This week on The Maris Review, Justin Torres joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Blackouts, out now from FSG.

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

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman: I want to start out by asking for your guidance for how to talk about this book, starting with the idea that someone is telling us the story. Are we calling this person the narrator? Is it you? Does it matter?

Justin Torres: It is a bit of a puzzle of a book and one of the things that it’s drawing attention to is this blurring of fact and fiction. And what goes into writing about history in fiction, and in a fictional way, and how it’s drawing attention to a certain kind of artificiality. And I think that it also clearly points towards me. I mean, I think it’s not, it’s not like a question that surprises me that you would ask. It is fiction. It is fiction.

MK: But it contains your piece about buying a leather jacket for a dog in The New Yorker.

JT: Yeah, exactly.

MK: And that’s nonfiction, so.

JT: Yeah, exactly. There is an explicit kind of pulling in of nonfictional things that I’ve written and also fictional things that I’ve written. And then there’s these endnotes at the end that further seem to kind of muddy those waters about what exactly this is. But, yeah, I think that with my first book, there was so much attention on my own biography and the way that it overlaps with the novel, and I think I wasn’t really prepared for that. I was green, I’d never had a book in the world, I didn’t know what it was going to be like. And this time I knew that that was going to happen, and I was like, well, let me have some fun with it.

Let me hope that people ask, well, does it matter? Right? I’m glad that that was the last question you asked. Does it matter?

MK: It seems like one of the things that we’re told over and over in this book is that ambiguity is okay. We have to learn even as readers to be okay with what we don’t know, because we don’t know if we don’t know it because it was never written down, or because the author simply didn’t want to tell us, or doesn’t know themself.

JT: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think that that is kind of like Keats’s idea of negative capability. Where it’s like, you’re able to sit in this place of ambiguity, and you’re not trying to like, desperately reach for some kind of decisive conclusion either way. And I think that this whole idea of blacking out and, and having incomplete pictures. It’s a book about looking at the past and especially looking at the queer past and looking at histories that were never meant to be recorded. And what you find is there are a lot of gaps and how do you, how do you sit with those gaps and not rush it?

MK: So the narrator of the novel is presented with this book, Sex Variants, which of course I googled right away and found for $45 on AbeBooks. (I wonder if that will change next week when your novel comes out.) But the copy in the novel is blacked out. In many ways it felt like it could be blackout poetry, but it also could be a FOIA request about Donald Trump.

JT: Yeah. I was really interested in this idea of redaction, a kind of erasure that is frustrating but there’s also creative potential for blacking out as well. You can make poems out of these kind of documents. And that was my experience of reading the original Sexperience book, which my book is a lot about. This study happened in the 1930s of all these queer people, and it was a very kind of pathological study. They’re thinking about how to cure this social disease.

But that’s not how the study started. It actually started by this woman. And so there’s this overlay of the pathological language on these first person testimonies. I was like, how do I engage with all the things that are happening in this book, all the different kinds of agendas and voices? One of those ways was to just start to black out the text itself. Blackout is a kind of productive, protective act versus just a redaction or erasure or something.

MK: And it kind of creates this counter narrative.

JT: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there’s this third narrative, because I didn’t feel like I could recuperate the original intention of somebody like Jan Gay, the lesbian activist who started this. Like, I didn’t feel like I could get there. I didn’t want to just let the kind of damaging medical early sexology language sit by itself. And so there’s this third thing that very much points towards an intervention of some kind.

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MK: There are two things that we should know about the DSM for the sake of this book, which Juan calls the biblia loca, which feels just about right. I think I knew that, until very recently, homosexuality was a condition that you could find in there. But what I didn’t know is that there was a thing called Puerto Rican Syndrome.

JT: I know, it’s wild. It’s absolutely wild. I mean, I didn’t know this either until very recently. A friend of mine, a colleague at UCLA, recommended that I read this book called The Puerto Rican Syndrome, and yeah, yikes! It’s by this woman who’s a Lacanian psychoanalyst and she does this amazing job of thinking her way through where did this diagnosis come from.How can you come up with this diagnosis, and what its relationship to colonialism is. I highly recommend reading that book.

And for the purposes of my novel, I was really interested in studies of deviance and how much of identity formation comes out of a reaction to stigma. And I think that it’s something that oftentimes, people just want positive stories and they want to reclaim history. They want to be proud and they want to amplify what is ennobled and dignifying about their culture.

And that’s great. And look, we need to do that. Like, absolutely. But I’m also really interested in stigma and shame. And this book is really interested in stigma and shame and how we’re seen and perceived by the majority culture. And so, Puerto Rican Syndrome is fascinating.

It’s absolutely fascinating. And it’s a lot like hysteria.  Like, this idea that women somehow have this mental illness that is related to their anatomy, their physiology. That there could be something about Puerto Ricans themselves that’s inherently symptomatic.

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Recommended Reading:

Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada • Greenland by David Santos Donaldson • Speech Team by Tim Murphy

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Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Tin House, and The Washington Post. He lives in Los Angeles and is an associate professor of English at UCLA. His new novel, Blackouts, has made the shortlist for the National Book Award for Fiction.

This week on The Maris Review, Safiya Sinclair joins Maris Kreizman to discuss How to Say Babylon, out now from 37Ink.

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

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman:  I’m going to start with me being the perfect kind of American idiot who has seen many college dorms with many a Bob Marley poster on them. And so I was really surprised in reading your memoir, I’m gonna quote you to you, by the 90s you say, the Rastafari, though still shunned and outcast by their own people, became the living mascots and main cultural export of Jamaican tourism.

That seems like a really lonely place to be.

Safiya Sinclair: Yes, it was. I kind of knew when I was thinking about writing the book, I’d already been to college in the US and had been asked all of the questions that you could imagine somebody from being asked. And I realized just how misunderstood Rastafari culture and history was, globally, even though it holds this large space in sort of the global imagination, right?

But in Jamaica, most people don’t know that the Rastafari are historically a persecuted minority. That most Rastafari were, from the beginning of the movement in the early 1930s, kicked out of their homes. They were shunned by their families, they were targeted by the government, by the police, we even had a prime minister in the 60s that sent the army after Rastafari and said, bring me all Rastas dead and alive.

The historical persecution of Rastafari in Jamaica continued this way when my siblings and I were born. We were the only Rasta children in school. We were among the first Rastafari children to even integrate public schools in Jamaica. Rastafari children were not allowed before then.

And so wherever we went, we were an oddity, even in Jamaica. I even had Jamaican friends who don’t know much of anything about the Rastafari movement. And so growing up we were like the only ones at school, the only ones at the beach, the only Rasta children wherever we went. So this made for a very unique upbringing and one that people might not have realized that that’s what it would be like growing up Rastafari in Jamaica. And so that was the root of where I began with the book.

MK: Yeah, and another thing you write a bit later in the book, which is something that you articulated later in your life, but giving the background of how your family grew up, you say every Rastaman was the godhead in his household. And so, your father made the rules. He was the authority.

SS: He was the authority. Yeah, he was the grand authority, which I think is probably another surprising thing for most people when they think about Rastafari. I think they only know one representation of it. I think when most people think of Rastafari, they think of the men, they probably think of one particular man. Most people don’t really know what a Rasta woman’s life is like, or a young girl who’s growing up in Rastafari. The fact that there is no sort of scripture or written book or guidebook of tenets that is uniform across all Rasta brethren, or, Rasta families.

And most of the time it really is just the head of the household, the Rasta man, the father figure who kind of divines: what is good? What’s bad? Who is holy? Who is heathen? My father held this large space in our household and in our family’s lives. He was bigger than the sun and took up as much of that room and decided when the sun shone on you and when it did not.

He was a disciplinarian and authoritarian, and he adhered to one of the stricter sects of Rastafari which dictated what we ate,  who we talked to, how my sisters and my mother and I dressed. There were lots of rules for women in particular, which is not a big surprise when you think about a lot of religions and a lot of particularly fundamental branches of religions.

And so Rastafari was no different. It was interesting for the women who were mostly on scene and not really  given consideration and to hold space in the Rastafari movement. So,, yeah, the women, my sisters and I, we had to cover our arms and our knees. The idea was that we were supposed to be pure and humble and obedient and that we had to express that outwardly by throwing off any trappings of vanity or Babylon, which is the Rastafari’s term for anything they believe is of the wicked Western world. Anything that’s corrupt or immoral or potentially bad, they call Babylon.

MK: It’s so interesting to me that this obsession with purity is fundamentally the same across almost every religion you can possibly imagine. And to think about how the British ruled Jamaica until the 60s, and so most of the country is Christian. And still, reproductive rights are very limited there, to say the least. And there is a culture of victim blaming. It seems like a difficult place to be a young woman.

SS: it was. It was because when you’re told that your silence is the highest virtue a woman could have, being pliant and not having any opinions and also that this idea that my body was more susceptible to corruption because it was quote unquote unclean. Because women menstruate, there’s a lot of Rasta brethren who believe that makes them unclean. There’s even a sect that has their women sequester themselves on their periods and cannot touch anything in the kitchen because they’re believed to be unclean.

And so, from an early age, hearing this idea of unclean and having these ideas of something being different about my body in a way that was wrong, that was also outside of my control, obsessed me for a long time. It marked the way that I thought about myself and wanting to be pure, wanting to be clean for my father. Not knowing of course that it was already a fixed immorality because of my womanhood. I was always someone who was questioning everything so this voicelessness was a struggle for me pretty early on.

And then when I started to grow older and I saw the roads diverging between me and my brother. You know, when I turned nine years old, my father was like, okay, you’ll never wear pants again. Suddenly all these rules were kind of shifting and my brother and I were so close and I was like, wait, wait, wait, hold on. Why is this happening? I just began to question all of that.

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Recommended Reading:

The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey • Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

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Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.

This week on The Maris Review, C Pam Zhang joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Land of Milk and Honey, out now from Riverhead.

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

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from the episode:

Maris Kriezman: You have written such a sensual novel, starting with all of the descriptions of food. I’m wondering if you could tell me about writing a novel in which food is a metaphor for many things, but also food is food.

C Pam Zhang: Yeah, I love that question because food occupies this very interesting place in our lives where one, it is a necessity in order to live, but two, increasingly, it is also seen as an art form. And I do believe it is an art form, and I think that seeing the roles that food occupies on different tables and different contexts tells us a whole lot about the values of the people who are in that situation. It’s funny because, yes, the food absolutely acts as a metaphor in this novel, especially as this chef goes to cook for this colony of the uber wealthy who have values that she doesn’t necessarily align with. But at the same time, it also is something that makes us animals, you know, and I loved playing with that duality.

MK: Absolutely. I was mostly reminded of The Wizard of Oz, when you take the chef from a place of black and white and gray, and then suddenly she’s in technicolor.

CPZ: Wait, I just have to stop and say what an incredible reference that is. There was an early version of this book where I had dreams of having images that are dividers between the sections in the novel, and I had dreams of having them go from black and white to color. Obviously, that wasn’t possible with printing.

MK: So maybe give us a little background on the grayness, where your senses are dulled because of something that seemingly could happen at any moment to us in real life.

CPZ: Yeah, so, in the world of the novel, there is a smog of unknown origins that has cloaked the Earth and killed off the majority of food crops. So, most people are eating this soy, mung, protein, algal, flour replacement, and only the very, very, very wealthy have sunlight and fresh food. So that’s what happens in the book and for me, it came from a place of similar bleakness.

I wrote this novel at the very beginning of 2021. We were in deep pandemic, and it was a time when I felt fundamentally disconnected from my body. There were so many big issues to be putting our energy into, you know, the political situation, pandemic relief, the murder of George Floyd. And I became impatient with the fact of having a body that had all these desires and wants. They felt frivolous, right?

And I really beat myself up for wanting to go out and eat a nice meal with a friend, wanting to go to a bar, wanting to travel. So the bleakness of the world was compounded by this enforced bleakness and stringency that I was having myself live under, and so the culinary background of the novel was really born out of one of my first meals out again after we were vaccinated. And eating with people I cared about and seeing how the food really brought them back to themselves. It was this light bulb moment that made me think, like, if I want that for the people I care about, don’t I want that for myself? Don’t I, in fact, want that for most everybody?

MK: Absolutely. When you describe the soy mung, it kind of reminded me of Soylent. Not the “it’s people.” But the kind of meal that a tech bro, for the most part, would have instead of running out to grab an actual bite to eat for lunch.

CPZ: Yeah, I have tried Soylent back in my days of living amongst tech bros. This world in which, like, if your ultimate goal is kind of efficiency, and you see your body and your brain as a machine, where does that lead you? Why do we want to become machines?

MK: Yeah, and even some further background into the unnamed chef’s circumstances before the smog descended sounds a little familiar to what I’m hearing today: that there’s a generation of people who were promised many different things for their futures, and then that has not come to bear out.

CPZ: Yeah, so the chef is American, and she starts out the book stranded in Europe because the massive famine and crop failures in America have caused the country to close its borders and to actually begin to question, again, who is American. Who is allowed back in? There’s a whole list. And so there’s a question at the heart of the novel about what does it mean to have faith in a nation, in a constructed identity, in any kind of identity, which certainly is a thing I think that many people living right now are contending with.

MK: Absolutely. The way you describe the super wealthy is also familiar in many ways, that there seems to be now more than ever, now more than in the Gilded Age, this desire by the ultra wealthy to hoard: to hoard resources, to hoard money, to really make it kind of a zero sum game.

CPZ: Yeah, and I think what’s also happening today is there’s this fascinating obsession that the non uber wealthy, the majority of us, actually have for these tactics, right? I think of things like Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture, absolutely a capitalist venture. This random fantasy of this man who has too much money to throw around, and people talk about it as if it is scientific innovation that’s going to bring this all forward. When literally he’s like, I’m gonna sell tickets to go to Mars if I go to Mars.

But there’s, there’s something that’s in the air right now where, I don’t know, there’s a kind of obsession, with the uber wealthy, and maybe it’s just… obsession with the sort of scope of their imaginations about the future. You know what I mean?

MK: Yeah. It’s funny to hear both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos talk about space exploration as if what they’re doing is noble is an exploration rather than a capitalist venture at heart.

CPZ: Yeah, and I think the public goes along with it because we’re just sunk so deep into this culture of capitalism and efficiency said in the same sentence as humanist progress, that it can be hard to disentangle.

MK: Absolutely. Especially when I feel like during the pandemic we saw that the richest people in the world got even richer, and of course the people who needed to work for their daily paycheck, struggled more than ever. And I guess it’s probably hard not to envy, at least.

CPZ: You know, another interesting trend that I noticed during the pandemic was in my life, and this is now anecdotal, but a lot of the people who were not super wealthy and who had a lot of responsibilities to juggle were also the people who kept pushing themselves to give more, to give back to their community, to check in on everyone, to kind of just worry on an individual level about the fate of the world: the nation, the elections, the planet, the environment. That was a fascinating contrast that also kind of drew me into this book because I, as much as those big causes are important, I also wanted my friends and loved ones to have space for individual pleasure and for them to think of it as not only good for themselves but in a weird way as good for the communities in which they were a part of. I was so tired of seeing my friends burn out, because after you burn out how can you give back to anybody else?

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Recommended Reading:

The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher • All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews • Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

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C Pam Zhang is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of a whole bunch of prizes and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a New York Public Library Cullman Fellow. Her new novel is called Land of Milk and Honey.

This week on The Maris Review, Maris Kreizman talks to Aparna Nancherla about her new memoir, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Imposter Syndrome, out now from Viking.

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

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman: Tell me about writing this book as a chronic procrastinator.

Aparna Nancherla: Yeah. Like many maybe procrastinators and many perfectionists, I sort of had this idea in my head of what it looked like to write the book, and then was so very wrong and inaccurate of what actually writing anything is like. I think I really had to meet myself in the middle in terms of being like, okay, you’re gonna write from, like, 11pm to 12am today, and you’re gonna maybe get three good paragraphs, and that’s gonna have to be okay.

So it’s a lot of trying to be nicer to myself. You’re not necessarily going to be the person who’s like, I’m at the writing center for seven hours, five days a week. Because I think my attention span tends to ebb and flow. And a lot of it is around anxiety, where it’s like, I’ll sit down and write, and then I’ll just start to feel really uncomfortable or self critical. And then I’ll just have to switch to something else. And that doesn’t feel like writing, but I think for me, it’s just as important to do the writing as it is to step away from it.

MK: That is very comforting. And another concept that I took away from that essay that I will put in my own Google Doc so I can quote you someday, is that I haven’t considered how perfectionists really are set up to procrastinate because everything is kind of perfect until you actually start the process of writing.

AN: Totally. I don’t know if this is a philosophy thing I learned a long time ago, but it was maybe Plato, but it’s there’s like a golden ideal or like an example of the perfect chair, like all the ideas of the chair are just trying to approach this one perfect chair.

And I think for me there is this golden thing I create that’s just perfect and unimpeachable and flawless and I’m just forever trying to reach it and nothing ever quite comes close. It’s just so disappointing to never come close to it so I kind of self sabotage because I realize that once I start I’ll just be reminded of how imperfect my actual work is.

MK: And accepting that is a lifelong process.

AN: I think I also was like, I’ll write a book about self doubt and it will fix my perfectionism. But no, you’re just going to be especially disappointed in your book about self doubt.

MK: I was really struck by how you talk about racial diversity in comedy and how we’re still at the point right now where if you’re diverse at all, you then have to be everything to everyone. You have to be the spokesperson. And how similar that is to talking about mental illness. it seems like, and I’m, I am guilty of this, we have an expectation of what a depressed person or an anxious person will look like. Tell me about that a little.

AN: I think it is really interesting that I’ll even have that thing where I’ll have sort of the petty human thought at a show where it’s like, I used to talk about depression and anxiety on stage and I might be the only person who talked about that night. And now I feel like every comedian I see is sort of like, “I struggle with anxiety and I…”

MK: You started a trend.

AN: I don’t know if I was responsible, because there were definitely people talking about mental health before I was, but I do feel like since then it’s become even more common. And in my head I’ll just be like, oh no, like, what is my thing now? That was supposed to be my thing, and now it’s everyone’s thing, and…

Even in my own head I’ll sometimes flatten myself into what’s my hook? Like what makes me stand out from everyone else? And forgetting that I am like a three dimensional human and not just reduced to these three qualifications of like,  brown person, soft spoken, mental illness, yeah, it’s hard when you’re in kind of this world that’s so driven by being a marketplace that you need to be like, what are my selling points or something?

I continually wrestle with that in my own self. I think making sense of myself as an artist where I have to remember sometimes it’s what you’re saying, it’s not just the package that you’re saying it with.

MK: Yeah, and you even talk about the disconnect between when you were doing material on anxiety and depression, how there was a disconnect between what you were saying to the audience and what you’re presenting and what was actually going on inside your head.

AN: Yeah, because I think anytime you make more personal stuff or more vulnerable stuff into work that’s then commodified, it just changes your relationship to it. And obviously, that sort of more polished, presentational, edited form of it is never going to be the same as the actual experience or how you reckon with it as a person in your day to day.

So I think trying to make those line up for me never quite worked. It always felt like a little bit of a deception, being like, yeah, I struggle with these things. So sometimes people would ask me, how do you write about it? Like, I just struggle and I can’t really make sense of it.

And I think for me, it is a little bit of a compartmentalization or even just a separation of this is anxiety and depression ()  in the work. And then there’s the actual experience, which is a lot messier and not at all presentational. Like if anything, it’s probably why I canceled my spot.

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MK: You’re also inspiring because you have stopped basically checking social media.

AN: Oh my gosh. Yeah.

MK: The Swifties came for you. I had forgotten that.

AN: I’m sure they’ve come for other people, but one afternoon of being mildly targeted by Swifties was more than my fragile ego could take.

MK: And so, aside from who’s paying attention to you, this is when you turn it around a bit and you start thinking about what you choose to pay attention to. I think I’m looking for a magic bullet here, but have your thought processes changed outside of the world of groupthink?

AN: Yeah. I mean, I have friends who are like, do you feel so much better? Like, are you just happier? And I wouldn’t say it’s cured me at all. But I will say it’s created space that I think I didn’t even realize I was missing when I was just on the platforms all the time. Just maybe being able to decide things for myself or really have perspective on what is important to me. Because I feel like when you have so many other people’s voices in your head all the time, you kind of lose sight of whose voice matters, or of your own voice. I think some people are good at keeping social media in its lane and being like, this is a fun thing.

I check sometimes, but for me, I just couldn’t handle that, that big a cacophony of other people’s opinions. Because I think I have been so driven by a life of seeing what everyone else is doing to make sure I’m aligned correctly. And with social media, you’re getting so many conflicting ideas of how to be or what’s good, what’s bad. It kind of left me unable to do anything in terms of making a decision or knowing how to be.

MK: I feel like social media is the worst place to try to get involved in gray areas, or to be unsure about just about anything.

AP: But my life is like one big gray area. Like that’s where I live, I’m changing my mind on things like in the same hour. So I felt like I don’t think I can survive here for long without being completely confused.

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Recommended Reading:

Users by Colin Winnette • They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us by Prachi Gupta • Saving Time by Jenny O’Dell

__________________________________

Aparna Nancherla is an LA-based comedian whose stand-up has been seen on late-night TV, HBO, Netflix, Comedy Central, and the occasional meme. Aparna also wrote for and appeared on Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, and has contributed multiple op-eds to The New York Times.

This week on The Maris Review, Kristi Coulter joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career, out now from MCD/FSG.

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

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman: Tell me a little bit about Amazon in 2006, because I feel like in 2023, I’ve spent so much time understanding the negatives…

Kristi Coulter: Yeah. And there are many.

MK: Especially in the world of book publishing.  But tell me about what it was like in 2006.

KC: Yeah, it’s, it’s funny looking back. I came to Amazon from a company of about 200 people, so Amazon seemed overwhelmingly vast to me, but it was parts of three buildings in downtown Seattle. I want to say it was maybe like 5, 000 people, so it seemed huge, but it was small enough that people would say, Oh, you know, Ted and recommendations.

And you’d be like, Oh yeah, Ted, I know him. It was basically just a retail company. It was already the most famous e-retailer on earth. But there was no Kindle. There was no web services. There was no A-Pub.

MK: All this stuff that would come later that would make it more than a place to shop did not exist or was in secret.

KC: Yeah, I certainly didn’t know about it. And we had offices in I think three or four other countries, but they were small. I mean, it was like a mom and pop shop compared to what it is now. When I arrived for my interview, the way I knew I was at Amazon is there was a piece of printer paper with Amazon printed on it, taped to the door. I mean, that was the lobby sign. And I was like, wow. Because even then I would have expected, you know, something a little more professional.

MK: I also didn’t realize that having no perks was such a big identity for early Amazon.

KC: And current Amazon, really. I mean, the offices are much nicer now, the public spaces anyway, but it’s basically a perk-free workplace. I overheard a few years ago, a guy… at a coffee shop who was giving a pep talk to his startup employee and he said, you know, it’s not Amazon. I can’t give you a gym and free haircuts and free food and daycare. And I was just like, Oh my God, where does he think it’s not Google? Like none of that, none of that exists at Amazon.

MK: And in fact, I was surprised to learn how so much red tape at Amazon prevented things from moving quickly, physically and otherwise.

KC: Absolutely. When I first worked there Jeff Wilke, who was the senior VP at the time, I remember him saying this: there’s going to come a time when we can’t turn the ship around quickly, and right now we still can. But we’re going to get to that point. And I was like, Oh, whatever, because we moved so fast. And I definitely saw it happen. Within my tenure there the ship just didn’t move fast anymore. There are times that’s good because you don’t always want to be making breakneck decisions, but yeah, lots of red tape as it grew up.

And I don’t know how you avoid that. I don’t think you can stay that agile and be. The largest company in the world, I mean, and it’s just inevitable, I think, but it’s kind of sad.

MK: I have read all the articles, you talk about a piece that Jodi Kantor wrote about Amazon in 2015. But it still feels like so many of the inner workings and methodologies of Amazon are meant to be top secret.

KC: It’s not a company that really talks to the public. I think Amazon’s been forced to start talking to the public in the last few years a lot more than it ever was before because the news has been so bad, just so bad. And they’ve not, in my opinion, done that very well. Like, I have caught them lying in public.

There was an article about stack-ranking employees where you have to put X number into your bottom bucket and get rid of them. And they said we have never stack-ranked employees. I mean, I was in meetings where we stack ranked employees at least three or four times.

So I said, maybe you don’t do it now and that’s great, but to lie and say you didn’t do it, there are tens of thousands of people who were there in those meetings. So it’s very strange. And I think the other reason that a lot of Amazon’s inner workings are secret is that Amazon is chaos. And this is something I really wanted to get across in the book. Nobody knows what you’re doing. And it’s a bunch of smart people kind of running around like chickens with their heads cut off, putting on a show in the barn.

And so I think a lot of the inner workings are just like, Oh God, oh, we have to do this. We just had a new goal handed down. Well, let’s figure it out. And so there are some systems of course, but there’s just a lot of like, no one panicked, and let’s figure this out. And so it’s hard to convey that outwardly. People think it’s an army.

MK: And one of the things that I feel like the lifeboat meetings get at, which is a big theme, in your memoir is the way that Amazon values data above all else, but also every data point is a human being in those buckets.

KC: Yeah, absolutely. The data points at the lifeboat meetings where we had to say who’s the worst. It was always fascinating because the way that we would talk about those human beings was always quite respectful. It was never just like, well, screw that guy, get him out of here. You could tell that everyone in the room was like, no one felt good about this. Aside from the odd sociopath here and there, there was the sense that these people, if they were the weakest, had to go. And some of these people were still really good. That was the painful part, that you couldn’t just be really solid. And a company needs a bench, you need people who aren’t trying to become CEO, who just want to be good at their jobs and then go home.

And there was a sense at Amazon that that was not okay, that you had to be striving and wanting to really grow. And every year you needed to get that much better. And at some point I remember thinking, we’re all going to get managed out at some point. If the hiring bar is that you’re supposed to hire people who are better than half the people you already know at the company, and the bar gets higher every year, then everyone who works here is going to end up in that bottom bucket.

I think It was chilling to realize that. I think Amazon is now seeing the limits of that because they’re kind of running out… well, they’re literally running out of warehouse employees. This has been publicly reported that they’re worried about it. And anecdotally, I know so many smart, brilliant people who just won’t even take the phone call because they don’t want to be in that kind of environment.

So I think they’re, they’re hitting the limits of seeing people as disposable batteries. And it will be interesting to see if they could change their approach.

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Recommended Reading:

Speech Team by Tim Murphy • Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin • The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard • Superior Women by Alice Adams

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Kristi Coulter is the author of Nothing Good Can Come from This, which was a finalist for the 2019 Washington State Book Award. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, was a Ragdale Foundation resident, and has taught writing at the University of Washington and Hugo House. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, New York magazine, Elle, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

This week on The Maris Review, John Manuel Arias joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Where There Was Fire, out now from Flatiron Books.

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

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from the episode:

John Manuel Arias: It’s true. I did live with my grandmother and I did live with four ghosts and I knew who they are and they were quite annoying.

Maris Kreizman: What were they like? What were they doing?

JMA: Well, they’re scary. I’ve had friends visit my grandmother’s house and it’s kinda like a force field. They get to the threshold and they go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, something’s going on here. And I’m like, no, it’s fine. You just sort of see the shadows in the – you know how old people have those convex television screens, and so you can see the entire room? – and so you’ll see the shadow sort of fly by, and then I’ve woken up and the covers on my bed have been taken off and folded on the floor and just really fun. They’re not mishaps, but they’re just minor inconveniences, which I think is what the dead do. Because they’re probably really bored. I think, what would I do if I was a ghost? I would probably inconvenience the living.

MK: I love that. In Where There Was Fire, the dead are often around. They come back and chat with the living all the time because of course if you’re bored, you wanna catch up with people.

JMA: Yeah, definitely.

MK: And so I don’t want listeners to get the wrong idea. This is not a horror novel, but it is a ghost story. Fair?

JMA: Very fair. Absolutely. I guess what sets it apart? I just taught a magical realism workshop with The Shipment Agency and it’s a craft. So it’s the way that you use ghosts, right? What are they meant to do in the story and how can they achieve that?

MK: I was gonna ask you about something that happens later in the book, and I think I’ll give it away right now. It’s not, it’s not a spoiler, I promise, but when Gabriel is in Costa Rica, he sees a woman doling out outlines from the Bible. And of course, her Bible is not the Bible. It’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

JMA: Well, that woman is me. I do walk around saying the first lines from One Hundred Years of Solitude and just talking about it. It is a cultural landmark in Latin America. It’s the one that started the boom. It put Latin America on the map on a global scale, and it just spoke to everyone who read it. I mean, my uncle has read it, I think, 10 times, in English and in Spanish. I actually really like the English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the very classic one that’s been around for the last 50 years.

But One Hundred Years of Solitude is just, Garcia Marquez sat down and he showed what could be done with time, what could be done with the porous nature of what it is to be between the living and the dead. How they just come in, they hop out, and you’re just gonna hang out with them because that is just the way that it is.

So not only did Garcia Marquez write this big saga that contains elements of the magical on just about every page. So we’re going into Where There Is Fire and it’s a big story, like we see a family tree on the first page and there aren’t that many people. And yet this story keeps kind of expanding and, and the ripples of the plot kind of grow wider as we go.

MK: So I wanted to ask you a really practical question about plotting. You have a lot of characters and storylines to keep track of. Tell me how you did that.

JMA: So there are a few answers to that. And shout out to Nadxi, my editor, who very much helped. Nadxi understood, because I believe Nadxi has an MFA in poetry. And so that’s my first answer, that I am a poet, as some of you may know. And I am an associative poet, which means that my poetry doesn’t have a clear narrative. What I do is I jump from association to association in order to ground the reader in the narrative.

What I do with the book is I choose big, recognizable associations. So for example, a very hot night. It’s easy to go back and forth, right? You choose a hurricane, it’s easy to go back and forth  in order to situate the reader in time because I don’t believe in linear time, both philosophically and culturally. I don’t believe that Latin America follows linear time. I think it’s a very restricting and incorrect view of the world and art and the way that fiction works, especially American fiction.

So relieving myself of the tethers of linear time allowed me to approach it in a completely different way. Because I believe that we experience time all at the same moment. So in this present moment, we are time traveling through the past with our memories and we are fast forwarding into the future with our hopes and dreams or our different lives and different selves are living those as well.

And so that’s what I put my characters through. I guess you could say that all of these things are happening concurrently. And some people might be a little bit hesitant to read that way, but sometimes it’s great to just go along with the ride.

MK: Absolutely, and I think especially for the reader, it then becomes a question of, what are we privy to when. Which chunks of time are revealed to us? Because for so much of the book, we know that there were two very tragic nights in the lives of these characters. And we know that they happened, but we don’t know the circumstances and why. And that seems like a rough thing to create a mystery around.

JMA: Yeah, I mean, it is the way that people tell stories. I learned a lot about storytelling from my grandmother, and Angie Cruz said it at her release for How Not To Drown in a Glass of Water, that when you are a person just telling a story, you have to excite the person in front of you. You have to tell it in a great way that’s going to keep them going with this narrative.

But when have you ever heard a person tell a narrative completely in chronological order? And also without having tangents? It doesn’t happen. That’s just not the way that people tell stories. So reading a novel like that would be a little bit restricting, but structuring it was very particular.

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Recommended Reading:

Sea Change by Gina Chung • Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva 

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John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican American poet and writer. He is a Canto Mundo fellow & alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn, New York, and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts. Where There Was Fire is his debut novel.

This week on The Maris Review, Myriam Gurba joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Creep, out now from Avid Reader Press.

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

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from the episode:

Myriam Gurba: [Mean] took me several years to write. It’s difficult for me to determine how many years because it’s difficult for me to determine what the actual starting point was. It began as a series of experiments and I didn’t intend for those experiments to be published. I intended for them to remain these private experiments that were for the sake of bettering myself as a writer.

When Mean did publish I had a lot of difficulty doing press for it because I had escaped from domestic violence and I was a bit timid and very guarded about some of the statements that I made when I was doing press. And one of the questions that I was often asked, and sometimes it wasn’t necessarily even presented as a question, it was presented more as a comment with the suggestion that it might be a question, that comment was, “gee, it must have been incredibly cathartic for you to have written a memoir in which you confront sexual violence that occurred when you were an adolescent and in your late teens.”

Writing Mean and detailing those experiences was not cathartic at all. I was surviving gender-based violence while writing about gender-based violence. And so instead of that manuscript or the process of creating that manuscript, being somehow like a cathartic process, it was a lifesaving process because the manuscript gave me a place to hide from my abuser. It was one of the few places he couldn’t enter into, he couldn’t chase me into the manuscript. He could not abuse me through the manuscript, and so it was a haven, but it wasn’t a location of catharsis. What I want for people to understand is that unless a reader or a critic or an audience understands the specific conditions under which a person is creating a work of art, in particular, a female artist, don’t assume that its creation was cathartic because we don’t know what that person is surviving in the moment.

Maris Kreizman: And this entire book is a very good reminder of that. I don’t often like to ask about book design, but the cover image and title are so striking. Partly in that, like the word “creep” is above your beautiful face with your grandmother’s eyes. And the word “creep” means so many different things in this book, but on the cover, it really implicates you too. Tell me about that.

MG: We had conversations about that word appearing in or around my face, and how I would become an implicated subject as a result of that proximity. Because part of the book’s project is to implicate everybody, and to both diagram in overt ways, but also suggest how it is that we all come to function as creeps, especially through systemic channels.

If we are in some way connected to a creepy institution, then we’re going to be coerced into doing its dirty work at some point in time. And so the book is an invitation for all of us to engage in personal inventory and to engage in accountability. That said, I am enamored of titles that are monosyllabic and crisp.

That’s why I like the title Mean. That’s why I like the title Creep. I really like these rich sort of consonant clusters because it’s really enjoyable to have them all together in your mouth. And “creep” is one of those words that’s incredibly multifaceted. For some of us, it is firmly entrenched in our imagination as a noun, for others, it’s firmly entrenched in our imagination as a verb. For some of us, it toggles back and forth as both. And so I’m really inviting readers to look at the dynamism of language through a word, through a simple word like “creep.”

MK: And another visceral word that you use in the collection is “Slime.” I think we’re almost exactly the same age, so there was this show called “You Can’t Do That on Television.” And it was a big practical joke that if someone said “I don’t know,” a big bucket of slime would pour on them, quite a metaphor there for constant vigilance. “Slime” so beautifully captures the idea of humor as being both something that we really need desperately and then also a great excuse for someone to do something terrible and say it was just a joke. Tell me about that.

MG: “Slime” is an essay about the seriousness of humor and essays about humor or analysis of humor are notoriously unfunny. And so I open the essay by disabusing the reader of any notion that they’re gonna be sliding into a humorous essay. This is an analytical essay, this is an autopsy of a clown, so to speak.

That’s how I enter into that analysis, and that essay was inspired by several dilemmas. One was as follows: I have had some critics and reviewers express that they are very bothered by the intersection of humor and horror that appears in my writing, especially my writing about sexual violence. That is shot through with comedy. So that has made some folks incredibly uncomfortable. And so I wanted to explore what the origins of that discomfort are. I wanted to go directly to that crossroads. I wanted to invite people to go to that crossroads with me and to think through that problem.

What I also wanted to do was invite readers to consider another problem, which is this: So often when misogynists engage in humor and make misogynist jokes, there’s this knee jerk reaction to say, what he just said is not a joke because I don’t find it funny. And so we’re gonna re-categorize misogynist humor and we’re gonna rebrand it as Other. I think that that’s a mistake.

I think what is funny to a misogynist is not gonna be funny to a feminist or a womanist, but that doesn’t exclude it from the category of humor. And what I argue in the essay is that humor isn’t necessarily a phenomenon that we can evaluate according to whether or not it elicits laughter. What it does is it restructures social space. And so if somebody’s joke has achieved that, then that person has engaged in humor and we really, really ought to pay attention to how it is that misogynists are attempting to restructure social space through language. Because what ensues then is a material restructuring of social space that, again, is going to fuck women.

MK: Speaking of that, I love your invocation of Chantal V. Johnson’s Post-Traumatic, which I think is such a masterful intersection of those two things in fiction.

MG: That novel is one of the few novels that goes hard. That goes really hard when it comes to how incredibly grotesque various forms of abuse are, in particular child sexual abuse. But that also invokes the sovereignty of the victim when it comes to her humor and her comedy and her use of medicine. When it comes to healing.

MK: The fact that more survivor stories don’t have humor is sometimes shocking to me.

MG: Yes, absolutely. I see the absence of it as part of… we all develop our habits, and storytellers develop habits too. And so I do think that there is a habit that exists in the current United States where when a survivor is invited to disclose a story of having survived sexual assault, we’re expected to narrate almost according to like these reverential and sacral tones. The class clown isn’t supposed to share her story of sexual violence, you know what I mean? And so I am inviting class clowns to share that.

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Recommended Reading:

The Other Slavery by Andrés Reséndez • Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko

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Myriam Gurba is a writer and artist. She is the author of the true-crime memoir Mean, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. O, the Oprah Magazine, ranked Mean as one of the best LGBTQ books of all time. She lives in Long Beach, California, and her new essay collection is called CREEP: Accusations and Confessions.

This week on The Maris Review, Hilary Leichter joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Terrace Story, out now from Ecco.

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

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman: I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how time works (or doesn’t work!)  in the novel, both for the characters and then for you as the writer of this story.

Hilary Leichter: Yeah, I’m a huge nerd when it comes to time in books. I teach a class on it. Because of teaching it, I think it’s come to frame much of the way that I experience books that I read and things that I write as well. So it was very important to me, but it also became quickly apparent that in a book about space that appears and disappears at will, and a world that’s expanding and contracting, time would have to be kind of wobbly around that space as well. They go hand in hand, right? And so I was thinking about that. I was thinking about how to use time to indicate the shifting parameters of the world that these characters live in.

In terms of how time works for me as a writer… I don’t know. I think it’s so mysterious with this book. I could say that there are things in these pages that echo emotional experiences that I’ve had, and I could do that thing of saying like I did at the start of this conversation, you know, I was living in a small apartment and that’s what happened, and that’s where the book came from.

And on a certain level that’s true. But there are also things that I wrote in this book that then happened to me after writing it. It was like I spoke them into existence. I mean, I don’t have a typewriter where I click a key and predict the future. I don’t have that going on, but I think there’s a way in which books don’t move forward in time. They reverberate. The biggest evidence of that to me is that they’re in conversation with books that you’ve never read, both because you’ve read the authors who have read those authors who have read other authors, and then people have read you that you don’t know about, and it’s like this circular continuum.

And so if you’re really tapped in a book can be inspired by something that hasn’t happened yet.

MK: You are doing a very good job of talking obliquely about this. And I love that the characters themselves can acknowledge that if they’re recalling something, they’re maybe not sure if the thing they’re recalling happened in one specific day or if it was over time. And that seems like something about memory that we all experience, and yet it feels so not right to acknowledge it.

HL: I know. But it’s the way that I experience things. Is it the way that you experience things?

MK: Oh, of course. I mean this, listening to your character say that made me in an interview be able to say, I actually don’t know when this happened.

HL: Oh, good. Good. It’s, isn’t it? Ugh. It’s a relief to say. You don’t know or you don’t remember, or that you’re not sure because, I don’t know about you, but that’s kind of how I feel a lot of the time. I’m not sure, and I think what’s shocking to me is that reading works the same way. I was just talking about this with someone, but I never had to reread books until I became a teacher. Then you’re rereading the books that you teach all the time and you’re reading students’ stories multiple times and you become this kind of keeper of a palimpsest of a book.

I’m never not astonished by how little I remember about not just any books, but my favorite books, and even after a third reading, there are moments that have eluded me and I can’t believe I’ve missed them. Of course, I haven’t. They’ve just left somehow, and I think life is the same way. I really believe that.

MK: And that’s so interesting to me because I really did feel like so many of the different parts of the novel echo each other. And a really close reading pays off very much, especially by the end.

HL: Oh, that’s so good to hear. Because of the nature of the structure and the fact that it kind of folds back on itself and it has this double helix shape, I wanted it to be amenable to a second read, and a third and a fourth. I wanted there to be new things that could be discovered only on a second read, and not just because a reader like me has forgotten the whole book, which is totally fine too. But I wanted it to welcome rereads that felt like a different way of thinking about fiction. And it’s risky too, right? Because it means that maybe you can’t have everything the first time around. But that feels emotionally true to me too about life.

MK: And as a reader, it kind of flatters me to know that you trust me enough to be able to go back and  piece all of these things together. It’s almost like solving a little mystery,

HL: Or, or not go back, you know? That’s okay too. I like the idea that it’s not mine anymore, you know? Go back, don’t go back. Read it out of order. That might be confusing, but, okay. And it’s not mine to read. It’s yours to read. It makes the world of the book larger for whatever experience you choose to have with it.

But I’m really interested in fiction that requires something of me. I think there are so many ways to receive narratives now, and they’re all different and they’re all great, and we have just this abundance of art at our fingertips, but it means that novels have to make a claim for why they should be here.

And I’m interested in a novel that, like you said, believes in me enough to allow me to be an active participant in the world of the book. And when that happens, I think that a book not only becomes a book that I’ve read, but it becomes an event that I’ve experienced in my life and I can think about books that I feel that way about.

I feel like Jane Eyre was maybe the first book I read where I felt that way. It was for summer reading in high school and I stayed up all night reading it for homework and then I just immediately started reading it again after I was done. Again, I haven’t read Jane Eyre in a long time. A lot of the details are lost in the midst of my brain. But I remember sitting in my bed with Jane, with Mr. Rochester. They were there. It was a moment that was a part of my life. It was sandwiched between the school year and camp. It’s something that I lived through and I want that feeling when I read a book.

I’m sometimes ashamed by how little I remember of the books I claim to love the most. But I guess if you can just remember the feeling you had, that can be enough.

MK: I think the feeling is the main thing.

HL: I mean, there are no people in books. There are no places, there are no events. There’s just words. And so they’re all letters and spaces and punctuation clustering in groups to create a feeling. And so there is nothing else but that at the end of the day.

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Recommended Reading:

 The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken • Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks

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Hilary Leichter is the author of Temporary, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her new novel is called Terrace Story.

This week on The Maris Review, Jenn Shapland joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Thin Skin, out now from Pantheon.

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

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from the episode:

MK: Tell me about the city of Santa Fe as a backdrop for this collection.

JS: I moved here seven years ago with Chelsea from Austin after graduate school. And you know, Austin had really changed in the time we both lived there dramatically. And a lot of cities are going through that same change, where kind of the tech industry comes in and everything is transformed and sort of overrun, and suddenly the city is completely different.

We wanted to live in a place where there was less of a chance of that happening. And we wanted to live in a place that was a little bit smaller, a little bit quieter. Santa Fe is all those things. It is really unique and strange and kind of a bubble unto itself, but in terms of a place where,  if you’re trying to pursue creative practice or creative work, it’s really conducive to that. No one’s really asking what do you do for a living? Everyone’s kind of interested in what you’re working on. Or they’re just really deep into their hobbies. I was at my friend’s house picking peaches this morning and they have like a little hobby farm. It’s like that kind of a place, which I really appreciate.

And so, as a backdrop for the book, it did become important. I describe it as a woo paradise at one point because certainly there are many different forms of healers who’ve flocked to Santa Fe and Santa Fe has a long history as a place where people come to be healed. I wrote an essay that’s not in the book, but that was about the history of the tuberculosis sanatoriums here, and how Santa Fe came to be understood as this place of retreat or a place for artists and writers to kind of escape.

There are problems with that narrative, too. There are ways in which that narrative is often about white people moving in. It’s often a colonial narrative. It really can discount the perspectives of the native people, the Pueblo people who’ve been here for centuries, of the Hispanic people who’ve been here for centuries. So it’s a place with a really complicated and living history. That’s a negotiation that I find to be happening in real time all the time. I appreciate that, too. That there are these conversations that are kind of ongoing within the city and among these different groups.

Whereas, you know, where I grew up, for example, Chicago, is one of the most segregated cities in the country, and it’s not something that in my suburb was discussed. It was a reality we lived within, but it wasn’t something we talked about. I hear people talk about it, which I appreciate.

MK: I really identified with that aspect of growing up in suburbia and watching the evening news and feeling so much fear. It took me years of living in a city to realize that that might have been manufactured.

JS: Right, right. “Strangers on a Train” is really my reckoning with some of the lingering aspects of that fear. The sense that when I take the trash out at night, why am I like watching over my shoulder and a little worried like, what is that? Where does that come from? And I really do feel like it comes from those very early memories of being made to feel vulnerable and fragile. And that was something that was coming through the news, like you mentioned, the evening news. And then it was also coming from my parents and it was coming from the rest of the community.

This idea that, no one’s saying this part out loud, but that as a white girl, I needed to be protected and I needed to not be exposed to certain realities. And that was what the whole town, the whole suburb existed to protect, uh, in this way. And then that kind of just lingers. And if you don’t find a way to examine it, question it, and reckon with it, it could really shape your behavior. Even as an adult, right? And so, yeah, as I sort of started moving through the world as an adult, specifically trying to travel on my own and camp on my own, suddenly coming up against, okay, what is this fear? I can’t stop fear, fear’s a very fast moving emotion in our brain, but, I can at least pause and say, what is that? And is that real? Do I need to believe that? And then, you know, progress from there.

MK: It does feel broader, like we were, basically, or I was, at least taught not to trust strangers.

JS: Right.

MK: Let’s talk a little bit more about “Too Muchness” before we get to “The Meaning of Life,” which is the name of the essay, not just like a thing we’re gonna talk about. You touch on this so well, but minimalism is so calming and aspirational, and I am saying this from my 800 square foot apartment in Brooklyn where you can see we are not minimalist here. Tell me about putting that together.

JS: Yeah, I mean in the too muchness, I’m writing about excess, so I’m writing about shopping, but I’m also writing about accumulation, like what it feels like to have a bunch of clothes that you can’t wear. All of them that, in my case, were being eaten by moths that represented really old and dormant or no longer useful aspects of my personality or my identity or my gender expression.

What do we do with all this stuff? Well, the flip side of that and something that you really find if you look at any kind of design magazine or website is minimalism, right? Is like an empty white space. And  it struck me, you know, the link there between minimalism between those spaces and whiteness and white supremacy.

So I dig a little bit into Anna Chaves’s work on middle minimalism and specifically minimalism and art. And what some of the artists, for better or worse, were thinking and believing about the way their work at that time could operate in the world. Kind of apart from politics. And this is the 1960s, so it’s a moment when everything is political, and these certain artists who are for the most part, white cis men decided oh, we could make work that stands apart from all that.

And that can be In this blank white space on its own. And, you know, thinking about those spaces, the line that comes to mind is Claudia Rankine and she wrote “At the bone of bone white breathes the fear of seeing.”

So this idea that somehow inherent in whiteness is this desire not to see or not to engage, and you find that very much if you start looking on the internet for people talking about wanting to purge themselves of their stuff. They’re like, I just don’t even wanna see this anymore.

And so that kind of led me to make the connection. Okay, so there’s a guilt here. Maybe there’s white guilt, but there’s also some real material guilt around the stuff that we’ve acquired and how it makes us feel. There’s a desire to just get rid of it that goes beyond creating a minimalist space. It can even lead to wanting to have a bunker and wanting to imagine the end of the world. And the end of the world is kind of like the ultimate minimalist vision. And then you could live on in that empty blank space. And all of that is so deeply connected to complicity, like you were talking about at the beginning, to this belief that we have wrought something terrible and it, it is in some way our responsibility.

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Recommended Reading:

 How To Break Up With Your Phone by Catherine Price • Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom • Festival Days by Jo Ann Beard

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Jenn Shapland‘s first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Lambda Literary Award and the Publishing Triangle Award. Shapland has a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin and she works as an archivist for a visual artist. Her new essay collection is called Thin Skin.

This week on The Maris Review, Edan Lepucki joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Time’s Mouth, out now from Counterpoint.

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

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman: My favorite thing to talk about with time travel is the rules of it. I’m wondering if you could talk about your rules as an author for how time travel works in your novel and how that works from a craft purpose. And then we’ll talk about your character’s rules for how to time travel.

Edan Lepucki: In my novel, characters can time travel back to moments of their own life, and it’s not, so, it’s not a Back to the Future scenario where somebody’s going back in time before they were born to see their parents and all that kind of stuff. They also are not walking through the past and people are like, Hey, what’s up? How you doing? They are sort of like a ghost on the edge of these memories, but they’re not memories. They’re actually happening and the person who can time travel can both be on the edge witnessing it, but also can feel whatever it was that they were feeling in the moment, and they can kind of know what they’re about to do, as it happens.

So it’s much more, another character in the book calls it emotional time travel, which is pretty much what it is. It’s just how it would feel to be in the past because we all wanna go back. I mean, I want to go back in time and what I really long for is the feelings I felt in that time and place that I can’t get back.

MK: Absolutely. One of the big questions that this novel brings up is like, if you could choose, because the time travels, travelers can basically choose which moment to go back to. Do you have a list?

EL: I would just love to go back to college. I think because it was such a formative experience in my life, I made some, like my best friends there. I lost my virginity in college. I learned how to read in college. I learned how to write in college.

So there’s all these things that I would just love to be in those transformative moments again. and with my kids, I would love to hold them again when they were just brand new. Born stage is so fast and then it’s over.

MK: That I’ve been following on Instagram from day one. The other part of this question is something I really enjoyed, that Ursa and Opal, the two characters who are doing the time traveling in this novel, both create rituals around how they travel through time. I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that.

EL: Both characters. It happens the first time when they’re teenagers and it happens accidentally. They’re like, what the fuck’s happening? And then they don’t really feel good afterward. They throw up or they feel queasy, they feel hot. It takes a kind of physical toll on people who enter the membrane.

And so they create these rules as kind of a way to keep themselves safe. So that they don’t do it too often because it can deplete you so badly. And so Ursa, who learns in like the fifties that she can do it, she does it once a month. It starts out that she can only do it once a month because she’s working so much and then later she kind of creates these rules where [she can time travel]  only when the moon is full.

And she gets these acolytes that they call the mamas, all these women, and they do it in this special room off of an addition on this old Victorian mansion in the woods of the Santa Cruz County in Santa Cruz County. It’s called the Eastern Wing and it’s like an ugly, honeycomb shaped building that somebody’s rich husband had created for yoga.

And this was in the fifties, when we really had to be either in India or like really out there to be doing yoga then, so they lock themselves up in this room. And over time there’s more kind of theater around it and she uses it as kind of a controlling device to get these women involved because when you are, I don’t know if you know this Maris, but if you are in contact with someone who is time traveling, you feel really good.

There’s like an offgassing that happens, A positive offgassing.

MK: I love that. I was trying to think if there are any other examples of that in, in literature or otherwise, and, uh, it feels new to me.

EL: Thank you. You know, it’s funny, it wasn’t with all kinds of world building in a speculative or fantasy element sort of. I mean, I feel this book is very realistic because I don’t read a lot of fantasy. I like things to be very grounded in reality. But when I am working on something that’s not totally real you’re laying the tracks of the train for the train as the train is coming down the track or whatever the phrase is. And so there were definitely a lot of like, oh shit, the train’s coming. What should I do? And so that element where it was having this outside effect was definitely in revision,  I needed a reason for the women to wanna hang out with Ursa.

Like why do they wanna do her bidding? And it’s because it feels so good to be around her. And so they need it like a drug. And also I just wanted to feel like this real world consequence of something that seems really nutty. It was pretty fun to write it. I will admit.

MK: She seems like a fun character to write in terms of like, when we first start reading the book, she’s our heroine. She has this weird time travel thing. She goes to California to start over and we are rooting for her. And then…

EL: I know, I just read, I just read a Goodreads review. Not that I’m reading my own Goodreads.

MK: Don’t!

EL: That was like, at first I hated this book because I hated this selfish woman at the beginning. Everything I write, someone’s always like, this is a selfish woman. But she does become a villain, you’re right. But my goal at the beginning was that you liked her. If you didn’t like her, I don’t really care if you like her, that you were interested in her and you were like, where is she gonna go next? And I want her to get better at time travel and be more powerful.

MK: But then things turn, and they turn pretty quickly. The book is 400 pages and you know, you’re still in the double digits when we start to see her  in ways that surprised me because I was used to having a female heroine guide me through, you know? And instead she’s like, I don’t care about your feelings, and I don’t care what the children are doing, and I just don’t care. I have other stuff going on.

EL: Yeah, I pulled one over on you. She originally wasn’t the beginning of the book. She came later, but starting the book with her was so eye-opening to me because before that she had always just been my villain, I didn’t really know her. So it was fun to write and be in San Francisco in the fifties and do the start of a commune. Like that’s just an interesting fictional problem to solve, like, okay, you have to start a commune. How did this begin? But by doing that, I learned about her and I really love her. I mean, I hate the things she does in the book, and I see her as a damaged figure who cannot change, even though she’s faced with these truths of her behavior.

But I care about her deeply because, you know, I saw the things that happened to her. Imagine being someone who was abused as a child, who then ran away to California, didn’t know anyone, and had a time traveling gift. I mean, who knows what you would do. So even though she really frustrates me and I find her reprehensible, I also learn to really love her from that beginning.

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Recommended Reading:

Mobility by Lydia Kiesling • Lonesome Dove and Moving On by Larry McMurtry

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Edan Lepucki is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels California and Woman No. 17, as well as the editor of Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them. Her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Esquire, and The Cut, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles with her family. Her latest novel is called Time’s Mouth, an intergenerational epic involving time travel.