they are actually hurting their family.
HR: I saw firsthand the effect that distance had on my mother. We left Korea in 1972 and my mother did not return for a visit until decades later. My father got into legal trouble, they divorced, and then she never went back to the country of her birth. I found that to be such a tragedy. I wanted to show how physical distance can impact psychic distance and emotional distance. It was very important to me that Angelina come back to the country of her birth. Why had her mother died by suicide? What was the family story?
JA: There is a lot of grief in this novel—mother-loss, child-loss, loss of a home, loss of someone without closure, and loss of marriage, among other losses. What did writing about these griefs teach you about grief itself?
HR: You know, because I wrote a memoir, people used to ask me: What makes a good memoir? To me, a good memoir is about the processing of grief. In 2015, when I was given the book Can You Hear Us, I was also going through a very ugly divorce. I was thinking a lot about the questions: How do you survive the unspeakable? How do you go on? I was being melodramatic in regard to my own situation—mine was only a divorce—but these girls had lived through hell and survived unspeakable horrors. At the core of it was a desire to understand how to process grief and how to come out the other side in some kind of functional shape. I think so many people get lost in that grief.
JA: It seems like these characters are trying to move toward healing, whether personal, familial, or cultural. Reading this book made me wonder: Do you think true healing is ever really possible? Or is bearing witness the best we can hope to do?
HR: Should I even answer that question? I don’t know if healing is ever really possible.
Phyllis Kim, the director of Comfort Women Action for Redress & Education (CARE), has had very close contact with many victims. Yong-soo Lee Halmoni, or Grandma Lee, as she is known in the West, is now 96 and is the only documented Korean victim who still has all of her faculties. She still continues to advocate for justice. She has petitioned the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, to hear this issue of comfort women and make the government of Japan apologize and acknowledge their war crimes. She is so driven by justice, yet there is a cost. There is always a cost.
I wish that this was a movie where, at the end, people are happy. But a happily ever after does not exist. The journey toward healing is a journey. There are many stops, a few steps forward, a couple steps back. I think it’s a lifelong journey, honestly.
All we can do about these horrific crimes against humanity is to bear witness. I don’t presume to think that my little novel will bring justice for the Halmoni. I don’t. But I think it is one more voice for justice.
His Tinder profile said his name was Oshik, he was thirty‑eight, married with no kids, looking for a serious relationship. Dorit, who wasn’t new to online dating, had never come across such an unusual line, and he sounded so square and had such high cheekbones and enormous blue eyes that she was curious enough to give it a try.
The only other Oshik she’d ever known was her dad’s uncle, an insurance broker from Netanya, and he was eaten by a shark. It was a big story back in the day, and there was an intimidating TV reporter at the shiva, who pounced on Dorit and her older sister, Rotem, demanding to interview them. Rotem told her that Oshik was an angel now, and that they would remember him forever. When the reporter asked Dorit what she would recall about Uncle Oshik in twenty years, Dorit stammered that the thing she would always remember was that a shark had eaten him.
Oshik suggested they meet at five p.m. at a branch of Roladin. Dorit was used to men on Tinder asking to meet at her apartment—they’d have had their first date in her bedroom if they could—but this guy not only wanted an afternoon meeting at a café frequented by everyone’s grandma, he also said he’d have to leave after an hour because he and his wife were going to a wedding out of town.
They sat facing each other, sipping coffee. Dorit wondered how long it would take to get to the punch line, but Oshik was in no hurry. She sensed that he was attracted to her and that he was a little embarrassed by it. His questions were stodgy: What was her childhood like? What were her greatest fears? What music did she listen to on Friday afternoons when everything was slowing down for Shabbat? The vibe was more like an arranged‑marriage date than a Tinder hookup. It was weird, and in some way she couldn’t explain, she liked the weirdness. She found it much more appealing to tell Oshik about how her sister had taught her to do a cartwheel when they were kids than to share her feelings on anal sex with a tattooed hipster she’d swiped right on five minutes ago. And this Oshik guy was really interested in her. More than interested: he fell in love. Dorit, who was thirty‑two and had finally broken up with an egotistical tech bro who saw the world and her as algorithms to be optimized, felt that this was the perfect time for a guy called Oshik who was gentle and romantic. Gentle, romantic, and married.
The screen saver on his phone was a picture of him and his wife in a gondola. When Dorit asked, Oshik mumbled that it was an old picture from a trip to Venice, and quickly changed the subject. Dorit took a picture of the screen saver when Oshik went to the bathroom, and later, at home, she examined it closely. Oshik’s wife was pretty. Prettier than her. She had golden‑brown curls, a long neck, and a smooth, radiant complexion that seemed unblemished no matter how much Dorit enlarged the photo. The wife’s smile showed off her glistening white teeth, and she wore an expensive‑looking wedding ring. Oshik looked contemplative, and there was no ring on his finger. He hadn’t worn one on their date, either. In the gondola picture, his left arm rested on his wife’s shoulder, but there was nothing sexy or charged about the touch. It looked more like a hug you’d give your army buddy than a romantic embrace.
Their second date was also at Roladin. Dorit wanted to pay this time, but Oshik wouldn’t hear of it. He ordered a cinnamon roll and told her that when he was a soldier, every time he got in trouble and was confined to barracks, he would go to the canteen and console himself with a cinnamon roll. Dorit asked if that happened a lot, and he nodded and said almost proudly that he was probably the worst soldier in the history of the IDF.
They had a really good talk, and afterward, Oshik suggested they go to her place. He tried to make it sound like the most casual thing in the world, but Dorit picked up on his anxiety. She said he was cute and she’d be happy to have him over, but before anything started up she had to understand the situation with his wife. There were lots of married guys on Tinder, but Oshik was the first one she’d seen who said he was looking for something serious. “What exactly does that mean?” she asked, grinning. “How serious can it be if you’re married?”
But I also know that I’ll probably never leave her, and it’s important for me to put that on the table.
Oshik nodded. “When you put it that way, it does sound dumb,” he said. She asked if his wife knew he was seeing her, and he stammered and said she didn’t, but they weren’t sleeping together anyway; they were more like friends. “I really am looking for a serious relationship!” he said, and stroked Dorit’s hand hesitantly. “But I also know that I’ll probably never leave her, and it’s important for me to put that on the table. Love me, love my dog, as the saying goes.” Dorit smiled and said she was actually quite fond of dogs, and that she didn’t know anyone other than her grandfather who still used that expression.
Sex with Oshik reminded her of sex in high school. In a good way. Everything was almost childishly exciting. He caressed, kissed, and licked every part of her body, and looked happy and grateful the whole time. Dorit closed her eyes and thought about a million things, including the Gondola, which was what she’d started privately calling his wife. She felt no guilt. Oshik’s body showed her how hungry he was for touch, and if he wasn’t getting it at home, she saw no reason why he shouldn’t get it with her. Especially if, while they were at it, he was going to keep making her feel like the hottest woman in the world.
At the beginning, Dorit thought of it as a fling. A sort of eccentric episode in her rather conventional life. An amusing anecdote she’d be able to tell one day, about how she dated a married guy who got excited every time they kissed and showed up to their dates with cinnamon rolls, Cornettos, and pudding cups. Oshik may not have been the most articulate person Dorit had ever met, but he was kind and funny and curious, and he loved her so much that some of the love rubbed off on her. Also, they talked about everything. Everything except his wife. When she tried asking about her, Oshik said that when he and Dorit slept together, he didn’t feel like he was cheating, but when they talked about his wife, he did. That’s why he wouldn’t even say her name. “I don’t tell her anything about you, either,” he quipped, but Dorit didn’t crack a smile. She told Oshik that the mistress thing had worked for her at first: living in the moment, no expectations. But now that a year had passed, it wasn’t enough. She wanted more: to live together, to have a child—not now, but one day—and to go to her parents for holiday dinners. If his relationship with the Gondola was really so friendly, surely she’d understand and let him go?
Oshik gazed at Dorit with his giant blue eyes, on the verge of tears. “Are you saying you want to break up because I don’t spend the Passover seder with your folks?” he asked. “Matza ball soup and Uncle Morris’s lame jokes, that’s what we’re lacking?”
“Yes,” Dorit said. “What can I say: of all the girls in the world, you landed on the one weirdo who likes her men unmarried.”
“It’s not fair,” he whispered. “I told you from the beginning—”
“Yes,” Dorit interrupted, “you told me I had to love your dog. And back then, it sounded fine. But now we’ve reached the point where you have to choose: it’s me or the dog.”
If it had been up to Dorit, that’s where it would have ended. But Oshik pleaded. He said she was right, it was all true, but things were complicated and he needed time. He didn’t tell her what he needed time for—to prepare the Gondola for a separation or to decide whom he was choosing. Either way, Dorit told Oshik he would have to make up his mind by the last day of Hanukkah.
After that talk, something between them soured. They didn’t fight or hurl insults, but they grew distant, unnecessarily cautious, thinking twice before they shared a thought or a feeling. They saw each other less, and when they did, Dorit’s ultimatum hovered over them like a curse. Deep in her heart, she knew Oshik wouldn’t leave the Gondola. And even deeper in that same heart, she knew it would be very hard for her to give him up.
Once, when they’d gone to the beach, Oshik had shown her the tall, ugly, marble‑coated apartment building where he lived, and on the morning of the first day of Hanukkah, Dorit found herself sitting on a bench across the street from the building. She didn’t have much of a plan. On the way there, she’d told herself that she just wanted to see Oshik and his wife walking down the street together so that she could understand where she stood. But after waiting on the bench for almost an hour, she was also able to picture the Gondola coming home with her shopping, and herself walking over to talk to her—not to snitch or harass her, just to make a connection, and then the two of them would arrange to meet without Oshik’s even knowing. After another twenty minutes on the bench, Dorit could imagine herself confronting Oshik and the Gondola right there in the middle of the street, making a scene and embarrassing him. Embarrassing herself. This thought frightened her, and she got up and took the bus home.
The next time she saw Oshik, after they had sex she asked him to tell her the Gondola’s name. “Yardena,” Oshik said, and pressed his face into the pillow. “Yardena, Ruth, Greta Garbo. What difference does it make?”
The following morning, Dorit went back to the ugly marble building. She bought herself a jelly doughnut and sat down to eat it on the bench. She ate the doughnut as slowly as humanly possible, taking tiny little bites, licking the jelly. It took almost half an hour, but there was still no sign of Oshik or the Gondola. Eventually, a young woman with a feather tattooed on her neck came out of the building holding a cigarette and sat down next to Dorit to smoke. Dorit asked her for a cigarette. She didn’t really smoke, but she felt that it would buy her a few more minutes to wait there without feeling pathetic. While they smoked together, the Feather started talking. She said her name was Lianne and she was studying occupational therapy and worked as a doorwoman at the building across the street. The people who lived there, she told Dorit, were filthy rich, but nice. At least some of them were. This week a whole bunch of them had given her envelopes with Hanukkah cards and cash, like a holiday bonus, and the old lady from the penthouse had handed her a hundred‑dollar bill. She hadn’t made that kind of money even at her bat mitzvah. She asked Dorit if she worked in the area, and Dorit, who did not usually lie, said she was a dental hygienist at a clinic nearby. After a few seconds, she added that she was pretty sure two of her clients lived in that building. Their names were Oshik and . . . the wife’s name had slipped her mind, but their last name was Arbel and they were really nice.
He’s not married. He’s one of those loner types
“Oshik Arbel?” the Feather said. “I know him. He’s kind of weird but he is a sweetheart.”
“Yeah. I clean his teeth, and his wife’s.”
“Are you sure? I know Arbel, he’s not married. He’s one of those loner types.”
When Dorit pulled out her phone and held up the picture of Oshik with the Gondola, the Feather smiled and said, “Oh, that’s Yardena. She’s his sister. She lives in Berlin, but she and her husband visit all the time.”
On the seventh day of Hanukkah, Oshik called and jokingly suggested they go out to celebrate the evening before her ultimatum expired. But when Dorit said she wasn’t in the mood, he backed off and said he’d come over and they could order in. They both knew this was probably going to be their last night together, and it was better to have a sad breakup at home, without an audience. Oshik arrived with a box of candy he’d been given by a client from Nazareth. They kissed and caressed as if everything were normal, and Dorit tried to be detached. She’d thought it was going to be hard, that she’d feel angry and distant, but even now that she knew he’d lied to her for a whole year, it felt like the most natural thing when he kissed her. If it had been the other way around—if she’d discovered that the man she was seeing was secretly married—she wouldn’t have been able to forgive him. But there was something about Oshik’s lie that, although annoying, didn’t really make her angry. He must have genuinely loved her, and only her, but at the same time he was afraid that without an imaginary gondola sailing across the horizon, they would be in each other’s lives 24‑7, each taking ownership of the other’s soul.
The Thai food was slightly cold. “Here,” Oshik said, switching their dishes, “mine’s actually okay. Not piping hot, but warm. It’s good, right?” Dorit ate in silence, and Oshik also said nothing as he chewed Dorit’s cold noodles. When they’d finished, he murmured, “I love you. I love you more than anything. More than her, more than me, more than those cinnamon rolls in the army. Do you believe me?” Dorit wanted to lash out at him, to tell him she knew everything, he could stop the act. But she only nodded. “If this is our last time together,” Oshik added, “then I’d rather we not sleep together. I know breakup sex is a thing, but I can’t take it.” Dorit still said nothing. “Okay,” Oshik said. “I guess I’d better go.” But instead of getting up, he stayed slumped on Dorit’s old armchair, and after a few minutes he started crying.
His tears were real. The pain, everything was real, everything except the stupid story about his wife. She went over to him, sat on his lap, and kissed him.
“If this is our last time,” he said again, “I’d rather not . . .”
“It’s not,” she said. “It’s not.”
After the sex, she told him she was willing to keep their arrangement, but she wanted a child. “You and the Gondola are never going to have a baby. Don’t you want to be a father?”
Oshik shrugged and said he never really had—he didn’t like himself enough. But now that he pictured a child who was half‑Dorit, it suddenly sounded like a pretty good idea.
For Nur’s third birthday, the three of them went to Italy. Oshik’s wife was in Boston for work, and he suggested they sneak in their own overseas trip. In Verona, they saw the famous Romeo and Juliet balcony. Near Milan, they visited a lovely amusement park full of unicorns and fairies. And in Venice, of course, they took a gondola ride. Nur was overjoyed. She kept laughing and trying to jump into the water. Oshik and Dorit had to physically restrain her. “You little fishy,” Oshik said, mussing Nur’s hair as she wriggled on his lap. He pulled out his phone. “Before you go disappearing into the canal,” he said, “let’s get a picture of you and Mom and me in the gondola, okay?” Nur pouted and shook her head. Oshik smiled. “It’s fine,” he said, putting the phone back in his pocket. “We don’t have to.”
The monstrous, the grotesque, the uncanny—horror’s tropes have long provided figures through which queerness finds articulation, with both liberatory and suppressive consequences. Here, bodies defy definition and desire warps. But the horror landscape is also shifting. No longer confined to the subtextual periphery, contemporary queer horror is carving out its own terrain, reveling in its excesses and capacity to transform traditional genres.
My own work as an author of queer horror texts, such as my forthcoming books Return to the Planet of the Vampires and Beyond the Planet of the Vampires, draws from the generosity of this proliferant, experimental landscape. Queer texts search out the raw nerve of horror: a fuzzy limit where the body and the unknown meet, where terror and desire collapse inside abjection and ecstasy. If you’re looking for horror that refuses convention and speaks polyphonically from the fringes of identity and accepted reality, these seven books will sear themselves into your thoughts. These books dismantle form and consume language, reassembling what remains into new possibilities that transgress the binary of the living and the dead. Long live the new flesh!
Rivers Solomon’s fiction thrives in the liminal, suturing emotional and political urgency together with speculative terror. Model Home employs familiar conventions of the haunted house narrative only to raze them. This novel outlines the architecture of trauma, exploring the ways history lingers spectrally alongside the impossibility of finding sanctuary in a world that nominates you as monstrous. Centered on a nonbinary Black protagonist who returns with their siblings to the gated Texas community where they were raised, the story navigates both personal and ancestral hauntings. Solomon’s work often tackles issues of survival and in their latest novel, where the protagonist’s dreams of home are foreclosed on in every sense, survival reveals itself to be a continuous haunting.
Few writers capture the ominous and uncanny ambience of horror fiction like Mariana Enríquez. In Our Share of Night, a father and son traverse Argentina, pursued by an occult order that seeks to possess them. Enríquez uses horror as atmosphere and allegory for dictatorship, grief, and the brutally intimate failures of the notion of family. She crafts a novel where terror is both supernatural and socio-historical. The novel seethes with menace, but at its core, it is a story of inheritance, documenting what we acquire from our predecessors—as well as what is violently taken from us in the exchange.
Mónica Ojeda’s Nefando is a work of conceptual horror fiction. This book operates like a glitching, hypervirulent internet conspiracy theory: something only half-perceived but totally disturbing. The novel follows six young people living in a Barcelona apartment, linked by a mysterious video game—one that dredges up trauma, violence, and a language beyond language. The horror of the text exceeds the material realm, festering in the structure of communication itself. The novel’s fractured, nonlinear storytelling mirrors the contagious, addictive quality of the digital space, itself impossible to unsee.
Sinaki’s Medusa of the Roses is a hypnotic fever dream of a novel that stokes the horrors of longing, loss, and aesthetic decay. Sinaki’s prose, charting an affair between two men in Tehran, unfolds like a fractured tableaux steeped in obsession. Beauty is transmuted, revealing its spectral and menacing foundations. This book queers mythology and the aesthetic atmospherics of horror into relentless existential dread. Sinaki’s prose is lush, drawing the reader in with quiet, inescapable persistence. This decadent horror novel examines the terror of being seen, desired, and ultimately undone.
Reed’s collection of nonfiction and poetry, With Bloom Upon Them and Also with Blood, idiosyncratically combines horror criticism, camp, poetry, and theory. In his essays, Reed deploys horror cinema as a lens for various alienations under an exploitative and racialized capitalism. This book doesn’t simply watch and critique horror—it burrows inside it, breaks it open, and revels grotesquely in the viscera.
Set in a gothic, post-apocalyptic New Hampshire, The Psychic Surgeon Assists opens upon a scene of pornographic surgical intervention. This unclassifiable work of experimental fiction is a hypnagogic descent into body horror, trans erotics, and medical spectacle. House transposes the voyeuristic sensuality of the medical theater into the work by operating on the medium of language via ablated, agrammatical prose. It’s a book where flesh and text become a continuous surface, and the reader becomes something akin to its nurse, always almost assembling a narrative from the text’s disjecta membra. The language itself mutates as a multiform body in transition: an experience that is simultaneously grotesque and ecstatic.
Described on the author’s website as “a queer assemblage diary,” McCartha’s The Cryptodrone Sequence promises to be a glitching cybernetic séance that drives genre boundaries into obsolescence. Drawing from computer security handbooks, radical Black poetics, and a constellation of queer and postcolonial thinkers, McCartha’s work pulses with generative queer polyvalence. The text continually performs cuts and stitches, reassembling its dizzying array of citations into visceral experimental poetry. The Cryptodrone Sequence is anticipated to be an experiment in linguistic disruption, weaving together horror, theory, and speculative digital poetics.
While writing my memoir-in-essays, Returning to My Father’s Kitchen, I sometimes found myself pondering over how fathers are depicted in Filipino books and movies. A harsh, distant, unforgiving father came to mind when I thought of the archetypal Filipino padre de pamilya. This didn’t quite align with my own father’s approach to fatherhood: my father was warm, nurturing, and unguarded, a far cry from the authoritarian figures I’d come to know from Filipino movies and TV shows.
When writing the essays that are now part of Returning to My Father’s Kitchen, I sought to challenge the stereotypes of Filipino fatherhood and manhood reinforced by the media and popularized in public discourse. Not only did my father challenge stereotypes with his style of fatherhood, but he also set an example for me as I pursued the life of an artist. He was a poet who nurtured my literary gifts, and his faith in the life path I chose enabled me to withstand the various challenges that writers face in a society that places little value in the arts. Literary fiction and nonfiction enabled me to explore the complexities and contradictions of the Filipino fathers I knew, which is why I gravitated towards the written word when seeking examples of Filipino fathers that my own work could respond to and be in conversation with.
It was when I began to think back on the books I had read featuring Filipino fathers that I saw how varied and complex their depictions are in literature. While conforming to Philippine society’s expectations of manhood and fatherhood, they also question and even subvert these expectations with their individual actions. Below are nine books that shed light on Filipino fatherhood, presenting us with complex and layered characters whose struggles invite us to perform a closer examination of Filipino masculinity.
There are two fathers in Miguel Syjuco’s sweeping 2010 novel Ilustrado: the protagonist’s biological father, a corrupt career politician who expects his son to follow in his footsteps, and Crispin Salvador, a Filipino novelist based in New York who serves as the protagonist’s second father, setting a more positive example for the protagonist as he strives to extricate himself from his powerful family’s tainted history. These two father figures serve as models for what the country’s leaders could be: men who look to the past as they reinforce the ingrained corruption of Philippine politics, and men who hope to break this cycle by exposing the sins of the past.
In his National Book Award-longlisted collection, The Diaspora Sonnets, de la Paz turns a sympathetic eye on his immigrant father, who attempts to make a clean break with his past while navigating a strange new land with his family. The silence with which his father chooses to enshroud his past becomes a burden in itself, weighing down on his family as they follow his lead into an unchartered future: “Where/there are memories, he lets the splinters/of those shards bury themselves deep into//skin. Where there’s a past, he lets it drive nails/into a tongue he holds back. Father, speak.” Despite these silences, de la Paz refuses to underestimate his father’s inner life, pondering over his father’s reasons for holding back as they provide possibilities for reconnection.
In Cherry Lou Sy’s coming-of-age novel, Love Can’t Feed You, the protagonist’s father, an elderly Chinese-Filipino man, finds himself adrift when the family lands in Queens and his much younger wife, who immigrated a few years before, immediately puts him to work as a janitor to pay off their debts. Papa reacts violently to his wife’s newfound power and to his diminished role as a new immigrant. His behavior toward his children is oftentimes immature and cruel: in one chapter, he steals money from his own daughter to buy a gift for his wife. His character is an interesting study of fragile masculinity, and the struggles Filipino men face when adjusting to immigrant life.
In her memoir The Body Papers, Grace Talusan reflects on the difficult decisions her father faced to give his family a better life. From choosing to remain in the United States after his medical residency ends, to making the heartbreaking decision to cut off his own father to protect his children, Talusan’s father is complicated but resolute, firm in his attachments to an old way of life, but also brave in defying his culture’s expectations when the occasion warrants it.
Jakob Guanzon’s novel Abundance is a tale of two fathers: the protagonist’s father, a Filipino academic who comes to America for graduate school, only to drop out of his doctoral program and slide into blue collar work to support his family, and Henry, his son, whose feelings of alienation gradually lead him down a life of crime, and who only begins to understand his father’s struggles when he becomes a father himself. Both Henry and his father struggle with fatherhood: Henry’s father responds with violence to his son’s failings in school and in life, while Henry finds himself raising a hand with his child during a particularly low point in his life. Their stories run parallel to each other as they grapple with a sense of inadequacy, borne out of their struggles as immigrants, that taints their relationships with their children.
The fathers in Mia Alvar’s story collection, In the Country, run the gamut of character types, from being distant and abusive, to having a little selfishness mixed in with their selflessness. My favorite fathers in the collection are Andoy in “A Contract Overseas” and Jim in the titular story, “In the Country.” Working-class Andoy gets his girlfriend pregnant by accident before deciding to find work in Saudi Arabia, joining an exodus of Filipino men who eagerly take on blue collar jobs in the Middle East to support their families back home. Young and naïve, he continues to pine for romance and adventure amidst the drudgery of his work, even when his pursuit of romance turns dangerous. Jim, like Andoy, is an idealist, criticizing the Marcos dictatorship in articles that land him in prison and force him to spend years away from his growing son. Believing that his activism can pave the way for a democratic revolution in his country, and a better future for his children, he ignores the practicalities of raising a family in an authoritarian society, and brushes aside warnings that his writing can put his family in danger.
Nathan Go’s debut novel, Forgiving Imelda Marcos, opens with Corazon Aquino’s chauffeur, Lito, as he drives her from Manila to the mountain city of Baguio to secretly meet Imelda Marcos. At the heart of this novel, however, is Lito’s difficult relationship with his son, who grew up without a father while Lito worked overseas to support his family. Mostly told from the point of view of Lito’s son, Forgiving Imelda Marcos sheds light on the difficult choices that working-class Filipino fathers face: either stick with a low-paying job that does not pay enough to feed, clothe, and educate one’s children, or go overseas for better-paying work, sending money back home while parenting one’s children from afar.
Castillo begins her essay collection How to Read Now with a tribute to her father, a security guard who maintains a lifelong love for the classics of European and British Literature and passes this on to his daughter. While reading the introductory essay to the book, I was reminded of my own father who also had to take on blue-collar work when we spent time in the United States, while actively maintaining his love for literature and art to preserve his dignity and self-worth. Castillo’s father is a warm and nurturing presence in her life, proving that a life of the mind gives us the strength and vulnerability to be fully present for our children.
Snail Fever: Poems of Two Decades by Francis C. Macansantos
In my father’s fourth and final collection of poetry, he contemplates his complicated relationship with his father, a task that becomes less difficult for him after he himself becomes a father. In “Fisherman’s Sonnet,” he looks back on his father’s attempts to connect with him that he refused to reciprocate because of his father’s physical and verbal abuse, while in “Via Air,” he meditates on the wordless love they shared that finds articulation after his father’s death. In “For My Daughter’s Birthday,” he asks his young daughter to guide him down the mysterious and mystical path of fatherhood. There’s a sense of wonder in my father’s poems about fatherhood as he reckons with his own limitations while extending grace to his father, and to himself.
Though it may seem counterintuitive, one of the most effective tools for generating new work or pushing stories to the next level is to impose creative constraints on them. Poetry is often taught by introducing students to rigidly structured forms like sonnets, villanelles, and haiku. Prose writers would be well-served by learning from this approach. What may begin as an arbitrary rule can redefine the work and push the author into making difficult artistic choices. The best known examples of these kinds of constraints come from the Oulipo movement; Georges Perec’s novel A Voidfamously does not use the letter ‘e’ (nor does the English translation of it) and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Stylecollects 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. One can imagine infinite variations on formal restrictions: every sentence must be a question mark, every chapter must hit an exact word or syllable count, the story must be told in the form of footnotes to an unseen text, and so on. The point is that the author has the opportunity at the start to define their project; the rules create boundaries, a container for the author to fill, eliminating at least one (if not several) confounding variables in the drafting process.
Not every constraint has to be wildly experimental. Most prose writers intuitively understand how point-of-view fundamentally alters any story. In the simplest terms, a 1st person POV is bound by the narrator’s intelligence, temperament, material conditions, and access to information in a way that a 3rd person POV is not. For the writer who is stuck—either at the start of a project or in the frustrating middle—the way to generate momentum may be to think about other restrictions they can apply to the text.
At the recent AWP Conference in Los Angeles, authors Darien Gee, Naomi Cohn, Sharon de la Cruz, and Tom McAllister ran a panel on this topic (moderated by Kathleen Rooney), focused on their own writing practices, offering practical advice for implementing constraints into your work. They also discussed how imposing constraints on students can help them to generate new pieces and add life to their pieces in revision. The following is a roundtable discussion between three of the authors conducted shortly after the conference.
Tom McAllister: First question, let’s start with the obvious. How have you all implemented constraints in your own work? I’ve done so most recently in my bookIt All Felt Impossible, in which I wrote a short essay for every year of my life, imposing a maximum word count of 1500 per piece. I started this project because I was in the middle of a long dry spell and beginning to panic that I had simply run out of words to write; I needed some specific set of rules to guide me so that I could stop staring at a blank page and feel like I had some momentum again. Have you always practiced writing with constraints, or was it something you did out of necessity or (as in my case) out of desperation?
Darien Hsu Gee: Oh, like Tom, panic and desperation 100%!
I began my writing career as a novelist, so my experience was with 85,000-125,000 word novels. In 2017, I was struggling with a manuscript inspired by true events affecting three generations of women in my matrilineal line. I wrote several drafts but the novel wasn’t coming together. I started telling the story in short bursts and, long story short, ended up with 36 prose poems/micro narratives/short pieces of 250 words or less about five generations of women in my matrilineal line. It wasn’t what I had intended, but constraints led to the form which resulted in an unexpected discovery and gift. These extremely distilled stories became Other Small Histories: Poems, winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship award.
Naomi Cohn: My use of constraints grows out of my lived experience with disability and my professional experience providing therapy and other emotional wellness programming. As far as disability—I’m legally blind, due to midlife vision loss. Living with disability means applying loads of ingenuity just to get through the day. Whether you view the constraints as stemming from a body’s limitations (mine can take a max of 2-3 hours of screen time—total—in a day) or from how our society doesn’t always make space for different sorts of bodies, survival means creative responses to constraints. As to therapy—a lot of my work in community settings uses writing and creative play for healing. I started to notice the “constraints” of working in a therapeutic space opened up some amazing writing and creativity in participants. As Darien says, long story short, I started using these tools in my own work—the most recent example being The Braille Encyclopedia, a memoir in brief alphabetical essays and prose poems, about vision loss and re-learning, as an adult, how to read and write. The formal limitation was a way to work in bite-sized chunks my body could tolerate, but also—in the end—aligned nicely with the weirdness of learning my ABCs (this time in braille) in my forties.
TM: The variety of constraints here is really interesting, and I especially like what you’re saying, Naomi, about the physical constraints on an author. Obviously, there’s a wide range of physical conditions that can alter an author’s relationship to their work. I’m thinking too of writers who are parents of young children—not the same as an illness, I know—who by necessity have to write at different times and in different ways because the days of sitting at a computer for 4-5 hours are long, long gone. Maybe people don’t think of that as a constraint in the same way as a word limit or formal choice, but what greater constraint is there on our work than physical reality?
NC: Absolutely, parenting, caregiving, economic necessities—multiple jobs or shift work—what particularly interests me is how writers contending with those constraints find ways to do their work unfettered by the constraints of norms, of there being one correct way to write, and expectations of productivity.
What greater constraint is there on our work than physical reality?
TM: Following up on the previous question, how do you all think about constraints in revision? When I was working on my book, I had friends telling me to just drop the 1500 word limit; they (correctly) argued that it was an arbitrary choice at the start, and now that I had the material on the page, I should free myself and write whatever I wanted. But to me, the concept of 1500 had become central to the project; it was what guided the structure of each piece, in addition to driving what specific details I’d included in the first place. To me, the only way to effectively revise was to treat this once arbitrary rule as if it was a natural law that couldn’t possibly be violated. You can’t just turn off gravity when it’s convenient, you know? What do you all think about removing constraints mid-process and/or using them as tools to help in revising or reimagining your work?
DHG: Every writer is different, and every writing project is different. If you’re in revisions and on a roll, then you do you. But if you’re struggling, consider adding some constraints to help you get out of your own way. For me, two constraints come to mind that can help with revision: 1) a timed revision for a specific word count (i.e. a 300-word piece allows only 10 minutes for the first pass revision) and/or 2) applying a form change (i.e. prose to poetry then back again, a hack inspired by Judith Cofer), also with a timed constraint. The idea here is to get unstuck if you are stuck, and to continue to see what might be possible with the work. The truth is: you can do whatever you want. If sticking with a 250-word constraint helps you reach the finish line, great. If doing so hinders you from moving forward, not great. At this point, after you’ve allowed yourself a chance to see where the work is going and you have a handle on it, I say to trust your writerly instincts and either let the form collapse into something new or stick with it if you know you’re on to something true.
TM: Totally agree, Darien. If you’re the one making up the rules, that means you also get to break them whenever you want, for any reason. Maybe they’re just the tool you need to discover the work you really want to do, and then they outlive their usefulness in the final draft. That said, when I was doing final edits on my book, I was complaining to friends that addressing all the editorial notes was pushing pieces over 1500 words. They all said, “Who cares? The rule was what you needed to get the draft done, just go over.” But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I felt like I’d come so far with it, why not just figure out how to make the cuts I need to in order to stay true to the original project? I’m stubborn, is my point.
I say to trust your writerly instincts and either let the form collapse into something new or stick with it if you know you’re on to something true.
NC: Tom—I honor your stubbornness in not busting the constraint in revision! That said, I definitely lean more toward tossing generative rules or adding a new constraint in revision. It’s a way of helping gain perspective. I say echo echo to you both on trusting your writerly instincts. For me the generative constraint is all about giving my puzzle/logic brain something to do so something weirder or more emotionally honest is allowed to come forward. If that initial constraint doesn’t end up having some deeper link to the material or project, then out it goes. Or, more often, it remains in a project’s DNA.
A general constraint or filter I love in revision is reading work aloud. It’s a way of being true to my poetic roots—paying attention to how words feel in the mouth and body, and to how words sound as well as mean. It also helps me hear whether a piece “sounds like me.”
TM: Yes to reading aloud! It is probably the revision tip I most often repeat to my students, regardless of course or skill level. Even my freshman comp students are sick of hearing me say it.
TM: Another question about generating material. How do you think about various formal constraints and their relation to content? Naomi already touched on this in her first answer, the way The Braille Encyclopedia is structured in part by the content being discussed. I’m thinking too about a piece like Jennifer Lunden’s “Evidence, in Track Changes,” in which she writes an essay about a particularly strange episode of her childhood, but then shares it with her mother, and they have a dialogue in the margins, using Word’s Track Changes tool, about the story she’s telling. The form there is not arbitrary; it’s a way into the material, and it also strangely reproduces the dynamic of a loved one who wants to sit on the sidelines of your story and nitpick and correct and argue. Do you all do any work where form has been driven by content, or vice versa?
NC: I hadn’t seen that piece of Lunden’s, I love it. I also love it when form and content align, but the truth is I usually bumble around through many revisions before I know what I’m writing about and whether there will be a correspondence between form and content. Maybe this is the place to admit I hate the word “constraint.” I prefer “invitation” or “experiment.” Maybe this comes from working in community settings, where participants with trauma backgrounds are common. It’s important to me to create a sense of safety, which includes not creating a sense of being trapped—even by a word count or a time limit. But to circle back to your question, I love it when the initial generative experiment, the final visible form or structure, and the content all play together; when the constraint or container that perhaps began as an intellectual experiment or puzzle also has a heart or emotional resonance. That said, right now, I’m struggling with the final form of my current project about birds. My initial draft was in the form of a birder’s “life list,” where I wrote about every bird I’ve encountered in my six decades. It was a productive generative conceit, but it’s clearly not working as a revision organizing principle, and I’m still noodling on what that might be.
TM: I like that reframing of invitation/experiment vs. constraint, Naomi—that may be the main takeaway from this whole conversation. What opportunities can you create for yourself as a writer by thinking differently about the drafting process?
DHG: Sometimes form informs content, sometimes it’s the other way around. Sometimes what you’re working on doesn’t come together until you completely dismantle and reassemble it. Joan Wickersham’s The Suicide Index is a great example of this. In an interview with Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, she describes struggling with the memoir’s structure for years before discovering the index form. She didn’t start writing with this constraint, but arrived at it after years of grappling with the material.
For me, choosing a form before I begin helps launch my writing—the constraints (I call them “containers”) provide a framework. The form guides me as I work and helps me make decisions. Once I’m done with a draft that’s gone through a few revision passes, I’ll revisit my original intention. Does the form still serve what I’ve written?
Currently, I’m working on a memoir in micro essays about my mother becoming a full-time practicing Buddhist in her 50’s and severing her connection to us. My chosen constraint is 49 essays total, echoing the Buddhist belief that the soul spends 49 days in the bardo after death. This time frame is divided into 7 days, so I’m echoing that form in the early draft with 7 sections of 7 essays each. Another constraint is to create the work as micro prose (300 words or less), but I may loosen this in revision. Constraints/containers help organize my thoughts and writing, and then I stay open to seeing if it still works once the draft is complete.
TM: Containers! Another good way to think about it. Your answer (because it mentions Buddhism, parents, and death) reminded me of a very short and very good book that was driven by a very specific set of rules. In Ruth Ozeki’s The Face: A Time Code the author gives herself the task of staring at her own face in the mirror for three hours, and recording her meditations on what she sees. It’s a simple (and, to me, daunting) idea that leads to incredibly rich reflections on aging, death, family history, race, and more.
TM: Do you all have any favorite constraint-generated books or projects by other authors? Another favorite of mine is Matthew Vollmer’s essay collection inscriptions for headstones, in which Vollmer gives himself a double-constraint: each piece is written as if it’s an epitaph for himself (“Here lies a man who…”) but also the essays are all written as a single, extremely long, discursive sentence, some as long as 3 pages. That book was revelatory for me when I encountered it, just seeing how much fun he was clearly having working with these constraints.
NC: I’ll mention Aaron Angelo’s The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications. Angelo gave himself the assignment of writing one piece on each of the words in one of Shakespeare’s sonnets “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes….”. Angelo explains in his author’s note that he rose early and meditated each day before writing. I loved the result, lyrical, inventive, and, somewhat to my surprise, it felt like a well-rounded exploration of a mind and a life.
There’s a huge power sometimes to intentionally NOT writing.
I also borrowed the procedure for my bird project—instead of meditating on a word, I meditated on a specific bird. Even though my current project feels like a disaster at the moment, following Angelo’s cue has made me a huge fan of meditating or intention setting before writing. There’s a huge power sometimes to intentionally NOT writing.
DHG: Victoria Chang’s Obit, a collection of prose poems that read like newspaper obituaries. Chang uses the obituary form—narrow, justified columns of text—to write not just about people (including herself) who died (literally and metaphorically), but also concepts, objects, and emotions. Also Emily Jungmin Yoon’s chapbook, Ordinary Misfortunes, where several of her prose poems about Korean comfort women during WWII all have the same title, “An Ordinary Misfortune.” It’s a simple constraint—the use of the same title, over and over—to generate multiple stories.
TM: Epitaphs, obituaries—rich texts, it turns out! (sorry for interrupting)
DHG: Joy Williams’ short short story collection, Ninety-Nine Stories of God, also comes to mind. In this case it’s not just numbered stories, but the “title” appears at the bottom of each piece rather than the top—a subtle inversion that changes how readers encounter each piece, making us reconsider the story through the lens of its title only after we’ve experienced it. These small decisions impact how a reader enters into the work, and what they take away from it.
TM:Can you talk about how you’ve used constraints in the classroom? I know Darien has mentioned this a bit above already. What kinds of assignments are you giving? Do you have a favorite that always seems to work? How have students reacted to constraint-based teaching generally?
NC: One I use again and again is an empty frame. I give a time limit: 5-10 minutes. The writers choose what slice of the environment they want to focus on through their frame. I ask them to include something they’ve “caught” in their frame in their piece of writing. One of my favorites was a workshop in which one writer chose to write about their friend’s hand (holding a pen, writing…) Again as mentioned above, I’m often working in contexts that combine creative and therapeutic or healing aims, so the activities aren’t always geared toward generating a “usable” creative product. But you can of course layer in additional directions or invitations to address that.
DHG: Like Naomi, I use the constraint of time—10 minutes for a first draft and 10 minutes for a first revision and another 10 for the second. After that, you can decide what to do next (more time, less time, let go of the constant) but the early generation process constraints are designed to help you get out of your own way and tap into what might want to make itself known in the page sooner rather than later (it’s also a kind of brain training). The prompt is always the way in so it almost doesn’t matter what the prompt is—it’s the key, not the room, so to speak. Students love constraints because it gives them a very clear and specific task versus “anything goes.” Hermit crab hybrid forms are a great way to show students what’s possible by following a specific form or constraint.
TM: Love these, and I’m going to steal everything for my own classes. My favorite exercise in both fiction and nonfiction is to have students write an instruction manual or how-to guide. You can encourage the students to lean in to their expertise, whether it’s in a specific skill, or just a life experience they know all too well. It’s such a malleable form. You can be silly with it (I’m thinking of a student who wrote a really funny guide on how to get fired from your job as a waiter on day 1) or you can use it as an indirect way to approach difficult subject matter (Jennifer Murvin’s “How to Put Your Child to Bed” uses the procedural details as a way of getting into all the big fears about parenting; Jerald Walker’s How to Make a Slave uses the guide as a frame for discussing complex racial issues). The possibilities are limitless.
Author’s Note: Some names in this essay have been changed to maintain privacy.
In 1973, when my Uncle Ricky was nineteen, he robbed an ice cream shop in Tennessee. Too much Butch Cassidy and Bonnie and Clyde rags-to-riches stories. The silver screen had promised a kind of outlaw glamour, false hope for something better. But real life wasn’t like that at all. Broke as shit, and feeling as though he had nothing worth losing, Ricky waved his gun at two girls behind the counter, demanding they empty the cash register into his bag. He left without firing the gun and the money he walked away with was declared petty, but still, it was armed robbery. Ricky was sentenced to 52 years in prison.
Sometimes, when I can stomach it, I try to imagine what it must have felt like for him to receive news that in one fell swoop, his free life was already over. Without a fully developed frontal lobe, he was told he wouldn’t step foot in another arcade, or even a grocery store until he was 71 years old unless he was granted parole. Still, when I envision that moment, it makes perfect sense to me that Ricky made his first escape two years into that original sentence.
I first got involved advocating for my Uncle Ricky’s case in January 2023, fifty years later but nowhere near his release. It was an untethered winter for me. I was headed to New Haven, Connecticut for the spring semester where my girlfriend, Daisy, was set to complete a three-month research fellowship at Yale.
I was spending the week before our departure with my family in Colorado. Sleeping beside my mom in her bed and doing facial peels with my fourteen-year-old nephew. I spoke to my Uncle Ricky on the phone when he called my mom during their weekly Wednesday time slot.
My mom and Uncle Ricky are two of seven siblings—each with their own call day. Their white Southern family grew up exceptionally poor in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Ricky had told me stories about collecting pieces of coal by the train tracks to warm their house. Other times, all seven kids would crawl into their mom’s bed and pull the covers over their heads to share their body heat. While my granny always worked—at a grocery store or local shops—it was hard being the primary caregiver. My grandfather had done a stint in jail, and not long after his release, he stood up from the dining room table, declared he was sick of starving, and left the family. Seven kids being supported by one measly income had left the family in a kind of poverty that made you feel like you were born into a dead end, where the only options out looked like joining the military or trying to get rich with guns or drugs. All the sisters accepted their fate, worked low-paying jobs, had children, kept the cycle going, but Ricky went down the bandit route. Sure, he knew it could get him into a lot of trouble, but life was tough enough just getting by that it was hard to care about the risks.
An inmate from a Tennessee penitentiary is calling, an operator said. Then I heard my uncle’s pre-recorded, deeply Southern, “This is Rick.” I hit accept and the operator warned that the collect call was ten minutes long. It would be recorded and then terminated automatically.
“Well, hey there Shellers,” he said.
I asked him for any updates. There was no time to waste.
“Still haven’t heard nothing back from the parole board,” Ricky said. “But I’m hopeful. I’ve heard about some guys getting out because the prison needs more beds for incoming men.”
Ricky’s first escape from Tennessee sounds just as surreal as his robbery: he caused a distraction during an inmate softball game, throwing his bat in the air and running like hell to Alabama in 1975. By then he was 21. In the following 30 days, he robbed three convenience stores trying to survive life on the run, then was arrested again. Ricky spent four-and-a-half years in an Alabama prison before he escaped during a 1980 farm detail—sneaking off and fleeing to Virginia, where my grandmother and five of his siblings had relocated.
It’s been said that my grandma always left the back door unlocked for Ricky, just in case her baby boy came home. Unbelievable almost, that one day he actually did. It still moves me to picture my grandma getting her wish. I don’t know all the details, but as a kid, I liked to picture her waking up to find Ricky, standing in the kitchen, flipping pancakes, free as a bird.
In those years he was out, Ricky was determined to stay straight and get his life together. He worked under a fake name at Norfolk shipyards for two years, fell in love, and had my cousin in 1981. Then the shipyards started fingerprinting and Ricky had to quit. With a family to feed, and a fear that he couldn’t hide for long, my uncle did what a lot of us would have done—he went back to his old survival tricks. He’d been caught and arrested every time in the past, so what else, other than desperation, could have motivated him? Ricky completed a string of robberies and was arrested for good in 1982.
When I was a little girl, my mother explained that my Uncle Ricky was in prison for the rest of his life because of a “three-strike-law,” which was not the same as receiving a life-sentence. As a child, I understood this as a warning not to get into any trouble, especially not more than once, because the consequences would be severe. I didn’t think much of it beyond law-being-law, until I was an adult and started to learn about the prison industrial complex and how punitive our country is towards disenfranchised people.
This law stated that “any person convicted of three separate felony offenses of murder, rape, or armed robbery…shall not be eligible for parole.” Many prisoners, just like my uncle, were given parole dates during their official convictions—Ricky’s had been set for 1994, twelve years into his sentence—only to eventually be notified that this newly instituted law had been retroactively applied to their cases by the Department of Corrections, not the court or judge. These men were now going to spend the rest of their lives in prison.
Then, in 2018, something unexpected happened.
After serving 38 years, Ricky received notice that he had been illegally denied parole for the last 26 of them. The “three-strikes-law” was found to be defunct and unconstitutional, a gross overstep of the Department of Corrections. My Uncle Ricky was one of 260 men who would be freed in Virginia at its overruling.
A blessing, as my uncle, who was then 68, had undergone two heart bypass surgeries and survived colon cancer, had been given only a few years left to live by an oncologist.
Ricky completed all the necessary steps to reenter society. Fulfilled rehabilitation classes, filed paperwork to approve of his future residency, and applied for parole in Tennessee, where that original ice cream shop sentence still awaited him. It seemed reasonable enough that the state might consider his time in Virginia a concurrent sentence, especially considering that 26 of those years had been illegally overserved, an injustice that had also prevented his being extradited to Tennessee way back in 1994 to finish out his sentence.
Our family hoped that Ricky would live out his final years in my aunt’s spare bedroom in Heathsville, Virginia—helping her with chores, repairs around the house, gardening, eating home-cooked chicken and dumplings (my grandma’s recipe) and learning the ways technology has changed since 1982. Instead, he was extradited to a special-needs facility in Nashville, to serve a sentence he cannot outlive.
On the phone, Ricky told me it had been three years and he was still waiting to hear back from the Tennessee parole board. I pictured my uncle in his baby blue prison uniform, the surgery scars from two heart bypass surgeries under his T-shirt, and the after-effects of colon cancer leaving him unable to live in a standard federal prison. Easy to imagine the hope he’d felt given his freedom in Virginia, and just as easy to imagine the anxiety of being denied parole, or dying before his paperwork was ever looked at.
You have one-minute remaining on the call, the operator said.
“I have a lawyer friend,” I told him. I rushed it all out: A girl named Lily. She practiced law in New York, but I could still contact her. I’d tell her the situation. She might be able to help. Give some advice.
“Oh, Michelle,” he said. His voice was like a prayer. “I would be so grateful to you. Just for anything. Even just to know what she thinks.”
I didn’t understand yet how much faith this small gesture of getting in touch with Lily would restore. It’s nearly impossible to get legal guidance or support when you’re a flat broke, regular joe, when your whole extended family lives paycheck to paycheck. It had just been my Uncle Ricky and some of his prison pals writing letters and filling out the applications and his limited research ever since this Virginia misstep was brought to light.
We needed help.
“I’ll write and tell you what she says,” I told him, then we were disconnected.
This was his life now. He would be in prison until the day he died.
We visited Uncle Ricky in prison often when I was a kid, and, after my family left Virginia in 2001, we saw him every summer. These visits were best back in the 90s when the rules were looser. We played Snakes and Ladders and Candy Land. I could sit on my uncle’s lap and hug him freely. My grandma was often with us, or an aunt and cousin. I didn’t mind the experience of being patted down, going into a private lady’s room with a guard and flashing my belly. Or walking from barbed wire building to barbed wire building while stifling my desire to wave to the men holding rifles on the roof tops. I loved sitting at the small plastic tables with my uncle and gorging ourselves on vending machine food. We always had a Ziploc bag filled with quarters so Ricky could have anything he wanted. He always wanted a cheeseburger. My sister and I would fight over who got to microwave it for him.
We also talked about my cousins who found themselves in trouble with gangs and drugs. Uncle Ricky often voiced his regrets about his past, and wished the next generation in our family would see how his life had been wasted in prison and choose differently. Ricky said if he could, he’d go back and do it all over, but that was nonsense. This was his life now. He would be in prison until the day he died.It wasn’t all bad though. He had people inside that were his family now, too. He’d found God and had become a Christian. It gave him a feeling of a spiritual existence beyond the prison. It made his struggles have purpose. It wasn’t a particularly happy life, but he’d made his peace.
Daisy and I arrived in New Haven in February 2023. We met Daisy’s mom for lunch at a Thai restaurant in town. She’d been diagnosed with a rare form of uterine cancer and was set to start chemo the following week. I thought of my uncle having been sick inside a prison. Who took care of him? I wondered. Were people kind?
Lily had been receptive to me reaching out. “Somebody has the power to let your uncle out of prison,” she told me over the phone. “We just need to figure out who that is.” I’d called her as soon as my uncle and I were disconnected. She asked me to collect every lick of information on Ricky I could find: his charges, his medical records, any reports of the three-strikes mess. My aunt sent me his entire digitized file, which I combed through obsessively.
I had just received an email update from Lily before we met Daisy’s mom. She had reached out to a few organizations and spoke with an attorney from one called Families Against Mandatory Minimums, who outlined the different types of parole and clemency options available in Tennessee.
Lily learned that medical furlough was only granted to individuals diagnosed with a terminal illness and less than a year to live. The more realistic options for my uncle would be executive clemency based on illness or geriatric parole. For clemency, the state wanted evidence that the applicant not only had a serious, life-threatening condition but has also made significant progress in self-improvement and could be trusted to live lawfully after release.
Geriatric parole was another route available to people over 70 who have chronic, incurable conditions that suggested they were unlikely to live much longer. However, individuals convicted of murder or violent sexual offenses were ineligible.
Lily told me there was a complication: my uncle was serving time for a charge labeled a “Crime Against Nature,” which historically has referred to some type of sexual offense. “It’s unclear whether this would fall under the category of a violent sexual offense since the statute may be outdated or no longer exist,” she wrote. At the end of her email she asked me to find out more.
Over spring rolls, I told Daisy’s mom that I was trying to help my uncle get out of prison. I said he was sick and that he’d only been given only a few years left to live. “He had cancer,” I said. Looking for a way to connect. To stir up empathy for this convict and his crimes. I wanted to humanize him. He’s like you.
“Well,” she said, grimacing and putting her hands up. “He did the crime.” It was not cruel. There was a tone of regret, and the question, what can you do? I thought of phrases she didn’t say but didn’t need to, like, suffering the consequences of one’s own actions. I knew that focusing on the decisions my uncle made as a stupid kid allowed for a feeling of justification. Plus, we can’t be sorry for everyone. We can’t let in all that grief. We can’t! Or we might have to look at the whole and ask why these systems of punishment make no effort of rehabilitation. Why our government would rather spend $44,000 annually to house an inmate when allowing them to live in halfway houses or simply supporting them as they get back on their feet freely are both cheaper options than prison. Why there is no culture of forgiveness for our former or current inmates.Why even the word “inmate” strips away any feeling of sympathy.
When I first went through my uncle’s file, I found his commutation letter, a personal reflection required for resentencing requests. It was from 2020, handwritten and scanned. “Now at the age of 67, and having lost 44 years of my life to incarceration, it is extremely easy to recognize what a wasted life I’ve lived,” he wrote. “The maturity which has emerged during my life has brought the realization of my failing to live up to who I could have been as a productive citizen and human being.” I couldn’t stop crying all afternoon.
I won’t romanticize the idea of who my uncle could have been or what his life would have amounted to had he not spent the last four decades in prison. It would have been humble. It would have been raising his son with his partner, whom he loved. Who he still calls and speaks to. His life would have been working the shipyards and manual labor. Paycheck to paycheck. He would not have been college-educated or the CEO of some company. But had my uncle been given a shorter sentence from the get-go, rehabilitated, and then released, he would have been kind. I believe that. He would have stayed close to my family. He would have had a good, happy, vibrant life.
And, despite his crimes, every last one of them, I still believe he deserves that.
There is no culture of forgiveness for our former or current inmates.
That week, I couldn’t stop thinking about a memory from when I was nine years old. My family had recently moved to Colorado. My Uncle Ricky, in place of seeing us regularly during visiting hours, started writing us all letters. He always sent us birthday cards, and once over the stretch of a year, he sent me and my sister dozens of Whoppers candy wrappers, flattened and empty, each with a promo running on the back—250 points could buy one movie ticket. 500 could buy two.
“I’ll never eat another chocolate malt ball again,” he told my mom over the phone when he’d successfully sent us enough for two tickets. Do you know how many bags of candy he’d had to buy from the commissary to send us to see Shrek? How much of his own money he’d had to spend while making pennies at his prison job? Or spending the small amount of money my aunts rallied to send him each month? How precious and generous that was?
I should tell you one more thing about my uncle’s first robbery. I’m sorry it’s late. I was scared to tell you before, worried he’d lose your empathy. When my uncle robbed that ice cream shop in 1973, he made the cashier perform oral sex on him. That’s what Lily was referring to on his record as a “Crime Against Nature.” I’d never heard this until I’d had to ask him what it meant.
What do we do when our loved ones fuck up? When they fuck up in ways that don’t align with our morals? I believe that those who commit sexual assaults should be held accountable. I believe in the trauma that survivors experience long into the future. I think of this woman and I wonder how this changed her. What is her name? What is she doing right now? Of all the things my uncle has done, this one challenges me the most. Of all the things my uncle did I know that this one challenges him the most too.
“There is no excuse,” he told me over the phone. His voice was sorrowful. “I feel ashamed. I regret it deeply. I was so young and stupid. At that moment, my adrenaline was so high.” I imagined my old uncle furrowing his brow, shaking his head. Leaning up against the wall, as he used the telephone in the common area, thinking of a mistake he made 53 years prior. “It’s a stain upon my life.”
I tried to have empathy. Couldn’t I remember being young and reckless? Feeling hopeless? I thought of that precise moment in my uncle’s life as an example of what humans will do for a false sense of power when they’ve lived their lives without it. I agreed with my uncle when he said there was no excuse for his behavior. And still I believe he has paid for his mistakes with the last four decades of his life. How do we talk about rehabilitation in this world? How do we say it was a mistake never made again?The robberies, yes, those went on. But he never committed any other sexual assault. Nor battery or murder. Never another person physically hurt. Nobody touched.
Lily continued to be helpful. She didn’t think any of the new details meant that my uncle didn’t deserve to be released. “This is now a 70-year-old sick man,” she told me. “He’s already spent 44 years of his life in prison. He doesn’t need to die in there to learn his lesson.”
We carried on, emailing organizations in Tennessee that might be able to help. There were many dead ends. Many more ghosted Lily, even though she was writing as a lawyer and not my Uncle Ricky reaching out as an “offender.” She told me she was getting frustrated by the discourteousness. That it took no time at all to respond and say, “Sorry, I can’t take on the case.”
Uncle Ricky told Lily that he prayed for her every day. He was extremely grateful for her hard work despite our no luck. To help, Ricky had friends looking into other law schools. It was a whole machine, trying to do research from within the prison, and keeping us all in touch. “I trust God’s plan,” he told me every time I spoke to him on the phone. But I could hear the restlessness in his voice. “Whether that’s my dying here in prison or being a free man.”
Then there was a small hope. In early 2024, Lily emailed me and said that Choosing Justice Initiative seemed interested in my uncle’s case. They had emailed her back and asked follow-up questions. It was an organization Uncle Ricky had asked her to reach out to. I read through their website: A Nashville non-profit law firm working to end wealth-based disparities in the criminal legal system. It was the most hopeful Lily had been all year. I felt hopeful too. I gave her all the information I had to help fill in any gaps. I called my aunt in Virginia to fact check. Lily sent it all over to the org. Fingers crossed, she wrote.
Once the three-strike rule was applied to his case, my uncle lived under the impression that he would die behind bars. It took hard work and a lot of time to accept that fate. For a majority of those years, he lived in a prison close to most of our relatives. He had regular visitors. He was never out of our family’s reach. When my grandmother passed away in 2010, three of my aunts sat at a table across from him and broke the news in person. They shared their grief for two hours. But when Ricky’s brother died in January of 2024, he received the news via phone call, all alone. I pictured him in his cell, his grief as big as a house. It was my uncle’s dying wish to visit Ricky one last time, but Tennessee was too far, too hard to get to.
Aside from that, Ricky knew the Virginia prison he was in for decades. He’d learned the ropes and had friends. He’d gotten diagnosed with cancer there, received treatment, survived, had open heart surgery and recovered in those walls. It was a place he knew as home. My uncle’s parole from Virginia may have given him hope he might live as a free man again, but it also isolated him from our family and completely uprooted his life.
Sick, he was placed in a special needs facility with men he had no history with. He received almost no visitors. He remained hopeful, wishing, yearning that the courts of Tennessee will have it in their heart—in their humanity—to let him live out his last few years a free man. I wondered if the hope of freedom had destroyed his peace. I wondered if it was worth it to be paroled at all if my uncle dies in Tennessee. You win, I wanted to tell the state governor, the district attorney general, the courts. He gave you his life. Give this man a free death.
“God’s plan” my Uncle Ricky said. Every time we spoke. “It will be up to God whether or not I walk out of here.”
Daisy’s parents are both doctors. They told me that after med school, when they started working in hospitals and losing some of their patients, they had to find a higher power and give up the arrogance that they could save everyone. God’s plan, God’s will, whatever you want to call it. You have to put it in someone or something else’s hands, or you’ll drive yourself mad. I thought of this every time my Uncle Ricky hung up the phone or signed off on his letters. I wondered if him keeping his faith is equivalent to keeping his sanity.
So, I started praying with each email sent out, each letter written. I lit a candle in my apartment. I bowed my head. I gave it to something bigger than myself.
Choosing Justice Initiative eventually emailed back in April, 2024. The email was four paragraphs long. Robust. But it was bad news.
How do we talk about rehabilitation in this world? How do we say it was a mistake never made again?
“IMO, it will be hard to convince prosecutors in East Tennessee to have any sympathy or mercy for him,” the lawyer wrote in her email. “I expect they’ll look at his story and see a man who escaped from prison and went on to commit a string of violent crimes in other states. They will not view the amount of time he spent in prison in VA without parole eligibility as any kind of injustice.”
I was bruised by the response. Lily didn’t forward me the email for two days, because she said it had felt hurtful to her too. She asked me to tell my uncle the news, so I wrote him a letter explaining the situation. I was not as harsh in my language. I didn’t say that Choosing Justice thought prosecutors wouldn’t have any “sympathy or mercy” for him. That in this woman’s honest opinion, the courts will not see a man who escaped and was done wrong by the Virginia courts, but rather a man that escaped and then went on to commit a “string of violent crimes.”
I tried to calm myself down by considering the number of cases that showed up on Choosing Justice’s desk. The amount of people, just like my uncle, asking for help. “In a world of endless resources, I’d be happy to take on his case,” the lawyer wrote at the end of her email. But in this world—where money was tight and they must make decisions based on lack—they could only take on cases with the highest likelihood of success. I thought of my uncle’s robberies—crimes that also took place in a world where money was tight and decisions were based on lack. I wanted her to see the irony of that.
At the end of my letter, I told my uncle I was still holding out hope. However small. Regardless of how long it took. There was nothing left to lose in knocking on doors, sending the letters, even if we had to put together the clemency application on our own. I signed off to my uncle with the phrase, “I put my faith in God’s plan.”
It took another six months before we heard a “yes.” It came from a professor at the University of Tennessee, who agreed to assign law students to Uncle Ricky’s case. “How could we not jump in?” she wrote in her email. “It is a heartbreaking situation and, while I’m not sure we have the answers, we can certainly look.”
I cried with relief at these words, and anxiously waited four long days until my uncle called and I told him the news. “I can’t believe it! I just cannot believe it, Michelle!”
Before we hung up he asked, “Will they visit me?” And I felt his loneliness reverberating through the phone lines.
Ricky’s still in there. Waiting for the law students to collect all the data, to make their case, but it’s coming. For now, we do our best to get by, and hold on to the possibility of something good. Freedom. A bedroom in his sister’s house. Driving a car. Grocery shopping. Cooking his own meals. Going to a movie theatre. Walking for as long as he wants in nature. Seeing a body of water. Swimming in it. I picture this. My uncle sun-kissed and wrinkled, standing in the sea. And I hold the belief in my heart that it will be true.
At the opening of Rob Macaisa Colgate’s debut poetry collection, Hardly Creatures, readers are presented with an Access Legend featuring fifteen Universal Access Symbols—symbols used in visual art exhibits and museums around the world to help potential audiences identify what events may be accessible to them. These Universal Access Symbols are found, in various combinations and reimaginings, throughout the
collection, cluing in readers on what type of reading experience they’d like to curate for themselves. Emulating the structure of an accessible art museum sectioned off into nine wings, Hardly Creatures reorders abecedarians, re-sequences sestinas, and guides readers’ physical hands toward tracing the words on the page, all in its interrogation of social media, the disability community, and what forms of intimacy are accessible, and in what spaces.
Rob and I met last year in a Zoom breakout room, during Lambda Literary’s annual Writers’ Retreat. Possibly despite, possibly because of, the virtual environment we were afforded, we immediately became fast friends—adding each other on social media, supporting each other’s work in the literary world, and occasionally messaging. By the time we met in person at a reading in Los Angeles, I felt I knew him so well already; we picked up right where we left off from our Instagram chats, like we’d been talking in person the whole time.
Hardly Creatures is one of the rare collections that so accurately captures the permanent multimedia-hood of modern life. One is not just a physical body; they’re also an Instagram user, a Tiktok scroller, a Tweeter. One is not just a museum goer; they’re also schizophrenic, Filipino, and bakla. Reading through Rob’s debut collection, there’s this perpetual feeling that all is accounted and cared for. Over Zoom once again, Rob and I discussed meeting the needs of your readers, the accessibility afforded from digital forms of connection, and why he’s bored of the current state of disability poetics.
Jalen Giovanni Jones: I basically doubled the width of this book because I folded so many pages of it. I constantly was like, “I need to come back to this. I need to come back to this.” Let’s begin by talking about the access legend that we’re presented with at the beginning. It presents us with these symbols that we’re meant to refer to throughout the rest of the book. I’ve never seen that in a book before.
Rob Macaisa Colgate: The access legend really just had to be there, because going into the project I knew I would be modeling the book’s accessibility after visual art’s accessibility, and a big part of that is the access symbols. I spent two years living in Toronto, working at a disability arts gallery called Tangled Art + Disability. It’s all disabled run, and puts on art shows all by disabled artists. That’s when I started encountering some of the access symbols that maybe aren’t universally familiar.
A big one for me when I got there was the “please touch” symbols, which were in a lot of spaces. Not all the art for every exhibit was tactile friendly, but every exhibit had some portion that was touchable. I was really struck by the contrast of how pretty much every museum you go to is covered in “DO NOT TOUCH” symbols, which you learn young and just accept that you’re not supposed to be touching things in museums. When I was at Tangled, it was the first time I was invited to touch what was in an art gallery, and that was the first time I actually thought about how “DO NOT TOUCH” symbols, while maybe protecting the art on some level (which is very important), [are] also quite restrictive to people whose most valuable sense is touch. From there, I wrote all the poems and then figured out what access symbols they were going to need.
JGJ: What led you to creating new access symbols for this collection? There were many I saw that I didn’t know, and it was immediately recognizable as something of the author’s intentional creation.
How could a poem do everything a poem wants to do, while also meeting the needs of the reader?
RMC: The “please touch,” “sensory sensitivity,” [and] “assistive tablet available” are all things I had seen at Tangled and other art museums that are starting to make bigger moves towards accessibility. But my main thing [with creating new symbols] was that I was sort of bored of disability poetics—really just meaning poems about disability—and became fascinated [by] how visual art could both be about disability, yes, but could also be made accessible in experience. I felt like I needed something like that for disability poetics, that I hadn’t seen or hadn’t encountered yet. The question I asked at the very beginning, before writing many poems from this, was: what would accessible poetry mean, maybe not in the ways that mean “easy to read” or “intelligible,” but as in “meeting the needs of the reader”? How could a poem do everything a poem wants to do, while also meeting the needs of the reader? That questioning drove the whole book, the individual poems themselves, and especially the access symbols.
JGJ: “Meeting the needs of the reader” is exactly it. I felt like needs I didn’t even know I had were accounted for while reading this collection. Sometimes there’d be a poem that was just the title, and the rest of the page would be blank. Those moments helped me realize that I actually needed to just sit and take the previous poem in, because maybe it had a lot of heavy material, or had a lot happening in it. Those moments give the reader their own authority over the reading experience. One could choose to just sit there in the blank space, or choose to reread the poem, or move on.
There’s one poem, “History of Display,” that really stuck out to me. While reading, the poem was at once being really guiding and gentle, but didn’t let that tenderness stop it from criticizing the absurdity of our ableist world. How did you learn to strike such a balance in your writing, of making sure to meet the needs of your reader, while also remaining critical?
RMC: I paid a lot of attention to my own experiences reading. I’m not always the best reader… I’m a very tired and sleepy person, and I would sort of pay attention to things like, Okay, how many poems can I get through before I feel like I need to stop? Or, What order of poems is helpful to keep me reading? If while reading I encounter a super dense, lyrical poem on one page, enough to make me think, I hope the next one’s shorter, and then the next one would be just as dense, it would pull me out of the work. I would feel bad about that because it’d be wonderful work, but because my needs weren’t being met, I wasn’t able to give my fullest attention to the work.
My inclination towards form was very helpful, because it helped to break apart the book into smaller units, poem by poem, and then wing by wing. It was a lot of reading, paying attention to how reading felt, and thinking about what made me feel better when I was reading.
JGJ: Along with the play with form, the structure of this collection was really unique—how it’s set up like we’re walking through an accessible museum. Did you have a system for deciding which poems were going to go in each wing of the museum?
RMC: I’ve spent a lot of time ordering poems in manuscripts I wrote during graduate school. The scenes in my play, for example, I wrote totally out of order. Selecting the order of your work is just as much of a practice as drafting and revising is.
I was being taught how my poems talk to each other.
I honestly felt like having the wings was sort of a hack to ordering the collection. I almost felt bad, because the wings made a lot of the ordering decisions for me. I grouped all the poems into wings, and then I ordered those wings based on where I knew certain poems had to be. There were certain poems, like “Abecedarian for the Care Shifts I Failed to Show Up for,” that I knew had to be toward the beginning. And I knew that “Bench: Eli Tidies Up” was going to be the last poem in the book as soon as I wrote it. Those markers helped me know where to put the wings. In general, ordering is a process that can deliver as much revelation as the act of writing poetry, in the same way that I think it’s a craft. You know when you’re writing a poem and it surprises you, and you know you’re on the right track because it’s taken on its own life? A lot of that happened in the ordering too. When I started putting different poems next to each other, there was a lot of surprise. There was lots of excitement. I was being taught how my poems talk to each other.
JGJ: Can we talk about “Hopescrolling?” The poem felt very modern, how it referenced so many different virtual spaces, all these posts on social media, and captured tens of disparate experiences all at once. What inspired you to capture that?
RMC: I love to scroll, and I don’t really feel bad about it either. Like, I’m really on that phone!
As we entered the later stages of the pandemic, and because of the challenge of the earlier stages, a lot of the reciprocal energy was clapping back at things like Zoom, virtual events, and people started talking about how much they loathed them. I don’t think it was totally because they loathed them. I think a lot of it was because it reminded them of a challenging time. Of course, the interpersonal connection is different digitally—I’m not necessarily going to say worse or better—but I also spent a lot of time thinking about how essential digital community is for so many disabled people.
Like I said earlier, I’m a really sleepy person. I take these anti-psychotics, and they have a huge sedative effect. I have trouble getting out of bed a lot of the time. I rarely work at my desk more than I’m working on the couch, like I am right now. And sometimes I still want to be at my friend’s event, but I’m about to pass out, and so I want to do it from bed. With “Hopescrolling,” I was trying to have a poem that was like, “You know what, the internet is good and digital connection is actually meaningful. And I know we don’t want to say that because we love being together in person, but let me just make a case for it.” And so I just started literally bookmarking tweets, Tiktoks, and Instagram posts that had takes on disability. You could see people in the comments, expressing their authentic feelings on disability without feeling like they were in a conversation about ableism or something.
JGJ: Something that I’m really curious about is how you sprinkled in references to Filipino culture throughout, but they never seemed to entirely take over any poem or section of the collection. What made you want to weave these cultural signals in, without having them take center stage?
RMC: I have a couple answers. One is that my verse play is very Filipino, and the verse novel I’m working on now is as well, so I have another outlet for that. Another answer is that writing about being Filipino is something that has been hard for me, and something that I wanted to do but knew I couldn’t force. I’m half white, I grew up going to Catholic school, and lived a pretty white life. I didn’t totally understand “being Filipino,” really, until I got to college and started dating—I’ve been out since I was 11—and found I was having a very different experience from white people. I’ve had a lot less time in my life to think about being Filipino, and I’m finally finding ways to write about it now, which is really exciting for me.
I’m hoping that this [collection] helps open more doors toward poems that are truly disabled in form.
In Hardly Creatures, I was so locked into my disability studies, and I think I really knew I wanted that to be the central to the book. That’s what I was spending most of my time thinking about. In the same way, there’s some Filipino details, but it’s never like “the Filipino poem.” It’s also a very queer book, but there’s never a poem that’s going “gay rights!” I think those aspects of identity show up because those two things—being queer and Filipino—are both ingrained in me. Whenever I’m settling down to write a book, I always have a larger project in mind. I knew the register I developed here, I wanted there to be utter, lyrical clarity. There were so many things I wanted to talk about, but trying to make all of them the main course wasn’t going to be in service of clarity. I let things come up, but made sure to keep my through line intact. It helped to remind myself, This is never going to be the last book, right?
JGJ: I totally respect a very clear artistic vision.
Earlier you mentioned that you were a little bit bored of disability poetics, and the conversations going on within and around it. What are you hoping to add to those conversations, through the writing of this book?
RMC: I’m really just hoping that when we talk about any subfield of poetry, that it’s not just a conversation on content. I think something that’s so important about poetry is form. It’s one of the most important things that separates it from prose. Prose, formally, is a lot more limited, with its need for sentences and paragraphs. I think we similarly limit ourselves when we talk about disability poetics, when we talk about queer poetics, or Filipino poetics. What we really mean is disability poems—poems about disability. Not all poems have to be about something, but I knew for this book, I wanted a lot of poems about disability, but it’s poems, and so it doesn’t just have to be about something. There are all these other layers that they can evoke, that can direct the reader, and that can cause thinking that isn’t just about the semantics of the grammatical sentence on the page.
I felt like I was only seeing “poems about disability” when we were saying “disability poetics.”I’m hoping that this [collection] helps open more doors toward poems that are truly disabled in form, and unpacking what that can mean. Poems have this incredible possibility to them that I really believe in, and that pulls me to poetry over other genres. We can do so much more than content. My hope is that all people—for whatever topic they’re writing about—don’t just think about the content of their poetry, but also about the form, the experience, the movements, the music—all of that.
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