Are you one of the countless writers, teachers, and editors heading down to the nation’s capital for AWP? If so, print out this AWP bingo card and see how quickly you can fill it out. We’ll give you a 10% discount at table 543-T on anything from our literary aces playing cards to our new Papercuts game.
(We will have bingo sheets at the booth too!)
Design by Nadxieli Nieto
In just two short days, the 2017 AWP Conference and Bookfair will be underway in Washington D.C. All the the cool-kid writers, teachers, students, editors, and publishers will be there, including Electric Literature. For our readers who are among the estimated 12,000 attendees, we’d love to see you! EL’s editors will be participating several panels and off-site readings, listed below. (Information about writers protesting Trump is here.) We’ll also be tabling Thursday through Saturday at booth 543-T. Make sure to stop by to play AWP bingo and high-five a hungover editor.
You also won’t want to miss the chance to buy Papercuts at a discounted price of $20 (they’re expected to sell out fast)!
Electric Literature’s interim Social Media Editor, Kyle Lucia Wu, joins Prairie Schooner’s Ashley Strosnider, Southern Humanities Review’s Aaron Alford, and Sarabande’s Ariel Lewiton to discuss editorial careers for writers.
Event Description: Not all graduate students in creative writing seek teaching jobs after graduation. How might you prepare for the editorial job market while earning your creative writing degree? The editors on this panel share how they landed editorial positions soon after — or even during — their graduate studies.
Time: 9:00 am to 10:15 am
Location: Room 202A, Washington Convention Center, Level Two
Featuring EL’s Contributing Editor, Kelly Luce, along with other panelists: Michael Noll, Manuel Gonzales, Daniel José Older, and LaShonda Barnett
Event Description: When talking about narrative structure, we often focus on the macro: three acts, plot points, beginnings, and endings. But there are micro ways to think about structure while working with character, dialogue, the movement through time and space, and shifts between interiority and exterior action. Authors of literary, fantasy, and YA fiction featured in the forthcoming Field Guide for the Craft of Fiction will discuss how they developed (and stumbled upon) structure in their novels and stories.
Time: 12:00 pm to 1:15 pm
Location: Virginia Barber Middleton Stage, Sponsored by USC, Exhibit Halls D & E, Convention Center, Level Two
Writers To Protest Trump at AWP 2017
Featuring EL’s Contributing Editor, Kelly Luce, along with other panelists: Bich Minh Nguyen Nguyen, Rob Spillman, Christian Kiefer, and Derek Palacio
Event Description:As fiction writers, we often feel pressure to write inside the confines our own experience, as defined by our ethnic identity, gender, sexual orientation, economic class, and so on. This panel explores the edges and interstices of that pressure. In what contexts is it acceptable to write outside such confines? In what contexts is it not? What does “diversity” mean when creating a fictional world? As writers, who has cultural permission to press past the confines of one’s own identity?
Time: 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Location: Room 202A, Washington Convention Center, Level Two
Event Description: Our weekly magazine of literary oddities, Okey-Panky is co-hosting with off site event with readings by Okey Panky’s Editor-in-Chief, Robert Lennon along with Okey-Panky contributors Dinty W. Moore, Su-Yee Lin, Elissa Washuta, Swati Prasad, and Samuel Ligon, Electric Literature contributors Kim Addonizio, Margaret Malone, and Kaj Tanaka, along with future-EL contributors Robert Lopez and Gary Lilley.
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: The Boundary Stone, 116 Rhode Island Ave NW, Washington DC, 20001 (This is an offsite event!)
Electric Literature Founder Andy Hunter joins Steven Church, Joe Bonomo, Jill Talbot as they read from their work and discuss the reboot of venerable indie-press Soft Skull. (Andy is stepping in for Dan Semeka.)
Event Description: Four writers representing a wide range of styles, interests, and subjects, while still embodying the Soft Skull spirit, will read from their latest nonfiction books and discuss their experiences writing, editing, and publishing their work with one of the country’s more unique and influential small presses. Their subjects include music and pop culture, savagery, love, loss, and family dynamics; and their forms vary from collections of essays to memoir to the book-length essay.
Time: 10:30 am to 11:45 am
Location: Room 206, Washington Convention Center, Level Two
Featuring Recommended Reading’s Assistant Editor, Brandon Taylor, along with Nancy Hightower, Amber Sparks, Stephanie Feldman, and Mitchell Jackson
Event Description: For increasing numbers of writers, MFA programs are an entry to the publishing world. How does this trend affect writers without the degree? What kinds of nonacademic credentials can help all writers in their careers? How does one become part of a literary community? What are the attitudes towards writers who do not teach? This diverse panel discusses the increasing cross-pollination between writers with MFAs and writers with other academic degrees that create a stronger literary community.
Time: 1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Location: Liberty Salon N, O, & P, Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Four
Going to AWP? Play Electric Lit’s AWP Bingo
J. Robert Lennon, Editor-in-Chief of Okey-Panky, will join Alice Sola Kim and Kate Bernheimer in a discussion moderated by Anton DiSclafani. (J. Robert Lennon is stepping in for Michael Taeckens, who can no longer attend. )
Event Description: Kathryn Davis is widely considered by critics to be one of the most important women writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Across seven stylistically breathtaking novels she has challenged and inspired a generation of readers, and ignited a movement of diverse, fabulist, posthuman, feminist authors. Her books constantly and electrifyingly ask the question of what is possible on the page. Students and colleagues of Davis speak about her work, ending with a reading from Davis herself.
Time: 1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Location: Room 209ABC, Washington Convention Center, Level Two
…
Andy Hunter is the Chief Operating Officer of Catapult and the Publisher of Lit Hub. He is also a founder of Electric Literature and serves on its Board of Directors.
J. Robert Lennon is the author of two story collections and seven novels. He teaches writing at Cornell University and is the Editor-in-Chief of Okey Panky.
Kelly Luce is the author of Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail and the novel Pull Me Under. A contributing editor at Electric Literature, she is a 2016–17 Radcliffe Institute fellow.
Brandon Taylor is a PhD candidate in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was a 2015 Lambda Literary Fiction Fellow, and is the Assistant Editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. His writing has appeared in Chicago Literati, Wildness, and Out Magazine Online.
Kyle Lucia Wu is the managing editor of Joyland and a PEN prison writing mentor. She has an MFA in fiction from The New School.
Lincoln in the Bardo takes place in February 1862, the month that brought the first major casualties of the Civil War, along with the death of Abraham Lincoln’s own 11-year-old son, Willie. At the time, rumors circulated of how the grieving president would return at night to the Oak Hill Cemetery crypts to cradle Willie’s body; Lincoln in the Bardo uses this image as its quasi-historical foundation. If, to you, the notion of a book built on a little boy’s corpse sounds depressing, that’s because it’s a depressing book. It’s also very fun: dramatic, witty, and unabashedly sentimental. What else would you expect from George Saunders, the Willy Wonka of American letters, who coats life’s cruel absurdities in a sugary glaze?
To be clear, Lincoln in the Bardo is a novel, but if you glanced at a few pages, you might mistake it for an oral history, the script to a radio play, or maybe one of David Shields’ anti-fiction bricolages. In some chapters, a chorus of historians and contemporary sources describe, from afar, a First Family at the intersection of personal and national crises. Some sources are authentic, some invented; Saunders never makes explicit which are which, though his playful little forgeries are often easy to spot. (“Nearly lost among a huge flower arrangement stood a clutch of bent old men in urgent discussion, heads centrally inclined,” for example, sounds a lot less like a 19th-century socialite than a 21st-century fiction writer.) Most of the book retains this chorus-form, but to more straightforwardly fictional ends, as a community of hapless ghosts fight to save Willie Lincoln’s soul.
In Lincoln in the Bardo’s afterlife — which is only ever called “the bardo” in the title — divine justice is dispensed with totalitarian arbitrariness, and souls are locked in their bodies’ moment of death. Willie’s two main interlocutors, Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III, appear, respectively, with hideously swollen genitals and a dent in his skull, and as a many-eyed, many-limbed blur; the Rev. Everly Thomas “always arrives at a hobbling sprint, eyebrows arched high, looking behind himself anxiously, hair sticking straight up, mouth in a perfect O of terror”; one woman remains ever-blissfully oblivious to a pursuer’s incessant molestation. Elise Traynor, trapped to the cemetery fence, has it the worst. She arrived in the bardo “as a spinning young girl” about Willie’s age, but now she’s demented and grotesque, transmuting into images of ruin. This is one of the more sadistic diktats of this universe (or of God, or karma, or George Saunders…blame whomever you’d like), that if children stay in the bardo too long, they get stuck there, and their suffering compounds the longer they remain.
So how do the ghosts leave the bardo, in Lincoln in the Bardo? They choose, very Buddhistly, to let go of their earthly attachments (i.e., their desire to live). Then, with a “bone-chilling firesound” and a blast of light, they vanish. This “matterlightblooming phenomenon” petrifies the ghosts, most of whom are in deep denial about their mortality—which, incidentally, them about the worst companions imaginable for Willie, who, like Elise on the fence, is beginning to become trapped to his crypt. Complicating matters further is the 16th president, who returns to reenact the Pietá with his son’s dead body. After this embrace of fatherly love, Willie cannot bring himself to leave. The ghosts, almost all of whom have long since been forgotten by the living, are likewise bowled-over by this display of affection, even though they know what consequences Willie will face if he remains.
Weepy stuff, as you can see. Reading Lincoln in the Bardo might, at times, call to mind funeral dirges, throngs of ululating women. The book wears its mawkishness like a crown, and it works: isn’t grief, a huge emotion, best expressed hugely? Still, after the reader finds herself, 70 some-odd chapters after Willie dies, reading yet another account of how in his final days he was “suffering horribly,” she might feel like her nose is being rubbed in a tragedy — an actual tragedy, a real boy’s real death, deployed to raise the stakes of a ghost story. As Joan Didion says, writers are always selling someone out; one senses that this novel knows, at some level, that it’s selling out the real Willie Lincoln, so it overcorrects, insisting ad nauseum that the reader mourn him. But one can only listen to ululations for so long.
Lincoln in the Bardo’s other shortcomings appear to be borne of this sort of finicky impulse. (And no doubt its successes — its eminent readability, playful language, and unrelenting narrative momentum — arise from this trait, which could as easily be called perfectionism, as well.) For example, too concerned with closing every circle, Lincoln in the Bardo rambles on for a few more chapters after it should’ve ended. Or take the matter of slavery: it would be remiss for a novel set in Washington D.C. in the 1860s to fail to address America’s original sin. And the novel does address it, two-thirds of the way through, when “several men and women of the sable hue” meander over to Oak Hill from a nearby mass grave, demanding to “have their say.” Then they have their say, for eleven pages. One man wishes he could go back and murder his masters; another finds both solace and sorrow in his memories of “free and happy moments” (“On Wednesdays, for example, when I would have two free hours for myself”). Here, one senses the novel’s self-awareness again, that it knows all its major characters are white men, and it’s perfunctorily trying to compensate.
By the same token, why call this afterlife “the bardo”? Bardo is a Tibetan term that refers to the liminal space after death and before reincarnation (it’s often compared to purgatory in Roman Catholicism). Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan religious text known in the West as the “Book of the Dead”, refers to a “bardo of the moment of the death,” which seems to be represented in novel by the ghosts’ stuck positions. Likewise, the “matterlightblooming phenomenon” might be a nod to luminosity, “the clear light of reality” said to be the state of consciousness in death. But this sort of engagement is superficial at best, reference without contemplation. And furthermore, Bardo Thodol also says that the period between death and rebirth lasts only 49 days. Outside of its title, Lincoln in the Bardo skews far more Christian than Buddhist. Engaging with Christianity is understandable, probably unavoidable, being that we’re dealing with a cast of dead white antebellum men, and the 49-day tarrying period would inconveniently obliterate the narrative stakes. But still, paired with the quickie slavery dialectic, what we see is a thin veneer of multiculturalism, clearly well-meaning but little more than cosmetic.
However, the book does engage in a complex way with matters of faith, largely through the Reverend Everly Thomas, the lone ghost who knows he’s dead. Not only that, the Rev. knows he’s going to Hell, though he says he has no idea what mortal sins he committed, and the reader has no reason not to believe him. He fled from judgement, and now he’s laying low in the bardo. After his spectral troupe encounters some souls from Hell (but not the worst one, they insist), the Rev. says:
As I had many times preached, our Lord is a fearsome Lord, and mysterious, and will not be predicted, but judges as He sees fit, and we are but Lambs to him, whom he regards with neither affection nor malice; some go to the slaughter, while others are released to the meadow, by his whim, according to a standard we are too lowly to discern.
It is only for us to accept; accept his judgement, and our punishment.
Oh, but I was sick, sick at heart.
So much of Lincoln in the Bardo is nakedly pleasurable, even—especially—at its most depressing, but what a bleak view of the universe it has. Yes, it finds comfort in the commonplace joys of being alive (“Such as, for example: a gaggle of children trudging through a side-blown December flurry; a friendly match-share underneath some collision-tilted streetlight; a frozen clock, bird-visited within its high tower; cold water from a tin jug…”), but it forces its characters to suffer until they renounce these joys, to embrace terrifying uncertainty, to deny the world and explode into nothingness—with no assurance that their suffering will subside. The fleet-footed sentences, prodigious research, unabashed sentiment, and rollicking plot, in the end, are all glacé. Underneath is an acrid core, which makes Lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders’s most complex and satisfying work to date.
Anatomy Lessons
for Di Seuss
There is an altitude in my mouth
I cannot identify. I think of all
the green tongues
of my plants. Want
to show them: my womb is bigger
than my heart. The only two
organs inside me. Tonight
I get so animal I bark. A mammal
in my bones stirs. My skin is so
defensive I can barely see. I meet the poet
ten drinks later. She teaches me about thirst:
there is a resolution
in the body
for desire.
The poet discovers a herd
lost in me. Her eyes — twin coins
flashing a scummy truth. Her hair —
some rope of earth. Her tits —
call them two new moons, fists of
sun, paws marking her rewards. She looks
at my collection of hides. She scents
the room orange. Her wings
grow large
and she shows me
a Mountain. It is a body
ruptured. A bird
headless and winged.
I Met Thirst in a Forest
My rings slipped off
cold fingers. I was returning
from a wake and wanted
to see the geese framed
flying in blue. So many jagged
windows. The dead
was someone I knew
in tiny ways. Like geese
droppings on a lawn. Waterfowl cover
the open fields at night. Melting
into another’s neck, a v of tail, wet
hearts flattened orange
on the ground. Sun filtered
through the fragile skin
of windows in the funeral home’s
bathroom. I was taking my time
and feeling the pressure
of bones was the easiest
kind. How long I still had to go —
photos and rosaries
to finger. Ligaments and anticipation
to break — I am a woman
after all, and always
hungry. The open coffin
seemed to glow like the refrigerator
at night — bare feet cool
and full. He had a body once
and now it is just behind
the handle, my hand on it,
my mouth full of wet.
I Am Not Married
I walk through a tunnel of blades. White
under my eyelids. On the rest of me
is ripened skin — my mother’s or the lady’s
next door. She hung herself
to dry and I saw her. Dripping. These
swords want to split something, and I dream
a plot of whispering teeth. When I glimpsed
the lady she had a husband — a man
everyone said. But he has departed
long ago. Now, I see the red and blue and coupling
of dusk. I wonder if that is what
the question feels like, a strange engraved
thrill. A caw comes out like blood. But all the red
remains inside. Once, I would like a crow
to be a beacon of hope. Once, a knife
cut a bit of rope — enough to be a ring.
The most iconic line in Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides (1993) has to be this one: “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.” It is, Eugenides says, the closest thing to a suicide note that we get from Cecilia Lisbon after she decides to slit her wrists with her father’s razor. No one understands why she’s done it. She’s pretty, healthy, cared-for. She’s only thirteen. As the doctor points out, stitching up her wrists, she isn’t old enough “to know how bad life gets.” She tells him he can’t possibly understand, before, weeks later, flinging herself out a window.
Almost no one in The Virgin Suicides has ever been a thirteen-year-old girl. Nor, for that matter, has Eugenides himself. His novel is dominated by an indeterminate number of male narrators. They recount a boyhood spent trying to decipher Cecilia and her sisters, who in turn commit suicides as inexplicable as Cecilia’s. To the boys, the Lisbon sisters are mysterious, mythic. The boys peer through windows at them and collect their discarded objects. They want to understand the source of unexpected violence within them.
The boys peer through windows at them and collect their discarded objects. They want to understand the source of unexpected violence within them.
Of course, there’s a better way to get inside the head of a thirteen-year-old girl than by studying her salvaged high-tops: ask her. Lucy Corin does just this in her 2004 novel Everyday Psychokillers: a History for Girls. In this disjointed, disorienting novel-in-vignettes, we venture into that unknowable space within a thirteen-year-old girl like Cecilia Lisbon. Inside, it’s terrifying.
Pirates rape chained-up princesses. Egyptian gods tear off one another’s penises. Children’s heads turn up on roadsides.
Everyday Psychokillers takes on the form of its subject. Corin dismembers her story into loosely-connected chapters. She dissects her scenes, examining the fleshy innards of each character. Most importantly, she enters a young girl, opens her up and lets us see her contents the way she knows we want to, the way she knows psychokillers want to. Her narrator — an unnamed girl growing up in swampy suburban Florida — takes control of her own opening-up:
This is the age when you start noticing that you are a series of orifices. People are looking at your mouth. They’re looking at your ass. There’s a way that cutting yourself is a matter of beating them to the punch, of breaking your skin before it’s broken for you.
Corin is relentless in showing us cut-up girls: Anne Boleyn, the Venus de Milo, Ted Bundy victims. Her narrator sees violence everywhere. One day, her uncle Ted shows her his amateur bug collection. He’s a pale and pathetic man with good intentions, the most present parent figure in her life. He shows her how he pins his insects, placing a live rhinoceros bug on a piece of corkboard and driving a pin through its back: “As I looked at the bug, I wondered about the bug, which meant, for me, that I imagined a pin through my back.”
Corin’s character recognizes herself in vulnerable creatures. She realizes that, as a girl, she occupies the most vulnerable position she possibly could. Girls wander through a world filled with those who could hurt them. Most don’t want to hurt them — and this is good, because this is the only comfort possible when you’re a girl or an insect.
Corin’s character recognizes herself in vulnerable creatures. She realizes that, as a girl, she occupies the most vulnerable position she possibly could.
While the “stranger danger” warnings of our parents and teachers are rarely gendered, girls eventually realize that they can’t move through the streets the way the neighborhood boys do. Adults hint that things are different for them: they want their daughters to be virginal and demure, and they don’t tell them that this is so that fewer people will want to hurt them. But girls are observant.
Cecilia Lisbon sees it in the fish flies that descend on her Detroit suburb every summer, breeding briefly before dying all at once, leaving millions of carcasses to be swept away like fallen leaves from the streets and yards. Fish fly season coincides first with Cecilia’s suicide and then, a year later, with those of her sisters. The story is bookended by these periods of spectacular death.
Cecilia, staring at the dead flies with her “spiritualist’s gaze,” sees herself in them: “They’re dead,” she said. “They only live twenty-four hours. They hatch, they reproduce, and then they croak. They don’t even get to eat.” And with that she stuck her hand into the foamy layer of bugs and cleared her initials: C.L.
To the neighborhood boys, it’s just one more example of Cecilia’s inscrutable oddness. For them, danger stays far away in Detroit, “the impoverished city we never visited.” As long as the boys stay in their suburb, the violence and poverty of Detroit’s slums can’t touch them: “Occasionally we heard gunshots coming from the ghetto, but our fathers insisted it was only cars backfiring.”
Violence against women — as Corin’s psychokillers and battered daughters attest — doesn’t end at the city limits.
But if boys and their fathers can ignore violence, their female neighbors cannot. Violence against women — as Corin’s psychokillers and battered daughters attest — doesn’t end at the city limits. Violence is everywhere for girls — in the cities, in the suburbs, in themselves.
Fish flies — better known as mayflies in many parts of the country — are the only members of the order Ephemeroptera, or ephemeral wings. Grotesque but fairy-like, they recall Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s yellow butterflies, lending The Virgin Suicides a quality of fabulism. The Lisbon girls, too, seem lifted from a fairytale. They are beautiful and mysterious and tragic. The boys refer to them as “our naiads.”
Corin’s readers, meanwhile, stumble from myth to myth, through a swamp of exaggerations and spectacles — but the effect couldn’t be more different. The overwhelming feeling of Everyday Psychokillers is not wonder but fear. Not magic but menace.
When you are a boy, girlhood seems romantic. Eugenides’s narrators are awed by the glimpses of tampons and compact mirrors they catch inside the Lisbon house; the bric-a-brac become objects of enchantment. But being the girl, Corin suggests, is a battle.
Eugenides’s narrators are awed by the glimpses of tampons and compact mirrors they catch inside the Lisbon house; the bric-a-brac become objects of enchantment. But being the girl, Corin suggests, is a battle.
Corin’s tone may be bleaker than Eugenides’s, but she also seems to have more hope. Ultimately, her novel is driven by its heroine’s survival. In a world where psychokillers want to cut girls up, girls cut themselves to learn how to live through it:
So you can feel what it feels like, so you can watch it try to heal, so you can watch yourself live through. Your body seals itself up and the marks leave a record, writing on a wall, a kind of hieroglyph, your skin like paper.
Facing physical and psychic dismemberment at every turn — by psychokillers, by advertisers, by newspapers, by novelists, by readers — girls need to know they’ll survive. Seeing women as tragic waifs, as beautiful ephemera, is a privilege reserved for boys. That’s why Everyday Psychokillers is a book written for girls — and The Virgin Suicides is one written for their spectators.
★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing Patreon.
As robots continue to replace the workforce, the workforce is forced to work out a way to make money. Luckily for some, many new types of jobs have appeared in recent years, from taxi drivers who uses their own cars to computer screen prostitutes.
One of the most intriguing new models of employment is one where instead of a boss in a suit who watches his watch while you eat your lunch, your boss is a bunch of strangers on the internet who just give you their own money out of their pockets and the goodness of their hearts.
With the help of a librarian and two people who looked like teenagers I was recently able to get my own Patreon website page. Patreon is a website where you ask strangers for money in exchange for a job they never hired you for in the first place. You decide what your job is and strangers decide if they want to pay you for it.
Via Patreon I’m inviting you to become my boss for as little as $1 or as much as whatever it takes to put you into crippling debt. My salary goal is a collective one million dollars because I want a million dollars. At the time of this writing, I’m 0% of my way toward that goal.
Anyone who becomes my boss and pays me more than $5 a month will receive a personal review of themselves. DISCLAIMER: I can’t guarantee you will be reviewed favorably, but I will review you.
At it’s heart, Patreon allows people to put a literal price on how much they value a person’s life’s work. If Patreon had existed when Van Gogh was alive, he would have had zero patrons. And then he would have Photoshopped his ear off.
What am I worth to you? Nothing? Or something?
BEST FEATURE: The potential for all my financial dreams to come true.
WORST FEATURE: Internet access is required to pay me. There is no cash option. If you would like to pay me in cash, please call me at (617) 379–2576 and I will give you my address. I don’t want to put my address on the internet because I don’t want white supremacists to know it.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Wade Boggs.
In a little over a week, writers, editors, students, teachers and publishers from around the nation will gather in Washington, D.C. for the 2017 AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) Conference and Bookfair. The event regularly attracts crowds of over 12,000, and at this year’s gathering, participants plan to capitalize on the convention’s fortuitous location by organizing protests and rallies against the Trump train wreck.
Earlier this week, Flavorwire reported that the Facebook group, Writers Resist Trump (with almost 900 members) is planning a “field trip to Capitol Hill” on Friday, February 10th, so that writers and other members of the literary world can drop in on their legislators to demand action against the Administration and its racist policies. Any and all are welcome to join.
On the evening of Saturday, February 11th, a “Candlelight Vigil for Free Speech” will be held at Lafayette Park, across from the White House. Numerous publications are co-sponsoring the event, including Community of Literary Magazines & Presses, Lambda Literary, The Rumpus and Tin House. Kazim Ali, Gabrielle Bellot, Melissa Febos and many others are scheduled to speak. RSVPs for the event currently stand at over 500.
If you’re not going to AWP this year, there are plenty of other ways to get involved in literary demonstrations. Write Our Democracy is a budding initiative that was born after poet and VIDA co-founder, Erin Belieu, encouraged writers to organize community events on MLK Day. In less than a month, her original call to action has inspired more than seventy-five global events. The group’s website does an excellent job of keeping tabs on upcoming gatherings worldwide. Check out their ever-growing list, and discover ways to get involved in your neck of the woods. Do you live in East Bumble, devoid of revolution? Organize your own resistance.
We’ll update you with more information on rallies and protests forming at AWP over the coming week.
Frank Herbert’s science fiction classic, Dune, is getting a new adaptation. This time from Denis Villeneuve (who most recently directed the Ted Chiang adaptation Arrival).
Publishers Weekly profiles author (and The Mountain Goats frontman) John Darnielle: “Bending over his writing desk, Darnielle opens a drawer, pulls out a black drawstring bag, and from it pours dozens of multi-colored gaming dice onto the desktop. Picking up a particularly pointy die and rolling it around in his fingers, he explains its idiosyncrasies.”
George R. R. Martin is publishing a new A Song of Ice and Fire work! But it still isn’t book six *shakes fist*.
How Yukio Mishima’s work made a writer move to Japan: “Mishima himself was a controversial, even repellent, figure: obsessed with bodily perfection, militarism, and imperialism. He committed ritual suicide after staging a failed coup. Yet this ugly tale is told in some of the most exquisite prose I had ever read, beautifully rendered by translator Alfred Marks.”
Britain’s celebrated woman’s prize for fiction has lost Bailey’s as a sponsor.
Valeria Luiselli once tried to write a novel from an, uh, unusual perspective: “It was a really bad novel at the beginning. My idea was that it should be narrated by this plant. It was like, well, how would this plant know, see what happens in my apartment now and what happened in his apartment back then. Imagine the boredom of this plant, seeing the world from only one corner. It was a very bad idea, but it led them to other explorations that were much more worthwhile, and that eventually became a novel.”
9 great books that continue on after the adventure is done.
Got some new work? Okey-Panky is open for submissions! There is no submission fee, and we pay.
Lewinter is one of those writers who you’ve never heard of before, but who, once you read him, you can’t understand why he isn’t better known. He is well known in France (like Jerry Lewis, who he doesn’t resemble at all), but virtually unknown in the United States. The two translations of his excellent slim books that New Directions has just published are the first pieces of his work to be translated into English.
I only heard of him because I was translating a book from French, Jean Frémon’s Proustiennes. There, Frémon puts Lewinter in the company of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Robert Musil, Michel Leiris, and Edmond Jabès, all writers I admire greatly, most of them (not Musil) known for their precision and restraint. But even among such company it is Lewinter who gets signaled out for giving us “a book stretched to the limit.” Frémon reserves his highest praise for Lewinter’s audacious who — in the order — to the evening redness — words, which consists of “five dense pages without an opening capital letter or closing period, followed by a gap that inserts the same five pages in a slightly different version. The fanatical care with which each displacement, each inversion is brought about in the most perfect control of its effects.” For writers working at this level of care, the shifting of a word, a comma, can have a tremendous impact, even a secret drama.
Some writers make fiction out of the exceptional moments of a life: the turning points, the moments where relationships fall apart or come together, the moments where politics shift such that you suddenly feel threatened, and so on. Certainly that’s the more usual way to put literature together, and it’s based on a model of history that favors the dramatic: what matters are important men making big decisions. At the same time, there’s an undercurrent in fiction that does just the opposite of that, that deals with the mundane, with the domestic, and which looks for small moments of vision or clarity that individuals stumble upon, and which are better understood in terms of specific lives rather than generalized to larger groups. In America, the best writers in this mode are predominantly female: Lydia Davis, for instance, who can employ the slightest scrap of fabric from an ordinary life to make something luminous, or Lucia Berlin who makes a great deal out of lives that many of us ignore, or Rivka Galchen, whose Little Labors passes lightly over a number of disparate things in a way that renders a new mother’s situation with startling resonance and power. These are all books that rely on their syntax and the care of their word choice to carry them forward, using language to alchemize the ordinary into something extraordinary. Lewinter is one of the few male writers I know who manages to do this well.
Jean Frémon speaks of Lewinter’s The Attraction of Things as being more a sort of music than a novel: “a melody that was sinuous, secret, haunting and, finally, dazzling.” The Attraction of Things is a book composed of the simplest things, the bits and pieces of the life of a man who seems in perhaps every respect to be Lewinter himself. It is a book that confounds the distinction between fiction and autobiography. Its narrator is a man who, like Lewinter, has translated Georg Groddeck and Rilke, who spends a fair amount of his time searching for old Opera recordings in the flea market, who is obsessed with finding a particular Kashmir sweater, and who has to sort through the complexities of his father’s illness. Over the course of seven chapters, in less than eighty pages, and with long, sinuous sentences, The Attraction of Things lays out the details of a life in all its blunt honesty: phone calls, visits to friends, little moments of personal joy and desolation. It is a profoundly personal book, intimate in the same way as Bastien Vivès’s almost wordless graphic novel A Taste of Chlorine is: you go away from the experience feeling that you’ve really entered another person’s skin.
In Story of Love in Solitude, instead of a fragmented view of the small moments of a life, we have three stories less than forty pages long in all, each of which walk that same line between fiction and autobiography. These are not plotted stories but reflections, simple moments described with clarity, accuracy, and perception and which can suddenly open into places of great — and always surprising — intensity. The title story, just two and a half pages long, is the story of a spider that keeps coming into the house and that the narrator keeps putting out. Just that, nothing else, but it somehow still gets at the heart of how we think of the places we live and the creatures that come into them. “Passion” is about a camellia plant and how the narrator interacts with this plant in his living place as it suddenly begins to wane. “No Name” is about a man the narrator keeps seeing at the street market and his interest in him: the way in which individuals can call to us without they themselves necessarily knowing and without us being sure exactly why.
In short, these are moving and sonorous stories despite their intense simplicity. These stories, taken with the longer narrative that is The Attraction of Things, suggest that Lewinter is a writer to be reckoned with, and that our literature would be better if more writers were willing to take the kinds of chances he takes.
Eimear McBride is not interested in linear sentences. She is not interested in “endless heaps of description,” or “being told what something is like, instead of what it is.” She gives me an example, an elaborate, figurative description of a girl going down the stairs, and then cuts herself off: “I think, ‘Oh god, just go down the stairs!’”
Don’t waste time, she seems to be saying, because life doesn’t waste time — it rushes forward, all the way to the end.
Like the narrator of her newest novel, McBride trained as an actor in London in the 1990s, and I find myself awed by her ease with words as she sits across from me in an empty office above the NYU Creative Writers House, drinking tea someone brings her in a Styrofoam cup. (“Oh lovely, thank you very much,” she says, as he ducks out of the room.) She is warm and expressive and straightforward. She answers every question, and says exactly what she means.
“I like reading women who write cruelly,” she tells me. “It’s not something that we’re supposed to do — and of course it’s a huge part of us, as big a part as it is of men.” There are typical female subjects — motherhood for one — which are interesting to McBride in their own way, but she’s also interested in women who are unafraid to write outside of those conventionally female concerns — “women who just don’t.”
When I first read McBride’s astounding debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, in 2013, I went around for a while shoving the first page in people’s faces: “Isn’t this amazing! No one else writes like this!” Also, I was terrified. I was sucked completely into the world of the girl, whom we follow from the womb and into life — but who never gets a name, and never gets to “become.” Instead she spirals backwards through abuse, deaths, guilt, and her brother’s sickness; she keeps hurting herself, or letting herself be hurt, even as she keeps reaching for some kind of rebirth, some kind of life. I read Girl through the day and the night without stopping, without moving, feeling awful. I went for a swim and panicked, for a moment, that I might get dragged under. I knew, while reading Girl, that death was much nearer than I’d ever noticed.
All this to say that McBride is not afraid to write cruelly. She is unafraid, period. Her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, now out from Hogarth in the US, is similarly riddled with pain and guilt and sexual violence. In the turns and eddies along the characters’ paths, McBride here proves herself unafraid to write in the other direction, too — towards joy, growth, tenderness.
“Is it Virginia Woolf who talked about the angel on the shoulder? I don’t have that.” No one is going to step between McBride and her pen, warning, as Woolf’s angel did, “My dear, you are a young woman…. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own.”
Woolf wrote, in “Professions for Women,” that this angel of propriety “bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her.” But she also wrote, in the same essay, that she had never been able to speak truthfully “about the passions,” “about my own experiences as a body.” She doubted that any woman writer in her time had managed it yet.
Thankfully, this modesty has never gotten in the way of McBride’s writing. I ask where she finds the courage to write explicitly about the life of the body, which even today still feels transgressive. “It’s not really bravery. It’s more of…” she laughs, “stubbornness, I suppose; an unwillingness to be told that I can’t, or that I shouldn’t.” What would happen, she asks me, if women decided not to be ashamed? “We are told everything about us is shameful, in every aspect of our lives…. What if we just said, ‘I won’t be shamed. I am not shamed.’”
“We would rule the world,” I say, and we laugh. (This was before the US election, when we could laugh about these things and still believe — or at least I believed — that this future was at our doorstep.)
“I find that I’m very interested in shame,” McBride goes on. “Even creating an experience in which I feel shame, as in writing a novel which is full of explicit sexual description, sort of gives me a thrill I suppose!” There is shame throughout McBride’s two novels — characters humiliating one another and hurting one another in extremely intimate, complicated ways. In their broadest terms, so many of these scenes are “two people being vulnerable in a room together,” which “isn’t always a nice experience.”
“Sexuality is such a huge driver in human interactions,” McBride tells me, “and it’s so badly served by literature. There’s an argument that women [today] write about the body because that’s the only way to make room for themselves in the canon — because men don’t write about it — and I don’t necessarily think there’s anything wrong with that.”
In a society where women are brought up to live far outside our own bodies, writing is, for McBride, a way to reconnect with the physical world. “I’m trying to write truthfully about experiences which are not easy to speak about, but which are fundamental to who we are, to the choices that we make in our lives for ourselves.”
McBride’s sentences are what get her deep into the life of the body — their quickness, their rhythms. They turn language on its head; they let words do things we didn’t know they could do: spin and tumble out the way sensations move through our bodies and thoughts move through our minds.
“I am able to sit on this chair,” she explains, “keep my balance, think about your question, think about my response, think that my ear is a little sore from the flying, think that I miss my daughter back in Norwich…the brain can do all of that at once. So I wanted my sentences to do that.”
When she first began Girl, McBride knew that she wanted to write from a different perspective than we often get in literature, from something “deeper, much further back in the psyche, and in the body,” so that reading becomes “a physical experience rather than an intellectual experience.” In reaching for that kind of “immediacy and intimacy,” the linear sentence becomes redundant — it simply takes too long.
That closeness of perspective continues through the narration of Eily, the narrator of The Lesser Bohemians:
“River run running to a northern sea. Thames. Needle skin brisk and eyefuls of concrete. Lead by the. Strip for the. National Theatre. Go on. Get a ticket. Go in.”
She is thinking of the beginning of Finnegans Wake with “river run,” and in fact the voice of this book does sound a bit like that one, in its rhymes and echoes, knocking about on the page. Unlike Joyce’s famously difficult final work, The Lesser Bohemians is perfectly intelligible on the first reading, once you get into it — and more so the further you get in; everything “begins to connect up,” McBride says. “As the book goes on, as [Eily] begins to make the connections within herself, the language begins to connect as well.”
The Lesser Bohemians is a book about “becoming.” Arriving in London from a traumatic and intensely religious childhood in a small town in Ireland — “Ireland is what it is,” Eily reflects, “Sealed in itself, like me.” — she now wants “to feel connected to life.” The river in “river run running” is “all the rivers of the world,” for Eily as it is for Joyce; being in London is being a part of the world.
“Go on. Get a ticket. Go in,” Eily tells herself, and in she goes: into the high tide of people, into the streets, the art, the messy drunken nights, the violence, the mess of sensations and emotions. “This is the finest city,” she thinks, after losing her virginity in a painful and humiliating night with an older man, “and no matter how awkward or bloodily, I am in it now too.”
Eily is “voracious;” she wants to feel everything — the good experiences and the bad ones. “There is a hunger in her for life”; it’s something McBride likes about her. Eily is unpredictable, illogical, often unkind to herself, but young and pure-hearted and lusty. This is, perhaps, what kept McBride going through the nine years it took to write the book.
She had written Girl at twenty-seven — three drafts in six months, followed by nearly a decade trying to get it published. After the first few years trying, she put the book in a drawer, and then had to decide if she was still a writer, even if she was a “failed” writer, an unpublished writer. The pragmatic part of her thought she should be “useful,” retrain as a teacher, even though she didn’t want to be a teacher — “but you know, life is slipping away and you’re just the person with this book in a drawer.”
“And then I just thought, ‘I can’t do anything better! Even if I can’t get this book published, I know that there’s nothing I can do better in the world, so I’m kind of stuck with this’.” She started writing again, and once she made it to the second draft of The Lesser Bohemians, once she fell in love with the book and started to feel that “rush,” publishing or not publishing didn’t seem to matter so much.
‘I can’t do anything better! Even if I can’t get this book published, I know that there’s nothing I can do better in the world, so I’m kind of stuck with this.’
Then Girl was published “out of the blue” in 2012 by Galley Beggar, a tiny, new press in the UK, followed by Coffee House Press out of Minnesota in the US, to enormous acclaim and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2014 — following which, of course, there were the nights when McBride would wake up in a cold sweat, worrying “what if I can’t write another book as good as Girl!” But by then she’d been working on The Lesser Bohemians for six years. She was “swept up” with the book; she felt “this tremendous weight of responsibility towards the characters, like this was the only life they were ever going to have, so I had to get it right!”
It is November 2016 when McBride and I sit to talk in a florescent-lit office above the space where she’ll give a reading, at the beginning of her packed US tour for the release of The Lesser Bohemians. “It’s such an honor to meet you,” I squeak out as we sit down, my voice several decibels higher than normal, and McBride laughs and responds on her jolly Irish accent, “Well, that’s very nice. It’s only me, though!”
I am struck again by her generosity — towards me, nervous and shivering in the chair across from her; and towards her characters, for whom she wrote and wrote and rewrote to “get it right,” to let them feel — as Eily so desperately wants to feel — alive. She is generous, too, towards her readers. She wants to give them the space to “take their own position,” to step inside her fragmentary sentences and, as Jeanette Winterson suggests in the New York Times Book Review, “fill in the gaps.” The “openness” of McBride’s writing is a departure, that review notes, from the controlling hand of the “old-fashioned despot writer,” the “take-it-or-leave-it arrogance” that we find in writers like Joyce.
Does that openness, that generosity, have something to do with writing as a woman? Certainly many male writers in our canon are the supreme rulers in the worlds of their novels. “I don’t know,” McBride responds, when I ask if we can attribute this difference to gender. “I know that as much as I love Joyce, it is a barrage…. Joyce is always present, and for me the point of writing is to make myself as a writer completely absent — so that everything that happens happens between the character and the reader. The reader should feel that it’s unmediated, that I’m not there with my moral views and my political opinions telling them what they should be thinking about all these things.”
‘Joyce is always present, and for me the point of writing is to make myself as a writer completely absent.’
This refusal to control the reader’s experience is certainly not a refusal to color it. McBride deeply admires Dostoyevsky’s ability “to create a whole atmosphere that you can’t escape from, that you almost suffocate within.” Her sentences could not be more unlike Dostoyevsky’s, but she creates this sort of all-encompassing atmosphere in her work too: “you just move through that whole world and it all feels like it’s the same color, and everything belongs there” — even the characters’ voices are part of the same fabric.
But the fabric is moving; it’s permeable. There is a lot of “room” in her writing — room for the reader to “go in” like Eily, to be a part of that world, to make of it what they will.
McBride reminds me of a sentence toward the end of The Lesser Bohemians: “When I first came here I wanted the world to look at me and now I might prefer to be the eye instead.” It’s part of growing up, she says, being able to connect with something outside of yourself; being a part of the world. This is where the unnamed narrator of Girl falls short. She wants to live, to feel, just as voraciously as Eily, but — to put it simply, which is of course a disservice to the nuance and extremity of the girl’s experience — family and disease and violence and trauma push her back, keep her “half-formed.” She is trapped in; she collapses inwards.
We all love a tragic heroine. We love to cry over Anna Karenina, Ophelia, Madame Bovary, and now Girl, squashed down by the weight of the world. But Eily — coming from similar circumstances as the girl from Girl, and connected to her in many ways (she once even dreams of the girl drowning) — Eily gets a ticket; she gets to London; she gets a start on that tangled path of “becoming.”
We talk about the book’s ending, which I won’t give away because, of course, you have to read it yourself. But in abstract terms I will say that like the best endings, it is also a beginning, and that like McBride, it is unpredictable. “You know that it shouldn’t work out that way,” she says, “it should resolve in a more comfortable, ‘normal’ way…but of course that’s not how life is. People do messy things all of the time, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t work. It just felt more human and more risky — to let people want to be happy.”
Here McBride’s bravery, or stubbornness, or whatever you’d like to call it, takes a new form: the audacity to let a young, naïve girl — from a traumatic past, in a traumatic present — live.
Thank You!
