Riveting and unpredictable, the 2024 presidential campaign trail reads like a novel. You literally can’t make this shit up—but if someone could, it might be Charles Dickens. Here’s a six-week slice of election summer as written by 10 writers of classic fiction.
The Candidate by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy’s novel moves slowly, like Biden. The gray narrative follows his struggle to determine if stepping down from his candidacy is the right decision. Short sentences help the 81-year-old President get through his thoughts.
Trump I, Part III by William Shakespeare
Donald Trump’s overconfidence and recklessness make him a truly Shakespearean protagonist. Heightened language suits his strange soliloquies, and iambic pentameter makes his words surprisingly comprehensible. Despite the inaccurate plot, audiences are captivated by the drama.
The Laughing Warrior by Margaret Atwood
Kamala Harris aims to save a dystopian nation where women don’t have the right to bodily autonomy. Her opponent claims that if he wins the presidency, citizens will never vote again. Clearly, Atwood has a wild imagination.
Material Truth: Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
In each short story, a different voter faces a shocking reality, including a Project 2025 supporter who learns that the agenda would ban pornography, a liberal arts college student who purchases a camouflage hat, and a couch salesperson who confronts customer JD Vance.
Say It to My Face by James Baldwin
A woman navigates racism at her “Black job” and homophobia in her family. She’s excited to vote for Kamala, who knows what it’s like to be marginalized. When “DEI candidate” becomes a euphemism for the N-word, she supports her candidate by doing a silk press with a round brush.
Courtesy and Civility by Jane Austen
Affluent white women gingerly discuss politics, attend a whites-only Zoom call, and raise millions of dollars for Harris. Free indirect discourse reveals that many of them are anxious about their vote until they hear Vance disparage “childless cat ladies.”
Independence by Toni Morrison
An unaffiliated moderate remains undecided between candidates. She first considers trivial factors—like Trump’s raised-fist photo and Megan Thee Stallion’s performance—but ghosts, memories, and identity turmoil urge her to contemplate her values and determine her beliefs.
To Be Young and Free by Zora Neale Hurston
As the nation crumbles, Gen Z voters enjoy dancing to “never-Trump guy” remixes on TikTok and posting images of Tim Walz on tampons. The authentic dialogue includes phrases like “Kamala is brat.” Critics call the book “unserious” until realizing its impact much later.
To The White House by Virginia Woolf
Through stream-of-consciousness narration, Trump grapples with the concept of mixed-race identity, while Kamala daydreams about inauguration. In epistolary sections, fundraising emails claim Walz will “unleash HELL ON EARTH” and press releases ask, “is Donald Trump ok?”
A Story of a Strained Country by Charles Dickens
Dickens needs more than 1,000 dense pages to recount the summer. He focuses on political issues—a fresh angle—instead of coconut emojis. Still, the novel amuses readers with vivid character descriptions, masterfully portraying Trump and Vance as “just plain weird.”
As a writer of both prose and poetry, I love to read work that falls between genres. Whether it’s fiction that leans into lyricism so unabashedly it should be called a poem, or a poem so loaded with narrative that it is, in effect, a lyrical essay, I celebrate the merging of poetry and plot to get at some otherwise inexpressible truth. I admire anyone who can write so transcendently that the lines between genres break down so it’s impossible to know what genre you’re reading in and, more importantly, it no longer matters.
While my debut poetry collection, Inconsolable Objects, falls squarely onto the poetry side of the line, everything I write is informed by a desire to tell a story, and every poem in my collection began with a narrative impulse honed into poetry. And yet, if I’d given the narrative a little bit more headroom, those poems could easily have crossed the line into prose.
Here, I present to you a highly incomplete list of books I love that live in the liminal space between genres and could be shelved in poetry, fiction, or creative non-fiction.
In his epilogue to this story, Henry Miller writes: “a clown is a poet in action. He is the story which he enacts.” Miller further states, “it is the strangest story I have yet written.” I initially encountered this little book in my father’s library when I was twelve. I was mesmerized by the language but didn’t know what to make of it. Was it a story or poem? While I couldn’t reconcile the intergeneric language, I was entranced by Miller’s tragic fable about Augustine, a clown who attempts “to depict the miracle of ascension.” Each night before an adoring crowd, Augustine falls into a trance. He is a man driven to impart not just laughter, but everlasting joy, and the ending, as with many poems, is both mysterious and devastating.
Poetry Foundation describes Lydia Davis as a short story writer, novelist, and a translator. That feels to me a bit like describing Mondrian as someone who paints lines, boxes, and squares. Lydia Davis’s writing cannot be defined by the traditional forms because her writing isn’t constrained by the typical dance moves of fiction. While she thinks of herself as a writer of fiction, it’s easy to see why she might be mistaken for a poet. Some of her stories are only one or two lines long and she freely uses enjambment and broken lines. In her essay collection Essays One, she says of her work: “…if, eventually, some of my work comes right up to the line (if there is one) that separates a piece of prose from a poem, and even crosses it, the approach to that line is through the realm of fiction.”
Yes, I know that Tinkers is squarely considered to be a novel and Paul Harding a novelist. Yes, the book won the Pulitzer for Fiction. And yet, I defy anyone who reads it to say it isn’t pure, incandescent poetry. The story, which weaves the tale of a tinker who “imagined himself somewhat of a poet” with the hallucinatory flashbacks of a dying man (his estranged son), is so lyrical you might fill a notebook with all the memorable sentences you’ll want to keep in your treasure box of beautiful writing.
Another indescribable genre-defying work crafted out of 240 numbered paragraphs (or prose poems) that navigate loss and love and profound grief through the lens of someone obsessed with the color blue. Nelson builds her book from borrowed sources: philosophy, psychology, art and music are mixed in with deeply personal observations often framed as questions. Like the elements of a great list poem, each paragraph not only functions as a whole unto itself but simultaneously as a part of the larger whole of the entire book. While the book isn’t an easy read, it offers up immense rewards.
The House on Mango Street is a series of linked poetic vignettes, a story told in the voice and language of poetry by the twelve-year-old Chicana protagonist, Esperanza as she comes of age in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago.
In one eloquent passage, Cisneros writes: “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing. It was my great-grandmother’s name and now it is mine.”
Citizen is the first book on this list typically shelved in with the poetry. Because it is poetry, and Claudia Rankine is one of our finest poets. But Citizen is more than just a book-length poem. It is often called a hybrid work of prose-poetry. And yes, it is that. But Claudia Rankine wrangles language into an entirely new form that doesn’t fit into any clear-cut notions of what we consider poetry or prose. She writes into that liminal space between genres to get at the lived experience of enduring daily microaggressions and being othered in America. An epic tale, a tragic, and profound work of art that bends language to the task of making the indescribable toll of being a marginalized citizen visible.
Before Denis Johnson wrote his epic Pulitzer Prize winning novels, he studied poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In Train Dreams, he finally merges the two genres into a lyrical tale that moves and breathes and thinks like a poem while capturing the hardscrabble lives and struggle of the men who built the old West in a time of rapid transformation.
On reading the first few pages of Offill’s exquisite story of a relationship as told by an unnamed narrator, one might be confused. Wait, this isn’t a novel, this is something else entirely. Offill shrugs off the expected trappings of a novel in prose and writes in short bursts of imagistic word-crafting that might have you convinced you are reading a poem. It’s like taking a bite of something expecting to taste one thing and discovering it is something else. And yet, this is a deft and compellingly told narrative that tracks a marriage from early courtship to heartbreak and back again.
Set primarily in Antigua, this book explores mother-daughter relationships, colonialism, gender, and coming of age. This slight collection of stories is more poem-like than many poems that call themselves poems. Yes, they are stories too, but they are clearly, unequivocally poems. The first story, “Girl,” is a poem of advice to a girl from some anonymous narrator, presumably her mother. It is a short punchy list of anaphoric declarations and guidance that accumulate and leave the reader breathless.
In all of Martha Baillie’s books you can feel her sister. Her words offer a portal to the multiplistic experiences of existence—to understand better how cut off we can be from each other and where true connection flickers too.
Baillie’s memoir There is No Bluewas published by Coach House Books in 2023. This year, a screen adaptation of her novel,The Incident Report, launched at the Tribeca Film Festival. The filmic incarnation is called Darkest Miriam; it was executive produced by Charlie Kaufman and stars Britt Lower of Severance fame.
Both Darkest Miriam and There is No Blue consider how mental illnesses impact the people who walk around in the world with them and the folks who are consistent in their daily lives.
Darkest Miriam features a librarian moving through enormous grief while navigating public facing work. She records the unusual occurrences of the library in a log of incident reports. As she receives notes from a stalker, she starts to knit details of her own life into these accounts and a longform narrative is born within the institutional record. In There is No Blue, Martha details the deaths of all three members of her original family (her mother, father, and sister). She turns over her incomplete understanding of them and the grief of losing them individually. The stories intertwine in the disorientation of their disagreeing conceptions of each other. Baillie spends the largest portion of the memoir with her sister, Christina. She and Martha co-authored the Trillium Award nominated Sister Language. Christina was diagnosed with schizophrenia and died by suicide about a month before that book’s publication in 2019.
I spoke with Baillie in my studio space, a refurbished industrial building in the west end of Toronto. We discussed the ethics of sharing stories that characterize mental health, her attempts at capturing pieces of her relationship with her sister in different texts throughout the years, and how Christina lives on in Darkest Miriam.
Sarah Feldbloom: So Martha, you’ve written eight books, if I’m counting correctly. Six novels and two works of nonfiction. Characters experiencing mental health challenges appear across your work. Can you tell me about what’s guided your choices in illustrating them?
Martha Baillie: I’ll start with The Incident report, as that’s a book that ethical and aesthetic concerns held me back from writing for a long time.
When you work in a public library, as I have for decades, you witness strange events. You’re assisting people of all ages, from all walks of life. For those living unhoused, some with mental health issues including addiction, the library offers a crucial refuge. De-escalating conflict between library users and handling aggression aimed at staff are key components of a public library worker’s day. One way of dealing with residual tension is to tell stories. For years I’d tell library stories at home, out loud, emphasizing parts that felt absurd. I knew that if I were to put those oral stories down on paper, I would have to address what’s behind them, including a great deal of pain and isolation, and so for a long time I resisted using the material. And then my sister gave me a novel by Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian writer, called The Voice Imitator. It’s a tiny collection of supposed court reports that are all absurdist. In one, the mayor of Venice and the Mayor of Pisa get in an argument, and end up switching the Leaning Tower for the Bridge of Sighs, then get arrested. In every report there is this delicious tension between the style of the prose and the content. Everything about this little collection set bells ringing in my head and I suddenly thought, ohh, if I were to write a novel made of a series of tiny reports, I could be true to the fragmentation at the heart of the stories I wanted to tell. I had been worried that if I wrote a traditional novel, the people I wanted to include might feel like decorative elements, which didn’t sit right at all. At the same time I didn’t want to take any one of their stories and make it the focus. I didn’t feel I had the right to try and elaborate. All I could do was report the fragments that I’d received. So once that structure came to me, I felt as though I’d found a way to honour how fragmentation is central to many conditions of mental instability, and to living unhoused. I’d found a structure that worked both aesthetically and answered some ethical questions for me. I ended with a novel consisting of an arrangement of 144 incidents.
SF: In other novels you’ve focused on a single character living with a mental health issue who you develop fully. Tell me about your process with that.
MB: You’re right. In If Clara, the protagonist is living with schizophrenia, and in The Search for Heinrich Schlögelthe protagonist’s sister makes a suicide attempt. Both those characters are based on my sister, Christina. I felt I knew those characters as well as I knew my sister, by which I mean both very well and not at all. My sister knew I was writing those books. I gave her both manuscripts early on. After reading my description of Heinrich’s sister recovering in a hospital bed following a suicide attempt, Christina said the scene was “a very good aestheticization” of her own experience.
When you work in a public library, as I have for decades, you witness strange events.
My sister was afraid to bathe. Her hydrophobia meant that she washed herself minimally. I asked her if she would mind me including this detail in If Clara. She said no, no, that’s totally fine. I want people to understand what I’m up against—they so rarely do. Then she added that what she did find painful in my book was that Clara succeeds in writing a novel, something Christina felt she couldn’t do. I had thought that I was giving my sister a gift by having her character write a novel; I’d imagined her vicarious pleasure. But instead my “gift” felt like a dagger. I so easily got things wrong when trying to guess what would upset her or please her. Slowly, the importance of asking became clear.
When it came to those I portrayed in the Incident Report, many I’d not seen in years, so I couldn’t ask; I could only draw on memory. I altered details and further fictionalized to make people less recognizable. I wasn’t making exact portraits but creating something new, building meaning from what I’d observed.
SF: I wonder if this may be a good time to talk about your approach to writing Sister Language.
MB: Sure. It was a work of call and response. Certainly, part of the impetus was that I’d used Christina, who was a writer herself, as a character in my books. I’d done so several times, and so I wanted to create a bridge for her to put her voice out into the world more directly, if she wanted that. When I’d approached her in the past, she’d expressed a deep ambivalence about publication, but this time she responded eagerly, asking me to provide a prose framework for her poems, a framework that explained the Formal Thought Disorder that caused words to shatter inside her head. If you said to her “appear,” it would break into “app” and “ear” or “app” and “pear,” and this constant crumbling of language made conversation difficult for her. On the other hand, she was the queen of neologisms. She played with language stunningly. James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Beckett were her heroes. She couldn’t write coherent prose, she claimed. But later, as Sister Language evolved, she composed beautiful letters to me that she made part of the book. In actuality, it wasn’t that she couldn’t produce prose, but she regarded doing so as a betrayal of her inner fragmentation. Her selves were numerous; one would take over from another; each had its own function, she said.
SF: So, when she wrote in a linear way, did you feel that she did that to be of service to you – that she was trying to provide you with ease, give you a gift?
MB: It was, yes, definitely a gift to me, but to her also. She told me that it brought her relief to discover she could do it. Maybe writing letters addressed to me felt so familiar that it was acceptable to her? With any new person she had to develop a whole new language, she said, which felt like “climbing a razor blade.” But between us a language already existed.
SF: How did you begin drafting the book together?
MB: I interviewed her about Formal Thought Disorder then took my notes home and typed up what I thought would be a little introduction to one of her pieces or a beginning of a prose framework, and brought it to her. Immediately she said: you know what? Maybe we could put my writing on one page and yours on the opposite page. That way our languages won’t contaminate each other.
I had thought that I was giving my sister a gift by having her character write a novel. But instead my ‘gift’ felt like a dagger.
She led the process of creating the book. Since she used a manual typewriter, she put pages of her poetry into an old school binder. My role was to respond on the opposite pages. Every few days the binder changed hands. A little way into this, after I’d included a question in one of my responses, she typed an answer on my page. That she’d broken her rule and snuck onto my page, I saw as an expression of trust. Not long after, she began composing the letters within the text, and from then on the whole thing kept evolving organically. She asked that we put in some of my work as well, and said that what it turned out we were looking at was our two different ways of dealing with language.
We included intricate word collages she’d made, and some of her found photographs. When our publisher accepted the manuscript Christina said: if we’re going to do any editing, I don’t want to be involved because I’ll just want to destroy the whole thing. That’s a process I could care less about. I want to create environments, verbal environments, language environments, that people can enter from any direction. Do what you have to so humans will read it, but any of my pages that go in have to remain untouched.
So we scanned her pages.
SF: That’s such a smart method for ensuring that purpose wasn’t lost. It’s a fascinating way for me to think about what’s possible with language, too.
MB: Christina once taped a piece of paper to her fridge door that declared: “language believes in the patient’s existence.” Often, she had difficulty believing that she existed, but she told me that when she read those words she felt witnessed by language. She explained that those words were more alive than she was, that the border between animate and inanimate no longer existed for her.
SF: Martha, what do you think about the danger that people often attribute to artists seeing themselves as being the things they create?
MB: Well, Christina ended her life several weeks before our book came off the press. Friends of mine have suggested that completing what she’d so wanted to write freed her to leave. They may be right. She may have also not wanted to face being read by strangers. There were many reasons she took her life.
In a speech she composed, to be read at the book launch she stated that “To reach someone who is schizophrenic and creative can only be done, in my experience, by connecting with the person through the person’s creative endeavour… The Sister Language experience has worked, it has reached me and strengthened me…[it has] achieved what ten years of dedicated psychiatric treatment failed to achieve.” Yet sister language failed to save her from suicide.
SF: I also have a sister, and maybe because of how dear that relationship is to me, I experience this incredible comfort while reading your books. I think that’s because, for me, your sister feels ever-present in your writing.
MB: That makes me laugh. Early in Sister Language I admit to Christina that I keep referring to her as “my sister,” because of having a hard time writing her name. I explain that writing “Christina,” starts me longing for our old intimacy. Christina’s response was: I can see how you might think that there’s warmth in this exchange, but just let me tell you, schizophrenia is a cold condition: though I can feel genuine excitement about what we’re doing, all emotion feels to me like a form of rape.
Often, she had difficulty believing that she existed, but she told me that when she read those words she felt witnessed by language.
In one of the journals she left, she wrote: my sister’s all about bringing people together, and I’m about the opposite.
But we both needed to make art, and were excited by each other’s art. That was the connection she could allow.
SF: That makes me think about how people classify love in traditional ways, but there are profound examples of how much bigger a concept like love can be. Maybe that’s the same with any concept of connection?
MB: In There is No Blue, there’s a lot of discussion of love and the nature of what love is in the opening piece. My 99-year-old mother is dying and I’m washing her body and making a death mask. And at a certain point, I say that I’ve replaced the word “love” with “attention.” I’m thinking, now, that “attention,” was what could be shared by my sister and me—a shared attention to language.
SF: A question I want to ask about There is No Blue, which was the book you published next after Sister Language, is that in that story you’re sharing with the reader the characters of your sister and your mother and your father, who have all passed now – and I don’t know if it was my reading of it – but it felt like you were with Christina for the longest, and that her spirit and essence were dominant.
MB: Mm-hmm.
SF: And I was curious about that choice – whether I was reading it as you were meaning for the text to feel. If so, why did you make the decision to structure the piece that way?
MB: Well, I started writing There Is No Blue within a year of Christina’s suicide. She’d inscribed her final message on her bedroom wall, and I took that to be her final poem. That I could read her farewell as a work of art, allowed me to continue a conversation with her, artist to artist. It gave me a structure to hold on to. The book tells the story of my family, but it is dominated by my response to Christina’s last words.
SF: I see the book as a family portrait. And maybe Christina is standing a little closer to the front of the photo.
I had to ask myself: am I doing this from a place of love? Am I doing this out of respect for this person?
MB: Yeah, when you have someone within a family who is struggling with a mental health issue, that can take up a lot of space. For us, it was what everybody was responding to—this situation of trying to figure out how to navigate, how to assist, or how not to fail to assist, how to address the struggling. But interestingly, while others feel that a person’s taking up a lot of room, that they are right at the front of the photograph, that all the attention is there—from what I understand based on what Christina told me —inside that person can feel as though they’re not seen at all, because they’re so misunderstood that they’re actually invisible, and that all this attention is coming towards somebody else, a false version of themself. If she read the book, she might say: I’m not here.
Who knows? I hope that she would recognize herself in the portrait, but would she feel that she was present in the book in the way that I feel she’s present in it, or that you, as a reader, feel she’s present? Hard to say.
SF: Yeah.
MB: And that brings us back to ethics. Publishing this book after my sister had passed away, she couldn’t give me her answer anymore about what was okay with her to include. In the end, I had to ask myself: am I doing this from a place of love? Am I doing this out of respect for this person? Am I trying to encourage understanding of schizophrenia? And if I am, then I have to hope that it’s worth going ahead. But it’s very important to me to make as clear as possible that I’m not an authority on anybody else’s experience. Any memoir is an act of imagination.
SF: The film Darkest Miriam, which is based on your book The Incident Report,recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Where do you feel Christina in it, and where do you think the audience will feel her in it?
MB: For me the film is saturated with her. A young version of me is very present, too. Writing that book, I was not thinking of the character of Miriam as being my sister, but Britt Lower brings a vulnerability and extreme sensitivity to the role that reminds me of Christina. Maybe I’m just more comfortable seeing Christina rather than me in Miriam. Tom Mercier, who plays Janko, the young Slovenian taxi driver and painter – I can see my sister in his character too. He brings a mesmerising intensity to his performance and his love of language is palpable. One day on set, I asked him to recommend a book, one he really loves, and he said, ohh, The Diary of Vaslov Nijinsky. So, I borrowed it from the Toronto Public Library. In it, Nijinsky is going mad, and his family is about to place him in an asylum. He writes letters to fellow artist, Jean Cocteau, in a language more similar to my sister’s than I’ve ever encountered. Perhaps it was Tom’s interest in Nijinsky’s madness that attracted him to the role of Janko? I didn’t ask. I see Christina to a more limited extent in the library users who behave in strange ways, because my sister was very careful not to draw attention to herself in public. Alone in her room she might have resembled one of those characters. The time she made photocopies of a squashed dead rat (in a plastic bag) at the Toronto Reference library, she made sure her artistic experiment went undetected.
The director, Naomi Jaye, is brilliant and she’s created a film that is haunting, at least for me. Now you have me wondering if readers who have encountered my sister as you have, in numerous works, will feel her in the film, too.
If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard. —Anne Sexton
The first time I heard a voice speak words unspoken in my soul, I was 45 years old and at an American Adoption Congress conference with a new friend who had also been given the name ‘Christine,’ as a baby on her adoption day.
We sat side-by-side listening as another adoptee, a surfer-pretty woman in her forties (who discovered her original name was “Summer”), describe her life as mime and mimic, always studying the landscape and figuring out how to fit in. “Sure, I can make myself seem like their biological child, or like my in-law’s family, or like I belong in this group or that. I know how to do that.” She let out a long exhale. “What I didn’t know how to do, never thought I could or should do, was ask myself, What fits me?”
I squeezed my friend’s arm. As the woman continued, actor Michael Caine’s voice in The Cider House Rules rang in my head. He played Dr. Larch, a World War II-era obstetrician and abortionist who ran an orphanage in John Irving’s book-turned-movie. In the opening scene, baby Homer’s first adoptive parents return him saying there’s something wrong with him, that he doesn’t make a sound. Dr. Larch says, “He didn’t cry. Orphan babies learn there’s no point in it.” Caring as the doctor and the nurses were, they couldn’t respond to all of them.
“You were a perfect baby,” my mother said the middle-school-summer-day that I learned I was adopted. “You hardly ever cried.”
What if I had?
I spent my first three months in an infant home. Three months is enough time for a baby, for a newborn nervous system, to learn that when it cries, when it needs someone—no one comes.
That Cider House scene had felt like an anvil on my heart since I saw it debut in 1999. I was the mother of a young son then. In his first year, when I was 30, I quit a full-time job I’d loved but required quite a bit of travel, to find a part-time one so I could have more time with him. And I signed up for a college music class in voice. Just for something outside the house, I told myself. There was something about music that I’d been drawn to like an elixir since elementary school chorus.
“You know what yourproblem is?” My voice teacher said after my third attempt to sing “Moon River.” She took her fingers off the piano.
There was something about music that I’d been drawn to like an elixir.
My classmates studied the tall pines through the window. I waited for Ms. Turner to tell me the answer, tell me in her matter-of-fact teaching voice, a voice that transformed to a gorgeous soprano when she broke into song. I stood taller, let my shoulders sink, and drew a long, slow breath into my stomach—the place of strength and sustainability she coached us to sing from.
She stepped away from the piano. “You’ve got a three-octave range for God’s sake.”
“Is that bad?” By that point in the semester, I’d learned I could sing alto and mezzo soprano, that a voice is a mix of many elements—some God-given, some nurtured—and that my younger classmates were far better versed in music.
“No, that’s good, quite good. Your problem is you never let your darn voice out.”
“I thought ‘Moon River’ was supposed to be sung quietly.” In all honesty, that’s why I picked it. Audrey Hepburn had sung it so in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and once told an interviewer that it was one of her most challenging roles because she was an introvert playing the extroverted “Holly Golightly.” I related to that.
The song was also far more appropriate for a voice recital than the 90s rock anthems I belted out in my car on the way to class, including INXS’s “The Stairs”—
The nature of your tragedy is chained around your neck.
Do you lead? Or are you lead? Are you sure that you don’t care?
Those lyrics felt a challenge, a challenge I didn’t want to face.
Ms. Turner planted herself in front of me and smiled. “There’s a difference between quiet and weak, and quiet and strong.” She poked her abdomen with two fingers. “You are not managing your breath well. And you’re holding back. You’ve got to sell it! Put more emotion in it— moresomethingof yourself.”
Something of myself is the problem, I thought. While Hepburn sold a persona unlike herself in a movie, I’d been selling one since I was a child.
One summer day in 1980, when I was almost 13, I played the board game Sorry with a girl down the street. I won a few games. She hated losing.
“I don’t even care. You know why?” She stood and kicked the board. “You’re adopted.”
The moment those words escaped her, I knew in my body it was true—and I understood she wielded that word ‘adopted’ like a sword meant to cut.
I ran home to our babysitter. She dialed my mother at work with her long, burgundy fingernails while I cried at the kitchen table. I knew my parents had struggled through miscarriages and the death of a baby, but they never told me I was adopted. I was overwhelmed to think my mother might not fully belong to me. She rushed home, sent the babysitter to the backyard with my siblings and hugged me as we climbed the stairs to her room.
While she rummaged through her closet, I sat on her waterbed’s edge across from a photo of my little sister, brother and me dressed in matching green-and-beige plaid. As a brown-eyed, brown-haired girl in a family of blue-eyed blonds, I looked darker than ever.
I’d spent many elementary school nights making projects about our French Canadian and Dutch ancestors, writing about kin who sang Sinterklaas songs and ate pepernoot, a biscuit made with cinnamon and spices. I drew pictures of girls in clogs. Those projects were meant for my classmates and me to connect with one another through our ancestors’ music and food and stories. I didn’t know I was writing fiction as my sister and brother wrote fact.
I didn’t know I was writing fiction as my sister and brother wrote fact.
My mother emerged, her hair a little askew, with a letter from Catholic Family Services and sat beside me. I was breathless as I read that my unnamed birth parents were Irish, Welsh and German; and that my birth mother was 5’5, intelligent and sensitive, and had taken piano lessons since she was a child. She’d hoped to major in music. She was 17 when I was born. My birth father was 17, too, “athletic and enjoyed the drums.”
The father I’d known had left our family shortly after my brother was born. My mom apologized for not telling me about my adoption and said they hadn’t wanted me to feel any less their daughter. She pulled me close and pointed to a photo of her round-eyed, round-cheeked grandparents. “See how they grew to look like one another—It’s like that for us.”
I wasn’t mad at her for keeping my origins secret, only viscerally aware of my parental math. I had four parents. Only one remained. I couldn’t risk losing her, too.
“Do Suzie and David know?” I asked, trying to digest a new reality that felt unreal.
My mother said they didn’t and that she loved me and nothing had to change. And I could choose whether or not to tell them. I didn’t want them to think I was any less their sister, so I marched out of that room and kept my origins to myself.
A few years before voice class, I discovered I was one of more than two-million babies adopted in America in the decades before Roe v. Wade—a time when surrendered babies like me came with a brand new birth certificate that implied our adoptive parents were our birth ones. It’sas if you gave birth to her yourself, they were told.
Our original birth certificates were sealed in 48 states and just like that—like a shake of an Etch-a-Sketch—your original name, identity, ancestry and medical history disappeared and you were grafted onto another.
Nearly half those states still hold sealed records today. That secrecy was intended to protect us from shame, from feeling worth ‘less,’ but it did just the opposite.
Trading in my nature for all things nurture, for a family, felt like a good trade after I learned I was adopted. For years I watched grown adoptees on 1980s’ talk shows squirm in their seats when they were asked if it might be “a little ungrateful,” or even “disloyal,” to want to know about the people they came from. “After everything your parents have done for you,” was a frequent refrain, along with—“You’re lucky. They saved you. They gave you a life.”
While my parents had not given me my existence, ethnicities, or whatever may have come pre-loaded in my DNA, they had given me a home and love, especially my mom. The Hallmark stores had rows of cards to thank them for that, but I never saw cards for birth parents, which I took to mean I wasn’t supposed to know them and felt ashamed of my desire to include my roots in my identity. What was never said, but I absorbed by osmosis: if you can just be who you’re told you are and ignore any inner voice to the contrary, then you can belong and be loved.
I spoke none of this to Ms. Turner. I only swept my arm toward her piano. “I’ll try again,” I said, hoping more dramatics might suffice.
She led me along the fundamentals instead—singing up the scale ah – ah – ah – ah – ah – ah – ah. . . . and down, Wa-ffles are won-der-ful they wi-den your waist.
“That’s it,” she said. “Just. Keep. Trying.”
Ms. Turner’s words of wisdom came rushing back twelve years later when I began a Master’s program in creative writing. My chest tightened as I listened to feedback on my first semester’s work:
“The voice is passive.”
“Give this character more agency, more ability to take action.”
“Your narrator needs to be really interesting as a person, more idiosyncratic, quirky, individual—give her a voice that conveys her personality.”
I was wrestling with voice again, only this time on the page. The voice I hoped to ‘let out’ was my birthmother’s, and in turn, my own. A lack of agency was central to her story—a story inspired by her time away at a home for unwed mothers.
I was wrestling with voice again, only this time on the page.
The first time I heard of such a place was the day a letter arrived folded around photographs of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman with freckled forearms like my own. I was a college junior and had recently transferred to a school near my mom. A chill raced up my arms as the photos spilled out—a little girl with painted fingernails, that girl now grown, standing beside an older lady who looked just like her, both smartly dressed in crisp black-and-white suits.
“Dear Christine,” she wrote. “. . . I remember holding you on my lap; your eyes seemed to look right into my soul. I knew I couldn’t keep you and my heart was broken and still is. Words cannot express how I have felt not knowing anything about you. I visited you at the infant home but I couldn’t hold you or kiss you because you were behind a glass window. You are a five to ten minute drive from my house. I named you Ann Marie. We are good people, nothing to be afraid of.”
My stomach was in knots when I shared the letter with my mother. She’d suffered so much in her life, and I never felt she loved me less than my siblings. Her eyebrows knit together as she read, ranting that she couldn’t believe this woman hadn’t contacted her first, and what if I hadn’t known I was adopted, and was she even thinking about what’s best for me. My mother handed back the letter and returned to the stove with a huff that I assumed meant she’d had enough.
“It’s a shock to me, too,” I said.
My mother didn’t bring up the letter in the days that followed. I tried to focus on my psychology final, which, ironically, included the study of what it meant to have a healthy sense of self—to feel known and know one’s self—know myself in ways those not adopted could take for granted.
A week later, I stared across a restaurant table at a stranger named Ann. “Oh, honey,” she said in a warm alto voice as she covered my hand with hers. I’m unsure what she saw in my face. I felt struck dumb. She seemed to recognize me in a way I didn’t recognize myself.
“I’ve thought about how strange this might be for you—to see someone who looks like you for the first time. You have the same roundness in your face as my sister, Lisa.” She took a deep breath and shared that she’d recently had a tubular pregnancy and lost the baby, but was still hopeful she and her husband could have children. “Tell me about you and your family.”
The waitress delivered two chicken parmesans as Ann and I attempted to fill each other in on twenty years of personal history. I told her how hard my mom worked to support us after our dad left and admitted I didn’t know I was adopted until middle school. “My brother learned a few years after I did,” I said, likely smiling as I pictured him. “He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I don’t care. She’s still my sister.’”
Ann took a long breath as if she was digesting it all.
I cleared my throat and asked, “How did I come to—be?” She described her relationship with my father in short phrases: “teenage puppy love,” “we met at a dance, we both loved Bob Dylan and poetry,” “we were so young, and times were very different.”
She moved on to music saying she was a piano teacher and that she had passed the time at the unwed mothers’ home practicing Chopin and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” for the senior recital she’d have after she returned. “You were getting big,” she laughed. “I had to figure out how to tuck you near the keys so I could play—do you play?” She looked hopeful.
“Not really. My grandmother taught me a bit on the organ when I was a kid and singing in my school’s chorus. We’ve always been close.”
“I always pictured you playing.” She looked down.
I felt a wave of loss. Her loss. My mother’s loss. And mine, too.
Thankfully, the waitress stopped to ask if we wanted dessert. As we shared a slice of chocolate cake, Ann shared that the home had forbidden salt and sweets with the exception of Halloween night. She over-indulged and mistook her stomach cramps for indigestion.
I was born the next day.
“You were a bundle of pink chub,” she smiled.
It was the first time I heard a true story about the night I was born.
The more she shared—about her family, about what life was like in the 60s—there was no sex ed, no legal birth control, and no credit cards for women without a father’s or husband’s permission—the more I realized I was missing the first chapter, the context, of my life. She said she found me with the help of people she met at an Adoptees Liberty Movement Association meeting, an activist group that was in its infancy stages in the late eighties.
“Your father Gregg is a high school English teacher,” she said as we finished. “He lives nearby, if you’d like to meet him.”
I realized I was missing the first chapter, the context, of my life.
A couple weeks later, I met Gregg. In the months and years that followed, he never talked about my adoption. He sent poetry he wrote that eluded to it and mixtapes of his favorite music—Bruce Springsteen, The Waterboys, U2 and threw in a Whitney Houston song here and there because he knew I liked her. On a road trip to a U2 concert shortly after we met, I learned that he, too, was an introvert who loved to run, travel and write.
Throughout my twenties, I met Ann and Gregg separately in coffee shops and restaurants. It was easy to talk to them from a part of me that felt like me. While my mother knew I’d met them, she didn’t ask much about it afterwards, or suggest how I might share the news, or them, with our family, so I kept my get-togethers on the down low. I didn’t want to hurt my mom, and I didn’t want to lose her. Acknowledging the connection I felt to my birth parents felt like an enormous risk to my relationship with the family that raised me.
If “Voice” is the full embrace, expression—and ownership—of allthat one is, I was on a long and winding road to finding one..
Which parts of my past could I own? Which parts of myself were acceptable to share with whom? That conundrum often left me speechless. And sometimes startled awake in the middle of the night feeling like I’d fallen down a deep well where no one could hear me, questions running through my mind on a loop. How do I say this just right? What if I hurt someone’s feelings? What if I’d said to my mother or family, “I appreciate everything you’ve done, but it didn’t—it doesn’t—take away the immense grief of losing my first family.” Would they love me less? Would they leave me in big ways or small?
Over the years, I’ve pictured finding a voice akin to opening a set of Russian matryoshka dolls. With each one opened through singing and writing, therapy and reading, I got closer. Closer to understanding that curiosity about my origins wasn’t a maladjustment, but a primal desire to answer a question that’s central to our human experience: Who am I?
A couple years before graduate school, I had the beginning of an answer. From my mother, I learned how to be resilient and strong, and to make time to start a day peacefully with good coffee. From Ann, I’d inherited a love of music and art and a deep curiosity about what it means to be human. And from Gregg, a steadfast tendency to use writing as a means to clear a path in which to live.
It was in those same years that Ann lost her life to breast cancer, at age 59. Losing her was the loneliest of griefs. I’d lost a mother I loved. I’d lost the person who wanted to know about all my families, and all the parts of me, and who loved me for them, too.
“Out of nowhere, a wave comes and I’m overcome,” I said months later to a holistic physical therapist who had become a friend. “It’s in the past. I know I need to move on.”
I’d lost the person who wanted to know about all my families, and all the parts of me.
Wen-Li worked the side of my body that moved freely first, then moved to the locked-up scapula behind my left lung, her way of bypassing my brain to show my body what was still working well and possible. Finally, the knot released and I took a full breath.
“Sometimes it is good to spend time in the past when it shines a light in a dark place.” Her hand rested atop my head.
In the decade before Ann’s death, she returned to college to study painting. The painting that graced her first gallery show’s postcard—an ethereal figure with a cascade of white-blue hair offering a trinity of tulips to a child—now hangs above my desk. In her artist’s statement she wrote:
“Being a musician all my life, I always had a silly notion that people are one thing. I never thought I could be an artist. Over the years, I vacationed out on the Cape. I loved the beach but I couldn’t wait to wander into all my favorite galleries in Wellfleet and Provincetown . . . but most importantly I have many works by my friend John Grillo . . . He once said, ‘My work is about color and love, and a little bit about art.’
I have found a voice as a painter, a painterly voice . . .When I am painting, I am in a different space, tapping into some other dimension of self, both intuitive and healing.
In describing these paintings, I think of music. The lyrics are the curved lines. The rhythm is in the texture. The harmony is within the color.”
The money Ann left me paid for my MFA, and a dog my family and I named Rookie. I, too, longed to tap into something intuitive and healing.
I attended that American Adoption Conference shortly after I graduated. It was there that I learned the costs of secrets and shame on many parents, and on their children now grown. Those discoveries came with me to a writing residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, in the Blue Ridge Mountains a few months later.
It took a full day to get used to the quiet, such quiet I heard the chestnut-brown horses chewing grass, and gravel crunch beneath my feet on the path to the barns-turned-studios. As I tacked family photos and a postcard of one of Ann’s paintings to the bulletin board above my desk, I felt guilty for being away from my roles back home; guilty because while my novel-in-progress had earned me the residency, it had no reliable monetary value and, worse, it was composed of words meant to go unspoken. And maybe a little guilt, too, because I was excited for a week in that sunlit studio with a pen, paper and pared-down life.
One night, a painter named Janet Gorzegno tapped her glass after dessert and invited us to her studio. Each of her gouache-on-paper paintings was of a different man in profile. They looked like time travelers from past centuries.
I fell in love with the painting she’d titled Between Land and Sea. He had a scruff of a beard, slight curl in his hair and soulful eyes cast skyward. One of the poets asked, “What inspired them?”
Janet tapped the side of her head. “Painting them is like meditation for me.”
I took a postcard from the table’s stack. Her upcoming exhibition was titled The Old Souls.‘Old soul’ was a term Ann had used often to describe people she loved. “What made you pick him for the postcard?” I pointed to her painting of a man with a stubbly beard and a Nike goddess-wing tattooed behind his left ear.
Janet pointed to another who was clean-shaven, with full lips and a strong jaw. “I thought it would be him,” she said. “But he’s too shy. He didn’t want it.” She touched the postcard. “He kept saying he would be the one, so I let him.”
“Wow,” was all I managed to say.
Voices. She not only heard their voices, she trusted them, too—trusted her inner compass and intuition to lead her in ways I wish I knew.
She not only heard their voices, she trusted them, too.
I sprinted back to my studio and thumbed through a binder of Ann’s letters. A few years before she died, she sent me three-pages titled “Remembrances” that included the day she and her family met with their priest to discuss the best plan for ‘the baby.’ She asked if the infant home could care for me until she finished high school. “A baby needs to be baptized by a married couple,” the priest had said. “If not, its soul will go to purgatory when it dies.”
What does a teenage girl do with the weight of those words?
After Ann died, I found a vine-patterned journal in her bookshelves. In the 22 years we knew each other, she shared poems she wrote while pregnant, a driving tour of the places she haunted as a teen, her music, her friends and dogs, a few piano lessons for me, and painting dates with my sons.
It wasn’t until her last years that she filled in the more horrifying details of unwed motherhood, though she’d never spoken these words that I found scrawled across a page:
Pregnant at 16.
Life of guilt and shame.
Now I have cancer.
Twelve words. What do I do with the story she told herself about herself, her haiku of how her body kept the score? And how do I honor—not shun—the reality of a bond that arcs backward through our roots and forward through my sons?
When I arrived at VCCA, I thought being around other writers would guide me, but it was the painters who left me up late imagining what it would be like for a high school girl to endure what Ann had endured, and get caught in the quicksand of loss that followed. I couldn’t write fast enough to capture what felt like her voice—her desires, her anger, the way she spoke about sexuality through the art she collected, and the peace she found through painting.
The next night, another painter, Jane Lincoln, clinked her glass in invitation. I was in.
The images that filled Jane’s studio were deceptive—composed of nothing more than colored stripes. “Each painting’s red is the same height and width,” she said as we entered.
Wandering the room, the red looked bold with yellow. With mossy green it seemed less vibrant. And paired with fuchsia, I swore there was more red in that painting than there was.
I stared at her wall of colors until my eyes blurred, broken-hearted by all the times I’d let my fear of loss drive the things I said and did.
Those moments felt like a bardo.
What if a voice is something you can never find, or get?
What if it’s something you must put your ear down close to your soul and listen for from the elements it springs from—a mix of nature and nurture, and the rest open to whatever you can open-heartedly create—and then live from.
Later that night, I walked the faintly-lit path from the studios to the residence building and saw a group sitting around the community room, a few bottles of wine on the table. I entered the foyer as I did every night, with a choice: left to the bedrooms, right to the community room.
Night after night I chose left, mostly for sleep so I could get an early start. But that night I heard music. A familiar voice in my head said: They’ve been here longer. They know each other well, and they’re singing. It’ll be awkward. Then, For the love of God, you like singing—and wine.Open the door.
It’s been ten years since that night. I can see more clearly now the ways I lived my way into answering the challenge embedded in that long ago INXS song, and how this thing called ‘voice’ is a matter of choice, of choosing, as the lyrics go on to say, how to climb as we fall and catch ourselves with quiet grace.
In those years, I’ve helped other adoptees share their stories and spoken at adoption conferences on the physical (I’m screened regularly for breast cancer) and mental health benefits of knowing the truth about your full identity (even if you can’t, or choose not, to know the people involved). The hard truth is that adoption is rooted in loss, and I share how powerfully healing it has been to share those losses with other adoptees, and over time, my family.
In the words of renowned researcher Brené Brown, in her book Atlas of the Heart, “our ability to connect with others is directly proportional to our ability to connect with ourselves.”
It haunts me to know that adopted adolescents have a four-times-higher incident of suicide attempts than the general population, to hear Supreme Court justices advocating the use of anonymous baby drop boxes, and to witness the ways recent legislation turns us back to practices so focused on birth that we miss the bigger question—what does it mean to nurture a life?
The hard truth is that adoption is rooted in loss.
I don’t have all the answers, but I share some insights I’ve learned whenever an adoptive parent approaches me after a conference panel for advice, including what a child psychologist said when I interviewed her for a writing assignment. My sons were very young at the time and it became my parenting north star: “If a child has one person in his or her life—ideally a parent, but it could be an aunt, uncle, grandparent—someone who tries to see that child for all of who they are and thinks they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread, that child will be okay.”
I returned to voice lessons recently. As I sang ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah up and down the scale again for the first time in years, I reflexively dropped a note when the sound got loud.
My new teacher, Catherine, made a motion with one of her arms. “Do this while you sing.”
I’d witnessed that motion a thousand times, only in basketball as a free throw. “You’ve got to follow through,” my sons’ coaches often said, their arm rising, hand pressing forward through their fingertips.
I made the motion, over and over, as I practiced with other sounds and words, and heard my voice rise from my core, on up through my throat, and arc out of my mouth toward the trees outside her window—it was sound in all its sonic fullness.
“Did you hear the difference?” Catherine laughed.
“I did!”
A few minutes later, as I continued, she said, “Could you feel what went wrong there?”
“I let it drop again, and a couple other times I think I tried too hard. But when it worked well it felt less like trying and more like allowing the sound to come out.”
“Yes! You made a transition rather than trying to jam the note someplace that it doesn’t want to go—which is a sign of both support and freedom.”
She asked if I had a song in mind to practice. I sent the video link to “A Beautiful Noise,” a ballad sung and played by Brandi Carlile and Alicia Keys. Its’ evocative lyrics speak to the choice we have to use a voice to heal.
I play it in my car sometimes, and sing myself home.
Wolfgang Mozart was remarkable. But then, so was his sister Nannerl. We’ve heard a lot about George Orwell, less about his fascinating wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy. How familiar are you with Dame Alice Kyteler, the first woman in Ireland to be condemned as a witch? Or Marie de France, a 12th century poet? Or Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the finest painters of the 17th century? Talented, smart, ambitious women came before us, as well as talented, smart, ambitious men. And yet, too much of women’s history has been erased or forgotten. It is through literature that we’re finally beginning to understand where we really come from.
I’m fascinated by the history of music. It’s by exploring this that I first discovered a collection of female orphans from 18th century Venice were fundamental to the birth of the concerto, and to their teacher— Antonio Vivaldi’s—compositions. Without these women and girls we wouldn’t have the most famous piece of music in the world, “The Four Seasons.” My novel, The Instrumentalist, imagines the life of one of these orphans: Anna Maria della Pietà. She was Vivaldi’s star pupil.
Picture a world without the Beatles, or Taylor Swift, without Claude Monet’s art or Maria Callas’ voice. Anna Maria della Pietà was the pop star of her day, a world-famous violinist that even kings and queens admired, and yet almost no one has heard of her. I decided I would do everything I could to tell her story.
Researching The Instrumentalist, I could feel the weight of all that we have lost. This enormous cavity where the stories that ignite our imaginations and the works that sing very our souls should be. Literature has the power to breathe light into the shadows. I decided that by combining fact and fiction I could try to do justice to the beauty of Anna Maria’s mind. A novel could demonstrate her determination and resilience, and how it might feel to be as talented as her and yet, still, capped by being a woman in the 18th century. We should never have forgotten Anna Maria della Pietà. And so, in The Instrumentalist, her key aim is to be remembered.
I’m not alone in my mission to bring back the women who came before us. There is a growing army of books exploring history from the female perspective, reimagining what has been lost. The following list celebrates just seven of my favorites. But this is only the beginning—a starting point to whet your literary appetite. History continues to be written. Bolder, more colorful, more nuanced and inspiring than ever. It continues to be imagined.
Cecily by Annie Garthwaite
Annie Garthwaite’s exquisitely researched novel is set in 15th century England. It imagines the life of Cecily, Duchess of York, who was mother to two kings—both Edward IV and Richard III. But in the novel Cecily is much more than a wife and mother—she is a genius political player, maneuvering the puppet strings during the Wars of the Roses.
In 12th century England there lived an extraordinary woman named Marie de France. While much of her history has been lost, in Matrix, Lauren Groff paints her as an assertive, visionary leader and queer woman. She marshals her convent of nuns into bloody battle and actively shapes the world she wants to see.
Being a woman with power was a dangerous thing in the 13th century. Molly Aitkinson’s Bright I Burn explores the life of Alice Kyteler, the first woman in Ireland to be condemned as a witch. Determined not to suffer the same constraints as her own mother, it’s a passionate reimaging of what women have suffered simply for wanting freedom.
Too many historians have painted Agnes Shakespeare as a calculating cradle-snatcher for marrying the younger William Shakespeare. In Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell challenges this interpretation and paints Agnes as a thoughtful, sensitive woman with a deep love of her husband and children. O’Farrell’s Agnes is someone with a remarkable ability to understand others and, more than anything, a desperate mother grieving the loss of her son.
The Book of Margery Kempe is believed by many to be the first autobiography in the English language, and Juliana of Norwich’s writings are the earliest surviving English-language works by a woman. In For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain, Victoria McKensie brings these two extraordinary women back with flare, celebrating both characters as courageous, visionary, and impossible, because of McKensie’s writing, to forget.
Nell Stephen’s debut Briefly, A Delicious Life explores the life of writer George Sand through the eyes of a long-dead ghost who is in love with her. It’s a joyfully original story which does justice to Sand’s strong personality and remarkable relationship to composer Frédéric Chopin. Both plot, and prose, are delicious.
Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the finest painters of the 17th century, and yet many people have never heard of her. She remains lost no longer thanks to Disobedient, Elizabeth Freemantle’s gripping novel, which chronicles Artemisia’s struggle to achieve all she was capable of within the constraints of her time.
IfDon’t Call Us Dead and Homie weren’t enough proof, Danez Smith’s Bluff confirms their importance in the poetic firmament through a magnificent array of form and content.
Smith’s singular voice dazzles, with subject matter that is both immediate and timeless. The poems are often a linguistic simitar about the world’s many injustices—whether it’s the systemic murder of Black people historically and today, or the devastations of climate change—and are equally wholehearted about love, and hope.
I had the pleasure of a generous and wide-ranging epistolary interview with Smith as they prepared for the publication of Bluff.
Mandana Chaffa: Prior to the epigraphs are the poems “anti-poetica” and “ars america (in the hold)” setting both the canvas and the stakes of what follows. In the former poem, despite the enumeration of what poetry can’t tangibly do—fix injustice, matter more than kindness, deliver freedom—what follows in the next 135 pages, proves why poetry is so valuable, even as the second poem is a kind of rooting, providing origin and geography. At what point in the process of creating this collection did these two poems arise, and did you always intend for them to be the preface?
Danez Smith: Leave it to a poet to start a long-ass book with a poem harping on the limitations of the form, right? I don’t remember exactly when I wrote those poems. I know “anti-poetica” came around when I was writing a bunch of ars poetica that were truly negative, maybe in a positive way, in their engagement with poetry. Near the revelation that these poems might be a book, my friend Angel Nafis gave it a read and gave me a good heart to heart about the inward critique and pessimism, the great weight of guilt in that early draft. When Angel says something, you listen. SoI looked at what was the negative force in the poems and leaned into that negativity so I could clock it, control it, play with it, balance it out, and not submit to it all the same. I have a note in my phone that says “turn all the ars poeticas to anti-poeticas” and I think that accurate adjustment allowed me to seek poetry’s use solely in its failures. So, it made space for hope, for light, for a way forward.
I leaned into negativity so I could clock it, control it, play with it, balance it out, and not submit to it.
“ars america” was an older poem that had a different title, maybe it was even untitled, that gained its title once I knew what I was writing into: language, genre, art, land, history, truth. I wanted to think about the art of America with the poems under that title. How and what does America make? What is an ars america? It could only be violence. I didn’t intend for them both to be the preface while writing them, but they felt like they set a certain set of conditions and understandings from jump. I put “anti-poetica” up top, and I think it was my editor Jeff Shotts who suggested putting the other poem up top, too. I think they make a nice two-step before the rest of the book unfolds.
MC: Speaking of epigraphs, the selections by Amiri Baraka, June Jordan and Franny Choi, refer in part to a new life coming from destruction, which feels especially appropriate in our world on fire. Yet the mythology of the phoenix is complex: though the phoenix rises from the ashes of its immolation, it will never be the same being that it once was. Each of your collections has a distinct, wonderful Danez-ness to them, yet there’s also a kind of regeneration that consistently makes it new; is this kind of motion and conversation something you contemplate or is it only present after the fact?
DS: I don’t think it’s intentional. I think I’m just writing each poem or collection as they come, but after a collection is wrapped and in the world, it is fun to think on which poems feel like they have instructions to keep writing, dreaming, and asking into the work. From Homie I think the poems that most influenced Bluff are “waiting on you to die so I can be myself” and “my poems.” Those poems I can see myself already beginning to struggle with the themes and exfoliating self-investigation that Bluff handles, and I think “waiting on you to die…” opened up a door into new lyric possibilities for me. I’m grateful there might be some kind of signature that I’m subconsciously imbuing the poems with, but my only task and mission is to write new poems and hopefully not just re-writing old ones, though that does happen too and I am in love with the fact that sometimes the soul just needs to say something again and again until it is satisfied or transformed.
MC: Though all the poems are visual in varying ways, the progression of forms in your collections, and especially in Bluff, are purposefully acrobatic and often upend the experience of reading in a meaningful way. In a few places, the placement of text necessitated either turning the book, or my head (I chose the latter), and that shifting—one’s body, one’s eyes—was invigorating, as well as a QR code, cascading text, background color shifts. Or in the magnificent “rondo,” which offers a multitude of literary forms: an homage, an elegy, weaving history, and a kind of urban street plan of poetic phrases. Let alone the shattering footnotes, delegated to the bottom of the page, echoing the line in “anti poetica:” that “poems only live south of something / meaning beneath & darkened & hot”
How did you determine the architecture for these poems? Did any of the pieces begin in one structure, and move to a different poetic neighborhood?
DS: It’s all play, trial and error, what ifs, and a little bit of useful boredom, too. All of these poems start with the word first… is that true? Well, no. There are poems like “end of guns” that were just a regular-degular poem in stanzas before the collage came into its body, but there are poems like “rondo” where I knew for a long time what I wanted the shape to be, but I had to wait for years for the language to come. I love the visual fields that poetry holds so well, but nothing can start without the word for me. However, language sometimes does not satisfy, and when that’s the case I can ask “Is this just not the write words or is there something about the shape that I can manipulate to better get to the poem’s intended heart?” I try not to play for the sake of making a poem “different” for variety, but to really listen to the poem and ask how it wants to be embodied outside the confines of my mind.
MC: Your poems are some of my favorites to read aloud—sonic, exuberant, complex—and I was excited about the variety of oratorical possibilities, especially for the visually-forward pieces. They feel like the opposite of erasures, if that makes sense: the voices, the phrases, the unexpected frictions overflow onto the page, a chorus rather than a solo. What’s been your experience of reciting these poems?
Sometimes the soul just needs to say something again and again until it is satisfied or transformed.
DS: I love thinking about something as the opposite of erasure! Maybe that’s why this book ended up so goddamn long. I am excited to meet these poems in the air, but I haven’t had a lot of experience reading them aloud. I go to fewer open mics than I have in the past, I don’t slam anymore (for now), so I’m looking forward to reading these with audiences soon. I am, however, pulled toward what possibilities there are in video. There is a Keith Haring exhibition at a museum in town right now and one of the things I was most attracted to were his “tapes.” I think some of these poems might be better audiotized as tapes so that way the visual elements are not flattened by reading. I hope to get to play around with some ideas along those lines soon.
MC: English, unlike many languages, elects to center the “I” on a pedestal away from the collective; you, we, them, other pronouns aren’t capitalized. You nearly always employ a lower case “i” in your poetry and there’s intimacy and democracy in doing so (autocorrect keeps demanding I turn this into a capital “I”, as I assertively attempt to wrest control), an “us-ness” to it, that feels like the doorway to the kind of eden you’re depicting. How does your work navigate the distance—or intersection—between I-dentity and identity?
DS: Hmmmm…I am not sure! I think i-dentity, for me, stands in as a little plausible deniability in the lowercase i. There are aesthetic reasons I prefer the lowercase i and lowercase letters in general, but it also feels more playful, open, and moveable than the big I. You’re right on the money with that us-ness too. It feels, for me, like I have an easier time folding a “we” behind the little i. The ability to tie the personal to the communicable helps me decenter myself and keep the poetics open, breathing, influenced to the urgencies and pleasures of others around me. I do trust and know that there are moments to be self-absorbed, selfish, utterly and unapologetically internal, but I wanna also find bridges between that deep interiority and the ecosystems I am a part of. I-dentity then is necessary tool to seek out the self, before then turning towards i-dentity which lowers the guard rails and lets the world in. Something like that.
From “Last Black American Poem”:
“Forgive me, I wrote odes to presidents.”
MC: The interrelations of your poems—and collections—provides an unexpected reflection on what you’ve written in the past. I loved “my president” from Homie, but “Last Black American Poem,” and others in Bluff, offer a glimpse of something I rarely see elsewhere: your collections—and the past Danez and current Danez—interacting with each other, as well as how thoughtful you are about the passage of time, and all that it highlights or erodes. Or as you wrote in “on knowledge:” “i wanted freedom & they gave me / a name, it’s distracted me for long enough” // i had to move my mind outside my body / move my body like my mind / move my mind / deeper into the dark / question of its use”
Do you revisit your other poems, and do they inspire or determine what you write about currently?
Sometimes the idea of audience scares me; sometimes it hands me a righteous responsibility and purpose.
DS: I do! I love to sit down with my old work every now-and-then, be it book or draft, and see what I was up to, how I’ve changed, to see how I’m still the same or what I’m still chewing on. Sometimes there is a kindness and self-appreciation in that reading, sometimes an embarrassment and drive to correct something I thought or did comes about. Bluff wouldn’t have happened without those visits into my writing past, be it via the reflective self-critique vein of the book or because there are poems that were written alongside or in-between poems from my previous two collections. Hell, I almost put a poem from 2012, before my first collection, in the book with an addendum written in 2022. I feel inspired by my former selves. I love their stupid, messy asses. I am community with them, still learning their lessons and nursing their wounds. I am grateful to be able to witness myself from a different point in time and put new pieces to the puzzle.
MC: “My Beautiful End of the World” is a remarkable poetic essay about the disastrous state of the physical world, interspersed with beautiful imagery of Minneapolis where you are “returned into the delicious flaunt of nature” even as you reflect upon the planet’s barreling demise. I hope not to be one of your “hesitant cousins” or worse, but even though I have a MetroCard rather than a car, I too am complicit, as we all are. After I first read this poem, I turned 40 pages back to “Minneapolis, Saint Paul” which focuses on a more devastating destruction, the murder of George Floyd, that unimaginable nine and ½ minutes, and all that ensued. Can we talk about the long-form poems that spire through this collection like Redwoods and what they allow you to examine?
DS: We sure can! I love a long poem. The best poem I’ve written so far is the long poem “summer somewhere” that opens Don’t Call Us Dead (don’t tell my other poems I said that). For me there is a lot of excitement in the long poem, having to extend past the brief utterance into volta after volta, door after door journeying deeper into the poem and further away from what language or thought sparked the poems inception. No poems surprise me like what I find deep into those long poems. In the long poem, the unknown, the formerly unutterable must surface, the incantation of length summons it up if you are submitting to it right. I go to the long poem/the essay when I know what I want to say is only the surface, when the questions I have feel like they can’t just sit there and linger, like they must be embraced and dived into right then and there. Sometimes what happens is a much shorter piece is retrieved from that deep investigation, but in Bluff I chose for a great many to stay long. I had a lot to say and unfortunately for the version of myself that said before drafting this “I want a really short book this time,” I liked what I was writing and wanted to share as much as possible.
MC: I can’t stop thinking about a happy poem that exists joyfully before the entrance of the audience. Is it the same for happy poets? I realize there’s no singular answer, and it could change day by day, but what is the “heaven” of writing for you, and how much does the audience—beyond your circle of loved ones for whom, with whom, you create—weigh on you or the process.
I believe in the powers of declaration, manifestation, chant, song, repetition, devotion, and all the things that make prayer happen.
DS: Correct! There are Fiftyleven answers to that question. Here’s today’s: My writing heaven is being able to write honestly and imaginatively about my life, my world, my dreams, my hopes, angers, griefs, disappointments, and pleasures. It is a gift to be able to share that with anyone. Sometimes I keep things for myself. I’ve been journaling again for the last few years and having a private practice has made it easier to maintain a good relationship with my public one. Sometimes the “white gaze” is something I think about. Sometimes it’s too boring and unuseful to consider. Sometimes I want to write poems and get them quickly into the hands of beloved community members known and unknown. Sometimes the idea of audience scares me; sometimes it hands me a righteous responsibility and purpose. When I’m making a book, I must think about the audience, what the effect of writing these pulled together pieces is gonna have on someone and because of that I always try to imagine how reading one of my books might be of use to someone else’s living and working.
MC: I’m interested both in your perspective of the power of words, of repetitions, as well as what I’d call your innate hopefulness, which I feel threaded through the collection, regardless or perhaps because of the undiluted truths also embedded within.
DS: Beginning with hope, I think there are few greater gifts to offer someone. Grief, witness, shelter, solidarity, resources, so many great gifts, but hope offers us possibility, proposes transformation, and believes in the future. There’s a lot of feelings in my work, but I think if you look at the architecture of all my collections you’ll find that I am always trying to orient us towards hope, towards a great “someday” where we are all loved.
I love an “i want” in a poem. I think of my poem “Dinosaurs in the Hood” which is also made of those “wants.” You know, Mandana, maybe it comes back to prayer. I believe in its power. I believe in the powers of declaration, manifestation, chant, song, repetition, devotion, and all the things that make prayer happen. Maybe I believe the purest poem is a prayer, and all prayers are poem, and they have real, big, spiritually tangible consequences and…hopes! I think words have more powers than I can list or even think of, but I think part of the reason I was put on this earth and tasked to make use of language is to provide hope in the midst of darkness, to be one of a great many torches as we light our way through.
There, on Redfin, is Grover Cleveland’s childhood home. Price: $295,000.
Despite my undergraduate degree in history, my knowledge of Grover Cleveland is scant. I can only pick him out of a presidential lineup is if he’s included twice for those nonconsecutive terms. A Google search reveals a mustache and a vague Theodore Roosevelt vibe, though I might be romanticizing since I now want to live in his childhood home.
The house, somewhat over our budget, otherwise checks the boxes: 1500 square feet, two stories, hardwood floors. “Probably original,” says my husband, and not in a complimentary way. After seeing Grover Cleveland’s childhood kitchen, Bryan is voting No.
Our daughter is voting No to the entire move to upstate New York. She wants to live in her childhood home, a teal house in California with orange trees in the backyard and lizards sunning on the wall.
Grover Cleveland’s childhood home sits upon a grassy lot where he once played boyish pranks on the neighbors. Inside is the only shiplap tub I’ve seen on Redfin. The rooms are dim and the wallpaper runs floral, but the built-ins and staircase banister are as charming as time. The house has white siding, welcoming front steps, and a placard announcing that this building is historically important and the people living inside are remarkable.
In Grover Cleveland’s childhood home, I’ll be so busy baking sourdough bread and reading poetry that I’ll rarely scroll the internet. I’ll play Barbies with my daughter without finding it excruciating. And we’ll host dinner parties. Historical, of course. I’ll be me, but more fascinating.
What actually happens is this: On the exact day someone else buys Grover Cleveland’s childhood home, we move into an adjacent neighborhood in upstate New York, a place where folks walk their dogs twice a day and children roam between houses. Because we don’t live in Grover Cleveland’s childhood home, I never join the women’s rugby team or take up knitting. I host exactly zero historical dinner parties. I remain ordinary—by which I mean myself—in every way, even as I paint walls and settle into new routines. We watch nuthatches out the kitchen window, play Wordle, walk our dogs by the Erie Canal.
And after school, my daughter shouts a new friend’s name and where they’re going, and she runs out into the day, the way children used to, the way I suppose Grover Cleveland once did when he lived in his childhood home.
The world is burning, and the smoke is all the proof we need. Over 18,000 Palestinians have been killed, “collateral damage” in the ongoing war, and over 1.5 million Gazans have been displaced from their homes. In Sudan, the civil war has resulted in a mass ethnic cleansing. Since April of 2023, more than 18,800 people have died in the civil war. And half of the population, 25 million people, are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance and protection.
We have witnessed in these past few months apocalyptic scenes of Palestinians being starved to death and the indiscriminate bombings of helpless children, women and men with no place to flee, their bodies burnt to ashes while schools and hospitals are destroyed, becoming a graveyard of rubble.
To metabolize grief and suffering of this magnitude is an excruciating experience, but poetry can offer us a space for reflection, healing, and activism. To borrow Mahmoud Darwish’s words: “all beautiful poetry is an act of resistance” and “language is the greatest weapon against oppression.”
“In silence, we become accomplices,” Darwish iterates, and so in these collections below, the writers, defiant in the face of oppression and persecution, have chosen to rebel and fight against tyranny. Every collection is an outcry of indignation and a rallying call for peace, justice, and liberation:
Palestinian American poet and journalist Hindi asks “Might we define this as a collective trauma? a. Whose trauma? b. A gathering of bodies might be called a circus to some // and a graveyard to others.” On many occasions in the collection, Hindi communicates as one who has witnessed the cruelest forms of oppressions firsthand. The collection triumphs for its urgency, and its searing, honest and unapologetic rebellion in the face of decades-long persecution against Palestinians. Hindi seeks to instigate us into rebellion against oppression, showing us that writing can be a medium to start a revolution.
In her book, Smith focuses on Black Americans who have suffered from the poison of racism: from Oscar Grant, the doting father; Tamir Rice, the lanky, lovable son; to Breonna Taylor, the decorated first responder. Dark Testament is an interactive text and she beseeches the reader to engage with the blacked out spaces on the page as a pause of remembrance: “silence is often an act in which those still living undertake to be worthy of those who died.” The collection aches in the sensibilities of what it means to be human in a dying, burning world. Smith questions the worth of a life and the commonality with which we treat genocide like an everyday accident. Smith mourns a massacre of people with families, hopes and dreams: “each of whom was once dear to someone”. She tasks the reader with the duty of lighting a flame of conscience in honor of those killed by violence, and carrying that torch into a brighter and more just future.
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator and his collection, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, captivates its readers for its lyrical allegory and unflinching examination of the violence and terror wrought by Israeli and American occupation. The most wrenching line in the collection is a reminder that “We were / granted the right to exist.” Joudah’s language serves as an anatomical inquiry into what connects and what breaks us apart, examining the aftermath of war in footnotes. The collection is an archaeology into the fossils of a dystopian world. In the titular poem, he writes “I call the finding of certain things loss.” Joudah articulates rage and grief with an attention to the body and language, mixing magic, science, and skepticism to tame the heart’s machinery.
In this book, Stewart rebels against stereotypes, against objectification, against -isms, and against cages. She refuses to be tamed. She refuses to have her freedom barred. And so she rages, rabidly, with sharp teeth. Here is a book of unfathomable intensity that triumphs in its colloquialisms to create a voice that exudes fear-defying confidence and is wickedly unapologetic about going all out uncensored. Ebony writes: “break the patterns / write on shredded paper / do not become complacent in the holocaust.”
Danez begins the collection, saying: “In the film, townsfolk name themselves Prince Charming, queue up to wake the sleeping beauty.” The collection challenges white supremacy and societal prejudices against Black bodies, bringing attention to the epidemic of police brutality on Black Americans. Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Renisha McBride, Brandon Zachary, and a host of others who have fallen to this oppression are mourned, commiserated with, and fought for in vengeance. They demand the justice they deserve, so the dead can receive a proper elegy. This collection is half-elegy, half-protest. Danez fantasizes about a world where their people are safe, free and alive, or in their words: “a safe house / made of ox tails & pork rinds / a place to be black & not dead.”
This poetry collection, written from a formalist lens, is filled with grief and loss, and begins with a history lesson about the Partition of India and Pakistan. Asghar interrogates the borders created by colonial powers, examining how countries, identities, and citizenship can shift and change overnight: “you’re kashmiri until they burn your home. take your orchards. stake a different flag.” Exploring the many ways in which violence manifests, they question what it means to be safe as a Pakistani Muslim woman in post-9/11 America: “…you’re muslim until it’s too dangerous. you’re safe until you’re alone. you’re american until the towers fall. until there’s a border on your back.” If They Come For Us is an education on the harsh realities of the world: an education on ancestral trauma, on losing your homeland, on being an orphan.
Abu Toha’s lyricism dwells in a marriage of soul between poetry and politics in which the verse is a weapon of resistance. In the company of a new generation of Palestinian poets, Abu Toha’s poems are a testament to the plight and the resilience of the Palestinian people. A native Gazan, Abu Toha writes about life in an open-air prison, constantly under surveillance, with the ever-present threat of destruction and assault looming large: “The drone’s buzzing sound, / the roar of an F-16, / the screams of bombs falling on houses, / on fields, and on bodies, / of rockets flying away— / rid my small ear canal of them all.”
On November 19th, 2023, Abu Toha was detained by the Israeli Defense Forces on suspicion of “terror” while attempting to flee Gaza with his wife and children. Two days later, Abu Toha was released but not without wounds from his time in custody. He writes: “In Gaza you don’t know what you’re guilty of. It feels like living in a Kafka novel.”
I grew up loving books because of my grandmother, who curated a library just for me. The narrow hallways of her house were crowded with bookshelves filled with Caldecotts, Newberys, and Coretta Scott King’s, collections of works by Alcott, Twain, and Poe, Penguin classics, and Nelson Doubleday’s Junior Deluxe Editions, which sparked my forever love of folk and fairy tales and mythology. Under my grandmother’s tutelage, books became my own personal portal, my escape into another realm.
As an adult, I became a children’s librarian, stocking my shelves with the same award winners as my grandmother. Like her, I did whatever I could to spark my students’ love of reading and writing, actively seeking out books which reflected their backgrounds and interests. I believed, then and now, that everyone is a reader, that they just have to find the book that speaks to them.
I left the library a few years back, but I’ve remained fascinated by librarians of all flavors—the fictional ones I loved in works by Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, their onscreen counterparts like Taystee Jefferson from “Orange Is the New Black” and Mary in the indie classic Party Girl, the archivists who focus on science, history, music, film, and more, or those who specialize in providing services for people of all abilities. However, the librarians who excite me the most are the ones who are also writers, like The Magic School Bus’s Joanna Cole, Beverly Cleary of the Ramonaseries, and Overdue’s Amanda Oliver. In honor of librarians everywhere, I’ve curated the following list.
Before she became known as a poet, professor, and activist, Audre Lorde served as a librarian at Hunter College, Columbia University, and in Mount Vernon. Lorde was the author of many acclaimed works, but is best known for her groundbreaking essay collection Sister,Outsider, which interrogates racism, sexism, class, homophobia and ageism, and explores the complexities of intersectional identity, advocating for the visibility of marginalized voices. Central to Lorde’s work is her belief in the importance of building community to enact social change. “You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same,” Lorde writes. “What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.”
Even thoughMadeleine L’Engle wrote more than sixty books, she is best remembered for her Newbery-award winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels. Much of L’Engle’s work was written in New York’s Diocesan House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where L’Engle served as a volunteer librarian and writer-in-residence for nearly four decades. In 2012, the Diocesan House became a designated Literary Landmark, with a plaque dedicated to L’Engle noting how her work reflected “both her Christian faith and interest in modern science.”
Today Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are remembered as German academics who collected and published folklore in the 1800s. The two established the framework, for better or worse, for what we modern readers know as fairy tales. However, like most writers, the Grimm brothers had to find some other profession to support themselves and their families. At different stages in their careers, both served as librarians. Both appear to have been principled— even losing their jobs when they refused to sign oaths of allegiance to Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover.
Jenny Han is best known as the dynamic co-showrunner of Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, as well as the executive producer of Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. There she earned raves for disproving the long-held industry assumption that a series centering an Asian-American teenager couldn’t find a broad audience. However, before Hollywood, before The Summer I Turned Pretty topped the New York Times best-seller list, Han acquired books and coordinated programming in the middle and upper school library of New York City’s Calhoun School.
Former librarian Alisa Alering’s rural gothic novel, Smothermoss, which debuts from Tin House in July, follows the saga of two half-sisters in 1980s Appalachia, the reverberations of the murders of two hikers on the Appalachian Trail, as well as other threats imperiling the sisters and their community. Praised by both Samantha Hunt and Karen Joy Fowler, Smothermoss is delightfully uncanny, and has been described as propulsive and hauntingly atmospheric.
Due to her strict Southern Baptist upbringing, queer Floridian author Kristen Arnett’s early access to literature was restricted. However, in part due to books provided by teachers and librarians, Arnett fell in love with reading. After graduating from Florida State with a Master’s in Library Science, Arnett became a reference librarian and worked in libraries for nearly two decades. Arnett even wrote much of her first novel, Mostly Dead Thingson the job, coming in early in the morning, staying late in the evening, and even working through her lunch break.
During his six decade career, novelist, historian, and librarian Dee Brown authored or co-authored more than thirty books, but is best remembered for his 1970 classic, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. This is not a cheerful book, but history has a way of intruding upon the present,” Brown, a white Southerner, wrote in the introduction. Relying on primary sources by Native American interpreters who attended treaty sessions, tribal councils, meetings with US army officers, and eye-witness accounts of battles and other events, Brown’s book documents the genocide of Native Americans by the US government, concluding with the 1890 massacre in South Dakota at Wounded Knee, when the 7th US Cavalry disarmed and slaughtered 300 Sioux, including women and children. Not without controversy, both for its unflinching debunking of the noble pioneer myth, as well as for reducing Indigenous history to near-extinction, since its publication Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee has changed the way Americans view history, been adapted into a movie, translated into at least 15 languages, and sparked a counter-narrative, David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee.
For over a decade, Maisy Card has served as a public librarian in New Jersey. She’s also taught at Columbia University and is a fiction editor for The Brooklyn Rail. Card’s 2021 novel, These Ghosts Are Family, is an intergenerational narrative exploring the repercussions of a faked death which also chronicles the family migration from colonial Jamaica to present-day America. Card’s nuanced exploration of the way each family member wrestles with their personal ghosts led to These Ghosts Are Family being honored with an American Book Award, among other accolades.
Thomas A. Dodson serves as an assistant professor and librarian at Southern Oregon University but in his free time he writes short fiction. In his exquisitely crafted collection No Use Pretending, beekeepers, traumatized veterans, distant fathers, and other disparate narrators are forced into seemingly unbearable situations, and each work charts their attempts to alleviate their discomfort. Winner of the 2023 Iowa Award for Short Fiction, No Use Pretending is a must-read for lovers of the genre, with characters I still think about months after finishing the book.
Former teen librarian Kelly Jensen is an anti-authoritarian powerhouse. Since leaving the library, Jensen has edited three books (Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy, (Don’t) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy, and Here We Are: 44 Voices Write, Draw, and Speak About Feminism for the Real World), joined the team at Book Riot, and runs the aptly-named newsletter Well-Sourced, which addresses all things related to books, censorship, and the current dystopian landscape for libraries.
Poet Emilie Menzel serves as a librarian at Duke University and the Seventh Wave community. This September, their debut book length lyric, The Girl Who Became A Rabbit, a dark, ruminative poem exploring how the body carries and shapes grief, as well as what it means to tell a story, will be published by beloved Southern indie press Hub City. Drawing comparisons to Max Porter and Maggie Nelson, Menzel remixes myth and fairytale to rewrite the body’s history. “It is important to make something beautiful,” Menzel writes, “To shape it into a form even when horrifically right.”
New Jersey reference librarian and poet Laura Sims’ 2023 psychological thriller How Can I Help You? draws directly from her workplace. Set in a small town public library, Sims’ novel pits two staff members against each other, with a new employee digging deep into her coworker’s sinister past. An insightful, edgy exploration of workplace politics, How Can I Help You? was A New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Book Riot, and CrimeReads Best Book of the Year.
Anne Spencer, poet
The majority of poet, gardener, teacher, and civil rights activist Anne Spencer’s work was published during the Harlem Renaissance—her poetry was so widely regarded that she became the second African American included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973). During Spencer’s lifetime, her home and garden was a gathering place for leading Black activists and intellectuals, including W.E.B. Dubois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Martin Luther King, Jr. However Spencer’s true passion was ensuring that the Black citizens of her community had equal access to libraries, and her advocacy led to the formation of the first library for Black citizens in Lynchburg, Virginia, which she led until 1942.
Melbourne-based Ruby Todd grew up in a family of librarians and worked in libraries for years. Bright Objects, her July debut, is a thriller following the obsessed widow of a hit and run accident waiting for the arrival of a once in a lifetime comet. For fans of Emma Cline and Otessa Mashfegh, Bright Objects offers mystery, astronomy, and romance.
Ohio librarianDouglas Westerbeke’s delightful novel A Short Walk Through a Wide World, which debuted in April, is my current go-to recommendation for anyone seeking a captivating, immersive read. A Short Walk follows the globetrotting adventures of Aubry Tourvel, who, after an encounter with a mysterious wooden puzzle ball, realizes she can live only if she keeps moving. From a riverboat in Siam to the sand dunes, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the jungle, with periodic detours in the type of library which could only be conjured by a librarian, A Short Walk Through a Wide World is a fantastic narrative, which explores the timeless question of how to find meaning in seemingly impossible circumstances.
For a long time, much of what was published about El Salvador was a grim monolith, authored by outsiders: gringo historians, mid-century anthropologists, Céline models. If you read Joan Didion’s terse little book on the place, Salvador, you might have the idea that “terror is the given of the place.” I could write for a long time about the historic erasure and suppression of Salvadoran writers, about the limitations of imagination in certain literary markets, about perverse appetites for humorless, untextured stories of suffering, about stories that don’t even go to the trouble of imbuing their characters with human consciousnesses and instead allude to “faceless brown masses.” To rephrase another visitor to the country, Carolyn Forché (in my opinion, a far more perceptive witness): what you have heard is not exactly true. What’s been left out of these explanatory narratives, what you may not have heard about the place, is a rich variety of Salvadoran voices. The people of El Salvador and its diaspora are more than vessels for terror and misery, and perfectly capable of artfully telling stories, and of writing into desire, joy, and even the nightmares of collective memory, on our own terms.
When I set out to write my own novel The Volcano Daughters, I had to contend with that grim monolith. Despite it, the voices of my narrators (and their cackles, bossiness, secrets and desires) were vivid in my ears. I heard their voices in my siblings, my friends, and in the lines of the poets I admired. I grew up in San Francisco, and El Salvador was my father’s country, a place I had only visited. Growing up we ate pupusas at El Zocalo, but I didn’t speak Spanish fluently. My connection to the place, only half a generation away, felt distant, in terms of family, myth, and history. Reading many of the books on this list affirmed the specificity of my own diasporic relationship to the place, and I found myself in community.
I’m heartened that more writers from the Salvadoran diaspora are being published and more Salvadoran writers are being translated and reaching wider audiences now than in previous literary eras (though, traditionally published or not, there are writers on this list who have been writing for decades.) Three of the books on this list were published just in the past year. Three are recent, excellent translations. These books—poetry, short stories, memoir, novels, myth, and even a cookbook—represent just some of the writing that comes from El Salvador and from the Salvadoran diaspora in the United States. These writers create work that transcends token representation and instead offers, to curious, discerning readers, visions of surprise, transformation, mischief, memory, grief, sex, food, dreams, formal innovation, and the future.
The words “Popol Vuh” mean “the book of the woven mat.” Poet Michael Bazzettt’s translation of the Mesoamerican creation story is an intricate epic that subverts the laws of linear time, and it’s full of mischief, beauty, and a very metal cosmology. Ilan Stavans’s translation of Popol Vuh is also an excellent introduction to the oldest book of the Americas, and it features some gorgeous illustrations by Salvadoran artist Gabriela Larios, as well as a great foreword by Homero Aridjis.
This short novel is a maniacal, paranoid, somehow delightful rant narrated by a writer with liver problems (hypnosis isn’t taking; could be the poor quality of rum he’s drinking) on the verge of returning home to El Salvador from his exile in Mexico City. His mysterious old friend, Mr. Rabbit appears in the midst of this madness, often at a taco shop, and invites him to participate in half-baked criminal plots, green salsa dripping through his fingers.
Roque Dalton, who wrote that “we were all born half dead” after La Matanza massacre in 1932, and that “I believe the world is beautiful and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone,” dedicated his life to anti-fascist revolution and poetry before being murdered by his own comrades. This volume contains a comprehensive collection of Dalton’s poetry voiced by five different heteronym personas, as well as several brilliant essays from poet Christropher Soto, Margaret Randall, and others, which place Dalton’s work in its time, and highlight his relevance today.
Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, translated by Julia Sanches
This novel takes on the long aftermath of war and separation through the voices of a family of ordinary women—four daughters, one estranged, and their mother, an ex-revolutionary. When the mother leaves the country to travel to Paris to reunite with the adult daughter who was taken from her and adopted by a French family during the war, a frame opens up in the narrative, forcing the mother, an interpreter, and the unknown daughter, to return to a place and time beyond memory. Part dreamy haunting and part bureaucratic tangle (“Her mother’s life story doesn’t fit in the assigned box on the university’s financial-aid application form”) Hernández’s novel is astonishing. About her book, Hernández says, “It’s nothing. I don’t do anything. I just listen.” Sanches’s gorgeous translation honors Hernández’s subtle, poetic structure that shapes each line.
Hernández Linares is queen-comadre of San Francisco’s Mission District arts and culture scene. I fell in love with her razor-edged words, her poetry and performance art, her commitment to justice, community, education, and to mothering. Her work introduced me to Prudencia Ayala, “the girl with the birds in her head,” a Salvadoran poet of the 1930s who ran for president before women could even vote. Decades later in San Francisco we became friends and literary co-conspirators. But let me tell you about her poetry. This woman takes on academic machos, centers community in the midst of gentrification, and conjures La Siguanaba walking down 24th street in tacones, all her power reclaimed from the myth’s shallow waters. The images in this collection will break your heart and nibble on your tongue. In “Luna de Papel,” she writes: “I tried to wrestle with the moon/y me mordió la lengua.”
Lovato’s tender, intense, sweeping memoir is a love letter to his complicated father, and a commitment to unearthing the truth where it is buried. Lovato makes explicit the deep, exploitative, and counterrevolutionary ties between the U.S. and Salvadoran governments that are responsible for the terror. From a forensics lab to the Evangelical churches of San Francisco’s Mission District to his grandmother’s sewing machine, Lovato takes readers through the heart of histories he refuses to leave forgotten.
Regalado’s poetry draws lavish lines between El Salvador and Miami, Florida as she writes back through her familial history and interrogates motherhood, class, power, bonds, and ruptures. From her poem “Salvadoran Road Bingo”:
“Every car is a carreta bruja on this highway, we’ve gone Red and bathed in red, oh deep colors bleed, a poem I found on the wash tag of a bath towel when I was twelve. Ours is the luck of my great grandfather who, one night, like any typical night, in a game of cards, lost a velvet sachet filled with his wife’s diamonds, and the title of their house. The cantor calls out the Lotería in a riddle: El Salvador whom is going to save us, whom are we to save? Day after day, our fingers in the wounds—here it is, touch it, there is the proof—surviving is what we do best.”
The stories in this collection are playful, hilarious, queer, and delightfully speculative. They imagine new worlds and write into boundless futures. Reyes’s stories are formally inventive and delightful. A taste for mangoes leads to elaborate familial exploitation. A son comes out to his dead father, who has returned in the form of a tiny robot. One story title iterates throughout the collection, inviting the reader to imagine an alternate Salvadoran history, or perhaps the world, in which the Pipil defeat the conquistadors in 1524, or in which a tyrannical dictator leads an excavation of dinosaur that brings fortune to the country. Is terror present, too? Yes. In that dinosaur story the bones are human, unearthed and refashioned into a lucrative fiction for the patrimony: “It was 1941. The memory of the massacre nine years prior was still in sight. Terror hid and rewrote details about everything, including the discovery,” Reyes writes.
This is no ordinary cookbook. It’s culinary documentation, historical research, and an archive of memory. And, Vasquez’s book, published in 2024, is the first traditionally published Salvadoran cookbook. Growing up in Los Angeles, surrounded by Salvadoran cuisine, Vasquez wondered why she couldn’t find any Salvadoran cookbooks. War and its destruction of cultural artifacts was one reason. Aforementioned flawed capitalist notions of “what the reading market truly desires” is another one. Recipes for quesadilla, pupusas, riguas, flor de izote (the edible national flower) yuca frita, and curtido were carried on the tongue. So Vasquez sought out the recipe-holders–friends, relatives, and community members–she calls them the “SalviSoul women.” In the pages of this book are recipes, and ingenious consejos from the SalviSoul women (stand on a ladder while stirring masa for more leverage). Especially compelling are the stories that some of the women share along their recipes and consejos: Ruth draws a throughline between losing her shoes during her journey to the United States as a child and later selling pupusas to a sweaty Leonardo DiCaprio at Coachella; Estelita remembers her last night in her beloved grandmother’s adobe home before leaving to join her mother in the United States; and on returning to El Salvador after decades away, Isabel says, “Tu corazón no puede renunciar a su tierra,” (Your heart can’t give up its land.)
Zamora’s debut poetry collection includes persona poems from young parents, and vivid moments of pain, abandon, and love. It’s a gorgeous map of the world that he writes about later in his memoir Solito, infused with music, longing, and rage.
Here’s the close of “The Pier of La Herradura”:
“There’s a village where men train cormorants to fish: rope-end tied to sterns,
another to necks, so their beaks won’t swallow the fish they catch.
My father is one of those birds. He’s the scarred man.”
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