How Edith Wharton Changed My Understanding of Marriage

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Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. This time, we asked: What book was your feminist awakening?

There’s a scene from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor in which Wenxiu (Wu Jun Mei), the second wife of the recently exiled emperor, tells her husband Puyi (John Lone) that she wants a divorce. “I do not want to be your mistress any longer,” she declares in the back of their chauffeured sedan while seated next to Puyi’s first wife, Wanrong (Joan Chen). Both women are shown draped in furs, each clutching their respective lap dogs. Later, we see Wenxiu make good on this threat as she walks out the front door of their European-style house and into the rain without an attendant or even an umbrella. It is a brief moment of triumph in the otherwise unhappy biopic.

Wenxiu (Wu Jun Mei) leaves her life as second wife behind in The Last Emperor

Being that I was around eight or nine years old at the time, most of the political history was lost on me. But I found myself drawn in by the grand images of the Forbidden City (a place I wouldn’t visit in real life until I was 20 years old), the adult themes (including opium addiction and lesbianism), and the epic tragedy of it all. The “first wife” and “second wife” statuses — which my mother assured me was the norm in China back in those days — was something I was still learning to wrap my head around about the same time I watched the film version of The Joy Luck Club. Perhaps the seemingly dated concept of polygamous marriage so struck me because somewhere in my subconscious I recognized its familiarity. I grew up fully aware that my mother and I were my father’s second family, and so I knew there was a “first wife,” whom he remained legally married to, and a first family filled with older half-siblings that I would see from time to time. I had an inkling that it was not the typical arrangement, but my parents lived together in one home, so it was close enough to a nuclear family as far as I was concerned. My parents finally separated when I was 12, and the comforts of my childhood departed along with my father in more ways than one.

I grew up fully aware that my mother and I were my father’s second family.

In my mid-twenties, fresh from first heartbreak and unsteady bouts of employment, I was long overdue to encounter Edith Wharton. I started with The Age of Innocence, which was perfection. But it was The House of Mirth that allowed me to see my life as a single woman in a whole new light.

The novel introduces its flawed heroine, Lily Bart, through the eyes of Lawrence Selden, a bachelor with little wealth, and who therefore is not a suitable match for Miss Bart. The first few pages read like a modern New York story: two friends run into each other at Grand Central. On account of her “thirst,” Selden invites Lily back to his place for some tea and a smoke. It is there in his Madison Avenue apartment that she remarks: “How delicious to have a place like this all to one’s self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman.” A typical man, he doesn’t quite understand his own privilege, replying, “Even women…have been known to enjoy the privileges of a flat.” She immediately sets him straight, interjecting: “Oh, governesses — or widows. But not girls — not poor, miserable, marriageable girls!” Therein lies the central question of the narrative: how can a woman live independently? In Lily Bart’s case, she doesn’t, not if she wants to remain in the good graces of society. Wharton, of course, was writing about the leisure class. Certainly, the char woman scrubbing the steps that Lily later passes while leaving Selden’s apartment doesn’t have the same luxury of contemplating gender politics in between social calls on a hot afternoon.

Therein lies the central question of the narrative: how can a woman live independently?

In my case, it was also thanks to a certain amount of privilege that I had been able to pursue unpaid internships and underpaid gigs before landing my first full-time, salaried job at the age of 25. Only then was I finally able to afford New York City rent on my own, without assistance from my father. I realize how lucky I was to have his help in those lean times, but the money did not come without an emotional cost. I remember the year he disinvited me from spending Christmas with his first family. “It’s better if you don’t come,” he said over the phone without giving me any reason. I cried as I told my mother, and we speculated what may have caused the change in heart. Although I had never considered that he might have been ashamed of me, perhaps he thought members of his other family would be uncomfortable with my presence. Maybe to his other kids, I would always represent his past dalliance, his brief abandonment of them. When I did see my father before flying back to New York, his parting gift to me was an envelope full of cash. He traded in money instead of love. I accepted the consolation prize, but it would be the last holiday I would spend in California.

Back in Lily Bart’s time, without money from her family, a woman’s only option was marriage. As the 29-year-old approaches potential spinster age — “I’m as old as the hills, of course,” Lily jokes — the pressure to marry is inescapable. When Selden asks her, “Isn’t marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?” she observes a clear difference between men and women when it comes to marriage: “a girl must, a man may if he chooses.” Here, she speaks to her lack of financial independence, for even as a grown woman, Lily lives as her aunt’s ward and receives an allowance. Of Gerty Farish, Selden’s unmarried cousin who has enough money to live modestly on her own but remains an outsider in society, Lily laments, “she is free and I am not.” Lily’s own situation is complicated by gambling debts and the constant need to keep up appearances. Only marriage to a wealthy man would solve her financial woes, and so Wharton draws a direct line between marriage and money — both of which went hand in hand for a woman’s survival.

Once, when I was feeling particularly blue about being single, a friend pointed out that for the majority of history women have been the property of men. Or, at the very least, they had no choice when it came to relying on men to provide them with a comfortable life and respectability. It was his way of helping me to maintain perspective. Thinking about Lily Bart’s fate, about that of so many women of literature and stories of the past, about my own mother’s struggles, I knew he was right. The lack of financial independence has proven to be the ruin of so many famous fallen women such as Madame Bovary, while Anna Karenina finds herself trapped by her class status. For these birds in gilded cages, the only way out seems to be death. For my mother, who grew up in a poor fishing village and as a second-class citizen in British-ruled Hong Kong, her fortune changed in America, where she met my father and helped him build his real estate business. And while I have come to respect her ability to free herself from their relationship, I also witnessed how her financial situation deteriorated afterward.

While I have come to respect my mother’s ability to free herself from her relationship, I also witnessed how her financial situation deteriorated afterward.

Perhaps this is why Wenxiu’s decision to leave behind her life as a royal consort in exchange for her freedom seemed incredibly brave to me. That she’s shown walking off screen, into the unknown, only added to the symbolism of the moment. We never see what happens to her in the film. In reality, she filed for divorce and was stripped of her titles. She became a schoolteacher, remarried, and died at 43. Years later, I’m reminded that the very act of being able to support oneself as a woman outside the institution of marriage is still a radical one. That women like Wenxiu, Lily Bart, and even my mother were willing to give up so much in order to live on their own terms makes me wonder why we continue to view marriage as the end goal. And that the possibility of a happy ending for women who choose to stay single or unmarried is still looked upon with doubt should compel us to rewrite the narrative.

How Kickstarter Is Changing Publishing

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Laura Olin raised the money to publish her book in a little over a day.

Olin, an author and social media strategist who worked on President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, spent November Kickstarting her children’s book Our President Was Called Barack.

The book, written by Olin and illustrated by artist Franziska Barczyk, was funded in 33 hours, raising $39,792 — $14,792 more than its $25,000 goal, falling just a few hundred dollars short of its $40k stretch goal.

Billed as a “yes we can book for children,” the project tells the story of Obama’s presidency, and more importantly, the way he invited ordinary people to become activists.

“I’m not asking you to believe in my ability to bring about change — I’m asking you to believe in yours’ was his overriding message from the beginning,” said Olin. “I think it’s important that kids hear that right now. Most biographies or otherwise traditional books seem to be uninterested or downright timid about getting into that space.” She wrote the book to provide a good presidential example to her nephews and kids like them.

It’s the second book for Olin, whose novelty book Form Letters: Fill-In-the-Blank Notes to Say Anything to Anyone came out in 2016. That project was published by a traditional publisher, Harry N. Abrams. It was a process Olin described as “perfectly okay.” But she had different aspirations for Our President Was Called Barack. For one thing, she wanted to get it on shelves quickly.

“I realized that I wanted to go faster with this book than traditional publishers can go,” she said. “Their time horizons tend to be a year and a half from proposal to publication, even two years.”

Olin was also inspired by Chance the Rapper and other artists who’ve found an audience without the help of traditional publishing gatekeepers. “We’re at this point in the life of the internet where being pretty autonomous can be possible sometimes, if you’ve got something compelling to offer and you get a bit of luck,” she said.

Olin is one of thousands of authors who are choosing to Kickstart their books.

Although you may think of Kickstarter as a platform for games and gadgets, publishing has always been among Kickstarter’s offerings. It just might not get the attention games or technology do because publishing projects tend not to raise millions of dollars the way a game might, said Margot Atwell, Director of Publishing for Kickstarter.

Still, book projects do all right. Publishing, a category which encompasses books, comics, and journalism, has so far had 13,297 projects funded in Kickstarter’s nine years, raising $132 million total. Right now, there are more than 300 publishing campaigns live on Kickstarter. Those projects include bookstores, journalism projects (notably, a campaign to save Gawker), and of course, books.

So far 13,297 publishing projects have been funded in Kickstarter’s nine years, raising $132 million total.

“This really showcases that there’s a community of backers who want to support literary works,” said Atwell. A lot of backers are book lovers; according to Atwell, more than 1.5 million backers have pledged to at least one publishing project.

Authors decide to fund projects through Kickstarter for a variety of reasons. Some, like Olin, might want to publish a book fast. Authors from marginalized communities, who might not be able to get their voices heard in the traditional publishing world, can bypass gatekeepers and go straight to a community of readers. Kickstarter publishing has fewer barriers to entry; writers can publish what they think people care about, rather than what a publishing house or agent thinks will sell. But make no mistake: While crowdfunding can help an author dodge some of the baked-in biases of the publishing world, it’s still a popularity contest.

Josh Fruhlinger is the blogger behind The Comics Curmudgeon, a longstanding blog that lovingly snarks on newspaper comics. He decided to Kickstart his own novel, The Enthusiast, in 2012. His goal was $6,666, and he blew past it, bringing in $20,159. Being an established blogger with his own audience helped immensely when it came to raising that cash, he says: “If you don’t have a built-in audience existing already, or a big social media network, it might not be as rewarding.”

One of Fruhlinger’s biggest post-campaign challenges was delivering the manuscript itself. Although he has been a professional writer for almost his entire career, he’d never written a novel before. He assumed he’d have the book done and ready to go by November 2013, but the process took longer than he expected, with books shipping out in December 2015. That delay stressed Fruhlinger out; he felt like he was cheating his backers by not producing the novel by Nov. 2013. Some backers agreed—one even asked for a refund.

Authors from marginalized communities, who might not be able to get their voices heard in the traditional publishing world, can bypass gatekeepers and go straight to a community of readers.

“I had all this money sitting in a bank account that I felt responsible for for two years, and it was really stressful to me,” he said.

Fruhlinger’s advice to any writer considering a Kickstarted book? Write the book first. Atwell agrees; she always encourages new authors to do as much work on their projects as they can before they launch their campaigns.

“That has two benefits,” she said. “One, the creator can really show backers what they’ll be getting if they back the project, and they can impart confidence that the book will get done, and two, once money changes hands, it can feel like the stakes are raised for the creator, so it’s helpful to do as much work as possible before that happens.”

Kickstarter can also act as a laboratory for ideas that might seem risky to traditional publishers; creators can test ideas that might raise an eyebrow for an agent or publisher and later use the success of the Kickstarter as proof the idea worked.

Crowdfunding Fiction: Talking With Charlie Fish, Founder Of Fiction On The Web, About Patreon

One author who did that was Ryan North, the creator of Dinosaur Comics and the current writer of Marvel’s Squirrel Girl. North had an idea: a choose-your-own adventure Hamlet. His agent, Seth Fishman, of The Gernert Company, didn’t think he’d be able to get a publisher to buy it for more than $20,000. So he suggested that North Kickstart the project.

The book, To Be Or Not To Be: That is the Adventure, met its funding goal of $20,000 in less than three hours, and ultimately raised $580,905. The success of that campaign allowed Fishman to sell the next one, Romeo And/Or Juliet, to Riverhead Books. Riverhead also picked up To Be Or Not To Be.

Fishman, who represents authors from Ann Leckie to Ryan North to Sarah Andersen of Sarah’s Scribbles, believes crowdfunding and traditional publishing can co-exist harmoniously. He Kickstarted a book of his own this summer, and many of his clients are independent web comics creators who are used to Kickstarting projects and otherwise operating independently. Fishman has seen them combine their independent projects with traditional publishing in various ways.

For example, one of his clients is Zach Weinersmith, the creator of the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic. Weinersmith and his wife Kelly wrote a book about emerging technology, Soonish, released in October. In June, however, the pair Kickstarted another project, Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness, a very small book about science. They wanted to offer Soonish as one of the rewards to their backers. The rewards would count as preorders of Soonish. Fishman role was to help convince the publisher of Soonish to support the experiment and set up distribution of the book through independent bookstores.

There are other notable marriages of crowdfunding and traditional publishing, not all of which involve the Kickstarter platform. Last year, for example, Hugo winner N.K. Jemisin made news when she was able to quit her day job and write full-time, thanks to her fans funding her through Patreon.

So, with the rise of crowdfunding, do authors still need traditional publishing?

With the rise of crowdfunding, do authors still need traditional publishing?

The traditional publishing houses we reached out to didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Fishman thinks authors do need publishers and agents. Aside from the things agents do to make life easier and more profitable for their clients — having lawyers on call to review contracts, foreign rights, television and film rights, feedback on ideas, for example — a traditionally-published book can open doors for even successful independent creators.

“What I’ve found for better or worse, is that traditional publishing provides a big of focus point in terms of validation and publicity,” he said.

Many of Fishman’s clients — like North, Weinersmith, or xkcd creator Randall Munroe — are already well-established as independent artists. They already have a large audience, and they may be doing well financially, but having published a book with a traditional publisher widened their audience, says Fishman.

Munroe’s webcomic, xkcd, for example, has a huge readership, but once he’d published a book traditionally, that book functioned as a kind of permission slip; fans who worked in media had an excuse to book him as a guest on their shows. His status as a published author, says Fishman, serves as an effective advertisement for his other work.

“Financially, self publishing can be all you need,” he says, but he calls a traditionally published book “one of the most effective advertisements” a creator can get.

“I think crowdfunding is really complementary to publishing,” said Atwell. “Kickstarter is a tool that authors and publishers can use to test out an idea, build excitement for a book or project, or garner support for a project that falls outside what they normally do.”

“Kickstarter is a tool that authors and publishers can use to test out an idea, build excitement for a book or project, or garner support for a project that falls outside what they normally do.”

Launching a Kickstarter project, she said, is a lot like launching a book. Authors need all the same things: a description, an author bio, an image, and a plan for spreading the word. It’s a lot of work, but if a project is funded, it can be worth it. Olin’s campaign wrapped up on December 8, and according to her campaign, books are due to be shipped in May. She offered two post-campaign thoughts: Don’t launch during the holidays, and believe Kickstarter veterans when they say how much work a campaign is — it’s often difficult to get press for a Kickstarter, and authors often have to sink money into their project before they make any money back.

“Unless you’re multitalented or have many multitalented friends who are okay with working for free, you probably need to pay to get a video made, produce graphics, buy music, do prototypes, and so on,” she said.

Fruhlinger, who wrote his own post about the trials and triumphs of Kickstarting a novel, agrees that Kickstarting ain’t easy. While the $20,159 he raised seems like a lot of money, much of those funds went toward the production of the book itself: editing, art, printing, and postage. (Atwell says distribution and the cost of postage are often hurdles faced by Kickstarter’s authors.) After he finished printing and fulfilling rewards to backers, but before he started selling books, his Kickstarter profit — his payment for two years of work — was just $467.55.

After he finished printing and fulfilling rewards to backers, but before he started selling books, his Kickstarter profit — his payment for two years of work — was just $467.55.

In the end, Fruhlinger was very happy with The Enthusiast. The book contains art from three different artists, and was printed in paperback and hardcover. He’s sold 1,500 copies of the book so far, selling from both online and brick-and-mortar stores, and his profit rose to a more comfortable $4,369.14. But having Kickstarted once is enough for him.

“If I were going to do another novel, I would try to go through an agent,” he said.

Olin says she’d definitely Kickstart again. In fact, she’s more likely to Kickstart again than to traditionally publish. She thinks other authors should crowdfund their books as well.

“It’s a really clarifying and focusing thing to think about an idea, and how to sell its value to other people, for the length of time it takes to put a Kickstarter campaign together,” she said. “It could lead to better books for all of us.”

Asked what he’d say to an author torn between getting an agent for a manuscript and Kickstarting a book, Fishman responded that it really depends on an author’s goal for a project. He feels that it’s at least worth trying to get an agent, but if that road doesn’t work?

“If you can’t find an agent and you believe in the book, go ahead and self-publish,” said Fishman. “Prove us wrong. Because we’re wrong all the time.”

Thinking of Kickstarting your book? Here’s some advice from Margot Atwell:

Make a plan: “Spend time planning your project and looking at other campaigns that are similar to what you’re planning to do before you launch yours. Make a budget carefully: make sure you cover all your costs, but keep it as low as you can, since Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing platform, and you can always raise more than you ask for but not less.”

Be clear about what you’re writing and why: “A good Kickstarter Publishing project clearly tells the story of what the creator is making, why it’s great, and why readers will want to get their hands on a copy, using all the tools the platform provides, including a well-done video, attractive images and/or GIFs, a compelling description, and appealing rewards.”

Make sure your Kickstarter page is visually appealing: “Even though readers care about the quality of the writing and what the book contains, that old chestnut really does hold true: on the internet, a picture’s worth a thousand words. We’re all really accustomed to scanning quickly over websites, so a project description that’s just a wall of text tends to lose all but the most passionate fans.”

Get the word out: “Come up with a good outreach plan–and a Plan B and Plan C in case that doesn’t get you past the finish line. Also, don’t be shy–tell people about your project! You’ve written something cool that’s important to you–you should give other people the chance to discover it and enjoy it.”

Looking Everywhere for a Way to Deal with Death

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Something uncanny happens in these photographs of the dead,” writes Thomas Mira y Lopez in The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint), his debut collection of essays. “Daguerreotype exposures took notoriously long to develop, and living subjects needed to sit still for prolonged stretches, minutes sometimes with their heads braced and bodies propped perfectly still…so that it became difficult to determine, when looking at a photo, just who is the corpse.”

Whether he’s sneaking into a defunct cemetery or racing between hospital and church, among preserved bodies in a shop outside Tucson or the Roman catacombs, Mira y Lopez shows the restlessness that makes living subjects of grief and contemplation — even as one tries to lay the dead to rest in monuments, mementoes, saplings, stars. The result is a book of remarkable range, insight, and style, which, as Mira y Lopez says below, works “to consider then reconsider then reconsider the reconsideration” of how we live and die. We corresponded about the use of research in lyric essays, persona, and the role of reportage in memoir.

Zach Savich: This book ranges among many places, many topics, but the essays feel capaciously steady, able to discuss ancient dental remedies and intricate memories on the same page. How did you arrive at this style? I’m curious, especially, about the mix of informational reportage and intimate memoir — how do you manage that balance? Juxtaposition often works by rupture, but in many of these essays it feels unusually seamless.

Thomas Mira y Lopez: The earliest essays I wrote in the book started out almost as a pin the metaphor on the donkey. I wanted to find some way of writing about memory that wasn’t just writing about myself — this is the time-honored answer that anyone who’s written a lick of personal essay must be obligated to give, whether it’s true or not — and metaphor was an easy way to pump significance, or seeming significance, into the narrative. I’m a superstitious, ritualistic person, my mother as well, and so I inherited a bunch of readymade symbols, substitutes, and monuments: my father’s tree, Egyptian mastaba as storage unit, sunspots. I set off to use these as parallels or responses to the personal, a game of Pong maybe.

Maybe successful essays are just ones where the author covers their tracks well enough to hide their initial idiocy.

But then there comes a moment when you ask what the symbol means — I mean tangibly, like what is an Ohio buckeye or a horse chestnut in actuality? What are their dimensions, proclivities, susceptibilities? You decide to find that out, and that in turn obligates you to reassess the personal, the meanings from that memory you think you already know. For the reportage, I was mostly just playing a character. I would go to sites and make up a story about the tension between the self I presented at the site and the self I present on the page. It’s kind of you to say the stories feel seamless. Maybe successful essays are just ones where the author covers their tracks well enough to hide their initial idiocy, where the hot air is collapsed yet there’s still space on the page.

Eileen Myles‘ Memoir Is Much More than Just a Dog Book

ZS: Did particular writers or books serve as models, as you were developing this approach? Did you feel there were gaps — or failings — in how people often write about death and grief?

TMYL: I tried to stay away from books about death and grief just as, if I’m trying to capture my own voice in a piece, I stay away from authors whose style I know I’ll end up trying to imitate. Many felt bound by a linearity I wasn’t interested in or they were attempting something, like Anne Carson’s Nox, I knew I couldn’t match. But the idea of place, or places, came to me before the concept and so I looked towards collections that moved with ideas that could swim several different strokes: John D’Agata’s Halls of Fame; Ander Monson’s collections; Joni Tevis’s The Wet Collection; Valeria Luiselli’s Sidewalks. And I looked towards books that helped me understand cultural attitudes towards death: Thomas Laqueur’s The Work of the Dead and Michel Ragon’s The Space of Death, in particular. I imagine there’s a nice little anthology of cemetery essays as well: Luiselli’s “Brodsky’s Room and a Half,” Wendy S. Walters’ “Lonely in America,” Randall Kenan’s “Finding the Forgotten,” Kendra Atleework’s “Dawn of Tomorrow.”

ZS: Focusing on place offers some productive displacements in The Book of Resting Places, as do metaphor and persona. This can help guide the essays to implicit, suggestive, and unexpected conclusions. At other times, these essays can be startlingly direct. I’m thinking of lines like the last sentence of “The Eternal Comeback,” an essay about cryonic preservation, among other things. It reflects on a recurring dream about your deceased father: “This dream and his return will come back for as long as I live, as long as I should live, which will hopefully be not a minute longer than my memory binds me to a body and mind.” This might relate to the tension between showing the staging and covering your tracks; could you comment on moments like this one, when the essays consider big questions and differing interpretations, but offer stark assertions?

TMYL: Well, I would say it depends which assertion you’re referring to in the quote. There’s the statement that the dream will continue to recur and then there’s the statement that I don’t want any form of my consciousness to continue after death. The latter is a rebuttal, albeit a gentle one, to the goal of cryonicists who seek exactly that. It’s never really a question in “The Eternal Comeback” about whether I myself will seek out cryonic preservation — if someone wanted to gift me $80,000, then maybe we’d be talking — but one of the things I try to keep in mind is that essays are also arguments, that I can make room as a writer for their rhetoric and polemics. That might seem obvious to say, but my natural state is to consider, then reconsider, then reconsider the reconsideration. It gets recursive. So once in a while it can feel satisfying to just throw up one’s hands and say, fuck it, this is what I mean, I hope my head never gets frozen and stuck in a cylindrical tube. At a certain point, we have to walk away and not look back.

My natural state is to consider, then reconsider, then reconsider the reconsideration. It gets recursive.

The first clause of that sentence — the statement that the dream will recur — I can never prove. It’s interesting to be returned to it, to look at the conviction with which I wrote the line and the impasse it creates. It’s just felt emotion, after all. Part of me hopes that the dream of my father doesn’t recur, that the heartache it carries doesn’t come back. And part of me hopes that it does come back because something beats nothing. That balance — between wanting to remember and wanting to forget; between wanting someone’s who died to turn into something else, such as another person or place or metaphor, and wanting the dead to stay dead — feels like an underlying tension to these essays. Sometimes, though, balance slips and we move one way or the other into an assertion.

Though, of course, I hope the assertions aren’t too stark. In the course of my research, I read the Quakers had a saying “false as an epitaph,” and did not mark their headstones with inscriptions. So I’m wary of making any such declarations or summations about a life or a lifespan, which this book, in its way, is.

A New Memoir Offers a Personal Look at How America Fails the Mentally Ill

ZS: To not write only about the self, to favor ideas that “swim different strokes,” to be wary of declarations — these impulses have some things in common. You are also a teacher. What do you tell students who wish to write essays that simply say what happened, perhaps by making declarations about the self in a single stroke?

TMYL: It’s the old “who cares?” question that I break out once or twice a semester, not in a mean way, I hope, always reminding my students I ask myself that question more frequently than any other. I think it’s important that they be able to say what happened — clearly and cogently and with some control — and, as I’m learning more as a teacher, I’m trying to respect the importance of that impulse. Once that’s down, if that’s down, then it becomes a question for me of, well, what else could have happened, what didn’t happen, why did or didn’t it happen. An attempt to broaden that impulse — how else did the same thing happen at different times and places, what else was going on when it happened — so that the self becomes not just a self, broadens into something much larger and more pleasurable. My hope is that, if students can ask those questions of themselves, they can ask those questions of the narratives and declarations they’ve written.

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Lately, I’ve had difficulty with the idea of relatability when it comes, not to writing, but reading. It seems a frequent point, both with respect to students’ comments and the culture at large, is to say “Oh, I had a dog too, so I was able to relate to this,” or “I’ve never been to an accordion festival before so I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to relate to this.” I want to respect each individual’s background but also: “Who cares? It’s not about you.” Though it is, also, of course, about you. I’ve had this discussion with other teachers, and one, Sarah Minor, whom you know, tells her class that when readers comment upon the relatability of the piece to their own life or not, they’re not making a comment about the essay but a comment about themselves. And not just a comment about themselves, but the same simple self-declarations one tries so assiduously to avoid.

Maybe this goes back to where we began. Because while I’m searching for metaphors all over this book, I’m also making a metaphor of myself, and my own experience. Not all readers will relate to that experience — I certainly hope they won’t; what a dull book that would be — but maybe they’ll find room to exist in not quite one self and not quite the other.

A Love Affair Preserved by a Petrified Fetus

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“Stone Baby”

by Michelle Sacks

Madame Monique of Riad Bovary in Fez, a once-beautiful Frenchwoman who didn’t seem to object to the waning of her youth or beauty, was up every morning at six a.m. It was always the same. She rose, drank the strong coffee prepared for her by Hassan and brought to her door on a silver tray, wrapped a scarf around her neck, and went downstairs. It was her favorite time of day. Too early for the guests to be up or for the rest of the staff to arrive. Only stillness, silence; the soft rattling of Hassan in the kitchen and the song of the swifts in the orange trees outside.

The sight of the riad in the morning light took her breath away. It was magnificent, the crumbling walls, the chipped remains of mosaics — everything meticulously restored and returned to its former glory. It made her feel like Scheherazade, installed in a palace, a living work of art. It had taken years and almost all her money, but she’d refused to stop until the place gleamed. A testament to her love of the city. A testament to love itself, which was more or less the same thing. She had visited the Taj Mahal some months ago on a trip to India. She wanted to see what Shah Jahan had built with his grief, this wonder of the world and the great monument to overwhelming love and despair at his wife Mumtaz’s passing. She expected to feel deeply moved when she saw it, but it was home that she longed for: these walls, this marble under foot. Riad Bovary was her mausoleum, the spectacular resting place of her great love, her only love. There was nothing else that could come close.

On the bus back to Delhi, she had closed her eyes against the heat and listened to two young women talking in English. The one sighed and said, can you imagine someone loving you enough to do all that? The other replied, hell, I’d settle for a bloody second date. Monique wanted to interrupt them, to say, no, it’s true, such love exists in the world! I have known it. She wanted to touch the taut skin of their faces and look into their bright eyes and see all the lives that were yet to unfold. She said nothing, only put her hand into her pocket and rubbed her thumb against the hard smooth baby secreted inside.

She was twenty-one when she came to Morocco. A girl, practically a child. It was on her father’s insistence that she visit, he wanted her to sleep under the stars of the great Sahara, a rite of passage he had shared with his father and one he had dreamed about enjoying with his own son. But Eduard was dead and buried, and a daughter was all he had left. Claude, her father, fancied himself an adventurer. He had joined de Gaulle’s Free French forces during the war, led troops through North Africa, and in the process fallen hopelessly in love with the continent all over again, with the endless expanse of sky and sand and the humbleness of the people, who appeared to him both regal and in possession of some arcane wisdom and grace. After the war, he returned to France with great reluctance. He was already married, his wife had suffered enough with his absence during the war, she would not consent to further marital sacrifice and a life spent living out her husband’s colonial fantasies. They rented a tiny apartment in Paris, a room really, with a little stove and a bathroom down the hall shared by everyone on their floor. It felt like prison to Claude, cramped and airless and achingly dull. He contemplated running away and once almost did, but then his wife opened her bathrobe one morning and showed him the bump that was forming.

In Marrakech, Claude had guided his daughter through the rabbit warren of the medina, past the carpet sellers and herbalists and the men sitting street side drinking pots of mint tea and arguing about the world. He knocked on the tiny wooden door of a crumbling house and, when it opened, ushered her inside a magnificent riad that smelled of saffron and lemons. The owner of the house was Omar, onetime soldier and longtime friend of Claude’s. The two men greeted each other with kisses on the cheek. Omar summoned his children and grandchildren from the other rooms and as the two families smiled and kissed, Monique was struck by the man her father appeared to be in this faraway place. It was Friday, Omar’s wife had prepared couscous with lamb and vegetables. She presented the food on a dish so large it required her two sons to carry it. They sat upon cushions on the floor around a low table.

Eat, eat, Omar urged, and she watched her father stick his hands into the food and scoop out a handful of warm couscous. He shoved his fingers into his mouth, licked the fat, and declared it delicious. The rest of the family put their hands into the dish, ate hungrily. Try it, Claude instructed his daughter, go on. She put a few fingers into the food, gingerly scooped some up, and put it into her mouth. It was the best thing she had ever tasted. She smiled, she ate more; her father gave her knee a pat.

Good girl, he said, that’s it, and she felt he had never been prouder.

In Paris she had a boyfriend, a sweet but dull man who loved her a little too much. She expected that he would propose soon enough and she would be obliged to say yes. The idea filled her with mild dread but she hid it well. Her mother was terribly excited about the prospect of a son-in-law who was a lawyer. Claude took her to Volubilis, to the ancient Roman ruins, they visited Fez and stayed in a riad that had once belonged to the philosopher Aziz Lahbabi. They got lost in the medina’s elbow-wide alleyways, paid children to lead them back to where they came from. In the markets, they sampled dates and pastries heavy with honey and orange blossom, they ate tagines cooked for hours over coals piled onto little corners of the street, and never refused the offer of a mint tea with a curious stranger. Everywhere, Claude spoke Arabic like it was his mother tongue. Monique was struck by how easily her father fit into this world, as though it was here that he belonged all along.

You’re so happy here, she remarked, and he nodded sadly.

From Erfoud, they headed into the Erg Chebbi desert, guided by Addi, a six-foot Tuareg man with a wide smile and green eyes. He had brought two camels, one for Claude and one for her. He would be on foot, and shoeless. The camels were not easy to ride over the dunes, their spindly legs seemed to give way from time to time as they struggled downhill. Monique held tight to the metal handle, felt her muscles tense and relax as she tried to move in rhythm with the animal.

You’re doing splendidly, Claude called to her.

Yes, yes, Addi agreed, your daughter is very good Berber!

The animals were flatulent and uncomfortable, but the desert — the silence and the vastness and the feeling of being alone in the world — it was magic. The first day they trekked eight or so hours, stopping only briefly for a modest lunch of nuts and fruit prepared by Addi. After lunch they continued on until they reached a small Berber compound.

We will rest here tonight, Addi said, and he helped them off the camels.

They ate a meal of vegetables and chicken, cooked in a tagine buried in the sand since the morning. The chicken’s head and feet sat in the dish, pale and fatty. As the sun began to set the sky turned pink and then orange and then black. It was the most beautiful thing Monique had ever witnessed. They sat under the stars, father and daughter, silent and content. A Berber woman covered head to toe in robes and scarves ushered them into a tent laid out with carpets to sleep upon.

It’s safe, Addi said. Berber carpets dyed with saffron to keep away the snakes!

They slept deeply and in the morning set off once again, this time with a different guide. I am Bakai, the man said.

He spoke to them in perfect French, inquired about their night and if their dinner had been satisfactory. He had gleaming white teeth and eyes dark like onyx.

Are you also Tuareg? Monique asked.

No, madame, he replied. I am a nomad.

Bakai, in his blue djellaba, also walked barefoot.

Is the sand not hot? Monique asked.

He smiled, I am used to it, he replied. It is easier for me to walk without shoes.

Claude that day seemed to be in a slight decline, perhaps too many regrets or memories at the surface. He spoke little, and rode off at a distance. Monique and Bakai had hours to talk. By the time they reached that night’s Berber camp, it had already transpired: Monique was in love. She loved the way Bakai moved, his muscles neat and perfect under the robes; she loved how he spoke, his voice deep and soft at the same time, liquid almost. He took care with her, held her hand as she dismounted the camel, offered her water and tea and looked into her eyes and through to the other side; she could hardly breathe with his gaze upon her.

That night, as her father snored in the tent, she lifted the blankets off her and slipped outside into the cool desert air. The stars were out, lighting her way as she walked softly with the sand underfoot. The camels were tethered together, each one with a hind leg bound to prevent it wandering off. It was heady, the night and the stars and the smallness of everything but the sky. She headed slowly toward the dune, felt her heart pump with blood as she climbed to the top. Looking down, she could see the tents and the camels, tiny dots in a sea of sand, a microcosm of life as opposite to her own as one could get. You are alright, madame? It was Bakai, he had followed her up the dune, as she had hoped.

Oh yes, she said. I think I have never been better.

How strange the life that finds you, the life that snatches you from everything you know to be true and holds you fast and firm in its grip, refusing to let go. She did not return to France with her father, or with her mother, who made a special trip out to Morocco to try to persuade her daughter of the lunacy of her decision.

I will never return, she declared.

Bakai it turned out was married already, with several children and one on the way. He could offer her nothing more than a few stolen days every few months, between time in the desert and time with his family. Still, it was enough, anything was enough; those hours together sacred and exquisite. She moved to Fez, rented a little room with a family but soon realized that she would need privacy in order to avoid scandal. She wrote to her father and begged him for a loan. She implored him to understand her decision, to allow her to honor her great love.

I suspect your life was not in the end the life of your choosing, she wrote, I believe that when we fight our destiny we die a little more each day, until one day nothing is left but the negative space once occupied by dreams. Please Father, she wrote, please help me. He wired her the money the following week, enough to buy the riad and a little left over to fix it up. She called it Riad Bovary to be ironic, and maybe a little dramatic, but it suited her nonetheless and she settled into her new life with remarkable ease. Madame Monique, the locals called her, always a little awed by the young French girl who lived alone in a faraway place.

You have no husband? the women asked, and when she replied that she did not, they shook their heads and speculated among themselves what the reason for such misfortune might be.

Bakai visited when he could, always knocking on the door and inquiring at the desk if he might book a room for the night. She would smile calmly while her heart beat furiously and her body braced itself for the long-awaited thrill of his touch.

Yes sir, she’d say, we would be delighted to accommodate you for the evening.

He would have no bag, no change of clothing, only a stash of fresh dates wrapped in brown paper brought for her from the desert as a gift. She would have one of the staff escort him upstairs — always to the same room — and spend the hours until evening trying not to blush. After finishing up for the night, she would head upstairs, slip into her own room to change her underwear and brush her teeth, and then knock softly on the door next to hers.

My beautiful, he would say, opening up, leading her inside where they would lie entwined in each other’s arms.

In the morning she would find him on the floor, curled into the carpet because the bed was too soft. She always asked after his family and he always told her with pride about his sons, who were strong, and his daughters, who were becoming beautiful. She did not feel jealousy toward them, only some strange sense of kinship: they loved the same man, they were one family.

When her father died suddenly, she returned for a brief time to France. Her mother was old with grief, lined and brittle as if she might break.

You must come home now, she said, we are all that is left.

She helped her mother pack up the closets and bundled up her father’s shirts and books into cardboard boxes. He had surprisingly little, for a man of so many years. In the back of the wardrobe she found his journals from his time in the war and slipped them into her coat to take with her.

I think I will die soon too, her mother said, we are not meant to exist in solitude.

Perhaps you will come to Fez, Monique said. The change would do you good.

Her mother sneered, lit a cigarette, and said with bitterness, you are just like him, happiest when farthest away from me.

Monique left after several weeks, exhausted from tending to her mother’s need and from her own grief at being fatherless. But also there was something else.

In Fez, the doctor examined her and frowned.

You are some weeks along, he said.

He regarded her coldly, prodded her belly with rough fingers that gave her gooseflesh. The nurse looked on uncomfortably. They were aware that she was unmarried. There was no way of getting the news to Bakai, she could only wait until his next visit, and there was no knowing when that might be. She sat sipping tea in the kitchen of the riad, hands trembling with a mix of dread and delight. A child, her child, their child. She knew there would be difficulties, disapproval.

She started to show some months later, a rounding of her belly which no one was shy to point out.

You are getting so fat! the women at the market declared, laughing. Yes, she smiled, I am having a baby.

One of the women said something to her friend, and both women shook their heads. Faizel, who worked in the kitchen, came to her one afternoon to tell her that he was leaving.

You bring shame upon yourself, he scowled, and shame on me if I work for you.

Soon after, the others left too. They needed the money but not at the cost of their moral standing in the community. It was too great a scandal. Monique sent a telegram to her mother, asked her to come to Fez for the birth. The reply was curt, not altogether unexpected.

I have no daughter, her mother wrote.

She signed with her Christian name, not Mother, as she had always done.

Still, Monique did not feel alone those months. She felt the hardness of her belly, the sharp pain that told her life grew there, slow and steady. She made a quilt and found a man who would build her a crib. She did not mind taking over the cleaning of the rooms and the cooking of the guests’ breakfasts; she found the labor somehow beautiful, an ode to the new life she was creating. She watched as her body changed in the mirror and imagined how it would please Bakai to see her fill out. She wrote out names for boys and girls, in Arabic and in French. If it was a boy she would name him after her father.

One day at the door there stood a man.

Madame, he said in French, I believe you are short of staff.

Yes, she smiled, it seems that Riad Bovary is not an altogether desirable place to work. She indicated her belly. It is a little scandalous, she said.

Beneath the man’s djellaba she saw that he was skin over bone. He smiled at her. Perhaps we can be helpful to one another, he said.

His name was Hassan, he had crossed over from Algeria on foot. Monique hired him on the spot, sat him down at the kitchen table, and made him eat a breakfast of yogurt and eggs and oranges.

At twenty weeks she was brought to her knees. The pain was unbearable. She ordered a taxi to deliver her to the hospital. The doctor on duty slipped on a plastic glove and opened her up with his hand.

Something is wrong, he said. We will do more tests.

They took blood and urine and another doctor put on another plastic glove and felt her insides. She curled into a ball and wept, for pain and loneliness and the terror of everything unknown. They gave her painkillers, which allowed her to sleep. When she woke the doctor told her she would need an operation.

We need to remove the baby, he said.

No, she cried, you cannot take my child.

I am sorry, he said, but there is no child. Only stone.

It was called lithopedion, she learned later, the calcification of a fetus that dies during an abdominal pregnancy. A doomed child in the wrong place, suspended in time and turned into stone. She allowed the doctor to remove it on condition that he keep the baby to give to her afterward. He looked at her sadly but agreed. As the anesthetic took effect, she had a vision of herself in the Sahara, lying on the hot sand and cradling a stone. The sun beat down on her and the wind shifted the dunes until they buried her completely under sand. I am drowning, she mumbled, and then all was dark. She woke sore and in a haze. There were nurses around her speaking quietly in Arabic. She could tell that they were talking about her, motioning at her belly and at something beside her bed. She tried to make out the words but fell once more into the quiet of sleep. Later, she saw it too. The baby in a jar beside her bed. Her baby. It was the size of a golf ball, the color of sand. She opened the lid of the jar and removed it. In her belly the pain was severe. She welcomed it, breathed into the wound and gripped her fingers around the rock-hard child in her palm. The tears she couldn’t stop, and so she let them come. The nurse came up to her and touched her gently on the head.

The pain will pass in time, madame, she said.

Monique clutched the baby and brought it to her lips to kiss. Already she loved it and would forever.

The doctor came the next day with a solemn face. There were some complications, he said. I am terribly sorry.

The baby had been too deeply lodged to her insides, there was no way to remove it without taking the uterus. There would be no more children. Only the child of stone.

Is there someone I may call to collect you? the doctor inquired, and it was Hassan’s name she gave.

Back at the riad, he tended to her with great care. He brought her meals to her room and insisted on sleeping outside the door so that she could call for him in the night. She showed him the stone baby, and he held it with fascination and tenderness.

Is it a boy or a girl, he asked, and she realized that she had no idea.

It was some weeks later that Bakai appeared back at the riad. He held her in his arms as she told him of the pregnancy and the baby and the fact that she would never bear more of his children.

You are well, he said, you are here, this is what matters.

He held the baby, traced with his finger the outline of head and torso. It is a miracle, he said.

Why? she asked.

He kissed her lips and put the stone into her palm. This child we made will live a million million years. It cannot die, it cannot turn to dust.

Because the riad was empty of guests and because Hassan was Hassan, the three of them sat together and ate dinner around the table.

Hassan has been my savior, she told Bakai.

And madame mine, Hassan replied.

Bakai took Hassan by the hand and kissed him on each cheek. Then it is good we have found each other in this world, he said.

Before Bakai left again for the Sahara, he presented Monique with a gift. It was something he’d had made for her, a little pouch embroidered with gold thread that she could wear around her waist.

So you can keep the baby close, he said. He tied it gently around her and she slipped the baby inside.

It was hard sometimes to remember those years, the tremendous longing between visits with Bakai, the elation when he would arrive at the door at last. In bad seasons, he would come only once in the year, and she would read on his face the shame and the disappointment as he stood before her.

I could lend you a little money, she offered once and never again.

It had been the cause of their first and only argument. He would never consent to taking her money. There were times when loneliness gave way to despair, when the gaze of a man on the street reminded her of everything she was missing out on. There was an American diplomat who stayed at the riad for three weeks. He asked her to prepare him dinner on a few occasions, and then insisted that she join him in eating it.

So, he said, you must be running from something or toward someone. Which is it?

After dinner he pressed his lips against hers and put his hand under her shirt. You are disarmingly beautiful, he said.

She let herself follow him upstairs and in the morning washed the stains of him from her skin. There were others, always only brief and sweet. Love was reserved for Bakai alone.

The guests at the riad were often incredulous.

But you live here, they said, all alone?

Yes, she would reply, and there is nowhere else I would want to be.

It was almost true.

She read books, she learned Arabic, she busied herself with the endless restoration of the riad.

Why do you do this? Hassan asked.

She smiled, because I would like to leave something behind when I die, something perfect and beautiful.

Any money she made from the tourists she poured into the restoration, there was always something more to be done. Years when there was a little left over, she would book a flight somewhere far away. Cambodia, India, Brazil, Turkey, Jordan. She loved the smells and the colors and the food, she loved leaving and she loved the return. There was Hassan too, of course, her constant companion, her most loyal friend.

Hassan, she often said, what would have become of us if you had not found your way to my door?

He too had no family, no home but this one. There had been only one conversation between them about his life before Fez, but she could guess at the circumstances of his departure from Algeria, his lack of family ties, his disinterest in finding a wife. They made a perfect match.

Years became decades. She watched her youth leave her, slowly at first and then all at once. She was now an old woman, not yet frail, but not far from it either. Her hair was gray, her face lined with everything that had passed. Still, Bakai called her beautiful, still he kissed her with tenderness and desire. He was old too, worn by time and sun. On recent visits, she had noticed how he breathed at night, almost a struggle. She wondered how many more crossings of the Sahara he would be able to make before his legs gave way. He told her that his youngest son was almost ready to take over from him and she was glad. His wife was ill, he said, he needed to look after her. Monique, despite herself, felt a flicker of hope. If his wife died, it might be possible for him to spend more time with her in Fez.

She walked quickly now through the narrow warren of the medina, the houses in some places so close that it was hard to pass at all. After all these years she could make her way on instinct alone, finding her way effortlessly through the old town, through the vendors and the hordes of tourists on their way to the tanneries, through the winding markets past the odd donkey laden with goods to sell. At the market she waited while the man sliced wedges of flaky pancakes and wrapped them in paper for her breakfast guests. She spoke to him in Arabic, made him laugh, and felt as always the pleasure of such an exchange. From the fruit seller she bought kiwis and oranges, she sent wishes to his wife, who was having their fifth baby, and made her way back to the riad. As she opened the door, Hassan came to her.

Someone is here to see you, he said. His face was grave.

Who is it? she asked.

He took the shopping from her and pointed her to the study. He is in there.

It was a young man, and he rose as she entered the room. He wore a blue djellaba, a nomad or a Berber, she thought. She greeted him in Arabic, which made him smile. As he did, she recognized him. It could only be him.

You are a son of Bakai, she said. She sank into the sofa.

In French, he replied. Yes, I am Bakar. And you are Madame Monique.

Hassan without a word laid a tray of tea on the table and then left the room.

Bakar, Monique said. I have heard about you from your father. You look very much like him.

Bakar nodded. Yes, all my father’s sons do.

Madame Monique, he said, please forgive my intrusion of your home, I am —

Please, Bakar, Monique interrupted, tell me why you have come. Is your father ill?

Bakar shook his head. No, madame, he said. He is not ill. He has already passed. Monique heard the words but shook her head. No, no, it is not possible, she said. It cannot be so.

Her head spun, her heart a tremendous pounding she could feel in her ears. She put a hand in her pocket and squeezed, felt the cold and hard stone against her flesh. She looked at Bakar, at the face staring back at her, familiar and strange at the same time. Bakai’s son, Bakai’s son.

I am sorry, he said. I am sorry to bear this news.

Monique clasped a hand over her mouth, shut her eyes against the tears. Is it possible, she said, is it possible I will never see him again?

Bakar shifted in his seat; she remembered suddenly that she was not the only grief-stricken woman he would have had to break the news to.

I’m sorry, Monique said, composing herself. It is a great loss for your family. For your mother.

Bakar opened his hands to the sky. It is God’s will, he said. He had a good life. Many children. He knew great love. These are things to make a man happy. He cannot ask for more.

Monique nodded. He was very proud of you, she said. I can see why.

Bakar motioned toward the tea on the table. May I take something to drink, he asked. My goodness, she said, of course. You have walked, from the desert?

Most of the journey, Bakar said.

It was kind of you to come, she said. You have done an old woman a great kindness.

Bakar drank his tea and she filled his glass again. My father told me about you some years ago, he said. He spoke of his love for a Frenchwoman in Fez, Madame Monique from Riad Bovary. He would have wanted you to be informed.

Monique shifted. You must think I am an awful woman, she said.

Bakar shook his head. No, madame, not at all. I think you are a courageous woman. You followed the calling of your heart.

Yes, she said quietly. And now that heart is broken.

You must be hungry, she said suddenly. I would like to prepare you some food. And offer you a room to stay the night. Please, she said. Let me return your kindness.

Bakar nodded, that would be very welcome, he said.

She showed him to a room and went to the kitchen. Hassan, standing over a pot, held out his arms to her. She wept on his shoulder and he stroked her hair. Together they cooked a stew of chicken and vegetables, Hassan made bread and sliced up some cake left over from the breakfast guests.

Monique went to summon Bakar to lunch, but found him already asleep in the room, flat on his back on the floor. Downstairs, the Englishman was waiting with his backpack at the entrance.

You are going today? Monique asked, struggling to remember who was due to leave or arrive.

For three nights, yes, the man said. The Path of Love and Presence. In the Middle Atlas?

Yes, yes, Monique said. Mr. Tom. Of course, you are participating in the retreat. And you will be back afterward. I am sorry, she said, waving a hand in the air. Everything is everywhere today.

He smiled at her. But perhaps everything is just where it should be, he said.

They ate together later that night, Monique and Bakar, and the next five nights after that. Monique found him to be much like his father, his gestures, his voice, the way he spoke with his eyes.

What will you do now? she asked.

Bakar set down his tea. I will take over from my father, he said. As a Sahara guide.

Do you enjoy it? Monique asked.

Oh yes, he said. I am under the stars every night, all around me there is sky and space. This is everything I need for my happiness.

Monique nodded sadly, yes, she said, that is what your father said too.

And what will you do? he asked. Will you return home?

Oh, she laughed. This is the only home I have known.

There were some things of Bakai’s that had gathered in the riad over the years, shoes and books. Monique bundled them up and gave them to Bakar.

We had a child, she said. I suppose you would have been an older brother. She showed the baby to Bakar and he turned the stone over in his hands.

It is a good reminder, he said.

Of what, she asked.

That life is strange, he said, and beautiful in its strangeness.

When he left, Monique handed him two things. An envelope of all the dirhams she had in the world, and a small pouch with a stone inside.

On Dismantling the Power of White Antifeminist America

Posted on by 007595

I grew up in the America which, until recently, was not often discussed, the one ruled by fundamentalists. My father became a born-again Christian in 1979, the year Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority swept through the country. The organization was crusading against the “signs of cultural decline”: abortion had been legalized, divorce and access to birth control were contributing to the deterioration of the traditional family unit, and women, homosexuals, and people of color were petitioning for equal rights. With the election of Ronald Reagan, the Moral Majority sought to seize control of the federal government. Reagan promised, as the current inhabitant of the White House has promised, to support conservative judges who respected the sanctity of human life, “traditional family values”, and prayer in public schools.

Purchase the novel.

When I was fifteen, my father sent me to a Christian re-education camp affiliated with Mike Pence. I’ve spent much of my adulthood terrified that Christian extremists would take over America, and, at the same time, irritated that many of my peers seemed oblivious to my concerns — or they did until 2016, when 81% of white evangelicals voted the Religious Right into power with the election of Donald Trump. This past year, as I watched my deepest fears actualize, I was thrilled to discover Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks, a darkly comic novel that explores an America overtaken by Christian extremists. Zumas follows five different women navigating life in a country where the Personhood Amendment has made abortion a crime, IVF is banned, and only married couples are allowed to adopt due to the Every Child Needs Two Amendment.

Zumas is also the author of the short story collection Farewell Navigator and the novel The Listeners, and she teaches in the MFA program at Portland State University. I talked to her about American whiteness: how it feeds an antifeminist political culture, how she writes it, and how the phenomenon inspired Red Clocks.

Deirdre Sugiuchi: I love that Red Clocks is unabashedly focused on being female and having female relationships. In some ways I feel like this is the Gen X novel I have been waiting for, the one that Sassy promised I would read. Can you talk about writing a feminist novel while living in a culture and society that frequently tries to suppress feminist principles?

Leni Zumas: I was a Sassy reader, too. I once searched every drugstore in a ten-mile radius for the issue with Ian Svenonius on the cover, as Sassiest Boy in America.

While I was working on Red Clocks, a shadow-question surfaced: “Are any men going to want to read this?” But why was I asking this question? I doubt Norman Mailer was too worried about The Naked and the Dead having no women in it, or that Ernest Hemingway spent a huge amount of time wondering how female readers would connect with a novel about (mostly) male fighters in the Spanish Civil War.

I’ve spent much of my adulthood terrified that Christian extremists would take over America, and, at the same time, irritated that many of my peers seemed oblivious to my concerns.

Recently someone asked me if I consider Red Clocks to be a feminist novel. When I said “Yes, absolutely,” the woman looked uncomfortable. I am curious about people’s resistance to the term “feminist,” even if the resistance scrapes my nerves. In this case, I was talking with a very intelligent and thoughtful person who believes fiction should be free of ideology. Whereas my take is: nothing is free of ideology. We all see the world through filters. As a feminist I look through a lens of skepticism, alert to what is hidden or buried, watchful for the “violence and power concealed under the languages of civility, happiness, and love” (to borrow a phrase from Sara Ahmed’s brilliant Living a Feminist Life). Consciously and not, my writing bears the imprint of this watchfulness. As Ahmed puts it: “If we have been taught to turn away, we have to learn to turn toward.”

One way I “turn toward” in Red Clocks is by labeling the five main characters according to roles or functions: “Biographer,” “Polar Explorer,” “Wife,” “Mender,” “Daughter.” I wanted to call attention to the inadequacy of labels. All of us have multiple identities — play multiple parts in the world — yet we can find ourselves reduced (by immigration laws, magazine headlines, a conversation with a neighbor) to a single one. Or we may be asked to claim the “core” label, the role that’s more cherished than any other. At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama said, “At the end of the day, my most important title is still Mom-in-Chief.” Hillary Clinton’s Twitter bio reads as follows: “Wife, mom, grandma, women+kids advocate, FLOTUS, Senator, SecState, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, 2016 presidential candidate.” Why does “wife” come first? Why does “2016 presidential candidate” come last?

DS: Exactly! It’s such a weird bind to be female, to find yourself so often reduced to one role. I take being a mother very seriously but I never made being a mother the core of my identity. It’s unhealthy. There has been a strange shift in how being a mother, being a good mother, has been marketed over the past two decades. I enjoyed the interplay between the mothers in the book.

LZ: That’s exactly the right word: marketed. Being a mother is a role that gets outrageously sentimentalized, whether it’s by advertisers, screenplays, or your friends on Instagram. My love for my son, age 4, is boundless and joyfully animal, but not simple; in the mother role I feel ambivalence, doubt, conflictedness. I don’t find my experience well represented in the reductive American mythologies.

Being a mother is a role that gets outrageously sentimentalized, whether it’s by advertisers, screenplays, or your friends on Instagram.

In Red Clocks, when Susan (“the Wife”) runs into a fellow mom at a store, she’s overcome with loathing for this woman who feeds her kids homegrown chard and brags about the oldest one testing into a gifted-and-talented program. It’s one of the most cartoonish moments in the book, maybe because the degree of competitiveness, judgment, and performance anxiety among parents — in some pockets of our culture, at least — is so ridiculous.

For complex, thorny, platitude-resisting depictions of motherhood, I recommend Noy Holland’s recent novel, Bird; Sophia Shalmiyev’s forthcoming memoir, Mother Winter; and anything by Elena Ferrante.

DS: Yasmine is not a primary character, but her story is core to the book. Why did you choose to tell her story through the Daughter’s?

LZ: My novel is set in a state with a grim record of white-supremacist laws. Before I moved here, I’d heard Portland described as the whitest city in America, but I was ignorant of the structural racism in Oregon’s history. When it joined the Union in 1859, its constitution banned African Americans from living or owning property in Oregon; this ban stayed on the books until 1926. In the 1920s, the state legislature (which was heavily influenced by Ku Klux Klan members) passed a law barring Japanese Americans from owning land. These are just two of too many examples.

The Daughter (Mattie) is a white person becoming aware of her own whiteness. She is starting to realize how white privilege organizes her place in the world. Her best friend, Yasmine, who is black, has to endure some things that Mattie does not; and the depth of this inequity is revealing itself. The phrase “ignorant white girl” echoes through the book, and in one of the last chapters we learn why Yasmine said this. It was important to me to frame Mattie’s racial identity, more than Yasmine’s, as the site of conflict and unease. In this novel and beyond, I want my work to face the trouble of whiteness: how it’s been constructed, how its power is maintained, how we could imagine dismantling that power. Texts that have deepened my thinking on this question include Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark; Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda’s foreword to The Racial Imaginary; Ijeoma Oluo’s “The Heart of Whiteness,” an interview with Rachel Dolezal; and Lore Segal’s Her First American, a painfully hilarious novel wherein an Austrian Jewish refugee and a black American intellectual fall in love in 1950s New York.

In this novel and beyond, I want my work to face the trouble of whiteness: how it’s been constructed, how its power is maintained, how we could imagine dismantling that power.

DS: I’ve spent my adulthood frustrated with the lack of awareness of the Religious Right’s impact in our culture as a whole. Even now people don’t seem to realize the import of extremist Neil Gorsuch being appointed to the Supreme Court, of the Department of Justice issuing guidelines to protect religious freedom, and of the Trump Administration allowing employers and insurers to invoke religious and moral beliefs when choosing to cover birth control and other contraceptives. Red Clocks, with its Pink Wall, and Personhood Amendment, and Every Child Needs Two edict, seems prescient. What clued you into writing the hell in which we now live?

LZ: You’ve written elsewhere about the link between the Religious Right and these “re-education” institutions, and I was not surprised to learn that Mike Pence has done fundraising for Crosswinds, an organization tied to your former school. Pence is one of the politicians who helped me imagine our current hell. As governor of Indiana he sought to discipline and punish the bodies of women and LGBTQ people. In 2005 and 2007 he co-sponsored federal legislation that would recognize human zygotes as legal persons, thereby outlawing not only abortion but certain fertility treatments and all non-barrier forms of contraception. In 2016 Pence signed a bill (later blocked by a federal judge) that would require women who have miscarriages or abortions to pay for the fetus’s funeral.

Another radical conservative who gave me ideas for Red Clocks is Paul Ryan, a longtime proponent of so-called personhood amendments. He cosponsored the 2013 Sanctity of Human Life Act, which would grant full legal rights to a fertilized human egg.

DS: Are there any writers who inform your thinking on this matter?

LZ: I’m influenced by texts that worry the membrane between individual fate and collective predicament — that map characters (or narrative personas) onto broader grids of sociopolitical history. One of my longtime favorites in this vein is W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Three that recently blew me away are Hilary Plum’s Watchfires, a lyric memoir/essay-in-fragments about illness, war, family, and the Boston Marathon bombers; C. D. Wright’s One Big Self, a docupoetic photo-and-text series about incarceration in Louisiana; and John Keene’s Counternarratives, a collection of fictions that rip up American history and stitch it back dazzlingly true/askew.

DS: The mender, a forest-dwelling homeopath, helps many of the women in the book heal. Some who are suspicious of her describe her as a witch. This is not the first time you’ve written of witches. When did this fascination begin?

LZ: Like a lot of my fascinations, it started in books. Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond made a lasting impact, as did, a bit later, The Crucible, The Tempest, Macbeth, and Homer’s Odyssey.

I’m interested in how the figure of the crone — magical, unbeautiful, un(re)productive — defies the order of normative femininity, which wants the female body to be young, pleasing, and fertile. The Mender, Gin Percival, isn’t strictly a crone, but she is definitely not pleasing or compliant. She has stepped away from the order. Chosen to live out of order.

I’m interested in how the figure of the crone — magical, unbeautiful, un(re)productive.

DS: You used to play drums in bands (S-S-S Spectres, The Spells, Red Scare). The main character in your novel The Listeners is a musician coping with the loss of her band. In your short stories and your novels, you write from multiple perspectives. Do you think working and touring in a band contributed to your ability to write characters from different perspectives?

LZ: That’s cool. I hadn’t considered the link between music and multiple perspectives, but it makes sense: melody and counterpoint, echo and refrain, the textures built by different instruments or voices together. The link I’m most aware of is cadence: obviously kind of important for drumming, and crucial to how I think about making sentences. Syllables are beats, and phrases follow the logic of sound before sense. As my hero Virginia Woolf famously said, “Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm.”

DS: One of the things I loved about Red Clocks was the banality with which the characters accept tyranny. What are your thoughts on how we, as a society, respond to tyranny?

Susan Sontag says in Regarding the Pain of Others that “compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” Horrors become familiar, habitual, with enough repetition. Battle footage from Iraq and Afghanistan, flickering for years on laundromat TVs and gym monitors: we stop seeing it. Photos of tiny boats crowded with people fleeing: we stop seeing them. (By “we” I mean Americans with access to television or the Internet.) In Red Clocks, there’s a gradual restoring of visibility, met by terrified recognition, when certain characters wake up to the political facts. It’s a half-waking, not an epiphanic or triumphant one; yet it pricks their numbness. It opens up space for action.

Submissions are Open for Personal and Critical Essays

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Electric Literature is opening submissions of personal and critical essays starting today, January 2. We’re particularly interested in pieces that examine the intersection of the literary experience and other creative endeavors: film, fine art, music, video games, science, tech, architecture. Submissions will close January 16.

Some of our favorite recent personal essays include pieces about what it’s like to live without a mind’s eye, about a writer’s journey out of her father’s house and into feminist rage, and about why men have to stop telling women to read David Foster Wallace. Has a book changed your life, or has your life changed how you read a book? Do you have a personal story about your favorite story? Bring us your sad, thoughtful, funny, illuminating experiences.

Critical essays may cover a single book, multiple books, a whole genre, or non-book pop culture like TV, music, and games. In the past, we’ve been interested in why we need dystopian stories without apocalypse; the metafictional elements of Dungeons & Dragons; why people are so critical of “I Love Dick”; and why we should all have imaginary friends. Some essays may be both personal and critical, like a meditation on how angry female heroes helped a writer with her depression.

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

Submissions will be accepted on our submittable account here.

11 Books and their 11 Spectacular Trees

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The year after I graduated college, I was broke. Hungry broke. So broke that I didn’t need to set an alarm clock, because my growling stomach would wake me up every morning at seven. I was living in the last house at the dead-end of a dirt road at the top of a mountain in southern Vermont, surrounded by forest, and every morning I’d get up, pour myself a small bowl of Cheerios, and read. And look at the trees. And then read some more.

That fall, I put cereal on the table by working as a woodcutter. For ten dollars an hour, I’d swing a maul, over and again, splitting piles of firewood for the winter — oak, hickory, birch, ash, locust, beech — and then I’d go home to my books. I read most of Shakespeare’s plays that year, and Goethe’s Faust, and Nietzsche’s collected works. I dove into Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson, and I read and reread Invisible Man. It was the year I discovered Rebecca Solnit and reacquainted myself with Willa Cather. When I got paid, I’d go to the used bookstore, pick up a few titles, and then return home to read and contemplate the trees.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that my own book, This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent (forthcoming in 2018), is about trees and what happened when certain nineteenth-century Americans, skeptical about the social and environmental costs of capitalist progress, looked out at them. I spent ten years reading everything about trees and culture that I could; yet what I read is only a fraction of what’s out there — even in English. It seems that humans have never tired of writing about the sylvan world.

Here are a few of those books, and a handful of the trees I discovered, a highly idiosyncratic list, that have helped to define my life. Maybe some of them will guide you through your inner forest.

Tree: Wolf Willow
Book: Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier, by Wallace Stegner

Stegner moved frequently as a child, but he spent his boyhood in southern Sasketchewan on what was the last North American frontier. His book begins when the middle-aged Stegner returns, for the first time, to his hometown, only to find it utterly strange, until he crushes a few leaves of the scrubby, silver-leafed wolf willow, and brings it to his nose. What ensues is a Proustian remembrance that blends fiction, lightly fictionalized memoir, history, and philosophy of history — “a librarian’s nightmare,” Stegner called it — every page of which is bewitching.

Trees: Palm, Cottonwood, Rubber, Holly
Book: Gardens in the Dunes, by Leslie Marmon Silko

Gardens in the Dunes is set at the end of the nineteenth century, and begins in a small pocket of bone-dry desert on the Arizona-California desert where Indigo, her mother, grandmother, and sister are the last of the Sand Lizard people. It’s the very end of the US’s unbroken war against the American Indians, and the novel follows Indigo as she’s captured, sent to an Indian boarding school to be “civilized,” and then taken in by a woman named Hattie and her botanist husband, Edward, who combs the globe for marketable plants. The trio travel widely — Europe, South America, the East Coast of the US — as Indigo struggles to find a place in a world that is being so quickly remade in the image of empire and capitalism. Silko is painterly in her evocation of nature, and each new journey of Indigo’s is marked by strange new trees. In a scene that functions synedochally for the rest of the novel, Indigo, transplanted to New York City stands, shocked, as two entire entire beeches are uprooted and replanted: “wrapped in canvas and big chains on the flat wagon was a great tree lying helpless, its leaves shocked limp, followed by its companion; the stain of damp earth like dark blood seeped through the canvas.”

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Tree: White Pine
Book: White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems, by Mary Oliver

Evergreens have long carried with them connotations of healing, of resurrection, of life everlasting — arbor vitae literally means “tree of life” — which is one of the reasons why they are used for Christmas trees. Oliver’s collection meditates on life and the passage of time measured against the environment, and it glows with spiritual revelation: “This is, I think,/ what holiness is:/ the natural world,/ where every moment is full/ of the passion to keep moving.”

Tree: The Tree of Death
Book: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

The unrelenting dull despair of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road comes from his evocation of a hopeless world devoid of all but human life, which he establishes by having his father-and-son protagonists march through an unchanging landscape of dead and burnt trees. Page after page, step after step, there’s nothing but burnt forests for his characters to look upon, nothing but shades of ashen grey, nothing with which to kindle hope. And yet the father walks on, in faith. “All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later,” he tells his son. “But not on us.”

The Girls Who Turned into Trees

Tree: Tree of Life
Book: Unchopping a Tree, W.S. Merwin

Merwin’s poem, Unchopping a Tree, elegantly bound in a hardcover edition from Trinity University Press, brilliantly captures the poet’s twin commitments to environmentalism and pacifism, both of which, at root, are about a practice of care. There’s a deep sadness to Unchopping a Tree, which imagines what it would take to put just one felled trunk back together so that it could again live. Along the way, the reader gains a sense of just how carefully, fragilely, and perfectly life teeters on the edge of oblivion. “Everything is going to have to be put back,” Merwin ends on a note that blends resolve with desperation.

Tree: Mangosteen
Book: The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

Roy’s first novel is a tragedy set against the enduring ravages wrought by British colonialism in India that left marks on bodies, on lives, on politics, and on the land. The story follows a pair of young, innocent twins, Estha and Rahel, who one day discover an old boat lying beneath a mangosteen tree that their great-grandfather, a minor religious celebrity known as the Revered E. John Ipe, had planted on the banks of the enormous Meenachal River. Estha and Rahel, and, later, their British cousin Sophie Mol, take to playing in the boat — the same boat used by their mother to cross the river at night and meet with her Paravan, Marxist lover, a violation of of both strict caste conventions and class. The same boat from which Sophie Mol will tumble and drown. The mangosteen witnesses this all, and is the mark of history: a tree planted by a well-to-do great-grandfather in colonial times, a tree sheltering the secret of illicit love, a tree under which the innocence of childhood drowns in the trauma of becoming adult.

Tree: White Birch
Book: Survival of the Bark Canoe, by John McPhee

McPhee has written about trees — or their fruits or the people who live amongst them — on a number of occasions, but my favorite, and possibly my favorite McPhee of all time, is his slim volume, The Survival of the Bark Canoe, from 1975. It’s about a young, intense man named Henri Vaillancourt, one of two Euroamericans alive at the time who knew how to make a canoe in the traditional, Native American way, using nothing but the bark of a white birch, cedar planking, spruce roots and pitch, an axe, an awl, and a knife. McPhee and Vaillancourt take one of the canoe builder’s boats down the Allagash river in Maine, and the book-length essay is a tale of clashing personalities, monomaniacal obsession (Vaillancourt does nothing but think about, talk about, and make canoes, writes McPhee), and McPhee’s quest to understand what drives someone to build a boat that had all but gone extinct. It is also a tale of artistry — only McPhee could turn the details of shaping a gunnel, thwart, or rib into poetry — that ultimately begs the unresolved question, how should we take care of the past?

Tree: Holm Oak
Book: The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino

When Italo Calvin sets his magical-realist novel in a Holm Oak tree surrounded by an eighteenth-century Italian forest, he’s following in a long tradition. The woods have seemingly always been a site for fantasy, hallucination, and wonder. Try to imagine A Midsummer Night’s Dream taking place in a wheat field, Snow White in a market place, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in Manhattan. The Baron in the Trees is the tale of a young nobleman, Cosimo, who took to living in his family’s oak tree at the age of twelve, never to set foot on land again. Aloft in his sylvan kingdom, Cosimo discovers true liberation, and, over the course of the next fifty years, fights battles, makes journeys, falls in love, and gradually turns into a Saint Francis-esque woodland sprite. He never dies, either, and instead simply floats away on a rope dangling from a passing hot-air balloon. It’s a fable, but one that resonates with Emerson’s observation that “in the woods, we return to reason and faith.”

Tree: Tree of Knowledge
Book: Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, by Robert Pogue Harrison

Harrison’s Forests is a genealogy of how forests have cultivated the Western cultural imagination, from antiquity to the late-twentieth century (the book was published in 1992), but it’s not the standard one-damn-thing-after another kind of history; instead, it’s a beautifully rendered philosophical essay that moves subtly, unpredictably, and thrillingly to its final conclusion. Facing the forests, Harrison writes, we find ourselves, not because the trees are like us — they’re irreducibly different, in fact — but because, in their unknowable difference, they set us free to become who we are. When we lose touch of the forests, we lose everything.

12 Unforgettable Forests in Literature

Trees: Hemlock and Oak
Book: “I robbed the Woods,” (or poem 41 from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson), by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson is a paradox: haunted by loss, she gave to the world poetry that is radiant with an evergreen beauty. Dickinson, whom the cultural critic Lewis Mumford called “a rare flower,” drew her inspiration from both death and the vitality of the natural world, which, in many of her poems, are yoked together. One of my favorites, poem 41 from 1858, echoes loudly in our era of global climate change and environmental degradation:

I robbed the Woods —

The trusting Woods.

The unsuspecting Trees

Brought out their Burs and mosses

My fantasy to please.

I scanned their trinkets curious —

I grasped — I bore away —

What will the solemn Hemlock —

What will the Oak tree say?

And simply: Leaves
Book: About Trees, by Katie Holten

I just recently found Katie Holten’s About Trees, and I’ve never encountered anything quite like it. Holten, an Irish artist living in New York, invented a tree font: A is represented by the skeletal silhouette of an apple tree, B by the beech, all the way on to the Zelkova. The form of each sylvan letter is unique. About Trees is composed from excerpts of famous passages on trees, Darwin on thinking, for instance, rendered in English — and then reprinted, all on one page, in Holten’s tree font. Holten turns text into a forest, and the tremendous beauty of her art comes in the realization that the tree-font forest is both immediately familiar — as in the opening lines from Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees”: “Her green plastic watering can for/ her fake Chinese rubber plant/ In the fake plastic earth” — and immensely strange. Her book is a wilderness of prose and poetry that ultimately returns us to the fact of human wondering, which we have long recorded on leaves.

Bigfoot on the Beach

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Morning again. The sand fleas were bad. But everything else here, the breeze, the good rough smell of the sea air, the way daylight wakes you slowly, was better than the forest. He stretched his massive arms, feeling his shoulder muscles expand against the sand, then groggily stood up to check out what the waves were up to today.

It was flat. Low tide. The water was licked with imminent sun.

He was readying himself to run toward it, to feel the cool black current, laced with stars, rinse the fleas from his fur, when he saw it —

A cluster of humans sitting in the sand.

He got down low, then peered up slowly, scanning through the blades of salt hay to discover that there were droves of them, little clusters of silhouettes dotted up and down the beach. Some of them surrounding small pits of orange fire.

What were they doing out this early?

Usually, the crowds, with their brightly-colored shade-makers and folding seat contraptions and rectangular mats and round balls and heavy boxes full of ice, didn’t arrive until late morning, at the earliest. It takes time to move such artillery.

He had a pang of missing Littlefoot and Mediumfoot, and all their artillery (banana peels, walnut shells, vine hammocks, bamboo husks), so he tried to diffuse it by looking back at the water. Its swirls of silver were just beginning to settle his nerves, when he noticed that one of the silhouettes, a tiny one, was looking in his direction. Her finger rising up toward him.

He dove back toward his nest, crouching low in the sand. He wasn’t too worried about them coming for him yet, a child the only one who seemed to have spotted him — and who believes a child?

But still. Why on earth were they here? He had a bad feeling.

Not only was it dawn, it was winter. Usually the only humans you got this time of year were the ones who wore dark bodysuits, who lumbered into the freezing water with big white boards upon which they tried, time and time again, to stand. Those ones never noticed him. He could walk out onto the sand entirely exposed, and they would mistake him for one of their kind, his fur looking like their bodysuits from that distance, if they noticed him at all. It looked fun, trying to stand on the water. He sometimes dreamt of swimming out to one and using his eyes and gestures to ask to borrow their board. He had a feeling, a hunch, he’d be good at riding it, knowing just when to stand, when to bend. But he knew that it was probably too grave a risk. Humans, even the ones so in love with the waves they seemed more peaceful than the rest, couldn’t help their natures.

He’d always wondered why his kind bothered them so. They seemed perfectly content with deer, with squirrels and raccoons coexisting alongside them. What was it about his species that riled them up so? He was almost entirely vegetarian, liked a good termite nest, if he could find one, the piquant crunch of a fire ant, but that was basically it. He would never dream of trying to consume mammalian flesh. The thought made him sick. He wanted only their friendship, or, less than that, a benevolent disregard, neighborliness. But they were never content to leave him be. The few times he’d been spotted, his presence had always brought screams, then the raising of objects — cameras, spears, nets, guns — which one, depended on the human. The bullet wound in his lower leg still ached most days, all these years later.

Sigh. He figured his only course of action was to crawl a half mile or so low in the dunes and make his way to the water once he was further from the hoards.

He was just about to sit up, to heave himself forward to begin the four legged crawl through the grass, when the tiny human appeared on the top of the dune. For an instant, before he registered her oddly tangy, chemical smell, he pictured it was Littlefoot. Poised high on a branch, about to bound on to his chest — their favorite game… Why had he left them? The answer wasn’t simple. He had come to feel encumbered by it all. The gathering, scraping, chewing everything for everyone. Finishing just in time to start it all again.

After leaving, he had initially tried living in the woods, a few woods over from their woods, but the branches were too dangerous, hung too thickly with memories. He’d find himself yearning. For the soft plunks of Littefoot, the gentle crackling of twigs as Mediumfoot sat nursing under a tree. A dangerous force, this yearning, for he knew, if he gave into it, it would pull him back to a life he did not want.

The foreignness of the beach, its flatness, its lack of trees, its waves, even its sand fleas, was his best protection. He was safe here, as long as he had those waves. Every morning rinsing off the memories that had accumulated overnight.

The tiny creature had drawn near. Her smells of vanilla, of cucumber, were overpowering. “Hi,” she whispered, waving her furless little hand.

Though he had no idea what the word meant, he grunted back, “Hunph.”

“Are you here to see the sunrise?” she asked.

Again, he could not understand the question, though he noted its tones of curiosity. He gestured at his nest. “My home,” he said, which came out like, “Hunnn, hun, hun. Hn hn.”

“It was my mom’s idea,” said the girl. “She came up with it a few weeks ago. She said we should all stay up late to watch the ball drop on TV, and then get up early and drive to the beach so that we’d be the first Americans to witness the dawning of the New Year! My dad said, ‘Well, technically, there are some beaches in Maine that are further East, who would see it before us.’ And my mom said, ‘Arg. Why do you have to rain on my parade?’ And my dad said, ‘Not trying to be mean! Just stating the facts.’ And my mom sighed and got gloomy. But they still woke us up this morning. It was pitch dark, and I was confused at first so they let all of us stay in our jammies, and we’ve just been sitting in blankets on the sand, waiting, waiting. Mom says it’s gonna be beautiful. A fresh start. Dad says it’s gonna look like an over-easy egg, cracking over the waves. Mom said we could go out for pancakes after! But dad worried nothing would be open on New Year’s Day. Or, that for those few places that were open, the lines would be too long. And mom said, ‘For chrissakes wasn’t your new years resolution to be more hopeful, Bill?’”
The girl got quiet, conspiratorial, whispered in Bigfoot’s ear, “Bill is my dad’s name.”

Bigfoot adored this. Being chatted with. He had no idea the meaning of any of her words but believed he could register the emotions beneath them. Namely, that she was confortable with him. He put his massive black palm out toward her.

Impossibly, she rested her tiny white starfish of a hand upon it.

The contact, he was helpless against it. He was awash in Littlefoot. In his divine, loamy smell. The memories swirling into him — the piggy back rides, the walnut fights, the time Bigfoot had defended them from bees, little bastards. The honey he had extracted from the hive, amber liquid dripping off his finger, and into Littlefoot’s mouth. Littlefoot’s copper eyes, warming wide. He wondered, dared to wonder, how old Littlefoot was now. Nearly a year, up to his shin, surely. How Mediumfoot would have been faring, without him around to gather food. Then he was slammed by a horrific image. Something he felt sure was the truth. Both of them dead. Eyes picked out by vultures, rib cages protruding from the forest floor, dangling with bits of meat and matted hair.

He took the tiny human into the crook of his elbow and lifted her to his chest. She giggled and reached her arms around his neck, her little fingers twisting and pulling at his fur in clumps. The warmth of her, the size of her, so like Littlefoot. He hugged her close.

She said, “uuuf.” Then, “ow.”

And he understood this to mean hold tighter. He complied. Hugging tighter and tighter, her breathing becoming labored, gruntlike, just like his.

He could feel it, her warmth, her breath, breathing life back into the skeletal images of Littlefoot, of Mediumfoot. An illusion, he knew, but a great one. Their skin plumping up nice, their fur prickling back into thick, shiny coats, their eyes alighting with gold. He hugged tighter and tighter until the wriggling in the creature’s limbs had stopped entirely. Till there was no more warmth to squeeze out.

He let the husk of her body flop to the sand and began his slow, achy crawl to those merciful waves, the hoots and cheers of humans resounding from just over the dunes.

About the Author

Lulu Miller is a Peabody award-winning journalist for National Public Radio. She is the Co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia, a show about the invisible forces that shape human behavior. Before that, she was a reporter on the NPR Science Desk, and a founding producer of WYNC’s Radiolab. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her wife and dog and writes stories when they are sleeping.

These 8 Books are Fiction, but Climate Change is Not

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Fiction allows us to extrapolate our own futures, both on a personal level and on a societal one. With the Trump administration looking to make it easier to dig for fossil fuels and ignoring evidence of global warming, climate change has once again taken a prime position in the news, and the need for cautionary tales about the environmental path we’re on seems more important than ever. Here’s a look at eight books that explore the dangers of climate change to both landscapes close to home and on a global level.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl features a number of high concepts, each of which might be enough for a gripping read. Its setting is one in which global warming has suffused the landscape, reshaping the boundaries of nations and altering the way humans live. Genetic engineering has undergone massive leaps forward, as has energy technology; the result is a work that’s both cautionary and dazzling.

Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins

The Californian landscape of Claire Vaye Watkins’s heady, haunting novel Gold Fame Citrus is punctuated by abandoned homes, strange fauna, and a resurgence of the desert. It’s a setting that’s drawn from the present day: where once the homes of the affluent existed, a wasteland has sprawled, off-limits to all but the bravest or most desperate. It’s a bold commentary on where our society might end up, and how certain trends might accelerate into something hazardous and inhospitable.

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

Climate change can affect as many landscapes as exist on Earth. In Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Who Fears Death, the setting is sub-Saharan Africa at some point in the future. The societies depicted in this book live in the wake of an earlier, more technologically advanced one, which crumbled at some point in their past and our future. What remains is an altered world and terrain, populated by a handful of people possessing uncanny abilities.

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks encompasses the bulk of the life of its protagonist, beginning with her childhood in the recent past, and moving forward into the middle of the 21st century. It’s in this last section that the novel becomes truly devastating: as a result of environmental and economic collapse, society has reverted to a sort of brutal feudalism. It’s an unnerving conclusion largely due to the realism and level of detail with which Mitchell conveys this world; we see it in all of its unsettling dimensions.

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard

The novels of J.G. Ballard frequently use transformed versions of the world as their settings–sometimes to accentuate thematic points, and sometimes to explore the uncanny. (The Day of Creation focuses on a new river emerging near the Sahara, while The Crystal World focuses on a terrifying transformation of the landscape.) The Drowned World is set in a future where polar ice has melted, submerging existing coastlines and reshaping urban geographies around the globe.

Age of Blight by Kristine Ong Muslim

The title of this collection references a moment in human history when certain societal tendencies will have advanced past the point of salvaging. In other words: what happens when the surface of the planet is entirely blighted, and what will the events have been that got us there? Muslim’s stories not only explore the means by which the environment is degraded and remade, but also delve into the psychology of alienation that causes such actions to take place.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

The meanings of metaphors shift over time. When Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle was first published in 1963, its central MacGuffin–a substance called ice-nine, which would turn water into ice at any temperature–came off as a metaphor for nuclear weapons. As a story about human technology with the potential to irrevocably break the world, it now could just as easily be read as a cautionary tale about climate change, with none of its power lost.

Rubicon Beach by Steve Erickson

Steve Erickson’s novels all tap into their own surreal energy, whether they’re spinning tales of parallel timelines or returning to motifs of lost and destroyed structures. In his early novel Rubicon Beach, Erickson opts for a familiar setting, Los Angeles, but imagines that city in the not-so-distant future, when cataclysmic events have resulted in flooding of the city. The portrait of an urban space after such a transformation is one of the most haunting aspects of this unpredictable novel.