At the beginning of Khuê Phạm’s debut novel Brothers and Ghosts, translated by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey, the narrator makes a confession: “I don’t know how to pronounce my own name.” It’s not something you hear often and something unimaginable for many. But for Kiều, the young Vietnamese German writer at the center of Phạm’s adroit novel, it’s the effect of a lifetime of trying to assimilate into German society. She was born in Germany, after all, and there is no reason not to be like any other German (that is, white Germans). She goes by Kim and keeps her Vietnamese heritage at bay.
But once her grandmother dies, leaving a will, Kiều and her family are urged to visit their American relatives to reveal their inheritance. In California, it would be the first time she’s around so many other Vietnamese people in a very long time. The experience forces her to confront not only her heritage but her family history.
In many ways, Kiều’s story is very familiar to children of immigrants. My birth name, for instance, is Phong, and though it wasn’t any of my decision, my parents legally changed it before I started school to something more “American.” Likewise, I spent most of my teen years trying to fit into mainstream American culture.
But Phạm goes beyond the theme of the individual’s cultural loss. Brothers and Ghosts is a novel about how a family ends up scattered around the world. While it might be easy to lay blame on war and history—indeed, that is a large part of Kiều’s situation—Phạm highlights the inner works of family and its members, the ways they protect or deceive one another, the ways they disappoint us, they ways they support us, and ultimately, what we inherit from them.
I had a chance to talk to Khuê Phạm via Zoom about her novel, growing up as a child of immigrants, and the meaning of family.
Eric Nguyen:Brothers and Ghosts follows the stories of three family members. You have Kiều, her father Minh, and her uncle Sơn. Why did you choose to tell this story through three characters?
Khuê Phạm: I experimented a bit with the number of characters and how I wanted to tell the story. Originally, I wanted to tell the story of the two brothers who end up on different sides of the political division line because that’s a conflict I know from my own family and I have always been intrigued by it. However, when I started writing, I showed the first drafts to my agent and publisher and they felt that the person who’s narrating the story was Kiều, that she’s very important to build a bridge to readers who may not know the conflict in Vietnam very well. Kiều belongs to the second generation; she grows up between east and west, and at the beginning of the story, she’s very naive. She doesn’t know anything about the history of her family or indeed the history of Vietnam, perhaps like the reader. So, she became a narrative tool to uncover the different layers of her family’s journey.
EN:All your characters are in a way outsiders. Kiều’s Vietnamese German, but she lives in a very white society. You have Minh, who’s an outsider in his own family since he left in the middle of the war for Germany. And then there’s Sơn, who is deemed a traitor once Saigon falls and the Communists take over. Why was it important to have these outsiders be the path through your novel?
KP: They are all outsiders for those very reasons that you described, but they’re not outsiders to me. The experiences they have are normal and worth telling. Contemporary German readers, and I guess many American readers, will not be familiar with the fact that there are indeed quite a number of second generation [Vietnamese diasporic] writers nowadays. But I do feel that this outsider perspective says a lot about mainstream society and I too have often felt a bit as an outsider growing up in Germany. It’s a perspective that feels very familiar to me. Writing a book is a chance to bring people into the center that are sometimes on the margins.
When the book came out in Germany, a lot of Germans told me they could identify with the story even though they have a very different cultural background. The family dynamics, the generational conflicts, the battles for opinions and values, that is something that everybody knows about and it’s a very universal experience.
EN: I saw myself in your book, too, especially Kiều. Brothers and Ghosts is very much a story about Kiều trying to find her roots. At the beginning, she doesn’t even know how to pronounce her name correctly, and it’s not until her family takes a trip to the US that she’s forced to face her family’s history and culture, despite having spent most of her life running away from that as she tries to assimilate into German culture. She uses a non-Vietnamese name, Kim, for example. Why do you think we—especially immigrants and children of immigrants—why do you think we run away from our history and culture?
KP: I have seen this happen over and over again to children of immigrants who grew up in a different country, this pressure to assimilate, this pressure to become normal, to become like everybody else around them, the feeling that it’s so much cooler to be German or American or French than Vietnamese. This internal cultural and racial hierarchy, even children seem to pick up so easily. I can even see it with my 4-year-old son, and I don’t condemn it because I know that feeling very well.
Looking at the German context, I would say that at the time when I grew up in Berlin in the 90s, the climate in Germany was very difficult. There was xenophobic undertone in Germany because it was the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. East and West were kind of somehow coming together. Germany as a country was trying to assimilate into each other, you could say.
There were a lot of tensions that translated into racist attacks. There have been a lot of high-profile racist attacks on asylum seekers. At that time, growing up in Germany, I felt this constant sense of distrust. People would always ask me, “where are you from?” And I would say, “I’m from Berlin,” because I was born in Berlin and I had a German passport and I speak German so much better than my crappy Vietnamese. Yet people wouldn’t believe me. They would always say “No, but where are you really from?”
This nagging question gave me the sense that somehow, I would always be so different and I would never be accepted. It made me quite angry and I think it made me quite angry at my Vietnamese heritage.
Now it’s very different. Luckily the country has become much more tolerant. Also, I’m much older and I’m able to hold that thought in my head, that I am German and Vietnamese, and maybe that leads to some sort of a third identity. Not only is it an additional culture that I possess, but also additional struggles within me that power my writing. I feel now that all the things I felt were very difficult also is part of who I am.
EN: I’m going to take this next question from your book. At one point Kiều asks, “how much does it take to understand where you come from?” How would you answer that question?
KP: I am still trying to understand where I come from. I wrote this book because I feel that you cannot really understand yourself if you don’t understand your family. Kiều engaging with her family and going to California and spending time with her relatives, she moves outside of her comfort zone into a zone that is unfamiliar and scary to her. She doesn’t speak Vietnamese very well. She feels that somehow this shouldn’t have anything to do with her, that her family is holding her back. But the more she engages, the more she realizes that a lot of things, a lot of her own mannerisms, a lot of her own values are shaped by the values of her family.
Perhaps even some of the traumas that her family has gone through in the aftermath of war and due to immigration and making it in life, the way they’re dealing with their past is by not looking at it. And she’s doing the same. The dark experiences of being a refugee, of being in a country at war, they’re covered in silence, but somehow that silence is passed on from one generation to the next. We have it in us, we just don’t really know how to name it or how to find it.
EN: Your main character is named after Kiều from the classic Vietnamese epic poem, The Tale of Kiều. In the poem, Kiều sacrifices herself to save her father and brother from prison. Reading your book, I couldn’t help but think of all the women who appear in your novel who sacrifice themselves or go through hardships for their family. You call it “the art of suffering.” There’s Minh’s mother who still works to take care of her family after the war is over and her husband is at reeducation camp. There’s Kiều’s mother who gave up a life of activism to raise her children.
But there’s a different type female character in Brothers and Ghosts as well. We’re introduced to Kiều’s aunt in Vietnam after the war, where she’s evolving to be this strong-willed woman. Then later, we meet another character, Lee, a Vietnamese American lesbian, who’s very outwardly rebellious. Do you see feminism as changing between different cultures and generations? And what do we do with that?
KP: I’ve been thinking about what it would mean for me to live in Vietnam, and there are two things that I always feel would prevent me from being happy there. One is I don’t think I could be happy as a writer because there’s no press freedom or freedom of speech. And the second is the fact that I’m a woman and I always feel that the role given to women by society, and that is shaped by Confucian values as described to The Tale of Kiều, keeps them small and turn them into servants to their families and husbands and older sons. They fulfill their role, they don’t make demands, they suffer in silence.
At the same time, the Vietnamese women I know, and this is I think probably very contrary to Western cliches, are very strong. They have this kind of subordinate role, but they’re strong-minded. They’re so hardworking, they go to work, they raise their children, they do the household chores, they take care of the money at home. They’re so tough, that’s something that’s often overlooked.
I guess my way of feminism is influenced by having grown up in the west and being very self-determined. But I do feel I actually have an additional layer of feminism due to the fact that I’m Vietnamese. As a woman of color, you have to set your determination even higher because you’re dealing with a world of white people. I have this question to overcome my cultural background. Then there’s the second world that I’m dealing with, which is the world of men. So as an Asian woman, people have a lot of assumptions about me, and that often leads to people like me being underestimated.
I think people like me have to be much tougher to raise their voice and make themselves heard. My female characters are testament to that. On one hand, you may underestimate them when you first see them, but when you look deeper, you realize how strong they are.
EN:Along with the theme of sacrificing oneself for family, your book also touches on obligation to family and duties to the family. These affect how they act and, at the end, the secrets they keep. Why do you think obligation and duty are such powerful concepts in your characters’ lives? In our lives?
KP: It’s such a Vietnamese experience. You grow up somehow knowing that you need to fulfill certain duties in your family, and you grow up with this feeling that you need to fulfill your parents’ expectations and that sense that they’ve made a lot of sacrifices so you can have a better life. Isn’t that one of the key components of being a kid in a Vietnamese family? Of course, in that kind of family, obligation is something that’s very stifling. It’s probably very stifling to a lot of kids in Vietnam, but especially to Vietnamese kids growing up in the West, because we see other families, other kids who don’t have that sense of obligation or crazy expectations from their parents. We see that and we long for that freedom. We long for that easy life they have. It looks so much better than in our families.
I’m critical of some of the very strict ways that Vietnamese and perhaps Asian families raise their kids. As a mother myself now, I do feel that it’s good to show love to your children. I do feel it’s good to praise them, say they did great, rather than always piling one expectation on top of another. But I also now understand my parents loved me as much as anybody else did, but they had different other ways of expressing their love.
They also learn it from their own parents, this very authoritarian, strict, harsh way. And again, it’s something that has defined me and that’s why I wanted to show it.
In my book, I show how Kiều struggles with it. This is one of the reasons why she rejects her Vietnamese heritage because it burdens her so much. But then later, she also comes to almost admire or at least respect the strong values that lie behind it when you do sacrifice yourself for the family.
I’m also a bit more ambiguous now about this sense of familial obligation. When I look at my family or other Vietnamese families, I do feel that the bond is quite strong. In my own family, I feel that I can always rely on them; there are things I never would need to discuss with them, and it’s perhaps a bit different from what I’ve seen in some German families. We expect a lot from each other, but we also take care. I feel that the part of taking care should be stronger than the part of the expectation.
EN: Yeah. There are two sides to it. You could see familial obligation as something burdensome, oppressive, but on the other hand, showing your obligation and duty to your family is a type of love language. But is there happiness in obligation and duty?
KP: I notice within myself a strong sense of wanting to give something back to my family. Somehow, it’s important for me to fulfill that. What you can do as a second-generation person is to define for yourself what you want to give back. Maybe that’s the way to do it. Not to take on the burden that is placed upon you, but to follow that instinct within you, to find your individual way of satisfying it.
Happiness is always best when you do it your own way and not the way that your parents taught you.
I have my own kid now, he’s four. When I look at him, I want him to know where he comes from, but I don’t want him to be burdened by it. He doesn’t have to speak the language, he doesn’t have to perform a certain role, he just needs to know that he’s special. That’s all I want.
“There is a saying,” his mother had told him several times, just before sleep, when he was still quite young, “always three graves.” She had taken the saying from a book, he discovered years later in college. The same book, as it turned out, from which she had taken many of the stories that, late at night, she had told him to frighten him. Even once he learned that, they still frightened him.
“Why three?” he asked her that first time.
She shrugged. “One for the father,” she said. His own father at the time was already gone, buried. “One for the mother. And, well . . .”
She seemed reluctant to go on. She had been, he now guessed with the perspective of several additional decades, pretending this reluctance, but he hadn’t known this at the time.
“Tell me,” he forced himself to say, though he dreaded what he might hear. But wouldn’t hearing it be better than imagining it?
She shook her head slowly. “I’ve already said too much,” she claimed. And then she turned off the light and left the room, leaving him alone in the darkness.
Later, once he had a child of his own, he wondered why his mother had terrified him so when he himself was just a child. He would never do something like that to his own son. No sane parent would. Was his mother not sane, was that the problem? Or was she simply cruel?
And why was she like that only at night, and not even every night? During the day she was kind, loving. Most nights she was this too. Only one night in twenty would she terrify him. If he was asked what on the whole his childhood had been like, he wouldn’t hesitate to say, Happy.
Seen in that light, what harm, really had been done to him? He had turned out all right, had had a few frightened nights, but ultimately this had had little effect on him. He wasn’t “traumatized,” he didn’t need a therapist, he lived what by all outward appearances was an implacably normal life.
He was, true, still afraid of the dark, but even that was hardly an issue. Anything to disrupt the dark, even the blue dot on the wireless router across the room and beneath the desk, was enough to allay his fear. It was never a problem, his fear was always in check.
Or, rather, it had only been a problem once, years ago, when he and his wife had first bought the house they lived in now and there was a power outage. He had woken up in the pitch dark not knowing where he was and feeling he was back in his childhood room again, in that same dark, having just been told another awful story. This one about a man who accidentally drank a ghost.
He must have gasped, or made an exclamation of some kind. Before he knew it his wife was awake beside him and was touching his side, which made him gasp again—he heard himself this time. And then she spoke. “Are you ok, honey?” she said, or “Sweetie, what’s wrong?” He couldn’t remember which now. Hearing her voice, he knew where he was and his panic began to subside. A moment later there was a beep, and the blue light of the router came on again, and everything was fine.
The strange thing, it seemed to him thinking about it years later, was that she tried to scare me at all. She never did during the day, never even said Boo! to him, was never anything but kind. So why at night? Not every night either, not one night in ten. There was no real regularity, so he could never predict when it might be coming. No matter the night, she would come in first and read to him—nothing scary, just a normal kid’s book pulled from his shelves. She would read to him and then tuck him in, kiss his forehead, and leave the room. She would turn off the light on the way out the door. But on those nights when she was going to frighten him, even though she flicked the switch down as usual, the light somehow stayed on. He did not know how this could be—he had tried to make the switch do that himself but never could. And she always acted too like the light had gone off properly, as if she believed herself to be leaving him in darkness. “Good night,” she said, “sleep tight,” and closed the door.
But a few minutes later the door would silently slide open again and she would come back in, taking her place in the chair beside the bed without a word. She would remain like that for a moment, silent, hands resting lightly on her knees, and then turn to look at him.
“Do you want to hear a scary story?” she would say. And then, whether he said yes or no or nothing at all, she would tell him one.
What made her come back? Why did she return some nights but not most nights? He wasn’t sure. There was no reason that he could make out. She just did.
He asked his mother about it once, when he was older, when he was in college—before he met his wife-to-be and long before his son was born. The two of them were in the living room she generally reserved for company. But now that he was away at college he qualified, he supposed, as company.
In a lull in her recitation of neighborhood gossip, he had asked, “Why did you used to tell me those scary stories?”
She gave him a strange look, as if genuinely surprised. At first he read it to be surprise that he would mention during the day what they never acknowledged except at night, but then she said, “What scary stories?”
“You know,” he said. “At night.”
She made a little noise of disgust. “I never told you scary stories!”
But she had, he insisted. He went on to explain how she had left the room and then come silently back in shortly after.
“What nonsense!” she said. “Once I left I never came back in. Why would I?”
“But you did,” he insisted.
She shook her head. “You must have dreamed it,” she said.
He hadn’t dreamed it, he was sure he hadn’t. Why would she lie? he wondered, once back in his dorm room. Shame, perhaps. Or perhaps she genuinely didn’t remember.
He lay on his bed, staring up at the flaking acoustic tiles. On the other side of the room he could hear his roommate talking to himself as he tried to complete his chemistry homework, mumbling scraps of formulae. Or maybe, he thought, even at the time she didn’t know she was doing it.
One story she told was about a creature that looked human but wasn’t.
One story she told was about a creature that looked human but wasn’t. Mostly it couldn’t be distinguished from a human but it was, so she said, “capable of atrocious self-distortion.” To him, very young, the phrase sounded like a spell. “It was capable, for instance,” his mother said, “of growing as tall as the ceiling, and then across it, and then lengthening itself down the wall. You can walk into a room only to find it behind you and above you and before you all at once. The worst thing to do is notice it. If you notice it, well, what choice does it have but to fall all around you and do away with you?” She gave him a smile—or half her mouth did anyway. The other half tried to smile but failed. “Good night,” she said, and turned off the light and left him alone in the dark.
Another story: this one told slowly, in almost hypnotic tones, about a boy. “A boy not unlike yourself,” his mother said, and smiled. A boy who went into the woods and crawled into a hole he found there, and found, at the bottom of that hole, not roots and grubs and rocks, but a long glittering passageway, illuminated by torches and lined down one side in mirrors.The boy had heard enough fairy tales to feel optimistic about where this passageway would lead. Walking along it, his reflection pacing beside him in the mirrored glass, he dreamed of piles of gold, enchanted princesses, witches and ogres and other villains that he would defeat with one deft twist of his clever mind.
He was so caught up in his thoughts that he did not notice that even though the mirrors had come to an end long ago, his reflection still walked beside him, more and more solid, matching him step for step, indistinguishable from him in every detail except that the creature that used to be his reflection couldn’t smile properly. Every time it tried to smile, it came out glittering and terrifying, little shards of mirrored glass in place of teeth.
His mother stopped speaking, rocking slowly in her chair, staring at nothing.
“When did he notice?” the boy finally asked.
“Eh?” said his mother, coming to. “Only when it was too late.”
“Too late for what?”
His mother stretched, stood. She went to the doorway and lingered in it a moment, then reached out with what seemed an unnatural slowness and switched off the light.
“Let’s just say,” said her voice out of the darkness, “that someone who either was the boy or looked like the boy came back down the passage a few hours later, spattered with blood. When he reached the part of the hall that was mirrored, it made no reflection of him at all.”
His mother claimed to have never told him that story either.
II.
He was naturally thinking about this, couldn’t help but think about it, when he and his wife and son went to visit his mother. Normally they stayed in a hotel, ostensibly so as not to be a bother to her, but the real reason, a reason which he didn’t share with his wife or his mother, and certainly not his son, was that he was worried his mother would offer to read a bedtime story to his son, worried too about whether she would frighten him once she was done, just as she had done to him growing up.
This time, his mother had specifically asked for them to stay with her. “But we don’t want to bother you,” he said. It wouldn’t be a bother, she claimed: when they stayed in a hotel she didn’t see as much of them as she would like. She would, she claimed, sleep in the recliner. She didn’t mind: most nights she slept in the recliner anyway. He and his wife could have her bed.
He protested. They couldn’t do that to her!
But no, she insisted, they could. They should! And as far as their son went, he could simply take his father’s old room.
Later, speaking to his wife about it, he found himself hard-pressed to know how to justify his desire to cancel their trip. “You’re being ridiculous,” his wife said. “She’s old. She won’t be around much longer. If she wants us to stay with her, so what? If it gives her satisfaction, we should say yes.”
“But what if she tells our son stories?” he asked, hearing even as he said it how ridiculous it sounded.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Scary stories,” he said.
His wife laughed. “Your mom?” she said. “That sweet old thing? She would never do something like that.”
And yet she had, he wanted to say. She did it to me. But since he had never managed to say this to his wife before, he did not feel like he could start now. It would sound like a lie he was telling to get his way.
Still, when he called his mother back to let her know they’d be staying with her, he couldn’t stop himself from telling her there was one rule.
“Rule?” she said.
“No scary stories,” he said. “You can read to him and even put him to bed, but you can’t scare him. Not like you used to do to me.”
She made a disgusted noise. “This again!” she said. “You and your delusions! I thought we’d moved past them long ago.”
“Promise,” he said, ignoring her.
“Of course I promise,” she said. “I’d never scare any little boy, and never have.”
“What about—” he started.
“I never have,” she said firmly.
“But—”
“I’m getting off the phone,” she said, speaking louder now. “I’m expecting a call. If you don’t want to stay with me, then don’t. But be honest about it. Stop making up these ridiculous stories to justify it.”
But she had told him those stories, she had. Yes, it didn’t sound like something she’d do. Yes, it was hard to believe it had happened unless you had been the boy in the room forced to listen to them. But if you were that boy, which he was, you knew she had told them, even if you couldn’t convince anybody else.
Yes, it was hard to believe it had happened unless you had been the boy in the room forced to listen to them.
It upset him that she denied it, that she continued to deny it after all these years. If she would just admit it, that would be enough. It hadn’t damaged him, he wasn’t traumatized, he didn’t need a therapist, he was ok, he was normal, he was, he was, and yet this nagged at him, nagged and nagged. It stood in the way of him and his mother having a real relationship, and had been in the way ever since he was eight.
They went. They stayed with his mother, that lovely, harmless old lady who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but who had periodically terrified him while he was growing up. And they weren’t even her stories! She had stolen them out of a book! Did that make it better or worse?
She made them a lovely meal and they sat at the table and chatted with her about the neighborhood gossip, until the moment his wife looked to him and said, “You’re awfully quiet tonight.”
He was awfully quiet. He was lost in his thoughts. He was thinking about what he’d have to do to catch his mother telling scary stories to his son.
But he rallied, joined the chatter. Better to do that, better to do nothing suspicious, nothing to give himself away.
After supper, his son put his pajamas on, then sat playing with some action figures he had brought with him. Soon, he started to yawn.
“Somebody’s getting sleepy,” his grandmother said.
The man didn’t say anything.
“Sweetie, do you want your granny to read to you and tuck you in?”
His wife looked at him when his mother said it, to see what he would do. But he still didn’t say anything.
“Sure,” his son said.
And there was his son, with his hand clasped gently in his grandmother’s hand as she led him away.
“Are you all right?” his wife asked.
“Fine,” he said, his voice strained. “Just fine.” He kissed her. At a little distance he heard the door to his former room open, then close.
They hugged, then separated. “I’m going to take a shower,” his wife said.
“I’ll be along in a little bit,” he said. “I’m going to read.”
But he did not read. Instead, he snuck into the dark hall that led to his son’s room, stationing himself at one end of it. He would, he believed, be invisible to anyone coming out of the bedroom, and if not he could pretend he was just going to or coming from the master bedroom, which was at the other end of the hall.
He could hear his mother’s voice, gentle, a distant murmuring, from his old room. He could see a sharp line of light beneath the door.
Some time went by. After a while, his mother came out.
“Good night,” she said from the doorway. “Sleep tight.” She walked toward him. And then, without seeing him, even though she came just five or six feet away, she turned out of the hall and into the living room.
I should have reached out and touched her, he thought. Then I would be the one scaring her. The thought made him smile.
But no, that wasn’t why he was there. He needed to be patient, to wait.
From his vantage he could see his mother. She was in the recliner, sleepy, leaned all the way back. She was reading, but her head jerked a little each time she almost nodded off.
She wasn’t going to go back in, he thought. There was no point waiting. They might have to stay with his mother twenty nights before anything happened. He had accomplished nothing. He was getting tired. He rubbed his face. He should have scared her after all.
And then, suddenly, he thought he heard something down the hall. His wife, maybe? He peered through the darkness and yes, there was someone there, near his son’s room, and his eyes had adjusted enough for him to see that it was his mother.
How did she creep so quietly from her chair? he wondered. Almost involuntarily, his eyes flicked toward the living room. There, in the chair, was his mother.
Panicked, he looked back at his son’s door. The light in his son’s room was on now—he could see the band of light under the door. And there, outside of the door, was his mother too. She was in the chair and in the hall at the same time.
He took one shaky step forward then found, abruptly, that he couldn’t move. He tried to speak, but the sound came out strangled and weak, hardly a sound at all.
From down the hall, his mother was looking at him, her eyes glittering coldly in the dark. There was something off about her smile, even in the dark. About one side of her smile.
To the other side of him, in the living room, out of sight now, he could hear his mother, his other mother, snoring softly.
The mother outside the door reached out. It seemed to him that her arm stretched a little longer than an arm should be able to stretch before her hand closed around the doorknob. She eased the door open and silently entered his son’s room, his old room, leaving him helpless, still unable to move, alone in the dark.
Flash fiction is a form that often skirts the line between narrative poetry and short fiction, offering a depth of narrative and poetic expression.
When I think about books that have had the most palpable impact on me, I realize that many of them use innovative forms. And many of the most memorable flash fiction books combine form and content in unexpected ways. Betsy Reed argued that one of most important things we can learn from the work of novelist Milan Kundera is “[t]he inseparability of form and content”. And this idea about how form and content are inseparable helps explain why innovative forms in literature are so jarring, so memorable. Every form offers unique strengths and opportunities. And by combining various forms and content in deliberate and unconventional ways, unexpected depths and ranges of expression are possible. The following eight works of flash fiction use innovative forms in the service of their compelling narratives, and I explore how their form adds to their power.
A glance at the table of contents tells the tale. Only two or three pages separate these brief flashes of stories, which Kawabata called “palm-of-the-hand stories” because they were small enough to hold in your palm. The titles are ripe with meaning, much like a poetry collection where titles bear a lot of the weight of meaning. And the titles are often small things —“The Ring”, “Canaries”, “Photograph” “Glass”, Summer Shoes”, ”Umbrella”, and “A Child’s Viewpoint”. Consider how poetic the prose leans. The page-and-a-half-long flash story “The Girl Who Approached the Fire” ends with these lines after the narrator dreams he sees a girl running toward a fire because she does not want to be near him: “In a dream there is no bluffing or pretense.” And then goes on to leave this line standing by itself after a line break—a loud and terse ending: “I felt desolate to think so”. Another flash story from the collection called “The Sparrow’s Match Making” begins with this: “Long accustomed to a life of self-indulgent solitude, he began to yearn for the beauty of giving himself to others.” Two short pages later, after hopelessly considering whether he will ever find a wife, flipping a coin, and seeing two sparrows dive into a pond, he is changed. The story ends with the narrator musing, “And then, with a clear-hearted greeting to the girl in the photograph, he felt the greatness of God”. This is a long distance to travel in a brief couple pages, but Kawabata does this often throughout this collection.
Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan
The publisher describes these as sixty-two “ultra-short stories”. Like Kawabata’s collection, titles bear a heavy burden of meaning. Consider the title story’s title, “An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimeter Film”, “Winter Rug”, “The Pretty Office”, “Ernest Hemingway’s Typist”, “Thoreau Rubber Band”, and “The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon”. And with such a short time to work their magic, these flash stories pull the reader into their world in direct and memorable fashion. For example, “A Short History of Religion in California” begins with “There’s only one way to get into it: We saw the deer in the meadow.” And “An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimeter Film” begins with the following: “People cannot figure out why he is with her.” And “Getting to Know Each Other” starts with a brief declarative sentence that begs the reader to lean in to hear more: “She hates hotel rooms”. Brautigan makes direct use of the structure to echo meanings in other flash stories. In “Forgiven”, he opens with “This story is a close friend or perhaps a lover to a story called “Elmira”. Why Brautigan began the story in this way instead of simply placing the story beside the earlier story, “Elmira” only he knows. But like all Brautigan’s fiction, this book is ripe with his inimitable voice—a blend of soaring imagination and seeming lightness, with a tender and heavy heart hidden at its core.
Sherrie Flick’s Whiskey, Etc. makes the most of the unique meaning-making opportunities available in the flash fiction story collection form in fascinating ways. The book is organized into eight thematically linked sections of flash stories: songs, pets, coffee/tea, dessert, art, cars and canoes, soap, and whiskey. And Flick compels her readers into her story worlds with irresistible openings. “Anna” begins with “Anna dreams about crickets”. And “Shadows” starts with “The sun refused to begin”. “The Paperboy” opens with “I seduced the paperboy yesterday” and ends with “He will never forget me. I will be the first woman he ever loved”. Like the narrator of “Paperboy”, these flash stories seduce the reader and cannot be forgotten.
Delta 88 by Christopher Chambers
After first reading these flash stories slowly over an extended period, savoring them, they haunted me long after I stopped reading. Donald Ray Pollack wrote that Chambers’ flash fiction collection “does so much in so few pages” and Jennifer S. Davis observed, “These shorts are spare on words, but not on heart and insight”. I agree. Flash stories like “The Beatles”, “Heavy Metal”, “The Velvet Underground”, “Muscle Car” and the title story will make you recognize moments from your life that you’ve forgotten, moments that defined you and broke your heart. The collection is full of sentences like this from “Spaghetti Western”: “Our whiskey was Canadian and our cigars, Swisher Sweet, glowed like the eyes of stray dogs in the flickering blue darkness”. The voice of these stories is familiar, authentic, and irresistible. This is how the flash story, “Memphis” begins: “I was between jobs, getting by on what I’d skimmed from the till at my last bartending gig. I liked to sip Stoli straight up to keep an even keel in the wee hours and they fired me for drinking on the job. So I was biding my time at a roadhouse by the river, nursing a longneck, tapping my foot to a rock-a-billy trio with a stand-up bass when there, I swear, across the smoky room, appears the girl of my dreams.” Throughout these stories, a consistent voice emerges that rings with the truth of felt experience. These twenty-four soulful flash fiction stories build on each other, accumulating emotion and meaning, adding up to something beyond their individual narratives that will make you recognize parts of yourself you need to remember. This collection makes you remember your past and, like the narrator of “Memphis”, come to the conclusion that “Even now I think, if I’d known then what I know now, I’m afraid I’d do it all pretty much the same.”
This collage of flash stories imagines dreams by Albert Einstein in 1905 while he was working in a patent office, just as he was realizing his theory of relativity—a new conception of time and reality. Bursting with imagination—like the best work by Italo Calvino—each of these brief stories imagines a different world and reality in which time is experienced uniquely. Even the titles are time-obsessed, each a date of a dream by Einstein. One flash story chapter titled “14 April 1905 begins, “Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly”. Another flash story titled “24 April 1905” starts with this: “In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time”. A later story, “15 June 1905” imagines that “In this world, time is a visible dimension”. Lightman’s flash stories illuminate the many radical possibilities for reality and time.
Ondaatje wrote in the afterword to this book that it was the first book he’d written where he’d “swam into the deep end”. And I’m glad he did. Taking up his childhood obsession with westerns, this book is a collage of brief flashes of poems, prose, interviews, and songs about Billy the Kid. The way these moody and sometimes matter-of-fact elements interact and echo off each other are captivating. Describing the structure, Ondaatje writes that “there had to be some unspoken or hidden link” between moments and elements he combined. After reading this book I was haunted by the image of Billy the Kid hiding out in a barn, watching the sunbeams cut through the cracks in the walls. In the afterword, Ondaatje admitted that, at first, he didn’t know how he felt about the “crazy content and possibly crazy form” in this book. But, for the reader, content and form intersect in fascinating ways and create an unforgettable experience.
In this novella-in-flash, Sandra Cisneros tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, as she comes of age in Chicago. Using brief flash fiction length chapters that feature titles instead of chapter numbers, Cisneros combines the strengths of both flash fiction and the novella form. As with poetry collections and short story collections, titles of individual works like “Hairs”, “My Name”, Cathy Queen of Cats”, “Laughter”, “Hips” and “Born Bad” create meanings in ways that aren’t possible in traditional novels. And the structure that the numerous brief flash fiction stories/chapters impose on the work—much the way a sonnet creates turns and emphasis with its form and stanzas—cause memorable lyrical openings and closings. For example, “Linoleum Roses” begins with a sad declaration: “Sally got married like we knew she would, young and not ready but married just the same” and ends three brief paragraphs later with: “She sits at home because she’s afraid to go outside without his permission. She looks at all the things they own: the towels and the toaster, the alarm clock and the drapes. She likes looking at the walls, and how neatly their corners meet, the linoleum rises on the floor, the ceiling smooth as wedding cake”. The flash fiction form, with is closeness to narrative poems, allows for numerous lyrical and poetic insights like the following from “Four Skinny Trees”: “They are the only ones who understand me. I am the only one who understands them. Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine”. The novella form lends its unique balance of brevity and depth to offer an even more impactful experience for readers as they follow Esperanza’s journey.
This novella-in-flash by Justin Torres reveals the turbulent lives of three brothers as they grow up together. Pam Houston described this book as a “musical tornado of a novel”. And there is a musicality to the prose. Consider the musical way repetition is used in the chapter “Us Proper”: “When we were brothers, we were Musketeers. . . We were monsters, Frankenstein, the bride of Frankenstein, the baby of Frankenstein…we were the three Bears, taking revenge on Goldilocks for our missing porridge. The Magic of God is three. We were the magic of God. . . The stooges were three, the Chipmunks.” This is one of the benefits of the flash fiction form: because it is so closely related to poetry—and narrative poems, particularly—it lends itself to this musicality and repetition. A review of the book in Elle magazine argued that “The imagistic power of We The Animals exists in inverse proportion to its slim 128 pages.” But I would go further and argue that the imagistic power of the book exists, in part, because of its slim 128 pages. The concision and power of the novella form, combined with the layers of meaning and lyrical qualities engendered by flash fiction help propel the powerful impact of this work on readers. Dorothy Allison described the book as a “miracle in concentrated pages”. The miracle of Torres’ work is how he melds what Ondaatje might affectionally call his “crazy content and possibly crazy form” by choosing to tell his turbulent and heartful coming of age story using the constraints, concision, lyrical and poetic opportunities, and power that the innovative novella-in-flash form offers.
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.”
This morning as I razed the onion grass, I remembered
how my father once steered the riding mower with my sister
on one knee and me on the other. When he left,
we used our fingers to pick debris from the dandelions,
after someone crushed his 6-disc changer with an Easton B5.
Even a baseball bat, after all, can be a kind of lever,
a fulcrum on which to balance what we could not
shovel— not hope, exactly,
but what precedes it: a wrecking ball or a Roomba
a stopwatch or train.
When I Wake My Daughter for School She Tells Me I’ve Ruined the Dream She Had
Yes, love, I say to her: Don’t I know it? And yet. Just imagine—
how much else can be ruined by love,
by that which we’ve dreamed might love us in return.
Here, dear, is what I’ve been trying,
failing every which way to teach you:
the world is equal parts reverie and premonition.
Sometimes to dream is to see the world as it could be.
Sometimes to dream is to see the world as it is
& remain awake.
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