We’re celebrating our 15th birthday, which makes us about as old as Poe would have been in literary magazine years. In honor of this glorious milestone, we’re throwing a party!
Join our esteemed hosts, Emma Copley Eisenberg, Vanessa Chan, Deesha Philyaw, and Clare Sestanovich, as well as EL editors and authors, for an evening of drinks and dancing in support of Electric Literature at our masquerade on October 18, 2024 in Brooklyn, New York. We’ll have a photo booth, free books, free masks, an open bar, and, of course, cake!
The Masquerade of the Red NEON Death Littlefield, Brooklyn, New York Friday, October 18, 2024 VIP Cocktail Hour 7 – 8pm Dance Party, featuring DJ Sean Davis, 8 – 11pm
This year, we’re going electric and the dress code is black and/or neon. Think bright colors, day glow, and pop art. Feeling introverted? Show up in black jeans and a black t-shirt and you’ll fit right in. Feeling extroverted and wondering how hard you can go? There is no limit. Need proof? Check out last year’s photos by Jasmina Tomic, and revel in the photo booth antics. EL members receive a 10% discount. (Check your email for the discount code.)
Masks and neon accessories will be provided, or you can bring your own. Come ready to dance because the tunes by DJ Sean Davis will light you up!
Can’t make it to Brooklyn for the event? You can still support our mission to make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive with a charitable donation. Everything Electric Literature publishes is free to read. We publish over 500 writers per year, and we pay them all. Each gift of $75 sponsors one of our writers to attend the Masquerade for free, so we can celebrate them as guests of honor.
Patrons that give $150 or more will be acknowledged at the Masquerade. Please write “Masquerade” in the notes field, as well as the name you wish to be acknowledged under.
Electric Lit, Inc. is 501(c)3 non-profit, and your ticket purchase is tax-deductible minus the cost of goods and services.
Who are the women who shaped the middle ages? Can you remember? Were you ever even told about them? So many of their names are barely remembered today. Often their histories are ignored, their stories silenced or simply lost to time. Why? Maybe it’s because they were seen as dangerous. Often they were not the docile and pious creatures that we often imagine when we think of medieval Europe. No, the women who made their mark were warriors, rulers, writers, composers, artists, inventors, and so many other things besides. These dangerous women are the most fascinating of all.
My second novel, Bright I Burn, is about the loudest of ghosts: a wildly intelligent, ravenous and angry woman from history. One day out walking in the snow, I heard the voice of Alice Kyteler, the first person ever formally accused of witchcraft in Ireland in 1324. A school teacher told me about her when I was twelve, painting her as a figure from Grimm’s fairy tales, or worse an early Disney hag. I was terrified of her, but as an adult I began to realize there must be more to her than sacrificing animals and killing her four husbands. I was right. I read everything I could find about her—which wasn’t much—and discovered she was a powerful moneylender and highly influential person in the late 13th and early 14th-century. For a woman like this, it seemed highly unlikely she would have needed to practice witchcraft, and yet her trial helped lay the foundations for all the thousands of executions and murders that followed in Europe and later in the U.S. Instead of focusing on her trial, which was only a small part of her long life, I explored her four marriages, and all the jealousy, greed and passion that bred from them. The more I immersed myself in the wild and violent world of medieval Kilkenny, the more alive Alice became on the page. Often I really felt as if it was her writing, not me, and when I glance over the pages now, many came to me intact, as if in a dream.
In Ireland, Alice Kyteler is for the most part remembered through the misogynistic lens of the man who brought her case to trial. This was her legacy, and I sensed her rage about it. Her voice in my head grew louder and louder, until I sat down to write her story from her point of view. Bright I Burn is the result. It is, I hope, her legacy now.
In short this ghost of mine was formidable. What you might call ‘badass’. When I chose this term, I was thinking of a tough, uncompromising, perhaps even intimidating person. These are characteristics often associated with the men who populate the history books. The men remembered in history are often expected to be violent, even praised for it. The same cannot be said for women. Has Napoleon or Julius Caesar ever been described as badasses? I don’t think so. It’s only applied to women. Perhaps the term is meant to degrade women who display supposedly male characteristics. But the time has come to reclaim it.
So many women’s histories have been ignored or silenced. But no more. I’ve curated a small list of fiction and non-fiction books about “badass” medieval women, so that you too, if you wish, can experience the middle ages through the eyes and ears and hearts and minds of women. Let’s remember these women, not as faultless, but complicated and messy, terrifying and clever, brilliant and badass.
A novel that beats to its own drum, Matrix is a soaring and luminous exploration of the life of a real woman from 12th-century Marie de France. There’s little known about her beyond her extraordinary writing, but the cavernous gaps in our understanding of who this woman was has allowed Lauren Groff to step in and re-imagine her. In the opening pages, Groff’s Marie de France is a queer, fierce warrior riding a warhorse. Most of the story takes place in a nunnery, but this is probably unlike any you’ve ever read about. Marie teaches the nuns she leads sword fighting and sets a bold new course to find wealth and power. Most compelling about Marie is not her resilience or strength, but her determination to make her mark on a man’s world, and which she achieved with her writing. But it is Groff’s skill with the pen that really shines throughout the book. Every page is spangled in a way that feels uniquely medieval. I defy you, reader, not to fall in love with this flawed, fierce, and completely brilliant woman that is Lauren Groff’s Marie de France.
‘I am the fiery life of divine substance, I blaze above the beauty of the fields, I shine in the waters, I burn in sun, moon and stars.’—Hildegard of Bingen
The pitch for this one really is in the title. Janina Ramirex highlights, in rare technicolor for a work of history non-fiction, many of the key women figures in medieval Europe: leaders, artists, scientists, spies, diplomats, entrepreneurs and outcasts. Reading this book will most likely fill you with a riotous rage that you’ve never heard of any of these brilliant women before. Ramirez explores all their wild and fascinating lives, but more importantly how they shaped the world we live in now. One brilliant example is Ramirez’s account of Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179) who was a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and medical practitioner. Hildegard was also influential across Europe, giving counsel to all kinds of people including popes and kings. She is just one tantalizing example of the types of women you will find hidden within these pages. Yes, this is a history book, a widely and deeply researched one, but please don’t let this dissuade you. It is is vastly readable and enjoyable.
‘When fools are in charge, wise men make no predictions.’—Hilda of Whitby
Sometimes, we want to lose ourselves in a thick, luxuriously long novel, and this meticulously crafted tapestry of 7th-century England is ideal if you’re looking for deep immersion in the past. Hild thrusts the reader into the early life of Hilda of Whitby, a woman who would come to be worshipped as a saint. She is destined to become the king’s seer, but her true skill is in observation of people and nature. Most wonderful about this reimagining is that Hild is bisexual. Ideas about sexuality were not as rigid in the middle ages as we might expect and Griffith leans into this with beauty. Every facet of medieval England is brought to life from the domestic to the bloody, reminding us just how privileged we are to live in a world where we can easily heat our homes or phone our loved ones. From the first to last page, the reader is completely transported to the 7th century. It really is a feast of a book.
In medieval England, men ruled women, and the King was ruler of everyone. Yet, royal power ended up in the hands of women. Of course, not all historians agree with this delicious and convincing reading of the past by Helen Castor, but we shan’t concern ourselves with them. In She-Wolves Castor tells the dramatic histories of four women who wielded great power: Matilda, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France and Margaret of Anjou. Castor fleshes out the lives of these four who have, with the exception of Eleanor of Auiquitaine, were overlooked in history books because they were wives, and their husbands, the kings, were considered to be more important than them. Castor maps out how each of these women shaped the England that followed, laying the way for Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I to become sole ruler of England. Throughout the book, the writing is fluid and full of verve. It is clear in every sentence what pleasure Castor takes in the written word, illustrating that beautiful sentences are created not only by novelists. I predict you will be won over by the she-wolves, and Castor too.
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie
‘I take no heed what you have been but what you would be.’—Margery Kempe
A small but mighty epic, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain shows us that historical fiction can be just as potent, even when the writing is lean, and the details of the past sparse. Yet due to this every sentence feels layered and weighty. MacKenzie explores two fascinating women who lived in the 14th century: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Although very different women who lived almost opposite lives, one as a religious recluse, and the other as a wife with fourteen children, they both had visions which they interpreted as being gifted by God. This counterpoint between the two builds until the final pages where they finally meet, reflected in MacKenzie’s experimental and at-times fragmented writing style. This is a book that can be read over and over and new meanings and nuances will be found each time.
It is challenging to find book set in the middle ages that don’t focus on England or France, but The Wreath by Sigrid Undset is a rare exception. Set in 14th-century Norway, it is about a fictitious Norwegian woman, Kristin Lavransdatter, who is defiant in her behavior yet often ridden with guilt, unsurprising given the religious zealousness of this period. Kristin falls in love, or at least in severe infatuation, with Erlend, a ravishing and rich rake. Kristin is the only character from this list of books who is entirely fictitious, however, Undset brings her to life with a vividness that convinces us readers that perhaps, just perhaps, she did live. At the very least we leave the book feeling that women like her must have existed. The meticulous research shimmers on every page, but the writing is in no way labored by it. This is the key to truly skilled historical fiction, and no doubt a major contributor to Sigrid Undset winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928.
“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it.”
Joan of Arc is probably the most famous medieval woman so it’s not surprising that there are many novels about her, but a recent stand out is Katherine J Chen’s Joan. There is a freshness and also a sheer sense of excitement in almost every line of this book. This is a Joan that feels new. Chen introduces us not to a supremely pious girl visited by visions from God, but to a girl with physical gifts. She is strong and agile, which makes sense for a girl who would go on to lead the French to victory against the English, yet usually there is a frailty or even mania to the portrayals of Joan. Chen’s inhabitation of the character is far more realist and because of that far more alive. It is a surprisingly propulsive read given that most of us know the story, and know her ending. Yet this book makes us question history’s portrayal of Joan, and consider that she may have been different to how the mostly male historians have written her. This is one of the powers of historical fiction: the best writers can shine a light on the misogyny of our beliefs about the past. Chen does this in flaming, and illuminative language, recasting this woman as far more complex than we had imagined.
The lights go out. And in the darkness two friends banter—until one sees something. A portal into another realm? The friends are frozen and a figure appears announcing they tell stories here. It doesn’t matter if the friends want no part of this, the monsters’ greed is bottomless. That’s the prelude to Gianni Washington’s debut short story collection, Flowers from the Void(CLASH Books). Published in the U.K. this past spring by Serpent’s Tail, the collection is now available to American readers who enjoy short stories that veer into the strange and haunting.
This prelude acts as a clever framing device for the collection, allowing Washington to showcase a wider range of stories regarding tone, narrators, and voices than might otherwise be expected. Some of the stories stick close to our world, others stray from it. Often the alternate realities aren’t immediately apparent, so the reader is lulled into the world of the story before realizing what trepidation awaits, other times that’s clear right away. Most of the stories are contemporary, though not all—one takes place in the 17th century with an African witch preparing to join a coven of white women. On the surface, the compilation of stories might seem rather hodge-podge, as if they don’t quite fit together aside from a shared creepy factor. But a deeper reading reveals the immense heart bubbling underneath each of the stories. Because while they are indeed unsettling, they’re much more than that; they’re pulsing with empathy and united by how they highlight what we all have in common: a shared humanity. And each story is skillfully written—something that becomes even more apparent the second time around. Washington is an inventive and talented writer, elegant on the line level, emotionally intelligent with her characters, no matter how monstrous, and able to weave unforgettable macabre stories that linger, but also should be pondered. Flowers from the Void is a smart, imaginative collection by a notable new voice in fiction.
I had the pleasure of talking to Gianni Washington about this diverse range of stories, rereading, and the horror genre.
Rachel León: Typically when I interview authors it’s before their books’ pub date, but we’re talking after your collection was published by Serpent’s Tail and before its launch with Clash Books, so I thought we could start there. Can you share what it’s been like to first debut abroad? I’m wondering if that somehow lessens the pressure, or maybe it adds to it?
Gianni Washington: It’s a bit of both. I feel some pressure regarding how the book will be received in the U.S. versus the U.K., especially because the book is still quite new and finding its ideal readers across the pond. A staggered release draws the process out, giving my mind free rein to come up with every awful scenario possible. On the other hand, I appreciate the chance to experience talking about the book in public ahead of its release here because I anticipate (maybe hope is a better word) that it will get easier the more I do it.
RL: I hate to ask, but how would you describe this book’s ideal reader?
GW: Really,I suppose the book’s “ideal” reader is me, haha. The risk of publishing anything is that readers won’t be pulling from the same bank of references as you, the author, and as a result, won’t get as much out of the work as you hope they will. That said, my ideal, non-me reader is receptive, compassionate, observant, and thoughtful; in other words, someone who reads in good faith.
RL: I love that because despite how these stories tend toward strange and otherworldly—horror, if you will—I felt like they’re united by the idea of what makes us human. Which isn’t what I anticipated from the book’s description.
GW: That’s exactly what I hope readers will take away from this book! I really enjoy using the unfamiliar to highlight the familiar. Because we can only know the intricacies of our individual lived experiences, we spend a lot of time feeling misunderstood. But I tend to attribute that misunderstanding more to the different ways we communicate and receive information than an actual inability to relate to one another. Putting characters in strange, sometimes horrific situations is one of my favorite ways to illustrate that we all have access to the same range of emotions, regardless of the circumstances we find ourselves in. Even if you can’t exactly relate to what a character is going through, you can probably relate to how it makes them feel.
RL: Maybe now’s a good time to talk about the range of the collection, which I found impressive: these stories are all so different. I hesitated to say ‘horror’ earlier because while some feel that way, others feel more gothic. There’s an incredible range here, and you pull them all together beautifully with a framing device. Could you speak to the way these stories stretch across the collection?
GW: I wanted to give readers as many opportunities as possible to connect with whatever style, situation, or character resonated with them most, as well as wanting to showcase my own breadth as a writer. The framing device was incredibly useful as a sort of home base for each story, keeping them all united thematically. Though the stories vary, I always seem to return to the same concerns: life as performance, emotional isolation, metaphysics, belief, and fear. I sometimes wonder if I shot myself in the foot by not keeping the collection more cohesive on the surface, but in the end, this is a far more authentic representation of me than I could have asked for. It can be pretty nerve-wracking to expose so many aspects of your inner world publicly, but worth the terror if it means reflecting some part of a reader back to themselves.
RL: Publishing anything that exposes our inner world is terrifying, but it seems almost poetic to do so while writing terrifying stories. Like spreading the fear around!
GW: Agree! Sharing your fears and questions and whatever else is swirling around inside your head is ultimately such a good thing because there will always be someone else out there who feels how you feel or has the same questions. Spreading the fear around can help nullify it because you create new ways to consider that fear, which can lead down some exciting rabbit holes that are more fascinating than they are frightening.
RL: Speaking of fear, I’m curious: are you into scary movies?
Because we can only know the intricacies of our individual lived experiences, we spend a lot of time feeling misunderstood.
GW: There are horror films I really liked that have stuck with me: Hereditary, The Ring (one of the few Hollywood redos I prefer to the original), the old Pet Sematary (1989). My favorite ones are also hilarious. I saw The Cabin in the Woods in the cinema without watching the trailer or knowing anything about it and it was one of the best film experiences I’ve ever had. The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is bonkers. I also really dug The Menu and Get Out, which was hilarious and scary because of how much of it I recognized. My absolute favorite pieces of screen-based horror media are on TV. Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House is a masterpiece. The way the story maintains its fright factor while also being a completely engaging character study… I love, love, love it. Another fave, The (original) Twilight Zone, though not always horrific, is always thoughtful and imaginative.
RL: It’s interesting you mention humor because I tend to shy from straight up horror because it often seems one-note. I need something to go along with the dose of fear, and humor is the perfect partner. That’s another thing I enjoyed about your collection: there’s humor here, which I really appreciate.
GW: Humor has a grounding effect—it strengthens the connection between the fantastical stories we read or watch and the reality we live in. If you can see what’s funny in a situation or share a laugh with a character, you’re primed to immerse yourself further into the story as a whole. I mostly included humor in the form of banal observations and thoughts we’ve likely all had at some point as opposed to actual jokes.
RL: My favorite kind! Though, there are also a few jokes in the opening in the form of dialogue. Which brings us back to the framing device. I’m guessing that wasn’t always there. At one point did you bring it in?
GW: The framing device was actually there from the beginning! I love Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man—probably my most memorable encounter with a framing device in short fiction—and I thought it could be fun to try out something similar. Once I knew what stories I definitely wanted to include, I built the framing device around them, then wrote the remaining stories with the established framework in mind.
RL: I badly want to talk about individual stories, but I don’t want to spoil them for readers! That said, as delightful as my first read was with so many stories taking unexpected turns, I think I’m enjoying my second read of the collection even more. I’m dazzled by all your clever craft choices, so I encourage readers to revisit this one. Most avid readers seem to fall into one of two groups: Camp Never Reread and Rereaders like myself. Which are you?
Spreading the fear around can help nullify it because you create new ways to consider that fear.
GW: I am definitely a rereader. Sometimes it’s just to see if a story can still make me react as strongly as it did the first time. But usually it’s to see what I notice that I didn’t before. It’s thrilling to discover additional nuggets of interest in a story I already love. It can make a story feel neverending, in a good way. I do see where Camp Never Reread is coming from though. I get a little sad when I think about the books I won’t get around to.
RL: Yes to seeing more the second time around. One of my favorite stories in the collection is “Under Your Skin,” and knowing what would happen allowed me to notice things I hadn’t in my first read. Plus, rereading helped with one story I’d initially misread the narrator’s identity in—the back cover notes the tales are told through the lenses of Black, female, and queer narrators, so I read the one in “Hold Still” as female the first time, only realizing my mistake five pages in. It was a more enjoyable read without the confusion! Because one of the things I love about your work is its subtlety. It feels like you trust the reader. Is that true?
GW: Oh yes—Black, female, and queer, but different combinations of those characteristics, or only one of the three (or none in one case). I do have faith in the reader! When I read, it excites me to notice small details without everything being spelled out, so I try to give other readers a similar experience without leaving them confused. Striking a balance between being clear enough that the reader will enjoy the story, and staying true to your own style and creative goals is an ongoing challenge.
RL: I loved the range of narrators, especially because the differences echo that idea of what makes us human—we all experience fear. Why was that something you wanted to explore and showcase, like out of a full range of emotions, why fear?
GW: Confronting what scares me has always turned up important information. It happens every single time and I love how that feels. Some of my narrators have fears that I write them through; others only make it to the point of figuring out what frightens or confuses them, but even that helps them to understand themselves better. I think there’s value in facing what terrifies you, and in revisiting who you think you are, especially if you end up changing your mind.
A Study of Labor and Fire: On Being a Queer Educator in the Second Lavender Scare by J. Bonanni
I
It is December 2022 and I am reading A Raisin in the Sunwith my four classes of 8th grade students at a middle school on Cape Cod. Desks are arranged in a circle so that we can perform cold readings of the play, allowing each student to be different characters on different days. We are midway through the book, an edition I’ve chosen because it adheres to Hansberry’s original intentions with the play, scenes and words which are often deleted for schools—Mrs. Johnson, the word faggot, the n-word.
Before we encounter the slurs, I ask the students to have an honest conversation about each one, a practice I picked up from Matthew Kay’s book, Not Light But Fire. With the students, we have just covered a whole week of Black history from slavery to Civil Rights in our ELA classroom because this won’t be taught in their Civics classrooms as 8th graders. For each slur, I ask them to consider:
What does this word mean for you personally?
What images does this word conjure?
What is your relationship to the word?
Who gets to use it? Why?
If I have done my job as an educator—building trust and community within each classroom—there is an exchange of dialogue. Maybe there are some arguments, and eventually there’s a consensus that certain words are now reserved for certain communities because of the violences enacted on those communities by people who historically held positions of social power. Equally important, there’s a consensus that no one can give another person permission to use these words.
But, if the kids don’t like each other, or they don’t like me, or they don’t like themselves enough to speak, then the room stays quiet. One or two students may not be afraid to articulate their thoughts, in which case I will converse with those students. If no one speaks, I model my own relationship to these slurs, and hope that this can act as a guide for them.
Today we are approaching page 56, where Hansberry’s character, Walter, is about to call George’s shoes “faggoty.” George has more money than Walter. I warn the students before we see the word.
When I look over at Aiden, he has turned to Steven, his close friend. He is trying to grab Steven’s attention. He is smiling at the word faggot. I pause. I wait for his eyes to meet mine.
When they finally do, the room is quiet. Having worked with kids for over fifteen years, I have learned to perfect my death stare. Here, though, I can see it all: death stares back at me.
Equally important, there’s a consensus that no one can give another person permission to use these words.
Before I was a teacher, I was a writer. Working at a residential school with kids with developmental disabilities from 2008 until 2015, I learned to compartmentalize my creative life with my working one, and therefore, never bothered to create a pen name. During this time, earlier poems of mine focused largely around issues of class and mental illness. I think much of this preoccupation stemmed from the political climate of the time—Obama was president and the U.S. momentarily looked poised for movement in a direction of Queer inclusion, something I had craved since my early childhood.
I think, sometimes, about the poets of the New York School—O’Hara, Schuyler, Ashbery. Frank O’Hara’s poems were Queer. They were out. Ashbery, despite identifying as gay, read as much more cryptic. In a 1982 interview, Ashbery commented:
“There might be a lot of suppressed or sublimated eroticism in my poetry because, as I say, I write off of people whom I’m thinking about. Some of them are people to whom I’m sexually attracted. But I try to keep that quiet, not out of prudery, but just because it seems there are more important things, though I don’t yet know what they are.”
In 2021, Jay, an 8th grade boy, was teased for being effeminate. He was in another teacher’s ELA class, though I wish he had been placed in mine so as to protect him, at the very least, for fifty- five minutes a day. In one of my classes, we read “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury, and after discussing the protagonist, Margot, who is locked in a closet by her classmates, the conversation orbited around bullying. Some of the girls in the class started to share about “someone” who got teased for being gay.
“Well, he doesn’t even know he’s gay,” one girl tried to explain.
“If he hasn’t identified as gay, then we can’t be calling him that,” I said. This poor kid. “He’s fourteen,” I said with an exhaustion that felt both overworked and personal.
Jay had not yet stated to anyone that he was gay. He shouldn’t have to. And no one should be bullying him in the meantime. I came out when I was 21.
Jay had befriended one girl, whom another student, Darrell, then began dating. About 100 feet from campus, outside the town library, Darrell tackled Jay, shoved him with both hands to the concrete parking lot, wailed on his face with his fists. Jay left the scene bloodied, brushing off the small stones from the skin of his scraped knees.
Some faculty theorized that Jay was attacked because Jay is friends with Darrell’s girlfriend. Anyone who’s gay knew this was bullshit. It was a hate crime, and no one wanted to call it a hate crime because the school is wealthy and predominantly heterosexual and white, and therefore, runs on the electric pulse of Stepford.
Jay’s parents chose not to press charges. In the meantime, Jay’s teachers changed his schedule; not Darrell’s.
Later in the year, Darrell got in his third first fight. Besides a few in-school suspensions, nothing happened. By June, I emailed the district’s Director of Special Education and the Superintendent. “In my time in Special Education, I’ve seen students outplaced for worse. It is not safe here,” I wrote.
The district’s Director of Special Education replied that we could not discuss the matter because of “confidentiality.” I reminded her that Darrell was under all of our care—in fact, I was the primary English teacher for Darrell.
Around that same time, one boy hacked into Jay’s friend’s phone. He found a series of text messages with Jay that “proved” he was gay. That student shared these texts with his friends, all of whom were vying for the same alpha male status. When the guidance counselor interviewed both Jay and his friend, she chose not to tell the administration. Or the police.
Jay had not yet stated to anyone that he was gay. He shouldn’t have to.
What else do we bury? Ray Bradbury writes, “The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.” Margot, too, was locked in a closet.
In October of 2022, a math teacher arrived at my classroom door to tell me a group of boys had uncovered a reading of mine on YouTube in which I read poems that dealt specifically with Stonewall’s history. The boys, of course, were laughing. Karla, an educational assistant in the room, said, “Mr. Bonanni is a friend of mine. Do you even know what Stonewall was?” She ensured they knew. The room went quiet. I was thankful for Karla’s support, though still, a part of me wishes that the math teacher just wouldn’t have told me anything.
Back in September, some of the kids had googled me, found pictures of me reading poems, my author photo. They screenshotted them to their iPads, their phones. At first I didn’t know what happened to these photos. I found it creepy, but didn’t address it; let the teachers who know about it report it, I told myself. Let the administration handle it, there are more important things. When the principal approached me in October, she said that she’d taken away the culprits’ iPads.
“Was there anything homophobic?” I asked. It was hard for me to ask, but I knew enough to ask it. She told me there wasn’t, but she had been working at the school for three months, our fifth principal in three years. She was new and cisgender and heterosexual.
In February of 2023, they find, on one student’s TikTok account, videos he created using photos that he’s taken or found of his teachers. I am one of the targets. “Is there anything homophobic?” I ask again. No. Again, I won’t believe it. I ask to see them. I want my own copies.
I am called out of my last period class for an impromptu meeting. I fumble through papers, give instructions to a sub, and walk to the principal’s office. Two police officers are there sitting, next to three other teachers.
“You are allowed to have union representation,” the principal says to the teachers. Why would I need it? I did nothing wrong. No one asks for it.
At the principal’s large conference table, we sit down with the Orleans Police Department, and Detective J. tells us that there’s nothing criminal about the kid’s TikToks because there’s nothing sexual. The student had taken a picture of a science teacher bending over. When I tell them this is sexual, Officer J. says that it’s “arguable.” He says there’s not a pattern yet, even though this same student had shared my home address with other students in the beginning of the year. He says there’s nothing “threatening.” I am a rabbit in a corner.
“I don’t feel safe,” I tell the room. “And I want to know if there are guns in the home.”
In March of 2018 a technology teacher, hired at a neighboring elementary school within our district, had been found to be molesting children. It was in the local paper. Another special education teacher stepped into my class to check in. It had been awhile since we talked. Because we were both, at that time, within the silent, often ignored, world of special education within the building, we occasionally bonded over being left out of scheduling or a field trip or an assembly. When we began to talk about the horrific nature of the incident, she said she knew the child molester, and that she had met him before. Then she said, “We all knew he was gay.”
Did she not know the difference between gay and pedophilia? I didn’t correct her. She knew I was gay, I knew I was gay, and therefore, my place there must have been to ensure I am not to be confused with grooming, with a pedophile, so I just allowed her to talk. “Terrible,” I said.
II
During February break of 2023, I like some thirst traps on Twitter, now X, without fully realizing that when you like something on Twitter, the activity is public. Shirtless muscley blondes, hot Latinos, wet Black men, and cut Asian men pointing their hard dicks at the camera. Instagram fluent, but not Twitter fluent. This is why they call it a trap.
The students who stalked me find this. One voice says I brought this on myself. It was an amateur move. Unprofessional. How could I not know my likes were public? Okay, Boomer. But the embarrassment is not embarrassment because embarrassment is temporary. What is this feeling that shakes each muscle in my body? Shame. The blood moves into my face, and I shiver at night for a week while I ruminate over it.
Detective J. tells us that there’s nothing criminal about the kid’s TikToks because there’s nothing sexual.
When the kids talk about it in the new teacher’s math class, she tells me. I make the account private, then ‘unlike’ the thirst traps. How sad that good nudes got unliked.
I apply to a job that I know I will never get at a university in Boston.
I get a request to follow me by a fake teacher at the high school in the next town: it’s clearly another student trying to harass me. I follow them back, then block them. I make my Twitter public and write: Being a Queer educator is like being assaulted every day. The next day, I make the account private.
This is the same week that the state of Tennessee passes a law that outlaws drag shows. Close to a dozen bills just like it work their way through Republican led legislatures, as though a fire’s embers rise, propagate, then land on each capital courthouse steps. The same week, Biden’s student loan debt relief is challenged in the Supreme Court. I now have another 10 grand to pay back and a car with 160,000 miles on it. I start an application to teach at a prestigious private school, fooling myself into thinking that this will make it any better.
More fake accounts have requested to follow me. They all claim to be Asian men, which is the race of one of the thirst traps I had liked and which had been posted by my friend, a queer Chinese-American poet. Some of the fake accounts are more impressive than others in their homophobic racism.
One fake account pretends to be an Asian man who teaches at the public school in the next town. Another fake account pretends to be an Asian writer. Another account just says “I like farts.” One has some handywork. The person has doctored an Asian American man’s face onto people saying, “Me at my writers’ conference.”
Queer baiting by 14-year-old boys. I try to think of a time that this level of bullying and harassment occurred in my life. I remember it now: I was 14.
Alex Chee’s course description for the 2023 Summer Fine Arts Work Center Catalog reads:
“Self-censorship is pervasive for LGBTQ+ writers, whether we are considering being out at work or addressing intergenerational trauma. How can we recuperate what we have hidden even from ourselves — much less others — as we set out to write fiction, and how can we write about it meaningfully, without harming or re-traumatizing ourselves or others?”
His course is sold out by the beginning of March. I won’t attend. It’s too expensive on a teacher’s salary. That first weekend of March, I delete my Twitter account.
One of my favorite drag queens, Headda Lettuce, has a joke: What’s the difference between anonion and Ron Desantis? You don’t cry when you chop up Ron Desantis. The last time I saw Hedda Lettuce was in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. She belted out show tunes, insulted the audience, and paddled ping pong balls from beneath her skirt. On the same vacation, I dropped in to la farmacia to stock up on things I might need for later in the U.S., where everything requires a reason, an explanation, a prescription. I bought antibiotics and some variation of speed. I bought sixty dollars’ worth of Clonipin, an antianxiety medication doctors in the U.S. have been hellbent on controlling since the opiate epidemic ravaged our country. I smuggled the pills home in a Tylenol container in 2020, some still in a drawer somewhere. Surprisingly, the whole U.S. population is not all addicted to downers. But we’re not all pure either.
In March of 2023, my paranoia keeps me up at night. In my mind it plays out in the worst possible scenario: The kids will tell the other kids. Some kids will tell their parents. Maybe the parents won’t mind? Doubtful, it’s New England, where the Puritans landed and where their boat-shoed ancestors still reign in moral superiority. The parents will tell the administration. The administration will tell the Superintendent. They will get the lawyer. No one tells me, but I can feel the clock tick until I get called into an office to have my sit-down about professionalism. I could say the account was hacked. I could say one of the kids did it, that it was a fake account, which is the least believable. Shame rises through me like a snake, starting in my stomach and moving into my head. My blood flushes. At night I shiver.
I apply to more jobs. Fight, flight, freeze.
I take the Mexican Clonipin. I make an appointment with a nurse practitioner for antidepressants, SSRI’s I haven’t had to take since I was in college 15 years ago. When I was coming out. It comes to me when I make that appointment: I’m not here to inspire the next generation of writers. I’m here to survive.
Here’s a headline I saw: “Teacher Fired After Students Discover OnlyFans Account.” Apparently, she had filmed herself having sex with her husband, created an Only Fans, uploaded it for her followers under a different name, and students discovered it. The school administration then fired her. When they discovered that this teacher had performed sex for money, parents were “outraged.”
I consider how boundaries between coy posing and porn can blur—first a person posts their own thirst trap to Instagram, and then they get likes. They hit the gym more and work on their body. They post more thirst traps, they get more likes. They think: Maybe I could be an influencer. Maybe I could profit off of this somehow. What if that could get me the vacation I wanted this year? But when, exactly, do thirst traps become porn?
More importantly, why was my first reaction: At least I’m not her.
Why was my second reaction, Wait. This girl needed a side hustle. We all do.
In 1595, Shakespeare wrote a play titled Love’s Labor’s Lostwhich centers around three lords who are recruited by a king to study under him for three years. The conditions the king requires for the three-year period of study: one day of full fasting weekly, with only one meal on the other days.
I try to think of a time that this level of bullying and harassment occurred in my life. I remember it now: I was 14.
Each student must also only live on just three hours of sleep per night. The final condition? Celibacy. The lord Berowne says, “O these barren tasks, too hard to keep—/ Not see ladies, study, fast, not sleep.” The play is performed for Elizabeth I one Christmas. The play is a comedy.
It’s still March 2023, and I am losing sleep. My coping skills—running, meditation, writing—help with this, but the sleeplessness continues. I run 4-mile bursts outside or on the treadmill at the gym, but because my anxiety prevents me from eating adequately, it starts to feel like something akin to an eating disorder. I am 130 pounds as a 5 foot 8 inch 38 year old man. It’s a weight people strive for, but in all my burning, I can see in the mirror the way my jaw extends wider over my thinning neck.
I don’t report any of the fake Twitter accounts to the administration. Why? It’s cyber-harassment and it violates the school’s technology policy. The police could likely hunt down the IP addresses of these kids. But I liked a nude. I liked multiple nudes. If they know this, it’s a conversation about professionalism, and, in likelihood, one in which I apologize for thinking that my Twitter was private, or, one in which I lie and claim the account was made by a student, or lie even further and say that my account got hacked. I’m not sure what they know, what they’ve already hunted down. Perhaps they’re extending me a small forgiveness? Perhaps they understand that becoming the pariah of 8th grade boys is punishment enough for my actions? Perhaps they realize that, with my union, I can easily obtain a lawyer and call this exactly what it is: discrimination against someone for being too faggoty. And perhaps they know how much that costs. I certainly don’t.
I now realize why my tweets had more views—the students were viewing them—why my LinkedIn Profile kept “getting noticed.” Parents could have been googling me. For weeks I hope it will blow over. I don’t tell my partner or even my closest friend. I bury it. Like so many Queers are taught to do.
In Kansas in 2022, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. won Teacher of the Year. After being warned not to discuss his identity with students, not to discuss “gay issues” in his high school classes, after bearing witness to harassment, after being harassed himself, Willie quit teaching. He wrote a book: Gay Poems for Red States.
I like to think that my situation is different, and it is, in that my environment is slightly less hostile: In Massachusetts, there would, at least, be conversation about whether it was homophobic or not to harass a Queer teacher. In Kansas, of course, in Appalachia, they just fire you. Willie’s administrators said, “We will not protect you,” on the subject of being an out teacher. “At least they were honest,” Willie says in an interview.
My administrators are actually required by law to protect me from homophobic harassment. Does that make me lucky? Should I be happier because of this? In so many ways, the similarities are there: I was searched out by kids. When they learned that I was gay, those kids made fun of me. I order Willie’s book.
When I talk to Willie about what happened, he says, “It’s a hate crime.”
Love’s Labor’s Lost, Shakespeare’s play about having to famish oneself through fasting, lack of sleep, and suppression of sexual desire, all for the trade-off of an education, is considered a comedy. But rather than everyone marrying at the end, as they do in most Shakespearean comedies, this play culminates when the Princess’s father dies. Shakespeare’s comedy about education, about famishment, about sexual repression, ends, instead, with death.
My biggest inner Queer wants to say I knew they were following me. I want to say, I knew my likes on Twitter were public. Seek me out? Stalk me? Make fun of a gay? Here. Try a nude. Fuck you. I did it on purpose. I really want to be that Queer. I’m not. At least not yet.
That Friday, I take my doctor’s appointment through telehealth. Parked at a state park, it is me and the pine trees and the Bluetooth and a decision to go on pills for my happiness.
I’m not here to inspire the next generation of writers. I’m here to survive.
“So you’re a teacher and you’re having some stress at work?” the PA asks.
“Yeah, I haven’t had this level of anxiety in a really long time,” I tell him.
“So we’re going to start you on small dose of 10 milligrams, and then we’ll up the dose to 20,” he says. “And for the anxiety, I have a script that I’ll send over to your pharmacy that’s non habit forming, take it over the weekend. Some people say it makes them tired, others say it makes them a little dazed. You’ll have to see.”
“Thanks,” I say, “I just need to get to June.”
“Sure thing. We can taper it off in the summer, and then, if you need to go back on it in September, we can taper you back on it. We’ll schedule your next appointment in four weeks to see how you’re doing.”
“Thanks,” I say. Back on antidepressants in September? Really? What kind of advice was that? Why didn’t he ask me if I had reached out to my support network? If I had a therapist? Have you thought of different jobs, John? Your transferrable skills? Is this how it all worked? You tell a doctor you’re a teacher, and they write you a script for whatever psych med you need to keep teaching? Power through it. 180 days; you can hack it or you can’t.
The anxiety medication gives me cotton mouth, dry eyes, and a hazey vision clouds my perception. When I look it up, it’s an antihistamine. Basically Benadryl. The first week on Celexa, my side effects are worse than anything I experienced the week prior: insomnia, hot flashes, panic attacks, headaches, fatigue, exhaustion. I almost abandon the med completely. The only times in my life I have taken an SSRI has had to do with the way the world perceived my sexuality. Coming out in the early aughts. Homophobia.
I read some Celexa reviews online and resolve to stay the course.
I stuff the Benadryl in my nightstand drawer, and pull out something stronger: that stash of Mexican Clonipin, smuggled here, just before our world shut down.
By the end of March 2023, Ron Desantis attempts to expand the Don’t Say Gay bill from its initial legislative K-3 to grades 4-12. If I taught in Florida, I couldn’t teach my curriculum: Sara Denizan’s short stories, The 57 Bus, the excerpts from The Men with the Pink Triangle.
Meanwhile, I have started a unit on literature of the Holocaust with my 8th graders, and, to provide appropriate context, I lecture about WWII history and Hitler’s rise to power for a week. I say, “In a democracy we must have free exchange of ideas. That’s why we can’t burn books here.”
My administrators are actually required by law to protect me from homophobic harassment.
“Unless you’re in Florida,” one of my students says.
“Or Texas,” another chimes in.
My heart and how it beats so. My heart, my heart.
I facetime my poet-friend, Michael Bondhus. He has written three books of very Queer, gender- bending poetry. When I tell him what happened, he relays a similar story about middle schoolers finding a picture on his MySpace. “This was after I had left the school though,” he says. He now works as a professor at a community college in New Jersey. He pauses for a moment. Looks up. He says, “Albert Camus says, ‘We must imagine Sisyphus happy.’”
In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Berowne confesses his inability to suppress sexual attraction for the sake of his schooling: “From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive. They sparkle still the right Promethean fire. They are the books, the arts, the academes.”
I apply to a local private high school. The charter school in Hyannis. I apply to Phillips Andover Academy. I apply to Deerfield Academy. Boarding schools far, far away. I apply to a pharmaceutical company as a trainer—I think it’s a trainer? Once, when I worked at a residential school for children with comorbid disabilities, I was certified to distribute psychiatric medication. I put this on my resume.
Around this time, some of the writers I met when I was in Tahoe studying poetry decide we need a Zoom call. We pour ourselves a drink and check in about our writing. All of us, except one, is looking for another job. I tell them I have also been on a search for something else. It’s as though after holding it together during the pandemic, during lockdown, during remote learning, hybrid learning, in-person learning, policing masks and 3-foot distances, I am only now unraveling. I tell them I got cyberbullied this year. That a kid made a TikTok with my face that he had found off the internet, and that my administration did nothing. Not even an apology.
“That happened in my building,” another teacher says. “And all the teachers that were subjected to it quit.”
One of my friends is a UX Writer for a major bank. None of us know what this means, but she tells us to look into it: UX means user experience, where a writer would write for the tech, keeping in mind the ease of the user’s journey through that tech. She calls herself a glorified copywriter, works remotely, and shares her salary, which includes six digits none of us have ever dreamed of making. She emails all of us, then proceeds to walk us through the process of applying. She sends us an annotated job description that translates all the corporate- speak into language that reflects our transferrable skills.
“I might sell out,” I tell my friend, Keri. We had worked together at the same residential school for kids with disabilities and tonight we’re drinking boxed wine out of mugs. She has decided to quit her job as a special educator at a charter school outside Boston. “Sell out!” she says,“ “Then you can help me.”
I am only now unraveling. I tell them I got cyberbullied this year.
Once at that same residential school, Keri guided the kids and me through a meditation to help us find our “animal ally.” White people like us used to call these spirit animals before we realized how culturally appropriative it is to do so. Regardless, I very much believe that animal guides shift throughout the course of one’s life. In my twenties, a rabbit approached me in my meditation. The interpretation said, “Be careful to always have one foot out the door.” What I learned with my jobs: Always have one foot out the door.
By the end of April I take myself off the antidepressants completely. I go for long runs at the state park and try to avoid alcohol. Sometimes I can avoid alcohol.
Phillips Andover has hired someone else by May. I wasn’t their pedigree anyway, and the thought of having my life taken from me by a school—dorm parent, coaching, teaching—makes me wonder why I ever applied in the first place.
In one interview at a top ranked public school in Massachusetts, with an International Baccalaureate curriculum, I am asked to observe an English classroom. Watching from a chair in the back, I observe one student open up her homework and dual-screen between ChatGPT and her graphic organizer. She copies and pastes, then changes some words. Another student opens up his Chromebook, looks back at me, tilts his screen so I can’t see it. Two other students are deep into a discussion of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which I haven’t read since 9th grade. A few others are listening intently. It is a typical public school classroom. It is very much my current classroom. Read, arrive, take out your work, and let’s discuss it. It should be simple. It’s not.
We now compete with social media, which we know arrests development. We now compete with AI bots who write papers.
In May of 2023, an eighth grader named Bob gets sent out of his class by a substitute teacher. He feels slighted, and on his way out, he screams the word, “Faggot!” The art teachers hear it. The French teacher hears it. Sixth graders hear it.
Administrators will do nothing. There will be no “restorative task.” They will bury it because they are cisgendered and heterosexual and white and don’t fully comprehend that this language is inexcusable, even from a child.
He is not my student, but he has always said hello to me in the hallways. He is well- liked by his classmates, a good baseball player, and occasionally, goofy. When I see him walking out the door, I ask to talk to him. When I ask him about what had occurred, he denies it, lays the blame on the substitute, and, like most eighth graders, reaches slowly for creative excuse-making, brown eyes grasping toward the ceiling, showing clear signs of lying.
“You might not understand the violence or the history behind that word,” I tell him. “But when you use language like that, it hurts me. And it hurts this entire community,” I tell him. I am shocked at my ability to articulate, to educate, on something so personal. My eyes tear when I say it again, and in my head I am channeling so many. Sylvia Rivera. Harvey Milk. Frank Kameny. Pedro and Danny from the Real World: “When you use language like that, it hurts an entire group of people.”
The next day, a teacher approaches me to tell me Bob wants to talk to me. She steps back into her class, and we’re in a cold hallway with no else is around. “Mr. Bonanni,” he says, “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for what I said.”
I thank him. Peter Staley. Marsha P. Johnson. Mark Harrington. Vito Russo. Willie. Michael. It’s the most meaningful apology I’ve ever received in my life.
By June 2023, I have applied to be a UX Writer for an international bank. Like most jobs with any whim of hope, I know someone, or someone knows me. My friend has walked me through the application, provided feedback on my portfolio and my resume, which I cater to the position. I call my brother, a seasoned copywriter, and he tells me to “use the client as your editor,” to “maximize happy paths” and to “empathize with the user journey.” I learn the corporate lingo and try my best to speak it. And because of friends, there is a small hawk perched in a birch tree above the school where I work. He looks down, almost nodding.
III
At dinner, alone, on a Friday night in June, I answer the phone. It is a recruiter offering me a job as a UX Writer. I confirm the salary, a 15 percent raise, and tell him, “I’d like to accept.”
He is not my student, but he has always said hello to me in the hallways.
Love’s Labor Lost, the Shakespearean comedy that comments on learning and education, ends, unconventionally, in death. When I meet a British lit scholar at a museum in Provincetown, he tells me that Shakespeare knew full well that a comedy in 1500s Britain should have everyone married at the end. He wrote a comedic play that allowed people to laugh at the belief that in order to learn fully one must starve, chasten, and deprive themselves of rest. To learn, one must repress, repress, repress. The repression is the humor. All of the characters behave completely against their human nature. No one marries; the princess’ dad dies. But the play also ends with spring. Blooming. Nature. Shakespeare laughs at education’s demands to remove our natural instincts, and then concludes the whole comedy in birdsong.
To prepare them for their transition to high school, I read my students Charles Bukowski’s “The Laughing Heart,” knowing full-well I won’t be back next year. Because of his misogyny I’m not particularly a Bukowski fan, but this one resonates. The poem begins:
your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
And continues:
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
I look over Thank You notes, gifts from old students, one Lego man that a student spray- painted with gold paint. I look over at the bookshelf Tyler made me in woodshop. It’s crooked and unfinished, but I’ll take it with me. I make one last trip to the laminator so I protect my National Poetry Month posters with a smooth sheen, to prevent their tearing and warping in my trunk. As I pack up my things, I have told no one that I won’t be returning. Those that know me suspect I won’t be back. Theresa, the science teacher, looks in my room. “It’s looking pretty sparse in here,” she says, and squints her eyes.
When we read aloud A Raisin in the Sun, the kids respectfully blank out Walter’s “faggoty” in every class, or at the very least, knowing enough to pause, say, “Can I say that word?” Every Walter I have taught well. “No one can give someone permission to say that,” I say, “we either understand its consequences or we don’t.”
One of my main discussion points that day, annotated in the margins of my copy of Hansbery’s play, is Walter’s insecurity. Why is he calling George’s shoes faggoty? Remember: Hansberry was a lesbian. Her word choices are precise here. I lead into this with very literal questions, followed by a deeper character analysis.
“Well he says that because he’s drunk,” Billy says.
“Okay, but I know plenty of people that drink and don’t use that language.”
“Because it’s the fifties,” Sally says, knowing full well that these terms were thrown around casually then.
“Maybe,” I say, “But what’s actually happening in the scene? I mean, with Walter? Summarize the dialogue.”
“He has just asked George to go into business with him—I mean, he’s not really asking George to do anything yet, but just, you know, to consider it.”
“Good. And then what does George do?”
“He totally blows him off. He is completely disinterested while he waits for Beneatha.”
This is usually the moment where kids start to call out, and I allow it, because I don’t want to interfere with the pacing of getting this out in the open.
“How does Walter feel about this?”
“Walter reads this as a rejection by someone that knows business, and so he responds by calling him a slur.”
“So what leads to the slur?”
“Not being able to go into business with someone rich.”
“Exactly. They call this projection in psychology: he calls him a faggot. In other words: ‘Who are you to insult my masculinity? You’re less masculine than me because, well, look at your shoes. You’re a girl.’ The biggest insult you can call a man is to call him gay because gay people aren’t considered men; in fact they’re dehumanized. In the fifties you’d lose your job, family, and housing for being gay. How does George respond?”
“Good night, Prometheus.”
“And what does this say?”
“I’m smarter than you.”
“Yes! George not only insults Walter by calling him Prometheus, an ironic Greek allusion about him saving the family—he also insults Walter’s intelligence with this allusion that flies straight over his head. He’s basically saying that power, and masculinity, in this society relies on a person’s intelligence, and that Walter really has none.”
As I pack up my things, I have told no one that I won’t be returning.
This is where I bring it home for those in the back, those who use these words casually, those who tease Jay, those who make TikToks with my face on them, those laughing at my Twitter account.
“In other words: You can call me whatever you want, but if I have more education than you, then I technically have more opportunity, and I will always have more power.”
Bukowski’s poem ends:
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
In June of 2023, I stare at the walls of my empty classroom. Students have stacked desks in the back of the room. The empty bulletin board held tight to a few staples puncturing rips of paper. The once clean, shellacked floor bounces sunlight and my own reflection. I glance out the small basement window, then take note of all the floor’s scratches.
“We all belong to the sea between us,” wrote the Cuban American poet Richard Blanco. Our global ocean, the least accessible yet most critical set of ecosystems on Earth, has seemingly always been a source of spiritual and creative inspiration. The sea is the setting of dreams, of trauma, peace, beauty, curiosity, cleansing, aspirations, new life, ancient life, and unknown life in the dark for leagues and leagues between (and beneath) us.
For more than thirty years now I’ve been lucky to read, teach, and write about the sea, often while aboard ships gazing with students and fellow authors upon a 360˚ saltwater horizon. The open ocean is a big place, of course, and our relationship with this most expansive and influential of Earth’s ecosystems is as varied, vast, and complex as human history and culture. Yet, perhaps needless to say, due to centuries of racism and misogyny, written works set at sea in English—fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—have been predominantly published by white authors, most of whom were men (myself included and likewise privileged). I adore and continue to be inspired by the sea stories crafted by such icons as Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Rachel Carson, as well as those by the likes of Sarah Orne Jewett, Farley Mowat, and Mary Oliver. But dozens of extraordinary works by writers of more diverse identities somehow managed to emerge and publish classics of the genre, while more and more are being created and printed every year.
Below are just ten great works of sea literature in English by people of color.
“She couldn’t determine which was worse: the pain of the ancestors or the pain of the living. Both fed off her.” So thinks Yetu, the young protagonist of The Deep, who is charged with the weighty task of holding the horrific memories of her entire underwater society, to archive their history yet not burden all the other individuals with the daily sufferings of the remembrance. Author Rivers Solomon, in collaboration with hip-hop musicians Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes (who had composed music riffed off the work and mythologies of previous multi-media artists), crafted a novel of a submarine world after the Middle Passage. This world of wajinru beings with Yetu as historian is composed of descendants of the thousands of pregnant human women who died and were cast overboard, as well as those women who were forced or chose to jump into the waters instead of living and subjecting their children to the terrors and inhumanity of enslavement. The Deep has a fantasy façade, but like all profound science fiction, or any sea literature for that matter, its message and struggle are crucial for our navigation of today’s world on land.
Tentacle by Rita Indiana, translated by Achy Obejas
Set in the Dominican Republic, this work of cli-fi, speculative fiction, bends the rules of this list in that it was written first in Spanish as La mucama de Omicunlé (2015)—the English translation is by the Cuban writer Achy Obejas—but I can’t resist slipping Tentacle in here, because Rita Indiana spun such a fascinating story of a beach town ravaged by global warming, overfishing, drugs, and capitalism. Prisoners watch Blue Lagoon in a room that despite the fans and the shade bakes at 115˚ F: “Movies in which the sea is full of fish and humans run in bare skin under the sun are now part of the required programming during this season, just like movies about Christ during Holy Week.” Short, profane, and punchy, Tentacle explores the art world, Spanish colonialism, gender, sex work, coastal tourism, and marine conservation. This is truly a 21st-century work of sea literature.
It’s difficult for most of us to understand how central were ships and the ocean to travel and emigration before the recent age of the affordable airplane. Michael Ondaatje’s novel The Cat’s Table takes us aboard a steamship on the most important voyage of a person’s life (before they can look back and realize this to be so). The Cat’s Table is a fictionalized memoir of a boy’s voyage by steamship across the Indian Ocean and north, from Sri Lanka to a new life in Britain. In the masterful hands of Ondaatje, this recollection of an ocean passage is told personally, seamlessly, and subtly while it explores memory, childhood, class, race, and sexual awareness. Deceptively languid and breezy, The Cat’s Table serves up a rite of passage, a slice of a life and a world that is both familiar and foreign.
Yang is an editor, publisher, translator, and poet, yet some of his earliest training was as a marine biologist. In this A-Z verse bestiary of ocean animals, from “Abalone” to “Garibaldi” to “Nudibranch,” from “Parrotfish” to “White Whale” to “Zooxanthellae,” Yang wove philosophy and politics with careful, scientific observation, helping the reader envision these animals in beautiful and compelling new contexts. He often tucked in post-colonial commentary in deceptively simple ways, such as in “Jellyfish”:
Picking up a century after James H. Williams, Francisco Goldman wrote of the plight of merchant mariners. Instead of essays, however, he created a suspenseful novel about Central American immigrant men trapped on a derelict bulk carrier that is rusting in Brooklyn at the whims of distant owners. Docked within the barbed wire of the shipyard with little knowledge of English, they have no way to get help or justice. For centuries of sea literature, ships might as well be floating prisons, and in The Ordinary Seaman this plays out intensely, if ironically while tied at the wharf: “Nowadays life on the Urus almost feels like the middle of a long ocean crossing on a real ship—the lassitude, people keeping to themselves, bored with one another, not much to do but play dominoes and tinker around or endlessly chip or paint.” That is, until Esteban begins escaping each night and finds a sympathetic bilingual lawyer. Goldman is a master of characterization, which he achieves through flashbacks and daydreams. Before the story is over, he’ll teach you how our material goods get shipped across the oceans—and by whom.
Derek Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, published two years earlier his epic poem Omeros, which he spun from Homer’s Iliad. Omeros ismostly set in St Lucia among the turtle fishermen and islanders. Although it references classical Greek poetry, Walcott wrote with local dialects from multiple perspectives and brought the sounds, sights, and smells of the tropics. With his readable verse and shape-shifting, time-traveling narrators, Walcott gave dignity, texture, and gravitas to communities of everyday Caribbean people in the past and present. Omeros closes with a small gift of mahi-mahi that leads to a universal theme of sea literature: the smallness of human endeavor in comparison to the indifference and immortality of the ocean:
“Achille put the wedge of dolphin
that he’d saved for Helen in Hector’s rusty tin.
A full moon shone like a slice of raw onion.
When he left the beach the sea was still going on.”
“The muted thunder boomed under water like a great door opening far away,” says the narrator in The Whale Rider, a novel in which a female child is chosen to resume a centuries-old relationship where “the whale burst through the sea and astride the head was a man.” Witi Ihimaera was involved in the movie Whale Rider (2003), but the original work, the first Māori novel published in English, is quite different from the Hollywood version, including a more nuanced view of the colonial impact on indigenous New Zealanders. In the book the narrator travels to other parts of the Pacific and offers an illuminating perspective on the Polynesian Renaissance of the 1970s and ‘80s. Ihimaera based the story around a couple of actual events, including a mass stranding of sperm whales on a beach in Aotearoa New Zealand. In The Whale Rider he layered in spiritual retellings of Māori stories and even the perspective of the whale. If you can find one, I recommend reading an edition with Ihimaera’s “Author’s Notes” and the accompanying Māori glossary.
Lady with a Spear by Eugenie Clark
In the midst of the surge of ocean interest after World War II, Eugenie Clark published likely the first memoir by a female marine biologist. Her Japanese mother let young Eugenie explore the aquarium downtown on her own and took her swimming out on the beaches of Long Island. Beginning first with “underwater goggling,” diving with only a mask and fins before the availability of modern SCUBA gear, Clark earned her PhD and became a leading biologist of fish, sharks, and rays. She had a lengthy career as a professor and founding director of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida. Clark was a favorite of National Geographic and had a gift for what is now called science communication. Lady with a Spear, the first of her books (out of print, but easily found), recounts her early career spear-fishing and studying reef fish and sharks in the Middle East and the southeastern Pacific. She described adventures like this at a marine lab on the Red Sea: “We were munching on the last of the mermaid meat at lunch one day, when the old Rais, the ‘chief’ among the sailors, came rushing to tell us that a giant devilfish had been caught alive. We ran out to see it.”
Blow the Man Down! (c. 1897-1922, anthologized 1959) by James H. Williams
Blow the Man Down is a collection of rare newspaper articles by James H. Williams, a sailor-author who grew up in Rhode Island the son of a white Irish mother and a Black father. His dad was a mariner and died young, so as an early teenager Williams began his life at sea alone. InBlow the Man Down, edited by Warren F. Kuehl, Williams recounts his decades around the world in the merchant marine and on whaleships with a level of detail that is invaluable to historians. Williams also knew how to spin a yarn, so, much like Dana and Melville before him, he entertained with tales of storms and shipwrecks as he revealed the injustices bore by sailors. Williams became a labor leader, organizer, and public advocate for sailors’ rights. “I was only a sailor and, like most others of my class, had a sublime and abiding reverence for law and order,” Williams wrote in The Independent in 1902, which is anthologized here. “But there is a point at which patience ceases to be a virtue, and where oppression becomes the parent of rebellion.” Many of his stories speak to this, and, while the Blow the Man Down collection can be hard to find, it’s worth the extra effort. If it’s not at the library, there’s a Kindle version for sale or it’s available for free on archive.org.
One of America’s most gifted and important orators, Frederick Douglass first learned to read as an enslaved boy working at a shipyard in Baltimore, then he later escaped to the north by dressing as a sailor. In his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), he described how for many enslaved people in the nineteenth century the vision of the sailing ship offered freedom, both literally and figuratively. Lesser known today is Douglass’s novella The Heroic Slave, which was likely the first work of fiction in English published by an African American person. Here Douglass used the tools of fiction, playing with point of view, allowing his readers to be inside the heads of both white and Black characters. His protagonist, Madison Washington, leads a rebellion to free smuggled Africans and sail them to British-held Bermuda and eventual freedom. In The Heroic Slave a white sailor relays later what Washington declared while steering the ship in a hurricane: “Mr. Mate, you cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free.”
Acknowledgments
Richard J. King thanks David Anderson and Alison Glassie for introducing him to some of these titles over the years.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Sky Daddy by Kate Folk, which will be published by Random House on April 08, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
Cross the jet bridge with Linda, a frequent flyer with a dangerous obsession, in this hilarious and provocative debut novel by the acclaimed author of Out There:
“I glimpsed many fine planes resting at their gates. A beefy Boeing 777 pulled back from F4, pivoting on his slender ankles, with surprising grace for such a big fellow. I spotted an old friend who went by the tail number N78823, an Embraer 175. I’d accompanied him to Salt Lake City a few months ago, and found him to be a playful lover, teasing me with a round of turbulence as we descended.”
To outside observers, Linda’s life might seem drab. Weekdays, she earns $20 an hour moderating comments for a video-sharing platform, then rides the bus home to the windowless room she rents in a garage on the outskirts of San Francisco. But on the last Friday of each month, she indulges her true passion: taking BART to SFO for a round-trip flight to a regional hub. Linda’s secret is that she’s sexually attracted to planes: Their intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages and powerful engines make her feel a way that no human lover ever could. She believes her destiny is to someday “marry” one of her suitors by dying in a plane crash, a catastrophic event that would unite Linda with her soulmate plane for eternity. Linda is used to hiding her true nature, but when her coworker, Karina, invites her to a quarterly Vision Board Brunch, Linda sees a chance both to get closer to her work friend, and to nudge the universe on behalf of her destiny. However, as the vision boards seem to manifest items more quickly—and more literally—than Linda had expected, the carefully balanced elements of her life begin to spin out of her control, and she must choose between maintaining the trappings of normalcy or launching herself headlong toward her greatest dream. A subversive, unforgettable tale of the distances some will travel for true love, Sky Daddy examines desire, fate, and the longing to be accepted for who we truly are.
Here is the cover, designed by Sarah Horgan.
Author Kate Folk: “When I was first talking with my publishing team about the cover for Sky Daddy, we discussed vintage airline ads as a point of inspiration. There’s a glamour and beauty to these ads that feels apropos to a story about a woman who is romantically obsessed with planes. And the book also involves a lot of anthropomorphizing of planes—Linda describing planes as if they are sexy gentlemen, and comparing human men to various plane models. I knew there should be a plane on the cover, and I wanted that plane to have personality. ‘The plane should look sexy,’ I probably wrote. When I saw the first round of cover options, this one clicked for me immediately. I love how the red lettering pops against the cyan sky. The typeface feels unique and subtly evokes a retro vibe. I also love how the plane feels so active, its nose pointing upward, with an air of optimism and mischief. The book is in casual conversation with Moby-Dick, and this cover captures the spirit of embarking on a great adventure. It’s a cover that says, Get in, baby, we’re going for a ride.”
Designer Sarah Horgan: “The design directive for this project was ‘phallic planes’ and I had a lot of fun interpreting this task. The challenge was finding the balance between being too obvious and too subtle with the innuendo. One moment I would look at a cover and think ‘okay, I’ve gone too far’, and then look back and think ‘no, it’s not enough!’. The tone we wanted to convey was weird and darkly humorous. I took a lot of design inspiration from vintage airline ads, specifically their use of type and how they position the plane. I tried a range of styles from illustration, to photographic, to collage. In the end, we landed on a strategically cropped photo of a plane with bold 60’s inspired type. I think the final image sits on the subtler side of innuendo, but once you read the title and flip to the summary, you get it.”
We all have one—that memory of something done or said with the absolute confidence of youth that makes our toes curl to recall. We think about it years later, in bed at night or on long drives or errantly in the shower and wish, cheeks somehow still flaming, that there was some way to take it back.
I myself have an entire collection, a hideous slideshow of my awkward phase, which stretched from ages 12-32. It’s good in some ways—to be humbled, to remember that it’s actually quite hard being young. But there are some mistakes that don’t just embarrass, they haunt. Because those are the ones whose consequences spread like greedy fingers into the lives of everyone around you. And although you may no longer be the same person who made that fateful decision, you sure are stuck with the fallout.
My novel The Snap is the story of Poppy Benjamin, an NFL professional trapped by the actions of her twenty two-year-old self. It’s told in two timelines so that readers can realize along with the older Poppy just how deeply she has blundered. There is no taking it back, there is only the hope of a chance to make it right, and a prayer that it is not too late.
Mistakes are inevitable, but here are eight books about life-ruiners.
The heartbreak of this novel is how viscerally we can all relate to the sting of thinking yourself adult but being dismissed as a child. Thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis endures one such humiliation and is determined to never let it happen again. When a witness to a crime is sought, she steps forward, arranging a set of partial facts and contextless observations with a young person’s understanding but an adult’s certainty. Briony gets the satisfaction of having done something significant, of contributing confidently to the world of Things That Matter, but realizes in her later years just how much pain and suffering she has caused. The micro tragedy of cursed young lovers is contrasted with the trauma and chaos of a world war. Briony is left adrift in all of it.
You’re probably familiar with the slasher film adaptation, but Lois Duncan’s early 70s novel relies less on jump scares than on the crushing, claustrophobic feeling of knowing almost immediately that you’ve done the wrong thing. Julie James knows that she and her friends should have told someone that they were responsible for the hit-and run death of a young boy, even though it would have meant admitting they’d been drinking. It’s often said that the cover-up is worse than the crime, but in this case it is a small attempt at absolution that sets in motion an unstoppable chain of events. The original editions have those incredibly satisfying rough pulp pages that will have you wanting to read this one in a hammock with a popsicle-stained mouth.
One of the hallmarks of high school is what a small slice of the world it actually is, but how all-encompassing it feels at the time. A defeat suffered there seems unsurvivable, and Ani FaNelli experiences that twice, in very different contexts. After the first, her confidence in her ability to read people is shot, but she slowly rebuilds, finding a new safe space and new people to trust in. When her world comes crashing down a second time, she runs, putting as much distance as possible between her newly created persona and her traumatic past. Then a phone call threatens to unearth everything she’s tried to leave behind, and Ani is forced to reexamine her teenage understanding of what happened to her. But absolving herself of guilt for one tragedy creates motive for the second, just when the push for accountability is coming.
The line between opportunism and exploitation is razor-thin, as Javier Perez discovers in this meditation on telling people what they want to hear. When a well-meaning advisor suggests that Javi embellish personal tragedies in his college admissions essay, he’s hesitant. It’s not lying, but it’s not exactly true either. Once Javi is willing to present himself in a certain way, the world opens up to him, and soon he’ll take whatever he can gain through the guilt and morbid fascination of others. But pity is a double-edged sword, and although Javi is a talented writer worthy of genuine accolades, he’s built nothing on the basis of that talent and so can’t trust it.
Pragmatism is a noble quality when it comes to the real world, and no one knows that better than legendary actress Evelyn Hugo. From nothing and owed nothing, she inherently understands that to be successful, she will have to identify what people want and then give it to them. Women have long lived this way—Evelyn could be classified as a golden age precursor to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or Gone Girl’s infamous “cool girl” persona. But being someone else inevitably means leaving your real self behind—where you come from, what you look like, and who you love. When Evelyn’s years of stardom are behind her, she is left wondering if her successes were worth the significant sacrifice.
All lives have seasons, and the way we react to people and things depend so heavily on the time when they find us. That’s the case for Advika Srinivasan, who is isolated and adrift after a personal tragedy, pouring drinks at Hollywood awards galas while dreaming of being on the other side of the bar. Maybe if her parents hadn’t moved away, she would have turned down Julian Zelding, a legendary producer 41 years her senior, when he asked her out. Maybe if she wasn’t disconnected from her lifelong friend group, she wouldn’t have needed so badly the outsized attention that Julian lavishes on her, resulting in a whirlwind marriage and elopement. But they did and she is, and so just like that, Advika is living a life she never imagined and doesn’t quite want. It takes a voice from Julian’s past to open her eyes to the severity of her situation, but by then it may be too late.
This book is a car crash you desperately want to look away from but can’t, careening forward as the tension ratchets up and up to the point where you’re literally begging the protagonist to make any other choice. June Hayward is a frustrated middling author. She watches bitterly as her sometimes-friend Athena rockets to literary stardom, attributing Athena’s ability to break out of a crowded marketplace to her Chinese-American background. June knows her talent is on par with Athena’s; the deck is simply stacked against her as a dime-a-dozen white girl in publishing. When the opportunity comes to step into Athena’s shoes, June takes it, because it’s no less than what she’s owed. The magic trick of this book is that June’s delusion is so complete she has no idea her comeuppance is coming, although the reader unbearably feels it page by unbearable page.
To love someone is to willfully look past their faults. Whole-hearted devotion is a beautiful thing, but it can also blind. What happens when a loved one is accused of a terrible crime? Who among us would believe it of them? American college student Ashley Smith sees this dogged loyalty firsthand when she’s unexpectedly invited to her classmate Emma Chapman’s country home for Christmas. Emma’s handsome and moody brother Adam has been questioned about the murder of a local girl. Emma dismisses the accusation out of hand, and Ashley, awed by the stately home’s crackling fireplaces and elaborate holiday décor, is inclined to agree. This novella is a scoop of a book, something I wished I could have luxuriated in for much longer. But the story’s strength is in its brevity, in knowing that whatever will happen will be soon, will be now, because the pages rush past like water through fingers until we’re left stunned and chilled at the final reveal.
Ledia Xhoga’s debut novel Misinterpretation opens with the unnamed narrator, a translator from Albania, accepting an assignment to interpret for a Kosovar torture survivor named Alfred. Elements of Alfred’s story map onto her own family’s experience, and the narrator becomes all-consumed by his case. As personal and professional boundaries start to blur, the narrator is caught up in the precarious lives of other asylum seekers, like Leyla, a Kurdish poet who is being stalked by her ex-husband. Eventually, the narrator has to face the consequences of her meddling and the toll it takes on her professional life, her marriage, and even the lives of the people she’s trying to help.
The narrator reflects at one point, “Since moving to America, my life had been like… two parallel highways with regular exits onto each other.” In Misinterpretation, Xhoga artfully captures the experience of having a foot in two different worlds and how the narrator’s reality is distorted as a result of constantly shifting between them. Being able to speak so many languages and translate for so many different people gives the narrator a deep capacity for empathy, but it also complicates her relationships, blurs the lines between her identity and the people she translates for, and raises ethical questions about friendship and boundaries.
As an immigration journalist, translator, and nonprofit director providing services to asylum seekers, I was impressed by how deftly Xhoga captures the challenges of translation and the complexities of navigating the US immigration system. I spoke to Xhoga ahead of the novel’s release to discuss what it’s like to live on the border between two worlds, the unseen struggles of asylum-seekers, and how language shapes our world view.
Shoshana Akabas: The story starts with the narrator interpreting for a Kosovar torture survivor, despite her training that “if the interpreter’s circumstances resemble the client’s, do not accept the assignment.” What drives her to accept the job anyway?
Ledia Xhoga: For me, writing the book started with a “what if?” At one point, I volunteered to interpret for an organization that helps survivors of torture. I was supposed to interpret for someone, but it didn’t work out, and I always wondered what could have happened. So, that was the initial spark.
What convinced me that there was a novel in it—because, you know, there could have been nothing, it could have been a short story—but what convinced me was the complexity of the main character. She is very committed to helping other people, but eventually her behavior becomes disconcerting, because she’s incapable of holding two opposing viewpoints inside of her. And the novel starts from that moment when she realizes that maybe this is not such a good idea, because Alfred’s situation is bringing up a lot of her own past traumas. But on the other hand, she can’t help it. She has this compulsion to help other people that’s unchecked, at times, by other considerations.
SA: That’s very different from how her American husband moves through the world. He sees very clear limitations and boundaries. What do you think accounts for that difference?
LX: I think some of it is probably upbringing or cultural. I’ve noticed in my life that my husband and I are very different, and with American friends, sometimes I notice that they see things differently and boundaries are different in other cultures.
SA: Like when the narrator visits Albania, everyone knows each others’ business, whereas when she’s in the United States, lots of characters keep secrets from each other.
LX: Exactly. In Albania, for example, it’s very common for people to live together. Even if you are married and have kids, you can still live with your parents. They live in such close proximity to you. That doesn’t happen as much in the United States. The idea of boundaries is much more pronounced in American culture.
SA: I also wonder how the narrator’s translation work shapes her worldview. As a translator, she’s used to slipping into different lives and sort of embodying the person she’s interpreting for.
LX: You have to be very flexible when you’re translating. It’s not as simple as, “I’m going to tell you this exact sentence.” It’s more like, “I’m going to say it in a way that you’ll understand.” Instead of being analytical, you’re trusting your intuition, your emotions, and understanding the other person’s body language. You’re so much more involved, immersed in the experience.
SA: Let’s talk about the title for a minute. Translation figures into the story in so many different ways. How does the theme of mistranslation run through this book?
LX: So many ways. In everyday communication, even within the same language, even with your family members, there can be two opposing views. You can look at the same thing in different ways. Misinterpretation is everywhere. And of course, it takes on another meaning when you bring in a different language. It’s especially pertinent to the story, because during the therapy sessions, she really misinterprets Alfred, and she withdraws so much into her own trauma, into her own past. So I started to think of ‘Misinterpretation’ as the title after I wrote the scene with Alfred when there was a real misinterpretation. But the more I continue to write, the more I could see other things being misinterpreted throughout the book. And then, there’s this wider meaning that a work of art is always going to mean something different to different people. Any work of art, anything that you create, will necessarily be, in a way, misinterpreted.
SA: The theme of translation in this book is so beautifully complemented by the theme of immigration and the idea of having a foot in two different worlds. Can you talk a bit about how these two themes work hand-in-hand for you?
In everyday communication, even within the same language, even with your family members, there can be two opposing views.
LX: I read this quote by Toni Morrison, “I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.” It totally spoke to me, because it felt like that’s what I was doing. Misinterpretation is a novel about standing at the border and claiming that as your reality. The translations, interpretations, everything—it happens because you are on a border. That’s your reality, so that’s where you have to exist.
It’s funny, because when you finish a novel, what you’ve written doesn’t fully sink in until some time has passed. So one of the things I thought about recently is the duality of experience in the novel. Some of them are very obvious: you have the Albanian language and you have English. New York City and Tirana. But then I started thinking about how this duality extended also to other elements of the novel.
SA: Like the characters with legal status and the people who are in immigration limbo?
LX: Yeah, the path of a person who already has their papers and the person who doesn’t have their papers. There are so many instances of doubleness or polarity. The Kurdish woman who appears in the novel, that’s another path the narrator’s life could have taken, almost like another reality, so I was just thinking about how much I internalized this duality that it became a theme for the book.
SA: How did you approach using both Albanian and English in the text?
LX: Initially, I didn’t have a lot of the sentences that you see in Albanian. They were in English. My editor said, “Let’s have more sentences in Albanian,” so I started having more sentences in Albanian, and it changed my perspective of the text, in a way, because then I started looking at other sentences in English and thinking, “What would they sound like if they were in Albanian?” And then I started thinking, “What would this whole novel be like if it was written in Albanian?”
SA: That’s fascinating, because I think the characters in the book act differently when they speak in different languages and when they’re in different countries. So, it makes sense that your writing might take on different characteristics depending on which language you’re writing in.
That’s why we read, right? So that we can realize that we have enough things in common with each other.
LX: Just those few sentences with these two elements together—the Albanian and the English—brought up so many questions.
SA: Circling back to immigration, I appreciated how the book digs deep into different immigration stories. Many of the characters are in really complex and precarious positions. Like Zani, who was promised asylum in exchange for offering information about a crime, but the process doesn’t go as planned. What kind of research did you have to do to create these backstories?
LX: I’m a little bit afraid of research, because I feel like it kind of paralyzes me. So, what I tend to do is: I look things up, and then I let a lot of time go by, so that it’s not so fresh in my mind, and then I use whatever has stayed in my mind. And maybe what has stayed was also the most interesting part of it. So I did read about somebody who was promised asylum for collaborating with the U.S., but it somehow didn’t work out. So, yeah, I did some research for these situations.
SA: As we discussed, art can be interpreted or misinterpreted in many different ways, but what’s something that you hope the reader understands about “standing on the border” as a result of reading about these characters?
LX: I hope they find commonalities with their own lives, even if they’ve never heard of Albania, or they don’t know what is on the map. No matter what, I hope that they read it and they realize, “This person has such a different culture, and their background is so different from mine, but I feel like I can relate to them.” I also think the description of the novel necessarily focuses on some of the darker aspects of the plot, but I’d like to think that the book is a little bit more colorful and has more hope, more nuance. So I hope people see that side of it. But yeah, finding things in common. I mean, that’s why we read, right? So that we can realize that we have enough things in common with each other.
Nature as tangled forest, as oil-drenched bayou or salt desert. Nature as flux and change. In all the books discussed here, the writers use ideas of nature as backdrops for perplexing and life-changing character dilemmas. The ideas of nature are different in every case, and the protagonists are all searching for something they don’t quite understand the nature of, but the common thread is nature always presiding, abiding, inspiring and looming. Nature provoking. The searches happen within the context of an overriding concept that’s much bigger than the protagonists are, and crystallizes within a metaphorically resonant space that augments the complexity of both concept and character. In their various encounters with these spaces, whether it be an uncharted wilderness, apocalyptic landscape, or flickering apple orchard, the characters all shed one kind of skin and grow a different, sometimes extraordinarily richer one.
My book, Babe in the Woods, or the Art of Getting Lost, didn’t start out in the woods, or with any kind of space in mind. It didn’t even start out with much of a story. What it had was a Concept, which I thought was Grand. Concepts are serious stuff, I thought, laudable, possibly even game-changing, but in a narrative, I discovered, they’re ineffectual by themselves. While all the books I’ve selected here include at least one big concept–one that dwarfs the human stories swirling around it–it’s those puny humans and their wayward, unruly yarns that grabbed my heart. They’re the vehicles for bringing big concepts to life. But I didn’t understand that when I started my own project.
The first draft for what would eventually become Babe tried to make its big idea primary. I wanted to shed light on what makes art “art” and give readers visual lessons in how ideas in great paintings are actually structured, how their messages are made available to an audience and deliver wisdom. The problem was, this mission amounted to a Mother Tree story, way bigger than the scope of any individual life, so there was no way to grasp it.
A graphic novel is the perfect medium for analyzing such powerfully visual things as paintings, and what I wanted to do in my book, I thought, was show readers how the compositions of great paintings elucidate subject matter and deliver insights that make us better and wiser. That’s the sort of thing I teach—why great paintings matter—but that ambition isn’t a story. The story Babe needed turned out to be right in front of me, lying in wait, but it was one I’d never thought worth telling. It struck me as just an unruly weed because my thinking was too caught up in the Mother Tree mega-canopy idea. Mother Trees don’t need us in the slightest. We’re better off cultivating the new seedlings that do.
My own seed of a story wasn’t much more than an innocuous speck when it first occurred to me: a woman lost in the woods with a baby, that was it. But slowly it grew: she began to notice things, look more closely at the world around her, peer underneath things to discover ants and termites and her own urgent issues, ones she’d never given much thought to. She remembers things she’d squelched, discovers a need to reconcile with her dad and have that conversation with her mother she’d never dared have, all while moving through a terrain full of obstacles, real and otherwise. And, with that grand concept accompanying her, she discovers a space even grander.
Always unpredictable, nature becomes a trope for all we can’t control. In these nine novels the settings vary widely, but each of them challenges the reader to engage deeply in that very unpredictability. Just as weather catalyzes change in the environment, these characters encounter conditions that spark changes in themselves, and in the reader too.
When I read The New Wilderness while in the middle of writing Babe, I felt immediately in kindred country. The story follows Bea and her sickly five-year-old, Agnes, who have volunteered for an experiment with 18 others to leave civilization—now polluted and overcrowded—and decamp to what’s called the Wilderness State—the last bastion of untouched nature— and the only chance Agnes has, possibly, to heal. It had been forbidden territory up until now, rapacious humans having proven themselves unworthy of it.
Cook addresses many issues, not the least of which is how to deal with the conundrum of bringing children into a world ravaged by centuries of exploitative behavior. There’s betrayal, danger, terror around every corner; but Agnes thrives. Now Bea has to wrestle with the idea of losing her daughter in a way she’d never considered. The question is not only how does one survive in an actual wilderness with no survival skills but also how might we address the even more difficult question: what kind of world do we want?
Eight stories about nine people, The Overstory follows characters from different eras, backgrounds and histories whose lives, like roots, are intricately intertwined with each other through their profound engagement with trees. Some characters are fictional, some based on real people: I learned about Julia Butterfly Hill through the character of Olivia Vandergriff, and the novel’s tree scientist, Patricia Westerford, is based on the actual Canadian researcher Suzanne Simard, who studied how trees have their own unique intelligence, evinced in richly complex mechanisms of communication.
Each of Powers’s characters is beautifully drawn, with their own individual quirks and obsessions; each has their own corresponding tree. Powers’ gift is to festoon the reader in gorgeous language while also teaching us a wide and gorgeous variety of things, from the history of the Chestnut blight and ancient Chinese manuscripts to how to survive up in a tree for a year. But mostly he gives us lessons on trees, their amazing biology, how they talk to and protect each other, how they’re so much grander and more important than us. He wraps us up in imagery involving all the invisible linkages that occur between root systems, how they sustain each other and the larger environment in ways none of us can see, and the multistory book itself is structured like this root system. In the end you understand what it means to seek the wisdom of trees in thinking about our own fractured world.
A single apple tree grows in the woods some time back in the 1600s, around which a dwelling is built, gets renovated, changes ownership, and eventually falls into ruin. But, before that, it shelters a host of different characters, living and dead, whose lives and stories span three centuries. From a young couple fleeing the strictures of their Puritan community to modern day Nora, who uses the house as a respite after she crashes her car nearby, these layered stories about endurance remind us that the past is vivid and always with us should we care to notice its traces in the smallest of details, like the age lines in a face.
We meet a variety of vividly drawn characters including a lusty beetle, a bevy of ghosts and the unforgettable Charles, who remakes his life in that same Northwoods dwelling, cultivating an entire apple orchard alongside that first tree. We meet his daughters, twins who return to the story after death, along with other inhabitants of the house who also can’t leave it. A conman, a lonely painter, a schizophrenic writer, all the characters are presented as part of a cycle of seasons divided into the twelve months of the year, and alive on the page in a world beset by the kinds of secrets that can ruin or, in the hands of wise writers, save us.
Janina, an eccentric, middle-aged Polish woman contends with a spate of animal killings she discovers in the forest outside her village. As we follow her story, meeting villagers along the way with whom she constantly tussles, we gather that mere human psychology isn’t adequate to the question of how a world becomes deranged. That seems to be why Janina is attracted to astrology, using it to make sense of the madness going on around her. Only the stars can take on such mysteries, she suggests, the distance they have on humankind offering the wide perspective of eternity needed to explain our unfathomable human cruelty.
As the narrative unspools it looks as though the forest animals are fighting back, and we travel alongside Janina as she interacts contentiously with her community, quotes Blake, and gives people nicknames that describe their true character. Her unique voice allows us inside the tangled complexities of not only a cast of bad actors fomenting chaos around her but also her Wise Woman intelligence.
Nature run amok is the backdrop for this dystopian novel about a teenage girl forced to decamp from her family home after a collapsing economy, war, disease, drugs and chronic water shortages have ravaged the entire United States. After Lauren Olamina’s family is killed when a fire destroys their home in what was supposed to be the one safe neighborhood left in LA, Lauren, who has the gift (or curse) of hyperempathy, is forced to face the deadly outside world on her own, armed only with the seeds she’s managed to bring with her in the hopes of finding a place safe for sowing them, and in that way, beginning again.
As she heads north, Lauren takes up with a diverse crew of other refugees fleeing conditions like prostitution and debt-slavery, and in the course of their travels she becomes a force for hope in their dismal lives as she slowly confides her idea for a new religion, one she calls Earthseed. Her god is Change—more of an idea than something to venerate—but still something to grasp and hold on to for people doomed to live in a world riven by short-term wins and losses, the danger and uncertainty of a rudderless existence. Her idea is a way to keep going, without illusions but nevertheless with hope.
A young Swede in the 19th century goes on a kind of backwards pilgrimage in search of his brother whom he lost after they disembarked in NYC. Taking another wrong turn, he finds himself alone and penniless in California, going east during the westward expansion. Inordinately tall and knowing little English, Hakan is viewed as a murderous madman by some and as a legend by others. In the course of his travels, he survives a maelstrom of violence, invidious characters, and horrifying circumstances that bring him to the brink of death over and over again.
Terrifying characters abound, thwarting our ideas of type: hooker as sensual hag, murderous cult leader with a modicum of wisdom, naturalist going slowly insane in his search for the impossible. The desert Hakan traverses back and forth is a nightmarish place lightened only by his meeting a naturalist who is one of the only good characters in the book. This man studies imaginary creatures in alkaline pools and shows Hakan how to find water in the dry dust of a dauntingly unforgiving terrain. Despite his honesty, integrity and good intentions, Hakan over time develops a reputation as a notorious outlaw, unable to avoid doing violence in circumstances that bring even good men to the brink.
In this novel, Labatut takes us into the complex and troubled minds of some of our greatest physicists—Fritz Haber, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, among others—struggling with the most profound moral and scientific questions underlying all of nature. We get a glimpse inside the mind of the man who brought us such miracles and horrors as nitrogen-based fertilizers (which allowed us to feed an exploding world population) and the pesticide Zyklon B (which was the gas the Nazis used to exterminate millions of Jews). We become intimate with the thoughts of the men who mastered the radical intricacies of nuclear physics and quantum theory, eventually bringing us the atomic bomb.
For someone who barely passed high school Physics, I found the opportunity to peer into the minds of such geniuses, through the clarity and precision of Labatut’s language, an extraordinary experience. These are minds engaged not only in pondering the greatest mysteries of the natural world, but also unravelling their knottiness. Thinking along with them for a few hours is breathtaking. Labatut’s ability to find words that function as metaphorical equivalents for baffling concepts in quantum physics, which manage to enfranchise even the STEM-challenged like myself, feels almost miraculous.
Awarded a Medal of Honor by Obama, Hochschild is a renowned sociologist who travelled deep into the Louisiana bayou to live and work with poor, mostly conservative members of a community employed by but also preyed on by the oil industry. Her mission is to tell the real story of those people and their lives, detailing all the maddening and mostly counterproductive excuses they give for retaining that industry. It has been systematically destroying their environment and denying them a reliable livelihood for generations, yet they work to ensure it isn’t thrown out of the state.
An elite Berkeley academic, Hochshild is caring and down-to-earth; for that reason she becomes a trusted member of a community who might otherwise have shunned her. This involvement allows her unique access to the people and their contradictory behavior. Oil giveth and oil taketh away and these people have had the very ground they’ve been walking on for eons taken away from them: the whole town is swallowed by a sinkhole created by oil drilling.
In her book, Hochschild has made an enormous contribution to the left’s understanding of what makes such people tick. She theorizes about economic disparity with the image of a ladder on which people stand, hoping to slowly move up, rung after rung, waiting patiently to go that step higher, but being constantly thwarted by strangers—immigrants, the poor and needy, gays, etc.—who jump in front of them. They are constantly led to believe that outsiders—not the system—are cheating them and their children of their just deserts.
What was it like to hang out with Neanderthals 32,000 years ago in the prehistoric time when we inhabited the earth alongside them? What really was shamanism, before it became a contemporary conceit? Who were the actual people who painted the Chauvet caves, and how did they do it? Were they anything like us at all?
Only someone like Robinson with real science bona fides could take up such questions and turn them into historical fiction. We are first introduced to Loon, the main character, naked and alone in a stark world. We journey with him on his rite of passage, with no tools to help him in the his many struggles. His very nakedness is the medium that allows readers to assume his skin as he fights his way through the forest and encounters numerous calamities, including breaking his ankle. He seeks the means to bind it using only forest tools, figuring out how to manage while facing even more dangerous forces.
There are shamans, healers and lovers, all rendered in beautifully imagined strokes. The shaman passes down stories and wisdom that Loon must learn and eventually shape in his own way The healer is an old woman whose practice is born of observation, the first tool of science. The lover is an outsider who helps Loon’s people see the world in a new way.
Robinson’s remarkable ability to transport us to such a distant time and place—one that most of us couldn’t possibly imagine even though it’s somewhere in our genes—is the boon of this book. Robinson provides precisely drawn characters we can readily identify with even though they have very little language. A consummate researcher, Robinson invented their language using a combination of Basque and Proto-Indo-European, thinking carefully and compassionately about every word.
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