Like Yin and Yang, Poetry Holds Tension Between Polarities

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Li-Young Lee’s first collection in a decade, The Invention of the Darling, remixes many themes from his five previous poetry books: family, exile, intimacy, and the divine. Yet somehow these plain verses feel fresh. In “Counting the Ten Thousand Things,” Lee writes,

“Start over in secret, at night
with my mother and father and the escape to… 
Canaan? Bethlehem? America? 
Where was it we thought was safe?”

Four quick lines recall the pain of a refugee’s journey, one that never quite arrives at the land he was promised. Since Lee’s last collection, various horsemen have come calling: a deadly pandemic, a spike in anti-Asian violence, a U.S.-enabled genocide. In Lee’s poetry, love (“the true lover lives / only to love the beloved”) is a powerful expression of resistance against external forces of harm and displacement.

Lee, born in 1957, immigrated as a child to the U.S. while fleeing violence in Indonesia directed at its ethnic Chinese population. Before embracing what would become a decorated poetry career—including a Lannan Literary Award, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation—Lee packed books in a warehouse and, with his brother, launched a fried chicken restaurant and a jewelry business. (The jewelry, made of found materials like Coke cans, was featured in Vogue and the rom-com Pretty in Pink.) In addition to his poetry, Lee has also published a memoir and a book of interviews, which often range into the philosophical and mystical.

I spoke to Lee over Zoom between the release of The Invention of the Darling and the publication of his co-translation with cosmologist Yun Wang of Laozi’s Daoist verse Dao De Jing.

April Yee: You said in 2016 to the LA Review of Books,

“The Chinese say, ‘In order to write poems, it’s a process of Yin, the practice of Yin beckoning to Yang.’ Yin is yielding. That is, you practice yielding. We live in a culture in which yielding is not a virtue. Retiring is not a virtue. Staying silent is not a virtue.”

I’m curious about these ideas of silence versus aggression, Yin and Yang, and the practice of poetry, this idea of aesthetics and activism. Particularly in the current environment—which feels like a silly thing to say because something terrible is always happening in the world. But I think the particular way in which things are happening today engenders a type of complicity, particularly as Americans, that’s possibly different than before. And so I’m curious about that relationship to Yin and yielding and silence and retiring, whether that’s changed—and also about your relationship to activism today.

Li-Young Lee: I feel as if this Yin becomes more important in my life, more and more and more important. It’s almost exclusively what I’m interested in at the moment and, you know, it’s not weakness. In the martial arts, when you throw a strike, the more Yin you have in that strike, the more precise and the more powerful it is. Even Western boxers know this when they say, “Sit inside your punches.” Think about that. The punch is going out, but they’re saying, “Sit inside the punch,” right? 

Poetry is the logic of all logic. And it’s a logic beyond reason.

The longer I live, the more I realize that the world is a koan to me. It’s an instance of something beyond reasoning, beyond rationality, beyond understanding, beyond my grasp. I live in complete mystery all the time. I don’t know how to deal with it. Now, it seems to me that out of desperation and fear, I’ve been telling myself I can fix it, I can control the world. But in my trying to fix things, I’ve ruined so many things. I cannot tell you. I believed that I was trying to fix the world. I ruined so many things, personal things I live with every day. The world is no better. I didn’t fix the world. And so I realized I better practice this koan attitude. And that finally poetry is the logic of all logic. And it’s a logic beyond reason. It’s the logic of God. It’s the logic of my mother. She endured so much.

From the day our neighbor in Indonesia raised the machete to my parents and said, “I have to drink your blood, I just have to”—the world became beyond my understanding. Nothing will be able to explain that. I played with that man’s children. And the flip of a switch, he was standing there covered in sweat, spattered in blood. I don’t know who else he had killed. And he says to my family, “I have to drink your blood. You don’t understand, I have to.” 

How am I going to fix that? He’s not the only one. And if I’d talked to him, he might have had reason to. Is there a reason to kill your neighbor? I don’t know. The horror is just beyond us. The beauty is beyond description. The mystery is beyond description. The terror is beyond description. The joy is beyond description. It’s all beyond me. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I keep thinking that poetic logic will be able to account for it or something. 

AY: That memory you just raised, you know, reminds me of some of my own family histories. And I suppose what’s different is that those things have happened. We’re left to grapple with them and the different ways that they manifest in our consciousness and in our bodies. But is there some kind of obligation in the more Yang sense to prevent that [violence] from happening, and how do we do that as poets?

LL: The first thing for me, when I discovered that murderer in me, I thought on a daily basis… I’m not murdering people, but I found that I’m capable of the same kind of violence, the same kind of rage, the same kind of anger, the same kind of reactive whatever-it-was that man was experiencing. I realized—it’s so hard to accept—I’m no different than him. 

So I started to think, during the activism part—I want to tell you maybe I was usually unlucky. I was very involved with activism, but a lot of the people I was involved with were the worst people in the world.

AY: Can I ask what specific areas you were working on?

LL: When we first came to Chicago, this area was crime-infested, and there was just garbage everywhere, dirt lots, a lot of drugs being sold openly on the street. So we began a neighborhood watch. We began a local neighborhood gardening project. We built gardens. We stood watch. We did outreach to the projects, young people. We got a lot of them to finish high school. I mean, we started from the ground. We weren’t just beautifying the things. We started teaching meditation, martial arts reading, after-school programmes. Years of this. Years. We had some success stories, a lot of success stories. People finishing college, people going to college for the first time. 

But at the same time it wasn’t even a drop in the bucket. It was nothing. Everything just kept getting worse. And on top of it the people working there were so ego-bound and so glory-bound and fame-bound and everybody saw the activism as a way to—I didn’t understand it—as a way to gain more influence or as a way to gain political power in the neighborhood. 

After I saw that, I thought, I’m not against activism. But if there’s not inner work going on, I just don’t see any hope. I don’t think there’s a political solution. I don’t think there’s a social solution to a spiritual crisis.

AY: I have a question more in the vein of what we call craft or process. I was really curious about the way that you wrote your memoir and about that desire to write the book in a single night. And correct me if I’m wrong, but even when it would be revised, it would also be rewritten in the span of a night, or as close to a night—a couple of nights—as you could get to as possible. This kind of thing nearing automatic writing, or maybe it’s nocturnal prayer, or whatever it is. I’m curious if that’s also the mode in which you write poetry and if that’s something—that long form—that you might ever want to return to, and what specific knowledge that mode of creation can unlock?

The practice of poetry is the practice of polarities—which is Tai Chi.

LL: I’m troubled by the long form. I keep noticing my ego is really at play in the long form. There’s something about it thinks it’s huge. The ego thinks, “Look, look, look, I’m just so big. I’m so competitive. There’s so much of me.” 

I feel as if I’m beginning to wonder about what’s driving that, because I thought I was trying to make a model of the universe. My models aren’t other works of art. My models are things in nature. So when I set out to write that [memoir], I thought, that has to be the universe. So it has to have everything in it. It’s impossible. 

And I feel as if what might be more interesting right now is a model of the universe in a small lyric poem. The tension between the size, the smallness of the lyric poem and the largeness of the universe—that polarity might be the thing that I need. Because I feel like the practice of poetry is the practice of polarities—which is Tai Chi, right? 

AY: One of the polarities that I noticed in your work in general but maybe more specifically in The Invention of the Darling is the polarity between the specific and the nonspecific. You have this poem, “Call a Body”:

“The one with bones 
is born of the boneless.

The one with a face 
is born of the faceless.

Too obvious? 

The one with skin 
is born of the borderless.
The one was features 
is born of that without features. 

Not concrete enough?“

I’m really curious about who that’s addressed to. For me, I read that almost as a challenge to the kind of poet’s critic [saying], “This image is not tethered to detail sufficiently for the detail-hungry reader.”

And then a couple of poems later, there’s this much more specific one. That’s “Thus the World is Made,” where the speaker of the poem is saying,

“We fled the soldiers.
We fled the police. 
We fled the revolutionaries.
We fled the mobs.”

And so there’s this feeding into that specificity and that biography, or supposed biography, that the reader is often hungry for. So I’m curious about how you balance that in your writing, this drive between these two polarities and the reader’s hunger, that third party.

LL: The most I can do is demonstrate my openness and ready assimilation of the divine. It’s the same thing a shaman does. That’s what they do for the community. They enact possession by the divine. But the third party, I’m not looking at the third party. That poem “Call a Body” is a dialogue between the lover and the beloved. All of my poems are a dialogue between lover and beloved. Sometimes that dialogue is full of love. Sometimes that dialogue is inflected with stress, and maybe even strife. Both the lover and the beloved, I think, is the founding paradigm of all my work. 

The cover of The Invention of the Darling is the image of Yin-Yang. That is the tantric Buddhist image of the union, the male and the female in conjugation, staring into each other’s eyes. They said out of that encounter with the male and the female—the polarities of weak force, strong force, Yin and Yang—out of that encounter, the whole world manifests.

And I want to clarify here, that when I talk about silence, I’m not talking about the white page. I think nobody understands that the white page isn’t silence. It is full of noise. So a lot of times I see people using this convention where they leave a lot of white space. It just fills up with noise. Poetry has this very powerful effect. It creates silence. That’s why it’s so hard to face the white page. It’s not the silence. It’s the noise. 

I have to say Emily Dickinson does this so superbly. I don’t even know how she was able to—she builds her own silence within which to hear the poem. 

AY: I wonder if that’s a flaw of the form of the book, in general, and that Emily Dickinson wasn’t writing into the book form.

I want to write with a daemon hand and a Christ-like heart.

LL: Yeah, I think that’s catastrophic to write into a book form. I’ve never written into a book form. I feel as if the poem is the thing. The book is just a collection of those instances. I think poetry is the practice of ultimate polarity, ultimate stillness, and ultimate motion. It’s this tension between absolute stillness or silence and the speed of the fastest thought. And then there’s the polarity between male and female. There’s the polarity between denotation and connotation. There’s the polarity between the One and the All, between the specific and the general. 

The One and the All is one of the highest-tension polarities in lyric poem. It’s the One, the mortal being, inflecting the All that is eternity. And somehow, that polarity, if it’s not experienced in the poem—if the poem is just an instance for the ego and it isn’t this polarity between mortality and eternity—somehow there’s not enough tension in the poem, you know?

AY: Back in 1995, in an interview with Bomb, you said, “When I’m writing, I’m trying to stand neck and neck with Whitman or Melville, or for that matter, the utterances of Christ in the New Testament, or the Epistles of Paul.” I’m curious, three decades on, if those are still those who you’re trying to stand with today. 

LL: I want God to speak through me. I’m tired of my own voice. I’m tired of me. I’m tired of all my own schemes, all my egos and machinations. I’m tired of being lost. I’m tired of following my ego. I’m tired of the whole thing. I just want God to live my life. I want God to speak those poems. And I feel as if—you know, Melville went mad. I mean, his best books are insane. There’s some sort of daemon, you know. I want to write with a daemon hand and a Christ-like heart. Does that make sense?

American Culture Made Me Believe Being Black Wasn’t Good Enough

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

“September,” an excerpt from Come By Here by Neesha Powell-Ingabire

YAHA

The tour guide calls our class’s attention to an alligator on a log, napping to a symphony of songbirds and swaying bald cypress trees. Y2K is around the corner, and we’re on a field trip at the Okefenokee Swamp. Our lives are in the hands of a tour guide captain, a middle-aged white man whose name I can’t remember. Since we are under twelve and got a children’s discount, the tour cost us each less than twenty bucks. During the one-hour bus ride to our destination, kids joked about who would get eaten first.

Mr. Tour Guide is expected to save two dozen of us from the whims of a thirty-five-mile-per-hour-running reptile with an appetite for small mammals. He is the only protector on our long white canoe in the middle of miles of black water. This 400,000-acre wetland, the traditional territories of the Timucua peoples near the Georgia-Florida border, is now his domain. White men claimed it as theirs hundreds of years ago, falsely believing land is intended to be owned as products of a feudal society. I am supposed to trust this man, but I don’t. He is a stranger with the same skin color as the kids who call me “nigger.” I can’t stop my foot from shaking. There are an estimated ten thousand alligators in the surrounding water, no known attacks, but I’m not privy to this knowledge. So I wonder if the reptiles are hungry for human flesh, hungry to conquer like those white colonizers. 

Thirty years from now, a white-owned company will apply for a permit to open a mine by this swamp, threatening all the wildlife we’re here to see—and burial grounds of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

YUCHA

If you’re curious about the Timucua, you won’t find anything about them on the Okefenokee Swamp’s website. You won’t find out what Okefenokee means either. It could derive from a Muscogee word for bubbling water, oki fanôki. Or, from a Creek word meaning “trembling land.” Timucua may originate from a term one of their enemy tribes used to refer to them, Thimogoua, or the Spanish mispronunciation of atimoqua, the Timucuan word for “lord” or “chief.” Before their extinction, the Timucua had thirty-five chiefdoms in southeast Georgia and North Florida. The last Timucuans are said to have either left for Cuba on a boat in 1763 or been taken in by other Indigenous groups. 

Our tour guide didn’t share this information with us. Perhaps he thought it insignificant. I hope he didn’t withhold it intentionally. Native American history was rarely taught at my elementary school until Thanksgiving came around. I once graced my local newspaper in kindergarten wearing a pilgrim costume. Reading my picture book of Christopher Columbus “discovering” the Americas, I made no value judgments; although, I visually identified with the colorful, feathered brown-skinned people with jet black hair. The only Native Americans I knew at the time lived inside an electronic tube. From bed, Mama watched black and white “cowboys and Indians” movies on weekends. I saw Native American cartoon characters (usually voiced by non-Natives) far more than actual Native American actors. I didn’t know any Indigenous folks in real life, as far as I knew.

On the morning of my eighth birthday, Mama gave me my gifts by spreading them out on her bed: a smorgasbord of Pocahontas, the first Disney princess to look remotely like me with her sepia-colored skin. I loved everything about the rebellious character and found her attractive. Among the presents was a soundtrack CD with a book of lyrics, which included a song loosely based on an Algonquin language that implores the Great Spirit to help Pocahontas’s people “keep the ancient ways.” I boisterously sang the chant at the beginning and end of the song, pretending to dance by the sacred fire: “Hega hega yah-pi-ye-hega/Yah-pi-ye-he-he hega.” It felt like the cousin of the clapping, dancing, jumping, and shouting that shook my Black Missionary Baptist church each Sunday. It felt joyful.

HAPU

“Woahhh ohhh ohhh ohhh,” my cheer squad warbles to the tune of the band playing in front of us, our right hands making a chopping gesture. We’re cheering on our middle school football team, the red and black Needwood Warriors. I’m standing beside a friend who I consensually touch on during practice. We touch each other, not sexually but playfully. It gives me a rush. I’m crushing on her; although, I would never admit it because no one is openly gay at my school. I only see gay people on TV. 

A white male teacher with a brown ponytail wearing Native American garb stands in the distance, and nobody questions whether it’s cultural appreciation or appropriation. Native American costumery is ubiquitous here, and we are all blissfully ignorant or at least we behave that way. A group of parents and students voted for the Warrior to be our mascot to channel the spirit and strength of “Georgia’s first Americans.” The Warrior’s side profile graces a wall of our cafeteria: a chisel-faced man with red warpaint across his nose and a red and white headdress. 

I cringe when I see myself tomahawk chopping on the morning announcements, a goofy grin spread across my face. I wish I could hide inside of my shirt. We all look terribly silly. None of us are Native American; I know of only one Native American kid in the entire school. Nevertheless, I dutifully chop whenever I hear those familiar notes. We chop and chop and chop away, never knowing we’re cheering on Timucua land.

Native American costumery is ubiquitous here, and we are all blissfully ignorant or at least we behave that way.

CHEQUETA

I stretch my legs out, resting them on the back of the seat in front of me. It’s the mid-2000s, and I’m sitting in a college lecture hall with my friend, Alexa, waiting for class to start.

Alexa examines my legs. 

“Your skin is red like an Indian’s… you got Indian in your family, girl?” she asks.

 “Who knows?” I reply. 

I am tickled by the question, a little flattered even. I’ve been asked if I was mixed with white before, but this feels a whole lot cooler. 

Almost every African American at some point wonders whether our great-grandmother with high cheekbones and straight black hair hanging down to her butt or whether our own loose curls mean we got “Indian” in our family. I think it makes us feel better, like at least not all our ancestors came over in chains. Being Black and Native American is seen as infinitely more special and exotic than being plain old Black. Black American guests on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS genealogy show, Finding Your Roots, are always surprised when family rumors of Native American ancestry are proven wrong via DNA. Gates tells them Black people with Native American heritage are a lot less common than we think. 

Still, the myth of the Black and Native great-grandmother persists. When another Black girl at school had long, straight hair without putting a chemical relaxer in it, I thought to myself with a tinge of envy, “She must got Indian in her family.” She had won the genetic lottery because she didn’t have to waste hours with smelly paste burning her scalp like most of us fully Black girls.

MARUA

I am on the phone in my rundown office on the southside of Seattle in 2014, chatting with an elderly white activist. We’ve met once or twice at meetings. Our conversation about organizing public housing tenants drifts to other topics, like the Duwamish tribe, whose land Seattle occupies, and their fight for federal recognition. 

“By the looks of it, you’ve got Native American blood in you,” the lady says.

I tell her she is mistaken. I have my suspicions, but I don’t want to be misconstrued as claiming an Indigenous identity. I am more aware of whose land I’m on than ever living in a state with twenty-nine Indian reservations, a stark contrast to my home state Georgia’s zero. It’s easy for people in Georgia to talk about Indigenous Peoples as if they’re all gone. Not here though. Here, I attend events where land acknowledgements are spoken first, brief statements made in respect to the Native American tribes whose land we inhabit. The city is named after a Duwamish and Suquamish chief who befriended white settlers, who in turn expelled Chief Seattle’s people from their ancestral home. I wouldn’t dare say, “I might have Indian in my family,” in this achingly beautiful environment. I literally cried as Jojo and I drove on the edge of Washington state’s snow peaked mountains dotted with evergreens on our trek from down south. The Duwamish are the rightful keepers of these lush, enchanting lands. It infuriates me to think about their tribe being denied their right to self-governance and federal funding for decades.

Being Black and Native American is seen as infinitely more special and exotic than being plain old Black.

One of my first Thanksgivings in Seattle, Jojo and I eat dinner with two friends, another couple. One of them is an enrolled member of a Coast Salish tribe, but we don’t discuss the irony of him being here. He’s here to spend time with friends, not to celebrate. Somehow, we end up watching Pocahontas on VHS after dinner, and when I hear the familiar Algonquin chant of my childhood, I instinctually belt it out. A sharp look from my wife stops me mid-chant, and my face burns. Our Coast Salish friend doesn’t say a word, but I am still ashamed. I’m not an eight-year-old nor a middle schooler anymore. I now know Pocahontas’s story is about colonization, genocide, and trafficking, not a romance between her and the Englishman John Smith like Disney portrays. I know you shouldn’t wear traditional Indigenous clothes as a costume. I know Indigenous songs aren’t meant for me to sing—they’re for the descendants of those who fought and died to preserve them. I know they are sacred. I know you shouldn’t adopt another culture’s customs without their explicit permission, and even then, you walk a fine line between appreciation and appropriation. I ask myself, am I no better than the “white man”? 

I silently vow to do better. I act unbothered as we watch the rest of the movie, even jeering at John Smith, but I’m secretly disturbed by my own ignorance. 

MARECA

Sitting in my office chair at the tenants’ union, I spit into a tube with vigor. This tube and this spit hold the key to reconstructing lineage lost in the Middle Passage. This is redemption for the times in school when I couldn’t answer, “Where is your family from?” As a Christmas gift to myself, I forked over $99 to 23andMe for an ancestry DNA test.

My mother gets excited when I tell her about the test. “You know we have Indian in our family, right? My grandmother who you never met, my dad’s mom, used to tell me her grandmother, September, was an Indian with long hair down her back who lived in South Carolina.” Mama never mentioned this before, but I’m not surprised. Every Black American family has a September.

A month goes by. I hungrily scan my DNA test results as soon as they hit my inbox: 75.6 percent West African, 9.4 percent Congolese and Southern East African, 12.1 percent European, one percent Chinese and Southeast Asian…and 0.4 percent Native American. This means 0.4 percent of my DNA matches Native American samples in 23andMe’s database. Being this percentage Native American means my most recent fully Native American ancestors roamed the earth two hundred to three hundred years ago. September was probably more white than Native American. 

When Mama hears the news, she sounds disappointed. We got “Indian” in our family—but it’s extremely distant. Just enough for the Americas on my 23AndMe ancestry composition map to be colored in yellow. Across the Atlantic, Africa is colored in purple. My DNA comprises 31.5 percent Nigerian, 29.9 percent Ghanaian, Liberian, and Sierra Leonean, and 8.6 percent Angolan and Congolese, among myriad other African ethnicities. I felt a smidge of disappointment about lacking Native American ancestry because I grew up believing it would make me important and special. I’d internalized anti-Black beliefs in our culture that say being just plain Black isn’t good enough. But I quickly shifted my focus to the pride I felt in being majority African. I like thinking about how my ancestors have found intimacy and companionship in their own communities for thousands of years, even after being stolen and displaced to another continent.

I’ve had conversations with my Rwandan spouse where they say, “African people are always left out of conversations about indigeneity in the United States, but we are Indigenous, too. We are indigenous to our different regions of Africa.” I may be an Indigenous African, but still, I have no claim to the native dances, songs, food, and customs of my ancestors. I am indefinitely unmoored. When I wear the mushanana of my wife’s culture for special occasions, a sash draped over one shoulder and a wraparound skirt, I’m not sure if it’s an act of appreciation or appropriation. But I am sure it makes me feel beautiful and makes my wife happy.

PIQICHA

It’s a drizzly day in Atlanta, where we have moved back to from Seattle. Jojo and I are both on holiday break and want to do something outside our norm. We decide to visit the Etowah Indian Mounds less than an hour away. Etowah is a Muscogee word for town or trail crossing. It is afternoon when we walk into the building at the historic site, where we are the only visitors. We pay our six dollars each and go on our own private tour of the museum. We read the stories of the prehistoric ancestors to the Muscogee Creek, the Indigenous peoples of the South Appalachian Mississippian culture, who are responsible for building the site’s six earthen mounds between 1000 and 1550 A.D. A thousands-years-old culture and society vanquished by Europeans’ smallpox, measles, and violence.

After circling the entire museum, we step outside to face the towering mounds. Ten-foot-high Mound C is the only one that’s been completely excavated, offering clues on a way of life full of arts, games, worship, and ceremonies. The tallest of them, The Temple Mound or Mound A, stands sixty-three-feet high, equivalent to a six-story building. It was likely a platform for the home of the chief. We walk up the stairs of the Temple Mound, taking care not to slip on the slick steps. Pleased with our mini workout, we snap a selfie at the top. We take another with the Etowah River in the background. Unlike in Okefenokee all those years ago, I am my own tour guide now. I choose which displays to engage with and read them critically since they were likely written by employees of our racist state government. I interpret what I’m seeing for myself. I’m no longer reliant upon a white man.

I may be an Indigenous African, but still, I have no claim to the native dances, songs, food, and customs of my ancestors.

We are browsing the gift shop about to leave when two Black men with locs walk in the door and buy tickets. I wonder why they’ve shown up less than an hour before the site closes. Jojo and I give them a nod of solidarity as fellow Black people appreciating Indigenous culture. Maybe they, too, recognized the links between people indigenous to the Americas and indigenous Africans—how both groups lived in harmony with nature before being colonized and are currently reclaiming ancestral land and cultural traditions. The more we learn about each other, the more empathy we can foster for our different but similar struggles. 

Back in our car, we start planning trips to other nearby Indian mounds. 

PIQINAHU

I come across an article about gender-variant and queer Timucuans on Twitter. I already know Indigenous tribes have included gender-expansive people and same-gender relationships since their inception but never thought about them living on the land of my hometown. I can’t find much on the topic, but an academic article by Heather Martel in the Journal of the History of Sexuality enumerates the differences between how the French and the Spanish interacted with the Timucuans when they arrived on their land in the 1500s. Spaniards perpetrated physical and sexual violence onto them, while the Huguenots, French protestants, enacted a policy of “allurement” with the tribe, performing love and friendship. As the Huguenots cultivated this amiable relationship, they also wrote lies to people back home about the Timucuans being perverse while also rejecting “hermaphrodites” and “sodomites” in their society. To them, a culture accepting of queerness was inherently savage and depraved. 

I wish I could’ve learned about gender-expansive and sexually diverse Timucuans growing up, how their culture viewed loving the same gender as natural and normal, how I was far from the first queer person on Georgia’s coast. I wish their legacy wasn’t strategically left out of history books. Since I rarely saw myself in history lessons, learning about Timucuans who diverged from sexuality and gender norms would have been affirming. Maybe I wouldn’t have repressed my queerness until college if I’d known queer people have always been here. It would have shown me Indigenous Peoples aren’t as “other” as my teachers made them out to be. 

I resonate with Indigenous cultures that acknowledge more than two genders exist, that a person can embody more than one gender, and that intimate relationships between any gender are valid. How I love and who I am will never be fixed. My identity can change with the weather, the season, the location of the planets, the alignment of the stars. But the western world is too rigid to accept this way of being. We’re forced to label ourselves and to then stick to those labels. We’re taught particular identities are attached to shame. The Timucua knew of no such thing. We have a lot to learn from Indigenous peoples throughout the world about how to live without shame. Colonialism teaches us to do the opposite quite literally by dictating school curriculum and controlling our culture, our media narratives, the very stories we internalize. 

Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in this country’s puritanism. I wish I could be free. But is freedom attainable in a place founded on bloodshed and plundering?

* Note: Each section header is a number from the extinct Timucua language. They are in chronological order from one to eight. I use them here in an effort to resist the erasure of my hometown’s Indigenous peoples. I consider this an act of cultural exchange.

Excerpted from Come by Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast, copyright © 2024 by Neesha Powell-Ingabire. Published by Hub City Press. All rights reserved.

7 Creepy & Mysterious Novels Set on Campuses

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If the rise in popularity of Dark Academia has taught us anything, it’s that readers love a campus novel with an eerie bent. Of course, the murder-y campus aesthetic extends well before the #darkacademia hashtag garnered over 100 million posts on TikTok. Arguably first, there was The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel that introduced readers to the clan of snobbish classics majors who end up murdering one of their own. But even before that, the campus novel genre has always had dark tendencies. Consider Dorothy L. Sayers’ 1935 novel Gaudy Night, perhaps the first murder mystery set on a college campus, or even John Williams’ quietly devastating Stoner, released in 1965 and to me a paragon of Midwest Gothic literature.  

I tapped into that tradition in my novel, The Wayside, which takes place at Paloma College, a (fictional) liberal arts school in Northern California. The novel opens with a pair of hikers discovering the body of Jake Cleary, a student at Paloma, at the bottom of a cliff. Local police deem Jake’s death a suicide. But as Jake’s mother Kate uncovers the secrets of his life on campus, she becomes convinced that something even more sinister might have pushed Jake over the edge. 

It’s not hard to see why college campuses are great fodder for thrillers, even beyond the ivy-bricked, ivory-towered settings that make such perfect mystery set pieces. What do you get when you throw thousands of ambitious young adults into an insular environment with highly specific, often unspoken codes of conduct and ask them to compete for success, attention, and romance? In the real world, you become a grown-up. In a certain kind of genre fiction, sometimes you get murdered.

In addition to The Secret History (at this point, a given), here are seven mysterious and unsettling novels set on campuses. 

Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

The first in a trilogy by a Ukrainian husband-and-wife writing team, Vita Nostra lingers in some liminal space along the spectrum of dark fantasy, speculative fiction, and (stay with me here) metaphysical treatise. Briefly, it follows Sasha, a teenaged girl who’s recruited to enter a mysterious university. There, Sasha and her peers undergo increasingly bizarre tests, such as memorizing nonsense passages and listening to excruciatingly long recordings of absolute silence. The students are never told the purpose of these lessons—only that they’re of vital importance, and that progressing through them will result in uncanny changes in their biological and psychological makeups. If they fail, their instructors warn them, their loved ones will die. 

This is an intellectually rigorous read, as we’re left to our own devices to uncover both the what and the why of Sasha’s byzantine education. The translation from its original Russian captures the bleak setting for a deeply unsettling sensory experience overall. But this is incredibly rewarding, too, and it’ll stay with you long after you read the final page. 

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Leigh Bardugo is a master of YA fantasy, and she brought all of that fast-paced plotting and dynamic worldbuilding to her first adult novel. Here Bardugo reimagines her alma mater, Yale, as an occult-inflected institution run by eight secret societies that engage in all kinds of fantastical activities, from necromancy to shapeshifting. Alex Stern, a high school dropout with a troubled history, gets an unexpected full ride to the school on the grounds that she join Lethe, the shadowy “ninth house” that’s tasked with policing the other houses—all of which are populated with the children of the rich and entitled, and who’d happily set forth on supernatural power trips that would threaten to upend the campus (and, potentially, the world) if not for Lethe keeping them in line. This is as much a send-up of the social politics on elite campuses as it is a smart, thoroughly entertaining fantasy.  

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

This tightly plotted thriller follows Mariana Andros, a recently widowed therapist whose niece, Zoe, asks her to come to Cambridge—Mariana’s alma mater, where Zoe is a current student—after her friend dies under mysterious circumstances. Mariana becomes convinced that Edward Fosca, a beloved Greek Tragedy professor and the de facto leader of a secret society that calls themselves “the Maidens,” played a role in the murder. When yet another Maiden is found dead, Mariana digs deeper into her theory that Fosca is guilty, despite a seemingly airtight alibi. Dark Academia fans will eat up the setting, plus the Greek mythology symbolism sprinkled throughout.     

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

Another new entry into the Dark Academia canon, M.L. Rio’s debut novel opens with Oliver Marks the evening before he’s released from prison on charges related to the death of his former peer at an elite theater conservatory. Before he retires from the force, Detective Colborne, the lead investigator on Oliver’s case, asks Oliver to finally share what really happened the night of the murder. Like its spiritual predecessor The Secret History, this deftly explores the (sometimes murderous) tensions that arise among highly competitive, emotionally intertwined young people in an enclosed, pressurized environment.  

Bunny by Mona Awad

Heathers meets Jennifer’s Body meets “Guy in your MFA” Twitter in this deliciously twisted novel. When Samantha Mackay enters a prestigious creative writing MFA program, she’s introverted, awkward, and can’t quite seem to find her place—which doesn’t bode well in a cutthroat workshop environment. Then she’s pulled into the “Bunnies,” a cabal of students who engage in less-than-savory extracurricular activities, including ritual animal sacrifice. And things only get weirder from there.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

Pessl’s debut novel is ambitious, eclectic, scrappy, and wildly unique—probably why it garnered such extremes of praise and scorn when it was released in 2006. It’s very much a “black licorice” novel, but it appeals to my tastes. This follows Blue van Meer, a precocious teenager who enters a new private school and is soon drawn into the “Bluebloods,” a clique of rich and popular students. The group’s mentor, Hannah, is a cool film studies teacher who takes a special liking to Blue. When Hannah is found dead, Blue takes it upon herself to solve the case. This reads less as a mystery per se than a coming-of-age story that happens to include a murder, but I think its genre-bending, formally inventive nature is what makes it so compelling.  

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Set in a dystopian near-past, Never Let Me Go follows three friends at an English boarding school who come to discover that they’re human clones raised for the sole purpose of harvesting and donating their organs. Think Eton run through the Black Mirror wash. It’s hard to keep the twist under wraps almost twenty years after its publication (not to mention a movie adaptation starring Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, and Andrew Garfield), but this will still break your heart and haunt your dreams.

Find Creative Inspiration From Your Vices

Posted on by Jo Lou

In Tony Tulathimutte’s new short story collection, Rejection, a man fantasizes that his “individual spermatozoa are so tall and charismatic that they’re elected to lead the G8 nations”; a group chat splinters over a bloodthirsty raven and a “coochie juice” stain; and a terminally online recluse ascends “from human to spam.”

Brain-twisting, incisive, and laugh-out-loud funny, these stories follow a loosely connected group of loners who obsess over their respective experiences of rejection.

I first met Tulathimutte when I took his creative writing class, CRIT, earlier this year. We spoke over Zoom and email about autofiction, inspiration, and indulging one’s vices.

Angela Hui: The first story in Rejection is “The Feminist,” which went viral after being published in N+1 in 2019. The main character is a male feminist who becomes a blackpilled misogynist. I’m curious to know about your inspirations, literary and otherwise.

Tony Tulathimutte: When I started the story in 2013, it was just about a guy who gets rejected a lot, and I didn’t know what to do with it. There was no movement to it. Around the time of #MeToo, I thought it would be a funny angle and give the story a stronger focus to make the character someone who’s rejected because of a misapplication of ideology: he’s a feminist but in an incredibly off-putting way. At first I thought his character arc would be something like Breaking Bad. But I realized that making this dichotomy was actually a bit naive and Manichaean, because acting like a feminist to suit your own purposes is not the opposite of misogyny; it’s on the same continuum. There’s the same ideological strictness used to justify self-interest, and the same hyper-confidence in your ideological purity, which tends to blind you to your other faults. So it’s less about a process of corruption than it is about his apprehending and acting on what was there the whole time.

But anyway, the story just started with the feeling of rejection. Rejection is a very intimate and isolating state. You don’t welcome condolence or reassurance, especially not from the person who rejected you, and often not even from your friends. So you’re alone with this condition that forces you to think about what you look like to other people, what they saw in you that caused them to reject you. You’re not likely to chalk it up to bad luck or fate unless you’re very mentally healthy. As a sort of ego-protective mechanism, you start creating this theory of the world and of other people that externalizes your own flaws.

What I wanted to hold onto was the idea that all the way up until the end, even as he commits this act of violence, he still considers himself an unimpeachable feminist. He believes he’s the true feminist and everybody has adopted this insincere bad-faith form of it, which explains why he’s not being rewarded for it.

AH: A common theme in this collection is how people behave when they anticipate being rejected: they can try to get ahead of it through self-sabotage, antisocial behavior, or preemptively acknowledging their own faults. Are people better off not knowing why they keep being rejected? 

Rejection is a very intimate and isolating state. So you’re alone [and forced] to think about what you look like to other people, what they saw in you that caused them to reject you.

TT: Yeah, probably. When someone rejects you, their reasons for doing so may not be straightforward, so if they give you a reason why, they might be telling the truth, but they also might dress it up to spare your feelings, or give you false reasons so they don’t reveal something ugly about themselves, or may not properly articulate what they really mean. In the moment it may not even be articulable at all, but just a vibe or intuition. Of course feedback can be very helpful, but the person giving it has to be doing so accurately and in good faith, and the person receiving it has to uncynically lower their guard, and those things don’t often line up when rejection is involved. 

AH: Your story “Our Dope Future” takes the form of a Reddit post, and I’ve noticed that many of your stories, if posted in r/AmITheAsshole, would get a lot of conflicting responses, probably with a plurality voting “Everyone Sucks Here.” You’ve said yourself that your characters are insufferable pieces of shit, but I also sympathize with them deeply at times. What are your intentions when it comes to reader response?

TT: Obviously, I’m saying this in a tongue-in-cheek way, but what I really mean is I’m an insufferable piece of shit, or at least that’s how I feel most of the time. And that’s something I project onto my characters, who I do care about, whether or not I like them. Most of the stories in this book are a form of hairshirt in some way or another. “Our Dope Future” was mainly a vessel for my grievances around working in Silicon Valley and the capitalist, solutionist mindset behind it, toward the ends of maximizing utility and profit, irrespective of people’s dignity, rights, and happiness. Maybe because of my time in Silicon Valley, and maybe not, I tend to approach problems by trying to break them down and fix them, which is something I’ve tried to moderate in myself, because not everything warrants it. That story is about a guy who attempts to break down and fix someone else who does not want or need it, and his attempts to do so wind up constituting hideous psychological abuse, whose effects he’s completely oblivious to. 

To your question about reader response, I try not to think about it too much, except that I want to make people laugh.

AH: You’ve mentioned that you didn’t start using humor in your writing until around 2010. What have you gained from switching to a more comic writing style?

TT: For the first seven years of writing I did nothing but write mopey stories about white people, and I had a lot of convincing-sounding justifications for that. I grew up in a very white town and went to very white schools, so I thought, why do I have to write about myself at all, isn’t this fiction? I believed that a writer was good insofar as the characters were fictionalized, that the extent to which they were different from the writer was the yardstick of talent and empathy and imagination. A lot of this denial was fueled by stereotype threat. I was aware that anything that I wrote would automatically be associated with Asians, and be seen as typifying “the Asian experience,” and so on. I think a lot of Asian writers go through some version of that, and it was even worse back then, when there were fewer prominent Asian American writers. With some significant exceptions it wasn’t until recently, I mean like six or seven years ago, that the publishing world consistently cared about Asian American writers writing about things other than Asianness.

Around the time that I decided I wanted to write comedy was when I realized I could write about race in a way that suited me. It turns out I had plenty of things to say about race, but through some heavy layers of grotesquery and irony, and that was not available to me in the shoegaze-y mode I was writing in before.

AH: Let’s talk about beating the autofiction allegations. Your stories “Main Character” and “Re: Rejection” explicitly point out that you have biographical similarities to several of your characters, including ones that you probably wouldn’t want to be confused with.

TT: To answer this, I want to unravel the thread of autofiction a little bit. I’ve said before that I think autofiction is like the personal essay plus plausible deniability, and that for a lot of reasons—maybe out of a desire to stay in your lane, or maybe just because some publisher decided on it—we have been migrating towards fiction that cheekily skirts the boundaries of self-reference. It goes some way toward alleviating those anxieties around things like stereotype threat I was talking about earlier, getting ahead of readers connecting you to your work by doing it yourself, and telegraphing your awareness of it.

It wasn’t until recently that the publishing world consistently cared about Asian American writers writing about things other than Asianness.

I knew that with really personal subject matter and with characters that resemble me in all kinds of ways, this book was going to get read as autofiction no matter what. And so my attempt here is to fight autofiction with metafiction. The thing is, I actually kind of hate metafiction as it’s usually practiced, the exhausted Hall-of-Mirrors variety. Like yes, we get that this is all a game, we’re all very smart. But I think it gets interesting again when you run it through autofiction. It takes for granted what autofiction is always hinting at, which is the meddling of the author, and the self-conscious construction of the stories. And the distancing that’s inherent to metafiction stands in a tense relationship to the assumption of personal investment and involvement in autofiction. 

Originally I thought that the only story I’d take that approach with is “Main Character,” which has an authorial self-insert near the end. Even though it goes pretty far, I didn’t feel like I’d gone far enough, so the last piece, “Re: Rejection,” goes all in and ends up disassembling the entire book in the form of a rejection letter from a fictional editorial committee. I thought it was funny that I’d written myself into a corner by writing a book that resisted closure, and the conventional redemption narratives around rejection, or any suggestion of self-knowledge or virtue as a silver lining. But I didn’t want to end it flatly either. And so this was the other solution that I came up with—that, staying true to the point, it’d rip itself apart at the end, recapitulating itself in kind of a mean way. And metafiction is good at that.

AH: Speaking of the conventional redemption narrative around rejection, is that what the Ralph Waldo Emerson epigraph is supposed to represent? (“…but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us, whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.”) The book seems to reject that narrative around rejection, but as a work inspired by rejection, it also kind of proves it right.

TT: Emerson actually comes up twice in the book, and the idea was to sort of twist his optimism about individuality into something more ominous. What I like about the quote is that it’s written in this soaring exalted style, but if you read closely, there’s nothing definitively positive about it. “They build a heaven before us,” but that means you’re stuck on the outside of heaven looking in. The “new powers” and “new and unattempted performances” just sound ambiguous to me, because why couldn’t new mean worse? But the real key here is that it’s only the second half of the passage. The first half is about how people who accept us are “dear” to us. This idea, that your rejectors matter more to you than those who accept you, certainly worked with my premise.

AH: As we’ve discussed, many of the stories in Rejection experiment with form. “Re: Rejection” is a rejection letter, “Our Dope Future” is a Reddit post, “Main Character” is a wiki, and “Sixteen Metaphors” is a list story in the vein of Lydia Davis and Carmen Maria Machado. What do you feel that this formal experimentation afforded you?

TT: First of all, variety. Switching the form up is one way to keep things lively, and it’s a good way of forcing yourself into different registers. I had originally imagined this book as being about half fiction and half nonfiction, so it was actually a lot more experimental at its inception. The fiction parts were meant to have a specific kind of voice that followed all kinds of rules, like distant-omniscient narration, protagonists with no names, mostly summary, and so on. I got the idea from self-help books, where sometimes the chapters will begin with made-up anecdotes, you know, like: “Meet Bob. Bob wakes up in the morning at seven o’clock and gets up and brushes his teeth,” etc. I was doing a takeoff on that: what if this went on for much longer and got much more specific and was not so much a morality play or a “Goofus and Gallant” story, but this voyeuristic account of somebody messing their life up, with no lessons learned whatsoever? I thought that all the fiction pieces would be like that, and you’ll notice that the first three stories of the book form a kind of trilogy along those lines, but after the third piece, I didn’t feel like writing that way anymore. I also think form is just usefully generative. It helps me come out with more writing and results in a less monotonous experience in reading it.

AH: In your previous interview with Electric Literature, you said it’s interesting in writing to “hyper-indulge your vices.” What does that mean to you? Is that something you did when writing this collection?

Your vices are things you’re automatically going to be interested in, and will generate feeling and insight and material.

TT: Yeah, like I alluded to before, developing as a writer really demands that you strip away different layers of denial. I think that your biggest enemy is this vaunted idea of yourself as a writer, which is bound up in ego and wanting to be perceived and respected in a certain way. Your vices, however you define them for yourself, are things you’re automatically going to be interested in, and will generate feeling and insight and material.

Obviously the glaring example of this is all the porn in “Ahegao.” It’s not really the most dignified thing to be authoritative about, but you have to push past that and write about whatever you’re really interested in. When I was working on that story I found that the ending, which is a very elaborate custom porn video that was not in the first drafts at all, kept getting longer and longer, to the point where I just had to concede that everything else had to be organized around it. 

AH: The editorial board in “Re: Rejection” also calls metafiction self-indulgent.

TT: Another word would be “masturbatory.”

AH: It’s funny that “Re: Rejection” accuses the book of taking on different perspectives to ward off accusations of navel gazing, but “Ahegao” has an image that takes literal navel-gazing to its extreme: attaching an endoscope to a dildo and winding it through nine meters of digestive tract. Was that something you were thinking about? 

TT: Actually, that is literally the operating metaphor there. With that image I was partly playing off that David Foster Wallace story in Oblivion, “The Suffering Channel,” which is about an artist who shits out intricate sculptures, with cameras trained on his asshole while he’s excreting them. I think this dovetails with what we were just talking about, the desublimation of your interests in writing, because this is where Kant is actually able to get past his inhibitions and articulate what he wants, despite it being comically gross and impossible. He is gaining literal insight into his fantasy, though he falls short of ever getting it. It’s an expression of his most honest self, even if he doesn’t mean it that way.

7 Small Press Books About Motherhood You Might Have Missed

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When I started to write about motherhood a decade ago, the topic still carried a tinge of shame. Writers tended to fear motherhood would push them into some unsightly box, as if they’d succumbed to something less serious than the laudable material of their (non-mothering) peers. In the Los Angeles Times in 2017, Sarah Menkedick discussed her initial tendency to “apologize” for writing about being a mother. “Patriarchal culture,” she observed, “has reduced motherhood to an exercise no serious artist would tackle as a subject.” I felt that silence. When my daughter was a newborn, I remember putting her in a Moby Wrap and searching the library’s shelves for books that captured what my life was becoming. I didn’t search for parenting books—of which there were plenty—but lyrical, literary depictions of the actual, internal experience of being a mother. Books that captured that sometimes-joyous, sometimes-heartbreaking, sometimes-painful transition I was making. Such books were few and far between.

Thankfully, that has started to change. I can think of nearly a dozen books published in the last few years that explore motherhood. Perhaps due to conversations surrounding reproductive justice, perhaps due to the heightened stressors mothers faced during Covid-19, perhaps due to high percentages of women and non-binary students in MFA programs, more and more contemporary writers are interrogating motherhood. I count myself among these writers—and my own essay collection, We Are Animals, among these books—and I am grateful for this shift.  

Yet within this current cultural moment, I’ve found that the richest, most nuanced books continue to strike me as those I turned to again and again when my daughter was young. Books that sent their observations and words out into a world that didn’t always offer a landing spot for literary narratives of motherhood. But books that remain, to me, some of the best on the subject. 

Dirt and Honey by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland

One of the most overlooked and underrated books about motherhood I can think of is Raquel Vasquez Gilliland’s collection of poems, Dirt and Honey. To be honest, the book isn’t so much about motherhood as it is about creation, femininity, the maternal, and our ancestral ties to the earth. This is a book that merges the personal with the mythical, and the embodied with the ethereal.  The language sings and surprises throughout the collection, but I especially appreciate the book’s willingness to mix religious allusions, personal experiences, and ecofeminist retellings. In Dirt and Honey, the feminine and maternal are a rich, entangled knot of the individual, ancestral, political, and spiritual, and Gilliland truly honors that richness.

Bring Down the Little Birds by Carmen Giménez

In Bring Down the Little Birds, Carmen Giménez captures the experience of mothering a young child, gestating a second, trying to maintain a writing career, and adjusting to her own mother’s brain tumor and dementia. The threads are woven together beautifully, and Giménez’s gifts as a poet clearly come through in this, her first work of nonfiction. Stylistically, the memoir is fragmented, sparse, and lyrical. Giménez writes of motherhood the way Sarah Manguso writes of motherhood—though Giménez published her book first. Readers who sometimes struggle to balance motherhood with an artistic career will especially appreciate Giménez’s quips at the writing life.

The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich

There’s a moment in The Blue Jay’s Dance where Louise Erdrich describes dressing her newborn in “her bunting” and “cart[ing] her across the road” to Erdrich’s writing studio, where the baby sleeps and cries and later crawls across the floor. Erdrich, meanwhile, tries to write, though more often she observes the natural world around her and reflects on family history and what it means to mother. In this way, early motherhood is intertwined with the changing seasons, with the nesting blue jays, with the spring kittens, the deer, and the morning glories and foxglove. Reading The Blue Jay’s Dance when my own daughter was young felt like immersing myself in a sacred holding space. The book is meditative, quiet, comforting, and profound.

Tender Hooks by Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly’s Tender Hooks is, quite frankly, a delight—the kind of poetry book you’ll pick up with curiosity but then read cover to cover in a single sitting. The book explores early motherhood, from childbirth to breastfeeding to weaning, and it reads like the memoir of a woman bruised but in wonder from it all. Although Fennelly approaches motherhood with depth, nuance, and lyricism, her greatest gift is her humor—witty, embodied, and sometimes wonderfully profane. I especially appreciated the couplets interspersed throughout, such as “Gong”: 

From the kitchen, fixing her a bottle, I hear it:

two milk teeth against my beer can.

Great with Child by Beth Ann Fennelly

Also by Beth Ann Fennelly, and published around the same time as Tender Hooks, is Great with Child, which presents a series of letters that Fennelly wrote to a pregnant mentee about preparing for motherhood. The letters are poetic, comforting, and affirming, and readers who are balancing an artistic career with early motherhood will especially appreciate the light-hearted advice and empathy that Fennelly provides. 

Having Faith by Sandra Steingraber

“Early motherhood is an extreme sport,” Sandra Steingraber writes in Having Faith; “Sleep deprivation is part of the problem. This will not come as news to anyone who has ever had a baby, but before I gave birth, I had naively assumed that some mystical, mother-love hormone would kick in and make it possible for me to endure sleeplessness in ways that non-mothers cannot.  I am somehow astonished to discover that being awakened at 2 AM feels just as awful as it ever did.” For those looking for an account of motherhood written by someone who clearly understands the science, yet who can also maintain a compelling narrative voice, ecologist Sandra Steingraber’s Having Faith offers it. Steingraber seamlessly integrates personal anecdotes with narrative about the biological experience of motherhood in a manner that is lyrical, humorous, and grounding. If you haven’t read it, you should.

The M Word edited by Kerry Clare

An anthology, The M Word brings together short essays by female Canadian women writers. “The M Word: it means something to every woman. Exactly what it means is rarely simple,” the book jacket states, and they are right. If what we long for in motherhood books is complexity, and moments when joy and sorrow and boredom and anger can rub against each other, side by side, this book certainly offers that. It isn’t a celebratory motherhood book—the kind you might see at the bookstand at Target around Mother’s Day. Instead it is real, well-written, evocative, and diverse, containing essays about infertility, being a stepmom, deciding not to have children, and childbirth. It left me able to hold the complexities of my own experience, and to see those complexities as beautiful. 

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “When the Harvest Comes” by Denne Michele Norris

Posted on by Jo Lou

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of When the Harvest Comes by editor-in-chief Denne Michele Norris, which will be published by Random House on April 15, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.

In this heart-wrenching debut novel, a young Black gay man reckoning with the death of his father must confront his painful past—and his deepest desires around gender, love, and sex.

“I got tired of running away from what I should’ve been running toward.”

The venerated Reverend Doctor John Freeman did not raise his son, Davis, to be touched by any man, let alone a white man. He did not raise his son to whisper that man’s name with tenderness. But on the eve of his wedding, all Davis can think about is how beautiful he wants to look when he meets his beloved Everett at the altar. Never mind that his mother, who died decades before, and his father, whose anger drove Davis to flee their home in Ohio for a freer life in New York City, won’t be there to walk him down the aisle. All Davis needs to be happy in this life is Everett, his new family, and his burgeoning career as an award-winning violist. When Davis learns during the wedding reception that his father has died in a terrible car accident, years of childhood trauma and unspoken emotion resurface. Davis must revisit everything that went wrong between them, his fledgling marriage and irresistible self-confidence spiraling into a pit of despair. In resplendent prose, Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes fearlessly reveals the pain of inheritance and the heroic power of love, reminding us that, in the end, we are more than the men who came before us.

Here is the cover, designed by Emily Mahon:

Author Denne Michele Norris: “Some years ago, I took my first international vacation. A dear friend had decided to celebrate his birthday in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. In this friend group we were all in our late twenties: early in our careers, without much in the way of disposable income. But we scraped the money together and joined him. One night, we dispersed: one of us went to a pool party, another went to a bar, and another stayed home eating tacos on the lanai. I’d made plans to meet up with a man I’d met earlier that day. I arrived at our chosen spot at the chosen time, but he was nowhere to be found. I called him, I texted him, I waited for 30 minutes, but he never came. I was deeply disappointed. Earlier that day when that man had approached me, talked to me, asked for my phone number and made plans with me, I’d felt blissfully chosen. But in that moment, standing outside the restaurant, peering left and right, hope written all over my face, I began to feel invisible.

As I waited, I realized I’d likely been forgotten—surely, no harm intended on his part. I could’ve easily texted one of my friends and joined them at the pool party or the bar, but for a reason that remains unknown to me, I couldn’t bear the thought of it. Or perhaps, what I couldn’t bear was showing up and joining my friends, thereby signifying having been forgotten by an attractive man yet again. This was foolish, all of it. I knew that, but I felt it anyway. Unable to stay there any longer, I instead walked to the beach. The sun had set, the horizon criss-crossed with blue, purple, and the last embers of golden sunlight. The sky was dotted with pink and orange glittering stars. I was almost entirely alone on that beach. For a few moments I sat, wiggling my toes in the sand, feeling windswept and loose. I opened iTunes, started playing Beyonce’s Lemonade, which had been released a few months prior. When I stood, my intention was to head back to the hotel, but instead I closed my eyes and began to dance. I did something I rarely do; I released all tension in, and control of, my body. I removed my clothes, and I danced alone in the moonlight in a place that felt very much like the edge of the earth. I felt, suddenly, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be at exactly the right time, in precisely the right circumstances.

When my editor at Random House showed me this cover a few months ago, my breath caught in my chest. Its beauty arrested me, and I fell silent. A night sky, speckled in pink and orange, beaming like stars. Gold, for glamor, for a little extra shimmer, raining down upon an unclothed Black body in motion. Elegant, poised, secure in their person, and their surroundings; a dancer, perhaps. Believe it or not, I’d never shared this memory with anyone on my publishing team; it never even occurred to me in those early discussions about what the cover of my book might look like. And yet, in some way, I’d been exposed, as though the smallest, most vulnerable version of myself was suddenly in the spotlight. I bathed myself in love and generosity for that boy, and for all the boys who move through the world the same way I used to. Staring at this cover, I remembered dancing in the moonlight on the beach. I remembered the feeling of the sand sifting between my toes, the wind sweeping around me, and the truth that washed over me that night, nearly a decade ago: that just as I was, I was more than enough.”

Designer Emily Mahon: “Despite the protagonist Davis’ years of childhood trauma, the novel leaves us with a feeling of jubilation in the acceptance of their life and the love they choose. The gold and pink confetti-like dots are a gesture to this feeling of celebration. The figure suggests movement, relating to Davis’ fluidity of gender and sexuality.”

Every Time I Read Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando,” Something Changes

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Orlando is Virginia Woolf at play—a piece of frippery, pure queer pleasure, a little romantic, a little coy, hinting at secrets. I have returned to Orlando repeatedly over the years, most recently after a few lifetimes away. Each time, something different awaits. To return to Orlando is to travel in time. Woolf shows us how we might live multiple lifetimes in one life.

Orlando’s own time travel is doggedly linear. Orlando simply grows older, very slowly. He is 16 when we meet. I, too, am sixteen—feckless class climber, clumsy gender bender, aspiring deviant, not rich enough to be punk. It’s 1987. I have a mushroom haircut. I skulk in the basement stacks of a fancy all-girls boarding school library, poking through the Ws while cruising (without knowing I’m cruising) an aloof classmate with three last names, a buzz cut, and a “Modern Love”–era slouchy suit. Maybe her father’s, likely Armani. I fondle an ancient, good-smelling hardback of Orlando (the title of which I’ve seen on a list of “Lesbian Novels” in a book called Lesbian Lists, memorized in the corner of the New Haven women’s bookstore). I flip through a few pages, skim for dirty bits, turn up The Lion and the Cobra on my portable Radio Shack tape player, get distracted by a different classmate flipping through Artforum—her father’s a painter, she’s a photographer, and I am in thrall. I hear the voice of the father from Orlando’s mouth—gore, glory, kill, own, be a man!—the voice of empire. Orlando ventriloquizes colonial patriarchy, that bad dad, and at 16 I ignore that voice, as I do all fathers. I put the book back on the shelf, and for decades will remember that I first read Orlando at sixteen.

It’s 1990; I’m 19. I’m carrying my unread Signet Classics Orlando around a Jesuit college to impress my Novels of Transgression professor, who is a Modernist, which I’ve just learned means queer, which I’ve begun to understand is cooler than lesbian, or maybe just more accurate for me personally, which I won’t understand fully for ten more years (at least). I’m also carrying around a copy of Violet to Vita, a collection of love letters between Woolf’s beloved Vita Sackville-West (the inspiration for Orlando) and Vita’s other lover, the writer Violet Trefusis (the inspiration for Sasha). I try briefly to be femme to secure the attentions of a funny, handsome, and extremely authoritative butch writer whom, I will soon realize, I’m actually trying to be, not do. I’m impressed by Woolf’s dedication to seduction, the commitment it takes to write a whole book as a romantic gesture.

I have returned to Orlando repeatedly over the years, most recently after a few lifetimes away. Each time, something different awaits.

Two years later, I’m annotating my now-thrashed copy of Orlando, which I’m actually reading, to impress a different queer Modernist professor at a big state university. My comments are a master class in jejune opinions and point scoring, presented in careful, art-boy block lettering. Confronted with racist language and imagery, I angrily print coloNialism! Titillated by Woolf’s gender theory, I abbreviate scandalous terms, thrilling at my own esoteric knowledge, my range. I revel in Woolf’s light approach to gender, how Orlando becomes a woman who cross-dresses and finds adventure in the demimonde, the bits of earnest queer romance that slip through.

I have an ancestor, finally.

In class, I read Orlando in contrast to another formative queer novel, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, also published in 1928 and following the depressing life and melodramatic death of a wealthy British invert, Stephen Gordon. I prefer my playful ancestor, the one who wanders between genders, lives centuries without a scratch. And yet, I bore easily. I’m annoyed by Woolf’s satiric treatment of the literary world. I tire of her obsession with time. I want more dirty parts. I take some ill-gotten Ritalin and slow down enough to appreciate the ellipses, but I turn to Mrs. Dalloway for something more palatable—these gestures toward sapphic sincerity, toward rapture. Something less compromised.

It’s hard to get past the first paragraph of Orlando. In fact, you can’t actually “get past” the first line of Orlando, and neither can I. Whatever Woolf intends (a misguided attempt at a feminist critique of colonial masculinity is the most generous reading), her exalted prose style can’t help but exult in the pageant of the teenaged white boy Orlando desecrating the body of a dead African man:

“He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”

Orlando is a book from another time, and no amount of historical context will change how it is compromised by Woolf’s Orientalist preoccupation with racialized bodies, her zeal in evoking Blackness in racist terms. We don’t get past the racism that rises from these pages, that haunts this book and many others of its time. We don’t read the book in spite of it, either. If we keep reading, we read into the time, understanding that whiteness and all its violence, along with Woolf’s brilliance, her vision, her profound intimacy with the English language, are among the forces that shape this literature.

It’s 1993. I’m alone in the dark of the campus movie theater, discovering Tilda Swinton in Sally Potter’s Orlando. I’m undone by cinema, where everything happens with no explanation. I’m transfixed by the film’s opening, the knowing glance, the relief of Potter’s elision of Woolf’s first paragraph, the sinister elegance of that pivot, which I call feminist. I’m entirely seduced by Jimmy Somerville’s sexy Anglican countertenor, by Quentin Crisp’s powdered queen, by the offer of inclusion in the gay-boys’ club, by Woolf’s queer window on history showing all of European time as gay, gay, gay, and by Swinton’s performance suggesting that female masculinity could be cool like Derek Jarman was cool.

We read into the time, understanding that whiteness and all its violence, along with Woolf’s brilliance, are among the forces that shape this literature.

Potter’s Orlando is aristocratic queer feminist camp. This is a balm. I imagine Potter must have identified with Orlando; maybe Tilda Swinton did, too. To be a woman director or lead actor in 1993 was to fight on a battlefield where Woolf had fought only decades before, and casting Swinton helps us to see Orlando as the story of a woman artist. Potter’s Orlando also tells a story about aging queerly, and at the time, it offered an out—gender-fluid immortality—to those of us whose people were dying. (Charlotte Valandrey, who plays Sasha, died in 2022, with HIV. She was 53.) Potter mostly avoids Woolf’s race problems, prefers to play with the middle of the first line: “. . . there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it.” That’s a choice, I see now.

What Orlando aficionado hasn’t tried an adaptation? An explosion of takes marks this new century, includes playwrights, fashion designers, graphic novelists, curators, drag kings, librettists. Perhaps most significantly, Paul B. Preciado’s 2023 documentary, Orlando, My Political Biography, challenges Woolf’s colonialism and racism from a trans perspective and makes manifest Orlando’s multitudes by casting twenty racially diverse trans and nonbinary people (alongside Preciado himself) to play the lead.

It’s 1994. For Halloween I’m Potter’s Sasha, Orlando’s love. With my dark curls, who else could I be? Plus I have the right hat, a faux fur thrift score. I feel myself to be in drag but am unable to communicate this to others. I flirt with a long-haired bisexual boy or maybe my straight girl roommate or maybe both.

Then there’s some years between 1994 and 2007, when I remember only one thing about Orlando—the passage where Orlando goes to sleep, sleeps for a long time, and wakes up as a girl. The ease. Class magic, Woolf’s inheritance of audacity.

In 2007, a writer I know, Tisa Bryant, publishes a collection of essays, including one on Orlando called “The Head of the Moor.” Bryant writes:

“Woolf apparently believed that a human being is made up of thousands of selves existing across time and space. Woolf writ- ing as parodist, lover, critic, self, and more. But there’s much in Orlando’s fabric that . . . deep knowledge of [Woolf] . . . cannot account for, the racialized darkness throughout, exoticized, yes, but not interrogated, over time and space, between thousands of selves, writer, critic, reader, admirer, gatekeeper.”

I see that I have been reading through my whiteness, yet again.

This new edition is an opportunity to revisit Orlando. We are friends across time, me and this unruly queer ancestor of ours.

Fast-forward to 2019. I’ve written a novel some people have compared to Orlando, which I accept as a kindness. I see what they mean, of course, what with the shapeshifting, the refusal to explain, the attention to the fashion of the times. And Orlando really must have been somewhere in my mind as I wrote—for, like its hero, I took 342 years to finish my first book. I’ve been flown to England and on my first day ever in the country, I’m rambling jetlagged around Charleston House with my publicist, marveling at this pilgrimage she set up, to the Bloomsbury Group’s HQ, that bisexual idyll where writers wrote and painters painted and everyone slept with everyone else, a pocket of freedom in a war-stunned country, or so the story goes. Later at Monk’s House, in Woolf’s small writing lodge, I marvel again: she wrote her dazzling sentences here, those radiant paragraphs. Was this the very desk where she wrote the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse? Did she walk the garden path, dreaming of Sally and Clarissa in their youth? Did she gaze out this window, imagining Vita as the ambassador to Constantinople, imagining revolutions, imagining that one might change one’s body and find some new liberation? My publicist and I take selfies, which I post to Instagram, interpolating myself into this literary lineage. I haven’t shaved in a week and have a small asymmetrical collection of hairs above my lip, which I hope creates some hormonal ambiguity on this book tour where, as usual, I don’t feel trans enough and also feel too butch, which in 2019 feels as archaic as heterosexuality.

I stoop through the old doorways, gender-affirmed but an interloper in an aristocrat’s rustic fantasy.

Now it’s 2023. I’ve been asked to introduce Orlando, and I accept, thinking of the opportunity to say something about reading differently with time and experience, about reading as a white person, about how it’s good to change over time—and also thinking about the prestige, linking my name with Woolf’s. Late Western capitalism flows through me.

I felt one way at first, I feel differently now, I will likely feel a new way in the future… Reading, like life, is subject to revision.

I am asked to write something personal, which at first I resist. Like that other queer refusenik Bartleby, I would prefer not to. I have changed since I first encountered Orlando 35 years ago—what adult hasn’t changed in 35 years? And because I have changed, how I read has changed. I’ve even changed since I first started writing this essay, in the summer of 2023. I’m recovering from recent top surgery, once a topic for a memoir and now routine, covered by insurance. I am rereading Orlando—arguably the first modern transition narrative—during my recovery. Like Orlando, I find that I have woken up over a crack in the sidewalk, feeling not much different in my new body. Instead of thinking about gender, I find to my surprise that what resonates now is Orlando as Künstlerroman, the maturing of the artist. What resonates now are all Woolf’s ideas about metaphor, her finely crafted arguments about the material conditions necessary to write, even the bits about marriage. What did I learn from Orlando? I learned that we could play with gender, not take everything so seriously all the time, oh my god. I learned that transformation could be the easy thing, writing the hard thing. I learned that writers could skewer other writers’ ambitions, and I learned to fear being skewered thusly. I learned that rich people really care about their inheritances. I learned that white people often need to read a few times to see what’s on the page. I recently learned that Woolf was writing climate fiction a hundred years ago. Every time, a surprise. What do I take with me? The queer art of refusal, with a soupçon of aristocratic entitlement mixed in. Also, that one might write a book to impress girls.

This last time I meet Orlando, I’m 52. On the last page, Orlando is 36. And Woolf is 46, in 1928, at the time of publication. Impossibly, they are both younger than I am now. I’m old enough to have seen more than a few decades of literary life unfold, to have reread my early influences and revised my thinking, to have been revised myself by reading. To have revised my own body while time revises me. This new edition is an opportunity to revisit Orlando, as artists have done for a century. We are friends across time, me and this unruly queer ancestor of ours.

Rereading this book that has accompanied me throughout most of my life, I am left with this: I felt one way at first, I feel differently now, I will likely feel a new way in the future. Like Woolf, I will resist explanation and merely say that reading, like life, is subject to revision.

My own centuries, both of them, are the ruins of Orlando’s times. And yet we all live here. There’s no place outside the ruins, no place to return. We root around in the remainders, hold up the shards to the light of history, the light of transformation, the light of time. Woolf as ancestor, in this stream of time. What can she tell us? What can we tell her?

From Orlando by Virginia Wolf, published by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Foreword copyright © 2024 by Andrea Lawlor.

7 Coming-Of-Age Poetry Collections That Use Form in an Innovative Way

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As a poet, I think about how a poem’s formal elements impact its content. To put it another way: form is the container into which we pour our material, and like water, the poem takes on the form’s shape. A coming-of-age novel, film or TV show is often regaled in prose, with a linear structure; but a coming-of-age poetry collection often moves back and forth between the speaker’s past and present selves, allowing these selves to meet on the page, in a way that is not possible in life. Additionally, a poetry collection can draw upon a fixed form (ex. a sonnet), or create its own constraints. 

My debut poetry collection, Saints of Little Faith, seeks to explore the relationship between my childhood and adulthood selves. When I first started writing my book, I thought I would get to the root of my sorrow by exploring my lapsed relationship with God. But the poems quickly revealed that they were also interested in exploring my relationship with my father, along with family lore and high school. When I started to really work with my material, I wondered, should I just start at the beginning of my life and write to the end? But that approach lacked tension and did not capture the way my mind moved through memory and feeling.

As I revised individual poems and ordered the collection, I looked to others for example and inspiration. Here are seven coming-of-age poetry collections that play with form, illuminating new possibilities of engaging our past and present selves.

The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan 

Hala Alyan’s The Twenty-Ninth Year subverts linear structure, often moving associatively between places (across the Middle East and America) and states of being (alcoholism to recovery; singlehood to marriage). In “Truth,” the collection’s first poem, Alyan writes: 

    “Hunger is hunger. I got drunk one night
     and argued with the Pacific. I was twenty. I broke
     into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar. I wasn’t twenty.”

These contradictory statements create tension. What is the true age of the speaker? And ultimately, does this narrative fact matter, if what the poem is ultimately asking us to do is feel? Some of the poems in the collection take on longer, prosaic lines, but are paired with short section breaks that move us surprisingly from one moment into the next. In “Telling the Story Right,” Alyan’s speaker lists a series of texts she has received:

    "Goddamnit Hala why don’t
     The airport
     They took
     The men
     The men
     The men"

And then moves to prosaic lines:

    "Two years later, I fill a flask with warm rum. Men line the neighborhood
     with rifles. A boy swarms my body. It's not your war, you know. I want to
     spit in his mouth."

How do we reclaim authority over our own story’s telling? One mode that Alyan suggests is through bringing in different states of being, both the high lyric which suspends us in deep anxiety (“Baba they took the men/ Baba they took your hair”) and the narrative, which moves us through time: 

    "I shook the chain-link fence near the border and gave a false name.
     Lorelei. I kissed the night guard, stalling. His eyes silver as a wedding 
     ring; he showed me the dangerous thing in his hands. You better use those
     legs, Lorelei. I did."

I’ll also call out Alyan’s gorgeous step work poems, which do not progress linearly, but instead leap to whatever step is most in conversation with the material that surrounds it ( For example, “Step Eight: Make Amends” a poem about changing one’s behavior, is preceded by “Even When I Listen, I’m Lying,” and followed by “A Love Letter to My Panic // A Love Letter to My Husband”.) Reading Alyan’s collection encourages me to let go of linearity, and instead prioritize felt experience, both as a writer and for the reader.

Ghost::Seeds by Sebastian Merrill 

As we cross the threshold into a new phase of our lives, how do we speak to our past selves? “If our mother were to tell our story,” the speaker offers, “it would begin with grief./ She mourned your loss,/ her only daughter.” Ghost::Seeds is a book length dialogue between a trans-masculine speaker and his former self, now a girl-ghost. To create texture and variation across manuscript, Merrill weaves in a second sequence, a queer spin on the myth of Persephone, a coming-of-age myth itself, about the separation of daughter from mother, the movement into the winter of one’s life, that leads to adulthood. Or, as Merrill’s speaker aptly puts it in a Ghost:: Persephone poem:

                                                                           “It takes a long time
                                                                            for the eyes to adjust
                                                                            to the enfolding dark.”

Notice, too, how the Ghost::Persephone poems are all right margin aligned. Here’s another excerpt from later in the collection:

                                                                           "I gathered flowers.

                                                                           Hades poisoned me,
                                                                     dragged me, t-shirt torn,

                                                                            into the underland.

                                                                                     Poppies wilter
                                                                       in my trembling hands."

The effect of shifting away from the right margin, is that we feel the absence of the familiar, left margin. We become more attuned to the white space on the page, not taken for granted. Merrill’s speaker asks us to look and look again. In reckoning with the self, we must confront our wounds. Merrill teaches us tenderness, through the use of the second person: “You do not have to abandon/ your sweet self/ to love what is lost./ I’ll never be sorry.”

Through language, the self can hold the former self close. 

Organs of Little Importance by Adrienne Chung

As poets, we have the gift of fixed forms. In Organs of Little Importance, Adrienne Chung shows how adept she is at imagining widely with a form’s constraints. In the book’s opening ghazal, “Tasman,” the speaker shares about an encounter with a lover:

    "When Tasman went home, I pleaded with heaven.
     Night hung low in the branches, twilight muslin.

     Why is there always that scene in the movies—
     white sheets on clotheslines, rippling like muslin?

     My mother prayed for a girl in pink satin.
     God punished her with a small fright in muslin."

Within these three stanzas, we move between varied images—branches at night, white sheets on a clothesline, the speaker’s mother praying for a girl in pink satin; and of course, that devastating turn from satin to: “God punished her with a small fright in muslin.” (Note, too, the movement between adulthood and childhood, the ache that links them.) The ghazal is anchored by its refrain, in this poem “muslin.” When the reader’s ear is primed with repetition, any sonic change is heightened. In studying Chung’s fixed forms (shout out to the sonnet crown at the book’s end), I am once again awed at how compression allows for a density of expression, a multiplicity of self. But I am equally impressed with her ability to write prosaic lines within nonce forms, such as the numbered sequence, “Blindness Pattern.” 

    ">>

        1 . There is a mathematical formula   { R = e – t/s }   which plots the erosion of 
        memory over time where  Retrievability  is  Euler’s number  to the negative power of  
        Time  over the  Stability of memory. They call this the Forgetting Curve.

        2 . What this means is that memory fades."

Notice the sharp change in diction, from a scientific language to a declarative sentence. By allowing herself to think in different formal shapes, Chung’s collection continues to surprise the reader with self-revelation.

Instructions for Banno by Kiran Bath

When we come of age, we move back and forth between states of confusion and clarity. At times, we must look outside ourselves to understand our emotional inheritance, to perhaps better discern who and why we are. In Instructions for Banno. Bath brings together the voices, experiences, and geographies of women in her family, making a compendium of advice for the Banno, a South Asian bride. Bath writes prose poems in a high lyric, with short, declarative sentences: 

    “Say time is non-linear. Say here we collapse 
     planes, enter at even age. Choose 23 
     (ornaments, early confidence). In this version 
     you’re not married off. . .”
—from “How to return” (DEEPU TO NIKKI)

Amidst the moment across generations and continents, the poet interrupts. 

    "Have you pondered on the sex lives of our elders?

     I read the Kama sutra and realized Vātsyāyana was a hypocrite.

     I read the Sattasaī and felt shapes of longing and restoration.

     I started living alone to develop a formula.

     A connection of stars between G-spot and clit-song."
—From “Instructions for Banno The poet interrupts: How to fuck anew”

Formally, this new speaker, the poet, breaks out of the established prose block and into monostitches; from short, declarative sentences into compound sentences. We move from the intense language of the interior, a language spoken between mothers and daughters, sisters and brides, to a question, and answers that link clause with clause, thought with realization. In this way, the book’s language enacts movements from feeling into thinking; from receiving knowledge to processing knowledge, and moving through it. 

回 / Return by Emily Lee Luan

Poetry is a lyric art, often concerned with communicating a depth of feeling. And what feeling is more true to the experience of adolescence as sadness? In 回 / Return, Emily Lee Luan writes of the Taiwanese diasporic experience, the sorrow of displacement, the search for belonging and the many ways we return–through memory, art, and imagination. In “Anger Diaries,” the speaker writes of her mother: 

                                                    "...I watched
     from behind the turning conveyor belt,
     her broken English. But is there a word
     for an anger rooted in sadness? Is there forgiveness
     for us in either of our languages?”

Luan engages this question through diction (many of the poems contain the words “sorrow” or “sadness”), as well as through form, by translating the Chinese tradition of the reversible poem into English. Here are the first two lines of “Reversible Poem in Dishwater”: 

    "He carried me into the kitchen to get a glass of water
     He reached for a cup in the sink filled with dishwater”

and the final two lines: 

    “The cup sinking he reached for me
     The kitchen carried me into the glass”.

Note, first, the melancholy of those images, the glass of water/ dishwater, the cup sinking, the kitchen (in the absence of the lover) carrying the speaker into the glass. Second, how traditional grammar has been subverted: the noun “sink” returns as the verb “sinking,” the direct object “cup” returns as the subject “the cup sinking”. The reversible poem can also be read in multiple directions, so another reading of the poem could begin with: “The kitchen carried me into the glass/ The cup sinking he reached for me,” which is a literal image of sorrow: the speaker in a glass, sinking. . . 

Portrait of Us Burning by Sebastián H. Páramo

How do we make meaning of what pains us?  In Sebastián Páramo’s Portrait of Us Burning, the speaker uses the framing of self-portraiture to imagine himself into the holes, gaps, and fragments of memory. From “Self-Portrait as My Father, The Roofer”, the speaker states:

    “I work hard heat into a home.
                                  Then when everything is done & dark,

     I lie flat & can't help thinking of those
                                  Who named stars. Because there once was a 
                                   city I fled."

The speaker speaks as his father, or perhaps through him, recounting moments that the speaker knows of his father’s life. Thinking of his first love, a blue-green Chevrolet truck, the speaker as his father declares: 

                      ". . . I will gift it to my son for nothing.
                                             He earned it when he gave me a North Star.

     I will lead him by his hand to the flatbed
                                                & we'll look toward a swath of stars. We'll call
                                                it ours."

Portraiture and self-portraiture provide another vantage point from which to access our own experience, and imbue it with resonance: we imagine, so carefully, into what we cannot fully access. Playing with negation in “Portrait of What He Didn’t Want” the speaker describes his father as:

 
    “such a neat man. . . He didn’t want to pick up the pieces. He 
     didn’t want love to become backbreaking work. He didn’t want 
     that choice. One day, he found himself with a hammer. He 
     didn’t want to clean houses. He filled himself with things. All 
     the things he never had.”

Afterlife by Michael Dhyne

In novels, a coming-of-age story (often) has an inciting incident. What do we claim as our origin story, the birth of our spiritual and artistic concerns? Michael Dhyne’s Afterlife opens with “To My Father, The Light”: 

    "In the room, there are two reels projecting onto the wall. One is
           playing
     your death and the other

     my birth. ONe starts in a bathtub, the other staring up at the
          sky. Both
     in a pool of light--"

Dhyne writes, with precision and clarity, about his father’s sudden death, and how he had to learn to keep living. Later in the poem, Dhyne writers: 

    ". . .The reels catch fire. I try to save myself,

     leaning against the wall as your image dissolves beside me. I can't see you,

     only the light you passed through to get here. "

The image of light, so beautifully established in this opening poem, recurs throughout the book, suspending us, the readers, in the speaker’s present moment. In “New Mexico” the speaker is awestruck on a road trip: 

    “I wake Jesús in the passenger’s seat because I’ve never seen 
     light that looks like this–like a radiant bruise. Lightening cuts 
     into the sky then disappears. I wonder if we should be afraid.”

How do we allow in that which is bigger than us–love, grief, death–these forces that shape our lives, that we try to get close to, in an attempt to understand? In “Tennessee,” Dhyne’s speaker implores us:

    "...Reader, if you believe one thing I tell you,
     let it be this. As Jesús sketched my portrait

     in the dim light of a rented basement room,
     I sat on the floor and wrote, I'm sorry

     I couldn't be there for you. And yes, I was high
     and in love and crying, but I really did feel

     my father’s spirit move through my body,
     that he wrote those words, not me.” 

“Truth” and “Telling the Story Right” from The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan. 2019 © by Hala Alyan. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

Excerpt from Ghost :: Seeds © 2023 by Sebastian Merrill. Appears with permission of Texas Review Press. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Organs of Little Importance by Adrienne Chung © 2023. Appears with permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved. 

Excerpt from Instructions for Banno © 2024 by Kiran Bath. Appears with permission of Kelsey Street Press. All rights reserved. 

Excerpt from 回 / Return © 2023 by Emily Lee Luan. Appears with permission of Nightboat Books. All rights reserved. 

Excerpt from Portrait of Us Burning: Poems © 2023 by Sebastián H. Páramo. Appears with permission of Curbstone Press, an imprint of Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Afterlife © 2023 by Michael Dhyne. Appears with permission of The University of Wisconsin Press. All rights reserved. 

“Madwoman” is the Essential Novel About the Cycle of Domestic Abuse

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Chelsea Bieker’s new novel Madwoman opens with a two-sentence mic drop: “The world is not made for mothers. Yet mothers made the world.” What follows is the story of Clove, a young mother in the Pacific Northwest fervently attempting to outrun her violent childhood by creating a perfect family of her own. But as her past pushes ever closer, Clove begins to understand that she will never be free of her secrets until she stares right at them.

Bieker’s first two books—the novel Godshot and the story collection Heartbroke—announced her not only as a stunningly talented storyteller but also as an author with unique insight into motherhood and motherloss. In Madwoman, she homes in on how trauma ripples through a family, across generations and oceans. She considers carefully what is required to break the cycle of domestic violence once it’s been set in motion.

I sat down with Bieker on Zoom in early summer to discuss how she crafted a thrilling literary page-turner that also moves forward a critically necessary conversation. We spoke about the inherent murkiness of memory, the claustrophobic isolation of new motherhood, how violence is too often carried forward not by its perpetrators but by its most innocent victims, and more.

Marisa Siegel: When did you start writing Madwoman, and what did the journey toward the completed novel look like?

Chelsea Bieker: The first inkling I had of the book was when I’d gone out for the first time since becoming a mom. I had so much undiagnosed postpartum anxiety after having my daughter in 2014; it was very hard for me to leave her. When she was around two, I remember going out to a reading one night, and afterward everyone went to a bar. There was a younger, seemingly childless woman there and I was kind of observing her, and was really taken by her—it was like seeing a reflection of a past self. It was a tiny moment, a little seed, but it was the beginning of wanting to write about how motherhood had changed me.

I went home and wrote a short story titled “Madwoman.” There was something reckless I was feeling about motherhood and it felt urgent to me. I sent the story to my agent, and as soon as I did, I realized that I had a lot more to say here. I knew this wasn’t a short story. And then the COVID lockdown happened: I couldn’t go on my book tour for Godshot, and I needed something to focus on, so I did one of Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words of Summer prompts. It was just what I needed, and I was filtering everything I was feeling into my writing. 

There was something reckless I was feeling about motherhood and it felt urgent to me.

I came out of that period with a draft of the novel. It was quite unlike the novel that exists now, but that was the start. It wasn’t until I got a lot deeper into the writing of it that I understood the domestic violence thread. At first, I was interrogating the daily grind of motherhood and the ways it had become so hard to inhabit certain spaces as a mother. I was tracking the ways pediatricians and teachers and people out in the world began to call me “mom” instead of using my name. My identity had been changed in this obvious and strange way. 

MS: So did the thread about all the products marketed to new moms, and ways new moms are inundated with and might become obsessed with such products and messaging for control and self-soothing, come in much earlier than the theme of domestic violence?

CB: They came hand-in-hand. I remember so vividly this moment where I was on the phone with my own mom, who has since passed away, and she was telling me about a very stressful situation she was navigating. I found myself frantically searching through my refrigerator during the call for this bottle of green juice, because I was sure that if I could just find this juice, it would keep me safe. In the book, Clove says something like, “Grocery is the opposite of violence.” That phone call with my mother was a light-bulb moment: these products promising wellness or goodness or cleanliness, these tactile things that Clove clings to in the book, allow us to separate from the more devastating and violent realities we might be experiencing. Of course it’s a surface Band-Aid, though there is an element to it that feels like an affirmation of one’s own worth. There was so much that Clove and her mother were not allowed, and so Clove as the adult, wants to offer herself these nice things as a counter to that. 

MS: Talk to me about Clove’s Instagram addiction, and her growing presence on the platform as an influencer.

CB: The book is a direct address to her mother. I think there is part of me that always felt I’d never be known by my mother because of our circumstances. Crossing the valley to have her know me in a day-to-day way felt impossible, but through writing, I could perhaps try and talk to her about my life, about the ways I was showing up in the world each day. 

It had become so hard to inhabit certain spaces as a mother.

I think social media, for Clove, is another way to feel connected in her desired identity while not having to contend with the rest of her life. It’s another way for her to construct—or re-construct—a world that is safe.

MS: I was just about to ask whether the epistolary structure had been in place at the start of your writing!

CB: I remember feeling like I had to write it that way. I remember thinking, Oh, maybe someone will make me change this or maybe this doesn’t work, but then no one ever said anything about it. I thought, great, I got away with it! I love a direct address. I love that urgency. I think it added something to Clove’s voice, and to the way the novel unfolds.

MS: Any favorite books that also do this, or works you were thinking of and looking toward while writing Madwoman?

CB: Both The Push by Ashley Audrain and Animal by Lisa Taddeo are fascinating first-person novels that use direct address to astonishing effect. Both were very inspirational to me. I love the intimacy and immediacy created by this mode. 

I’ve also been writing this way for years! I realized this when I came upon some old blog posts I wrote when I was twenty-two that were all a direct address—“Dear M” and “Love C”. I think it reflects a desire to be seen by the person you are addressing in a way that’s not possible in real life. But in fiction, you can sort of command that attention.

MS: Do you think of Clove as an unreliable narrator?

CB: Yes and no—I think for the first time in her adult life, she’s needing to be honest. The shit is hitting the fan and she has to look at things clearly for the first time. But she’s also grappling with a hormonal imbalance from weaning and a haziness has taken hold, so she’s a little knocked off her game. She’s at this desperate moment. 

I like that it’s unclear how reliable Clove is, because memory is being interrogated in this book. Memory is inherently unclear at times. 

MS: I was compelled by the relationships between women throughout the novel. How were you thinking about motherhood and community?

Violence blinds women to seemingly obvious truths. I aimed to display the strain and the closeness this creates.

CB: Clove has a persistent yearning for connection. She is at a moment where she’s realizing that shrouding herself in secrecy has backfired because she can’t achieve genuine closeness with anyone. She is not known by anyone, and she’s realizing how painful that is. I wanted her to be yearning for connection so that she would befriend a stranger (who literally crashes into her) in such an immediate way; Clove knows she doesn’t want superficial relationships anymore, and subconsciously, she wants someone to start pressing at certain issues she’s kept to herself. Jane does that.

I wanted to show, for all the women in the book, how they are connected in so many different ways, but ultimately, they go to bat for each other and also betray each other.  Domestic violence at the center of it all. The crux of their connection is this domestic violence. They’re all steeped in patriarchy. I wanted to examine how women maintain friendships and connection while contending with survival on a daily basis. I wanted to show in action how we isolate women, especially mothers, and show the ways the violence blinds these women to seemingly obvious truths about each other. I aimed to display the strain and the closeness this creates between women. I drew from what I’ve observed in my mother’s female friendships, and also the tremor of fear that ran through every day of my childhood—fear running through a day at the beach, fear running through her meeting up with a friend, these really innocent things were always so fraught because of male violence. I wanted to capture that on the page.

MS: How did domestic violence become one of the hearts of the novel?

CB: As I was interrogating motherhood, I started to understand that I couldn’t look at it comprehensively until I’d looked at it through the lens of domestic violence. Because of my mother: For so long, we all bought into a narrative about her that was focused on her addiction but left out that she was being brutalized on a daily basis by men. And I as a child was like, yup, addiction. That’s the problem. But as an adult, and especially after her death when I was reading her journals, I came to understand the vast bind of her oppression. I thought, Wow. Motherhood is hard enough in the best of circumstances. To realize that she mothered me, or tried to, in absolute hell was a light-bulb moment for me. It was like, Oh, you did not die of alcoholism. You died of domestic violence. 

For me, motherhood stirred up trauma.

Every bit of my mother’s life was affected by the trauma and the PTSD and the cycle of violence she found herself caught in. I wanted to tell a story that included that.

MS: Each of your books thinks carefully about generational trauma, and Madwoman is no exception. Clove actively attempts to break the cycle but finds that’s not nearly as easy as she’d thought. As a woman who was raised steeped in trauma, I know well that C-PTSD adds a whole other wrinkle to motherhood.

CB: Yes! I think that when I became a mother, I very much had the notion that having a family of my own would be what undid my trauma and fix the past. But what I found was that in the hormonal upheaval of pregnancy and new motherhood, I was dealing with intrusive thoughts, with memories that seemed to emerge out of nowhere. I felt almost psychically attacked by the past. I don’t know if you’ve read the essay “Ghosts in the Nursery,” but that idea of trauma creeping in in the wake of new motherhood, of trauma as a looming presence in the nursery—everything is meant to be wonderful and serene, but actually we are instead asked to contend with our past. For me, motherhood stirred up trauma. I realized, Okay, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to have to look at the past in a very direct way so I can be making decisions from a really grounded place versus a place of trauma response. 

MS: It’s a moment that forces you to reckon with what it means to be a mother, and then to reconsider the choices our own mothers made. Can you say more about how motherhood made you reconsider memory?

CB: As a new mother, so much of memory felt scary for me. It felt terrifying even though I knew I was safe in my own adult home. My body and nervous system couldn’t understand that safety. Memory is a real bitch. It’s alive in a way that feels dangerous. Madwoman is my attempt to nail that down—the slipperiness and urgency of memory.

MS: How did you so successfully resist the tropes that often emerge when writing a “thriller” about domestic violence?

Memory is a real bitch. It’s alive in a way that feels dangerous.

CB: My goal throughout was to add complexity. I think a lot of the genre tropes occur when the story becomes too simplified, when the violence is stripped of its nuance. I wanted to challenge readers’ expectations. And I was really after getting at the generational aspect of domestic violence you mentioned—the violent relationship belonged to Clove’s parents, but the book is about what Clove carries forward through her life, what that looks like long-term. I was interested in writing from the perspective of a child who has lived through violence and realizes that the violence doesn’t just end, someone has to carry it. I remember early on in the writing of the book, a question came to me: Where does the energy of violence go? It seemed like I’d somehow become the carrier of the memory of that violence. 

MS: Even when we are doing all we can to end the cycle, it continues forward. As you said earlier, it’s still in the room, sitting with us.

CB: And the people who enacted the violence are often no longer carrying it in this way! I sat with the weight of it—it’s a huge weight to carry that violence. Carrying it while caretaking and mothering is… a real mindfuck. 

MS: For me, watching my son grow has offered me new insight into what it meant to grow up in a violent home—motherhood has made processing my own trauma a necessity. But it’s also an opportunity, because you can fathom the child that you once were in a way that wasn’t possible before. Reading this book, it felt like, Finally, someone has written about the very specific strangeness of having been an abused child and then raising a child of one’s own. Thank you for putting it down on the page. 

CB: I’ve had that exact experience. And I don’t think there is enough writing about it. For me, watching my kids age is a renegotiation of everything. Every time I think I’ve made sense of my memories, my children hit new milestones and I realize I haven’t pinned it all down so neatly. For me, motherhood awoke a lot of rage. I realized, wow, things back then were actually worse than I’d thought. It opens up a new layer of absolute anger. I’ve had to do a lot of processing of the anger that’s come up in my body. What do you do when there is no one from the past to hold accountable? It’s work you have to do for yourself. It’s a gift to yourself to do that work, but it’s not easy stuff. 

MS: Let’s bring it back around to the book—Clove is trying to outrun her trauma but eventually she comes up against the fact that it’s still there in the room with her. I’m curious whether for you, Madwoman tells a hopeful story about trauma and motherhood?

Violence doesn’t just end, someone has to carry it.

CB: I do think Clove comes to the understanding that she cannot bypass her trauma. She realizes it’s not serving her or her children or her relationships to hide from the truth of her past; it’s actually this massive bypass. At the start of the book she mentions that she’s done so many different healing modalities—but she has never tried just looking at the truth of her life directly. I think the novel ends with a door opening for Clove, rather than closing.

MS: Are you feeling ready to put such a personal novel out into the world, and for the heavy emotional responses you’re likely to receive from your readership? Is it different from the first two books?

CB: This is such a different feeling. I’ve been really emotional lately, and I think it’s because I’m anticipating what it’ll feel like to have the book out in the world. I do feel that, as you’ve said, women might read this and it’ll spark conversation or deepen their understanding of something—that is the utmost goal, the most amazing outcome I could imagine for Madwoman: for women to understand the effects of domestic violence in a way that fosters connection rather than division. I look forward to that piece of it, I really do. Beyond my urge to write, to make art, I do have a sense that this book needed to exist, to be in the world. The suffering my mother endured, that I endured, I like the idea that it might have a meaning beyond just suffering. That is what art does. This is the power of story.