I was in the middle of a revision and absolutely convinced that this one was going to kill me. Slowly, painfully, a long, drawn-out death at the hands of weapons I’d created myself:  jagged plot holes, cuttingly sharp transitions, two-dimensional characters ready to wield blunt cliches in their quest to live a larger life.

It was the story of every revision I’ve ever done and I knew it, but I’d made it even worse this time, because this story had magic. Magic with internal logic, a system I’d built and created to lure my protagonist, Flair, into the kind of life-altering disaster she needed to change. Magic that had served the story—and therefore me—well. Until now.

Now it was screwing everything up. Things I needed to happen couldn’t. I was stuck.

Damnit, I texted my two writer buds. I’ve magicked myself into a fucking corner.

Their responses were simultaneous.

Use your wand.

Are you a witch or not, Hermione?

Very funny, kids. Thanks a lot. And yet…the more I thought about it….

It was exactly what I needed to hear.

If there is one rule of literary magic, it is that it must serve the story, not solve it. To do that, the magic needs limits. Rules. Mine did, and those rules were getting in Flair’s way, because that is what rules do. If they were getting in my way as well, that could only mean one thing. They were the wrong rules.

There’s a line we straddle as writers, made famous by variations on a tweet I see screenshotted regularly on Instagram: To the reader who complained because my novel about vampires on a submarine was “unrealistic”: sorry.

The joke is solid—vampires! Submarine! And yet the complaint might be valid too. If you’re going to put vampires on a submarine—and you can, you should, it’s actually quite logical and raises questions for me about vampires in space, because is that sunlight? What is day in that context? but I digress—if you’re going to put vampires on a submarine in all that nice undersea darkness, those things must transcend what readers know about our reality and take on a life of their own. They have to become real.

The story logic has to hold and the emotional glue has to stick and we have to care and worry about those vamps in their sub. And probably, because this is the way of both story and life, the fact of their vampire-ness has to become an additional problem for them to overcome, a barrier to what they want or must do to survive their journey and achieve or revise their goals.

Rules are what makes that happen. Rules, expectations, the laws of physics—those are the boundaries that create both lives and stories. Even if we declare that there are no rules, that’s a rule. In that world, some things can happen (fingers become sausages), and some things can’t (certainty of any kind).

Flair, stuck in her story, was hating those rules. Cursing her limited powers, her disappointing allies and most especially her supposedly magic Tarot deck, flat out refusing to do anything useful while she tried to find a way—any way—to get herself out of this mess unscathed.

I was stuck because my job wasn’t finished. The rules I’d made were still hazy and worse, I didn’t even know what Flair thought those rules were, or why, or whether she was right. Which meant I didn’t know who she was or, why she was who she was, or what she would really do once the thing that mattered to her most in the world was in danger of disappearing for good. And until I knew those things, she couldn’t know them, either.

In real life, the rules are always hazy. We’re hardly ever entirely certain what we believe, or why, or what we will do if we’re trapped on a submarine with a vampire or our fingers suddenly turn into hot dogs. The magic of a story—and the job of the witch who creates it—is to deliver that clarity.

I found myself in trouble along with Flair because I’d forgotten not just who made the rules (me) but more importantly, why. We can’t just make up any old rules (or change them when they become inconvenient). The writer’s job is to make the rules that force our character to transcend that moment of twisting and turning and beating her hands against a closed door and do something else. To make a choice that is not just possible, but inevitable.

Flair wanted her magic to fix the people around her. To make them do what she wanted them to do and want what she wanted them to want. After I got those texts demanding that I put on my big witch pants and do the work, I sat down at my desk and spent the next four hundred and fifty-seven hours cursing my limited powers, my disappointing allies and my own Tarot deck while going backwards and forwards and sideways in story time and story logic to give Flair what she thought she wanted and then show her what it meant.

My spell had to ensnare both Flair and the reader in the kind of magic in which the only things that can happen are the things that do and the only thing Flair can do is what she finally does—which is to accept that the only choices she can control are her own.

It sounds so easy when I put it like that. But every writer knows that fighting through all those words we put on the page in search of what we really meant to say with our keyboard as a sorry substitute for a wand is ridiculously difficult. But at least now I know the right thing to ask myself when the rules I’ve made have me backed into a corner and the magic isn’t happening and it feels like it never, ever will.

Are you a witch, or not?

______________________________

Playing the Witch Card by KJ Dell’Antonia is available via Putnam.

When I was writing my book Raising Hell, Living Well I would repeatedly state to anyone who would listen that this was not a how-to or self-help book. Nothing against self-help books. I’ve been a reader of them my entire life, having found everything from answers to inspiration to backbone within their pages. They line my shelves like memories of old selves and old lives that were shed because of them. Their bindings are something I look back upon with pleasure, pride and sometimes—pain. The writers who share their talents, wisdom, philosophies, and intellect to make the world a better place to inhabit are my icons, idols, and a handful of times, saviors.

I found my way into writing through how-to books, whether it be the tattered and worn Making a Living Without a Job by Barbara Winter (which I haven’t let go of since I bought it at the age of 18), Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Susan Shapiro’s The Byline Bible, or the essential Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I found my way towards an ownable and personal stance on religion and spirituality thanks to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now and Sam Harris’ Waking Up. I found my way through my career with the help of Cal Newport’s Deep Work, Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I found an escape from unhealthy or unhappy relationships thanks to The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman or the Art of Letting Go by Damon Zahariades. And I found myself in the books that brought me back to center like Jonathan Fields’ How to Live a Good Life, Brené Browns’ Daring Greatly, Paulo Coelho’s the Alchemist, or Quiet by Susan Cain. Whether it was love, guts, money, purpose, career, or kids I knew there was always someone smarter that I could turn to in the self-help or how-to section of my bookstore.

But if the whole thesis of my book is that by opening readers eyes to the culture of influence, they can hope to escape it, having it be a practical how-to felt contrary to its core. My subtitle literally says: Freedom from Influence in a World Where Everyone Wants Something from You (including me). If I wanted my readers to think, discover, and explore on their own so they could fully embrace their autonomy and freedom, I didn’t want to tell them how to do anything, especially how to live.

Instead, I set out to make a book that was a how-come, opening their eyes to the programming of cultural, economic, geographical, historical, biological, educational, psychological, political and sociological influence to which we are all subject. Because in a world that had become much more unwell, unhappy, and unhinged despite all the how-to books, I saw a glaring hole in the market for understanding why we are the way we are. Maybe I could show that it wasn’t us that was the problem but rather something below the surface, below the mountains of influence throughout all of time and space culminating in this very moment. A root cause. My hypothesis was that all the productivity hacking, wellness seeking, and minimalism detoxes in the world cannot fix what’s ailing us if in fact, it is not us who are actually sick.

At different points in my life, I’ve sought out further understanding on topics that range from politics to persuasion to motherhood and culture. I have gone deep down the research rabbit hole to understand things like “what the Internet is doing to our brains?” or “why women make less money than men?” or “what’s the makeup of resilient people?” or “why do some people have all the luck?”. I like to ask big picture questions but also, I like to question why those answers are what they are. Along the way to writing Raising Hell, Living Well there were key books that answered some of these questions, creating the foundation of how I now think and view the world. While some might be shelved as how-to’s, they ultimately helped me understand how-come.

*

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

I can’t begin this list without starting with the very first book that opened my eyes in understanding that there is so much more hidden below the surface than we ever were taught in school or around our kitchen table. Or as the authors of Freakonomics say, that there is a “Hidden Side of Everything”. My first introduction to behavioral economics thanks to Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner lit a new curiosity for the world in me, through the lens of their quirky analyses of why things are the way they are. This book implanted a “question everything” mentality in me in my formative years.

The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene

If it’s not the luck of height, right birth month, family, or zipcode that propels some forward and not others, it’s the ability to understand human nature and instincts. As Robert Greene, the author of The Laws of Human Nature says, knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess. Understanding how-come someone might seek money, status, power, or fame allows you insights on their motivations and you can adapt yourself accordingly. This book beautifully draws on ancient stories and philosophies that are brought to life through the modern lens. My perceptions of others as well as myself changed drastically after reading this book.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

And if you’re not able to understand why someone is the way they are, the book Predictably Irrational shows us what happens below the surface. Author Dan Ariely picks apart how-come we are not to trust our assumptions, because even experts can be irrational. He reveals our cognitive biases and the tricks at play but delivers his experiments and research in a light-hearted manner, making our past mistakes more palatable. Most importantly, he shows us how-come we repeat mistakes time and time again, arguing that the irrationality is so patterned that it’s predictable. By knowing these patterns, it’s possible to stop falling into the traps our brain makes.

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Speaking of mistakes I’d be remiss to not mention a book by Glennon Doyle that I still can’t shake out of my brain. Her book Untamed shines a spotlight on the repeated mistakes that are so commonplace we accept them as fact. I was already a feminist, but this book showed me how-come I was the way I was despite all my best attempts to not be boxed in. I was a product of the culture that surrounded me, and the cages it produced for me as a woman. I spent much of my twenties and thirties operating as a man would in a system built by men that prioritized men. I was so under the influence of this culture that I didn’t even know I was reinforcing the cage I was attempting to escape.

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

No book helped me appreciate that we are a product of the influences of our generation’s zeitgeist more than Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties. How-come I was so obsessed with digital culture and nostalgia in my later life was because my formative years happened at the nexus of pre-internet/post-internet. The nineties were when I consumed my core intakes of the world around me and boy did it influence who I would become! Looking back on that time period and my place within it, allowed me to see myself with new eyes.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

My fascination with the current era only grew as I consumed books about the digital revolution, the digital divide, the algorithms, technology innovation and regulation, social media and loneliness, connection and neurology. But it wasn’t until I read Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror that someone was zooming out on the entirety of the modern world to pick at scabs below the surface of our self-delusions that affected everything from how we see ourselves to how we see others. Jia’s work wasn’t just a reportage on all that ails us, and it wasn’t the first how-come that tied together personal narratives with philosophy and criticism of the modern world. But it was the first one I had read from a woman who came from almost the same generation as me, and it gave me a different perspective from those written by older PhDs, from the male dominated world of theory, criticism, and technology.

Monsters by Claire Dederer

When I picked up Claire Dederer’s Monsters on a whim (I loved the cover) I had to buy it. But it was the first page that had me immediately tucking myself away like ten-year-old Bastian in the Never-Ending Story. Just me, my book, an apple and a blanket while I journeyed through a world I had never known before. The writer’s entire book was a question: can we separate the art from the human? In fact, the book continued to pose many questions. Is using the word “we” a cop out in criticism? Why are specific individuals considered geniuses? Who crowned them so? And why? Or how-come? As with Trick Mirror, reading a female perspective in a genre often dominated by men shifted everything. Dederer resisted tying up her book with authoritative statements, telling us if we should or should not ban Picasso for his actions or if we can still dance to R. Kelly. Her book didn’t tell us how-to think about it. She lead the reader through her exploration on how-come we think, believe, and act certain ways based on culture and allowed them to decide for themselves.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

When I began putting this list together I started with my own mind, moved through others’ minds, and zoomed out into social structures, accepted norms, technological systems and culture. But no book zooms out like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. This is the final book in my list because his work is the ultimate how-come book. Tackling everything from our revolutions (industrial, cognitive, scientific, agricultural, etc.) through to huge events like the invention of language, his book threads needles to tie momentous moments in history to issues like happiness, poverty, and sexuality. It’s hard to understand how-come if we don’t fully see the whole.

 __________________________

Jessica Elefante’s Raising Hell, Living Well: Freedom from Influence in a World Where Everyone Wants Something from You (including me) is available from Ballantine Books.

For this installment in a series of interviews with contemporary poets, contributing editor Peter Mishler corresponded with Christopher Kennedy. Christopher Kennedy is the author of six collections of poetry, including four from BOA Editions: The Strange God Who Makes Us, which will be published in May 2024; Clues from the Animal Kingdom (2018); Ennui Prophet (2011); and Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (2007), which won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award from BOA. He is also co-translator of Light & Heavy Things: Selected Poems of Zeeshan Sahil (2013), published by BOA as part of the Lannan Translation Selections Series.

He has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Kennedy is professor of English in  the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. The Strange God Who Makes Us is available for preorder now.

*

Peter Misher: I would like to start with the question I ask everyone in this series. What’s the strangest thing you know to be true about the art of poetry?

Christopher Kennedy: There’s a lot that’s strange, starting with why anyone feels compelled to write a poem given its marginalized status in the culture-at-large, but I’m going to say the confounding fact that it’s impossible for a reader to tell the difference between a poem I worked on for half an hour and a poem I struggled with for years. Sometimes I think it’s a byproduct of writing prose poems and doing what I can to make the poems seem reader friendly, even if I’m doing something relatively complex. Maybe the effect ends up being that everything looks like it took me half an hour to write.

Also, I’m speculating here because for all I know some readers can discern between them. In fact, I’m sure this is pure projection on my part. I should start labeling poems with a timestamp to show how long it took to write them. On the other hand, that could be embarrassing. “Two years, it took years, for this?”

PM: A few of the poems in your forthcoming collection The Strange God Who Makes Us were originally published some years ago. Could you talk a little bit about your decision to collect them in this latest book? I’m thinking in particular about “Occlusion in Long Rain,” as well as the title poem. I wondered if these earlier poems appeared to “fit” as you collected work for a new book.

CK: Both of those poems were in a manuscript that evolved from my thesis in graduate school. They were originally in verse, and the manuscript was a semi-finalist or finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize four years in a row. But then I was no longer Younger and ineligible to submit to the contest. James Dickey, the judge those four years, sent me a very nice letter encouraging me to submit again and to keep writing for him, for Yale, for poetry. He also asked for a copy of the manuscript, since he had to return the one he had to Yale. I sent him a copy with a note thanking him for his encouragement and letting him know I was no longer eligible for the Yale Prize and did he know of a publisher that might be interested in the book.

He died shortly after that, and I decided to shelve that manuscript. I had been revising it for years and was tired of looking at the poems, and in retrospect I feel as though I had become stagnant writing toward what I’d already written and not going forward as a poet. So, I started writing prose poems exclusively that represented a very different aesthetic from the “Yale Manuscript” which was liberating and set me on a different path.

The poems in the new book from that earlier manuscript fit the new book for a few reasons. One, they were originally written in verse as were almost all the poems in the new book. In fact, all the poems in the section about my mother were written as double sonnets originally, the last line of the first sonnet being the first line of the second. Two, tonally they seemed right, and they didn’t lose anything when converted to prose (poems). If anything, they seemed well-suited to the change.

PM: In your years of writing prose poems, do you have any observations about this form that you’d be willing to share? I’m curious if there are aspects of writing prose poems that you’ve discarded along the way, and, equally, if there are facets of this form that you are continuing to understand, perhaps differently than before?

CK: If I remember correctly, I started writing prose poems when I realized I was obsessing over things like line breaks and stanza breaks at the expense of the content in my poems. I decided to focus on writing more freely in early drafts and then imposing formal restrictions on what I’d written. That led to me writing prose that I turned into verse, and eventually I started turning the verse back into prose. Everything I write has a verse version and a prose version at the very least, but more often there are several versions in both formats, until I find the right prose version.

PM: To what degree do you think of yourself as a prose poet almost exclusively? Your response makes me think that you’ve made a kind of procedural commitment to it, and I wonder what keeps you coming back to this approach.

CK: The past few years, I worked on a short novel. It didn’t start out as a novel, and it may not be one, but it’s a longer prose piece in short chapters. In some ways, it felt like a logical conclusion to go there. It’s finished to the extent that it feels done to me, though I’m sure I’ll make changes once I get some distance, but writing that long form prose piece made me appreciate how much, when I’m writing prose poems, I think about all the things I would think about if I were writing verse.

I know prose poems seem like a different beast, but I no longer see the difference. I’m working on a new manuscript, and the poems in it are as verse-like as anything I’ve ever written. There’s a great deal of rhyme, attention to meter, etc. Maybe subconsciously I moved from the novel to more verse-like prose poems as a reaction to having been so focused on elements of fiction. I drove myself crazy with plot issues and characterization problems, and maybe it was a relief to focus on the things I love in poetry, even if they might be a bit hidden at times in my work.

PM: Let’s go back in time a bit to another question I ask everyone in this series. Is there a feeling or fleeting memory from childhood that in some way presages that you would become an artist and write poetry, as an adult?

CK: My father died when I was seven, and one of my older relatives, a cousin on my father’s side, John “Bozo” Corbett, and his wife, Gladys, used to visit my mother and me often. John was an incredible storyteller, still the best I’ve ever heard. He would drop Gladys off and go to the causeway at Otisco Lake to fish and stop by the Amber Inn for a few beers afterward. When he got back to the house, Gladys would prod him, and if he was feeling it, he would tell stories of borderline and not so borderline criminal behavior I’d heard many times, and I was thoroughly enthralled every time.

Occasionally, John would stop by with things for me to read, magazines mainly, sometimes ones my mother wasn’t happy about, and after he left, I would have to sift through the trash to find them and squirrel them away somewhere safe. But one time he brought me a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the Edward FitzGerald translation. I read those quatrains incessantly, even though I didn’t understand them, and I became fascinated by the effect the poem had on me. It was visceral, as if my body were absorbing the language, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell you anything about what the poems meant to me, not in any way that would have made sense at least.

Not long after I read the book, my sister came home from college for a short visit. I have a clear memory of being in our kitchen and me telling her I was going to be a poet. She did a good job containing her laughter, but I could tell she was skeptical. I insisted that it was true, and she asked me if I had written any poems. I hadn’t, but in what was to become my modus operandi later in life any time I was asked if I had work to submit, I said yes.

She asked me to recite one for her, so I called her bluff and started my “poem” by saying “In this day and age” and then looking out the kitchen window. Seeing a car drive up the street, I finished the line with “people drive cars up the street” and repeated the refrain, “In this day and age,” followed by whatever was in my line of sight. My sister was hysterical by the end of my impromptu performance, and her reaction, ironically (any reaction is a good reaction?), made me think there might be something to this poetry thing.

It was several years before I wrote a poem, but that moment seemed to foretell a fate that would have seemed as ridiculous to anyone who knew my background as it had to my sister.

PM: When you started to write poems, to what extent did that performative, knowing, funny, kind of impertinent and disaffected “recitation” for your sister get into those early poems?

CK: When I first started writing poems, I would never have thought to be funny, to use humor in any way. I was writing “serious poems” about “serious things.” The first prose poem I wrote was in graduate school, and I never showed it to anyone initially. It was comic and it was in prose. I assumed everyone would hate it. I eventually showed it to Ken Victor, another poet in my cohort, and he said he thought it was the best thing he’d seen of mine.

That confused me at first, but it made me reexamine the poem, and I started to see that it might be a new way to approach my work. It was a serious poem, but I’d found a way to express myself that allowed me to use one of my strengths. Humor is my family’s way of dealing with or deflecting grief and sadness, so it came naturally to me once I allowed myself to embrace it.

Still, it was several years before I committed to writing prose poems that were comic/absurdist, and my first book, Nietzsche’s Horse, was the result. I had discovered Russell Edson’s poems in an anthology and became fascinated by them. I’d also read Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel” and Zbigniew Herbert’s prose poems and eventually Daniil Kharms’ work.

The new book is more of a throwback to the “serious” poems I was writing years ago (though not exclusively), another reason why the two poems you asked about earlier felt right for the manuscript.

PM: What do you think necessitated this shift to seriousness? Seriousness, to me, seems to accompany “about-ness,” though something more comic or absurd is, of course, not about nothing. I wonder if you’d be willing to consider that binary. Is there a difference that jumps out to you between the serious and the comic?

CK: I think “about-ness” is a good way to describe the difference. Even though the poems aren’t necessarily about particular events, though some are, there’s a more concrete aspect to them than say an absurdist or metaphor-driven poem that is more conceptual or philosophical. There’s also the obvious, which is that many of the poems are about memory, which lends itself to that “about-ness.” Also, I was writing very consciously about climate change at times, and the effect of what’s happening environmentally to our psyches, or at least my psyche.

On the other hand, my more comic poems are also serious, but humor is a kind of mask that allows me to approach subject matter I might avoid or write about in a way that could be overly sentimental or hackneyed. Ideally, the humor draws a reader in, and the emotional undertone sneaks up on them. I’m a sucker for those types of poems. Think Russell Edson and James Tate, for example.

But the new book has less of that approach, especially the poems about my mother’s Alzheimer’s. I felt obligated to be as straightforward as possible with those poems. Since the experience was already absurd, it didn’t need any embellishment, and I didn’t want to disguise the speaker’s state of mind with any aesthetic choices that would obscure meaning.

PM: Your response recalls a poem in your new collection where you’re thinking of Russell Edson in the supermarket. It’s an elegy that echoes Allen Ginsberg seeing Whitman in the supermarket, although Edson isn’t there in your poem. It made me think of this poem as a sort of nod to going it alone without the absurd. Do you think that your approach with your new book felt like “going it alone” in some new way?

CK: It’s a poem that pays homage, as does Ginsberg’s, and it references something that happened when Russell gave a reading at Syracuse. He was supposed to read the previous semester, but because of some comical travel issues, he and his wife, Frances, ended up in Pittsburgh, which could be a Russell Edson poem. When he finally did make it to Syracuse, I picked him up at the airport and took him to the hotel. At the hotel, the woman working at the desk asked him how many room keys he would like, and he said, “200.”

The rest is imagined, but your question has me thinking that for some reason when I started putting the manuscript together, I knew it would end the first section, and it does feel a bit like saying good-bye to Russell and his influence. I can’t say I had an awareness of moving in a different direction, but the more I wrote, the more I could see I was writing about events rather than ideas and concerned not so much about accuracy as in emotional truth, if that makes sense.

Maybe the best way to answer is to say I was ready to see if I could write poems that were closer to the bone and didn’t rely on humor and abstraction as much.

PM: Is there something that you are willing to lose or say goodbye to when you begin to put a poem into prose form? I’d love to know what you think is gained or what feels satisfying about the transformation that occurs? I was wondering if you would talk about this in relation to the heart of the book, the second section, your beautiful Memory Unit poems?

CK: Well, to follow up on a previous answer, I was willing to say good-bye to a certain amount of artifice in the poems about my mother. The experience of being in the nursing home with her, trying to figure out how best to communicate with her, always at some emotional and psychological expense, was so overwhelming, that when I tried to write about the experience, I wanted the straightest line between what happened and what I could write to represent it as possible.

I mentioned before that those poems had been double sonnets, but that was after they were written as prose poems. I wanted to see if imposing the form would improve them, and I ended up sending those poems to the NEA that year and received a fellowship, so they must have been okay. But when it came down to it, I felt the prose poem format was closer to the actual experience I had. I don’t usually write quite so autobiographically, but there was no sense in trying to fool myself or anyone else, so I went with the straight-line approach.

PM: Because you’ve written prose poems prolifically, I’m curious how you think of the sentence as a unit within a poem. Maybe a sentence as opposed to a line is how you might measure the music of a poem? What I love about this new book and your work in general is that there is a moment-to-moment presence that I can feel in each sentence, a precision or care, even if the poem is propelling me through it to “find out what happens.” Is there anything that resonates for you when I say this?

CK: Those are great observations that require some explanation. I definitely think in terms of sentence, but only after having fashioned lines that work as verse that can be converted to sentences. Punctuation, syntax, and margin setting play a role. I always use a hard right margin and revise within that rectangular shape. Sometimes the lines/sentences dictate that I need to change the margin, but just as often the margin forces me to cut or add to the line, mostly cut. It makes for a cleaner, tauter sentence. It also allows for enjambment. Essentially, all the poems are verse disguised as prose.

That may be what you’re sensing when you said, “I can feel in each sentence—a precision or care—even if the poem is propelling me through because it is narrative.” That’s a very perceptive reading of what I’m trying to do.

PM: When you revisit the Memory Unit poems now in book form, what effect do they have on you? Do you have a different sense of why you wrote them after getting some distance from them?

CK: Once I finished writing all of them, I never thought I would publish the Memory Unit poems. I’m sure it’s because they didn’t seem like something I would write, so they threw me. Having some distance from them helped me see how necessary they were to write. I’ve written many poems about my father. His absence being the catalyst. I’d only written one other poem about my mother before I wrote the Memory Unit poems. I felt compelled to honor her and to try to unpack the experience of interacting with her as her memory faded.

We had a complicated relationship for most of my life, and the last few years of her life things became very straightforward. I had to take on more of a parental role with her, and I was determined to be a better parent to her than I was a son. We loved each other, but I resented her dependence on me, and she resented my desire to have as normal a life as possible given the circumstances. That tension was a significant barrier.

Also, my mother worked, and I was on my own a lot at a young age. Being so estranged from each other was a distance that was hard to overcome. One gift of my mother’s last years is that I was able to tell her things I might never have told her, things a son should be able to say to his mother, as simple as “I love you.”

PM: What was the experience like for you of arranging this collection with the Memory Unit poems as the centerpiece. How do you see the relationship between the Memory Unit section and the two parts that flank it?

CK: I remember how unsure I was about grouping them together in a section of their own. That uncertainty seems strange to me now, since there’s a discernible narrative to the section that would have been lost or at least harder to follow had I separated them. There’s also a narrative thread of sorts in the entire book, since the first section contains poems based on events from when I was younger, the poems in the Memory Unit section are from a decade or so ago, and the poems in the third section are based on more recent events and often concerned with climate change with the last poem, “The Coda,” consolidating past and present.

Ultimately, the Memory Unit poems feel like the emotional center of the book, so it made sense to place them in the middle, and it made sense chronologically, as well, which made the decision an easy one.

PM: After you mentioned the story about John and Gladys earlier in our conversation, I realized that John is also featured in a Memory Unit poem, which articulates what you loved about him – his storytelling. I also notice your desire in these poems to record your experience with your mother more closely. And then there’s the appearance of figures from Greek myths and epics. It almost seems like you’re honoring that “storytelling” part of you.

Is there a tension for you personally about working back and forth between a part of you that is in a mode to “record” versus a part that is less straightforwardly “knowing?” While we’ve both heard of poets beginning with a block of text and shaping it into verse, your process does strike me as very unique. What comes to mind for you as you’re reading my thoughts here?

CK: Working-class Irish storytelling and Greek myths and legends are foundational for me. John Corbett was the best of the bunch, but I was around many great storytellers, and when I was nine, during a blackout in the Northeastern United States, my mother and I were without heat or electricity, and we drove to her co-worker’s house because they had a fireplace.

Upon arriving, I noticed a book on a table in the entranceway. It had a picture of a man holding a sword and a severed head. I must have been staring at it, because my mother’s friend asked me if I wanted to look at the book. I took it with me to the living room and lay down in front of the fireplace all night, reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. That picture of Perseus with Medusa’s serpent-coiffed head in his hand was my gateway to a world that I couldn’t get enough of.

Kennedy’s boyhood copy of Mythology

When we were leaving, the woman said the book belonged to her daughter, but I could have it, and she would buy her daughter another copy. I still have the book.

The first poem of The Strange God Who Makes Us refers to when I asked my mother to buy me the first edition of a cheap encyclopedia I saw in a grocery store. There was a picture of Achilles in his chariot, dragging Hector’s body around Troy, and I knew the story from Hamilton’s book. The two incidents began a lifelong love affair with those myths and legends.

Coincidentally, John and Gladys’s oldest son, Chuck, an amazing character in his own right, left home at fifteen, lied about his age, and joined the Navy. He didn’t run away. He announced at the dinner table one night that he was going to New York City to join the Navy to see the world, and John left the house and came back with a suitcase. Allegedly, he gave Chuck the suitcase and told him, “Go see everything I didn’t get to see.”

Chuck ended up in Europe, where he went AWOL and set out to Majorca to find his literary hero, Robert Graves. He found out where Graves lived with Laura Riding and knocked on the door. A man answered. Chuck said, “Are you Robert Graves?” The man said, “Yes.” Chuck said, “I love you.” Graves said, “Then you must come in.”

He lived with Graves and Riding for a while, and the story goes that Chuck transcribed the manuscript of The White Goddess for Graves while he stayed with them. It might be apocryphal, since the book wasn’t published until about ten years later, but I choose to believe it. It occurs to me that Graves has a translation of the Rubaiyat. Lots of odd coincidences the more I think about it.

To answer the other part of the question, it might be as simple as having more confidence that the stories are worth telling or inherently interesting and don’t require more than attention to detail. As far as my process goes, I’m of the belief that prose poems need to honor poetry as much as they do prose, so I suppose that belief informs the poems to the degree that it’s noticeable, maybe? I hope not in an intrusive way, but I want the poems to sing while they’re telling the story.

PM: I have to wonder if there are musicians or songwriters that have inspired you or given you permission in some way as a poet to explore certain ideas, tones, feelings, approaches, or ways of being?

CK: The first songwriter who made me want to write poems is Neil Young. His albums, After the Goldrush and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere were instrumental in getting me to jot things down when I was in high school. We didn’t have a stereo, but my friend David had one, and I spent pretty much every day after school my junior year at his house, listening to music, and he had those two albums. Young’s voice has such a melancholy quality to it, and I was a grief-stricken sixteen-year-old.

That was the beginning of a long love affair with bands and songwriters over the years. You could add Marvin Gaye, Ray Davies, Paul Westerberg, Curtis Mayfield, Brian Eno, Joni Mitchell, Mark Eitzel, Aimee Mann, Sly Stone, Pete Townshend, PJ Harvey, Robert Pollard, Alex G, etc.

PM: It’s interesting that you’ve named Neil Young here as an important early influence. Listening to After the Goldrush over the past couple of months that we’ve been corresponding, it’s easy to see the similarities between his approach to songwriting and your approach in this book. On the Young album, there are some very cryptic songs, and yet they strike this chord in me even though I’m not sure what they’re about, like “Tell Me Why.” Are there artists that have been influential for you because they provide both an expository directness and mystery at once?

CK: The two books that had the biggest influence on me when I decided to get serious about writing are Denis Johnson’s The Incognito Lounge and Michael Burkard’s Ruby for Grief. I was in my mid-twenties and enrolled in a poetry workshop I’d seen advertised in the local paper. The class was offered through Syracuse University’s adult extension site, University College. It turned out the teacher was Michael Burkard, whose work I’d seen in a poetry anthology and been very drawn to. Michael told me I should get a copy of Denis’s book, which I did, and Michael’s Ruby for Grief had just been published, so I picked that up as well.

At first, Denis’s work was more accessible, while Michael’s was harder to grasp. Over time, however, I began to realize both were writing autobiographical poems that were on face value documenting experiences in their lives. Their delivery was the difference. Denis’s poems were more available at the surface level, but I began to understand how the music of those poems made them transcendent, mysterious if you will, whereas I began to understand that Michael’s work was, underneath the mysterious presentation, very straightforward.

For example, Michael has a poem in one of his books where he refers to “blueberry money.” It’s a poem set during summer in Nova Scotia where a relative lived. At some point, either because Michael told me or because it finally clicked, I can’t remember which, I knew it referred to money earned from selling blueberries. Once I knew, it seemed obvious, but before it had seemed fairytale-like.

Michael has this innate ability to make the most ordinary thing feel otherworldly, whereas Denis could describe having a drink in a bar in such a way that it became a treatise on loneliness and alienation, the world both beautiful and terrifying. Those influences are always with me, even if how they manifest is different and, hopefully, original to my sensibility.

As far as other art forms, a de Chirico painting has the qualities I’m thinking of, or Klee’s, whose work I know because I looked him up after reading a poem of Michael’s years ago. I can recognize buildings or animals or other objects in those paintings, but they take on a dreamlike quality and a significance they would never have if rendered by a lesser artist.

Music-wise, what you’re referring to in “Tell My Why” is a good example of a song that is both straightforward, musically, and lyrically, that has cryptic elements, like the chorus, that take it to another level. Young’s guitar playing is similar. He’s strumming and playing individual notes simultaneously. It looks easy, but it’s quite difficult to replicate. At least it is for me.

I was carrying around a lot of unexpressed grief as a teenager, and songs, Young’s in particular, that seemed to express some type of loss or other deep emotion, were cathartic for me. I didn’t need to know what the lyrics meant. I knew how they felt when sung in Young’s unorthodox sounding voice. He seemed to be singing from a place that had less to do with popular music and more to do with keening. Early in his career, when he was first recording with Buffalo Springfield, the record execs wouldn’t let him sing his songs at first. They couldn’t hear what I was feeling, I guess.

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The Strange God Who Makes Us by Christopher Kennedy is available via BOA Editions.

Louisa May Alcott is best known for Little Women, of course, her classic American novel for young readers—but she earned her first taste of celebrity as an essayist. That should surprise no one. Her writing genius defied genre. In many ways, her finest essays are even more brilliant—more consistently brilliant—than her novels and stories. Three of her non-fiction pieces alone—”Going Out to Service”; “Transcendental Wild Oats”; and “Hospital Sketches”—are, as they used to say in Charles II’s day, worth the price of admission to all the rest. Anyone who has read and loved her novels will recognize her characteristic style, energy and wit.

Louisa May Alcott was born to a family of high idealists—lovers of equality, ideas, and books. Her first playthings as a toddler were her father’s volumes from his private library. She learned to express herself and share her observations of the world in the childhood journals her parents required her to write. These provided a habit of writing, and also fodder for novels, stories and non-fiction to follow in time.

In her earliest writings  she identifies and scorns hypocrisy—especially when it harms the poor, the helpless, and the young. By her teens, she exercises the eagle eye of a reporter. For instance, she describes the highly-respected Julia Ward Howe, author of the American anthem, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as a “straw colored supercilious lady with pale eyes & a green gown in which she looked like a faded lettuce.” Her Boston relations would have been appalled had they read her notes.

Louisa sharpened her literary tools in those diaries and letters—and by the time she was writing essays she’d begun to truly hone her craft. One of her literary idols was Charles Dickens. She modeled the family “newspaper” on his Pickwick Papers, shared his empathy for the downtrodden, and learned from him to pay close attention to and bring readers to love even her most minor characters.

Alcott played a supporting role in her own family, shaped in the shadow of her eccentric philosopher father. Bronson Alcott stood tall among the founders of American Transcendentalism and Louisa’s first teachers and adult friends included great figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. No one could have had a more exalted education. Emerson loaned her books from his library and Thoreau became her first natural science teacher, escorting the four Alcott sisters on walks and canoe rides, pointing out the flora and fauna (and more fancifully, the fairies) of New England.

Alcott began to write seriously in early childhood. She composed her first poem, “To the First  Robin” when she was eight. By the time she was fourteen, she was given the great gift of her own room and desk. As a teenager she wrote anything and everything—stories, romances, news articles for the family paper, comedies, melodramas, poetry and plays.

Her earliest “real book,” as she called it, was Flower Fables published in December, 1854; a collection of fairy tales written for her pupil Ellen Emerson, the daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Inscribing the very first copy to her mother, Louisa made an apology and a promise: “I hope to pass in time from flowers and fables to men and realities.” One of the ways she kept her promise  was by writing autobiographical essays about even the grittiest “realities.”

In one of her earliest essays, “Going Out to Service,” Alcott records her labors as a young, naïve and  over-worked domestic servant. When Alcott was about fifteen, her mother began an informal employment agency geared to help the poor. Louisa became one of her early “clients,” going out to keep house for a miserly lawyer in Dedham. Alcott’s sympathies always lay with under-appreciated and underpaid female workers, and the roots of her sympathy may have begun with her own difficult  experiences “in service,” shoveling snow, cooking, cleaning, hauling water and chopping wood. There is nothing glamorous about her character in the piece. Most authors would hesitate to show themselves in such a humble and humbled light.

Yet the piece is as deft as anything she ever wrote. Alcott’s  sanctimonious minister-employer  proves to be a liar, glutton,  and predator with designs on the poor young author. “[H]e presented me with an overblown rose, which fell to pieces before I got out of the room, pressed my hand, and dismissed me with a fervent “God bless you, child. Don’t forget the dropped eggs for breakfast.” Part of the tragicomedy is that the innocent narrator doesn’t see his misbehavior coming—but the reader does.

The narrator seems to leap right out of a Jane Austen novel. She sees but does not understand  what lies ahead. “He possessed an impressive nose, a fine flow of language, and a pair of large hands, encased in black kid gloves.” Those large hands “encased” in black kid gloves are also the stuff of gothic horror—at which Alcott also excelled.

An aspiring, unknown Louisa Alcott presented “Going Out to Service” in 1861  to Boston’s most distinguished publisher, James Field of newly-created Atlantic Monthly.  He glanced through the piece and  dismissed her with a condescending “Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can’t write.” To add insult to injury, her offered her forty dollars as a loan to start her own school. Luckily for us all, a quiet young editor named Thomas Niles sat beside Fields during this interview, listening in. Years later, he commissioned, edited, and published her novel Little Women.

Her first taste of significant success came from a book-length memoir about her time as a Union war nurse. Alcott’s autobiographical “Hospital Sketches” captured  the attention of a reading public hungry for news of the American Civil War. But it was not written with an eye toward fame. Culled from letters home and journal notes, Alcott thought it a hodge-podge of sketches, unlikely to interest anyone.

She was more shocked than anyone when it became a popular sensation. First published  in serial form and later  as a book, (1863) “Hospital Sketches” provided rare on-the-ground reportage of the long, bloody conflict from a war nurse’s perspective—a thing  unheard of at the time. Her non-fiction was sometimes severe, and always strived to be real—even when she included elements obviously invented.

“Hospital Sketches,” this longest and most memorable work of non-fiction, features a Civil War narrator named “Nurse Periwinkle.” Nearly everything else in it derives from her actual personal history: Louisa did nurse sick and dying Union soldiers; she witnessed their arrival from the catastrophic battle at Fredericksburg. She served as head of the night ward after only two weeks on the job. In the Hurly Burly House hospital (again, only the name is changed) she came down with typhoid pneumonia that nearly killed her, and was heavily dosed with the wonder drug calomel, the mercury poison that likely did.

Grateful nineteenth century readers found in “Hospital Sketches” their first real-life account of the solders’ experiences of the Civil War. Hers was new journalism before the phrase was ever invented—and readers embraced it. War news traveled northward slowly and unreliably. “Hospital Sketches” filled the gap for anxious Yankee families and friends. But Louisa expressed amazement at the book’s success. “I cannot see why people like a few extracts from topsey turvey letters written on inverted tea kettles,” she marveled. Only later did she admit that these autobiographical and realistic essays “pointed the way” toward her true writing material and style.

Among her best essays, one of the last written  is Alcott’s autobiographical piece on her unhappy early childhood experience at a communal farm. Written in 1873, “Transcendental Wild Oats” alternates broad comedy with tragedy. It records in detail the near-dissolution of the Alcott family. They nearly froze, nearly starved. The commune even at its most populous was too small to succeed, and it housed eccentrics and bonafide lunatics equally. The utopian experiment was a dismal failure, for the commune and for the Alcotts personally, and at the end of it all Bronson suffered a breakdown.

Surely these events were traumatic for a ten year old child, and this may partly explain why she waited so long to write about it, but in “Transcendental Wild Oats Alcott” never lingers on the psychological devastation. Instead of dwelling in the self-reflection more typical of memoir, she focuses on the characters around her and records the homely details of daily life—”unleavened bread, porridge, and water for breakfast; bread, vegetables, and water for dinner; bread, fruit, and water for supper”—leaving little room for disbelief.

It must all be true, because it sounds true. Indeed that is part of her genius as an essayist and memoirist. She is as succinct as a newspaper reporter. Her prose canters along. She covers great distances in the fewest words.  There is no dilly-dallying. Alcott once advised an aspiring writer, “The strongest, simplest words are best.”

On more than one occasion she halted publication of her nonfiction because she felt it was not true, not deep enough. This happened with a linked series of European travel essays, written for a projected book called Shawl-Straps. Instead, the pieces appeared later in miscellaneous books like Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, where the spare parts could find a place. The popularity of her “Hospital Sketches” had led to invitations for similar works of nonfiction. One collection intended as a travelogue of American places she cut short close to its start, fearing that writing superficially might become a bad habit. She refused to become an imitation of herself.

Nor was she ever willing (or perhaps even able)  in her nonfiction to keep a straight face throughout, no matter how somber the subject matter. In her lighter tone—her tone, throughout all of her essays, is flexible—she captures, for example, the comic anxiety of the amateur traveler desperate not to lose important papers: “put my tickets in every conceivable place…and finish by losing them entirely. Suffer agonies till a compassionate neighbour pokes them out of a crack with his pen-knife.”

Her essays are rich with unerasable moments, and as in her greatest works of fiction, they strike the intersecting point between tragedy and comedy. If she tugs on heart-strings in her essays—and most assuredly she does—she also demonstrates a clear awareness of the funny side of life.

Alcott understood that habitual use of humor and exaggeration might incline readers to doubt the veracity of her non-fiction.  At the end of Hospital Sketches she urges the reader to believe what is only partly true: “such a being as Nurse Periwinkle does exist, that she really did go to Washington, and…these Sketches are not romance.” Her fiction found its roots in real-life experiences and her non-fiction always contained kernels of invention.  She largely shrugged off strict distinctions between fact and fiction.

In her non-fiction Alcott spoke her mind, politically and otherwise, and incorporated into her writing her beliefs in abolition, suffrage and equal rights. She also wrote dozens of civic-minded minded letters, both privately and publicly, on issues important to her day. Newspapers provided a handy platform. One of her shortest pieces, “Happy Women,” published in a “Column of Advice to Young Women” on—of all days—Valentine’s Day, defends women’s inalienable right to remain single.

Alcott herself, though she later became an adoptive mother to a niece and a nephew, never married. Her mother Abigail May Alcott had labored in Boston’s worst slums, campaigning tirelessly for healthier, safer working conditions for women, fair pay, equal opportunity. Louisa was an outspoken defender of the rights of women to vote, early and late. (She was also the first woman ever to cast a vote in her home town of Concord, Ma.) She shared her mother’s dedication to feminist causes and social justice.

In her fiction for young readers she had become known as “The Children’s Friend.” Such accolades were both enriching (financially and otherwise) and limiting. Essay writing allowed her to say openly what her children’s stories could only suggest.  She had tried bringing her social conscience and philosophical beliefs into her adult fiction, only to find herself roundly condemned for thinking as she did—perhaps indeed for thinking at all.

Fortunately for her future young readers, her “serious” literary fiction—which she’d believed was her destined format—was a commercial failure, coming into print only on the heels of the far more successful Hospital Sketches. That essay’s success was the main reason her literary novels were published at all.  Suddenly, Alcott became a viable commodity. Her first serious novel, Moods, published in 1864, earned tepid reviews at best and poor sales; her second, Work, published nine years later, fared no better.

Even her more daring, gothic novels appeared only under a series of pseudonyms. Had any of these fully succeeded, we might never have had Little Women, nor any of its successors. As it was,  Alcott tumbled into children’s literature—or was pushed into it, by Thomas Niles, the young editorial assistant who had seen her early essay “Going Out to Service” rejected out of hand.

In the 1860s and 70s a new pseudonymous “Oliver Optic” series of books for boys flooded a new market and Niles wanted to test the publishing waters for girls, believing there was a vacuum waiting to be filled. He used a blend of charm, encouragement and family pressure to persuade Louisa to try her hand at a girl’s novel. Privately she noted in her journal, “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.” The one saving grace, she believed,  was the story’s reality: “we lived it.”

Autobiographical essays such as “How I Went Out to Service,” “Hospital Sketches” and “Transcendental Wild Oats” are closer in tone, style, voice and subject matter to Little Women than any of her early fiction, including her many gothic romances and the two serious novels. If one wants to see the author of the March family chronicles in the making, one need look no further than into those three exceptional essays. The published thrillers such as A Long Fatal Love Chase sound nothing like the author beloved in young people’s books like Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys.

But the essays certainly do. Even if they were not the literary jewels they are, they would be worthy of attention. It’s not often that we get to see a great author coming into her own before our eyes. The essays also give further proof of her indefatigable energy. Nothing but death and dying could slow her down.

As a young woman Alcott wrote for ten and twelve hours a day, in addition to her other labors. Later, after her stint as a war nurse,  she wrote with an aching arm, or painfully swollen leg propped up on a stool. Mercury poisoning from the “miracle cure”  calomel she’d been given, slow and insidious, had begun to take effect. The writing “machine,” as she called herself, labored to keep producing. She published not only to express herself, but to earn money to keep “The Pathetic Family,” (her private name for the Alcotts) afloat. She could not afford to sentimentalize or write lengthy and rambling descriptions; or to hold forth like  her father. She knew she must “please the public or starve.”

As a woman and as an author, Alcott was a force of nature. She worked incredibly long hours for years—scrubbed and sewed through the night, cleaned and cooked, taught school, walked miles to get where she needed to go—while also writing her own material in every possible genre  hours a day. None of non-fiction was ever intended to be her “real” work—that ambition she reserved for her unsuccessful literary adult novels.

But the warm reception of her essay “Hospital Sketches” gave her confidence to trust her own voice and material. Without that “hint,” as she called it,  she never could have written Little Women.  It proved to her that people love truth as well as invention. Under the most challenging circumstances, she kept on writing, celebrating the good and calling out the bad. She rejected sentimentality and self-pity in an era that encouraged both, especially for women who were expected to faint away at the first obstacle. That was not Louisa’s way. “I was there to work, not to wonder or weep….”

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A Strange Life: Selected Essays of Louisa May Alcott is available via Notting Hill Editions.

I’d finished writing, I thought, when I sent the essay to my editor, but my editor had other ideas. Questions came back for which I had no answers. Suggestions came back with which I did not agree. The clock was ticking, I knew, and in New York the clock ticks faster than it ticks here in Tennessee. I went to the woods anyway.

People often ask how long it takes me to write an essay, and I wish I knew how to answer. When I start, I don’t know where I’m going, and I don’t know what wandering route I must take to get there. The whole thing is an exercise in faith. It begins with an image, a feeling, a vague sense of why something matters to me. It never begins with a plan. I just start writing and trust the words to keep coming. I need the words themselves to guide me, to tell me where to go and why. When I lead workshops, I tell young writers to write. That is my whole pedagogy: Just write. Trust the words to come. If they don’t come, go for a walk.

Always I find more answers in a forest than I find in my own hot attic of a mind. Scientists have made studies of the walking brain, and the results are dumbfounding. Given a test that measures creativity, college students sitting at a table produced unremarkable results. But when scientists put them on a treadmill, or sent them for a walk around campus, their brains lit up like the night sky. The students who walked produced 60 percent more original ideas than the students who were seated.

The study measured only the cognitive effects of a body in motion, walking on a treadmill or along a familiar route. I would like to see an fMRI image of a mind in a forest, even one as carefully managed as my local park, where the trails are mulched with donated Christmas trees. A forest so small that the cars on nearby roads are audible from every place on the trail.

It was raining the day I was on deadline, and I like the woods best in rain. There are fewer people on the path. The dampness softens the ground and muffles the sound of my own footsteps. The heat-dulled leaves of the canopy grow visibly greener. The understory goes greener still.

Best of all, in a wet world deadfall and soil erupt into fungi. Delicate whorls of polypores make a bouquet of fallen pines. Bright elf cups are scattered across the leaf litter as though a parade has passed by. Glowing angel wing mushrooms fruit on the hemlock like a bridal veil trailing along the path. Chicken of the woods make yellow and orange ruffles fit for a square dancer’s skirt. Oh, their marvelous fungi names! Firerug inkcap, turkey tail, witch’s hat, stinkhorn, jelly fungus, shaggy scarlet cup!

These are flowers of the shady forest, the silent scavengers of deadwood and rotting leaves. In living trees, they can form a symbiosis, colonizing roots and helping trees absorb nutrients, creating vast underground networks that allow trees to communicate with one another and even share resources. In dead trees, fungi soften wood, making it hospitable for insects, a place that can be carved out by birds in need of a nesting site, or animals in need of a hiding place or shelter from the cold. Fungi, too, can turn death into life.

I rely on apps and field guides to identify mushrooms, but their color variations seem to be endless, and I have no idea if I’m right. I would never eat a mushroom that grows wild in the woods. There are too many ways to be dead wrong, an adjective I choose deliberately, and too many purposes for fungi when they remain in the woods. I squat, I admire, I take pictures, I move on.

In one fallen tree, the transformation has been unfolding for so long that a little cave has opened up where a branch once joined the living oak. Over years, dead leaves collected in the cavity and turned into soil. In the shelter of that death-opened place, new green life has sprung up: moss and clover and some sort of trailing vine I can’t identify. In the center, as carefully arranged as if a florist had planned it for a centerpiece, rises one woodland violet. Every time I see it, I remind myself to come back in springtime to see it in bloom.

By the time I reached the violet that day, I had already stayed out too long, but suddenly I understood how to fix the problem in my essay. I texted my editor to tell him I was on my way back to my desk. As an apology for my tardiness, I included a photo of the secret terrarium in the fallen oak.

“Like a little tree womb,” he wrote back.

And that’s exactly what it is. It’s what all trees are when we leave them alone.

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Excerpted from The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl. Used with permission of the publisher, Spiegel & Grau. Copyright © by Margaret Renkl.

Novelist, playwright and screenwriter Marie Ndiaye has had the attention of the French literary world since she published her first novel, As to the Rich Future, at seventeen. Born in Pithiviers, the daughter of a French school teacher mother and a Senegalese father, she won the 2001 Prix Femina for Rosie Carpe and the 2009 Prix Goncourt for Three Strong Women. Her latest, Vengeance Is Mine, is a true crime novel about a mother who has murdered her three children presented as an existentialist monologue by a troubled lawyer who holds onto her worldview with great strength (or stubbornness), even as her home, her relationships, and her body crumble. “I began thinking about this book at the same time as I was working with Alice Diop on the script of her latest film. Saint-Omer,” Ndiaye told me. “That movie is based on a true story that happened in France about twelve years ago: a woman who evidently had no particular problems, a woman who was educated, refined, drowned her sixteen-month-old daughter in the ocean even though she’d cherished her from the moment of her birth. Working on that movie led me to try to understand those ‘excellent mothers,’ loving and devoted, who very deliberately kill their children. As for my book itself, it’s an invented story.” Our email conversation spanned several weeks and many time zones, from Paris to Nebraska (for translator Jordan Stump to work that magic) to Sonoma County.

*

Jane Ciabattari: How have the past three years of pandemic and global turmoil affected you, your work, the translation and launch in the US of this new novel, Vengeance Is Mine? Where have you been living, and how has COVID affected your residence?

Marie Ndiaye: During the confinement I was still living in the country, near Bordeaux. When you live in nature, you don’t have the same perception of what’s going on in the world, everything seems somewhat distant. I lived essentially the way I always do: writing, working in the garden. I was lucky enough not to be affected in any painful way by that time.

JC: The layering of placid conversation, deception, confusion, horror, and journey backward into unclear memory in this novel brings to mind the work of Stephen King. Is he an inspirati? Or Claude Simon, whose investigations are fragmented and searching? (He once noted, “The novelist today tries to make his way through a kind of fog; it isn’t really a question of irony, but one of vertigo: he just doesn’t know the answers.”) Others?

MN: Those are two writers who have an enormous importance to me, for all their differences. Claude Simon taught me, I believe, not to go “straight to the point” in writing to twist and turn around a secret or a mystery that language tries to get as close to as it can—and yet the writer knows he’ll never find the way into that core of darknesses and silences, he can only try to get close enough to knock on the door, and he hears the echo of that knock but he knows the door is not going to open. My favorite Stephen King novel is It. He knows better than anyone how to understand and describe the terrors of childhood. Joyce Carol Oates as well, whom I’ve admired since I was twelve years old. There’s also Anna Maria Ortese, Javier Marias, Russell Banks, Sigrid Undset, so many others!

JC: Vengeance Is Mine is set primarily in Bordeaux, where your narrator, a lawyer we know as M^e Susane (no given name), is based, with side trips to nearby La Réole, where she grew up. Your 2005 book Self-Portrait in Green (reissued this year in a hardback edition with Jordan Stump’s translation by Two Lines Press) also is set in this area “eternally under the threat from the floodwaters of the Garonne.” Is this a region of France you know well? Have you lived there?

MN: Yes, that’s the part of France I know best: I lived there for about ten years before I left for Berlin. When I set my characters in motion I need a very precise image of the roads, the streets they’re moving through, even if I don’t necessarily describe them. That’s why I have never, I think, made any character live in a place I haven’t seen.

JC: Your opening is enticing and mysterious. A new client “timidly, almost fearfully” enters M^e Susane’s office on January 5, 2019, to request her services on behalf of his wife Marlyne, who is accused of murdering their children. We follow your narrator’s thoughts intimately as she realizes she may have met this man, Gilles Principaux, thirty-two years before in the Caudéran neighborhood of Bordeaux, when she was ten and her mother took her along on a job: “he was the teenager she’d fallen in love with for all time, long ago…” The question Who is Gilles Principaux to me? drives your plot. Did you begin with this opening? Or did it emerge as you worked on the novel?

MN: I never start writing a novel without having long reflected on an image that, for one reason or another, fascinates me. In this case the image was this: a woman—I don’t yet know who she is or what she does in her office—sees a man come in, and him too I don’t yet know who he is or why he’s come to see her, and she’s so shocked that she feels like she’s been struck right in the face. That was the image that made me want to write this novel, like a mystery I had to explore.

JC: M ^e Susane, her mother and her father have radically different memories of the incident in Caudéran. This conflict in what they recall leads to a rift in the family. It’s as if the unreliability of memory is a character in the novel. Is that what you intended?

MN: M ^e Susane is fighting off her father’s determination to make her a victim—he’s convinced that in that house she suffered something unnamable (he certainly doesn’t give it a name!). She doesn’t want to be the victim of anything or anyone. And even if it happened the way her father thinks, she’d rather be on the side of her enchanted memories than on the side of the truth.

JC: M^e Susane’s housekeeper Sharon, is an undocumented mother of two from Mauritius on whose behalf she is working to get legal papers. You portray vividly the lawyer’s inner turmoil at their relationship, her sense that Sharon pities her and doesn’t appreciate all the efforts she is making on her behalf (and Sharon certainly doesn’t signal that she is superior and admirable, which is what she feels entitled to). Sharon’s role in her daily life grows, yet there is no true connection between them, which makes her feel even more isolated. How can we understand what binds these two strong women whose roles and class place them so far apart?

MN: M^e Susane’s problem with Sharon is that she feels guilty. She doesn’t know how to be a boss. She mixes up friendship and a work relationship. She wants desperately for Sharon to like her, but Sharon isn’t interested in anything like that. And so M ^e Susane feels a sort of resentment, because it seems to her that she’s doing a lot to help her housemaid, which is true. But you can’t demand love in exchange for the help you give someone.

JC: Rudy, a former law firm colleague and boyfriend, calls on M^e Susane to arrange babysitting for his young daughter Lila, a process that grows increasingly complicated. Is Lila a doppelganger for the younger M^e Susane when she first met Gilles Principaux?

MN: Ah, I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s interesting!

JC: Given the range of characters in this novel, how did you decide on the narrative point of view?

MN: I wanted the narrative never to leave the point of view of M ^e Susane, as strange as that might make it sometimes. I wanted the reader to be literally a prisoner of Me Susane’s mind.

JC: M^e Susane’s client, Marlyne, refuses to see her husband (although she does speak at length to her lawyer in a breathless ten-page section). Gilles Principaux rants at M^e Susane mercilessly, at one point without noticing she is bleeding from an injury, offering her a first-hand experience of his self-involvement. M^e Susane’s sense of horror builds as she begins to understand Marlyne as if from within her stultifying marriage. How is she to know who is the guilty one?

MN: I think she listens to Marlyne’s and Gilles’ respective accounts without really judging either one of them. That was another thing I wanted as I wrote this book: they both have a right to their own interpretation of the facts, their own account of their lives. But the fact remains, it was Marlyne who killed, not Gilles.

JC: How does the translation process with Jordan Stump, the translator of this novel and others (That Time of Year, Self-Portrait in Green)—and this interview—work?

MN: Jordan always asks me a few questions about the text, and from those questions I can see he’s an extraordinary translator: they always show a pertinence, a subtlety, and perceptiveness that fill me with joy and gratitude. Thanks be to translators! Without them how would I have access to literature from all over the world?

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Vengeance Is Mine by Marie Ndiaye, translated by Jordan Stump, is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

A meta-narrator has an authorial awareness of a story being told. They make their presence known, intervening when they deem necessary. In the case that they are also the protagonist (which is often) then they must be as adept as immersing themselves in the real-time story unfolding up close as they are in commenting on it from on high.

I have a fascination with these sorts of narrators for as long as I have had stories told to me (which is always). When it came time to approach the task of writing my own novel, Pay As You Go, I knew that I wanted such a narrator at its helm. Slide is as much a participant in the novel’s unpredictable events as he is an intrepid reteller, and is the best companion I could have asked for along the many pages.

To discover him, I first had to do some reflection myself on just how such meta-narrators work, or the differences in their positioning. Here are the results of those reflections.

Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco

Can storytelling save us? As far as our souls are concerned, sure. But what of actual, existential survival—as a defense against death or erasure? One of our great examples is that of Scheherazade, spinning tales for one thousand and one nights just to stave off a sultan’s cruel judgment. More recently, there’s Chamoiseau’s Texaco, a masterpiece of Caribbean literature.

The novel opens with a modernizing urban planner who is struck by a stone the moment he arrives at the eponymous Martinican slum. Residents are rightly suspicious that he has been sent by some government council to consider the eradication of their shanties.

Unconscious, he is taken unconscious to Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the community’s wisest resident and, of course, our meta-narrator, who recognizes the urgency of relaying the town’s (and townspeople’s) saga, so that the urban planner can see its underlying worth beyond the appearance of some stitched together shacks. What follows is multi-generational saga spanning from the last days of slavery, through decolonization, to the rise of the post-colonial city and the founding of the shantytown Texaco itself.

To make matters more meta, there’s also a stand-in for the author nicknamed Oiseau de Cham, who’s tasked himself with compiling this history through interviews with a now-older Marie-Sophie. Further, the novel is interspersed with excerpts from the urban planner’s notebooks, letters from Oiseau de Cham to Marie-Sophie, pages from Marie-Sophie’s diary and so on. In less deft hands, the whole thing would be unwieldy. Luckily, Chamoiseau and his team of narrators are nothing short of masters.

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (trans. Ann Goldstein)

The first book of Ferrante’s four-volume saga begins with the protagonist receiving a phone call. She is old, tried, and soon also annoyed by the content of the call, which is from the son of her erstwhile best friend, and has to do with that friend’s final disappearance. She hangs up, abruptly but reenergized, for the time has finally come to put into words what she has spent her entire life—spanning an impoverished childhood in Naples to bourgeois comforts in Rome—trying to say. “We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I turned on the computer and began to write.”

Thus our story is framed as the final battle after a long contest of wills. Proceeding in mostly chronological fashion from age eight onwards, Ferrante’s novel nonetheless keeps us keenly aware of the older, wiser hand at the helm of proceedings, whose impetus for record-keeping (or setting) permeates the novel. Along the way we become so richly immersed in the characters’ girlhood happenings that we forget the meta-narrator at work, until she interjects to clarify that she may not be remembering something perfectly, or to confess she has skipped over details.

It’s an enjoyable pantomime of weakness that is one of the meta-narrator’s primary indulgences. Nothing would be lost in omitting these interruptions and keeping the story moving along: What difference does a “mis-remembering” make in a fictional story? These self-deprecating interjections on the part of the narrator, like those of an exquisite host apologizing to dinner guests that the soufflé will be a few more minutes, in fact serve mostly to remind us exactly who is running the show—lest we end up forgetting amongst so many delights.

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Saleem Sinai has a problem: he’s falling apart. Not, as he clarifies, metaphorically, but by literal disintegration. In his role as narrator, his time left to tell his tale is dwindling, and the urgency of said telling becomes all the greater for it. It is why Midnight’s Children opens with a conflicted sense of both urgency and reticence, of a narrator who fears he may not get through all that he has to talk about.

Sinai is also another active chronicler, often stepping back from the world of the story to show himself at work at his typewriter under the care of companion and audience stand-in Padma. From here he is free to pontificate, summarize, foreshadow, or bemoan the extent of the labor still left before him. It’s all performance, and begs the question of why he should take the time for detours if there is so much to tell?

But Rushdie couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate guide through the hyperbolic world of newly independent India. In a book that takes on no less a subject than History as its central concern, part of the point of the story is to see it being made.

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Hamid set out to write a story with the rhythm of a conversation, that could be read in a single sitting as if having an extended chat. So said so done: in this his first novel we assume the role of interlocutor, addressed directly by a loquacious narrator who tells us his life story. We see him pass from a fresh-faced immigrant to the US, full of bright prospects, to a disillusioned outsider in the aftermath of 9/11 anti-Arab sentiment.

For all the heavy baggage, our narrator seems unflappably upbeat whenever we return to the present moment with him. It is not without intent, and in the novel’s culminating moments Hamid uses his set up to push the story one step further. It seems we were not so innocent in our role as conversation partner after all.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

The true mysteries are those without an answer. Others are mere ploys to lure an audience further along. The question of whodunit, once satisfied, does not encourage us to return again and again to a text, for the author’s primary technique of enticing us though the pages by withholding vital information can be deployed only once before depleting in value. Conversely, questions of whydunit are concerned not with some concealed detail of plot, but rather the unfathomable nature of human desires and intentions, the ones that cause us to love, to cheat, to save and to destroy, which remain infinitely compelling through their essential inscrutability. 

As the title suggests, we learn who is to die and by whose hands in the opening sentences, and by the end of the first chapter the deed is done. This is how our meta-narrator frees himself of the mundane concerns of victim and culprit to head onto the mystery that has been haunting him and the townspeople for all the years since: How did everyone let something so avoidable like this happen? There is no satisfactory answer, and the story makes use of its narrator’s reporter-like gaze to revisit the moment, its buildup and aftermath from every possible angle.

What emerges is a tapestry of jilted love, machismo gone awry, a community’s complicity, and the clockwork indifference of fate. Here the storytelling is as self-aware as it is beautiful, and our meta-narrator a necessary cipher through which we are allowed to continually revisit these questions without answers.

Ian McEwan, Atonement

A meta-narrator should never be a mere stylistic quirk; their use should be integral to the story being told. Ian McEwan’s Atonement is a case in point, a novel that would be bereft of its emotional import without its choice in narratorial approach. Reader, here be spoilers.

The book proceeds in seemingly third-person fashion, up to and beyond the story’s major inciting incident: that of a young girl, Briony, mistakenly accusing their estate’s groundsman, Robbie, of sexually assaulting her older sister Cecilia. The consequences are ruinous. We follow the fallout over years of war, estrangement, and heartache, until at the end Cecilia and Robbie finally reunite and see what is left of their unrequited love.

Except this never happens. In actuality, the young Robbie perished in the war, his name still wrongfully sullied, without a chance at redemption. The account we have just read to the contrary has been one of earnest mythmaking on the part of our heretofore hidden narrator: an older Briony.

Haunted by the guilt of her girlhood lie and the damage it caused, she has spent the time since reliving that moment, and rewriting its consequences. It is the fabricated story itself that is the atonement, her attempt to repair through fiction what was rendered irreparable in “real” life.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (trans. Michael Henry Heim)

“It would be senseless,” declares this narrator, “for the author to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived.” Indeed, our narrator here is so meta in relation to the book’s characters—so “above,” to take the words Greek root literally—that we have the sense that he  watches proceedings unfold from some divine height. It’s for the best, especially since Kundera is less concerned here with the minutiae of daily experience that is the purview of realism, than he is with the lessons of the sublime made accessible by so lofty a vantage.

We as readers become attuned to the novel’s strange rhythm where the action may be interrupted for an extended musing (in fact, the book opens with two chapters of philosophical reflections before a character is even introduced), or a revisiting of earlier moments in order to re-examine through a new lens. The ambitions of the narrator extend beyond the bounds of simple storytelling and into, as the quote above shows, that of authorship, thinning the divide from Kundera himself.

This peek behind the curtain is in some ways the real show. Kundera’s true power lies in the audacity of emphasizing the wind-up doll nature of his characters, and imbuing them with such a sense of pathos and humanity that we care all the same.

Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events

Reader beware! If you have any other means by which to spend your time, then you should certainly do so instead of reading these books! They are simply too horrible! The story they contain too disastrous, without happy endings!

In similar manner are we warned by our narrator to take every exit available to us instead of continuing to read these episodes. As with any good trick of reverse psychology, it instead has the opposite effect of intriguing us all the more. Snicket is himself a kind of alter ego of the author Daniel Hadler, and assumes his role of both “author” and storyteller with the dire, morbid air of an Edgar Allen Poe creation. He adopts a grandiose pantomime of regret and weariness, forever apologizing to the reader when yet another unpleasant episode must befall the Baudelaire orphans, no matter the ingenious solutions they come up with.

By creating Snicket, Hadler allows his role of author to be assumed by this meta-narrator, freeing himself to be a passenger in this rollicking ride alongside us. All responsibilities are left to Snicket alone, whose shadowy past is slowly revealed to us as the series continues.

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Pay As You Go by Eskor David Johnson is available via McSweeney’s.

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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To celebrate the release of her new story collection Roman Stories, we’re flashing back to when Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri joined us in 2021. In vivid, writerly detail Lahiri describes being raised in a family “spread out in various places” , her late mother’s recurring presence in her writing, the comfort (and pain) of being an observer, and the vibrancy she found in Rome, which inspired her novel Whereabouts. On the back-half of our talk, Jhumpa reflects on the metamorphosis that occurred in her mother’s final days, how her familial ties (from Calcutta to Rhode Island) informed her early stories, and, finally, an exhortation on why she writes.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: I get the sense that the driving force of so much of your writing is a desire to feel untethered.

Jhumpa Lahiri: That’s the ideal state for the writer. It’s to be able to write from purely one’s own perspective, and not feel that one needs to tell other people’s stories. Maybe one wants to tell other people’s stories, but how much of it is a want, and how much of it is a sense of obligation? Even if the obligation is coming from within yourself.

To come back to this earlier question about my parents at the center of four of my books, I think it is critical to move to the point where I don’t feel that I have to speak for other people. Part of what drove me to write those early stories was that impulse that I had, as a child as well, to be able to speak for my parents— to defend them, to protect them, to explain them in a world in which they weren’t being completely understood or respected or heard. I had access to both realities, so I was constantly going back and forth, and understanding, and reading; reading the ways they were being read. I was both their child and their protector. When I started to write, it was the first time I felt that I had an instrument, a voice, a perception, a way of protecting them and explaining them, through my stories largely about them and about their experiences.

SF: But it generated a kind of expectation, that obligation you’re talking about.

JL: Not from them particularly, but I think once you begin to write about, say—Bengali immigrants—then there’s that, “Oh, aren’t you going to write more stories about that?” That is what happened. I think that can become problematic because one writes to be free. One writes to feel free. We’re actually not free, but writing is a form of freedom. It’s a way to feel free.

SF: You wrote a beautiful description of why you write in your book In Other Words. Would you be open to reading some of that?

JL:

Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.

If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me—everything that makes me react, in short—I have to put it into words. Writing is my only way of absorbing and organizing life. Otherwise it would terrify me, it would upset me too much.

What passes without being put into words, without being transformed and, in a certain sense, purified by the crucible of writing, has no meaning for me. Only words that endure seem real. They have a power, a value superior to us.

Given that I try to decipher everything through writing, maybe writing in Italian is simply my way of learning the language in a more profound, more stimulating way.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve belonged only to my words. I don’t have a country, a specific culture. If I didn’t write, if I didn’t work with words, I wouldn’t feel that I’m present on the earth.

What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing. Just as a word can have many dimensions, many nuances, great complexity, so, too, can a person, a life. Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor. Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable.

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Jhumpa Lahiri, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies and is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent non-fiction book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

Before I became a journalist, I was an academic cultural theorist. If you want to construct a scholarly argument, you cite other people. In journalism, it’s basically the same. But whatever academics or journalists claim, no matter how many times we do it, no matter how committed we are to sticking to the facts, absolute certainty does not exist.

When I was transitioning out of teaching at Yale en route to my current vocation, I took a brief detour through a journalism graduate program. There was this one professor we used to call “Sarge,” who was always blathering on about how the number-one rule of journalism was that you had to “get everything on record.” As my classmates scribbled away in their notebooks, I interrupted him. “What does that mean—get it on record?”

Sarge was flummoxed. “It means pull out your goddamn notebook, McCabe, and write down everything the subject says. That way when they say later that they never said it, you can pull out that notebook and say, ‘Yes, you did!’ When they threaten to sue you, you can pull out that notebook and say, ‘Go ahead, make my day!'”

Everyone nodded and laughed, scooping up Sarge’s pearls of wisdom. “But who’s to say they didn’t just make up what they told you? Or that you didn’t just make it up or distort what they said when you wrote it down?” I asked. “Then you get other people to talk to you,” Sarge replied, clearly exasperated, “and get them on the goddamn record, too!”

Everything in my lived experience up to that moment led me to reject this position as stubbornly naive, or absurd, the idea that THE TRUTH can be established through the steady accumulation of testimony, transcribed by a disinterested hand acting as judge and jury. Anyone who’s ever done an interview knows it isn’t a witness statement, and a memoir is even less so. Famous or not, people say the things they think other people want to hear and revise or hold back what they don’t. Contradictions and omissions aren’t simply a consequence of dissemblance or forgetting.

They’re the residue of feelings, not entirely erased, only obscured. Those who can “read” this half-hidden ink aren’t superhuman empaths who conceal their identities behind a mild-mannered facade to serve the noble cause of truth and justice. They’re just better at understanding that the truth appears as much in what’s not said as in what is, and in how it’s said, and when and where, and to whom, and why. Tuning your ear is totally different than sharpening your pencil. It starts with being in touch with yourself and being willing to risk exposing your own vulnerability to see or hear what someone else is trying to tell you.

This may be especially true for musicians, music journalists, and ardent music fans—all of us searchers. Thankfully for us, the celestial jukebox is a limitless lost and found. Think about your favorite songs, especially the sad ones, and why they resonate for you so strongly. It’s not necessarily the specific circumstances being described in the lyrics or the precise way the notes are arranged on the staff. Instead, it’s in the imaginary conversation you’re having with the artist, and how it helps you to connect in some way with your own experience.

That experience often indexes something you’ve lost, whether consciously or not. Songs can help us bring it back, recollect it, make sense of it, or at least learn how to live with its absence. Even though memory is never identical to the thing that’s been lost, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to remember. It means we should try harder. As time goes by, we may find ourselves further removed from one kind of truth (what it was) but edging ever closer to another (what it means).

Going into my interview with Sinéad O’Connor, I knew it wasn’t going to be as easy as the interviews I’ve done before with artists such as Laurie Anderson, John Cale, or Thurston Moore—all big names and big talents, but not people I personally related to on the same level, not people whose music has made me weep so much or so deeply. I knew that O’Connor’s story wouldn’t be easy for me to tell, but that’s why it felt especially important for me to try.

Although my profile would be built on my interview with O’Connor, to bring context to her story I also interviewed feminist punk icon Kathleen Hanna and music critic Jessica Hopper. When I started putting all of the tape together, I assumed that the hardest part was going to be packing everything I wanted to cover into five minutes of airtime.

Changing the narrative about O’Connor proved far more difficult. The main point of contention was over using tape from her 1992 SNL appearance. Rather than leading with it, or bringing it in at all, I wanted the show host to refer to it only briefly in their introduction—something along the lines of:

“Sinéad O’Connor rose to the top of the charts with an unforgettable song [Clip of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’]. Two years later a controversial appearance on Saturday Night Live dimmed the limelight. But O’Connor is out now with a new memoir, and she says that moment re-railed—rather than derailed—her career.” Allyson McCabe has the story.

Then, rather than reminding the audience that O’Connor was canceled, I wanted to show how and why she was canceled. That meant bringing in tape from Joe Pesci’s appearance on SNL the week after hers. Pesci goes after O’Connor aggressively in his three-plus minute monologue, at first referring to what happened fairly neutrally, as “an incident.” He then tells the audience he thought tearing up the photo was wrong, and explains that he asked someone to paste it back together. He holds up the reassembled photo and the audience applauds wildly. “Case closed,” Pesci says. But it wasn’t.

Pesci went on to implicitly blame Tim Robbins, who had hosted the episode, for “the incident,” for letting O’Connor get away with it. Then he remarked that she was lucky, “because if it was my show, I would have gave her such a smack.” Pesci held his hand to demonstrate the smack, and, again, the crowd broke out in applause—accompanied by cheers. Pesci took it in, smiling from ear to ear. “I would have grabbed her by her…by her….”

This is where I wanted to abruptly cut the tape. The word Pesci says next is “eyebrows,” a crack about O’Connor being bald, but of course the audience would hear the cut and think what he said was “pussy,” and think of Donald Trump. And that is exactly what I wanted them to think.

My point wasn’t that Pesci = Trump. I know that Pesci was reciting lines he probably didn’t write and expressing wiseguy viewpoints he may or may not have actually felt. (Pesci’s wiseguy character Vincent LaGuardia Gambini from the 1992 comedy film My Cousin Vinny was reprised in 1998, when he put out an album called Vincent LaGuardia Gambini Sings Just for You. It includes “Wise Guy,” a misogynistic gangsta rap song in which Pesci brags, in character, about how to treat “bitches.”)

What I wanted to show with my tape cut was that Pesci’s lines landed because the audience felt them. The point was not that he was a misogynist. It was that the audience, and by extension the larger culture, was misogynist.

In using that tape cut, I hoped to pose an implicit question: To what extent did misogyny mediate the way we saw O’Connor in 1992? And to what extent is it still woven—consciously and unconsciously—into our cultural scaffolding? This isn’t just a matter of perspective, male versus female. As a journalist, I’ve worked with men who acknowledge misogyny as a problem, and women who don’t. When it seeps into reporting it’s rarely overt—which is what makes it so powerful, and so hard to fight.

In this case, my editor (at that time) was a middle-aged cisgender heterosexual white man who would certainly identify himself as feminist. Nevertheless, he used words and phrases like “too suggestive” and “overkill” to urge me to dial Pesci down and bring more of O’Connor’s “incident” in for “balance.” Which one of us was right?

On the one hand, journalists are supposed to be neutral: just the facts, ma’am. That’s what we’re taught and how we’re trained. But deciding what tape to use and where to cut it are intentional choices with powerful ramifications. They deeply influence how we frame a story and give it context and meaning—and how you as the public see and hear it.

Therefore, our clash was more than a trivial difference of opinion. It was, on the contrary, a fundamental though unspoken disagreement. My editor wanted to include O’Connor’s performance to remind listeners about the controversy that she invited or even provoked. I wanted to include Pesci’s monologue to show how O’Connor was reprimanded and why.

Better, I think, for journalists to be transparent about these positions and to own them, rather than to pretend that one is objective and the other is biased. But deadlines are deadlines, especially in daily news, so rather than argue, I agreed to include brief clips from both tapes for “balance.”

However, I pushed for a new title, so it was “Sinéad O’Connor Has a New Memoir…and No Regrets” rather than the one the editor had floated, in which she “proclaimed” that she has no regrets. I also landed on the point that what O’Connor won’t do is apologize for surviving—which was far more suggestive than anything I would have been able to show with the tape cut.

In the end, I think my title reflected the main point of the story, but it wasn’t the whole story. Even if I had five years instead of five minutes, it would have been impossible to present a comprehensive biography. O’Connor explicitly denounced several unauthorized attempts in the early 1990s. (There are a couple of pre-SNL Sinéad O’Connor biographies floating around, such as Jimmy Guterman’s Sinéad: Her Life and Music [New York: Warner Books, 1991] and Dermott Hayes’s Sinéad O’Connor: So Different [London: Omnibus Press, 1991]). In 2012, she pulled out of a biography project that she had officially sanctioned after only six months.

Even in her own 2021 memoir, O’Connor acknowledged that there are significant challenges in telling her own story, namely, that her recollections are riddled with inconsistencies, gaps in her memory that she attributes to not being present for large chunks of her life. She says other memories are private, or concern matters she would prefer to forget. In the foreword, she tells readers that she hopes her book will nevertheless make sense. If not, she advises us to “try singing it and see if that helps.”

I want to take that advice and honor it, to accept the inevitable gaps and inconsistencies, the difficulty of getting it right, and the impossibility of pure neutrality. I therefore plan not simply to recite O’Connor’s story, but to “sing” it bel canto, which, as she explains in her memoir, has nothing to do with mastering scales, breathing, or any other formal technique. Instead, it’s about singing in your own voice, allowing your emotions to take you to the notes, and allowing the notes to take you to the truest expression of the song.

Such an approach entails not only close reading but telling O’Connor’s story intimately, feeling the feelings myself, and letting the notes that are inside of me spill out onto the page from time to time, a bit like Fiona Apple’s duet with O’Connor in the “Mandinka” YouTube video. My goal, simultaneously easier and more difficult than conventional biography, is to illustrate why O’Connor matters, and to ground that assessment in the circumstances of her life and work and in mine.

As you read, I invite you to hold up a lighter, or a mirror, and sing along with us too, all of us piercing through the darkness together…journeying toward the kind of catharsis that only music can bring. Where better for us to begin than at the beginning?

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Excerpted from Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters, by Allyson McCabe, © 2023, published with permission from the University of Texas Press

For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today?

Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known.

How do we humans experience nature? And how might we experience nature differently from one another? In this episode, Jacke talks to writer, film producer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and educator Erin Sharkey about a new book of essays she edited, A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, in which “a constellation of luminary writers reflect on the significance of nature in their lived experience and on the role of nature in the lives of Black folks in the United States.” PLUS Jacke continues his journey through the poetry of Emily Dickinson with a look at Poem 232 (“He forgot – and I – remembered -“).

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