Can literature predict the future? Well… sometimes. This nifty infographic from redcandy takes a look at what the future might look like, if literature is to be believed. Are you ready for your bird assassins and ChickieNob snacks?
★★★★☆
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing my mom’s old lamp.
Even though my mother died many decades ago, I still think of the lamp that sits in my living room window as hers, because she wrote her name on it. I worry if someone else named Eunice Wilson were to get her hands on the lamp, I might not have much legal ground to stand on.
I considered painting over my mother’s name but it felt like I would in some way be erasing a little bit of her. That’s how I felt when she was buried in the ground. Like I was erasing her. A lot of her.
The man at the funeral home suggested taxidermy as an option for people having trouble letting go. He said it wasn’t legal, but he needed some fast cash before he left town. I considered it briefly, but it likely would have caused a lot of confusion, especially among my mom’s older friends with poor eyesight. Another option would have been to have her taxidermied and then placed inside a taxidermied bear with a removable head. Kind of like she died wearing a bear costume. I’m glad I chose not to do this. I’m scared of bears.
The lamp hasn’t worked in years. The switch is broken, wiring frayed, one of the legs came off, and there’s a crack from the time I fell onto a rock while hiking with the lamp. At this point it’s less a lamp and more of a paperweight with a lampshade. But I still can’t let the lamp go. It’s funny how we can become attached to objects.
My mother never cared much for this lamp but it’s literally the only thing she owned that I still have. For a while I had the couch she died on, but because she was murdered the police took it as evidence.
I saw an identical lamp in a thrift store and considered purchasing it so my mom’s lamp wouldn’t feel so lonely, on the off chance the lamp contains my mother’s ghost. But then I worried the thrift store lamp might have a ghost in it as well, and I don’t know if ghosts can get scared by other ghosts the way humans get scared by ghosts. It was a tough call because the other lamp was only $2.99, which is a good deal as far as lamps go these days.
I have some photos of the lamp in a photo album if you would like to see them. Some are better than others. Please call me at (617) 379–2576 to arrange a time to come over. Unfortunately I can’t show you the lamp in person for fear that it could be damaged.
BEST FEATURE: Because the lamp doesn’t work, it means I can’t electrocute myself on it again.
WORST FEATURE: The lamps is in the shape of a dolphin, which I don’t care much for, because I’m scared of dolphins.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Elliott Gould.
Mexico City, Mexico
Cultura de café, by Juan Villoro
translated from the Spanish by Philip K. Zimmerman
Built over a lake that was drained, overwhelmed by the exhaust of cars and the pollution in a valley encircled by mountains that don’t let the wind in, Mexico City is a bastion of dust mites. The atmosphere isn’t as aggressive as our winter is benevolent (although you suffer inside the houses, built according to the superstitious idea that heat is unnecessary), but spring asthenia thrives in the dirty air. The arrival of the rains, more torrential all the time, provides relief from allergies but not from flooding.
In this context cafés are not, as in other parts of the world, places where you can escape the snow for a while, but rather spots where you can combat the rush and, in some cases, breathe differently. Some modern coffeehouses have a system known as “washed air”; the more traditional ones don’t have it and don’t need it: they make up for the vapors of the Italian machine with a fan that simultaneously refreshes the air. The best atmosphere in Mexico City is in a café.
In his exceptional conversations with Bioy Casares, Borges lamented that there should be a literature of wine, of opium and of absinthe but not one of café con leche. Despite its galvanizing effects, the mixture lacks the glamour to justify an alternate vision of the universe.
In my adolescence people spoke of “café intellectuals,” not with the respect due to a sect that transmits ideas within the cramped space of a table but with the contempt reserved for those who turn their backs on reality and take refuge in vain speculation.
Nonetheless, the elusory cafés of Mexico City represented singular refuges for reinventing the real with words.
In my adolescence North American-style diners were beginning to develop, but there was only one Vips and only one Denny’s. Although Sanborns had several locations already, the franchise coffee shop wasn’t omnipresent yet. Those of us who were starting to read would search out secluded cafés to hold gatherings that resembled conspiracies, not for what we said but for the scarcity of participants and the fanaticism we assumed.
From my rambling childhood, I passed to the sedentary life of cafés. There have never been many of them in Mexico City. If you don’t count the spots started by Cubans and Spaniards in the centro, among us the café has never occupied the preeminent place it has in other metropolises. What’s more, the North American-style chains have bit by bit replaced the little cafés where the owner would smoke behind the counter with a dog on a comfortable cushion at his side, the unique, unrepeatable places, the grottos of the initiates.
The capital’s best-known café is the Casa de los Azulejos, or House of Tiles, built by a revanchist Spaniard looking to get back at the authoritarian father who had told him, “You won’t even be able to build a house of tiles” (meaning a toy house). The stately building has a mural by José Clemente Orozco in its staircase. Upstairs there’s a bar with a little window in the shape of a flower which gives onto one of the best views of the centro histórico, dominated by domes and bell towers.
The Zapatistas ate breakfast at Sanborns after taking the capital in 1914 and left behind the indelible image of a people receiving for the first time the providential gift of pan dulce.
The writer Carlos Monsiváis liked to ask: “What percentage of you belongs to Slim?”
This building of indubitable lineage was the first in a chain that now belongs to Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world. The writer Carlos Monsiváis liked to ask: “What percentage of you belongs to Slim?” As investors own stakes in a boxer, so the owner of Sanborns controls a part of the life of every Mexican. The Casa de los Azulejos is merely the nucleus of an empire of ubiquitous businesses which spans the entire country. In 1990 President Carlos Salinas de Gortari initiated the privatization of Teléfonos de México. Slim was handed the company as an absolute monopoly for five years and a relative one for ten. Without this impetus foreign to free competition and derived from the trade of governmental favors, he wouldn’t have become the magnate he is today. The coffee at Sanborns is terrible, but it tastes even worse when you know the trajectory of the owner.
The invasion of plastic-chair coffee shops lent the few real cafés an air of quasi-secrecy. Meeting spots for a sect to which one belongs on merits that can’t always be defined.
A café is a place for talking. The mythology of radio announcers, who populated my childhood with magic words, was substituted in my enthusiasm by that of writers, particularly poets. Going on twenty, I’d make pilgrimages down Bucareli towards Café La Habana, where according to Roberto Bolaño the “iron poets” could be found.
Mario Santiago Papasquiaro: I met him in 1973 under his original name, José Alfredo Zendejas, in a short story workshop. He wrote only poems but liked to debate narrative. His critical sense was ferocious, yet he tempered his fire with jokes that he himself celebrated with thunderous guffaws. He had read more than we had, knew the avant-gardes, banged the drum, along with Roberto Bolaño and other rebels, for infrarrealismo and was planning an epic trip to Europe.
By the 1990s that poet of the fiery eyes and riotous hair was handicapped, walking with a cane because he’d been hit by a car. A forty-something with strange hair and bad teeth. People treated him with annoyed suspicion. When he’d come to see me at La Jornada, the newspaper where I worked, the receptionist, who was used to dealing with all kinds of eccentrics, would call me on the phone to ask whether I really wanted to let Mario in.
I preferred to see him at Café La Habana, where he’d order a beer at ten in the morning in order to evoke the 1970s, the period Bolaño was to make famous in The Savage Detectives, where Mario appears under the name Ulises Lima.
The rhythm of a café lends itself to the writing and correcting of verses that roll onward as the cigar smoke once did. You can’t write a novel in a café.
The urgent demands of journalism and the need for isolation drove me away from cafés, where I had begun to feel superfluous. I wasn’t a poet and was wasting time. So said my puritanical conscience, trained at the Colegio Alemán.
Sometimes I take shelter from the rain in those places and kill time there between one appointment and the next, but they’re no longer targets in my life. I admire the people who get together there, although I do it with the incongruous feeling of one who’s been missing out on something for thirty years. Every city has parallel societies: the gamblers, beggars, drug dealers and addicts tend to associate clandestinely in order to fraternize at the margins of the norm. For me cafés have become something similar, almost prohibited. Is there any reason for this renunciation? It’s possible that it all has to do with the way we administer the future. For years I’d meet with poets to talk about the future. I didn’t plan to write any poems, but like the protagonists of On the Road or The Savage Detectives, I aspired to live poetically. The café was the place of violent conjecture, the place where we could conceive of rare, perhaps unattainable hopes.
With the years the past grows stronger, until suddenly it presents itself with the blunt extension of a city; it’s a labyrinth begging to be crossed. This book is a lot like a returning. Only in writing it have I understood that distancing myself from cafés had to do with distancing myself from the future. Little by little the horizon ceased to be imaginable and transformed itself into a certainty that lies behind me.
But sometimes the dash of milk in my café cortado reaches me like a telegram from another time, and I recall the teachings of poets who scanned verses by tapping their cups with their coffee spoons.
The history of a city is the history of its cafés, where life mixes with culture.
The history of a city is the history of its cafés, where life mixes with culture. Ramón Gómez de la Serna set up his observation post at the Pombo in Madrid, Claudio Magris his at the San Marco in Trieste; Karl Kraus at the Central in Vienna; Jean-Paul Sartre at the Deux Magots in Paris; Fernando Pessoa at the Martinho da Arcada in Lisbon; Juan Rulfo at the Ágora in Mexico City.
Is there any better way to get to know a city in a sedentary key? If the walking man deciphers the lay of the land by looking, the man of the café understands his time by listening. Coffeehouses afforded me a valuable exercise: being in the city without being absorbed by it, seeing others at the moment when they excuse themselves from their habitual codified conduct. The urban custom they turn to most often in that enclosure is a certain type of conversation, one that foregoes conclusions and aspires only to continuation.
The infinite needs strategies in order to become intimate. Mexico City is inexhaustible in a provisional way, like a cup of café cortado.
Juan Villoro is the author of El testigo, Dios es redondo (God is Round), Los culpables (The Guilty), and other books. His journalistic and literary work has been recognized with such international prizes as the Herralde de Novela, Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, Rey de España, Ciudad de Barcelona, Vázquez Montalbán de Periodismo Deportivo, and Antonin Artaud. He has been a professor of literature at UNAM, Yale, and la Universidad Pompeu Fabra de Barcelona. He is a columnist for the newspapers Reforma and El Periódico de Catalunya.
Philip K. Zimmerman is a writer and a translator from Spanish and German. Born in Madrid, he was raised in Upstate New York. His work has been included in the Berlin International Literature Festival and the New York International Fringe Festival, and he recently completed a translation of Helene and Wolfgang Beltracchi’s autobiography, Selbstporträt (Self-Portrait). He lives in Munich, Germany.
This essay is excerpted from Juan Villoro’s El vértigo horizontal: la Ciudad de México
Read other essays in Electric Literature’s The Writing Life Around the World series.
The penultimate story in Monica Drake’s debut short fiction collection, The Folly of Loving Life, is called “S.T.D. Demon.” That, in itself, reveals a whole lot about the tone of these stories: knowing, darkly funny, collapsing under the weight of the past, auguring an inevitable and painful future.
A quote from the same story reveals more: “The motive of all pathogens is to reproduce. Same thing with humans, we just have baby showers.”
That’s Nessie — Vanessa, and occasionally Nessa — one of two major recurring sister-protagonists from an isolated home in country-turned-strip-mall territory outside of Portland, Oregon. So is this:
I weighed nothing. That was where we lived: an anorexic town. Girls worked hard to be less, expect less. When I wanted something, I’d say no. I’d say, No thanks, no way. But what I was always saying really, behind those words? One thing: Love me, motherfuckers.
Nessie is the tall, flirty, waifish elder sister. She wears high heels and drinks heavily, falls for hockey players and deposed dictators, drug addicts and dealers. She wanders the continent in discontent. We watch her grow from a damaged teen to a mother finally figuring out what it means to trod across an apathetic world that shifts under your feet.
Her sister, Lu — Lucille, and occasionally Carrion, at her own request — has her own struggles. Perpetually forgotten, withdrawn and lonely, she goes the goth route rather than following in her sister’s brassy act. She works at a fast food joint as a teen, and has “Fry-O-Lator” permanently seared into her forearm, courtesy of a cruel manager and one bad night. She attends a local college and gets high a lot.
Like Nessie, Lu stops eating, but for different reasons. The fast food joint is one. Another is a disturbing foreign exchange student who lived with her and her family one year after Nessie moved out. He died at the kitchen table while eating, and out of spite for him and his sexual overtures, Lu decides to eat one of the sausages remaining on his plate. She was fourteen.
It’s been thirty years. I feel like that mistake is still with me. I ate a dead man’s greasy sausage, and what if some part of it is still in my body? …I’d have liposuction if a doctor could promise to find exactly the fat cells plumped by that single hot, dripping sausage. I want everything about it to go away. When you see women who don’t eat? Or women who cleanse, detox and purge? I think they’ve done something like this. They’ve eaten in a way that’s left a memory, a creepy ghost, a body inside their own body.
All of which is to say, The Folly of Loving Life makes its most obvious point of comparison, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, look positively sunny. (Well, at least partly cloudy.) Much of that is because the portrayal mental illness and addiction from women’s perspectives across a span of twenty years or so adds a whole secondary weight.
It’s also due to the sheer scope of this world’s brutality. Nessie and Lu are the products of a broken home — in the collection’s first story, their mother has a mental breakdown, imagining the ghosts of children murdered in their new home calling out to her at night. But their family’s misery isn’t unique. All of these characters are broken — mental patients and drifters, drone operators reeling from PTSD, addicts desperate for their next fix.
Drake wrote two novels before this, and it shows. The collection is almost a novel in snapshots, told from a few different points of view. Nessie is the primary narrator, and Lu after her, but there are others, like one of Lu’s exes. Sections called “Neighborhood Notes,” told from a few perspectives, serve as glances into the lives of America’s forgotten and broken, trying and failing always to escape.
External escape evades these characters, but internally, it’s only as far from them as their resolve. “The road dead-ended again,” Nessie recalls in her final chapter. “I turned around in that funhouse maze, determined. I’d get us out of this.” She’s the only one, in the end, to say it, even to herself. Maybe that makes it true.
by Michael Peck
Sometime in 1739 King Louis XV paid a special visit to a duck being displayed in Paris.
The inventor of the duck, Jacques de Vaucanson, was regarded as an inventor of mechanical life par excellence, someone who’d been lauded by the unimpressible Voltaire and by Denis Diderot (the latter spoke of him in superlatives in both D’Alembert’s Dream and again in his Encyclopedie’s section on automata). He’d charmed imperial salons with his 1737 flautist and a number of other curiosities, including a tambourine player, and a calligrapher.
Vaucanson would load the creature with tiny pellets, and it was these the duck defecated to wild applause.
The Mechanical Duck was his greatest invention yet. An intricate mechanism of cams and levers set the animal in motion, making it waddle like an actual canard. Each wing was composed of approximately 400 individuated parts, the whole apparatus made of copper. “The Duck with Feathers”, as the showman advertised it, splashed around in a small pool and pecked grain out of an audience member’s hand. Ingenious tubes aided the Duck’s digestion, but before each show Vaucanson would load the creature with tiny pellets, and it was these the duck defecated to wild applause.
A fake shitting animal was a national treasure, said Voltaire facetiously, and without it “…you would have nothing to remind you of the glory of France.” Soon, the Duck would be a fixture in parlors and cabinets of wonder across much of Europe. With this and other mechanical contraptions, Vaucanson’s aim was to synthesize beast and machine. He’d even had wrapped human flesh around his flute-player’s hands to smooth out its awkward movements, while a dog’s tongue waggled in his Talking Head, making a daring first step into cybernetics. One of his prototypes was called “profane” by a distinguished guest, who then had Vaucanson’s laboratory destroyed. His child handwriter was so marvelous that the Inquisition impounded it, believing it the result of casual necromancy.
So Louis had come to the exhibit with a question that would have been ridiculous to anyone besides the inventor. Taking Vaucanson away from the crowd, he inquired whether it was possible to construct an entirely artificial man.
Before Vaucanson, legends about automated beings recur throughout the ancient and the medieval worlds:
-4th Century B.C.E.: Archytas of Tarentum, Greek Pythagorean philosopher, gives steam-powered flight to a wooden pigeon.
-circa 150 B.C.E: Before unveiling the very first vending machine and robot theater, Hero of Alexandria fashions a moving body with a non-detachable head.
-12th-13th Centuries: Robert Grosseteste designs the first of a flurry of brazen heads that could “telle of suche thinges as befelle”; the churchman Albertus Magnus has a brass figure whose demoniac speech so infuriates his student Thomas Aquinas, that the latter smashes it to bits; later, Roger Bacon and his assistant, a Friar Bungy, are accused of cavorting with Satan, who’s allegedly taught them how to make a bronze or brass head on a pedestal that could dispense prophecies; when they miss their opportunity to summon the devil, the head immediately explodes.
-13th Century: A quartet of musicians serenades the viewer from a small boat, as invented by the Persian clockwork manufacturer El Jazari; Giovanni Fontana, a self-styled magus, produces miniature clockwork devils and creatures given movement by rocket propulsion.
-15th Century: In Japan, Hisashige Tanaka, (aka “The Gadget Wizard” and founder of what would become Toshiba) builds an android archer.
-1494: Leonardo da Vinci devises an empty, automated suit of armor.
-1562: When the son of King Philip of Spain is near death, the monarch calls for Diego de Alcala to be placed in his son’s bed; the holy man has been dead for close to a century; nonetheless, the decree is carried out. In the morning, the heir-apparent is cured, claiming that the monk spoke to him in the night. Philip hires a watchmaker to construct an android based on the monk’s likeness: the wood and iron faux-monk can walk, hold up a cross and open and close his mouth like a nutcracker.
-1649: As a child, Louis XIV is given a toy carriage with synchronized horses and footmen.
-circa 1670: Athanasius Kircher, inventor of the megaphone, introduces various clockwork figures, including a statue that listens and speaks
From the late 17th and early 18th centuries, self-correcting machines combined the Enlightenment-era pursuits of magic, mechanics, spectacle and philosophy into a unified field theory. Even before the automata-boom, mechanical tinkering was being used to explain nature and the universe. Rene Descartes, pretty much the founder of Continental philosophy, asserted in Treatise on Man (1629–1633) that the animal kingdom bears a closer affinity to clockwork than to divine handiwork. (Descartes was an early adapter of mechanical objects. He supposedly fashioned a wind-up doll and called it Francine after his beloved dead child. During an ocean voyage to visit Queen Christina of Sweden in 1649, the superstitious seamen and their captain tossed Francine overboard, blaming her for the turbulent weather they’d been experiencing.) But the philosopher’s theories, tinged with impiety, reached a blasphemous apotheosis in the hands of Julian Ofray De La Mettrie, who said bluntly that man was nothing more impressive than a refined automaton.
Rene Descartes asserted that the animal kingdom bears a closer affinity to clockwork than to divine handiwork.
La Mettrie was a one-man Enlightenment. Where others vacillated between faith and reason, he plunged in headfirst, refuting the soul and having the audacity to call man a “living representation of perpetual motion.” The Histoire naturelle de l’âme (Natural History of the Soul) was an opening salvo against god and superstition, exploring a hallucinatory state as the result of physical processes. Even in the relatively free-thinking Netherlands, La Mettrie’s materialist theories caused a scandal, forcing him to flee the country.
In Holland he published his 1747 magnum opus, l’Homme Machine (Man, A Machine), one of the most influential materialist tracts of its era. Man was a mechanical being, La Mettrie stated, not ruled by god, but by his own mechanistic impulses. Copies of l’Homme Machine were quickly consigned to the bonfire, and once again La Mettrie was consigned into self-exile with his heresies. This time La Mettrie journeyed to Berlin, where he was welcomed by another iconoclast, Frederick the Great.
In a roundabout way, Louis was asking Vaucanson to bring La Mettrie’s condemned ideas into practice.
Louis had a few reasons for wanting a man-machine to be built. Like Frederick in Germany, Louis embodied the scientific worldview of the Enlightenment, and the mascots of science seemed to be ever more complicated machines. Many scientists and men of letters denigrated mechanicians as mere “toymakers,” but Louis sided with the scholar Hermann von Helmholtz; for them, automata were a means of peeking into the enigmas of human biology.
At age 5 Louis ascended the throne in 1715, after a series of familial tragedies. Mechanical toys offered a respite from the traumas of his childhood, and his fondness for automata never waned during his topsy-turvy reign. He’d always been sickly and frail, and his attention turned naturally to medical research, a wholly neglected field when he assumed power. Louis called on legions of quacks, homeopathists and pseudo-scientists throughout France to palliate his ailments. Probably in this way, he came across the work of Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, a cantankerous surgeon whose interest in biological simulation renewed Vaucanson’s own dabblings in automation.
The proceedings of the Academie de Rouen notes the attributes of the model, and concludes with, “God forgive us, all that follows from him.”
Le Cat himself tinkered with androids, too. In 1739 he diagrammed a “living anatomy” that would feature respiration and “the secretions.” The proceedings of the Academie de Rouen notes the attributes of the model, and concludes with, “God forgive us, all that follows from him.” But Le Cat’s intention for the machine wasn’t just to be mind-blowing and showy; it was to unravel the human body’s design. Together Le Cat and Vaucanson worked on the rudimentary android, but Vaucanson tired of the collaboration and set out to make his own automata.
Activities of the blood was an all but unknown process up to this period; doubtful physicians engaged in bloodletting — a practice that had more in common with Russian Roulette than anything provably ameliorative. At that point, practicing medicine was guesswork and accepted myth. The king set out to rectify the often deadly fads in physiology, and to do this would require analyzing circulation. Instead of experimentation on a living person and risking a public outcry, Louis hatched his audacious plan to replicate human functions in an automaton. And there was no one more suited than Vaucanson to assemble the king’s android.
Man-making belonged to the domain of god, and to preserve the secrecy of their project — while also bringing the inventor’s considerable proficiency with machines into his employ — Vaucanson was installed as the Inspector of Silk Manufacturing in the city of Lyon. The country lagged behind England in that industry, and between 1745 and 1750, Vaucanson practically invented the assembly-line, and for that matter, kickstarted the Industrial Revolution. His innovations in weaving led directly to the Jacquard Loom, and infuriated the many hundreds of workers who were being replaced by mechanical levers. In addition to threatening notions of the soul with his inventions, Vaucanson was now putting livelihoods at risk as well. Unrest followed close on the heels of these modernizations, and weavers who hadn’t been made redundant went on strike throughout the city. Vaucanson was violently attacked in the streets and forced to flee to Paris disguised as a monk.
Meanwhile, he was at work on the king’s “L’homme saignant” — the Bleeding Man. Using an intermediary, the Controller-General Baptiste Bertin, to funnel jewels and gold to Vaucanson, Louis kept their arrangement hidden from the Church and the public. Besides the three of them, the undertaking was absolutely secret, known by a few of the king’s ministers and Vaucanson’s assistants, making the project into something quite similar to a cabal.
For two dedicated hypochondriacs like Louis and Vaucanson, the Bleeding Man was a representation of the ideal anatomy: a being crafted without the frailties of human existence.
He was given total autonomy; in exchange, the king stipulated that the automaton should mimic human bodily functions as closely as possible; it should masticate and digest, breath, bleed. Later, when Louis got bouts of vertigo and could barely move, he ordered that the Bleeding Man be able to stand up and walk around. Consciousness, it would seem, was to be the only human trait not programmed into the schematics for their hybrid. Transparent wax would coat the automaton, its organs and blood-flow exposed to observers. As Vaucanson envisioned it, their almost-human mannequin was a combination of metal and glass, powered by clockwork and hydraulics.
For two dedicated hypochondriacs like Louis and Vaucanson, the Bleeding Man was a representation of the ideal anatomy: a being crafted without the frailties of human existence.
But the artificial model was likewise running into glitches. Vaucanson’s trouble involved a lack of suitable material. Wood and other common materials had sufficed for his previous showpieces, but this new machine was an order of magnitude removed from tambourine players and ducks, and more on par with resurrecting a golem. A malleable, yet rigid agent had to be procured for the arteries and veins of the Bleeding Man. Adding to Vaucanson’s difficulties was the utter secrecy of the undertaking. He could not correspond with other scientists for suggestions.
Rubber was the solution to Vaucanson’s first problem. Charles Marie de la Condamine, a scientist and explorer, had found the substance in the South American jungles a few years earlier. Condamine returned to France with a sample of cahuchu, as Amazon tribes called it, delivering a paper on its properties to the Academie Royale des Sciences in 1736. The limited supply by then being imported to France, however, was not enough for Vaucanson’s purposes, and he asked the king for more. Louis launched a surreptitious rubber-gathering voyage to Guyana, then under French control, to bring as much rubber to Vaucanson as he desired.
David Brewster’s 1832 Letters on Natural Magic offers an altered version: “It was agreed that a skillful anatomist should proceed to Guiana to superintend the construction of the blood-vessels, and the king not only approved it but had given orders for, the voyage.” Instead of rubber being imported to France, the king would deploy a scientist into the jungles to make the artificial man’s innards and these would then be sent by steamer back to Vaucanson. Regardless, the Guyana expedition was embarked on and a king-sponsored ship crossed the ocean for the sake of the Bleeding Man’s completion. As with Le Cat’s blueprint, Vaucanson also hoped that rubber would allow him to mold vocal chords for his contraption: The Bleeding Man, as he fancied him, would also be endowed with speech.
For sundry reasons, the plot to import rubber, and hence the automaton itself, was a failure. The Bleeding Man was at no point a very real feasibility. That didn’t stop the crowned-head of a world power and one of the great scientists of his age from their conspiracy to conjure a human replicant.
Louis’s consuming pursuit for the man-machine became overshadowed by national concerns. While praised for his support of the sciences, his reign was a hodgepodge of minor wars and failed treaties. He perished of smallpox in 1774. Unlike previous monarchs, his heart was not removed and preserved; fearing contamination, quicklime and alcohol was poured directly into his coffin by attendants.
Vaucanson also hoped that rubber would allow him to mold vocal chords for his contraption: The Bleeding Man, as he fancied him, would also be endowed with speech.
Ruthless in his drive for mechanical perfection, Vaucanson was unanimously called a difficult man. Among his many assistants who didn’t leave in fury, Herve Foucault (his grandson would invent the namesake Pendulum) likened his cold, inflexible personality to that of an automaton itself. Vaucanson fiddled off and on with the man-machine until his death in 1782, but officially he was done with the king’s impossible scientific dream, remarking only that he was “disgusted” with his involvement. Whether that disgust came from the sacrilegious nature of their cloning venture, or out of frustration at the unavailable resources needed to perfect the Bleeding Man, he never did elaborate.
In a 1790 allegory of the French Revolution, Francois-Felix Nagaret published “Le Miroir des événemens actuels, ou la belle au plus offrant,” or The Looking Glass of Actuality. Nagaret was influenced by the astounding mechanical beings of his day, chiefly those made by Jacques de Vaucanson. The work is about the invention of an automaton that is brought to life. Its inventor went by the name of Frankenstein.
The Blunt Instrument is a monthly advice column for writers. If you need tough advice for a writing problem, send your question to blunt@electricliterature.com.
Dear Blunt Instrument,
My questions for you are about nerve and grit. I write flash fiction, short stories, am working on a novel, and I’ve been sporadically writing blogs for fun for almost six years. I’m also aiming to write for online magazines. I have a fair amount of experience writing copy for companies, and I’m now in the early stages of setting up a freelance business.
I’d like to know how a writer trusts that their work is good, and has the grit to keep going with it?
I grew up in a place where people asked, “Who do you think you are?” of anybody doing something outside the norm, and in spite of moving on geographically, those words are often in my head on days of a confidence dip. I’d like to continue being constructively self-critical but be able to shake away this negative voice!
I completed an MA in creative writing three years ago where I got some good feedback. People have also said good things about my blog, I have happy copywriting customers, and sometimes I feel tuned into and confident about my writing. Recently however, I’ve decided to properly pursue becoming a paid freelance writer — rather than dabbling as a sideline alongside day jobs — and attempt publication of my creative writing. Logically, I know a lot of work, editing, and rejection will be part of this, which I am up for, but even so I think the idea of testing my writing via more “official” realms has spun me out and got me feeling all anxious.
Some side questions: Is submitting to competitions/magazines a good way to judge where you’re at? When writing fiction with the hope of publication, at what stage should you show your work to an agent?
If you could please offer some advice, that would be awesome!
Thanks very much,
Lisa.
@lisajderrick
Dear Lisa,
I’ll give you some practical advice in a minute, but first let’s establish something important: There is no such thing as “good.” There is no objectively good work and there are no objectively good writers.
I can name plenty of books that I think are genius but which are detested by great writers whose opinions I respect and vice versa- there are books I despise which are revered by writers I love. Writing also goes in and out of fashion; when I was a kid John Updike seemed to be universally accepted as a great writer, whereas these days I more often hear his name as an example of bad writing. The point is, a piece of writing has no inherent value in a vacuum. How “good” it is is decided by people at a point in time and space.
I don’t think this is uselessly abstract, I think this has real bearing on how you choose to think about your own writing and where you look for validation. Sitting around wondering if you’re “good” and expecting the world to answer is like asking how you know when your book is done — it’s not something the book or the world can tell you. It’s a decision you need to make.
There may be important and famous writers who went to the grave tortured and doubtful of their own talent. It’s possible that you can find great success as a writer without ever feeling like you “know” if you’re “good.” To me, that sounds like no way to live. So when I write, the standards I try to meet are my own: Do I want to read what I’m writing? It’s that simple. If I write a poem or an essay that I want to read and re-read after I’ve finished writing and editing it, then it’s good by my own lights.
If you don’t feel that way about your own writing, the challenge becomes: Write something that you would want to read. It may sound obvious, but I don’t think most writers hold themselves to these standards. Did you know that people are faster to recognize photos of themselves that have been photoshopped to make them look slightly more attractive? Self-assessments are often self-flattering. (It’s not easy, but I think working at being a better reader and editor of other people’s work makes you a better reader and editor of your own work too.)
Now for the more practical part. First, a reminder that freelance copywriting and fiction are totally different worlds. When you’re freelancing as a job, the standards you need to meet are the client’s. And typically, the client makes it pretty clear what they want, what the goals of the piece of writing are, and whether or not you’ve met those requirements. Getting creative work published is a very different game. As you say, you’re going to get rejected a lot. It’s very competitive and what “the client” wants is much less clear. Dealing with all that rejection and retaining your “grit” will come from, on the one hand, only submitting work that meets your own quality standards and, on the other, recognizing that rejection isn’t personal — more on that here.
So to answer your side questions, I’d say that no, submitting to contests and magazines is not a good way to “judge where you’re at.” The point of sending your work out is to get it published. Finding an editor who likes your work might give you a confidence boost, but it doesn’t “prove” that you’re “good,” since the process is both extremely selective and somewhat random. (You might be rejected from a number of small magazines only to finally publish the piece somewhere much bigger. On the other hand, work I hate gets published every day.) Send your work out when you’ve decided that it’s as good as you can make it. External validation should be a bonus — if you need it to believe that what you’re doing is worthwhile, you’re going to crumple with rejection.
As for the agent question: As a fiction writer, it’s unlikely that you’ll get an agent without a finished book unless you’re publishing stories in top-tier journals like the New Yorker and the Paris Review. (Nonfiction books are a different story.) If that’s not the case, have a strong polished draft of either a novel or a collection of stories in hand when you start sending out queries to agents. An agent may push you to make further revisions, but start with a book you’re confident in — that you would want to read.
The Blunt Instrument
Looking for some interesting reading to get you through the week? Here are some literary links from around the web to check out:
Kelly Link and John Crowley discuss the first science fiction novel
A look at how libraries are faring around the world
How Frog and Toad was a celebration of same-sex love
Surrealist dystopian fiction is getting popular in the Middle East
Is America’s obsession with adult coloring books a cry for help?
On breaking up with your own manuscript
Daniel Jose Older responds to the writers against Trump petition
Aleksandar Hemon also responds to the Trump petition
Book Riot wonders if Patreon is the way forward for publishing
Why do we treat short story writing as just warm-ups for a novel?
Google almost any celebrated short story writer — George Saunders, Kelly Link, Alice Munro, Isak Dinesen, Joy Williams — and you’re likely to see the same two words over and over again: “writer’s writer.” Lest you be tempted to exalt that phrase’s use, consider Cynthia Ozick’s description: “Every writer understands exactly what that fearful possessive hints at: a modicum of professional admiration accompanied — or subverted — by dim public recognition and even dimmer sales.” Other words might be “underrated,” “under read,” even “obscure.” Ask your co-workers who Lorrie Moore is and watch the blank stares you get in return. Click over to Goodreads and check out some of the reviews of short story collections, and you’re likely to get comments like “I wish he’d write a novel,” and “I just hate short stories.”
As a short story writer, I lived in denial for years. I pretended that the editors were all wrong when they said that short story collections don’t sell, that the Goodreads comments were sullen outliers. After all, most of my friends loved short stories! Never mind that most of my friends were writers, and when I told non-writer friends that my book was a short story collection they were congratulatory but fervent in their expressed hopes that I would someday, finally, write a novel. I did, one sad afternoon, suck it up and start asking people — non-writers — whether they read or enjoyed short stories, and after that proved too dispiriting I took to the internet and read lots of reviews and comments and criticisms and understood, finally: It’s all true.
Most people really don’t like short stories. And that includes lots of critics, who often seem to regard short story collections as a warm-up for the real thing. (Don’t believe me? Look up how often a writer with one or two short story collections under her belt gets called a “debut writer,” when her novel comes out — and how often said novel gets called “her first book.”) If you’re thinking, sure, sure, the public hates short stories, but they win lots of awards and respect! then you should probably go ahead and search for “awards for short story collections” online.
Go on. I’ll wait.
See what I mean? That doesn’t mean collections can’t and don’t win awards (a collection won the National Book Award in 2015, for example.) But they certainly don’t win nearly as often as novels do. When Alice Munro won her Nobel Prize, it was the first time in over a century the prize had gone to someone known for writing short stories primarily.
This is not, by the way, a new phenomenon. There’s a reason so many short story writers headed to Hollywood to make their living, even in the first half of the last century. John Cheever back in 1969 was bemoaning the underdog status of short stories, calling the short story “something of a bum.” Though I’d argue he was always a better short story writer than a novelist, he wanted to stake his reputation on his novels. And he’s not unusual. Take Kafka — he published mostly short stories in his own lifetime, and yet the unfinished novels he left behind seem what he’s better known for — in addition to “The Metamorphosis,” a short story often billed as a novella or even a short novel.
I’ve seen many excellent short story writers make the inevitable and expected career move from short stories to novels, because they want the accolades and the acclaim and the wider audience/money/fame, too. And who can blame them? If you don’t move to novels, you risk looking like a small or unambitious writer or worse, a one-trick pony. Some really do want to write a novel, and some write great ones. Some clearly don’t have their heart in it, and the novels — even if technically perfect — don’t have the soul and the urgency of the short fiction they write. Sometimes critics acknowledge this, and often they don’t.
But WHY is this the case? Short stories have been around forever, of course, and many of our modern tales have their roots in the fairy tales and folktales told hundreds of years ago and collected by the Grimm brothers and Charles Perrault, among others. And as Anne Therlault points out, “One need only look to the sources cited by the great folktale and fairy tale publishers from the late seventeenth century all the way through to the early nineteenth century (a time when readers, editors and publishers showed renewed literary interest in both fantastical stories and traditional storytelling) to know that women were, by and large, the main collectors, keepers and tellers of these tales.”
Is the short story seen as a womanly art form, tamed and domestic, slight compared to the doorstop novels of the most well-known male novelists? Alice Munro has said that after some success publishing short stories, she fell into a depression because she couldn’t write a novel, the way she felt she was supposed to. “I had simply lost hope, she said, “lost faith in myself…I guess it was because I still wanted to do something great — great the way men do.” The Vancouver Sun ran a piece about her titled, “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories.”
Aside from gender stereotypes, the novel is exciting, transcendent — the novel is the avatar of burning American ambition. The search is always on, the articles are always being cranked out about the next great American novelist. But what about the next American short story writer? We produce so many excellent short story writers here; why don’t we celebrate them the way we ought? Nabokov knew it. In 1972, he said “at the present time (say, for the last fifty years) the greatest short stories have been produced not in England, not in Russia, and certainly not in France, but in this country. Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge.” (And by the way, he greatly admired Cheever’s short fiction, too.)
Since then, the proliferation of MFA programs, the internet, the flourishing of new presses, and a thousand other factors have produced more excellent American short story writers than ever before. Look at the many excellent collections to come out in just the last few years, many on small presses — and look at something like the Wigleaf 50, which every year produces a sampling of the finest short short fiction around. Too, the explosive growth of those much maligned MFA programs has produced a larger audience, if only slightly, than ever before — writers trained in the writing and reading of short stories, ready to appreciate and love the form for what it is. Why do we then ask that these writers become novelists? Surely we have enough of those already?
I’m not sure, having spoken to many non-writers (including many avid readers) that the market will ever support a plethora of commercially successful short fiction. Readers cite the lack of time or interest in constantly immersing themselves in new situations, new scenarios, new characters. They cite plot over character, which will always favor the novel. They say if they’re going to read, they’d rather invest than dip in and out. And of course, mainstream magazines continue to die out and lose readership, and fewer and fewer feature fiction in their pages. So possibly, short story writers are doomed to remain “writer’s writers,” and that might be the problem we really have to solve: how do we assure that short story writers can feel free to pursue their craft without the pressure to move into another, longer form?
Poets don’t have this problem — we don’t tell poets to quit writing poetry and move into short stories already. And maybe poetry, or even visual art, is where we should look when considering short story writers. Maybe we should support short stories not as the cash cows they never will be, but as a vital and necessary art form that we wish to preserve. Maybe there could be more support for short story writers, more awards, fellowships, grants, and showcases. Maybe critics could review short stories collections the same way they review novels. Maybe Time Magazine could occasionally feature the next great American short story writer, whoever she or he may be. Maybe there could be more financial support for, a wider distribution of, the kind of literary magazines that publish top notch, innovative short fiction. Maybe high schools could teach more than the same five short stories (sorry, Updike) so that kids could learn to love the form early on.
Some of this is already happening. Every few years we claim a renaissance in short fiction which is at least partially true, and I like to think that more online publications, more innovative publishing ideas (using Kickstarter to fund projects, for example) — more access, in particular — has led and will lead to a wider readership for short stories. As a reader and writer of short stories myself, of course I’d love that to be true. But honestly, I’d just be happy if people stopped asking “when are you going to write a novel?”
Amber Sparks is the author of the short story collection May We Shed These Human Bodies, and the co-author (with Robert Kloss and illustrator Matt Kish) of the hybrid novel The Desert Places. You can find her most days @ambernoelle and some days at ambernoellesparks.com.
by Brandon Taylor
Jensen Beach’s collection, Swallowed by the Cold (Graywolf), opens with a story about a tennis match between an aging tennis pro with one arm and another gentleman named Rolf. It sounds like the start of a joke one might tell in a bar after a few drinks, and yet this story lays so much of the groundwork for what is to come later in the collection. Buried off-center, among seemingly insignificant observations, are key details that come to form the core of later stories. Beach has finely threaded this collection so that there is a sense of parallelism running throughout it. Another striking feature is the way Beach has chosen to tell familiar stories from new, oblique angles, imbuing them with a wry humor. It is difficult to guess how these stories end or to classify them as funny or sad, uplifting or depressing, smart or silly, etc. The truth is that each of these stories is all of those things and much more.
The relationships in Swallowed by the Cold are all in peril. Marriages are threatened not only by infidelity but also by personal vices. These are people who waver, who hesitate just short of saying what it is that they want to say and doing what it is that they know is necessary. In one sequence of stories, Martin and his wife Louise navigate a practical but unhappy middle age. Neither is capable of seeing the other for the person that they truly are. Martin is unable to see Louise as anything but a drunk, near-embarrassment and is often relieved when she chooses to stay at home. Louise is frustrated and sees Martin as not only a bore, but a hard, paternalistic entity. They are each trapped by their own myopia. In “Kino,” Martin’s discomfort with Louise and his discomfort with himself collide in an unexpected way while in “The Apartment,” we see the source of Louise’s private tragedies, the near-misses, how close she came to another life, where she might have been happy. It’s one of the strongest stories in the collection, “The Apartment,” and it so beautifully embodies one of the themes that makes Swallowed by the Cold, so affecting: parallel lives — both those lives we might have lived if only things had gone a little differently, and also the parallel lives that people pursue when they live together yet separately as Louise and Martin do.
There is a hyperlocality to this collection of stories; that is, they feel so much as if they occur within a single neighborhood, though this isn’t exactly the case. It is a cliché, but it would be inaccurate to say otherwise: place is a character in these stories. The way that Beach has used his remarkable, clear voice to fully render weather and architecture and nature, has made it at once invisible and yet so striking. It was so easy to picture the park where Helle and Henrik meet in “Anniversary” or her apartment as they have dinner, the candles and the table. There is also the tennis court where Rolf plays the best tennis of his life in “In the Village of Elmsta,” the cracks and the nets and all.
As much as this collection is about people on the edge of trouble, it is also about Stockholm, its history, its geography, and its culture. There are also extreme examples of hyperlocality, stories where the plot itself hinges on place. In “Ships of Stockholm,” two people discuss a particular museum which is freighted with memory for one of them, transforming an idle flirtation between strangers into a reflection on the relationship between a father and son. There is also “The Drowned Girl,” which does not have a famous place at its core, but a minor cemetery in a small village which plays such a poignant, touching role in the life of a young girl as she works her way through grief. Places both named and unnamed loom large in this collection, becoming an unforgettable and necessary backdrop. While these stories are universal, they couldn’t have happened as they did in any other place.
Reading Swallowed by the Cold calls to mind such experiences as reading Mavis Gallant’s excellent Linnet Muir stories (collected in Varieties of Exile) and offers a sharp response to the critique often leveled at short stories for being too brief or for leaving things unresolved. Provided here is an expanded universe of personal intimacies and exploration of all the parallel lives that collect in a place. Jensen Beach moves deftly in and around all of his characters’ lives, often revealing with stark and startling clarity all the absurdity and beauty present in even the most mundane of daily rhythms.
Click here to read a story, “In the Night of the Day Before,” from Jensen Beach’s collection, Swallowed by the Cold, as part of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading.
Patricia Engel’s new novel, Veins of the Ocean (Grove Press 2016), begins with one of the more arresting sequences I can remember. Whenever I’ve recommended the book to a friend, or a colleague, or anyone who would listen, rather than telling them what the book was about, or trying to explain why it was urgent to read now, at a time when our country seems hell bent on dehumanizing the immigrant (and first generation) communities that form its bedrock, I opened up my copy of Engel’s book and asked them to read the first page.
It begins:
“When he found out his wife was unfaithful, Hector Castillo told his son to get in the car because they were going fishing. It was after midnight but this was not unusual. The Rickenbacker Bridge suspended across Biscayne Bay was full of fishermen leaning on the railings, catching up on gossip over beer and fishing lines, avoiding going home to their wives. Except Hector didn’t bring any fishing gear with him. He led his son, Carlito, who’d just turned three, by the hand to the concrete wall, picked him up by the waist, and held him so that the boy grinned and stretched his arms out like a bird, telling his papi he was flying, flying, and Hector said, ‘Sí, Carlito, tienes alas, you have wings.’
Then Hector pushed little Carlito into the air, spun him around, and the boy giggled, kicking his legs up and about, telling his father, “Higher, Papi, Higher,” before Hector took a step back and with all his might hoisted the boy as high in the sky as he’d go, told him he loved him, and threw his son over the railing into the sea.”
You’re either the kind of person who reads those words and needs to read more, or you’re not, it seems to me.
But to give you more context, Veins of the Ocean is about Carlito’s sister, Reina: her love for her brother, who survived that fall only to repeat the same unspeakable act, years later, on his girlfriend’s son; Reina’s struggle to come to terms with her part in Carlito’s crime; her decision to leave Miami behind for the Keys, where she learns to free dive and works with dolphins and meets Nesto, a Cuban working odd jobs and saving up to bring his children Stateside. It’s at once a sprawling epic and an intimate story of one woman’s struggle to find some peace and a little hope.
Engel is a quietly commanding presence. She came into the EL offices on a recent Monday afternoon, after a final recording session for the audio book version of Veins of the Ocean. We spoke for an hour or so about life in South Florida, the story that inspired that chilling opening scene on the Rickenbacker Bridge, her research trips to Cuba, the courage of immigrants, and the way her characters’ lives, and her own, have been transformed by the Caribbean.
Dwyer Murphy: I want to start by asking about the opening section of The Veins of the Ocean, where your narrator, Reina, tells us about her family, and about Carlito. Can you tell me how that story — of her brother and the bridge — came to you, and how you went about crafting it into the novel?
Patricia Engel: The opening began as a short story that I wrote back in 2008, called “The Bridge.” I was with my mother one day, driving past a bridge, and she said to me, “A long time ago, a man threw a baby off that bridge.” She didn’t have any information, didn’t know when or how or why or what happened afterwards. She only knew that a man had thrown a baby into the bay. The image stuck with me, but I didn’t know what to do with it and I was busy working on my first book, Vida, at the time. I had no idea how to enter that story about the bridge, or even whose story it would be. Finally I sat down and wrote from the perspective of the sister of the baby who was thrown over, telling the story of their family and its collective trauma. I went on to write another book, It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, in the meantime, but that story about the bridge stayed with me. I always felt I would come back to it, though I didn’t yet know how.
DM: Did you eventually find out what happened? Were there newspaper clippings?
PE: No, I didn’t. I made it all up. But in the years since I published that story, people have sent me articles about incidents like that one. There’s a famous ongoing case in Tampa of a father who threw his 5 year-old daughter off the Sunshine Skyway bridge. Apparently it happens all too often, all over the world. Adults throw children from bridges.
DM: In narrating, Reina occasionally slips between English and Spanish, which enriches the language of the novel and also creates a sense of intimacy with the reader. Did you have a systematic approach as to when Reina would express something in Spanish versus English, or were you going by feel?
Some things are better expressed in Spanish…it’s natural to reach fluidly for whatever words best convey what you’re feeling.
PE: I write whatever feels true to the voice of the narrator. This is how Reina would speak naturally, as she is fully bilingual. Often it’s the way I speak naturally, too, and how my friends speak when we’re in our most comfortable element. You realize there are things you experience in your life that cannot be expressed in the English language, which is extensive and rich but not perfect. It has substantial gaps that don’t correspond to all the things we feel as humans. Some things are better expressed in Spanish, and when you have access to two languages, or more, it’s natural to reach fluidly for whatever words best convey what you’re feeling.
DM: This struck me as a distinctly South Florida book: the landscape; the ocean, which plays such an important part in the story; the Latin communities; the Keys. Was there something about the state that particularly inspired you?
PE: I grew up in the north, inland, nowhere near the ocean. I love the ocean, but I noticed when I moved to Florida twelve years ago that people who had the good fortune to grow up next to the beach view the world a little differently than people who didn’t. They experience life and the landscape in a different way. I wanted to tell a story that would show how that particular connection to nature and water develops. Also, I’ve always been interested in writing about specific communities and subcultures: how people find their communities and form new extended families when they’re taken from the world they know, when they’re displaced, whether it’s by immigration, or by some other kind of dislocation, or even a sentimental exile. In a place like Miami, which is a very expansive city but has so many different worlds within it, those communities are there, and they’re intertwined in a way they might not be in another city. From Miami, I moved the story south into the Keys, a place that’s even more distinctly situated: vulnerable to the elements, remote, and then to Havana and Cartagena. Those settings lent themselves to a different kind of story. I wanted The Veins of the Ocean, also, to be a novel of the Americas.
DM: The Caribbean comes into play, especially, when Reina meets Nesto in the Keys. She continues to narrate, but for long stretches we read Nesto’s history: his life back in Cuba, his childhood, his migration. I was wondering, where the Cuban community is so prominent in South Florida, and where the stories the community tells about its exile and its memories of home are so central to the culture there, did you feel any special pressure in crafting Nesto’s story?
PE: I’ve lived in Florida for twelve years, and I grew up with a lot of Cubans, who were like family to me, so I had a certain amount of second hand knowledge of their family histories. I also met somebody in Miami, a very recently arrived Cuban refugee, and the stories he told me were shocking and quite different than anything I’d heard before from longtime exiles. He was the product of a family who had stayed in Cuba and had experienced the revolution with all its highs and lows. He told me things I had never heard about before, in such detail, and he was the one who first encouraged me to look deeper into it.
But I knew I would have to go to Cuba myself. I couldn’t only do research from afar or rely simply on testimonials. So I went. I didn’t yet know what for exactly. I still wasn’t thinking it was for a book. I was just propelled by my own natural human curiosity, because I enjoy traveling and learning. But I kept going back. The more I went, the more I realized I would have to make even more trips, because there was so much to understand and I was barely scratching the surface. It’s an endlessly fascinating and complex country. The people are incredibly warm and have so much to tell. And at a certain point, I realized that because Reina’s character is so closed in on herself and is punishing herself in so many ways, it would be crucial for her to create a bond with somebody, in order for her to grow and fulfill her humanity. I thought, what kind of character could really reach her? It would have to be somebody who has endured a lot and with almost as complicated a past as she has; someone like Nesto. But I didn’t allow myself to be pressured into portraying life on the island with a particular slant or sympathetic to a specific point of view, as I would when describing any setting. Everything I have written about Cuba is absolutely true.
DM: This is also a story about the relationship between two siblings: Reina and her older brother, Carlito, who’s in prison, on death row, for having thrown his girlfriend’s child off the same bridge he was thrown from by his father as a baby. Reina’s life is so attached to Carlito’s, and their bond is so strong. It’s rare to find a book that’s so deeply about the brother-sister relationship.
How do you reconcile the fact that a person you love and have known all your life did something unforgivable…?
PE: It started because I wanted to write about incarceration and what that does to the family of the prisoner. They also have to absorb the consequences of the crime. As a family member, you’re free, you’re on the outside, but very often isolated by shame and blame, and how does that affect the love you feel for the person who’s on the inside? How do you reconcile the fact that a person you love and have known all your life did something unforgivable, committed this unnatural atrocity — throwing a child off a bridge, and in Carlito’s case, has lost the right to be alive? I considered who should tell the story of this man who, in spite of his guilt, is still human and worthy of our compassion, though he’s done this heinous thing. I decided it should be the sister who loved him best.
DM: Why did you want to write about incarceration?
PE: I’ve had some experience with it, and I’ve known other people who’ve also been affected by incarceration, not just as direct victims of crime but also the loved ones of people serving life and death sentences. I felt that incarceration gets portrayed as a single story in literature, in the media, and in our own popular consciousness. I wanted to offer something more. And it was on my mind, especially, because I live in Florida, which has such a corrupt incarceration system. Florida is one of the few states that still has death row and executes people regularly. That’s one of the greatest barbarisms of our country’s legal practice. And it’s not only the prisoners who are affected. There’s a long line of innocent people who suffer in different ways as a consequence of one person’s crime and the government’s punishment, and we don’t often hear about them.
DM: We’re in a particularly toxic moment in this country when it comes to issues of immigration, too. Latin communities, especially, are feeling the brunt of it. Your characters are very much of that world — Reina is first generation Colombian. Nesto was born in Cuba and is trying to get his children to the States. As you were writing, did you find this political climate affecting you?
Immigrants, whether they’ve arrived in their new country by choice or forced by circumstance, are the people I admire most…
PE: A general political and social disdain for Latin immigrants and their families has always existed in the United States, and has affected me all my life by virtue of being constantly reminded of my otherness and foreigness even though I was born in this country. But I started writing this book years ago, before this current phase of openly hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric was brought out so publicly and shamelessly. The times we’re living in now are quite unbelievable. I don’t write with a specific political agenda, but a human one, and a commitment to realism and truth. The fact is, I’m a daughter of immigrants and I grew up around immigrants, most of my closest friends are immigrants or the children of immigrants, and I still live in a predominately immigrant community. It’s the world I know and love. Immigrants, whether they’ve arrived in their new country by choice or forced by circumstance, are the people I admire most, whom I consider to be among the most courageous people in the world. I feel privileged to write about them in any way I can. With regard to the restoration of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba, I was as stunned as everyone else by the announcement. Had I ever imagined this new fold in history, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to write the story of Nesto, who was fleeing Cuba in a time when there was virtually no hope of change on the horizon.
DM: I wanted to ask, also, about religion. Reina isn’t somebody who goes to church on Sundays, but her life is touched by the spiritual: saints’ rituals and prophecies and, later, the offerings Nesto makes, and the belief system he was raised with in Cuba. Was there a story about religious development you wanted to tell?
PE: By the time the story starts, Reina, who comes from a Catholic background, mixed with some superstition and folklore, is a person who’s lost her faith. Yet Nesto, who was raised within a regime that systematically rejected religion, is full of faith. I wanted to show how people endure certain experiences, and some lose faith while others gain it, also how faith is so often tied to what we observe in our own families or communities. But faith is an ever-evolving thing, and open to interpretation. It accommodates our needs and the challenges life brings us. We can grow with faith or turn on it. Sometimes it comes back in unexpected ways. And, in the case of Nesto, who’s Cuban, I couldn’t ignore the fact that Afro Cuban religions are so prominent in Cuba, and there’s a great sense of the spiritual and divine being connected to the natural world. I did extensive research while in Havana to get those descriptions right, out of respect for the faith. In the novel, you see the unraveling of Reina’s past, and how she begins to piece together her own views of the world and beyond, deriving strength and meaning the more she grows connected to nature, and more specifically, to water.
DM: Finally, can we talk a little more about the ocean? In the Keys, Nesto teaches Reina to free dive, and a good deal of the story seems to be happening during those trips, underwater, essentially. Is diving something you’re interested in?
I always write for the person who knows more about something than I do. I want that person to feel like I got it right.
PE: I knew the ocean was going to figure prominently in the novel, as Reina’s and Nesto’s lives are controlled and transformed by the ocean in different ways. Personally, I’ve always been into scuba diving, but for my research I decided to take up free diving, too, took classes, and got certified. I hold myself to a tough standard with regard to research. I always write for the person who knows more about something than I do. I want that person to feel like I got it right. A lot of writers feel their imagination gives them license to write things however they want, but I know how it is to feel written about, as if a writer didn’t care much about getting things right, because they think their imagination takes precedence over reality, or else they’re just banking on the ignorance of their reader. So I’ve always gone overboard trying to get the details right, even for things probably nobody will notice. For this book, I spent a lot time many miles out in the ocean, throwing myself into the water with nothing but a wetsuit and my breath.
I don’t have a fear of the ocean, but free diving is very physical. There’s a lot of preparation and training involved. You’re limited by your body and can only go as deep as it lets you. But once you’re comfortable down there, being free of the noise and the tanks is a very special experience.
DM: What about dolphins? Between the boat trips, the dives, and working for a while at a dolphinarium, they feature pretty prominently in Reina’s story.
The Veins of the Ocean is an exploration of imprisonment in all its forms…
PE: In my years in South Florida, living in a seaside community, I’ve witnessed mass beachings of dolphins and manatees– sometimes from the red tide, and of course the oil spill. Soon after I moved here, I began volunteering with a marine mammal rescue organization. I spent many nights with dolphins in holding tanks, because they were disoriented and couldn’t swim straight, and we’d have to hold them, help them stay upright, and guide them along, keeping them in motion so they wouldn’t get water in their blow holes. I got to know people who dedicate their lives to that work, learned a lot about the line between animal conservation and captivity, and was deeply moved by the experience. The Veins of the Ocean is an exploration of imprisonment in all its forms; Reina begins to see parallels between the captivity and exploitation of the animals she works with and her brother’s treatment while in solitary confinement, as well as the ways the walls of her own life have closed in on her due to the burden of guilt she’s been carrying for her brother’s crime.
Originally published at electricliterature.com on June 2, 2016.
Thank You!
