Jewish Authors Wrestle with the Violent Side of Book of Esther

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

While Trump’s second term has been an overwhelming barrage of shocking events echoed in a staccato tone of news stories, this past Saturday became a flashpoint when Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil was snatched by federal agents under vague accusations of supporting terrorism, a claim that stems from Khalil joining millions of students and community members in demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine. Every effort has been used to undercut the movement to end Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, but underpinning each tactic, from expelling students to sending in police to violently clear protest encampments, is the same central assertion: that these demonstrations are harmful to Jews and directly supporting Hamas. 

Weaponized accusations of antisemitism have been leveled to suppress support for Palestine for years, but since October 7th, it has become a unified rallying cry for those who believe any criticism of Israel is beyond the bounds of humane discourse. The far-right has long seen this as a perfect political opportunity: they can claim to care for Jews, who usually vote left, and simultaneously use accusations of antisemitism to attack their enemies, the organized protest movement of the left. This was codified most specifically in Project Esther, the portion of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 vision for what they could accomplish in a second Trump administration.

Their program is named after the Biblical Esther who, under threat of Jewish annihilation, turned the tables on her oppressor. These Republicans, most of whom are Christian Zionists rather than Jews, would show their pro-Jewish bona fides by lobbying for harsh sanctions on speech they deemed “anti-Israel,” most specifically deporting student protesters (Trump said on Truth Social that Khalil is the “first arrest of many to come”). This seemed like a far-right fantasy, but Trump promised to turn campuses into culture war zones, and the government has now made their advance with the capture of Khalil. The White House even tweeted “Shalom” to Khalil after the arrest, gloating about the suffering they have sparked and giving the action a particularly Jewish appearance. While it is certainly depraved that a primarily Christian far-right think tank would appropriate a Jewish figure for their political agenda, it’s not altogether different than the way others have, including the Israeli far-right.

This time last year, as war commenced and tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians had been killed, many on the Israeli Right laid special attention on Purim, the celebratory Jewish holiday built on reading the Book of Esther—the same one that the GOP tries to embody in its alleged fight against the enemies of the Jewish people. 

The Book of Esther tells a bombastic farce where Persian King Ahasuerus orders his luscious queen Vashti to strut in front of his dignitaries during an extravagant party, and when she denies his demands, he fears her Jezebelian behavior will inspire women to disobey their husbands. He picks Esther to replace her and likewise chooses Haman to rule Shushan, yet after Haman is offended by Esther’s relative Mordechai, Haman decides to dispose of the Jewish people entirely.

Mordhechai and Esther launch a scheme to flip that decree on its head. Mordechai reminds Ahaseurus how loyal he is, Esther reveals Haman’s plan, and Haman’s attempts to rectify the situation goes sideways. Eventually, the decree is shifted: it is not the Jews who will be killed, but instead it is us who are able to kill, first Haman and his sons and then tens of thousands of Persians. From that moment forward, just as we fast on Yom Kippur, we celebrate with drink and merriment on Purim, the time Jewish life was spared and our enemies received just desserts.

This story was, for most of Jewish history, a boisterous comedy where evildoers are punished and the Jewish people are saved. When we celebrate Purim, which falls this year on March 13-14, we remember the events by cheering as we read from the Megillah (scroll) and wearing garish costumes to honor the absurdity of the entire affair. 

Reading the text this year, after nearly a year and a half of Palestinian genocide and with Project Esther underway, simply feels different. 

For most American Jews, the final cruelties in the Book of Esther, relegated to Chapter Nine, are not the focus. Instead, Purim is a time for kids to dress up, where we celebrate our perseverance, to take pleasure in one of the more amusing stories from the Bible (it can be laugh out loud funny), and to pat ourselves on the back: we are still here, no matter how many times they’ve tried to butcher us. But for the Israeli far-right, Megillah Esther is not just a tale about our survival, but the persecution that survival demands. Reading the text this year, after nearly a year and a half of Palestinian genocide and with Project Esther underway, simply feels different. 

Because pro-Israel politics are so often conflated with the work of organized Jewish life, there can be complicated feelings about Jewish tradition at a time of unimaginable suffering the land Torah called Eretz Yisrael. In journalist Peter Beinart’s 2025 book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, he asks questions that aim to get at the heart of this. The book is a logical progression of the same questions he has been asking for fifteen years, which have evolved alongside the changes in Israeli politics.

“[I’ve] always been troubled by the way people talk about the Book of Esther…there’s a connection there between not really reckoning with the ninth chapter of the book of Esther and not reckoning with what has happened in Gaza,” Beinart told me on the first day of Adar, the Hebrew month of which Purim is the prize jewel. We don’t just excuse the violence of the Purim story, Beinart points out, we abandon it almost entirely. In two of the most popular survey books on Jewish tradition, those given to students and converts, the genocide of the story’s conclusion is omitted completely, and commentaries on the Book of Esther tend to focus on almost anything other than the violence enacted by Jews: the feminist heroism of Esther, the fickleness of state power, God’s invisible ability to work through human hands, the strategies and tactics we need to establish safety. All of these are valuable lessons from the story, but without the ending, something is missing. 

“For most of our history, when Jews had little capacity to impose our will via the sword, the conclusion of the book of Esther was harmless and even understandable fantasy,” writes Beinart. “Who can blame a tormented people for dreaming up a world turned upside down. But the ending reads differently when Jews wield life and death power over millions of Palestinians who lack even a passport, let alone an army. Today, these blood-soaked verses should unsettle us.”

The way the Book of Esther is often discussed plays into why so many are unwilling to use the term genocide for the IDF’s campaign or to mention the Holocaust alongside other genocides: to be Jewish is to be a victim, never a perpetrator. Many of our stories were written not from just a point of vulnerability, but utter powerlessness, and when we read them in perpetuity without acknowledging the world has changed or that there is a powerful army claiming to speak for Jews, we assume that Chapter Nine can only exist in our imagination, never in the rubble of Gaza City. The world has already been turned upside down, we just haven’t acknowledged it. 

The world has already been turned upside down, we just haven’t acknowledged it. 

“I have mixed feelings about every Jewish text, as we all should,” says Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, whose work often places Torah in its historical context and wrestles with its complexity. “What transcends time about the story is that we don’t have cut and dry good guys and bad guys.” She points out that the destruction of Gaza is not the first reminder of the darkness that lies in Esther. In 1994, far-right Settler Baruch Goldstein entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, a site held sacred by both Jews and Muslims, and opened fire on Muslim worshippers with his IDF-issued rifle, massacring 29 before being engulfed and killed by the survivors. Goldstein is still revered by some on the Israeli far-right as a hero who engaged in Kiddush ha-Shem (sanctification of the name), acting as a kind of modern Mordechai against people he believed to be enemies of the Jews. As Beinart points out, there is a certain honesty in the appeal the Zionist right makes to Esther, that brutality is in the text; it is the rest of us who often refuse to grapple with its implications. Today, we hear Israeli politicians calling Palestinians ‘Amalek,’ the Biblical race G-d commanded the Israelites to snuff out from under heaven, the same one that Haman is said to represent. “Purim isn’t only about the danger gentiles pose to us. It’s also about the danger we pose to them,” he writes. 

Reading Esther in 2025 should compel us, by force of history, to read the entire story, and to wrestle (the name Israel means “wrestle,” as in the one who wrestles with G-d) with what it means. In their 2024 book on Jewish tradition, For Times Such as These, Rosenberg and Rabbi Ariana Katz write, “Alongside and deeply woven into the story of resistance and rebellion, it is essential to confront and be accountable for acts of violence by Jews that this story spawned and encouraged. Not only do Jews take up armed resistance, they enact revenge killings; the legacy of the violence in this ripples through our text tradition and history.” 

“I experience our lineage as profoundly radical and liberatory and magical,” Elana June Margolis told me as she prepared for the Purim Spiel she is writing to be performed on stage before a packed New York audience. This is her fourteenth year writing a Purim play, which takes a wildly vaudevillian, burlesque, and unapologetically queer retelling of Esther—one of the most inventive ways of making Jewish tradition relevant. This year she is doing it for the long-standing progressive Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), whose Purim Spiel was earth shattering for her years ago, at time when she was wrestling with the hold Zionism had on Jewish life and the ways in which her queerness didn’t seem to fit in many synagogues.

This year’s spiel is named Project Vashti, with Esther crossed out, a nod to the way Project Esther is mobilizing the name of our matriarch to level attacks on activists and Palestinians. 

“There’s so much liberatory potential [in the Purim story], and there’s a lot of really nasty, nasty images in there that deserve to be wrestled with,” Margolis says. Part of why we tell the story, she points out, is that this is the story we tell: it has been with us for millennia. It is part of how Jews have historically processed our experiences, our fears and dreams, and our obligation to ourselves and others. “I don’t know that I could say I know what the Purim story is about…I’m so deep in the story, what isn’t it about?” she says.

Purim Spiels are a long-standing theatrical tradition that picks up on the absurd comedy of Esther, and then pushes its ideas further by escaping into costumes, giving way to debauchery, and lowering the cost of entry: it’s a Jewish event, but anyone is welcome. Purim is known for drinking (and a few other great things as well), and Talmud teaches that we are “encouraged to get so drunk that they can no longer distinguish the hero of the tale…from the villain Haman.” In the end, we no longer have enemies, only friends. 

“On Purim, permission is given to reveal the hidden light at every moment,” writes hasidic rabbi R’ Kalyongmous Kalma Shapira. While the cheers and jeers may come from the violence of the book, the festival has expanded beyond its alleged root. We party because it’s good to party.

And yet, the brutality remains. This is why in 2024, when the genocide in Gaza was only six months old, Margolis’ Purim Spiel directly reckoned with the crimes of Chapter Nine, incorporating references to the present moment. In the Spiel, anti-Zionists from Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) wearing “Ceasefire Now” shirts declare we can’t abide the holiday with what’s happening in Gaza. “We have a responsibility to get present with the truth and turn the tables, both on the narrative in the Megillah and the way it is playing out in real time now, in Palestine,” they shout. 

None of us are saved until all of us are. 

But Margolis’s Purim Spiel doesn’t end with Purim’s erasure. It continues by doing what Jewish tradition does best: it reinvents itself. “The tools to transform our tradition are encoded within the tradition, an inheritance designed to heal itself [and] align us with liberation,” says one character later in the Spiel before calling the Megillah, the scroll that contains our story, to be brought before the crowd. Jews exist calendrically, but since Judaism is the process of interpretation and even imprinting, the stories that mark that calendar never remain the same. In the end, “we tell the stories we tell, until the stories start telling us,” says Margolis. This is why the question of what the Book of Esther is really “about” is so opaque, at once revolutionary and reactionary depending on the commentary.

“I’m glad that I didn’t grow up hearing [the violent ending] of the story because I’m glad I didn’t grow up thinking being Jewish means killing other people,” says Ami Weintraub, an author and rabbinical student whose 2024 book To the Ghosts Who Are Still Living grapples with the legacy of Jewish trauma. “I don’t think that’s a choice that is skirting the responsibility. It’s a choice of what we are going to revere in our community…and in this moment, it hits different…and there’s more wisdom for us now.” Rabbis have intentionally shifted our focus over time to emphasize the values they want to impart, to create traditions that highlight pieces of our inheritance that embellish our best selves This is why we celebrate Hanukkah with a hanukiah and the story about the oil that lasted longer than it should, rather than the story of militant fundamentalists executing their enemies and re-establishing the covenant of G-d’s law. But both stories are there, just as there are multiple threads found in Esther. 

“Acknowledging the suffering we have instilled in others makes us full humans,” says Weintraub. “Stepping into full humanity requires acknowledging the suffering you cause.” That acknowledgement has naturally made its way into our holidays already. As I hear the Megillah read, we will acknowledge the suffering, not just with cheers, but with sorrow. Some synagogues use despairing melodies, reminiscent of the bloody wine drops of anguish over the plagues used against Egypt in the Passover story. Others are leading difficult conversations, meeting with activists, taking the tactical lessons that Esther teaches: to stop state violence we need every strategy on the table. Some midrash says Purim is when the Jews finally accepted the Torah, but I think it’s also when we became people like any other, the multitudinous ability to hurt and be hurt.

Esther is written about Jewish vulnerability at a time when we didn’t have state power. And while much of the tradition of reading the megillah has been to place the oppression Jewish communities were facing in a spiritual context, we experience suffering and survival now as we did then; for the story to have meaningful continuity, we cannot be limited by how the story was once told. And if Esther is, ultimately, a story where all things are possible, we have to think about what the story means when the world where it is being read has already been turned upside down, one where we fight for our liberation, then turn it back as oppression on our enemies. 

“The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors,” wrote Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The desire to liberate and the desire to oppress are not always a different desire, or, as rabbi Menahum Nahum of Chernobyl said, the greatest salvation and healing comes from taking the “evil urge” and raising it to a holy purpose. More rage isn’t inherently pure, it has to be molded, channeled if it is ever to raise us beyond the confines of our current moral reality. Without this there is no hope for tikkun olam, the healing of the world. None of us are saved until all of us are. 

Without explicit discourse about the implications of moments such as Chapter Nine’s ending, we rob the text of its capacity to teach, to unpack the human experience, to illustrate the full dimension of what we are capable of. As Oren Kroll-Zeldin, a Jewish Studies professor and author of the 2024 book Unsettled, says, “I think that it is our responsibility to tell that part of the story and to think about it in connection with the past and how we make sense of the past in the present…Teach the bad parts.” 

Esther tells a story about how we become free, and then what we do with that freedom. As with similar parables, sometimes our liberation is bound up with the liberation of others, or, as with the Exodus story or the Book of Joshua, our freedom is derivative of others’ suffering. “Esther illuminated Israel like the light of dawn, while this light itself was like darkness for the nations of the world,” says Midrash Tehillim. Purim’s lightness weighs heavily, the two emotions inevitably bound together, like the grief of losing an old world and the joy of perhaps inheriting, or inventing, a new one. 

The Jewish tradition teaches that the mission of the Jewish people, perhaps of all people, is to piece together the brokenness of the universe, embodied in things as large as the galaxies and as significant as a human life. This future, as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner wrote, begins “when we treat another human being as a human being,” allowing the “captive sparks” of holiness to be released and “the cosmos is healed.” Honesty about the stories we tell, the implications they have for life and history, is not just about treating those who have suffered as human, it’s about finally seeing ourselves as human as well.

“‘They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat’ isn’t the story of our holidays,” writes Beinart. “It’s a choice about what to see, and what not to see, in Judaism, and in ourselves.” 

If closing our eyes to the full story has ensured a profound sameness, where healing has been supplanted by rituals of warfare and revenge, then perhaps it’s time to ensure nahafokh hu. Something else is possible.

Nicole Graev Lipson Turns to Literature to Rewrite the Societal Roles Expected of Women

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Nicole Graev Lipson’s debut Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is a collection of twelve tightly crafted essays that blend personal narrative with reflections on history and literature. The book is, of course, an exploration of motherhood, but Lipson is also broadly concerned with the roles women often play—or are expected to play. In “The New Pretty,” for example, she riffs on the concept of beauty, which is not a “physical ideal” but rather “the promise of power, for which we cede the power we already have. “The Friendship Plot” examines the ways in which female friendships have been portrayed from antiquity to now. As with many of the essays in this collection, the author challenges the stories we’ve been told. Lipson is bored, for example, by the tired notion that “girls and women are wired for rivalry.”

Lipson calls her book a “bibliomemoir” and this comes through in the ways in which she connects her experience– and the experiences of her family–to literary texts. “As They Like It,” originally published in Virginia Quarterly Review and later included in the 2024 volume of Best American Essays, examines gender identity and generational change through the lens of Shakespeare’s Rosalind. The opening essay, “Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me,” explores sexual temptation through the lens of Chopin’s “The Storm” and the resulting scholarly debate: Was Chopin condoning or condemning the female protagonist’s affair? Is she a hero or a villain? Or neither, as Lipson suggests, since life is more complex than the reductive narratives that are often fed to us. Above all, Lipson continually returns to this central question: How, in the face of idealized versions of motherhood in which intellect is pitted against the maternal, can a woman “carve out a motherhood that’s not a projection of others’ fantasies, but an authentic expression of her values?” 

I spoke to Nicole Graev Lipson about resisting the “good mother” archetype and the connection between caregiving and creativity.

Victoria Livingstone: Let’s talk about the title of this collection. I interpret the reference to “fictional characters” as an invitation to challenge the reductive stories we have been told about the roles women play, whether as thinkers, friends, lovers, or mothers. Can you say more about the title?

Nicole Graev Lipson: I love how you call this an invitation, because that’s exactly how I wanted the reading experience to feel—like a door held open for readers to walk through to consider alongside me the narrow templates of womanhood our culture hands us. I wanted to challenge these reductive stories, yes, but even more, I wanted to explore how easy it is for us as women to become complicit in their telling, erasing our own complexity as we step into fictional versions of who we are. My way into this territory was to write as intimately and honestly as I possibly could about the ways I’ve embodied these templates against my better judgment–as a girl, a young adult, a mother of three, and a woman now standing in the shallows of middle age. 

My book’s epigraph contains a quotation from Simon Weil’s notebook: “Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.”  Each chapter of my memoir conjures a particular attempt to tease out truth from the fiction in my life, and to locate the strength to live this truth more fully. In one, my sudden, aching attraction to a younger man upends my sense of what it means to be a happily married woman. In another, I grapple with what it means, as a mother and creator of life, to destroy my frozen embryos left over from a round of IVF. In another I lay bare how I’ve fictionalized myself in the most literal way possible: by altering my very flesh to conform to beauty standards.  

As a reader, English teacher, and book critic, I knew that pursuing these questions would mean revisiting the treasured literature that has shaped my understanding of the world and my place in it—works by Doris Lessing, Gwendolyn Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and others. These forays into literature give the book’s title a secondary meaning as well—because it is so often in the realm of the imaginative and fictional, ironically, that I find truth. 

VL: The opening paragraph describes a photo of your mother before she was a mother. In the photo, she is young and glamorous. For me, the image ties into one of the themes of your book: the sort of splitting of selves that can accompany the experience of motherhood. Could you say more about that? 

NL: Finding that photo in my mother’s drawer when I was a girl had a profound impact on me, because the woman in it—sprawled on a loveseat in a velour catsuit, smoking a cigarette and squeezing my father’s cheeks—seemed so wildly different from the mother I knew, who was very composed and subdued and most certainly didn’t smoke. It illuminated for me a whole new way that my mother hadn’t always been A Mother, and that she contained layers and facets far beyond my imagining.

It illuminated for me a whole new way that my mother hadn’t always been A Mother.

During my teen years, the extent of the schism between my mother’s outward life and inner life came to a head in explosive ways. All this made me acutely attuned to how much pretending the role of mother can demand, and the potential harmful consequences of this pretending. My husband and I were married for six years before we had children. I kept delaying, not because I didn’t want kids—I very much did—but because of my looming sense that once I became a mother, I’d be subsumed into a sort of generic, stock “Mother” identity and have to forfeit all my particularity. I’d internalized that the realm of motherhood was a separate place entirely from the realm of intellect and ideas, and the prospect of leaving behind my “thinking” self, in particular, filled me with dread.  

After our first child was born, I did find myself lured, for a time, into enacting what I thought “good motherhood” looked like, frantically pureeing vegetables and trying to wear my daughter in one of those earth-mama slings I could never figure out how to wear right. I felt so powerless to resist the archetype that I threw myself into it instead. What ultimately freed me was coming to understand just how faulty—and misogynistic—the assumed divide between mothering and thinking is. Mothering is thinking, through and through. There’s perhaps no experience that has challenged me to observe, theorize, analyze, and revise my assumptions of what it means to be human as caring for children has. And I would say that my best parenting happens not when I’m pretending, but when I’m being my most genuine, idiosyncratic self. I think children can sniff out dishonesty, and they respond—like all of us—to the true.

VL: What role does literature play for you in reconciling the various parts of ourselves? 

NL: Literature for me has been a life-saving reminder that we all contain contradictions and are more complex than meets the eye. I think it’s so easy to go through our days imagining that other people are more whole—and in a way, more simple–than they are. We assume that the mother we always see on the playground smiling hugely as she pushes her child on the swing always feels joyously unconflicted about her role, and we can’t help but wonder what’s wrong with us. Literature frees us from this illusion, because it allows us to peer directly into the consciousness of others, where things are always layered and shadowed. It’s a sort of practice ground for embracing our own complexity.

VL: You offer no easy answers. In your essay on IVF, for instance, you are unable to reconcile your political ideology with your reluctance to destroy embryos stored in a lab. I see writing as a transformative process. What did writing these essays reveal to you? Did your views on any subject shift as a result of writing this book?

NL: The writer Philip Lopate said that “The essay offers the chance to wrestle with one’s own intellectual confusion,” and for me this feels very true, and so different from what’s commonly expected in public discourse, which is airtight argument and opinion. I love essay-writing because it allows for ambivalence and bewilderment. More than ever in our polarized climate, we are expected to pick a side and know precisely where we stand. Personally, I have a clear opinion on very few things that involve any level of complication.

I’d say that “As They Like It” is a good example of how an essay can be a place for reckoning with confusion. Observing the ways my oldest child began, in early adolescence, to migrate from girlhood to boyhood was deeply confusing. On the one hand, I love my child and wanted to support them no matter where this journey was headed. On the other hand, I had questions, and the changes were happening too fast for me to wrap my head around. I was hungry for the stories of other parents who struggled to get their footing as I did, but nearly all the first–person writing I found by the parents of trans and gender non-conforming kids was persuasive in nature, op-eds in the service of a politized stance. I wanted to see if I could come at this topic from a purely human stance, and to reckon honestly on the page with my own learned biases and blind spots. 

Every single essay in this book was born from the very human desire to resolve a dilemma. I wanted to figure out once and for all what to do about the ethical problem of my frozen embryos, what to do about the harmful ideas about manhood my son is absorbing, what to do about my fear of becoming irrelevant as my body ages. I’m not sure if any of my views changed as a result of writing this book. But what the writing did do was help me claim more fully those truths I know deep in my bones but have been taught to question. It emboldened me to honor my own authority, and to trust the wisdom I’ve gathered in my decades on earth. 

VL: This book is, as you put it, a bibliomemoir. You mention canonical authors such as Adrienne Rich and Kate Chopin as well as contemporary writers. What about the recent surge of books on motherhood? I’m thinking of books published in the last five years– which books have you found particularly influential or surprising?

Motherhood doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It intersects with every other facet of the human condition.

NL: These books are like candy to me, honestly. I think there’s a bit of an oversimplification in the publishing industry categorization of the “mother book”—an assumption that these books are all more or less alike and will appeal to a very specific sort of mother-reader. But motherhood doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It intersects with every other facet of the human condition. I love seeing the endlessly varied ways motherhood can lead writers to a fuller, revised understanding of their other experiences and preoccupations. In her memoir Lessons for Survival, raising two Black sons heightens Emily Raboteau’s awareness of the threat of climate changes, particularly for marginalized communities. Yael Goldstein-Love’s speculative novel The Possibilities is about postpartum motherhood, but it’s also a wild adventure into quantum mechanics and the multiverse. Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, too, isn’t about motherhood, per se, but about all the characters women shape-shift their way through as we move through life. Motherhood is sometimes the topic, but more often, it’s a lens through which I encounter the world.

I think there’s been a real awakening in the past few years to how the “failures” we feel as mothers are often, in truth, societal failings. The book that first opened my eyes to this, Adrienne Rich’s 1976 Of Woman Born, isn’t new. But there are more recent books I’ve loved that deepen Rich’s arguments and bring them into the 21st century. Sara Petersen’s Momfluenced, for instance, opened my eyes to the ways our digital world has intensified expectations around motherhood, and Amanda Montei’s Touched Out traced a line for me I hadn’t quite seen before between rape culture and the surrendering of bodily autonomy “good” motherhood demands. I’m so happy that these books are being written, and that these dialogues are happening.

VL:  I agree! There are so many recent books–including yours– challenging reductive narratives of motherhood. However, at the same time, terms like “mom brain” and “mom guilt” persist– and, as you point out, terms associated with the term “mom” or “mommy” are trivializing and often insulting. Many of us then internalize the biases associated with those terms. A lot of recent literature is pushing against that– what about other art forms? And how else can we call attention to the problems with that kind of terminology?

NL: I was an art history minor in college and have always responded powerfully to visual art, though I have no particular talent in this area! But I love going to museums and galleries and have discovered in recent years some artists who are challenging the cliched tropes of motherhood in beautiful ways. If there’s a bias in the literary world against motherhood-centric work, the sense I get from my artist friends is that this is even worse in the art world, where there’s still this lingering myth that to be a real artist, one must devote herself obsessively and single mindedly to her work. Motherhood, in this narrative, is a dealbreaker, not inspiration. 

My newsletter, “Thinkers Who Mother,” explores the symbiosis between caregiving and creativity, and in each issue, I highlight a particular writer or artist. I recently featured the sculptor Venetia Dale, who creates fiber sculptures out of other people’s unfinished embroidery projects and casts the stuff of her daily life—like leftover food from her children’s meals—in pewter. Her pieces don’t try to hide the disruptions of caregiving but instead make unfinishedness part of their shape and beauty. I also loved profiling the photographer Kristen Joy Emack, who has been photographing her daughter and nieces together for over a decade in a series called, “Cousins,” which beautifully makes visible how caregiving can hone our attention.    

For the love of god, let’s not call these women “mom artists”! They are artists, and one of the experiences that informs their art is motherhood. 

VL: Your mother is an important character in this collection. You write about how much emphasis our culture places on our relationship with our mothers in shaping who we become. You write that “We come to understand that our mother signifies, and that our relationship with her is a story crucial to pursue.” Could you say more about this?

NL: I think there’s a fine and precarious line between a deep regard for the role mothers play in nourishing life, and the scapegoating of mothers when things go wrong. This goes all the way back to Eve, right? The original sinning mother, whose mistake we are all still paying for. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes that “We look back through our mothers if we are women,” acknowledging the ways our mothers shape and influence us. But in the warping context of patriarchy, the primacy of mothers is often used against us. We become a convenient target of blame for things that aren’t truly in our control. Sometimes, this blame might of course be warranted—there are some truly horrific mothers out there—but I do think we’re trained by our culture to be acutely attuned to our mothers’ every misstep, and to interpret these as injuries to us. 

I absolutely went through a period in younger adulthood of falling into this trap. I conjure a memory, in the book, of sitting in a therapist’s office in my early twenties, searching for something concrete that would explain the sudden, overwhelming depression I was experiencing, and feeling relief when this therapist coaxed me into talking about my mother. The problem wasn’t me, it was her! 

Becoming a mother disabused me of this illusion. Nothing has ignited my compassion for my mother like discovering just how much raising children demands. I also now understand the  psychic burden of internalizing, as so many of us do, that whatever goes wrong in our children’s life must originate in some fault in us. This is a terrible cross to have to bear. If there was one gift I could give to all the mothers I know, it would be freedom from this excruciating belief.

Kimchi Has Always Been a Part of My English

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

“Winter Kimchi” by Elizabeth Lee

kim·chi
/ˈkimˌCHē/
noun
      a Korean dish of spicy pickled cabbage.

In a Korean household, you will commonly find two refrigerators. One is your run-of-the-mill refrigerator stocked with everyday groceries and condiments—milk, eggs, fresh produce, ketchup, your favorite brand of hot sauce, maple syrup, leftover couscous. The second one, though it now comes in a generic upright form, was originally conceived as a top-loading cabinet, not dissimilar in appearance to a top-loading washing machine. This refrigerator contains special compartments for holding kimchi while maintaining a frigid 32 degrees Fahrenheit, low air circulation, and high humidity levels to facilitate fermentation and preservation.

If your home is very traditional, your second refrigerator is outside, and it is not a refrigerator at all but an ovoid earthenware pot ranging anywhere from one to 60 liters in size, buried deep in the earth so its mouth is level with the ground. Throughout the winter months, the jars maintain temperatures between 32 and 35 degrees Fahrenheit, their porous walls allowing evaporating salt water to escape, casting flower-like designs on their outer surfaces. These kimchi pots are referred to as onggi, though they also have more specific names based on size: danji for small jars, hangari for medium ones, and dok for the largest. 

Our household is neither traditional nor high-tech, so our second refrigerator is a normal kitchen refrigerator that lives in our garage. On first glance, its insides appear gutted and ineffective, shelves spaced far apart and drawers removed or sitting crookedly atop one another, but there is a system and a logic to the arrangement. In summertime, the rickety drawers burst with produce; through the long winter months, each of the two remaining shelves hosts tall glass bottles brimming with spice-freckled napa cabbage, whole radishes stripped of their skins and floating phantasmagorically in golden brine, quartered cucumbers stacked like logs and slowly growing supple while still maintaining a good crunch (Koreans are all about the textures). Kimchi by the gallon—kimchi galore. 

The layers of pickled vegetables dwindle with each passing day, served out in generous portions to be consumed alongside aromatic chicken soups infused with ginger and jujubes, braised short ribs so tender they fall off the bone, or cooked—into spicy seafood pancakes with golden-batter lace that melts on the tongue or hearty stews that evoke an otherworldly reddish glow. When we have to fish through the jars’ opaque liquid for slips of kimchi, spring is arriving, and soon, sunny harvests will fill the refrigerator drawers with raw vegetables to be salted, spiced, and fermented in the newly emptied jars, ready for winter once again.

If you are Korean, you likely already know all of this.

Excerpt from NPR’s Code Switch podcast, hosted by Shereen Marisol Meraji and Gene Demby. Episode: “Hold Up! Time For An Explanatory Comma” with guest Hari Kondabolu on December 14, 2016

DEMBY: So…on this week’s episode of Code Switch we are talking about something we’ve been calling on our team the explanatory comma.

MERAJI: It’s like Tupac Shakur, comma, the rapper-slash-actor who did this and that and all this other stuff, and we’re going to explain to you who he is. Or, you know, Taika Waititi…The filmmaker from New Zealand. He’s part Maori, part Russian Jew and 100 percent brilliant.

DEMBY: So that little aside there, that’s the explanatory comma. And it’s not really a hard and fast line when we should use it…when is it appropriate for us to explain stuff that we think people should know? And when is it appropriate for us to just let people figure it out in context and how do you decide when to let people just look through the window…

When I was in elementary school, I asked my mother to pack Korean food for my lunch. I thought it would be cool to bring something different from the other kids, that I would be able to show off my kimbap or bulgogi or gyeranmari. Also, I didn’t like the sandwiches she packed me.

My mother refused. She had the foresight to know I would have been bullied, though she never said as much. Her euphemistic explanation: Korean food was for the home; outside of it, we should eat what others eat. She took this motto to heart, always listening carefully to my lists of the latest trends at school, food or otherwise. She dropped heartfelt notes in my lunchbox; she took me shopping for skinny-jeans; she offered to buy feathers for my hair (thank goodness I declined). 

Assimilation is never easy, whether it is into the words on a page or the new life your immigrant parents are building.

When I returned from friends’ homes, she asked me what we had for lunch, or snack, or dinner, and when I had friends over, she’d prepare similar dishes: mac-and-cheese, chicken nuggets, spaghetti with meatballs. Perhaps this is why I so closely attach Korean food to my mother, and to my sense of home—for a long time, before it gained overnight popularity, we ate Korean food only at home, only when no one else was there to see it.

Confined to the viewfinder of my school-day anecdotes, my mother took pains to fit me into the snapshot of my surroundings in hopes that doors would open for me, that I would never be outside the window, looking in. Assimilation is never easy, whether it is into the words on a page or the new life your immigrant parents are building.

KONDABOLU: The explanatory comma often ends up being stuff that is about people of color or marginalized groups…ours is the stuff that has to get explained…I wanted to explain it because I want to reach as many people as possible because we’re talking about lots of complicated and big things. And at the same time I wanted to make it clear to listeners who do know what I’m talking about that, you know, this is also for us and you shouldn’t feel like, you know, this section isn’t for you…

DEMBY: OK. That is a thing that I think we feel a lot, right? It’s like, are we talking to white people here when we do that? You know what I mean? That sort of specific anxiety over that.

Sometimes I read one-star reviews for books by authors I admire:

  • it was annoying that she used so many foreign words without any glossary to help those of us who don’t know the language
  • I never felt like I was really in Korea; ___ never describes anything endemic to Korea or Korean culture with the kind of finesse with which ______ _______ described Iran in ____ __ _ _______ ____, which is an excellent book. So what you get is a boring book about indistinguishable characters in a blandly described environment.
  • I read this book for my book club. I [had] a hard time getting into the book. The writer mixed in Spanish words which was interesting, but I often had to look words up on Google.
  • the use of Korean words and phrases (without translation) was annoying.

When my friends and I discuss books we’ve read, one title that comes up is Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. An excerpt from the opening:

Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.

H Mart is a supermarket chain that specializes in Asian food. The H stands for han ah reum, a Korean phrase that roughly transIates to “one arm full of groceries.” H Mart is where parachute kids look to find the brand of instant noodles that reminds them of home. It’s where Korean families buy rice cakes to make tteokguk, the beef and rice cake soup that brings in the New Year. It’s the only place where you can find a giant vat of peeled garlic, because it’s the only place that truly understands how much garlic you’ll need for the kind of food your people eat. H Mart is freedom from the single-aisle “ethnic” section in regular grocery stores. They don’t prop Goya beans next to bottles of sriracha here. Instead, you’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup. Or in the freezer section, holding a stack of dumpling skins, thinking of all the hours that Mom and I spent at the kitchen table folding minced pork and chives into the thin dough. Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?

“Have you read it?” my white friends ask me. “It’s really good, it made me cry.”

“I stopped midway,” I reply.

In a virtual meet-up of Tiger Balm, a Korean American writer’s collective led by authors Gene Kwak and Joseph Han, guest author Crystal Hana Kim speaks on the topic of explanatory commas:

KIM: It doesn’t make sense for a Korean character to explain Korean words, if I’m in their interiority. So that was easy for me to write from their perspective, use the Korean words that are necessary and not say, like, “kimchi, comma, a fermented cabbage, comma,” like I didn’t even need to do that because it wouldn’t make sense to the emotional truth or lived experience of the characters… And then it was just really important for me to find an agent and an editor who understood what I was doing and wouldn’t say, like, “You have to italicize these words,” or “You have to explain this,” or you know, “You have to broaden or cater—or revise the story to cater to a Western or whiter audience.”

KIM: I have some Hangul throughout the novel, and it’s important for me to not translate that, and it’s important for me to have an editor who knows—because she can’t read Hangul—she will not get some of the subtleties, and if you read Hangul then you’ll understand the book in a different way at the end than someone who doesn’t, and I’m okay with that, and she is thankfully okay with that, too.

Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.

H Mart is a supermarket chain that specializes in Asian food. The H stands for han ah reum, a Korean phrase that roughly transIates to “one arm full of groceries.” H Mart is where parachute kids look to find the brand of instant noodles that reminds them of home. It’s where Korean families buy rice cakes to make tteokguk, the beef and rice cake soup that brings in the New Year. It’s the only place where you can find a giant vat of peeled garlic, because it’s the only place that truly understands how much garlic you’ll need for the kind of food your people eat. H Mart is freedom from the single-aisle “ethnic” section in regular grocery stores. They don’t prop Goya beans next to bottles of sriracha here. Instead, you’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup. Or in the freezer section, holding a stack of dumpling skins, thinking of all the hours that Mom and I spent at the kitchen table folding minced pork and chives into the thin dough. Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?

The closest H Mart to Colorado Springs, Colorado is in Denver, an hour’s drive away. My strongest childhood road-trip memory: Once a month, we pile into our 2000 silver Honda Odyssey—my mother, my father, my older sister and brother—and drive seventy miles to Denver, where we spend hours browsing the aisles of H Mart, filling one, sometimes two shopping carts with buckwheat noodles, gochujang, packs of gim, bags of shrimp crackers, fresh tofu, red bean popsicles, anchovies, Solomon’s seal tea, cuts of meat for galbi and samgyupsal, a box of one dozen chamoe, containers of ready-made banchan, trays of dduk and kimbap, jars of kimchi.

When my siblings and I tire of begging our parents for Yakult, mochi ice cream, and bbeongtwigi, we steal plastic bags from the long rolls in the produce section, filling them with air from our lungs before tying them closed: makeshift balloons we pass back and forth—don’t let it touch the ground!—until, inevitably, they land on some unexpecting halmeoni’s head; until, inevitably, our mother’s sharp-tongued “Ssst!” motioning to stop, calm down, hand her that bag for these melons; until, inevitably, we pile into the van and back out of the parking lot at dusk with a trunkload of H Mart goods, provisioned for yet another month, and the sky grows dimmer as we drive homewards until, inevitably, the lights of the Air Force base glitter like diamonds at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and my eyelids, grown heavy, can’t quite close on that dazzling landscape.

Texts to my friend about a book conversation I had with a coworker:

he told me the book instilled in him an interest for “books about other cultures”

and then i felt compelled to try to explain to him that he shouldn’t approach books by poc authors with the expectation that they will culture him

and i was like race is not the only differentiator of perspectives in novels by poc writers

like that would be saying that hemingway is the same as salinger is the same as etc

and i thought he was following my argument about not all white male authors being the same

so i was like and that also applies to poc authors, like not all authors of a specific race are going to have the same perspective

and he thought about this for a second and was like mm maybe

Excerpt from “Min Jin Lee on Her New Novel and Writing about the Korean Diaspora” by Marina N. Bolotnikova in Harvard Magazine, February 13, 2019

“I’ve been asked why I write about Koreans,” Lee said. “And it seems like such a strange question. Because why wouldn’t I write about Koreans? To me, Koreans are mothers and fathers and daughters and sons, which means Koreans are like us; we are worthy of consideration and reflection.

KONDABOLU: The majority of the references we’re going to get fed are things that are dominant in white culture and [are] claimed to be American culture and only American culture. And then we have our other stuff, you know, like our family stuff, our community stuff. And, you know, that’s—that becomes our other consciousness…Like, that was—you know, our lives. Like, we’ve already done all that work. Why do we have to fall behind because somebody else didn’t do the required reading?

Crying in H Mart makes me cry because although it covers topics close to my diasporic upbringing, it, like so many books that came before, was not written for me. Zauner is explaining to me a world in which I already live; when I read her book, I am the one looking through the window.

Another transcription from the Tiger Balm call:

KIM: I think [for] the _____ ______ essay—I think she wanted me to italicize Korean words, and I would explain, like, why I wouldn’t, and she said, “But this is our standard formatting,” and then I couldn’t win…Sometimes I would try to push back on the italics, and they would sometimes just say like, “This is our—this is the in-house style,” but for me, the important thing is to explain what I’m doing, and if they in the end say no because it’s in-house style, then I can’t—I’m not going to push further.

When I look up “house style guides” for major publishing companies, the results are sparse, which causes me to wonder, What are they hiding from us? All I can find is Bloomsbury Publishing’s September 2016 version of House Style Guidelines for Authors and Editors. Here is the “Foreign Languages” section (underlining my own):

Use italic type for any words or phrases given in a foreign language (that have not been subsumed into English), with a translation, in parentheses and in roman, if necessary (don’t use quotation marks for this translation). Names of institutions, organizations and other proper nouns should not be italicized. 

Example: doppelgänger (double) 

Give titles of foreign-language works in italic, in the language in which they were written / composed / painted etc., and follow with an English translation of the title, in parentheses and in roman. 

Example: l’Étranger (The Outsider) 

When you quote in languages other than English, use roman type inside quotation marks. 

Example: ‘Au fait, beau T-shirt’ 

Localized terminology that may be unfamiliar or confusing to non-native readers should be avoided, and replaced by appropriate terminology for the language chosen. (Example: the term lakh would be unfamiliar to non–South Asian readers.) If the term must be included, add an explanation in parentheses. 
Example: Jewels and slaves worth ‘5 lakh’ (500,000 Rupees) were stolen.

Example: Out of endless possibilities, the worth of ‘5 lakh’ (500,000 Rupees) was attributed to an Orientalized, subjugated juxtaposition of “jewels and slaves.”

Example: Could the estrangement be any clearer than when providing the title, l’Étranger (The Outsider), as an example?

Example: Some sense of my language legitimacy as both an American and ‘hanguk saram’ (Korean) was stolen.

Due to its prevalence on menus of contemporary non-Korean restaurants, its plentiful stock in beloved grocery stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, and increasingly non-italicized usage, one might say that the word “kimchi” has been subsumed into the English language. 

But kimchi has always been a part of my English. Whose English has this word now been subsumed into?

Example: Some sense of my language legitimacy as both an American and ‘hanguk saram’ (Korean) was stolen.

Hello _____,

Thank you for the opportunity to publish my short story…I looked at the proof and took note of a few corrections needed…

I noticed that “Aiya” is italicized in: 

“Aiya”, I heard Baba say 

when it originally was not. This also occurs for “xiaolongbao” on pages 116, 117, 118, and 120. I’d appreciate it if we could change the formatting on those words back to non-italics. I understand that italicization is a common editorial practice for non-English words, but it is important to me that non-English words be incorporated seamlessly in my text to emulate the natural way they occur in dialogue in multilingual households. 

I’ve truly enjoyed working with _____ on the edits for this piece and appreciate the journal’s openness in accommodating my storytelling choices thus far. I look forward to the issue!

Best,

Elizabeth

— —

Hi Elizabeth,

Thank you for your reply and close read!  

Our house style has traditionally been to italicize words in another language, but this discussion has been evolving.  We will return those words to Roman.  Please take a look the attached revised proof to be sure I’ve fixed everything.

Thank you!

Best,

_____

Crystal Hana Kim was my college workshop professor. In class, she emphasized that the writer should never feel compelled to explain to the reader. After the Tiger Balm call, I followed up on our longstanding email exchange.

I especially enjoyed the conversation [with Tiger Balm] about the explanatory comma and italicization in publishing—I actually had my own encounter with this recently…she was very understanding of what I was trying to do, although we compromised on providing inline hints for Korean words. It’s interesting to me that such small editing choices can have such profound effects—each time I try to reword a sentence to provide contextual clues, I wonder if I’m toeing that explanatory comma line. With each edit, each decision, I have to evaluate if it betrays some part of my literary agenda. All this to say, editing is such a careful and meaningful process.

KONDABOLU: Certainly…there [were] a ton of comedy references that we didn’t explain… like, we didn’t explain what biryani is. And I would like to think people know what biryani is… And it’s not just like, “you mean the Eastern version of paella?” I mean, I would lose my mind. I would lose my mind.

DEMBY: Yeah, that’s the other thing. Like, what if you do the explanatory comma wrong? Like, what if your explanation is actually trash?

KONDABOLU: Yeah. I mean, you got to be careful because it almost causes more damage, right? You know, and also how you minimize something that’s important to a group of people…

Cho Dang Gol is a homey restaurant my parents found in New York City after dropping me off for my first semester of college. They take me there for dinner before heading back to Boise. 

“Come here when you miss Korean food,” my mother tells me as we cut into blocks of homemade tofu with our spoons, the mildly sour taste refreshing in the late-summer heat. So at the start of my first Thanksgiving break away from home, three months since I last tasted Korean food, I do.

My college friends, C and P, are both from the tri-state area; they go home for every school break, be it three days or three weeks. Under their parents’ roofs, they sleep in their childhood beds and eat their parents’ cooking. It is the start of Thanksgiving break; they are due to go home the next day, but they accompany me to Cho Dang Gol for dinner that evening.

The soondubujjigae is hot and comforting; though it doesn’t taste like my mother’s, it tastes like home. But more than the stew, I am fixated on the banchan, specifically the kimchi. When the mains have been cleared away, I extend my chopsticks toward the toppling mound of kimchi on its flat, round dish. C and P stare at me with wide, curious eyes as I shovel piece after piece of kimchi into my mouth, one right after another. It’s the good kind, ripe and spicy, so hot it burns my tongue, but I don’t stop—it’s been so long, too long, since I’ve tasted kimchi. I consume enough to last me the next few weeks before I fly back home: monthly provisions.

When I can’t handle the spice anymore, I set down my chopsticks, glug water. Only a few stray pieces remain in the dish.

“Wow,” says C, who is also Korean American. “I’ve never seen anyone eat kimchi like that.”

Meaning, she hadn’t seen anyone eat kimchi on its own, as neither ingredient nor side dish. But I watched my dad do it all the time. He would sit at the table before dinner was ready and lift a chopstickful of kimchi to his lips, munching it like a starter salad. He did this after dinner, too, when the only thing remaining was the communal dish of kimchi which, if nearly empty, he would clear with ease, kimchi juice and all.

Meaning, my relationship to kimchi is vastly different from C’s.

Excerpt from Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home by Eric Kim, New York Times staff food writer. Section title: “Kimchi Is A Verb”

Let me start off by saying that, no, kimchi is not literally a verb. It’s a noun used to describe an array of salted vegetables fermented until sour with lactic acid bacteria. And while a jar of the red, cabbage-based variety is probably sitting in your fridge right now—and is, to be sure, a mainstay of Korean cuisine—there are a million other shapes, sizes and flavors in the pantheon of kimchis. “Many things, like cucumbers, chives, and apples, can also be kimchi’d,” write Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard in Koreatown: A Cookbook, in which they explore the myriad ways in which kimchi is more of a technique than just a single item, “more of a verb than a noun.”

A handful of the million types of kimchi:

Baechu kimchi
Kkakdugi
Oi sobagi 
Pa kimchi
Nabak kimchi
Altari mu kimchi
Gat kimchi
Baek kimchi
Geotjeori
Bossam kimchi
Yeolmu kimchi
Dongchimi
Buchu kimchi
Kkaenip kimchi

When we move to Boise, Idaho, there are no H Marts in the entire state. The Asian marts that do exist—a Vietnamese grocery store, a Chinese market—stock kimchi in limited, unreliably scheduled amounts, with little variety. So my mother takes it upon herself to make her own.

Even the mere acquisition of ingredients for this task is difficult; in Boise, Idaho, it is nearly impossible to procure the correct radishes for kimjang, but my parents have a supplier. Once a year, my dad’s coworker’s church’s community farm harvests vast supplies of radishes, a portion of which my mother then turns into bottles of altari mu kimchi. 

The kimjang process is long and painstaking. First you must wash and trim mounds of vegetables—volumes that overflow the sink. Then you salt them in layers so they are evenly coated and let them sit for two to eight hours until they grow supple. You must rinse them once again, then mix and spread a red pepper paste (or other seasoning) among the vegetables. It takes a lot of time and care to ensure each radish, cabbage, green onion, is equally coated in red pepper paste. By the end of it, your hands sustain a garish orange hue and tingle from prolonged contact with salt and spice. 

In the fall, my mother makes jars upon jars of kimchi, all of our favorites—baechu kimchi, altari mu kimchi, dongchimi, oi sobagi. She never asks me to help, though one time, when I am visiting home, I do. The two of us stand in the yellow haze of the kitchen light on a cold autumn evening, scrubbing red pepper paste into cabbage leaves. The trick for even distribution is to pick up a clump of julienned radish, spring onion, and mustard greens and, using it like a sponge to gather the spicy paste, paint the cabbage leaf. Then we roll the leaves into little balls and pile them into the jar. By the end of the evening, three glass half-gallon jars of kimchi sit in a row on our counter; over the next two weeks they will marinate until they fizz and bubble, and we will dish them out in glistening ruby piles to grace our kitchen table, riches we consume. 

“It will taste even better because you helped,” my mother tells me as we rinse our tingling hands.

KONDABOLU: [With] an explanatory comma, you can’t write a page after a comma and then end the comma and continue the sentence.

Kimchi, a Korean dish of spicy pickled cabbage, or radish, or cucumber, or myriad other vegetables, all of which go by their own names—baechu kimchi for cabbage, oi sobagi for cucumber, kkakduki for radish (though there are other types of radish kimchi, like dongchimi, which isn’t really spicy, but is actually a mild winter kimchi, categorized as such due to the radish’s late fall harvest period, and so is commonly consumed throughout the winter months)—as well as their own tastes and textures, like the bright, crisp notes of baechu kimchi, or the juicy, toothy burst of flavor from oi sobagi, or that sweet, addictive crunch of kkakduki, as though biting into a perfectly ripe apple—but beyond the textures lie the memories, often of family, or mothers, because kimchi and kimjang, the process of making piles of kimchi to last the whole winter, is communal yet intimate—it is the collective acknowledgement of the need for food (because kimchi is very much a household staple due to its preservative qualities that carry throughout the frigid winter months, a source of nutrition and flavor dating back over 4,000 years) but also the close dynamics between mother and child, like how one of my earliest memories of my mother is when she would fill a shallow bowl with water and dip each piece of baechu kimchi into the bowl, rinsing away the red pepper flakes until the cabbage emerged from its baptism clean and pale, mild enough for my child’s palate, repeating this process thoroughly and methodically and moreover she would expertly stab her chopsticks into the ribbing of each cabbage slice, tearing it into small strips I could fit in my child-size mouth, and we would eat like that, me consuming white fermented cabbage strip by strip, my mother hardly eating at all, focused on the parade of cleansed kimchi pieces that ever dwindled on the rim of my plate, and if that’s not love I don’t know what is, or how now, when the holidays are approaching, meaning I will be flying home soon, my mother on the phone will say guess what I have waiting for you, and I will say what, and she will whisper like a secret, dongchimi!, and I will gasp dramatically but also sincerely, because dongchimi is my favorite kimchi, which is of course why she goes through such pains to make it, though she calls me a halmeoni, a grandma, for loving it, because it is supposedly an archaic taste most appreciated by senior citizens, and when she dishes it out, slicing the fat radishes into quartered circles on the cutting board, I will dip the ladle into the jar for the fizzy, electrolyte-rich juice and sip it straight from the ladle, cool and sour on my tongue, and my mother will shake her head at me and call me halmeoni, and I will laugh and she will laugh and that is what kimchi is,

KONDABOLU: I mean, you really have to be brief and it’s going to be minimizing. So, you know, sometimes I wonder, like, should we actually just do a parenthesis after and just make a longer explanation or is a footnote better—in written form, I mean—or is there another way to do it? Because I think sometimes you really have to put time in to define the terms and define the people. And it’s worth it if people get a fuller picture.

Is this essay a parenthesis or a footnote?

In a Korean household, there are commonly two refrigerators. One is your run-of-the-mill refrigerator stocked with everyday groceries and condiments—milk, eggs, fresh produce, ketchup, your favorite brand of hot sauce, maple syrup, leftover couscous. The second one, though it now comes in a generic upright form, was originally conceived as a top-loading cabinet, not dissimilar in appearance to a top-loading washing machine. This refrigerator contains special compartments for holding kimchi while maintaining a frigid 32 degrees Fahrenheit, low air circulation, and high humidity levels to facilitate fermentation and preservation.

If your home is very traditional, your second refrigerator is outside, and it is not a refrigerator at all but an ovoid earthenware pot ranging anywhere from one to 60 liters in size, buried deep in the earth so its mouth is level with the ground. Throughout the winter months, the jars maintain temperatures between 32 and 35 degrees Fahrenheit, their porous walls allowing evaporating salt water to escape, casting flower-like designs on their outer surfaces. These kimchi pots are referred to as onggi, though they also have more specific names based on size: danji for small jars, hangari for medium ones, and dok for the largest. 

Our household is neither traditional nor high-tech, so our second refrigerator is a normal kitchen refrigerator that lives in our garage. On first glance, its insides appear gutted and ineffective, shelves spaced far apart and drawers removed or sitting crookedly atop each other, but there is a system and a logic to the arrangement. In summertime, the rickety drawers burst with produce; through the long winter months, each of the two remaining shelves hosts tall glass bottles brimming with spice-freckled napa cabbage, whole radishes stripped of their skins and floating phantasmagorically in golden brine, quartered cucumbers stacked like logs and slowly growing supple while still maintaining a good crunch (Koreans are all about the textures). Kimchi by the gallon—kimchi galore. The layers of pickled vegetables dwindle with each passing day, served out in generous portions to be consumed alongside aromatic chicken soups infused with ginger and jujubes or braised short ribs so tender they fall off the bone, or cooked—into spicy seafood pancakes with golden-batter lace that melts on the tongue or hearty stews that evoke an otherworldly reddish glow. When we have to fish through the jars’ opaque liquid for slips of kimchi, spring is arriving, and soon sunny harvests will fill the refrigerator drawers with raw vegetables to be salted, spiced, and fermented in the newly emptied jars, ready for winter once again.

7 Books to Read When the World Is on Fire

Posted on by Jo Lou

“System Change, Not Climate Change,” we chant during environmental marches. We write the slogan on signs and hashtag it on social media. But how do you change systems when your government denies climate change, silences experts, and promises to increase fossil fuel production?

When my daughter was born in 2014, it was the warmest year on record; each year since has been warmer. Confronted with a crisis that would shape my child’s life, I felt both overwhelmed and determined to act. Eventually, I started a free environmental newsletter called Cool It: Simple Steps to Save the Planet. Through my research, I have come to believe that while engagement and voting are essential at changing systems, we can take immediate action as we wait. The purchases we make—and more importantly, the ones we don’t—and the gardens we grow can support the world we want to live in. Climate change isn’t a dystopian possibility hundreds years away, it’s already here.

In this reading list are seven books to read that offer a sustainable path forward: 

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, Camille T. Dungy addressed the first Trump presidency, writing, “In the months after the 2016 presidential election, I often found myself in the company of people, almost always white, who said, ‘This is all so surprising. This isn’t who America is!’ . . . But I was not shocked. For quite some time–since the beginning, really–Black Americans have pointed out that ‘this’ is actually happening.” 

It is now 2025 and “this” is still happening, but even more egregiously. Soil expands the definition of nature writing, inviting in those—such as mothers—who have been excluded from the genre. She is mindful of her readers’ mundane responsibilities because she, too, has to wash the dishes. As Dungy nurtures her garden, pulling up bindweed and growing native plants, she contends with both a pandemic and racism. She weaves these lived experiences together into a book that is wise and sustaining, and through it, she shows us the work we must undertake to create a better future.

Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment by Maxine Bédat

In Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment, journalist Maxine Bédat traces the life cycle of a pair of jeans from the cotton fields of Texas to a textile plant in China to a garment factory in Bangladesh to an Amazon fulfillment center in Washington and finally to a landfill in Ghana. Bédat ends her extraordinary reportage with some concrete action steps for consumers, including an invitation to join the Clean Clothes Campaign. You’ll be haunted by Rima, a textile worker in Bangladesh who is paying for our addiction to fast fashion through unbearable work conditions. 

Year of No Garbage: Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems, and One Woman’s Trashy Journey to Zero Waste by Eve O. Schaub

Could you go a full year without throwing anything away? That’s the challenge Eve O. Schaub embarks on in Year of No Garbage: Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems, and One Woman’s Trashy Journey to Zero Waste. Schaub composts food scraps, recycles glass bottles and cardboard boxes, and even teaches readers about “aluminum foil potatoes,” but what can she do with all the non-recyclable plastic that flows through even the most vigilant of households? Schaub is as funny as she is educational, and you’ll find several ways in this book to reduce your plastic waste. 

Thicker than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis by Erica Cirino

In Thicker than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis, Erica Cirino visits the great Pacific garbage patch, describes the plastic found in the stomach of a sea bird, meets scientists working on plastic alternatives, and interviews activists fighting to close the petrochemical refineries of Cancer Alley. Plastic, we learn, is only cheap because we ignore its harms to our health and the environment. Cirino arms readers with alternatives to single-use plastic and advocates for more circular systems. 

Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods by Amelia Pang

Amelia Pang’s Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods begins when a woman in Oregon buys Halloween decorations and finds a note inside: “If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization.” The note was written by Sun Yi, a political prisoner in China whose work unit made the decorations. Journalist Amelia Pang finds and interviews Sun Yi, bringing us both his story of state mandated reeducation and the horrific labor camps where so many of our goods are made. We have all purchased something (probably a lot of things) made by slave labor. The book ends with clear action steps. 

The Day the World Stops Shopping by J.B. MacKinnon

In his evocative and well-researched book The Day the World Stops Shopping, journalist J.B. MacKinnon imagines how life would be different if we stopped shopping. Chapter four is titled “Suddenly, we’re winning the fight against climate change.” Shopping, it turns out, is a big reason we’re heating the planet. The gains we make with renewable energy are canceled out by our escalating consumption. Each decade, we buy more and more things, requiring more and more energy. On the day the world stops shopping, however, we not only win our fight against climate change, but we have more time and richer experiences. MacKinnon is clear that his book’s premise is only a thought exercise, yet he is serious about conscious consumption and how it is the key to saving the planet and ourselves. 

Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard by Douglas Tallamy

In Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard, Douglas Tallamy challenges us to use our yards to support biodiversity. He sounds the alarm on insect collapse and explains why pollinators are essential to our survival. Most importantly, he gives us the information we need to turn our yards into habitats. Tallamy’s book highlights the importance of growing nectar plants like Joe Pye weed and keystone species like goldenrod and how native milkweeds are essential for monarch butterflies.

True Wellness Is a Goop.com Vibrator

Posted on by Willem Marx

Self-Portrait as Rotting Lemons

Thick-skins shine jaundiced 
in the chipped ceramic bowl

where I arranged them: spotlit 
and spoiling now in the window

because I believed in happiness 
as a Pinterest board, cleanliness

a badge that meant worthiness, 
the opposite of poor. I coveted

a basic life: loungewear, roomba, 
a symmetry worth noting, linen

duvet with matching sheets, gold 
vibrator so discrete you’d wear it

on your neck. A life you’d want 
to buy on Goop.com, bright

white, citrus-infused-water 
in-a-fluted-glass-carafe-life

that isn’t mine. In my life, I reach 
for a lemon, blooming blue,

my hand breaking the waxy mask, 
a delicate sensation all its own.

Metamorphosis

I didn’t want to believe in nature or nurture. To be the girl 
whose picture I keep in a book next to my bed. To die
at thirty-two with a gun clasped in my hand. My mothers,
my two fragile wings: the one who carried me, the other
who cared for me. Both of them a weight I bear, folding
and unfolding their pull against my back. I know
not all creatures can endure the burden of change, the way
the caterpillar dissolves completely during metamorphosis—
tissue thick and sticky, cells coding re-creation. But the body
and its double is already predetermined inside the egg,
long before the creature is even born. An open question:
if at a fancy restaurant, my father-in-law turns to me
and says “I guess you’re really white trash, then,”
does it mean it’s true? Once, after a terrible storm,
I found several chrysalises in the garden, bright green pods
nestled in the sharp slate of the garden path. The home
I made for them: a large dinner plate. I delighted in the bounty
of small gems, until the silhouettes of half-formed wings
shrunk and blackened against the cloudy edge. What I’d wanted
was an ending that wasn’t so inevitable. Instead, I learned
to camouflage myself. To make the face of some fiercer animal.

7 Novels About Women Over 40

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

If you spend enough time on BookTok or looking at the latest best-seller lists, you may start to wonder—is reading only for the young? Most of the biggest book influencers are in their 20s—and it stands to reason they’re interested in reading about protagonists their own age falling in love, slaying dragons, and solving murders. But don’t let BookTok fool you. Recent research suggests that 75% of active readers are actually 45 and older. 

As someone in my 40s, I was interested in reading about women in the messy middle of life. It’s one of the reasons I wrote my novel Jane and Dan at the End of the World. There are so many love stories about the beginning of relationships— twenty-somethings falling in love and living happily ever after. But what happens next? Long-term relationships are rarely easy or picture-perfect and I wanted to explore what it means to find yourself next to someone fifteen or twenty years in, when there are kids and a mortgage and orthodontist bills and mountains of laundry and you wake up and wonder—whose life is this? 

This reading list features protagonists over the age of 40—women navigating the complexities of middle life with all its triumphs, heartbreaks, and reinventions. These stories of women rediscovering themselves or chasing long-forgotten dreams prove that life’s adventures don’t end at 35. 

All Fours by Miranda July

Coming of age books aren’t always about teenagers. A 45-year-old artist embarks on a solo cross-country trip, but finds herself stopping in a small town and having an affair in a cheap motel—eventually coming to terms with her own sexual awakening, identity and sense of self. 

Sandwich by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman lays bare what it means to be a woman and mother in midlife, when the matriarch of the family gathers with her husband and adult children for a weeklong beach vacation. It’s moving, funny and oh-so-relatable.

The Idea of You by Robinne Lee

A 40-year-old single mom has an unexpected love affair with the 24-year-old lead singer of one of the most popular boy bands on the planet. This age-gap romance is part fantasy fulfillment, part intense love story, and it was adapted brilliantly onscreen by Anne Hathaway.

Separation Anxiety by Laura Zigman

This quirky and irreverent tale finds a middle-aged woman coming to terms with the challenges of midlife—raising a teenager, her lackluster career and marriage, her best friend dying. On a whim she begins wearing her dog in a baby sling—and then can’t stop. 

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett’s latest engrossing novel is about a 57-year-old mother who finally tells the story of her once-upon-a-time love affair with a famous Hollywood star to her three grown daughters. It’s poignant, introspective and beautifully nostalgic.

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhorn

Historical fiction fans will love this true story of Martha Ballard, a 54-year-old midwife in 1789 who investigates a shocking murder in her small Maine town—and will stop at nothing to get justice, even at the risk of tearing her community and family apart.

The Change by Kristen Miller

Three middle-aged women discover that menopause brings them new “gifts.” They begin channeling their superpowers to find the killer of young women in their affluent neighborhood. 

To Tell My Disabled Stories, I Needed to Unlearn Ableist Workshop Critiques

Posted on by EL Assistant2

“Is there a way to end on a positive note?”

“This seems unrealistic.”

“Have you tried yoga?” 

These were some of the comments I received in writing workshops regarding my work about disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence. Often, I was the only student writing about living with disability, rather than using it as a cliché metaphor about being mad, blind, lame, or deaf, where disability was only present when it represented something else. Sometimes my classmates wrote about disabled characters, relying on crude stereotypes, or about disabled family members, focusing on the burden of caregiving or of loving difficult people. In these cases, disability was not at the forefront. Instead, it was being used as a plot device to convey either empathy for characters dealing with someone else’s illness or frustration at disability thwarting abled people’s attempts to live happy lives. 

I was not represented in these works. None of my disabilities were visible. I was young. I was relatively successful. I loved and was loved in return. I was happy, except when I was not, but often this had little to do with being disabled and more to do with trying to survive in an ableist world. I did not want my existence to inspire pity in those who were not disabled, by which I mean I did not want to make others feel grateful they did not live a life like mine. 

What I wanted was to write stories about the experience of living with chronic pain and the sensory onslaught of neurodivergence. I wanted to write stories about bodies and brains like mine without having to justify that yes, this really did happen and, yes, I really did feel this way, and no, I was not exaggerating to garner attention or sympathy. I wanted to be called what I was—disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent—instead of sitting in workshops that insisted on using demeaning terminology such as “differently-abled,” “handicapable” and “special needs,” which imply we’re both helpless to our disabilities and yet somehow capable of overcoming them. I wanted to write about my crip community—our collective rage and exquisite joy and sharp humor—without abled classmates insisting I was generalizing. I was tired, I was in pain, and I did not want to spend my limited energy fighting for my place in workshops that didn’t understand me or my work.

Like many disabled people, I was skilled at masking. The abled world often does not want to accommodate us, and if we vocalize our pain, let alone demand access, we are punished. So we mask to fit in and hopefully succeed, though this comes at great mental and physical costs. I masked in workshop and on the page, dutifully following the writing advice I received in the workshop, even when much of it invalidated my lived experience. 

I grew tired of writing the abled story of my disabled life.

But after a while, I grew tired of writing the abled story of my disabled life. I no longer wanted to translate my experience for abled audiences who often failed to understand—or even believe—my stories. In order to write, I needed to unlearn much of the advice I had encountered. I wrote my craft book, Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice, about my experiences as a multiply disabled writer in order to help others who might need what I needed after so many workshops where abled writers insisted they knew best: strategies and methods to form a disabled writing practice. Along the way, I learned how to dismantle some of the most commonly received pieces of “feedback” in ableist workshops. Below is some advice on how to spot these comments, so you can dismantle and unlearn them too: 

1) Disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers will often be encouraged to create work about these identities and little else. 

When disabled writers include a small detail about disability in their work without it being the primary focus, workshop colleagues may call attention to that detail and insist it’s what the work is “really about.” This type of comment assumes the writer did not know their own intentions. Despite this common suggestion, it is possible for disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence to inform a work without being the focus, just as it is possible for disabled writers to create work that does not include any discussions of this identity at all. 

2) Assumptions about a writer’s identity or information from their previous pieces may be brought up in order to imply that this information needs to be included. 

We do not need to consent to violations of our privacy and dignity.

When disabled writers do choose to disclose information about their identities in their creative work, workshops may focus their discussion on unanswered questions about the author’s diagnosis, asking invasive questions and speculating while the author is forced to sit silent. Workshops colleagues may ask us to include extensive information about our lived experiences and various disabilities, shifting the focus of our work to a medical report about our brains and bodies. We are expected to put our suffering on the page, to “show, don’t tell” what it is like to experience medical trauma. At the same time, we may be told to spare readers the details about our lived experiences that make them uncomfortable. But disabled writers do not need to shield readers from our suffering, just as we do not need to perform our trauma. We do not have to justify or explain every detail about our disabilities, treatments, and lived experiences for them to be accepted as true or valid or worthy of art, nor do we need to answer invasive questions on the page or in the classroom. Sharing our stories requires our consent, and we do not need to consent to violations of our privacy and dignity.  

3) If writers choose to write about disability, they will frequently be told to do so with an optimistic tone. 

We’re often told this suggestion is being made because the story is hard to navigate, difficult and upsetting to read. We may be asked, as I was time and again, to “describe how you find the courage to go on living,” as though our lives would be better off ended. The subtext here is that disabled people make abled people uncomfortable, and we must anesthetize our stories if we want to engage an abled audience. But why should we shoulder the burden of translating our stories for the ease and comfort of others? If even the mere facts of our brains and bodies are so upsetting to abled audiences, then perhaps these are not the readers we hope to engage with our work and certainly not the people we should be turning to for writing advice.  

Similarly, disabled writers must resist pressures to demonstrate stoicism and grace above all else. This is not to say we cannot strive for these qualities in our lives and on the page, but rather that we must not allow abled others to reduce us to these qualities, must not accept that our stories are only of value if they imply that our lived experiences, full of frequent injustices, are easy to bear or devoid of unpleasant emotions. We do not need to revise our lived experience in order to make ourselves or our characters courageous and cheerful for the reader’s comfort. 

4) Disabled writers may receive medical advice masquerading as craft advice.

Many times, the ableist need for optimism means requiring that disabled characters undergo treatment and prove their hard work, or at the very least, demonstrate hope. Because of this, we tend to receive all sorts of unasked for advice: recommendations to try meditation or essential oils, stories about a friend or family member or stranger from the news who benefited from some obscure treatment that the disabled writer ought to try. This “advice” implicitly asks us to prove we’ve tried everything in our power to be well. We’re expected to reveal this failure cheerfully and without criticism, certainly not mentioning that ableism is an inherent part of both the medical industry and of being offered unsolicited medical advice while we’re just trying to live our lives. Rather than succumb to calls for our work to provide inspiration—as though our lives are not challenging enough without the added pressure of needing to serve as a saccharine greeting card about looking on the bright side—we must remember that crafting our stories accurately is the ultimate act of agency. Resisting pressures to perform illness for others is a reclamation of our power.

5) Ableist audiences often want a triumphant recovery arc, or the promise of one to come. 

As a result of points 3 and 4, workshops may encourage disabled writers to spend lengthy time discussing the possibility of recovery, as though each piece about disability should conclude with a magic cure or medical breakthrough. Alternatively, audiences will accept disabled stories that inevitably end in death, so long as the disabled character goes calmly and compliantly into the good night. Mostly, however, readers love a success story, meaning a story where disabled, chronically ill, or neurodivergent people rehabilitate and assimilate. In other words, where we become (or at least pretend to be) abled. But doing so requires the erasure of the reality for many disabled people, one where treatment and recovery are not always possible or even preferable, our unique identities intertwined with our disabilities and inherent to our sense of self. Implying our stories are only of value if we assimilate requires the eradication of our very existence. In a world where so many disabled people are denied access to public spaces, education, politics, and even healthcare, we cannot allow ableist workshops to erase us on the page, in the stories of our very own lives. 

“Why not conclude by reflecting on how far you’ve come?”

“Can you show how hard you’ve worked to overcome this?” 

“Can you spend more time explaining how this doesn’t define you?”

Years after my time in writing workshops, I still remember these frequent comments and still receive them from book and magazine editors. But if I were to revise based on this feedback, I could only conclude that I’ve come very far in ignoring advice like this—the kind that suggests my writing is only of value if I demonstrate how far away from my disability I have managed to escape. If I were to revise based on this feedback, I could only say that I have worked very hard—all my life—to navigate disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence, all of which are difficult to live with, but even more so because they are rejected by an ableist world that refuses to accept or accommodate them.

I will no longer explain that disability does not define me, because it is a preposterous thing to ask of any writer about their identity. My disabilities do define me, and to pretend otherwise is to actively erase me—from society, from the writing workshop, and from my own work. Treating everyone the same is an ableist society’s convenient way to overlook that disabled people have different access needs, and thus rid themselves of the responsibility to educate themselves and provide accommodations. When workshops treat each writer and work the same, they mirror this injustice. Unlearning the expectations of the ableist workshop is an ongoing process, one that continues to help me write the story of my disabled life. I hope others in our community do the same, finding new ways to resist and reclaim.

Sarah Lyn Rogers Turns Ugly Feelings into Poetry

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Cosmic Tantrum opens on incantation: “If in place of a mentor you had a hostile mirror” begins the dedication, signaling to a particular audience with open arms. Welcome, dear readers who identify with the dutiful student, the overworked assistant, the eldest daughter. This vulnerable rush is the first crack into the playful, often ironic frame that drives Sarah Lyn Rogers’s debut collection.

Cosmic Tantrum is invested in the child who did not get to be a child, invested in the adult who remains one—for better or for worse. Rogers blends sympathy for Charlie Brown with hypnotic riffs on writing prompts, always letting fun live alongside something harder. The anxiety of monstrosity follows Rogers’s speakers throughout, finding deflection and absolution in successfully funny poems, a rare and difficult delight. Lines like “Write about your early fear of transforming into a brat, the worst monster” live inside facetiously titled poems like “UNIVERSALLY RELATABLE WRITING PROMPTS, PART 1.” This push-and-pull of vulnerability and deflection guide Cosmic Tantrum; it made sense to find echoes of Rogers’s poetic in our conversation. Over Zoom, we discussed how everything from work to astrology to memes to passive-aggressive cues find their way into our writing. Like her poems, she was charismatic, a generosity attached to every story—that expert blend of silly and vulnerable. In recounting personal experiences, she paraphrased a line in “ARS POETICA WITH NEED AND WILD CATS;” I was struck, when re-reading the poem in full later, by the transformation of a feeling she achieved in the simplicity of her line. It goes, “Are you cold? somebody / used to ask, a statement and request. They were, // and I should offer remedy.” I do not need a dictionary definition nor history lesson in the concept of “guess culture”—Rogers’s work illustrates the the tension of the phenomena elegantly. My favorite poems capture the mundane, lifting them towards immortality; Cosmic Tantrum makes immortal ugly feelings and dirty houses, with a warmth and cleverness to make them worthy of our attention. 

Summer Farah: Could you tell me how the book came together? At what stage did the various connective threads—fairytales, therapy, and on—start talking to each other? 

Sarah Lyn Rogers: This is its reborn version. I wrote a version of the collection 6 or 8 years ago—there was no theme for it, it was just…the first forty poems I wrote! What connected them was this mood of restraint, or withholding. When I was a baby poet, I really admired Marianne Moore for being able to say the thing without saying the thing. And so I had a whole collection of poems where, haha! I dropped one little piece of info, see if you can pick it up. I reached a point where I realized I wasn’t very interested in almost any of the poems anymore. They didn’t have any energy for me, except for the trances and the meditations. So, I kept those ones on the back burner and kind of threw everything else away. It was around this time that I watched the documentary Grey Gardens for the first time, and I was obsessed. Not only because of the squalor these former wealthy socialite women are living in, but the way that they talk to each other—this sort of obsessive push-pull thing. Their power dynamic intrigued me. So, not thinking about a collection at this point, I started writing a series of Grey Gardens poems. I came up with the collection title, Cosmic Tantrum, because I felt like I was going through one. It felt like I was fated to end up in one of the worst jobs I could possibly have for my mental health and well-being, which was being an executive assistant. It felt like this domino effect, like all these things had conspired to put me in this pretty triggering position of having to be of service to people who have power over you and you have to be very intimate with them. The tantrum component is me going through my Saturn return and realizing Oh, I’m sort of complicit in my suffering. [Cosmic Tantrum] didn’t match the old version, but the title had so much energy and charge around it, I thought: there’s something there. That’s when the concept of the local beast emerged—a series of fake newspaper headline poems about the “local beast,” a being who’s just existing but bothering other people by inhabiting their space. They were funny and bizarre and they had this sort of cryptic, absurdist energy that I was moving toward. Once those were in the mix, the collection really started to be fun to me. 

SF: Your poems have a lot of humor in them, which is hard to pull off. They’re funny! Especially “Guided Meditation with Mean Voice,” with its opening line “Oh, so we’re doing this again.” How do you see humor as a poetic tool?

SLR: There’s something generous about humor. You have to be able to understand what another person will expect based on what you’ve already said, and then be able to subvert that. That maps really well onto poetry because you build your own container—it follows its own rules. Poetry has basically punchlines, but they’re the turn or the volta. It’s like, you thought this was going this way? I’m going to change it up on you. Humor could be another poetic form, you know, maybe it doesn’t have the same gravitas or credibility as other poetic forms, but I find it useful, and I think a poetry collection that wasn’t in any way funny wouldn’t be true to my life. Humor is how I cope with everything. 

SF: I want to go back what you said about a sense of complicity, or responsibility in your own life. A lot of this collection is engaged with the image of the child, the “eldest daughter” in particular. The dedication, especially, is a beautiful affirmation of childishness, as well as the word “tantrum.” Can you speak to the oscillation between responsibility and childishness in your narrators? 

SLR: I’m definitely writing this collection for parentified children. It’s a paradox—you’re a young person who is asked to take care of people who should be taking care of you. It’s like this upside-down world where big expectations are placed on you. There’s something very sad, and very silly, about, you know, having been a child who wasn’t exactly a child, dealing with adults who are maybe not exactly adults—maybe it’s your parent, maybe it’s your boss, maybe it’s the worst roommate you’ve ever had. The sense of responsibility is very connected to indirect communication. I don’t know how much you’ve heard before about “ask culture” versus “guess culture.”

SF: No, what is it? 

SLR: Some people’s families are taught that when you want something, you directly ask for it. Can you pick me up after school? Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t. I have this going on. You’ll have to ask somebody else to pick you up. But some families have more of a “guess” culture, where they’ll indirectly say things so that you can’t tell them no. An example in the collection is in “ARS POETICA WITH NEED AND WILD CATS” someone asks—are you cold? And that means “I would like you to turn up the thermostat for me.” So there’s this You confused with me. Guess what I want and need and provide it for me without me having to say what it is. I’m not asking requests that can get denied, I’m admitting the request, I’m emanating the request. And you should receive it. Yeah—so that’s sort of been my experience with the world, guessing what other people want and need. That definitely was at play in my family of origin. It has played out at work, it has played out in friendships—it’s a very exhausting way to be.

SF: Do you feel like that gestural sort of upbringing—then working through the way that’s harmed you—shifted your poetics? I’m thinking about the first draft of the book you mentioned, “say the thing without saying the thing,” to the way it exists now. 

SLR: I do. There’s this sort of this feedback loop where the epiphanies I have in my writing teach me how to live, which teach me how to have different epiphanies in my writing. Even the fact that the collection is very online, it’s sort of crass, it’s got these jokes in it—it’s not exactly announcing itself as a respectable poetry collection. And I definitely think that has been important for me as a person who has invested in feeling respectable, or at least not being a problem, not attracting the wrong kind of attention. The collection is able to exist in the world in the way that it does because of these insights, pushing me towards showing up in the world more the way that I want to. But I still think the collection is braver than I am. So it’s a process.

SF: That’s true for a lot of us, I think. Speaking of online, there are a lot of internet-isms and poems that are totally located in that online space. What is your relationship to being online—how does it affect your poetics and how you move in writing spaces?

SLR: I’m a very online person. I don’t post as much as I lurk, but it’s a way for me to be a fly on the wall. It’s sort of like the fantasy of being able to get inside people’s head. I love the rhythms of internet speech, but memes seep into the back of my mind—that rhythm or those word choices inform what I think is funny and what I think is profound. There’s a succinct way that the biggest tweets manage, like poetry, to compress really complicated ideas into just a few words, but in surprising combinations. Like, I think dril is a powerful poet. It’s like, I have all these different short, silly voices to draw on when I’m when I’m making my own work.

SF: I wanted to talk about Grey Gardens. It’s not something I’d watched, just heard of—I realized it was a documentary over the course of reading your book. I find the way you talk about it, especially in “Genre Study,” to be so compelling in considering genre—the way you position it as a fairy tale, then the repetition of fairy tales throughout the collection in other ways. Do you feel like there’s a relationship between poetry and documentary film? How do you feel those relationships function as you’re writing about a documentary?

SLR: I don’t know that I can speak to poetry versus documentary in general, but this particular documentary is interesting because it’s really just capturing without commentary. There’s no backstory, no pulling together any historical documents about the women. Well, the backstory is that these women are cousins of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. And at one point, their house was condemned because of how poorly they were taking care of it. It happened because Big Edie, the mom, got divorced and seemingly couldn’t accept reality and wanted to continue to live in a giant house—this was in a time before women could have their own bank accounts. So, her sons meted out money to her, but it wasn’t enough to pay to maintain the facility. So Edie, and her loyal daughter Edie, lived alone in this house. Couldn’t pay for a garbage pickup, couldn’t pay for landscaping, et cetera. So the Hamptons community got them in trouble. When you do see the documentary, and you see the squalor that they live in, you’ll have to know that this is after the house was already condemned and after it was already cleaned up. The Maysels went to film another cousin of Jackie, but discovered the Edies and were like, oh my God, no, this is the real story. They don’t give any context, they simply arrive at the space and film these women going about their day-to-day routines. I think there is something so poetic about that. You arrive in the middle of a sort of perplexing situation where you’re like Something more is going on here than I’m seeing. Why am I being shown this? That’s part of why I like the documentary so much. It doesn’t explain, it just presents. So, there’s all this room for me, the viewer, to insert my own perspective, the way poems allow for, like it’s a room you can step into. 

SF: I like that: “a room that you can step into.” You’ve spoken a little bit about your relationship to work as it ends up in your writing. We know each other firstly as editorial colleagues—in your poetry, where does that editorial instinct go?

SLR: Hmm. Yeah, it’s really hard for you to maintain the balance between editing other people’s work for pay so that I can live my life and include time for my own projects. Most of my writing time is not really writing: it’s walking my dog, it’s taking an iPhone note that I’ll think about for weeks or months. I really don’t have a lot of discipline when it comes to protecting my writing time. Parts of this collection were written around editorial work that I was doing. It was certainly easier when I was a new editorial assistant with a fantastic supervisor, Yuka Igarashi, who was very respectful about me as a human and an artist. That was such a gift. The nice thing about poems is they are so short and you can steal an afternoon and work on something for a couple of hours and then forget about it for a few weeks and come back to it with fresh eyes.

SF: Are there collections or other works that you consider mentor texts for Cosmic Tantrum?

Candace Wuehle’s collection, Death Industrial Complex, which is sort of a portrait of the photographer Francesca Woodman. It’s very spooky. It’s very occult. It’s definitely more lyric than narrative, which is not exactly my style. So it was something I wanted to lean towards. Carolyn Forché’s Blue Hour. Definitely a stylistic and energetic inspiration is Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. Victoria Chang is also an influence for me—Obit is not a direct influence, but there’s something I love about the facetious way she uses form, how she manages to often be funny in the midst of tragedy.

SF: References to the occult and spirituality occurs throughout the book. It’s fun to hear that some of that was inspired by the work you were engaging with while writing, but what’s your overall relationship to the spiritual, astrology, tarot? 

SLR: I love all that stuff. Tarot is a big thing for me. I took a six-month tarot immersion course almost 10 years ago now, in 2016, with Jeff Hinshaw. He ran this school called Brooklyn Fools Tarot. We spent each week in one of the cards the major arcana. We would live one week as The Fool and think—what sort of fool things are happening in my life this week? Tarot was a game changer for me, because not every card seemed like a good card. But you learn to see them as archetypes that you pass through. You know, maybe you’re in a The Tower moment, where everything’s crumbling, but you remember that after The Tower comes The Star, when you have relief. You can pour water on the parched earth. I liked being able to read for myself and pull cards that were like, what do I think of this experience, versus what is it actually about? Basically, creating an exercise for myself where I would think: what am I lying to myself about? How could I be more honest about my motivations in this situation? I think I love tarot as somebody who loves narratives.

SF: That kind of self-reflexive questioning, digging into honesty and vulnerability—how does that impact how you approach writing?

SLR: I’m not interested in writing that stays on the surface of a feeling. I want to know the yucky underbelly of why somebody’s doing something. I think tarot can offer in life, and in writing, a respite from the idea that we need to be good saintly people all the time. There are ways we sort of try to dodge our own pain, or make other people carry it for us. I think if we can be really honest about that, in writing, the way we can when we’re reading [tarot] for ourselves, it can inspire other people to take ownership of their own more destructive impulses, so that they can change them.

She Got the Money and I Did the Time

Posted on by Willem Marx

“One Thing About Blue” by Maureen O’Leary

One thing about Blue, she always had a scheme. The summer after high school I drove a van she got from her cousin who we just called Cousin. Blue got Cousin to take out seats and cut a hole in the floor so I could drive over the metal circle thing at gas stations. I drove and Cousin unscrewed the bolts to siphon diesel. We got the job done six times and Blue knew a guy who drove his own long-haul truck to sell gas to, so there was money to be made. That’s something Blue liked to say.

I was afraid of Cousin because he was big and grumpy, but he didn’t talk much. I wasn’t supposed to drive but Blue said I was smarter than people thought and taught me how, so I became our driver. Nobody suspected me bumping over the metal thing in the middle of the night except for the sleepy-looking man who worked at the 7-Eleven on Broadway in Tahoe Park. He called the police.

Me and Cousin served the time. Blue made the money. I went to County for eighteen months and that’s where I got caught in the middle of a bad fight one time and ended up with a ruined face.

Mr. Cox who was my teacher visited right before I got out. I looked messed up compared to before and his eyes wobbled when he first saw me. He had on a nice shirt and I bet his shoes were shined. Mr. Cox always dressed like he was headed somewhere better than room 32, which was where the special-ed kids learned. I felt sorry for him sitting there with a phone to his ear and his red face and his ironed shirt. He liked showing PowerPoints of his vacations. There was a picture of him and his wife at the Grand Canyon and he told us that every year somebody got too close to the edge and fell off because the canyon could hypnotize you if you weren’t careful. He also said he got to go to fun places because he worked hard. He said, I work hard and so should you.

He held the phone thing away like he was afraid his lips might touch the plastic. He asked me how I was.

My shirt was not ironed. My shirt was orange and white stripes and I would never enjoy a Creamsicle again in the summertime, I will tell you. The color orange made my teeth hurt forever after two years of that’s all I got to wear.

I said I was going home to my mom in Oak Park and he said he gave my name for a job cleaning classrooms at the charter high school there.

You can’t be haunted by the past, Georgia, he said, and wouldn’t look me too long in the face. He said the most important thing was hard work.

Cutting the circle hole in the bottom of the van was hard work. Sparks flew everywhere. Driving so the hole in the van matched the circle in the ground was hard work. But he didn’t need to know all that.

Mr. Cox told me to remember I had a disordered brain. Whenever I thought I found a shortcut, I had to remember it was going to be a disordered shortcut. Period.

Mr. Cox was a nice man. Not a creeper. Nice dresser. Worked hard. Always visited his former students when they were about to get out of jail.

My first night at the charter-school job, I didn’t recognize Blue. I went in to the office and there was a lady standing at the copier, the machine’s light going back and forth.

She collected the papers and smiled like she knew something about me. Her hair was blond and in a twist. She also smelled like a whole other person than last time I saw her at Cousin’s house in West Sac. Back then her perfume was diesel and french fry grease and her hair was black. Back then she wore Dickies and men’s undershirts and a ball cap from Mobil gas. This lady looked like the waitress in the steak restaurant my mom took me to after I got out to celebrate. But this was still Blue. Same face. I would know her no matter what.

I said, I didn’t know you worked here, and she smiled without showing any teeth and didn’t say anything about my face. She didn’t like her teeth because of the gap in the middle, though when we were kids I made her laugh so she couldn’t help showing the gap. I loved her teeth.

What I mean to say is I can only tell what happened the best I can, but do not think I will say a word against Blue.

I was supposed to empty trash and dry-mop the floors in the classrooms, yet Blue said no. She told Mr. Cox that there was an opening for a janitor so he would not ask questions, but there was more to the job. There was money to be made.

My neck got hot because I hated fighting with Blue. I wasn’t mad about my time inside. I made the choice to drive the van. She didn’t force me. I never wanted her to suffer same as me. But I didn’t want to do her schemes anymore either. I didn’t want to get in trouble ever again.

Then she proved herself by showing me the empty rooms with no desks, no garbage cans to dump out, nothing but shiny floors. In the office we ordered clothes for me off Amazon using the school’s account. Pencil skirts and high-heel shoes. Button shirts like a steakhouse waitress. Blue gave me an envelope of cash and told me I should deposit the money in a bank. She said I needed to be smart and put my pay in a checking account I could look at online.

Then we went to her apartment in Midtown and she cut off my split ends and dyed my hair blond same as her. After she rinsed out the bleach, she held my head and made me look at us in the mirror side by side, her jaw square and whole, the side of my face looking like I fell into a wall. When I tried to look down, she held me tighter and forced me to look.

You are beautiful, she said. You are smart.

Her long nails scraped the back of my head lightly when she used the blow dryer and her touch made me shiver and want to cry.

She said we had to change our names at the job. She was Bea Andersen. I was Jo Little. We used to call each other Bee and Geo, short for Blue and Georgia, when we were kids, so there would be no slipping.

We’re different people now, she said. So we must change our names at work.

Blue dropped me at home at midnight and my mom was waiting with the light on in her room. She worked at Costco and went to meetings four times a week so she got tired a lot. She called for me, lying on her side all tucked in.

She said I smelled funny. She asked who did that to my hair and I said Blue.

She sat up in bed. Please, Georgia, anybody but Blue. And she was crying. I patted her cheeks with my fingertips and I was sorry to make her cry. But Blue was a canyon I fell into just by standing near the edge. Explaining this would not be a comfort, so I said, I love you, Mom. I said, I promise I will stay free.

I went in a few more nights to dust-mop the already clean floors. I emptied the garbage in the office. The school was big and the classrooms were empty except one hallway had a few rooms with desks in rows, white boards, and signs on the walls saying Work Hard and No Excuses. The garbage cans never had trash. The boards never had writing.

Blue was a canyon I fell into just by standing near the edge.

On Friday, Blue gave me a bottle of Dior perfume and the clothes. She said she had an idea for us. Like she said, there was money. I would get paid way more but I could not tell anybody what we were doing. My ears got hot. I thought about my mom crying in bed. I wanted to go home.

The look on your face, Blue said. Girl. She put her arms around me and I was a baby bird made of light bones and skinny feathers. She was meaty. She smelled like particles and money. Her face was wet pressing against mine and the salt from her tears burned my skin.

Georgia, I owe you, Blue said. I will never hurt you again. Trust me.

I trust you, I said. But I didn’t.

I went to work at five o’clock the next day. I was Blue’s assistant and she didn’t want me to talk to anybody at the meeting. Me being her assistant made her seem like a boss and that was the important thing.

The lobby was big as a parking garage and there were three tables set up in a U around a screen. Blue was making the projector work with a clicker. You look good, she said. She sniffed me. Good perfume, she said. Not too much. Enough. You smell rich.

Her top was silky. Her nails were shiny as vanilla ice cream. She said to pretend to take notes. There was a man coming to the meeting. That is, there were many men coming to the meeting, but only one was important.

How would I know which one was important?

Blue said I would know.

The men were coming in. A wash of them in suits, ties, dress-up shoes that made noise on the concrete. This is the superintendent, Blue said. Mr. Lewis.

Mr. Lewis’s eyes were above me watching the door. This was not the important man. The important man was entering with a lady with short blond hair and a purple dress. Her heels clicked on the floor like Blue’s. Mr. Lewis greeted the important man who was tall and thin and wore a tie. He was dad age. Grandpa age. He moved like a dancer on television. He wasn’t dancing but he moved graceful. When the tall graceful man entered, the other men talked faster, their voices a hum of bees. I became dizzy.

Blue moved me to a seat by the short-hair lady. The important man shook hands with everybody. When he came to Blue, he leaned down to talk in her ear. I wondered what he said. His hand was on her back. She brought him to me.

I’m Jim Bell, he said. I shook his hand firm like my mom taught me. You must be Jo. Ms. Andersen speaks so highly of you.

That’s nice, I said.

The meeting started. Mr. Lewis was talking. The blond-hair lady whispered to me, Jim has a Purple Heart from Vietnam. He doesn’t like to talk about the war but I think people here should know. Jim is a hero.

Blue showed a video of kids in black polo shirts and tan pants walking into the school. In the lobby there were pictures of kids in black shirts sitting in front of computers and holding basketballs. I never saw these kids. These kids who made no mess, left no garbage, whose teachers never wrote on the whiteboards.

Mr. Lewis was saying the charter high school had the best graduation record for minority kids in the city. The kids in the video walked in slow motion across the lobby. I never saw their footprints when I swept at night.

We send more minority students to four-year colleges than any other school in Northern California. This was Blue now talking. The movie was over and there was a graph with a jagged line full of spikes and valleys. Mountains. Canyons.

The woman whispered next to my face, her breath minty fresh. She said, Jim is the kindest man I have ever known.

Blue said to come in the next day at four p.m. She said to sit at her desk and she would be back soon. I opened her laptop and researched Purple Heart. A medal for bravery. When Jim Bell told the meeting that he planned a substantial donation, the short-hair lady whispered to me, I told you so.

I researched Jim Bell. There was a Jim Bell who was a soccer player in England. The important Jim Bell was in charge of Bell Partners Developing.

A man came in looking mean, and when Mr. Lewis stepped out of his office the man asked where were the students and Mr. Lewis said to remember we were a year-round schedule and this was our fall break. They closed the door and there was stern talking. My head tingled like when people were fighting in jail. Something bad was happening and I was going to get stuck in the middle. I was going to get hit.

I was about to run out when Mr. Lewis banged the door open. He rushed me yelling questions.

What did you do with that permit? You said you filed the permit.

The man behind him shook his head like he couldn’t believe someone was as dumb as me. They were mad at me. My face bones hurt. I looked down at my hands.

Goddamnit, Ms. Andersen depended on you. I depended on you. This is unacceptable. There are legal repercussions to your mistake, Jo. We can only hope nothing comes of this. We can only pray to God that the city council decides to give us another chance. Do you know what you’ve done? Do you know?

I clutched my skirt to keep from shaking. I squeezed my eyes closed. The mad man left and nobody said goodbye. Mr. Lewis kept yelling at me. I saw purple hearts bursting.

Suddenly Mr. Lewis stopped yelling and I heard him step into the hall. I heard him go into his office again and close the door.

Blue came in carrying her purse and jacket. I’m fired now, I said. Maybe they will arrest me.

Blue said no and to get my stuff. We were going somewhere fun.

Normally I loved riding around in the front seat when Blue was driving. In high school she took me everywhere and we sang along to the radio. We drove over the Yolo Causeway sometimes because Blue liked to look at the owls that hid in the trees by a dirt road there. On the way back into Sacramento toward the tall buildings coming up out of the flat land, she liked to say that we were headed to the Emerald City, and whenever I was with Blue I could believe that we were.

In the car was where she explained things to me, such as who at school was nice and who was only pretending. Teachers to trust and teachers to avoid. But that night in the passenger seat of Blue’s car, the sun was setting and the sky was on pink fire and my stomach hurt from getting in trouble. My head hurt too and I said I felt like I was dying.

Oh baby bird, she said, I wish you didn’t feel that way.

She took me to Dutch Brothers for a blue drink, which made me feel better. Don’t spill, she said. After we drive, we are going to dinner with Jim.

We took a turn through the Delta by the river that was a broken mirror for the sky that held storm clouds purple as hearts.

This is haunted country, Blue said.

I shivered in the way only she could make me.

She explained things when we got back to town. We’re not supposed to have those kinds of meetings on public property, she said. Not without a permission slip.

I didn’t know, I said. I tried to remember a permission slip. My mom signed a permission slip for camp at Sly Park when I was in seventh grade. That was all I could think of.

There wasn’t one, Blue said. If we filed with the district, we would have had to say what the meeting was for and we can’t do that.

I didn’t know what she was talking about. The ice cubes rattled in my cup over a bump in the road. They sounded like cracked glass.

We pulled into a parking lot and went into a restaurant. White tablecloths. Candles. Blue said to the lady we were guests of Jim and she brought us to a table where Jim was. He shook my hand and kissed my cheek. I felt that kiss in my body, and even though he was as old as a grandpa, I wondered if he could like me.

Mr. Lewis sends his regrets, Blue said. You just have us tonight.

He told us he was delighted and that we should get what we wanted, and I looked at Blue, who laughed with her teeth out and said we would have steak and shrimp but first we needed red wine.

This is a good night, Jim said. The work you are doing with the charter is really something. You are changing the world. Gives me faith.

Blue touched his arm, her fingernails white beetles on his sleeve. She asked him if he knew how she met me. She said, I met Jo at the Sacramento Children’s Home. We were there together. Roommates. She laughed again.

I wiped my mouth. Ran my tongue over my teeth in case there was lettuce there from the salad. In our front room my mom kept a photo of me sleeping on a hospital bed, my bald head covered in a beanie and wires, tubes everywhere. To remind her to never drink again, she said. The red wine burned in my stomach, which was already having a rough day. Jim looked at me. I wondered, Why tell this to the important man? My mom got sent to jail after my brain was injured in her DUI. I didn’t like people knowing about me like that. I can hide better if people don’t know. I was wondering if maybe Jim could like me, but how could he like me now?

Blue touched my hand under the table where Jim couldn’t see. I studied hard and got into Berkeley, she said. I worked to pay my way through and I just want to pay that forward, you know? Give kids like me a chance.

My grandson just graduated from Berkeley, Jim said. I don’t suppose you would know him. It’s a big school. Franklin Bell?

Blue tapped her finger on her chin. She was thinking. Wait, she said. Alpha Delta Phi?

Jim smiled like he was the happiest man in the world.

Oh, he was way too cool for me, but I knew of him. Everyone knew of him. Great guy, Blue said. Really great guy.

He would be lucky to know you, Jim said. I don’t know what happened with your parents, but if you were my daughter, I would be very proud.

When Jim excused himself to the bathroom, I said to Blue, I didn’t know you went to Berkeley.

Oh Georgia, she said.

When he came back to the table, Jim wasn’t looking at me or caring anything about me. He was falling off the cliff of Blue. The air was filling his jacket. He was dropping through the sky.

When the bill came, Blue grabbed the leather folder thing. This is on me, she said. Your gift to the charter means the entire world to those kids. She blinked back tears, building diamonds on her mascara. I remembered Blue in a ball cap and undershirt in Cousin’s backyard off Jefferson Boulevard. We covered our ears as he cut a hole in the van big enough to siphon gas through. She taught me when there was money to be made.

She set her purse on the table and took out a pink wallet. My wallet. I looked down and there was my orange purse we bought on Amazon, open.

Jim tried to insist. Blue didn’t care. She signed my name on the bill. The money was everything in the account and more. I did not speak. I felt wind against my face. Jim’s blue eyes crinkled at the edges when he smiled at me. We were both lost. And yet me, the one with the injured brain, I was the only one who knew it.

When I got home, my mom called me from her bedroom but I stopped for a minute to look at the pictures on the shelf. The school photos of when I was little with no front teeth and then up to junior high. In seventh grade I had a big smile because I didn’t know what was going to happen.

There’s one picture of me and Mom in our backyard and we are happy. That was right after she got out of jail and before I got arrested. There were no pictures of me since being in County but I knew what I looked like. I was broken to pieces in a jail-yard fight and glued back together by a jail infirmary doctor. I had a crescent-moon scar under my eye, and my right cheekbone was sunk so far in my face was crooked.

Sometimes I looked at the girl in the seventh-grade picture who wasn’t in the car wreck yet. She didn’t have an injured brain yet. She never took a disordered shortcut. What happened to you, girl in seventh grade? She was off at Berkeley, working her way through.

Mom was looking at a show on her iPad with earbuds. She took one out for me so I could watch too. Her body smelled like cinnamon. I rested my head in the soft part of her shoulder and watched that show she was into about bikers with a tough mom who is in charge of everybody.

I worry about you, my mom said into my hair. I remembered that my bank account was empty and my stomach hurt. My mom would be so pissed if she knew. I didn’t know why Blue wanted me to pay, but I couldn’t be mad. She didn’t force me.

Blue didn’t tell Jim Bell everything. She didn’t tell about how after Sacramento Children’s we landed in the same group home on 59th Street with windows that had locks but no bars. She didn’t tell about the nights we ran through the park, playing on the swings and singing our favorite songs to the moon.

I’m proud of you getting a job, but Blue is rotten, Mom said. I don’t trust her.

I was so tired. My head was full of static. There were gunshots in my right ear from the show and gunshots in my left ear from down the street.

Blue is mine, I said. You can’t take her away.

There is one more part to the story. Blue wanted me in at two the next afternoon. I took a long time getting ready. I would be like the lady in my mom’s show who was so tough that no one would be mean to her. I would tell Blue to pay me back. No one would yell at me that day. No one would blame anything on me.

When I saw Jim Bell was in the office, I didn’t feel so tough anymore. He shook my hand and kissed me on the cheek. He asked me what was wrong. I touched my face and felt the hollow place where the doctors could not fix the tiny fractures in my cheekbone. The wetness on my skin.

You should be careful, I said.

He tilted his head. Blue came into the office then with Mr. Lewis and a boy in a black shirt and tan pants. My head felt sparkling. Something was strange. The boy seemed like someone I knew, but at the same time I did not know him.

This is Nathan, Blue said. He is our student body president.

Jim shook his hand but did not kiss him on the cheek.

We are on a year-round schedule, Mr. Lewis said to Jim Bell. Which means we are on break right now. But I wanted you to get a chance to talk to a student. Get a tour from a young person you are allowing to get a college preparatory education.

The way Mr. Lewis talked made me think of choking. He made me think of drinking sand.

Nathan led Jim Bell on a tour. Mr. Lewis walked alongside with his hands clasped behind his back like he was out for a stroll.

We were going to the rooms with desks.

This is where I take AP calculus, Nathan said.

With enough community support, we could serve every underprivileged student in the city, Mr. Lewis said.

Nathan was applying to MIT. He wanted to study chemical engineering.

Jim looked at his watch and said, I’m proud of you, son. He patted Nathan’s shoulder. I was jealous of Nathan. What would make Jim say he was proud of me?

When Jim left, Mr. Lewis walked off and Nathan, Blue, and I were alone.

Hey, Georgia, Nathan said. He had a sideways smile I swear I knew before.

Hey, I said. Pretending like I knew what was going on. I knew how to pretend.

I could pretend all day.

It’s Nate, Blue said. Don’t you remember him?

Think of me short, he said. Think of me following you guys around and begging you to play with me.

He was Nate from the home. Ten years later. Warm honey flowed through my chest whenever I remembered things I wanted to remember. It was a sweet feeling. A coming-home feeling.

You go here now? I asked.

Warm honey flowed through my chest whenever I remembered things I wanted to remember. It was a sweet feeling. A coming-home feeling.

Blue and he laughed. I’m here now, he said.

Blue wanted to show us something. We went outside to one of the older buildings, one that was round and full of windows. There was a giant stage and red-velvet seats and a balcony. I tried to picture the whole room filled with students and that just made the empty space feel lonely. Behind the curtains Blue flipped a switch for the lights.

We climbed stairs to a room of dusty couches and a window overlooking the stage. There were tools left behind. A screwdriver. A hammer.

Nate said, This place is haunted. I would not come here at night.

Would you for a thousand dollars? Blue asked. She sounded far away. She put her fingers on the window.

No way, said Nate.

Would you for a million? Blue tapped on the glass.

Nate pulled his shirt out of his waistband and said for a million he would. He cracked his knuckles. Blue took the hammer off the ground and smashed the glass. We watched the pieces fall to the stage below and catch the lights like stars.

In the office, Blue wanted my bank password and username.

I didn’t say anything.

Then she said, So I can pay you back. You didn’t think I was going to pay you back?

Blue taught me how to drive a stick shift. She taught me how to rig a locked window so I could escape at night and climb back in when I wanted. She taught me that the Yum Yum Donuts on Franklin Boulevard put out free donuts by their dumpsters at night. She taught me not to take pills at parties and to protect my drinks and she taught me that somebody cared about me.

Blue hugged me tight. After I got home, I looked into my bank account and there was still minus seventeen dollars and twenty-four cents.

When I went to work the next day, the door was locked. I texted Blue and got a red Not Delivered message. Maybe we were having a day off and nobody told me. My heart was beating fast when I walked home. I had a bad feeling.

That night, Blue tapped on my window. She crawled through and landed on my bed. Her ponytail was black through the back of her ball cap.

She told me I needed to listen. You are beautiful, she said. You are the most beautiful one who ever lived. Please don’t forget that. Please don’t forget me.

I never could, I said. Don’t you know that? You are my best friend.

I was going to just leave and not tell you, she said. I thought that might be better for you. But I couldn’t help myself. I had to see you.

She would not tell me where she was going. She warned me to never go back to the charter high school. She told me never to try to find her. She told me never to talk to Jim. If I saw him in the street or whatever, I needed to pretend I didn’t see him. I needed to pretend I didn’t know him.

Dye your hair back to brown, she said.

She hugged me so close she hurt my ribs. My mom called through the wall.

I’m sorry you went to jail, Blue said. It was my fault what happened to you. She put her hand on my face. She patted my messed-up cheek with soft fingers.

I love you, Georgia, she said. Don’t forget me, she said, and she was gone.

Mr. Lewis is superintendent someplace else now. The charter school has somebody else in charge. Sometimes I see kids around my neighborhood in black shirts and tan pants and I wonder if they are the kids I never saw in the school. I dreamed I saw Jim Bell. I’m proud of you, he said in my dream. He shook my hand and kissed me on the cheek. I know this will never happen. I don’t go the same places Jim Bell goes.

A man came to our house because Jim Bell hired him to find me, which he did through the bank card Blue used to pay for dinner. The man knew about me. Knew about my mom and my brain injury and that I was hurt in County. He wasn’t a mean man. He wasn’t mad at me. He just had questions.

Do you know where the other woman is? Jim says she went by Bea Andersen. I’m not law enforcement. I just want to talk to her. Jim Bell wants to get some answers. He deserves that, I think. Don’t you think he deserves that? The man won a Purple Heart. He thought he was giving money so kids could learn, and instead this woman embezzled the funds. That means she took the money for herself. You’re not in trouble. You’re as much a victim as he is—that’s what Jim says, and I agree.

I said, Please tell Jim I am sorry. I literally don’t know.

He left a card. Sergio Castillo. Private Investigator. I was glad my mom wasn’t home. He never came over again.

One more thing happened.

A year later on a full moon, Cousin who got arrested same as me came to the gym where I work. I give out towels at the desk and keep things nice. My hands smell like cleaner a lot but I like the job. I go by my own name. Coach Carl who owns the gym is nice to me. No one ever yells at me.

Blue’s cousin waited by my car after I closed up because he said he wanted to show me something. I went into his van and I saw there was a circle cut out of the floor. Our van from before had been confiscated by the police. This was another van.

I almost said, No thank you, but he told me not to worry. We drove down Highway 99 past Elk Grove and then took an exit past Lodi and went until we hit the river and took that snaky road for over an hour.

I asked if we were going to see Blue. I missed my friend. I wanted her to know that I wasn’t mad about her using my bank card to pay for the fancy dinner. I made that five hundred dollars back and more. I worked a lot. My mom wanted me to save up for school but I didn’t want to go.

Cousin didn’t answer me. We went on a dirt road.

My shoulders got cold. Cousin was never really mean to me, but this wasn’t right. I looked at my phone. No signal.

I thought about jumping out while we were moving, but what if I broke my legs? Then Cousin slowed down. Stopped. Looked at his phone. Backed up some. Killed the engine and the lights.

The moon was bright enough to see by. We parked at the edge of a field under a big oak with branches like knuckles. This is it, Cousin said. I ducked because I thought I was going to get hit. He ignored me and went to the back like in the old days. But instead of a bolt tool, he had a posthole digger. He put on a headlamp and pushed the digger into the soft ground, pulling up soil and grass. After a couple clods thrown out the back door, he clanged on metal. He got on his stomach and pulled a box out of the hole.

One thing about Blue, Cousin said. She always tries to make things right.

He put the muddy metal box on my lap. It was a safe with a combination lock.

She called me last night telling where to find it, he said. Half for you, half for me.

I wanted to know how much.

He would not answer but he said that Blue said that I was smart enough to be careful with this amount of money. I couldn’t buy a Lamborghini. Nothing flashy that police would notice.

I said okay.

You can’t deposit this amount in a regular bank account, he said. The IRS will want to know where the money came from. The police will want to know. Do you hear what I’m saying?

I said I did.

He turned on the radio. Hummed along. More relaxed now. Happy. She told me you’re smart, he said. I guess we both are.

We hit the road that snaked along the river, taking the Delta way back to Sac. The moon played around on the surface of the water and I thought, This place is haunted.

I thought, This place is free.

8 Very Funny (and Serious) Books of Poetry 

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I made a list of funny poetry books for you. 

Must be a short list. 

I get it—you hear “funny poem” and think, “There was an old man from Nantucket….” Or what you like about poetry—the slanting sunlight of the noble stance, perched on a crag; the melancholy swoon for the absent beloved—are the serious feelings. Poetry, after all, is serious business. 

But poetry is an impertinent concoction of registers, references and intentions, providing a variety of pleasures, including giggles, chuckles, and/or yucks. The books on this list, then, discuss serious matters in funny ways, or they take the human comedy seriously. Some of these books helped me evaluate my own poems—my own stance in regard to various impulses to write—when I was working on The Coronation of the Ghost. 

Now, the kind of laugh a funny line of poetry gets can sound like a huff or nothing at all. But there are similarities between the comedian and the poet that go deeper than sharing basement stages. We share rhetorical devices: understatement, overstatement, and misdirection, to name three. Some of us make fun of ourselves. And we have filthy mouths. Like the comic working with rhythm, time limits, expectations, poets also work inside and push against forms, whether or not that form is imposed from without (sonnet, ghazal) or arises from the possibilities and customs of the language (free verse). 

And we also push against the received ideas of the art and of the moment. One way to reframe expectations is to rebuild them from the inside. I play with the sonnet in The Coronation of the Ghost, a form that others have painted over with love and argument, raided for parts, abandoned in all but the name, and even restored for historical accuracy. The funny in the poetry on this list helped me pump weird gasses into the rebuilt room and also move walls. Other poems in these books helped me move on up from the self-aggrandizing melancholy pup tent to more delightful abodes. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to give up brooding on the heath; there are melancholy passages in Coronation: as the title suggests, I was feeling belated, all of us the late us, and one speaker crowns herself for it, but that happens at the top of a see-saw. I think I overbalanced my despair, tipping the scales to delight, ending the book with a dram of hope. And if so, some of these books by funny people helped me do it. 

Yeah, No by Jordan Davis

“Baffle baffle baffle disclose / … baffle disclose / …Baffle. Baffle.” That’s the final stanza in the title sequence of Davis’s previous book, Shell Game, and I read it as not just an ars poetica for the sequence but for the tricky camaraderie with which many of Davis’s poems meet us on the street. That the explanation of what he’s up to comes after pages of verbal sleight of hand is one of the ingredients in Davis’s sense of humor. In his new book, Yeah, No, he writes emotion with Classical distance and wit, the sentiment arriving, for instance, as we run through the baffles of enjambment in “Cassiopeia”:

…so far

the five stars

haven’t left

their omega,

Anna,

in bed

with a flower,

a pink

zinnia.

Why are the stars devoted to Anna, who is in bed with someone else, a pink zinnia? I especially like the gesture at an abecedarian poem—prepped with “omega” and delivered by pointing from “Anna” to “zinnia”—and we’re freed from having to read an entire abecedarian.

Davis has said that he likes his poetry to be flexible and irascible, with a bite. Sometimes in Yeah, No the irascibility is pronounced: Davis has some lessons to impart because “…if / dignity means a lot to me so does linguistics.” But Davis knows that dignity can maintain itself while being silly, as in this couplet that possibly suggests a glum moment at the breakfast table:

Corn cakes,

why do you make me sad?

Elsewhere (two pages earlier) he signals his astringent intentions with “Bad Poem”:

Put that rock down

Davis warns his impulse to throw poetry rocks that it mustn’t, but what would the bad poem throw stones at? (It might eat the stone, i.e., the reader might.) At the same time, he warns us: one of these poems might not put down that rock—that criticism or insult—but just might go ahead and throw it. I say, throw the rock, read the book!

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen 

The speaker in these poems admires the mango. The book begins with the prefatory “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential,” in which the speaker dreams “of one day being as fearless as a mango.” This odd claim for the tropical fruit comes to make sense as the themes are developed, and while those are serious ones—being distasteful to one’s mother and feeling inadequate for that and for the culture’s rejection of queer people—the arc of the sorrow bends toward comedy:

…[my mother’s] grandchildren ready to gobble. 

They will be better than mangoes, my brothers. 

Though I have trouble imagining what that could be. 

Flying mangoes, perhaps…Beautiful sons. 

The intention to find silliness in the midst of pain characterizes the collection. Confronting his sadness, for instance, the speaker wonders if anyone could explain it to him: 

Maybe the centipede in the cellar 

knows with its many disgusting legs 

why I am sad. No one else does. 

No explanation is found, but when 

…my host sister 

…said, SOIS HEREUX. 

BE HAPPY…miraculously, 

I wasn’t sad anymore. 

All I felt was the desire to slap my host sister. 

Joker, Joker, Deuce by Paul Beatty 

Beatty became famous as a fearless satirist when his novel The Sellout won the National Book Critics Circle Award and then the Booker, but about fifteen years earlier he had received accolades for his poetry at the Nuyorican Poets Café, where he was named the Grand Poetry Slam Champion. In Joker, Joker, Deuce, his second book of poems, he tells us the stories of his coming up, making fun of himself (“im gonna be / the bulimic bohemian // eatin up my people / then purgin their regurgitated words”) and everyone else in order to present the depredations of racism. After a vivid description of the messed up feet “my soul is rested on,” for instance, he says, “dont nobody appreciate feet / like [blacks] do” and then tells an anecdote about falling in love with his teacher’s feet in second grade and dropping his pencil a lot so that he could look at them. As their origins at the Nuyorican suggest, these poems ask to be read aloud — they give the mouth a workout and jump and slalom down the page. 

I Am Your Slave. Now Do As I Say by Anthony Madrid 

JAM me in hot hell. Make me drive a street-cleaning truck 

in the folds of the Devil’s anus, but don’t make me read all this Irish poetry. 

All right, these lines made me laugh out loud. I think Madrid, the poet (“Madrid” is also a character in the poems), loves many Irish poems, including, I bet, the peat bog poems of Heaney to which the next lines allude. Or maybe the dislike is sincere. Regardless, this one’s also funny for its hypocrisy, which we get because earlier “Madrid” says he “…scissored out all the distichs [he] judged obscene.” Like outrageousness, misdirection is a tactic Madrid shares with the stand-up comic:

We 

Split open the Big Bad Wolf… 

The girl who stepped out from that chassis was not | the same as the one who went in. This new one got into Northwestern and majored in International Finance… 

…Uppity little MacGuffin. You 

Control the minds of the nation’s youth… 

These bits should give you a sense of the field in which the Madrid circus performs, where erudition, persnicketiness, amorous flights, silliness, grandstanding, prayerful ejaculation, smut make a spectacle that will recalibrate your meter. 

What It Is Like by Charles North 

Although “A Note to Tony Towle (After WS),” a send-up of Stevens’ “Snow-Man,” heads toward critique (“deracination is fast qualifying as essence”), it makes darkly funny stops along the way, such as, “not to wake up and feel the morning air as a collaborator / thrown from some bluer and more intelligent planet.” And North melts the Stevensian frost by tap-dancing in the vaudevillian’s oversized shoes: “One must have breakfasted often on automobile primer /…and have read Paradise Lost aloud many times in a Yiddish accent…” (Try this! It’s weird.) Sure, the vaudevillian, like the tramp of silent film, is standing in a puddle, but there are poems in the book that are primarily funny, such as “The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight,” which compares the beloved in a number of let me count the unflattering ways: 

More reliable than bail-jumpers 

Defter than those who are all thumbs 

…You are faster than tortoises 

Tighter than muumuus 

…Hotter than meat-lockers are you… 

Philosophical, smitten, absurd—North packs a lot of stances into his poems, and although What It Is Like offers a varied, erudite experience, North’s sense of humor runs through his observations and his fine music. 

Poemland by Chelsey Minnis 

I wish I had invented the Minnis form. I wish I had thought up the Minnis voice, but there was no chance of that. In Poemland, Minnis writes a kind of femme absurd in stanzas of widely spaced four to six lines that peter out. A tipsy, wordly, girly persona speaks from these poems, and I hope you will read that gendered description as feminist; it might help to know that Minnis was included in the anthology Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics, described by its editors as using “gender stereotypes to subversive ends.” In that persona I hear a little Lucille Ball, if Ball had spilled eros on her goofiness, a little Mae West if West had attended a women’s college:

I like a man in a fur coat…especially a man with very little self-discipline… 

…He is just a little tramp… 

The subject of the statements is often poetry itself, which is a great way for Minnis to evoke situations without belaboring the point: 

In a poem… 

You have to make a charitable sentiment… 

…I like it to be very obscenely old fashioned like an old fashioned stripper… 

And: 

This is when you throw your shoe at the door… 

And it is like moving the old man’s hand to your knee… 

And it is like poking someone with their own crutch… 

Your behavior does not please god but it pleases yourself… 

I like reading around in the book. The reiteration of a small number of themes invites flipping back and forth, searching for the jokes and thrown to the mat tropes that please you. 

The Orange and Other Poems by Wendy Cope 

Cope can be downright silly, as in “Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis” (although there may be more than silliness at play here that readers in the know would know): 

It was a dream I had last week 

And some sort of record seemed vital. 

I knew it wouldn’t be much of a poem 

But I love the title. 

In general, Cope handles keen observations about gender roles and relations, as well as occasions for delight and love, in neat, rhymed packages, using both the concision and the rhyme to comic and pathetic effect. She also uses it to skewer, or corkscrew, stereotypes, as in “Loss.” 

The day he moved out was terrible— 

That evening she went through hell. 

His absence wasn’t a problem 

But the corkscrew had gone as well. 

Mourning the impossibility of having a drink rather than the end of the relationship is a move that Dorothy Parker would approve. That said, Cope doesn’t sound as if she’d feel at home at the Algonquin. But you can decide, for she herself reads the audiobook. Her careful inflections together with her British accent bring us the droll, nimble music of her thinking.

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty by Tony Hoagland 

The satirical title should signal a poet whose medium is irony. Hoagland can write about a lovely romantic moment, but he’s going to approach it at an angle, as in “Romantic Moment,” which discusses the mating habits of other species: 

…And if she was a Brazilian leopard frog she would wrap her impressive 

tongue three times around my right thigh and 

pummel me lightly against the surface of our pond 

and I would know her feelings were sincere. 

Hoagland handles societal problems with a storyteller’s gift for jawin’ and feel for the trajectory of the plot, charming specificity, anger that, we understand, is directed at himself as well as the situation, and comic flourishes. In a poem concerned with race in America, for instance, he describes the American brand of whiteness as enfeebled, “…the way that skim milk can barely / remember the cow.” Rereading Hoagland, I wonder if unconsciously I lifted the description of trees as arthritic, which I use in the first poem of The Coronation of the Ghost. I don’t have to wonder but remember that I turned to Hoagland in the past, as I do now, for his strength in sharing weaknesses and mistakes and for being just damn funny.