Rebecca Schiff on Humor, Crafting the Perfect Line and Casual Sex in Fiction: An Interview

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by Claire Luchette

There are a whopping 23 stories in Rebecca Schiff’s slim new collection The Bed Moved, and this is just one of Schiff’s many sleights of hand. Each story is a delight — drily funny, irreverent, original. But just as they’re refreshingly candid and witty — they are very witty — Schiff’s stories also offer tender, but stubbornly unsentimental emotional truths. The stories in this collection are interested only in being honest, and that means shedding light on grief, pride, promiscuity, and loneliness in ways that are surprising, funny, and frank.

The narrator of the final story, “Write What You Know,” reflects on the titular aphorism: “I only know about parent death and sluttiness…liberal guilt and sexual guilt and taking liberties sexually.” Here is the magic of Schiff: she offers aphorisms without waxing pretentious, and she delivers humor without devaluing the emotional concerns. The book is evidence of her refreshing talent and sharp, incisive intelligence.

Schiff answered my questions about how these stories took shape, being funny, and casual sex in fiction.

[You can read Schiff’s story, “It Doesn’t Have to Be a Big Deal,” and her reading list, “Contemporary Innovators of the Short Story,” at Electric Literature.]

Claire Luchette: What I loved most about these stories is how stripped they are of all the often-clunky narrative stuff that shows up in more traditional stories, where it can seem like character biographical details and situational context are dumped into the text. It’s very refreshing. And I think that spare prose pairs so well with your humor. Tell me about being funny. How do you know when the wit lands or when something feels less successful? Are you able to judge for yourself?

RS: I’ve definitely written stuff that’s funny but lacked a greater emotional purpose. And then I can judge that I’m hiding behind the jokes. But I try and make sure the humor is connected to the emotions of the piece: is it organic to them? And then I feel more comfortable joking, because I know there’s more going on in the story.

I also, while I’m writing, often make bold the lines that I know could be funnier. And then I’ll go back later and try to push myself to make the line funnier.

CL: It’s an interesting thing — if you feel you’re funny and no one laughs, then are you actually funny? And if people tell you you’re funny and you don’t feel funny, then something’s off.

RS: Yeah! In some ways, we can’t find ourselves funny, because we’re just who we are to ourselves. It does require a kind of response or engagement. When I read aloud, some parts will get more laughs than others, and that’s a means of evaluating the humor. But you don’t often see people respond to your stuff, so you don’t know if they’re laughing or totally horrified.

CL: Who are your favorite funny writers?

RS: I love Etgar Keret. I love George Saunders, for obvious reasons. Sam Lipsyte’s very funny, as is Grace Paley. Lorrie Moore, obviously. I read her as a teenager, and she was the first person I had read who was strange and funny, and it opened up possibilities for me; I saw it could be done that way.

CL: The story “Communication Arts” is all about the challenges of teaching writing — it’s a teacher navigating all these students’ issues and requests on e-mail. What’s your approach to teaching writing?

RS: When I was just starting out, I never had control of the room — I was teaching maybe 30 kids, which isn’t so many, but is a lot if you haven’t done it before. I think that experience, of teaching composition, toughened me up. I had to be a better teacher in order to get through the day.

A lot of people seem to think student writing is terrible, but one of the things that helped a lot was I learned to find what students are doing exactly right and point it out to them. And then encourage that, instead of jumping straight to criticism. In teaching creative writing, it’s a bit different, but the same principle applies: look for the place where the magic is coming through, where you can see the student’s voice. And help the students see that in themselves, what’s working.

CL: How do you approach teaching “the rules” of creative writing?

RS: The thing about rules is that when a writer creates her own rules, she still has to follow them. Which, in a lot of ways, is even harder. Restrictions on a story — putting limits on it — can be really helpful.

Most of my students seem to want to know the rules — know some straight-forward way to write a story, like you would a five-paragraph essay. But of course that doesn’t exist.

CL: You have such a knack for first lines. Each of these really start with a bang. Some favorites: “She slept with men who only wanted to play Settlers of Catan.” “The pot grower was broke.” What are some of your favorite first lines in stories?

RS: Off the top of my head, there’s Leonard Michaels’s “In the fifties, I learned to drive a car.” The story’s called “In the Fifties.” It’s kind of like a list story, a non-traditional story. It’s such a specific first line, and then it allows the story to grow from there.

CL: What do you think any first line should do for a story?

RS: I think it’s mostly instinct. I’m not in love with all my first lines, but for a lot of stories I found my first line only after I started writing — after a couple of paragraphs, so I could see where the story really starts, where the good stuff begins. They say a line should draw you in, but it should definitely establish what we’re dealing with here…One way to start is with a lot of information. There’s that Joy Williams story, “Honored Guest,” and the first line tells us so much: “She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny in the eleventh grade and you had to be careful about this because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke.” Williams just takes it so much further in a way that establishes the tone, and it takes you a place you don’t expect.

CL: These stories are concerned with women who are navigating their worlds and are often dissatisfied. How do you describe the stories’ “aboutness”?

RS: I think the aboutness reveals itself to me as the stories unfold. I don’t always know why I start to write about something, and usually I’m interested in certain emotions or language, and I enjoy the way words sound together. But the way stories develop, I start to keep track of what characters are going through and what’s happening for them…I have trouble with that question, “What are your stories about?” I have trouble answering that. I usually say, “They are what they are!” They are about women getting through, or figuring out how to get out, or whether or not they should get out. It’s hard to see what your own work is about.

CL: In “Little Girl,” the last lines do such a great job of describing what it’s like to leave a lover’s place: “Some of the buildings had elevators and she enjoyed the anticipation of the ride up, the soreness on the ride down. What happened in between almost didn’t matter. She’d wind up back where she started, walk into the street, and hail a cab.” It’s so good! What do you understand as what happened “in between”?

RS: It’s the sex, but this woman is having so many of these experiences that the only constant is herself. There’re all these guys, and they have sex or talk or hang out, but the experiences all kind of blur together. What do you think happens?

CL: It’s almost like a commercial break, like these one-night stands are just distractions. A brief vacation.

RS: I like the idea that it’s a vacation. So many people think of casual sex as just depressing, and in my stories in this collection, I tried to present it as otherwise. It can be, but it can also be exhilarating and funny. There’s a lightness to it! For that narrator, she’s having a good time, but she’s also not.

CL: In Girls, we indulge in the awfulness of the sex. And in Broad City, it’s like it doesn’t end up mattering.

RS: Yeah. I like both shows. I think both wouldn’t exist without Sex and the City, and I fall between those generations. I don’t think I would be the writer I am without Sex and the City. I don’t know if that’s suicide for a literary writer to say, but I think it opened up the culture, and allowed us to start talking and thinking about sex.

CL: The final story, “Write What You Know,” is so funny and good. Tell me about your experience writing what you don’t know.

RS: I think the writer is always doing both simultaneously. There are things you think you know, and you start there, and it turns out that there’s a lot you don’t know — about a story, a situation, a plot. I’m always learning the way I feel about something, through writing fiction.

My Journey Into the Woods: What Stephen Sondheim Taught Me About Conceiving a Child

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by Carly Rose

When I was in elementary school, one of my favorite hobbies was making lists of names. Mostly girls’ names. I would hunch over a piece of looseleaf paper, pen in hand, and try to fill the white space on the page with as many names as I could possibly think of, all in one sitting. It was a game of endless possibilities and all-consuming creativity, my smudged fist dragging quickly down the page, a swollen, inky protrusion on my middle finger. I’d start at the beginning of the alphabet and work my way to the end. Adeline, Amy, Beverly, Beth, Cora, Clarissa…Yarden, Yvette, Zora, Zadie. I loved reciting the particular strings of syllables aloud in my head, making small changes and watching total transformation. Trudy to Tracy. Greta to Greenie. Bonnie to Bronte.

I’m not sure why the activity brought on such a rush. As a child, I enjoyed writing stories, but these names often did not find their way into my work. Their depth was paper thin, tossed away after the exercise was over, a mere stepping stone for my longer, lovelier list. Weeks later, I’d push the boundaries even further. Today, with all the chic, alternative, hipster-fab names circulating around New York City, I’m certain I could best my last effort.

* * *

In December 2014, Into the Woods hit movie theaters. My husband has been a Sondheim fan since childhood and asked me to see the movie with him. I agreed. Anything to watch Anna Kendrick. In preparation, he played some of the music for me from the Into the Woods Broadway production starring Bernadette Peters. I hadn’t been familiar with it. The lyrics I could appreciate easily; they were meticulously chosen to clever and playful effect. Poetic. I felt dazzled with a phonic fulfillment that surpassed anything I had ever heard. Stephen Sondheim, where have I been all your life? I couldn’t wait to see the movie. But when I inquired more into the plot, I felt at a loss. Jack and the Beanstalk? Cinderella? Little Red Riding Hood? Rapunzel? The awaited enhancement had dispelled into a collection of fairytales. Hadn’t I heard these stories before? What more could I possibly glean from them? The one bright light for me: the baker and his wife. Their wish intrigued me. It seemed so simple. Something they could give to themselves if they chose to do so. More than anything, they wanted a child.

The baker and his wife, their wish intrigued me: It seemed so simple. More than anything, they wanted a child.

In December 2014 my husband and I began to try to conceive our first child. We hoped for a smooth road ahead, but did not expect one. At twenty-nine I had never gotten a natural period in my life. I had been on the pill since I was eighteen, because the doctors had told me that in order to keep my system running I needed the pill to induce an artificial period each month. And so, for eleven years I bled monthly and had the requisite cramps, but I never ovulated. I was told I had eggs. They just never left my ovaries. If my eggs were actual people, I would call them reclusive.

For the baker and his wife, they must venture into the woods to undo a curse cast on their house by their neighbor — a witch — in retaliation for the baker’s father stealing from the witch’s beloved vegetable garden years ago. The greatest betrayal of all was the theft of six magic beans, beans that the witch’s mother had warned her not to lose. As punishment for her loss, the witch was cast from a beautiful, young woman to the wretched old woman she is now. The witch, in turn, casts a spell on the thief’s house, that it will always be a barren one. When the baker and his wife learn of this, they are both devastated, yet determined. They will do whatever is needed to break the curse. The witch makes them an offer: “You wish to have the curse reversed? I’ll need a certain potion first. Go to the woods and bring me back: One: the cow as white as milk; Two: the cape as red as blood; Three: the hair as yellow as corn; Four: the slipper as pure as gold.” If all these items are brought to the witch before the stroke of midnight in three days’ time, she promises that they will have a healthy, neigh, a perfect child. Then she casts them off into the woods to begin their journey.

I had eggs. They just never left my ovaries. If my eggs were actual people, I would call them reclusive.

After college I went off birth control to see what would happen. My cheeks became rosy with acne, a familiar but unwelcome visitor. I also began losing hair. I noticed my thinning hairline in the mirror one day, in the bathroom I shared with one of my two roommates in our midtown east apartment. My hairline was intact on the right side of my head but my scalp peeked through on the left in a way it had not before. In the shower I felt clumps of tangled strands sliver down my back. I was devastated, certain that if my romantic prospects seemed slim now, they were certain to take a veritable nose dive in future months. My mother brought me to a hair growth specialist, who, ironically, was bald. He loaded me up on vitamins to counteract deficiencies that I had. Lysine. B12, Biotin. Vitamin D. I took them religiously. My mother told me to mail my fallen hair home in an envelope so she could count the strands to see if the doctor’s regimen was helping my cause.

Around that same time, I was diagnosed with a genetic condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a hormonal imbalance caused by a missing enzyme, which is necessary for the production of cortisol. Severe cases of CAH can be fatal. Fortunately, I was diagnosed with non-classical CAH (late-onset CAH). While mild in its symptoms, it does preclude me from natural ovulation. It could also perhaps have been the cause of my severe acne beginning at the age of ten. Or the hair loss. Or the fact that I was average height as a child but turned out to be a short adult. Perhaps. Either way, I wasn’t too concerned. The doctor had told me that when I was ready, I could still have children. I just couldn’t start the process too late. Thirty, she told me, time and again, was the magic number. I got back on the birth control pill and continued on with my life. My hair stopped falling out, or maybe I just stopped counting.

Thirty, she told me, time and again, was the magic number.

The journey into the woods is, predictably, rife with conflict. For the baker and his wife, collecting these items in three days’ time proves to be more challenging than anticipated, both physically and emotionally. There arises the question of who needs the items more. To the baker and his wife, these four items mean they will have the child they have pined over for so long. What’s problematic is that these items are the dear possessions of the people encountered along the way. The cow as white as milk is best friend to a poor boy named Jack, whose mother has instructed him to go to the market and sell the sickly cow for as high a price as he can fetch. The cape as red as blood belongs to Little Red Riding Hood, and it is her only protection against the dangers of the woods. The hair as yellow as corn belongs to Rapunzel, a fair maiden locked in a tower, and it is the one thing that allows her visits from her beloved prince. The slipper as pure as gold belongs to Cinderella, whose fancy attire has gained her admittance into the royal life of her dreams.

The baker and his wife don’t have much to trade for these possessions, but they do have the beans. Magic beans, supposedly. Is it wrong to fool the poor boy into trading his cow for beans of questionable, and as yet, unproven power? The baker’s wife seems to think not: “If you know what you want, then you go and you find it, and you get it, and you give and you take, and you bid and you bargain, or you live to regret it.” Though I knew her judgment was questionable, I couldn’t help but take her side. What won’t we do for our children, even if they don’t exist yet?

What won’t we do for our children, even if they don’t exist yet?

Turns out, I hadn’t waited for my doctor’s deadline. Something had shifted in me before my thirtieth birthday. During the summer of 2014 at the age of twenty-nine, I summited Mt. Kilimanjaro. In the months following my arrival back home, I felt my wanderlust go on an indefinite hiatus. I wanted a baby. My husband did too. In January, after 10 weeks off the pill, I began my first round of Clomid at 50mg, one pill over the course of five days. There were evenings when I woke in a profuse sweat, or mornings when the edges of objects blurred, but aside from these side effects, I felt okay. Two days after I completed my five-day course, I went for a blood test. The results were disappointing: my eggs, cozily tucked away in my ovaries, were not growing. Nothing was happening. Next I went on 100mg of Clomid. Lo and behold, I ovulated. I was instructed by the nurse when to have intercourse and told to take a pregnancy test in two weeks. As any woman trying to conceive will tell you, there is nothing more interminable than the two-week waiting period to see if the egg and sperm took. As any woman (and man) will also tell you, reducing lovemaking to a routine appointment is a foolproof antidote to romance.

As any woman trying to conceive will tell you, there is nothing more interminable than the two week waiting period to see if the egg and sperm took.

On the designated morning, I ripped open the home pregnancy test and made my way to the bathroom. I peed on the stick and set it aside on the tub to wait for the results. Plus meant pregnant. Minus meant not pregnant. I was a minus. I consoled myself with the fact that this was just a trial period to see if the dosage of the medication worked, and it had. Success! (Sort of.) But the second time I tried it, 100 mg was a flop. A flop, but not a total failure. I had enough of a lining that I had to go on Provera to release it. I did not fare well on the medication. I was short with family members, cried hysterically without cause, and felt my generally sunny outlook plunge into darkness. The next round, my Clomid dosage was increased to 150 mg.

These days, Clomid wasn’t so easy either. I had tired of the routine surrounding the medication, and the constant purple bruises on the soft skin of my elbow. I was seeing the phlebotomist more than my friends and felt myself becoming bitter with my lot. I began to despise the thoughtlessness behind TV shows about teen moms, started to avoid my Facebook newsfeed because there were too many babies staring back at me and none were mine. Despite my husband’s constant comfort and support, I felt like I was failing. Wasn’t conceiving a child supposed to be the most natural thing in the world?

At some point in the woods, the baker and his wife realize that if they want this child, they can’t go it alone. They need to work together in order to secure the items that the witch has asked of them. And so they do, each helping the other to reach their mutual goal. This team approach works wonders for their relationship. Only now do they start to see the value that the other has brought to the journey. The hardship that has been their time in the woods has birthed a magic of its own, freeing them from their limitations and allowing them to set their sights on what really matters: their future family. The end is in sight.

If the story ended on this high note, I might have felt cheated, for the obstacles faced were flimsier than at first sight. But Sondheim knew, there’s always a second act.

The 150 mg of Clomid was working. Each month I tried it I successfully ovulated, sometimes multiple eggs. I was regularly in touch with a wonderful nurse and at each turn, we were excited for good news. It seemed that my situation was steadily improving. Each time the two-week waiting period ended, I took my test, first thing in the morning. I tried to visualize a plus sign on the pee stick. I channeled The Secret. I squinted my eyes. Nothing. When I realized how much money I was spending on these tests, I eschewed store brands, opting for a slew of cheaper online tests instead. On these tests a positive result came in the form of a second line. Just as well, I had grown tired of the minus sign anyway. By this point, my husband and I had turned to intrauterine injection (IUI), in which the sperm is injected directly into the uterus. We hoped it would increase our chances of success. For months, I waited for that second line. But it never appeared.

At the end of Part I of Into the Woods, the baker and his wife, successful in their mission, become pregnant with a child as the witch has promised. The witch, in turn, transforms into the beautiful woman she once was years before. Everyone who ventured into the woods to get the thing that they did not have now has it. Jack and his mom are rich with the gold coins he stole from the giants when he climbed up the beanstalk. Little Red Riding Hood has the newfound wisdom that will keep her safe in the future. Cinderella is now married to the prince, presiding over a royal court, and the baker and his wife are a happy family of three. If the story ended on this high note, I might have felt cheated, for the obstacles faced were flimsier than at first sight. But Sondheim knew, there’s always a second act.

Who knows? Maybe they’ve been there all along, traveling in the woods beside me, telling me that they’re on their way. Me, their mother.

I recently began in vitro fertilization. It has meant stronger medications (read: headaches and general exhaustion), an abundance of needles and more frequent monitoring. But the more I talk about it, the more I learn how many people have done it or are about to do it. I even had an unexpected reunion with an old friend in the doctor’s office waiting room. While the baker and his wife seemed to be the only people in their community who wanted a child, at least I have the comfort that I’m not alone. No one is alone. Sondheim got this right too.

* * *

I still think of those lists of names. The lists I so enjoyed creating back when I was a child, for no one but myself. The lists that tried to squeeze in as many names as could possibly fit on a page. Mostly girls’ names. But some boys too. Hundreds of them, standing at attention, trying to decipher my next move. These days, I wonder if my children were on that list. I wonder if I could pick out and circle their names. Who knows? Maybe they’ve been there all along, traveling in the woods beside me, telling me that they’re on their way. Me, their mother.

Sometimes I have visions of the future. My children are running around the house, my sons, my daughters. Sometimes there are three, sometimes five. They are loud and unruly and brilliant and kind and I’m sitting with my husband in the center of the chaos, beaming with a satisfaction that could only be conjured by a woman trying to conceive, who has both glamorized and whitewashed the messy travails of early motherhood.

The truth remains, I don’t know when the woods will end. My journey will get more difficult before it gets easier. But when I imagine what could be mine, I know I’d walk through the woods and back, if only to find it.

Noir is Protest Literature: That’s Why It’s Having a Renaissance

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Noir is everywhere these days. The kind of hard-hearted crime stories that arose in pulp magazines and Hollywood films of the mid-20th century are achieving a cultural prominence they’ve not had in decades — best exemplified by the popularity and cachet of TV series like Breaking Bad and True Detective, but including a variety of other books, films and comics. More than this, the images and tropes of that classic noir have melted into the broader culture, and are now re-appearing in a broad swath of works, in many genres — from the urban fantasy of Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim to the YA of Chelsea Pitcher’s The S-Word. The modern re-invigoration of the Western, from Unforgiven through Deadwood, can be seen as injecting the classic cowboy film with ideas and images from noir; as can the re-invention of the comic book hero that was launched in the 1980s with The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and reached its grunting, incoherent anti-climax last month in Batman vs. Superman.

What is it about crime films and novels from the 1940s and ’50s that calls to us so strongly? True, we are also drowning in superheroes, wandering dumbly through an endless series of post-apocalypses, smothered by the advances of paranormal romance… Each of these gluts derives, in part, from the scope of today’s near-infinite media universe, which offers space for just about anything to have a renaissance, but to the degree it includes mainstream as well as cult success, each also taps into specific cultural desires and anxieties of the moment. There are reasons why noir was powerful to begin with, and why it’s coming back now.

By “noir,” I mean something more than a general tone of bleakness and dysfunction. In his foreword to The Best American Noir of the Century, genre sage Otto Penzler rather caustically remarks that “noir is not unlike pornography, in the sense that it is virtually impossible to define, but everyone thinks they know it when they see it.” He goes on to describe a nihilistic genre about monstrous people “doomed to hopelessness” by their own appetites. Penzler’s noir is compelling — if you haven’t read the collection in question, do so — but I think there are broader definitions that more fully encompass the challenge early 20th century noir posed to the literary status quo, and help explain the genre’s popularity today.

Anglo-American fiction evolved in the grip of a controlling public morality, which demanded the representation of behavior only within certain socially acceptable lines. The classic crime story, the kind written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dame Agatha Christie, is the whodunit: it takes place in an essentially orderly universe, with a common understanding of good and evil. Crime here is a dangerous anomaly, but order can be restored by a hero-detective who investigates and, eventually, unmasks the criminal: revealing evil for what it is, giving it a physical location in an individual, and in the process, re-affirming the innocence of the other characters.

Noir, as it emerged in the middle of a violent century, said to hell with all that. Its world was chaotic, baroque and hypocritical. Crime doesn’t disturb this world, it’s foundational to it. Noir stories gave the stage to criminals and their motivations, which range from unspeakable passions to a firm conviction that their particular crime serves a greater good. A detective may pursue such a criminal, but noir reveals the line between them to be a product of chance and circumstance — if, indeed, such a line exists at all.

In noir, the problem is not an individual: the problem is the world.

Penzler, like some other scholars, leans toward keeping noir for the bad guys, and excludes from the genre the very detective stories that are most associated with it: Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade and Mike Hammer are relegated to a separate category of “hard-boiled,” because they have a core of decency that makes them too close to “white knights.” Penzler has a point, but I see other aspects of those detective characters as more important than their (arguable) virtue. They work for money, not a cop’s sense of duty or a superhero’s great responsibility. Their decency is usually a struggle, and attempts at chivalry are often reluctant, hypocritical, costly — or all three. But most important is their ultimate powerlessness. They may catch a criminal, but their investigation reveals deep-rooted evils they are unable to change. In noir, the problem is not an individual: the problem is the world. Institutions are corrupt, public moralities hypocritical, the watchmen un-watched. One person may pull a trigger, but that act is part of a sprawling web of mendacity and exploitation. No one gets away clean.

It is ironic that the visual signature of noir has been so defined by silhouette and stark black-and-white, when the genre’s true colors are shades of gray. It posits a world of complexity and interdependence, in which humans are incapable of functioning as the autonomous moral actors we want to be, because our every choice is influenced by distant and unassailable systems of power. If the superhero archetype was the aspirational counter-force to 20th century nihilism (some would call it wish fulfillment), noir was the opposite: a determined attempt to stare into the abyss we were creating, to acknowledge this thing of darkness as ours.

When Dashiell Hammett’s nameless operative brutalized criminals and civilians alike in the service of the Continental Detective Agency, he launched a frontal assault on the bizarre dreamland that popular culture had been forced into by the guardians of public morality. No more good-hearted-if-irascible detectives who always get their man, usually from the comfort of an armchair. The Op and his successors — Frank Chambers, as well as Philip Marlowe — demanded that literature represent a universe more like the one we live in than the one we imagine for ourselves.

Noir was powerful because it was a tiny bit true.

But then, it faded. Perhaps, in part, it was the cultural revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, when, for a moment, it seemed that victory over the forces of Old and Evil was possible. (I believe there were other reasons as well, which I’ll get to in a moment.) But today, noir has returned with a vengeance, and it’s easy to see why. Even as social and political revolutions have failed, the media revolution has succeeded. In an expanded world of internet and mobile technology, we are more aware than ever of the webs of power, money and influence that ensnare us, their global tendrils connecting us to people all over the planet. Yet more than ever we are powerless to influence the powers-that-be, change the system, or hold the corrupt to account. Add to that the nostalgia inspired by rapid change, and the proliferation of media and markets, and it seems clear why we look back to noir heroes and antiheroes: doomed losers, perhaps, but ones who could look the corruption in the face without flinching. There is, for me, no clearer marker of the noir moment in our popular culture than the UK TV series Sherlock, which tries (with very uneven success) to re-imagine Sherlock Holmes, the elite icon of the whodunit, the Superman of detectives, as a noir figure.

…a moment when noir could realize its original promise, or could melt away into so much kitsch…

As someone who re-reads The Black Dahlia every year, I’m predisposed to see the return of noir as a good thing. But I also recognize it as a turning point: a moment when noir could realize its original promise, or could melt away into so much kitsch. Noir tropes lose their power when they stray too far from their message: shorn of the impetus to address moral complexity and social injustice, they become parodies of themselves, just a lot of fedoras with nothing inside them.

Sadly, many of today’s noir-influenced entertainment products have exactly this problem. Modern noir can aspire to real relevance only to the degree that it returns to what noir always meant to be: a vehicle of protest and deconstruction, a weapon against entrenched and invisible systems power and privilege, a haven for unheard, angry voices.

Western literature in general has an inclusion problem (to put it gently), but in the case of noir it is particularly ironic. Here was the ideal vehicle for making visible and attacking those power imbalances that entangle us all, particularly racism and sexism. But that never happened. Classic noir presented worlds of corruption and inequality, but it was still primarily inequality between white men. Women remained cutouts: luscious objects of desire, their mystery no more than the question of whether they would prove to be princesses awaiting rescue, or seductive sirens waiting to drag you to hell or the gas chamber. Racial and sexual minorities fared even worse: they were cast mostly as set dressing, or as villains, tempting innocent white people into depravity. (Consider for a moment how even the name, noir, defines the world: through the absence of whiteness, i.e., goodness, purity, heroism. Racism masquerading as English: this is how tight the net is drawn around us.)

…the longer noir remained a white boy’s club, the more it stultified.

To my mind, noir’s failure to offer a mainstream voice to all those oppressed and entrapped by power was what truly sent the form into decline in the 1960s, and began its long sparring match with irrelevance. The genre of Cain and Hammett just had less to say to a racially and sexually diverse counterculture. And the longer noir remained a white boy’s club, the more it stultified.

Today it has a second chance — assuming it continues to draw in and cultivate new and challenging voices. This is already starting: I’m thrilled to see a growing number of bleak and hard-hearted crime stories being created by and about women. (I don’t have numbers, but I believe women have long been better represented in mystery and crime writing than in many other genres — noir and hard-boiled, though, were hold-outs, a last clubhouse for the “man’s men.”) Denise Mina has been one of the most powerful voices in modern crime writing since the late 1990s. Her bleak, brutal stories eschew noir tropes, but exist in truly noir worlds, where female protagonists struggle to solve crimes in the face of mental illness, gender and class discrimination. Megan Abbott has spent a decade writing classic hard-boiled tales in the vein of James M. Cain, but with women in all the big roles. Veronica Mars changed the pop-culture landscape with its melange of high-school drama with a genuine noir sensibility, and paved the way for today’s Jessica Jones, another genre-bending noir, this time with a female showrunner, Melissa Rosenberg.

At the same time, the genre, particularly where it intersects the mainstream, is still blindingly white and Anglo-centric. There are a few lights on this horizon. The poet, professor and activist Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (son of Kenyan literary icon Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o) has written a pair of crime novels featuring detectives — one African-American, one Kenyan — who team up to unravel international webs of deceit and post-colonial violence. The Indian poet Jeet Thayil’s Booker-shortlisted Narcopolis, while not previously categorized as such, is an amazing work of modern noir, a story of murder, betrayal, transformation and addiction in Mumbai’s drug culture, with atmosphere so thick you can smoke it. Franco-Vietnamese writer Aliette de Bodard writes science fiction and culturally diverse alternate history, but her Xuya universe features a number of noir-influenced detective stories. British-Israeli writer Lavie Tidhar explores his obsession with classic pulp and noir in strange and magical crossover tales like Osama and A Man Lies Dreaming, that take the genre tropes in profound and unexpected directions. New imprints, like Hard Case Crime, have been formed to publish both contemporary noir and forgotten books from the genre’s heyday, while others, like Melville International Crime, are leading the way in bringing foreign noir classics into English translation.

…a true contemporary noir renaissance will need more. More female noir, black noir, Latino noir, queer and trans noir.

I look forward to readers who will point out exciting works that I’ve missed — because a true contemporary noir renaissance will need more. More female noir, black noir, Latino noir, queer and trans noir. More noir from English writers outside the Anglo-American axis, and more translation to and from other languages and cultures. It must be global, and it must be diverse.

Of course it’s not up to me: tomorrow’s writers will choose the modes they think best to attack prejudice and injustice. I hope some of them choose noir. Light can slant harshly though Venetian blinds in most any neighborhood on the planet; tough-as-nails private investigators can come in any gender identity or color of the rainbow; doom-driven crooks can ride from first kiss to gas chamber with a member of the same sex as easily as the opposite. Noir does not belong to America, or the ’50s, or some set of lily-white literary gatekeepers: it’s your world… if you’re hard-boiled enough to live there.

About the Author

Nicholas Seeley is the author of Cambodia Noir. He is an international journalist based over the past decade in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy Magazine, Middle East Report, and Traveler’s Tales, among others. His fiction and criticism has been published in Strange Horizons. He is originally from Fairfax, Virginia. Cambodia Noir is his first novel.

Midweek Links: Literary Links from Around the Web (April 27th)

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Looking for some interesting reading to get you through the week? Here are some literary links from around the web to check out:

Alexander Chee, Jesmyn Ward, and other authors pay tribute to the genius of Prince

Is Don DeLillo’s new novel too much of a retread?

The scoop on the Somali-British poet who inspired Beyonce’s new album

Why is George R. R. Martin’s Westeros so… backwards?

How mapping Alice Munro stories can help your own writing

Curious what a Pulitzer award does to book sales? (Hint: it helps)

Mensah Demary on hip-hop and storytelling

Some rad pics of the oldest libraries in the world

The novel you should be reading based on your favorite Game of Thrones character

A look at the literature of cyborgs and robots

Sometimes you read a book at just the right time in your life

10 Books that Capture the Ineffable Thing that Makes Texas Texas: A Reading List from Anton…

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I was almost born in Texas — my mom was eight months pregnant when she and my father left Houston for Memphis. As it was, I spent nearly all of my childhood vacations crisscrossing the state, staring at the absurd (Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo) and the stunning (the historic houses of River Oaks) from the backseat of my parents’ rental car. (I also spent a lot of time staring at the desert landscapes of West Texas, the Piney Woods of East Texas, and the astonishing traffic of greater Houston.)

Even though I’ve never lived in there, I know Texas. I know that the Dallas/Houston rivalry isn’t fake; I know that you can smell Hereford before you see it, because of the feedlots; I know that a one-fingered wave is the proper way to address other cars on sparsely populated highways. (I also know that announcing you are a vegetarian to your rancher great-uncles will earn you a lot of good-natured mockery.)

My new novel, The After Party, was a story that couldn’t be set anywhere but River Oaks; my characters could only have been born and raised in Texas. I don’t know that everything is bigger in Texas (though it’s a place that loves hugeness) but it is different. It’s its own place. Here are ten books that capture the ineffable thing that makes Texas Texas.

Mary Karr

1. The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr

I wish I could go back in time to when I had not read this book and reread it; it’s my favorite memoir. And one of my favorite books. This clear-eyed account of Karr’s hardscrabble childhood in Southeast Texas is heartbreaking and awful and tender all at once. The Liars’ Club was Mary’s father’s poker club, and it’s a fitting title for a book about the stories that adults tell children, and the ways children live forever in those fictions.

Lonesome Dove

2. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

I mean, of course. Nobody captures the literal massiveness of Texas like McMurtry. I read this book from the backseat of the aforementioned car while on one of the aforementioned relative-visiting trips, and seeing the landscape McMurtry described while reading his book was one of the most powerful reading experiences I’ve ever had. It wasn’t hard to shuttle myself back a hundred years and imagine myself crossing old Texas on my trusty steed…

Philipp Meyer

3. The Son by Philipp Meyer

Another sweeping historical epic set in Texas, this one involves the kidnapping of a settler child by roving Comanches; oil that turns people astonishingly rich; and the Texas Rangers. It’s the stuff of potboilers, yes, but not in Meyer’s hands: the Texas he writes about makes you weep.

Edna Ferber

4. Giant by Edna Ferber

The famously thinly fictionalized account of eccentric oilman Glenn McCarthy’s life, who is Jett Rink in Ferber’s novel. James Dean went on to play Jett in the movie; Houston, who claimed McCarthy as one of their own, hated both the book and the film. Giant is a spectacular depiction of the rise and the fall of one of the great Texas oilmen.

Katherine Porter

5. Noon Wine by Katherine Anne Porter

A perfect novella, about a Texas rancher who loses control of his land to a hardworking Swede. Whether it’s rural Texas or Weimar Germany, nobody does place like Porter. And the final scene, which ends with this line — “That way he could work it” — is horrifyingly flawless.

Annie Proulx

6. That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx

Proulx is so marvelously good at capturing the spectacular weirdness of a place, here a Texas town called Woolybucket. And the dialect? It does not disappoint.

Rene Steinke

7. Friendswood by Rene Steinke

A small town in Texas is destroyed by a toxic leak. Told in multiple perspectives, the residents of Friendswood live, in various ways, in their own particular aftermath. There’s a lot of misery, but there’s hope, too.

Buzz Bissinger

8. Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, and A Dream by Buzz Bissinger

The origin story of Coach Taylor, and, besides that, a fascinating, shocking look at the role football plays in small-town America.

Robert Caro

9. The Path to Power by Robert Caro

Could Lyndon B. Johnson have been born and raised anywhere besides Texas? Big and bawdy and powerful, with an unexpectedly sensitive side, the Lyndon Caro depicts for us here is fascinating and unforgettable.

David Foster Wallace

10. “Lyndon” by David Foster Wallace

Technically a short story (though I would argue it’s a novella) most of it is set in D.C., not Texas, and Wallace reinvents Lyndon’s history: here he’s bisexual, and dying (anachronistically) of AIDS. Speculative handiwork aside, Wallace’s Lyndon is so real — urinating in a flower pot, doting on Lady Bird, at all times surrounded by people (he hated to be alone) — you feel like you’ve shaken his hand by the end of the story.

The Doppelgängers

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“The Dopplegängers” 
by Helen Phillips 

The Queen always looked profound when she pooped. Her eyes solemn, as though regarding the void. That was why they had taken to calling her The Queen, even though she was only a month old. Also, the way she sat enthroned in her car seat in the over-packed car as they drove to the new town. And the regal purple stars on her blanket, beneath which her absurdly tiny legs jerked this way and that.

“It’ll be better here,” Sam assured Mimosa that night in the new house. She was standing in the new kitchen beside the new window looking out into the new backyard. She was holding The Queen close to her. She — Mimosa, not The Queen — was crying. The Queen was sleeping. The Queen’s head fit flawlessly beneath Mimosa’s chin. She wondered if all babies’ heads fit so flawlessly beneath their mothers’ chins, if it was a biological thing. Who were those women, those women who had cautioned her, “Don’t worry if you don’t love your baby right away; it takes a while”?

“It’ll be better here,” Sam said again, or maybe he didn’t. She was too tired to know. Everything was a blur — the red numbers on the digital clock, the black hole of The Queen’s mouth.

Sam came up behind Mimosa and did something, the bite on the back of her neck, his vampire move. It was a trick he’d discovered by accident, one night many years ago; they’d been rolling around in bed and somehow his teeth had found the skin there. He’d immediately let go and apologized. “No,” she’d said firmly, giddily, realizing that now she could love him. “I mean, please. Do it again.”

Since this was the first time he had done it since the birth of The Queen, Mimosa was particularly sensitive to it. The touch of his teeth traveled silken down her spine, like an epidural in the seconds before it begins to numb. She turned to him, opening her mouth. The Queen awoke with a howl.

While Sam was at work, Mimosa ran her fingers from the top of The Queen’s head all the way down her spine, again and again, an addiction. It was too much, this beauty, this responsibility. The Queen burped. The Queen stared wide-eyed at the corner of the room as though watching a ghost emerge from the wall. The Queen farted. Mimosa couldn’t bear the softness like a piece of overripe fruit where The Queen’s skull had yet to fuse. It seemed that The Queen could vanish or disintegrate in an instant, that it would take almost nothing to destroy her.

“Are you there?” Sam said, standing in the doorway. A heat wave had begun. The bedroom was hot and dark. The whole house was hot and dark. He couldn’t see who was crying and who was sleeping.

Over the weekend they did things. Nice things, together, as a family. Sam insisted. It felt strange to Mimosa to be out and about, strolling down the sidewalk, sitting on a bench, eating ice cream. She was so accustomed to being inside the house. She was so accustomed to sitting on the bed with The Queen on her knees. Her armpits were damp and her sundress smelled. Her breasts were leaking.

On the other bench, another couple ate ice cream and gazed into a stroller. The woman wore the same sandals as Mimosa.

“Let’s go,” Mimosa said, standing abruptly.

Sam looked up, surprised.

“Come on,” she said.

The labor had been so long. She hadn’t slept more than three hours at a stretch since then. He rose and gripped the handlebar of the stroller. She stormed down the sidewalk toward a quieter street. Small, sensible houses, not unlike their own. She allowed Sam and The Queen to catch up with her. At the end of the block, a woman was watering a row of sagging stargazer lilies with a long hose. Mimosa, who liked stargazers, very nearly smiled as they approached the yard.

But this woman, the woman with the hose; she was wearing the same sundress as Mimosa. And, arcing outward from the small house: the wail of a newborn.

In the middle of the middle of the night, The Queen was screaming for milk, and Mimosa’s breasts were dripping, but the screaming interfered with the latch. The Queen was sticky with milk. Mimosa was sticky with milk. Mimosa wrestled The Queen’s confused, damp body closer to her nipple. Milk plastered them together at their stomachs.

On Monday, the heat was worse than ever. Something was happening to The Queen: hundreds if not thousands of small bumps had arisen on her skin. Mimosa noticed the rash when The Queen woke her at 4:57 in the morning (Sam slept through the crying, could always sleep through, and this was troubling to Mimosa, and at times filled her with queasy hatred, as though she had married a Frisbee or a spoon rather than a man).

Mimosa stepped around the moving boxes and turned on the overhead light in The Queen’s room. She removed The Queen’s onesie and diaper. She stood at the changing table for far too long, staring at The Queen’s skin. The Queen kicked and twisted and reached, oblivious to her mother’s hard gaze. Only when The Queen’s flailing arm had a little heart-wrenching spasm (overexcitement? agitation?) did Mimosa finally pick her up.

She went back into the other room and watched Sam sleep. Then she shoved The Queen at his face.

“Look!” she commanded.

“Oh,” Sam cooed sleepily, taking the baby, pressing her into his chest hair. “I am looking! I am looking at this beautiful, perfect baby! Oh my!”

The Queen smiled at her father, or so it seemed.

Mimosa pulled The Queen away from him and held her close, as close as close could be, the baby’s head in its nook beneath Mimosa’s chin, but she wished there was some way to hold her even closer.

The house felt small, small and hot. Mimosa could smell herself more strongly by the minute. Her body odor had intensified since The Queen’s birth. Sam had read somewhere that newborns can recognize only one person in the entire world, and the way they recognize that person is by scent alone. She wondered when her stink would begin to offend The Queen, or if The Queen liked it more as it grew stronger.

In the car on the way to the park she felt victorious (having packed the diaper bag, located the car keys) and rolled down all the windows. She wanted to sit on a bench by the pond and hold The Queen in her lap and gaze at the swans. This was something she had imagined doing when she was pregnant.

But today even the birds terrified her. The swans and the pigeons were preparing for a face-off. They surrounded the most desirable bench, the pigeons viciously iridescent, the swans viciously white, ready for some kind of reckoning.

She spun the stroller around, away from the battlefield. The Queen began to fuss. Only a witch would dare stroll her infant in such indecent heat.

“You’re my best friend,” she said to soothe The Queen, but it just sounded plaintive.

Mimosa drove home slowly. She wished The Queen could be up front in the passenger seat beside her. She narrated the sights they passed: that’s a church, that’s a school, that’s a gas station. Soon the backseat was swathed in the hush of The Queen’s sleep. They said it was good to talk to your baby, but sometimes it was hard to know what to say, even when your baby was The Queen.

If Mimosa had been alone, truly alone, as she had so often been as of five weeks ago, she would have turned on the radio. But now the hush enveloped the car as Mimosa pulled up to a stop sign.

There were four cars at the four-way stop, three in addition to Mimosa’s.

First the car to Mimosa’s left passed through the intersection, driven by a woman with a dark bob, a tired face, a car seat in the back. Next the car to Mimosa’s right passed through the intersection, driven by a woman with a dark bob, a tired face, a car seat in the back. Then the car across from Mimosa passed through the intersection, driven by a woman with a dark bob, a tired face, a car seat in the back. Now it was Mimosa’s turn. She was horrified, paralyzed.

Yet it was her turn, and so she drove.

Early evening, and Sam was driving. A deep blue summer night, birdsong paired with silence. Stopped at a red light, they watched a woman push a stroller across the gleaming crosswalk.

“This town,” Mimosa said bitterly as the light turned green.

“What?” Sam said.

There was a row of dark trees, the kind of trees that ought to be Christmas trees. They looked strange here, in the heart of the summer, standing upright against the heat.

“Filled with doppelgängers of me,” Mimosa said. As she said it, she could see them — furrowing their brows the same way over the list of ingredients on a jar of tomato sauce, struggling the same way to wipe the shit out of the rolls of fat on their babies’ thighs.

Sam gave half a laugh. Mimosa glanced back to check on The Queen. The backseat was dim, but she sensed that the baby was awake.

“Yeah,” Sam said in that flat way of his. “That’s why I love you. ’Cause you’re just like everyone else.”

She craned her neck further, caught a glimpse of her accomplice’s dark alert eye.

Mimosa had been very organized, before all this. She’d had plans to start a small business. Somewhere on her computer there were spreadsheets.

“Just because they, what, have the same stroller we have?” Sam said as he pulled into their driveway.

He got out and opened the door to the backseat and unlatched The Queen. The Queen spat up on him, just as so many babies all over town were spitting up on their fathers.

It was eerie, more than eerie, it was nauseating, to see them standing at the gas station, their hair wilting in the heat just like hers, their bodies at the same stage of post-birth flab.

There was a doppelgänger in the produce section. Perched in the woman’s shopping cart, a sleeping infant in a handy detachable car seat identical to the handy detachable car seat of The Queen. Mimosa hid behind the bananas and watched. The woman held a real lemon in one hand and a lemon-shaped container of lemon juice in the other. She dropped the lemon into her cart, put the container back on the shelf, and began to walk away. Then she turned around to swap the lemon for the container. Then, she changed her mind again, put the container on the shelf once more, and returned the lemon to her cart.

Mimosa recognized the indecision born of exhaustion, that familiar fuzziness. This sizzle of recognition propelled her toward the woman.

“I did that just last week,” Mimosa found herself saying.

The doppelgänger, now studying the nutrition information on the container of lemon juice, didn’t react. Boldly, Mimosa raised her voice a second time.

“I have a hard time choosing between them,” she said. Her voice seemed an intrusion in the cool, tranquil supermarket.

The doppelgänger turned to her with a radiant smile, and Mimosa reacted with a radiant smile of her own.

“I know!” the doppelgänger said, as though they were in the middle of a conversation. “It’s like, convenience versus authenticity. I can’t believe that squeezing a lemon sounds like too much of a hassle, but that’s just where I am in my life right now, you know?”

So much did Mimosa know that she had to blink back a pair of tears.

“How old?” the doppelgänger asked, turning her smile on The Queen.

“Six weeks,” Mimosa said.

“Mine too!” the doppelgänger exclaimed. “Well, six and a half. Just started smiling for non-gas reasons last week. Look, you’ve got to join my moms’ group for babies born in June.”

“Oh,” Mimosa said, revolted and fascinated.

“Mary Rogers,” the doppelgänger said, sticking out her hand.

“Mimosa Smith,” Mimosa said.

“Mimosa!” Mary Rogers said. “That’s quite a name.”

“My mom’s favorite drink,” Mimosa explained, as usual. Mary Rogers didn’t yet know that, aside from her name, Mimosa was just like any other plain Jane.

It was there, damp with sweat, in the pocket of her sundress. She reached down and squeezed it during dinner. She’d made pasta and now she didn’t know why she’d made something that required water to boil. The night was already devastatingly hot.

“Want me to hold her?” Sam said across the small breakfast table. They had a dining room with a dining table, but they had yet to use it. Mimosa held The Queen with one arm and with the opposite hand clenched the piece of paper torn magnanimously from Mary Rogers’s shopping list. On one side, Mary Rogers had scrawled the name of the café where the moms’ group was meeting this week; on the other side, brown rice, prune juice, paper towels, oli-. It felt so intimate to have this scrap from another woman’s list, her items jotted just as messily as Mimosa’s always were.

Mimosa insisted on holding The Queen, even though the baby’s warmth was increasing her own temperature by a degree or two.

“You need to eat your food,” Sam said.

The Queen is my food.

“It was stupid to make pasta in this heat,” she said.

Sam shrugged, pressed a forkful into his mouth. She could tell he agreed.

“Let me take the baby,” Sam said, “so you can eat.”

She pitied him, and willed herself to pass the baby. The Queen kept it together for twenty seconds before starting to shriek. He stood up, bounced her, didn’t do it quite right. Mimosa refrained from critiquing his technique. They couldn’t be put into words, anyhow, The Queen’s particular needs. After a few minutes he was forced to return the baby to her mother. The Queen quieted instantly, offensively. Sam carried the plates to the sink and put them down hard.

The women threatened to overwhelm the café, these women with their strollers and sandals and sundresses, staked out at two large tables and encroaching upon a third. Mimosa struggled through the doorway with her stroller. She was stuck halfway in, halfway out, when it occurred to her that she could still escape. It could still be just her and The Queen, alone together.

“Hi! Welcome!” one of the doppelgängers cried out — Mary Rogers, she assumed, though it was impossible to know. “Come on over!”

And they all turned their heads, their tired faces reflecting her tired face. They were gesturing to her, they were scooting aside to make room.

For the first time in a long time, Mimosa knew exactly what was required of her. She glided across the café and took her place among them. She was given a seat and an iced tea. She pulled The Queen out of the stroller and began to nurse her, idly, as the others were. So this was all she had to do: sit here, nurse her baby, blend in.

But then the questions began. How many weeks? Where’d you deliver? Pounds, ounces? How’d you pick the name? When do you go back to work? Have you figured out child care? What’s the nap schedule? Sleeping much at night yet? So flustered did she become that she said the wrong birth date, the tenth instead of the twelfth, but was too embarrassed to correct the mistake, because one of the doppelgängers had already gone into raptures about the fact that her baby had been born on the same day.

Mimosa took shelter in the sight of The Queen — until she observed that the rash had now spread to the scalp. She hoped none of the other mothers would notice.

“We were just saying how much wet wipe dispensers suck,” someone said. “We can go to the moon, but we can’t create something that makes it easy to get those fucking wipes out?”

She’d had this same thought two days ago, struggling to yank them out while holding The Queen’s kicking legs high above her gooey diaper.

“So,” someone said to Mimosa. “How’ve you been holding up?”

They were all looking at her. The answer was on the tip of her tongue: Oh, just fine. She gazed around the table, at all these other infants in various stages of sleep and wakefulness, of dissatisfaction and contentment. She had to admit that each of them was as beautiful as The Queen, and as repugnant.

“I cry two to four times a day,” Mimosa said.

Her confession was met with silence. She shriveled. It was wrong to bare one’s soul.

“Only four?” someone said.

“Try six!” someone yelled.

“Every time I go walking with the baby in the park, it’s like someone turned on a fucking faucet.”

“The other day this old lady in a wheelchair rolled up to me and was like, ‘Are you okay? Can I help you?’”

“Oh my god, there’s poop on my dress.”

“Want half of my croissant?”

“Hey, please don’t look too close at my baby, ladies! His rash is disgusting!”

“What are you doing?” Sam said one morning, coming up behind her. Mimosa was standing at the mirror in the bathroom, gazing at herself, searching for the doppelgängers’ faces in her own.

“Getting ready,” she said. “Brushing my teeth.”

But she was not brushing her teeth.

“Ready for what?” he said.

“To go and see the — ” Mimosa stopped herself, then chose her word: “moms.”

She regarded him coolly in the mirror, the same way she knew the doppelgängers regarded their husbands when asked what went on at all of those endless meet-ups.

In the nursery, The Queen coughed, whimpered. Mimosa felt as though her own arm was coughing, whimpering. She smiled to herself.

“Didn’t you see them yesterday?”

Mimosa reached around him to pull her sundress off the hanger dangling from the hook on the bathroom door.

Yes, she had seen them yesterday, had sat with them in a circle, their assorted tears falling onto small heads encrusted with yellowish cradle cap. How precious they were, these women who believed their babies were tiny pieces of cosmic fluff the universe had blown their way for safekeeping, who despised themselves for being unfit for the endeavor of motherhood. There among the doppelgängers, you could come right out and say it: “I think I’m a witch.” And they would echo you word for word. You could confess that in a recent dream you were turning into a geode, and the doppelgängers would list all the things they’d dreamed they were turning into. They knew the feeling — love enwrapped in dread — that made it difficult to push the stroller down the street without being overwhelmed by dark daydreams of garbage trucks rearing up onto the sidewalk.

She hummed a lullaby as she buckled her sandals. Sam watched her. He had gotten The Queen out of her crib, but The Queen wanted her mother.

Mimosa stood up and spread her arms wide.

Sam, again. Across the table. Nighttime now. Hair unruly, unshaven: a stranger. They were eating summer squash but it tasted mealy, as though the summer had gone on far too long.

“I feel bad for us,” Sam said.

Mimosa stayed quiet, as she so often did nowadays, except when she was among them. At tables all around town, weren’t the other mothers also feeling the weight of their own little lives? She was addicted to eating dinner with The Queen in her lap, but it was difficult to wield the forkfuls of squash so that no chunks fell down onto The Queen’s painfully soft hair.

The Queen wiggled her legs, unrolled her crooked little sidelong smile.

Mimosa willed herself to reach across the table and touch Sam’s forearm. She stroked his veins with all the tenderness she could muster. He stared down at her hand as though it was five worms rather than five fingers.

The Queen’s smile flipped; a wail began deep inside her and shot upward.

“What’s her problem?” he said. The question sounded harsh, but he was asking it the way a little boy would — scared, and truly wanting to know the answer.

In the black of the night, Mimosa reached out toward Sam’s silhouette, but there was nothing there. She could see his outline in the darkness, very dimly, his head on the pillow, but there was no body to touch.

Waking up sometime later to nurse The Queen, she saw that Sam was back, his outline and his body both — relieved, tender, she ran her fingers from the top of his head down his spine.

They were lounging on blankets in the park, the doppelgängers and their babies; the mothers were eating grapes, they were tossing grapes, they were laughing, their minds were loose and hazy, their babies had awoken them at 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. and 6 a.m., and what could be more hilarious than that? Now the babies were crying, now pooping, now wanting milk, milk, milk, and out came the luminous breasts, and who wouldn’t want to place lips on breasts so full, and the mothers grinned at each other like a bunch of teenagers on the same high, and the heat wave painted an extra shimmer over it all, and the grapes were radiant in the grass and The Queen smiled her wide milky smile and motherhood (the doppelgängers agreed) was underrated, everything so dazzling, Mimosa had diamonds for eyes. A universe away from the grim dinner table in her quiet home, from the version of herself that had sat on a beat-up brown couch with Sam a decade back, both of them stock-still and united in secrecy when his ex-girlfriend entered the room; now it was she and The Queen who froze when he entered the room.

“Isn’t it funny,” one of the doppelgängers murmured lazily, “that we never talk about our so-called better halves?”

It was explosive, the chorus of agreement; it always was, with the doppelgängers. And Mimosa joined in; hadn’t she just been marveling at her distance from him?

Yet amid the sharing that followed, the echoes upon echoes upon echoes, the dark amusement at their collective indifference to their partners, Mimosa found herself wanting Sam, she found herself standing up, drunkenly gathering The Queen’s scattered belongings.

She dumped The Queen into the stroller, moving more hastily by the second, and set off across the grass toward the path, putting distance between herself and the smell of their laundered and spat-up-upon sundresses, fleeing the perfect alignment of their thoughts and her own. She glanced back; the doppelgängers were all packing up and dispersing.

Back from the park, navigating through the screen door into the kitchen, Mimosa felt weak, awkward. The car seat banged hard against the door frame and The Queen awoke with a shriek, her body rigid in its devotion to the screams.

She clutched the writhing baby and ran down the hallway to the bathroom and hit the switch and stared at the mirror. The Queen’s rash was worse than ever, spreading across her face; Mimosa felt it pressing upward as though through her own pores.

But meanwhile The Queen’s screeching self was warm and strong, tried and true, and Mimosa couldn’t contain all these sensations, the overlapping positive and negative and positive and negative. There was no room in her for such love; it was explosive, almost identical to panic.

She slammed the light switch downward. In the darkness, The Queen quieted. The desolate evening twined itself around them. Mimosa wondered what they looked like in the black mirror.

Sam.

“I’m beat,” she confessed.

“I’ll take the baby,” he said. “You take a nap.”

“What about dinner?” she said.

The Queen was limp, gentle, in his arms. Mimosa walked to the bedroom and plummeted into sleep.

When Mimosa awoke, she felt strangely refreshed, as though she had slept for years. The bedroom was cool, the heat wave broken. She couldn’t wait to see them.

The house was dark. The car was gone. Outside, the last of the day was draining away swiftly, as it does in late August — or, wait, had September arrived?

She called out for them, even used The Queen’s given name, but the words felt foreign on her lips.

The kitchen was invisible, silent.

It was no wonder that he had left her. She had been awful to him, hadn’t she? Yet she couldn’t remember how she’d been. All she remembered from the entire summer was The Queen’s face, its thousand different expressions.

She didn’t want to have to survive without him, but she could.

The other, though — that she could not survive.

There was only one place she could think of to go. In the ever-weakening light, she hurried down sidewalks no one ever walked. She couldn’t tell where the night ended and she began.

Approaching the house, Mimosa anticipated a scene identical to the one she’d fled: Mary Rogers standing alone in her own unlit kitchen, orphaned. But when she looked through the screen door, she saw that Mary Rogers’s kitchen was all Technicolor — the brilliant red of the tablecloth, the intense white gleam of the refrigerator. There sat Mary Rogers, glorious, at the small breakfast table in the corner, beneath the glow of an orange plastic shade, with her husband and her baby. They were just finishing dessert. Mary Rogers held the baby — almost but not quite as beautiful as The Queen. Mary Rogers’s husband’s back faced Mimosa. It could have been Sam’s back — the post-work slump, the hair just beginning to dull.

Mimosa wanted, more than she had ever wanted anything, to slip into Mary Rogers’s body, hold her baby, eat her last spoonful of ice cream.

Mary Rogers stood and passed the baby to the husband. As she turned to walk out of the kitchen into the hallway, Mimosa noticed the mouth-shaped marks on the back of her neck.

When Mimosa pressed, the screen door into Mary Rogers’s kitchen opened with a squeak she recognized from her own screen door.

“Well hello,” said Mary Rogers’s husband with an odd matter-of-factness. He twisted around to smile at her.

He looked just like Sam.

The baby on his lap began to whimper. She felt her milk come down. Her fingertips went electric with desire. She rushed across the kitchen and seized the baby. The man’s only protest was a wry half-laugh.

“Oh baby,” she said. “Where’d your mama go?”

She sat down across from him and unbuttoned her sundress. The baby latched. That ecstatic buzz of oxytocin; she could feel it spreading through her blood, making her toes and fingers tingle, opening the valves of her heart and the ducts in her breasts, a downpour of milk and sympathy.

He watched her in that flat, cool way of his. She enjoyed his gaze. She felt grand, maternal, untouchable, like a woman from before human history.

When the baby had taken its fill, she buttoned her sundress and stood up, holding the baby close, its head in the nook beneath her chin. He too stood and they stepped away from the breakfast table, out of the circle cast by the hanging lamp.

He placed his forehead against her forehead.

“What if she comes back?” she said.

“Who?” he said. His breath on her eyelid. “Who are you talking about?”

Reactionaries Attack the Hugo Awards Again

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The finalists for the 2016 Hugo Awards for science-fiction and fantasy were announced today, and it looks like the Puppies are at it again. As The Guardian reports, the majority of nominees promoted by The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies — groups that “campaign against a perceived bias towards liberal and leftwing science-fiction and fantasy authors” — made the final ballot.

The Sad Puppies, founded in 2013 by writer Larry Correia, criticize the Hugos for favoring “academic” works that allegedly promote left-leaning messages. In 2015, Theodore Beale — a “self-described ‘fundamentalist’” whose racism, as Ryan Britt explained in Electric Literature, is well-known — founded the more radical and political Rabid Puppies.

Since Hugo nominations are determined by voters, the Puppies have stirred controversy by actively campaigning for the inclusion of works that conform to their ideologies. After buying a membership to the annual World Science Fiction Convention, voters can nominate up to five works per category, and the five works with the highest numbers of votes make the ballot.

To the chagrin of many authors — including George RR Martin and Connie Willis, who declared the Hugos “broken” and rife with “bullying” — the Puppies have been successful. Some writers, like Alastair Reynolds, have requested that the Puppies remove them from their lists of recommendations. Faced with a ballot full of Puppies-backed nominees last year, voters declined to select winners in an unprecedented 5 categories. This year, 4,032 nominating ballots were cast — a new record. Of the 80 works recommended by Beale, 62 snagged spots on the shortlist, including an essay that Beale wrote under his pen name, Vox Day.

Here is a partial list of the 2016 Hugo Awards Finalists. A full list is available on The Hugo Awards website:

Best Novel (3695 nominating ballots)

  • Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
  • The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher (Roc)
  • The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
  • Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson (William Morrow)
  • Uprooted by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)

Best Novella (2416 nominating ballots)

  • Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com)
  • The Builders by Daniel Polansky (Tor.com)
  • Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum)
  • Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson (Dragonsteel Entertainment)
  • Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds (Tachyon)

Best Novelette (1975 nominating ballots)

  • “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander (Lightspeed, Feb 2015)
  • “Flashpoint: Titan” by CHEAH Kai Wai (There Will Be War Volume X, Castalia House)
  • “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu (Uncanny Magazine, Jan-Feb 2015)
  • “Obits” by Stephen King (The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Scribner)
  • “What Price Humanity?” by David VanDyke (There Will Be War Volume X, Castalia House)

Best Short Story (2451 nominating ballots)

  • “Asymmetrical Warfare” by S. R. Algernon (Nature, Mar 2015)
  • The Commuter by Thomas A. Mays (Stealth)
  • “If You Were an Award, My Love” by Juan Tabo and S. Harris (voxday.blogspot.com, Jun 2015)
  • “Seven Kill Tiger” by Charles Shao (There Will Be War Volume X, Castalia House)
  • Space Raptor Butt Invasion by Chuck Tingle (Amazon Digital Services)

Best Graphic Story (1838 nominating ballots)

  • The Divine written by Boaz Lavie, art by Asaf Hanuka and Tomer Hanuka (First Second)
  • Erin Dies Alone written by Grey Carter, art by Cory Rydell (dyingalone.net)
  • Full Frontal Nerdity by Aaron Williams (ffn.nodwick.com)
  • Invisible Republic Vol 1 written by Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman, art by Gabriel Hardman (Image Comics)
  • The Sandman: Overture written by Neil Gaiman, art by J.H. Williams III (Vertigo)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form (2904 nominating ballots)

  • Avengers: Age of Ultron written and directed by Joss Whedon (Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
  • Ex Machina written and directed by Alex Garland (Film4; DNA Films; Universal Pictures)
  • Mad Max: Fury Road written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nico Lathouris, directed by George Miller (Village Roadshow Pictures; Kennedy Miller Mitchell; RatPac-Dune Entertainment; Warner Bros. Pictures)
  • The Martian screenplay by Drew Goddard, directed by Ridley Scott (Scott Free Productions; Kinberg Genre; TSG Entertainment; 20th Century Fox)
  • Star Wars: The Force Awakens written by Lawrence Kasdan, J. J. Abrams, and Michael Arndt, directed by J.J. Abrams (Lucasfilm Ltd.; Bad Robot Productions; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form (2219 nominating ballots)

  • Doctor Who: “Heaven Sent” written by Steven Moffat, directed by Rachel Talalay (BBC Television)
  • Grimm: “Headache” written by Jim Kouf and David Greenwalt, directed by Jim Kouf (Universal Television; GK Productions; Hazy Mills Productions; Open 4 Business Productions; NBCUniversal Television Distribution)
  • Jessica Jones: “AKA Smile” written by Scott Reynolds, Melissa Rosenberg, and Jamie King, directed by Michael Rymer (Marvel Television; ABC Studios; Tall Girls Productions;Netflix)
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: “The Cutie Map” Parts 1 and 2 written by Scott Sonneborn, M.A. Larson, and Meghan McCarthy, directed by Jayson Thiessen and Jim Miller (DHX Media/Vancouver; Hasbro Studios)
  • Supernatural: “Just My Imagination” written by Jenny Klein, directed by Richard Speight Jr. (Kripke Enterprises; Wonderland Sound and Vision; Warner Bros. Television)

Win a FREE Spot in a New York Creative Writing Class

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Want to take a writing class but feeling too broke or otherwise on the fence? Or do you just like winning stuff? We have good news either way: Once a month, we’ll randomly select a winner who will be offered a FREE spot in one of Catapult’s six-week workshops or one-day bootcamps, co-presented by Electric Literature. Classes are held in our shared NYC offices.

These intimate workshops and intensives are taught by some of the best debut and established contemporary writers. In May, writers can learn how to transform their diary into sellable nonfiction with Emily Gould, or how to evoke place using sensory detail with debut novelist and Hi Wildflower Botanica founder Tanwi Islam. Students will learn to think like an editor and write for their readers with Henry Holt editor and novelist Caroline Zancan, and they’ll hone their sentences until they pop with NY-Times approved short story writer Rebecca Schiff. In our publishing bootcamp with Dan Blank (We Grow Media) and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore (NY-Times bestselling author), writers will begin to build a marketing platform that will help them make their future books bestsellers, and in our travel-writing bootcamp, aspiring Elizabeth Gilberts will not only learn the craft of travel writing from Departures editor Jessica Flint, but also how to pitch pieces about their adventures abroad to paying venues.

All classes are accepting applications for regular admission now — feel free to double your chances of landing a spot by sending in a regular application and entering the giveaway. Giveaway winners are eligible for participation in all student programming, from our reading series to our free professional development events.

Click this link and enter your email for a chance to win! Our first winner will be announced on May 13th.

Jane and I: On Re-Reading Jane Eyre

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by Selin Gökcesu

Reader, I did it. I reread Jane Eyre. It was, I’m sad to say, a bitter disappointment.

I reread Jane Eyre as part of an experiment aimed at resurrecting my love for reading. Soon after I enrolled in an MFA program in nonfiction, something completely unexpected happened to me: I could no longer derive any pleasure from books. At first, I blamed it on men. Although I started the program in the 21st century New York, the great majority of the books I was assigned were by male writers. How could I, a Turkish woman in her late thirties, be moved by the concerns and priorities of Updike, Roth, Nabokov, and Thoreau and lose myself in the literary discharge of their male minds? But, the reality was that I did not fare much better with women. The moment I turned my attention to contemporary female essayists, it dawned upon me that I shared little with them beyond an endorsement of the personal essay and memoir as literary forms. Most nonfiction works authored by women, I started to notice, were about illness and pain (mental or physical), men (as lovers or oppressors), and motherhood — topics I might be interested in socially, but not in a literary sense. I started missing the days when I was able to surrender my heart and soul to a character, be one with her (and, on occasion, him), and effortlessly, deliriously, read.

How could I, a Turkish woman in her late thirties, be moved by the concerns and priorities of Updike, Roth, Nabokov, and Thoreau and lose myself in the literary discharge of their male minds?

That’s when the idea occurred to me — how about Jane, my old friend? Perhaps she could respark my love of reading. Jane Eyre was the first non-picture book that I was given, when I was about eight. It was a small paperback, abridged for children and translated to Turkish. I referred to the protagonist as Janeh Eyreh, as silent vowels do not exist in my native Turkish. Our connection was immediate. I entered Jane’s life the way Alice entered the looking glass room. I stalked Jane through the dark and dreary corridors of Gateshead Hall. I fretted over her when she lost consciousness in the red room where she was so unjustly jailed by her awful aunt. I shivered in bed with her and Helen Burns the night Helen surrendered her soul to her maker. My identification with Jane was so complete that when Mr. Rochester fell in love with her, it was as if he fell in love with me.

Back in those days, reading was not an isolated activity that ended when my books did. I reread copiously and forced the stories into my life. I wanted to be Jane. I adopted her tastes. I decided to prefer rainy days because she did. Since our windowsills were awfully high and narrow, I could not read on them the like Jane. That didn’t deter me — I fashioned my own window seat by pulling a chair to the window and draping a curtain around it. I took up drawing to be more like Jane, and produced images of disembodied heads and stormy seas.

My identification with Jane was so complete that when Mr. Rochester fell in love with her, it was as if he fell in love with me.

Despite my earnest efforts, my life was nothing like Jane’s. I grew up in 1980s Turkey, not Victorian England. My mother, who survived childbirth twice and did not succumb to any epidemic, was loving. I had no mean aunt to lock me up. I went not to a boarding school but to a private one. I had never eaten porridge — hot, cold, or burnt. A diet of bread and water was out of the question even as an occasional indulgence — I was forced to eat an egg with my breakfast and three spoonfuls of yogurt with my lunch. All this only served to make me more interested in Jane’s peculiar life and spurred my desire to emulate her.

I was thirteen when I discovered that the real Jane Eyre was a lot longer than my little volume. I was overjoyed, and set out to read it. I breezed through Jane’s childhood and adolescence and was surprised to see how many pages I still had left — in my abridged version, Jane arrived at Thornfield Hall at about the halfway point. Soon after Jane became a governess, however, I found myself dreadfully bored and abandoned the book. I attributed my boredom not to Jane or Charlotte Brontë, but to to the fact that I was reading a dated translation into Turkish. Eventually, I did finish the unabridged Jane Eyre in the original English, when I was in my early twenties. It was part of a Victorian literature marathon that I deemed necessary at the time, to expand my knowledge of literature, and Jane blended in with Agnes Grey, Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, and Dorothea Brooke.

My childhood companion, the hapless, strong-willed orphan, grew up into a dour, self-righteous maid.

When I reread Jane Eyre at thirty-eight, I wasn’t expecting to relive my childhood. I was simply hoping that a novel that for me was so intimately tied to the joy of literature would allow me to lose myself in a book once more and perhaps trigger a reading spree of the sort I used to enjoy in my earlier days. The experiment started off well enough. Once again, I moved swiftly through Jane’s childhood and adolescence, this time admiring Bessie’s complex relationship with Jane and appreciating what an unusual character Helen Burns was. I also enjoyed Jane’s essayistic asides, when she stepped away from the moment to give the reader some background information or a piece of her mind. Nevertheless, soon after Helen died, my interest waned. My childhood companion, the hapless, strong-willed orphan, grew up into a dour, self-righteous maid. I found the passages of Jane’s religious moralizing insufferable and pedantic, even after making allowances for her 19th century roots. The relationship between Jane and her condescending, superior master Mr. Rochester (which I had once found romantic, if not sexy) was downright disturbing.

*

Though life experience may make one a better writer, it doesn’t necessarily render her a better reader. Youth reads with the benefit of an unbridled imagination that transcends isolated pictures and carries a story into life. The juvenile reader is not in search of originality, she is not even in search of a “good” story — any narrative that has forward momentum and a child protagonist will do.

The young reader, just like she can be friends any other girl her age, can identify with any heroine that fits her demographic. Presence or absence of toys, foods, and parents, being subject to unfair treatment by grownups, separation from family are all too relatable, independently of social background. When I was little, as a result of living in an economically mixed neighborhood, all my friends were children of poor, working class families that were more conservative and religious than mine. As I grew older, without any deliberate thought or action, my own friendships became limited to people who had similar educational and political backgrounds as myself. In parallel, I became more selective regarding the characters I could identify with and the writers I could tolerate, which slowly but consistently eroded my reading pleasure.

I became more selective regarding the characters I could identify with and the writers I could tolerate, which slowly but consistently eroded my reading pleasure.

With age, I grew sensitive to the writer’s political and moral agenda, separately from the protagonist’s. When I read Jane Eyre at eight, I gave little thought to Charlotte Brontë as a separate entity from Jane. At thirty-eight, what I perceived as Brontë’s moral standpoint rubbed me the wrong way. Nowadays, to enjoy a book, not only do I need to make peace with the characters but also, with the writer whose fingerprints I detect in every sentence. If I am put off by either, instead of sitting back and enjoying the story, I argue with it. Among my pet peeves are libertarianism, overt moralizing, unwarranted optimism regarding human nature, and a writer’s contention that he has within himself the entire human condition.

*

Technically, one need not identify with the protagonist or the writer to enjoy a good book. Although my eventual inability to relate to characters and writers did interfere with how much pleasure a book gave me, all through my twenties and early thirties, I continued to chain-read novels and memoirs written by a diverse group of men and women. I would find myself interested in a time period or a style — late 20th century American writers, pre-war British writers, social realism in the Turkish novel, Russian classics, literary horror — and read samples of it until I reached a point of saturation or boredom. This type of reading was not quite as gratifying as the way I read and reread Jane Eyre or Little Women as a child. Grownup reading was a little more detached from the characters, a little less enthusiastic, a little less visceral, but still one of my favorite pastimes.

I admired Wood’s ability to praise with intellectual rigor.

During my first year at the MFA, right about the time my anti-reading symptoms were starting to make themselves known, I picked up a small volume by James Wood titled How Fiction Works. I made slow progress but enjoyed it nevertheless. When a critic decides to praise the book he’s analyzing, it usually makes for an unexciting, predictable read. I admired Wood’s ability to praise with intellectual rigor. Moreover, unlike contemporary American writers, Wood was not overly concerned with being original, entertaining, or conspicuously passionate. He simply allowed his keen interest in the subject matter guide him and the reader.

I had read a number of the writers Wood analyzed — the Brontës, Jane Austen, Muriel Spark, Gustave Flaubert. However, as I made my way through How Fiction Works, I realized I had read them very superficially. Starting with the chapter entitled “Flaubert and the Modern Narrative,” Wood turned to the idea of “writer as a seer” and analyzed the types of literary details that masters bundle into sentences. Many of the excerpts he picked out to dissect were passages which must have once entered my mind (since they were from books I had read) but exited in silence, leaving no trace. For me, micro-level concepts such as literary detailing, the contraction and expansion of time, the proximity of the narrator to the protagonist’s mind, consciousness, or language were akin to faded stains on a waiting room carpet. I didn’t see them. They were overshadowed by the story and the characters. “I have to learn how to read,” I realized with panic. “I have to reread everything I ever read if I am going to keep walking around telling people that I read this book or that.”

“I have to learn how to read,” I realized with panic. “I have to reread everything I ever read if I am going to keep walking around telling people that I read this book or that.”

I didn’t realize at the time I read How Fiction Works, that my tendency to quick-read was actually allowing me to enjoy the story itself unencumbered by some yawning washerwoman over yonder, the purplish tint left behind by a sunset, the texture of the moss on the roots of some old tree, or the howling of the wind. What I thought was careless reading was in fact an unwavering loyalty to the plot. It made no difference to the old-me whether the writer collapsed a year into a paragraph or expanded a minute into a chapter — I remained equally oblivious to both as long as the narrative flowed smoothly. Detached narrators, omniscient narrators, the first person, the close third, I was blissfully blind to it all.

With or without James Wood, it was inevitable that the way I read would change after I started the MFA program. Once someone criticizes your work for perspective, suddenly it becomes impossible not to notice perspective in other works. Once a workshop classmate collapses a decade in one clumsy sentence, you become attuned to time in your own writing and elsewhere. Becoming hyper-aware of the nitty gritty of writing, however, did not not make me a better reader as I had originally expected. Paying attention to every word of every sentence is taxing. My new way of reading worked only to distance me from the story and its universe.

Paying attention to every word of every sentence is taxing. My new way of reading worked only to distance me from the story and its universe.

During my first semester at the MFA program, a translation professor told the class about Paul Valéry’s claim that he could never become a novelist because he refused to write arbitrary and purely informational sentences such as “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.” At first, I thought little of this anecdote. A year or so later, however, after I metamorphosed into a “close reader,” I began to find statements in the “The Marquise went out at five o’clock” category impossible to ignore and unbearable to read. Gone were the days that I could skim over such sentences and process them as information progressing the plot. They started making me cringe.

In How Fiction Works, Wood briefly addresses Valéry’s statement and dismisses it, concluding that the Marquise sentence is only arbitrary in isolation, not when it’s set up by a preceding sentence. My objection to the Marquise going out at five was not on grounds of arbitrariness alone, but also, banality. Unlike,Valéry, however, I do not refuse to write “The Marquise went out at five o’clock” — I will write anything that takes me from one paragraph to another. I just refuse to read it.

When my Jane Eyre experiment failed to rekindle my book love, I did not give up. I went on to read The Wide Sargasso Sea, which had a decade ago mesmerized me with its glorious imagery and its half-dream, half-nightmare universe. I had also been impressed that there existed a woman who had read Jane Eyre and identified not with Jane, but with Jane’s nemesis in the attic. But, I found no cure in The Wide Sargasso Sea either. No matter what I read, I saw the Marquise everywhere.

Nowadays, although I write everyday, my reading is limited to shop signs, emails, food labels, cosmetic ingredients, and book spines with an occasional glance at a back cover. But, I suspect that my evolution from repeat-reader to quick-reader to close-reader to no-reader is not over yet. The next stage may very well take me some place wonderful, laden with literary bliss where I meet Jane once more.

On Killer Whales, Eden & Screenwriting: An Interview with Shirley Barrett, Author of Rush Oh!

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by Peter Meinertzhagen

Shirley Barrett is best known as a screenwriter and director whose first feature film, Love Serenade, won the Caméra d’Or at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. It’s with the publication of Rush Oh! that Barrett has quickly made her name as a novelist, with her debut featuring on the longlist for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016 and showing that her vivid and visual storytelling transfers perfectly to the page. Rush Oh!, based on a real story, tells the story of a New South Wales whaling community in the early 1900s that worked together with a pod of killer whales that returned each year to Eden bay for whaling season. I caught up with Barrett to discuss the writing of Rush Oh!, where the story came from, and how her work for the screen influenced her novel.

Peter Meinertzhagen: Rush Oh! began life as a feature film script before you turned it into a novel. How did you go about approaching that transformation?

Shirley Barrett: Having written it first as a feature film, it gave me a structure to hang the novel on, which helped. I already knew it was going to revolve around one particular whaling season. Also I had an entire set of characters that I’d lived with for a while, even cast them in my mind, so I was very familiar with them all when I began. The film script started the same way as the book with the arrival of John Beck, but it finished with the Plain and Fancy Dress Ball. It was a much simpler story, a romance. When I started the process of transforming it into a novel, I laboriously copied the dialogue from the script. As I grew more confident, I referred to the script less and less, and the novel began to dictate its own terms. I found that now I didn’t have to adhere to a tight screenplay structure, I could meander more, tell little stories on the side, and all that I found really enjoyable. I like detail, and there is precious little room for details in screenplays! Also, the movie was always going to be very expensive because of the whaling scenes, but now that I didn’t have to worry about expense, I could have as many whaling scenes as I liked. I didn’t have to hear kerching! kerching! every time another whale hove to.

PM: Having a cast in mind for each character must have really helped in bringing those characters to life. I know many authors base characters on people they know in order to realise them on the page. Do you think you’d approach your future fiction in a similar way, casting the characters in your mind?

SB: No, not really. I feel that would be quite limiting somehow. It is very useful, however, in screenwriting when you know the actors you’re writing for. You can really write to their strengths, and tailor the role for them. In fiction, however, that feels sort of redundant. One thing I do find very helpful as a stepping-off point, however is photographs, particularly portraits. I like to peer long and hard at photographs and try to glean as much as I can. I did this with a photo of the real Davidson offspring (see below), imagining various personalities for each of them. One of the girls had spectacles, and had also moved when the photograph had been taken, and was subsequently a bit blurred. She became Mary, my narrator.

PM: Were you worried when you began writing the novel that you would struggle to see it get published, after the difficulties you had with getting the movie produced?

SB: I didn’t really imagine I would get it published mainly because I wasn’t very confident that it was any good. I’d look at real novels, and think, hmm, they have much longer chapters than me — things like that. So I sent it off to Curtis Brown (literary agent) here in Sydney as a speculative thing really. I just wanted to see if it had any hope at all.

PM: How long did it take Curtis Brown to get back to you and what was their reaction?

SB: They got back to me within about two weeks, wanting to read more. I had sent them the first 45 pages, which I had polished up quite a bit. So then I had to frantically try to polish up the rest of it, not wanting to test their patience by taking too long over it. The ending didn’t quite work — it felt a bit rushed. Grace Heifetz, my agent at Curtis Brown, was immediately rapturously enthusiastic, even in spite of the fact it had a shaky last twenty pages. She absolutely loved it, and told me so — it was wonderful, especially after being in the film industry where everyone is much more circumspect when it comes to doling out any praise. She told me to go away and fix up the ending, which I did.

PM: Now that the novel is published and has enjoyed some success in the short time it’s been out, do you think it will be easier getting Rush Oh! turned into a film? Is that something you’ll still continue to pursue? Were you to re-adapt Rush Oh! for the screen, would you approach it differently than the first time around?

SB: Much as I would love to see Rush Oh! produced as a film, I don’t hold out a lot of hope, nor do I have any intention of pursuing it. The same difficulties still remain — it’s just a very expensive film to make owing to all the computer generated effects required for the whaling scenes, and really, who wants to watch whales being killed? It’s one thing to read about it (even then, my own mother had to put the book down for two days after the first whaling scene), but another thing to watch it unfold onscreen. I have sometimes wondered if it could be done in a less conventional way, so the whaling scenes were depicted in much the same way as the pen and ink illustrations in the book. Still expensive, but less horrifying perhaps…

Also I seem to have booby-trapped the book for movie adaptations by choosing to tell the story from thirty years hence. I know my heart always sinks at the prospect of an actress in age make-up and a crocheted rug, harking back to gentler times.

As to how I would adapt it differently were a producer to approach me with a pot of gold, that’s a good question! I think I would try to be a bit more adventurous and find a way to somehow include all those deviations, the flash-forwards and flash-backs. They can be annoying and disorienting sometimes in films, so it’s tricky. Also, maybe I’d dispense with the idea of telling the story from thirty years hence, thus ridding myself of the fore-mentioned actress in age-make-up problem.

Rush Oh! is told in the first person, too, and the reader is very much in Mary’s head. The only real way to achieve anything like this in film is to use voiceover, and I’m always leery of that as a device. It seems a bit clunky and ham-fisted. But I seem to be busily discouraging any potential producer from even contemplating the idea, so I’ll desist!

PM: The premise of Rush Oh! is based on a real story. When did you first come across the story of the killer whales of Eden? How faithful were you to the original story?

…this killer whale had been so loved and revered, a whole museum was built around his skeleton!

SB: Many years ago now, we visited Eden on a rainy day during a South Coast beach holiday and sought shelter in the Eden Killer Whale Museum. Tom’s skeleton, lovingly preserved by George Davidson, is right there as you walk in, and a pretty impressive sight it is too. I was struck by the fact that this killer whale had been so loved and revered, a whole museum was built around his skeleton! And then, of course, the more you learn of the story, the more amazing it gets. A pod of killer whales returning year after year, and assisting the whalers in the whale chase, sharing the spoils — the whole idea of inter-species co-operation appealed to me.

When I decided I would have a bash at telling the story, I had to find a way in. I have an old photograph of George Davidson with his offspring gathered around, and I used to stare at that and wonder what they were like. Somewhere along the line, I settled on telling the story from an imaginary eldest daughter’s point of view. I figured that way I could imbue the story with a female point of view, and perhaps give it some humour and romance. So I just leapt off the precipice, created my own brand new set of Davidson offspring, and did away altogether with George Davidson’s wife.

But I was concerned that if I’d taken a liberty like that in creating a fictional family, then would this undermine the parts of the story that were actually true, especially those pertaining to the killer whales? I didn’t want the reader to think I’d just concocted all that too. So I made a decision to try not to embellish anything concerning the killer whales and the whaling, and to make it clear what’s true and what’s not in the Author’s Note, supported by newspaper reports of the time.

PM: What compelled you to want to tell this story? Especially to go as far as writing a script and then re-writing it for a novel, clearly this story meant something to you.

SB: I think I fell in love with the world. I spent a lot of time poring over the Eden newspapers of the time, and the world seemed so rich and colourful and mad. I found it fascinating, and loved spending time immersed in it. So when I realised the film would never be made, I decided to have a go at writing it as a novel, just so I didn’t have to give it up. If I could write a string of sequels, I would, for the same reason. But of course I’ve thwarted that possibility by writing the novel from a viewpoint thirty years hence!

PM: Rush Oh! is sprinkled throughout with illustrations. Was the inclusion of these part of your original vision for the book?

SB: It occurred to me that since Mary talks a bit about her under-appreciated artwork, it might be nice to include some — particularly “Stern All, Boys!”, which she describes in some detail at the beginning of the book. I thought having a visual reference might help in understanding the whaling process too. It was also useful in depicting the differences in the killer whales’ dorsal fins, and details such as the flensing of the whale and so forth. I went to the State Library and found a wonderful collection of early Australian amateur artists’ sketch books. That was really inspiring — beautiful, carefully wrought illustrations of the surrounding fauna and birdlife, but, because a kangaroo or a kookaburra won’t stay still for long, they were always just slightly wrong, a little wonky.

We found a wonderful illustrator named Matt Canning to do the illustrations. I looked at his website and he had done a beautiful drawing of a whale, and I knew instantly he was the one. He’s based in the U.K., so we began an email correspondence. I had to encourage him to draw as if he were an untrained nineteen year old girl back in 1908. This meant, of course, drawing less well than he actually draws — a bit of a poisoned chalice, really. But he embraced it, and I think his illustrations are beautiful and add enormously to the book.

PM: Were there parts of the novel-writing process that you especially enjoyed over what you’re used to in writing screenplays? Was there anything you found more challenging?

…I suddenly had an enormous amount of freedom, where I had felt quite constrained within the conventional three-act structure of the screenplay.

SB: It just felt like I suddenly had an enormous amount of freedom, where I had felt quite constrained within the conventional three-act structure of the screenplay. As I said earlier, I loved the flexibility novel-writing gave me in moving about in time; I loved the way it gave me access to Mary’s thoughts; I loved the way I could include poems and newspaper reports and as many whale chases as I liked! As for what was most challenging, well, grammar has never been my strong suit…

PM: It what ways do you think your background as a screenwriter helped you in writing Rush Oh!?

SB: That’s a good question. I think working as a screen-writer, you become used to thinking visually, which is a useful skill. You also gain experience in working out the shape of a scene, how it begins and finishes, and how one scene will flow in to the next. Also as a director, you have to think about how the actors move within their space, and I think that discipline somehow carries through — you become used to thinking about things in three dimensions.

PM: This question came from Facebook from a fan of Love Serenade — In your work do you deliberately set out to set up and then undermine genres and genre expectations?

SB: A Love Serenade fan! Thank you for writing in. No, I don’t deliberately set out to undermine genres. I am pretty unsophisticated in my thinking, and actually I try to avoid thinking in terms of genre and so forth. I just wanted to write a story set in that particular town, and give it the same creepiness of that great Barry White song Love Serenade — those were really my stepping off points in writing it.

PM: What does your daily working routine look like?

SB: Well, I try to get up early, go for a run, and then do all my chores so I can sit down to write by about 9. It’s imperative for me to use an internet blocker — I am very easily distracted. I write fitfully, with frequent trips back and forth to the fridge and possibly a small nap at some point, till about 4, on a good day, and then I have to start thinking about what’s for dinner. I have days when I’m quite productive and days when I’m hopeless, but I think I’m used to that now, and don’t get too despairing about the bad days.

PM: If you could give a single piece of advice to an up-and-coming writer, what would it be?

…confidence, the belief that you can actually pull this off, is everything.

SB: I think it would be to be careful about getting too much feedback. I am not a fan of feedback. I don’t show anyone anything until it’s in a very solid state i.e. finished. If you do feel like you need feedback, then be very careful about who you select, and prepare yourself to reject completely anything they have to say if you disagree, or feel they’ve misread it. I just feel that the wrong feedback, especially when your work is at a formative stage, is potentially so destructive, not just to the work but to your confidence. And confidence, the belief that you can actually pull this off, is everything.

PM: What’s next? Will you be continuing with screenplays or is another novel in the works?

SB: Well, I continue to work as a television writer and director, but I am desperate to get stuck into another novel. I miss it. I have written one small horror novella since I finished Rush Oh! but no one seems very interested in it… So at least Stephen King has nothing to worry about.

PM: A horror novella sounds interesting, tell me more about it. And what has the response been to it?

SB: Only two people have read it, both in the publishing world, and they both told me to stretch it into a novel, that novellas are too difficult to market. But at this point, I don’t really see how I can — I don’t think it would work padded out. I want it to be a wild ride — you have to hang on tight till it throws you out at the end. So I’m not really sure what to do with it. Perhaps release it digitally myself? I would be happy to have any advice, if anyone has any bright ideas!