My dog got ahold of a chicken bone covered in fire ants. This is a metaphor for pornography. This a metaphor for the time in high school when I read my girlfriend’s sister’s diary and was sure, though her thirteen-year-old sister’s prose was so purple it was hard to translate into a coherent confession, that my girlfriend had a fling while on a family vacation. This is a metaphor for teenaged sexual desire. This is a metaphor for AIDS as depicted in late-1980s health center pamphlets and posters I saw while an undergraduate at the University of Maryland. This is a metaphor for the will to power. This is a metaphor for the retrospective guilt I felt decades after I stole a few coins from the wicker Sunday school collection plate in the basement of the Baptist church my Marxist parents cleaned every Monday as part of the $75 rent they paid for the foursquare on Mulberry Street in Normal when I was in fourth grade. This is a metaphor for five of the seven deadly sins. This is a metaphor for the time when I was fifteen years old and I was caught shoplifting a paint marker from a drugstore in Wheaton Plaza and it took my dad a long time to come and collect me because he felt it necessary first to shower and put on a tie, and a metaphor for the time my daughter was four years old and stole gum from a drugstore, proudly showed it to her mommy in the parking lot, and had to go back inside and confess her crime. This is a metaphor for Ronald Reagan. This is a metaphor for the Internet. This is a metaphor for free market capitalism. This is a metaphor for populism and fascism. This is a metaphor for consciousness.
For Borges
Borges writes, All men, in the vertiginous instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who speak a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare. Shakespeare can cause pleasure I agree is akin to vertigo, as can coitus, as can one byproduct of coitus — my kid — whose diapers I changed when she was a baby, and whose hair I’ve washed for a decade. Any squeamishness I ever had about my body disappeared when I was allowed access to the bodies of others. There was blood in my stool for a month so my doctor sent me for a colonoscopy and it turned out I had cancer. Six weeks later a surgeon used a robot to remove from the body in which I’ve lived with few complaints for forty-seven years ten inches of my colon and a tumor. The topography of my asshole has been altered. I do pelvic floor exercises in order to relearn how to hold my shit. Could be worse, could be dead. Instead I walk my daughter to school in the morning and drive her to dance class in the afternoon and read to her at bedtime and laugh with her and alone I read Shakespeare and Borges and I feel the bed and then the world fall away when my beloved presses me down into twisted sheets.
Verso
The USA’s too new for Baedeker’s legends of cathedrals built atop mosques built atop temples. The closest we come are TV shows and movies about what happens when a subdivision or 7-Eleven is built over a Native American burial ground. In Denver, I tried to find daguerreotypes in antique stores and was told no one in Colorado circa 1840 was allowed the vanity of having her portrait made. Even our oldest cities are all surface, our visions of their evolutions just visions of our aging selves we see flashing in their shop windows and puddles. The city of the last night with one lover and the city of the first night with another, the city of leaving in what feels like defeat and the city of returning in what feels like triumph, the city of madness and the city of sanity: it’s a single city. On the verso of an old postcard a message written in a fin de siècle hand fades to sepia while the recto shows a landscape unchanged.
For Charles Simic
From the coffee shop window I watch as across the street a campus cop proudly unrolls twin targets to show a buddy how he’s clustered his shots and perforated the bright blue chests of two featureless paper criminals, and I think, If only he’d patterned those bullet holes into a pretty pair of Valentine’s hearts.
Dirty Pictures
Cleaning up last night after everyone else was asleep, I found under a library book on the kitchen counter the torn drawing. On one scrap, the crotch of a woman, triangle of scribbles, on another, the crotch of a man, disproportionately large penis hanging beside single ovaloid testicle. I pieced the picture together. The nudes stood side by side, nothing drawn below their thighs or above their innocent bellybuttons — or were they supine, perhaps postcoital? My daughter’s nine. What boy passed her this? She’d ripped it up but not thrown it away. I tried to remember how old I’d been when first I’d seen some kid’s penciled version of sex, probably nine, maybe ten — and it hadn’t been this chaste. I decided to talk to my daughter about the drawing in the morning. It would be a serious conversation. I went to bed feeling uneasy about entering a time in my life in which I would have to think about sex in a new way — and it occurred to me, just before I fell asleep, my disquiet was perhaps in part nostalgia for the moment in my childhood when because of a dirty picture a time in my life had begun in which I had to think about sex in a new way. At the breakfast table I said, I found a drawing of a woman and a man, and instead of looking embarrassed, my daughter looked amused, and my wife said, I drew that. She wanted to know what a naked man looks like, so I drew that.
I’m a contributing writer at Electric Literature. I was discussing writer residencies with some of the EL editors and we thought it might be a good topic for your column. Basically, as a writer, I feel like everyone I know is doing them, but I’m not sure what value they provide, i.e. is it just a good, free place to write? Are they valuable for your resume? Also as someone who works in NYC, it’s difficult to take off, so how do people navigate that issue?
Cheers
This is a great topic, but having never done a writing residency myself, I didn’t feel qualified to answer your questions. Instead, I spoke with author Sandra Beasley, who is much more versed in this area than I am.
Sandra Beasley is author of three poetry collections: Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize, as well as the memoir Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life. Honors for her work include a 2015 NEA Literature Fellowship, the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, and three DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowships. She lives in Washington, D.C., and is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at the University of Tampa. You can find out more by visiting SandraBeasley.com
The following interview took place over email in February of 2017.
You’re someone who has done multiple writing residencies. How did you get started? What was your first residency experience like?
I’m writing this for you while at the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Florida. I’ve been up since 3 AM. The beach of Manasota Key is a hundred feet to one side of my bedroom; the bay is fifty feet to the other side. My fellow residents, housed in four adjacent forms of housing, are a drummer, a novelist, a composer, and two photographers, though by next week the mix will be different. I’ll be here through March, working primarily on nonfiction. The last time I was here, I had to keep my curtains tightly closed at night lest the light from my reading lamp lure baby sea turtles in the wrong direction.
One funny thing about being a writer on the road is that a few years in, you forget what it’s like to travel without an anchoring reading, or a classroom visit, or a concentrated opportunity to write. Traditional vacations lose their appeal. If I can spend 3–4 weeks at a residency each year for the rest of my life, I will, with the occasional exception to prioritize a getaway with my husband.
How did I get here? I graduated from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2002. By that fall, I was working full-time at a nonprofit simultaneous to earning my MFA from American University, where I also served on the editorial staff of their literary journal. I had a partial fellowship, but I also had loans and a lot of pressure on my shoulders. Applying for residencies was a way of pushing back on all of that. I’ve never been good at creating boundaries. I say Yes to things more than I should. I suspected that those who’d gotten used to siphoning off my time would respect the formality of a residency, and that hunch proved correct.
My first residency was in June of 2003, at Vermont Studio Center. That’s an expensive one, though I didn’t have any reference point. I thought of it as budgeting for a vacation, and in a way I was. You stay in beautiful buildings along the Gihon River. The residency carries an opportunity to conference with a visiting Master Artist, which in my case was poet Carol Moldaw, who was generous in her feedback. The Red Mill’s community library is particularly rich. I fell so hard for Karen Chase’s collection Kazimierz Square that I stole VSC’s copy.
You + nature = productive af
Jeez, my heart leaps, remembering. We’d go to a nearby watering hole and pick off baby leeches afterwards. I bought a 99-cent bottle of Miracle Bubble and walked down the stretch of highway that is Johnson’s main drag, blowing bubbles at the passing truckers; I took a lot of photos with my last proper film camera, an Olympus with a panoramic option. The visual artists threw the good parties. Eight of us would drag a couch out into the gravel parking lot, turn up the volume on Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, and stand around talking and drinking into the early hours. At age 23, this was heaven.
What value do residencies offer for writers? Is it mainly a way to get time and space to write? Or are they also important for resume-building, industry networking, getting an agent, getting a job?
The value of residencies is the work you do while you’re there, with social networking as an option. What you do is really and truly up to you. One of my favorite things I ever heard was said on my first day at Millay: “You’re here to honor yourself as a writer,” the residency director said while giving the tour. “If that means reading, rather than writing, that’s fine by us.” I found that really liberating — and of course, once I felt free to do what I craved, which was curl up on the studio couch with a handful of poetry collections, I was inspired to write.
Different residency spaces, and how long you have in them, shape the work that will get done. A brief stay might be best for editing an existing story or essay. A studio with pegboard walls and lots of floor space is perfect for laying out pages that need to be ordered for a poetry manuscript. A desk next to a big window might inspire new drafts, while an Adirondack chair beside a river might become a favorite reading spot. I make a conscious effort to take cues from the setting.
I’m always subconsciously looking for excuses to not write, and I don’t want the landscape to be one of them.
Personally, my ideal setting is “pretty but not too exotic.” I’m always subconsciously looking for excuses to not write, and I don’t want the landscape to be one of them. Many of the spaces that become residencies have fascinating back-stories. On the grounds of Millay you can still see the ghost-outline of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s tennis court, and track down her repository field of empty gin bottles. The Hermitage was a nudist colony at one point.
As an added line to a resume or curriculum vitae, attending a residency won’t make a big difference. But most gatekeepers, by whom I might mean a prospective agent or someone interviewing you for a teaching job or fellowship, are members of the literary world themselves. If you can deepen your connection with them based on shared familiarity with a residency — Yaddo and MacDowell are known to have the power to do this — that can help.
How do you stay productive? How do you structure your time?
I love lists, so I usually end up making three lists on arrival. The first captures the elements of an ideal residency day, meaning the balance of reading, writing, and physical activity I need to feel rested and refreshed. I don’t make a to-do list of the actual residency work, or the order in which it needs to happen; that would make me claustrophobic. The second list gathers and, I hope, compartmentalizes the practical tasks that tie me to life back home, such as getting a student recommendation letter in or returning proofs on a freelance piece. The third list is a holding pen for fun stuff I hear about from other residents — “Oh, you have to check out that barbecue joint” — or destinations I identify when researching the area, such as a nearby Botanical Gardens or independent bookstore. I usually drive, which gives me the freedom of taking a few hours off and exploring; sometimes a residency will have a loaner bike or car.
In terms of the social time, the intensity of that can vary. Some writers crave the spontaneity of field trips, parties, after-dinner conversations, and maybe a board game or round of ping-pong. These friendships tend to spark quickly, burn bright, and flicker out a month after the residency ends. Some writers seek out the same few people every lunch — they’re probably looking for a few takeaway friendships, or even relationships where you might later exchange work for critique. Some writers hide, period. Other writers want specifically to hang out with the artists and composers; their lives back at home are already well stocked with writer-types.
What’s the best way to find the right residency for you? Are there different residencies for different genres? Any specific recommendations for women, writers of color, writers with disabilities, chronic illnesses or other special needs?
There are lots of residencies out there. I mention Yaddo and MacDowell, but that’s like describing MFA programs in terms of the University of Iowa and NYU; just because they’re the famous ones doesn’t mean they represent the apex of this type of experience, much less the gestalt. Poets & Writers magazine has an annual issue devoted to residencies, as well as a database of conferences and residencies. Kim Roberts of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, in DC, curates an in-depth index of Artist Residency Programs that is sorted by type, geography, and genre, though most residencies welcome all genres of writing.
Increasing accessibility and inclusivity in the writing community, including residencies, is a much bigger conversation than we can have here. Here’s what I will say: if a program specifically solicits applications from a marginalized community of which you are a member, take a close look at why. Is it because their deep infrastructure is genuinely welcoming, and they want to get the word out to more people? If so, by all means give it a shot. A good example of this is a residency is fully outfitted with ADA-compliant design, often as a result of a specific donor gift.
Or…does this opportunity exist because your “kind” is not represented in their constituency, and they need you? If so, be aware that you might feel isolated or tokenized, and you’ll probably have to do some work of educating. Make sure your creative energy won’t be constrained by being an organization’s guinea pig, no matter how well intentioned they may be.
An alternative, if you have an existing literary community that is nourishing but lacks a “residency” outlet, is to create your own residency.
Residency time is precious and kind of fragile. An alternative, if you have an existing literary community that is nourishing but lacks a “residency” outlet, is to create your own residency. Reach out to that community with which you already gather for workshops or conferences, and see if anyone would be interested in splitting the cost of a short-term rental, where the specific purposes is unstructured and private writing space. There are retreats, such as The Porches in Virginia, which lend themselves to being occupied by self-made groups.
Also, remember that residencies evolve over time. One case study that comes to mind is Hedgebrook, on Whidbey Island in Washington state. They’ve been around since the late 1980s; I first looked at applying in the mid-2000s. At that time, Hedgebrook was a quirky option — you had to like rural cottage life — that happened to be exclusive to female applicants. The rumor was that they were open to emerging writers, meaning I had a viable chance at getting in.
I wanted to apply, but hesitated. I’d never dealt with my food allergies so far from home, not for a whole month. There was also a rule was if you got in, then couldn’t go, you forfeited future opportunity. This made sense from the perspective of a fledgling organization with minimal staff and limited resources. But it was scary for a twenty-something unable to guarantee, six months in advance, time off from work or funds for travel, which in my case would have been a very expensive cross-country plane ticket. So I went with another residency, on the East coast, which was the same size but was close enough that I could drive — saving money on travel, and ensuring access to a grocery store.
Today Hedgebrook has a prestigious and thriving alumni community, with associated salons and master classes and a slogan, “Women Authoring Change.” Deferrals are permitted, and they’ve modified their language to make clear that “women” welcomes those of trans- identity or other nontraditional gender expressions. They are clearer about how community meals are prepared; there’s even a Hedgebrook cookbook that emphasizes farm-to-table. There’s also a complicated process of deliberation, with three rounds of judging, and a narrow window for applying. I really want to attend, but I suspect I’ll have a tougher time getting in than if I’d applied in 2006. I wouldn’t worry at about the food now; still not sure how I’d pay for my airfare.
Can you do a residency if you have a full-time job?
You can definitely do a residency while in a full-time job. The terms of how long you can get away have to be negotiated with your employer, of course. [Ed. note: There is a real range of residency time periods, from as little as a week to up to 9 months. But even a week can be productive.] I notice that people whose workloads are cyclical — teachers, arts administrators, or those who work at nonprofits with a “slow” season — dominate the residency pool. If your job has no slow season, ask if you can have a specifically designated check-in day of each week, where you turn your studio into a virtual office and stay on top of critical responsibilities. You might pair that day with a day when residency life is typically interrupted anyway. Is every Wednesday night a showcase for resident works-in-progress? Cool. But if you work like I do, then you might as well set aside all of Wednesday the weekly errands, emails, and phone conferences.
You’ll want to scope out the tech resources in advance. Increasingly, residencies are wired for internet; some places provide WiFi in sleeping quarters, but not studios. A few places specifically resist such encroachments: Blue Mountain Center in New York doesn’t provide WiFi and cell phones are prohibited, except for emergency purposes. Jentel doesn’t have any such rule, but it is so far outside Sheridan that I remember having to stand on tiptoe at the top of a hill to get a Verizon signal. Also, know that printing and computer repair may not be as readily available as back home. Look for residencies that have a college campus nearby, as a back-up resource.
Any tips on applying to residencies? What to do and what not to do?
Submit the strongest possible work sample for two-thirds of the allotted pages. If your strongest work is completely different from the work you’re setting out to do, make sure that other third represents relevant material. That said, don’t worry too much about your project proposal. Everyone understands that a plan is theoretical, especially since months may pass between submitting an application and attending a residency. What evaluators are looking for is an ability to articulate goals, an ability to scale those goals specific to the time you’re requesting, and a connection to the particularities of their residency space.
What evaluators are looking for is an ability to articulate goals, an ability to scale those goals specific to the time you’re requesting, and a connection to the particularities of their residency space.
If you are required to send letters of recommendation, and you happen to know alumni of the residency, they are more compelling references than those of someone outside the community.
People will tell you to apply in a residency’s “off season” to increase your odds of admission; for example, they’ll suggest, apply for the upstate New England residency in a winter month. The accuracy of this tip probably varies, and administrators aren’t excited to answer queries about how to game the system. They’ll tell you to apply for when you genuinely want to attend.
Since we’re on the subject of how residencies are administered: if you get one of these opportunities, say thank you at every turn. Say thank you to the staff. Say thank you to the benefactors. If you publish a book that includes work you wrote while at the residency, mention them in the acknowledgements. Offer to write a letter of support for the residency’s future funding applications. Don’t take one minute of this for granted, especially in a moment when arts dollars are hard to come by.
Do residencies tend to be more social or more isolating? What happens if you’ve got family — can they ever come along or at least visit?
Whether a residency represents an opportunity to be social or isolated varies widely based on their circumstances, and yours. Larger residencies like UCross, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center do tend to have reputations as being “summer camp” for writers and artists, even when there’s snow on the ground. There is simple camaraderie in numbers: if you’re looking to take a break or open the wine, someone is always ready.
There are also residencies with service components, if you’re looking to be pulled out of your normal rhythms. In Tennessee, the Sundress Academy for the Arts asks residents to put in about five hours a week at Firefly Farms. Other residencies ask artists to visit local schools.
For me? I’ve lived in Washington, D.C. since 2002. I’ve got a very vibrant community that includes friends who go back to MFA days, an informal poetry workshop group, a book club of fellow women writers, and the Arts Club of Washington, where I volunteer my time. I love those folks but it makes for a very full calendar. At residencies I work in my room, for long and often late hours, and I skip group meals when I can. Not because I don’t like people, but I’m just so thrilled at the prospect of unfettered time.
Having family visit can be tricky. First off, it does happen. I’ve seen kids, parents, lovers, and spouses visit. Even though you may miss them like crazy and want them to see the residency, don’t underestimate the interruption that will occur — not only for you but for your fellow residency-mates — in terms of hours and focus of energy. That said, a day-trip visit is usually fun. An overnight will probably be okay, but will not be sanctioned; don’t expect the chef to make an extra serving of eggs for your partner in the morning. Any visit longer than that is usually overstepping your bounds.
There are a handful of residencies open to writers who need to travel with their families, and some provide stipends for childcare either on or offsite.
There are a handful of residencies open to writers who need to travel with their families, and some provide stipends for childcare either on or offsite. The Sustainable Arts Foundation is a key resource for writers with children. They recently gave New York’s Writers & Books a grant for programming co-situated between Neighborhood of the Arts, in urban Rochester, and the rural location of Gell: A Finger Lakes Creative Retreat. After choosing a location, artist-parents can be accompanied by their children and one other adult for a one-week stay. Applications are closed for 2017, but it’d be wonderful to see that become an ongoing program. The Hermitage welcomes artists with young children for one- or two-week stays in the month of June. The Island Hill House Artist Residency Program in Michigan gives the artist a whole house, which can sleep up to four.
Are there challenges to be aware of? Have you ever had a bad experience or totally blown the residency?
People in adjoined spaces get into thermostat wars. Bring a blanket and a fan so that you can self-regulate your temperature. While you’re at it, also pack an extension cord, noise-reducing headphones, and a flashlight. In residencies with buffet meals, people will complain about the cooking. In residencies with communal kitchens, people will complain about the housekeeping. Please, whatever you do, do not be that person who leaves dirty dishes in the sink. These are usually minor complaints in what everyone recognizes is an overall gift of a situation.
International residencies have their own risks. I’ve heard a few hair-raising stories about getting to an obscure city and discovering you’re someone’s B&B guest in a space with musty décor, dim light, and an uncomfortable chair. On the other hand, who isn’t tempted to take a chance on a castle? Luckily, word gets around fast if a residency is truly failing to thrive, especially in the age of social media.
More and more residencies are staggering the possibilities of arrival and departure dates. The model of being part of a curated “family” for exactly 28 days is becoming the exception, not the rule. That increases variety among those who can take part in a residency, which is wonderful, but be aware that your fresh start may be someone else’s or mid-residency crisis. When you sit down to lunch on your Day 1 and the composer across the table gives you a thousand-mile stare, it’s not about you; it’s about all he still wants to do in the three days before he leaves.
You’re walking in on other people’s romantic lives, too. People get divorced coming out of residencies. People get married coming out of residencies — I got lucky in that respect. My husband is a painter that I met at Virginia Center for Creative Arts back in 2012. We quickly realized we lived only blocks from each other, in northwest DC, which distinguished the relationship from a residency fling. There’s nothing wrong with residency flings, per se. Just be sure you don’t flirt around with the guy who was, prior to your arrival, romancing the woman who makes the service assignments for the residency. You’ll end up with two weeks’ kitchen duty, scrubbing sheet pans and cleaning bread mixers. Trust me.
On November 14th, 2008, Governor Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency for Santa Barbara county. A small bonfire set by about ten college students in the Montecito area had caught the highly flammable vegetation after years of drought. For three days between November 13th-November 15th, the town of Santa Barbara, nestled between the Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific ocean, watched as a gigantic half crown of flaming thrush lit up the mountainside.
My neighborhood was evacuated almost immediately, and my boyfriend and I (good graduate students that we were) found ourselves frantically packing up our cat and books and even a few items of clothing before heading down to the motel 6 in Carpenteria to wait out the hellscape. Even in the daylight, the ash floating throughout the usually Disney-fied downtown looked like a scene out of Milton’s hell. Cars were covered in a thick film of soot, and I felt my own asthmatic lungs spasm for weeks after the incident. As an east coaster, raised most of my life outside of Philadelphia, I had always found the vast open stretches of California vistas incomprehensible.
The calm, limitless Pacific lapping towards the red towering rock which in turn always seemed to bow down to a happy meadow of yellow weeds running alongside the 101 — the beauty of these scenes seemed unthinkable and overwhelming to someone who was used to strip malls, suburbs, and a line of fast food chains blotting the major east coast highways of the tri-state area. As a twenty three year old barely a few years into a graduate program, Santa Barbara seemed like a place out of time. And yet now here it was, a smoldering paradise made wicked by fire. And even stranger, here I was transfixed by its rage and unbecoming. To be so captivated by its relentlessness gave me some unease.
Fire was not an element I understood very well in the context of this region. To me, I felt as if I was witnessing a catastrophic, biblical event. In reality, fires in Santa Barbara county aren’t rare at all. In fact, 2008 had its share of destruction from the Great Gap fire of July to what was eventually called the Tea Fire of November that year. In 2016, the California Climate Change Center estimates that due to extreme weather variations, we could see a 300% increase in wildfire risk, and just this past August, the Rey fire above Lake Cachuma in Santa Barbara county burned over 32,000 acres.
I begin with this story, because I think we probably have all had an experience such as this one. A feeling that what we were witnessing was an uncanny, freakish, or improbable event, and that by witnessing such an exceptional sight, we were documenting a rupture in the natural world. I also begin here because that is how Amitav Ghosh begins his book. Only eleven pages into The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Ghosh recounts an experience in Northern Delhi in March of 1978. Crouching on the floor of a nearby balcony, Ghosh, to his astonishment, hears “a frenzied pitch” of wind that begins to tug at his clothing and then sees “an extraordinary panoply of objects flying past– bicycles, scooters, lampposts, sheets of corrugated iron, even entire tea stalls. In that instant, gravity itself seemed to have been transformed into a wheel spinning upon the fingertip of some unknown power.”
After the “event,” some papers reported it as a cyclone. Others used the phrase “a funnel shaped whirlwind.” Ghosh learned later that he actually had witnessed the very first tornado to hit Dehli in recorded meteorological history. He writes:
“What had happened at that moment was strangely like a species of visual contact, of beholding and being beheld. And in that instant of contact something was planted deep in my mind, something irreducibly mysterious, something quite apart from the danger I had been in and the destruction I had witnessed; something that was not the property of the thing itself but the manner in which it had intersected my life.”
Beholding and beheld. A species of visual contact. A manner of intersection. What is being communicated in this mesmerizing contact or intersection? Perhaps a reality of climate change that we continue to fail at imagining? Hence our collective derangement. But perhaps what is most interesting about Ghosh’s provocative narration of this seemingly chance encounter is that increasingly, these are becoming not chance encounters at all, but the very makeup of our daily lives. He asks us to imagine a narrative style of improbable events and chides a novelistic reflex that focuses, channeling Franco Morretti, too much on “fillers” that make novels “compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life.”
Here, he suggests that a fidelity to representing routines of modern life and the habits of a modern mind make large scale events inconceivable to narrate. The catastrophic has long been regulated to genre fiction (science fiction, climate sci-fi, fantasy, horror), but to continue to think of genre in this way has great ethical implications for Ghosh who sees the “sense of place” in these texts as part of a dangerous delaying trend to some dystopian future when narrativizing climate change and disaster. “The future is only part of the Anthropocene,” he argues in one section. Ghosh’s determination to reorient our climate despair in the present is reminiscent of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, a text which critiques the compulsory “eventilization” of disaster and ignores how crisis is rooted in our everyday routines and habits of consumption. Ghosh write of these “events”:
“To treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling — which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time.”
Ghosh’s book is divided into three sections: stories, history, and politics. His writing is erudite and elegant with some broad, associative leaps from researched to anecdotal accounts of climate crisis to support his major theses. Each of these sections come to quick and surprising conclusions that feel slightly out of pace with the rest of the book, perhaps betraying a mild impatience on the part of the author who takes (among politicians and religious leaders), writers and artists to task most of all for their complicity in the great derangement. This is not a structural issue to brush aside. Climate despair is a kind of trauma and often traumatic events are nonlinear and non-causal.
Ghosh is a seasoned writer of global history and migrations, particularly across Indian ocean diaspora. His work has always attended to patterns of displacement or trade routes, and his writing is eerily anticipatory as evident by books like The Calcutta Chromosome which seemed to predict questions about bioengineering and biopolitics. In contrast, The Great Derangement feels nervy and speedy, moving the reader from one continent to another, from one staggering statistic to another, without enough room to fully grasp the gargantuan swell of the threat. To feel dwarfed and destabilized is part of the intended effect.
Ghosh points out some well mapped neoliberal myths about the dangers of personal authenticity, sincerity, and interiority in novels that do not spend enough time talking about “men in the aggregate” and furthermore, he suggests that if politics can be defined as a collective survival, then what is missing from contemporary fiction is exactly that: the collective. This is a difficult argument to digest since contemporary fiction, especially to a newer writer such as myself, feels so varied, experimental, and heterogenous, but perhaps what Ghosh was suggesting is that even if there were a plethora of novels dedicated to a present day representation of “men in the aggregate” representing a specifically atmospheric climate change disaster, that it would still somehow fail to move or alter the popular literary imagination.
Yet if we think of climate change as that which frays our idea of a nation-state and geopolitical terror, I think of Lidia Yukanavitch’s recent book, The Small Backs of Children. If I think of superstorms and the threat to megacities, I think of Ben Lerner’s 10:04. If I think of people so lobotomized by their televisions that they eat the inedible, consume the inorganic, quietly starve as they sit lithe in front of their programming, I think of Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. If I think about the ways that animals have served as objects of disgust and abjection, but also metaphors of deviant sexuality and disposable bodies, I think of Aaron Apps’ Intersex. In other words, it is possible that we are all interpreting the effects of climate change the only way we know how to encounter threats of competing vitalities: through discourses of otherness. When we write about bodies that are deemed disposable, we are writing about climate crisis. It is the paradigmatic form, borrowed from critical race, disability, queer, and postcolonial studies, in which our derangement manifests. And vitality is important to Ghosh here. After all, part of what made the tornado experience so riveting was the forced acknowledgment of a mighty, nonhuman power.
Spending some time parsing out the narrative kinship between human and nonhuman forces in the world, Ghosh treads on academic fields such as posthumanism and new materialism. While scholars important to those fields such as Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton are cited frequently, there appears to be a missing intellectual history of feminist and queer science studies critics who have discussed widely the relationship between a vitalist nonhuman agency and a contemporary environmental politics (Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, Stacy Alaimo, Mel Y. Chen, Karen Barad, etc).
Borrowing language from discourses on toxicity, physics, and biodiversity, these scholars often position the Anthropocentric as a lens to uncover the bodies most vulnerable to ecological debt. As Stacy Alaimo argues in her book Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self:
“Race, for example, has been well documented as the single most important factor in the placement of toxic waste sites in the United States.”
Ghosh offers an pointed history of the effects of industrialization and urbanization on climate crisis. Port cities such as London and Amsterdam are protected from open waters by “bays, estuaries, or deltaic river systems,” but cities built after European global expansion in the seventeenth century such as Mumbai, New York, and Chennai, are instead built directly on seafronts and therefore are the most susceptible to superstorms. Ghosh writes: “A special place ought to be reserved in hell… for planners who build with such reckless disregard for their surroundings.” Build on an estuarine landscape, Mumbai’s soil has lost much of its absorptive ability and in the great deluges of the 21st century, 2.5 million people were “under water together” during the floods.
Ghosh traces the new brewing seismic activity and cyclonic profiles in the Arabian Sea off the west coast of India and provides evidence that for the first time in history as of 2015, the Arabian Sea has provoked more storms on the west coast than cyclonic activity in the Bay of Bengal on the east coast of India (which has typically born the brunt of tsunamis and tropical storms). His point in this comparison is to illuminate the vulnerability of a country now flanked by storms on both sides:
“Suddenly the waters around India were churning with improbable events.”
The great derangement is essentially a great denial of climate crisis, but not by climate deniers on the fringe of politics, but actually as Ghosh argues, by state sanctioned engineers and government agencies themselves. The idea that we are planning for the “exceptional” event is maddening. The idea that disaster management is mostly focused on “post-disaster” response is to neglect and disregard a risk that feels more like an inevitability. If Mumbai floods, the most dangerous threat to the region is that it is one of the only world’s megacities with two nuclear facilities within its urban periphery. “Both these plants sit right upon the shoreline.” Perhaps it should come as no surprise then that the Pentagon is among one of the most dedicated investors and researchers of climate crisis, because they take seriously the need for green security.
Ghosh recounts the words of Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell while he was the Secretary of State:
“The only department in… Washington that is clearly and completely seized with the idea that climate change is real is the Department of Defense.”
And yet even green security might be stuck in the same deranged echo chamber, in an endless feedback of the same problematic hermeneutic loop, as Lindsay Thomas, a scholar of literature, media, and security studies at the University of Miami suggests: “The word “recovery” itself — a favorite word of the Department of Homeland Security, for example — is telling: it assumes not only that disasters are something out of the ordinary, but also that they are something we can “recover” from. Something that we can “return” to “normal life” from, as if normal life is not part of the disaster itself.”
The second section of Ghosh’s book is entitled “History,” and it details an astonishing account of climate risk for Asia. Ghosh argues that Asia will be the most vulnerable continent to environmental disaster simply because of the “numbers game” stating that, “the brute fact is that no strategy can work globally unless it works in Asia.” I have yet to read such a distilled and cogent telling of the risks and statistics posed to the region. Cyclones hitting the low lying lands of the Bengal Delta have killed people in the hundreds of thousands for the past half century. Bangladesh and Vietnam are two of the countries most jeopardized by rising sea levels with necessary migrations from those lands estimated between 50–75 million people.
Desertification in Pakistan and India could cause famine and agricultural disaster with China’s desertification problem causing annual losses of about $65 billion. The water crisis in Asia, in particular water sources in the form of ice in Tibet and the Himalayas, “sustain 47 percent of the world’s population,” yet this region is “warming twice as fast as the average global rate.” The statistics are paralyzing. With the industrial expansion of Asia from the 1980’s onwards, Ghosh posits an important argument about imperialism, decolonization, and the myth of Western modernity as singular.
The truth is that “every family in the world cannot have two cars, a washing machine, and a refrigerator — not because of technical or economic limitations but because humanity would asphyxiate in the process.” We know this, but the rhetoric of our foreign policy and supposed geopolitical allyship seems to continue to make promises that are more than impossible, they are outright dangerous and misdirected. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, the Great Acceleration is itself linked to decolonization.
China and India are now major competitors in the carbon economy and, as Ghosh illustrates in his book, despite the fallacy of Western exceptionalism, they have always been intellectual authorities of energy invention and politics. The truth is that before decolonization, much of the financial gain and raw resources went to serving imperial powers and that perhaps now countries in Asia and Africa justifiably feel entitled to the wealth of the carbon economy. As Ghosh states, “The argument about fairness in relation to per capita emissions is, in a sense, an argument about lost time.”
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable is a timely book in the era of a Trump presidency precisely because it investigates gaslighting and accountability. It is no coincidence, I think, that Ghosh chooses “derangement” as an apt pathology of the zeitgeist in a moment when facts are rendered meaningless and instead, the clumsy, misleading, and dangerous interpretations of scientific evidence are recreational fodder for the highest political office in the United States.
There was a protest after the election at the small liberal arts college where I teach. Professors and students could “walk out” during class and meet on the quad in the middle of campus for a demonstration. Of course, I participated as did many of my colleagues in the humanities. But it was my colleague in engineering that surprised me the most. He stood in front of his classroom and said, “I am also walking out. I am walking out because I believe in science.” A small, simple, seemingly obvious gesture that in our current moment, feels so bizarrely radical. And while some of Ghosh’s critiques of contemporary fiction may come across a little damning, the lesson to learn here from Ghosh is that what we are doing in the name of climate change, as writers and artists, is still not enough. Perhaps it has never been more important than it is now for scientists and artists to collaborate and politicize together. I wish I had said something similar to my students as I led some of them out to the quad, so they could understand the consequences of the very derangement that allows for a continual repression of fact.
This is an administration in which climate data will literally disappear. I should have also said to my students: I believe in science and science is telling us (again and again and again) that the sky is falling.
Ghosh’s incredulity is not precious. He is telling us to look up.
A Yale scholar’s ‘how-to’ guide for resisting authoritarianism is about to be released as a series of posters on London’s streets
Yale historian Timothy Snyder is unveiling his latest scholarly work On Tyranny in an unprecedented fashion. According to a report from the Guardian, Snyder, who specializes in European History, will be fly-posting 20 posters with the help of Vintage creative director Suzanne Dean and a team of students from Kingston University. Each poster contains the full text of a chapter from Snyder’s book, which is essentially a how-to manual for thwarting the rise of repressive regimes and counteracting the official and non-official evil perpetrated by little hands clinging to nuclear codes.
llustration: Rosie Ackroyd, Charlotte Allen, Ella Anthony, Leah Fredrickson, Grace Lister (left), Sophie Harris (centre) and Julia Connolly (right)/Vintage
In the book, Snyder endeavors to “distill what [he has] learned about the 20th century into a guide for action today.” He says the primary impetus for undertaking the project was the widespread shock and helplessness he’s witnessed many U.S. and British citizens express in the wake of their countries’ political unravellings. An obvious goal of the fly-posting (besides the publicity, of course) is to raise awareness about how ordinary citizens can take meaningful action against the rise of populism, which Snyder describes as an “urgent” concern for anyone who enjoys their freedom. In that vein, the posters will be pasted around Leonard Street, at the heart of the creative bustle in London. Snyder’s publisher chose the location because “every other person around there uses Instagram and Twitter,” and they hope the messages will gain sweeping traction on social media.
Though Snyder admits that it took him a minute to understand the poster campaign when it was initially proposed, he said in a statement:
“I will be more than happy if the posters themselves convey its message. We have become unused to the stakes being high, but they are: those who control the executive branch of the US government want a regime change in my country, and the basic sense of freedom that many of us have come to take for granted in the west is under threat.”
When this comes from a well-respected historian who has extensively studied European history and the Holocaust, people ought to pay attention.
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing The Mayo Clinic.
The Mayo Clinic is widely regarded as one of Minnesota’s top hospitals. To find out just how good it really is, I drove to Rochester to see for myself. Then I drove home because I accidentally drove to Rochester, NY which is a much easier drive for me. I then flew to Minneapolis and then took a shuttle to Rochester. For such a great hospital, they put it in a really out-of-the-way place.
As you near the Mayo Clinic, you will be greeted by the Mayo Clinic mascot — an anthropomorphized mass of cancer cells — spinning an arrow shaped sign on a street corner and directing you to a “BONANZA SALE.” Or so I thought. It turned out to be a bunch of grapes directing me to a mayonnaise sale at the Aldi supermarket.
After I stocked up on mayonnaise and grapes, I made my way to the real Mayo Clinic. They had no mascot or big sale. Not even any coupons.
The best way to tell if a physician is worth his or her salt is to see if he or she is able to diagnose false symptoms. A bad doctor will believe anything you say just to make a quick buck. Another way to identify a bad doctor is see if you can seduce them. I tried both these techniques and my doctor didn’t fall for either of them.
The most intimate thing she did was to stick a light in my ear after I told her my ears and nipples get warm when I eat spicy food. She didn’t even touch my nipples. A bad doctor would have touched them a lot.
She seemed to be the real deal and refused to prescribe me any cocaine despite me saying I wanted it for medical use only. As near as I could tell, this was a legitimate hospital. Not like the one I normally visit.
So the doctors aren’t bad, but what about the rest of the hospital?
SECURITY: The security guards are top notch. When I dressed up as a doctor and tried to visit patients, the security guards chased after me as fast as they could.
DOORS: Every door in this place opened exactly as it should, and I couldn’t find a single unlocked door that was supposed to be locked.
WINDOWS: I tried to throw a chair through a window and it didn’t even crack. It could have been my weak arms or the light plastic chair, but those windows just would not shatter.
I couldn’t really find any flaws in The Mayo Clinic. But does this make it the best hospital in Minnesota? I have no idea because I didn’t visit any others.
BEST FEATURE: The cafeteria has some really decent pudding. WORST FEATURE: Like any hospital, it’s a place full of sick people spreading their germs around.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a tadpole.
True stories that are strange enough to be fiction
Stuck on an idea for your next short story? Every now and then we gather news headlines that are strange enough to be fiction. Here’s a batch of headlines to get your creative juices flowing along with suggested genres:
Saunders, Offerman & Mullaly say they’re in ‘artistic cahoots’
It’s been a little over a month since beloved short story writer George Saunders debuted his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, butNick Offerman and Megan Mullally have wasted no time in acquiring the bestseller’s movie rights. Everyone’s favorite Hollywood power couple will produce the film adaptation alongside Saunders, who sounds ecstatic about working with the pair. So ecstatic, a simple term like “working” wasn’t going to be enough. “I am thrilled to be in artistic cahoots with Megan and Nick, two artists I’ve long admired,” Saunders told Deadline, where the news was first reported. “My hope is that we can find a way to make the experience of getting this movie made as wild and enjoyable and unpredictable as the experience of writing it — I am so happy to have such fearless companions on the trip.”
As though Saunders hadn’t already given us enough in the way of verbal invention. Forget that “job” you work with “colleagues” in an “office.” You, friends, are in “artistic cahoots,” just like Offerman, Mullaly and Saunders.
The new production won’t be the first time Saunders has teamed up with comedy’s first couple. The audiobook for Lincoln and the Bardo features an enviable cast of 166 actors, including: Don Cheadle, Julianne Moore, Bill Hader, and David Sedaris. Among the first artists to sign onto the project were Offerman and Mullally, who respectively voice the characters Hans Vollman and Betsy Baron. You can listen to an excerpt of the audiobook, featuring a generous snippet of Offerman’s smoldering voice, right here:
Lincoln in the Bardo takes place over the course of one night and tells the story of Abraham Lincoln’s grief over his recently deceased son, Willie, through the narration of several ghosts. In an interview with Electric Literature, Saunders revealed that he had originally written the novel as a play, though that material didn’t make it into the final novel. But might it make the screenplay cut? We can’t wait to see what their cahoots will yield.
This is the west of Ireland and the partnership is not one you’d expect in this rich debut novel from Irish writer Jess Kidd.
At first sight the little village of Mulderrig in County Mayo, the wild west of Ireland, is benign. Nay, sleepy. But when handsome stranger Mahoney blows in from Dublin to take a break from city life, everyone and everything in Mulderrig and its frame of ancient trees begins to wake up. Twenty-six-year old Mahoney has been away from this place for all the years of his life and is only recently in receipt of the news that it is where he was born, and of who his mammy was. Except that all he knows is that her name was Orla Sweeney, she was young and “she was the curse of the town, so they took her from you.”
Not that Mahoney is going to share this new-found knowledge with the folk of Mulderrig in a hurry, for he has also been told that “they all lie, so watch yourself.”But although he declares himself to the first locals he meets to be there in search of peace and quiet, he is a man who invokes the opposite by his very presence. He disturbs not just the living souls in the place, but the dead too, and they play a big part in what is to unfold in this rollicking story.
The dead join a cast of vivid living characters in Himself, starting with Tadhg Kerrigan, a man of prodigious girth with a love of fast cars and rock ’n roll, who, after sharing several pints, offers to take Mahoney in search of lodgings. But before he even gets a place to lay his head Mahoney is disturbed by a meeting with one of the important cast of the dead. She’s a little girl with scuffed shoes who looks like any other, except that she has no back to her head and her voice sounds like someone on a bad phone connection. Her name is Ida and she will, in the fullness of time, skip ahead to lead him to a place of secrets in the woods.
But first Mahoney will settle into Rathmore House, where Shauna Burke looks after the day-to-day needs of Mrs. Cauley, “who lies in state in the library,” bald, spider-like and literally surrounded by books but very much alive. On his first night in the house the dead gather. They want to be seen, and heard:
“For the dead are always close by in a life like Mahoney’s. The dead are drawn to the confused and the unwritten, the damaged and the fractured, to those with big cracks and gaps in their tales, which the dead just yearn to fill. For the dead have secondhand stories to share with you, if you’d only let them get a foot in the door.”
Jess Kidd’s descriptions of the departed show them not as wraiths, but the shades of real people who have passed on. In the book we learn how they differ from the living. But it would be misleading to call this a ghost story, for the central mystery is very much about the living. Mahoney finds that he and Mrs. Cauley share the same kind of honesty — “The twisted kind: when something gets so wronged it gets righted” — and he tells her the real reason he has come to Mulderrig, to solve the mystery of what happened to his mother. Neither of them believes the official version that she willingly left town or gave up her child.
Mrs. Cauley, one-time renowned actress on the stage of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, gets her books to identify — literally! — the play she should direct as her swansong for the St Patrick’s annual fundraising production. The playbill for Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World” emerges and is presented to her by the ghost of Johnnie, best-beloved of her former lovers. This will be the vehicle for her joint pursuit with Mahoney, starting with the auditions, where interrogations of all potential suspects will begin.
It is a fine conceit, and makes an excellent container for the unfolding story, which could otherwise threaten to spill over into confusion. But Jess Kidd marshals her motley cast with sharp and affectionate definition, amongst them the lovely Róisín Munnelly, mother of skipping Ida, weasel-faced Father Eugene Quinn and his housekeeper Bridget Doosey, “the second sharpest old biddy in town,” the elusive Tom Bogey for whom the villagers leave sandwiches, soap and pipe-cleaners on a roadside shrine, and so on, not forgetting Miss Mulhearne (spinster, deceased).
These are glorious characters, worthy successors to those of Dickens and Dylan Thomas. And it’s not just the characters who bring to mind those who inhabit the Welsh village of Llareggub in Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood.” Jess Kidd is an author who shows a poet’s way with words and rhythm in her evocation of Mulderrig at night, silent but for various soft sounds around its sleepers, including:
“Mulderrig is silent but for the bats that sing in the key of darkest sonar as they spool in and out of the attic of Rathmore House. Where Mrs. Cauley sleeps in her magical library, hairless and open mouthed, fat-bellied and spindle-armed. She’s treading the boards again tonight, all night.”
And, sewing the pieces together, a plot of which Agatha Christie would have been proud. There is murder most foul involved and Mahoney soon realises that he is at risk himself. After the performance of the play as the action accelerates to its climax there is a car chase in which you can almost hear the screeching of the brakes of Tadhg Kerrigan’s sky-blue Eldorado as you turn the pages.
Aided by supernatural forces swirling through the village, which include a Holy Well appearing in Father Quinn’s library, complete with frogs, Mrs. Cauley and Mahoney — now accorded the respectful Irish epithet ‘himself’ — do pull off a triumph with the play. And they do solve the mystery. Or rather, a part of it. Mahony may have reached a way of moving on, but there are things which remain mysterious in Mulderrig, stories started and awaiting an ending, characters whose future is uncertain.
Father Quinn runs out of the story in his underpants to who knows where and the new priest who inherits his damp library wonders vaguely why it is so. But isn’t this just like life? The bees can understand it all, for, we’re told, “they know all things,”but the rest of us must simply muse upon it all or wonder whether Jess Kidd might be writing a sequel to this beautifully paced, sometimes funny, sometimes sad and ultimately heart-warming book. I’d say a definite “yes please” to that.
I came late to the party of Anna Journey’s wisdom and wit, but I was thrilled to be ushered into the room after reading her latest collection of poetry, The Atheist Wore Goat Silk (Louisiana State University Press), and then devouring her stunning debut collection of essays, An Arrangement of Skin, out now from Counterpoint. In both her poems and her essays, Journey makes the imprecise and the expected her enemy.
Journey has a preternatural gift for artful swerving and associative shifting, so that—in the title essay, for example—a recollection of a breakdown and an ensuing call to a suicide hotline opens into a consideration of taxidermy and lyric time. In writing about her mother’s penchant for telling macabre stories at the dinner table, Journey makes a connection to campfire songs, and suddenly we’re delivered into a new space the essay has created to argue for the cultural importance of American roots music. And in providing the reader with a portrait of a tattoo artist named after a pirate-themed rum, Journey is concurrently turning our attention to the ways in which we inscribe our skins and spirits through the intimate gestures of ink. All of this without the work ever feeling as though Journey has her thumb on the scale, which is no small feat. This restraint is a mark of brilliance as well as an act of generosity. It’s a vote for the reader’s autonomy and an invitation to wonder and wander inside the latitudes laid out in the work; spaces in which Journey is both our cartographer and our fellow traveler.
It was a galvanizing gift, having the chance to speak with Anna via email about her work.
Vincent Scarpa: One thing I admire about the essays in An Arrangement of Skin is that what seems to motivate so many of them (their origin story) is as simple — and as complicated — as curiosity. It isn’t hard to imagine someone asking you, “So, why did you take up taxidermy as a hobby?” you responding, “I was curious about it,” and the other person being unsatisfied by that, if not suspicious. But I love that the essays advertise that curiosity as their raison d’être in favor of constructing some kind of false framework upon which to build. Reading them, I felt as though you weren’t seeking to indict, to expose, to philosophize, to self-evaluate, to self-synopsize, et c.— though, of course, much of that happens via the act of writing, and is deeply pleasurable — so much as you were seeking to be a student of swirling environments — personal or otherwise — and to report back from that place. Is this totally off-base, or does it strike you as at least somewhat like your modus operandi?
Anna Journey. Photo by Stephanie Diani
Anna Journey: I would definitely call curiosity my modus operandi. What’s it like to slice open a starling and taxidermy its body? How does this gesture connect to our narrative impulse? To aspects of beast fable? To freezing time in lyric poetry? Why did my dad buy a leather trench coat from a German immigrant at a Bolivian airport in the seventies if he believed the salesclerk was probably a Nazi in hiding? Interrogating one’s own curiosity makes for an exciting mode of inquiry for essayists — it keeps us circling.
I think curiosity always informs my choice in subject matter. I also think it helps me navigate and develop metaphor. In my essay “Modifying the Badger,” for instance, based on the second class I took at the taxidermy studio Prey, in Los Angeles, I arrived at a metaphor for the ways we shape-shift throughout our lives, becoming different versions of ourselves. During the taxidermy class, we got to choose our specimen (coyote or raccoon) from a pile of tanned hides. My instructor had mentioned that the person who picked the largest raccoon — the “boar” — would need to modify a cast polyurethane badger form (with a Dremel tool and several saws) to fit the skin, since the commercial raccoon forms were too small for the big guy. I knew I had to choose that specimen. The whole scenario seemed to me like a macabre fable or Ovidian myth set in a hip, ethically sourced taxidermy studio. Transforming a badger into a raccoon? How could I resist that metaphor?
In another essay, “Little Face,” my curiosity about and fascination with the renowned cosmetic dermatologist Dr. Fredric Brandt — whose suicide and blank, Botoxed face haunted me — lead me toward the essay’s governing metaphor. I began a meditation (etymological and personal, social and lyrical) on the image of the face. The trope of the face and the facet (derived from facette: a “little face”) suggested a “faceted” structure I might use to juxtapose various narratives in the essay. So finding that figurative thread helped me stitch together a number of anecdotes: Dr. Brandt’s ghoulish alterations of his mask-like face; my own dermatological adventures in chicken pox scar removal; a Grimm fairy tale about youthful transformation gone grotesquely wrong; and an ill-conceived art project at the elementary school at which my mother works that involved digitally aging photographs of first graders so the kids could glimpse approximations of their future wrinkled, one-hundred-year-old selves. I think curiosity has a lot to do with my compositional approach as well as my interest in the layered textures and associational possibilities of metaphor.
VS: The Atheist Wore Goat Silk begins with the poem “Upon Asking the Cashier at Kroger to Scan That Old Tattoo of a Barcode on My Forearm,” in which we learn that the speaker, when she was nineteen, tore a barcode from a grocery store coupon and got it tattooed without ever having known what the barcode designated. The cashier tells her the barcode is for “a dollar sweet potato,” and later the speaker wonders why she’s waited ten years to investigate this, to learn — or relearn, as the case may be — “I’ve always been sweet but slightly / twisted, I’ve always been // waiting to disappear like this, / bite by bite, into someone’s mouth.” This struck me as an interesting entry point into asking an otherwise not terribly interesting question about how long the essays in An Arrangement of Skin have been accruing on your end before making their way into the container of this collection. Did you desire a sense of delay between what a given essay adumbrates — which, in my clumsy analog, I suppose would be the tattooing of the barcode — and then the writing of the essay itself — the scanning for meaning?
AJ: The delay depends on the essay’s subject. Sometimes I’ve been trying to write about a subject for years (like my childhood in South Asia) and in other cases the time frame will be much shorter. Sometimes there’s barely a delay at all and I’ll begin an essay, believing I’m writing about one thing, and then stumble into the piece’s deeper subject.
In the case of the title essay, “An Arrangement of Skin,” I’d planned to write about my visit to Deyrolle, a spooky two-hundred-year-old house of taxidermy and museum of oddities in Paris, on the Left Bank’s rue du Bac. I thought: I’m going to write a meditation on taxidermy. After Paris I rented a dark, narrow apartment in Prague with exposed cedar beams and an ornate green-and-white tiled ceiling whose pattern I’d describe as medieval Czech psychedelic — it looked like an Airbnb decorated by Baba Yaga. This was the perfect place to begin my taxidermy essay, I figured, sitting at the kitchen table while my husband taught a morning poetry workshop for the next two weeks. I described Deyrolle’s white peacock, spiny anteater, stuffed zebra, and intricate diagrams of fluted French mushrooms. A couple of pages into the essay, however, I moved away from the dead animals and toward other aspects of mortality, including my phone call, several years earlier, to a suicide hotline and the context for that desperate gesture. Writing about the taxidermied animals at Deyrolle — their bodies, their mortality — made me consider my own body, my own mortality. The etymology of the word taxidermy, too, began to reveal itself as a potential metaphor to which I might return in future essays: taxis (“arrangement”) and derma (“skin”) — “an arrangement of skin.” The act of arranging seemed to speak to the art of the storyteller or poet while the image of skin began to resonate as a metaphor (for family members, friends, lovers, animals, poems, stories, the different selves we inhabit in a life).
I didn’t plan to write about my breakdown when I started what I thought would be a meditation on a Parisian shop of oddities. In fact, I was so horrified by the essay’s pivot from taxidermy to my scandalous personal business that I put away the draft for an entire year. I finally returned to the essay, though, revising the piece so it began with the phone call to the suicide hotline. The unexpected swerves in metaphor and narrative in “An Arrangement of Skin” reminded me how much I value these sudden associative leaps, how they make writing an ongoing process of discovery.
“I didn’t plan to write about my breakdown when I started what I thought would be a meditation on a Parisian shop of oddities.”
VS: I’m wondering what your feelings are about perceived truth-content in writing poetry, and how those feelings might have carried over, or perhaps changed, when writing personal essays. We don’t ask of poetry, in the way that we do of (most) prose, that it be designated as “true,” whatever that word might mean, or “fictional,” whatever that might mean, but — though I’m not really a poet — it does seem that a poem in which the writer is using “I” is presumed by many readers to collapse any distance between the writer and the poem — eliminating the possibility that “the speaker” of the poem might be someone altogether different from the writer of it — and thereby shifts the poem into the terrain of autobiographical writing. A distillation of this (rather knotty) inquiry might be something like, How, if it all, does the expectation that the content is “true” affect your process in writing both poems and personal essays? Do you feel like there are strictures — or, conversely, immunities — that present themselves in either form in this regard?
A moment that comes to mind here — and it’s one that I really love — is that scene in your essay “The Goliath Jazz” in which you emphasize the ways in which, over the course of the essay, you’ve been thoroughly misremembering details about a character from your past, and how that misremembering has calcified into a species of “fact” that both you and the essay itself now have to confront, to dislodge.
AJ: The self is always my subject in a personal essay, even when I’m writing about taxidermying a raccoon or examining the fairy tale “Bluebeard” or considering the directions wisteria spirals. In “The Goliath Jazz,” an essay about a guy I knew who ended up murdering his sister, the problem I encountered while writing the essay (learning a certain detail I’d taken for granted as a “fact” was actually a distortion of memory) opened into the piece’s deeper subject. Why had I remembered things this way? Questioning my own contradictions and limitations became just as urgent to me as reckoning with a curly-haired choirboy from my past who grew into a knife-wielding murderer.
As a poet, I used to get cranky when people made assumptions about autobiographical content in my work. Like they weren’t giving me credit for having an imagination. I’ve learned to take this particular form of naiveté as a compliment, though, as I hope it has something to do with tonal authority: a certain matter-of-fact attitude my poems’ speakers often take toward the strange or macabre. Recently, an established author emailed me to say that he liked a poem from The Atheist Wore Goat Silk (the one you mentioned earlier: “Upon Asking the Cashier at Kroger to Scan That Old Tattoo of a Barcode on My Forearm”). I could immediately tell, from the way the writer talked about the poem and from certain details he shared with me, that he believed the poem’s dramatic circumstance was entirely autobiographical. He was convinced that I’d once gotten a tattoo of a barcode on my forearm, based on a grocery store coupon, and that my body had rung up under the clerk’s scanner, ten years later, as a sweet potato. I love that this outrageous scenario seems at all plausible. And this writer’s total faith in possibility charmed me.
VS: If I can follow that thread a bit further, I’d love to hear your thoughts about some broader questions regarding genre. It seems to me that we’re getting closer and closer to a place where it’s universally agreed-upon that genre distinction is mostly useless to begin with; if we’re not at that place yet, then perhaps we’re at a place wherein the lines between genres have never been more flexible or blurry and the forms themselves have never been more capacious and undiscriminating, and this is good. (I’m reminded here of that great Eula Biss line: “I think genre is as much a lie as gender is.”) I am, however, interested in how you specifically — having written three collections of poetry prior to An Arrangement of Skin — navigate genre.
Is it an interest of yours to trouble what an essay might look like or how it might function? For that matter, I could ask the same about your intentions in writing poetry. The poems in The Atheist Wore Goat Silk are mostly propelled by narrative, and evoked in me the kind of readerly experience that perfectly executed flash nonfiction does.
I’m also curious to know if there are other writers whose work is often designated as genre-defying — either by the writers themselves or by a readership — that you felt instructed by in composing this collection.
AJ: Although I worked on An Arrangement of Skin for five years, I wrote over half of the essays in a stretch of focused attention during the last year. I began to see the shape of the collection coming together and that clarity and excitement galvanized me. During this time I read English poet and nonfiction writer Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, which combines aspects of grief memoir, environmental writing, and literary criticism. I loved Macdonald’s lyrical prose style — all those striking metaphors, images, internal rhymes, and assonance — and I admired her book’s structure. As a writer who often works in the braided form on the scale of the essay, I felt a kinship with the way she weaves personal, literary, and historical threads in her memoir. So H Is for Hawk was an important book for me as I completed my nonfiction collection.
I’m especially drawn to the work of memoirists who, like Macdonald, began as poets. I admire Maggie Nelson’s fluid interweaving of theoretical inquiry and personal anecdote in The Argonauts, for example, as well as the fascinating intertextual resonances between her poetry collection Jane: A Murder and her courtroom narrative/memoir about sexual violence, The Red Parts. Mark Doty, Nick Flynn, and Mary Karr started out as poets. Nabokov, too. I like to read his dazzling autobiography, Speak, Memory, slowly, as I would a book of poetry, savoring his imagery’s rich synesthesia. And, of course, I always read poetry. When I was a young writer, reading Larry Levis’s collections Elegy and The Widening Spell of the Leaves changed the way I structured time in my poems. His approach to orchestrating motifs, repeating images, and braiding temporalities helped shape my sensibility.
I also seek out essays in journals and magazines to which I subscribe as well as collections of literary nonfiction. The growing audience for essays should be encouraging to us all — just look at the broad interest in Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. I’ve admired a number of other recent essay collections, too, such as Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land,Charles D’Ambrosio’s Loitering,andAleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives.
VS: In your experience writing these essays, did you ever feel as though the form was granting you access to do something — with language, with movement, with engaging the content, etc. — that a poem might have made difficult? I suppose the reverse also interests me; if anything you found possible in writing poetry felt distant or even inaccessible when writing these essays.
AJ: While I enjoy employing narrative strategies in poetry, most of my poems tend to fall farther along the lyric end of the spectrum. They’ll often evoke a particular moment rather than narrate a series of events, and they’ll use fragments of stories to suggest partial glimpses of larger ones. In a poem, I’m interested in concision, brevity, mystery, and metaphor. I want to make a single clear gesture. In the essay I’m interested in being more expansive and engaging with narrative in a more sustained way. I hope to push the lyric capacity of my prose — in terms of figurative language, imagery, and sound — though I’m working in a more capacious form, which gives me room to sprawl out, to tell more of the story.
Then there’s the issue of subject matter in the poems and essays. If I’m writing a poem called “As a Child, My Mother Took a Girl Scout Field Trip to the Men’s Ward of a New Orleans Prison” (this is an actual poem title and the event did happen), I’ll feel free to make up a bunch of details about the experience and maybe exclude others that seem too crazy (like the fetuses preserved in jars of formaldehyde that my mother recalls seeing on shelves in the prison’s basement morgue). If I wanted to write an essay that involved my mother’s Girl Scout prison adventure, I wouldn’t go nuts and make up a bunch of details the way I would in a poem, but I’d find other areas in which to be inventive: with metaphor, with syntax, with a surprising countertheme. I’d also think: Include the fetuses.
VS: Entering into the framework of understanding you bring to bear on taxidermy and then revisiting Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing — a book that really stunned me when I read it only a few months before reading An Arrangement of Skin, so it was a thrill to see you engaging with it — I was detecting certain parallels between taxidermy and autobiographical writing. Specifically, I was thinking about the fraught nature of what one might call the ontological impulse or impetus to have something taxidermied or to write autobiography. For as much as taxidermy is about preservation of some kind — the urge to freeze time, to keep alive what isn’t, to suffuse something gone with a sense of continuance, to make oneself a kind of god — it also strikes me as a way to make that very same thing end; to force a coda of one’s own fantasy over reality. And I wondered if the same couldn’t be said of the nature of autobiographical writing, too. The taxidermied object is, as you so wonderfully put it, “arrested in time and posed to emulate everlasting life.” When I landed upon that line I thought — well, hey, that’s the essay in a way, too, right? I admire that the essays don’t bully the reader into forced recognition of the possibilities of these parallels, which seemed to me, so excited as I read, a mark of authorial restraint that I often associate with poets. But speaking outside of the essays, I wonder what was going on in your thought process with regard to all of this? In “Birds 101” you write, “The taxidermist’s ability to hide the seams — those threads that join dead flesh to fabric — is what makes the vanished animal flutter back to life.” Do you feel you were seeking something similar in writing certain of these essays?
AJ: Yes, I do. I discovered Poliquin’s cultural and poetic history of taxidermy, The Breathless Zoo, about five months after I’d written my collection’s title essay in the Baba Yaga apartment in Prague, so when I finally revisited the draft I brought to it a keener awareness of taxidermy’s storytelling and lyric capacities. Her argument that seven “narratives of longing” compel people to create taxidermy seemed to describe many of the reasons that drive writers to make art, too: “wonder, beauty, spectacle, order, narrative, allegory, and remembrance.” So Poliquin’s notion of the taxidermist-as-storyteller or lyric magician inspired me to Google “taxidermy classes, Los Angeles” and locate Allis Markham’s taxidermy studio Prey, where I took my Birds 101 weekend workshop and my Mammal Shoulder Mounts class. After reading Poliquin’s book, I also kept thinking of Rilke’s famous poem about the unicorn (“the creature that doesn’t exist”), in The Sonnets to Orpheus, in which he suggests that the mythic beast can become a living creature if people nourish it with the strength of their belief. “They didn’t feed it with corn,” Rilke writes, “but always with the chance that it might / be.”
“Desire drives taxidermists, it drives writers. I think the erotic dynamic of lack — I had this, I want it back — has everything to do with why and how we create literature.”
So you’re right to describe the imaginative drive of the taxidermist and personal essayist as a similar forcing of a “coda of one’s own fantasy over reality” in that we project our longings onto our subjects — a posed starling, a powerful memory — and use these narratives to tell essential stories about ourselves. Desire drives taxidermists, it drives writers. I think the erotic dynamic of lack — I had this, I want it back — has everything to do with why and how we create literature.
James Baldwin: But that demands redefining the terms of the western world…
Audre Lorde: And both of us have to do it; both of us have to do it…
James Baldwin: But you don’t realize that in this republic the only real crime is to be a Black man?
Audre Lorde: No, I don’t realize that. I realize the only crime is to be Black. I realize the only crime is to be Black, and that includes me too.
The year is 1984, and two now-legendary Black queer icons debate, one mansplaining to the next. Their conversation will end up published in Essence Magazine, three years before James Baldwin’s death and eight years before Audre Lorde’s. Baldwin confidently states that in America being a Black man is the only “real” crime, thereby delegitimizing Lorde’s struggle as a Black queer woman dealing with many systems of oppression. For all of his poignant work on white supremacy as a poison to us all, he sometimes failed to recognize his privileges while centering his own struggle as a Black man in the fight for liberation. And yet, as a writer who lives queer Blackness in a very heteronormative white world, Baldwin speaks to me in a way no other writer has.
Baldwin’s brilliance as a political essayist is unmatched, and Raoul Peck’s 2017 documentary I Am Not Your Negro gives an important glimpse into the thought process of a visionary. Based on the scant thirty pages of a manuscript by Baldwin, unfinished before his death, the film introduces him to new audiences and also serves to remind us that ain’t shit changed. Both the greatest strength and weakness of the documentary is in Peck’s mission to ensure that “every single word was pure Baldwin.” With the intention of telling the story of the deaths of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X solely using Baldwin’s notes, the director succeeds by overlaying Samuel L. Jackson’s narrated reading with a series of contemporary and archival visuals.
However, as some commentators such as Dr. Eve Ewing have suggested, to create a full-length documentary out of a series of loose unfinished pages is a risky endeavor, one that creates a slight unease for the viewer. The film points to the chalk outlines of Medgar, Martin, and Malcolm not as discrete and unconnected events but as part of one world, and yet falls short in explicitly tracing our government’s history in repeatedly targeting Black revolutionary thinkers. What actually sticks out in the film are the modern shots of #BlackLivesMatter protests, footage of lily-white women, and the interview clips from Baldwin’s prime that serve as a testament to his oratory prowess.
Peck’s faithfulness to the original manuscript may at times be thrilling, but this is also a documentary where the FBI provides the only voice to speak on Baldwin’s sexuality, rather than Baldwin’s own. I Am Not Your Negro cites an official Federal Bureau of Investigation document which refers to Baldwin as a “suspected homosexual.” This brief memo is the sole mention of his non-heterosexuality, and of his non-compliance with the expectations of Black men in this country. What might seem like an insignificant biographical notation should actually be read as an act of violence, considering how the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) worked at that time to literally and figuratively assassinate activists, community organizers, and public intellectuals such as Baldwin. The efforts by former major players like J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon did not end there, however, as demonstrated within the current Movement for Black Lives on more than one occasion. But it follows a long history of erasure by historians to make those who are marginalized even at the margins appear more palatable for Black, white, and heterosexual audiences alike. It is in light of these details that we must renew our focus on how Baldwin’s Blackness was queer, and his queerness Black. Much as his Blackness informed his work so too did his queerness, and there is no way — as the film attempts — to separate those two identities from each other.
Even considering my qualms, I am lucky to say that in the last year I have consumed more accurate representations of my full Black queer self through films like Moonlight and parts of I Am Not Your Negro than I have in my entire life. I do not intend for that to stop, but encouraging the production of Black queer intellectual work is a different endeavor than taking responsibility. The enduring writing by Sojourner Truth in the 1800s and James Baldwin in the 1900s can finally lose some relevance in the late 2010s when we push for new work and also hold ourselves to a higher critical standard. Although we should celebrate Peck for successfully summarizing and historicizing white supremacist violence in North America, producing a well-received documentary that only gives a partial accounting of Baldwin’s work is simply not enough.
This spirit of loving critique for Peck and loving defense of Baldwin’s life comes out of my recognition of both the author’s irreplaceable brilliance and of his culpability as a blueprint for mistakes which we continue to make, as evidenced in his debate with Audre Lorde. It’s true that when looking at the entire Black queer literary canon, few artists have embodied Baldwin’s unrestrained sociopolitical commentary. Even putting myself in the same theoretical arena as Baldwin requires balancing ego against imposter syndrome. But as a fellow Black queer male essayist, I have an awareness of how the architects of popular narrative can reshape our history to diminish or dismiss those less favorable aspects of our identities. We would do ourselves a disservice by allowing Baldwin’s immortalization as an untouchable pillar to stop us from assessing the ways in which we collectively entrench the very systems of oppression that necessitated such raw work in the first place. Avoiding the subject forces us to keep quiet about those parts of ourselves that have long gone unspoken. The only way we embody Baldwin is by honoring our truth.
I was first introduced to James Baldwin, by name only, in 2013. I had been planning to study abroad in Cape Town, South Africa, with the intention of creating art in the week just before classes began. A white community college professor of mine — the head of the acting conservatory I had attended right after high school — suggested that I do a one-man show on James Baldwin. I had never heard of him, and as I collected more ideas for the “what to create for the Grahamstown National Arts Festival” bucket, Baldwin remained little more than a name. I think there was a nagging sense in my mind of, what does this white man know about Black queerness? This was at a time in my life where I did not openly consider myself a writer and, further, it was not clear to me why I should care. Looking back I believe his suggestion was a combination of benign intent, problematic projection, and a profound difference in cultural capital.
It wasn’t until 2015 that I finally read The Fire Next Time while on a plane. Much like I Am Not Your Negro director Raoul Peck, the sense of recognition was such that I could not stop thinking about Baldwin after reading only a few words. I devoured the last bit of the thin novel as I flew into Baltimore for an HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, and advocacy conference. Encountering that book upon attending an all-queer, all-Black conference brought me even more clarity than had the experience of the beginnings of #BlackLivesMatter in 2014, while I was living in a former Apartheid state. Or rather, the encounter with his work built on what I had already begun to see, once I’d stepped outside my own privileges.
I returned home and began to understand that for most of my life I was the negro whom Baldwin had spoken about. In many ways white societal expectations had groomed me to be “their negro,” through my socialization as a child of military parents and a keen sense of awareness on my mother’s part. There is a profoundly cruel irony in successfully protecting Black children from the ill-will of humans who see them as inhuman, by teaching them to be respectable negroes. Many Black children unintentionally adopt a politic of respectability by forcing our younger selves to silence pride in the face of structural and interpersonal racism. We want to survive, meaning that we sometimes ignore when we are not paid as well as a less-qualified peer. We want to survive, meaning that we enter interracial relationships without critically interrogating the elephant in the room — the toxic pervasiveness of white supremacy. Studying abroad on a scholarship accelerated my personal process of decolonization, the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like expanded my global political consciousness on Blackness, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time cemented the dawning truth that he so eloquently states in the film: “white is a metaphor for power.”
More importantly, Baldwin taught me a lesson that stood contrary to everything else I had learned in life up till then. As Black folks we do not tell our business, and we definitely do not disparage fellow Black folks in front of white people. In fact, our business is really only safe at home, where white and non-Black people of color are out of eye and earshot. Not only does whiteness have a way of using truth and vulnerability against the Black body, it also has a tendency to appropriate Black pain, Black joy, and Black ingenuity. Black folks are not allowed to publicly display weakness or incompetence, which may even contribute to suicide rates among young Black boys when the solution lies in the opposite direction, in greater openness and increased mental health advocacy to end the stigma. These are silencing norms preached in many Black communities for the sake of our collective survival. Baldwin defied what I was personally taught when he told all the business, in what read like a single, rugged, run-on sentence.
Externally, white television hosts would invite Baldwin on their talk shows only to dismiss him, in spite of the furor of audience applause frequently shown in the documentary. And it is clear that Baldwin’s precise diction aided in his presentation to the white folks who could — and did — just as easily hate him.
The shift in the audience came after the November 17, 1962 issue of The New Yorker, where Baldwin penned his “Letter From a Region in My Mind.” He had published in a white periodical that largely pandered to that very same audience, although the difference was he was actually speaking not only to white folks about themselves, but to Black folks about ourselves. The essay, republished later in The Fire Next Time, details the minutiae of his meeting with the Honorable Minister Elijah Muhammad, who held an enormous amount of power at the time not only among Black Muslims but also many Black Americans searching for a leader. Under Baldwin’s pen, the suggestion was that not everyone who is our skinfolk is our kinfolk. This risky candor — which came through in the piece’s many biting observations, such as that “Elijah’s power came from his single-mindedness” — taught me the necessity of intra-community critique and self-reckoning, particularly as an openly queer Black man with mental illnesses.
Writers like Baldwin, Biko, and Lorde eventually became, for me, portals of rediscovery. I had always loved to read, but it was only in poring over their work that I saw my full self on the page for the first time. My personal narrative became less “special,” but at the same time more robust when not overrun by the suffocating gauze of whiteness. I highlighted or underlined damn near every word of The Fire Next Time — I’d found a written testament to so many of the feelings I had experienced in my own life, but which had never before been reflected back to me. It was like being under the same mentorship that Baldwin had guided his nephew by, when he wrote that, “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a n*gger. I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it.” Whereas the value of Biko was in expanding the bounds of the diaspora, Baldwin gave me something else: a quiet permission to be Black, queer, vocal, and critical.
I Am Not Your Negro is America’s opportunity to peek into Baldwin’s boudoir for the first, fifth, or fiftieth time. The author’s mission, to heal us from the ongoing perils of whiteness, is a message for all ages, nationalities, abilities, sexualities, races, ethnicities, and gender identities. Although Peck disappoints by prioritizing the FBI and generally downplaying the question of Baldwin’s sexuality, we have writers like Dagmawi Woubshet who have written extensively about such mistakes, pointing out that slack. We need more authors who force the audience to chew on what we have to say like it’s the gristle in their steak, and who also make us wrestle with our own responses. For me, Baldwin held up a daunting — if blurry — mirror that revealed the essayist, critic, and intellectual inside myself that I never knew existed. And I firmly believe that when Baldwin wrote that he thought “all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life,” he also meant for that to apply to how we tell our stories and define ourselves. I see myself as more than just a conduit for his political musings, a frame for his work, or a retreading of the past. The greatest effect the film can have is to get people to go back and read Baldwin, to reread and critique him, and to start on documenting their own narratives. There is no other way.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Mondays, strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
