Page 485 – Electric Literature

Why Adding Monsters and Fairies to a Memoir Can Make It Even More Real

Posted on February 22, 2018March 14, 2019 by 007595

Sofia Samatar: Since I am starting this adventure, let me tell you why I chose to bring this particular group together. Carmen has written some of my favorite short stories, and one time when we were sharing a hotel room at a conference, I told her I’d been thinking about the intersection of memoir and speculative fiction, and she said she was actually working on a speculative memoir at the moment. Matt’s a fiction writer, too, and I invited him because, also at a conference, at some reception in a dark room, we were standing around with our paper plates, and he told me he was writing a dissertation on the blurry space between fiction and nonfiction, looking at Virginia Woolf and J.M. Coetzee and Samuel R. Delany. Rosalind is a brilliant writer, whose story “Insect Dreams” I have read many times. Her work plays with history and the fantastic, and recently she told me her new book is about the idea of the female Adam, and described it as a “hybrid” and a “faux autobiography.”

I started thinking about the idea of “speculative memoir” because I was a fantasy and science fiction writer whose work was becoming more and more autobiographical. Of course, all writing draws from experience, but there’s a particularly weird energy to writing memoir, in a deliberate way, in a fantastic or uncanny mode. It seems to announce a certain relationship to memory, and to experience. I wonder if each of you could start by talking a bit about this in relation to your own work. What do you find compelling about the concept of speculative memoir?

Carmen Maria Machado: Right now, I’m working on a memoir called House in Indiana that uses genre tropes to engage with and unpack a narrative of abuse. That means that interspersed with chapters that detail actual events, I have fictional sections that use these tropes as extended metaphors. As I was writing the first draft of this book, I kept thinking, “Am I allowed to do this?” And then Sofia and I had a conversation about speculative memoir at AWP, and then she turned me onto Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies which took off the top of my head. I’m just so fascinated by the elasticity of the essay form.

Matthew Cheney: When Sofia mentioned the term “speculative memoir” to me, I was immediately intrigued, because it provided a term that made me think of a bunch of otherwise pretty different material: Samuel Delany’s “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” (from Flight from Nevèrÿon), elements of work by Virginia Woolf and J.M. Coetzee, Richard Bowes’s Dust Devil on a Quiet Street, Jeffrey Ford’s story “Bright Morning,” texts by Carole Maso and C.D. Wright, and more.

I have written one unabashed speculative memoir, a story called “Killing Fairies” that was in A Capella Zoo in 2015 and reprinted in Best Gay Stories 2016. I wrote the story with my 40th birthday staring me down. I had begun to realize I’m losing a lot of memories from my early life, and before I forgot everything, I thought I ought to write about my first year of college. What I did was create one completely fictional character and then use him to shape all the other material, most of which was strictly true to my memory (which is not to say true to reality). The fantasy element is subdued and ambiguous, but it’s there, and I like the way it destabilizes the whole, because here we have this memoir-like thing that most readers will know by the end can’t really be a memoir because such stuff is impossible. But I hope that the impossible conveys an emotional reality, one that couldn’t be crystallized by memoir alone.

I hope that the impossible conveys an emotional reality, one that couldn’t be crystallized by memoir alone.

Rosalind Palermo Stevenson: I am working on a book called Adame, which as the title might suggest is an exploration of the female Adam, but explored through the creation of a faux autobiography. Like most of my work, its narrative style is a fusion of prose and poetry. Adame is also a fusion of the real and the imagined. It builds from an autobiographical base but brings in imagined characters, situations, as well as distortions, and reinventions. When I began the piece I found that I had included myself by name, alternating that with the name Adame. And yet what I was associating with the actual “me” of me was a rush of imagined material. As I followed this path onward the shape continued to define itself more and more that way and I began to get excited about the concept of a faux autobiography.

What excites me is the ability to give play to the imagination and through that to arrive at a place of emotional truth. Working with the speculative, the highly imagined, having the license to incorporate anything as long as that “anything” coheres and has integrity in relation to the piece itself is for me a way to go deeper into my interior world and in that sense to achieve the greatest degree of authenticity. I love the concept of the imagined becoming or being a vehicle of emotional reality.

What excites me is the ability to give play to the imagination and through that to arrive at a place of emotional truth.

SS: This is all so rich: genre, memory, time, the impossible, the faux. And this reaching toward the intensely imagined in order to tell the truth. Everyone seems to be saying this, in some way — that it’s precisely the tropes of fantasy and science fiction that are capable of expressing trauma, it’s the impossible that conveys emotional reality, it’s the rush of imagined material that’s “the actual ‘me’ of me.” When I was writing my own uncanny autobiography, Monster Portraits, I felt something very much like what you’re saying, Rosalind — this incredible breadth, the license to incorporate anything. I was myself, my own memories were there, yet I also inhabited a series of monsters. And each monster revealed another facet of my thinking or experience.

There can be a lightness, too, to the speculative memoir. You’re not tied to a narrative, a life story. It’s life writing that doesn’t encourage people to put you in a box. In a way, it might even block the kind of voyeuristic gaze that just wants to peer into your life. It’s too weird for that. And yet, as we’ve been saying, it’s the most piercing truth.

CMM: I’m really interested in the parts of the real, lived experience that exist beyond empirical evidence and tangible events. Fantasies. Daydreams. Memory decayed by time. Hallucinations. How experiences knock up against one’s sense of narrative. Even when people witness the same incident — say, an accident — their accounts of it rarely match up. What happens in between two cars smashing together — something gloriously, horrifyingly physical — and the way people experience that event, and then recount that experience back? I’m obviously not the first person to explore this — I feel like memoir as a genre is constantly asking these questions about how to best encapsulate memory — but it’s just really captured my attention lately.

RPS: I’m particularly drawn to the idea, as Sofia phrased it, of “reaching toward the intensely imagined to tell the truth.” But still I ask myself: why does this “emotional truth” seem to find its authentic expression in the imagined? (And what exactly is meant by emotional truth?) For me it has a lot to do with getting out of the way of myself. I think of emotional reality as something which comes out of a connection to deeper consciousness and an expression of the writer’s interior world. It becomes an “allowing” rather than a “controlling.” I love Sofia’s idea of “blocking the voyeuristic gaze.” For me the imagined can block that gaze. The voyeur often being myself!

I’m really interested in the parts of the real, lived experience that exist beyond empirical evidence and tangible events. Fantasies. Daydreams. Memory decayed by time. Hallucinations.

SS: I think Carmen’s right, of course, that memoir is always asking questions about memory. What’s interesting to me is what happens when memoir — which is already strange and tricky and fraught in its relationship to memory — meets the deliberately imagined, the blatantly non-factual, the impossible. As if you’re taking a memory that’s already decayed and then tearing it up, or sewing a bunch of feathers onto it. It becomes a bit monstrous. And this — all of us seem to agree — is when it’s finally recognizable as yours.

I must also admit that I love facts! I treasure the facts as I remember them, and I love to write to them. Almost as a constraint. How, in a city of winged scribes, does my parents’ living-room couch appear with its orange fuzz? And their dusty, gauzy curtains.

A Dark Fairytale About Post-Earth Education

MC: Yes, for me the etymological trace of memory in memoir feels like something necessarily active. Now that I’m older and have this whole bank of memories from adulthood, I’m very much aware that there were experiences for which I have no memory. What I know is the gap only. Or I have friends and family who remember things vividly one way, and I’ve also got a memory of it, but it doesn’t align with theirs. Similar to what Carmen says about the notorious unreliability of even confident witnesses, there are things for which I have vivid, strong memories, memories I have confidence in, but that I’m quite sure, from the outside evidence, must be wrong. It’s unsettling, but for me also has become one of the primary engines for writing, because memory is so tied to both self-conception and to history. Who I think I am is who I remember myself to be. And memory is key to so much of the social and political world: memory gets cultivated and weaponized for purposes of nationalism, militarism, imperialism…

The label of memoir sets up readers’ expectations for a certain level of reality, and so to use those expectations to undo reality rather than confirm it is an appealing challenge for me as a writer. Not (purely) out of a sadistic relationship with the reader, but for the purpose of investigating how memory shapes our idea of self, history, world, identity, possibility.

The label of memoir sets up readers’ expectations for a certain level of reality, and so to use those expectations to undo reality rather than confirm it is an appealing challenge for me as a writer.

Rosalind, I’m curious what you see is the role of fact, or actual events here. Why not call the work fiction? What does the actual allow that the fictional might not for you?

RPS: I see it largely a matter of positioning. The idea of speculative memoir or faux autobiography suggests to me the idea of setting out with a basis in personal fact/actual experience, saying I and meaning me, placing the weight of the piece on that personal life base, but skewing it, reimagining it, introducing fantastic and impossible elements. My intention in writing Adame is to position it from an autobiographical base, but to add to and alter that base with reinvention, enhancement, and the reimagined. Why? In some ways introducing the imagined is perhaps a way of daring to approach the material. But it is primarily a way of conveying something that can bring it closer to essential reality than actual reality. Perhaps it is even to say something about the way reality as a construct of thought might encompass all that it can imagine.

CMM: Like Sofia was talking about above, I’m very actively interested in memoir-adjacent work that contains impossible elements. I’ve always thought of genre, in the broadest sense, as a management of expectations — if a dragon appears, or a ghost, or futuristic technology, does that development jive or clash with the reader’s expectations for the world? The pleasure of using these devices is that we can take a thing that, by definition, must be real, and include things that, by definition, cannot be, and the resulting text is sweet and sour. Some people would argue that once you include the unreal element, the genre automatically switches away from nonfiction, but I definitely think there needs to be room for the work that occupies that gap.

What I Don’t Tell My Students About ‘The Husband Stitch’

SS: To wrap up, I wonder if each of you would be willing to mention a work or two, written by others, that you think of as speculative memoir? For me, it’s somewhat hard to name. I feel hesitant; I don’t want to call a piece of writing “memoir” unless invited. The work has to call out, to announce itself. And that’s fairly rare in the genres generally grouped under “speculative fiction”: fantasy, science fiction, and horror. But Matt told me about “Buffalo” by John Kessel, which seems to fit beautifully. And I think of the works of Bhanu Kapil — all of them, but maybe especially Incubation: A Space for Monsters and Ban en Banlieue. And the ghostliness of Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter, the way it opens in an uncertain space between memory and dream.

MC: Works that announce themselves to us as memoiristic speculations and speculative memoirs are, indeed, relatively few — “Buffalo” is a wonderful example, a work I absolutely adore; Rick Bowes’s “My Life in Speculative Fiction” would be another — and as much as I enjoy and respect those, I find myself drawn more toward the outcasts and outliers, the freaks that make friction in any taxonomy. I think of Woolf’s Orlando, which when published was not read as what we can now see it as: a fake biography infused with love for Vita Sackville-West. Now, having access to biographies and introductions and annotations, we read it more as we would a speculative memoir, or speculative biography, or whatever, than we would have were we a random common reader off the streets in 1928, someone who didn’t know anything about Woolf or her friends but who picked the book up and was intrigued and so read it. What might that experience be? Are we, the later readers, better poised for Orlando’s pleasures, or are we hindered by the accumulation of information through the years?

I feel like the speculative should always end with question marks, and so here are a few: How informed must the reader be, how certain of genre and stance? I know nothing about Pamela Zoline’s life, but were I editing an anthology of speculative memoirs, I’d seriously consider “The Heat Death of the Universe”, but is that a violation (and if so, a violation of what)? What do we make of Philip K. Dick’s VALIS? Is Barry Malzberg’s Galaxies a work of metafiction or a speculative memoir or a whatzit? How about Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, or Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, or Clarice Lispector’s “Brasilia” — or, indeed, any of Lispector’s Cronicas? Must we know for sure?

RPS: For my list I first offer Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, the first three hundred pages of which bear the heading “A Factless Autobiography.” Writing through his many selves — his heteronyms — each one named, given a birth date, a personality, a physique, etc., Pessoa’s book, never finished, exists in the fragmented pieces of the experience, thoughts, memories, opinions, feelings, dreams, irritations, things imagined, personal things and personal truth of his life. I also include Carole Maso’s The Art Lover, which in some ways flips the expectation of the way that speculative memoir might work by writing an alternative form of fiction filled with inventions, memories (false or real?), and stylistic innovations, and then in the middle of what is being read as fiction she breaks the form with her true, painful, memoiristic account of the death of her friend from AIDS.

CMM: I think of Geoff Ryman’s 253 as a work of speculative memoir. He reveals in the book that the date of the fictional train accident is the same date he learned one of his best friends was dying of AIDS, and the plot mimics the slow-motion crash of grief so perfectly. Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. (From an interview in The Guardian: “But when we arrive at the question of where the story itself came from, he draws a deep breath, and slows almost to standstill. ‘It’s…erm…The experience of the boys in the flat is…based on my dad dying. When I was…six.’”) And the entire oeuvre of Lucia Berlin, which was functionally autofiction. The stories overlap in such imperfect ways, and seem to be cut directly from the fabric of her life.

About the Authors

Matthew Cheney is the author of Blood: Stories (Black Lawrence Press). His fiction and essays have been published by One Story, Conjunctions, Weird Tales, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, and others. He is currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of New Hampshire.

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, is a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. She is a fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. Her memoir House in Indiana is forthcoming in 2019 from Graywolf Press. She is the Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

Rosalind Palermo Stevenson is the author of the novel The Absent, the novella Insect Dreams, and the chapbook Kafka At Rudolf Steiner’s. Insect Dreams has also been published in the anthologies Poe’s Children (edited by Peter Straub) and Trampoline (edited by Kelly Link). Her story “The Guest” was selected to be included in Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana, and her short fiction and prose poems have appeared in numerous literary journals. She lives in New York City.

Sofia Samatar’s latest book, Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar, is forthcoming in February 2018 from Rose Metal Press. The author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, and the short story collection, Tender, she has received the William L. Crawford Award, the John W. Campbell Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She lives in Virginia, where she teaches at James Madison University.

The Last of the 14-Year-Old Virgins

Posted on February 21, 2018May 19, 2023 by 007595

“Music”

by Ellen Gilchrist

Rhoda was fourteen years old the summer her father dragged her off to Clay County, Kentucky, to make her stop smoking and acting like a movie star. She was fourteen years old, a holy and terrible age, and her desire for beauty and romance drove her all day long and pursued her if she slept.

“Te amo,” she whispered to herself in Latin class. “Te amo, Bob Rosen,” sending the heat of her passions across the classroom and out through the window and across two states to a hospital room in Saint Louis, where a college boy lay recovering from a series of operations Rhoda had decided would be fatal.

“And you as well must die, beloved dust,” she quoted to herself. “Oh, sleep forever in your Latmian cave, Mortal Endymion, darling of the moon,” she whispered, and sometimes it was Bob Rosen’s lanky body stretched out in the cave beside his saxophone that she envisioned and sometimes it was her own lush, apricot-colored skin growing cold against the rocks in the moonlight.

Rhoda was fourteen years old that spring and her true love had been cruelly taken from her and she had started smoking because there was nothing left to do now but be a writer.

She was fourteen years old and she would sit on the porch at night looking down the hill that led through the small town of Franklin, Kentucky, and think about the stars, wondering where heaven could be in all that vastness, feeling betrayed by her mother’s pale Episcopalianism and the fate that had brought her to this small town right in the middle of her sophomore year in high school. She would sit on the porch stuffing chocolate chip cookies into her mouth, drinking endless homemade chocolate milkshakes, smoking endless Lucky Strike cigarettes, watching her mother’s transplanted roses move steadily across the trellis, taking Bob Rosen’s thin letters in and out of their envelopes, holding them against her face, then going up to the new bedroom, to the soft, blue sheets, stuffed with cookies and ice cream and cigarettes and rage.

“Is that you, Rhoda?” her father would call out as she passed his bedroom. “Is that you, sweetie? Come tell us good night.” And she would go into their bedroom and lean over and kiss him.

“You just ought to smell yourself,” he would say, sitting up, pushing her away. “You just ought to smell those nasty cigarettes.” And as soon as she went into her room he would go downstairs and empty all the ashtrays to make sure the house wouldn’t burn down while he was sleeping.

“I’ve got to make her stop that goddamn smoking,” he would say, climbing back into the bed. “I’m goddamned if I’m going to put up with that.”

“I’d like to know how you’re going to stop it,” Rhoda’s mother said. “I’d like to see anyone make Rhoda do anything she doesn’t want to do. Not to mention that you’re hardly ever here.”

“Goddammit, Ariane, don’t start that this time of night.” And he rolled over on his side of the bed and began to plot his campaign against Rhoda’s cigarettes.

Dudley Manning wasn’t afraid of Rhoda, even if she was as stubborn as a goat. Dudley Manning wasn’t afraid of anything. He had gotten up at dawn every day for years and believed in himself and followed his luck wherever it led him, dragging his sweet southern wife and his children behind him, and now, in his fortieth year, he was about to become a millionaire.

He was about to become a millionaire and he was in love with a beautiful woman who was not his wife and it was the strangest spring he had ever known. When he added up the figures in his account books he was filled with awe at his own achievements, amazed at what he had made of himself, and to make up for it he talked a lot about luck and pretended to be humble but deep down inside he believed there was nothing he couldn’t do, even love two women at once, even make Rhoda stop smoking.

Both Dudley and Rhoda were early risers. If he was in town he would be waiting in the kitchen when she came down to breakfast, dressed in his khakis, his pens in his pocket, his glasses on his nose, sitting at the table going over his papers, his head full of the clean new ideas of morning.

“How many more days of school do you have?” he said to her one morning, watching her light the first of her cigarettes without saying anything about it.

“Just this week,” she said. “Just until Friday. I’m making A’s, Daddy. This is the easiest school I’ve ever been to.”

“Well, don’t be smart-alecky about it, Rhoda,” he said. “If you’ve got a good mind it’s only because God gave it to you.”

“God didn’t give me anything,” she said. “Because there isn’t any God.”

“Well, let’s don’t get into an argument about that this morning,” Dudley said. “As soon as you finish school I want you to drive up to the mines with me for a few days.”

“For how long?” she said.

“We won’t be gone long,” he said. “I just want to take you to the mines to look things over.”

Rhoda French-inhaled, blowing the smoke out into the sunlight coming through the kitchen windows, imagining herself on a tour of her father’s mines, the workers with their caps in their hands smiling at her as she walked politely among them. Rhoda liked that idea. She dropped two saccharin tablets into her coffee and sat down at the table, enjoying her fantasy.

“Is that what you’re having for breakfast?” he said.

“I’m on a diet,” Rhoda said. “I’m on a black coffee diet.” He looked down at his poached eggs, cutting into the yellow with his knife. I can wait, he said to himself. As God is my witness I can wait until Sunday.

Rhoda poured herself another cup of coffee and went upstairs to write Bob Rosen before she left for school.

Dear Bob [the letter began],

School is almost over. I made straight A’s, of course, as per your instructions. This school is so easy it’s crazy.

They read one of my newspaper columns on the radio in Nashville. Everyone in Franklin goes around saying my mother writes my columns. Can you believe that? Allison Hotchkiss, that’s my editor, says she’s going to write an editorial about it saying I really write them.

I turned my bedroom into an office and took out the tacky dressing table mother made me and got a desk and put my typewriter on it and made striped drapes, green and black and white. I think you would approve.

Sunday Daddy is taking me to Manchester, Kentucky, to look over the coal mines. He’s going to let me drive. He lets me drive all the time. I live for your letters.

Te amo,

Rhoda

She put the letter in a pale blue envelope, sealed it, dripped some Toujours Moi lavishly onto it in several places and threw herself down on her bed.

She pressed her face deep down into her comforter pretending it was Bob Rosen’s smooth cool skin. “Oh, Bob, Bob,” she whispered to the comforter. “Oh, honey, don’t die, don’t die, please don’t die.” She could feel the tears coming. She reached out and caressed the seam of the comforter, pretending it was the scar on Bob Rosen’s neck.

The last night she had been with him he had just come home from an operation for a mysterious tumor that he didn’t want to talk about. It would be better soon, was all he would say about it. Before long he would be as good as new.

They had driven out of town and parked the old Pontiac underneath a tree beside a pasture. It was September and Rhoda had lain in his arms smelling the clean smell of his new sweater, touching the fresh red scars on his neck, looking out the window to memorize every detail of the scene, the black tree, the September pasture, the white horse leaning against the fence, the palms of his hands, the taste of their cigarettes, the night breeze, the exact temperature of the air, saying to herself over and over, I must remember everything. This will have to last me forever and ever and ever.

“I want you to do it to me,” she said. “Whatever it is they do.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I couldn’t do that now. It’s too much trouble to make love to a virgin.” He was laughing. “Besides, it’s hard to do it in a car.”

“But I’m leaving,” she said. “I might not ever see you again.”

“Not tonight,” he said. “I still don’t feel very good, Rhoda.”

“What if I come back and visit,” she said. “Will you do it then? When you feel better.”

“If you still want me to I will,” he said. “If you come back to visit and we both want to, I will.”

“Do you promise?” she said, hugging him fiercely.

“I promise,” he said. “On my honor I promise to do it when you come to visit.”

But Rhoda was not allowed to go to Saint Louis to visit. Either her mother guessed her intentions or else she seized the opportunity to do what she had been wanting to do all along and stop her daughter from seeing a boy with a Jewish last name.

There were weeks of pleadings and threats. It all ended one Sunday night when Mrs. Manning lost her temper and made the statement that Jews were little peddlers who went through the Delta selling needles and pins.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rhoda screamed. “He’s not a peddler, and I love him and I’m going to love him until I die.” Rhoda pulled her arms away from her mother’s hands.

“I’m going up there this weekend to see him,” she screamed. “Daddy promised me I could and you’re not going to stop me and if you try to stop me I’ll kill you and I’ll run away and I’ll never come back.”

“You are not going to Saint Louis and that’s the end of this conversation and if you don’t calm down I’ll call a doctor and have you locked up. I think you’re crazy, Rhoda. I really do.”

“I’m not crazy,” Rhoda screamed. “You’re the one that’s crazy.”

“You and your father think you’re so smart,” her mother said. She was shaking but she held her ground, moving around behind a Queen Anne chair. “Well, I don’t care how smart you are, you’re not going to get on a train and go off to Saint Louis, Missouri, to see a man when you’re only fourteen years old, and that, Miss Rhoda K. Manning, is that.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Rhoda said. “I really am. I’m going to kill you,” and she thought for a moment that she would kill her, but then she noticed her grandmother’s Limoges hot chocolate pot sitting on top of the piano holding a spray of yellow jasmine, and she walked over to the piano and picked it up and threw it all the way across the room and smashed it into a wall beside a framed print of “The Blue Boy.”

“I hate you,” Rhoda said. “I wish you were dead.” And while her mother stared in disbelief at the wreck of the sainted hot chocolate pot, Rhoda walked out of the house and got in the car and drove off down the steep driveway. I hate her guts, she said to herself. I hope she cries herself to death.

She shifted into second gear and drove off toward her father’s office, quoting to herself from Edna Millay. “Now by this moon, before this moon shall wane, I shall be dead or I shall be with you.”

But in the end Rhoda didn’t die. Neither did she kill her mother. Neither did she go to Saint Louis to give her virginity to her reluctant lover.

The Sunday of the trip Rhoda woke at dawn feeling very excited and changed clothes four or five times trying to decide how she wanted to look for her inspection of the mines.

Rhoda had never even seen a picture of a strip mine. In her imagination she and her father would be riding an elevator down into the heart of a mountain where obsequious masked miners were lined up to shake her hand. Later that evening the captain of the football team would be coming over to the hotel to meet her and take her somewhere for a drive.

She pulled on a pair of pink pedal pushers and a long navy blue sweatshirt, threw every single thing she could possibly imagine wearing into a large suitcase, and started down the stairs to where her father was calling for her to hurry up.

Her mother followed her out of the house holding a buttered biscuit on a linen napkin. “Please eat something before you leave,” she said. “There isn’t a decent restaurant after you leave Bowling Green.”

“I told you I don’t want anything to eat,” Rhoda said. “I’m on a diet.” She stared at the biscuit as though it were a coral snake.

“One biscuit isn’t going to hurt you,” her mother said. “I made you a lunch, chicken and carrot sticks and apples.”

“I don’t want it,” Rhoda said “Don’t put any food in this car, Mother.”

“Just because you never eat doesn’t mean your father won’t get hungry. You don’t have to eat any of it unless you want to.” Their eyes met. Then they sighed and looked away.

Her father appeared at the door and climbed in behind the wheel of the secondhand Cadillac.

“Let’s go, Sweet Sister,” he said, cruising down the driveway, turning onto the road leading to Bowling Green and due east into the hill country. Usually this was his favorite moment of the week, starting the long drive into the rich Kentucky hills where his energy and intelligence had created the long black rows of figures in the account books, figures that meant Rhoda would never know what it was to be really afraid or uncertain or powerless.

“How long will it take?” Rhoda asked.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Just look out the window and enjoy the ride. This is beautiful country we’re driving through.”

“I can’t right now,” Rhoda said. “I want to read the new book Allison gave me. It’s a book of poems.”

She settled down into the seat and opened the book.

Oh, gallant was the first love, and glittering and fine; The second love was water, in a clear blue cup; The third love was his, and the fourth was mine. And after that, I always get them all mixed up.

Oh, God, this is good, she thought. She sat up straighter, wanting to kiss the book. Oh, God, this is really good. She turned the book over to look at the picture of the author. It was a photograph of a small bright face in full profile staring off into the mysterious brightly lit world of a poet’s life.

Dorothy Parker, she read. What a wonderful name. Maybe I’ll change my name to Dorothy, Dorothy Louise Manning. Dot Manning. Dottie, Dottie Leigh, Dot.

Rhoda pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes out of her purse, tamped it on the dashboard, opened it, extracted a cigarette and lit it with a gold Ronson lighter. She inhaled deeply and went back to the book.

Her father gripped the wheel, trying to concentrate on the beauty of the morning, the green fields, the small, neat farmhouses, the red barns, the cattle and horses. He moved his eyes from all that order to his fourteen-year-old daughter slumped beside him with her nose buried in a book, her plump fingers languishing in the air, holding a cigarette. He slowed down, pulled the car onto the side of the road and killed the motor.

“What’s wrong?” Rhoda said. “Why are you stopping?”

“Because you are going to put out that goddamn cigarette this very minute and you’re going to give me the package and you’re not going to smoke another cigarette around me as long as you live,” he said.

“I will not do any such thing,” Rhoda said. “It’s a free country.”

“Give me the cigarette, Rhoda,” he said. “Hand it here.”

“Give me one good reason why I should,” she said. But her voice let her down. She knew there wasn’t any use in arguing. This was not her soft little mother she was dealing with. This was Dudley Manning, who had been a famous baseball player until he quit when she was born. Who before that had gone to the Olympics on a relay team. There were scrapbooks full of his clippings in Rhoda’s house. No matter where the Mannings went those scrapbooks sat on a table in the den. Manning Hits One Over The Fence, the headlines read. Manning Saves The Day. Manning Does It Again. And he was not the only one. His cousin, Philip Manning, down in Jackson, Mississippi, was famous too. Who was the father of the famous Crystal Manning, Rhoda’s cousin who had a fur coat when she was ten. And Leland Manning, who was her cousin Lele’s daddy. Leland had been the captain of the Tulane football team before he drank himself to death in the Delta.

Rhoda sighed, thinking of all that, and gave in for the moment. “Give me one good reason and I might,” she repeated.

“I don’t have to give you a reason for a goddamn thing,” he said. “Give the cigarette here, Rhoda. Right this minute.” He reached out and took it and she didn’t resist. “Goddamn, these things smell awful,” he said, crushing it in the ashtray. He reached in her pocketbook and got the package and threw it out the window.

“Only white trash throw things out on the road,” Rhoda said. “You’d kill me if I did that.”

“Well, let’s just be quiet and get to where we’re going.” He started the motor and drove back out onto the highway. Rhoda crunched down lower in the seat, pretending to read her book. Who cares, she thought. I’ll get some as soon as we stop for gas.

Getting cigarettes at filling stations was not as easy as Rhoda thought it was going to be. This was God’s country they were driving into now, the hills rising up higher and higher, strange, silent little houses back off the road. Rhoda could feel the eyes looking out at her from behind the silent windows. Poor white trash, Rhoda’s mother would have called them. The salt of the earth, her father would have said.

This was God’s country and these people took things like children smoking cigarettes seriously. At both places where they stopped there was a sign by the cash register, No Cigarettes Sold To Minors.

Rhoda had moved to the back seat of the Cadillac and was stretched out on the seat reading her book. She had found another poem she liked and she was memorizing it.

Four be the things I’d be better without, Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt, Three be the things I shall never attain, Envy, content and sufficient champagne.

Oh, God, I love this book, she thought. This Dorothy Parker is just like me. Rhoda was remembering a night when she got drunk in Clarkesville, Mississippi, with her cousin Baby Gwen Barksdale. They got drunk on tequila LaGrande Conroy brought back from Mexico, and Rhoda had slept all night in the bathtub so she would be near the toilet when she vomited.

She put her head down on her arm and giggled, thinking about waking up in the bathtub. Then a plan occurred to her.

“Stop and let me go to the bathroom,” she said to her father. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Oh, Lord,” he said. “I knew you shouldn’t have gotten in the back seat. Well, hold on. I’ll stop the first place I see.” He pushed his hat back off his forehead and began looking for a place to stop, glancing back over his shoulder every now and then to see if she was all right. Rhoda had a long history of throwing up on car trips so he was taking this seriously. Finally he saw a combination store and filling station at a bend in the road and pulled up beside the front door.

“I’ll be all right.” Rhoda said, jumping out of the car. “You stay here. I’ll be right back.”

She walked dramatically up the wooden steps and pushed open the screen door. It was so quiet and dark inside she thought for a moment the store was closed. She looked around. She was in a rough, high-ceilinged room with saddles and pieces of farm equipment hanging from the rafters and a sparse array of canned goods on wooden shelves behind a counter. On the counter were five or six large glass jars filled with different kinds of Nabisco cookies. Rhoda stared at the cookie jars, wanting to stick her hand down inside and take out great fistfuls of Lorna Doones and Oreos. She fought off her hunger and raised her eyes to the display of chewing tobacco and cigarettes.

The smells of the store rose up to meet her, fecund and rich, moist and cool, as if the store was an extension of the earth outside. Rhoda looked down at the board floors. She felt she could have dropped a sunflower seed on the floor and it would instantly sprout and take bloom, growing quick, moving down into the earth and upwards toward the rafters.

“Is anybody here?” she said softly, then louder. “Is anybody here?”

A woman in a cotton dress appeared in a door, staring at Rhoda out of very intense, very blue eyes.

“Can I buy a pack of cigarettes from you?” Rhoda said. “My dad’s in the car. He sent me to get them.”

“What kind of cigarettes you looking for?” the woman said, moving to the space between the cash register and the cookie jars. “

Some Luckies if you have them,” Rhoda said. “He said to just get anything you had if you didn’t have that.”

“They’re a quarter,” the woman said, reaching behind herself to take the package down and lay it on the counter, not smiling, but not being unkind either.

“Thank you,” Rhoda said, laying the quarter down on the counter. “Do you have any matches?”

“Sure,” the woman said, holding out a box of kitchen matches. Rhoda took a few, letting her eyes leave the woman’s face and come to rest on the jars of Oreos. They looked wonderful and light, as though they had been there a long time and grown soft around the edges.

The woman was smiling now. “You want one of those cookies?” she said. “You want one, you go on and have one, It’s free.”

“Oh, no thank you,” Rhoda said. “I’m on a diet. Look, do you have a ladies’ room I can use?”

“It’s out back,” the woman said. “You can have one of them cookies if you want it. Like I said, it won’t cost you nothing.”

“I guess I’d better get going,” Rhoda said. “My dad’s in a hurry. But thank you anyway. And thanks for the matches.” Rhoda hurried down the aisle, slipped out the back door and leaned up against the back of the store, tearing the paper off the cigarettes. She pulled one out, lit it, and inhaled deeply, blowing the smoke out in front of her, watching it rise up into the air, casting a veil over the hills that rose up behind and to the left of her. She had never been in such a strange country. It looked as though no one ever did anything to their yards or roads or fences. It looked as though there might not be a clock for miles.

She inhaled again, feeling dizzy and full. She had just taken the cigarette out of her mouth when her father came bursting out of the door and grabbed both of her wrists in his hands.

“Let go of me,” she said. “Let go of me this minute.” She struggled to free herself, ready to kick or claw or bite, ready for a real fight, but he held her off.

“Drop the cigarette, Rhoda,” he said. “Drop it on the ground.”

“I’ll kill you,” she said. “As soon as I get away I’m running away to Florida. Let go of me, Daddy. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” he said. The veins were standing out on his forehead. His face was so close Rhoda could see his freckles and the line where his false front tooth was joined to what was left of the real one. He had lost the tooth in a baseball game the day Rhoda was born. That was how he told the story. “I lost that tooth the day Rhoda was born,” he would say. “I was playing left field against Memphis in the old Crump Stadium. I slid into second and the second baseman got me with his shoe.”

“You can smoke all you want to when you get down to Florida,” he was saying now. “But you’re not smoking on this trip. So you might as well calm down before I drive off and leave you here.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “Go on and leave. I’ll just call up Mother and she’ll come and get me.” She was struggling to free her wrists but she could not move them inside his hands. “Let go of me, you big bully,” she added.

“Will you calm down and give me the cigarettes?”

“All right,” she said, but the minute he let go of her hands she turned and began to hit him on the shoulders, pounding her fists up and down on his back, not daring to put any real force behind the blows. He pretended to cower under the assault. She caught his eye and saw that he was laughing at her and she had to fight the desire to laugh with him.

“I’m getting in the car,” she said. “I’m sick of this place.” She walked grandly around to the front of the store, got into the car, tore open the lunch and began to devour it, tearing the chicken off the bones with her teeth, swallowing great hunks without even bothering to chew them. “I’m never speaking to you again as long as I live,” she said, her mouth full of chicken breast. “You are not my father.”

“Suits me, Miss Smart-alecky Movie Star,” he said, putting his hat back on his head. “Soon as we get home you can head on out for Florida. You just let me know when you’re leaving so I can give you some money for the bus.”

“I hate you,” Rhoda mumbled to herself, starting in on the homemade raisin cookies. I hate your guts. I hope you go to hell forever, she thought, breaking a cookie into pieces so she could pick out the raisins.

It was late afternoon when the Cadillac picked its way up a rocky red clay driveway to a housetrailer nestled in the curve of a hill beside a stand of pine trees.

“Where are we going?” Rhoda said. “Would you just tell me that?”

“We’re going to see Maud and Joe Samples,” he said. “Joe’s an old hand around here. He’s my right-hand man in Clay County. Now you just be polite and try to learn something, Sister. These are real folks you’re about to meet.”

“Why are we going here first?” Rhoda said. “Aren’t we going to a hotel?”

“There isn’t any hotel,” her father said. “Does this look like someplace they’d have hotels? Maud and Joe are going to put you up for me while I’m off working.”

“I’m going to stay here?” Rhoda asked. “In this trailer?”

“Just wait until you see the inside,” her father said. “It’s like the inside of a boat, everything all planned out and just the right amount of space for things. I wish your mother’d let me live in a trailer.”

They were almost to the door now. A plump smiling woman came out onto the wooden platform and waited for them with her hands on her hips, smiling wider and wider as they got nearer.

“There’s Maud,” Dudley said. “She’s the sweetest woman in the world and the best cook in Kentucky. Hey there, Miss Maud,” he called out.

“Mr. D,” she said, opening the car door for them. “Joe Samples’ been waiting on you all day and here you show up bringing this beautiful girl just like you promised. I’ve made you some blackberry pies. Come on inside this trailer.” Maud smiled deep into Rhoda’s face. Her eyes were as blue as the ones on the woman in the store. Rhoda’s mother had blue eyes, but not this brilliant and not this blue. These eyes were from another world, another century.

“Come on in and see Joe,” Maud said. “He’s been having a fit for you to get here.”

They went inside and Dudley showed Rhoda all around the trailer, praising the design of trailers. Maud turned on the tiny oven and they had blackberry pie and bread and butter sandwiches and Rhoda abandoned her diet and ate two pieces of the pie, covering it with thick whipped cream.

The men went off to talk business and Maud took Rhoda to a small room at the back of the trailer decorated to match a handmade quilt of the sunrise.

There were yellow ruffled curtains at the windows and a tiny dressing table with a yellow ruffled skirt around the edges. Rhoda was enchanted by the smallness of everything and the way the windows looked out onto layers of green trees and bushes.

Lying on the dresser was a white leather Bible and a display of small white pamphlets, Alcohol And You, When Jesus Reaches For A Drink, You Are Not Alone, Sorry Isn’t Enough, Taking No For An Answer.

It embarrassed Rhoda even to read the titles of anything as tacky as the pamphlets, but she didn’t let on she thought it was tacky, not with Maud sitting on the bed telling her how pretty she was every other second and asking her questions about herself and saying how wonderful her father was.

“We love Mr. D to death,” she said. “It’s like he was one of our own.”

He appeared in the door. “Rhoda, if you’re settled in I’ll be leaving now,” he said. “I’ve got to drive to Knoxville to do some business but I’ll be back here Tuesday morning to take you to the mines.” He handed her three twenty-dollar bills. “Here,” he said. “In case you need anything.”

He left then and hurried out to the car, trying to figure out how long it would take him to get to Knoxville, to where Valerie sat alone in a hotel room waiting for this night they had planned for so long. He felt the sweet hot guilt rise up in his face and the sweet hot longing in his legs and hands.

I’m sorry, Jesus, he thought, pulling out onto the highway. I know it’s wrong and I know we’re doing wrong. So go on and punish me if you have to but just let me make it there and back before you start in on me.

He set the cruising speed at exactly fifty-five miles an hour and began to sing to himself as he drove.

“Oh, sure as the vine grows around the stump You’re my darling sugar lump,” he sang, and;

Froggy went a-courting and he did ride, Huhhrummp, huhhrummp, Froggy went a-courting and he did ride, Huhhrummp,

What you gonna have for the wedding supper? Black-eyed peas and bread and butter, Huhhrummp, huhhrummp . . .”

Rhoda was up and dressed when her father came to get her on Tuesday morning. It was still dark outside but a rooster had begun to crow in the distance. Maud bustled all about the little kitchen making much of them, filling their plates with biscuits and fried eggs and ham and gravy.

Then they got into the Cadillac and began to drive toward the mine. Dudley was driving slowly, pointing out everything to her as they rode along.

“Up on that knoll,” he said, “that’s where the Traylors live. Rooster Traylor’s a man about my age. Last year his mother shot one of the Galtney women for breaking up Rooster’s marriage and now the Galtneys have got to shoot someone in the Traylor family.”

“That’s terrible,” Rhoda said.

“No it isn’t, Sister,” he said, warming into the argument. “These people take care of their own problems.”

“They actually shoot each other?” she said. “And you think that’s okay? You think that’s funny?”

“I think it’s just as good as waiting around for some judge and jury to do it for you.”

“Then you’re just crazy,” Rhoda said. “You’re as crazy as you can be.”

“Well, let’s don’t argue about it this morning. Come on. I’ve got something to show you.” He pulled the car off the road and they walked into the woods, following a set of bulldozer tracks that made a crude path into the trees. It was quiet in the woods and smelled of pine and sassafras. Rhoda watched her father’s strong body moving in front of her, striding along, inspecting everything, noticing everything, commenting on everything.

“Look at this,” he said. “Look at all this beauty, honey. Look at how beautiful all this is. This is the real world. Not those goddamn movies and beauty parlors and magazines. This is the world that God made. This is where people are really happy.”

“There isn’t any God,” she said. “Nobody that knows anything believes in God, Daddy. That’s just a lot of old stuff . . .”

“I’m telling you, Rhoda,” he said. “It breaks my heart to see the way you’re growing up.” He stopped underneath a tree, took a seat on a log and turned his face to hers. Tears were forming in his eyes. He was famous in the family for being able to cry on cue. “You’ve just got to learn to listen to someone. You’ve got to get some common sense in your head. I swear to God, I worry about you all the time.” The tears were falling now. “I just can’t stand to see the way you’re growing up. I don’t know where you get all those crazy ideas you come up with.”

Rhoda looked down, caught off guard by the tears. No matter how many times he pulled that with the tears she fell for it for a moment. The summer forest was all around them, soft deep earth beneath their feet, morning light falling through the leaves, and the things that passed between them were too hard to understand. Their brown eyes met and locked and after that they were bound to start an argument for no one can bear to be that happy or that close to another human being.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” Rhoda said. “It’s a free country and I can smoke if I want to and you can’t keep me from doing it by locking me up in a trailer with some poor white trash.”

“What did you say?” he said, getting a look on his face that would have scared a grown man to death. “What did you just say, Rhoda?”

“I said I’m sick and tired of being locked up in that damned old trailer with those corny people and nothing to read but religious magazines. I want to get some cigarettes and I want you to take me home so I can see my friends and get my column written for next week.”

“Oh, God, Sister,” he said. “Haven’t I taught you anything? Maud Samples is the salt of the earth. That woman raised seven children. She knows things you and I will never know as long as we live.”

“Well, no she doesn’t,” Rhoda said. “She’s just an old white trash country woman and if Momma knew where I was she’d have a fit.”

“Your momma is a very stupid person,” he said. “And I’m sorry I ever let her raise you.” He turned his back to her then and stalked on out of the woods to a road that ran like a red scar up the side of the mountain. “Come on,” he said. “I’m going to take you up there and show you where coal comes from. Maybe you can learn one thing this week.”

“I learn things all the time,” she said. “I already know more than half the people I know…I know…”

“Please don’t talk anymore this morning,” he said. “I’m burned out talking to you.”

He put her into a jeep and began driving up the steep unpaved road. In a minute he was feeling better, cheered up by the sight of the big Caterpillar tractors moving dirt. If there was one thing that always cheered him up it was the sight of a big shovel moving dirt. “This is Blue Gem coal,” he said. “The hardest in the area. See the layers. Topsoil, then gravel and dirt or clay, then slate, then thirteen feet of pure coal. Some people think it was made by dinosaurs. Other people think God put it there.”

“This is it?” she said. “This is the mine?” It looked like one of his road construction projects. Same yellow tractors, same disorderly activity. The only difference seemed to be the huge piles of coal and a conveyor belt going down the mountain to a train.

“This is it,” he said. “This is where they stored the old dinosaurs.”

“Well, it is made out of dinosaurs,” she said. “There were a lot of leaves and trees and dinosaurs and then they died and the coal and oil is made out of them.”

“All right,” he said. “Let’s say I’ll go along with the coal. But tell me this, who made the slate then? Who put the slate right on top of the coal everywhere it’s found in the world? Who laid the slate down on top of the dinosaurs?”

“I don’t know who put the slate there,” she said. “We haven’t got that far yet.”

“You haven’t got that far?” he said. “You mean the scientists haven’t got as far as the slate yet? Well, Sister, that’s the problem with you folks that evolved out of monkeys. You’re still half-baked. You aren’t finished like us old dumb ones that God made.”

“I didn’t say the scientists hadn’t got that far,” she said. “I just said I hadn’t got that far.”

“It’s a funny thing to me how all those dinosaurs came up here to die in the mountains and none of them died in the farmland,” he said. “It sure would have made it a lot easier on us miners if they’d died down there on the flat.”

While she was groping around for an answer he went right on. “Tell me this, Sister,” he said. “Are any of your monkey ancestors in there with the dinosaurs, or is it just plain dinosaurs? I’d like to know who all I’m digging up…I’d like to give credit . . .”

The jeep had come to a stop and Joe was coming toward them, hurrying out of the small tin-roofed office with a worried look on his face. “Mr. D, you better call up to Jellico. Beb’s been looking everywhere for you. They had a run-in with a teamster organizer. You got to call him right away.”

“What’s wrong?” Rhoda said. “What happened?”

“Nothing you need to worry about, Sister,” her father said. He turned to Joe. “Go find Preacher and tell him to drive Rhoda back to your house. You go on now, honey. I’ve got work to do.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek and disappeared into the office. A small shriveled-looking man came limping out of a building and climbed into the driver’s seat. “I’m Preacher,” he said. “Mr. Joe tole me to drive you up to his place.”

“All right,” Rhoda said. “I guess that’s okay with me.” Preacher put the jeep in gear and drove it slowly down the winding rutted road. By the time they got to the bottom Rhoda had thought of a better plan. “I’ll drive now,” she said. “I’ll drive myself to Maud’s. It’s all right with my father. He lets me drive all the time. You can walk back, can’t you?” Preacher didn’t know what to say to that. He was an old drunk that Dudley and Joe kept around to run errands. He was so used to taking orders that finally he climbed down out of the jeep and did as he was told. “Show me the way to town,” Rhoda said. “Draw me a map. I have to go by town on my way to Maud’s.” Preacher scratched his head, then bent over and drew her a little map in the dust on the hood. Rhoda studied the map, put the jeep into the first forward gear she could find and drove off down the road to the little town of Manchester, Kentucky, studying the diagram on the gearshift as she drove.

She parked beside a boardwalk that led through the main street of town and started off looking for a store that sold cigarettes. One of the stores had dresses in the window. In the center was a red strapless sundress with a white jacket. $6.95, the price tag said. I hate the way I look, she decided. I hate these tacky pants. I’ve got sixty dollars. I don’t have to look like this if I don’t want to. I can buy anything I want.

She went inside, asked the clerk to take the dress out of the window and in a few minutes she emerged from the store wearing the dress and a pair of leather sandals with two-inch heels. The jacket was thrown carelessly over her shoulder like Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven. I look great in red, she was thinking, catching a glimpse of herself in a store window. It isn’t true that redheaded people can’t wear red. She walked on down the boardwalk, admiring herself in every window.

She walked for two blocks looking for a place to try her luck getting cigarettes. She was almost to the end of the boardwalk when she came to a pool hall. She stood in the door looking in, smelling the dark smell of tobacco and beer. The room was deserted except for a man leaning on a cue stick beside a table and a boy with black hair seated behind a cash register reading a book. The boy’s name was Johnny Hazard and he was sixteen years old. The book he was reading was U.S.A. by John Dos Passos. A woman who came to Manchester to teach poetry writing had given him the book. She had made a dust jacket for it out of brown paper so he could read it in public. On the spine of the jacket she had written American History.

“I’d like a package of Lucky Strikes,” Rhoda said, holding out a twenty-dollar bill in his direction.

“We don’t sell cigarettes to minors,” he said. “It’s against the law.”

“I’m not a minor,” Rhoda said. “I’m eighteen. I’m Rhoda Manning. My daddy owns the mine.”

“Which mine?” he said. He was watching her breasts as she talked, getting caught up in the apricot skin against the soft red dress.

“The mine,” she said. “The Manning mine. I just got here the other day. I haven’t been downtown before.”

“So, how do you like our town?”

“Please sell me some cigarettes,” she said. “I’m about to have a fit for a Lucky.”

“I can’t sell you cigarettes,” he said. “You’re not any more eighteen years old than my dog.”

“Yes, I am,” she said. “I drove here in a jeep, doesn’t that prove anything?” She was looking at his wide shoulders and the tough flat chest beneath his plaid shirt.

“Are you a football player?” she said.

“When I have time,” he said. “When I don’t have to work on the nights they have games.”

“I’m a cheerleader where I live,” Rhoda said. “I just got elected again for next year.”

“What kind of a jeep?” he said.

“An old one,” she said. “It’s filthy dirty. They use it at the mine.” She had just noticed the package of Camels in his breast pocket.

“If you won’t sell me a whole package, how about selling me one,” she said. “I’ll give you a dollar for a cigarette.” She raised the twenty-dollar bill and laid it down on the glass counter.

He ignored the twenty-dollar bill, opened the cash register, removed a quarter and walked over to the jukebox. He walked with a precise, balanced sort of cockiness, as if he knew he could walk any way he wanted but had carefully chosen this particular walk as his own. He walked across the room through the rectangle of light coming in the door, walking as though he were the first boy ever to be in the world, the first boy ever to walk across a room and put a quarter into a jukebox. He pushed a button and music filled the room.

“Kaw-Liga was a wooden Indian a-standing by the door, He fell in love with an Indian maid Over in the antique store.”

“My uncle wrote that song,” he said, coming back to her. “But it got ripped off by some promoters in Nashville. I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “I’ll give you a cigarette if you’ll give me a ride somewhere I have to go.”

“All right,” Rhoda said. “Where do you want to go?”

“Out to my cousin’s,” he said. “It isn’t far.”

“Fine,” Rhoda said. Johnny told the lone pool player to keep an eye on things and the two of them walked out into the sunlight, walking together very formally down the street to where the jeep was parked.

“Why don’t you let me drive,” he said. “It might be easier.” She agreed and he drove on up the mountain to a house that looked deserted. He went in and returned carrying a guitar in a case, a blanket, and a quart bottle with a piece of wax paper tied around the top with a rubber band.

“What’s in the bottle?” Rhoda said.

“Lemonade, with a little sweetening in it.”

“Like whiskey?”

“Yeah. Like whiskey. Do you ever drink it?”

“Sure,” she said. “I drink a lot. In Saint Louis we had this club called The Four Roses that met every Monday at Donna Duston’s house to get drunk. I thought it up, the club I mean.”

“Well, here’s your cigarette,” he said. He took the package from his pocket and offered her one, holding it near his chest so she had to get in close to take it.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, thank you so much. I’m about to die for a ciggie. I haven’t had one in days. Because my father dragged me up here to make me stop smoking. He’s always trying to make me do something I don’t want to do. But it never works. I’m very hardheaded, like him.” She took the light Johnny offered her and blew out the smoke in a small controlled stream. “God, I love to smoke,” she said.

“I’m glad I could help you out,” he said. “Anytime you want one when you’re here you just come on over. Look,” he said. “I’m going somewhere you might want to see, if you’re not in a hurry to get back. You got time to go and see something with me?”

“What is it?” she asked.

“Something worth seeing,” he said. “The best thing in Clay County there is to see.”

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll go. I never turn down an adventure. Why not, that’s what my cousins in the Delta always say. Whyyyyyyy not.” They drove up the mountain and parked and began to walk into the woods along a path. The woods were deeper here than where Rhoda had been that morning, dense and green and cool. She felt silly walking in the woods in the little high-heeled sandals, but she held on to Johnny’s hand and followed him deeper and deeper into the trees, feeling grown up and brave and romantic. I’ll bet he thinks I’m the bravest girl he ever met, she thought. I’ll bet he thinks at last he’s met a girl who’s not afraid of anything. Rhoda was walking along imagining tearing off a piece of her dress for a tourniquet in case Johnny was bit by a poisonous snake. She was pulling the tourniquet tighter and tighter when the trees opened onto a small brilliant blue pond. The water was so blue Rhoda thought for a moment it must be some sort of trick. He stood there watching her while she took it in.

“What do you think?” he said at last.

“My God,” she said.

“What is it?”

“It’s Blue Pond,” he said. “People come from all over the world to see it.”

“Who made it?” Rhoda said. “Where did it come from?”

“Springs. Rock springs. No one knows how deep down it goes, but more than a hundred feet because divers have been that far.”

“I wish I could swim in it,” Rhoda said. “I’d like to jump in there and swim all day.”

“Come over here, cheerleader,” he said. “Come sit over here by me and we’ll watch the light on it. I brought this teacher from New York here last year. She said it was the best thing she’d ever seen in her life. She’s a writer. Anyway, the thing she likes about Blue Pond is watching the light change on the water. She taught me a lot when she was here. About things like that.”

Rhoda moved nearer to him, trying to hold in her stomach.

“My father really likes this part of the country,” she said. “He says people up here are the salt of the earth. He says all the people up here are direct descendants from England and Scotland and Wales. I think he wants us to move up here and stay, but my mother won’t let us. It’s all because the unions keep messing with his mine that he has to be up here all the time. If it wasn’t for the unions everything would be going fine. You aren’t for the unions, are you?”

“I’m for myself,” Johnny said. “And for my kinfolks.” He was tired of her talking then and reached for her and pulled her into his arms, paying no attention to her small resistances, until finally she was stretched out under him on the earth and he moved the dress from her breasts and held them in his hands. He could smell the wild smell of her craziness and after a while he took the dress off and the soft white cotton underpants and touched her over and over again. Then he entered her with the way he had of doing things, gently and with a good sense of the natural rhythms of the earth.

I’m doing it, Rhoda thought. I’m doing it. This is doing it. This is what it feels like to be doing it.

“This doesn’t hurt a bit,” she said out loud. “I think I love you, Johnny. I love, love, love you. I’ve been waiting all my life for you.”

“Don’t talk so much,” he said. “It’s better if you stop talking.”

And Rhoda was quiet and he made love to her as the sun was leaving the earth and the afternoon breeze moved in the trees. Here was every possible tree, hickory and white oak and redwood and sumac and maple, all in thick foliage now, and he made love to her with great tenderness, forgetting he had set out to fuck the boss’s daughter, and he kept on making love to her until she began to tighten around him, not knowing what she was doing, or where she was going, or even that there was any place to be going to.

Dudley was waiting outside the trailer when she drove up. There was a sky full of cold stars behind him, and he was pacing up and down and talking to himself like a crazy man. Maud was inside the trailer crying her heart out and only Joe had kept his head and was going back and forth from one to the other telling them everything would be all right.

Dudley was pacing up and down talking to Jesus. I know I had it coming, he was saying. I know goddamn well I had it coming. But not her. Where in the hell is she? You get her back in one piece and I’ll call Valerie and break it off. I won’t see Valerie ever again as long as I live. But you’ve got to get me back my little girl. Goddammit, you get me back my girl.

Then he was crying, his head thrown back and raised up to the stars as the jeep came banging up the hill in third gear. Rhoda parked it and got out and started walking toward him, all bravado and disdain.

Dudley smelled it on her before he even touched her. Smelled it all over her and began to shake her, screaming at her to tell him who it had been. Then Joe came running out from the trailer and threw his hundred and fifty pounds between them, and Maud was right behind him. She led Rhoda into the trailer and put her into bed and sat beside her, bathing her head with a damp towel until she fell asleep.

“I’ll find out who it was,” Dudley said, shaking his fist. “I’ll find out who it was.”

“You don’t know it was anybody,” Joe said. “You don’t even know what happened, Mr. D. Now you got to calm down and in the morning we’ll find out what happened. More than likely she’s just been holed up somewhere trying to scare you.”

“I know what happened,” Dudley said. “I already know what happened.”

“Well, you can find out who it was and you can kill him if you have to,” Joe said. “If it’s true and you still want to in the morning, you can kill him.”

But there would be no killing. By the time the moon was high, Johnny Hazard was halfway between Lexington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, with a bus ticket he bought with the fifty dollars he’d taken from Rhoda’s pocket. He had called the poetry teacher and told her he was coming. Johnny had decided it was time to see the world. After all, that very afternoon a rich cheerleader had cried in his arms and given him her cherry. There was no telling what might happen next.

Much later that night Rhoda woke up in the small room, hearing the wind come up in the trees. The window was open and the moon, now low in the sky and covered with mist, poured a diffused light upon the bed. Rhoda sat up in the bed and shivered. Why did I do that with him? she thought. Why in the world did I do that? But I couldn’t help it, she decided. He’s so sophisticated and he’s so good-looking and he’s a wonderful driver and he plays a guitar. She moved her hands along her thighs, trying to remember exactly what it was they had done, trying to remember the details, wondering where she could find him in the morning.

But Dudley had other plans for Rhoda in the morning. By noon she was on her way home in a chartered plane. Rhoda had never been on an airplane of any kind before, but she didn’t let on.

“I’m thinking of starting a diary,” she was saying to the pilot, arranging her skirt so her knees would show. “A lot of unusual things have been happening to me lately. The boy I love is dying of cancer in Saint Louis. It’s very sad, but I have to put up with it. He wants me to write a lot of books and dedicate them to his memory.”

The pilot didn’t seem to be paying much attention, so Rhoda gave up on him and went back into her own head.

In her head Bob Rosen was alive after all. He was walking along a street in Greenwich Village and passed a bookstore with a window full of her books, many copies stacked in a pyramid with her picture on every cover. He recognized the photograph, ran into the bookstore, grabbed a book, opened it and saw the dedication. To Bob Rosen, Te Amo Forever, Rhoda.

Then Bob Rosen, or maybe it was Johnny Hazard, or maybe this unfriendly pilot, stood there on that city street, looking up at the sky, holding the book against his chest, crying and broken-hearted because Rhoda was lost to him forever, this famous author, who could have been his, lost to him forever.

Thirty years later Rhoda woke up in a hotel room in New York City. There was a letter lying on the floor where she had thrown it when she went to bed. She picked it up and read it again. Take my name off that book, the letter said. Imagine a girl with your advantages writing a book like that. Your mother is so ashamed of you.

Goddamn you, Rhoda thought. Goddamn you to hell. She climbed back into the bed and pulled the pillows over her head. She lay there for a while feeling sorry for herself. Then she got up and walked across the room and pulled a legal pad out of a briefcase and started writing.

Dear Father,

You take my name off those checks you send those television preachers and those goddamn right-wing politicians. That name has come to me from a hundred generations of men and women . . . also, in the future let my mother speak for herself about my work.

Love, Rhoda

P.S. The slate was put there by the second law of thermodynamics. Some folks call it gravity. Other folks call it God.

I guess it was the second law, she thought. It was the second law or the third law or something like that. She leaned back in the chair, looking at the ceiling. Maybe I’d better find out before I mail it.

Casting White Actors in ‘Annihilation’ Is Missing the Point of the Story

Posted on February 21, 2018January 16, 2024 by 007595

The whitewashing controversy surrounding the film Annihilation, based on the eponymous novel by Jeff VanderMeer, has been a particularly thorny one to parse out. The two organizations that fired the first shots, Media Action Network for Asian Americans and American Indians in Film and Television, accused English director Alex Garland of erasing the Asian and Native American identities of two of the main characters by filling the roles with two white actresses, Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Both Portman and Leigh denied having prior knowledge that the roles were whitewashed. Garland, too, has pled ignorance, saying he based his script solely off the first book of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, in which the characters’ races remain unspecified.

In the novel Annihilation, the author makes a stylistic choice to keep all of the characters’ identities deliberately vague. By omitting information such as names, physical appearances, and backstories hinting at any cultural or ethnic backgrounds of the characters, the narrator — known to the reader simply as the “biologist” — attempts to shed extraneous prejudices that may encumber the mission of what we’re told is the twelfth expedition into a mysterious landscape. She explains: “We were meant to be focused on our purpose, and ‘anything personal should be left behind.’ Names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X.” Stripped of these footholds, the reader becomes a worldmaker of sorts, instinctively filling in the gaps, not unlike the ever-proliferating organisms discovered in the seemingly alien ecosystem that the expedition has been tasked with exploring.

It’s not until the sequel Authority that VanderMeer offers concrete identifiers, including race, with regard to the characters. He describes the biologist as possessing “high cheekbones that spoke to the strong Asian heritage on one side of her family.” Later, he colors in the personal history of the character previously referred to as the psychologist with the mention of “her Native American mother, her white father.” These are the characters being played by Portman and Leigh, respectively. Garland wrote the script before Authority was published, so it’s likely that his claim — that the whitewashing was unintentional because he had no idea of the characters’ races — is accurate.

But why, when faced with two racially ambiguous characters, did Garland imagine them as white? The director clearly appreciates the symbolic value of including women of color in his film, as demonstrated by his casting of black actress Tessa Thompson and Puerto Rican American actress Gina Rodriguez to play the other members of the expedition team. But an overwhelmingly white supremacist culture means that whiteness is often the presumed default, and at the end of the day he elected to have the protagonist’s role, which is responsible for carrying the emotional weight of the story, go to a white woman. The casting serves to reinforce a racial hierarchy when leading parts are awarded to white actors and supporting roles to black and brown actors. And I’d argue that it also ignores and negates some of the most interesting aspects of Annihilation — that, in short, the narrative is impoverished if the reader, or in this case the director, lets the white default get in the way.

The narrative is impoverished if the reader, or in this case the director, lets the white default get in the way.

To VanderMeer’s credit, his work appears to be conscious of the need to de-center the largely white, male gaze that preoccupies science fiction storytelling. He underscores this point, challenging normalized perspectives, when he writes from the point of view of the biologist in Annihilation: “I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective — even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.” We learn that only men participated in a previously unsuccessful expedition, so the novel’s investment in following an exclusively female team is no accident. The racial background of its characters may not be a coincidence, either. Once races are explicitly established, it becomes clear that no primary character in the Southern Reach trilogy is identified solely as white.

There’s a strong argument to be made that VanderMeer’s story of exploring an otherworldly landscape within our mundane world is best understood as the experience, not only of women, but of women of color. Bringing personal context to my reading of Annihilation helped enrich my connection to the biologist, who sees herself as “an outsider.” Sure, there are other surface-level explanations for her outsider status that do not hinge on her racial identity, namely those related to her introversion, as well as her scientific responsibility as an observer. But a line about her rocky relationship with her husband who resented her guardedness, in which she says he “wanted me to be assimilated,” reverberates with additional meaning when one considers the connotations to a person of color.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ Is a Masterpiece of Racial Metaphor

The expedition’s unwelcome presence in a psychologically damaging, potentially toxic, and ultimately violent environment easily stands in as a metaphor for perpetual otherness. In another passage, the biologist becomes an observer of herself in Area X: “I would stand out to whoever or whatever watched from that vantage as something unnatural in that landscape, something that was foreign. Perhaps even a threat.” Whether or not VanderMeer intended it to, the language he uses alludes to the racist metaphor of Yellow Peril and America’s history of xenophobia toward Asian immigrants. Thus, those words feel especially poignant when the reader imagines them being written by someone of Asian descent. Her racial identity would have certainly added another layer to the already complex and nuanced character, and it would have been meaningful to see that portrayed on screen.

The film also erases the Native American background of the psychologist, who wields a position of power as the group’s leader, and whose lifelong relationship with the geographic space is a significant motivating factor. Throughout the series, VanderMeer employs the language of colonization to discuss Area X, which pertains to the fixation on the ever-expanding border as well. This framing of the boundary between civilization and wilderness harkens back to the country’s past genocide of Native Americans and stealing of tribal lands under the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. And it’s precisely this historical lens that allows the reader to fully comprehend the greater implications of the ecological crisis occurring in the Southern Reach.

VanderMeer employs the language of colonization to discuss Area X. This framing of the boundary between civilization and wilderness harkens back to the country’s past genocide of Native Americans.

While Annihilation may have left room for interpretation, Authority undisputedly cements the racialized identities of the characters as canon — and as io9 points out, Garland had plenty of time to incorporate this new information into his screenplay: “Authority was released three months after the first novel, meaning that the book was more than available for Garland to read, if only to better understand the story he was taking on.” Furthermore, the story’s setting in a plausible near-future supports the rationale for the entire expedition to be comprised entirely of people of color since minorities are expected to be the majority by 2044. Some of the best contemporary fiction to depict dystopian futures recognizes America’s changing demographics and reflect this diversity on the page, such as On Such A Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee and Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. VanderMeer’s trilogy recognizes this reality, too. It is Garland’s vision that’s limited.

While the director may garner praise for his cinematic capabilities showcased in Annihilation, his inability to represent non-white-centered stories on screen is nothing short of a failure of imagination. Ultimately, the loss of Asian American and Indigenous characters negatively impacts not only those communities yearning for representational justice but also the story itself.

Leesa Cross-Smith is Taking Back Kentucky

Posted on February 21, 2018March 14, 2019 by 007595

Leesa Cross-Smith started her writing career composing obituaries for the local newspaper. She has since changed her focus, from the departed to the fictional, but her ability to encapsulate a life in a couple of sentences still serves her well.

Cross-Smith’s debut was the story collection Every Kiss a War (Mojave River Press, 2014). Her upcoming novel Whiskey and Ribbons chronicles the relationship between Evangeline (Evi) Royce, a ballerina, Eamon Royce, her police officer husband, and Dalton Berkeley-Royce, Eamon’s adopted brother. When Eamon is killed in the line of duty, Evi and Dalton are left to cope with their grief. Whiskey and Ribbons recounts a timeless story of love, grief, resilience, and family set against the backdrop of modern Louisville.

Cross-Smith’s work has received Editor’s Choice in Carve Magazine’‘s Raymond Carver Short Story Contest and been a finalist for both the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Award and the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in Oxford American and The Best Small Fictions 2015, among many others. She is also the founder/editor of the literary journal WhiskeyPaper.

Cross-Smith and I took some time to talk Southerner to Southerner about misconceptions of Southern African-American life, delayed gratification, and hip-hop in Louisville.

Latria Graham: There’s a 20-year arc between when this story was started in school, and it’s publication with Hub City Press. Can you talk a bit more about Whiskey and Ribbon’s origins and how it developed?

Leesa Cross-Smith: I started it when I was in college. Originally it was a simple story about a woman who was torn between two brothers/adopted brothers/best friends.

A local police officer in my town was killed right after my daughter was born. I started thinking about his widow and how her life looked now, and felt now, and I was so touched by it just because those things always affect me but because I just had a baby and I was so dependent of my husband. I just couldn’t stop thinking about that and tying that to the story I started in college. You’re always encouraged in writing to dig into those really dark places. I was compelled to continue working on it, so it just kept coming back to me. I made it a short story, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I just kept writing it and made it a novel.

LG: I was listening to the Spotify playlist that accompanies the book. There’s classical, there’s country, there’s the Grateful Dead in this lineup. Even the way the novel opens is musical. What does music do for you as a creative?

LCS: I always make playlist to everything I’m working on, so it’s always been something that I do, whether I’m assigning a song to a specific character, or creating a mood. So I’ll always have something in mind to create a mood, or I will say to myself, “I want to write a story, like how this song makes me feel.”

LG: What role did you intend for music to have in the novel?

LCS: Originally I had no idea how to structure this novel. It drove me crazy. I would go on long walks, I would walk three miles. I would just think about it, and I couldn’t, I absolutely could not figure out how to structure it.

While reading, I came across the idea of a fugue, which is defined as a piece of music that intertwines several different voices, some of them repetitious, and then a voice drops out. That’s exactly what I needed to do when I was putting this book together. I have their voices come together as if they’re all singing a song, and then we have Eamon’s voice drop out.

While reading, I came across the idea of a fugue, a piece of music that intertwines several different voices, some of them repetitious, and then a voice drops out. That’s exactly what I needed to do when I was putting this book together.

LG: Everybody thinks of Kentucky, musically, as a country music kind of place. I don’t know whether or not you agree with this, I see the state as a middle ground for music — where rock, bluegrass, country, hip-hop and blues intersect.

LCS: We have so many dope hip hop artists here in Louisville. There’s rock, and there is a lot of bluegrass, and then there’s a lot of punk bands in the 90’s, and a lot of alternative music and stuff like that. My Morning Jacket is from here, and they’re super alternative. Kentuckians know how much diversity there is, but then people in other places, yeah they will ask if we ride a horses.

Louisville is a big city. A lot of people don’t really know that, but in Whiskey & Ribbons, what I’m trying to show is that there’s Black people who live in Louisville and it’s wild, but yeah, they get married too. They go out to dinner, they go to work, they own businesses. There’s black people here, you know, dancing and listening to music. And they get in fights, and they have sex, and they get hungry. Eamon is a Black dude and he listens to Grateful Dead.

LG: What do you wish people understood about the Kentucky?

LCS: There are people here existing in that middle space. It’s just a matter of listening, which I think a lot of people don’t do, especially in this climate. So there’s a lot to say there but I think it requires a lot observation, which people aren’t that good at. It’s easier to make snap judgements, or rely on what you see on television if you’ve never been to a place — the way people think California is all about surfing.

Stop Dismissing Midwestern Literature

LG: I understand that this may be more of a craft question, but when reading the book I realized that a lot of the power in this novel was gained by the restraint — not saying too much, letting glances and touches linger instead of spelling them out. How did you know which moments to prune and which you should allow to bloom?

LCS: I cut everything about the kid who killed Eamon, because that wasn’t important to me. It really is just an isolated, random act of violence. There’s so many people in families that have to deal with that. They don’t have the answers. There’s no court case. The kid is also deceased now. There’s just nothing else to say. It’s just a tragedy. So that’s something I stripped down a lot and took outside completely.

In terms of allowing sections to bloom, when I talked to my editor, I really thought really hard and wanted to make sure what we had in there were a lot of the really comfortable, intimate moments between Evi and Dalton when they’re snowed in together. I wanted it to be so confessional, and they know each other so well, but then there’s intimacy there that has not been breached out of respect. Creating that intimacy was important to me. And one other part, in terms of blooming was allowing the reader felt Evi’s jealousy and anxiety she has about Dalton potentially being in love with another woman.

LG: I know you draw inspiration from your surroundings but what helps you keep going when you’re in a real rut?

LCS: I’m stubborn. I am, for lack of a better word, a finisher. I feel blessed because I’m really easily inspired, if that’s a term. I’m really easily inspired. I can see a man’s cuffs on TV, or the way someone steps out of their house, or something like that, and I’ll get a story I could write from that. So it’s really not the inspiration, it’s just keeping in the flow of it that’s hard. The publishing business is designed to break you down, designed to make you want to give up. I have this desire to dig in and be like, “No, I said I was going to finish this, I’m going to finish it.” I’m okay with letting things go if I know they’re not working or something but Whiskey & Ribbons would not let me go.

The publishing business is designed to break you down, designed to make you want to give up.

LG: I know the internet literary community helped you with some of those moments — you’ve been very candid on Twitter about what goes into your writing and what it took to make this debut novel happen. What did the internet literary space do for you at the start of your writing career?

LCS: The internet is how I learned. I was not a part of an MFA program. I did not have my MFA because I couldn’t afford it. And so I really just would see that people in MFA programs are reading like a craft book, and then reading a book of short stories, and I’d go and see where they got published, and I would go to those literary magazines and see if I liked their stuff there. And if they did, I would send them my stuff. And that’s kind of where I started. So I started reading a lot of what people were writing and then when I loved it, I would write them immediately and be like, “I loved this.” My husband and I started our own literary magazine. And so that really helped a lot. I made a lot of connections, and ended up connecting with the man who published my short story collection, through Whiskey & Ribbons. And so I made a lot of connections that way because then I got to spotlight people, which I feel far more comfortable doing than the spotlight being on me. I wanted to add something positive. I really do think that kind of community is what you make it.

8 Medieval Texts that Prove Things Haven’t Improved that Much

Posted on February 20, 2018July 26, 2021 by 007595

For legitimate reasons, many of us consider the Medieval period a backwards time. Women were second-class citizens, homosexuality was illegal while misogyny was lawful, and religion controlled everything.

But the Medieval period was also a rich and complex time. History is written by the oppressor, so we don’t hear as much about the women from this era who were running businesses, leading their communities, having healthy sex lives, and — yes — writing. Entering college, an English major with her eye set on teaching, I had no love for Medieval literature. I thought it was boring, outdated, so far removed from my own life, experience, and the conversations I had around those topics. And then, as they magically do, a really fantastic professor changed that. In Medieval lit, we read Chaucer — all of Chaucer — in the original Middle English. Three years later, I was starting grad school with a concentration on gender in Medieval literature.

I return to Medieval literature again and again. Each time I pick up one of these texts, I find them full of relevant questions about gender, class, sexuality; they help me examine encounters that I have now, in 2018. The following texts prove that the conversations we are having currently about women’s writing, gendered experiences, and female authority are similar to those that writers like Marie de France, Julian of Norwich, and others were having as early as the 12th century. Which tells me that either the Medieval period was much more progressive than it’s given credit for, or the 21st century intelligentsia isn’t as advanced as it thinks.

Piers Plowman by William Langland

Although written by one of the many, many white men that fill the Medieval lit canon, Piers Plowman is a standout work. It’s a strange, distorted story of a man who splits his time almost equally between sleeping and waking. In both dreams and waking moments, he finds himself on a journey of theological, political and social discovery. In Piers Plowman, women are given agency, which isn’t as uncommon in literature of this period as people might expect. But Langland’s women are also central to major philosophical discussions — this text touts values that, hundreds of years later, would become tenets of socialism and liberation theology, making concise arguments for giving all of your money to the poor and questioning class hierarchies.

Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich

In 1373, Julian of Norwich was given her last rites on her deathbed. She then experienced a series of visions, depicting Christ’s crucifixion in gory detail, which miraculously restored her to health. She spent the rest of her life in a small room, as an anchoress, giving spiritual guidance to her local community. Revelations of Divine Love is her theological thesis on Christ, suffering, and of course love. Texts like this, written by mystics, were daring at the time because women were not meant to write, much less write about theology or the Church. Julian’s text, some 600 years later, reads as a complex essay by a woman ruminating on the trauma of a near-death experience.

The Fire of Love by Richard Rolle

Richard Rolle is one of the few male Medieval mystics, mostly because the term “mystic” is a gendered term. The label suggests emotion and otherworldliness; minus the etymological connection, it’s associated with women in a similar way to “hysteria.” But Richard Rolle’s Fire of Love is full of sensual, mystical energy that disregards the limitations of the gender binary. His work was extremely controversial in his time, for a number of reasons. He held a strong fascination with women’s clothing, chose a life of hermitude, and his writings on God and Christ read, today, as overtly sexual — all making him a popular subject of Medieval queer theory.

Lais of Marie de France by Marie de France

Marie de France was a French poet who lived in England in the 12th century. She’s most famous for her lais, which are short poems that tell stories of chivalry and romance. The Arthurian lais “Lanval” is what she’s known for, but it’s “Bisclavret” that earns her a spot on this list. “Bisclavret” is considered one of the first werewolf stories and, while it’s not explicit, it’s easy to read as a queer narrative. It tells the story of a young man who is the King’s favorite knight. His wife starts to worry because he’s disappearing into the woods every night, and returning “happy and gay.” She fears he’s living a double life with another lover, but soon finds out he’s a werewolf. She leaves him for another man, and he goes to live in the castle with the King, happily ever after — just your classic gay werewolf tale.

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

It’s difficult to write a list of texts from the Middle Ages without including Chaucer. Chaucer is certainly the most prolific Medieval writer, and his works are rich, determined, and funny. He plays around with genre and language in ways that shock and delight even now. I chose The Canterbury Tales over his other work because it’s full of bawdy women and biting class critiques. There is not enough space here to go down the list, so I’ll just throw out my favorite: to spurn his unrelenting advances, a young woman farts in a man’s face.

The Book of Margery Kempe by Margery Kempe

The Book of Margery Kempe is a lot — the first autobiography written in English and penned by a woman who lived a textured life. Margery Kempe defies every preconceived notion most people have about women in the Medieval period. Breaking the stained glass ceilings of her time and writing this book is even more impressive given that she wasn’t a member of the upper class. She lived independently running a brewery. She saw visions of Christ and cried openly in the streets, overcome with emotion. What sets Margery’s book apart is that it’s a theological doctrine written by a devout mystic, yes, but it’s also a memoir written by a woman about her own body, her own emotions, her own experiences.

The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan

Whenever I see Molly Roy’s imagining of a NYC subway map with stops all named for women (an illustration in Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Shapiro’s Nonstop Metropolis), I think of Christine de Pizan. Christine de Pizan wrote a text around an idea that Virginia Woolf (and Molly Roy) would pick up hundreds of years later: What would the world look like if women were afforded the same opportunities as men? In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf invented Shakespeare’s fake sister, who wrote successful plays because she was given the funding, education, and space her brother was. Christine de Pizan rewrites whole chunks of history to situate women from famous myths and histories in one city and names monuments after them to show what a city who values women would look like.

The Trotula (author unknown)

The Trotula texts are actually three medical texts from the 12th century. They explored different areas of “women’s medicine,” touching on everything from menstruation to makeup. The practices within, inaccurate and dangerous, were used to backup pretty much every misogynistic idea Medieval men had about Medieval women. It’s difficult to read in 2018, and it would have been horrible for everyone with a uterus to read when it was published, due to it’s grotesque renderings of anatomy, bizarre medical practices, and the language it uses to describe women. It was thought to have been written by a woman — Trota of Salerno, a medical practitioner — but that’s been hotly, and mostly successfully, contested. There’s no doubt it had a huge impact on how men approached women’s medicine for centuries. I’m including this text on the list not because it should be followed, but because it raises questions relevant to today: who are we going to let shape the conversation about women’s health? How far have we gone to take away women’s authorities on their own bodies? This text and history have shown us what happens when the wrong people and messages dictate power over women. Trotula, as I said, was published 9 centuries ago. Don’t we think it’s time to break old patterns?

The Book That Made Me Realize I Was a Mansplainer—And Saved My Marriage

Posted on February 20, 2018March 23, 2019 by 007595

Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. This time, we asked: What’s a book that made you fall in love?

You already know the efficient neologism “mansplaining,” but let me tell you about it anyway. The word has bite, immediate resonance, self-definition, and even a dash of humor. It carries a critical weight behind it like a sledgehammer yet delicately situates a reader in context. It is powerful, one-word, informative. Merriam-Webster name-checks it in their “Words We’re Watching” section, claiming it is “clearly not going to be dropping out of use anytime soon.”

As you can tell from my mansplanation of mansplaining, I have a tendency to mansplain. Given that most men do annoying things much more than they realize, I probably mansplain more often than I think. And, just as a bullshitter knows one, a mansplainer knows his own kind, even if in another time and on another continent. Sometimes, it’s only another mansplainer who can save us from ourselves. This is why I am smitten with Kōbō Abe’s unlikable protagonist in his allegorical 1962 masterpiece, The Woman in the Dunes — not just because I recognize him, but because recognizing him helped me be a better partner.

Though the novel was a best-seller and translated into twenty languages, it was made even more famous by the 1964 movie filmed by Japanese-Renaissance director Hiroshi Teshigahara, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes and two Oscar nominations. The movie made a splash for its sexuality, the film poster showing a couple, mid-coitus, sprawled across sand. Like the film (also written by Abe), the novel Woman in the Dunes is remarkable for its profile of an inveterate mansplainer who meets his reckoning in a bright-but-bleak desert, a place that cleanses him and holds up a sandy mirror to see his own pompous face.

Jumpei is a teacher and beetle collector, obsessed with finding rare and beautiful things and killing them and showing his colleagues to make them jealous. The man is unenthusiastic about his job, his life, and thinks, “Rarely will you meet anyone so jealous as a teacher. Year after year students tumble along like the waters of a river. They flow away, and only the teacher is left behind, like some deeply buried rock at the bottom of the current.”

I too am a teacher and was one when I read this book in 2008 while living in Japan. I taught English and felt, as Abe’s narrator does and as I assume many teachers do, the Sisyphean exhaustion of pushing children up a knowledge curve only to watch them cartwheel back down. And, perhaps like many teachers, I thought I’d be doing something else at that point in my life (I’d wanted to be an outdoor guide). The conflict between my career fantasy and my often thankless reality caused me to internalize failure. This, coupled with standard, toxic, masculine expectations bred in West Texas, created anxieties I was only fleetingly aware of. Unconsciously, I went looking for an outlet.

I was already engaged to the person, Yumiko, who would be my partner for the next ten years and counting (she knew more than I, it turned out, about Sisyphean labor). I was still at that post-adolescent-still-really-adolescent stage of finding a well-fitting partner but doubting my luck, and I kept trying to fill that Grand Canyon-sized insecurity with obstinate proclamations of knowledge. My favorite tactic was talking over her. Abe’s book didn’t help me see commitment more clearly, but it did help me understand the kind of asshole I was being as we planned our wedding and Yumiko’s immigration to America.

Abe’s book didn’t help me see commitment more clearly, but it did help me understand the kind of asshole I was being.

At my most un-self-aware moment, I remember mansplaining something about the kanji alphabet to Yumiko. I’d been studying Japanese for a year, and one day there I was, in a car on the way to a venue we were considering for our wedding, trying to mansplain to a native Japanese person something I’d just heard on Japanesepod101. If I’d been listening to myself, I would have realized that I sounded just like Jumpei.

To cure his malaise, Jumpei takes frequent trips to wildernesses to collect bugs. He travels to the coast of West Japan, hoping to find a rare beetle he has not yet cataloged. Approached by seaside villagers, Jumpei asks where he can stay for the night, and they bring him to a house bundled in steep dunes that are hundreds of feet tall. A rope ladder must be used to descend into the home. There he finds the woman of the title. Then the rope ladder is removed, and he is not allowed to leave.

The villagers’ designs are for Jumpei to take up with the woman and help her shovel the sand that nightly cascades into her home, preventing the thatched dwelling from collapsing, which would directly lead to the collapse of the village nearby. Logically, the plot makes little sense. Why are the woman and the village forced to live among dunes? Why would the village collapse? Why would the man not be able to climb sand? Film director Teshigahara found constructing steep enough dunes to make the predicament believable almost impossible.

The plot creates a parable for coupled struggle, something Abe knew well. Before the publication of this bleak novel, which ironically made him rich, Abe was living hand-to-mouth, selling vegetables and charcoal with his wife, an artist, in recently fire-bombed Tokyo.

Abe is clearly interested in allegory. Though Jumpei has a name, he is almost always referred to in the book as “the man.” Likewise, his eponymous companion is simply “the woman.” This helps make the characters purified, sterile, like the sand they are surrounded by. Their namelessness helps the novel rise into parable.

It is ironic that Abe’s protagonist is held against his will, made to do arduous chores, and yet I am rooting against him. To survive, the woman and man receive supplies from masked, elderly villagers from above, who lower water, food, cigarettes, and sake, and haul up the sand. They sell the sand, cheaply, to construction companies to make cement. It is not clear whether the woman’s descent into the dunes was a trick or her choice, but she has accepted her condition, and would not escape. Her former husband and child are buried there, she tells the man. She participates in the capture of Jumpei because she must. “Well, life here is really too hard for a woman alone,” she tells him. Alone, she cannot shovel enough sand to stay ahead of the drifts. The woman has accepted fate, but Jumpei has not. That first morning, he refuses to help. Then he starts on the action that defines him in the book.

Mansplainers are legion. It might be, and probably is, that every man who has ever talked to a woman is guilty of it. But Jumpei takes this to another level. He argues with the woman, yells at her about her living, about her goals, her house, her body, her food, all the work she has to do to keep the sand from waving over her home. He mansplains radios. He mansplains the effects of heat. He starts to explain dishwashing. He mansplains why the villagers give them sake. He mansplains that she is a victim of the villagers’ action as much as he, even though she demurs. He says, “‘What are you hesitating for? Come on, I’m not the only one concerned. You’re as much a victim as I am, aren’t you? Well, aren’t you?’” He goes on to explain what he has no intimate knowledge of, but which she obviously does. Jumpei, in a feat all mansplainers should admire, mansplains sand:

I’ve done some research on sand; I’m especially interested in it. That’s why I made it a point to come to a place like this. Sand has a strange fascination for people today. There’s a way of taking advantage of this. The place can be developed as a new sight-seeing spot, for example.

He drones on, sandsplaining. The woman closes her eyes, bearing his diatribe, before revealing the reason his musings are ridiculous: There is nothing to invest in a tourism industry with. David Mitchell, writing in The Guardian, suggests that village in Woman in the Dunes is populated with burakumin, “hamlet people,” or Japan’s traditional lowest caste, often made to do work like shovel shit all day and butcher animals. They are engaged in a class war for survival that upper-crusters like Jumpei hardly acknowledge.

He mansplains radios. He mansplains the effects of heat. Jumpei, in a feat all mansplainers should admire, mansplains sand.

I didn’t catch this dynamic on first read, but it makes the novel snap into focus. The woman, whether or not she chooses to be in the dunes, doesn’t matter. She clearly is trapped, perhaps by the memory of her family, by her status as a burakumin, or by the concern she has for the other villagers. Yet the man is uncomprehending, uncompassionate, spiteful. She makes him meal after meal, sprouts an umbrella over his soup to keep out the sand, offers to wash him, love him. He never once thanks her.

It wasn’t Yumiko’s fault that I related to a character who’d been kidnapped into hostile terrain where dunes threatened to drown him daily. Like the woman of the dunes, who tries everything to make life easier for Jumpei, Yumiko was my stalwart defender and my saving grace. Yumiko was, when I met her, a cosmopolitan translator at a major Japanese automotive company. She could be compassionate to strangers to the point of tears, goofy as a sock puppet when it was the two of us, and tough enough on swindlers to make them wish they’d never met her — I regretted not recording one hour-long conversation in which she berated an asshole working for American Airlines, the kind of confrontation I avoid. Yumiko, as I know now with a decade’s hindsight, is the best person I was going to find for the matrimonial foxhole.

But still, I felt unmoored. Besides externalizing the hidden poison of failure and retrograde masculinity, I was also struggling with commitment; the idea of marriage spooked me and led me to behave even worse than I might have, despite how good I had it. As an undergraduate, I had planned (because I was the kind of guy who planned things like falling in love), to live in Japan for three years, have flings, travel, then return to grad school, meet a fellow academic, marry, and work at each other’s universities, encasing our life with bookshelf fortresses. Yumiko didn’t fit my plan. She wasn’t an academic, had entered my life before I was ready for fidelity. She stood, in testament, as a critique of my wisdom. In turn, I behaved foolishly. Like at the plush ring store with family when I openly mocked prices like an errant uncle at a used car lot. Or when I kept denouncing her wedding ideas because they were too expensive, but happily added to our costs based on my own whims. Or the time I screamed at her in the car for no good reason other than I stress-freaked and she wouldn’t agree with whatever silly point I was making.

Yumiko didn’t fit my plan. She stood, in testament, as a critique of my wisdom. In turn, I behaved foolishly.

Jumpei goes through something of a similar arc. He stays with this woman and initially refuses what he interprets as sexual advances. She sleeps completely nude in the living room the first night, with only a towel on her face. He finds her sand-coated body irresistibly erotic. But instead of confronting his feelings, he yells at the woman, taking his frustrations out on her.

In the midst of all this anxious lashing-out, reading Woman in the Dunes was like holding up a mirror. The desert is so stark and bleak and bright that as it scours Jumpei, it also shone brightly into my eyes, which recognized themselves. This was not a pleasant experience. Denial exists because realizing you’re an asshole is painful. Early on in my reading, I noticed connections between Jumpei and me, our teaching and escaping into nature, our feeling trapped and compensating by positioning ourselves as superior to a person who tried very hard to care for us. As a reader, I wanted to reach into the book and pinch close Jumpei’s lips. I wanted to whisper, you didn’t even like your old life and now you’re in a support system with a hard-working, benevolent partner! But of course I couldn’t do that, and the power of literature is that sometimes the change I want to enact on like-minded characters, I can make on myself.

So, I began shutting up when I would otherwise speak — chewing on what Yumiko said, trying to understand, only responding when I’d run through my mind a few times anything that would otherwise have triggered my mansplation. Yumiko suspected something had changed when I became less hostile in our wedding preparations. When dinner conservations were more cordial, like-minded. She herself, of course, had grown doubts about me (who wants to marry an inveterate mansplainer?), but the change solidified whatever spark she’d originally seen. No one else was going to be as patient as she’d already been with me. I don’t want to suggest that it saved my marriage and possibly my life, but I might have to.

This was in 2008, right around the time Rebecca Solnit wrote that article in TomDispatch.com that would help make the term “mansplaining” vernacular. The term “mansplaining” was brand new; Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” inspired its coinage that year. I didn’t know the term, but I knew what I was — thanks to Kōbō Abe, who laid what I was doing bare before me.

The Woman in the Dunes alone wasn’t enough to cure me. Solnit’s work has also been especially illuminating, but so has reading The Toast (R.I.P.) and essays like “Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me.” That is the thing about being an ally, with our lovers and with our colleagues. We former and current mansplainers have to remain vigilant with ourselves lest the sores of our privilege erupt on our tongues and cause us to speak ill. To slip back into privilege-speak, to harangue, to harass, feels powerful, like Anakin Skywalker crossing to the Dark Side, though it’s important to note that he lost his love in the process. I’m happy to report that I haven’t lost mine. I haven’t yet been the man from American Airlines on the other side of the line from my wife, having my mansplanation served back to me.

The power of literature is that sometimes the change I want to enact on like-minded characters, I can make on myself.

Which is what happens to Jumpei — his obnoxious mansplaining sandwich is served back to him by the end. One brilliant aspect of the book is that Abe gives the game away at the beginning. A brief first chapter lets readers know Jumpei went missing, was hardly missed, and was never seen again. Readers know he will never leave the confines of the dunes because they provided a purifying cleanse to his sickness. That he, after declaring over and over he’ll never submit to the villagers’ and woman’s plotting, in the end embraces his lot and the woman who wants to work by his side. He begins to look forward to eventually raising a child, keeping a home, and forming part of the wayward village. Jumpei is never heard from again because really, he isn’t the same person.

Like any good allegory, Woman in the Dunes is ambiguous. At the end, when the pregnant woman is lifted away to receive medical care, the villagers forget to raise the rope ladder, giving Jumpei a means of escape. He stares at it but declines, instead choosing to remain in his home. Other critics have found this ending bleak. They read in the novel a struggle and failure for existence beyond soul-sucking labor. I see his decision to remain in the dunes as a spark of belonging, of responsibility, of a desire to stop escaping and becoming a better man — which is what I hope I’ve done with Yumiko, who was kind enough to give me space to recover from an inward sense of failure and the bullshit West Texas breeds into its men.

There is an elemental quality to the book. At one point, still hopeful of escape, Jumpei says to himself, “Men have escaped through any number of concrete walls and iron bars.” But we know from the opening chapter that our protagonist will never escape. He will be absorbed by sand, which he came from and to which he will return. The woman shows the man how to clean dishes using only sand. Later, the man recalls a blackjack, sand packed into a leather sack, “striking power comparable to that of an iron or lead bar.” Sand as cleanser, sand as weapon. Eventually, the sand erases him, the “he” that was impetuous, self-absorbed, limiting, ungrateful.

I like to read into this that men’s initial, natural state is not as mansplainers, that the toxic part of masculinity is an aberration. That when pushed against elements, or returned to them, we become better allies, better partners, better lovers; that a book can cleanse like sand wiping guck off a dish, and also serve as weapon, slapping the head of the errant mansplainer that pokes its head from the hovel of dunes.

What Anaïs Nin Can Teach Us About Online Dating

Posted on February 20, 2018January 14, 2022 by 007595

I t’s 2018, and if you’ve spent any chunk of the last decade single, you have probably tried online dating. Since we are the first generation where online dating is so ubiquitous, we’re learning and creating the etiquette as we go. What happens when we swipe on a coworker? How forward is too forward? What do you do when you run into someone at the bar who you earlier ghosted on OkCupid? It’s easy to think that we are in a new era when it comes to romance; not only do we have apps that can match us with hundreds of potential dates with ease, but society is re-examining ideas around monogamy, what relationships look like, and so much more. But while the technology may have changed, the fundamental issues of dating and relationships have barely budged since the age of dowries. Plenty of pre-Tinder minds have applied their literary genius to the problem of love, and their wisdom still applies. Which is why, when I’m facing a dating dilemma, I like to turn to Anaïs Nin.

Nin, a French author who split her time between France and New York City, contributed to literature through her short stories and personal diaries published in the 1930s through the 1970s (some posthumously). They are refreshingly open and honest looks at erotica and female sexuality, and worth reflecting on if your mental real estate has a healthy portion around the state of sex today. When I first read Nin I was amazed at how I kept forgetting that she was writing from a completely different time. I identified with so many of her experiences that and I find myself revisiting her work when I’m finding the dating game in 2018 especially tricky. So without further ado, here are the lessons we can learn from Anaïs Nin’s writing that still apply to the world of online dating today.

1. Learn how to sext

Let’s look at a not uncommon exchange I had the other day:

Me: Hey! How’s your Tuesday treating you?

Them: It’s ok. It would be even better if you were sucking my dick.

<Unmatch/Delete/Unsubscribe me from this newsletter for the love of all that is good>

By all means, insert some sexting into your courtship ritual, but if you want to actually get anywhere you’re going to need to put some effort in. Luckily, you can find some Ninspiration here.

Here’s what Nin would say about that slapdash approach: “There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.” This is even more true now than it was in Nin’s day; the imagination is especially critical when you’re communicating through a screen! Without body language and physical chemistry to rely on, the imagination needs to work double time. So by all means, insert some sexting into your courtship ritual, but if you want to actually get anywhere you’re going to need to put some effort in. Luckily, you can find some Ninspiration here too. Her erotica was controversial when published, but today we can look to her lyrical prose as a model: “When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body.”

Quick poll, are you more aroused by Nin or by “Hey babe, DTF?” If you’ve done it right, by the time you catch eyes in the dimly lit bar you agreed upon with your Tinder match, sparks will fly. The best case scenario for your effort will echo this sentiment: “He had not touched me. He did not need to. His presence had affected me in such a way that I felt as if he had caressed me for a long time.”

2. Smash false dichotomies

Part of why Nin was so controversial during her time is because she challenged people to rethink the heteronormative and patriarchal principles forced upon her. This is most present when reading Henry and June, her published diary that documents her relationships with Henry and June Miller while she was married to her first husband, Hugo. Nin’s diaries aren’t just about sex as recreation, they actively reflect her examining of the sexual role she was told to play by society: “Often, though, the passivity of the woman’s role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? It terrifies me. Do women act thus? Does June go to Henry when she wants him? Does she mount him? Does she wait for him? He guides my inexperienced hands. It is like a forest fire, to be with him. New places of my body are aroused and burnt. He is incendiary. I leave him in an unquenchable fever.” Throughout the novel we see Nin explore a not-always-ethical polyamorous dynamic, her attraction to women, and even voyeurism. Later, when asked for life advice Nin would reflect “you should experiment with everything, try everything…. We are taught all these dichotomies, and I only learned later that they could work in harmony. We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences, and very painful one’s sometimes -the feeling that we have to choose.”

3. Set emotional boundaries

If you’re going to experiment with everything, though, you also need to be honest with yourself and others — something Nin learned the hard way. Nin’s affairs with Henry and June are often cited as a catalyst that broke up the Miller couple, but it is also clear that Nin found herself in the middle of a sometimes volatile relationship. All while balancing her marriage to Hugo. While she was navigating the complex dynamics between Henry, June, and Hugo, she also had to navigate her own complex emotions. “The truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings. When I return to Hugo in the evening, to the peace and warmth of the house, I return with deep contentment, as if this was the only condition for me. I bring home to Hugo a whole woman, freed of all ‘possessed’ fevers, cured of the poison of restlessness and curiosity which used to threaten our marriage, cured through action. Our love lives, because I live. I sustain and feed it. I am loyal to it, in my own way, which cannot be his way. If he ever reads these lines, he must believe me. I am writing calmly, lucidly while waiting for him to come home, as one waits for the chosen lover, the eternal one.” By the end of the book, you can sense her emotional exhaustion from balancing three different partners. It’s a good reminder that just because you can smash dichotomies, it doesn’t mean you have to if it doesn’t work for you.

6. Click “share”

Over-sharing and over-documenting is framed as a real concern in the digital age, especially when it comes to broadcasting our relationships. However, Nin’s work makes an excellent case for the benefits of sharing and documenting your life. For Nin, writing about her life wasn’t just acceptable — it was essential: “I believe one writes because one needs to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me… Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”

If you’ve ever related to someone’s twitter thread, been endeared by someone’s earnest OkCupid profile, or had an “aha” moment about dating thanks to someone’s Facebook status, you have Nin to thank.

Nin was a trailblazer in women writing openly about their personal experiences. We can easily get caught up in the wild and sexy life she wrote about, but as Deena Metzger reflects “We often forget that we are in the presence of a woman who lived through war, and a woman that decided that he would have her own life, and we forget that there was a time when that didn’t happen. That women did not have their own life.” So if you’ve ever related to someone’s twitter thread, been endeared by someone’s earnest OkCupid profile, or had an “aha” moment about dating thanks to someone’s Facebook status, you have Nin to thank. “She brought in the journal. She brought in the articulation and the recording of one’s own life, and how important that was. She brought in the intimacy, she brought in the personal.” reflects Deena.

5. Make Mistakes

Which leads us to our last piece of advice: “You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.” Nin is the patron saint of exploring her romance, even if it hurt. Time and time again, she so clearly articulated how being afraid to make mistakes holds us back romantically: “Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.” However, she was also clear that being willing to make mistakes doesn’t absolve you from responsibility, but that responsibility isn’t limiting “The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny.” So yes, try new things, take that leap, make mistakes, learn from them, and don’t let fear hold you back.

Nin’s work is timeless, messy, steamy, and thoughtful. Embracing our inner Nin is freeing not only for ourselves, but for the folks we try to court and for the wider dating pool. I hope the next time you find yourself swiping you think of Nin, and open up your mind, your heart, and your inner eroticist.

How I Bought Into Gone with the Wind’s Mythology of Whiteness

Posted on February 19, 2018May 2, 2020 by 007595

I am a re-reader. I have been all my life. The habit was born of necessity: I grew up poor and itinerant. The books I accumulated were from thrift stores, picked up in paperback for fifty cents or in hardback for a lofty dollar. I tried to pick books that were long and would last me a while. Periods away from the library or school left me without fresh books, so I would read the good ones over again.

Gone with the Wind was one of the longest books I had ever laid eyes on that wasn’t a history or a Bible. I knew the title from conversations about the movie. The cover made it look sexy, those flames and dark-haired lovers. My mother never had the time to censor what I could read, so at nine years old, I dove into Margaret Mitchell’s epic of the Civil War.

Except it isn’t. Written in 1936, Gone with the Wind predates the concept of Young Adult literature, or really even the idea of a young adult. But as the novel begins, Scarlett O’Hara is a sixteen-year-old girl caught between two cultures and about to embark on the greatest adventure of her life. If that’s not YA I don’t know what is. It indulges in some of the most common trope constructions of the genre: Scarlett isn’t beautiful, except that she definitely is. She is torn between two love interests who are both very attractive but appeal to different parts of her nature. She is set against insurmountable odds, yet gifted with privileges of which she is never made aware. She proves astonishingly competent at skills never taught to her: mathematics, running a business, shooting a trained soldier in the face. Scarlett O’Hara is Katniss Everdeen in a hoop skirt.

Scarlett proves astonishingly competent at skills never taught to her. Scarlett O’Hara is Katniss Everdeen in a hoop skirt.

I fell in love with this book. Scarlett was easy to identify with: bratty, cunning, manipulative, emotionally turbulent, artificially disguised as a victim. She flouts social convention and disagrees with the limits set for her by a restrictive society and a boring family. As a burgeoning pre-teen, this was like catnip. The short sex scenes were smoldering promises of what was to come in my own sex life. I read these scenes in that deliciously furtive way that kids do; trying to discern the mechanics from flowery euphemisms. I wept over the personal and political tragedies of Scarlett’s life like they were my own. I was hooked.

I read Gone with the Wind the first few times as all kids read books: innocently. I did not yet know how to evaluate assertions or assumptions in fiction, to discern through an author’s use of tone what she valued and what she despised. I did not yet have the tools to understand the book’s racist content or consider my dissimilarities to Scarlett O’Hara. I was her and she was me and that was it. I entered adolescence with this book as my sorting hat. In the same way people use the Harry Potter houses to decide who among their friends is a Slytherin or a Gryffindor, I divided the girls I knew into Scarletts or Melanies, boys as either Ashleys or Rhetts. The Hufflepuff types around me were minor characters: the India Wilkses and Charles Hamiltons.

I came back to Gone with the Wind as a teenager, finally in early womanhood as Scarlett is in the first section of the novel. This re-read was brought on by scarcity; I was losing my home. It was not the first time. I can’t count the number of times we were evicted, either formally by a landlord or informally by family or my mother’s partners, but I was familiar with the process at this point. I crammed all that I could into my backpack and prepared to leave a place and never return. On this occasion, I was the last one in the house. My mother’s boyfriend, who owned the place, had gone for the weekend, having made it clear that he wanted to return to his home with all traces of my mother and her children gone from it. When my work of packing up was done, my mother was supposed to come pick me up.

She didn’t.

The electricity had been turned off and the cupboard was bare. I was no stranger to these conditions, either. I lay down on a couch in a back room without supper, lit a candle, and began to read. The book on the top of my pack was Gone with the Wind.

This time, I expected to identify with Scarlett in the post-war years at Tara. After all, she was starving. She had to pick cotton to survive. She was saddled with her mentally ill father and functionally orphaned by her mother’s death. She had nothing, yet her indomitable spirit carried her through and back to prosperity.

I began to dislike Scarlett. I saw how privileged she was. She had literal slaves to contribute labor to her household.

At least, that was what I remembered.

Instead, for the first time, I began to dislike Scarlett. I saw how privileged she was. She owned a home and a farm that could not be taken from her, even by the tax collector. She had literal slaves to contribute labor to her household, who were inexplicably devoted to her as if she were their own child rather than the issue of two rich white people. She had family who loved her, including the unfailing sweetness of her despised sister-in-law, Melanie Wilkes.

The first time I read “I’ll never go hungry again,” I had cried. I was a baby feminist and I saw only a stubborn, brave woman following her ambition and refusing to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

This time, I laughed. Yes, Scarlett is stubborn. Yes, she basically decides to resort to sex work in order to keep her property. But she has no idea that she’s still a princess in this ruined kingdom. When Scarlett adds up her assets after this declaration, she has the cold eye of a jeweler considering a flawed gem: she has her own prettiness, a pair of diamond earrings, and a set of velvet drapes hanging in her house. Her million-dollar estate, populated and run by three unpaid human slaves, are not included in her inventory, even as she plans to gather up most of them and travel to Atlanta to engage in the aforementioned sex work. She is so blinded by her privilege that even in her ruinous state she cannot see these things for what they are: the unearned gifts of her station.

I was not Scarlett O’Hara. I never would be. She was just another rich bitch who had no idea how lucky she was.

By the light of a candle, I laughed in a house with no heat as the snow fell outside. My laugh echoed in the empty darkness where no family or friend might have heard me. Certainly no domestic servants came to ask what was wrong, did I maybe need some corn whiskey or warm milk to calm me down?

I was not Scarlett O’Hara. I never would be. She was just another rich bitch who had no idea how lucky she was.

I read the novel again in college, my own post-war period. I had dropped out of high school and failed to launch. I had passed through several periods of homelessness, reading Gone with the Wind in starlight as it filtered through an olive grove, hoping not to be hassled by the cops. When I was hungry, I would read the passage about Scarlett’s hunger at post-bellum Tara, where she dreams of feasts of the past. I can recite that section from memory:

How careless they had been of food then, what prodigal waste! Rolls, corn muffins, biscuit and waffles, dripping butter, all at one meal. Ham at one end of the table and fried chicken at the other, collards swimming richly in pot liquor iridescent with grease, snap beans in mountains on brightly flowered porcelain, fried squash, stewed okra, carrots in cream sauce thick enough to cut. And three desserts, so everyone might have his choice, chocolate layer cake, vanilla blanc mange and pound cake topped with sweet whipped cream. The memory of those savory meals had the power to bring tears to her eyes as death and war had failed to do, had the power to turn her ever-gnawing stomach from rumbling emptiness to nausea.

I would consider my own prodigal wastes: the last few cold fries I had thrown away when they failed to entice me, or the burnt edge of a frozen pizza cut off and tossed in the trash. I would read this section again and again, thinking of Thanksgiving dinners given by parents of friends who’d invite me out of pity. The fast food jobs I had had that included a discounted meal during my shift. Once I knew Scarlett for a spoiled brat, there was no going back. But at least I could suffer hunger with the O’Hara’s instead of suffering it alone.

It did not occur to me to ask how hungry her slaves were. When the household suffered food shortage, how did it affect those who had always received the scraps of the table? I was hungry like Scarlett was hungry: in a way that did not consider other people.

I was hungry like Scarlett was hungry: in a way that did not consider other people.

Community college taught me to read critically, and then to read as a writer. I began to pick apart the choices Mitchell made. As my racial consciousness was shakily born, I began to encounter Gone with the Wind as a cultural touchstone of whiteness. I saw the reverent references to it in other works: in Prince of Tides, in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. The Southern writers of the next generation held Mitchell blameless and enshrined her as the keeper of the Old South’s identity. In doing so, they helped preserved the myth of the happy slave, the people who had made the whole story happen without ever existing at its center.

Additional works in the same universe failed in the same way to examine the book’s relationship to whiteness. Critical disasters in every sense of the word, Scarlett and Rhett Butler’s People were pale and puny fanfic-quality imitations of Mitchell’s competent prose, while also taking no action to advance the storylines of any of the black characters beyond their subservient roles in the original. Only Alice Randall’s unauthorized parody, The Wind Done Gone, does any of that work, and the Mitchell estate did everything in its power to try and stop that racial recontextualization and queering of the original novel from happening.

It was in reading these other books that I began to see the irony in my love and rejection of Scarlett O’Hara. I wasn’t her; I wasn’t born to privilege, a slave owner, a rich widow who was neatly handed the tools for triumph during the only adversity she had ever experienced. As a poor white woman, I was more like the O’Hara’s unfortunate neighbor, Emmy Slattery, who attempted to buy Tara when Scarlett was down on her luck. As a fat woman working in food service and manual labor, I was more like Mammy: seizing my dignity by force of will beneath the yoke of terrible oppression. As a self-made success, I was more like Rhett Butler, who made his living as a gambler and discarded the morality of his culture to live as a hedonist and drunkard.

As a poor white woman, I was more like the O’Hara’s unfortunate neighbor who attempted to buy Tara when Scarlett was down on her luck.

Except I was none of those characters. I was, in fact, Scarlett O’Hara.

The last time I read this book, I was older than Scarlett will ever be. The novel ends when she is 28, estranged from her husband, and the negligent mother of three children, one of whom has died. She has not grown up, nor learned anything from her mistakes. She is still a spoiled brat, insisting that she will get what she wants in the final words of the book. Because she has never known a life where that isn’t the case.

Re-reading is a way of encountering your former selves, tucked neatly between the pages like pressed spring flowers and autumn leaves. If you are honest and your memory is good, your former selves will speak to you as if this often-thumbed volume is your own diary. The last time you passed through this story, you were someone else. Because I have now read it over a hundred times in thirty years, Gone with the Wind holds many, many versions of me.

Re-reading is a way of encountering your former selves, tucked neatly between the pages like pressed spring flowers and autumn leaves.

It holds my youngest conscious self; the one who had just begun to experience lust and doubt and accept that I am separate from the universe and subject to it. It holds my teenage self, trapped in homelessness and loneliness and searching for a way out, even if it means following Scarlett’s blueprint of marrying young for a shot at a soft bed and some hot meals. It holds the dawn of my adult consciousness, when I was finally able to see the way this story is tilted to keep Scarlett always in focus and deprive slave characters of any equivalent humanity in the narrative.

Finally, in this last read, I was able to grapple fully with my own privilege and lifelong investment in white supremacy. I am ashamed to say that I never understood how truly hollow and mean-spirited the archetype of the Southern Belle is until I saw a comic of the ubiquitous hoop skirt made up of a slave ship in the article “The Southern Belle is a Racist Fiction” in 2014. I had thought (as most white liberals often think) that I was good enough, anti-racist enough, that I was not invested in racist fictions anymore, nor deriving benefits from slavery and the structural forms of inequality that followed it in in my everyday life. These, too, are racist fictions. It took me far too long to see that even my optimism was a gift that helped me move toward the life I wanted.

American schoolchildren are taught a sanitized version of their own history; one that corresponds neatly to Gone with the Wind. We are induced to believe that many slaves were happy, treated as members of the family, and were transported out of Africa as “workers.” We are told that everyone has been equal since 1776 and free since 1865, glossing briskly over the struggles of 1965 with a video of Martin Luther King delivering a speech that solved racism so that Obama could be elected in 2008. Congratulations, it’s a post-racial America! We are taught, explicitly and implicitly, that anyone who says different is just complaining because life is hard for everybody.

Congratulations, it’s a post-racial America! We are taught, explicitly and implicitly, that anyone who says different is just complaining because life is hard for everybody.

As the product of this myth treated as truth, of the policies of redlining and disenfranchisement and brutality that are the legacy of this American mythology, all white Americans are complicit. We are all Scarlett O’Hara. Some of us are Scarlett O’Hara at her richest and most viciously powerful: Ivanka Trump in a ball gown thinking herself the favorite child of a self-made man who tells it like it is. Some of us are post-war Scarlett, taking an inventory of our privilege and remaining blind to over half of it being the product of plunder.

When I thought of myself as rising from the ashes of a ruined life and congratulating myself on digging my way out of poverty, going to college, rising to my own well-earned pride, I did not realize for many years that much of what came my way was luck. It was unearned privilege. Doors were open for me when they remained closed to others because I am white. Because I am not disabled. Because I am not trans. I worked hard just as Scarlett worked hard. But it took witnessing her ignorance for me to realize that I was also standing on someone’s back to reach these heights. The trouble with most white Americans is that we never look down.

It took witnessing Scarlett’s ignorance for me to realize that I was also standing on someone’s back to reach these heights. The trouble with most white Americans is that we never look down.

I have read Gone with the Wind over a hundred times. I have seen countless stories and videos that strive to explain who these angry poor white people are who elected Trump and insist on border walls and believe that abortion is murder and vote time and time again to keep themselves in poverty so long as their black neighbors suffer just a little worse than they do. I have spent my life in the presence of white feminists who have only read Gone with the Wind once and never got past the initial rush: what a trailblazer Margaret Mitchell was! Scarlett O’Hara is #goals! The O’Haras are the blueprint for the temporarily embarrassed millionaire: dirt-poor but still better than you because of how they were born. Gone with the Wind sells the white bootstrapper myth as romantic reality for white people. It has been doing it for nearly a century and it can be found in every book store, every thrift store, and every library in America.

It takes real work, as a white person, to realize the racism in which you have been steeped all your life. It takes re-reading the texts you hold most dear. It takes literacy and critical thinking and listening to people of color to realize that not only is Gone with the Wind fiction, but most of what you know is fiction. Your family history is fiction. Your elementary school textbooks are fiction. Your construction of yourself is fiction. We all have to read ourselves more than once. We have to proofread and edit ourselves. We have to rewrite ourselves every day. We have to learn to separate truth from fiction from fake news. This is a monumental task, and most of us will fail.

Kids and adults will continue to pick up this book for the first time. Gone with the Wind is in some little girl’s hands right now, and she’s seeing the world through Scarlett O’Hara’s eyes.

I hope she goes back and reads it again.

11 Literary Characters Who Should Run For President

Posted on February 19, 2018July 6, 2020 by 007595

President’s Day was conceived as a day to honor particular past presidents. But in this crucially important midterm election year (you’ve checked that your registration is current, right?), we’ve decided to use the opportunity to think about our dream leaders of the free world. Here are some of the fictional characters we think could do a great job in politics—or at least a better job than our current options.

Snowball, Animal Farm by George Orwell

Though he’s eventually defeated and scapegoated by a more violent-minded pig, Snowball is the equal-opportunity leader that the farm needs. He gets everyone reading and simplifies ideologies in order to ensure that all animals on the farm understand the plans for the future. He is an orator beyond the oink, one that can unify and rile up the people and use words as a tool for persuasion rather than creating conflict—you wouldn’t find Snowball in the middle of a Twitter rant. Concerned that a pig can’t legally be president? We invite you to look at the current administration.

Sean Phillips, Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle

What this country needs is a President who will speak out against the horrors of gun violence. Sean Phillips survived a (self-inflicted) gunshot to the face as a young adult, and his subsequent guilt and isolation might give him the perspective and empathy a politician needs to get something done.

Hermione Granger, the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Hermione Granger is whip-smart, a cultural chameleon (she was raised by Muggles but thrives in the magical world), and has been shutting down mansplaining since before we called it mansplaining. She understands the importance of reading and the arts (or at least the Dark Arts), and you would never find the founder of S.P.E.W. cutting funding for important organizations that support people living in poverty.

Celie, The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Though she comes from far less privilege than the typical presidential candidate, Celie has survived and triumphed, coming out victorious and learning how to love herself through the process. She would be a strong candidate for those who have survived sexual assault and an example of how to find community through adversity. In this time of “thoughts and prayers,” it would also be nice to have a politician whose faith is more than a cynical pose.

Sherlock Holmes, the Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

We’ve had movie stars become President, so why not a detective? Sherlock Holmes’ skills and legacy could make him an ideal candidate; he’s famous, brilliant, sought-after, and so, so detail-oriented. Sure, Watson describes his knowledge of politics as “feeble,” and he’s also a huge asshole, but these things are no longer barriers to the presidency. He’d probably have to cool it on the casual cocaine, though.

The narrator, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The narrator of Ellison’s novel is smart, a skilled orator, and knows firsthand how cruel this country can be to young black men. It is through his passionate speeches that he is picked up by the Brotherhood, where he strives to serve his community in Harlem. Although he’d have a lot to overcome—the bigotry of voters, his involvement in a riot, the uncertain motives of the Brotherhood itself—by the end of the novel he’s looking for a way to speak for other downtrodden people rendered invisible by society. What better way than for this community organizer to run for president?

Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Clarissa Dalloway would be the cool, calm, collected President who would react well under pressure since she has come to terms with the reality of death. Class- and propriety-conscious Clarissa would also be a master of diplomacy, keeping foreign affairs running smoothly.

Matilda, Matilda by Roald Dahl

At five and a half years old, Matilda is a little too young to legally run, but you can already tell that her brilliant and serious mind and lack of tolerance for bullies would do the country a world of good. And though we’ve never had a leader with telekinesis, we’re guessing it would come in handy in dozens of ways. Unfortunately, Matilda was born in England, so she’s probably out—perhaps she can be the first telekinetic secretary of defense?

The Man in the Shack, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

We’ve already gone on record suggesting that the best president would be a president that had zero interest in ruling over anybody—or, as Douglas Adams put it, “those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.” The only solution: a solipsistic ruler, who doesn’t believe anything is real besides himself, though he’s willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to cats and whiskey. That’s a slogan many millennials can stand behind.

Jing-mei (June) Woo, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

After June’s mother dies of a sudden brain aneurysm, June steps in to take her place at the table of the Joy Luck Club—and comes to terms with her mother’s memory by reconnecting with her lost siblings in China. This ability to take the reins, step into a gap in leadership, and move forward with extreme gumption is what can save families in this country. And it would be great to have a president with experience understanding and uniting immigrant families, rather than splitting them apart.

Esperanza Cordero, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Esperanza’s story speaks to a group that is destined to be a quarter of the U.S. population in the next 50 years—not to mention any child that has felt the need to leave their hometowns for something “greater.” Esperanza, whose name means hope, spends her life coming to terms with the pressures that keep down women, specifically Chicanas. Hmm, hope, presidential campaign… why are we feeling so nostalgic right now?

Alternate Shakespearean Endings

Posted on February 16, 2018June 16, 2025 by 007595

“Juliet Changes Her Mind”

by Amelia Gray

It was right around the moment all seemed lost and her man lay dead on her lap, the moment the friar had left her to do whatever, when the candles addressed their warmth to her alone, their crackling sound like angel wings, like insects pinched above the flame, the moment her lover’s lips lost their warmth, and the slab felt extremely slablike, cold as the crypt around her, which she had chosen as the best location for this performance but was lately feeling a bit dramatic and — she could admit — a little silly, the candles smoking up the place and dripping wax all over, walls lined with wrapped figures of the proud familial dead, this place being so gross and forbidden even from her most wicked cousins’ most wicked dares that she had never so much as touched its heavy iron door and now here she was camping out, long after dark with a man’s body pinning her, it seemed, to the slab; pushing him off her required setting down his dagger, but at last he slumped aside, and his head when it tipped from the low-set stone bumped on the floor like a fresh summer melon and she saw him then for what he was, a dead boy in his own grave, glory fading with the night, candle wax stuck to the long lashes she had loved until that moment. When she pulled herself up and felt the pins and needles of feeling come back to her legs, she nearly cried out with a keen and sudden sense of everything, of the whole glorious world filled to bursting, wild and ready for her and, stumbling over herself, she made a break for the iron door and the east, where life itself would rise to meet her with the sun.

Psyche in the Dark

by Miranda Schmidt

When he comes at night, he is invisible. She hears his approach in the sound of his footsteps, in the pulse of his breath in the dark. He could be anything.

Some nights, she imagines him human. Some nights she imagines him monster. A man’s head. A snake’s body. A wolf’s teeth. Hooves.

She is not here by force, though she has trouble remembering when it was that she made this particular choice, how it was that she entered into this peculiar marriage. The rules are simple: she cannot see him. She may roam the castle freely but, when he comes to her, she must cast no light.

Her sisters believe she has married a monster. They visit her. They give her advice. Light the lamp, they tell her. See the monster. Kill him. Free yourself.

Sometimes they almost convince her. Sometimes, when they leave, she feels so sure of what she must do. But, as she listens to the deep breaths of her husband’s helpless sleep, she cannot bring herself to cast the light.

In the dark, she lives in possibility. Her husband might be a monster or a god or a man. He may be ugly or beautiful. He may be human or beast. Sometimes she believes it would be possible for her to spend her life in this way, to trust in not knowing, never knowing, the truth of her marriage.

But when the lamp is lit, as she knows, one day, it must be, her marriage, her life, all the nights behind her and all the nights to come, become singular. So, for now, she keeps the lamp beneath the bed, the knife beneath the pillow, and when her husband comes to her, she keeps her eyes closed so she can feel him in the dark.