Growing up as a monster kid, Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man were basically the big three, the unholy trinity of spookiness. I tore through Stoker and Shelley, but wondered why there wasn’t an equally-iconic fictional take on the werewolf. Sure, there were the great Universal films—Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is a yearly rewatch—but back in the early ‘90s, my local library’s shelves seemed relatively bare of werewolf fiction, with a handful of exceptions like Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf.
You would think there’d be more, right? The werewolf archetype is an iconic monster for a reason and plays on our basest fears in a unique way. What if the people closest to us are secretly monsters, ready to tear us apart (anyone who grew up with an alcoholic parent is probably nodding along right now)? And conversely, what if we’re harboring a monstrous nature underneath our own exteriors? What if, deep down, there’s something horrible inside us, just waiting to take control? To do beastly thing with our bodies, once a month, and all we can do is bear witness to the aftermath. Don’t we all worry, despite our best intentions, we might inadvertently hurt our loved ones, our partners, our children? That our own monsters, whatever they might be, could get the better of us?
One thing that’s always motivated me creatively is that old adage, write the books you want to read. My upcoming novel, Good Dogs, is my attempt at doing something new and interesting with one of our most iconic monsters. Of late, slashers have been enjoying a real renaissance thanks to writers like Stephen Graham Jones (I Was a Teenage Slasher, Lake Witch Trilogy) and Brian McAuley (Curse of the Reaper, Candy Cain Kills). I’ve always loved a good slasher tale, so with Good Dogs I combined the tropes: a group of werewolves goes off to the woods to hunt in peace, until a mysterious killer starts picking them off one by one.
While writing my novel, I took a deep dive into lycanthropic literature, and there’s way more fascinating books out there than there used to be. Here are some books you can really sink your teeth into!
Thor by Wayne Smith
Released in 1994, Wayne Smith’s Thor is a preeminent classic of the genre. Told from the point of view of a family’s German Shepherd, Thor, the book details the schism caused by the arrival of Uncle Ted, who raises Thor’s hackles and soon reveals himself to be a very bad dog. The book’s unique POV helps cement its status as a genre classic. It was also adapted for film in the 1994’s Bad Moon.
For another inventive take on the werewolf mythos, look no further than Joshua Gaylord’s 2015 Shirley Jackson-nominated novel When We Were Animals (which sounds kinda like a Killers song, doesn’t it?). WWWA centers on Lumen Fowler, a teenage girl growing up in a midwestern town with a very odd tradition: when its children come of age, for one year, they turn feral during the full moon. While the children don’t turn into wolves, their inner bestial natures reveal themselves, providing for a unique commentary on puberty, tradition, and familial secrets.
The premise starts like a Hallmark movie—high-powered NYC executive comes home to the small town where she grew up and falls for a local contractor—but our intrepid C-suiter falls victim to a werewolf bite within the first few pages. Combining body horror and personal trauma with some humorous flourishes, Such Sharp Teeth flips the script on both lycanthropy and the aforementioned Hallmark build, delivering a heartfelt, compulsively readable novel.
Adapted into the 1981 Joe Dante movie of the same name, Gary Brandner’s The Howling shares some elements with the film but is entirely its own beast. After surviving a horrific attack, Los Angelenos Karyn and Roy Beatty decamp for the mountain hamlet of Drago in search of some good, old-fashioned small town peace and quiet. But in typical horror fashion, all isn’t as it seems! Something’s howling in the woods, Roy’s having an affair, and Karyn’s trapped in the mountains with a pack of werewolves. Spawning two book sequels as well as a film franchise, Brandner’s The Howling is easily one of the most iconic works in the subgenre.
Carnivorous Lunar Activities by Max Booth III
Named after a quote from the 1981 classic An American Werewolf in London, Carnivorous Lunar Activities is an offbeat horror comedy perfect for fans of Kevin Smith movies. When Ted’s old friend Justin thinks he’s turning into a werewolf and wants Ted to kill him. Is Justin crazy? As the clock ticks closer to midnight, Ted’s going to have to make a decision. Filled with whip-smart dialogue, Carnivorous is a compelling story about the nature of friendships and how they wax and wane.
After a mother and daughter go missing in the Alaskan wilderness, the woman’s brother, Troy Spencer, sets out in search of them. This one’s got it all—an eye-popping setting, mystery/thriller elements, mysterious outsiders, and monster-on-monster action. If you enjoyed True Detective: Night Country, Nola’s novel is a perfect followup, combining polar wilderness and supernatural elements with a fast-paced plot.
Perhaps the preeminent modern werewolf novel, Mongrels is a coming-of-age story about a family of itinerant werewolves, societal outcasts who drive “werewolf cars” and guzzle wine coolers and always pee outside the backdoor. Like several of the other contemporary takes, Jones puts his own spin on the mythos. Did you know french fries are the lycanthrope’s Achilles heel? At once realistic, grounded and moving, with liberal splashes of humor and an off-kilter POV that holds concepts like identity and family up to a fun house mirror, Mongrels is a can’t-miss read.
Amelia Morrison, beloved [neglected] wife and [disappointed] mother, [also, a limber and enthusiastic lover to several of her husband’s grad students] passed away last night [which dear hubby only noticed today].
Born locally in 1952, she loved [loathed] our little town. [After the pregnancy test came up positive on graduation night,] T[t]his Woodrow High valedictorian dedicated herself to domestic joys. She is survived by Mr. Robert Morrison, their two adult children, and her cherished Pomeranian, Muffins [the only defense against an allergic daughter with a penchant for blowing up her life and boomeranging back home]. Unfortunately, her son can’t attend tomorrow’s funeral [due to incarceration] but will join in spirit. Her bereaved daughter, Mary Morrison, caught the first flight in [and already cleared the house of jewelry and electronics]. In lieu of flowers, she asks for donations toward a commemorative bench [frozen forehead and camel lips].
Always altruistically minded, Mrs. Morrison chaired the volunteer committee for Our Ladies of Ashland, and thought of the other volunteers as sisters. [How else was she to keep a lid on the rumor mill those bitches live for?] In her spare time, she enjoyed reading [oh, sweet sweet escape] and gardening [the tool shed out back offered a nice spot for toking up]. Her other interests included music [though—gosh, darn—her loved ones can’t recall a single one of her favorite bands] and crime shows [especially where the wife offs the husband and gets away with it].
The family [Mrs. Morrison] would like to extend a warm thank you to the staff of the Angel Memorial General Hospital who took such good care of Mrs. Morrison in the final years of her life [in 1969, when a young gynecological shift nurse, whose name is now lost to time, whispered “I know a place.” And then held her hand in the back room of a veterinarian clinic, and didn’t flinch when she ran out in her slip into the freezing rain. And cried with her, but understood that the pain of a silver cross grazing the collarbone and igniting the warning flame of eternal damnation wouldn’t be washed away].
The Angel Memorial General Hospital had long been dear to Mrs. Morrison’s heart for helping bring her own precious angels into the world, and she contributed generously to their annual fundraisers. [, but did she contribute as generously to her children? Even after she willed herself to dream of only them and anchored her heart to the eye of their storm, did they somehow still know that they hadn’t been wanted? Is this why they’re pathologically unable to stop taking? Why they move through life with the ferociousness of those who suspect they are in it alone?]
The family would also like to express gratitude to Coroner Schmidt, a long-time family friend, who rushed over on his day off to attend to the body.[, probably counting on his halitosis to wake the dead. But alas, no cigar, old friend. Thanks for trying. You always were one of the good ones. Maybe if it had been you in the backseat after prom. . . Loreina is a lucky lady.]
Betrothed [Bamboozled] shortly after high school and married for over fifty years, Mrs. and Mr. Morrison worked hard to keep their romance alive. [Mr. Morrison can look forward to an avalanche of interchangeable V-day/birthday/anniversary teddy bears that will rain on his head from various pantries and closets. They are the ghosts of his laziness and will haunt him forever.] Robert cannot imagine life without his other half, but is deeply moved by the outpouring of support from friends, neighbors, and former students.[such as Giovani Saladino, who was the most promising and handsome and pillow-talked of the Mediterranean coastline and said “a different way for you to be, over there” so convincingly that it blistered for years.]
Our dear Amelia will be remembered as a sweet, traditional lady, who gave much to her community and smiled so brightly. Come celebrate her tomorrow at Ashland Town House Church, from 2:00-3:00. Service to follow, including the sprinkling of ashes over the Sinai Hill, her favorite picnic spot. [, where in between bites of cucumber sandwiches and pecan pie brownies she looked over the edge of town and sometimes further across the multiverse. From this spot she could peek into a life not pinned by predictability. She saw another version of herself there. She watched her navigate projects, teams, departments, organizations. Saw her take out the trash in her underwear, fight when angered, cry openly in public—never deterred by the watchful eyes about. Nor those above or within.]
Though our hearts break, we know she’s at peace [nothing]. [She spent her life as an apparition: a silent translucent figment of our imaginations. This manifestation is her final attempt at being rendered visible, if only just once.
She leaves behind the dusty duffle bag she packed on graduation day and an unused bus ticket that once smelled of mountain snow, and spring valleys, and the sweat of skyscrapers on a hot summer day, but now only smells of rot.]
As the political and cultural capital of Denmark, Copenhagen enjoys a vaunted status. Founded some 1,000 years ago by the Vikings, it has grown to become one of the most important cities in Europe. With its 650,000 + residents it is the second largest in Scandinavia, behind only Stockholm (when you include Greater Copenhagen in the population tally, the figure balloons to over 1.4 million). Like many majestic old cities, it’s a palimpsest. In 1728 and 1795 the city went up in flames, and it was bombed by the British in 1807 during the Battle of Copenhagen; after each conflagration it arose from the ashes like a Phoenix. Thanks to such rebirths, you can walk through nearly any section of Copenhagen and find myriad architectural styles. It’s a vibrant place, bright and colorful. One of the distinct features of the city can be found capped on its many buildings: green copper roofs that glint in the sunlight.
It’s very much a city of writers, too. Søren Kierkegaard comes to mind. His contemporary Hans Christian Andersen wasn’t born or raised here, but he certainly became famous in Copenhagen, as did one of Denmark’s most important 20th century poets: Inger Christensen. Karen Blixen spent much of her life living on her family’s estate just a few kilometers north of Copenhagen, in Rungsted. Today, scores of writers (and translators) call Copenhagen home, including, among many others, Pia Tafdrup, Christian Jungersen, and Olga Ravn.
After more than two decades of translating Danish novels and writing ultimately failed manuscripts, my debut, The Book of Losman, finally publishes this week (SFWP). It’s about a literary translator with Tourette Syndrome who gets involved in an experimental drug study in the hopes of finding a cure for his condition. The novel’s setting, Copenhagen, was purposeful. In addition to being an amazing city where a Danish translator can ply his trade, Copenhagen is also home to a number of pharmaceutical giants. The Book of Losman is fiction, but I liked the idea that scores of scientists are at work in Copenhagen.
In my reading list, I explore recent novels and memoirs set in Greater Copenhagen that reveal parts of the city you won’t find in any guidebook.
By now, American readers surely recognize the name Dorthe Nors, the Man Booker International Prize-nominated author of Mirror, Shoulder, Signal(also translated by Hoekstra) and several other important books published by Graywolf. So Much for That Winter consists of two experimental novellas. The first, “Minna Needs Rehearsal Space,” explores the life of the eponymous protagonist, a down on her luck composer, via simple declarative sentences:
“Minna hasn’t been out of her apartment in three days.
Minna has sent a lot of texts
Minna has asked Lars to tell her what was supposed to be
In front of But.
Lars doesn’t reply.”
And so on. It’s a remarkable novella, one that proves you don’t need to pile on descriptions to build a compelling narrative. The second novella, “Days,” is built as a series of daily journal entries, lists. The narrator simply tells us what she did each day. The result is an arresting story that’s thematically linked to “Minna” in that it’s about a woman going through emotional turbulence. Both novellas are beautifully translated by Misha Hoekstra.
Although Helle Helle is less a household name in the United States than Dorthe Nors, she’s a prolific, award-winning writer in Denmark with a singular vision. This Should be Written in Present Tense is about a young woman, Dorte, who lives in the southern Zealand railway town of Glumsø but is ostensibly a student in literature at the University of Copenhagen. Commuting back and forth between the two places, she is adrift, living a life she can’t quite settle into. Instead of going to classes, Dorte spends much of her time drinking coffee, riding the train, and having random sexual encounters. Helle Helle is a master of understatement. This Should be Written in Present Tense favors a narrative style in which the protagonist glides along passively. Things often seem to happen to her—though this never feels labored. As with her previous books, Helle Helle shines a subtle light on hidden ridges below the surface of her protagonist’s life. And with her clean, minimalist prose that keeps the reader at a slight emotional remove, as though viewing Dorte through a thin film, Helle’s style and register feel wholly original. It’s as though Dorte is a kind of Everywoman for the modern age. The translator is Martin Aitken, whose work is always top notch.
American Thomas E. Kennedy was a prolific writer and critic of more than 30 books. He was also a mainstay on the Copenhagen literary scene. Beginning in 2010 with the publication of In the Company of Angels and concluding with Beneath the Neon Egg in 2014, Kennedy finally received the broader recognition he deserved when Bloomsbury published his Copenhagen Quartet—four novels that read like a love song for Kennedy’s beloved adopted city, where he spent much of his adult life (he passed away in 2021). In the third novel of the quartet, middle-aged Kerrigan is a surly but lovable curmudgeon who’s writing a book: a guidebook to Copenhagen’s 1,525 serving houses (a term Kennedy employs in the novel to denote bars, taverns, and pubs; later, it even became the name of the publisher he co-founded, Serving House Books). Early in the novel, we learn that Kerrigan’s younger wife has left him and taken their daughter with her; we understand his desire to write this book is more about drinking (and numbing the pain of loss) than writing. But Kennedy doesn’t dwell in darkness. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kerrigan in Copenhagen reads like a fine, comic (and literary) stroll through the recesses of a great European capital.
When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back was longlisted for the National Book Award, and it’s easy to see why. With Aidt’s characteristic lyricism, which blends poetry and prose and literary allusions in startling and fresh ways—in an exemplary translation by Denise Newman—this book explores the harsh reality a mother and her family face when a child is suddenly taken from them. With a masterful use of repetition that periodically returns readers to key moments in the timeline of her son Carl’s death, Naja Marie Aidt pulls no punches here. This is a brutally vulnerable and honest book, engrossing and powerful. Though it’s not for the faint of heart, it is a book that reveals Aidt’s crushing sorrow—and rewards us, yes, rewards us—by dropping us deep into the great depths of her tragic experience and impelling us to feel, viscerally, our shared humanity. Nobody wants to experience such loss, such pain, not even second hand. But Naja Marie Aidt is an authoritative guide through the darkest hours of her life following Carl’s death. That loss may be the instigator of the story, but the overwhelming emotion one feels is Aidt’s unassailable love for her beautiful boy, whose life ended all too soon.
Tove Ditlevsen was a prolific Danish poet and writer whose work is seeing a resurgence thanks to the 2021 publication of The Copenhagen Trilogy, which was recently ranked as #71 of the best books of the century by the New York Times. Ditlevsen’s life was, in many ways, a sorrowful one—as The Copenhagen Trilogy illustrates. In these three chronologically-arranged memoirs, Ditlevsen narrates the story of her life from her childhood until her mid-thirties, by which time she’d already been divorced three times. Born to working class parents in Copenhagen, her life was one of struggle and strife from the start, and throughout her career she mined her experiences to write books in multiple genres. The trilogy culminates in one of the very best memoirs I’ve ever read on the subject of addiction—from the point of view of a woman whose drug use was deliberately enabled by her mentally unstable third husband. The translation across the three books is seamless, with both Tiinna Nuunally (Childhood and Youth) and Michael Favala Goldman (Dependency) doing a fantastic job recreating Ditlevsen’s vivid voice in English. Ditlevsen’s oeuvre includes more than three dozen books, very few of which have been translated into English. Let’s hope that changes soon.
Civil Twilightby Simon Fruelund; translated by K.E. Semmel
Spuyten Duyvil reissued in August my translation of Simon Fruelund’s short novel Civil Twilight. This novel takes place entirely on a fictionalized suburban Copenhagen street, Dante’s Allé. Fans of Richard Linklater’s 1990 film Slacker will especially appreciate this novel. The narrative moves down the street, from house to house, character to character, giving readers brief glimpses into the many lives and families who live there. When it was originally published in Denmark in 2006, the book was a bestseller—a fact that may seem remarkable today since nothing much actually “happens” in the story, though associations are made between the many characters that turn the narrative into a kind of puzzle readers can piece together, a game of connect the dots. Simon Fruelund is a minimalist with a keen sense of humor, and even though it may seem that not much is happening, there’s a great deal of activity burbling underneath the surface. Perhaps ironically given the way Fruelund hops from character to character, Civil Twilight is one of those splice of life novels that reveals the rich social complexity of Danish culture in a globalized community.
Soula Emmanuel’s Wild Geese is a terrific debut novel, and it won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for best transgender fiction. Protagonist Phoebe is thirty years old and, like the author, hails from Dublin. She’s a PhD student in Lund, Sweden and living a solitary life across the sound in Copenhagen. She is trying to find her way in life, discover herself. Born and raised as a boy, Phoebe is three years into her gender transition. When Grace, an ex-girlfriend from her college days, appears at her apartment door in Copenhagen, it sets the stage for the formation of a tender, intricate, and compelling friendship that will develop over the course of the novel—one that includes a significant romantic evening when the two explore, awkwardly at first, their bodies. What begins as a novel about a lonely young woman fashioning a new life for herself in a foreign city becomes, instead, a novel about the intimacy of female relationships. Phoebe and Grace crack open the darkest parts of themselves and share these parts with the other. This is a novel deeply rooted in the coming-of-age tradition, even as it pries that tradition apart. Soula Emmanuel writes with verve, poise, and warmth, occasionally even flourishing a welcome and lively philosophical spirit.
In Clement Goldberg’s madcap and campy debut novel, cats, plants, alien intelligences, and a group of human misfits conspire to make us all freer and more joyfully connected. New Mistakes offers a hilarious, surreal, and sexy new vision of queer collectivity—one that involves the living earth and intelligences from beyond—while a cast of mundane and zany antagonists, ranging from a government intelligence agency to protestors against cat psychics to the plain old decentralized corporate defanging machine, works to shut it all down.
It’s rare that I read a book that makes me laugh so hard and at the same time feel as though the horizon of queerness is just a little closer. The novel teems with wordplay and kinky sex, but harbors an undercurrent of social and ecological collapse.
The work builds thematically and aesthetically on Goldberg’s body of film and animation work, which includes a lemur-based queer evolutionary/extinction mythology in Our Future Ends, stop-motion mushrooms who conspire to take over the earth in The Deer Inbetween, and a wild multi-director adaptation of Michelle Tea’s classic lesbian novel Valencia.
New Mistakes is the first single-authored book from Michelle Tea’s Dopamine Press. It follows Dopamine’s first book, Sluts: Anthology, a multi-authored collection packed with queer writers celebrating pleasure, connection, and life. Michelle handed me a New Mistakes galley at a Dopamine Press reading, a few nights into my return to LA after two years on academic exile to Ohio. The combination of Sluts and New Mistakes offered me a space in which to land and from which to think—together, they announce Dopamine Press as a queer refuge, a cauldron of life-giving queer magic, and a preservation of the ways in which queer artmaking creates a web of influence where we all just keep giving birth to each other.
As a queer writer who also channels earth voices in a campy way, and who is always on the hunt for fellow horny and funny queer utopians, I knew I had to talk to Goldberg. Luckily for me, they were already a fan of my book Sarahland, and we moved easily into creative interchange, swapping books and films and ideas—in the two months since Michelle gave me their novel, we’ve been talking. Here is a bit of our exchange.
Sam Cohen: I think we’ve both been compelled by the overlap in our work, so maybe we can start with that. I feel like we’re both giving voice to the earth in a campy way, and then also just, like, being funny and gay and referential and, even a little stupid sometimes.
Clement Goldberg: Yeah. I really like stuff that’s extremely dumb, but so brilliant. I think it’s a very queer art that does that.
SC: The premise of New Mistakes is maybe that plants, cats, and aliens are at the fore of revolution via communicating to human misfits. It is really absurd and great and I’m curious where you started with the project, with that premise or somewhere else. What emerged and surprised you as you wrote?
CG: So much of the book came out of walking up the hill during the pandemic lockdown, in the neighborhood I live in. The plants here are very chatty, and the animals. Specifically, I was having a relationship with a particular tree, and then one day there was a cat who seemed lost and was asking for help. This other time I saw a giant light in the sky, and I thought, Oh! This is it! They’re here. This is the moment. I felt all of these chemicals in my body as I prepared. I was like, am I ready, or am I scared? Like, do I want to go with them? What’s gonna happen? And then I figured out it was a comet.
So, all of that gestated, and was in the background of developing these human characters who foreground the narrative.
SC: So I think that we talked about—
CG: Is nature conspiring towards revolution? Is that the talk that’s in the air?
I feel like some of the trees have had it. They’re thirsty. There’s a drought. The soil is falling off the hill. They keep building fences and developing over here, and the coyotes are like, why are we the bad guys?
SC: I really love that your book allows plants to be pissed. I just like that you allow the non-human world to be, like—
CG: Annoyed with a leaf blower?
SC: Yeah! Salty and bitchy some of the time. There’s trees with complex feelings and hedges with petty feelings and it’s just really great. I also wanted to say that I lived here, on the hill you live on, where New Mistakes is set, when I wrote Sarahland. “Becoming Trees” is set in my old backyard here. So I think there is a kind of magic in the flora and fauna on this hill that we’re both tapping into.
CG: I felt very connected to your book when I read it. And I read it while I was living here. So it felt folded into the writing.
SC: The chattiness is real.
CG: It’s a very chatty neighborhood. But you never saw a UFO-type orb or comet? Have you ever had any kind of experience like that where you’re like, oh my God, it’s happening, am I ready?
SC: I think that I have not. I do think that when I first came to LA, that there was this really expansive sense of what is possible. I think people make fun of LA people for believing in astrology and—
CG: Astrology’s real.
SC: Yeah, I know, but astrology feels more real here. The possible is very expanded here, in terms of the social and being a city of dreams or whatever but also in terms of this very felt connection to the universe and the nonhuman world. But no. I haven’t had that with UFOs because I see all kinds of weird shit in the sky and it’s like, is it drones? Like, who knows what people are putting up there.
CG: Trash and leaving it up there. It’s rude.
SC: On the note of expanding the possible, each of your character’s arcs opens up possibilities for existing in the world more freely and playfully, with more generosity and kindness. I’m wondering if that is something that you set out to do.
Nature operates on desire. Horniness is what drives things to continue to sprout and flourish and connect and change form.
CG: When I set out writing, I thought the book was about people being suddenly set apart and how they were going to navigate that. And then I think once I got deeper in and I was thinking about the book being called New Mistakes, I realized that everybody at the top is coming from a place of making their old mistakes over and over again and each character is coming to a point where they’re ready to make new mistakes. Maybe they come to more liberatory, playful responses because the situation itself is sort of absurd.
SC: When I say that I mean you have a dyke in her sixties who gets to do drugs and party and have fun and have hot sex. You have a 25-year-old girl who is very aware of and in charge of her sexual power, and very pleasure-oriented. You have a failed academic who reroutes his life in order to sit in a roundabout chasing UFOs and everyone’s fine and together and connected. I think your characters are also just really kind to each other. I think it feels rare that fiction shows us a more playful, hot, loving, cool way to live.
CG: I know a kind and generous queer world of artists. I adore a lot of the people around me and I’m inspired by those people. Maybe having a book that’s not talking about childhood or the birth family gave room to be more focused on what it has been like to be a queer person. I care about queer culture and representing the world I inhabit, but also at the same time, I was never a Julia, who’s the 25-year-old, but she just seemed like a really fun protagonist to give everybody an opportunity to inhabit. I liked the idea of Julia as the everyman.
SC: Why do you see her as the everyman?
CG: I don’t think there is a universal person but, if there is, it’s some white man, you know? If we take that away and then we give everybody the opportunity to make Julia the everyman, it’s a fun new place to go, which feels different than what one would expect. It’s usually not a she, she’s usually not 25. I would want anybody with any identity and any location to be able to see the world through her eyes and have an experience within that container. And I just adore femmes and femme culture, and why not center a book with a fun person that you can move through the world with?
SC: You have this great line spoken by Julia’s ex-girlfriend Reggie, who says that she “just wanted to get plowed in a sundress like everybody else.” I love that language, which makes everybody be wearing a sundress. It’s no weirder than the ways we’re supposed to understand masculine language as neutral, but just felt so fun and freeing.
Okay I also want to ask you, on the theme of getting plowed in a sundress: This is one of the most unabashedly horny books in American letters. But it’s also very much a book about multi-species revolution and how to exist at the end of the world together. And I am just curious if you see a relationship between multi-species justice and being a horny slut.
CG: I think that nature operates on desire. I think that horniness is what drives things to continue to sprout and flourish and connect and change form. Colonization has killed off the vibrancy of the planet, and it’s killed off cultures that regarded nature in high esteem and instead it holds up the human animal in a way that leads to this man-versus-nature idea. But so then I’m on nature’s team, I’m, like, a species traitor. I’m in cahoots with the animals and the plants, and then if there is some kind of extraterrestrial force that has some good ideas, I’m interested in hearing them.
My time on this planet has basically been the arc of destruction and depletion of the natural world. You look at, like, the World Wildlife fund or these other data collecting things, and it’s like, I enter the story, and then everything goes downhill as far as how much of the natural world is left. Wildness has been killed off at every turn, so a lot of my work looks at wildness and wilderness and the non-human. And so maybe somehow horny sluts are therein. I think it’s queerness.
I think a lot about extinction and the disappearance of things. And it’s just a really sad part of the story. And then I think horny sluts are, like, happy. So I think it is a way to be joyful and still look at the decline of the natural world. Maybe my last project had lemurs and this one has horny sluts.
SC: Well, it has a lot of things. It has cat psychics and cats. A lot of cats.
A really cool tree. A bitchy hedge. In addition to being very horny and very revolutionary, this book is very funny. And I have a question about that, which is: this novel doesn’t shy away from acknowledging the dystopia of environmental destruction and crumbling institutions, wealth, hierarchy, and governmental control. Yet it’s also very hilarious and fun. Do you have advice for accessing humor in these times or insight about how humor works in apocalyptic fiction?
CG: I hesitate to call any of the projects that I’ve done apocalyptic. I just think it’s what’s happening.
SC: Well, I would say we’re living in apocalyptic times. Societal collapse. Environmental collapse. I’m using apocalypse as a shorthand for that, not something imaginary or, like, biblical.
CG: I just feel really sad. I can’t even watch a happy nature documentary anymore. I feel devastated. And I don’t function well looking head on to, you know, a polar bear standing on, like, an ice cube because the whole glacier melted. These things make me want to curl up under my desk or my bed and never come out. I have found that being able to engage with these horrors—internalizing them, processing them—requires a sense of humor. Like, gallows humor. I think it’s a survival skill that I’ve gotten from people within queer community and a family that’s been through a genocide.
Gallows humor is a survival skill that I’ve gotten from people within queer community and a family that’s been through a genocide.
I think writing this book was really about creating something fun and, like, a place to go. I find I have a higher threshold for holding horrific things and circumstances if there’s some humor with the heaviness.
I feel like you do that in your work, too. I find your work very funny, and I feel like maybe there’s characters in pain or going through painful circumstances, but then you use humor to where it feels like a fun story and refuge. It feels almost candy-colored. There’s some kind of candy element to things that makes it so you can engage with heavier topics and emotional landscapes.
SC: Your book has a lot of collaborative energy in it, including direct references to living queer artists. We see the ecosexuals, and I think it’s hard not to think about Catherine Opie when we read about the photographer/professor character. How did you decide to include real queer artists in your fiction?
CG: Queer culture is really important to me and I have this feeling of wanting to stockpile it. It’s an homage to all these people who, like, I’m here because they are here, and then there’s also people that were here that are no longer here. I carry all of these people with me. I don’t see myself as separate or able to exist and work not in relation.
I also just like stuff that rubs up against reality. I like a blend of fiction and the real world and I take a lot of inspiration from queer artists and then want to play with that and note it and let it be within the story.
SC: I read this back to back with Miranda July’s All Fours, and it made me feel like we were entering an era of almost a new ethic of listening to desire or following the body. Both books made me feel like following desire was the way to move. Is that something you’re wanting to give?
CG: As someone who is progressively becoming more embodied from a place of having been disembodied, I think it’s a good time, and I want to give people a good time. I feel like that’s been really hard and getting harder, and so maybe offering a rich, desirous, queer fun romp felt like something that was a gift to give. I wanted it to be a kind of a queer refuge and a very vibrant, good time.
In a way, Michelle Tea commissioned the book. She loved the pilot I’d written and encouraged me to write it and said that she would help me get it published. We didn’t know then that she was starting a press. I love her work, and we’ve been long-time collaborators, and her work is really fun and funny and full of sex. A lot of the book was written to make Michelle Tea laugh. And since, in a way, she was the person that I was writing to, the book is a conversation I’m having with her, but one I wanted to share with everyone.
I also feel excited about Dopamine Press and about the Sluts anthology being the first thing that hit the world from this place. I feel like that anthology is doing something really fun and important and collective and, like, cool for everyone. So maybe I would include Sluts in the pantheon of All Fours.
SC: I want to confirm that your book is a refuge and a gift. I know that you’re coming from a particular place of getting in your body, but I think, too, about all of the ways that the state and its institutions are constantly telling us not to be in our bodies, not to listen to our bodies, that our desires are bad and we have to shut them down, so it feels great that there is so much permission given to listen to the body in all of these works.
I will also include Sluts in the pantheon in a personal way because I think that I am very much having a Sluts summer. I left this academic institution in Ohio and went immediately into the Sluts tour, and it felt so life-giving.
I, too, would not have written that piece without Michelle’s invitation. I was so jazzed that Michelle Tea asked me to be in Sluts and I was really taken with the earliest description of the press, which was like unvarnished stories of queer lives. Then I was in Europe and my reasons for going there fell apart and I just ended up in Vienna having this wild affair with a past lover. There was a moment when I was riding on the back of this person’s bike where I was like, oh, this is the piece for the anthology.
It felt like we could have, like, this moment outside time, because of queerness and I thought, this is it, my story of unvarnished queer life. So Michelle Tea is definitely creating magic invitations that plant seeds for this very pleasureful work to be made.
I wrote in my Sluts piece that riding on the back of the motorcycle was the meaning of life, and then when I was on the Sluts tour I was like, Oh, this is the meaning of life, too. Just, being able to be together as queer writers and readers, to make art and live to see that art birth other art.
CG: Yeah, there’s no better feeling than being with queer artists and writers and making work and sharing work and experiencing work from each other. It’s really my favorite thing about existence. Most of my work is in service to that and in relation to it and in awe of it.
As much as I pushed the project forward by myself, you reach a certain point in writing where other people are involved, and then it is a collaborative art form, you know? It returns to the collaborative queer realms of multispecies revolution and horny sluttery.
I hope someone will give New Mistakes to Chappell Roan so that I can give back a gift to the summer spell that she offered to me and to so many of us.
In 1993, I published my first decent story in a literary journal and a few months later received a letter from an agent whose name I recognized. I’d written short stories in college classes, sent them off, and typically the only thing that came back was a rejection, housed in the self-addressed-stamped envelope I’d sent with the story, my own handwriting preparing me for the paper inside that said thanks, no or we liked this, but.
The agent letter was a surprise, and I was buoyed by it for days. The letter went something like this, “I enjoyed your short story. I’d be interested in seeing more of your work. Do you have a novel?” It felt great to be approached. It was flattering. But the answer was no: I didn’t have a novel.
A few years later, I received another agent letter after another story publication. A few years after that, an email. The notes all said some version of “I liked your short story. But do you have a novel?”
I’d heard from my graduate school creative writing teachers, who taught us only to read and write short stories, that a fiction writer’s final form was novelist, or at least, they said, that was the publishing industry’s core belief. The books that sold well, the books editors at big publishing houses wanted to acquire, were novels. Collections could be published, sure, but they were afterthoughts or add-ons.
Whenever it came up, the “do you have a novel” question made me a little indignant. I thought it was like telling someone to use their eyes for eating. Novels use words and sentences, obviously, just like short stories, but they require a different skillset, as well as a lot of attributes, like patience and a good memory and discipline, that I—first as a 20-something who just wanted to write poem fragments on my forearms and listen to Pavement, and later as a parent, shellacked with two smallish kids and a full-time job—did not have. If I could write even a third of a short story over a few weeks, it felt like a win.
The notes all said some version of “I liked your short story. But do you have a novel?”
When my kids were more self-sufficient and I found myself with actual pockets of time to write and submit, I started getting wildly, embarrassingly jealous of every Publisher’s Marketplace announcement I saw. More egalitarian and generous writers would Tweet about how “there’s enough success for everyone, there’s plenty to go around,” but I, then in my 40s, felt like maybe there wasn’t. Maybe short story writers, all of us vying to win the same few small-press collection contests that ran each year, were doomed to not have book deals. I decided to try to feel content about publishing individual stories in literary magazines and pushed aside the idea of a book.
The next time an agent emailed me was 2020, and it was the same line as ever. “Do you have a novel?” No. “I really cannot sell a collection on its own.” Okay, I understand. “Do you plan to write a novel?” I guess. Maybe?
I signed with the agent, which was a leap of faith more for her than for me. I started trying to expand a short story I’d published, to build it somehow into a novel. In most ways, it was like trying to make a bathmat work as a rug in a room the size of a ballroom. Still, I wrote early in the morning, on weekend days, while waiting for doctor’s appointments, on all-hands meetings. I remember even feeling a little bit hopeful, like, “Maybe I’m doing it, maybe I’m really writing a novel, finally,” like this magic land, unenterable for twenty plus years, was opening to me.
In the end, my draft was more of a loose assemblage of stories. The plottier parts that lurched each chapter forward, the parts that made it a possible novel, weren’t working. When I expressed self-doubt to my agent, she asked me, more than once, if this was “the book [I wanted] to send into the world,” which felt pretty jagged. I remember thinking, Well, the book I want to send into the world is my short story collection. Maybe I even said it out loud.
We went “on sub,” which is the silly sport-game-sounding name for flinging your book out to a selected group of editors, followed by the brutal process of checking email all the time, being mad at anyone who emails you who isn’t your agent, and (in my case) almost always getting bad news. We sent the book out to 18 editors, and over the course of a few months, we got many nice rejections, paragraph-length notes my agent told me were encouraging and that I should feel good about, and even one call with an editor who liked the book that ultimately resulted in months of ghosting and no book deal.
The process was flattening. People wanted “propulsion,” and I was focused on sentences and moments. I liked the quiet pockets I was able to build into short stories but that felt harder to make work in a novel.
In a stupid fit of “now what?” I frantically, in a few months, wrote a whole other novel. The agent hated it, which stung, but it was likely hate-worthy.
I liked the quiet pockets I was able to build into short stories but that felt harder to make work in a novel.
How did I spend the pandemic? I speed-wrote two novels, only to realize I am not a novelist, or at least not yet, and market trends, traditional publishing’s seeming demands for books that rapid-cycled you from beginning to end in one sitting, weren’t going to make me one.
In summer 2022, I parted ways amicably with my agent and returned to story writing. She told me if I started working on another novel project, she’d take a look. I didn’t fault her. Agents have been told collections don’t sell. So many of them have to deal with the industry realities of looking for plot-heavy books. This isn’t to say there aren’t brilliant and successful poetic, experimental, quiet novels – there obviously are. But if you’ve queried an agent lately, you know: propulsion and plot are king.
I disassembled the second novel draft and built some short stories from the parts, then wrote some new stories, too. I understood stories and loved how within one I could focus intensely, think about every word, and I could experiment without worrying about staying on a path of forward momentum. I revamped my short story collection, sandwiched in some new stories, moved things around, took out the flash fiction.
This, I thought, feels like the book I want to send out into the world.
I submitted it to the same few indie presses and university contests where I’d sent earlier versions of a collection and had been rejected more than once. At this point, only a few of the stories were the same. What the hell, I thought. I was 54 and had gotten my first “but do you have a novel?” agent letter thirty years earlier.
And then I waited. Items in my Submittable queue changed from Received to In Progress.
In August, I moved my daughter into her first dorm room in a tall building, and I thought, simplistically probably, about how the dorm, each floor, with each room another person, style, story, was a collection, and how so many things in the world were more an assemblage of disparate parts than a mellifluous whole. My daughter, who is also a writer, said it didn’t make sense for people to be so weird about short stories. Why was publishing so opposed to short fiction, when the world seemed to want and love short-form everything else?
In September, a few weeks after leaving my daughter in New York, in my haze of sadness that was like an anvil hitting me repeatedly and saying you fucking fool why did you help make a person who is designed to leave you, I got an email from one of the small presses. I saw the re: ____ subject line, and I braced myself for the rejection those emails usually are. Instead, it was a nice editor I’d corresponded with a few years before, telling me they wanted to publish my collection.
I was so numbed by life that month, by all the accumulative sadnesses of being 50-something in a whirlpool of life change, that I wasn’t sure how to feel. But when I stood up from my computer to walk around the neighborhood and look at all the familiar things, so many of which had years of memories attached to them, each their own little story, I let myself feel happy. This wasn’t the novel. It wasn’t the Big 5. But it felt truer to the writer I wanted to be.
Small presses, less beholden to concerns over big sales, are able to publishcollections and the kinds of books Big Publishing tells writers we shouldn’t bother making. For that, I’m grateful.
As is true of so many writers I know, some of my favorite texts are short stories. Each time I come upon a new collection in the library or in a bookstore, I get excited about the hive of situations and characters I’m about to dive into and the room for experimentation. It feels like so much possibility.
I remember hearing last year that a lot of traditionally published debut novels sell only in the hundreds of copies. The managing editor of the small press that accepted my collection told me something like, “During the life of the book, a good outcome would be selling 1000 copies.” A thousand sounded good. Better than the hundred of some novels. Big Fiction’s insistence on the novel as default is maybe a failure of marketing or the imagination about what a book can be and do.
Small presses are able to publish the kinds of books Big Publishing tells writers we shouldn’t bother making.
I’m trying again to write something that approaches a novel, but this time I’m letting myself lean into my tendencies and reminding myself that a novel does not require a traditional narrative arc, nor a set number of scenes and beats. So I’m trying a “novel in stories,” and I’m not writing it with some big splashy publication in mind. I’m writing it when and how I want to write it.
After an excerpt of the novel-in-stories project won an Honorable Mention in a contest, an agent I adore, a “dream agent,” messaged me and asked me if I had the full novel ready. I don’t, at least not yet. But when I do, I hope I’m able to pull together a whole made of small slices of the world pulsing together, a collection in its own way, that champions the short form while also feeling like a whole. To the industry, maybe it will even be considered a novel.
Is this just an essay about someone who wanted to and couldn’t sell a novel so now wants to champion the short story? Maybe a little. But, more, it’s about a circuitous path away from and back to the thing I actually enjoy writing, that the industry told me I shouldn’t do if I wanted to succeed.
The world has always been filled with mysteries. Where does the sun go at night? Why is there lightning during a storm? What happens when we die? The fun thing about humans is we can’t just let those mysteries go unsolved. The unknown is frightening, maybe even dangerous, and we live on a whole planet full of it. So we search for answers, and when we don’t know an answer, we have a habit of making one up. For millennia, we’ve been filling in the gaps in our knowledge with stories of gods and ghouls and the odd fairy thrown in for good measure.
Eventually, science overtook mythology and answers shifted from fantastical beings with quick tempers to planetary rotation and electric charges. But one subject still remains wrapped in mystery and mystique: Death.
Every culture in every era throughout history has had their own explanations for what happens after we die, and modern beliefs remain just as varied. But whether we have pearly gates or hungry worms to look forward to, the one certainty is we’ll all find out in the end. Until then, all we have are stories.
When I wrote my debut novel, A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer, I think I was partly trying to answer the question for myself. But, as a neurotic millennial exploring the ultimate scary unknown, the only way I could even think to approach the subject was through humor. So the last great mystery, death, became a mundane office job. Hey, if death is the great equalizer then surely the second greatest involves cubicles and paperwork.
Of course, for my protagonist, modern-day corporate grim reaper Kathy Valence, the mystery of death is old news at this point. The bigger mystery is why her most recent soul pickup, Conner, is missing. And when she eventually tracks him down, why he swears someone at her company, S.C.Y.T.H.E., killed him.
Solving the mysteries of life against a backdrop of death, or in the face of other unknowns, is no easy feat. Thankfully for Kathy, she’s not the only one. Below are seven fun, innovative reads that really put some “life” into the afterlife.
Carriger’s steampunk take on the Victorian era is bursting at the seams with beings who could tell you a thing or two about death. In a world where vampires and werewolves are staples in polite society, protagonist Alexia Tarabotti finds herself lacking in the same supernatural spirit. Or, more specifically, lacking in a soul. This unusual affliction makes her an antidote for paranormal powers, which is a handy skill to have until it inadvertently leads to her very unceremoniously killing a vampire, which goes against all sense of propriety and etiquette. But someone or something else is harming high society vamps, on purpose no less, and Alexia teams up with a handsome werewolf government operative to solve the mystery of the disappearing immortals. This book is full of humor, intrigue, and Victorian manners, and introduces a one-of-a-kind world you’ll have to be unwillingly dragged out of.
Ghosts are not only real but deadly in this introduction to the Lockwood & Co series, which follows a trio of teen ghostbusters solving the mysteries of the dead to stay alive. This young adult novel follows Lucy Carlyle, a talented agent trained to fight against “The Problem,” an epidemic of ghosts appearing throughout England. Children and teens, being the only age groups actually able to see or otherwise sense ghosts, play an important role in keeping their communities safe, and the Psychic Detective Agency Lucy joins is set up for the same purpose, only this one is run by her young contemporary, the charismatic Antony Lockwood. Together with the brains of the operation, George, the team is charged with clearing the most haunted house in England, but there’s more to this haunting than ghouls. The world Stroud creates is so grounded in reality, and so intricately constructed, that you can’t help but expect to find a Visitor glowing in the streetlights outside your window.
If we were to play a game of “Spot the Difference” with this list, you wouldn’t be wrong for picking this option. Dirk Gently isn’t a paranormal mystery in the traditional sense. But then, if you’re familiar with the off-the-wall writing of Douglas Adams, I’m sure you know “traditional” isn’t an adjective you’d find in the same universe as most of his work. Dirk Gently is what the love child of Doctor Who and Monty Python would look like, only somehow more absurd. The plot can only properly be explained in the book itself, but suffice it to say there is murder, time travel, and a horse stuck in the bathroom. Everything is connected, but the how and the why of it can only be untangled by someone with a name like Dirk Gently.
It takes a pretty special detective to solve their own attempted murder—twice. After being strangled in an alleyway in modern-day Edinburgh, Scotland, Detective Mallory wakes up in the body of a Victorian maid who’d had the very same rope around her neck 150 years earlier. Now Mallory gets to put her 21st-century knowledge to the test and help her cute undertaker boss figure out who keeps trying to kill her across lifetimes. This book struck the perfect balance between pithy, macabre, and supernatural to keep me hooked (though it certainly didn’t hurt that I got to read it while traveling through Edinburgh myself, thankfully with no ropes involved).
It’s one thing to be charged with solving a mystery as an amateur sleuth, but quite another when you wake up each morning as a different amateur sleuth, on a day that keeps repeating itself. For Turton’s protagonist, Aiden, this is really just the beginning of his problems. One thing he knows for certain is that Evelyn Hardcastle, daughter of the house he finds himself staying at, will be shot dead at the ball that night—and every night until he discovers her killer. But while a classic detective would interrogate the suspects, Aiden finds himself inhabiting their bodies each in turn, going through their motions on the day of the murder and putting the pieces together as he goes. This is such an inventive take on the genre and is executed to perfection.
The Restorer by Amanda Stevens
Set against the lush backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, Amelia Gray is a cemetery restorer who can see ghosts. This unwanted—and unfortunately un-returnable—gift comes in handy when a woman’s body turns up on her job site. Amelia’s knowledge of graves, and their residents, makes her an ideal consultant for the detective on the case. But communing with the dead could mean risking her life. I devoured this series like chips back when I first discovered it a decade ago, and sometimes I still find myself tempted to go back for another bite.
Set in 1920s England, The Haunting of Maddy Clare follows impoverished young woman named Sarah Piper who takes a job assisting a ghost hunting team. Together they investigate a barn supposedly haunted by the ghost of a young girl who took her own life there. Unfortunately for Sarah, the ghost of Maddy Clare is not only real but she hates men, leaving Sarah to take on more than she bargained for. This is a rich story full of scares, mystery, and just the right amount of romance to help keep the nightmares at bay.
When people strive for a Dickie Greenleaf summer—whether wearing bowler shirts, behaving petulantly, or just generally being in Italy—I always want to ask, do they remember how that ended for him?
In Craig Willse’s debut novel, Providence, Dickie’s demise is part of the canon. The noveltells the story of Mark, a young professor at an elite college in a small town in Ohio. Mark exhumes a body of research on gay murderers in order to interpret cultural discourse around sexuality. When he takes a shine to one of his students, the precocious Tyler, he quickly unravels in Tyler’s world. Providence is a gripping page-turner, tracking a person’s descent through obsession, addiction, and the deception he long studied from a distance. This propulsive novel examines how a person can learn to negotiate the pressures of the world around him and how those maneuvers can lead him into his darkest hours.
We met over Zoom to discuss his novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, gay murderers, and the trauma plot.
Michael Colbert: The novel opens in Mark’s classroom with a discussion on The Talented Mr. Ripley. I’m such a Ripley head—I love the movie, book, all of it. Can you speak to the genesis of your interest in Mark’s research subject, cultural discourses on sexuality and crime?
Craig Willse: Yeah, that was actually a project I was working on in my early twenties and then put aside for two decades. When the story of Mark and Tyler came to me, the idea that Mark would be working on this project came soon after. There’s a scene when Mark is explaining his research to Tyler and tells him about Andrew Cunanan, who killed Gianni Versace. I grew up in Miami and was living there the summer Versace was murdered, and I was obsessed. I still have a box with all of the Miami Heralds during this massive manhunt. That kicked off for me this interest in how stories about gay murder get told and what they reflect about the period of time that that murder or crime takes place in.
Mark is parroting me in that conversation when he’s talking about the AIDS panic, immigrant panic, and the discourse about Cunanan’s illegible ethnicity—as if Cunanan was doing something wrong in not being able to be read clearly by people. That was the beginning of my interest in the topic, and then I spent a couple years doing research on murder. That’s also around the period of time when The Talented Mr. Ripley film came out. I didn’t read the novel until I was working on mine. It was obviously a real influence, not just on the story but how I was thinking about telling the story. It’s funny, when you sit down to write, there are things you know you’re going to do, and then there are all these influences that you’ve been carrying around.
MC: How does Mark’s relationship to the work and the discourse surrounding it influence his understanding of himself? Why is Mark the person to be researching this?
I grew up in Miami and was living there the summer Versace was murdered, and I was obsessed.
CW: That’s a good question. One of thethings that defines Mark is a feeling of himself as an outsider and of not belonging. He gives a guest lecture about his work, and he says that he was drawn to it because he’s reacting against a sort of happy, positive version of gay life that he’s seeing represented. He wanted to spend his time with the worst gays possible and reject this idea of “gay is good” or pressure to tell only positive stories about gay people. I think all of that is true, but I think beneath all of that is his own sense of himself as being out of place, maybe out of time, of not fitting in. He is drawn to people who embrace that. At the same time, he gravitates towards people who seem to have found their place in the world and feel quite comfortable in it, which is his interpretation of Tyler. Maybe those are two sides of the same thing—people who either fit in or don’t but one way or the other really feel like themselves. I think Mark really struggles to feel like himself, or to figure out who he is.
MC: I want to discuss the two sides of that discourse: the good gay couple and the “rapacious gay man preys on innocent child.” How were you interested in situating the novel inside of the larger narrative, especially where the predation narrative is gaining traction among certain circles?
CW: One of the things the book is trying to explore is the difference between power as it actually exists and operates in the world, and our feelings of being powerful or being powerless, and the ways those things do and don’t correspond with each other. I think there’s something missing sometimes from public discourse around sex and power. At a party, Safie—Mark’s best friend at work—says if there’s sex, there’s power. I think Mark feels very powerless, and he feels completely overpowered by his desire for Tyler. I think he knows this isn’t true at times, but he feels very much that he’s under Tyler’s control. Of course, he isn’t—Mark’s an adult; he’s making his own choices—but I think that feeling of being completely overwhelmed by desire—by something that feels unreachable, unattainable, and also incomprehensible—deepens his feeling of Tyler’s hold over him.
I’m very concerned about the right wing, obviously, but I also have seen online so many young queer people reproducing the same discourse and the same interpretation of power and exploitation. The lack of awareness—that feeding this discourse is only going to hurt you—is really unsettling to me. I went to college in the 90s, and I was really influenced by 1980s and 1990s feminist writing and early queer studies around these questions of sex, porn, and power. Gayle Rubin has a really famous piece “Thinking Sex,” and she talks about the charmed circle. Behaviors can move in and out of the charmed circle of what’s acceptable. She looks at how some forms of monogamous gay sex can move into the charmed circle, but sex in the back alley stays out. That was very influential for me. When I see queer people enforcing the borders of the charmed circle and feeding these sex panics, it makes me very angry.
MC: Yeah, it’s coming from within and enforces a social conservativism.
CW: We bring really messy, conflicted selves into sex. That’s always true, and I think some of this discourse is rooted in a fantasy of sex with no conflict, with no friction, with no bad communication, with only transparency of desire on both sides. That’s a great idea, and I don’t think it exists in reality, so I don’t think we’re actually serving ourselves when we’re propping up that fantasy. I think we can have better, more fulfilling, and safer sexual experiences when we’re honest, actually, about the impossibility of ever fully being able to know, articulate, and actualize ourselves to ourselves. That’s what’s happening for Mark in this book, and so I think that’s what I’m nervous about with this flattened discourse about power, for the ways that it actually sets us up to not be able to care for ourselves in what are charged and confusing experiences and settings.
MC: The book also explores addiction—to substances, to social media, and to other people. How do they relate to each other through the novel?
CW: I had a whole academic career and spent years writing things where I was trying to convince people of what to think. With this book, I really wanted to raise questions, not give answers, and I wanted it to be a story that was engaging and moved quickly.
We live in an unbearable world, and I think probably all of us are seeking ways to get out of reality.
In terms of addiction, I think the way those things cohere for me in the story has to do with Mark’s early family experiences and his older sister, Cassie, and her life of drug use as a teenager. Mark learned a certain way to be in that family system that had to do with not being the focus of his parents’ attention because of how much attention and energy Cassie took up. The story that gets told in Mark’s family is about Mark not needing help; we get one of Mark’s rare flashes of anger about the idea that a child wouldn’t want help from his parents.
But of course, Mark also has gone on to build a life where he mostly doesn’t rely on other people, where he doesn’t believe people would choose him or want to help him. There’s a way that Mark has learned to be in the world that I think is one of the ripple effects of addiction, substance use, and the way it impacts groups and families in particular. Like Cassie, Mark, is seeking an escape from reality—through projection, and fantasy, and social media. For me, this is not a moral discourse. We live in an unbearable world, and I think probably all of us are seeking ways to get out of reality. I’ve tried in my own life to figure out ways to balance that. Certainly, characters in the book are not finding that balance.
MC: There are these really propulsive sections in the novel where I felt Mark’s desire. He longs for connection—he looks for it in the synagogue and at school. Do you understand his loneliness as a feature of his character in any other ways?
CW: Mark is somebody who has both been isolated and felt outside his entire life, and then there’s also the specificity of this moment in his life. He’s gotten this academic job that he’s worked so hard for, and he is wrestling with the disappointment of what it actually looks like. He’s in a small town in Ohio and feeling the drudgery of what this job is day to day. The book is set very intentionally in this period of time after 2008, when universities took advantage of the recession to do everything they wanted to do in terms of slashing permanent tenure track jobs, increasing people’s workloads, freezing or cutting salaries. This thing that at some point in time had been a wonderful job had been chipped away.
Although I want to say I did spend one year teaching in Ohio, and I actually really liked that job and made a lot of really good friends there. My experience of teaching in Ohio was more like Safie’s. I found a group of friends, and we figured out a way to be in this small, weird place together. There was something very bonding about being in the small town together, but Mark doesn’t have those. He already feels so alone and so isolated, so those circumstances that intensify it become pretty unbearable.
MC: We’ve talked about serial killers, obsession, loneliness, addiction, and also social conditions. This all makes me think of the famous trauma plot essay. How were thinking about the interaction between trauma, backstory, and broader social conditions? How do those things interact to exert pressure on a character?
CW: I’m not against happy endings, but I’m against a moral discourse that a happy ending is the best ending, or the kind of ending a writer should write, or a reader should want to read. I think the trauma plot discourse ends a conversation about desire before we can have it. I’m really interested in why we like and enjoy stories about horrible things happening to people. What is the pleasure that we get in reading about really painful, really horrifying things? I think that the trauma plot discourse falls into a moral discourse that suggests there’s something bad about the desire to read about traumatic events or to read something that has a traumatizing effect on the reader.
When I read the initial trauma plot piece, I understood that the writer was drawing our attention to something that can feel really forced, where it’s like there’s one thing that happened to the character in the past, and then maybe two thirds of the way through the story that one thing is revealed, and it’s supposed to explain everything. That does not feel to me like how the world works. Even if in our own lives we have one particular traumatic event, how we experience that event is also embedded in our whole lives.
Even if in our own lives we have one particular traumatic event, how we experience that event is also embedded in our whole lives.
In terms of crafting the story, that’s why I was trying to think about Mark’s family system, the stories his family told, and all the different ways he learned to be a person in that family system. I hope it doesn’t feel like it’s about one bad thing that happened to him in his childhood but more about the way he learned to be a person in relationship to his parents and his sister and the things he closed down, the possibilities for life that got shut down for him in those experiences. I hope that’s a little more nuanced and rich than what happens in a superhero movie where that one thing explains everything.
Also, with some of the online discourse around the trauma plot essay, I wonder about being in a moment of what some scholars call multicultural neoliberalism, where publishing has expanded a little bit in terms of publishing work by authors of color and queer writers. I wonder sometimes about the relationship between some of that discourse and this moment. It feels to me a little bit like the message is, “you can publish your stories, but don’t bum us out,” like tell us a story of immigrant triumph or of gay resolution. I think there’s something there.
Nora hated driving to begin with—especially highway driving, especially with a car full of teenagers—and that day it was raining. Not hard enough to delay the trip, just opaque gray skies and slick roads, a steady thrum of raindrops that made half the drivers slow down and the other half swerve impatiently. Already they’d passed two accidents. When she saw the first sign for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, she turned off her daughter Chloe’s atmospheric house music and announced everyone would need to stop talking until they’d safely made it to the other side.
“Seriously?” Chloe said from the passenger seat. “Just pull over. I’ll drive.”
In the rearview mirror she could see her son and his ex-girlfriend Ruth smiling at each other. Around her he almost seemed like himself again, which was such a gift that Nora didn’t care what Chloe had to say about the unfairness of Ruth being here. While Evan was withdrawing from his friends and ignoring his homework, Chloe was away at college. She didn’t see him lose weight or quit the lacrosse team or become afraid of sleep. At night he would start out in his own bed but by morning she’d find him in the living room with the lights on, his laptop open, a message from Netflix asking if he was still watching, and he’d missed enough assignments that he might not graduate from high school in June. She and Brendan had been so worried he would hurt himself.
“Your life shouldn’t be this stressful,” Chloe said. “You should get medicated.”
Nora started to say something but let it go. Chloe had a point—Nora’s anxiety had skyrocketed lately—whose hadn’t?—but this particular swinging bridge with its narrow lanes, no shoulders, and low railings made the gray water below them feel menacing. A digital sign at the entrance warned of a wind advisory.
“Okay, honey,” she said. “Thanks for your feedback.”
On sunny days, the bay sparkled, but today the water was a dull gray line on the edge of her vision that almost blended into the sky. At the height of the bridge, the wind shook the car. Nora kept her eyes on the road, made herself breathe, and eventually they were on the other side. She had a cramp in her right thigh and took one of the first exits, pulling into the parking lot of a local park with a playground, athletic fields, and a couple of picnic tables.
“I need to stretch my legs,” she said. “Does anyone need the curtain?”
It was May 2020, and the curtain was a hot pink privacy tent she’d found on Amazon along with a camping toilet and set of disposable bags—their strategy for traveling responsibly during a pandemic. The curtain and the trip had been her husband’s idea, but at the last minute, he’d had to cover for another oncologist and so now she was stuck with the driving and the pee bags and Chloe’s bad attitude. She didn’t blame him, though, if she’d known she’d be doing this alone, she would not have agreed to the trip. Plus, it was cooler than she’d expected it would be on Memorial Day Weekend.
“No thanks,” Chloe said. “I’ll pee in the woods.”
Nora, Ruth, and Evan huddled under a picnic shelter while Chloe walked toward a patch of skinny trees, pushing back brambles and vines. A couple of months ago, after William and Mary closed, she asked if her “friend” Emily could live with them in DC, and Nora and Brendan said no: He was working with immunosuppressed patients and needed to be careful, their DC townhouse was tiny, and Evan was still in the midst of a very hard time.
“Isn’t everyone?” Chloe had said and accused them of discriminating against Emily who identified as nonbinary.
“Give me a break,” Nora had said, but Chloe remained unconvinced.
Now Emily, who didn’t get along with their parents, was living in a hotel in Williamsburg and working at Food Lion. Because of their exposure at the grocery store, Brendan and Nora had said Emily was welcome on this vacation but would need to stay outdoors.
“It’s completely hypocritical,” Chloe had said. “But I can’t say I’m surprised. When it comes to me and Evan, you’ve never been fair.”
Brendan assured Nora that Chloe was manipulating them, saying the thing she knew would get to them, but Nora was having trouble letting this remark go. Until recently, Evan had always been the easier, happier child, and maybe, her relief in having one carefree, amiable child had made Chloe think she loved him more.
When Chloe came back to the parking lot, Ruth walked toward the woods, and Nora waved Chloe over to the picnic shelter. Her intention was to call a truce, to tell her daughter how much she loved her, but when Chloe arrived scrolling on her phone, half-heartedly scowling up at Nora, she snapped, “Can you put the phone away? I want to talk to you and Evan.” Chloe gave her a look but dropped the phone into her raincoat pocket. “Jesus, are you okay?”
“Let’s have a good trip,” she said. “Dad can’t be here, and it’s raining, but we’re still very lucky. We’re healthy and together. We have enough money to rent a vacation home—”
“Got it, Mom,” Chloe said. “I’m totally spoiled and ungrateful. I know.”
The rental home was a small tan two-story house with aqua trim a few rows back from an inlet of water. It had a weathered roof, a screened-in porch, and a loose railing on the front steps. When they stepped inside, it was obvious the house was used only as a rental property. Dated or cheap furniture, plastic dishes and Formica countertops, a giant amateur painting of a mallard that hung over the mantel. The whole place smelled damp.
“Not great,” she said. “But it’s what was available.”
Her kids ignored her, but Ruth hung back.
“I think it’s okay,” she said. “It’s close to the national park, right? That’s what we came to see anyway.”
She had always liked Ruth who was skinny and freckled, self-possessed and kind. Before she’d ever met the girl, back when she couldn’t have been more than about ten, she sent Nora and the rest of the school’s board of directors a thank you note for expanding tuition remission to include the school’s support staff like her mother who was an office administrator in the lower school. I do not know what the future holds the note read but I have a feeling this school will change my life.
Ruth was a fellow cross-country runner a year behind Evan and they’d dated throughout his sophomore and junior year. They went to prom together, lifted weights together, did homework side by side at Nora’s dining-room table. They seemed so effortlessly happy that Nora would not have been surprised if they’d stayed together in college and eventually gotten married. When they’d suddenly broken up this past fall, Nora had felt heartbroken and confused. A few months later, when Evan told them his English teacher, Ms. Caldwell, had been abusing him, the breakup made sense: Ruth was one more thing that woman had stolen from her child.
Evan was the one who’d asked to bring Ruth on the trip, but when Ruth said no, Nora, unbeknownst to her son or husband, drove to her apartment complex in Bethesda and convinced her to go. She was, she knew, no better than those high-strung hated-by-everyone Hollywood parents who had been involved in the college admissions scandal, a so-called Snowplow Parent, but what were you supposed to do when your child was drowning and you saw one small way you might help?
Ruth answered the door with a confused and panicked look on her face that only got worse once Nora explained why she’d come.
“I don’t know Ms. King,” she’d said and stepped out onto the sidewalk. “I’m still not over him dumping me, and my parents are kind of strict about sleepovers with boys.”
Ruth sounded certain, but she was wearing a Georgetown Baseball T-shirt that had once belonged to Evan, and she took this to be a sign that Ruth still cared.
“He’s struggling,” Nora said. “I’m not sure how much he’s told you.”
Ruth shook her head. She knew she had to tread lightly. Evan would not be happy she was here at all, but if she told Ruth anything about Ms. Caldwell, he wouldn’t forgive her.
“Everything that happened this year has hit him really hard,” she said carefully. “I know it’s not fair to ask, but he could use a friend.”
Ruth squinted at her and what seemed to be a look of realization passed over her face.
“I’ll ask my parents,” she said finally. “I’ll let you know what they say.”
Nora shook her head. “Just tell Evan. I wasn’t here.”
She promised Ruth’s parents the room she shared with Evan would have two single beds, but when they all went upstairs to check out the house, they discovered the room only had a king.
“I thought—” Ruth said, looking at the bed.
Nora knelt down on the carpet to look under the mattress. “We’ll fix it. I’m sure they come apart. See? It’s two single beds hooked together.”
They got the beds separated but after searching all the closets in the house, they couldn’t find any sheets. She suggested they put in a Target order, but the closest store was an hour away.
It wasn’t until she asked if Chloe would share a bed with her brother that Chloe admitted she’d brought an extra set of sheets for the following night when she and Emily would sleep on an air mattress inside a tent.
“Chloe!”
“What? I don’t want to sleep on dirty sheets.”
For dinner they ate the baked ziti she prepped ahead of time, whole wheat focaccia from an artisanal bakery, a Greek salad with kalamata olives and peperoncinis. For dessert she set out a plate of lemon bars, peanut butter blossoms, and those chewy chocolate caramel cookies she usually only baked at Christmas.
“Happy vacation,” she said, clinking her wine glass with their water glasses, hoping the cheerfulness in her voice didn’t sound desperate.
For months Evan had barely seemed to function. He played video games for hours, showered only when she nagged him. A couple weeks ago they’d had a meeting with his advising team who warned his admission to Northeastern could be revoked if his spring semester grades didn’t improve, and he’d barely seemed to register the news. A year ago, they would have taken away his phone and his computer, made him sit with them each night to do his homework, but punishing him for being depressed felt cruel.
As soon as the call ended, she told Evan that if he ended up taking a year off or starting at a community college, this was okay, and he’d made a scoffing sound and slammed his belongings into his backpack.
“Expect more from me,” he shouted. “Stop staring at me all the time like you feel sorry for me.”
Nora didn’t want to stare at Evan, but she wasn’t sure how else she was supposed to know how he was doing. When Chloe was upset, she was loud and emotional, but Evan retreated and said nothing.
He might never have told them about Ms. Caldwell in the first place except he’d wanted to drop his journalism class, and they wouldn’t let him. She’d been Chloe’s adviser and favorite teacher, a pretty thirty-something who’d published two books of poetry and who was known for her no-nonsense attitude and challenging classes. They’d thought Evan wanted an easier teacher, and he said they didn’t understand.
“It’s not about the work,” he said. “It’s her. She’s terrorizing me.”
“What?” Nora asked. “What are you talking about?”
“She’s a horrible person,” Evan said. “You have no idea what she’s capable of.”
Brendan heard something that Nora didn’t and put his hand on Evan’s knee. “Did something happen?” he asked. “Did she hurt you?”
Eventually the story came out in bits and pieces. One afternoon, in the journalism lab, Ms. Caldwell had started touching his shoulders. When things got “out of hand,” Evan froze. He’d never had a crush on her, he told them, but he hadn’t said no. Soon they were meeting more often, and she was telling him she loved him, that she wanted to leave her husband. When he told her he couldn’t do it anymore—he was having panic attacks—she told him he didn’t have a choice. Every day, often multiple times each day, Nora fantasized about drowning the woman or throwing her in front of a train.
Every day, often multiple times each day, Nora fantasized about drowning the woman or throwing her in front of a train.
Ms. Caldwell had been put on unpaid leave immediately and soon fired. The headmaster had also sent an email to the school and alumni list explaining she’d been fired for having a sexual relationship with a student, and the story had been picked up by the local media. It was unlikely she’d teach again, but because Evan had been eighteen, the police wouldn’t press charges.
After dinner, Ruth and Evan volunteered to do the dishes. Chloe disappeared upstairs, and Nora went to the bedroom just off the kitchen and started to unpack. Behind the door she could still hear Ruth and Evan talking about their classmates and the weirdness of Zoom school, which Tupperware containers and bowls they’d brought from home and which belonged to the rental. Then she heard Evan say in a low voice, “I was stupid to break up with you. It’s honestly the biggest mistake of my life.”
The water went on and off. A dish clanked in the rack.
“I know,” Ruth said. “And if you break my heart again, I’m going to kick your ass.”
According to a couple online reviews, the wild ponies could be seen from overlook on the park’s Woodland Trail in the early mornings, and so Nora woke up before dawn to make four egg and cheese sandwiches and wrap them up in foil. She shuffled everyone out of the house just as the sun was rising, deep pinks and yellows backlighting the clouds.
“Gorgeous,” she said, her coffee kicking in, her mind relaxed now that she was driving on a two-lane road in a town where everyone crept forward at twenty miles per hour. “I’m so grateful for the sunrise and that all of you are here with me to see it.”
They crossed the salt marsh that separated the island where they were staying from the one that was home to the national park. She was thinking about how she used to make them all name something they were grateful for each night at the dinner table, how she used to be convinced this would help her privileged kids gain some perspective. She stopped herself from forcing them to do this ritual now, but Evan seemed to read her mind.
“I’m grateful my mom woke me up at the ass crack of dawn,” he said. “I’m grateful Chloe isn’t in charge of the music.”
“Ha ha,” Nora said sarcastically, though she was thrilled to hear him joking and happy she’d convinced Ruth to come. “Good one.”
The trail was a paved loop lined with dead white tree skeletons stripped of their leaves and bark. The air smelled of pine, and they could hear birdsong and the ocean’s waves in the distance. After about a half mile, they reached a wooden observation deck, where a gray-haired couple in Harley-Davidson windbreakers stared at their masked group skeptically. In the distance, four horses were visible, but even with binoculars, they were just blobs of color grazing.
“I thought they’d be closer,” Nora said. “I can barely see them.”
Online there had been dozens of pictures of these squat wild ponies running on the beach, tails whipping in the wind, but these animals in the field were far away and practically motionless. They’d had a better look at the penned ponies they’d seen outside the hotels getting photographed and fed handfuls of corn by tourists.
The man raised his chin in her direction. “The big herd is on the other side of the island,” he said. “If you want to see more of them, you’ve got to go by boat.”
“Ah, okay,” Nora said. “Thanks.”
She had read a little bit about the island and the wild ponies but hadn’t done the usual legwork required to plan a good trip. Usually she ordered guidebooks, scoured online message boards for off-the-tourist-track beaches and restaurants, but in a normal year, they would go to France or Italy, Hawaii or Colorado. In the fifteen years they’d lived in DC, they’d never once vacationed in Maryland or Virginia, but they’d needed to go somewhere within driving distance and coming to the beach with the wild ponies she’d read about as a girl had felt romantic and freeing, an antidote to their months of constricted movements.
“Sorry I woke you up for this,” she said, once the couple was out of earshot. “I’ll see if I can book a boat ride for tomorrow.”
Evan shrugged. “It’s okay, Mom. Nobody cares about the ponies.”
They followed the paved road to a dirt trail packed with crushed oyster shells and eventually reached an inlet of blue water. Yesterday’s storm had passed, and the sun was out, but the air was still cool enough for a light jacket. They walked along the water’s edge, and when they saw a strange-looking metal structure on a wooden platform, Evan and Ruth ran ahead to investigate. Chloe looked at a flock of gulls with her binoculars, and Nora took out the trail map and pretended that she wasn’t watching Evan and Ruth, trying to figure out if they were falling back in love.
Chloe checked her phone and a look of anguish washed over her face. Nora suspected Emily had texted to say they couldn’t make it, but it turned out to be Chloe’s internship in Provincetown, which had been canceled.
“I should have known, but I was just hoping,” she said. “It was the last good thing that might happen for a while.”
The internship was at a writer’s retreat where she would have done twenty hours of janitorial work each week in exchange for free lectures and poetry workshops. She would have needed to get a job at a restaurant to pay for her food and housing, and the internship itself seemed to have little practical use, but Nora knew this wasn’t the point.
What Chloe wanted was a summer in a sunlit seaside town filled with rainbow flags and queer people. In high school, she had announced she was pansexual and spent most of her time hanging around with kids she knew from Pride Club, some of whom had serious mental health issues. Chloe had dated two people that they knew of—a nice enough girl named Alex who wore gold aviator glasses and took photography classes and a sweet but troubled trans guy named Conrad who had been hospitalized twice for self-harm. Nora was fine with Chloe’s sexuality—she’d always assumed she was queer; they’d picked this school because it was progressive—but she didn’t love the fact that several of her friends seemed to be in a constant state of emotional distress. They were in and out of mental health treatments, struggling in school, fighting with their seemingly supportive parents, and often their depression felt contagious. After Conrad’s first hospitalization, Chloe had become moody and fragile and had eventually started taking antidepressants. Nora was not proud to admit that when she’d first heard about Emily—a nonbinary kid at odds with their family—her first thought had been, “Jesus Christ, Chloe. Not again.”
“Who knows if it will even be an option next summer either,” Chloe said. “By then I’ll need a real internship.”
Nora thought Chloe was being dramatic: Everyone’s summer had been canceled—some people had lost jobs, watched relatives die. But Nora knew it wouldn’t be helpful to say so. Instead, she tried to, as her therapist had instructed, “reflect her child’s emotions.”
“You must be so disappointed,” she said, tentatively resting her arm across Chloe’s shoulder. “It was going to be such a good summer for you.”
“Yeah,” Chloe said. “It was.”
They drove to the ocean side of the island, which was windy but bright, and walked along the sand, collecting shells. When they passed a stoic young woman in a fur coat and hat, Evan and Ruth cracked each other up by referring to the woman as Melania. After a while, Chloe and Nora set out a beach blanket and watched the water, and Evan and Ruth ran with the tide, in and out, letting the cold water chase them.
“He’s so dumb. He acts like a little kid,” Chloe said, but her voice was affectionate. To Nora, Evan and Ruth looked like puppies, frolicking.
Back at the rental, she moved the sheets to the drier, set out the overpriced brie, crackers, candied pecans, and shortbread cookies she’d splurged on for the trip, and they took turns using the showers. Nora went last and let herself take a long bath. By the time she dried her hair and came downstairs, Emily had arrived and was with Chloe, masked, turning kabobs on the grill. Someone had set out placements and silverware on the glass patio table.
“This is great,” she said. “Thank you. I’m Nora by the way. It’s nice to meet you.”
Emily gave a little wave. “Emily. Thanks for having me. It’s nice to meet you, too.”
They had thick wavy brown hair cut into a shag and were wearing a cropped floral top with loose high-waisted jeans, hot pink eyeshadow at the corners of their eyes. Nora didn’t quite understand what it meant to be nonbinary if you went by a girl’s name and wore pink, but Emily seemed friendly and helpful, and she appreciated that they were wearing a mask.
“What can I do?”
“Nothing,” Chloe said. “You already prepped everything. Just relax.”
While Chloe went inside to make a salad, Nora sat at the table and asked how Emily had been holding up. They talked about Food Lion, where coworkers kept getting sick and customers no longer made small talk, the strangeness of being in Williamsburg without students or tourists or the colonial actors you used to see sometimes walking around. Their life sounded difficult, but she didn’t sense any of the resentment Chloe had about their current circumstances. Nora felt like an asshole for assuming Emily was depressed and a bigger asshole for having wanted to protect her daughter more than she’d wanted to help a young adult without a place to go.
“I can’t believe this is how college ends,” Emily said. “None of it feels real.”
“What’s next for you? Never mind. I’m sure that’s a horrible question.”
Emily shrugged. “It’s okay. I have some interviews. I actually got a job offer with Northrop Grumman, but I have to think about it.”
Nora tried to hide her disbelief, but when Emily saw it, they just laughed.
“I know. I never thought I’d work for a defense contractor either, but the money is good, and I have student loans. Plus, I can’t rely on my parents.”
She felt another surge of guilt. “Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry we couldn’t invite you to live with us. My husband works with cancer patients, and we already had four of us living in a townhouse, but I know you were in a bad spot, and I’m sorry.”
Emily looked a little perplexed. “Oh, I didn’t expect you to take me in.”
“If you get stuck, we’re here, though,” Nora said. “And congratulations. A steady job right now is no small thing.”
The temperature had dropped, and it felt almost too cold eat outside, maybe pointless anyway if Emily was making out with Chloe, but this was the agreement she and Brendan had made. The food was cold before they finished eating and to compensate, Nora offered them Pinot Noir—full glasses for Emily and Chloe and half glasses for Evan and Ruth.
“Why?” Evan said. “Yesterday you said no.”
“It’s chilly,” Nora said. “I thought the wine might help.”
After dinner, Chloe pointed out a firepit and woodpile Nora hadn’t noticed and asked if they could make a fire.
“Sure,” she said. “Why not?”
Emily and Chloe arranged the logs and fanned the flames with a cereal box while Ruth and Evan moved plastic lawn chairs around in a circle. The lawn was low and wet in some places but there was a dome of elevated sand around the firepit. Once the fire was going strong, Emily sat by Chloe and put a hand on her knee. Ruth and Evan asked Emily questions about college and the world “out there” that they largely hadn’t seen since March. They all talked about how boring it was to take classes online, how much they missed their friends, but the tone was upbeat, almost giddy. When Emily’s hand moved higher on Chloe’s leg, Nora announced that she was going to sleep and that since the lawn was so damp, Emily and Chloe should feel free to sleep on an air mattress on the screened-in porch instead of in the tent. This was a small gesture—the porch was old and they would still practically be outside—but Chloe seemed pleased.
Inside she found an extra comforter that she brought out to the porch and then poured herself another glass of wine and FaceTimed Brendan.
“Everybody’s happy,” she said. “Nobody’s arguing. You should have seen Ruth and Evan chasing each other around the beach. He actually seems like himself.”
Brendan smiled. His eyes were red, and he looked exhausted. “Good.”
She was proud of herself for smoothing things over with Emily and Chloe and for knowing somehow that what Evan had needed was connection. She started to tell him about visiting Ruth but stopped herself.
“Thank you,” she said instead. “I’m so glad you suggested this trip.”
Nora woke up to the sound of the screen door slamming and Chloe swearing. It was past seven, but a headache throbbed in her right eye socket. She had almost gone back to sleep when she heard voices in the kitchen. At first, she thought it was Chloe and Emily—hopefully masked, hopefully just using the bathroom—but then she heard Ruth’s voice.
“Do you think there’s any way Emily could take me to a pharmacy?” she whispered.
“The only one that’s opened on Sundays is thirty minutes away, but it’s kind of an emergency.”
Chloe said something Nora couldn’t hear, and she grabbed the glass beside the bed, swallowed the stale water, and put it against the door to amplify the sound. She wasn’t proud of herself, but she was the adult, and shouldn’t she know what was happening? There was a long enough pause that Nora thought she’d missed the answer, but then Ruth said, “Um . . . Plan B?”
Nora’s heart squeezed.
“I won’t tell my mom or anything,” Chloe said. “Don’t worry.”
Ruth laughed. “She gave me wine, and I’m pretty sure she had them put the twin beds together. I feel like she wanted us to hook up.”
Nora couldn’t breathe. This wasn’t true. How could Ruth believe this was true? What she had wanted was the sweet relationship she and Evan had before Ms. Caldwell had ruined his life. What she had wanted was the opposite of this.
“Wow.”
“If I tell you something, would you not tell Evan?”
“Okay?”
“She came to my house and kind of pressured me to come on this trip.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“It’s whatever,” Ruth said. “I’m not sorry about what happened. I’m the one who wanted to hook up. I just don’t think your mom will care about this.”
“She has no boundaries,” Chloe whispered. “She acts like our privileges make us weak, but it’s her. She can’t stop herself from micromanaging our lives.”
She can’t stop herself from micromanaging our lives.
They were both quiet for a moment and then Ruth said, “What happened with Emily?”
“I have no idea. I thought things were fine, but apparently I came on too strong.”
“That sucks.”
Nora thought of the perplexed look on Emily’s face when she’d mentioned their living situation and told herself not to overthink it—surely the breakup had nothing to do with her—but felt a twinge of guilt anyway.
“It does, but it’s also fine,” Chloe said. “We’re pretty different. It probably wasn’t going to work out anyway.”
Chloe sounded less upset than she would have expected, and Nora let herself zone out for a bit. She was thinking about the boat cruise she’d booked and now regretted, her headache, and also how much she needed to pee, when she heard Chloe confess that she’d texted Ms. Caldwell to tell her about her internship being canceled.
“I know I’m supposed to break off all contact, but I actually miss her,” Chloe said. “Do you think it would be awful if I met up with her?”
Nora’s blood pressure spiked so quickly that she felt dizzy, and it took all her restraint not to fling open the door and scream.
“I’m sorry,” Ruth said eventually “but I think it’s a bad idea. Evan is kind of traumatized. As far as I’m concerned, she’s a rapist.”
Chloe mumbled something she couldn’t hear and then apologized.
“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t know why I miss her so much.”
“You’re not, like, in love with her, are you?”
She couldn’t hear an answer, but Nora knew immediately that Ruth was right.
She waited as long as she could to leave the room and pee and then took a long hot shower. She made eggs and pancakes in almost total silence, but no one seemed to notice. When Chloe said she needed to drive to another town to get a phone charger for Ruth, she seemed poised for an argument, but Nora handed over the keys.
“Wow, okay,” Chloe said, staring at her. “Thanks.”
“Just go,” Nora said. “If you wait around, I’ll change my mind.”
The boat cruise was fifty-five dollars per person for a two-hour ride narrated by a heavyset retired naval officer named “Captain Jerry.” Out on the water, it was windy and cold. Every few minutes, the boat idled so that Captain Jerry could point to distant wildlife and deliver commentary filtered through a conservative lens. He was opposed to oversight by the Fish and Wildlife Commission and believed the volunteer fire department that owned the ponies on the Virginia side of the island should not have to pay taxes on the land they used. On the Maryland side of the island, the National Parks Service controlled the population with birth control darts, and Captain Jerry seemed opposed both to the birth control and the National Parks Service.
“Their story is that the horses came from settlers,” he said. “But the genetic tests they’ve run can tell you that doesn’t hold water.”
The story he preferred was a Spanish shipwreck that happened before the arrival of English settlers, the marooned horses fleeing to shore, somehow finding a way to survive.
Chloe, who was on the bench beside her, took pictures with her phone. Ruth and Evan sat on the other side of the aisle, huddled under a blanket borrowed from the tour company. When Captain Jerry began to talk about the social dynamics of the so-called harem bands of mares who “belong” to a single stallion, Ruth looked like she might throw up, but Nora knew she was probably just nauseated from the Plan B.
“Here we go!” Captain Jerry shouted. “This is Riptide’s band, and as you can see, he likes the blonds.”
He pointed to a chestnut-colored stallion in the distance, grazing in a field with several ponies with blond manes. According to Captain Jerry, these ponies had survived only because their bodies adapted over generations to the harsh conditions of their environment. They were squat and scruffy with bloated bellies and had thick stomachs and enlarged kidneys. When other breeds had been introduced to diversify the gene pool, they’d all died pretty quickly. It seemed to Nora that there was a lesson here about resilience and survival, but she couldn’t say what the lesson was.
As soon as they stepped off the boat, Nora handed her car keys to Chloe.
“My head hurts,” she said. “Just be careful.”
She cranked up the heat and watched the RV parks and vacation homes slide by. She was overwhelmed, tired, not sure what to think. Should she be happy Ruth had the maturity to get herself to a pharmacy or was this just what it felt like—another parenting failure, another lapse in judgment from one of her kids? She was furious with Chloe for contacting Ms. Caldwell but felt compassion for her, too. What had it felt like to discover her mentor, who she had apparently also loved, had come for her brother? Back when Chloe was in ninth grade, the Parents’ Association at her kids’ school had sponsored a lecture by a parenting expert who argued that their goal as parents should not be to prevent their children from failing but to raise self-sufficient kids. At the time, she’d laughed at the stories of parents cutting up steak for their twelve-year-olds and making their kids’ science fair projects. She was thinking about how sure she’d been that she was different, how little she’d known then about how high the stakes could feel, when she heard Chloe scream and felt the car lurch as she slammed on the brakes.
“Oh my God,” Chloe shrieked. “Jesus Christ.”
When Nora looked up, a pony stood feet in front of the SUV—brown and white spotted with a black mane. Up close, he looked wild and strange—a ragged coat, bumpy with mud and scars, a thick muscular body, a dark wet mouth chewing a long amber reed.
Chloe was shaking. “He ran into the road out of nowhere. I thought I was going to kill him.”
At the roundabout ahead of them, a police barricade blocked traffic, and Nora saw that it was not just this pony but a whole group that had made its way into town. Three ponies grazed in the grass by a Days Inn; another one had stopped in the middle of the road. A small group of people had gathered in the parking lot of the Days Inn to watch.
“Can we get out?” Evan asked.
Nora nodded. “Just not too close.”
When Chloe opened the door, the spotted pony darted across the road and pranced through the soggy grass in front of a pink cottage advertising vacation rentals. Ahead of them a police officer directed traffic. In the parking lot of the Days Inn, they watched the ponies shake flies and eat grass. Ruth took a video. People came out of hotel rooms, more cars stopped, and a crowd began to form. The mood in the air was one of wonder and excitement, though she was disappointed to hear that these were likely not really wild ponies but rather that some of the penned ponies on display for tourists had probably escaped.
When a little girl in pigtails walked right up to a pony, Nora expected a parent to stop her, but no one did. The girl, who looked about five or six, pet his tail and then reached up to touch his face, at which point, the pony flicked back his ears and shook his head.
A man called out, “You want to give him some space now,” but the girl stayed still. Nora’s heart lurched. The girl could be bit, kicked, trampled, but she just stood in the spooked horse’s path, unmoving.
“Lindy!” a woman yelled. “Move back.”
The woman had long damp hair and was wearing a tracksuit and Nike slides. She had a toddler on her hip that she handed to what looked like a stranger. She ran toward her daughter, but the pony reacted first, shaking his mane and throwing his feet in the air, just missing the girl’s head before he galloped off toward a patch of grass by the dumpsters. Her mother picked her up and the little girl threw her arms around her, sobbing. As her children wandered away, Nora watched the woman and her daughter. She could feel the girl’s weight and her grip, the woman’s heart and breath slowly resetting their pace.
I don’t love fish. One thing this means is that people in my life who do love fish are constantly trying to introduce me to fish that I might like. The least fishy fish in the sea! Barely Fish™! This fish almost tastes like it grew up on land! They insist that I just haven’t found the right one and when I do my eyes will be opened and my life will be changed.
This is what I’m about to do to you with poetry.
Before my Great Poetry Awakening, I honestly didn’t think much about the genre. I had a run of the mill appreciation for some of the classics that we read in school—I’m not a monster!—but for the most part I saw it as heavy, stuffy; overflowing with “doths” and “nays” and “shan’ts.”
Much like fish, I certainly saw how people could love it, I just didn’t think it was for me.
And then, thanks to the internet, I started coming across poems that really resonated with me. They made me feel less alone. They made me cry. Crazier still—they made me laugh. A lifelong writer, I had never dabbled in poetry, but one fateful day, while visiting my boyfriend’s family, I was taking a shower in his childhood home bathroom and suddenly a poem started writing itself in my head.
Fast forward about two years and that poem—called, “My Boyfriend is from Alabama,”—is included in my poetry book, A Bit Much. How’s that for a spoiler alert? At the time, I wasn’t even sure if what I had written was a poem, but I fell hard and fast for the style and soon began sharing my work on Instagram under the handle @maryoliversdrunkcousin. I realized quickly that poetry can be whatever we want to be, and that’s part of what makes it so special.
In A Bit Much, for example I use humor and absurdity to explore heavier topics. I title my pieces ridiculous things like, “Resurrectile Dysfunction” (about leaving my religion), and “Heck Yes I Have an MFA: Major Frickin’ Attitude” (about artistic gatekeeping), and “A Race Against the Guac” (about the societal pressures women face as they age).
As it turns out, I wrote a book of poetry for people who don’t like poetry; myself included.
I’m by no means the first to break tradition or subvert expectations in this field. I credit many of the poets in the list below with showing me how to experiment with form, rewrite the rules, play with words and of course: reveal something true and meaningful to the reader. You should give these books a shot, they just might (read: definitely will) surprise you.
Catherine Cohen has been called a voice of her generation and, hilariously, a Notes-App Laureate. In her debut book of poetry she takes her observational comedy skills and channels them into angsty, sexy, truly funny poems. Her work is self-indulgent without being self-serious and she masterfully finds a way to make millennial minutiae and mundanity take on deeper meaning. (I have officially used up all of my “m” words for the day.) Cohen’s poems are short and sweet and salty and you may find yourself reading the entire book in one go.
If the incredible title of the book doesn’t make you fall in love right away, perhaps you’ll be wooed by the fact that Chen Chen’s poetry is often described as “anarchic.” What better type of poetry to dive into if you “don’t like poetry”?! That’s what I thought, Wiseguy! Okay, but seriously, in this, his second collection, Chen writes about how and who we call home—with punchy irreverence and vulnerable depth; candidly exploring his conflict with his parents about his sexuality. This is the perfect book to win yourself over on poetry and Chen Chen publishes new work constantly, which will come in handy once you finish this book and find yourself fully obsessed with his words.
I’m furious I have to pick from Kate’s three existing books for this list, because they’re all fantastic. But for the sake of the task at hand (strong-arming you into giving poetry a shot), I Hope This Finds You Well is the perfect starter because it’s an entire book of erasure poetry. Don’t know what that is? It’s basically taking existing text and erasing large portions of it to reveal a new meaning with the remaining words. Baer does this masterfully by taking messages she received online from followers, fans, spammers, and haters and transforming their often-vitriolic intent into something new and beautiful.
Estoria has the voice of an angel, and the words to match. A spoken-word poet, musician, and actor, she translates her vocal magic to the written word in this collection of poems, essays, and meditations. Her work has been described as a “lullaby” and you don’t have to even get 10 pages into this book to see how true that is. The Unfolding feels like a hug—walking you through Estoria’s own unfolding, and reminding the reader to be gentle with where they’ve been and proud of who they are becoming.
Leigh is stupid smart. But somehow her book of poems is approachable, and also bingeable. Written during the COVID-19 pandemic, Stein makes wry and timely (yet timeless?!) observations about everything from celebrity gossip to disassociation to wellness influencers to mortality. You never know what’s coming in these poems; one minute you’re sinking into your feelings, the next you’re surprise-laughing at the dark humor plot twist. Reading What to Miss When will remind you that when it comes to poetry, the only rule is there are no rules.
A book of poems all about the relationship between femininity and body hair? Sign me up When you realize that Peluda translates to “hairy beast,” you start to instinctively know what you’re in for in this unapologetic collection from award-winning slam poet Melissa Lozada-Oliva. With titles like, “I Shave My Sisters Back Before Prom,” And “Red/Lip/Must/Ache,” Peluda creatively, tenderly, and surprisingly explores body image, identity, and family. Bonus: the cover is incredible.
It’s fitting to close with a book that is all about the things we love and the things we hate (and then love again). Lobster: And Other Things I’m Learning to Love is refreshing and honest and passionate; with pieces about learning to love her body, pleasure, and the word “moist.” McNish’s poems and prose have whimsy and conviction in equal measure and invite the reader to question the external influences that guide our choices…even the smallest ones. Lobster will remind you that love is a much more worthwhile use of our (limited) time than hate. In fact, it may have helped me change my mind about fish. (Maybe.)
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia, which will be published by Coffee House Press on April 22, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
With echoes of Zora Neale-Hurston and Clarice Lispector, Sulaiman Addonia turns from the broader immigration narrative of land and nations to look closely at the erotic and intimate lives of asylum seekers.
In the squares of Bloomsbury, near an orphanage in Kilburn, a young Eritrean refugee named Hannah grapples with a disturbing sexual story in her mother’s diary. As Hannah moves through the UK asylum system haunted by this tale, language becomes a tool of survival and time becomes a placid lake in which the Home Office drowns her.
In a single, gripping, continuous paragraph, Sulaiman Addonia’s The Seers moves between past and present to paint a surreal and sensual portrait of one life among thousands. For Hannah, caught between worlds in the endless bureaucracy of immigration, the West is both savior and abuser, refuge from and original cause of harm, seeking always to shape her—but never succeeding in suppressing her voice.
Here is the cover, designed by Sarah Schulte, artwork by Malachi Lily.
Author Sulaiman Addonia: “For centuries, writers and artists have been encouraged to embrace subtlety. While this may have led to great art, it might also have limited creative expression. The Seers breaks away from this tradition, showcasing exuberance instead of restraint. So when Malachi Lily, the designer of the artwork, asked if I was comfortable with sex and sexuality being depicted on the cover, I immediately responded with a resounding yes.
I was overjoyed when I saw the cover, and even more pleasantly surprised when I was told that the Coffee House Press staff loved it. Throughout my career, I have always asked publishers for bold covers that convey the audacity and playfulness of my characters. This was the first time I felt my dream had come true.
I have been influenced by feminist artists who have sought to subvert the male gaze, particularly the surrealist artist Leonor Fini. Her paintings depict men embracing their feminine side and displaying their beauty. I am reminded of her work when I see Malachi Lily’s design, which shows a man defying stereotypes, freely expressing his desires, being vulnerable with his female partner, and opening his body to her hunger.”
Artist Malachi Lily: “I was enraptured by the story’s roiling container of a fuck, and I wanted to highlight Hannah topping her friend O.B.B. in the park. Hannah’s hand, firm-potent-hungry, exposes the vulnerable offering of O.B.B., who is bursting into a garden in her presence. This bursting is beautiful but painful as thorns and blooms weave through the skin. The flowers are roses (the national flower of England), gerberas (the national flower of Eritrea), and different species of nightshade flowers that are common in Eritrea. Flowers like the Devil’s Trumpet and Solanum incanum are very poisonous; they are beauty encapsulating death, and have some hallucinogenic properties and associations with witches.
I always do divination readings for my work, and I received cards emphasizing this story and cover’s relationship to fire. The story burns, eating itself from the inside out. While looking for reference images, I sought color palettes and value structures focused on heat, intensity, shadow, and light.
By choosing an intense color palette and contrast, as well as filling the image with floral information, I intentionally and playfully distorted and obscured the salacious activity/the submission/the ass splitting into a flower on this cover, drawing people in to want to know more…and ensuring this erotic masterpiece of a novel is not immediately banned.
I’ve been a mixed-media artist for a while. Yet, this piece catalyzed my relationship with charcoal and graphite into something more raw and physical, matching the visceral quality of the story. I used a sharp 7H pencil to carve into the paper, like etching, and the charcoal acted like ink over a linocut or woodblock print. I will be taking this carving technique forward into my work.”
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
