Page 507 – Electric Literature

The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Baby Farm

Posted on November 8, 2017March 18, 2020 by 007595

“Ourselves, A Little Better”

by Mai Nardone

NEW HOTEL

The opening was timed for the anniversary of the first test tube baby. A facility erected as a milestone: five decades of obstetrical progress. The chosen ground was a frontier of Bangkok, itself a forerunner in the contest for medical tourists. It opened as Newbirth Centre Asia, but for its hospitality-trained staff would be known locally, and later infamously, as New Hotel.

Ourselves, A Little Better (Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading Book 286)

The first commission was from a photogenic Australian couple, Bill and Joyce Boe of New South Wales, of tabloid-famous infertility, of an undefined beige ethnicity. They wanted a boy. Less than a year later, baby Adam was born to specification: 8 lbs., hazel eyes (his mother’s), AB+, and free of Bill’s family’s strain of an enzyme deficiency disease. The headline of The New Century, an Australian newspaper, exalted, “Science Bests Nature”.

UNNATURAL SELECTION

Dial back one decade and two patents, to the year New Hotel’s founder Dr. Susan Sims, then an embryologist at Waindell Medical Institute, pioneered a technique for egg harvesting and maturation.

It was a triumph of will more than science. Sims, Connecticut raised, had been drilled by prep-schools and a childhood fascination with natural selection to understand existence as competition. Like the best Thoroughbreds, she knew only forwards, the grind of track dirt underfoot, the constant gnawing at the bit. She spent her thirties butting her head against the gates that held her back, thwarted in her experiments on oocyte maturation. The object of her obsession she found under the microscope, the prison of her vocation: cell boundaries. She kept a habit of snacking from a bowl of flavored, half and half creamer capsules as she worked. French Vanilla, Hazelnut, Sweet Crème — everyone, said one former lab assistant, “knew what to buy Susan for Christmas.” The popped, crumpled shells littered her desk, giving off the sour stench of obsession. Sims preferred to work alone, and alone she made her discovery.

In vitro maturation (IVM) is the maturing of oocyte in a petri dish (hence, ‘in glass’). At the time, IVM was already on its way to displacing traditional egg harvesting procedures, which required the egg to mature in a woman’s womb before being extracted. IVM made egg donation easier; donors no longer had to endure procedural injections of a hormone cocktail. Dr. Sims’ method also improved egg quality and doubled embryo yield. She produced an unprecedented pregnancy rate: 74%. She didn’t publish the findings or disclose them to the university. Instead, she forfeited her position and, like every great American innovator, took the technology private. A year later Sims’ California-based fertility clinic, the Hatchery, came to be.

Enter here the marketing guru behind the Hatchery’s rise, Sims’ partner Denis Osman, who in a previous incarnation had made his name pushing pregnancy skin care products (breast firming cream, elasticity oil, stretch mark gel). Moms of the AOL era may recall the NewYou campaign, a weekly newsletter detailing postpartum mothers experiencing a ‘rebirth,’ second lives as figure skaters or salsa competitors. By the late 90s one prominent magazine was referring to Osman as “the patron saint of new mothers.” Still, his downfall was swift, the result of boasting, on a late-night show, that he had penned the stories himself. The Hatchery became Osman’s own opportunity at rebirth.

Denis Osman’s talent was understanding that relative ease of egg donation after IVM changed the way donors could be wooed. The Hatchery opened as an all-around fertility provider, but was quickly driven to mainstream attention for its hallowed egg donor database. Osman bought full-page ads in newspapers. A booth pushing donation popped up outside the Harvard Square T Stop, and fliers dotted the third-wave coffee shops of Princeton, NJ. Teams of intern copywriters produced think pieces that were pushed out through content recommendation engines. They directed chatter down the why-not route: the money was good, the process was (almost) painless, the eggs would have been flushed, anyway. An early employee of the Hatchery recalls a training session in which she was told to identify target donors as “Ivy League and Out Of Your League.”

The Hatchery went an extra length by providing each donor with complimentary cryostorage of a dozen of her eggs, which were vitrified (‘turned-to-glass’ rather than ‘frozen’). To reinforce this point, in the cavernous lobby of the clinic hung an impressionistic oil painting [1], an artist’s idea of what vitrified human eggs, collected in straws and stored in a dark swirl of liquid nitrogen, might look like: a string of rhinestones, a belt of stars. A hedge against the future — what if? The result of Osman’s campaign? Donors signed on in droves. Soon, the Hatchery had its pick of the country’s ‘finest’. And once the Hatchery had its pick, so did its clients.

[1] Now displayed in the Human Odyssey room at the California Academy of Sciences.

A survey of donor profiles, recovered from a cloud storage facility where the backup database was held, gives us an idea of what a perusing client might have seen. Each profile included a banner, often a collage, but sometimes a single image (a still lake, a rising sun, Machu Picchu). The pictures were themselves a timeline, beginning with baby-with-attitude through cap-and-gown. The average age of donors was twenty-five. Dimples were advertised. Ethnicity, hair type, body type, body weight, body hair, height, SAT score, eye color. Do you: sing in the shower; have gay or lesbian friends; like your handwriting; believe in life on other planets. Donors touted “strong leadership abilities” and “team player.” The language was always effusive. Ancestry.com provided the genealogy, complete with known monogenetic diseases. Everyone had gay friends. Less than one percent of donors identified as gay. Questions most often left blank: Corrective lenses? Multiple sex partners? College GPA? One early donor ended her personal statement with, “I love animals, human bodies, and working out. I love healthy meals. I use my artistic abilities to draw anatomies.”

Two years after opening, the Hatchery had already captured a third of the domestic reproductive technology market, prompting the Federal Trade Commission to open an antitrust investigation into the company’s practices. The Hatchery App topped the Lifestyle category of the App Store (for its app, Osman had hired the product team behind that decade’s most popular dating application). Eggs stored in cryogenic capsules were being shipped worldwide. The period also saw a rise in offspring t-shirt slogans: Rappaccini’s Daughter, Son of Krypton etc. The New York Times ran an Op-Ed piece titled What Do We Do With All These Eggs? an echo of investors’ cautiousness about the egg-donor boom. The public supposed a natural limit to the growth. Was infertility on the rise? It was not.

THE NEW GALTONIANS

For outsiders, the chief difficulty of extrapolating the future of the Hatchery was the seclusion of its founder. It wasn’t that the Hatchery was a particularly secretive institution — to garner client trust in what was a relatively new field, the staff was transparent, the legal team explicit, the doctors accessible. But each subsequent circle of workers obscured the founder, a cumulative effect, as of translucent sheets overlaid. Sims was known to work in isolation, in her laboratory in the center of the circular structure. She had her own entrance that opened onto the carpark. One employee worked there three years and only saw Sims twice. “We didn’t know if she was in or out. We had a running bet, a pot you contributed a dollar to each morning.”

This isn’t to say Sims neglected her duties as boss. She was meticulous, collecting all the client reports, reading each donor profile. Handwritten notes of commendation were shuttled from her lab to the employees. One recovered note reads, “Tracy, superb work with the Mendez family. You really surprised me this time.” It was an eerie juxtaposition of platitudes and detachment for some, but many were spurred on by the Sims’ gaze, as if aware of a coach’s presence on the sideline. One employee described the environment of the Hatchery as a modern-day Panopticon: was Sims watching now? Sims was present in the soothing minimalism of the lobby and the multi-flavored creamers available in the break room.

Other scholars have argued that there were clues in Sims’ interests, and in the few interviews given by Osman, but such reports are overblown and entirely retrospective. When Sims eventually went on trial, for example, the tabloids went into a frenzy, reading into the Sims’ court-presented possessions the doctor’s peculiarities. They wanted a Henry Jekyll, a Victor Frankenstein. Instead, they found a shy, messy woman. The most portentous of the items turned out to be the bedside reading:

Leach, Gerald. The Biocrats: Implications of Medical Progress

Hornblum, Allen M. Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison

Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius

Galton, Francis. Kantsaywhere

The last entry especially captured the public’s imagination. Kantsaywhere, written by Charles Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton in the early 20th century, is a novel describing a utopian, eugenic society. Sims in college had founded the New Galtonian Society, an unsuccessful attempt to resurrect Galton’s ideas about the inheritability of intelligence in the context of modern genetic determinism. The club only held one meeting, which Sims attended alone, surrounded by chants of a student protest staged outside the classroom.

So how does an idea that a couple decades previous had been spurned by an entire student body come to the mainstream? Michelle Huang, bioethicist and historian, notes in her book Manufactured Evolution that there was a necessary confluence of scientific advancement and “unregulated thinking” to augur the rise of Newbirth and the making of New Hotel.

Huang points the sequence of thinking that was rekindled under the Human Genome Project and saw the proliferation of ‘Understand Your DNA’ services. The mapping of the human genome demystified that final frontier. And although the new preeminence of genetic determinism spawned a number of protests about scientific tyranny and even a hit documentary from The National Geographic titled Cells: Imprisoned by the Genome, the movement lacked the conviction of previous decades.

In medical circles at the time, restrictions to gene therapy were being debated. Recombinant DNA, the technology for genomic editing, had come of age. It was possible to edit germ-line DNA (eggs and sperm) and therefore scientifically feasible to genetically augment (or diminish?) future generations of humans.

At the same time, Huang argues, the world was undergoing a separation of family and kinship. The modern family was an economic unit, a household — consanguinity had lost consequence. The previous year had seen the abolition of the last monarchy (the biggest champion, as it were, of the bloodline). A new era in American statecraft reintroduced pro-democracy regime change on a scale reminiscent of the Cold War. The Arab Spring swept North Africa, and covert CIA operations led to the fall of other dynastic autocracies (see the example of North Korea). Even the family-industrial model favored among the ‘Asian Tiger’ economies had given way to public companies. This was true especially in South Korea, famous for ascension through the avenues of chaebols (Samsung, Hyundai), those paragons of the family conglomerate. Thus, it mattered less in the modern era whether children resembled parents. What was important was improvement, each generation producing a better specimen than the last. Birth became not about reproducing genetic features, but improving upon the old.

Perhaps when we abandoned family, we also lost sight of legacy, and therefore history. The last of the Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors had passed away, and despite the best efforts of schools, new wars were layered over old wars. 20th century eugenics was too far back to provide its cautionary tale. That history had fossilized; it was the wreckage of an earlier civilization.

Huang’s storyline, however, treats history’s course as that of a river: its ocean destination inevitable, and coaxed by the earth’s topography. And yet only a visionary, like Susan Sims, could have charted that route in the present. And there were signs of her unique vision. From its inception, the Hatchery hadn’t been registered under its own name, but that of a parent company called Newbirth.

MAPMAKING

One of the documents to survive the Hatchery’s paper purge, which preceded the court hearings, is the handwritten notes of one doctor. Under the heading Corrections, the doctor has scrawled the following: “Type 1 diabetes, myopia, father’s height five inches below the national average, poor visual-spatial intelligence.”

Imagine now that you believe in the correlation (and it’s been argued there is one, especially in men) between height and success. You’ve lived with the daily inconveniences of myopia, the shadow of diabetes, a lifelong difficulty interpreting maps. A fertility provider promises to manufacture the desired result. The Hatchery was already in the business of gene therapy. Preemptive genetic screening was a given, and the usual suspects — sickle-cell, Tay-Sachs, hemophilia — were routed. Sims simply needed to expand the existing menu and up the price. She asked Osman if he could sell it. He said he could.

NEWBIRTH: OURSELVES, A LITTLE BETTER

The phrase was borrowed from James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. His response to questions on the potential of genetic engineering was, “Why not make ourselves a little better.”

Osman also studied DuPont Pioneer’s successful branding of genetically ‘edited’ crops, a follow-up to the poorly marketed GMOs of the previous decades. The language of education was employed: head start, trajectory, success. Osman molded the message to suit focus groups of various demographics. The message was always positive; it emphasized augmentation. Through the Newbirth campaign, Osman hoped to gently usher the world into a new age of genetic tinkering.

Sims meanwhile had utilized her egg database to map polygenetic traits that could be marketed to intended parents. Polygenetic diseases had long plagued the scientific community. How to pinpoint the responsible genes, given how many different genes could influence, say, heart disease. Such diseases were not as easily isolated and snuffed out as monogenetic ones, like sickle-cell anemia. Germ-line augmentation was only as good as the traits that could be isolated. Many in the scientific community moved on to epigenetics, and the naysayers trailed those advances for a time.

Sims, however, had delved into the race to map master-regulator genes (a race led, incidentally, by Sims’ former employer, the Waindell Institute). A master-regulator gene is a gene thought to determine the pathway for cell fates. It’s a switch that creates a cascading effect; an initial flash in the bolt that arcs through the human genome, forking unexpectedly, activated or muted by environment, by chance. Sims realized that she only needed to isolate the such genes for the select traits she wanted to sell. Hers was a nimble and small operation. She already had the largest collection of human eggs and corresponding genealogy ever amassed. Also, America’s embryonic stem cell research was sluggish in returning from years of suppression under the Bush Jr. administration. Within a year, she had already isolated three master-regulators, discoveries that only surfaced for the scrutiny of the hovering NIH, Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, and FDA when Denis Osman filed patents for the genes’ locations.

Sims wasn’t doling out certainties, of course, but propensities. Switch on a gene and increase the likelihood for logical-mathematical intelligence, for verbal-linguistic intelligence, and even, perhaps, for kindness. How she charted the cascade set off by the master-regulator gene was described by one geneticist as triangulation. Sims fixed one trait’s position using its relationship to two known traits, and once oriented, mapped down, pausing at each level to find her bearings. Once she had covered the master-regulators for various intelligences according to Howard Gardner’s theory of intelligence, she devoted herself to other favorites from the questionnaires: leadership ability, body type, dimples.

MEANWHILE…

Osman, in filing the patents, had in mind success on the scale of Genentech’s patent of recombinant insulin in the 80s. His ambitions were quickly stymied by the courts.

Meanwhile, The Economist magazine ran a special report on surrogacy, highlighting China after the lifting of its one-child policy. Picture this: Chinese families wanting for first sons, more sons, but the mothers beyond childbearing age. There followed increased demand for women who could carry a fetus to term. That demand, it turned out, was huge. Market forces prevailed. Thailand and India became the world’s surrogacy destinations.

Meanwhile, Sims was vacationing in Thailand. What was she doing there? Scouting. She would find Thailand a hospitable country for Newbirth. It already had an established gestational surrogacy industry. Also, thanks to a recently-completed high-speed rail that began in southern China and stitched together Southeast Asia, Bangkok was the playground of China’s millionaires. Specific records of Sims travels are scant, especially because the attention of geneticists and the media was on the patent case, which that week was settled by the Supreme Court.

What was patentable, it turned out, was Sims’ method. But no matter. On the other side of the world, the foundations were being laid for Newbirth Centre Asia. Its primary market was China, a nation less squeamish about the sort of genetic augmentation Sims would sell. The previous year, genetic modification of the human embryo had been attempted at Sun Yat-Sen University with barely a ripple of dissent. China was a country of over 10 million millionaires. Its Ministry of Culture had spent the last decade pushing money into ‘historical’ blockbusters with the purpose of re-education. They emphasized Confucian principles. And so, when time came for Osman to put together a narrative for the marketing team, he sold two packages. One involved surface changes, what Sims liked to call ‘the shell’, and the other emphasized the Five Constants of Confucianism:

仁 Ren — humaneness

義/义 Yi — righteousness

禮/礼 Li — propriety

智 Zhi — knowledge

信 Xin — integrity

How and whether Sims isolated a ‘righteousness’ master-regulator is unclear. Being a private enterprise, Sims’ research wasn’t open to peer review, and with its Thailand base, it wasn’t under the scrutiny of the FDA.

Build-a-baby, as the process was later called, started at USD 300k. This base package involved “maximization.” The baby’s genome was comprised of the best of each parent, without any additional features. Augmentation (beyond maximization) was 50k-80k per feature, depending on the difficulty in creating a reasonable propensity for that feature.

At the program’s inception, the main obstacle for Newbirth was that the pregnancy rate for in vitro maturation was still 74%. Given the intricacies of gene editing and the wait to see whether the fertilized embryo would take, Sims realized that it was inefficient to implant the embryo in the intended mother. Instead, she used surrogates. She implanted identical embryos into four women (sometimes as many as eight) at a time. If more than one fertilized egg was successful, they aborted the remainder, a cold and clinical and demonstrably effective strategy.

For its first trial (a batch?) Newbirth Centre Asia received over ten thousand applications from all over the world. Osman chose the Boes as the poster parents, citing their “empathetic features”.

CHAMBERS

The New Hotel is today a museum, a display of hubris, or ambition. Try the guided tour. One guide suggested to me that the structure was built to resemble a cell: solid outer boundary, the nucleus of the main office in the center of a glassy atrium. On a later visit, I was told the structure most closely resembles Jeremy Bentham’s fabled Panopticon, a prison design. The upper chambers, they’ll tell you, are where the surrogate mothers were imprisoned during their pregnancies. They’ll use that word: imprison. You’ll be invited to step inside a room.

Personally, I see in the structure a Russian doll effect: hollows within hollows. The facility, a round chamber, and within it chambers, and the mothers, round, fulfilling roles as chambers. And when you’ve arrived at the smallest chamber, a thing growing.

A year after New Hotel opens, Sudhidaa Chaiprasit, an undercover journalist, enrolls herself in a new cohort of surrogate mothers. What follows are the headlines we know: GENETICIST GROWS POST-HUMANS IN PRISONERS. We learn of a surrogate’s self-induced miscarriage, of a suicide, of infanticide. New Hotel is shut down.

Sims is later charged by the International Criminal Court of violating the Nuremberg Standards. Osman and the lab technicians testify to believing that the implanted embryos belonged to clients. Many were actually Sims’ experiments. She needed chambers; she hid her experiments in the children born to clients.

The following was taken from Sims’ court statement:

“I tried to free us from genetic determinism. From our evolution, our genes, which will fail us. You look at me and see the worst of humankind. I looked through the glass and saw in my work a future for our kind.”

In her experiments to perfect the human race, Sims held the embryos against a standard that could be traced back to the client questionnaires of the Hatchery. She wanted to create the ideal embryo, and by planting it her army of surrogates, begin the work of propagating a generation of post-humans. Ourselves, a little better.

On the eve of the trial’s verdict, Susan Sims kills herself with an injection of phenol to the heart. She is 49.

Despite the media barrage, there’s much that was kept secret by the Thai police. We don’t know, for example, how many children were born to Newbirth in that first year. A conservative estimate puts the number at two hundred. It’s suspected that the CIA has been working to track down the children for genetic testing.

And what of the promised qualities? Was Sims successful in her attempt to imbue these children of science with the Five Constants? The many intelligences of Howard Gardner’s theory? With kindness? It’s not known whether she managed to perfect the embryo according to her designs. However, Sims, who never married, kept in her home a vat of liquid nitrogen, a chamber, in which she stored a straw of her own embryos, vitrified and glimmering, already modified, already fertilized, one woman’s ante in a game for the future — what if?

Reading ‘Girl, Interrupted’ in the Psych Ward

Posted on November 7, 2017March 24, 2021 by 007595

I ’ve re-read Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted nearly every spring since I was eighteen. She has a bit in there about how springtime is suicide weather, and the first time I read that line it was one of those revelatory sort of moments that casts the rest of your life in a different light. Because of that, the book has become forever linked with the season, and my yearly springtime sads send me scrambling through my bookshelves, praying that last year I was sensible enough to re-shelve it in its proper spot.

I know for certain that I reread Girl, Interrupted in April of this year, because I tried to work the “suicide weather” line into an essay about suicidal ideation. My editor took it out, with a note about how it seemed a bit trite to open with a Kaysen epigraph. She was right; the line added nothing to the piece and wasn’t meant to. It was there as a sort of secret note to myself, a reminder of the slippery, tricksy nature of this season. You think you’re watching the earth wake up from its deep freeze, all birdsong and warm breezes and snub little snowdrops pushing up through the soil, but really you’re feeling yourself coming out of your own cold storage, with every pain and misery and heartbreak the spring has ever brought you melting and rising in you like sap.

Two months after the publication of my suicide essay, I woke up one morning and knew I was going to kill myself that day. Or rather, I couldn’t think of any good reasons to put it off any longer. Why drag myself through another miserable day on the increasingly remote chance that things might get better? I’d been making that gamble for months, and not once had the cards come up in my favor.

By that point, I hadn’t slept in weeks. I’m not a good sleeper to begin with, and then one dose of Cymbalta — which my psychiatrist had prescribed in the hopes that it would help manage not just my moods but my increasingly debilitating joint pain — broke my brain. I stopped sleeping altogether; even an increased dose of my extra-strength prescription sleeping pill couldn’t touch it. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t write. My mind moved in rapid circles, the same awful cycles of thought over and over again. My muscles ached from a body that was locked in constant state of fight-or-flight. Day bled into night bled into another day bled into another night bled into yet another day.

Two months after the publication of my suicide essay, I woke up one morning and knew I was going to kill myself.

I tried breaking my days and nights down into hour-long increments, then into quarter hours. I told myself that if I could survive from 3:15 am to 3:30 am, then I would be all right. But of course after that I always found myself staring down the barrel of another fifteen excruciating minutes.

Then one grey June afternoon I felt like I couldn’t survive even one more minute. I downed a bottle of sleeping pills and some whiskey, wrote a note, and got into bed. A few minutes later I got out of bed, shoved a few things into my backpack, stumbled down to the street and took a cab to the hospital.

I wound up on an involuntary 72-hour hold in the psychiatric ward of downtown hospital. As the nurse sorted through my hastily packed bag to remove anything forbidden — my pen, as it turned out, was a sharp, as were my bobby pins — she didn’t even pause when she pulled out my copy of Girl, Interrupted. Maybe she didn’t bother to read the title. Or, more likely, I wasn’t the first to bring this book in with me.

Kaysen’s account of her years spent in a mental hospital may seem like a strange choice for someone actually facing time in one, but to me it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. If I’d been traveling to Greece I would have brought a Lonely Planet guide or whatever, something that would give me the lay of the land and help me understand the local customs. Since no one has seen fit yet to print a patients’ guidebook to psychiatric wards, Girl, Interrupted — the first chapter of which is titled Toward a Topography of the Parallel Universe — would have to do.

I had a lot of time to read on the ward. Breakfast and morning meds happen at 8 am, and after that there’s a four-hour stretch before lunch. There’s usually some kind of programming in the afternoon, either art therapy or group therapy or walking group, the last of which involves walking circuits of the ward like a high school student who has to do laps for misbehaving during gym class. Dinner is at 5:30. There’s no official time for lights out, but unless you’re willing to go to bed at 8, the evening hours are even longer and emptier than the gulf between breakfast and lunch.

Since no one has seen fit yet to print a patients’ guidebook to psychiatric wards, Girl, Interrupted would have to do.

I spent my first two days in my bed, which was in a cozy sort of alcove up against a window, with the lights dimmed and my curtains drawn. I felt like the rest of the world was a stormy sea and my corner of the ward was a raft; as long as I clung to it and clung hard, then I could ride out my time in the hospital and go home to my family. I clung to my book, too, as both an insight into the strange new world I found myself in and a link to my other life, the one that existed somewhere outside the walls of the hospital. I didn’t talk to anyone except the nurses and doctors. I took all of my meals alone at my little bedside table, even though my nurse mentioned meaningfully that the staff “liked it” when patients ate together in the dining room. When I told her I’d rather not, she wrote something in my chart.

As Kaysen notes in Girl, Interrupted, everything a patient does or doesn’t do on a psychiatric ward is pathologized. The doctors “had a special language,” she writes: “regression, acting out, hostility, withdrawal, indulging in behavior. This last phrase could be attached to any activity and make it sound suspicious: indulging in eating behavior, talking behavior, writing behavior. In the outside world people ate and talked and wrote, but nothing we did was simple.”

Sure enough, during my next meeting with my psychiatric team (doctor, intern, and student), they told me that people had noticed that I wasn’t engaging much with other patients. Other meetings brought up other notes about my behavior: it had been noticed that I cried frequently, that I didn’t eat my breakfast, that I didn’t participate in group activities. A good portion of the half hour or so I had with the psych team every day seemed to be devoted to reviewing what I was and wasn’t doing on the ward.

I was tempted to say something very witty and cutting about how I was a suicide case in a hospital, not some ambitiously networking businesswoman at a social event. But as much as witty and cutting might rack up point with friends and admirers, they don’t tend to go over so well with doctors. And I knew that if I wanted to be considered well enough to get out of this place, then I needed to be someone who went over well with doctors.

The psychiatric field tends to value compliance above all other traits. A compliant patient, after all, is one who is likely to take her medication on time and show up to appointments and follow commands like “tell someone if you feel like you’re going to hurt yourself.” And yet a hospital is not an environment where compliance flourishes; patients have no access to fresh air or sunshine, they’re expected to follow arbitrary rules to the letter, and if they do things like question their medication or try to talk to hospital administration about conditions on the ward, they’re labelled “difficult” and medicated even more aggressively. While I was in the hospital I saw a situation escalate from a frustrated woman throwing a cup of (cold) tea on the floor to that same woman being pinned down by guards and injected with a tranquilizer.

It wasn’t hard to see that if I wanted to be released, I would have to learn to be compliant. Which meant learning to participate in day-to-day life on the ward.

Coming into the hospital, Girl, Interrupted had felt like a friend that I was allowed to bring with me — someone I’d known for more than a decade who knew the ins and outs of life on a psychiatric ward. Having this friend with me made it easy to spend hours alone in my alcove, flipping through the pages of my book by the humming fluorescent light above the bed. And yet as easy as it was to be alone with my book-friend, she spent hours patiently convincing me to get up and out of my room and talk to someone else. After all, Kaysen’s relationships with other patients form the core of Girl, Interrupted’s narrative; it’s their camaraderie that makes the book what it is. And a guidebook is a guidebook, by which I mean that you choose not to follow its advice at your own peril.

Coming into the hospital, Girl, Interrupted had felt like a friend that I was allowed to bring with me.

I started spending time in the patient lounge. I joined in a game of scrabble and offered to get snacks for movie night. I taught a regular yoga class every morning to help alleviate the post-breakfast boredom. I traded stories with other patients, and felt the giddy freedom of talking openly and candidly about mental illness with people who really got it. With them, having made a suicide attempt didn’t make me an object of pity or fear; it just made me one of the guys. It was the most normal I’d felt in months.

The doctors and nurses at the hospital were there to make sure that I was safe, that my medications were working, and that I had some sort of plan for what I’d do after I was discharged. All of the staff I encountered were kind to me and they all seemed to genuinely care about my welfare, but that was about the extent of our relationship. It was the other patients who sat with me while I cried, who listened to the litany of reasons why I was a bad person, who respected my space when I just wanted to be left alone. It was the other patients who devised a game to keep us busy over the weekend, one where we pretended we were at sleepaway camp complete with ugly crafts and late-night ghost stories.

Girl, Interrupted was what had made the idea of being in the hospital bearable. It was the other patients who helped me bear the hospital itself.

The Women Who Carried Violence In Their Bodies

Posted on November 7, 2017March 25, 2019 by 007595

When I was six years old, my family lived next to a man rumored to be a pedophile. Back then, the word meant nothing to me beyond hush-hush talk about him touching his female pupils inappropriately. I didn’t know what made some touches appropriate and others not. My parents must have heard the rumors too because they banned me from interacting with him longer than it took to pass customary greetings.

The glory of childhood is in its transparency, the not-so-black and white lines, the non-sinister imagination and untainted morals. This innocence will lead me to run errands for this man against the dull ringing reminder of my parent’s warnings. I couldn’t see the wrong in helping him buy items from the store two houses away, especially as I got to keep whatever change was left.

Innocence will lead me to run errands for this man against the dull ringing reminder of my parent’s warnings.

On one such errand, he handed me back the extra change, thanked me and tapped my bottom as I walked away. I thought nothing of it. My mind was occupied with the thought of the melting chocolate cubes I’d buy with my hard-earned money. But my brother witnessed what had transpired and told my parents who thought plenty.

Later, my father called me into my parent’s bedroom, where I was met with the unforgiving leather of a belt and a statement leaving no room for response: I heard you went to Mr. Tola’s house today.

I was whipped until my wails stuck in my throat and I choked on my own saliva. The brown of my skin was crisscrossed with red, blue and black welts. Blood trickled out of torn flesh. My mind swirled with questions for the belt and the hand that brought it down. I knew I was being accused of something. I’d been found guilty and this beating was my punishment, a loving attempt to purge me of the evil that sponsored the crime. The injuries I sustained took at least a decade to heal.

Over the years I grew reclusive, terrified of beatings. I blossomed into a teenager and headed to university, elated to be away from the transgressions of family and heady with the scent of freedom. I unfurled my wings and flew off into the sunset — but too close to a man with lava for hands. He raped me, left me flat on the ground with melted wings, and I wished my next breath would not reach my lungs.

Surrounded by a culture bounded by shame and sewn heavy with silence, the key to surviving was to leave no footprints stained with blood or traces of trauma that could lead back to: I heard you were in his house that night? What were you doing there?

I borrowed several pages from the book society hands all girls at their christening, whole chapters filled with rules: what to do, what to say, how to behave, how to be a good girl, how not to bring disgrace to your family. Where I come from, a person’s strength is directly proportional to how much suffering they can endure and still do what is expected of them. I have good practice from watching my mother do it. I believe I am very strong. Look at me hold it all in.

Where I come from, a person’s strength is directly proportional to how much suffering they can endure and still do what is expected of them.

Reading has always been an intimate experience to me. Books provided a sacred companionship no one could desecrate. I had a tendency to assume the characters’ lives — their triumphs were my own, my secrets were theirs. I have lived meaningful lives this way. This communion has helped me walk over a thousand hills and made sure I made it down. Somehow.

When I plucked The Color Purple by Alice Walker from my shelf and first met Celia, she was writing a letter and the raw confusion in her voice was palpable. Like me, she had been abused. She was only a teenager and could not tell anyone about her pain, didn’t know if anyone would listen. She decided to write to God, the one person she felt was close enough to know, and distant enough to not create problems. Her first letter opens:

Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.

I understood the exhaustion one must endure in order to bleed on paper. I kept a journal. I filled it with all the questions I was too afraid to ask out loud, not from fear of not making sense, but something deeper: shame at needing to ask at all. My brother found the journal and was about to read it aloud to my parents before I wrestled it back. I decided to keep my words in my chest, so they did not shame me.

My brother found the journal and was about to read it aloud to my parents before I wrestled it back. I decided to keep my words in my chest, so they did not shame me.

Celia was two years younger than me when we met, yet she embodied a lot of the things that I was. We both were afraid of our own voices. We both believed that the world would automatically be good to us if we did what we were supposed to. The world was never that pragmatic. Much of Celia’s frustration flowed from her perception of herself through the lens of others. People called her ugly, she believed it. They treated her badly, she judged herself worthless.

Society sees women that are raped as dirty and ruined, and I believed it, and I wanted desperately to be clean again.

My body was an ocean I could not cross, and floating around were pictures of men who had taken things from me: my father, random men on the streets, friends, relatives, the man with lava hands…

Men took things away from Celia too, but when she began to ask for those things, so did I. Together, we verbalized independence, resistance. We stood a little more upright. By the end of the novel, my face was streaked with tears.

A book club suggestion introduced me to Dominique Francon, one of the most complex characters to ever come into my life. We struck up a slow, unpretentious friendship filled with questions. The Fountainhead quickly became my favorite book. I was grateful to Ayn Rand for bringing Dominique to me.

A stark contrast from Celia, Dominique was an intelligent, opinionated, and eccentric woman. She was most things I wanted to be. She shunned societal expectations and criticized opinions she found to be lacking substance. Dominique was the ruler of her own world; she dictated the course of her life. She had what women everywhere in the world wanted: freedom.

Alvah Scarrett asks, “What do you want, perfection?”

She says, “Or nothing, so you see I take the nothing.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” he says.

She says, “I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alva, freedom.”

She knew what she wanted, demanded it, and refused to apologize. Alvah says, “Dominique, it’s abnormal to feel so strongly about anything.” She responds, “That’s the only way I can feel or not at all.”

As I read, a new conversation began with myself. I wanted to be this woman, I wanted to be in control of my body and life, I wanted the world to stop taking things away from me. I discovered feminism.

As I read, a new conversation began with myself. I wanted to be this woman, I wanted to be in control of my body and life, I wanted the world to stop taking things away from me.

Over the years, my mind has circled back to this conversation whenever I voiced my opinions about women’s issues. There has always been someone eager to tell me what I’m allowed to be angry about and how far that anger can go, how passionately I can denounce actions that hurt me. I recognize this as an attempt to negotiate false middle grounds. I’m able to see the unfairness of having to fight on uneven ground while being expected to play by another’s rules, and reject it, because I was there when Dominique pointed this pattern out to Howard Roarke:

When I think of what you are, I can’t accept any reality except a world of your kind, or at least a world in which you have a fighting chance and a fight on your own terms. That does not exist and I can’t live a life torn between that which exists and you. It would mean to struggle against things in men who don’t deserve to be your opponents. Your fight using their methods and that’s too horrible a desecration.

My connection with Dominique meant I had to find myself in a way of my choosing, at my own pace. It was time to reclaim my battered body from my father, take back my sexuality from the abusers, seize my pride from purity culture, denounce the patriarchy in all forms for what it was, even if it meant sacrificing some of its benefits.

Benevolent misogyny is still misogyny. Benevolent misogyny is a foster child of patriarchy.

A moment of crisis occurs in The Fountainhead between Dominique and her love interest, Howard Roarke. This crisis has been christened “The Rape Scene” and the literary community is split into two groups, those who think a rape occurred, and those who don’t.

This crisis has been christened “The Rape Scene” and the literary community is split into two groups, those who think a rape occurred, and those who don’t.

The apologists in the literary community consider this scene symbolic because character traits and ideals suggest this is what Dominique wanted and the only way she could have given herself to Roarke. I find this argument problematic as the idea of cues, suggestive actions and character traits serving as concrete validation of sexual request can easily spiral out of control. Speech is the language of consent, especially between people with no prior sexual relationship.

What I got from the scene is how easily lines can blur when a thing is taken out of context. Desire for a person is not approval or a signal that it is okay to have your way with them. In reality, where there are no narrative motifs to help escape accountability, a smile can be pounced upon as implying sexual desire instead of vocal consent. There are way too many women who carry violence in their bodies already. We cannot make room for any more.

A Poet Survives Abuse, Brain Trauma, and a Hurricane, Then Turns to Memoir

I realize how much this need to gloss over actions to make them more acceptable has permeated some of my past sexual experiences. I know violence can be subtle, creep under the skin like it belongs there. I too have called it a different name. I have wanted to absolve perpetrators of responsibility because I cared about them or was too embarrassed to call what had happened what it was. I figured piling makeup on the face of the experiences was the only way to look at myself in the mirror and not feel so ravaged. Otherwise the old pains would begin to ache and I was out of places to hide pain. I thought that if it didn’t happen, then I didn’t have to feel anything. I’m still finding myself. I am naming all the transgressions now.

And I wondered about the futility of ridding girls of innocence in the name of protection. Are female bodies cursed to be crime scenes waiting to happen? Can we ever keep ourselves safe enough to escape the violence if it comes bearing our names on its hands? On how many fronts can we fight this battle of preservation without losing whole portions of ourselves?

Are female bodies cursed to be crime scenes waiting to happen? Can we ever keep ourselves safe enough to escape the violence if it comes bearing our names on its hands?

I wonder what a safe woman looks like.

Early this year, I went hunting for books written by women of color and a copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God found its way into my hands. I gulped down the classic coming-of-age story of a woman named Janie.

From the outset, I was confronted once again by the array of violence committed against the female body: religious, cultural, social, economic. It seemed they were all in a race to see which could subjugate women the most.

I read and bore witness to the female body used transactionally, bundled away in exchange for sex, family honor, marriage, fragile egos, respect. And I considered that what little joy we women win back for ourselves also carries grief. I am thinking of war-torn bodies, little girls forced to become veterans before they have the chance to live a little.

Janie is born after her 17-year-old mother is raped by the schoolteacher. She grows up under the watchful caring eyes of her grandmother, who, after she is caught kissing a boy, decides to marry her off to an old man.

I was reminded of my parents and the accountability they forced on my shoulders, the crackle of a belt dancing through air, my body punished for male transgression.

Can we ever escape violence, or must we merely tolerate it? How much do we owe it and how much is owed to us? Will the debt ever be repaid?

Jamie’s second husband, Logan Killicks, eclipses her voice and tries to control it. I’ve seen men in my life do same. I’ve seen men on television do it. I’ve seen men everywhere do it:

“Thank yuh fuh yo’ compliments, but mah wife don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no speech-makin’. Ah never married her for nothin’ lak dat. She’s uh woman and her place is in de home.”

The idea of a female voice that is seen and heard is an inconceivable atrocity to some. The need to censor and police the female body is built on fear. But fear of what? A culture that rids the male body of responsibility and accountability while tattooing blame on the female body is dangerous and benefits no one.

The idea of a female voice that is seen and heard is an inconceivable atrocity to some. The need to censor and police the female body is built on fear. But fear of what?

Women are culturally engineered to be custodians of patriarchy as much as men are. The existence of these wonderful, rebellious, independent, audacious women characters opened my eyes to painful realities. I drew inspiration from their experiences, some of which had been mine. Like them, I did what I could to move against the swirl of transgression.

I am reclaiming my time. I am learning what freedom is. Coming into myself with the audacity of sunshine after a storm. I am verbalizing my defiance.

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“The young girl was gone, but a handsome woman had taken her place. She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was there.”

This signifies Janie’s release from the shadow and control of her husband.

I, too, am crafting my freedom. I am saying my name again and again until I learn to trust it. I am rejecting the little things, like being called to make dinner for my healthy brother who can cook perfectly but would rather play games than feed himself. I am making my dissatisfaction known. And when someone says it is wrong to feel so strongly — it’s just cooking — I’ll remember the personal is also the political. I will stand my ground.

Every time I make these little triumphs, like Janie, I’ll pull in my horizon like a great fish net, and I’ll summon my soul to come and see.

Where to Go Monster-Hunting in Britain

Posted on November 7, 2017March 25, 2019 by 007595

An infographic of creatures from English, Irish, and Scottish folklore, and where you can find them

Spiders in the Sky, Spiders in the Mouth

Posted on November 6, 2017March 5, 2020 by 007595

Lucid Ruse

I’m eating lunch with Sami and watching the season’s first storm. Sami fled Syria seven years ago. His son, Victor attends school with Wil. Sometimes, Victor dresses like Charlie Chaplin. After lunch, I dress like Lear. All day the moody air. My friend, Chris, is directing the play next year and he asked that I provide him with a poet’s perspective. I stand opposite Hannah, who’s playing Goneril. Two crowns on the table. I choose Goneril’s. Fine, Chris says, but read Lear’s lines. I look Goneril in the eye. Hark, nature, hear: Dear goddess…Into her womb convey sterility. Dry up in her the organs of increase. If she must teem create her child of spleen. Goneril winces. Or is it Hannah? A living father’s living daughter. Chris asks me how I feel. Sad, I say. Sad for Goneril. Sad for Hannah. And sad for Lear for going insane inside patriarchy. For not hearing Cordelia. For his inability to receive. Blindfolded, I’m led downstage. Extemporize on the word vision, Chris says. I talk about Edgar’s imagination nurturing Gloucester’s imagination, till Gloucester finally sees beyond his false fall over the cliffs of Dover. When Chris removes the blindfold my eyes squint into a spotlight’s glare. Is nudity standing on a stage pretending to be someone else, or standing on a stage pretending to be yourself? Walking home, lightning strobes the neighborhood. Expecting to find Kisha in bed, her face lit by the glow of her laptop, I open our bedroom door to a room so dark is it even a room? From that emptiness, Kisha says, I’m watching the storm. Later that night I listen to Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side. When I tell Kisha I’m only now realizing Reed’s brilliance she shows me an article in which Reed admits his jealousy over Kanye’s ability to turn an album (Yeezus) into a “novel.” Why, I ask Kisha, am I so behind the times? You were raised in Banks, she says. Banks is a one stoplight town surrounded by strawberry fields and forests. For fun, my friends leaned out the passenger window of a car and smashed mailboxes with baseball bats. Our mascot was the Braves. Baseball fans pretended their arms were tomahawks while chanting what they imagined were Native American battle cries. We listened to popular radio: Spice Girls, Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana. Friends and I stood by our lockers staring at Nevermind’s album cover, the underwater baby reaching for a dollar bill. The baby is Spencer Elden, now a California artist whose penis might be more famous than Ron Jeremy’s or Michelangelo’s David’s. When I Google the most famous penises in history. Number six is Lili Elbe, an early 20th century Parisian whose wife dressed him as a woman to model for a portrait, triggering a long struggle between Elbe’s public, male persona and emergent female self. Eventually, Elbe underwent a series of operations in which his penis was removed. It’s rumored that as a teenager Lou Reed’s parents approved electroshock therapy to relieve him of homosexual tendencies. The next morning I’m in the grocery store parking-lot when a hot air balloon passes overhead, its basket skimming the building’s roof. All week, pilots from across the country fly balloons over the valley in the annual balloon stampede. I walk faster. The balloon’s burner is pulsing bursts of flame. The basket grazes a powerline before landing in the parking lot of the Elks Lodge where a yard sign supports the 2016 Republican presidential nominee. That evening Kisha says, Your hands look idle, then lays her feet in my lap. I press my thumb into the sole of her foot and tell her that Wil worries Trump is going to send Victor’s family back to Syria. I walk to the kid’s room. They’re asleep. I lie down on the floor and breathe against layers of shame. Growing up, my sister and I battled for control of the TV. Fingernails dug into my arm. When I kicked her in the groin she collapsed to the floor. Boy body. Girl body. Breathing sleep, they sound the same. I’m in the kitchen the next morning making eggs when Wil points out the window at a hot-air balloon shaped like a giant clock. We step outside. Scan the sky. Between us and the balloon, a strand of gossamer floats near the roofline. Then another. And another. Hundreds of barely visible spinnerets drift through the air. Every fall, baby spiders climb to a high point, position their abdomen to the sky, then release fine silk spinnerets until the slightest breeze carries them away. The spiders travel a few feet, or a thousand miles; even ships at sea have recorded spider landings. The migration is called ballooning. Mortality is high. Once, in a high school baseball game, from the pitcher’s mound I watched a killdeer run hysteric over the infield grass. Someone said it was pretending to be wounded, that it might draw our attention away from its nest filled with eggs camouflaged in the chalk line beyond first base. Further beyond, behind the outfield fence, I saw a boy on his knees. For a moment, I thought he was praying, but he was planting flowers around the base of the flagpole marking the distance between me, and the disaster of ignoring intuition. One thing I love about Kisha is that she never stops me from staring at men I hope see in me what I see in them.

Lucid Ruse

Lindy shits her pants again. Little herring, let’s bathe, you and me. I’ll tell you a ghost story. Housesitting for Joshua For Emma Forever Ago on repeat for hours sleeping on the couch I felt hovering a ghost. Go find Brandon, I said. Place your ice fingers around his shingle ribs. In the morning, I emptied a bottle of Garnier Fructis fortifying shampoo. Is Joshua’s hair curlier than mine? Must be. He’s your standard tropical bird type; books arranged by subject on tables in every room. I wrote to Joshua: “I love your apartment, its friendly ghosts” is the story I tell Lindy. After cleaning the shit off her back, we’re naked on the bed. What poet hasn’t wished at least once in her life that poetry was dead? Some of us walk into fear, give it the finger; poem’s future zero according to Brandon who occupies disproportionate space in my heart compared to the time I’m with him. Wil says he fears the people he hears elongating vowels like Aaaaaand, we’re done here. In the CVS where I get the flu shot, neon touches Wil and me pretending to be strangers, fun for a while, like narcotics, then you prefer ye olde perception. Gold stars to that tagger transforming hydrants into R2-D2 when no is watching the lightning downgrade from Habanero to Hot Paper Lantern Kisha grinds to powder for soup for our neighbor cross-stitching “My teen has meth-face” into a pillow she’ll hang on a nail the western wind stuck in her door before the streeeeeets welcome her daughter forever. If your eye is the first circle, horizon is the second, I say to Wil. If only I could stand on my head between mirrors, trace one hand with the other, the horror of it, like an animal, or worse, an animal I know. I subdue the overwhelming sublime by writing poetry between mirrors developing blemishes made worse my imperfect mouth Kisha promises to kiss when I offer it. In the kitchen, cutting meat require my undivided attention. When I say, The best artists are assholes, Kisha says, Mind the fucking ham hock. Forgive me for staring but your waist is so, so Victorian. After reading Ruskin we make love in shirts whose arms we know for less control. In my anxiety dream I pitch a no-no to the soundtrack Not Everyone Long for God is Medieval. In the morning, it’s like angels really are and not merely bell episodes against dying. In the Spanish cloister of this apartments near zero boundary between me and strangers fucking, Kisha’s reading “A Kentucky of Mothers,” Medela Pump emptying the side Lindy fell asleep on. In the bathroom, I rinse something red from my hair. Wil enters with spiders a nightmare left in his mouth. I blame the fable about a wife cutting her husband’s sparrow’s tongues in half. My eyes grow to see you, Wil says. I hate his knowing so much before reason intervenes. I feel better after reading “Poets are ludicrous. And the best people I know,” in Callie’s poem. Wil draws a sea animal that will die soon, because a bat has it and a Jedi has the bat. Dad, I don’t think you know this. There are 100 moons because there are 100 worlds like the Brooklyn and the North Pole. Wil’s sea animal stares at me, till I change. Eye affirming cracks in walls baby rats enter in this part of the city officials call Electric. On the phone with his grandfather, Wil describes his day. I look for myself in every word. I never want to exist outside his thinking. My knowledge of the architecture reveals I know a little despair, but not the source of the sea smell guiding me, ushering me out into the night air giving me something to do in this privilege I’ve so long tried to ignore, happy to pass the time with friends and even alone on the sidewalk where I toss a paper airplane over the street, watch its flight into a passing car’s open window, awfully deserving, I think, of a little applause, so I’m clapping when couples exit the bar, pause to register my position, then continue walking against sirens, seldom and mixed through a landscape divided and mostly out of focus. Passing by is that me in the future tense? All these screens emitting light I’d like to turn away from. The shrugging effect seasons have when days begin the same, or nearly the same in gestures, seconds feelings take to change. Congratulations on that sweater, I think hear someone say, or the other anxieties different from these, till the question becomes whether or not the good spells might persist into areas dark and dangerous that almost belong to me when the humming of my thoughts leave small marks on paper as I sit between mirrors when Lindy’s not sleeping against the clang love is the beginning of a life poetry makes immense.

Tick

The Secret History of Cricket Magazine, the “New Yorker for Children”

Posted on November 6, 2017January 16, 2024 by 007595

No one answers the phones at Cricket Media.

The company has fully embraced the opaque, untouchable nature of most contemporary companies: a pretty website, a menu of general email addresses, and a fully automated phone system.

You press 1 for one set of publications, 2 for another, 3 for the dial-by-name directory. Or you can hold the line for a receptionist who simply doesn’t exist.

In the course of researching this story, I’ve dialed many names, held the line, emailed addresses both general and specific, and tweeted at Cricket. But I failed to reach anyone who currently works there.

Cricket wasn’t always so unavailable. Founded in 1973 by an educational reformer, Cricket has been accessible to so many children for the last 44 years. Generations of young readers cut their teeth on the pieces in Cricket: work by writers like Lloyd Alexander, George Selden, Ursula LeGuin, and Julius Lester.

In a time when children’s magazines mostly featured hidden object drawings and games, Cricket stubbornly refused to underestimate its young readers. It welcomed their correspondence, and was such a human endeavor that for many readers, finding Cricket in the mailbox every month was like a visit from a friend.

Cricket stubbornly refused to underestimate its young readers.

Kelly Link, whose collection of fantastical short stories Get In Trouble was a Pulitzer finalist in 2016, loved Cricket so much as a child she’s kept all of her back issues — she could not bear to get rid of them. Cricket influenced her to become a writer “one hundred percent,” she says, and more than that, nudged her toward writing short stories.

“[Cricket taught me] that poetry and short stories could be playful,” Link said. “That you could write contemporary short stories deliberately. That I liked some short stories better than others, and I especially liked stories of the fantastic.”

Laura Newcomer, a professional writer and editor, also read Cricket as a child. She loved that the magazine felt like it was written for her.

“I was an intelligent and extremely imaginative kid, and I felt like the magazine didn’t patronize me. Instead, it felt like it celebrated me and other kids like me, and provided a space for us to come together and be smart and imaginative together,” Newcomer wrote to me.

That sense of kids being taken seriously was no accident. It was the whole idea.

In the early ’70s, Marianne Carus received a submission for her fledgling literary magazine. It was from Astrid Lindgren, the creator of Pippi Longstocking. The submission was part of her manuscript for her latest novel, The Brothers Lionheart.

It was a children’s book, but not a happy one: within the first three chapters, the titular characters both die and go to the afterlife; the older brother sacrifices his own life to save the younger in a housefire, and the little brother later dies of tuberculosis.

Carus read it, loved it, and decided she had to publish a portion of the book. It was excellent literature, and that was what she wanted in her newest endeavor, Cricket, a literary magazine for children, a curated collection of the cream of children’s literature, that would eventually come to be called “The Little New Yorker.”

When Carus, now 89, talks about her philosophy in creating Cricket, she paraphrases English poet and children’s author Walter de la Mare, saying only “the rarest kind of best in anything is good enough for children.”

“We only accepted stories and art of the highest quality,” she said. But “the rarest kind of best” and “the highest quality” didn’t always align with what people thought was appropriate for children.

Carus’s staff balked at The Brothers Lionheart. The story’s themes of death and disease seemed too dark for a children’s magazine.

Her art director called to tell Carus that the new magazine could not publish the story. It was too dark, and too sad. Carus was unmoved.

Her art director, Trina Schart Hyman, called from her home in New Hampshire to tell Carus that the new magazine could not publish the story. It was too dark, and too sad. Carus was unmoved.

“I said ‘Trust me, Trina. I will have it in Cricket,’” she said. “So we did.”

Marcia Leonard, then on staff as an assistant editor, remembers not loving the story, less because of the themes and more because of its presentation, but she also trusted Carus’s judgment.

“Although Marianne sought her editors’ opinions, we recognized that she was in charge and the magazine was her baby, so she made the final decisions,” she wrote in an email.

There was no watershed moment when Carus, a German immigrant and mother of three, decided to found a literary magazine for children. Instead the magazine was born out of a cluster of enterprises, pressures, needs, and about 13 years of interest in educational reform.

A poem from Cricket Magazine featuring art by Eric von Schmidt. (Courtesy of Caitlin von Schmidt)

It all started when André Carus, the oldest child of Marianne and her husband Blouke, started first grade for the second time in the fall of 1959. He had already attended school in spring of that year, when his family was on a year-long trip to Germany. When the Caruses returned to Illinois, his parents were appalled by the repetition and the limited vocabulary of the Dick and Jane books he was given to read in school. That experience prompted the Carus family to launch the Open Court Readers, a reading curriculum that relied on phonics and engaging reading material.

Starting publications is a Carus family tradition. In 1887, businessman Edward Hegeler — Blouke Carus’s great-grandfather — started the Open Court Publishing Company. The original goal of the company was to publish two journals: The Open Court, a journal which aimed to reform religious thought using the principles of science, and The Monist, a philosophical journal. (The Open Court put out its last issue in the 1930s. The Monist is still published today, now by Oxford University Press.)

So when the Carus family, in the early ’60s, decided that their son’s reading material was substandard, they used the family publishing house to publish the Open Court Basic Readers.

Blouke Carus is an engineer by training, but absolutely dedicated himself to improving the U.S. education system. He found himself up against not just the Dick and Jane see-and-say method of teaching reading, but inertia in the educational system.

It’s been a long battle. When I reached Marianne Carus to talk about Cricket, Blouke had left their home in rural Illinois to go to Washington, D.C. to talk to education officials.

“He’s 90 now, my husband,” said Carus. “But he’s still very young at heart, and very fortunate that he can still travel to Washington and talk to the most important people there. They listen to him, but they don’t do very much about it.”

While the Open Court Readers were Blouke Carus’s project, Marianne was brought in early on as a kind of tastemaker. The Open Court Readers focused on phonics paired with good reading material, so that children would be interested in reading. Marianne, who studied literature at the University of Freiburg, the Sorbonne, and University of Chicago, knew good work when she saw it, and was able to identify selections that should be included in the readers.

Carus is one of those rare adults who seems to understand children; when you talk to her about the choices she made as Cricket’s editor, she draws on her own experience of being a child who loved to read.

“Short reading material is very important. It gives you a certain sense of accomplishment if you finish a story or if you finish a short book,” she said. “When I was a child, and I was reading one book after another, I was very happy when I did finish a book and didn’t just leave it because I was not interested in it anymore.”

She founded Cricket because in her work with the Open Court Readers, she discovered a dearth of good short material for children.

In the early 1970s, there were about 100 children’s magazines on the market. None of them carried great material, in Carus’s opinion. She recalls reading Highlights for Children to André when he was sick with a sore throat. Highlights did the trick — it put him to sleep. It also put Marianne to sleep.

“I was reaffirmed in my belief that children needed something they would stay awake for,” she said.

‘I was reaffirmed in my belief that children needed something they would stay awake for.’

Carus modeled her new project after St. Nicholas Magazine, a literary magazine for children which ran from 1873 to 1943, and had been edited by Mary Mapes Dodge, the author of Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates.

The magazine began in 1972 with a small staff: Marianne and a part-time secretary worked on-site in the company’s office in LaSalle, Ill. Trina Schart Hyman, whom Carus had met at a book fair and hired as Cricket’s art director, worked remotely from her home in New Hampshire, sending her work in through the mail.

Carus also brought on an editorial assistant, Marcia Leonard, a recent college graduate with a degree in children’s literature. Leonard had been taking a summer course at Radcliffe in magazine and book publishing when one of her classmates showed her an ad for a new children’s magazine. She had been planning to go to New York, but she couldn’t pass up an interview with a new children’s magazine in her home state of Illinois. So she drove out to LaSalle, a little town in farming country.

“After I talked to Marianne about the magazine and her plans for it I knew I had to be there,” she said. “That was very exciting, to be in on the very beginning of something.”

Carus asked Leonard to commit to two years. Leonard promised one. She was there for six and, in that small office in that little midwest town, Leonard received a more rigorous training in editing than she might have gotten in New York.

“Marianne was a great mentor. She would sit beside me and go through a manuscript I had edited and she would talk with me about [why I made the edits I’d made]. I learned tremendously from that experience,” said Leonard, who is now a freelance editor and the author of more than 100 children’s books.

The cover of Cricket’s first issue. (Courtesy of Marcia Leonard)

In 1972, Carus, Hyman and Leonard put together a pilot issue of Cricket. There was only one problem with it: Drawing from the example of St. Nicholas, the magazine’s titles were hand-lettered, which made it hard to read. So Carus brought in a designer: John Grandits.

While Grandits, who is now a children’s author, started with the Carus Publishing Company as a typographer, he quickly learned through working with Carus and Hyman a truth about Cricket’s philosophy: good storytelling wasn’t just about the printed word. The stories should be linked to the best illustrations possible.

“Illustrations are a speciality field, and in ’73 there were many great illustrators still working and still alive and Trina was able to corral them and get them to work,” said Grandits, who later became Cricket’s art director and took the magazine from its original 6 by 9 size to its now-iconic 7 by 9 format.

All of the artists in Cricket were remarkable; Grandits recalled one conversation in which Wally Tripp painstakingly explained how to correctly alter a horse’s anatomy so it could be anthropomorphized.

“He says, ‘Well, horses have hooves. They have no opposable thumbs. If you’re given a story to draw with a horse, how do you resolve the thing where he has to have a top hat and cane? He can’t put the hat on. He can’t hold the cane. What do you do? There’s a lot of illustrators who sort of lay it nearby, and it looks as if they’re holding it maybe, and nobody ever addresses the question of how the hat got on the head. But what you have to do is make adjustments to the anatomy of the horse.’ So he said, ‘Here’s a horse skeleton.’”

Tripp sketched out a horse skeleton in the dust of the fireplace where they were sitting. He went on at length, about how many fingers a horse should have, and how the cleft part of the hoof could work as an opposable thumb.

“He’s worked through all this, very seriously and very sensibly,” said Grandits. “There are big problems you have to solve if you want to draw this with honesty and honor.”

Another of Cricket’s artists was the late folk singer Eric “Rick” von Schmidt. Singer, composer, friend and collaborator to the likes of Bob Dylan, von Schmidt was also an artist. His work can be seen on album covers from the ’60s, but also within the pages of Cricket.

The first piece he did for Cricket was in 1979, said Caitlin von Schmidt, who is herself an artist. (She began reading the magazine that year, when he started working for them.)

“It was all storytelling for Rick,” said Grandits. “You tell stories with your pictures, you tell stories with your songs.”

Hyman herself, who died in 2004, was an incredible artist. Her dreamy, detailed drawings won her the Caldecott Medal in 1985 for her work in St. George and the Dragon by Margaret Hodges. (She also garnered three Caldecott Honors.) It was Hyman who drew Cricket, Old Cricket, Ladybug, Sluggo, and all the other bugs, worms and spiders that still crawl, wriggle and jump through the pages of Cricket and its sister publications.

“[Trina] just had such a wonderful way of drawing them,” said Leonard. “They served as explanation of difficult words so if there was a vocabulary word that might stop a kid reader the crickets would explain what that word meant. They also had their own little life in the four-block cartoon.”

The first Cricket and Ladybug cartoon, by Trina Schart Hyman and John Grandits (courtesy of John Grandits)

The Brothers Lionheart was published serially in 1974, beginning in Cricket Vol. 2, #12. The response from readers affirmed Carus’s decision to include the excerpt in the magazine. A Librarything review from 2013 describes having read the first installment and not being able to find subsequent issues of Cricket to finish the story.

“Oh how I suffered, not knowing what happened to the two brothers who jumped out of their burning house to what seemed certainly to be their deaths, ” wrote user anderlawlor. “Then in 2002, I was working at Dog Eared Books in San Francisco and someone brought this book in to sell. One of the best days of my life. It actually holds up to twenty years of longing.”

‘Kids love to cry. I wanted to cry too when I was a child.’

Susan Bernofsky, a translator shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her German to English translation of Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, was a voracious reader of Cricket as a child. She remembers The Brothers Lionheart as a particular favorite.

“I think I loved it so much because of the sadness and the modeling of how to deal with sadness with love and grace,” she told me. “I loved the picture the story painted of fraternal love, and the idea that somebody could send a message of love from beyond the grave.”

Carus, in giving children credit for being able to respond to a range of emotions, had made the right decision.

“Kids love to cry. I wanted to cry too when I was a child,” said Carus. “And in some ways, it was a relief, to be able to cry about something. Just as it is a relief to cry about when you are very very happy.”

Children — like Link, Newcomer, and Bernofsky — responded to the trust that Carus showed them. They wrote in en masse, often addressing their letters to Cricket and Ladybug, sending story suggestions, recipes, and letters. One child, said Grandits, found a cricket in their home and mailed it to the bugs “as a friend.”

“The response from the readership to the magazine was phenomenal,” he said. “These kids took this thing very personally… from very little to very mature, kids would write to us.”

“Cricket was a gateway drug to The New Yorker,” said Sarah Burnes. Burnes — now a literary agent at The Gernert Company — read Cricket cover to cover when she was a child. She loved the stories and conversations between Cricket and the other bugs.

‘Cricket was a gateway drug to The New Yorker,’ said Sarah Burnes, a literary agent.

“It certainly played a big role in my becoming a fanatical reader of both magazines and books, and then an English major, editor, and now agent,” she wrote.

“It sounds cliche, but I think the word ‘transported’ applies to my experiences with reading the magazine,” said Newcomer. “I eagerly looked forward to its arrival and could get lost in current and back issues (I saved every single magazine for years) for hours. It was like entering a flow state through creative consumption as opposed to creative output.”

Bernofsky began reading Cricket as a 7-year-old in 1973. Her mother, a teacher, learned about the magazine before its official launch, and subscribed Bernofsky and her younger sister to Cricket, starting with the very first issue. She read each issue multiple times.

“I still remember some of the drawings and poems and stories today,” she said in a Facebook message. “There was a little poem ‘Pity the girl with the crystal hair, how can she run, how can she bicycle?’…I could probably still recite most of it.”

André Carus went from being the inspiration for the Open Court Readers to being their publisher; he managed the Carus Publishing Company (Open Court’s parent company) from the mid-’80s until 2011.

It was during his tenure that Cricket’s magazine family expanded to include its 14 sister publications, including the other “bug” magazines: Babybug for babies, Ladybug for toddlers, Spider for small children and Cicada for teens. There were other magazines as well: Grandits and his wife Joann were brought back to Carus Publishing to launch the nonfiction magazines Muse and Click.

When I reached out to him for this article, Carus was willing to be interviewed, though he asked me to do some homework first. He wanted me to read a 2006 book called Let’s Kill Dick and Jane: How the Open Court Publishing Company Fought the Culture of American Education, written by Harold Henderson.

The book, commissioned by Carus, is less about Cricket, which is mentioned just once, and more about Open Court Readers and Blouke Carus’s quest to reform U.S. education. In fact, although Carus was attached to the magazines, he feels the textbooks were the greatest contribution to education in the U.S.. The Open Court Readers, he points out, made a difference to disadvantaged children who needed to learn how to read. Cricket was aimed at a demographic that would probably have been literate anyhow.

I asked Carus, now 64, what it was like growing up alongside his parents’ publishing enterprise and educational efforts.

“Oh, I was a believer,” he said. “I think the company made a difference.”

Unfortunately, Carus inherited a difficult business model; magazines are normally supported by ads, and none of the Carus magazines ran ads, relying instead on subscriptions.

The business model was made even more difficult by the rise of the internet. Cricket and its sister publications did move online in some ways: by 2007 parts of all the magazines were available online and electronic versions of the magazines were available to subscribers. That didn’t help, however. Cricket, which had long relied on subscriptions to its physical magazine, had a difficult time finding a way to adapt to an online environment.

Cricket, which had long relied on subscriptions to its physical magazine, had a difficult time finding a way to adapt to an online environment.

In 2011, when it was sold, the company was still fulfilling many print subscriptions. Two thirds of those subscriptions, said Carus, were gifts from grandparents.

It wasn’t enough to keep the company afloat. The Carus magazines had always catered to an audience that was willing to pay a little extra for quality, but there weren’t enough of those customers to keep the company solvent. While the Carus Publishing Group had some success finding new customers through direct mail in the mid-’00s, the 2008 financial crisis dinged it badly. Banks were no longer as willing to deal in cash flow lending.

“If we hadn’t sold, we would have gone bankrupt,” said Carus.

Now that he’s out of the publishing business, he is engaged in another of the Carus family’s passions: philosophy. Carus earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2007, and writes a blog dedicated to the work of the German-American philosopher Rudolf Carnap. He now lives in Germany, where he is a visiting fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.

He seems both saddened and relieved when we talk about the sale of the Carus Publishing Company. He’s finally free to pursue his love of philosophy — he says he never really got any peace until the company was sold — but he’s sorry to have to sell the company his parents built.

The textbooks had already been sold off in the late ’90s. The magazines were sold in 2011 to ePals Corporation, a Canadian digital education platform that would hopefully be able to bring Cricket and the other magazines into the digital age. That company is now called Cricket Media.

Cricket is still around.

I found one of the latest editions in a library this fall, and it’s as well-written and well-illustrated as ever, which is unsurprising, considering that the current editor-in-chief worked with the Caruses before the magazines were sold.

If reviews from current and former employees on Glassdoor are to be believed, the current editorial staff still cherishes the values held dear by Cricket’s founders, although the management is struggling with the realities of magazine publishing.

Today’s Cricket is exactly like its namesake. Its output can’t be ignored. But if you’re trying to find the cricket itself, good luck.

There is a hint in those reviews that the current owners might be educational reformers in their own right: one review talked about the owners’ vision for school-wide technology and their conviction that the way students are educated must change.

It sounds quite familiar, but I never found out, of course.

Cricket is named for a scene in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s A Day of Pleasure, in which a cricket in the house chirps all night, “telling a story that would never end.” Today’s Cricket is exactly like its namesake. Its output can’t be ignored. But if you’re trying to find the cricket itself, good luck.

The 10 Best Umbrellas in Literature

Posted on November 6, 2017March 25, 2019 by 007595

Like their real-life counterparts, umbrellas in fiction have a peculiar knack for getting lost, borrowed, stolen, and turning up in all sorts of unexpected places. They have been revered and reviled, cared for and cast aside, and used as weapons, shields, metaphors and even magic wands. Sometimes they slip into the action for a brief moment before ducking out again; other times, they are the catalyst for an entire novel. Perhaps most intriguingly, novelistic brollies frequently reflect real-world attitudes towards umbrellas, and the myriad meanings humans have invested in them over the centuries.

In researching my book Brolliology: A History of the Umbrella in Life and Literature, I’ve traced the humble bumbershoot’s origins and eventual domination, its reputation and moral associations, and even its erotic potential. Here is a collection of some of my very favorite literary umbrellas: from the pivotal to the mundane, the intriguing to the downright bothersome.

Howards End, E.M. Forster

When Helen Schlegel absent-mindedly abducts a stranger’s umbrella one day, she can little imagine the ramifications of her thoughtlessness. Her unfortunate victim is a clerk, Leonard Bast, who possesses very little money or social standing but yearns for education, art, culture. When he retrieves his brolly from the Schlegels’ house the gulf between their classes yawns wide — they have countless umbrellas; he has just the one, and it’s in appalling condition — and still wider as the Bast and Schlegel families become ever more entangled. What follows is a sensitive yet damning exploration of class relations, social norms and women’s rights in early 20th century England — a time when, in Forster’s words, “the Angel of Democracy” proclaims that “all men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.”

The Umbrella Man, Roald Dahl

This short story is very Dahl, and wonderfully touches on truths that have followed umbrellas around for centuries: the sumptuousness of a well-made brolly, the class connotations attached to them, and the umbrella’s propensity to be lost, borrowed or stolen. I won’t give away the ending, but suffice it to say that, when George Borrow (an apt umbrella name if ever there was one) wrote in 1907 that “robbers never carry umbrellas” he could not have predicted the wildly inventive uses Dahl would put one (umbrella, and robber) to.

The Giant, O’Brien, Hilary Mantel

This novel is a fictionalized account of the “Irish Giant,” Charles Byrne. Fleeing the poverty of 1780s Ireland to seek fame and fortune on British shores, O’Brien and his friends arrive to a country quite different from their own, with a few novel inventions not seen in the course of their rural upbringing: staircases, and umbrellas. These “[canopies] on a stick,” as one character describes them, are in their earliest days of use in England, and Mantel deftly captures the real-world antipathy towards them with the reaction in her novel: boys like to throw stones after umbrella-carriers, and “collapse the tent on their heads, making them sopping.”

Elizabeth is Missing, Emma Healey

One of the unexpectedly pivotal characters of this novel is a woman living on the very edges of society. Driven mad by grief and trauma and shunned by her community, the woman carries an umbrella, “a shabby inky thing, half unfurled,” which she brandishes at passers-by (and occasionally hits them with). It’s an echo of a time when umbrellas were aligned, in the British imagination, with scruffy, disreputable, and decidedly lower-class characters. In fact, Healey’s “mad woman” has, in Australian author Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South, a literary sister: an Aunt Kathy who “went mad and danced Salome’s dance in her skin and an umbrella.”

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

What child, reading the first Harry Potter book for the first time, could fail to be beguiled by the image of Hagrid, the hulking hairy half-giant who makes a dramatic appearance in the earliest hours of a rain-whipped morning, finally giving readers what they have longed for — a friend and rescuer for neglected Harry, and overdue comeuppance for his bullying cousin, Dudley? Certainly not ten-year-old me, and the frilly pink umbrella Hagrid swooshes through the air to conjure a curling pink pig’s tail from the seat of Dudley’s trousers has held a special place in my heart ever since. It’s not exactly a magical umbrella… but that’s another story.

Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens

It’s hard to narrow down Dickens’ best brolly mentions because there are so many, including at least two essays (“Please to Leave Your Umbrella,” in particular, is superb) and a whole cast of memorable characters. However, the most (in)famous is undoubtedly Mrs Gamp, the self-satisfied, generally sozzled nurse of Martin Chuzzlewit, whose dubious qualifications primarily consist of eating, drinking, and snoozing beside her long-suffering patients. So memorable was Mrs Gamp’s umbrella — terrorizing coach passengers with its pointy end, catching innocent bystanders around the throat with its handle — that her very name became synonymous with the objects, and “gamp” remains part of British vernacular to this day.

Amerika, Franz Kafka

Kafka’s first, and unfinished, novel, was in part inspired by Dickens — so it is entirely appropriate that it should contain an umbrella. Sixteen-year-old Karl Rossman has been shipped to America in disgrace after being seduced by a housemaid. He is about to disembark when he realizes he has left his umbrella in his cabin. In the process of trying to recover it he befriends a stoker, who takes him to the ship’s captain, who just happens to know Karl’s long-lost uncle, who offers Karl unlooked-for friendship and hospitality (for a time, at least; it wouldn’t be Kafka otherwise). The umbrella, as far as we hear, is never recovered.

Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert

Like her future husband, I became slightly besotted with Emma when she appeared in the early pages of Madame Bovary beneath a luminous sunshade on a molten spring day. Indeed, a sunshade, or an umbrella, accompanies her through much of the novel — most tellingly when she first expresses dissatisfaction with her marriage, or begins to fall in love. It is one of the more subtle, yet striking instances of an umbrella’s delicate eroticism and its ties to the individual.

Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers

No list of literary brollies would be complete without mention of the iconic Mary Poppins, whose umbrella accompanies her on adventures, errands, and the occasional flight over Cherry Tree Lane. The Poppins of the books is far sharper than Julie Andrews’ saccharine movie counterpart — and exceedingly vain about her parrot-headed accessory.

Umbrella, Will Self

Umbrellas abound in this linguistically playful, modernist jaunt of a novel set partly in an umbrella factory — and the text is absolutely crawling with brollies. They appear in the hands of almost every character; they are sprinkled liberally throughout as metaphors; they are intertwined with sex, death, dreams, memory, hallucinations, medicine, the moon landing — they even, in one or two memorable scenes, transcend human-umbrella boundaries entirely. Ever wondered what it might feel like to turn into an umbrella? Read this, and wonder no more.

About the Author

Marion Rankine is a London-based writer and bookseller. Her work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Overland, and For Books’ Sake, among others. Her latest book is Brolliology: A History of the Umbrella in Life and Literature.

Am I Still a Real Writer If I Don’t Feel Compelled to Write?

Posted on November 3, 2017August 21, 2024 by 007595

The Blunt Instrument is a semi-regular advice column for writers. If you need tough advice for a writing problem, send your question to blunt@electricliterature.com.

Dear Blunt Instrument,

There are some (a lot?) of writers who say shit like, “I have to write, I couldn’t not write, writing saves my life” etc. etc. (like cough my ex before last whom I’ll apparently never get over). So the reason I don’t think I’m a real writer, even though I’ve been published and some writers/people I respect have told me I can write well is because I don’t feel like I have to write.

I’ve been blocked for years and avoid writing almost every day. I can only manage haikus or song parodies because they’re so short and constrained that my hatred for my words and ideas doesn’t have time to kick in. So I feel like I’m probably not a writer, compared to my stupid ex who writes everyday and has been working on a book for years, along with getting engaged. FML.

So I guess my question is, am I not a real writer if I don’t feel like I have to write?

—Am I Real

Dear AIR,

First of all, I don’t see writers versus real writers as a useful distinction unless writers includes fictional characters who write and “authors” who let ghost writers do all the work. That’s not you, so if you write sometimes and not never, you’re a “real writer.”

Now let’s unpack this assumption a little. It seems closely related to what a friend of mine calls “the ass-in-the-chair canard,” or the idea that you need to write every day if you want to be a real writer. I hate this idea — it’s both privileged (it’s a lot easier to write every day if you’re healthy, if you don’t have to work a full-time job, if you can afford to do stuff like have an office, pay for childcare, have a housekeeper, etc.) and gatekeeper-y (a way of keeping those less lucky people out of the game). It’s also a version of that uniquely American condition I think of as Productivity Madness (more is always better! Suffer! Produce!).

If you write sometimes and not never, you’re a “real writer.”

This version — the “I can’t not write” canard — is slightly different, but as a way of shaming writers who aren’t as prolific as you, I find it similarly unsavory. Probably people who feel like they “have” to write don’t actually have a compulsive disorder; probably they mean they really like writing, or they find it really helpful in some way, or that it’s a learned routine. When you do something all the time, not doing it starts to feel wrong. (If you feel like you have to eat breakfast right when you wake up, guess what — you feel starving in the morning because that’s when you usually eat, and your body has learned to prepare for the onslaught of food by lowering your blood sugar. You can unlearn that.)

I’m Almost 40 and Still Getting My Stories Rejected—Am I Running Out of Time?

In reality, writing — art-making in general — feels different for everyone. Some writers write a book a year like clockwork, others take a decade. Dorothy Parker said “I hate writing but love having written.” Woody Allen seems to keep making movies purely out of habit. As for me, I love writing! But I don’t love writing if I do it every day. To borrow a metaphor from sex, I have a long refractory period; writing releases built up tension, but it’s not very enjoyable if I don’t allow time for the tension to build.

Rather than holding yourself to an arbitrary standard, what would be useful is figuring out a process or set of habits that works well for you. Being “blocked for years” and “avoiding writing almost every day” doesn’t sound super healthy, even if it doesn’t mean you’re not a writer; it sounds like you’d like to be writing more than you are.

I would try to figure out what is keeping you from writing. Is it mostly competitive jealousy? Or just not feeling confident that your writing is good? What was different about your life when you were writing more? Did writing used to make you happy — either while you were doing it or at least afterwards? I assume it must have, on some level, or you wouldn’t be asking this question. Can you re-create those circumstances? Can you isolate the parts of writing that you find meaningful, and do them more? You don’t have to do it every day, but as noted above: you have to do it sometimes, not never.

Now, since the ass-in-chair routine is well established elsewhere, I’d like to devote a little space to the benefits of not writing every day.

1. Not writing gives you time to read. When I have too many writing deadlines I honestly feel annoyed that I don’t have more time to read. Reading is the greatest! It’s also maybe the easiest way to become a better writer.

People who have time to write and read every day are lucky jerks. If you’re not a lucky jerk, reallocate some of the time when you feel like you should be writing to reading instead. Go to the library a lot and surround yourself with books. Abandon books that don’t interest you. Read books that do interest you with a notebook and pencil and those little sticky tabs nearby. Also, light a candle, pour yourself a beverage, get into it! I like to treat reading as a luxury, and being an engaged reader always makes me want to write.

2. Not writing gives you time to have experiences. I can’t stand that thing where people are talking about something interesting in the world on social media or whatever, and some scold pops in to say, “This is a distraction/waste of time, get back to work.” As though anyone can literally work all the time and never stop to talk to humans or engage in politics and expect to make good art out of that.

You actually have to spend some of your life living and doing normal life stuff or you can’t be a good writer. Life gives you stuff to write about, plus perspective and insight and context. Too much ass-in-the-chair time and you’re not getting exposed to the actual world.

You actually have to spend some of your life living and doing normal life stuff or you can’t be a good writer. Life gives you stuff to write about.

3. Not writing gives you time to think. Even when you know exactly what you want to write about, even when you’re deep into a draft or second draft or whatever, you still need time out of the chair to think. You can think while you write, yes, but writing comes so much more easily if you’ve done some of the thinking work beforehand.

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There are tons and tons of studies that show the brain is really good at solving problems (even creative problems!) when you give it plenty of time and space to do its thing. The amazing thing is that a lot of the work gets done unconsciously! What could be easier?! When you give yourself permission to think, you can have good ideas without even trying. They’re canards too, but the take-a-shower and go-for-a-walk canards really work in my experience; they offer just enough of a distraction that your unconscious mind, which knows a lot, can get to work without your conscious mind always trying to steal the show.

Supposedly Charlie Parker, according to the art critic Jerry Saltz, once said, “If you don’t play the saxophone for a year, you get a year better.” I love this idea so much. It jibes with my experience of learning as discrete, more than continuous. Instead of steadily getting better on a curve, it feels more like we suddenly level up. It’s like all this potential learning gets stored up, and then a change of circumstances or an artistic breakthrough turns all that potential into real energy.

I say all this to say, when you’re a real writer, not writing is writing.

Help A Confused Artificial Intelligence Learn to Write the Perfect First Line

Posted on November 3, 2017March 25, 2019 by 007595

Most of the time, research scientist Janelle Shane’s pet neural network is the most creative entity on the internet—sorry, everyone who toiled for an MFA just to be outdone by a machine! It’s generated paint colors beyond the dreams of DuPont (Stanky Bean, Grass Bat, Snowbonk), kitten names even the gentle weirdos at the rescue couldn’t imagine (Snox Boops, Big Wiggy Bool), and this year’s hottest Halloween costumes (Disco Monster, Pumpkin Picard, Grankenstein). It’s come up with a whole anthology’s worth of short story titles—including “Zombies of Florence,” “Indiscreet Maidman,” and “Swords and Batman: Summer Party?”—and tried its hand at Doctor Who episodes and Harry Potter fanfiction. It even helped write an opera. What’s the last opera YOU helped write?

Of course, we know exactly the limits of its creativity. For each of the neural network’s projects, Shane explains what she used for a database and how she set up the parameters the program uses to generate new ideas. All the AI can do is slice up its inputs, figure out how they’re made, and put them back together in highly algorithmic ways. But that’s really all the human brain can do, too—we just can’t see the gears.

The human brain is quicker and more sophisticated with its cutting and pasting, though, and its database is HUGE. (To create a true robot writer, you might first need to simulate the entire history of civilization, a la one of my favorite Stanislaw Lem stories.) This means that sometimes, the neural network runs up against a challenge that’s relatively easy for a person, but that an artificial intelligence just can’t hack. One of those challenges, apparently, is writing the first line of a novel.

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Shane fed a few hundred famous first lines into the neural network, and it tried to learn how to make them—but a few hundred data points aren’t nearly enough, and the AI balked. “The neural network proceeded to do what it usually does when faced with too little data, which is to give up on trying to understand what’s going on, and instead just try to read it back to me word for word,” Shane wrote. “Think of it like cramming for a test by memorizing instead of learning how to apply rules to solve problems.” Results included “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except the station steps; plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of people.” You can see how things went wrong.

There were a few minor gems; I might read a book that started “It was a wrong number that struggled against the darkness.” But ultimately, like everyone other aspiring writer in the world, Shane’s AI can’t learn to write the perfect first sentence unless it reads a lot of them first. That’s where you come in.

Shane has set up a Google form to collect more first lines for the AI to read and learn from. You can add the first line of the unfinished novel that’s sitting in your drawer, or the favorite book that’s sitting on your bedside table. You can methodically go through your bookshelves and feed every first line into the database. The more first lines the neural network gets to read, the better its own writing will be. Think of it as training the robot writer who will one day replace you.

And meanwhile, congratulate yourself on being able to do something an artificial intelligence can’t do—yet.

SEARCH

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The 10 Best Umbrellas in Literature

Howards End, E.M. Forster

The Umbrella Man, Roald Dahl

The Giant, O’Brien, Hilary Mantel

Elizabeth is Missing, Emma Healey

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens

Amerika, Franz Kafka

Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert

Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers

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About the Author

Am I Still a Real Writer If I Don’t Feel Compelled to Write?

Help A Confused Artificial Intelligence Learn to Write the Perfect First Line

Recommended Reading Is Open for Submissions of Translated Fiction

“Ourselves, A Little Better”

by Mai Nardone

An infographic of creatures from English, Irish, and Scottish folklore, and where you can find them

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The Umbrella Man, Roald Dahl

The Giant, O’Brien, Hilary Mantel

Elizabeth is Missing, Emma Healey

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens

Amerika, Franz Kafka

Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert

Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers

Umbrella, Will Self

About the Author

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