Hail Oblivion! The Apocalypse Book that Wasn’t

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According to the mighty gods of Wikipedia, Novi Sad is an old, Serbian port-town that is located squarely on the banks of the Danube River. It was once an epicenter of culture, which earned it the nickname the Serbian Athens. How relevant or revelatory any of that information may be is up for considerable debate. That is to say, it’s pretty unclear (highly unlikely?) if the eastern European city of Novi Sad is the actual setting for Jeff Jackson’s phenomenal follow up and, in some ways, companion piece to 2013’s Mira Corpora. But that initial uncertainty and questioning of reality is important, if not integral to the world that Jackson is culling to the surface.

“Jackson paints a vivid and immersive portrait of a world on the brink.”

Novi Sad continues in much of the same tradition of Mira Corpora and Jackson’s short story, The Dying of the Deads (whose setting, Monrovia, is another real city in Liberia, though certainly not the setting for that piece). In many respects, all these pieces are cleaved from the same dark crystal and woven from the same dreamcloak.

The backdrop for Novi Sad is the end times, although the year is a bit vague. There is no evidence of the internet or cell phone or any of the culture of those devices and the world seems to have returned to a more primal state.

The ensuing Armageddon seems difficult to cope with for everyone except our main character, Jeff, who seems to have been on the run since he was a kid and, therefore, whose life was almost certainly already in a constant state of upheaval.

Of the group of scrappy survivors he has found himself with by untold means, we know that he has been alone and homeless long enough to see through the politics and semantics of group leader, Hank’s, diatribes of survival. The reader can almost sense that perhaps Jeff is using the group for refuge and doesn’t buy into the ideology.

Jackson paints a vivid and immersive portrait of a world on the brink, or over the brink, or so similar to our own that we must use words like that to distance ourselves from it. This is a world where “even the feral kids have famished from the streets, replaced by dogs prowling in loose packs, scrounging for half-digested scraps.”

Make no mistake, Jackson is showing us the Future of Now. He is gazing, as Ballard did, five minutes into the future to show us a world where the news grows increasingly bizarre with each passing day, where world leaders’ hunch in underground bunkers and bankers perch on window ledges as they cling to money. In short, he is showing us our future.

Jeff and his band of survivors aim to seal themselves off from this fucked world by making an abandoned hotel their shelter. They toast to the end times, “Hail Oblivion!” — and are then left to wait, something they are perhaps less than prepared for. They drink, they watch television, they take drugs, they play stupid games. They are us. We are them.

Jackson’s background as a playwright is ever-present in the book, in Hank’s grand language and gesturing, in the surreal and grand bombed-out setting of the abandoned hotel, in the arrangement of portable generators and gas cans gathered in the courtyard. This is particularly impressive considering the world of Novi Sad is almost entirely insular; whether it is within the hotel or the perspective of Jeff, who views conversation as “a sub-species of misunderstanding”. In many ways, the walls of Jeff’s body are akin to the walls of the hotel, both a protective and safe refuge from the world outside.

Like most good stories about a group of people who follow a charismatic leader, there is an inevitable mutiny. This one, however, is interrupted by the cataclysmic disaster they have all been waiting for.

Jackson’s end of the world is much like Eliot’s –there is no bang. In Jackson’s words, it ends mid-sentence. It leaves us feeling unsatisfied and without the cathartic bloodletting we’ve been taught to expect and, as a result, it makes me wonder, are we living through the end days now? If our world was ending, would we even know it? Would we even notice?

Part two begins with our crew looking for Hank. The world has come and gone but not much seems to have changed for our characters, save for the loss of their leader.

Their days mostly rotate around trips to the pier where the fishermen use their nets to bring in stray bodies from the river instead of fish or crabs. Jeff and his cohorts hope to see Hank’s body pulled up as some sort of closure so they can all move on. But that citing never comes.

Part two is intentionally aimless. The world has ended, but how can one look at it with anything other than a sort of indifference since our characters have survived? I suppose whether it is indifference or a defiance to move on is unclear, but to our characters that still live in the hotel and desperately are waiting for the return of a leader who will never come, what’s the difference?

With Hank gone, they must find strength inward; something not all the characters are particularly good at. One finally leaves the hotel after his idea to burn it down was met with laughter. Jeff tells us that in hindsight, he didn’t think the idea was all that crazy; he was just too preoccupied with some vague notion of loyalty to someone or something that he couldn’t quite place.

In short, this aimless afterworld leaves our characters desperate and lost. Without an apocalypse to prepare for or a leader to guide them, they seem unsure how to grapple with being survivors.

Part three flashes forward. Jeff is now alone in the hotel, his friends all gone- some dead, some split. Jeff is hanging up the clothes of his lost friends on the clothesline of the roof and allows the wind to fill their shape. At first he tells us he does it as a signal, but quickly he and the reader understand the ritual resembles more of a séance than a signpost, as it appears to be some desperate or sad attempt to conjure the presence of his lost friends.

The sadness and beauty of this moment hangs for just a second before Jeff quickly finds himself caught up in a proverbial comedy of errors. When Hank’s old flame shows up drugged out of her mind and mistakes Jeff for Hank, he plays along. Jeff isn’t even aware he is dressed in Hanks clothes and the ease with which he plays along becomes a fascinating and telling trait about the character from whose perspective we get much of the book.

“Make no mistake, Jackson is showing us the Future of Now.”

What seems to start out as playful soon escalates when Jeff follows the girl to a party on the other side of town. He gets his ass kicked but still manages to go back home with the girl, despite the array of pills they have each taken. Soon he realizes he cannot sustain the charade and leaves. He is not Hank and he could never be, and the revelations that have led to that understanding cannot be changed.

The appendix is truly fascinating and one of my favorite parts of the book. Jeff addresses the reader directly and describes photographs of the motley crew we have come to know; only the photographs are all blacked out. it’s a brilliant and beautiful section because each photograph tell us something about the character, how they are posing, where the photo was taken, but instead of showing it to us, Jeff, the character for whom language often seems to fall short, explains it to us.

The entire book is brilliantly illustrated by artist and Kiddiepunk founder, Michael Salerno. The images are hauntingly beautiful — decaying buildings, teenagers with their eyes scratched out. Packaged together, this book acts as a sort of found object that is so cohesive and singular that at times it almost appears to be breathing.

Like all of Jackson’s work, Novi Sad is a truly singular and profound experience. It firmly roots you in the familiar while simultaneously transporting you to a soft, light-blue dream space. Much like the work of Lynch or even Harmony Korine, Jackson’s world is one that, despite all logic, you know must be true, not because it looks true, but because it feels true.

Jane Alison on Desire, Ovid & Miami Beach

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The back-cover copy of Jane Alison’s Nine Island (Catapult, 2016) identifies it as “an intimate autobiographical novel,” which seems both exactly right and entirely inadequate. The book — which tells the tale of a recently-divorced translator of Latin who’s reassessing her life from the vantage of a high-rise apartment in the Venetian Islands of Biscayne Bay — is as candid, contemplative, hilarious, and affecting as that description would lead one to hope. It’s also quite a bit stranger than one might expect, in the best possible sense: allusive and elusive, it conflates its narrator’s restless mind and its louche, peculiar setting to produce an effect that’s vibrant, slippery, erotically charged, and slightly menacing.

Born in Australia, raised in the United States and elsewhere, Jane is the author of three previous novels and a memoir about her complex upbringing, as well as the compiler and translator of Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid. (Here I should mention that Jane was also my MFA thesis advisor at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina.) She was kind enough to avail herself of the wi-fi on a northbound Amtrak train to answer my questions about process, influences, classical studies, rock music, and a certain punctuation mark perhaps best left to experts.

Martin Seay: Although new fans will have no trouble enjoying it on its own, Nine Island is a particular treat for those of us who are familiar with your earlier books, in that it draws together a number of elements that appear in them. Its autobiographical content, for instance, recalls your memoir The Sisters Antipodes. The concern with human responsibility toward a fragile natural world that’s so central to Natives and Exotics has a supporting role here. Even the book’s narrative circumstances — a play of conflicting desires set against the tropical backdrop of Miami Beach’s Venetian Islands — bring to mind the (Italian) Venetian episodes of The Marriage of the Sea. And then of course there’s Ovid, about whom more later. In a novel that’s (at least in part) about a writer taking stock of her circumstances, these intertextual backward looks seem entirely fitting, but they got me wondering: where did Nine Island begin? The finished book can be characterized as many things; which one was it first?

Jane Alison: It began five years ago in a moment of fantasy-while-walking. I was walking the Venetian Islands one evening, thinking of Ovid (whose sexual stories I was translating), when I passed a modernist bungalow I coveted that had been empty and for sale for several years, and thought about the hundreds of times I used to walk by the house or the dorm room of a boy or man I craved, and suddenly, just as I passed the empty house, a tall, striking man appeared in the doorway. This created an instant Vox-esque fantasy: me, the man, a flirty exchanging involving “woman” in different languages, me stepping into the house, door shutting, ah. I actually stood still on the road, seeing a novel open up before me. Something about a woman who walks and fantasizes, a woman involved only with old men, dead men, far men, gone men, and the ultimate old dead far man, Ovid. It took another year or two for the other parts of the novel to appear, though, the more substantive parts about women’s bodies + desire + time, something I tried to work out through the figure of the hourglass pool that the narrator swims in every morning.

MS: Nine Island is a work of fiction, but (as I mentioned above) much of it is obviously autobiographical, and it doesn’t drop a ton of hints about exactly where reminiscence and confession are supplanted by pure invention. (In fact, it employs some classic anonymity-granting devices — e.g. the naming of several characters, including the narrator J, by their first initials only, as well as the use of evocative nicknames for the men in J’s life — that bolster the impression that what we’re reading is more reported than invented.) While I will not ask how factual Nine Island actually is — as doing so seems unsporting and obtuse — I am curious about how you came to conceive of it as fiction, and how you wrote it to operate as such.

Or, to approach this another way: I recently came across Deborah Eisenberg’s review of the reissue of Magda Szabó’s The Door, a novel that’s narrated by what seems to be a minimally-fictionalized version of Szabó herself. Eisenberg writes that despite its autobiographical content, The Door is “unmistakably a work of fiction, with fiction’s allusive and ambiguous purposes and effects;” I thought that was nicely put, and probably applicable to Nine Island as well. Are there aspects of it that you consider essentially fictional?

JA: Deborah Eisenberg has put that beautifully (and The Door is a wonderful novel). I’m one of many writers hoping that soon an era will dawn in which literature will either drop the current names for itself or find the right ones (see Geoff Dyer’s essay in the Guardian). Fiction = name for content; nonfiction = name for what it is not; poetry = name for form. Not Linnean distinctions. I will be in a bind now trying to say what is essentially fictional about Nine Island, having thrown out those names; I made a stab at conflating the categories by calling the book a “nonfiction novel.” But how about this: its fictionality or “made-up-ness” lies more in form than content, with willful mixing of Ovidian re-makes, faux-chemical equations, bits of pure brain-junk like counting . . . Yet similar or more extravagant moves happen in Bruce Chatwin’s books or Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family or Anne Carson’s NOX or Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts, which are more likely to be called “nonfiction” — so, sorry, it looks like I can’t say what is essentially fictional here . . . A certain freedom might be part of it, going back to Eisenberg’s “allusive and ambiguous purposes and effects.” A verbal gesture can be made to set the mind making associations, wheeling into the sky. But in any case: fiction comes from Latin fingere: to touch, handle, stroke; to form, fashion, frame, shape, mould, model, make. In all of these senses is the notion of material being handled, something that already exists, whether it’s wax or clay or memory or life being lived or thought about right now.

MS: I’m surprisingly satisfied by that answer! The book’s maneuvers in the space between confession and invention are also in keeping with a major element of the plot: J is a translator working on tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Nine Island itself seems artfully suspended at the midpoint of metamorphosis from lived experience into fiction. While I think a concern with myth — and more generally with transformations and enchantments of various sorts — is evident in just about all of your work, it’s worth noting that your engagement with Ovid has been particularly longstanding. In Nine Island, J associates her youthful discovery of Ovid with the beginning of her romantic life and its attendant complications; his works become a lens through which she interprets the novel’s events. Your writing in Change Me and The Sisters Antipodes suggests that this is drawn directly from your own experience.

Rather than having you paraphrase material that’s rendered so vividly in the novel, I’d like to go a different direction and ask you to talk about Ovid as an influence on your life as a writer. Do you feel that reading his work affected your decision to begin writing fiction? A more general question: your undergraduate academic background is in classical studies, and I recall you making the case for classics as being competitive with (or superior to!) the ubiquitous English-lit degree as academic preparation for creative writers. Do you mind revisiting that subject here, with particular reference to your own work?

JA: Actually, reading Ovid at nineteen sent me straight to drawing. I didn’t think of writing fiction for almost a decade after first reading Ovid, and it happened only then because I was trying to illustrate Apuleius’ story of Amor and Psyche and decided to rewrite it; from then on I stopped drawing and wrote. But two immediate points re classics: in my grad seminar at UVA now we’re looking at excursions in narrative, in particular at texts that resist the “dramatic arc.” First we looked at the king of dramatic arcs, Oedipus, and really appreciated its stern form. Then we found so many other things to take from it beyond the dramatic arc: the super-compressed timeline and space, for instance; shifts among speeds even in a purely spoken — not narrated — work; perforations in space via dialogue; countless new possibilities for a “chorus;” etc. And on Ovid: aside from the perfection and strangeness and truth of his stories in Metamorphoses, one of the ruling sensations in reading that book is the tension between stasis and change. Narrative exists in the flux between them, which he not only shows hundreds of times but makes the very subject of his great work.

(Have attached an Ovid drawing from those days, gruesome and youthful as it is. Wish I still had a copy of the Nassau Lit that published it and a few others, because one was printed back-to-back with a poem by David Duchovny.)

MS: While Ovid is the writer whom you’ve most obviously invited to join you in the pages of Nine Island, I also kept imagining the novel exchanging knowing winks with a few works from eras nearer to our own: Renata Adler’s Speedboat in its anxious humor; Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red in its fresh and elegant use of myth. About a third of the way in — as I took note of the tropical setting, the proliferation of sinister and conspiring characters, and the persistent atmosphere of deferred eroticism and sexual menace — it occurred to me that I might be reading a rather ingenious riff on a gothic novel, with an aging Miami high-rise standing in for a crumbling castle in the Pyrenees and the figure of the ingénue supplanted by that of a woman in middle age. Were there other works or other writers that were helpful inspirations or navigational aids as you were composing Nine Island?

JA: Yes, to Speedboat, although even more to Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever and Marie Redonnet’s Hôtel Splendid. Also, yes to various works by Anne Carson (who first taught me Ovid), including The Beauty of the Husband and Eros the Bittersweet. But nothing gothic, I think . . . Much as I’d like to claim that piece of ingeniousness, I think it’s yours. A starting point was William Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and, through it, “Sailing to Byzantium.” Also favorites like David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress and Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus, and hard not to have Jean Rhys in mind, or Edna O’Brien, or, in a very different way, Nicholson Baker — the fantasies and madcap parsings. Plus some rock-and-rollers like Chrissie Hynde, Marianne Faithfull, the Clash, Iggy Pop (“Platonic”). I was thinking of paintings, too, Annunciations and repentant Magdalenes especially.

(Actually, Hôtel Splendid might be your riff on a gothic novel.)

MS: I don’t know Hôtel Splendid; I’ll check it out. But, wait, rewind: how in the hell did I not know that you studied with Anne Carson at Princeton? This seems like a significant lapse on my part (and also like information that it’s possible to make too much of, so I’ll fight that urge) but it also leads me to another question. You have a diverse and distinguished career as an educator, one that includes traditional university classrooms, at least one low-residency MFA program, workshops at Bread Loaf and in Switzerland, and your current position as Director of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, surely among the most highly-regarded such programs in the country. Is the process of teaching writing difficult to square with your own practice as a writer? Aside from the obvious merits (money) and demerits (time), has it been helpful and/or burdensome to divide your attention between these two related pursuits? Are there teachers or educational experiences that have been important to you that you’d care to say more about?

JA: I doubt that Anne Carson remembers me from one semester in 1981, but she and her course affected me powerfully. (I think she was working on Eros the Bittersweet at the time.) Ten years after Princeton (years spent working spottily as an illustrator, freelance editor, editorial manager, proposal- and speechwriter), I had great writer-teachers at Columbia: Mary Gordon above all, Richard Locke, Robert Towers, Carole Maso. It’s amazing how often, when I’m teaching, my mind goes straight to how they did it as a test to make sure I’m on the right track. As for my own teaching, I spend half my time anxious about it and the other half utterly energized. Working with exceptionally smart, talented students is good for the mind. It’s stimulating and crucial to see what they’re reading, what new angles on literature they’re taking: how they’re pushing at the edges of this enterprise.

MS: To pick up a couple of threads from earlier: I’m very intrigued by the decade you spent as an illustrator prior to becoming a writer — and also by the idea that the switch to writing was initially just a strategy for continuing a particular project, which suggests that these methods are broadly applicable to the same ends. Would you say that illustration still informs your writing process, and if so, how?

Similarly, I’m interested in your citation of rock music as an influence on Nine Island. For many artists, I suppose, it’s helpful to be receptive to approaches and influences that have little formal relationship to their ultimate medium. (I once heard the composer John Corigliano say that he’ll sometimes draw a piece in colored pencil before he writes any music for it.) The proto- and post-punk artists you mentioned above seem like a great fit for the book’s tone and mood, but I’m curious about how they found their way in, and how you think of them as functioning.

JA: I did only a little illustrating. Just wasn’t and am not very good. But I still draw sometimes because color pencil on paper is so pleasing. I do think of color in writing, though, as well as lighting, chiaroscuro, the visual composition of a moment, etc.: the visual arts have informed the narrative arts just as much as music has over the centuries. And on music: well, those songs are in my head all the time. Hardly an evening passes when I don’t hear David Bowie (“Time and again I tell myself I’ll stay clean tonight”) or Iggy Pop (“Immoderation seems to suit her best / but then I turn around and she’s very delicate”) or Chrissie Hynde (“Anger and lust . . . my senses running amok”). Partly the words are stuck in a brain-groove, but partly (I think) they’re telling me something. And then there’s the pure sexiness. Their words are in my character’s mind just as much as words of Ovid or her mother or her friends K or N are — all the same texture. Plus they add a soundtrack to the whole, I think, another layer for free.

MS: A question that most of us despise, but that I, with apologies, will ask anyway: what’s next? I recall that after Natives and Exotics came out in 2005 you were contemplating a nonfiction sequel of sorts about Scottish plant-hunters in Australia circa 1800; is that something that’s still taking shape?

JA: Nope: that project turned into the memoir I wrote about my doubled, half-Australian family, The Sisters Antipodes. I was trying to write about tropical exotics transplanted in the north — palms and tree-ferns taken to Scotland — but a friend (Robert Polito) suggested I make the narrative more personal. So I added a layer about little Australian girls being transplanted in North America, and their story nudged the plants off the page. I still love that material, though, so who knows. I have two projects now. One I’ve worked on a long time and am overhauling: a (possibly “nonfiction”) novel about Le Corbusier’s obsession with Eileen Gray and her house on the French Mediterranean. The other is a book-length essay about using patterning and other design elements in narrative, like coloration and striping — but above all, about finding structural forms other than the arc. Spiral, escalator, panopticon, chain, fractal: lots of ways to build a narrative.

MS: One last thing: an assertion I cannot resist making. You use exclamation points often, and you do so more effectively than any other writer I can think of. It seems as if your prose should be bubbling over like a hastily-opened bottle of tonic water as a result, but that’s never the case: it’s always sharp, elegant, exquisitely controlled, and frequently very moving. I can only think to attribute this to your extremely well-crafted sentences, but that explanation seems insufficient. How do you do it? Have you always done this?

JA: Thank you, and so funny you’ve asked this. A brilliant grad student just this past week gave a presentation on exclamation marks in Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine: what they signify tonally, whether they’re ironic or sincere. I was going for a sort of dark mania with mine. The exclamations were meant to show a giddy fending off of horror. Writing in the first person about a character quite like me was hard: whenever she was earnest or self-conscious she repelled me. Exclamation marks (and avoiding personal pronouns) tore a shell off her, which somehow made it easier.

Emerging Writer Happy Hour

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The Author’s Guild, America’s oldest and largest writers’ organization, is partnering with Electric Literature to celebrate the launch of their new Emerging Writer Membership.

Open to all writers looking to actively publish their work, the membership will help you navigate the complicated literary scene by providing necessary information and facilitating communal connections.

Please join us on October 7 in Brooklyn for complimentary drinks and snacks, and the chance to mingle with our wonderful hosts, as well as writers, agents, editors, and Authors Guild members.

The evening is hosted by:

Kathleen Alcott, author of Infinite Home
Megan Lynch, Editorial Director, Ecco (HarperCollins Publishers)
Kirby Kim, Literary Agent, Janklow & Nesbit Associates
Katie Kitamura, author of Gone to the Forest

Emerging Writer Happy Hour
Presented by the Authors Guild and Electric Literature
Friday, October 7, 6 to 8PM
Powerhouse
28 Adams Street, Brooklyn NY

RSVPs are appreciated: RSVP@authorsguild.org

Left: Katie Kitamura and her novel Gone to the Forest. Right: Megan Lynch of Ecco.
Left: Kirby Kim of Janklow and Nesbit. Right: Kathleen Alcott and her novel Infinite Home

Cracking the Code to Bestsellers?

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Stanford Researchers may have the answer to why books sell

In an attempt to streamline the creative process, publisher and English PhD Jody Archer and Stanford Literary Lab co-founder Matthew L. Jockers are using data analytics to figure out what makes books sell. Utilizing a team of “reading” research computers, they’ve cataloged 5,000 titles published over the last thirty years. The machines — which are programmed to track characters, plot points, sentence structures, and word usages, among other factors — have been sorting through the texts, cross referencing and compiling the common traits of literary blockbusters.

With the recently released The Bestseller Code, Archer and Jockers are finally presenting their findings. The book, despite its non-algorithmic gestation, presents some intriguing, even marketable, claims. A few surprising tidbits:

  • sex, apparently, doesn’t sell like “human closeness”
  • dogs are far superior to cats
  • the best protagonists use the verb “need,” a lot.
  • ditto for “want” — the people need want

The computers’ favorite book? Dave Eggars’ 2013 techno-thriller The Circle, which surprisingly outranked more standard contenders like Gone Girl and 50 Shades of Grey Although, it is worth noting, the algorithm is only 80% accurate according to Wired’s recent reporting.

Wired also noted that a host of analytic approaches have recently seeped into publising. One, Jellybook, a British startup, provides data driven promotional forecasts based on the reading habits of their trial groups, who receive digital versions of texts modified with Java Script to track their exact reading habits — when people read, for how long, and even which chapters kill a book’s momentum. In a shocking turn of events, their preliminary findings report that readers abandon novels before the halfway mark the vast majority of the time. (Previously, that phenomenon had only been ascribed to Gravity’s Rainbow.)

For its part, the literary community has responded to news of Archer and Jockers’ findings with customary aplomb, providing biting commentary on these soulless capitalist enterprises. After all, curation is the enemy of surprise. Agent Katherine Flynn commented on the matter to Wired in particularly poetic fashion, musing, “the beautiful thing about books, unlike refrigerators…is that sometimes you pick up a book.” Nowadays, in these trying digital times, that’s the type of perspective we all could use more of.

Yes, Writing Is a Job (Even if it Doesn’t Pay Well)

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Writing is hard. It’s hard to do, hard to sell if you do it, hard to find readers if you do sell, and hard to earn a living wage off of even if you find readers. But writing is work. Work deserves pay. Writing is, in short, a job.

That may seem obvious, but the point needs to be repeated now and then because there are lots of forces that would like you to think writing isn’t a job. Sometimes those forces are corporations who try to convince you to give away your work for “exposure.” Other times they take the form of well-meaning writers who are trying to give some “real talk” about the writing life. Today’s example is Ester Bloom in The Billfold with a piece titled “You Can’t Make A Living As A Writer Because Being a Writer Isn’t a Job”:

Kafka, Dickens, Nabokov — they all had day jobs. Novelists have day jobs! Roxane Gay, who is busy and accomplished enough to be several people, still has a day job. Writers have day jobs because being a writer isn’t a job. Writing is a thing you can do if you like it! It’s a thing you might get paid for, now and again, if you’re good at it! But it’s not a job.

Bloom goes on to say that maybe writing can be a part of a job “doing the kind of un-fun, unsexy kind of arranging words that pays the bills: content marketing, for example, or corporate communications.” There are a few points that should be made here. The first is that many people do make a living writing. In addition to all the people doing the “un-fun” writing work, there are TV writers, film screenplay writers, newspaper journalists, and even full-time novelists who earn their living writing. All of those gigs are hard to get, but they certainly do exist and many people have them. So Bloom is factually wrong from the start. A second point is that it’s a little dishonest to say that famous writers like Dickens and Nabokov had day jobs and point to jobs they had before they were famous writers. Those writers did not write as quirky side hobbies. Their whole lives were built around writing, and when they were selling enough to write full time they did. (Kafka, of course, barely published during his lifetime and died young and mostly unknown. Writing is a hard life, even for geniuses.)

The fact that writing is hard and there are many hobbyists doesn’t mean it isn’t a job either. It is very hard to be a professional athlete or a head chef, and many people practice sports or cooking as hobbies. But we would not pretend an NBA player or a head chef doesn’t have a job.

The more important point is that something can be a job even if it doesn’t pay you as much as you wish it would. Many literary writers today work as professors, editors, or book publicists while also earning income from writing. Many lucky authors who could live entirely off of their writing still work a part-time or even full-time job for extra money (because the Baby Boomers destroyed the global economy and shit is fucking tough out there). Still, earning 50% of your income teaching and 50% of your income freelance writing doesn’t mean that one or the other “isn’t a job” or is something you should approach with the attitude that you only “might get paid for, now and again.”

Even if writing only makes up a tiny fraction of your income, it can still be a job and should be treated as such. Or, at the very least, if your writing is generating money for other people — publishers, magazines, corporate entities — then you should be getting paid too.

My point is not to pounce on Bloom here. There is a real problem with the attitude that writing and other art forms are just hobbies or passions that the creators shouldn’t expect to get paid for. That’s exactly what allows artists to be exploited. Companies prey on the attitude that art is just a fun side thing. Corporations love the idea that “exposure” is all they should have to pay artists with. It is the very idea that writing isn’t a job that makes it not a job!

And the attitude really does affect how the publishing economy shakes out. As an example, here’s a dirty little secret I’ve learned from the publishing world: literary magazines and publishers normally pay visual artists more than writers. That’s right, even though 99% of the people buying a copy of The Miscellaneous Slush Pieces Quarterly are doing so to read the writing, the handful of reprinted photographs or paintings probably cost more money than the stories. Why? Because visual artists and designers don’t give their work away for free! Publishers know they have to pay more to get good art, so they pay more.

In fact, this is true among writers as well. As a fiction writer, I have a foot in the genre world and a foot in the literary world. I’ve published in both worlds and know many editors and writers in both. The genre world typically pays more, when you compare work in equivalent size magazines. Why? Because the genre world has a very strong ethos about paying writers. Magazines are designated “professional” or “semi-professional” based on pay rates, and memberships in professional organizations are based on having published in paying markets. This attitude shapes how the genre world operates.

I’m not saying you should never work for free. I’ve published many, many pieces for free. Sometimes exposure is worth it, and sometimes the money just isn’t there. If you are writing weird poems on a friend’s Tumblr page that only a handful of people will read, you can’t expect to be paid because there is no money being made. But if you are writing for, say, a big website that gets massive traffic, you should absolutely demand to be paid.

Plus, if we treat writing as something that can only be done as a side hobby, then we will only have writers who can afford a side hobby.

To be fair to Bloom, she was responding to an essay by the writer Merritt Tierce in which she lamented promptly going broke despite publishing an acclaimed novel. I’ve met Tierce before, and we published a rave review of the book here. Tierce is a great fiction writer, but it is true — as Bloom and many others have pointed out — that she comes off as a bit naïve in her essay. Tierce quit her job before her book came out, expecting to live on her advance and her husband’s income, and then years later, having failed to produce a second book, learned she couldn’t live as a writer and got another job. Writing is a job, but, well, you have to do it to get paid. No one can live as a book writer not writing books.

And to be fair to Tierce, most people can’t make a living writing fiction period. Most writers do need a second job or a day job. Sometimes that’s another writing job (magazine non-fiction writing say), sometimes that is a writing-related job like teaching, and sometimes that’s something else entirely. It is true that the literary world can be very naïve about money, and the MFA world doesn’t give writers the clearest picture of how hard writing can be.

Tierce also says she’d gladly accept a mere 40k a year to write books without another job. 40k is more than the median income of a single earner in the US, so hardly a noble sacrifice. But there is middle ground between wide-eyed idealism about how all fiction writers should be paid a handsome wage, and exploitation-enabling cynicism about how writing should never be seen as something you can earn real money from.

No matter how many “death of the novel” think pieces are published each year, people still pay — in dollars or eyeballs — to read writing every day. If your writing is getting read, you should expect to be paid, even if it isn’t enough to live off, entirely; hell, even if it isn’t enough to pay your bar tab as you weep over your tiny royalty statement.

Writing is a job, but will only remain one if we treat it as such.

10 Books on the American Immigrant Experience

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In my first couple of years in America, I mostly read books about Africans living in Africa — I was homesick and wanted to return to my homeland of Cameroon as often as I could through these books. Over the years though, thanks to time and friendships that offered me a new sense of home, my homesickness diminished and I came to accept my status as an immigrant living in America. I moved away from reading primarily about people and places that felt familiar and began reading books about all humans, regardless of where they lived. With this openness, I discovered new worlds of literature, including literature about immigrants like myself who had left their homelands for one reason or another, to create a new life in a new country.

The books below are by eight authors with roots in eight different countries, telling stories about immigrants in America. While the books explore a myriad of issues including love and family, hope and despair, culture and identity, they also paint a portrait of the joys and travails of the American immigrant experience. — Imbolo Mbue, author of Behold the Dreamers.

1–3. Angela’s Ashes, Tis & Teacher Man by Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt’s trilogy chronicles his life from his birth in New York City to Irish immigrant parents to his childhood of poverty in Ireland and his eventual return to New York City, where he lived as a young Irish immigrant who eventually became a teacher and author. His is a story about poverty and resilience, the bonds of family, and the promise of a better life in America.

4. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

This short story collection is about Indians and Indian Americans seeking love and all things desirable. While all the stories aren’t set in America — some are set in India — those that are, like “The Third and Final Continent,” depict characters living at the intersection of India and America.

5. Little Failure by Gary Shtenygart

In this memoir, novelist Gary Shteyngart writes with humor about his family’s immigration from Russia to America. An only child, Shteyngart and his parents grapple with finding themselves and understanding each other in the strange land they’ve made their new home.

6. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s novel, Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman, arrives in America to attend college and confronts the realities of being a black person in America. While navigating a quest for love and identity, she maintains a blog where she writes about topics like the racial hierarchy in America, Barack and Michelle Obama, and an embrace of her newfound blackness.

7. The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

This story, told in a lyrical first person plural voice, is about Japanese picture brides who migrate to the US to meet their husbands. The women speak of their marriages to men they barely know, their interactions with Americans they encounter in their daily lives, their raising of American-born children who grow up to be different from them in many ways, and the ways in which their lives changed after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

8. Brother I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat

Moving between Haiti and America, Edwidge Danticat’s memoir is about her parent’s migration from Haiti to New York, leaving her and her brother with an aunt and uncle. She and her brother eventually join her parents in New York and her uncle, attempting to escape a volatile situation in Haiti, comes face to face with the underbelly of the American immigration system.

9. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel is a multi-generational story which explores not only the American immigrant experience but also the weight of history, Dominican culture, family, identity, and the quest for love and desperations of an overweight boy nicknamed Oscar Wao.

10. We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

In NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, a young girl named Darling leaves behind a childhood of poverty in Zimbabwe to live with an aunt in Detroit. There, she encounters a life which while not defined by the kind of utter poverty she’d grown up with in Zimbabwe, is nonetheless full of its share of challenges.

About the Author

Photo by Kiriko Sano

Imbolo Mbue is the author of Behold the Dreamers, her first novel. She’s a native of Limbe, Cameroon. She holds a B.S. from Rutgers University and an M.A. from Columbia University. A resident of the United States for over a decade, she lives in New York City.

X by Brian Evenson

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I shall begin this written record by reporting the substance of our last conversation — which was not only the last conversation I had with Horak, but the last I had with anyone, or ever expect to have. Perhaps the last conversation that any two humans will have, if he and I can be said to both qualify as human. There is apparently some debate on that score. Or would be if he had not abandoned me. Was some debate, I should say.

I did not know how to make the machine function properly, and did not know either how to shut it off — it was not me who suspended him within the machine in the first place. The instructions for the operation of the machine were to be found in a sector that proved to be decayed, the data irretrievable. Nor did I know the sequence or the code, and my slow muddlings got me nowhere. In the end, seeing my own time ticking away with nothing resolved, I decided drastic measures were justified.

How long has it been since a person left the warren and how long did he survive? I had asked the monitor earlier, before all this. I knew the answer to this question: the last of us to leave the warren had left 140 days ago — I wanted to see if the monitor knew this fact or if this portion of the data was also corrupted. The last of us to leave was named Wollem, a name chosen for him by the pair who had come before him, Vigus and Vagus. When they neared the end of their lives they had themselves imprinted within the monitor and then set about constructing Wollem. They had hoped to make a pair, as had always been done before, but there was so little material that out of prudence they opted to make only one, so that he in turn could make another one, so there might be at least a little more time given to us before a final end. 140 days ago, Wollem left in search of more material, knowing he would die in the process. But, with luck, he would die only after returning with sufficient material for others to be formed and for us to persist a while longer.

He did not return.

To my question, the monitor responded: Query, what do you mean by person?

I thought about this a long time and then asked, “What do you mean by person?”

It responded, Bipedal, an individual thought process enmeshed in a body, procreated through the fertilization of an ovum by a sperm and its subsequent development in a womb.

“Only the first criterion is relevant.”

With this definitional clarification, it said, this sort of “person” left 140 days ago. He did not return. It is not known how long he survived. This is not a question for which there is sufficient data to provide an answer.

“Is it likely he survived?”

It is not likely.

“And if all three criteria are considered relevant?” I asked.

By these criteria it has been seventy-one years, eleven months, six days, and twenty one hours since a person left the warren. He still survives and has been carefully preserved.

But I intended to start differently. I allowed myself to get distracted. Since I learned most things in a way that I have come to feel would not be considered normal for those who might read this record, my sense of balance and order is sometimes far from perfect. At times I become confused about the order in which things should be told. Parts of me know things that other parts do not, and sometimes I both know a thing and do not know it, or part of me knows something is true and another part knows it is not true and there is nothing to allow me to negotiate between the two. The monitor can help if I ask the right questions, but in many circumstances it just adds another layer of confusion so that whatever is being choked or stifled is even more so.

“He still survives?” I asked.

Yes, said the monitor.

“Does he have a name?”

Yes. Horak.

“He has been preserved?” I asked. “On an impression?”

Not on an impression. Being preserved on an impression is not the same thing as being alive. His body has been physically stored and his mind along with it.

“Show me where.”

It showed me a schematic. Horak was, in fact, quite close. Perhaps through some of the tunnels of the warren that had been filled he could be reached, I thought at first, but then another self within me stirred, opened its pale eye and said, No, on the surface.

“Is he outside?” I asked myself.

He is in a facility. Don’t you remember?

“No,” I said.

I do, it said. I said.

“Is the facility at — ” eye after eye opened within me as I groped for a word, finally found it, “ — ground level?”

Yes.

“And he’s still alive?” I asked, amazed.

Some of the sectors pertaining to the proper use of a suit had been corrupted, but not all of them. As a result, I had some information and some noise, and needed only to determine what was information and what was noise, and then determine which parts of me I should ignore and which I should listen to. Could I survive at ground level? Yes, it was clear, but not for long. Longer if I was wearing a suit, but even then not long. How long was not long? The answer to this question was unclear, and querying the monitor did little good. No sensors currently accessible at ground level, it indicated, and then seemed to consider the matter closed.

After Wollem had formed me and made it possible for me to communicate, and then imbued me with the further quickening that made me a receptacle for the selves that had come before me, he told me: My purpose is complete. Now I go in search of help. I am almost certain that I remember him saying this. And that after saying it he drew a suit up around his body, sealed it, and left the warren.

After he departed, I lay there on my tablature, for how long I do not know. I was trying to translate the vast amount of damaged and partial information that had been poured into my mind into some sort of rational order, into something useful. I could see, in vivid detail, the means by which a finger could be made to flex and move — I understood the electrical impulse that would best bring this about, but seemed unable to manifest it. I do not know how long I lay spread on the tablature, trying to move a single finger. And then, suddenly, I did manage a pulse of electricity and the finger moved. But when I examined what I had in my head again I saw the simple movement of a finger had burnt a line there, a minuscule thread, hardly noticeable, unless you happened to be looking for it, unless you happened to be looking very closely because you needed something very specific and saw the way that the line split that thing in two and even obliterated the slightest portion of it. And then I understood that everything I said, everything I did, would do damage to whatever was already contained within me, that there was hardly enough space in my head for all the various selves, let alone their memories, let alone my own.

What did I do? For a long time I did not move, waiting to see if what I held within my head would congeal in some way, become resistant or formalized or…I don’t know. I could see how the information that was there was part of different strata, that what I had thought upon waking was just one being was in fact many layered one atop the other, that I was the partial record of all those who had come before me. These I began to peel off, divide up, and put to sleep, so that I could keep them straight and, if possible, safe.

But in the end I could only do so much of this. In the end, I had no choice but to move another finger.

Wollem came back into the room wearing a suit, prepared to leave, to go to ground level. Or rather, no, that was not what it felt like at the time. I am not sure this is my true memory or instead the memory of an earlier self. At the time, whether my memory or another’s, what it felt like was this: Wollem left the room. He was gone for a time. I struggled to move a finger and began to rearrange the architecture of my mind. And then a figure, bipedal but featureless, made of vulcanized cloth, with a head made of a bulb of steel and tempered glass, entered the room and spoke in a tinny voice. The figure waved once and then was gone. It was only later that I stumbled upon a sector on the monitor that told me this was a man wearing a suit. This man must have been, so I deduced since there was nobody else, Wollem.

I rummaged through the warren until I found a suit that reminded me of that suit I had seen, and then I forced my body into it. There were cracks and splits in it, a rent in the stomach, the fabric stained around it by what looked like rust. Doesn’t matter if there are holes, part of me that was still awake thought, you’re dead anyway if you go outside.

But I opened up each pale eye within me and inquired until I found enough to tell me to rummage some more, and then I tried to close all the eyes again at once, to seal each back — for their own good, for their safety. Each is already crisscrossed with darkness and scars and damage, and awakening them seems only to damage them worse, so better to keep them asleep.

I rummaged until I found a rusted can of sealant — though the rust on the can was of a somewhat different color than that on the lips of the tear in the suit. Perhaps merely a difference in material. I shook it and sprayed it. When it came out and I positioned it correctly, it bubbled and filled the cracks and splits and sealed the lips of the rent not only to one another but to my skin beneath, so thoroughly that to remove it later I had to take a knife to my belly and separate a strip of skin from my body.

Wollem told me: “I was taught by Vigus and Vagus in a different way than you will be. Some things were imprinted, but only the most basic of things and with gaps between. The ability to chew and swallow, the ability to walk and crawl, the basics of language. Then Vigus and Vagus took turns instructing me. Once they were gone, I learned from the monitor.

“But the monitor is not what it was. Whole sectors are damaged. Vigus’s personality is still preserved, but Vagus’s is so damaged that if he were to be brought back he would be mad. For years we fooled ourselves into thinking we could preserve ourselves in such fashion, and be reconstituted later when someone came to relieve us. But no one is coming. No one ever will come, unless it will be someone who means us harm.”

And yet, even knowing this, even believing this as he did, once he had imprinted me not just with simple gestures and abilities but with the surviving personalities of our expedition, Wollem could not stop himself from going out to look for someone or something to save us.

There are times when I look back at this writing and do not recognize what I have written. There are moments, whole pages even, which are written in my hand, to be sure, but which I have no memory of writing. When I awake I sometimes find myself deep in the warren before the writing desk, with the charcoal grasped tight in my hand and no memory of how I arrived there.

I am writing this on paper even though such writing is a forgotten art. I am writing on paper because I have seen the way that the sectors of the monitor and other recording devices can become corrupted and whole selves, as a result, are lost. I am trying to leave behind a record that will survive. Apparently, judging from the passages that I do not remember but which are nonetheless written, I am not the only part of me writing this.

I do not have an earliest memory. All the memories came at once, an overlay of a dozen different personalities and all the memories going along with them. Or at least some of the memories — there is not enough room and each new memory I make, each new thing I do, ends up sacrificing memories that came before. Each moment I live snuffs out a little more of the lives of the others within me.

Wollem meant well. When he discovered what was happening within the monitor, the fact that the majority of personalities imprinted within the monitor had grown corrupt with time, he did not know what else to do. He could have let each recorded personality lapse: could have waited until, one after another, they either grew corrupt or until the monitor or the tablature broke down sufficiently so as to make organic reinscription of these personalities possible. Instead, having one last source of material at his disposal, he formed me, and then, within me, formed everyone who remained.

And yet, Wollem did not inscribe his own personality. He did not reproduce himself either on the monitor or, organically, within my brain, along with the dozen or so others. Why? Was it merely an oversight on his part? Was it because he knew there were already too many within me? Or was it selfishness, a very real desire to let his flesh and self die together, to keep his self to himself?

Suit affixed, heart pounding, I squirreled my way along the edges of the warren and came to the first seal. This was much farther than I had ever gone before. I removed the seal and ignored the warning sirens. I had salvaged a piece of rebar from the failed portion of the warren, the damaged portion, and positioned it to keep the seal open, just in case it was inclined to slide closed while I was gone or in case, despite the damage the warren had undergone, there was some mechanism that would, after a certain amount of time had passed, draw the seal closed.

I climbed the ladder, slowly, putting one foot over the other as I had been taught to do. As I did so, I felt several pairs of eyes within my head flicker open, awakened by a movement that was familiar to them, from their own climbs to the surface many years before. The strangeness of that: the feeling that you, or rather I, are at once dreaming and remembering and simultaneously doing something as if for the first time. That terrible rapid construction of the world around you, but not as a new world: instead, as a world already known, already seen. At the top of the ladder was a second seal. I had not known I would encounter it until my hand reached out in the dim and touched it, but once touched it sprang forth fully formed. A set of eyes within my head opened, but another set opened wider, and I climbed down the ladder and found a second piece of rebar and then climbed back up again.

It was difficult to force open this second seal. I had to pound on it with the piece of rebar and as I did so, flakes of rust sifted slowly down around me and adhered to my faceplate, mottling my vision. At first I thought it was not going to open for me, and then a voice from a self within me directed me how to brace the rebar and use it as a lever and by so doing slowly force the seal open. Even then the seal did not give until, abruptly, it did and I lost my hold and dropped the bar clattering down the shaft and almost tumbled down myself.

Light, the shock of it, more searing and intense than anything I’d ever seen. Then, blind, I was up and through the seal and on the surface, up and running now, all the eyes of the selves I harbor in my head open now and the mouths attached to them counting a measured cadence, one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, and on and on, the numbers growing, the heads within my head growing anxious and me myself anxious along with them. How much time, in the suit, did I have before I would be poisoned and die? And then I had scampered across the bare, damaged ground and was at the seal of the facility, wondering with a sinking feeling if I should have brought another piece of rebar. I stumbled into the wall and applied the palm of my glove to the pressure pad and, unexpectedly, the door slid open and I tumbled into a solitary room.

Within, it was the same as the warren — the same, rather as the furthest walls of the warren, without the modifications that we had developed over the years. So much so that I became quickly convinced that this was part of the warren or once had been.

The storage unit occupied the center of the room, humming slightly, cables running up into the ceiling. It was as tall as my chest and twice as thick as a man, rooted solidly in the floor. Inside was a figure, human or nearly so. Crystals of ice were in his hair and he was frozen.

“Monitor,” I asked the room at large, “are you here as well?”

There was no answer. I looked for a monitor port but there was no port, so perhaps this had never been part of the warren after all.

The eyes within my head had stopped rolling now, had begun to calm, lids growing heavy, even beginning, in some cases, to drowse. I reached up to remove the helmet from my suit, making the motions exaggerated and definite, and though several stirred within me, when they became cognizant of what I was about to do and where I was, they lulled again. This, coupled with the green light now burning above the door, I took as an indication that it was safe, that I could breath and not die.

As I have said, parts of me are damaged, and so are the records we have that are stored in the monitor. I know more than most who came before me, but they had the advantage of having access to memories recorded outside of themselves, in the monitor. With those systems working, they could in an instant learn things that I cannot and never will. For me, memory is not only at times flawed and corrupted but also overlapped and confused, one personality hiding parts of another, blending too, so that the selves within my head sometimes seem many-headed and monstrous or deformed and impossible to comprehend.

I kept touching parts of the storage machine, thinking that the gestures would reveal something to me, would awaken someone within me, a self that would know what to do.

But nothing happened.

I took my suit off — or would have if I had not fused it to my skin while sealing the rip. I wriggled my arms free and let the suit hang around my waist, tugging at my belly. Hands freed, I touched the controls and the pad of the storage unit with my bare fingers, thinking it might respond to my touch or my heat, but it did not respond at all.

For nearly a day I was there, trying to make something happen. Nothing happened. At last, in frustration, nothing accomplished, I donned the suit again, opened the seal, and made a mad dash back to the warren.

“Monitor,” I asked, immediately upon my return. “When did the last person go out and when did he return?”

Query: what do you mean by person? It asked.

“As before. Bipedal,” I said. “None of the other qualifications.”

The last person to go out went out fourteen hours and forty-six minutes ago. He returned eight minutes ago. You are that person.

“Monitor,” I asked, “is the storage facility that keeps Horak part of the warren?”

Query: What do you mean by warren? it asked.

“This place,” I said. “What you see all around you.”

For a long moment the monitor did not respond, and I thought that it had at last reached its point of exhaustion. Everything is running down, dying. Perhaps the monitor will not outlast you, I thought. Perhaps before you die you will lose even that small consolation.

And then the monitor said, No. It is on the surface. This place is not on the surface.

“The warren,” I said.

If you call it that.

“But were they once connected?” I persisted.

Everything was once connected, responded the monitor. Everything still is.

I called up all the files related to storage. There was nothing that could be seen, nothing that could be read, nothing more than a few bits and pieces of code, a fragmented, damaged hodgepodge that told me nothing.

I could tell you how I tried to awaken him and how it all failed. But I have not even succeeded in telling you what I planned to begin with and there is no point, or little point, in pushing that goal even farther away on the horizon by stacking more and more up in front of it. No, it is enough to say that I, or we if you prefer, failed. We could not start the mechanism to unstore this Horak. It had been done before, I knew it had been done, but there was no record of it anywhere, not even fragments. It was as if this part of our history had been wiped deliberately and mercilessly away.

Is there a reason for this? an awakening part of me wondered. Do I really know what I am getting into?

I knew something of this Horak from my earlier conversation with the monitor. He apparently was not constructed but rather procreated through the fertilization of an ovum by a sperm and its subsequent development in a womb. He was, according to the monitor, an individual thought process enmeshed solitarily within a body. It is thought, at least by some residing within me, that unlike us he could not be hurt by being outside. There were some within me who felt he was not human, though others argued that he was a true human, a first human, whom we all had been set to emulate. Others still thought he had once been human but had, due to circumstances, changed.

What was true and what was rumor it was difficult to say: it is impossible for me to be objective about the opinions of all the selves contained within me, for I hear not only their words but feel along with them the weight of their conviction.

Better to be cautious, to wait and see if I can figure a way to awaken him, and if I cannot, perhaps I can convince myself that it is better not to awaken him at all.

And so, knowing all this, believing all this, I removed the suit and tore my strip of flesh off along with it, then bandaged my belly, ate, and fell asleep, trusting that tomorrow was another day, that tomorrow anything could happen.

Marisa Silver on Fables, Torture and Reading the Obituaries

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Marisa Silver’s latest novel is a stylistic departure from her previous work. In Little Nothing, the award-winning author (Mary Coin, The God of War) writes a fable steeped in archetype and magic. Pavla, a dwarf born to elderly parents, in a nameless, Eastern European town, is both an object of derision and fascination; like many women today, Pavla’s worth becomes tied to her form. When Pavla’s parents have her stretched by a local healer, the girl undergoes the first of several transformations. Each transformation takes Pavla further into a world of tricksters, criminals and beasts. Silver’s work allows us to consider the frequency of violence perpetrated against the female body. I had the pleasure of interviewing her by email while she began her book tour for Little Nothing. We discussed her story’s unusual origin, the freedom of writing as a wolf, and the questions this novel allowed her to pose.

Heather Scott Partington: What was the genesis of Little Nothing? How did it change from the original idea?

Marisa Silver: I’m an avid reader of the obits. A few years ago, I read about a man who, until his death, was one of the last remaining Munchkins from the “Wizard of Oz.” Tucked in among the usual details about accomplishments and the relatives he left behind was this: when he was a boy, his parents tried to have him stretched. I was, needless to say, curious, and my curiosity led me to begin to imagine the story of a young girl, born a dwarf, who undergoes this same ersatz “therapy” but with very different results. Early on, I knew that the girl in the story would change form in radical ways and that the story would take place over a lifetime. That’s what I started with. It’s hard to say the story changed from the original conception, because I had no conceit beyond that first impulse. I was not certain where I was headed, or even what her transformations would be or how they would be enacted. I just wrote my way through, inventing the story’s inner logic as I went.

Stories for me always begin with questions and some of the questions I asked myself were these: what were the implications of this kind of torture not only for her and her sense of her identity and her safety, but for the people who enacted such violence on her. I began to think about what all this had to do with the female body and how it is treated in society, why it is the subject of so much fear and violence. And I asked myself how it is that people survive a life of being hunted, both literally and metaphorically.

A novel exists in two worlds simultaneously: the one bounded by the time of the intrinsic narrative and the one in which the author lives. Around the time I was working on the book, two hundred Chibok schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria. In Kabul, an Afghan woman was stoned to death after having been accused of committing adultery. In so many parts of the world women don’t control their bodies. I was thinking about these realities at the same time that I was constructing the narrative of Pavla, and while her story exists on its own and is guided by the events and characters that occur only in the world I imagined, it is also a response to the contemporary and very real world I live in, where bodies, in particular women’s bodies, are subjected to great acts of cruelty.

HSP: You write in the tradition of fairy tales, grotesques, and fables. But Little Nothing presents a challenge to those predictable patterns of storytelling. Why were you inspired to tell Pavla’s tale in this specific way? Did the genre present challenges, or did it give you freedom?

MS: What interests me about fairy tales is the disjunction between the narrative style, which is usually unadorned, frank, and without overt psychological nuance, and the fact that the tales incorporate wild leaps between the real and the fantastic. There is something in that dissonance that enables the stories to speak to our most primal sense of ourselves. It seems counterintuitive that something so unadorned and lacking in associative image and lyricism should have such power. I was also interested in the way that, in a fable, the border between the real and the surreal is so porous. We find ourselves traveling back and a forth across that line between what we understand to be true and what we are willing to believe could be true if we were to strip away our skepticism and entertain a world that is not limited by scientific reality. One of the great pleasures of fiction is entering an invented space and believing that characters conjured simply out of words on paper can move and speak and react. The fairy tale takes this one step further, begging us to believe in the patently unbelievable. And even if we say we don’t believe that a toad can turn into a prince, in some metaphorical way, we really do.

HSP: Pavla undergoes several transformations in the book, at one point realizing she has become “wholly unfamiliar to herself.” As I read Little Nothing, I realized how much of our perception of character is tied to a sense of that character’s physical form. Little Nothing pushes the reader to think of form as something as illusory as structure. Pavla’s transformations make clear delineations of change in the story, but it becomes apparent that she is more than her physical form, just as a story is more than its imagined structure. Did that idea come as you developed her (sometimes) animal nature, or did it arise out of a larger conception of how humans tend to tie identity to form?

MS: It’s interesting that you talk about structure that way because I am a big believer that a story’s structure should not be arbitrary but that it should suggest something about a character’s lived experience, and that it ought to be in conversation with the overall meaning of a piece. I thought of the structure of the novel as an unpeeling. The story keeps being constructed and then it falls away, exposing another story beneath it. You unpeel and unpeel until finally there is nothing, a state the character finds herself in as well.

Once I wrote the scene where the character is stretched, I began to understand more about the way the book was engaging with the idea of identity and physicality, how the two are and are not related. Obviously, we all change over a lifetime. Some change is natural. We mature physically and emotionally. But some of the change is asserted on us by family, by circumstance, by the institutions that control us. I wrote about these ideas in an exaggerated way, through the mechanism of fable, using the uncanny in order to reflect the real.

Having said that, I do not write with meaning in mind. I focus on characters and on creating emotionally accurate moments and behaviors and language for those characters as they find their way through the plot. Given the sorts of metamorphoses I was going to embrace, and given the time and place of the books telling, the language and feel of the fable felt tonally right.

HSP: Similar to Pavla’s relationship to physical form (and the “rules” — if we can call them that — of how characters change from one form to another), her relationship to time becomes flexible, and inspires us as reader to challenge our own assumptions about what we think we can take for certain within the story. Were you (or are you) inspired by any other works of literature that do this kind of undermining of the reader’s expectations?

MS: I’m probably only interested in literature that, in some way, undermines expectations! I’m not sure what other reason there might be to write a novel but to use form to shape experience in such a way that what is unseen is brought to light. The challenge is to find a way to expose and explore the unexpected while still keeping the reader in a state of belief. The work is to find the associations of images and language that crack open fixed expectations so that the reader sees more deeply into an experience. One of the writers I read while working on the novel was Agota Kristof. She wrote a trilogy of novels, The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie. Told in spare, nearly uninflected prose, these allegorical novels about war and repression read like the darkest and most disturbing of fairytales. And yet their resonance to the real is vivid and inescapable. You cannot finish these books without seeing anew something you felt you understood about the way in which war disfigures the morality of even the most innocent.

Time is a big preoccupation of Little Nothing in the way it is both linear and circular. Time never really passes, or becomes past. What is happening is still happening within us and somewhere out in the distant universe. In order to imagine a world in which a character can change form in radical ways, one in which unnatural, or supernatural things occur, it felt like both time and space had to be considered as malleable. In some sense, Pavla becomes, finally, time.

Time never really passes, or becomes past. What is happening is still happening within us and somewhere out in the distant universe.

HSP: Why did you use a nameless country, but such familiar archetypes of place? Did this evolve for you as you worked on the novel, or was it always intended to be in an open kind of setting that would draw on the reader’s familiarity with this kind of old story?

MS: Having written stories and novels that could be put in the general category of realism, it took some work for me to let go of trying to root the novel in a particular historical moment. But whenever I did, defining a country or giving a name to a village, or making the war in the novel a specific and actual one, the novel lost its character. The book seemed to live in an unnamed village somewhere in Eastern Europe sometime in the early part of the twentieth century in the same way that fables exist in these indeterminate times and places. There is a subtle change in the novel as we move from a pre-industrial, agrarian world into modernity. The action moves from the countryside to a city, and although the city is not named, its markers are much more specific.

HSP: Pavla’s mother, Agáta, says, “‘We make up the sense of things after they happen… We tell stories. This happened because of that. We string things together one by one so that it seems like there’s a reason to it all. But there is no reason. The most unbelievable things can happen and you have no idea why.’” How was it different to work on this story — or perhaps I should say, this kind of story — compared to your other novels? I’m thinking of your previous novel, Mary Coin, specifically, which existed in a realist world and was based on the Migrant Mother photograph. I wondered if this idea of storytelling to make sense of things held true for both books. What are the threads that pull your work together?

MS: When I finished Mary Coin, a book steeped in reality, I declared (to myself — I’m not sure anyone else was listening) — that my next novel would be wholly imaginative. Up until the writing of Little Nothing, the impetus for my stories always came from social realities either in the present or the past. It felt like a necessary departure for me to move into a purely imaginative space, necessary in order for me to flex some different aesthetic muscles. I have the feeling the obituary and the detail of the stretching captured my attention precisely because I was not looking to the world around me or to the historical record for inspiration. I wanted something that would take me away from all that, and that detail, which, even though it was real for that very real man, seemed the stuff of fable, captured my attention. It was a challenge to look at reality through the lens of the surreal, to make these big leaps into the impossible. But the foundational issues were the same for me in this novel as in anything else I’ve written. I had to invent palpable characters. I had to create action that unearthed their natures while moving the plot forward in compelling ways. Once I entered my very odd world, nothing really felt that unusual at all.

The lines you quote in your question really do speak to what connects my work in the sense that I am not interested in answering questions. I’m interested in asking them, and in exploring their various implications. To me, a novel is an opening, not a shutting down. At the end of the book, I want the reader to come away feeling like the world did not get smaller and more manageable, but that it got bigger and even more unruly.

I am not interested in answering questions. I’m interested in asking them.

HSP: I love that you wrote, “A wolf is its own term.” It felt like you stretched into a different state of narrative with that section. What was it like to write from the perspective of a wolf? How did you approach it?

MS: The exciting aspect of this section of the book for me was to write from the point of view of an animal while maintaining a sense that this animal might be a being we have already met. So, while I tried to write with some degree of accuracy about the life of a wolf and a wolf pack, and while I tried not to anthropomorphize the animals, I still had to suggest, somehow, that this wolf was, or at least might be, a character we recognize. So a lot of it was finding the right narrative distance for that section, trying to write about a wolf as a physical presence more than an emotional one. It was quite liberating to think of a character, in this case, the wolf, as being wholly motivated by instinct and the body.

This section of the book also marks the moment when Danilo takes over the narrative for a while. So seeing the wolves through his eyes allowed me to invest in them emotionally in a way that I might not have been able to do were I only allowed to describe the wolves from the wolves’ point of view.

HSP: What’s the best thing you’ve read recently?

MS: I’ve been doing some re-reading recently and I just finished Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. I love that book. The complicated war of emotions packed into a single, beautifully rendered sentence — thrilling.

HSP: What are you working on now?

MS: I’m doing what I normally do between projects. I wander around, read things, look at things, wait for the image or the idea or the overheard sentence that makes me ask myself a new set of questions.

Forgotten Woman: The life of Misuzu Kaneko

Posted on by 007595

In the Higashi Otani cemetery built on a hillside in Kyoto, there is a small gravestone near the stairs that my aunt Michiko and I always pass on our way upwards to my grandparents’ grave. Weathered and untended in a crowd of closely packed stones on terraced ledges, it is easily overlooked. Chiseled on its front is the name of a woman, Sakurai Satoe.

I’ve always wondered who this woman was, Michiko would say. She’d noticed the stone forty years ago, when her mother was interred there. It was distinctive for a few reasons — one, the stone was small and perched near the stairs where passersby could see it if they were attentive; two, the stone was not part of a family group and contained only the gently incised name of a woman; and three, that name was evocative and poetic. Sakurai means ‘well of cherries’ and Satoe means ‘place in the countryside.’

She’d noticed the stone forty years ago, when her mother was interred there.

The woman was likely unmarried. Michiko imagined she worked as a geisha in the city. Kyoto, after all, is famous for these female entertainers whose artistry and elegance is world-renowned. When I lived in Japan in the eighties, I sometimes caught sight of a geisha or maiko in the narrow cobblestone alleyways of Pontocho, and wondered about their mysterious lives deep in the heart of the city. Only the well-heeled and privileged could afford the services of geisha. Perhaps Sakurai Satoe’s death was commemorated by a lover or another ‘sister.’

I’d been to this cemetery only a few times. My interest had been piqued by my grandfather’s mention of it in his memoir, which I translated with Michiko in 2007.

At first, I didn’t pay much attention to Michiko’s remarks about this solitary woman’s grave, but on our most recent visit, we noticed something odd about the gravestone. Looped around its base with string was a white laminated sign stating that the stone would be removed in the near future as there had been no indication of its being tended. It was likely whomever had been paying the annual fees to the graveyard administrators had stopped doing so. I knew the fee was nominal; my aunt and her siblings continued to pay for their parents’ gravesite.

Looped around its base with string was a white laminated sign stating that the stone would be removed in the near future as there had been no indication of its being tended.

On this occasion, Michiko and I, along with my fourteen-year-old daughter, had just returned from Michiko’s youngest daughter’s wedding in Tokyo. Michiko had brought with her the floral tribute bouquet that had been given to her and her husband by the couple. She thought it would be fitting to bring these flowers to our maternal ancestor.

My daughter was far less excited about visiting her great-grandparents’ grave than going to a wedding. She quietly tagged along as we mounted the stairs with our flowers and water for the vases. When we stopped in front of the grave stone of the single woman, Michiko explained the sign to my daughter. She shrugged and said, “If you’re no longer remembered, you’re no longer living. They’ve got to make room for others, don’t they?”

She shrugged and said, “If you’re no longer remembered, you’re no longer living. They’ve got to make room for others, don’t they?”

It was a startling comment. My daughter spotted more of the signs dotting the terraced plots. It seemed the graveyard authorities were cleaning house by taking stock of their neglected dead. Making room for others.

How was it that the last evidence of one’s life could be so easily removed? Would this be the last time I would see this stone? Then Michiko noticed something on the sign. The date for the stone’s removal had come and gone. My daughter suggested we put some flowers into the vases to give the workers pause. Plucking two pink roses from the tribute bouquet, we set one on either side of the stone as if to say, this woman, Sakurai Satoe, has not been forgotten after all. Not by us, at least.

In the spring of 1923, a young woman working in her uncle’s bookstore in the coastal city of Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi prefecture sent some poems she’d written to a few children’s magazines in Tokyo. She had a rather common given name, Teru, but being well-read and of a somewhat fanciful nature, she conceived of a pen name: Misuzu. The name was derived from the word ‘misuzukari’ which means the ‘reaping of bamboo grasses’ and was a classical allusion used in ancient Japanese poetry.

She had a rather common given name, Teru, but being well-read and of a somewhat fanciful nature, she conceived of a pen name: Misuzu.

The selection of a pen name by this talented young woman would both ensure and obfuscate the woman’s identity from the point of utter obscurity to nationwide fame decades after her death. Like Sakurai Satoe’s gently carved name on the gravestone, Misuzu Kaneko’s name would appear like a cipher as the author of a few noteworthy poems found in children’s magazines of the period with little else as evidence of her life until its re-discovery decades later by literary scholar, Setsuo Yazaki.

Courtesy of Preservation Association of Misuzu Kaneko’s Work

Misuzu was just twenty when she sent out her poems, the age when the Japanese celebrate entry into adulthood. Only a few months earlier, she had been living with her grandmother and older brother in the nearby town of Senzaki where she had grown up in a family bookstore run by her widowed mother, Michi. Her father, a bookstore manager, had died overseas in China when Misuzu was three. Since his widow Michi was saddled with the care of three young children (Misuzu was the middle child), the youngest boy whose name was Masasuke, was adopted out to Michi’s younger sister, Fuji, and her sister’s husband Matsuzo Ueyama at the age of one. Matsuzo was the owner of all the bookstores in the family. He and Fuji had no children and were happy to adopt the young Masasuke, whom they hoped would carry on the family business. Around the time Misuzu turned sixteen, her aunt Fuji died, and Misuzu’s mother went to the city to remarry her sister’s husband, Matsuzo. Misuzu remained behind so that she could finish her schooling — namely, high school, which was unusual for a girl of her time to complete — before being called to work in Shimonoseki at her Uncle Matsuzo’s bookstore.

Reunited with her mother, and working independently in the familiar environment of the bookstore, Misuzu was truly happy.

It was in this heady atmosphere of the city — Shimonoseki was a bustling gateway to China and Korea at the time — where Misuzu began writing in earnest while minding a small branch store of the family chain on her own. Reunited with her mother, and working independently in the familiar environment of the bookstore, Misuzu was truly happy. The acceptance on the first try, of five of her poems by four magazines in the faraway urbane capital of the country was quite an accomplishment for the young woman. In particular, Misuzu had garnered the attention of the sophisticated literary editor, Yaso Saijo, who believed he had discovered a new and rising talent. On publication, Misuzu soon received fan mail, and letters of admiration were quickly printed up by the magazine’s editorial.

Misuzu at her desk. Illustration by Toshikado Hajiri

Children’s magazines were fashionable in the Taisho era of the 1920s in Japan; they frequently published the work of some of the best literary talent in the country at the time. Writing for children was not seen as beneath writing for adults, rather it was seen as an outlet for the kind of creativity and innocence children were perceived as inherently possessing. Do-shin was the word used to describe a child’s innocent heart to which do-wa (children’s stories) and do-yo (children’s poetry) could speak. Everyone who had been a child had at one time possessed ‘do-shin’ and could therefore experience again through do-wa and do-yo that state of innocence, purity and curiosity that was the essence of a child-like consciousness.

Writing for children was not seen as below that for adults; rather it was seen as an outlet for the kind of creativity and innocence children were perceived as inherently possessing.

Talented musicians, poets, and artists of the time were exploring this avenue of expression with enthusiasm. Misuzu, herself, a product of the changing times — well-educated and raised in a bookstore by a conscientious single mother — found herself among an admiring milieu of like-minded artists who appreciated her poetry. Masasuke, Misuzu’s younger brother, was also enthusiastic and musically gifted. Since they had grown up together (as ‘cousins’ — Masasuke did not know he was Misuzu’s brother) the two often collaborated with one another. Masasuke, being younger, was impressed by Misuzu’s achievements and was inspired by her writing. Not long after Misuzu moved to Shimonoseki, Masasuke went to Tokyo to get training in the book trade, during which time he continued composing music for children. One of his compositions was published in the children’s magazine Akai Tori in April, 1924. Misuzu was excited to hear this news and encouraged him.

In the meantime, a man named Keiki Miyamoto began working in the family bookstore. Misuzu’s uncle Matsuzo kept his eye on the young employee as a possible match for Misuzu for he was becoming increasingly worried that his adopted son, Masasuke was falling in love with Misuzu. How aware Misuzu was of her uncle’s plans are unknown; she was perhaps, in some ways, oblivious, focused as she was on her writing career.

She had joined a children’s writing group in the absence of editor Yaso Saijo, who had gone to France but who had been a great advocate of talented new writers like herself, and she also started assembling a personal collection of poems called Rokanshu (A Collection of Precious Stones). The journal was organized in monthly chapters. Notably, the first poem selected was a translation of Christina Rosetti’s “The Lowest Place,” which she caught glimpse of in an expensive edition sold at her bookstore (which, ironically, she could not afford) but could copy from by daintily lifting up its cover and jotting the words down in her notebook:

The Lowest Place

Give me the lowest place: not that I dare

Ask for that lowest place, but Thou hast died

That I might live and share

Thy glory by Thy side.

Give me the lowest place: or if for me

That lowest place too high, make one more low

Where I may sit and see

My God and love Thee so.

I quote the poem here as an example of Misuzu’s wide reading, one which shows her attraction to a religious work that extols humility. Another significant factor in Misuzu making this selection was that Yaso Saijo had already translated Rosetti into Japanese before, and had compared Misuzu to her. Misuzu, being a conscientious reader would likely have read anything he’d written or translated in appreciation of his literary sensibilities.

In the summer of 1925 , Misuzu’s best friend Hohoyo Tanabe died suddenly; this was deeply distressing to Misuzu. Hohoyo had returned to Senzaki from Korea where she had been living with her husband, to attend her ailing mother. While looking after her, she fell ill herself and died. She was pregnant with her first child who perished with her. Hohoyo and Misuzu were close and shared a love of poetry. Misuzu had dedicated her first collection of poems Kowareta Piano — “A Broken Piano” to her. And Hohoyo herself had recently published in Akai Tori. While in the midst of Misuzu’s mourning, Matsuzo finalized his arrangements for her marriage to Miyamoto to which obedient Misuzu complied. The wedding was to occur in Shimonoseki the following February.

On hearing of these plans, Masasuke felt uneasy. He made a special trip out to Senzaki where Misuzu was staying that winter to dissuade Misuzu from agreeing to this match. He also had to confirm the unsettling feelings he had for her. Was it true that she was his sister and not his cousin as he presumed all along? Earlier he had learned of his adoption by seeing his army draft papers, but now it dawned on him that Misuzu’s mother might well be his own, making Misuzu his sister. He needed to confirm this to be sure.

He also had to confirm the unsettling feelings he had for her. Was it true that she was his sister and not his cousin as he presumed all along?

Misuzu admitted to Masasuke that in fact, she was his sister. Having settled that, Masasuke then began to express his feelings of opposition towards loveless, arranged marriages. “Well, fine then,” he said. “It’s okay if you get married. But isn’t there anyone else who you love? If there is, why don’t you marry that person?” Misuzu’s oblique response was, “That person is the one wearing black clothes and holding a long scythe.” She was making a reference to the Grim Reaper. The comment would turn out to be prescient.

Clearly, Misuzu was not looking forward to the arrangement, but rather, was resigned to it. She knew she was of marriageable age, and was aware of her mother’s concern that if she didn’t marry soon, she would not find anyone. Misuzu also wanted to respect the wishes of her uncle Matsuzo; not agreeing to the arrangement would put her mother in an awkward position with him, something Misuzu did not want to risk. Besides these reasons, it is also possible Misuzu considered Masasuke’s artistic ambitions. Even though he was expected to take over the family bookstore, Misuzu wanted him to be free of his responsibility for it; if Misuzu married Miyamoto and things went well with Miyamoto working in the business, Masasuke could pursue his dreams as a composer without worrying about the future of the bookstore.

“Well, fine then,” he said. “It’s okay if you get married. But isn’t there anyone else who you love? If there is, why don’t you marry that person?”

In an age when arranged marriages were the norm, Misuzu took the conventional route for unselfish and compassionate reasons. Thinking of the needs of others in the strict and gendered hierarchy of obligations and responsibilities of women to men, and young to old, Misuzu did what she felt was right for everyone but herself. No one could have imagined just how badly this union would turn out to be until it was too late. Miyamoto turned out to be a disaster; he was a frequenter of brothels, had been involved in unsavoury business practices as a stockbroker, and had even tried killing himself with a prostitute in a double suicide attempt at which only he survived. If there was any love to be had in him for a woman, it would certainly not be for the bookish young niece his employer had arranged for him to marry. No, this was a marriage of convenience, securing his position in a place of well-regarded and reputable employment.

The couple started their life in the second floor of the bookstore in Shimonoseki in February of 1926. At first, Misuzu tried hard to be a good and dutiful wife. Her earnest, child-like optimism is made evident here in her much-loved poem “To Like It All.”

To Like It All

I want to like everything — 

onions, tomatoes, fish — 
I want to like them all.

Everything my mother makes
for our meals.

I want to like everyone — 

doctors, crows — 
all of them, too.

Everything and everyone in the world
God has made.

Not long after her wedding in February, Misuzu’s poetry experienced a resurgence in popularity and she was published several times in the following months throughout the spring. Later on, in July of that year, Misuzu’s poems Tairyo (The Big Catch) and Osakana (Fish) were chosen for the acclaimed annual Nihon Doyo Shu (A Collection of Japanese Children’s Poems) edited by members of the preeminent professional organization of children’s poetry writers, Doyo Shijin-kai, several of whom were well known writers of the age such as Toson Shimazaki, Izumi Kyoka, the editor Yaso Saijo, and Akiko Yosano. Later, an invitation was extended to Misuzu to join the group, making her only the second woman admitted into the association after the well established Yosano, who was now in her forties.

Meanwhile, trouble was brewing between the men in the bookstore. Masasuke and Miyamoto did not work well together. After an argument with Miyamoto over business practices, Masasuke abruptly left Shimonoseki to join Misuzu who was in Senzaki on an errand. Matsuzo believed Miyamoto had driven his beloved son Masasuke out of the business and confronted him. When Misuzu returned to the bookstore, she tried to mediate between her brother, uncle and her husband, by calmly advocating for Miyamoto. The result of this intervention, however, made things worse. Miyamoto became haughty and arrogant, to the point of brazenness; he invited the women he’d been seeing on the side to visit him openly at the bookstore. This was the final straw for Matsuzo. It was now evident that he had chosen the wrong marriage partner for his niece. He proposed to Misuzu that she divorce him at once, but it was too late. Misuzu was pregnant.

He proposed to Misuzu that she divorce him at once, but it was too late. Misuzu was pregnant.

Miyamoto was fired. He left with the intent to start his own business elsewhere, and even though her uncle told her she could remain at the bookstore, the pregnant Misuzu decided to accompany her husband. On November 14, 1926 Misuzu gave birth to a girl whom she named Fusae. By that time, Miyamoto’s new business venture was failing and there was again strain in the marriage.

The following summer, editor Yaso Saijo was going through Shimonoseki enroute to Kyushu; he arranged to meet Misuzu at the train station. The dapper, well-heeled cosmopolitan editor was startled to see a disheveled young woman dressed in dull cotton kimono with an infant strapped to her back. The gentle soft-spoken woman said, “I’ve come over the mountains just so I could meet you in person. Now I will be going back over the mountain again to go home.” This would be the only time Yaso Saijo would set eyes on the poet whose work he admired so much.

The dapper, well-heeled cosmopolitan editor was startled to see a disheveled young woman dressed in dull cotton kimono with an infant strapped to her back.

In the fall of 1927, the family moved again this time because of financial difficulties to Kyushu to where Miyamoto’s parents lived. The stay was short; they returned to Shimonoseki within a couple months, this time for Miyamoto to start a grocery business. By the end of the year, Misuzu had contracted gonorrhea from her philandering husband.

In early spring, poet Tadao Shimada came to visit Misuzu at one of the family’s branch bookstores in the new fashionable department store in Shimonoseki. Misuzu demurred; she was ill, bedridden in fact, and she did not want Shimada to see her in her current condition. Moreover, her husband had expressly forbidden her to write any poetry or correspond with her brother, colleagues, editors or fans. When her alma mater high school requested a contribution for their newsletter, Misuzu sadly wrote back:

The wings of my imagination which soared as high as the sun have now been clipped. All that is left is one foolish mother. I remain a bookworm who only knows the world that exists in books and makes no effort to understand the outside world. My sole happiness lies in playing with my child and in opening books.

Misuzu decided to compile a complete manuscript of her poems to give to Yaso Saijo and Masasuke. Despite her being ill, however, Miyamoto moved the family again — their fourth move in two years, and the second in eight months. Misuzu wrote of her fatigue to her mother that September; she could barely undertake even the slightest of house chores without having to recover for days afterwards. Ashamed, she told no one of her disease. In those days, without antibiotics, treatment was not effective. Despite this, or perhaps even because of the illness, Misuzu did manage to complete her manuscript at the end of October 1929. Even as she completed her goal, however, there was a weariness in her tone as expressed in this poem:

Personal Note After Finishing my Manuscript of Poems

It’s done

It’s done —

My little book of poems.

Not to say I’m proud,

but my heart does not dance,

and I feel lonely.

Now summer is over

And with autumn too, about to end,

I pick up my needle and work on a cloth,

feeling empty.

To whom will I show this book?

Even I feel it lacks something.

How lonely!

Without even climbing the heights

have I come back —

the mountain peaks shrouded in clouds.

But still, even knowing this,

have I stayed up late into the autumn night

writing intently under the lamp.

What shall I write tomorrow?

Ah, how lonely!

By early 1930, the weakened Misuzu now separated from Miyamoto, was living with her daughter, Fusae at her mother and uncle’s place where her mother could help with the child’s care. Unbeknownst to Misuzu, Miyamoto had gone to Tokyo. The couple’s divorce was finalized in 1930 but Miyamoto insisted on getting custody of their daughter as was his right under the law, knowing full well that Misuzu would refuse. By threatening to claim custody of the child, he planned to extort money from the family. He wrote to Misuzu that he would come for Fusae on March 10.

The day before his expected arrival, Misuzu went to get a final portrait of herself at the Miyoshi Photo Studio in Shimonoseki. On her way home, she bought a package of sakura-mochi, a favorite family treat made of sweet bean paste and sticky rice wrapped in a salted cherry leaf. She shared it with her daughter, and then lovingly bathed her before putting her to bed. Her mother noted nothing unusual in Misuzu’s behaviour that night; her last words to her mother were about Fusae: “She looks so cute when she’s asleep.”

Her mother noted nothing unusual in Misuzu’s behaviour that night; her last words to her mother were about Fusae: “She looks so cute when she’s asleep.”

That night, Misuzu wrote three wills — one for her husband, one for her mother, and one for her brother. The three documents no longer exist so it is difficult to corroborate what was written, but witnesses say, she urged her husband to give up his custody of Fusae to her mother who was the only person she could trust for her child’s upbringing. She wanted Fusae to have a ‘rich spirit’ rather than to be provided for only materially. She then apologized to her mother for being a poor wife who could not prevent her husband’s infidelities, and to her brother, she gave words of encouragement to pursue his dreams as an artist in Tokyo representing their family.

After she wrote the wills, she took an overdose of the sedative, Calmotin, a common drug used by writers for committing suicide, and died on March 10, 1930 at the age of twenty-six.

From then on, the poet Misuzu Kaneko was completely forgotten.

It was in the mid-sixties when poet and literary scholar Setsuo Yazaki was perusing some old children’s magazines in the library that he encountered Misuzu Kaneko’s poem “Big Catch.”

Big Catch

At sunrise, glorious sunrise

it’s a big catch!

A big catch of sardines!

On the beach, it’s like a festival

but in the sea, they will hold funerals

for the ten thousands of dead.

Yazaki was struck by the poem. Who was this poet who could empathize with even the fish in the sea? When he went to investigate, he could find little information about her. Misuzu was a pen name, and ‘Kaneko’ was the maiden surname of the poet. And although he could trace the poet back to city of Shimonoseki from where she submitted her poems, the bookstore where she worked was no longer in existence. Still, Yazaki persisted in his search. In 1982, he got a lucky break — the poet’s brother, Masasuke was alive and in his seventies. He presented Yazaki with some photos and three battered pocket diaries containing 512 poems, most of which were unpublished.

At the time of Yazaki’s discovery, he serendipitously met up with a colleague who would later head up a publishing company called JULA Publishing Bureau. Founded in 1982, JULA was the publishing arm of the Japan Children’s Literature Institute. Yazaki gave over all the work he had recovered to the press for publication. JULA published a six-volume set of all the poems as well as Yazaki’s biography of the poet, The Life of Children’s Poet Misuzu Kaneko — a meticulously researched work that is an authoritative and seminal account of the poet’s short life that many have consulted, myself included.

Once released into the world, Misuzu’s poetry quickly gained popularity in Japan, so much so that there is now a museum dedicated to her memory in her hometown of Senzaki. Not only have there been books published, but films have been made about her life as well as music composed to her poetry. In 2011, Misuzu’s poem “Are You An Echo?” received nation wide attention when it was aired on TV during the tsunami-earthquake crisis.

In 2011, Misuzu’s poem “Are You An Echo?” received nation wide attention when it was aired on TV during the tsunami-earthquake crisis.

My own encounter with Misuzu’s poetry began in 2010 when I was working as a blog contributor and reviewer for the now defunct multicultural children’s literature website, PaperTigers. I was instantly gripped by Misuzu’s work. She was extraordinarily perceptive and her viewpoint on the world of living things was unique, unlike anything I’d read before in children’s poetry in English.

At the time of my discovery of Misuzu Kaneko’s poetry, there were only two books of her work translated into English — D.P. Dutcher’s Something Nice and Midori Yoshida’s Rainbows on Eyelashes. Both were published by JULA. Although the books were competent translations of Misuzu’s most famous poems, they left me wanting more. So I decided to sharpen my skills at translating Japanese poetry acquired during my research scholarship days in Tokyo in the late 80’s to reveal more of this woman’s poetic treasure in English. I enlisted the aid of my Aunt Michiko, who had helped me translate her father’s (my late grandfather’s) memoir into English. Michiko wanted to improve her English by delving into more of Misuzu’s work through the act of translation. We set up an impromptu arrangement over e-mail, with Michiko selecting poems she liked from the six-volume set of Misuzu Kaneko’s poetry she had taken out of the library and sending them to me with an initial draft of a simplified English translation. I would read the translation and compare it to the original, and then tweak the English to make it read better for a native English reading audience.

This process of translation, although slow, was always delightful.

This process of translation, although slow, was always delightful. Time after time, with each poem translated, Michiko and I would be startled anew into another dimension of Misuzu’s imagination. For example, in one poem she personifies Last Year as a ship quietly leaving the harbor; in another poem, she offers words of comfort to a carp in a pond gazing enviously at carp streamers in the sky. Misuzu had a great capacity for empathy and compassion for all living creatures. And her attentive and watchful gaze often went to the unattended or the invisible. She noticed things other people didn’t and pondered them. Moreover, she was curious. In another poem, she contemplates the nature of time by reflecting on how night and day follow one another like a rope. For me, reading Misuzu sometimes felt like reading Blake. Her poetry was simple enough Japanese for a child (or a non-Japanese foreigner) to read, but only in translating it did I experience the depth and breadth of her unique vision.

Illustration by Toshikado Hajiri

Like Sakurai Satoe of the neglected gravestone, Misuzu Kaneko was nearly forgotten. But would that have mattered to her really? It seemed to me she wrote poetry for the sheer pleasure of it and that her success, at least initially, came as a surprise to her. I felt as if Misuzu wrote purely, and by purely, I mean without the trace of a self-conscious egotism. She wrote with the kind of innocent abandon I wish I could have again as a poet. Selfless and without guile, attentive but uncloying, she wrote poems about the world without the weight of its meaninglessness burdening every syllable. She embodied that perfection of the poetic ‘I’ that observes and becomes the thing it observes in compassion and harmony with it.

She embodied that perfection of the poetic ‘I’ that observes and becomes the thing it observes in compassion and harmony with it.

This is not to say Misuzu was unambitious with her work. Even as she was ill, itinerant with a philandering husband, and a mother of a young child, she steadfastly continued through extreme conditions to produce a final manuscript of her work to give to those who had appreciated her poetry the most — editor Yaso Saijo and her brother, Masasuke. She was grateful to them and probably believed she owed it to them to give them all of the work she had composed thus far in her short life. And when she finally completed this task, no doubt at some cost to her health, she turned joyfully at hand to record the words of her three year old daughter in a book she called Nankindama, or “Glass Beads.” Misuzu was a poet through and through, a woman besotted with words and their power to express her deepest feelings of love, compassion and gratitude. She wrote, not so much to be remembered, as to not forget how delightful and wondrous the world could be for a child, and that is why her poetry is so celebrated in Japan today.

(Endnote: The biographical material on Misuzu Kaneko was written in consultation of Setsuo Yazaki’s biography Doyo Shijin Kaneko Misuzu no Shogai (The Life of Children’s Poet Misuzu Kaneko) published by JULA Shuppan, 1993 and Elizabeth Keith’s Masters Thesis (2002) for the University of Hawaii entitled Kaneko Misuzu and The Development of Children’s Literature in Taisho Japan.)

Read more about Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko, published by Chin Music Press.

Writer Risks Life to Save Life’s Work

Posted on by 007595

A cautionary tale that reminds us all to back up our work

Gideon Hodge en route to save laptop. Apparently not a reinactment. This and other dramatic photographs by Matthew Hinton, available at the New Orleans Advocate.

In the digital age, despite differences in creed, color, and craft, all writers share one practice in common: backing up their work. Since most modern authors write on a laptop, they are particularly sensitive to the risk of losing all of their hard work in a nightmarish moment of bad luck. All it takes is one hard drive crash. Or in Gideon Hodge’s case, a raging fire.

Last week, Hodge who writes plays and novels, found himself running into his burning down home to save his laptop, which contained the entirety of his life’s work. When his fiancée called to tell him the terrible news, he instantly thought of the lone copies of two completed novels which he had not backed up elsewhere. He darted past firefighters who tried to dissuade him from entering what was essentially a death trap. Fortunately he and his laptop made it out unscathed. Everything else in the couple’s home was charred.

According to the New Orleans Advocate, Hodge didn’t think twice about putting himself in harm’s way for his art. He said, “Despite my better sense, I just ran inside and grabbed it. I didn’t think to be scared.”

Sometimes it takes a traumatic wakeup call to remind a writer the importance of backing up their work. As for Hodge, he plans on investing in multiple external hard drives to store outside of his home, just in case lightning strikes twice.