A Tale of Two Author Photos: Gender, Race and the Body Represented

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by Nayomi Munaweera

In 2013 I was in India for the Jaipur Literary Festival and by some adept maneuvering my publisher scored me a photo shoot in Vogue India. The concept was for three debut novelists to be photographed in couture and jewels in a Jaipuri palace. The writers would be Samantha Shannon, the British paranormal and dystopian novelist, Deepti Kapoor, author of A Bad Character, which was soon to be released, and me.

Vogue picked us up from the festival and whisked us through some of the bleakest and most poverty-strickened landscapes I had ever seen to a palace turned hotel. In a five-star room, they poured me into a teal bandage dress that was so tight it did not close up in the back; giant binder clips and prayers were employed to ensure that the dress did not explode mid-shoot. My feet were stuffed into totteringly high and pointed heels, my face was painted and my hair teased big. A jeweler appeared with his bodyguard in tow. He opened steel cases to reveal Rajastani gold and gemstones that glittered in the dark room. The stylist picked out a few pieces that had cost more money than I had made in my life. She slid these onto my wrists and fingers.

Four hours of meticulous prep later, I walked very carefully out onto the set. It had been set up as a tea party. We would be three writers interrupted at tea and photographed in all of our glorious candor, because you know- writers always get dolled up and drink tea in the afternoon. It’s a secret but daily and necessary writer ritual. (If you are an aspiring writer-take note. This is how the magic happens.)

The photographer looked at me and said, “ah a big girl.”

He sighed, he fussed and fretted about what to do about my arms which are the opposite of Michelle Obama arms. The Vogue team brainstormed and then threw a cape over my shoulders. Problem solved, scary arm flesh hidden away, photo shoot saved.

Nayomi Munaweera Vogue

I’ve struggled with body image issues all my life. I grew up in Sri Lanka and Nigeria. I’d been a skinny infant among with other skinny infants in Sri Lanka, a fat child amongst skinny Nigerian children and a lumbering adolescent amongst svelte Sri Lankan girls in Sri Lanka when we went back for vacations. A well-meaning aunt’s nickname for me growing up was “Bursting At The Seams.”

At twelve moving to America and impending puberty precipitated a sudden and dramatic weight loss. Since then I’ve flipped and flopped between a size 8 and a size 10. I’ve heard the ubiquitous, “You’d be so hot if only you were 10, 20, 30 pounds lighter” numerous times. Sometimes this voice comes from the outside but often it speaks from within my own head. Sometimes, I’ve whittled myself down to a size 4, mostly by not eating much. This shape-shifting and estranged relationship with my flesh is what it means to live in a world where my primary worth is measured by the shape and size of my body.

When the Vogue India issue came out my friends didn’t recognize me. I barely recognized myself. I had been slimmed down, whitened several skin shades and given a sort of pig nose. I had to convince friends that this was really me. It is an uncanny experience to see oneself on the pages of a glossy international magazine, especially when the self presented is that of a perfectly feminized, sanitized, glammed-up stranger.

More than this, the irony was glaring. My novel, the one that had landed me in the pages of Vogue India is about two women caught in the atrocities of war. It is about what happens to the female body in the context of terrible conflict. One of my characters deals specifically with the discrimination that dark-skinned women face worldwide. My project, (as much as I could have said I had a project while writing) was a feminist one. This is something that the review of my book accompanying the photographs got right. The author even includes this sentence, “The novel is negotiated through two female narrators… Munaweera stresses telling stories from a feminist perspective.” And yet the pictures accompanying this article were decidedly not feminist.

Did I regret doing the shoot? No, of course not. I was a debut author with a book that had taken me seven years to write and another five years to place with a publisher. In that situation when Vogue India calls, one does not say no. Instead one gives thanks to whatever gods of publicity have made this miracle possible and shows up to the shoot bright and early.

Then too, as someone who spends most of my days writing in a threadbare pink robe and unwashed hair, it isn’t the worst thing in the world to be occasionally viewed as a glamorous cover-girl.

I don’t know how many books the Vogue photo shoot sold. I’m guessing not many. But it does pop up every now and then. Recently I spoke at a large Californian university where the students had read my book for their core curriculum. In the introduction the professor mentioned the Vogue shoot and there was a flurry of interest from the students, most clearly the female students. They liked my book in which women deal with war, love, violence, and migration but the magic word, “Vogue,” raised my estimation immeasurably.

A few months ago the online magazine Wear Your Voice approached me with a request to participate in a very different kind of photo shoot. The concept was to recreate the famous Dove ad that had pictured plus-sized models in white underwear with women of color, trans-women, differently-abled women, women of size etc. The Dove ad itself had been a commentary on the ultra-thin models employed in a Victoria’s Secret campaign. Wear Your Voice aimed to draw attention to the fact that even greater diversity existed in the world but that the media often ignored female bodies that did not conform to a certain narrow definition of femininity.

If I said yes to appearing in this shoot there would be no fancy clothes, no bling, no photo shopping, no Rajastani palaces, tea services or forgiving capes to distract the eye. There would just be a white backdrop, white underwear and bare skin. It was terrifying.

If the Vogue shoot had exposed the fear of not being presented as the self the Wear Your Voice campaign presented the exact opposite fear.

What would it mean to bare the self without the soft landing of digital manipulation? What would it mean to face the self unadorned?

In addition to these questions I had concerns about safety. I come from a culture in which women’s bodies are meant to be covered, where female chastity is prized above all other qualities. The magazine had asked a few other South Asian women to do this shoot but none of them had agreed. I understood why they would not. I had the same questions that probably made them refuse. Would being photographed half-naked be taken to mean that I was dishonorable in my home culture? That I was asking for sexual attention or that I was too Americanized? Simply put: would I be seen as asking for it?

And then there were the literary questions. If I appeared in my underwear what would people assume about my literary capabilities? Would I be written off as a publicity whore? Someone who would do anything to bring attention to her books?

Despite all these concerns I agreed to the shoot. And then I thought about cancelling a hundred times. I emailed my publicist bullying her with questions about whether participating would “hurt my image.” The second time, she said, “Only do it if you feel like it…” I asked my husband if I should do it and he said exactly what I knew he would, “Of course, if you want to, do it.”

I had been hoping someone would tell me not to do it for some good reason. But there was really no good reason and I had to grapple with the fact that I was balking for deep-rooted body-issue reasons and for the fear of possible repercussion. These were of course exactly the issues that the photo shoot was attempting to challenge.

On the day of the shoot, I showed up at an Oakland warehouse that was as far a cry from a Japuri palace as is possible and found myself in the midst of a crowd of women. We sat around and slowly, shyly shared stories. Quickly it became obvious that everyone was terrified about what we were about to do. One woman said that her conservative Mexican family was going to freak out when the pictures came out. Another whizzed around in her electric wheelchair and worried about how folks would react to her body, one almost never seen in this way, bared, and beautiful. A trans-woman talked about transitioning just eighteen months before and being bowled over by how much people attempted to police her now female body. She perhaps more than anyone had insight into how desperately the culture wanted to control femininity. Each woman I talked to had decided to participate despite what their families, their loved ones and society had told them about the value of their bodies.

We got in our white underwear; we did our makeup and hair. We watched as each woman took her turn in front of the camera and did her best to be as natural as she could be. Then we got together for group shots, our bodies close, sometimes playful, sometimes sultry. And yes, it felt warm, felt loving, and empowering. We were allowing a culture that shames and hates certain bodies access to our bodies. We were being vulnerable and ultimately that vulnerability felt powerful.

The Wear Your Voice photo shoot came out a few weeks later. I loved the pictures. They showed us as we were in all our varied loveliness.

We looked proud; we looked happy. We looked like real live human beings.

The campaign started out quietly and then it went viral, appearing in publications around the world. There were of course plenty of hateful internet comments. But for each of these there were many more from women and girls thanking us for showing them bodies like their own, for making them see themselves too as possibly beautiful.

I went to a party a week later. A friend asked me about the shoot and I was showing him the pictures when someone else that I did not know also looked over and said, “Why did you do this?” I said, “Because we are trying to change how culture views the female body.” He said, “That’s a useless cause. Body standards will never change.” I have to disagree. I think it’s important to keep knocking at the door and asking for change, asking for inclusion. I think that as we keep doing this change is not only possible, it’s inevitable.

The First Summer

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Excerpted from “Hide” by Matthew Griffin, Recommended by Stuart Nadler

We went to the beach together the end of that first summer, stayed in a little two-room shack with plywood walls so flimsy the sea breeze would have knocked them down on top of us if there weren’t so many gaps between the boards for it to slip through instead of strain against. We slept for the first time in the same bed, so narrow he crushed me against the wall and had to peel his chest from my sweaty back just to roll over, but I rested better than I had in years. I loved how deeply he breathed in the night, how early and suddenly he rose in the morning, as though sleep were a thin covering you could throw back as easily as the sheets. I loved how he had to stoop every time he walked through a door.

He cooked breakfast, humming as he pushed scrambled eggs around a dented skillet on the hot plate and waited for the last gleaming bits of moisture to burn away, while I summoned the will to get up. Even at my happiest, it always took me a long time lying in the bed, half-awake, to convince myself the world was worth waking into. He had the loveliest voice, though, could have been a singer if he’d wanted. Every note sounded like a deep laugh.

“I didn’t know you could cook,” I said, when the pop and sizzle and smell of bacon frying finally pulled me shuffling to the worn wood bench at the dining table. It barely fit between the walls. We had to climb over it to get from one side to the other.

“This is it,” he said. “Bacon, eggs, and toast. Don’t expect nothing else.” He’d learned it in the army. He was in his swim trunks already, and a white undershirt with yellow sweat stains creeping from the armpits. He scraped the eggs and bacon onto my plate and pressed two slices of bread into the greasy pan. Nothing I’ve ever cooked, in all these years, has ever tasted as good.

Afterwards, we walked through loose, hot sand that fell away from our feet and pulled us into lurching, uneven steps, down to where the waves solidified it into wet silt that held us up and held, for a few moments, the shape of our footprints. It was early still, maybe ten o’clock, and the light was hazy and soft, broken on the waves and blurred with salt. The breeze blew the loose sand in tumbling swirls toward our legs, then away, knotting together and blowing apart. There wasn’t hardly anyone else on the beach, just clumps of families so far away they could have been piles of driftwood, or heaps of seaweed. They may have been. Realtors had only built the rickety bridge to the island a couple years earlier, and there was just the one ramshackle motel then, and some falling-down shanties like ours tucked into the dunes for solitary fishermen.

We took each other’s pictures with the camera I’d bought to photograph my mounts for a newspaper ad. In them, he’s standing with his hands on his hips like he’s surveying the shore and not particularly pleased with what he sees, his brow jutted low to drape both his squinting eyes in shadow, the corrugated sea hammered out behind him. Just from the walk down to the water, he’s already drenched in sweat, his shirt hanging in heavy folds, his hair stringy and flat with it. His bare legs are huge, his calves almost as thick as his thighs.

He tugged his shirt over his head and grabbed my hand, pulled me toward the water. His palm felt rough and smooth at the same time, like sandpaper caked with the dust it’s ground away from wood, and his cheeks and shoulders and chest were sunburnt bright pink now, with dead skin peeling away in thin, papery scraps.

“You go on,” I said, taking his shirt.

“You can’t swim?”

“I can swim,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Come on,” he said. “It’s no fun by yourself.”

“I don’t trust water I can’t see my feet through.”

He looked mighty disappointed.

I watched him wade out past the sandbar, where the waves crashed and foamed, until the ocean covered his shoulders and its rolling surface sometimes obscured him completely from view before it sank again toward the earth, and there he spread his arms, lay on his back, and floated as though a lighter man had never been born. I could hardly believe somebody of his size could float so effortlessly: palms upturned to the sun, head leaned back as on a cushion, legs lounging just beneath the water with their upturned toes breaking through it to point at the sky.

I sat just beyond the water’s reach and wriggled my fingers and toes into the wet, gleaming sand at the furthest edge of a just-receded wave. I scooped up fistfuls of it, let it run between my fingers and over the edges of my hand. When I opened my fist and spread it wide, the sand cupped inside it broke open along the lines of my palm.

Frank waved at me as if I was an old friend he hadn’t seen in years and couldn’t believe his incredible fortune to come upon here, in this very place, his tattoos warping with the movements of his muscles like the shadow of a shifting cloud upon his skin. The waves built up and passed beneath him. Sometimes the water ran across and pooled in the hollow between his chest and stomach, but it never could push him under. I understood, then, how he made it to shore while all those other boys drowned, and I waved back, the wet sand trickling down my forearm, hardening as it dried into grainy, translucent rivulets that cracked and fell away. A wave spread itself across the shore as thin as it could without disappearing, then gathered itself up as it slipped backwards beneath the next, which unfurled forward and over it, as though the two were actually separate bodies, instead of twin fibers of the same heaving muscle. I marveled at that, how a single thing could move both forwards and backwards, in two directions at once.

You could do anything you wanted, I thought then. Anything at all.

He walked dripping out of the water. It poured off him in streams that ran back into the ocean, where they gave up their edges and shape and became again indistinguishable, as if they’d never pressed against him. Sea foam clung to his ribs and knees before dissolving in the wind. He sat heavily beside me in the sand and kissed me, his wet lips salty, the hair on his legs burning gold in the sun. Its light fell full and hard down on him, burned away another layer of his skin. I loved to touch those tender, sunburnt spots: how he tensed against the twinge of pain, how my white fingerprints on his chest filled back in with red.

We’re not together in any of the photographs. It was reckless enough just to walk out in the open and the sun like that without going and asking some stranger, who might not turn out to be one after all when you got close enough, to take our picture. But we’ve still got all of them, in a cedar box at the top of the closet, with his medals from the war and his mama’s wedding rings, and as tenuously as they link us, they’re the only real evidence that any of it ever happened, that we were ever even in the same vicinity. The rest we got rid of, if it ever existed at all. We never wrote each other love letters, anything someone might find, and he never came to my shop at the same time two days in a row, or by the same path through the downtown streets and alleys. Once I went to throw some carcasses in the trash can out back — the big noticeable ones I had to haul off myself, but the smaller ones, squirrels and possums and owls, I tossed in the trash can and nobody was the wiser — only to find him crawling on hand and knee down the alley to stay below the line of sight of some poor tenement family eating their gruel in the window above.

“So nobody can establish a pattern,” he said, real gruff and clipped, looking up at me from the ground.

He was the most worried about his mama. He was the only one she had left, after all — his older brother Harvey and his baby sister Iris had both died from consumption when he was a boy. It’s strange, now, to think about how many and often people died when we were children. It was happening all the time. Everybody had brothers and sisters, more than one, usually, who never saw their tenth birthday. So many people survive these days. Everybody lives so awfully long.

She was always trying to send him courting some girl she’d just met, and talking about how empty that old house felt, and how she sure would like to have some grandchildren someday to fill it back up. She was supposedly not in the best of health, had dizzy spells and heart palpitations and ‘the vapors,’ she called it. I was never convinced that was anything but a ploy to keep his attention.

But I didn’t blame him. For protecting her, for protecting himself. He’d lost enough already, felt enough pain. I didn’t want him to know how it felt to fumble for an excuse, to stammer and redden and try to explain without explaining the compromised position in which he’d been found; I didn’t want him to see the change in his mother’s eyes as the stain of understanding spread through them, seeping back through every memory and forward into every hope, so that no matter which way she looked, every sight of him was tinged with filth and soaked in sorrow.

I’d never met her, never even seen her from afar, but I felt her pull on us all the time, every minute we were together, even lying there on the beach in the hot sun. It wasn’t something we argued or even talked about, but a fundamental underlying force, like all forces invisible, that shaped our every surge toward each other and our every drifting apart, as if she was some enormous, distant mass so far away you couldn’t see it but so heavy and dense it warped all the space around it, curved it so sharp that by seven, seven-thirty every night, he started to look down at his feet, and out the window at the darkening sky, and every straight line I tried to pull him along into the hot night, no matter how fast and sure, bent into an arc that carried him back to her in time for dinner at eight. And so the closest any of those pictures come to showing the two of us together is my blurred fingertip, creeping in at the edge of one of them like the first dark sliver of the moon, invisible in the bright sky until just that moment, beginning to pass across the sun.

A storm blew up that night, a pretty bad one out of the east. I could feel it building all afternoon, slowly knotting the air into a bruise out over the waves, the ocean turning back on themselves the river waters that were supposed to run into it, and as the sun set Frank sat in the worn rocking chair out on the sagging front stoop of the shack, smelling like salt and sand, his hair ruffled with it — I loved the way his hair smelled when we came in from the beach, never wanted him to shower — and with his clasped hands pressed to his lips watched the storm clouds muscle their way through the drowsy evening light. He was always real funny about the weather. He wouldn’t take a shower during a storm, wouldn’t even wash his hands, thought the lightning would travel through the pipes and pour out the tap, crackle pink and branching all over him. His mama and her people had taken some kind of religiously-inspired pioneer trek to the Midwest when she was a girl, before they ran into a pack of unneighborly Indians and some mild cyclones and retreated back to God’s Country, having decided that they’d misinterpreted the previous signs and that it was, in fact, His Country after all. When he was a boy, she made them all huddle in the closet any time she heard a rumble of thunder. He was always watching the sky, even on the brightest of days, waiting for clouds to curdle green.

I pulled him inside, and we sat in our swimsuits on either side of the table and played gin rummy while the clouds scraped across the stars. He stretched his legs under the table and propped his feet on my lap, cold as the other side of the pillow when I flipped it in the night. When I got hot, I held them to my chest to cool me down. I pressed their soles to my cheek.

Each individual drop of rain resounded on the tin roof, sounded like someone dumping an endless truckload of gravel down on top of us, and thunder rattled the window glass. The little shack shuddered and swayed. You could feel the wind itself every now and then, big whistling gusts blowing right between the boards. I was just a turn or two away from laying my whole hand on the table in victory, when suddenly he set his cards to the side and his feet on the floor and wiped his sweaty hands on his bare thighs.

“Let’s stop,” he said.

“Stop what?”

“This game,” he said, amazed that I could even consider such an activity at such a time. “We’ll probably need to make a run for it.”

I couldn’t help laughing. He looked highly insulted.

“A run for what?” I said.

“For anywhere but inside this rickety damn house. Before it falls in on us.”

I loved to hear him curse. He was always so wholesome.

“It’s just a storm,” I said.

“Just a storm? The whole house is swaying back and forth.”

“It’s supposed to sway,” I said. “It’s on little stilts.”

“It’s going to collapse.”

“It sways so it won’t collapse. That’s the whole point of the swaying. And even if it did collapse, these boards are so flimsy it probably wouldn’t hurt.”

“We ought to evacuate,” he said.

I laughed and clambered over the table, to the one window that looked toward the ocean. Rain ran down the glass; the clouds billowed and crumbled. Light peeled them back from a bright crack in the sky, as if day were breaking through night, before darkness closed over and sealed the wound.

“Get back from there.” His voice was high and strained. “Didn’t anybody ever teach you to stay away from windows during a storm?”

I loved his nervousness, I loved his fear. I loved the way his bare foot bounced nervously on the floor, as if barely restrained from running away.

“Come here,” I said. He shook his head. “I don’t know how you ever made it through a war like this.” And, as if being dragged by an invisible, overpowering force against his will, he took the two steps from the table to the wall.

He wrapped his arms around me from behind, rested his chin in my hair. “My mother would kill me,” he said, “if she knew I was exposing myself to the elements like this.”

“You sound like somebody’s mother right about now,” I said.

He squeezed me tight against him. Sand, caught in the hair on his chest, ground against my back.

Rain dripped through a leak in the ceiling and onto the table. The roar of the wind was indistinguishable from the roar of the waves, as if they were crashing against the walls, closing over the roof. It blew through the room in a cool current. The floor shook.

“This house is about to come apart,” he said.

Lightning ripped the clouds open and sewed the clouds shut. I leaned us against the sill, so he could feel the wind: how it passed through the boards of the house and between our bodies and kept on its way, how the storm moved right through us without disturbing a thing.

Read Octavia E. Butler’s Inspiring Message to Herself

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Octavia E. Butler was one of the great science fiction writers of the 20th century, writing bestselling and award-winning novels over several decades and becoming the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. And apparently she knew it would happen!

The Huntington Library recently published some notes from Butler’s private journals. One telling entry is this inspirational note Butler wrote to herself in 1988 declaring that she will go on to be a “bestselling writer” who will be read by millions and inspire “poor black youngsters to broaden their horizons.”

Check out the note and get inspired yourself:

Octavia Butler

I shall be a bestselling writer. After Imago, each of my books will be on the bestseller lists of LAT, NYT, PW, WP, etc. My novels will go onto the above lists whether publishers push them hard or not, whether I’m paid a high advance or not, whether I ever win another award or not.

This is my life. I write bestselling novels. My novels go onto the bestseller lists on or shortly after publication. My novels each travel up to the top of the bestseller lists and they reach the top and they stay on top for months . Each of my novels does this.

So be it! I will find the way to do this. See to it! So be it! See to it!

My books will be read by millions of people!

I will buy a beautiful home in an excellent neighborhood

I will send poor black youngsters to Clarion or other writer’s workshops

I will help poor black youngsters broaden their horizons

I will help poor black youngsters go to college

I will get the best of health care for my mother and myself

I will hire a car whenever I want or need to.

I will travel whenever and wherever in the world that I choose

My books will be read by millions of people!

So be it! See to it!

Okey-Panky Is Open for Submissions this February

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Okey-Panky — our weekly online magazine of short, darkly comic, ironic, and experimental fiction, essay, poetry, and graphic narrative — is open for submissions! The word limit is 1500, and there is no submission fee. Put it on your calendar: the mailbox fills up fast.

Read through the Okey-Panky archives to get a sense of the style.

You can submit to all categories here!

Matt Gallagher & Phil Klay Discuss the War in Iraq and Finding Purpose at Home

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by Phil Klay

If you’d like to understand the modern American way of war, there aren’t many books that rise to the level of Matt Gallagher’s Youngblood (Atria Books, 2016). A war novel wrapped around a murder mystery and wedded to a Bildungsroman, the book dramatizes in ways no one else has the conflicting strategies that characterized the American effort in Iraq. Gallagher, an Army officer who served in Iraq, has long been a fixture on the veteran writing scene. He maintained a popular military blog while in Iraq, only to have it shut down by the U.S. military, and later wrote the memoir Kaboom, a smart and funny and irreverent look at his 16-month deployment.

In addition to writing fiction, he’s one of the smartest essayists and commentators on veteran’s issues, whether it’s on the members of my generation becoming ‘professional veterans,’ his meta-hot take on the hot takes on American Sniper, or what it’s like to compete in the world championship for the bar arcade game Big Buck Hunter (which, yes, counts as ‘veteran’s issues’). It’s fair to say many of us in the veteran writer community have been looking forward to his first novel for a long time, and Youngblood does not disappoint.

I sat down with him to discuss the novel, the various phases of the conflict in Iraq, and the modern American way of war.

Phil Klay: It seems like one of the challenges veterans have, when talking about the Iraq war, is of getting across the incredible complexities of a war that stretched across years.

The most vivid description of COIN I ever got as a young lieutenant was, “You know, like British imperial occupation.”

Matt Gallagher: The general public thinks of the Iraq war as one cohesive event, and the truth is there are so many parts of it, both from the American side and the Iraqi. There’s the invasion, of course, in 2003, which occurred over the course of three weeks and that was it. Mission accomplished. The Iraqis view that very differently. They call it “the collapse.” Their entire infrastructure, their entire way of life was totally upended. And then there are different phases: the sectarian war, the rise of the insurgency, from 2004–2006, then the shift to counterinsurgency, which took place in 2007. The most vivid description of COIN I ever got as a young lieutenant was, “You know, like British imperial occupation.” That’s not totally exact but it ain’t wrong, either. It’s about the long-game, being a jack of all trades immersed with the people, being beat cops and conducting electricity surveys and dealing with roadside bombs and snipers all at the same time. Obviously that conflicts with the popular American understanding of what war is, or at least what our wars “should” be. We push back fascist onslaughts! But the reality is that it’s much more likely that America will conduct another counterinsurgency campaign in the 21st century than we will fight another standard force-on-force war.

PK: Except that’s not really what we’re doing now. If counter-insurgency was the dominant philosophy of the second term of the Bush Administration, counter-terrorism has clearly been the dominant philosophy of the Obama Administration, with an emphasis on maintaining a light footprint, avoiding boots-on-the-ground, and a heavy reliance on drone strikes and kill/capture missions doing high value targeting.

MG: Counterinsurgency has an end-goal of a stable, self-sustaining local government. You can argue about its effectiveness, since the case studies that worked out pale in comparison to the case studies that didn’t. But at least it has a clear end-goal. The “counter-terror” approach, or whatever we’re doing now, doesn’t even have that as far as I can tell. It’s a low burn — but a constant low burn. It puts a heavy, heavy burden on special operations, and keeps the perpetual warfare machine going. It’s not about bringing the peace over there, or anywhere. It’s about keeping things calm back here. I can understand that approach, even appreciate it. But I find it deeply cynical and deeply disturbing, not so much as a veteran, but as a citizen of a republic.

PK: Your novel is set toward the end of our “boots-on-the-ground” phase in Iraq…the end of the era of counter-insurgency. And the different approaches to warfare that characterize different stages of the war come up in the novel, most clearly through the tension between Lieutenant Jack Porter and Sergeant Chambers. Jack is a young, untested platoon commander trying to do counter-insurgency, and Chambers is an experienced noncommissioned officer who learned how to be a soldier in a part of the war that was a lot more violent, and there’s a tug of war between these two for the soul of the platoon.

MG: I think the tension between Jack and Sgt Chambers is a natural one, in terms of their ranks and backgrounds — junior officer, just out of college, probably comes from a much more privileged background than most of his soldiers, and then there’s the battle hardened noncom who has been there and done that, walked the walk, who comes from a more blue collar background. Chambers is a product of his environment. He’s done what it takes to survive and bring his men home. There’s a Machiavellian aspect to Chambers that I found myself drawn to as I was writing him, and I hope readers find intriguing, as well. Say what you will about the man and his worldview, he gets things done. But his ‘war-is-war’ philosophy and approach comes with consequences, both physical and moral. And often enough, those physical and moral consequences are not the expected ones.

PK: And though Jack starts out wanting to get rid of him, once the tensions flare up in the town and there’s a lot more violence, Jack second-guesses himself because, brutal or not, too aggressive or not, Chambers knows what to do when the bullets start flying and Porter doesn’t.

MG: Absolutely. Combat is a lot more, as Jack learns, than theory and strategy and tactics. There’s a real raw, visceral leadership style that Chambers has, and not only do the men start gravitating toward him but Jack starts gravitating towards him too. The Army and the Marine Corps, frankly, need more Chambers than they need Lieutenant Porters. But they need Porters too, and they need them to stand up and say something when these morally questionable dilemmas are posed.

PK: Chambers exemplifies a particular type of physical courage, one that is admirable and clearly necessary in the Corps. Jack, as a young man at war, wants to live up to that standard of physical courage that we think of most readily when we think of warfare, but his true trials test his moral courage far more than his physical courage.

Moral acts of courage tend to come from a different place. They don’t happen in a moment, with a burst of adrenaline. They requires thoughtfulness, time.

MG: Moral acts of courage tend to come from a different place. They don’t happen in a moment, with a burst of adrenaline. They requires thoughtfulness, time. And then you make a decision and keep going. There are many cases where he maybe made the wrong decision, and that’s going to carry consequences, for him, for the Iraqi townspeople, for his soldiers, for the war effort as a whole. It’s so easy, in our culture, to criticize after the fact. But it’s never so easy in the moment, when everything is confounding. You think the only thing you can trust is yourself, but after 48 hours of no sleep, three different conflicting stories, and a subordinate that you want to trust but cant, how do you figure out what right even looks like. Often there are no clear answers. And that is such an inherent part of counter-insurgency, both for the occupiers and for the occupied. I think that’s true even for Chambers, who is the ultimate consequence of sending young men and women to war over and over again. He has done everything in his power to bring his men home — what more could you want from an NCO? But that kind of attitude can prove very dangerous, especially in a Wild West environment like the fictional town of Ashuriyah in Youngblood. Ashuriyah’s right on the sectarian fault line between Baghdad and Anbar Province, so these questions and consequences are happening in a potent, dynamic environment that’s difficult for any stranger–no matter how smart or accomplished–to grasp. Even Chambers seems baffled by it at times, and he’s been there before.

PK: Reading the novel, you understand why Chambers provokes both love and awe in his men. Jack may be essential for keeping them on mission, but Chambers is the one that really bonds them together as a unit. In the scenes with him, you can seen some of the deep satisfactions someone can get from time at war.

MG: War can be hell, but if war was nothing but hell it wouldn’t perpetuate. War nostalgia is a very old, time-honored tradition. It’s what led to the Red Badge of Courage, Crane interviewing these Civil War veterans who were dying off, wanting to tell their stories. Our friend Elliot Ackerman has written about nostalgia for war, about the type of veteran who is gravitating toward the Middle East now, to be closer to it. Jen Percy just wrote about veterans fighting ISIS, trying to respark something.

PK: Respark what?

It’s not just the adrenaline or the thrill that keeps drawing people back to war. It’s that clarity of being. It’s intoxicating.

MG: That sense of purpose, that clarity of being. It’s a common refrain for vets of Iraq and Afghanistan. America is this great, moneymaking empire that does a lot of good things but can be confusing and messy. Going through combat with good individuals on either side of you, doing that patrol, accomplishing that mission. Doing that every day, every night, with a tribe of like-minded souls who have your back, literally and figuratively … It’s not just the adrenaline or the thrill that keeps drawing people back to war. It’s that clarity of being. It’s intoxicating. I know I have not experienced anything like it since I got out. And I love writing. I found a sense of purpose back here at home that some of my peers are still looking for. But I think it’s a natural thing. It’s also something easy to say when you come back with all your limbs, all your faculties. I imagine some conversation down at Bethesda my have a darker tinge to it.

PK: And that purpose is part of why we joined in the first place.

MG: Looking back at it later it almost seems quaint, but people who joined after 9/11, it very much felt like a calling. We were attacked. Innocent civilians in our home were attacked and killed. Joining is something I’m proud of, as an individual, and it’s something I feel pride for in anyone who signed up. But fast forward a few years later and you’re occupying a country, wearing fifty pounds of body armor, wearing black Oakley sunglasses, realizing that the Iraqis are looking at you like what you are…a martial occupier…

PK: Those Iraqis get a lot more of a say in this book than they do in most American novels about the war.

MG: When I set out to write Youngblood. I kept thinking about inheritance. A cumulative inheritance. I wanted to write a book that, if it didn’t cover the entirety of the Iraq war, covered a large swath of it, something that was more than a slice of life. I’d already written a slice of life story with Kaboom. And as I figured out a way to do that larger story, the idea for a bi-level narrative came to mind. Setting it near the withdrawal made a lot of sense, so I could reference the entirety of the war. But also having that mystery part set during the height of the sectarian war made a lot of sense, too, because in many ways that was the fulcrum of the American experience in Iraq in 2003 to 2007, where everything changed and didn’t change simultaneously. Having that mystery set there, and having Jack and his soldiers encounter what had happened a few years earlier, felt important.

It wasn’t a possibility for me to reconcile all those things and form a coherent narrative without prominent Iraqi characters.

Also, the one continuity in these towns, in these villages, as the insurgency and the counterinsurgents were playing out against each other, was the Iraqi civilians. Every year units would rotate in and out. There’d be new commanders. New power players. New American moneymen. But the sheiks didn’t change. The imams didn’t change. The guy that sold ice at the corner didn’t change. The insurgents, unless they were captured or killed, didn’t change. So having them be an important part of the narrative was not just vital, it was inevitable. They’d been there through the duration. They’re still there, dealing with what we wrought in 2003. It wasn’t a possibility for me to reconcile all those things and form a coherent narrative without prominent Iraqi characters.

PK: You’ve been heavily involved with the veteran community — you worked for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, you co-edited an anthology of veteran writers called Fire and Forget, and now you’re working at Words After War, which is a writing NGO specifically designed to address the civilian-military divide. I wonder what your sense is of the current civilian-military divide. Are we getting better? Are we backsliding?

MG: It’s tough to say. In some ways, in the center of the storm, I want to say we’re getting incrementally better. Certainly that’s what I see every week at the Words After War writing workshops, where vets and civilians wrestle over issues of war and conflict in literature. They learn from each other, they better one another’s work, they argue and debate and find common ground. It’s fucking inspiring. Then I go home and see polls like the one about Millennials being pro-Syria invasion as long as they don’t have to fight themselves, and wonder if we’re all just pissing into the wind, to use that beautifully poetic Irish phrase.

PK: Watching the course of the war, the sheer horror of what is happening to the Iraqi people, and contrasting that with the level of the political dialogue about war here can certainly be intensely frustrating. In the book, you describe one character, saying, “A broken nobility was all that he had left.” What’s the state of your nobility these days?

My understanding of our generation of vets is that we were idealists. And for many of us, that idealism has been broken…

MG: Personally? I just wrote a book, and I think once you finish a book you have nothing left, to include nobility. Good bad or indifferent, that just matters to me less now. I think, writing, finding a new purpose was immensely helpful in that way. I know it’s something a lot of veterans of our generation are trying to reconcile with. My understanding of our generation of vets is that we were idealists. And for many of us, that idealism has been broken, not just by the rigors of war but by the ways these wars have been carried out, the immensely complex moral ambiguities of these wars, and just growing up. That broken nobility of Chambers reminded me of a lot of people I know, and have great admiration for. Both for their service, and for their capability, when they were in that service. But I think a lot of us, when Chambers is having that moment, it’s a reckoning. It’s something I wish more of us were talking about, I think America as a whole needs to have a reckoning with how Iraq played out. To see that reckoning largely being dealt with largely by twenty and thirty year olds who gave the best years of the lives to this effort is largely dispiriting. To see that reckoning still being dealt with in an incredibly brutal way by the Iraqis, over ten years after we told them we’d bring democracy, it’s tremendously dispiriting. Both of those things were part of the drive for me to keep rewriting Youngblood, even when it wasn’t very good, the desire to get a larger share of the country to deal with it. Because we didn’t just wear our unit patches out there, we wore the American flag. If you paid your taxes, we were representing you, even if you don’t feel like you were.

Literary Mixtape: Alexander Chee Finds A Heroine

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by Alexander Chee

We’ve asked some of our favorite authors to make us a mixtape. This month’s installment is from Alexander Chee, whose new novel, Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) comes out this week. It’s a novel about “one woman’s rise from pioneer girl to circus rider to courtesan to world-renowned diva in 19th Century Paris,” so yes, Chee’s mixtape includes a healthy dose of both Beyoncé and The Runaways. Put on your headphones, turn up the volume, and read on.

Writing a novel about the Second Empire in France, I was wary of being too precious, of being the wide-eyed American who is too romantic about the history and the legends. I wanted to strip off the layers of schtick and false formality that I felt had covered the era in recent popular entertainments. And I wanted to forget the weak cinema courtesans I had seen and to try and imagine the women I was sure had existed, had found in my sources — confident, bold, hilarious and sexy, these women who began with very few gifts but knew that some of those gifts were so very very valuable to others. As long as they lasted.

The novel poses as something of a 19th Century tall tale autobiography — the confessions of a celebrity, who knew everyone and went everywhere, that becomes a picaresque with a woman in the place where a man usually is. She adopts and abandons identities, one after the other, in pursuit of a life where she can just live as she wants. Parts of it are true and parts, maybe less true, but it seems she believes it all, and the fun is in figuring out what is what or maybe the fun is just being along for the ride.

My heroine, Lilliet Berne, arrived fully formed but still was elusive, and the music here is some of what I used to get closer to her and to the other characters as I wrote the novel.

1. In Da Club (aka Sexy Lil’ Thug), covered by Beyoncé

When you hear this, just forget 50-Cent. This is the version that matters. In Beyoncé’s hands — “my hair my nails my diamond rings” — becomes a courtesan’s anthem, proud and loud. And the descant she sings against her own voice in the recording is perfect. For summoning the air of beauty that knows itself, knows what it can make men and women do, there’s little better.

[ed. note — This track isn’t on Spotify. Just watch the video; you were going to anyway.]

2. Check On It, Beyoncé

La Paiva, the famous courtesan who once told a young man to come to her with 40,000 francs and to set it on fire, and that he could have her “as long as it burns”…

More of the same as above. This is sort of a call-and-response song with Beyonce’s narrator essentially calling out the men looking at her. La Paiva, the famous courtesan who once told a young man to come to her with 40,000 francs and to set it on fire, and that he could have her “as long as it burns,” well, if I were writing some as yet unwritten musical about her life, this is what she’d sing to him.

3. Waitin’ For The Night, The Runaways

There’s a night Lilliet runs away with her best friend Euphrosyne, after they think they’ve killed a man, and they stay up all night drunk waiting to leave on the train. It starts out in high spirits and ends in their decision to be friends no matter what — and to run away together. This is the soundtrack of them.

4. When I’m Small, Phantogram

Lilliet wears a wig and a disguise when she leaves the theater to escape her fans. I can imagine this playing as she walks away unknown, headed off to supper with the Verdis.

5. Deceptacon, Le Tigre

Daring isn’t something you just have lying around — you have to bring it.

This song, quite simply, just kicks so much ass. During the hardest parts of writing this novel, I would put it on and immediately feel like I was brave enough to do anything I had to — and the boldest parts of the novel come in part from writing while, or after, listening to it. Daring isn’t something you just have lying around — you have to bring it.

6. The 212, Azealia Banks

This song makes me think of Euphrosyne, Lilliet’s troublemaking best friend — laughing in the face of danger, a perfect mix of “seen it all”, profanity and hilariousness. And to be honest, I’d love to see Azealia do a cancan. I feel sure she’d kill it and then bring it back to life.

7. Nightcall, by Kavinsky

…the idea of not knowing where you’re going, and remember the incredible power of the beauty queen, so beautiful it was almost supernatural.

I was on an assignment for Departures, in Shanghai. I had been sent to profile the restaurant Ultraviolet, an avant garde French restaurant with 14 seats and two seatings per night. To get there, you met the driver at a meet point and he took your whole party to the secret locaton. There was a former beauty queen in the group with two men — she seemed to be escorting them or they her, it wasn’t clear — but she was so beautiful she was like a race apart from everyone else. This song was playing as we drove through the Bund, which is like this lost arrondissement in Shanghai, and so the song forever has for me the night, the idea of not knowing where you’re going, and remember the incredible power of the beauty queen, so beautiful it was almost supernatural.

8. Disparate Youth, Santigold

I love Santigold, she just gives me life. But this song in particular, the sly snare line, the keyboard, the spy movie guitar vamps — the light melancholy mixed with deep joy in her voice, and that line, “a life worth fighting for” — that’s my main character, pure Lilliet.

9. Pass This On, The Knife

There aren’t so many story-songs now in pop that make any sense, but this is one, all forbidden desire and not knowing who is seducing who, and the keyboards that are like Jamaican tin drums alongside the bass line…Once you see the video, you can never forget it — I watched it to cast a spell on myself and the spell wakes up again each time it plays. And I decided it was part of the spell I wanted to cast over the whole novel.

Writer Horoscopes for February 2016: Metaphor in Retrograde

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by Apostrodamus

Aquarius (January 20 — February 18)
Aquarians may find themselves in a rut after the rush of optimism at the start of the new year. For those working on long-term projects, it may be a good time to take a break, switch genres completely, and play a little in the unfamiliar to gain strength in unused writing muscles. Get yourself freaky and limber is what I (and the floating orbs) are saying. If you write historical fiction, read some flash sci-fi. If you’re a poet, read some financial documents. Everyone should read more erotica, and write more too. Get out of your comfort zone. This is a good month for trying your hand at Oulipo exercises, Oblique Strategies and the like. Get kinky. The word of the month is play.

Lucky genre: Theoretical Extraterrestrial Erotica
Lucky punctuation: ¿

Pisces (February 19 — March 20)
Fiction-writing fish will be swimming with the current this February. Whether looking for a place to spawn or an underwater nook for literary idea-fertilization, it should be an auspicious month for Pisces. But that doesn’t mean literary Pisces should thrash about in self-congratulatory excitement. Your waves may upset others and cause turbulence downstream. Be instead like the gender-switching cuttlefish that Victor Victoria’s its way to success by assessing the needs of the situation. If you’re a big fish in a small pond, it might be good to consider mentoring a younger writer. If you’re a small fish in a big pond, consider strengthening your community. Poets may experience intense visions this month, perhaps even premonitions. Sources say you should listen to your witchy night wishes, keep a dream diary, and mine that isht for gold.

Lucky genre: Aquatic Slipstream
Lucky punctuation: ~

Aries (March 21 — April 19)
I know, I know: new year, new novel, new and novel lover. But while February’s love bug may have you curled over your laptop writing novella-length love letters to future readers, dead poets, and current suitors, you can’t just ram (ahem) your way through every door — creative or otherwise. Take it slow this month…in the sack and on the page. Your mental and physical health need some attention (especially your joints and segues), so step away from the desk, stretch that back out, and stare at the birds for a second before hunching back over your magnum opus. If you’re a gainfully employed writer (ha!), sources say single Aries may find love in the office (perhaps while photocopying your manuscript for revision?).

Lucky genre: Self-Help for the Impatient
Lucky punctuation: —

Taurus (April 20 — May 20)
For the Taurus with a manuscript in their back pocket, this could be a banner month. Think big. That’s right. Send those manuscripts out, contact those agents, show up at the stupid industry party and charm the socks off the gatekeepers and the gatekeepers’ gatekeepers while sipping cheap wine and nibbling on stale cheese. If you’re a freelance writer, up your rate or pitch that big piece you’ve been dreaming about. All signs point to strength in networking, career, and finances this month, so leave the laundry and grocery buying until next month, February is for Seamless and making moves, Taurus!!

Lucky genre: Rags to Riches
Lucky punctuation: $$$

Gemini (May 21 — June 20)
For Geminis who have been trying to get their work published through traditional avenues, this month is a good time to explore other, more creative paths. Consider self-publishing that epic poem cycle, adapting your novel in a series of six-second Vines, or simply ghostwriting that memoir your Uncle’s always bugging you about. This month, reassess and recommit yourself to your writing goals. If you’re not writing the kinds of things you want to, now’s the time to adjust your trajectory. Been thinking of ditching your historical novel about depressed 16th-century butter churners in favor of your TV pilot about adjunct vampires? Now’s the time! If there is one thing for Gemini to remember this February it’s this: You are not dependent on others to achieve your goals. This is especially important to remember after the 19th, when work strain has the potential to get the better of you. Also, there are whispers of romance in store for Geminis this month, so brush your teeth before heading out to that publishing party.

Lucky genre: Experimental Self-Help
Lucky punctuation: …

Cancer (June 21 — July 22)
Be grateful that you have surrounded yourself with friends and lovers who understand that sometimes YOU CANNOT FUCKING DEAL WITH ANYTHING UNTIL THIS CHAPTER IS FINISHED. Thankfully, you’ll have a stress-free writing month, so rack up some pages instead of messing around on social media. And speaking of social media, sources say your grace game needs to be on point this month, so beware of accidentally (or intentionally) insulting colleagues. No subtweets this month, ok? Unemployed writers have a better chance of landing a job this month, though we can’t promise that said job will pay a living wage. The finance fairy says unpaid invoices from “unexpected sources” will start trickling in the second week of the month. And if they don’t, sigh, there’s always next month.

Lucky genre: Social Media for Writers
(un)Lucky punctuation: @

Leo (July 23 — August 22)
Folks often think that writing and shepherding a book into the world is a solitary act, but we all know that’s not true. This month you will have to rely on your community and connections, old and new. Leos with manuscripts out to agents and publishers will have stiff competition this month, and breaking through the fray will be a matter of hard work and a healthy dose of luck and nepotism (but isn’t it always?). Thankfully, your community is in your corner, and you will feel both the strain of competition and the bounty of support this month in equal measure. For the lovelorn Gemini, these same supportive colleagues may also be your best match-makers so ask them if they have any single friends, especially after the 19th when the V-day mania has died down and Tinder accounts have been fired back up.

Lucky genre: Writer’s Market, Fantasy Edition
Lucky punctuation: *

Virgo (August 23 — September 22)
This month is a rollercoaster of writerly feels for the literary Virgo. Virgo writers will start the month off puffed up like an overpriced jacket made of dog fur, but those bloviated egos will get in the way of good revision (or hearing notes from others) the 18th to the 29th when the sun is opposite your decan. And pesky Neptune is making you so sensitive you may cry/murder/burn this motherfucker down if someone suggests a semicolon — A FUCKING SEMICOLON!!!!! Let’s just say it’s an inauspicious month for starting a new workshop, getting notes on that novel/story collection/life goal you’re feeling really insecure about, revision, or just about anything.

Lucky genre: How to Meditate While Multi-tasking
Lucky punctuation: Anything but a semicolon

Libra (September 23 — October 22)
Dear Libras and Libros and Librxs, the word of the month is collaboration. Yes, that’s right. Stop being so selfish. Your best bet is to work with others this month, be it finding employment or publishing opportunities. Long story short: whether you’re collaborating in bed or on the page, the only acronym you need is GGG. In fact, when revising your work this month, ask yourself, is this line GGG? Or is this a selfish line that wants to take but doesn’t give? If the line isn’t getting you off as much as it’s getting itself off, kill that darling. Sources say you will have many opportunities to use your “creative talent” this month, especially with the academic crowd. Make sure you’re not the only one enjoying your work, if you know what I mean.

Lucky genre: 69
Lucky punctuation: &

Scorpio (October 23 — November 21)
This month is all about the personal essay, ese. Don’t write personal essays? Hate memoirs? Then call it semi-autobiographical fiction or just fiction and STFU. And by STFU, I mean sit back with a notepad, that unique interpretative device you call your brain, and enjoy the wackadoo manifestation of humanity around you. February gives good fodder. Hot hookups, writerly and otherwise, are in the cards, but long-term projects in love and literature take a backseat this month.

Lucky genre: Personal Ese
Lucky punctuation: !!!

Sagittarius (November 22 — December 21)
This month you are blessed with the gift of song and intuition. If your work isn’t making the reader vibrate, what is it doing? Instead of the left-brain list-making of outlines, the heavy-lifting of major plot holes, and the soul-killing work of freelance invoicing, spend this month revising your work with an ear for sound. Poets will be especially productive this month, and proseists who unshackle themselves from sense and cuddle up to sound will experience delights never experienced before. If you didn’t yawp in January, make sure you yawp in February. Go ahead, do it, just yawp (I know you want to). Outside pressures may vie for your time, but leave the estate planning to someone else. You’re too busy making the world vibrate.

Lucky genre: Vibrational Poetics
Lucky punctuation: ((()))

Capricorn (December 22 — January 19)
This month, you’re like an old book with a fancy new cover. Sexy sea goats will have no dearth of literary lovers this month. Enter a room and bidding wars commence just to see what’s between your pages. You may feel like the next Garth Risk Hallberg, but be sure to discuss with confidantes before settling on an, er, publisher. Underpaid writers living in over-priced metropolises may find themselves moved to tears from financial hardship in the first half of the month but both freelance and full-time job prospects start to look up in the second half of the month. As for actual writing, well, you may get some of that done this month between all the strutting and catting about; we’ll see.

Lucky genre: Literary Romance
Lucky punctuation: ♥

Burgers and Boys at Jack in the Box

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Fast Food

1.
When I was seventeen, I swapped my cap and gown for a fake-denim visor and pocketless polyester jeans that would help pay my way to college. My best friend Annette’s summers had paralleled mine since we were twelve, but that year, she preened in an air-conditioned office while I donned the female species of Jack in the Box uniform, with puffed sleeves and a Peter Pan collar to mark us as bait. Rules supposedly protected us: no more than one open button could titillate from the placket. But a construction worker flexed his forearm at me to shimmy his naked-lady tattoo. Which burger has the best meat? I told him, I don’t know, I’m a vegetarian.

2.
My graduation party was Annette driving us girls around in her 1968 Plymouth Belvedere wagon. We ordered drive-through fries and Whopper Juniors, hold the beef, and parked to eat. Strange boys parked beside us. Annette and I slithered from the car to flick off the light switch that powered the Burger King sign. Back in the Belvedere, we watched, dipping in ketchup, chewing, while the BK employee trudged out to switch the sign on again. When Mom grounded me for missing curfew, I said, In a month I’ll be in New York. You’ll never know when I come in. Her shoulders twitched. That may be, missy, but for now you live under my roof. She was uncaged, too, a freshly single parent, wings still wet.

3.
As we walked in the dark to Mr. Steak to see a boy, I reported that on my day off from Jack in the Box, the assistant manager had squeezed between the counter and the shake machine, grinding against a girl named Pepper, who’d worked at every fast-food chain there was. She punched him in the face. Knocked him down. I was sorry I’d missed it, I told my friends as we passed a doorway flickering with blue TV light. A man stood there, naked, his penis a soft white threat in dark fur. He smiled. We walked faster, but we were such nice girls, we almost smiled back. At Mr. Steak, the boy had clocked out. We forgot to use the restroom, or so we said, and so we squatted in the shadows outside Denver Christian School and bared our flanks. (We peed outside that whole summer, every time we got drunk, like we’d taken a vow.)

4.
We fled to the Great Sand Dunes one weekend to let sun and sand slough the grease. In Taos, skater boys circled like ravens, lured by our silver earrings, burnt skin, clove cigarettes. We lied and said we would attend their party, but we didn’t want to be collected. When Shelley flashed her dimples and faked a Southern accent, two men in a muraled van bought us beer. It was two hours back to our campsite, but Shelley drove 90 mph to save time, so we could sooner pyramid our empty Keystone cans on the picnic table and cackle when we knocked them down. In the tent I fluttered, awake — what was loneliness? I asked the stars, what was freedom? — until I pressed my back against Annette’s and slept.

5.
By day, I handed a drive-through order to a man whose testicles lay outside his nylon running shorts, like a small bald rodent. By night, my friends and I smoked in the stands at Red Rocks, exhaling through a bubble wand while we waited for Depeche Mode to stride out and wave, gleaming in the light, new and rich and leather-shining like freedom. Our feathers were already starting to tatter. A Goth girl I used to know had grown slack, scabby pink scalp showing through her black-dyed hair, and her boyfriend had the staggered teeth of a junkie. My shins were brown-pocked from standing on Jack in the Box tile. Waiting for the concert, every popped bubble burst smoke, like magic, a dirty surprise. I wanted to think the man in the drive-through hadn’t meant to flash me. I preferred to imagine he had been embarrassed.

6.
August afternoons, the monsoon rains washed the Jack in the Box parking lot. The hail ping-ponged, the streets emptied, and the fryer fell silent. With the managers gone, I sat on the greasy office steps with Kwesi, a boy who also only migrated to Jack in the Box for a season, unlike Hakim who unfurled his prayer mat in the room where we scooped guacamole, unlike Sancho whose clients ordered Jumbo Jacks with a side of weed. Kwesi carried a notepad in his hip pocket to write the titles of the books I was reading. I memorized his white smile. We were both going places, college places, and grinning our plans at each other helped to beat down our fear.

7.
My last night at home, Annette and I idled in the alley in her Belvedere. My mother’s bedroom window went dark. Moulting, I no longer remembered what she knew of me. Annette and I cried so my tears were on her face, and I tasted hers while I clutched her narrow shoulders in her white men’s T-shirt, and we laughed through the crying, I love you, no really, as we tried to imagine living apart. We were damp, feathered things. We were working at being wild. All we trusted was each other.

Image via Flickr

Against All Odds: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

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In the introduction to his sixth collection of short stories, Stephen King, one of the most recognizable and successful authors to have ever walked the earth, emphasizes the “handcrafted” nature of his creations. It’s an engaging notion. Here, the man who has published more than 50 novels, all of them bestsellers, lays bare his feelings of inadequacy as a short story writer before ultimately declaring that his newest batch is something even he can be proud of. It’s classic King: endearing, direct, and more than a little folksy. He is the seller of goods, and you, the constant reader, are his consumer.

It’s also a rather disquieting way to kick off a book, more often coming off as defensive rather than relatable. At this point in his career, King has proven that he can do a little bit of everything — no one could argue otherwise — though he is perhaps still best known as a writer of supernatural horror and dark fantasy. Still, there’s this nagging sense that he feels the need to remind readers that yes, he’s perfectly capable of telling a straight story. In other words, if King’s introduction paints him as the seller of goods, he does so by positioning himself beneath a sign that proclaims “buyer beware.”

With this in mind, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams functions as something of a career retrospective, a showcase of his various (and very demonstrable) talents. There are stories that exemplify the macabre and fantastic tendencies that first made King a household name (“Mile 81,” “Bad Little Kid,” “The Little Green God of Agony,” “Obits”), and others that successfully demonstrate a more literary quality, indicative of his more subdued and reflective later years (“Premium Harmony,” “Batman and Robin Have an Altercation,” “A Death,” “Herman Wouk is Still Alive”). All of these stories are pretty good, if not very good, though not everything included here is quite so successful. The two long poems, “The Bone Church” and “Tommy,” are largely forgettable. And a few of the other stories feel like sketches at best, or, at worst, like they’re mere exercises in building up to a punchline (“The Dune,” “Afterlife,” “Under the Weather,” “Mister Yummy”).

The best of the bunch, however, are as good as anything King has written. The novella “Blockade Billy,” which initially feels like the generic story of a simple-minded baseball phenom, is actually a great piece of historical sports writing — with an unexpected, and wholly fitting ending. “Morality” is a tightly wound, deep-cutting story about the dangers of compromising one’s — you guessed it — morals. The whole thing is harrowing, and told with the psychological complexity of a Polanski film. And, finally, despite loathing the idea of a story that was written as a promotional vehicle for Amazon’s Kindle, I have to admit that “Ur” quickly pulled me in with its peculiar logic and brilliant pacing. It’s a silly story, somewhat in the same vein as King’s much, much longer novel, 11/22/63. Against all odds, King makes it work. And then there’s “Summer Thunder,” the collection’s final story, which is a simmering, quiet take on the end of the world that is absolutely gut wrenching.

King’s recent work has been largely consistent in terms of quality. Sure, the man still occasionally writes weirdly anachronistic dialogue, and okay, some of the stories feel a bit predictable, like retreads from an especially lengthy and visible bibliography. But The Bazaar of Bad Dreams is every bit as deserving of your time as King’s other great, late-career collection, Just After Sunset. Here’s hoping the bazaar remains open for many more years to come.

Member of the Crowd: Vertigo by Joanna Walsh

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A flâneur is a member of the crowd, as well as a detached observer. This French word — literally meaning a “stroller” or “idler” — indicates, at least in the 19th-century-literary-sense, a person who wanders the urban streets, silently observing. The flâneur is inconspicuous as both participant and spectator, and he thrived in the hustle, bustle, and high commerce of 19th century Paris. Walter Benjamin wrote, “It suited [the flâneur] well to see his indolence presented as a plausible front, behind which, in reality, hides the riveted attention of an observer who will not let the unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight.”

Touching on a flâneur tradition set forth by writers like Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Marie Rilke, and Walter Benjamin, it’s fitting that Joanna Walsh’s new book, Vertigo, opens in Paris. In the spirit of those writers, Walsh conveys the Parisian streets in a manner that’s both surreal and razor-sharp. In the opening story, for example, the narrator strolls, reflecting:

“Even to be static in Saint Germain requires money. The white stone hotels charge so much a night just to stay still. So much is displayed in the windows: so little bought and sold. The women of the quarter are all over forty and smell of new shoe leather. I walk the streets with them.”

There’s an end-of-a-marriage at the center of this 4-page opening story, yet that loss is primarily rendered through the narrator’s experience of a Parisian department store. Instead of particulars on the philandering husband, we get observations on Chanel, Balzac, and department store design. Just as the store makes its mark on the narrator’s interior experience, the reverse is also true. There’s a gorgeously hazy line between the aisles of Le Bon Marché, and the passages of her contemplation.

Baudelaire thought that the human attempt to articulate feeling was weak compared to, “this ineffable orgy, this holy prostitution of the soul which gives itself entirely, poetry and charity, to the unforeseen that reveals itself, to the unknown that happens along.” In the case of Walsh’s story, the end of this marriage is represented by a sought-after red dress. So, we look at the clothes.

Walsh’s narrative method is more dynamic than straight flânerie, though, or it at least carries its own obsessions. Walsh, for example, is interested in turning this investigative impulse inward. When Walsh does reflect the internal trauma, she — sparingly, powerfully — captures it with precision. “I can’t be friends with your friends,” the narrator quickly imagines saying to her husband in the opening story. “I can’t go to dinner with you, don’t even want to.” In a manner that’s nearly as distant as her gaze on the streets, the narrator observes her own devastation.

Walsh’s stories contain many instances of flâneur-like investigations yielding moments of emotional revelation. In “New Year’s Day,” Walsh’s narrator reflects on the prior night’s party: “Everyone at the party was so lovely. Everyone was so happy. Everyone’s websites were now in color with hand-drawn lettering…” There’s a disappointing, one-night liaison at the core of this story, but it’s only circuitously remarked upon. Remembering the amorphous crowd, the narrator thinks, “Everyone liked looking at things that were pretty. I can still make things that are pretty, but I don’t now, and, as for the things I made in the past, I don’t even like to look at them anymore.”

Maybe one of the most brilliant moves Walsh makes is turning her flânerie on her experience of gender itself. In “Drowning,” a mother on a beach savagely observes that her husband never has to choose to be neglectful of the kids, because he knows if he does not pay attention to them, she will have to. She must also achieve the pretense of having fun doing this, otherwise “the holiday itself tips over.”

Or, in the title story, a mother sees her twelve-year-old daughter toss her hair. “It is the same gesture she used at nine, at ten,” Walsh writes. “One day it will become sexual. Is it yet? I don’t know. Why am I frightened by this progress? It will happen. It must happen.”

It’s notable that Walsh’s Vertigo was published by Dorothy, a press “dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction, mostly by women;” Both their stars seem to be rising at once. Last year, Dorothy published Nell Zink’s Wallcreeper, and they continue to build attention and momentum for their stunning catalog of books. Walsh, meanwhile, had three books come out this Fall: in addition to this one, a memoir/essay collection called Hotel (published by Bloomsbury), and Grow a Pair: 9 ½ Fairytales About Sex (by Readux Books, a small European press).

The stories in Walsh’s Vertigo are equally strange and edgy. She’s a flâneur who’s just as capable of representing the exterior and interior wreckage with equal precision. She takes on big ideas — partnership, loneliness, femininity, etc. — through the vibrant minutiae of contemporary experience.

Walsh excels as an inconspicuous observer, demonstrating the Benjamin assertion that, “The space winks at the flâneur: What do you think may have gone on here?”

Click here to read a story from Vertigo — “Option” — as part of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading.