Page 478 – Electric Literature

The Refugee Woman Who Shaped Brazilian Literature

Posted on March 27, 2018September 25, 2019 by 007595

Sometimes, people appear in the fabric of a country’s history as an inexplicable aberration. It seems to be the only way to explain Clarice Lispector and her monumental rise as perhaps the most influential writer of 20th century Brazil.

In 1921, as a one-year-old, Lispector came to Brazil with her family as a refugee, fleeing pogroms in war-torn Ukraine, only to become one of the country’s most revered, mysterious, and beloved authors. As Lispector was working on her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, which was published in 1943, her fellow journalist and friend, Francisco de Assis Barbosa noted that, “as I devoured the chapters the author was typing, it slowly dawned on me that this was an extraordinary literary achievement.” He guided the manuscript towards a publisher and gave her the inimitable nickname, “Hurricane Clarice.” But Lispector’s second novel, The Chandelier, couldn’t have been received more differently: publishers rejected it, and, upon release, the book was considered so strange and inscrutable that it was largely ignored and forgotten, so much so that Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards’ new translation of The Chandelier is its first ever into English.

Though Lispector has been a fixture in the Portuguese-speaking world for decades, she has long been neglected and poorly translated for English-speaking audiences. Over the past nine years, however, she has received a steady revival: a major biography, a first-ever collection of her complete short stories, and the steady retranslations of her novels by New Directions Press, led and edited by critic and biographer Benjamin Moser. Part of Lispector’s appeal is her unique identity as both a part of and apart from Brazil, from her unusual last name to her heavily accented Portuguese, a separateness that let her succeed in a culture and country prohibitive to women. She was one of the first Brazilian women to graduate from law school, and also one of the first to become a journalist.

Lispector’s unique identity as both a part of and apart from Brazil lets her succeed in a culture and country prohibitive to women.

Her name also helped build her famously mysterious allure — when her first novel was published, rumors flourished that her unusual name was actually as pseudonym for a man. Her mystery and mysticism is borne out in her writing, which is as wonderful as it is peculiar, emotive, and sometimes impenetrable: “from the high windowpanes one saw, beside the garden of tangled plants and dry twigs, a long stretch of land of a sad and whispered silence.” Or, when one of her characters is sitting in her apartment and writing letters to her family, she finds that “no, it wasn’t unhappiness that she was feeling, unhappiness was a moist thing on which someone could feed for days and days finding pleasure, unhappiness was the letters.” In drawing comparisons, she is often compared to James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or even Franz Kafka, but her style is one that, in the Portuguese language, is still considered singular and, at first, felt considerably “foreign.”

If she were of our current moment, Lispector might be best identified as a “Dreamer” or asylum seeker — when she turned 21, under the threat of being deported to Russia as a Jewish woman during the height of World War II, she appealed directly to Brazil’s infamous dictator, Gertúlio Vargas, saying she was: “a twenty-one-year-old Russian who has been in Brazil for twenty one years minus a few months. Who does not know a single word of Russian but who thinks, speaks, writes, and acts in Portuguese. . .Who, if she was forced to return to Russia, would feel irredeemably foreign there, without a friend, without a profession, without a hope.”

If she were of our current moment, Lispector might be best identified as a ‘Dreamer’ or asylum seeker.

Her petition was successful, and this good fortune, among the stability of a then-supportive marriage, and a husband in the prestigious Brazilian diplomatic corps, allowed Lispector to flourish as a writer, despite the obstacles she faced as a woman attempting to write and publish in a male-dominated culture that was skeptical of this foreign woman and her strange name. As one Brazilian critic noted of her work: “There are no chandeliers in Brazil.”

The Chandelier centers around its heroine, Virginia, growing up in the nondescript, rural “Upper Marsh” in a mansion known as “Quiet Farm” with her brother Daniel, until she is eventually old enough to move to an unnamed city to pursue her studies. While the novel might be generously described as “quiet,” without much of a plot, it instead concentrates on Virginia’s intensive, meandering internal monologues as she tries to understand her place and identity as a woman. While playing one day as a girl, she sees the novel’s eponymous fixture:

But the chandelier! There was the chandelier. The great spider would glow. She would look at it immobile, uneasy, seeming to foresee a terrible life. That icy existence. Once! once in a flash — the chandelier shed chrysanthemums and joy. Another time — while she was running through the parlor — it was a chaste seed. The chandelier. She skipped off without looking back.

For nearly 300 pages, this is the only reference that Lispector gives to the curious and inscrutable title — the chandelier of Quiet Farm that Virginia looks into only to see a doomed future. It’s description and resonance for Virginia, as she’s figuring out what it means to be a woman and have a body in Brazil and the world, is striking: a glowing spider, at once a seductive flower and a hard seed. From the start, Virginia is perplexed by all the irreconcilable demands of society on a woman’s body. After returning home from the city for her grandmother’s funeral, Virginia realizes, near the end of the novel, that the chandelier had vanished from Quiet Farm:

She was looking through the window and in the lowered and dark glass was seeing mixed with the reflection of the seat and the people the chandelier. She smiled contrite and timid. The featherless chandelier. Like a great and quavering cup of water.”

Virginia’s memory of the chandelier as an adult is as strange and ambiguous as the rest of the moments in the novel, deeply introspective and without a clear meaning, but the energy and spiritual wonder of her descriptions make the cryptic writing all the more resonant and spiritually urgent for both her character and her reader.

Even from a young age, Virginia is resolutely fixated on her body, its perceived awkwardness, and the bodies of others, which only intensifies as she grows older. Like the chandelier, she feels at times glowing with beauty but also as awkward and horrid as a spider. In a world before Photoshop and Instagram models and the concept of body dysmorphia, Virginia’s perpetual anxiety about the shape of her body, how she fits into her space, is nearly prescient, like when she is looking out her bedroom window at Quiet Farm: “She would grow more alone, watching the rain. She felt purplish and cold inside, her body a little bird was slowly asphyxiated.” Or later, when an adult Virginia attends a dinner party in the city and obsesses over the beauty of one of the other women:

What was making [Maria Clara] difficult was the crystalline part of her body: her eyes, her saliva, her hair, her teeth and dry nails that were sparkling and isolated

. . .Maria Clara’s pink camelhair dress was reminding her of a motionless river and the motionless leaves of engravings. With a movement of her leg, with the breathing of her breast the river would move, the leaves flutter. How clean and brushed she was.

All these beautiful women, fawning over Virginia’s lover, Vicente, make Virginia begin to feel not just jealous, but murderously inadequate, until “there was no point pretending she wasn’t beautiful, she would penetrate your heart like a sweet knife. The thin, confident women were chatting — they seemed easy for the men and hard for the women; and why didn’t they have kids? my God, how disconcerting that was.”

Throughout all this, Virginia struggles under the brutish and commanding nature and memory of her patriarchal father and the manipulative Daniel. Daniel’s psychological torment only furthers Virginia’s introspection and crises of self-doubt, her low self esteem and her paralysis preventing any change in her life. Once, while playing as children, Daniel commands Virginia: “Virginia, everyday when you see milk and coffee you like milk and coffee. When you see Papa you respect Papa. When you scrape your leg you feel pain in your leg, do you get what I’m saying? You are common and stupid. . . you don’t think, as the saying goes, deeply.” It is no surprise, then, when Virginia struggles to connect with the men that she meets in the city.

Despite being lovers, she is hardly able to strike up a conversation with Vicente. Virginia befriends her apartment’s married doorman, Miguel, and they share platonic but intensely romantic evenings drinking coffee and reading the Bible to each other — a sort of recompense for their quasi-immoral behavior. Eventually, the guilt is too much for Miguel and he tells his wife, and he and Virginia end their rendezvouses on sour terms. The repercussions of a stilted and repressed youth ripple throughout the psychodrama of Virginia’s life — Lispector herself did psychoanalysis for many years and was familiar with the trauma a wrecked childhood could have on a person: her mother, who was raped while fleeing the Ukraine, contracted syphilis and suffered paralysis before dying in Brazil when Lispector was just a girl. Her father struggled to provide for her family, working as a peddler, and died of an untreated illness before her first book was published, leaving Lispector orphaned at twenty. As Vicente notes on seeing Virginia for the first time: “she looked like a child withered, withered between the pages of a thick book like a flower.”

Lispector herself did psychoanalysis for many years and was familiar with the trauma a wrecked childhood could have on a person.

In his biography of Lispector, Why This World, Benjamin Moser writes “Clarice Lispector has been compared less often to other writers than to mystics and saints.” In reading The Chandelier, one finds an odd, mystical sort of clairvoyance in its pages — after pages and pages of a spiraling, circuitous, and rambling thoughts, the narrative will come up for air with a remarkable suddenness. A line, a passage will rise to the surface and ring brutally true or poignantly absurd. Near the end of the novel, Virginia reflects on the discomfort of even her own name:

Boys and girls would have to change their names so much when they grew up. . . after losing that perfect, skinny figure, as small and delicate as the mechanism of a watch, after losing transparency and gaining a color, she could be called. . . any other name except Virginia, of such fresh and somber antiquity.

The Chandelier, too, becomes a mutable thing, not just for Lispector’s heroine, but for any who look within its pages and sees what strange thing is shining out.

Searching for Solace in Queer Poetry

Posted on March 27, 2018April 12, 2021 by 007595

“Do you think you’ll ever find someone like your sister has?”

My mother asks me this as I survey my sister’s new backyard. An animatronic owl guards the flowerbed, greening tomatoes hang off the vines, rich mulch frames plants that are not yet fully grown — signs of fresh life, but one that is just beginning.

My sister has lived here in Austin for a little over a year with her new husband, and we’re here now celebrating their marriage. The marriage and this house are a symbol of her safety and her comfortability. Amidst my sister’s security, my mother is worrying about my own.

I say, “I hope I will,” and this is the truth.

The sun shines hot on us in summer.

Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds has a false ending. The penultimate poem, entitled “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” is an epistolary written to a future self.

Night Sky is perhaps a book of queer melancholy. An honest account of the emotions of putting up with one’s queerness. “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” reads:

Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us

Here, Vuong is looking for an ending that proves he has made it through his tribulation.

Throughout Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Vuong reconciles forms of his own identity, juxtaposing images and narratives of his body as a Vietnamese immigrant and as a queer young man. “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” ends:

I swear, you will wake —
& mistake these walls
for skin

Vuong hopes for a day where his existence is not a barrier but is as comfortable and form-fitting as skin. The use of “mistake” feels important here. The verb could have been “see” or “view” or “understand,” but he chose “mistake.” His perception changes; the wall remains a wall. He must trick himself into believing that he is okay, that he is worthy, even if, in the world of the poem, it might not be true.

I came out to my parents during my first year of college. It was November and it was Parents’ Weekend, when most parents of freshmen flew out to visit their children and see how they were adjusting. My parents drove four and a half hours from Joplin to St. Louis.

As soon as they’d arrived, I knew that I had to tell them. Before I thought I would wait until the holidays, but being around them in the context of school, in a context in which I was already “out,” felt like I was lying to them. In the past few months I had developed what felt like a new life with new friends that I didn’t have to hold secrets from.

Amid tours and samplings of local chain restaurants that weren’t too far out of their comfort zones — I wanted to make them as comfortable as possible, to feel like everything was normal — I couldn’t find the words to tell them. I couldn’t find the words on Friday. I showed them around my campus, pointing out the different places I spent my days. Here was my dorm, the common room, here was the dining hall, our go-to restaurants near campus. Saturday, I was even more afraid. I watched as my parents struggled to register all my new friends’ names. They were overwhelmed, and why wouldn’t they be. Neither of them had ever had a college campus experience like this. On Sunday, we ate lunch at a dimly lit Applebee’s and that felt wrong too. The atmosphere was too depressing. This can’t be where I do it, I thought. But I had been thinking this all weekend, at each of our destinations. So, I knew I had only option — to tell them after lunch, before they left for home, before I got out of the car. My stomach was in knots. I didn’t say a word on the way back to campus.

The parking structure outside of my dorm was gray as was the sky outside, so the light coming through only made it feel grayer.

My dad pulled into a spot so that we could say our goodbyes.

“Before you guys leave I have to tell you something,” I said from the backseat.

This alarmed my mother, as I knew it would. She whipped herself around in the parked car yelling What? in a fluid motion. I was stuck now, I had to tell them.

“I don’t like girls…I’m gay.”

I heard myself say this without believing it, without feeling it was real. The car felt static and frozen.

My mom began to cry in the passenger’s seat. She lifted her sunglasses to wipe her tears. My dad was silent.

“I wanted to let you guys know,” I began, just as I had practiced. “I know that a lot of people weren’t supportive of people like you being together, and I hope that you can be supportive of me.”

It hadn’t been very long that white people in Missouri were comfortable with seeing a Black man with a white woman. My mother had my older sister alone in the hospital. Her family was unsupportive and wanted nothing to do with it, all because the father was Black. I wondered if that was a low blow, but it was the closest I could try to get them to understand.

My mom kept crying, only stopping to ask questions: Who else knew? What about church? What about HIV? I cringed at the miseducation, the misunderstanding. I grew exhausted. I sat in silence for several minutes. I needed to let them process.

My mom kept crying, only stopping to ask questions: Who else knew? What about church? What about HIV?

“I’m just gonna go back to my dorm,” I told them.

I opened the car door and headed to the trunk to get my bag, and I was happy that they at least followed me. My mom, still crying, hugged me and said she loved me.

My dad hugged me and finally spoke: “Are you sure?”

I’m drawn to Justin Phillip Reed’s poetry because of its themes of queerness and God. Reed is Black and gay and I see him as an example of how to turn your own experiences into moving art. On the cover of his first collection, A History of Flamboyance, there is a drawn image of a Black boy, a pink floral print background. His head is crowned in doilies. A gold chain with a lock stands out against his black turtleneck.

The busyness and warmth of the cover soothes me. I like to think of my anxieties this way — a swirl of lace and beautiful, messy things.

The text begins with the poem “Torch Song: Straight Boy:”

I needed saving yesterday
stole your dog tags for a bookmark, fucked a tow truck driver
in your bed, lit your incense to kill the stink of poppers.
This is the art of reaching out to you

In the poem, a straight boy is living in the apartment nearby the speaker, somewhere where the noise and effect of his actions are both seen and heard. But I couldn’t get over the architecture of the scene.

The poem describes a moth alighting on the straight boy’s ceiling: “You crushed the insect with a bare-knuckle blow.” How does the speaker know? Does he live in the apartment above? Was he there, in the bedroom, when the moth was killed? I reread the lines of the poem again. And again. And again. What kind of apartment was this? Was it more surreal than that? Was I reading things too literally? Did it matter? I put the book away and went to sleep, convinced I am just bad at reading poetry.

I reread the lines of the poem again. And again. And again. Was I reading things too literally? Did it matter?

A few nights later I returned to the book and then it hit me — what if they were the same person? What if the unrequited love is with the self? A love that isn’t returned? Reed continues:

I flung faith to the sun’s far side and settled for you as an idea
like God
or electricity.
I never knew anything
could be worshipped in this way

Maybe the straight boy is a reflection of himself. A shadow of an old self, simply an idea. Maybe he finds himself worshipping and reaching out to man that is no longer living. Or perhaps this is just me projecting my own thoughts onto the poem. A yearning for someone to show that mourning oneself is a common practice.

The final poem in A History of Flamboyance is “My Angels / Will Be Tall / Black Drag Queens” in which Reed admits that a queer life is a sad one: “we confess the glory hole is haunted.”

The final lines of the poem read:

we cannot dream
a colder habit than silence

In Reed’s vision, heaven is a beautiful space, if it exists. It is a place where queer angels can be free, and unlike the stage of the living that feels a habitual form of death: silence. Heaven is loud and flamboyant. Heaven is not subdued. I don’t have to talk about myself in a low voice. I don’t have to pray that my extended family won’t ask if I have a girlfriend. I don’t have to worry about an eternity of feeling like I don’t quite belong in happy places.

Heaven is loud and flamboyant. Heaven is not subdued. I don’t have to talk about myself in a low voice. I don’t have to pray that my extended family won’t ask if I have a girlfriend.

I watch a squirrel run through my sister’s backyard. I want it to talk to the fake owl.

“I’m just so sorry for the way I reacted,” my mom says.

I figured this was where my mother’s conversation was going: we always approached my queerness this way: barely grazing it. Always brushing its side with delicacy.

I tell her it’s okay, that it has been almost five years, but secretly I am happy to hear her say this.

I feel proven right. That it wasn’t a good response. She cried the entire week after I told her. Every time I called her I felt the wound I had given her. I was still embarrassed about the way I had said it: I don’t like girls, I’m gay. The words sounded so silly to me. As if I were afraid of the word “gay,” so I had to say it in other words first. Thinking of that moment felt like pressing a bruise on the inside of my stomach. I never pressed on it too long.

She begins to cry again. I can’t see behind her glasses but I hear it in her voice. I don’t like to see her like this. So even though I am proven right, this doesn’t feel good. I tell her we don’t have to talk about it anymore, that I know she is sorry, that I always thought she was doing the best she could.

I hear my sister and dad inside playing a board game. I take a sip of my mother’s tea. I think of other things to talk about with her.

“It’s just, it felt like you died,” she says.

My favorite album in high school was a Christian rock album, Come Now Sleep by the band As Cities Burn. It seemed to struggle with the existence of God. It seemed depressed. Song titles like “Our World is Gray,” and “Contact,” and “Wrong Body.” The opening song, “Contact,” begins with lyrics that caught my attention:

Hearts aren’t really our guides.
We are truly alone
’cause God ain’t up in the sky
holding together our bones.

I had never heard a Christian album talk so explicitly about questioning God’s existence before. If we could question the existence of a God, we could question some of what the church thought. I finally felt like my own thoughts were justified. I listened to it over and over.

The song surpasses six minutes in length, but I always stuck around for the final sequence. The song strips down and becomes just vocals an ethereal synth, and light, acoustic guitar strums:

And brother have you found, the great peace that we all seek?
You say take a look around, if there’s a God then he must be asleep.

I listened to the album on repeat dozens of times searching for solace.

When I hear others talk about Moonlight, I wonder if we watched the same film. To me it’s not a story about love, but a story about death — the state of being dead.

To me, “Moonlight” is not a story about love, but a story about death — the state of being dead.

Death here, is present in absence. No death happens on-screen. The character Juan, the father-figure to the protagonist Chiron, leaves an absence that is felt throughout the film. Mahershala Ali even won the Academy Award despite only being present in one third of the film’s triptych.

But, in fact, none of the male protagonists are present in more than one third. Each Chiron of the film “dies” at the end of each act. Each new iteration is different. A different actor plays him in the next — the death and absence becomes embodied.

I cried during Mahershala Ali’s acceptance speech of the Screen Actors’ Guild Awards. He said “We see what happens when you persecute people…they fold into themselves.”

It’s just, it felt like you died.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to convince myself she didn’t mean it as bad as it sounds. Perhaps I was grieving a “death” just as much as she was. I once thought I’d be a doctor, get married right after college, have kids. I realized I wanted none of what I’d expected I wanted, and once I came out, there were no bounds. There was no road map. I thought about how my life could go anywhere.

My mother feels she has buried her son. Or at least a part of him. Or one of them. I imagine a doppelgänger in my place. My instinct says she’s wrong, but sometimes late at night my mind wanders. While she is mourning my straightness that is gone forever, I am dealing with a different loss of self. I too am not the person I imagined I would grow up to be. I think about the things I’ve done I never want my parents to know, all the things I think me would be appalled at. Things I’ve done simply for pleasure. Things I’ve done just to feel like I’m real.

My mother feels she has buried her son. Or at least a part of him. Or one of them.

I am new to reading poetry. That is not true, but feels like the right thing to say. I am new to reading poetry for pleasure, with understanding that there are poets out there with shared identities. I am new to understanding that poetry has been working through the same problems that I have.

In their book of poetry, Mannish Tongues, jayy dodd expresses their queer existence in terms similar to Voung and Reed. The book begins with the poem “Homeboy.” It begins:

I am often caught hollering at homeboys &
homothugs in the stairwells of labored
White parties. Kissing spliffs before familiar
tongues. These are our bodies

These are our bodies indicates that this is a fact, queer life is the perpetual party in the poem.

The final stanza reads:

I am often caught in the dark, with familiar
failures, hollering at homeboys &
whispering profanities

There is still shame here in this poem. The speaker is in the dark with failure. “Whispering” here feels like a distinctive choice. First, it brings to mind the image of jayy whispering profanities in a sexual manner. But they don’t grunt profanities or say them; they whisper. Like one tells a secret.

The final section of Mannish Tongues is titled “Eulogies.” The book closes with the poem “A Eulogy for Myself, The Night” and is written in honor of drag icon Pepper LaBeija. The poem speaks of a “He” who “dreamed” and “believed” in a beautiful world. The “He” here is perhaps intentionally unclear. The poem can be read as a eulogy for Pepper LaBeija, for someone else in the speaker’s queer lineage, or maybe, as the title suggests, dodd is writing a eulogy for a former self.

The poem ends:

He believed heaven was opulence — that the divine could truly
own everything in a ballroom at the edge of the universe,
where realness ascends above reality.
He only ever wanted to be real,
to be whole & full,
for all to eat.

It holds the same sentiment as dreams do for both Reed and Vuong. A hope for what could exist. A hope that it does exist.

I wasn’t always sad, but I did come out little and blue. When I was born I wasn’t breathing. My mother went into labor unexpectedly, and I was born two months early. I had to be whisked away by doctors as soon as my umbilical cord was cut. I was eleven ounces shy of five pounds.

Why is he blue? my mom remembers saying at the time. She didn’t get to hold me until after thirteen days in an incubator.

I thought this was a fun story as a child. My mom tells me it was one of the scariest times of her life.

“They had to bring you back to life, you know,” she tells me over the phone.

She hasn’t phrased it quite like this before. There was a resuscitation charge on the bill, this I knew, but I never thought of it in terms of life and death.

As of late I call my mom every other day. Our frequency is an attempt at emotional intimacy, though not the same. I don’t tell her how much her words have upset me.

Three years after my sister is married, I’m living in Pittsburgh. I started therapy when my insurance kicked in. In my therapist’s office, I discuss these thoughts, on unfulfilled expectations, on secrets I’ve kept to myself, how I’ve been so protective of my parents, wanting to prove that they are “good,” that I never gave myself room to sit with my own anger with them.

I’ve been so protective of my parents, wanting to prove that they are “good,” that I never gave myself room to sit with my own anger with them.

In the winter, I come home to my studio and see the outline of the termite that is dead in the lone, rectangular light fixture in my ceiling. One day it burrowed through the drywall or whatever inhabits the space in my ceiling. It’s difficult to conceptualize, but it must have broken through and into the light panel with nowhere to go. It buzzed and clinked around for hours while I waited for it to die. I had to leave my apartment while it happened.

I haven’t brought myself to remove the body. In winter, my apartment is too dark to see in without the light on. I don’t want to remove the body when the light is still on: I daydream of electrocuting myself, of breaking those artificial, fluorescent tubes open, a noxious gas invading my apartment.

I call my mother and ask if she’s dealt with something like this before. She tells me to leave it alone, that she doesn’t want something bad to happen to me. She tells me this every time I check in. “Your dad and I are always proud of you,” she reminds me.

“I love you,” she says. “I love you too.”
I remind myself that this is true.

I take her advice on ignoring the bug for now. I’ll wait until the seasons change.

The future will be brighter and warmer. I’ll just have to wait for it.

My Husband’s Posthumous Novel Is My Last Gift to Him—And His Last Gift to Me

Posted on March 26, 2018March 14, 2019 by 007595

Last night a box of books was left above the bank of mailboxes in my apartment building. I wasn’t told when they would arrive, so I’m surprised to notice the box is for me. I carry it up the five flights of stairs in my new walk-up lifestyle, which gives you some time to consider a package’s weight, ponder what’s inside, what it means, what it will look like when the box is opened. Inside I know there are copies of my late husband’s novel that I’ve been shepherding through posthumous publication. But they are more than that. They’re evidence of a much longer project.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the desire to read or write was slow to return after my husband’s death. George Saunders has said, “Literature is a form of fondness-for-life. It is love for life taking verbal form.” And I always thought of my reading and writing as a way to live, a way to be observant and engage with the world around me, a way to care. I’ve thought of literature filling the same role for me as religion might for someone else. And then, I stopped caring. As people might turn their back on god after a senseless death, I could not open a book, and I certainly couldn’t strike up the kind of focus and attention to the world needed to write. With my husband, what we were writing and what we planned to write next was a way we marked time. It was a way to move through the world. Writing and books were central to our conversations. If we were playing music, songwriting became the subject. It always came back to writing. Of the things I wish I could tell my husband about the world since he left, the revelation of McDonald’s serving breakfast all day was only seconded when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. How he wished for and would’ve loved this. How much he loved about life.

I always thought of my reading and writing as a way to live, a way to be observant and engage with the world around me, a way to care. And then, I stopped caring.

I often introduce myself now as what I used to be. I’ll say, I taught college in the Midwest for a decade. I used to live in New York before that. If this isn’t enough explanation for the inquisitive stranger or job interviewer, I’ll say, I’m a writer. So many writers in the city, this is often when their curiosity will wane, but sometimes the next question is what am I working on now, and this is when I feel guilty for using the present tense. So much is past tense these days. To tell any semblance of the truth would reveal many other things I used to be: a wife, a homeowner, a part of a community, someone with a clear identity. Maybe being a writer is in the past, too.

In the winter after my husband’s death I found his copy of Journal of a Novel in which John Steinbeck wrote to his editor every day before beginning his work on East of Eden. I knew this was one of the books that had sustained my husband in rural Saskatchewan with few writerly models around him, but I had never read it. I opened it one morning over my coffee, and without realizing it I had made a pact with myself to read a single entry from it every morning. And I started to think literature could matter again, because at least for those few minutes in which I read, it mattered to Steinbeck in how he sharpened his pencils and fretted over his scenes. It was a relief to see someone caring about something.

To tell any semblance of the truth would reveal many other things I used to be: a wife, a homeowner, a part of a community, someone with a clear identity. Maybe being a writer is in the past, too.

My husband and I were on a sabbatical when he died. I had my own writing projects, and he had plans to finish at least three of the many novels he’d been sitting on drafts of for way too many years. Perhaps prescient, there was suddenly a great urgency in his writing. We had places to work lined up through late spring. We had started in Marfa and were in the guesthouse of a writer friend of ours in New Mexico till Thanksgiving, then we had a beach house on St. George Island on the Gulf and then four months at the Wallace Stegner House in Eastend, Saskatchewan. My husband had plans for what he would finish in each place.

I followed most of our itinerary — I didn’t know what else to do — but of course nothing was as planned. At the beach house I imagined where we would have set up our workspaces. He’d want the extra bedroom with its own door to outside. He liked to wander and to nap when he was writing. But no writing happened there and no reading. I walked the empty, off-season island, which we usually visited in summer. Every day for a month I walked past the last house before the state park and saw the balcony where we had been married six and a half years earlier. Thirteen years total with him. No wonder, then, that as I walked I’d find myself collecting thoughts I absolutely had to remember to tell him later — not remembering the impossibility of this. Continuing into the park, there were no manmade structures for miles and most days I wouldn’t see a single soul. I’d feel shipwrecked, like I was in some other reality, and if I just kept going, I believe I thought I might find him or he might find me. Sometimes my legs would go limp under me, but I’d wobble on, staggering through the sand. All I knew was I just had to keep walking.

Shells collected from the beach on St. George Island. Photo: Emily Doak

Up to five hours a day I walked that beach. And as I walked, I picked up and brought back so many shells that I covered the back deck of the house. Different types washed up in cycles. There was a day of big conks and an olive shell season and stretches of scallops and moon shells. I made nested sets of cockles. I’d run to the surf line when I saw the big ones being pulled in and out on the waves. Some days I was only interested in miniatures. I took on this collecting like it was my mission. I laid them out by type and color and size, till there was a huge mosaic that had to be dismantled when I left.

By the time I got to Eastend, where I was alone in the Stegner House for the last six weeks of the four months we had planned there, I’d been reading the Steinbeck for months and had managed to get through a couple of Stegner’s novels. I brought bins full of my husband’s manuscripts, and I started sorting: looking for what I could salvage, comparing drafts, and editing what I could. I decided to write to my husband, like Journal of a Novel, every day before I worked through his books. I’d chat with him about whatever was going on, like Steinbeck did to his editor, Pascal Covici. It would be the first writing I’d done since remarks I’d crafted for my husband’s memorial. I wrote him about everything I was doing, about my morning sessions with Steinbeck, about my workspace with a view of the Frenchman River that was right out back and how he’d love the town campground around the bend. He loved a good picnic table for reading and for doing sit-ups and pushups. It would’ve been the perfect place for him to wander. I told him about learning to play his guitar — the mandolin didn’t sound right by itself — and about drives I took: how I’d find most of his characters’ names in the windswept graveyard in his childhood town of Aneroid, about the miniature horses frolicking by the grain elevator there, and about the buffalo molting in the Grasslands and scraping gypsum from dinosaur bones.

I brought bins full of my husband’s manuscripts, and I started sorting: looking for what I could salvage, comparing drafts, and editing what I could.

I wrote to my husband about all this and about reading his marked-up copy of another book that had been important to him: Wolf Willow, a hybrid of memoir, historical fiction, and nonfiction by Wallace Stegner that focused on his childhood in that very house and the history of that very land. I’d saved it to read until I got there, and it was uncanny to read it in that house and in the land of both Stegner’s and my husband’s childhoods.

The stories my husband told about growing up in Saskatchewan were so exotic to me, they felt mythic: sporting a .22 at six years old to wander out into the prairie and shoot gophers, grandparents that homesteaded and didn’t yet have electricity when he was a child, snowdrifts in the kitchen and chemical toilets on the back porch, his father protecting him from rabid dogs and climbing electric poles during blizzards to repair the lines. Stegner’s childhood in that house, albeit half a century earlier than my husband’s stories, didn’t sound too different. Settlement came late to the southwest corner of Saskatchewan — Sitting Bull camped nearby when he fled north after the Battle of Little Bighorn — and less than forty years later Stegner’s father built their home in a small town that sprang up from the Mounted Police outpost that was formed to keep watch over Sitting Bull’s people. The layers of Stegner’s Wolf Willow, so close together in time, lay like transparencies over one another, and I started to overlay my husband’s stories on top of that.

Grief does conflate everything: suddenly every detail of life feels connected and riddled with meaning, time feels arbitrary, past and present coexist, and layers of experience seem to happen all at once. The whole map of Saskatchewan became a manuscript imbued with almost holy meaning. Up north was the Churchill River where one summer my husband had guided prisoners on a pre-release canoe trip to help them re-enter the world — it would become the seed of the novel I’d someday carry up my stairs in New York. Down on the Trans-Canada, the real town of Moose Jaw had all the landmarks of his fictional town of Galaxy that he returned to so often in his work. I’d drive by other towns knowing my husband had winter-camped there as a Boy Scout or wrote at that monastery or played in hockey tournaments on that rink, where the guys were notoriously rough. I saw him everywhere: almost frost-bitten with a pair of brown mittens on his feet, imagining they were moccasins as he stalked game on the main street of the ghost town that is now Aneroid, or as a boy catching an apple his mother threw down to him from a hospital window after giving birth to his brother. Every place I recognized from family lore or from his stories or from his manuscripts became a sacred marker to me that my husband had existed.

The prairie and the rink in Aneroid, Saskatchewan. Photo: Emily Doak

Stegner writes of the prairie: “It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people.” And I started to understand something fundamental about my husband, about his sense of destiny that wildly enabled him to imagine becoming the writer he had become, although some, including myself at times, might have simply thought it a stubbornness in his character. Stegner writes, “It was not prairie dwellers who invented the indifferent universe or impotent man. Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow’s fall.”

Grief does conflate everything: suddenly every detail of life feels connected and riddled with meaning, time feels arbitrary, past and present coexist, and layers of experience seem to happen all at once.

It was a fitting place to mourn, a time when I felt so conspicuous. Even if no one was looking and no one had any idea what I was doing, I felt everything I did was being noted. It all had meaning. The universe was watching. The prairie, and grief, can make you feel so alone that you feel chosen. An antelope once stood in a field and watched me walk by. The horses and cows in that country, too, stop eating, raise their heads, and track your whole journey past them.

I walked in Eastend, as well, obsessively. Out into the hills, the very eastern edge of the Cypress Hills. It was desolate, no people, no paths, just undulating grassland ahead of you. You could feel like the only person left alive, and the hills so gradually rose that without realizing it you’d end up on the edge of a butte, dramatic vistas, the grass windswept, the earliest of spring wildflowers a marvel in that landscape. As I walked, I collected rocks hidden in the tall grasses and exposed in the white mud buttes and striped badlands. I’d carry back pounds and pounds of rocks, my pockets full, my hat taken off and filled, sometimes the front of my shirt scooped into a hammock to hold even more that I couldn’t possibly leave behind. I took pictures of the ones that were too big to move or had lichen I didn’t want to disturb. All of this collecting and noticing felt imperative to me.

A lichen-covered rock. Photo: Emily Doak

And I noted everything. I kept reading my husband’s manuscripts and writing him, about what he had intended by certain scenes, about how to fret a certain guitar chord, about seeing the Northern Lights for the first time just as they were described in his manuscript I was reading: “shimmering as if God was at the blackboard, erasing the stars.” I wrote him about my frustration in trying to recreate a missing page. Page 190 — where did you go? But I kept reading and writing and the rocks kept coming home in my pockets. A mosaic grew on the kitchen table. I’d think the hillsides would be barren, but there was always more there to collect.

*Rick Hillis’ posthumous novel* *A Place You’ll Never Be* *was published by Coteau Books.*

My husband was always bringing me back gifts, emptying his pockets of shiny, and sometimes rusty, objects he found on his wanderings: flattened pennies, rings, railroad spikes. He tried to bring me a turtle once, but that’s another story. He was always bringing back stories. If he was empty-handed, he’d cue up the greatest hits from that day’s newspapers and barstools. After his death, one of the bleakest moments was waking in a highway hotel on one of the 20,000 miles I travelled with his ashes strapped in the passenger seat and his manuscripts and then his gravestone in the back. He would never again have already been out to the lobby and read the free USA Today, bringing me back coffee and the news of the world before my eyes were even open.

Now, it is almost three years since he died. A house has been sold. Much has been lost and much has been saved. I can read again, and sometimes, I write. These are well-worn stairs I’m climbing but they are still new to me. My arms are full of this very long project he is shepherding me through. Upstairs I will open his latest gift with great care.

Electric Literature Essay Submissions Are Open!

Posted on March 26, 2018March 20, 2019 by 007595

Electric Literature is opening submissions of personal and critical essays starting today, March 26. We’re particularly interested in pieces that examine the intersection of the literary experience and other creative endeavors: film, fine art, music, video games, science, tech, architecture. Submissions will close April 13 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time.

Some of our favorite recent personal essays include pieces about seeing yourself in Sailor Moon, loving the Titanic before it was cool, and reading The Odyssey in a place that doesn’t yet feel like home. Has a book changed your life, or has your life changed how you read a book? Do you have a personal story about your favorite story? Bring us your sad, thoughtful, funny, illuminating experiences.

Critical essays may cover a single book, multiple books, a whole genre, or non-book pop culture like TV, music, and games. Recently we’ve been interested in reproductive dystopias, death-positive novels, the whitewashing of Annihilation, and the medieval roots of bro culture. Some essays may be both personal and critical, like an essay about J.D. Salinger and why women don’t get to be asshole geniuses.

Payment for essays is $50. Length is up to you, but we suggest aiming for 1,500–4,000 words.

Submissions will be accepted on our submittable account here.

A Murder Told in Reverse

Posted on March 26, 2018March 25, 2019 by 007595

Life Was Beginning

10.

The body landed in the gravel between the train tracks and Gilbert Snyder’s alfalfa field. Gilbert had looked up at the passing train just before the body was flung from it. He’d seen a figure in a long coat push the object — he didn’t know yet that it was a body; he thought it was a duffle bag — and disappear back into the caboose.

Gilbert braked the tractor, let it idle. Now Gilbert knelt in the alfalfa. The man’s neck was mottled. His windpipe looked crushed. He was wearing a dirty seersucker suit. His feet were bare.

Gilbert knew you’re not supposed to touch a dead person. But there was a piece of paper sticking out of the man’s pocket. He pulled it out carefully and squinted. Cecilia — 309–565–4821. He pushed it back into the pocket and wiped his hands on his own dungarees.

9.

Daniel was nervous when he boarded the train; he imagined Cecilia greeting him with flowers. He imagined them lying together in her cottage, what she’d expect him to do. Past a certain age, there was never a good way to explain your virginity.

At Peoria, a wide-shouldered man boarded. Daniel watched him move down the aisle past several empty seats, his long coat brushing against the handles. He sat next to Daniel without asking if the seat was taken, but he smiled, seemed pleasant. His clothes smelled of something like smoked meat. Daniel couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d seen the man before. But where?

His thoughts returned to Cecilia. She likes you, he told himself. You like her. And more important: she’s made of flesh and blood, not ectoplasm.

He hoped she liked seersucker.

8.

Cecilia, I’m down on my knees, I’m begging you please… The drunk man with the ponytail and tie-dye sang to the luscious black-haired girl.

She’d heard this a thousand times before, Daniel could tell. She rearranged some vegetables on her table and ignored the old hippie.

It was a gloomy, sparse day at the Farmers Market. Daniel was in St. Louis on assignment, covering a money-laundering scandal involving a city councilman. He’d been feeling weird since he arrived — what had Grandfather said about St. Louis? Go there? Don’t go there?

The girl with black hair looked up at Daniel and smiled. Her teeth were square and white.

7.

Daniel tried to quit journalism school on the first day. One look at all the other students — their eager eyes, their fast fingers — and he knew he’d made a mistake. “I think maybe I’m a different kind of writer,” he told the Dean that afternoon. The Dean resembled Daniel’s grandfather. So when he asked “What kind of other writer?” and Daniel said “A poet?” and the Dean laughed, Daniel felt as though his grandfather rose from his grave to caution him against writing poems.

6.

He walked away from Sigma Nu. Nobody would notice his absence from another keg-and-wings fundraiser. He’d found the empty farmhouse a week earlier. He’d wandered inside and felt something shimmering there like heat waves, but cold. Now he was returning with a notebook. Maybe he would write another poem that nobody would ever see.

He felt the waves again. He lay down on the floorboards. She emerged, then, from nowhere: the pale blond girl in the blue dress. “You’ve come back to me,” she said. “I’m so happy.” She was translucent.

“Yes.”

5.

In the summertime, Daniel worked in construction. He’d volunteered for the Restoration Guild— “You have to give colleges a reason to take you, Danny,” his mother had said — and soon enough it turned into a job. Up on that tall ladder, when no one was looking, Daniel would sometimes bring his arm to his mouth; the taste of his sweat was proof. He was alive.

He developed deep feelings for those big empty houses. He suspected that wasn’t normal. Once, he wrote a poem about a farmhouse: “Wearing Blue.”

4.

His older sister’s slumber party: her friends in Hannah Montana pajamas; their braces with pink rubber bands; the Ouija board on the purple rug. He stood at the door, watching.

“Danny, Danny!” Suzi, his sister’s best friend, was always nice to him. She beckoned and patted next to her. “It’s called a planchette.” Suzi guided his fingertips to the plastic heart. The girls giggled. The planchette began to move. Everyone grew silent. It skated over the board. His sister wrote down the message. Meet me in the farmhouse Danny I’ll be wearing blue.

“What does that mean?” His sister squinted at him.

“I didn’t do anything.” He was shivering.

She kicked him out.

But later, Suzi told him, “I believe you.”

3.

Whenever his grandfather visited, Daniel slept on a cot beside him. Once, the old man shouted in his sleep and woke the six year-old up. “The slaughter house! Corruption!” Daniel touched his grandfather’s shoulder. “Popup, shhh.” The old man opened his eyes, stared at Daniel for a long minute. “Do you know about St. Louis?” he asked. Daniel yawned. “Whatever you do,” his grandfather said, “always stay away from St. Louis.”

2.

“Danny-boy doesn’t like having his socks on. Right, my little Danny-boy?” His mother rolled the socks back over the baby’s feet and up his ankles. The baby laughed, looked into her eyes, pulled the socks off again.

The grandfather, visiting from St. Louis, poured two scotches and handed a tumbler to his friend. The baby looked up at the young man with the wide shoulders and burped. The mother laughed. “He’s smelling the meat off your clothes!” she said. The man reached into the bassinet, tickled the baby’s toes.

Oh, Danny — you were so small then. I would have to wait a long, long time.

1.

Daniela could get fired for wearing civvies in the delivery room, but that was the only way to maybe make it to her Neil Young concert; when Dr. Khan finally arrived, Daniela would dash out. This woman had been in labor for almost fifty hours, poor thing. That baby did not want to come out!

When Khan was checking the charts, Daniela squeezed the woman’s hand goodbye. The woman squeezed back so hard that Daniela shrieked. And then the birth started moving fast, with Mom squatting and Daniela kneeling to guide the baby out. When she held the newborn, she noticed a spot of blood on her new blue dress. But this kind of moment was the point of it all, wasn’t it? A new life was beginning.

End

About the Authors

Shelly Oria is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). Most recently, she co-authored a novella, CLEAN,commissioned by WeTransfer and McSweeney’s, which received two Lovie Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

Nelly Reifler is the author of a collection of stories, See Through, and a novel, Elect H. Mouse State Judge. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

“A New Life Was Beginning” is part of Dead is the New Alive, a collection of linked stories that Oria and Reifler are writing together.

7 Books About Different Writing Lives

Posted on March 23, 2018March 14, 2019 by 007595

Jenny Boully’s Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life begins with a preface about J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, who is described as “betwixt and between.” She likens Peter’s liminality to her own experience as a writer and the duality of writing about life and writing as a way of living. Her collection is a testament to this between-ness: it’s not quite a guide to writing, but it’s not wholly memoiric.

Betwixt-and-Between, out April 3rd from Coffee House Press, is an assemblage of essays written at various points during Boully’s life, and it shows. The collection is unique because it’s not an author’s remembrance of “a writing life.” Rather, every piece was written when the author was present in each stage of that life, and so the book encompasses a life as it was being lived. She compares writing to witchcraft, to violent weather, to a sacred place, to kissing. She likens love to moveable type and rough drafts. She’s fascinated by interiority — hidden lives, imagined experiences. These stories cover everything from opera to Roland Barthes to outer space to gardening.

Boully plays with the very premise of the book; essays have titles such as, “How to Write on Grand Themes,” and “The Art of Fiction” but do not, on the surface, contain any advice on how to write grand themes or fiction. When she does weave in advice, it is done seamlessly, so subtle you might miss it; and yet she delivered what is perhaps the most startling piece of writing advice I’ve read: “I need to begin treating my thoughts, observations, and inclinations…as if they too are dying and will not be remembered again, will never present themselves with the opportunity to be written down. In order to be a better writer and better reader, I need to believe in my own death and the death of others.”

Boully’s collection reminds us that there is a story not just on the pages we produce, but for every phase of our writing life, and for every genre, voice and style we pursue. Craft guides don’t teach us all we will go through as writers. We find advice, guidance and support in a wide range of spaces, and rarely do they include the phrase “How To”. Below are seven more books that, like Betwixt-and-Between, blur the divide between stories of a writing life and essays on the craft.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

Bird by Bird is the creative writing craft guide you’re assigned in your first college workshop, and wakes you up to what it feels like to call yourself a writer. Much like Boully’s collection, Bird by Bird didn’t just change the way I approached writing, it changed the way I thought about being a writer. It’s a more straightforward book-about-writing than Boully’s is, but the frank, confessional tone taught me that, as a writer, when you ask for instructions on writing, you’re also asking for instructions on life.

In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri

As an adult, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Italy and dedicated her time to speaking and writing in Italian. In 2015 she announced that she would now only write in Italian. In Other Words is a fascinating rumination on what it’s like to not just learn another language, but to commit yourself to it fully.

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

A Room of One’s Own is, nearly 80 years later, just as revelatory as it was in 1929. Taken from Woolf’s lectures, it’s an extended essay about fighting to become a woman writer in an industry (still) dominated by men. It remains startling for its frank demands: that women have been robbed of space to write and that we need financial support to dedicate our lives to the craft.

Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L’Engle

Madeleine L’Engle’s place as a Christian writer is fraught — she believed strongly in the concept of universal salvation, which earned her rebuke from Christian bookstores and libraries, yet at the time of publication, many critics found her books too religious. In Walking On Water, L’Engle probes what it means to be a writer who is also a Christian, while eschewing many of the traits people associate with Christian writers. It’s a book written from a particular and religious place, but as welcoming and universal as her fiction.

The Hidden Writer: Diaries and the Creative Life by Alexandra Johnson

Diaries are often a gendered medium, and the divide between public and private writing is still troublesome for women writers. In The Hidden Writer, Alexandra Johnson gathers the innermost thoughts of prominent writers, such as Anais Nin and Katherine Mansfield, together in one collection to examine to role of journal-keeping in the life of a writer.

Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work by Edwidge Danticat

A hybrid collection of memoir and essay, Create Dangerously focuses on the power of immigrant art, and its ability to heal, or at least confront, feelings of isolation, disconnection, and ostracization with which people contend after being driven from their homelands. It’s a testament to writing’s ability to bear witness.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

Nobody Knows My Name is a firebrand. James Baldwin takes on Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, and William Faulkner. It’s a brilliant collection of essays in which he parses what it means to be a Black writer in America, and what kind of black writing white America will allow.

What Is the Point of Literary Awards?

Posted on March 23, 2018March 14, 2019 by 007595

According to an AP release shared by The New York Times, Thomas Pynchon has just been awarded the first Christopher Lightfoot Walker Award, a lifetime achievement that comes with a $100,000 prize, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It’s unclear whether the reclusive author of Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, and Mason & Dixon will show up to receive the award at the ceremony on May 23rd. Other authors receiving cash prizes for lifetime achievements ($10,000) at the ceremony include Rick Moody, Mary Gaitskill, and Marlon James.

I’m not here to say that Thomas Pynchon doesn’t deserve honor for his literary achievements. But this news comes the day after the Whiting Award winners were announced—emerging authors who will each receive $50,000 for projects they are already working on. With that kind of contrast, it’s hard not to wonder: What are literary prizes really for? Are they intended to contribute to literary development by providing up-and-comers the means to survive while they write? Or is the purpose to simply celebrate literary development, by heaping a bunch more money on people who’ve already succeeded?

The history of literary prizes, chosen by committees with their own subjective tastes, is fraught with the politics of favoritism and outright discrimination. And while some may chalk up their dismay at an award winner to a difference in “taste,” it’s important to think critically about what these awards offer for the material future of the winners. The two most significant things are money (because writers gotta eat), and recognition, which hopefully means more money and more opportunities to write. There are really great awards that fund and celebrate emerging authors, besides the Whiting — awards like the Rona Jaffe Award for women writers ($30,000), or the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ Writers ($1,000), or the Louise Meriweather First Book Prize for a woman or a non-binary person of color ($5,000 + publication). They offer crucial resources and new opportunities for recognition.

But these emerging author awards, aside from the Whiting Award, generally don’t offer nearly the same payout as the big lifetime achievement awards like the Nobel (around $1.4 million), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize ($300,000) or the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize ($165,000).

When Bad Men Define Good Art

In the midst of our #ReadMoreWomen campaign, I am still trying to think through the implications of literary awards for communities that have often been silenced or marginalized. Why do we give out the big cash money to the folks who have already “made it” as writers? To be clear, I think we should have awards that celebrate both literary achievement as well as the future successes of unpublished writers. But what if we tipped the scales, so that more high-paying literary awards were granted for the promise of a literary future, instead of the praise for a literary past? Whose voices would emerge and be recognized?

What if we tipped the scales, so that more high-paying literary awards were granted for the promise of a literary future, instead of the praise for a literary past?

We’d be worse off, as a culture, without Thomas Pynchon, but we already have Thomas Pynchon. By contrast, the Whiting Award winners might not be able to finish their projects without that support, and we’d be worse off without them, too. (This is a good time to familiarize yourself with their work! Here’s Weike Wang’s Recommended Reading, Esmé Weijun Wang on writing and activism, and Patty Yumi Cottrell on finding inspiration on the F train.) Functionally, the purpose of awards may be to reward success. But rewarding success just makes famous writers richer. Rewarding potential enriches us all.

How to Name Your Small Indie Press

Posted on March 23, 2018November 19, 2019 by 007595

Running a small independent press is a romantic notion—just reading manuscripts in your cozy armchair, casually discovering the next Jesmyn Ward. Yes, that’s not at all what it’s like, but counterpoint: shut up. Let us have our dream.

And the only stumbling block to achieving that dream, besides the thing where you need money to live, is the difficulty of coming up with a really compelling name for your publishing effort. Luckily, we’ve solved that problem. (For the money thing, you’re on your own.)

Here’s the formula: Combine an adjective describing your favorite item of clothing (“soft,” “grey,” “flannel,” etc.) with your favorite natural or organic design element. This could be a natural feature or material you’d incorporate into your ideal home, or the flora or fauna you most like to see represented in clothing or home goods or jewelry. So if you love your stripey sweater and your bedspread is printed with foxes, congratulations: you’re running Striped Fox Press. If you have a potted fern in every room of your house and water them in your fuzzy slippers, we can’t wait to see what Fuzzy Fern Press puts out.

Feeling uninspired? That’s okay: we’ve built you a Press Name Generator. And below are some logos we generated for some of our favorite press names shared on Twitter. If you make your own, and especially if you give it a logo, and especially especially if you actually start publishing books, share it with us at @ElectricLit.

@j_zimms @edotwoods @emilyhughes Black Paper Press is legit.
— @diaryofaneditor

@j_zimms @edotwoods @emilyhughes I think Silk Succulent Press is pretty great.
— @carmenmmachado

@sharilyn @j_zimms @edotwoods @emilyhughes Cozy Stones Press. Pretty sure we publish inspiring books about finding Buddhism & doing your Art.
— @mollybackes

Corduroy Bird Unfortunately my new small press' mascot has just sold out on Etsy. https://t.co/VKdpG4eKj3 https://t.co/5OKk7VrSnQ
— @emlfc

@j_zimms @edotwoods @emilyhughes Omg Mustard Creek
— @theillustrious

How Learning to Shoot Hoops Taught Me to Write

Posted on March 22, 2018August 17, 2020 by 007595

We were down three points in the District II semifinals against John Glenn High School. I had the ball and was dribbling somewhere near the hash mark, 25 feet from the basket. There were ten seconds left in the final quarter. I was a senior and I had been practicing for this moment since I was six years old.

Playing basketball in the Steubenville’s St. John Arena was like playing in a cement desert. It was one of my favorite places to play because it was huge and old, a relic of an arena from the early part of the twentieth century that easily fit thousands of people and also doubled as a hockey rink and as a home to the circus. I always imagined I could smell hay in the locker rooms. The basketball floor had to be assembled; it was made up of interlinking wood panels a few feet square in size. The wood creaked and sagged and our footfalls created hollow sounds. The parquet also deadened the ball so that, at certain soft spots on the court, the ball failed to bounce back up to the expected height.

Newspaper clipping of a photo of the author as a high school player taking a shot

Because of St. John’s multi-purpose use, the bleachers were at least a good 30 feet beyond the court, creating an eerie cement slab between the cheering crowds and the court, filled only sparsely by a meager line of cheerleaders. The combination of the distant fans and the nearly constant cacophony of the hollow parquet made me feel happy, far removed from the pressure of the coaches and the expectations of the crowd. Others hated playing at St. John’s because of these exact qualities. It lacked the frenetic intensity of, for example, our home court in Cambridge, Ohio, whose pep band-infused roar was famous. In fact, the loneliness of playing in St. John’s felt comfortable because it so well matched my experience as a person. I had always been popular, so much so that I was noted in both my junior high and high school yearbooks as Class Favorite, which was ironic because I had zero friends, never hung out with anyone, never went to parties, and had only one girlfriend in all of junior high and high school—for a few months. Rather than partying, I spent Friday nights sitting with my mom in matching reading chairs in front of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that spanned the walls of our suburban ranch.

Rather than partying, I spent Friday nights sitting with my mom in matching reading chairs in front of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

My shelf, incidentally, did not foretell any kind of literary future. It consisted mostly of the Hardy Boys and Louis L’Amour, and I have an especially fond memory of a glossy biopic of Willy Mays. Nevertheless, it pleases me to look back over my childhood and adolescence and see my would-be writer self peeking out: in these Friday evening read-a-thons, I see the quiet introspection that, while perhaps awkward at the time, has always been the part of myself I feel most at home in.

Zack Pauley, John Glenn’s best player and my basketball nemesis since junior high, wasn’t fast, and he wasn’t a particularly good defender, but he was a good two inches taller than me, and yet I was a good enough shooter to know that if I gave myself the room to shoot over Pauley, I could make the winning shot. I don’t really know why I was a good shooter, or how I became one, other than I practiced thousands and thousands of jump shots. Still, I knew plenty of people who practiced their jump shots and weren’t particularly good. It’s all about how the ball leaves the last inch of your hand, which is such a small aspect of the things that make a good jump shot (feet alignment, leg strength, jumping ability, upper body strength, elbow alignment, support hand position, eye sight, courage, confidence, practice and probably another half dozen intangible elements). But how the ball leaves the top of one’s middle finger…that’s it. A poet might work forever on a turn of phrase or a title, but it all comes down to a poem’s final line, that’s it. How the poem leaves the reader’s mind determines if the poem hits its mark to remain lodged in memory, or if it’s forgotten.

My life could’ve been a farcical movie entitled ‘Shoot More!’

And yet — and here is the crux of my basketball career — when given the chance to select, at a summer basketball camp, one of three T-shirts (The Rebounder, The Shooter or The Passer — each complete with a mock personality description), which one did I choose? The Rebounder. I wore it to practice once and our center, who was a very good rebounder, saw it, tipped his head and asked, “Why are you wearing that shirt?” I couldn’t really answer him. I think he was slightly offended, like I was making fun of his realm, and I don’t blame him for his response.

People were always telling me I needed to shoot more. There were stages in my career where people told me I needed to shoot more so many times, and in so many strange places, that my life could’ve been a farcical movie entitled Shoot More! These interactions felt like the people were wrenching my insides with their knuckles, but I always smiled and tried to take their advice, as if I’d never heard that before. Why yes, I’ll consider shooting more.

One answer to the question “Why don’t you shoot more?” can at least be partially found in what I am doing now, which is making my life as a writer. Shooters shoot without thinking. Shooters never think about the past. Writers, on the other hand, seem to only think. Thinking is a writer’s material. It’s all about thinking and questioning and self-reflection. Writers take all that through an alchemical process, and if we’re lucky, come up with a manuscript, which then needs rethinking, revisioning, and reworking. But not Shooters; they just shoot. I always thought someday I would shed my introspection and become a Shooter. But it never happened. At least not in the way I imagined.

The essence of a pull-up jumper, the kind of shot I would need to shoot as Zack Pauley guarded me to tie the game and send it into overtime, is simple, though its execution can be difficult. It’s the shot Michael Jordan made to beat the buzzer in the 1997 NBA Championship. The offensive player takes one or two dribbles toward the basket, making as if they are going to drive to the hoop, but then, once the defensive player has been driven off and the defender’s momentum is going toward the basket, the offensive player jumps backwards into shooting position to execute a wide-open jump shot. For those like Michael Jordan who are gifted with high vertical leaps and supreme quickness, it is a very effective shot because it is virtually unstoppable. I practiced the shot all the time and at that point in the game against John Glenn, I had just hit a string of three-pointers over the course of a minute or two to bring us within three points.

Shooters shoot without thinking. Shooters never think about the past. Writers, on the other hand, seem to only think.

There are some athletes who love the spotlight. The bright gymnasium lights, the roar of the crowd, the hollering of the coaches, the shrill calls of the referee’s whistle — it all heightens the experience and they play better. But I was not that kind of athlete and that was shameful. I was the kind of athlete who most loved shooting baskets outside at the Cambridge City Courts at six AM with my father, or driving with my brother out to a barn, way-the-hell-and-gone out in Cadiz that my dad had rigged up with a basketball court to spend the afternoon. I was also the kind of athlete who shirked the obligatory post-game MacDonald’s trip to soak in the tub and read. I so seldom enjoyed, actually felt comfortable and good, playing varsity basketball for Cambridge High School. Even on the rare occasions when I scored over twenty points in a game and we actually won, I couldn’t feel good about it. Shouldn’t I have done better?

Newspaper clipping of the author as Athlete of the Week

Ten seconds on the clock. I knew I needed a pull-up three to tie the game. Instead I drove left around Pauley, easily making it around him, and headed for the basket, where I thought I could draw a foul and maybe even make a three-point play. It seemed like the entire John Glenn team was waiting in the paint. I jumped toward the basket, tried to draw enough contact for a foul, and threw up a left-handed runner, one of my favorite shots, hoping it would bank in off the glass.

To use the backboard is not easy, nor is it very popular. It requires the use of angles, similar to shooting pool, but without any of pool’s slow methodical shot preparation. One of my coach’s favorite rants against me was when I drove to the basket, tried to draw contact, and threw up a lefty runner. He called this “a fuckin’ Flyin’ Wallenda.” I now know that the Flying Wallendas were dare-devil circus performers, but back then, I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about and didn’t want to find out because I knew it wasn’t good. Often I made my Flying Wallenda shot, and sometimes I didn’t. That part didn’t matter to my coach. He thought it was too desperate a shot.

And that was the shot I took at the end of the game against John Glenn. Of course — how could it be any other way? — I missed. It was close to going in, but not that close. Nor did I draw a foul from the referee. The buzzer went off and we lost the game. We shook hands with the other team. Zack Pauley told me I played a great game. My coach put his arm around me and told me I gave it a good try. I walked toward the locker room. This was the last game of my high school basketball career. A middle-aged woman who I didn’t know leaned over the railing as I entered the tunnel to the locker room. “We love you, Jeff!” she shouted. I sat on the bench in front of my locker. Some of my teammates were crying. My brother gave me a hug. The police chief said I played a real good game. I didn’t say anything. What could I say? But what I felt was the biggest sense of relief. The season was finally over. Or at least until next year, as I had committed to playing college basketball at Denison University for my freshman year. But maybe that would be different, I reassured myself.

Some of my teammates were crying. My brother gave me a hug. I didn’t say anything. What could I say?

The next day in my English class, my teacher made a special point of pulling me aside. “You really went for it last night,” she said and patted me on the shoulder. I forced a smile. But what did I actually go for, and why was I going for it?

This essay is the first time I’ve tried to write about basketball and my muddled experience in it. I realize now that it’s been muddled in part because I’ve avoided the obvious: despite holding the record for highest career three-point percentage for 23 years, despite the modest hometown fame that persists to this day, it turns out that I failed at basketball. When I eventually quit playing a few years into college and instead focused on writing, it wasn’t anything more romantic or courageous than an acknowledgment of what had always been true about me — I was a well-rounded kid with some natural athleticism that almost made me a great basketball player. But at heart, I was a shy, socially awkward, gentle bookworm. I avoided reckoning with this suspended experience of failure because it seemed really depressing for a long time. I’d dedicated a large chunk of my childhood and adolescence to something I would never be great at. Forget the movie montages where practice leads inevitably to greatness. Those thousands of hours led me nowhere. Wasn’t there shame in that?

Those thousands of hours of practice led me nowhere. Wasn’t there shame in that?

I’m in my forties now. I realize there is more to this story than avoidance and failure and shame. Because to write well, and to be happy doing it, we have to lose our fear of failure. And we have to accept the unfair truth that hard work and talent do not automatically lead to success. And further, success is not the point! I loved playing basketball, and I love to write. Writing without fear of failure is a true pleasure. It allows us to be loyal to our weirdness and vulnerability. Through my experience with basketball, I lost the deep, elemental fear that I sometimes see in the eyes of other writers. I have faced the stark truth, and I no longer doubt — I just shoot.

A Novel for 2018’s Moribund American Dream

Posted on March 22, 2018November 9, 2020 by 007595

Jonathan Evison may be a bestselling author now, but he was broke for most of his life. At the age of twelve, he started working odd jobs and continued to do so until his first novel was published in 2008 at the age of 40. In the decade since, he has written five emotionally resonant and quirky funny novels.

His latest book, Lawn Boy, follows Mike Muñoz, a young, struggling landscaper who grew up on a reservation and now works as hired help in a wealthy neighborhood near Seattle. The book uses the struggles to the working class poor to ask whether the American Dream that we know and cling to is still attainable today.

I spoke with the author about how the meaning of the Dream has changed, and how literature can reckon with the shift.

Adam Vitcavage: Let’s talk about being broke, the unfortunate state of many a writer, and a serious problem for families and individuals across the U.S. You’ve talked before about being poor for a long period of your life. How did those years shape you?

Jonathan Evison: Working hard was just a continuation of my childhood, really. We never had any money. My mom was a single mom of four kids, originally five, so I started working young. [When I was an adult], I was really compelled to write. For most of my adult life, I didn’t usually work more than thirty hours a week which was to protect my writing time. I just made the decision to be broke and live on rice cakes and cheap beer so I could have more time to write. It’s so hard to give yourself fully to writing if you have to work a full work day. It’s why I don’t teach.

My life hasn’t changed. I have money from writing now, and that’s awesome. The money doesn’t make me happier. I was always happy to have the work. As long as I have just what I need, you know?

AV: When did you start to write?

JE: Third grade. My family started falling apart after my sister died in a freak accident. My dad left us. I just had a lot of external pressures pushing against me. I’m bipolar and I was always a manic kid. Thank god they didn’t put me on Ritalin. I started to become a handful in school and my third grade teacher, Mrs. Handford, saved my life. She saw I had a thing for writing and she just let me sit in a corner and write. She made a writer out of me.

I got published in fourth grade and then nothing for thirty years.

I got published in fourth grade and then nothing for thirty years. Eight, nine books and hundreds of rejections. But writing is how I manage my freaky-biochemistry. I can get a lot of stuff done but I finally realized in my forties is that the real reason I write books is because I like the focus. I need to focus. When my mind is going a hundred different directions, writing has always been there for me. It’s something I can really get inside of.

AV: What gets you focused when it comes to writing?

JE: I approach writing like an athlete. I write for two or three days in my cabin for sixteen hours a day. All week long I am preparing myself mentally for my workflow, making notes organizing my thoughts. By the time I get to my cabin, I can finally focus and get into writing pretty easily. It’s a lot of mental preparation.

I have three kids, so I don’t have a lot of me time. I’m always tending to someone else’s needs. I’m not complaining though. My wife sometimes thinks I’m sitting around, drinking beer and listening to records, which I am, but that’s not me time. I disappear completely into the story when I’m writing. I’m not even aware of my surroundings. People always say how beautiful my cabin is for writing, but I don’t really notice. I’m just inside of my story. Maybe I’m an escapist.

AV: What inspired you to write a story about a struggling landscaper?

JE: Wealth disparity and social imbalances. I think the American Dream is pretty moribund. We teach The American Dream as a 20th Century, post-war ideology but it has a different meaning in 2018. I wanted to write a book about how poverty, race, and class could thwart aspirations. A lot of people with money don’t understand what it’s like for the working poor. They can’t wrap their brains around somebody working two jobs and still having to live in their car. It’s so abstract for some people.

I always wanted to write a novel about class. West of Here was my novel about history. I wanted to subvert all of the tropes in history. I always wanted to do that with class, but with a wider scope. Every now and then I will just write anonymously. I started writing a blog by a landscaper called Mike Muñoz Saves the World. It looked like a 1996 website with this murky, shit brown background, terrible html and corny little lawnmower gifs. I was just screwing around when I found the irreverent working class voice I needed: Mike. The theme of class just embodied itself in him.

AV: How much of your personal landscaping experiences have seeped into Mike’s story?

JE: Anytime the novel waxes poetic about landscaping, that’s me. I love the instant gratification that comes with working with my hands. In fact, I just mowed an acre before I got on the phone with you. Mike is mixed, but identifies as white. Obviously, I’m just a white guy. Mike was based on my nephew, who’s his age and like a son to me. All of those experiences are based on observations I have had.

I’m in all of my characters. I’m even in Harriet from This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! I think there are universal emotional responses to things. There’s always the saying to walk a mile in someone’s shoes. Take that a step further and strip away the self. Instead of being a 49 year old guy, I was a 79 year old woman. My history was her history. You start piling that stuff on and the new character’s decisions start to become real. That’s the greatest thing for me: coming out of the other end of a book and feeling like I’m a more expansive person.

The range of experience I can access without having to leave a chair is what keeps me about writing. I write about reinvention, that’s the unifying nature of my works, but I love exploring the lives of characters. I can ride a bus through downtown Seattle and my mind is racing. I can see a guy out the window standing on a corner wearing a jacket and my mind is thinking about what his home life is like.

‘The Great Gatsby’ is the Great American Novel for WASPs.

AV: I know a lot of high school teachers use The Great Gatsby as the gateway to introduce students to the American Dream —

JE: The Great Gatsby is the Great American Novel for WASPs. I’m not degrading the book; it’s a beautiful book. It’s an amazing, luminescent piece of literature. But for me, it’s just the Great American Novel for a very small cross section of the world. If I were to look at the Great Jewish American Novel, for instance, I would suggest What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg. I wanted to write the Great American Landscaping Novel. I wanted to write the Great American Novel for the working class poor.

AV: What are the plans now that the Great American Landscaping Novel is out in the world?

I turned in a new book last week. The working title is Legends of the North Cascades. It’s a big book that jumps through 15,000 years of history about the American Northwest.

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