Under the Shade, I Flourish: The Art Revolution in Belize

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Pop culture shapes our reality. But who gets to decide what pop culture is in the first place? It turns out, we do. New Suns is a column dedicated to artists who are building our common future.

Jorge Landero is a painter. He likes to start working at three or four in the morning, after a cup of milk. His open-air studio is a concrete floor walled by a hedge of bamboo, and is frequented by his German shepherd, Max, who cannot be deterred from lapping water out of the paint cans.

jorge

Max, Kerry Johan Landero, and Jorge Landero. Bullet Tree, Belize. Printed with subjects’ permission. Photo by Monica Byrne.

Landero says he started painting after years of hating his masonry work. “It was so fucking hard. Nobody bought me a brush…[But] my life was going to be doomed if I was not going to be an artist.”

Now, he paints bright, beautiful canvases that hang in offices, banks, and resorts all over Belize. When Prince Harry visited the country in 2012, a resort owner touched down by helicopter to pick out a gift for him.

I ask Landero, “How would you like to see Belize change?”

“You cannot change Belize,” he says immediately. “The world is always going to be this way.”

While he and I talk, Landero’s nine-year-old son Johan puts down his own painting on the table. It’s a beautiful waterfall scene. After we praise it, he grins and disappears back into the house on a secret errand.

~

The national motto of Belize is sub umbra floreo: “I flourish under the shade,” which refers to the native mahogany tree, harvested to depletion in the 19th century by British colonial corporations. I learned this when I first traveled to Belize in 2012. My mother had taught there as a Jesuit volunteer when it was still called British Honduras. She’d always wanted to go back, but never got a chance to before she died, and so I went for her.

I thought I’d visit her old high school, see the ruins and beaches, and never return to Belize.

Instead, I found myself buying a plane ticket back as soon as I got home.

Every time I go, now, the country has shifted, like frames in a stop-motion film. Belize is seeing an unprecedented spike of development since they took back their land from the British in 1981. Add to this that Belize is tiny — only 340,000 residents, comparable to the population of my hometown of Durham — which makes it feel like a very large neighborhood. Everyone knows someone in every place. Everyone is within a few hours’ drive.

Because of this, the national conversation about identity is, by necessity, an intimate one. That includes the conversation on colonial incursion, which now wears a different mask: cruise ships parked like tanks offshore, tourists descending like locusts, and land disappearing to foreign buyers at prices that almost no natural-born Belizean can afford.

Artists in the country are navigating these pressures, which compound the choices all artists already have to make between expression and survival. Tourism is the biggest industry in Belize after agriculture. Some, like Landero, coexist happily with the tourist gaze, painting toucans, jaguars, and Mayan ruins, a visual language of pleasure common to Belizean and tourist alike.

But younger artists, many of them women, are answering those pressures in the exact opposite way: to deconstruct, destroy, and build something new in its place.

“There’s not a bone in my body that wants to paint [toucans],” says Briheda Haylock. “The new generation is slowly uprising in Belize. So the art needs to be different.”

At 24, Haylock is too young to have seen the days of British Honduras. That may be a good thing. She recalls a conversation with an older couple who felt the country was more structured in colonial times, and now, is chaotic. “That’s because we’re questioning ourselves,” she explains. “Before, we didn’t have the ability to.”

Haylock’s first solo exhibition, Society Killed the Teenager, highlighted the rates of suicide and depression among youth in Belize, especially LGBT youth. Her piece My Only Sin is Being a Woman tackled the basic insanity of violence toward women, simply for being women. All are taboo subjects. But as Haylock says, “If you plaster change everywhere, change is gonna come. I think that’s what art is. I think that’s what artists do.”

Briheda Haylock

From My Only Sin is Being a Woman by Briheda Haylock. Reprinted with permission.

The gallery where both exhibitions took place — The Image Factory, a waterfront space in Belize City — has become the mother hive for young artists in the country. Along with classes, labs, workshops, exhibitions, and performances, they produce Baffu, an e-magazine read all over the world. The title comes from the Kriol saying “If yuh noh di baffu, yuh di gamma” — meaning, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you make it up.

Now on its fifth issue, Baffu is a treasure chest of visual and literary outpouring from Belizean up-and-comers, none of it made with tourists in mind. Some of the pages are shots from artists’ notebooks, spiral binding and all. Other pages are screenshots of Facebook blowups about the Belizean art scene. The front cover of Issue 4 is a close-up of a friend’s stomach, shaved and stitched, after he caught a bullet in gang crossfire. The back cover is the exit wound.

Several issues feature Rony Jobel, who, after seeing a show at The Image Factory last year, started painting with crayons, markers, coffee, ink, bleach — anything he could get his hands on. Now he’s made over three hundred abstracts, which are in demand by the few serious collectors in Belize. “When I’m in the mood,” he says quietly, “I’ll paint maybe ten. When I’m not in the mood, I’ll paint maybe four or five.”

Shernell Whittaker is also a prolific contributor. In Issue 3, she draws a woman who — from the chest up — strikes a sultry pose familiar from Belizean beer ads. But from the chest down, she sports a spider necklace, huge penis, and two middle fingers.

tripod baffu

Drawing by Shernell Whittaker, text by Katie Usher. First published in Baffu, Issue 3. Reprinted with permission.

The accompanying text is by Katie Usher, who’s been working with The Image Factory since she was a teenager. She dislikes the national motto sub umbra floreo. To her, it evokes the tendency for painful things to be kept hidden in the dark, where they’re more difficult to see. “A lot of what we do at Image Factory is shed light on things. I try to flourish with the lights on.” As for tourist gaze, Usher says, “Most of the time, I don’t even consider it. I’m interested in deconstructing black female stereotypes.”

Any stereotype exists in a specific cultural context. What makes Belize unique, she says, is the ethnic diversity unparalleled almost anywhere else in the world — there are significant Mestizo, Creole, Mayan, Garifuna, Mennonite, Taiwanese, Indian, and Chinese populations, all existing in relative peace. But Usher also points out that naming and separating ethnic groups is itself a colonial strategy to control a large population.

Populations dealing with postcolonial trauma replicate that strategy in times of stress. For example, when a Creole man built atop the southern ruin of Uxbenka and was detained by Mayan villagers, Usher was dismayed by the anti-Mayan backlash she observed on social media. In protest, she put on a huipul — a traditional Mayan top — and stood outside the Supreme Court with her hand raised.

“As Belizeans say,” she says, “‘Wi dah one.’”

Katie

Katie Numi Usher on the steps of the Belizean Supreme Court, Belize City. Photo by Kareem Clarke. Reprinted with permission.

~

And then there are artists who fall somewhere on the spectrum. If an artist isn’t interested in protest per se, how does one articulate a visual language of pleasure that is truly their own, and not that of the colonizers? Must paintings of Belizean natural wonders serve the tourist gaze, or can they serve their own creators? As Usher explains, “Colonization doesn’t give you an identity. We were English subjects, but not English people. So you constantly have to find out who you are.”

Artist Rachelle Estephan — a childhood friend of Katie Usher’s, as it turns out — is wrestling with these very questions. I took the chicken bus to meet her at a bar in the bush off the Western Highway.

Amigos bar

Amigos Bar. Western Highway, Mile 32, Belize. Photo by Monica Byrne.

Her work, like Jorge Landero’s, also features lush colors and wildlife motifs — understandable, given that she works at her parents’ nature preserve, Monkey Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. She painted a jaguar for one of her first exhibitions. But at the opening, she began to hate it. “It just irritated me…it was trying to conform to something that people want. Every time I saw it, it became something I didn’t want to look at anymore.”

But both nature and beauty remain precious to her. And she resists having to justify their value, especially when angst and protest are celebrated as being more “serious” kinds of art. [Listen to Rachelle talk about this more here.] “I’m seeking a visual sort of contentment,” she says, “a feeling of ease and comfort and peace…Art is super symbolic to me, of not clinging, not being controlling, letting other people be free to interpret things, and not having it corrode what it really means to me. Those things are a struggle for me. And that’s why I want to do them.”

dragon art

Untitled, by Rachelle Estephan. Reprinted with permission.

There are still other ways to honor Belize’s natural beauty that don’t serve the tourist gaze. In the western mountain region, Jonathan Urbina works as a conservation biologist. Years ago, he began collecting feathers in his field notebook. Why feathers? “A feather’s just an evolutionary wonder. It’s simple as that,” he says. “They can decay and decompose into nothing, [but] I just can’t let it go to waste. I’d rather pick it up.” He’s made gorgeous individual framed works, as well as a clock finished entirely with ocellated turkey feathers.

His obsession makes an intuituve kind of sense. As a conservation biologist, Urbina has a front seat watching Belize’s land disappear. Huge tracts of land get bought and bulldozed in a matter of weeks. There’s only so much he can do.

Meanwhile, his art consists not only of the finished product, but the slow process of collection. His masterpiece — housed at the Belize Zoo — was fourteen years in the making. Nature sets his pace, not people: all of his feathers are sourced in the wild; he nevers kills birds, and never steals feathers from a birds at the zoo. He claims the reasons aren’t just ethical. He says, “Feathers from captive birds lose their aesthetic.”

~

I ask Jorge Landero the same question in a different way. How does he see Belize in a thousand years?

He again insists that he can’t change Belize. But then he seems to reconsider. “You can change your kid’s life to change Belize,” he says, indicating Johan, now folded up in the chair under the bamboo. “My baby is drawing. It’s so beautiful.” Johan then presents me with an excellent drawing of fish floating over coral reefs, indicating that I should keep it.

I insisted on paying him five dollars for it. And then wondered if I should have just accepted it, instead.

FullSizeRender

Untitled drawing by Kerry Johan Landero, age 9. Reprinted with permission.

Honesty and All its Oddities: This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison

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by Kurt Baumeister

This Is Your Life was one of T.V.’s earliest reality shows. Heavily choreographed and notoriously sentimental, it was a weekly salute to the life of one lucky person. Some subjects were famous, others not — the show’s unifying idea that life could be ordered, explained, and dramatized on T.V.. On This Is Your Life, the world made sense. There were always happy endings. The show was tailor-made for America in the 1950’s.

Still recovering from the violence and depravity of World War II — but emboldened and energized by its victory — America was feeling its oats as a superpower; the high, nuclear terror of the Cold War’s zenith still in the future. America’s victory in the war was proof that good would always win, that God would always be looking out for us. It was the beginning of a sort of national faerie tale some of us cling to today.

In many ways, Jonathan Evison’s This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! is a response to the mid-century American faerie tale. Stripped completely of the T.V. show’s hallmark sentimentality, Evison’s fourth novel is witty, not bland; knowing rather than saccharine sweet; wise instead of clichéd. From his intrusive narrator to his playful, Dickensian use of the metaphysical, Evison’s juxtaposition of literary color with a show cast in black and white presents a core irony that highlights the changes Harriet and America will undergo during her lifetime. Most significant among these is the advent of feminism, and with it the realization of other selves that might have been Harriet’s had she been the product of a time more like our own.

Born in 1936, a girl who came of age during World War II and grew to adulthood in the magically-placid fifties, Harriet is a widowed housewife who once dreamed of being an attorney, a seemingly proper woman with more than a few secrets. Her days a regimented haze of precise calorie counts and appointments planned months in advance, Harriet marches into late life uncertain of her place in the world.

Alternately troubled and comforted by memories of her husband, Bernard, and their life together, Harriet also has to contend with Bernard’s restless spirit who insists on communicating with her from the great beyond. As the book opens, Harriet is dealing with the way Bernard’s appearances impact her physical reality, producing effects she must explain to friends and acquaintances (a misplaced can of WD-40, moved slippers, etc.). More than that, she’s dealing with the obvious complication: no one, including the parish priest, buys a whit of it. Well, almost no one. The reader believes it. And with good reason. Within the confines of the novel, it’s indisputably true.

Told as the book is in third person omniscient, there’s never any doubt about whether Bernard’s spirit is actually communicating with Harriet. We see him doing it in-scene on multiple occasions. We even see Bernard in-scene without Harriet, bucking the instructions of Mr. Charmichael, his Chief transition officer in Purgatory, threatening his chances for heavenly ascension in the process. Bernard has his reasons, though. After their life together — or perhaps because of their life together — he has things to communicate to Harriet. Truths left untold, wisdom thus unlearned. He’s not the only one.

From Harriet’s children to her friends, the strangers she encounters on the Alaskan cruise that forms the story’s backbone, and even our narrator, everyone seems to be trying to tell Harriet something. The problem being they’re not entirely sure what it is they’re trying to say. And this becomes one of the book’s primary themes — the idea that real honesty is an acceptance of one’s lack of understanding, rather than a sudden rush of enlightenment.

Truth doesn’t bring the easy, sentimental answers that were so common to programs like This Is Your Life. Those shows and the version of America that went with them were lies. Self-congratulatory and devoid of purpose besides the perpetuation of clichés, they peddled the idea that life could be understood, that it represented a navigable path, a course ever-seeking some bright North Star.

But there are no North Stars for Harriet Chance. Every one she imagined — and there were many — wound up a counterfeit. Even her relationships with husband, friends, and children fall into this category, or at least show the effects of Harriet’s humanity, the trap from which none of us escape. Life’s not easy. Even when we’re lucky, it makes only the slightest and most fleeting of sense.

In spite of its honesty — an honesty that, at times, you might even call brutal — Evison’s is a bright book, not a dark one. Never weighed down by its topicality or lacking in humor, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! puts off a sort of freeing energy, a feeling of peace for its characters and readers. Wit and empathy, easy lyricality and elegant construction — these are Jonathan Evison’s strengths as a writer. They’re all here. But there’s truth here, too; lest we forget we live in the real world, not the kindly-lit soundstage of some American faerie tale.

This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!

by Jonathan Evison

Powells.com

A Personal History of Teeth

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Tooth and Nail

1789:

The year George Washington was inaugurated as the first American president, he had only one natural tooth remaining. His false teeth were made out of human and animal teeth, lead and ivory, not wood. He purchased some teeth from the mouths of his slaves. He named one of his hound dogs “Sweet Lips.”

1973:

At a family campout, my mother’s father told all of us cousins gathered around the fire to pay attention and listen while he told us a story. I don’t remember how it went or even what it was about. What I remember is how it ended. He stopped talking and backed into the darkness, away from the firelight for a moment while we waited, after he said, “…and guess what happened next?” We wiggled on our log benches. “What, Grandpa, what?” He stayed in the shadows for what seemed like forever. Then he came close again, leaned into the orange glow, and shot his false teeth out of his mouth and into his hand, grinning at us, transformed into a toothless monster. We screamed toward the sky.

1974:

My babysitter, Linda Crookshank, got high and triple-dog-dared me to yank out my two front teeth. The trouble was, they weren’t even loose. “If they come out early, you get triple the cash from the tooth fairy,” she said. I can still see my blood spattering on the mirrored counter in my grandmother’s bathroom as I knocked those teeth out of my head. When my parents returned, I was lying on the couch with my mouth stuffed full of teabags to stop the bleeding. The tooth fairy didn’t even pay double. Linda Crookshank did jail time for shop lifting and drug possession. I suffered through two years of grade school photos with no front teeth.

1976:

My father’s father kept dentures in a glass at the edge of the sink next to a toupee on a molded foam wig stand in our bathroom when he and my grandmother came to visit. The hair and the teeth scared me at night when I got up to pee. They looked huge and sinister in the glow of the little nightlight. His toupee looked like a hairy mushroom on the counter. It blew off his head one time at the beach and was tossed around on the sand like a dying bird.

1980:

The phrase “Tooth and nail” comes from the Latin, toto corpore atque omnibus ungulis, “with all the body and every nail.” The French, of course, have a more romantic way of fighting: bec et ongles, “beak and talons.” I’ve never fought with tooth and nail, clawing and biting and scratching. I came close once, when I was about twelve. One day, our mother sent my sister and me outside to fight. We were Methodists back then. We circled one another in the yard. She lunged at me. I leapt away. She got within striking distance, drew back her fist, squinted her eyes, and aimed at my face. I said to her, “Jesus says to turn the other cheek.” I put down my hands and turned my head sideways. “Go ahead,” I shouted, hands on hips. I stuck out my jaw and opened my mouth. She threw that punch as hard as she could.

1981:

My great-grandmother’s teeth clicked and clacked when she talked. I thought it made her sound mechanical, like a talking wind-up toy. I imagined turning a key inside her jaw. But when she went to the nursing home, they took her teeth out, put them in a paper sack next to the sink. Her face shrank in on itself like one of those dried apple dolls.

1982:

I once performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a dying lamb. It lived, but the mother rejected her. I had to tie the ewe to the barn stall while it jumped and kicked as I stripped milk from her tiny teats. I milked mama sheep several times a day, long enough to ensure the lamb got enough colostrum, the antibiotic, fat, and protein-rich first milk that the mother — all mothers — produce for the first days after birth. That mama fought tooth and hoof, but the lamb grew up just fine and won a blue ribbon at the fair. They say colostrum is important for health, that breastfeeding is important for dental and facial development. I was bottle-fed formula as an infant.

1985:

I know a poet who published an entire collection about his teeth. Each tooth has its own poem, and then some. I don’t have enough teeth for that. A bunch of mine were yanked to make room for braces, for my pretty smile. I was born with a mouth too small for my own teeth. Maybe my mother tried to breastfeed and my small mouth left marks. Maybe it closed too fast and too hard; maybe I hurt her first.

2003:

I once performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on my ex-husband’s great aunt, who fell and stopped breathing following an epileptic seizure. The root cause of her poor health was lack of dental care. She hadn’t been to a dentist since childhood. She had a fear of dentists that no amount of psychotherapy could cure. Her rotting teeth leaked poison into her blood. She eventually died from organ failure. Her breath smelled like death years before she passed. That day, on the kitchen floor, the sharp edge of one of her last remaining teeth split my lip as I pushed oxygen from my lungs into her frail body. When the paramedics arrived, I washed the stench of her saliva and my own blood from my face. I cried away my blood into the sink.

2010:

I thought I had cock-jaw once during a shameless foray into the world of BDSM. I went to the dentist with terrible jaw pain. I’d had a wisdom tooth removed months earlier, but it had long since healed. The dentist leaned over me with his little prodding tool and a mirror. “Have you had any jaw injuries lately?” Dirty deeds flashed into my mind. “Um…no,” I said, blushing. A week later, I felt something sharp with my tongue. I fished around with my fingers and pulled a thin piece of bone from my gum, apparently dislodged and left there following the surgery. With that sliver gone, the pain vanished, and with it, a part of myself.

2013:

My stepdaughter’s mother’s boyfriend, unlike George Washington, actually did carve himself a pair of dentures out of wood. For art, out of boredom, or to save money, we’ll never know. “He looks like a pirate,” my stepdaughter said. He named one of his guitars “Sweet Lips.”

Structure vs. Urgency: The Blunt Instrument on Finding Work/Life Balance as a Writer

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The Blunt Instrument is a monthly advice column for writers. If you need tough advice for a writing problem, send your question to blunt@electricliterature.com.

Hey Elisa —

I’ve had a lot of questions swirling since I decided to leave the MFA program I was at back in late November. Since I was a sophomore in college, all I ever really wanted to do was read and write. I didn’t really know where this passion came from, since, as a kid, I was a football-playing, church-going type of person who didn’t care at all about books. Once I got bit, though, that was all I seemed to care about.

That said, getting into the MFA seemed sort of like a dream. Something I really built up in my mind, which in retrospect couldn’t possibly have lived up to the hype. After sort of being away from the whole literary world for half a year, I’ve been able to see things clearer, and a few things really stick out to me about my experience that I’d love to get your thoughts on.

1) The literary community: One thing I really dealt with was taking seriously the literary community I had around me. To be honest, so much of what we were doing in the classroom seemed a bit overwrought and unnecessary. Like, much of the discussion about poetry seemed to be a great thing to us, but really useless in its larger context. Maybe this is just me being young and naive, but what is the true function of the literary community? How should it operate — both in the classroom and in the world — and what good can come from us truly investing in it? I know some of these answers will be obvious, but I also have a feeling there will be some answers I’m not quite expecting.

2) How to get back on one’s feet: Since I left the program, I’ve had to find a balance between my work life and my writing life. I have had to deal with leaving my ideal world of reading/writing all day, and have been forced to balance the daily grind of a job with writing, which is what I really want to do. I think my biggest fear is that, in leaving the MFA (ungracefully) at a young age, I’ve sort of squandered any chance I had at being able to truly give myself to my writing. I know this is a circumstantial thing, but how should one deal with the feeling that they sort of gave up on themselves and their dreams? What advice would you give to someone who is still young, but also feels like they sold out in this way? What hope is left for the one who quit, but still wants to pursue that thing they gave up on?

This is some of what I’ve been dealing with for the past year. In my mind, these things are connected, and once made whole again, might help me to become the writer I’ve always wanted to be.

— Trip

Trip,

I’ll start with your first question, which I think stems from a misunderstanding of what “community” is. Your MFA classmates are not necessarily your community. (I’m reminded of Junot Diaz’s essay about the whiteness of his program at Cornell, “MFA vs. POC.” They were definitely not his community.) Getting into an MFA program can be an excellent way of finding a writing community, but it’s not an instant community.

Remember your freshman year in college, how you probably made a few friends right away, but they weren’t necessarily still your friends by the time you graduated? When you’re meeting a lot of people at once (moving to a new city or starting a new job, for example), it can take a little while to find your people, the ones you really connect with, feel close to, and want to know better. The same is true with an MFA, and it’s entirely possible that you left the program before you had the chance to find the community that would have made your experience more worthwhile. (I don’t say this to make you feel guilty about leaving; I’m sure there were other factors at play, including cost.)

Further, I’ll say that the frustrating, “overwrought and unnecessary” nonsense that inevitably goes on in workshops is part of the point. A big part of the education of a writer is figuring out what you do and do not care about — including what kinds of readers are helpful to your editing/revision process, what kinds of critiques motivate you, what forms and techniques are interesting and generative and worth trying and what kinds are a waste of time, what kinds of writers you admire and want to emulate, and so on. (And if you intend to teach after getting your degree, it can also help you figure out what kind of workshop you want to run.) It’s actually helpful to be exposed to viewpoints you totally disagree with; most likely, not all of them are wrong. And by the time you finish an MFA, you have a more developed sense of what is worth your effort and attention as a writer and what is simply irrelevant bullshit. (That said, if your MFA experience is nothing but bullshit, quitting is a valid solution.)

But getting back to the idea of community and its function. I wrote about this in my first column, but allow me to reiterate: Your writing community serves an amazing dual function — they are friends who also help your career. (You’re helping them too, so it’s not parasitic.) They help your career both indirectly (through encouragement and friendly competition) and directly (by passing on opportunities and potentially even publishing you). But don’t underestimate the friendship part: A community gives you people to borrow books from, go to readings with, and talk to when you’re feeling discouraged. Seeing other writers get discouraged too will make you feel less alone. If you didn’t find a community at your program, I urge you to keep looking. Feeling part of an online community is almost (arguably just) as good. Writing can be very isolating without it.

Now let’s look at the second part of your question. You feel that you squandered an opportunity to read and write all day. Don’t beat yourself up about this. Quitting your program does not mean that you have given up on writing. You can always enter another program — but regardless, an MFA gives you two to three years tops of dedicated reading and writing time. Chances are slim that your degree will land you a job that allows you to make a living through writing (at least not the kind of writing you’re passionate about). It’s not long before you have to contend with the same struggle you face now: Finding time and energy to read and write on top of a full-time job. Excepting a very few especially lucky/wealthy people, every writer I know has the same struggle.

Again: you 100% do not need an MFA to count as a writer. All you have to do to be a writer is write. So how do you get back to writing? I’ll recommend two different approaches to striking a work-life/writing-life balance. I believe one of these can work for you, but which one works best will depend on your writing/working personality.

The first approach is driven by structure: Build regular writing and reading time into your schedule and stick to it, like it’s a regular appointment. I know a poet (with a full-time communications job and two kids) who gets up at 5:30 every weekday morning and spends an hour on poetry. This poet usually starts the hour by reading, and eventually does some writing. Maybe your writing hour takes place in the evenings, or it’s just 20 minutes a day, or a four-hour block on Saturday mornings. It doesn’t matter, so long as it becomes a habit. The advantage to this method is that, over time, you’re getting something done, plain and simple. Even if you have bad days or miss a few “appointments,” you won’t suddenly find that months have gone by during which you’ve written nothing because you “couldn’t find the time.” Aside from giving you material, this approach also trains you to take your writing seriously. You will feel like a writer because you’ll be writing. (Important to note, however, that just because you’re writing every day doesn’t mean you need to publish everything you write.)

As an addendum, you can help the structured approach along if you try to find a form that suits your structure. The fictional poet who narrates Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist starts a poem by thinking about the best moment of his day. This sounds cheesy, but I kind of love it. (Conversely you could start with the worst moment of your day?) When I took a job as a copywriter for a software company about six years ago, I found that, because I was writing prose all day, I had difficulty “thinking” in poetic lines. So I started writing a book of prose instead. I consciously chose a form that fit the pattern of my days.

The second approach is driven by urgency: Find the thing you want to write so much you don’t even have to schedule time for it. I have another friend, a novelist, who said he solved the problem of “writer’s block” by abandoning the high-minded projects he felt he should be working on and started writing the novel he desperately wanted to write. Suddenly he couldn’t wait to get home from his job to work on his novel. Previously, he had had to schedule time for writing and it still felt like a slog. I take a similar approach to reading — I surround myself with books (mostly from the library) and abandon them freely. If I force myself to finish a book just because I’ve started it, I’ll find something to do other than reading, but if I only read what I really want to read, when I want to read it, I’ll make time for reading almost every day.

In closing: I have found that it’s very tricky to change your outlook by force of will. Almost no one can just decide, “I’m going to stop feeling like a sellout and start feeling good about writing.” The best way to change how you feel is to change what you do. Figure out what, and who, makes you feel good about writing, then strategically carve out more time for doing those things and being with those people.

Best of luck,

The Blunt Instrument

If You’re Going to Do It, Go All the Way: An Interview with Helen Phillips

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Helen Phillips’ novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat is excerpted in this week’s issue of Recommended Reading. In the interview below, Phillips discusses her influences, her writing process, and the construction of a good sex scene.

Katie Barasch: The Beautiful Bureaucrat is filled with wordplay. Even naming your characters Joseph and Josephine is, in a sense, a kind of word play. Is the wordplay just for fun, or does it have a larger purpose?

Helen Phillips: Wordplay is fun (I’ve always been a sucker for puns and other linguistic coincidences), and in everything I write I’m interested in playing with language, but in The Beautiful Bureaucrat, the wordplay does serve a larger purpose. As Elliott Holt put it in her eloquent introduction to the excerpt from the book recently published by Electric Literature, Joseph and Josephine’s “connection is built on language: they construct their own world with words. Everything around them is unsteady … so it is language they depend on.” Their wordplay is a source of power for them as they grapple with an unknown city. And then, toward the end of the book, it becomes clear that the wordplay is critical to the plot, but now I’m verging into spoiler territory, so I’ll leave it at that.

Barasch: In addition to your story collection And Yet They Were Happy, you wrote a young adult novel called Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green. Did the experience of writing for a younger audience help or inform your approach to writing The Beautiful Bureaucrat? Do you see any hardline differences between the proclivities of children and adult readers?

Phillips: With And Yet They Were Happy (an inter-genre collection comprised entirely of two-page stories), I was largely focused on image, language, metaphor, surreality. With Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (an adventure story for middle-grade readers), I wanted to create a dynamic mystery plot with a clear arc and well-developed characters. In writing The Beautiful Bureaucrat, I attempted to do all of the above, pulling on skills honed while I was writing each of my previous books; they both served as training for this one. I think children and adults alike respond to a wide range of emotions and events, but I do feel more at liberty to include certain non-sequiturs when writing for adults.

Barasch: You’ve recently been compared to writers such as Aimee Bender, Franz Kafka, and Haruki Murakami. Did these authors influence you while you wrote? What did you read while working on this novel?

Phillips: Franz Kafka and Haruki Murakami were very much on my mind as I was writing. The list goes on: Shirley Jackson, Italo Calvino, Margaret Atwood, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, Kelly Link. And in addition to these creators of alternate worlds, I was also thinking about the precision and condensation of language, so Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, Maggie Nelson.

Barasch: The claustrophobia of a big city is powerfully rendered in your novel. How important is your own location in your writing process? Did moving from Colorado to New York affect your writing in any significant way?

Phillips: Though the city in the book goes unnamed, it does grow from my own experience living in Brooklyn. I hope that it reads as a sort of dark ode to city life, to its moments of bleakness and its moments of beauty. Location colors everything for me, both in terms of my life and my writing. I could never have written this book without having lived in an urban place for a long period of time, without being permeated by the shadows and brilliance of New York City.

Barasch: In an article for New Republic, Jeet Heer writes: “In good fiction, sex is most effective when integrated with the larger goal of the book: with plot, tone, and character development.” I was impressed by the sex scene between Joseph and Josephine in this excerpt — it was intense and multi-layered, and funny or chilling, depending on who you ask. How do you decide when to “fade to black,” so to speak, and what to make explicit?

Phillips: Compelling sex scenes in fiction are not that easy to come by; some of my favorites are in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. The sex scenes in The Beautiful Bureaucrat are critical to the plot, and also to the exploration of Joseph and Josephine’s new marital tensions. For the excerpt published by Electric Literature, we actually had to cut one sex scene (we feared, perhaps unnecessarily, that two sex scenes might have been a bit much for such a short selection from the book), so there’s a “fade to black” moment partway through the excerpt that is not a “fade to black” in the book itself. I generally tend more toward the explicit than the fade out — if you’re going to do it, go all the way.

Helen Phillips is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the Italo Calvino Prize, among others. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable book by the Story Prize, and her work has been featured on PRI’s Selected Shorts, and in Tin House, BOMB, and The New York Times. An assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.

TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: FANT4STIC FOUR?

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★★★★☆

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing Fant4stic.

There’s a new movie out called Fant4stic. I didn’t know how to pronounce the name, so when I bought my ticket I wrote the title on a piece of paper and handed it to the woman at the box office. She must have thought I was mute because she gave me my ticket without saying a word.

A lot of movies these days like to stick numbers into the name, like Leprechaun: Back 2 Tha Hood and 12 Years a Slave. They should have called this movie F4nt45t1c to show everyone how it’s really done. That seems like a missed opportunity.

Fant4stic hasn’t gotten very good reviews and I’m not sure why. I liked it a lot! The characters are unlike anything you’ve seen before, if you’ve never seen any of the three other Fantastic Four films they made.

One is a guy made out of rocks, but he’s not a statue like you would expect.

There’s a female character who is invisible. I know Hollywood doesn’t like to pay women as much as they pay men, but this just goes to show how they’re trying to change. They easily could have paid her nothing since you don’t even need an actress who you can’t see, but they didn’t do that. Good job, Hollywood!

Another character is a super smart guy made of rubber or whatever but he’s played by that kid from Whiplash. It’s sad to see the Whiplash kid has already been typecast as a student genius. He’ll only be able to play that role a few more years before he’s too old.

My least favorite character is the guy made of fire. He reminded me too much of the time I watched a man immolate himself in protest. It was horrible. Every time Fire-man came on screen I started sobbing and shaking uncontrollably. I guess that’s a testament to how good the special effects were.

Unfortunately I had to leave the film early to go buy some toothpaste but I’ll bet the ending was pretty good. If I ever get around to seeing it I’ll update my review. Keep refreshing the page every few minutes just in case.

BEST FEATURE: I can’t wait for the sequel, F4nt45t1c24ev4!
WORST FEATURE: Chet Hanks, best known for his work in Bratz, doesn’t get enough lines.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a bowl of soup.

Denver Little Free Library Burned by Mysterious Arsonist

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Ritualistic book burning has always been a grim aspect of our history — the Nazi book burning in 1933 comes immediately to mind — and yet, even now, this awful method of censorship and oppression persists in the United States and around the globe.

According to The Denver Post, Dan Wisdom awoke earlier this week to the charred remains of his Little Free Library, which formerly occupied the corner of Colorado Boulevard and E. 7th Avenue in Denver, Colorado. Wisdom and his 9-year-old daughter were perplexed by the burning, which was caused by a mysterious arsonist in the middle of the night.

Since its inception in 2009, The Little Free Library has been a charming and effective way to promote literacy and celebrate a universal love for books and storytelling. The concept is a simple exchange: take a book, leave a book. Todd Bol co-founded the nonprofit, which has since expanded to include 30,000 book exchanges around the world.

And yet, somehow, this occurrence in Denver is not the first time a Little Free Library has been targeted for vandalism. Book exchanges in Texas (including Victoria and Dallas) as well as Minneapolis, MN were destroyed by fire recently. It’s a disturbing trend — one can only hope that it won’t gain any more steam.

In Denver, book-loving passerby and residents have already offered to help rebuild and restock the Little Free Library.

Interested in finding a Little Free Library near you, or perhaps creating one? The nonprofit’s website provides all the answers.

This 50th Anniversary Edition of Dune Is the Most Beautiful SF Book You’ll See This Year

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Happy birthday, dear Dune. Frank Herbert’s beloved sci-fi epic turned 50 this year, and the Folio Society has celebrated by publishing a stunning new edition featuring painted illustrations by Sam Weber.

Winner of the 1966 Hugo and Nebula awards, Dune is a futuristic tale of noble houses grappling for control of a hostile planet — called Dune — which happens to contain the universe’s only repository of a highly valuable spice. It has been called a masterwork of science fiction, a spiritual brother to The Lord of the Rings, a sine qua non for Star Wars, and, lately, “a paradigmatic fantasy of the Age of Aquarius.”

Small wonder it was capable of inspiring some remarkable images. You can order the Folio edition here.

Cover of Folio Society edition

Cover of Folio Society edition

Shai-Hulud

Shai-Hulud by Sam Weber

Baron Harkonnen by Sam Weber

Baron Harkonnen by Sam Weber

Sandstorm by Sam Weber

Sandstorm by Sam Weber

Alia by Sam Weber

Alia by Sam Weber

Guild ships by Sam Weber

Guild ships by Sam Weber

Dune folio society

Dune with slipcase

interior spread

interior spread

Friend and Enemy Alike: The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann

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William T. Vollmann’s new novel, The Dying Grass, might be the longest volume ever published about the 1877 Nez Perce Indian War — it is certainly the longest work of fiction. However, for a novel, Vollmann’s book is uncommonly authoritative and well researched. In The Dying Grass, Vollmann uses the vehicle of fiction to immerse his readers in the history more effectively than any amount of straightforward journalistic reportage ever could. Vollmann does not depart from historical record so much as he alchemizes it into a fever dream. These are the late years of the Indian wars, and by bringing them to life, Vollmann vividly recreates some of the darkest moments of American history.

The Dying Grass is the fifth book in Vollmann’s Seven Dreams series — a seven volume cycle of novels examining the conflicts between the Native Americans and the European colonizers. The series began with The Ice Shirt (1990), which dealt with the Norse discovery of America. Each consecutive book in the series has moved readers slightly closer to the present day. The Dying Grass positions itself at a critical junction of American history: between pioneer times and the industrial era. Following the classic Western-genre tradition, The Dying Grass is a kind of elegy to the Old West and to traditional Native American culture.

The Dying Grass is an accurate and finely detailed account of the five month Nez Perce War: the war in which the Nez Perce war chiefs: Joseph, Looking-Glass and Toohoolhoolzote, through a series of brilliant military decisions, outmaneuvered, confounded and held at bay General Oliver O. Howard and his much larger U.S. military force. These Nez Perce leaders, Chief Joseph the most famous of the three, led less than a thousand Indians — mostly women and children — on a 1,200-mile fighting retreat across what is now Montana, Idaho and parts of Wyoming. This chase gives Vollmann’s book structure and urgency. It is not a meandering collection of researched details with a fictional plot imposed; rather, it is a tightly structured novel of pursuit, full of reluctant heroes, each, by turns, the hunter and the hunted.

It is difficult to describe The Dying Grass without describing the way Vollmann arranges words on the page. While the plot is simple, the structure is unique and complex. Each chapter contains a chorus of divergent voices, which the reader must navigate in order to make sense of the narrative. Characters and locations shift without warning, often in the middle of a conversation. Rarely will dialogue be tagged; breaks are only indicated by a section’s indentation. Some half-finished conversations resolve later in the chapter, while others do not. Some pages contain so many differently indented sections that the text sits on the page more like the stanzas of some modernist poem than a novel. Certain pages resemble games of Tetris gone horribly wrong.

This might seem edgy or experimental to some readers, but there is nothing flashy about the way Vollmann constructs his narrative. In this case, the tool seems to have been inspired by the task. Vollmann needs this structure to demonstrate the breaks between voices, and he needs the breaks between voices to submerge the reader in each scene. This small innovation saves him the trouble of constantly needing to introduce characters, tag dialog and set scenes. The final effect is completely immersive. Vollmann gives the reader enough information to continue on the journey, but not so much as to distract attention from the scene.

Because of the way Vollmann structures his chapters, readers have access to nearly two hundred characters’ thoughts, feelings, private conversations, dreams and memories, unified only by date and place. The Dying Grass is the story of a hard journey shared by all of Vollmann’s characters: friend and enemy alike. Nearly all of the information, events and actions of the book are filtered through a character’s point of view, and though it is not always clear whose, one feels surrounded by the story’s action. We follow both real and fictional characters on both sides of the conflict; we inhabit warriors as they kill and as they are killed; we freeze and starve with the elderly, the children and other non-combatants; we jockey with the West Point brass safely encamped behind the skirmish lines; we endure weeks of mind numbing travel; we shoot our worn out horses so that our enemies cannot make further use of them.

If this style were transposed into to a shorter work, it likely would not function. These half developed conversations, unfinished thoughts and daily minutia would frustrate most readers if taken in a small dose — and even in this long narrative, it took me nearly a hundred pages to acclimate to the book’s style. Any one of these points of view alone could furnish a short novel, but because of The Dying Grass’s bigness, the final effect is fresh, lifelike and complete — it is, indeed, a fully inhabitable dream — more a lived experience than a long book.

And yes, it is a long book. And like all long books, it is tedious in places. Around the 600-page mark, The Dying Grass feels oceanic and nearly unnavigable. Unlike many long novels, there are very few tangential sections not directly related to the plot — no 100 page essays about whaling, for example, or digressive histories about the battle of Waterloo or Alcoholics Anonymous to give the reader a respite from the repetition of the novel’s relentless structure. The book is fully character-based. It is a single, long and exhausting chase, which takes a huge toll on each character, and as a reader, one feels the characters’ exhaustion palpably.

The time necessary to tackle a book of this length, in itself, builds a kind of empathetic bridge between text and reader. Anyone familiar with long novels will recognize this version of Stockholm Syndrome — because you have been imprisoned by the book for so long, you become loyal to it. You begin to forget that other books even exist. At 1,356 pages, roughly each mile of the Nez Perce fighting retreat receives a full page of coverage. There are moments where the very experience of reading The Dying Grass parallels that forced march through the untamed West: the cold, the hunger and the thirst endured by both the Nez Perce and the American soldiers, paralleled by intellectual forced march a reader must take to reach the books final 200 pages of endnotes.

Reading The Dying Grass is a powerful and visceral experience. Most of us know about the destruction of the Native American tribes, and intellectually, most people will agree that it was a tragic blunder of American policy, but it has been a long time since I was able to emotionally connect to the disaster of it. The genocide of the Native American Indians is such a difficult concept to swallow, that it is rare to be reminded in a way that feels genuinely moving and not somehow trite or preachy. Vollmann achieves this by sticking to the facts and by moving slowly. The book is powerfully neutral, grounded in ambivalence toward both the Nez Perce and the American soldiers. Both sides perpetuate good and evil here, both sides are deeply sympathetic, and while this is certainly a political story, because Vollmann writes without a clear position or agenda, it works.

In The Dying Grass, Vollmann gives us a difficult book well worth the effort. He manages to seamlessly wed a historian’s eye for researched detail with a fiction writer’s ability to inhabit character and place. By welding these disciplines together, Vollmann manages to bring his readers the best of both worlds. This is a significant novel that returns to us an often forgotten story from the late years of the Indian Wars. It resurrects a part of our American cultural memory that many of us have forgotten. It probably won’t make a great beach read, but it might be the most important book you read this year.