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.

______________________________

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

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?

__________________________________

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.

Wole Soyinka is writer-warrior: at 89, he still has his abundant hair, lanky frame and lavish beard, which give him the look of a charming mad scientist.

Born in 1934 in Abeokuta, in the forested land of the Yoruba region of southwestern Nigeria, he was the first African writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, winning in 1986. He studied in England, founded two theatre companies [in 1960 and 1964], is a professor of comparative literature, was primarily exiled in the U.S., and currently lives between Nigeria and California. His impact on the history of literature is rivaled only by his political activism. Jailed in his homeland in the sixties, he served twenty-two months in solitary confinement out of twenty-seven months of incarceration. His prolific work—over 45 published plays, poems, essays, memoirs, novels—has been translated into dozens of languages.

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is his third novel, and his first in nearly fifty years. Recently released in French by Editions du Seuil, it was originally published in English two years prior by Pantheon Books. Soyinka dedicates the novel to the memory of two of his compatriots and friends, the investigative journalist Dele Giwa, and governor and lawyer Bola Ige. Both were assassinated in their homeland. He recalls his friend Giwa having immediately showed up at Soyinka’s sister’s home where he was staying in Lagos, clutching a bottle of Cognac XO, basically in his pajamas, when the news of his Nobel was announced. Giwa was blown up by a package bomb that was sent to him days after this celebratory reunion. As for Bola Ige, a former attorney-general and lawyer, he was assassinated in 2001 at his home on the eve of his departure for the United States to take up his new job as Africa’s representative on the United Nations international law commission. His wife used to call Soyinka and her husband twins, because of the way they were involved in so many political activities together.

This close circle dedicated to the service of humanity reflects Soyinka’s remarkable life and restless persona. His uncle, Oludotun Ransome-Kuti (musician Fela Kuti’s father) ought to be mentioned here. Soyinka wanted to write his biography and through him write on that first generation of nationalists to which his Kuti belonged. That was to remain an unaccomplished project; his uncle died soon after, Nigeria got its independence in 1960, and he gave up the idea. What happened then? “Well, you know, when you are in prison you have a lot of time on your hands,” he tells me with sly amusement. Deprived of paper and pen by the prison directorate, he found a way to create his own writing material from whatever outlet he could—Soyinka playfully calls himself “Soy-Ink”—and he proceeded to write on cigarette papers, rolls of toilet paper, and in between the lines of a book he had managed to have smuggled in. He envisioned those scraps as the outline of the first chapter of what would have been his uncle’s biography, but they turned out to be the groundwork for his own moving memoir Aké: The Years of Childhood, one of the best books of 1982 according to The New York Times Book Review.

We meet on a Friday, in the hall of his hotel, located on a quiet street by Saint-Germain-des-Près. It’s unusually hot in Paris for the season. He has a lunch appointment he wishes to get to and he says his voice is tired, brushing off any attempt to extend the interview. Wearing a Mao collar shirt and a dark blue sleeveless vest, he has on his right wrist a silver watch and a light tote bag is kept close-by. He momentarily looks for his hat, which he thinks he has left at an event he spoke at the night before, and makes the point that he wants it back.

“What keeps you young, what’s your secret?” I ask, right off the bat, to ease the mood.

“I have no idea,” he sighs. “I should be slowing down, I know, but each time I try to slow down something happens, and I have to get on the trail again. You see, I am deprived of that sense of inner tranquility once I turn my back on a situation. Quite frankly, I think it’s a flaw, because I am depriving myself of something which I know I need profoundly. If I didn’t manage to have some quiet in my mind, I’d have gone crazy years ago, so it’s a question of extracting myself [from the world] whenever I can.”

Soyinka calls this being a closet masochist. “It means depriving oneself of what one feels is pleasurable,” he explains. “You have to battle for your creative space, battle for it! Extract yourself whenever you can and be thankful for it, and just carry on waiting for the next opportunity to gratify your innermost instinct to disappear, and do not sacrifice it. If you can manage to balance the two [the activism and the writing] that’s OK, but if you find that you are being tortured internally then be quiet, just close the shop, run and go.”

His strong sense of social justice caused him a lifetime of pressure and persecution; yet he persevered. “I know it’s unbelievable but I really just prefer my peace of mind; I like to sink myself in a truly tranquil environment, which I find mostly in the forest. But [he raises his voice pronouncing those three letters], but, if between getting out of your house and getting into the forest you encounter something unacceptable on the way then that becomes a problem, and you cannot just enjoy what you really want until you have dealt with what you just saw.”

Puzzled, I query him whether that means he never intended to become a writer engagé. “No! Never!” he replies, without skipping a beat. “I don’t know,” he shrugs. “One shouldn’t expect literature to be committed. It is sufficient that a writer opens up possibilities. The fact is that something is being presented, a different view is presented, that’s what matters. The writer must be honest, if you have a bad temperament—of confrontation, of poking your finger in the eye of power—then by all means do so but if you do not don’t feel useless, don’t feel like you are betraying literature. You are writing, that’s your mission, that’s your métier; exploit it in whatever direction it leads.”

The year is 1986: Wole Soyinka wins the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Elie Wiesel is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What was the promise of the world then and what is its state today? Wars and displacement, corrupted systems and dictators, religious fundamentalism and brutality linger. “Take Gabon for instance [in late August, the army seized power disputing the election results in which Ali Bongo was declared winner; he had been president since 2009 and his father for 41 years before him], one family dynasty in power for fifty years, manipulating elections consistently, it was asking to be toppled, it deserves to be toppled—but—is the military the answer? The military has shown itself to be just as decadent, just as corrupt as the rest. Its claim to be a cleansing broom has been detonated, the only defense they have is to legitimize their terror. They will leave eventually, but look at the setback, it is heartbreaking.”

Soyinka’s art has always found its genesis in the African continent’s myths and mystifications, and in his own life experiences—he has been jailed on two occasions, in 1965 and again from 1967-1969, tortured, condemned to death by dictator Sani Abacha, and forced repeatedly and for long periods into hiding for his own safety. What can literature do in the face of such chaos, injustice, and violence? “Well,” he says in a hoarse voice, “present a model of possibilities, and that is all. Beyond that, nothing. The fact that literature is not helpless is proven by the fact that it attracts power. Those who hold power use it to censor, to harass [writers] so literature is not as helpless or insignificant as some people think.”

We turn to the subject of his incarceration: how does prison change a man? “When I came out, I was very bitter, not bitter about being in prison, I was bitter about the treatment I received, but most importantly of all the statements that were attributed to me which were false. My immediate writing was bitter, then I settled on looking at society and looking at the human condition and creating microworlds which is what all writers do. One of the problems one has as a writer who writes about society is the danger of becoming pessimistic, resentful, and aggressively so.”

The immediate writing he refers to is Madmen and Specialists, a play about the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), considered the writer’s darkest dramatic work. He recounted his years behind bars in 1972’s The Man Died: Prison Notes, which the Nigerian government eventually banned in 1984. His play Death and the King’s Horseman, first performed in 1976, brings Soyinka worldwide acclaim.

Wole Soyinka does not regard himself as a novelist; he refers to his novels as “accidents.” His debut, The Interpreters, was published in 1965, followed by Season of Anomy in 1973. He swears that this one, his third, is his last. “Oh, I am not going that way again! I just know it intuitively. A novel is hard labor. A play is unfinished and on stage it gets finished, so you don’t really mind, because you know that on stage you will have an opportunity to change things here and there. Theater is a dynamic process. A novel is frozen, until maybe a filmmaker is foolish enough to attempt to put it on celluloid.”

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is set in an imaginary Nigeria and examines the unreasonable and unethical contemporary state of affairs there. In the US, it has been received by some as pessimistic, while others, particularly in Europe, have welcomed it as political satire. “Although it’s not for me to decide, some say it’s also a Whodunit, and I say: absolutely, why not? I love detective stories, I used to eat them up in my youth, and I always said, one of these days I will write a detective story.” He laughs. “It wasn’t my intent at the start, but along the writing process it came to me that I could tag on a mystery element.”

Soyinka can create a story out of anything and he can write anywhere, but distance can help. “I had to get out of Nigeria to write [Chronicles]. I had to wait year after year to feel completely detached from the physical environment I was writing about. I wrote some parts of it in Senegal and in Ghana. Then Covid happened, it was touch and go, and the world began to button down. I was in Los Angeles at my son’s wedding; it was the last social event for us as a family, people had come from all over. When I realized that the lockdown was fast approaching I knew I had to go back to Nigeria, which is the only home I consider home. So I said: Listen, I’m getting on that plane, the rest of you, wherever you are locked-down, good luck to you. I couldn’t get back into Lagos directly, I had to go to Ghana and then continue by road, but I made sure I arrived in the nick of time to Abeokuta. And that’s where I finished Chronicles.”

When Soyinka is not keen on something he makes sure the message gets through loud and clear. In 2016, after the election of Donald Trump as the 46th President, he destroyed his U.S. Green Card. That same year, the Nobel committee’s literary laureate was Bob Dylan, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Wole Soyinka’s discontent vibrates the room. “The prize for literature should have never gone that way!” he tells me, his fingers fidgeting in the air. “As a music lover, and a composer myself, I respect music, but there is something called literature, and we don’t have enough prizes as is. If they award this prize to one more musician, I am sending all my musical compositions to the Grammys. I know what I consider literature, and writing lyrics or certain songs, is not literature, it is music! You want to have a Nobel Prize for music, fine, I’ll be there, but don’t say that you are taking a prize away from this discipline and extending it to another!”

On that note, he grows impatient. He has an appointment, which means I have one last question: What has the Nobel meant for his life? “It has changed nothing at all for me. All it has done for me is that since then I have to fight for my anonymity.”

Wole Soyinka leaves not a minute later. It’s sunny out. And his hat is still missing.

In Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, the struggle over Israel and Palestine is told through heart-wrenching story of a tragic accident that killed Abed Salama’s five-year-old son, Milad. The book is granular in its recitation of the daily injustices that make up the lives of the roughly 3.2 million Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and even-handed in detailing the intractable narratives of the region. Hailed for his “severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time), Thrall offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth. Thrall was in conversation with Masha Gessen earlier this month at the Center for Brooklyn History; their conversation is condensed and shared here.

*

Masha Gessen: This book is a staggering achievement. It’s particularly staggering because it’s so short, but it’s such an extraordinary work of history, it’s an extraordinary work of prose, it’s a couple of love stories, it’s a beautiful work of nonfiction that breaks through something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is that when you talk about the occupation, when you talk about Israel/Palestine, you always come up against the question of what the audience knows and who you’re talking to, and I think this makes Israel/Palestine really peculiar in the range of contemporary topics. Pretty much everything else that I’ve had to deal with, you kind of know what people know and what they don’t know if they read the papers, if they watch some television, if they maybe come to book events, if they read books. Yet for people living in the United States, for people living in Israel, the possibilities of not knowing are boundless. This is a book that makes that impossible. And it does it in a genius way, which I’m going to try to get to in this conversation, but really, have to read the book to understand just how brilliantly structured and told it is.

To start with, can you tell me about where you live and how you came to know Abed?

Nathan Thrall: I live about two and a half miles away from Abed in a neighborhood called Musrara, which is just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Abed lives in a town called Anata that has been partially annexed, so part of it is officially part of the sovereign state of Israel as far as Israel is concerned, and part of it is considered the West Bank, the unannexed part of the West Bank. Together with a Palestinian refugee camp called Shuafat, all of it lies within a walled ghetto. It’s surrounded on three sides by a twenty-six-foot-tall concrete wall, and on the fourth side by a different kind of wall that runs down the middle of a segregated road that’s famously known as the “apartheid road.” When the accident happened, I was living in Jerusalem, and I had been driving past this walled ghetto on a weekly basis, sometimes on a daily basis, and not paying it much mind. I think most people are that way. It was very easy to ignore this place that’s part of the city that I live in but with a radically different existence on the other side of that wall.

The way that Abed and I met is that when I started to investigate the accident, a very close family friend told me that one of the parents was a distant relative. She put me in touch with a relative of Abed’s, who put me in touch with Abed, and I found myself in his home.

*

MG: There were several families whose children died in the accident. You chose Abed and his family. There are many characters in the book, but the book, of course, is called A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, and it begins with an extremely close telling of Abed’s story. Why?

NT: When Abed finished the book, he asked me the same question. There are a couple of reasons. One of them is just the connection I had with him. The other is that the ambition of the book was to tell the entire story of Israel/Palestine through this single event, and I could only do that through Abed. He comes from a family that is very prominent in the town of Anata and who himself lived a life of activism in the First Intifada, who experienced imprisonment and torture. He was even forced by the system in which he lives to choose a wife at one point just to keep his freedom of movement and his job, to try and marry somebody who had the right color ID that would allow him to keep his job. So that’s why this is a day in the life of Abed Salama.

MG: What was the process like for you?

NT: A lot of the conversations felt less like interviews and more like therapy. Abed and I cried a lot together. I would come home and relay stories—Abed’s stories but also those of other characters, those of some of his relatives—and tell them to my wife, who would weep as I relayed the stories. It was a very intense process, emotionally, reporting the book. And I felt a tremendous responsibility because of the trust put in me.

MG: How many hours of interviews did you record? How long did this whole process take?

NT: Probably well over a thousand hours. It began in 2019, so we’re four years later.

MG: The writing approach, and I assume this was very much intentional, it’s what we call in the trade the “close third.” You’re always, and sometimes claustrophobically so, in the head space of the person who’s going through their life, and there isn’t a whole lot in quotations, unless we’re actually witnessing dialogue. So it’s written very much in the way a novel is written. You don’t see very much of this approach in non-fiction, although I’m partial to it. What kind of interviewing do you have to do in order to get to that? And what kind of questions do you ask? How do you get to what people smelled and what they saw?

NT: In this particular case I have to say that I don’t think it was any great virtue of mine. It was that many of these people were hungry to speak about something that nobody wanted to talk about around them. There was a cloud of silence in many of these homes around the accident. There were many times where I convened family members, and they said this was the first time they were talking about it since the weeks after the accident had happened. So in a number of cases, it just came pouring out. But it also took tremendous patience and trust and cooperation from people. Like Abed, who had me ask him things like, “what did you smell,” over and over again and come to him with very minor, specific details.

MG: Chapter 11, which describes the actual accident, comes in the middle of the book, which fascinates me as a structural decision. Can you talk about how you figured out the structure of the story?

NT: The structure of this book was the greatest challenge, and one of the reasons it was so challenging is that I was trying to balance two chronologies. The ambition of the book is to tell the whole story of Israel/Palestine; I’m also taking a character like Huda and telling the story of the Nakba. I have to tell the story of the Nakba before I tell things that follow the Nakba. On the other hand, Huda can only enter the picture when Huda actually enters the accident, and all these people came upon the scene of the accident at different times.

So this was a big puzzle. It wound up also meaning a lot of prioritizing and cutting. My temptation as a writer is always to include everything, but in order for the book to work, I really needed to keep tightly focused on the accident and not allow those historical interludes to go on for very long.

MG: We know that there’s an accident from the very beginning of the book, but by the time we get to really understanding how the accident happened, the word “accident” seems totally inappropriate. I’d love to hear you talk about that. Because to me it seems that that’s what the book is about. It’s about how it’s not an accident.

NT: Well, I’m glad that you think that’s what the book is about because that is what the book is about.

I was interviewed recently by an Israeli journalist. In Chapter 11, I mention a character named Salem, who went into the bus. He acted truly selflessly and went repeatedly on his own into this burning bus and rescued dozens of children, and afterward he had a meltdown and was screaming at everyone and anyone in his vicinity—at the emergency service personnel, both Palestinian and Israeli—he screams at them, “You killed these kids. Why didn’t you come?”

The Israeli journalist read that passage back to me and said, “So you’re saying that Israel wanted these kids to die? That Israel tried to kill these kids? That they knew that the bus was burning and they deliberately didn’t come?”

And I said, you’re reading what Salem said to these Israeli soldiers, and that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that the entire set of circumstances that happened on this day were the predictable outcome of an entire apparatus that put a wall around this community; the total neglect of the tens of thousands of people who live in it; a partition of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C not allowing the Palestinian Authority to come onto the road where the accident took place, but at the same time Israel not caring at all about what happens on this road. It’s patrolled by Israeli police but entirely neglected. And in addition, just the very fact that this enclave that Abed and his family live in has this crazy system where some of them have green IDs and some have blue IDs in the same family. The municipality doesn’t provide them with a school, forces the kids to either go through a checkpoint for hours (and the parents are frightened to have their kids interact with soldiers) or go to a dilapidated school in a former goat pen or, as these parents did, to pay to send their kids to school in the technically unannexed part of the West Bank.

So that is the real cause of all of the delayed response and everything else that transpired on that day. That’s what the book slowly unravels.

I just wanted to add one thing. There is an overriding logic driving all of those micro-decisions, which is a very simple logic, which is: to keep as many Jews in the heart of Jerusalem and as few Palestinians. That dictated the route of the wall, and it’s an explicit goal of the state, to keep as high a proportion of Jews inside Jerusalem as possible. And the lives of these people are affected in a thousand different ways by that central goal.

In many of my conversations with parents involved in the accident, there was a real focus on many, many micro, proximate causes and almost no discussion of what was prominent in my mind, which is this macro structure that made this tragedy, which would be a tragedy anywhere, so much worse because of the unique circumstances of who the victims were and where it took place. There’s this famous David Foster Wallace graduation speech where he tells the anecdote of fish—one fish says something like, “How’s the water?” and the other fish says, “What’s water?” That’s a little what it felt like talking to people about the causes of this accident, because they were all thinking about the driver, and the weather, and the materials that the bus was made of. But what about the fact that these kids had a play area just on the other side of the wall that they couldn’t go to, and instead they had to follow the snaking path of the wall to the outskirts of Ramallah in order to go on an excursion?

MG: One of the things that I love about the book is that it forces you to make that conclusion that it’s not an accident. You don’t quite spell it out.

One of the things that really struck me is that by diving deeply into Abed’s life, and Huda’s life, we see over and over again how gradual this process of restricting people’s freedom was. In addition to fish in water, there’s the boiled frog syndrome—all those horrible allegories we use for describing that thing that we do as humans, which is that we adapt. When you write about what life was like when these people were younger and how there weren’t these color-coded IDs and how there wasn’t this sense of constant terror and, most important, how slowly the fear for their children’s safety descended on them. By the time you get to the actual scene of the accident, I think you’re terrified for all of your characters’ children all the time.

Audience:  Can you imagine a future that looks different and better?

NT: One of the main goals of this book is to take us away from a conversation about hypothetical futures. Those futures may come or they may not come. They certainly look very, very far away. But there is a certain comfort that a lot of people have with having this debate: “What ought that future look like? One state, two states, confederation, let’s debate it. Of course this present situation is horrible; there’s no denying it. It’s awful. But it’s temporary. Let’s focus on how to get out of it by agreeing all together on what that future state ought to look like.”

I feel that this very conversation actually facilitates the ongoing oppression and suffering that we see. The ambition of doing narrative work like this is to force people to confront the reality that those conversations allow them to ignore. People don’t want to talk about Huda being powerless to protect her teenage boy from being arrested at one in the morning for throwing stones at an occupying soldier and being entirely powerless to do anything to even find her son over the coming days after his arrest. Instead they want to talk about one state and two states and all the rest of it.

__________________________

Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy is available now from Metropolitan Books.

One of the great astonishments of living with another artist is to watch their body of work take shape over time—to watch their imaginations leap in new directions, embrace new possibilities and questions. I didn’t read the majority of the stories in The Hive and the Honey until Paul had finished the book—even as a Paul “super fan” I was not quite prepared for how thrilling it would be to encounter this new work. I sensed a fresh boldness on the page, a kind of harrowing grace. I felt a writer stretching beyond the borders of what had been possible previously. I felt innovation, experimentation, real risk. It makes me so happy that the rest of the world will now get to experience the fierce wonder that I did all those months ago. Get ready, dear reader. You’re in for a ride.

*

Laura van den Berg: The Hive and the Honey is your third story collection, and I’m curious to learn more about how time has shifted your approach to the form. Were there different possibilities you wanted to explore in these stories?

Paul Yoon: I think in some ways my approach to building a story collection has remained the same since my first one: the project is one canvas, one book—I see a trajectory from the first story to the middle to the last; I want to build a world, and I want, hopefully, the reader to feel a sense of tremendous accumulation. I think what’s changed over the years is my attempt at adding as many layers as I can on to that canvas, whether that involves situations, history, characters.

I’m less interested these days in writing from, say a point A to a point B—even though admittedly I write a lot of journey narratives!—but more how can I write vertically; how can I make something rich with layers. And that’s something I think about not only for an entire book of stories but for each story in that book.

LVDB: That’s a beautiful answer; I love that idea of layers on a canvas. And it’s true that you seem to be drawn to journey narratives! What attracts you to that form?

PY: Maybe it’s because I moved around a lot when I was growing up. It felt like my family and I were never in one place for more than a few years. Life always felt like it was in motion, and also I never felt like I was able to settle anywhere. I grew up restless. Probably I still am.

We moved around a lot, too, when we were first starting to write. Always following the money and these temporary jobs. I don’t know if regret is the right word, but I look back on that and think it was crazy—I would personally never do that again. I value knowing we have a home base these days, that we’re rooted somewhere.

LVDB: Yes, I love that feeling of being rooted. It didn’t used to matter to me, but with time that feeling has become more important.

PY: But I also think I was drawn to a lot of art that depicted journeys or travels. Those were the kinds of paintings I loved the most when I was young and would visit museums; those were the movies I loved—with travelers, adventurers, searchers. Then, later, it was those books. Bruce Chatwin. Rebecca West. John Berger’s Into Their Labors trilogy. Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. All those vast canvases filled with people who came from somewhere else and were always on the move in some way and were trying to find a place to fit in.

Except of course I don’t write huge books, though my hope is—I hope!—even a short story of mine feels vast. How about you? You’ve got three collections yourself. Has the process of writing a story collection changed at all over the years? (Where are you by the way? I’m downstairs on the couch and I don’t know where you are…)

LVDB: I’m upstairs in my office! One thing that’s funny about our house, as you know, is that it’s very old, so all the floors are a little tilted. If I don’t keep my feet planted my rolling chair will just kind of start drifting across the floor. It’s a good exercise in posture.

I think a lot about the trajectory of the collection as a whole too, but those concerns come later in the process, after some of the macro-themes and ideas have emerged. Each collection begins, initially, as a reaction to the kinds of stories I’ve written in the past, the feeling that I have gotten a little bored with a particular approach and want to try something new.

PY: Are you working on any stories right now? I realize I don’t know the answer to this. I think we’re pretty open about our works in progress, but on occasion I do think we each have a secret story or project we hold on to and don’t talk about really until just a little later on in the process.

LVDB: I started and abandoned a few stories over the summer, so I’m not working on any at the moment. I worked on two novels for the last three years, and am now seeing one of those books, Florida Diary, through the production process and will turn to revisions on the other before too long. But I do want to start working on stories again sometime this year.

Going back to the overarching architecture of a story collection: I remember that, after you’d written a draft of the collection, you cut a few stories. The stories that remain span some 500 years, and create this sweeping account of the Korean Diaspora. There is a macro-structure at work that takes on a collective power as you move through the collection. What can you tell us about how you put the book together?

PY: I talked a little about this above, so I’ll just say that yes, there were a few stories that didn’t make the cut. I think when I was thinking about this collection as a whole, there were stories I had written that overlapped a little too neatly or too much with each other—theme, historical events, how they moved, the central preoccupations of the characters—so I thought: what if I pulled back a bit, removed some stories from the stage to let the others shine a bit more brightly and strongly? Am I correct that you probably have more stories on the cutting room floor than I do? Is there one in particular that has stayed with you at all?

LVDB: I almost never go back to stories that I cut from collections, or simply decide to not finish in draft form. They seem to slide into some kind of abyss of forgetting. But I do on occasion go back to stories that I really want to write, but maybe I’m just not ready. I’m not yet the person I need to be in order to write the story. Two stories from my last collection, “Last Night” and “Karolina,” would fall into that category. Was there a story in Hive that you almost gave up on, but didn’t?

PY: Oh yeah. I almost gave up on “Komarov” and “Cromer.” “Komarov” is a kind of spy story, and I was attempting to write a short, intense story, but have it be as impactful as an entire life. Juggling this goal while pulling on the espionage strings was tough, for me—it felt like I was, at every sentence, on the tightrope.

I almost gave up on “Cromer” because I hadn’t embraced yet the possibility of a multitude of open-endedness in that story. That the story is, at least for me, about things in life unfolding and progressing infinitely, with no answers.

LVDB: What helped you to figure out what you needed to figure out for those two stories? Was it just a matter of staying with them and giving the drafts time?

PY: Time. Absolutely. They needed time away from me. Or I needed time away from them. I write two ways. In my head and then on paper or on the screen. But I always need to go back to the first way with every project and that involves some stepping away and waiting to find a way to see the thing differently, at a different angle.

I also think what you mentioned above is equally important: this idea about not yet being the person you need to be. I think that’s true even on a smaller scale—something happens a day later or a week later or a month later and it alters you slightly. And maybe that change helps you step back into to a project, to get back to the physical work.

LVDB: When we first got together we were in an apartment so minuscule that we worked at the same tiny table. Somehow we survived! I think over time I’ve become less flexible in my work habits. I used to be able to write in crowded cafes, subways, wherever. Now I really feel that I need a quiet room and a door that closes. How have your work habits changed over time?

PY: I think eventually I used a small desk, but the apartment was so small we could still reach out and touch each other! Those were the days! I love how “in it” we were. I felt like I could write endlessly—which I don’t feel anymore. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’m more selective with the projects I chose to dive into.

In terms of work habits, I think over the time we’ve actually switched roles a little. I’ve gotten more loose in that way. It helps that in the past nine years we’ve had a high energy, bright, alert, responsive dog who doesn’t really give a shit about our writing. So I’ve learned to roll with Oscar. And find more humor and other joys in life because of him, too. For the past two or three books I was mostly on the couch, writing little bits with him beside me, until he woke up hungry and bored, but I also wrote on airplanes, trains.

LVDB: It is true that we live to serve Oscar, who makes life 500% more fun. And also I see your answer brings us back to journeys. I wanted to ask about reading, a different kind of journey. Some of these stories are historical. What kind of research did you do? Were there any texts or sources that you consulted that were particularly formative?

PY: I read two books long before I knew this book was a project, ones that blew open doors for me. The first is a book by Alyssa Park called Sovereignty Experiments which deals with Korean migrants in Northeast Asia in the late nineteenth century and beyond; the second is a book by Constantine Nomikos Vaporis called Tour of Duty which describes how daimyo, or feudal lords, were required to spend time in the capital city of Edo with their samurai retainers.

I love the hyper-specificity of both books. It’s like they were both showing me a very focused, detailed, strange corner of a house I wanted to explore but didn’t know how to yet. And staying in that corner for a long time with these narratives really brought out a way for me to build really focused worlds that, I hope, speak to that greater house.

Oftentimes, I find that it’s not that I’m researching something to see a story through, but the opposite: I find the story through research—that is, I don’t know if I can call it research? I’m just blindly reading things that I find interesting and sometimes something in there will take hold and not let me go and that’s when I know it’s time for me to respond to it—I suppose it’s not only that I’m inspired but it’s kind of like falling in love a little with some aspect of history and wanting to respond to it.

I think I fell in love a little with a settlement of Korean migrants in the late 1800s, in the Far East, as well as the long journey of samurai heading on foot toward the capital. Those became the jumping off points to create.

Do you read while you’re working on a project? I think I’ll always value above all our ability to talk to each other about what we’re reading. Like if I never write another book again—which I can live with—I know I’ll always be a reader first and foremost, and that I’ll always have you to talk to about the books I read.

LVDB: Oh yes, that long, ever-shifting conversation about books is one of the very best things. I read so much when I’m working on a project—in all directions. For instruction on a craft level; research; energy and inspiration. If my reading life is not exciting it shows up in the work before too long. And what a lucky feeling to be able to look up from a passage that has just, like, destroyed you and to be able to call out to another person Hey come look at this….

______________________________

The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon is available via S&S/Marysue Rucci Books.

But Will You Love Me Tomorrow is an oral history of the girl groups of the ’60. The songs that the girl groups created and sang are timeless, and have become embedded in American culture. Songs like “Mr. Postman,” “Be My Baby,” “Chapel of Love,” and “Where did our love go? ” As these songs rose to the top of the charts, girl groups cornered the burgeoning post-war market of teenage rock and roll fans, indelibly shaping the trajectory of pop music in the process. However, no matter how essential these songs are to the American music canon, many of the artists remain all but anonymous to most listeners. We interviewed over 100 people for this project, including women from acts like The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Supremes, as well as the songwriters, to their agents, managers, and sound engineers—and even to the present-day celebrities inspired by their lasting influence.

Our book gives particular insight into the experiences of the female singers and songwriters who created the movement, but we didn’t want to speak for the women; we wanted them, as much as possible, to tell their own story. This oral history is a compilation of the stories we have access to and people shared only what they felt comfortable disclosing, constructed from what was told to us as the people we are, by the people who lived it, and it represents only a small portion of those people’s lives. These women’s contributions to society and culture have been neglected for so long, and continue to be so, and we wanted to honor the women in the project by letting their voices lead.  We have been attending doo-wop shows for years and wrote this book not only because we love this music but also because we think this history is important and necessary.

Below, The Marvelettes, the girl group that introduced Motown to the nation.

*

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: We lived in the projects then, and Georgeanna and Wyanetta lived on the street opposite mine. And so we would always sit up and play cards and music and stuff like that. I think Gladys’s thing was, “What else do we have to do? So let’s do this.”

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: I already had in mind to ask Georgia Dobbins to be a part of my group. She was not only smart, but she was very kind. All the girls looked up to her, wanting to be just like her. I wanted her to be in the group, so I saved a spot for her.

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: Gladys needed another girl. She just came over to the house and asked me to sing background with her.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: I heard on the loudspeaker about the talent show.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: If we did win, we had a chance to go to Motown and do the song.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: I said, “Well, I’m going to get some girls.” I approached Georgeanna, and she brought Wyanetta and Katherine along.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: We came in fourth. Some of the teachers thought that we were exceptionally good and should have won and our teacher told us—Mrs. Shirley Sharpley—she told us that we were really good, and so she and several other teachers said that maybe we could go to Motown and sing.

Shirley Sharpley, The Marvelettes’ teacher: I thought they should have won. When I complimented them and told them that they should have won, they asked me if I would take them for the audition down at Motown.   The kids had the telephone number and I followed through. I just called. It was Gladys who gave me the number. I called and got an appointment.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Oh, honey, oh, honey, please  yes, we were country girls—they didn’t want us to do anything. They didn’t want to be bothered with those country girls, because Inkster was a small community—Detroit is much larger.

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: They looked at us like we were dumb. To them, we were little young, country, dumb-looking chicks. We were square, we weren’t glamorous at all. We were country kids coming to the big city.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Berry [Gordy] was the one who told us to come up with an original song. Berry said, “These girls are good, but do they have their original material? You can come back when you have your own original material.” You always get that “but” in there.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: I thought it would be a month or two before Georgia finished the song, but in just two or three days, she was at my front door singing it.

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: I was standing by the window. I was waiting for the postman to bring me a letter from this guy who was in the Navy. That’s how I came up with the lyrics. Then I made up the tune.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: That’s the reason the song came out. You know when you’re eighteen, nineteen years old—you have a problem. [laughing]

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: I just hummed it over and over and changed it to the way it should be. I improvised.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: When we went to Motown with “Please Mr. Postman,” they were excited because we had brought them original material. Here again, Motown was growing, it was building. So bringing in new material was like bringing in new blood.

The few people there when we came, they were not necessarily of the magnitude you may expect them to be because you’re a new company. You can’t have everybody be perfect. You had a couple of writers, but you really didn’t have a stable of writers. Therefore, it was vitally important to get original material. At that point Robert Bateman was there, Brian was there.

Brian Holland, songwriter: She came to Motown, to Robert Bateman and I, with the idea of “Postman.” We said, “Oh, that sounds great, that sounds great. Let us go and finish it—write this song.”

Marc Taylor, music writer: Holland and Bateman made some adjustments to “Please Mr. Postman” in order to fit it to Gladys’s voice and also arranged the background vocals; thus, they took part in the writing credits.

Brian Holland, songwriter: It was really Robert Bateman and I and Georgia Dobbins that did the song. Then Freddie Gorman came in.

Mickey Stevenson, Motown A&R: And Freddie Gorman was a postman. You know, he was originally a postman.

Marc Taylor, music writer: Gorman, who was actually a mail carrier, also offered a few suggestions and became one of the five official writers of the song: William Garrett, an Inkster classmate who provided the title; Georgia Dobbins; Robert Bateman; Freddie Gorman; and Brian Holland.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: A lot of people are on that disc, but, see, if you can find one of the discs that came out earlier—you would only see the three names, which was Brianbert [Brian Holland and Robert Bateman’s production team] and Georgia Dobbins.

Brian Holland, songwriter: No, no, no…I don’t really know that. I can’t answer that because I don’t really recall that—I know she had a part of a song, but we had to finish a lot of that song—period. She didn’t have a complete song—she had the idea of “Please Mr. Postman.”

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: We were going through rehearsals for about a week or so before they brought out the contracts. When it came time for the contract, I presented it to my dad and he hit the roof. He asked my mother, “How long has this girl been singing?” My dad did not know I could sing. My brothers and I were raised in the church and grew up a little strict. My mom would let me out. She knew I was having little rehearsals in the basement.

I’m not knocking my parents, but they thought that when they signed the contract, that if we didn’t make it, they’d have to pay that money back. That was their understanding. They didn’t know anything but going to work and going to church on Sunday morning. And by them being Christian, entertainment and nightclub life was out of the question. That was ununacceptable. Back then they’d call you “fast,” “no good,” “won’t amount to anything.”

My mother’s illness was also the reason why they wouldn’t sign for me. I’m the oldest child in the family with six brothers and my family depended on me totally. My mother was ill all of my life.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: Georgia’s mother was sick with a bad back, and Georgia made it clear that she was not going to leave her mother if we had to tour. Georgia wanted me to sing lead, so she taught me the song.

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: When my dad wouldn’t sign the contract, it was just like somebody had snatched the rug from up under me. It’s like wanting something and somebody just takes it away from you. You want to go, you’ve got your outfit ready, but Daddy says no. That’s the way it was for me. You’ve got your little dress and your shoes laid out, and you’re ready to go to the party, but Daddy said, “No, you ain’t going.”

I stayed in seclusion for about a year. I didn’t even come outside. I was so hurt. I felt…robbed. I wouldn’t listen to the radio or anything. It wasn’t until 1978 before I sang again.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Well, you know what? Yes—she was sad, but after you have plenty of time to think, after everything is all over, back in the day, we didn’t think that much about it because we were busy performing. But then, after a while, you begin to think about it, and you say, “Georgia, who wrote ‘Please Mr. Postman,’ that was her claim to fame was ‘Please Mr. Postman,’ because none of us could write anything like that.” But she didn’t understand that for a while.

Georgia Dobbins, The Marvelettes: Gladys had a lead voice and the rest of them didn’t. When my dad refused to sign for me, I got Gladys and told her, “You’ve got to sing lead on this song.”

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: I do remember that the session was long and then, on top of that, Gladys had to sing the lead because Georgia wasn’t any longer there. Then the background—Wyanetta, Georgeanna, and myself…we, and Wanda—because when Georgia left, Gladys took and recruited Wanda Young—so that means the four of us would be back there singing the background and Gladys would be singing the lead. Marvin Gaye played the drums. It was a long, long day.

Martha Reeves, The Vandellas: I think Gladys Horton gave her heart and soul, saying, “There must be some word today / from my boyfriend who’s so far away / please, Mister Postman, look and see / if there’s a letter in your bag for me.”

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Then the rest of it almost was history.

Brian Holland, songwriter: Let me tell you something—I was so elated when I first heard it on the radio. The Black station first started playing it. Then it became so popular, on CKLW—that was a big fifty-watt station at that time; it was the biggest station—they started playing it. That’s when it erupted. It became huge. I mean, that was the most exciting time for me as a songwriter to hear that song on the radio. Can you imagine? I mean, Jesus, it was like a miracle. It was a miracle. I mean, for me, as a songwriter, to hear that?

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: The next thing that we knew “Please Mr. Postman” was number one on the Billboard chart.

Billy Vera, musician: Don’t forget—the audience for rock and roll had now grown up to the point where they were out of high school. Even though there was no war on yet, a lot of boys went off to the draft. And so there were a lot of songs about soldiers—soldiers going away and the girl waiting at home for them.

Brian Holland, songwriter: Motown’s first big record was “Please Mr. Postman.”

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Really to be truthful. . . when our record hit number one, they were not ready. They went and began to scurry around, trying to find people to do this and do that, and all of a sudden they made it seem like it was really, really big. But Motown was not as big as they wanted people to believe it was.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: Everything happened so fast. It was like one-two-three-four. The talent show, the recording of the record, the release date of the song, the date it hit the number one spot on Billboard—all in the same year of 1961.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: But then they had five little Black girls from the suburbs of Detroit that took them there a little bit faster than they were ready for.

Marc Taylor, music writer: Motown needed to milk “Please Mr. Postman” as much as it could in order to generate some much-needed cash for the company.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Motown had a tour that went out and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles were the head-liners, and Mary Wells was on it. People began to start chanting—they wanted The Marvelettes. They caused so much noise, Berry called back and talked to Mrs. Edwards, which was his sister, to get us out there. Because if we didn’t come out there, there would be five other girls that they would take and announce them as The Marvelettes. Mrs. Edwards told us that.

The album had a picture of a mailman, but our picture wasn’t anywhere on it, because during that time, Black people weren’t allowed to put their pictures on it, because the prejudices of some white people. We couldn’t have our pictures on the front cover, I knew that.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: Berry Gordy wanted The Marvelettes to quit school because we had a hot record out, people wanted to see us, and at the time, Motown was able to sell more records when people could see us.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: All of us began to start thinking that we need to get it together and go out there. Because if we didn’t go out there to sing the song that we made, Berry would get somebody who would. We definitely didn’t want anybody else going out there to be singing any song that we had made, so we all got together and began to pack our little rags and then we left. We went to Washington, DC; that’s where our first major gig was.

Romeo Phillips, The Marvelettes’ principal: George Edwards, who was married to Berry Gordy’s sister Esther, came to the school right after the girls, on their own, made “Please Mr. Postman,” and he was encouraging them to drop out of school. In fact, I got on him because he did not stop by the office first. He just came into the building and walked straight back to the music room. He was talking to the girls, and they were expressing some ambivalence about drop- ping out of school. I think this was near the time they were about to graduate.

My experience in show business. One hit does not a career make, and I was raising hell with Edwards. We belonged to the same fraternity. He was saying, “You have to strike while the iron’s hot.” And I remember very vividly telling him, “You can strike while the iron’s hot, but unless the iron’s plugged in, it’s going to get cool.”

I know they faced pressure from George Edwards and he went to the parents and the guardians of the girls and told them this is a chance of a lifetime, that they could always go back to school but they couldn’t always have the chance. Once the record is out, they’ll promote it…the usual things that a promoter says.

Gladys Horton, The Marvelettes: Mrs. Edwards and her husband became legal guardians of me. I was an orphan so early in my life, that it wasn’t until I met her that I found out my real birth date, my middle name, my mother’s and father’s names, and place of birth. I had to send off for my birth certificate for the courts to acknowledge and sign the Edwards on as my legal guardians over my business and money affairs. That knowledge opened up a brand-new door for me. I discovered part of my roots and where I came from, the West Indies.

Katherine Anderson The Marvelettes: Because Gladys was in foster care, and George Edwards was in the House, or something [Michigan state legislator]. They took Gladys and made her a ward of the court. That means that they would have to care for her and watch after her. But anyway, they made sure that the money and stuff was right, or whatever they did, and—because I was only sixteen years old then—all I can do is speculate.

Romeo Phillips, The Marvelettes’ principal: I tried to get the girls to stay in school. We did not want the girls to be caught out there with no marketable skill. But then George Edwards went by their homes and talked about striking while the iron’s hot. I will never for- give him for that—he’s dead now. I’m very disappointed in him and I’m sure that fate would have taken a different turn for those young ladies had they stayed in school and graduated. That would’ve served as a platform for them to move on to something else if show business didn’t pan out.

Katherine Anderson, The Marvelettes: Unfortunately, that was the choice we had. We had a choice of staying in school or going out there and doing our record. So, why, if you were so family-oriented, would you think in terms of sending five other girls out there? Because the public doesn’t know what The Marvelettes look like anyway.

At sixteen years old, how could I know? How could any of us? Georgeanna was sixteen, Wyanetta was sixteen. We had the choice of going out there or staying in school, and all of us ended up making the choice—we made the record, we made it popular, and we were going out there and representing ourselves.

______________________________

Excerpted from But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?: An Oral History of the ’60s Girl Groups by Laura Flam and Emily Sieu Liebowitz. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

When I first encountered Andrew Chan’s work nearly a decade ago, my response was akin to that of hearing a great new recording artist: Who is this?! He was writing about Jazmine Sullivan’s 2014 album Reality Show, and clearly listening to women artists with what James Baldwin, quoting Henry James, might have called “perception at the pitch of passion.” Since then, we’ve had a chance to talk about our love of pop divas, academic training in race and culture, and something more basic that I might call a sheer appetite for performance: as critics, we are trying to explain but also to generate a felt sense of what makes singers so moving.

Chan exercises this skill across Why Mariah Carey Matters (University of Texas Press, 2023). Whether he is describing the “leathery lows” of Carey’s voice, the “sly insouciance” of a track like “Fantasy,” or the nuanced meaning of “Candy Bling”—a song “poised precisely between bitterness and sweetness” that “acknowledges that some losses can never be restored”—he is explaining why Mariah matters to pop history and, more specifically, to her fans. In a sense, the book tells a story about contemporary fandom by tracking Carey’s spectacular survival of the transition from the analog to the digital age. Chan shows how fans have analyzed, emulated, and obsessed over her music in online forums, while also finding comfort and salvation in more private, intimate encounters with her voice: “I can’t separate my love from Mariah from the belief that her voice has saved lives, including gay ones like mine,” he writes.

In the following conversation, we delve into the nature of these encounters—including the gifts and techniques through which Carey creates them.

*

Emily Lordi: I want to begin by saying frankly that I love this book—that as I was reading it, I just kept annotating it with exclamations of surprise and appreciation. I know you started writing it in the wake of the publication of Mariah’s memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, and I’m interested in the fact that you included less biographical background in your book than some readers might expect. What you’ve written is the story of why her musicianship matters. I wanted to ask you about this choice to keep her at arm’s length.

Andrew Chan: I’m glad you picked up on this. I did have some initial hesitation about doing this project because of how recently her autobiography had come out. But I realized that what I wanted to do was very different. My book is primarily a work of criticism, and I was looking to fill a void that I felt existed in writing about Mariah. There weren’t any books that went into sufficient depth about her music, what it does, and how it does it. I knew early on that I wasn’t interested in focusing on her celebrity persona or picking through the details of her personal life—except in the instances where those details could help illuminate something about how the music achieves its effects and how we respond to it.

Maybe this is rigid or old-fashioned, but I tend to think that, while it’s important to consider an artist’s intentions and her biography, that information should never crowd out the sensory, textural, emotional qualities of the aesthetic experience. At a certain point, the art has to be given space to stand on its own. And maybe this is what led me to begin the book with an anecdote about me stumbling on YouTube videos that analyze Mariah’s vocal style and skills. Those videos are incredibly, almost hilariously granular—and nerdy!—in the attentiveness of their listening. And I think, like them, this book expresses a desire to get close to the music, to put our ears up to it.

EL: I love that you emphasize, in the book, that this sound is not just the result of Mariah being born with a great voice, but that she arrived at it through experimentation and innovation. You also make a point to not privilege her songwriting and production over her vocal genius.

AC: Mariah is incredibly deliberate in how she creates her sonic world. I think it’s interesting that there’s been an effort among some Mariah superfans, particularly those who want to see her receive her flowers, to accentuate her songwriting above her other skills. Mariah has even said a few times that she thinks of herself primarily as a songwriter. I understand this impulse. It’s partly a way of addressing the fact that many people don’t know Mariah has cowritten almost all of her songs. It’s also a response to what is considered important and worthy of respect in music culture—whether it’s Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Prince, the musicians who have been most revered in the rock era are singer-songwriters who operate at a kind of auteurist level, who sort of style themselves as lone wolves. That’s a dominant model of artistic greatness.

But I didn’t want to just take that framework as a given. Yes, Mariah is a brilliant songwriter; she’s got a distinctive sense of humor, an uncanny ear for catchy melodies, and a gift for creating sonic pleasure. But what’s crucial is that she’s writing for her own voice—her writing and her production are often driven by the marvel that is her instrument. That’s why I think it’s more interesting to talk about how these different skills work together and bolster one another.

EL: Within African American literary studies, which is my first point of entry, I think of the work of Farah Jasmine Griffin, who talks about the practice of trying to legitimate Black artists through a Western-civ framework—Ralph Ellison gets compared to Herman Melville, for instance. There’s this impulse to identify a white male analog as a way of authorizing Black genius.

AC: Right. And in the case of Mariah, that problem is compounded by a historical lack of representation and valorization of Black women singer-songwriter-producers, at least in the context of pop and R&B. Now, I certainly don’t want to give short shrift to the work of women like Valerie Simpson, Patrice Rushen, Angela Winbush—female R&B pioneers who preceded Mariah. But in the era that Mariah came up in, audiences hadn’t been exposed to a lot of images of Black women artists calling the shots and practicing their studio wizardry.

But if you listen to Mariah’s music across the decades, it’s hard not to notice her attention to detail, how all the elements—from her lead vocals to the backgrounds to the ad-libs to the instrumentation—click into place, in a delicious way, regardless of who she’s working with. And this level of attention is evident in the way she talks about her music in interviews.

Another thing about Mariah that doesn’t conform to prevailing narratives of musical genius: she’s a heavily, openly quotational artist. In this way, she is fundamentally hip-hop. That’s not to say that all or even most of her songs incorporate elements of other people’s work. But, like many of the iconic hip-hop artists of her time, she does get a lot of her creative, compositional fuel from the quotation of preexisting music. Interpolation and allusion are generative forces in African American music, from jazz to R&B to hip-hop. So if you’re fixated on pure originality—which, of course, doesn’t exist—as a prerequisite for genius, then you’re going to miss out on the conversation with music history that Mariah has sustained throughout her career. She’s a great practitioner of sampling, and she knows how to use the inspiration of preexisting music to create something that’s her own.

EL: What do you think are her greatest sampling achievements?

AC: I could go on and on about this! Of course, I have to mention her use of Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” which serves as the foundation for “Fantasy.” Mariah brought “Genius of Love” to coproducer Dave “Jam” Hall, and because it was a song that had inspired several hip-hop riffs and remakes in the 1980s, it allows for a dense layering of music-historical associations.

In the book, I talk about how I’m fascinated with the fact that Mariah often chooses source material from the ’80s, the decade she grew up in, rather than canonical old-school soul and funk samples. That’s part of what makes her taste in samples so distinctive. For her, sampling is connoisseurship; it’s tied to her experience of R&B in the era of her youth. And she’s often highlighting R&B artists who didn’t have huge crossover success on the mainstream pop charts, people like Stacy Lattisaw and Loose Ends and DeBarge.

EL: I love that—this idea that she’s using sampling as a way of promoting artists who didn’t benefit from the major institutional support she had right out of the gate…

AC: Yes, exactly. There’s a fierce attachment to R&B history in her music that I find really moving.

I will also add that, if I had to name my favorite instance of sampling in Mariah’s music, I’d have to go with something that’s more of an interpolation—as in, the source material has been reperformed and rerecorded, rather than being directly lifted and looped. It’s in her hip-hop remix of “I Still Believe,” from 1998, which interpolates the song “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It’s one of her wackiest and funniest choices of a musical reference, but she isn’t exactly playing it for laughs; it’s seductive and beautiful while also being utterly absurd and even a little creepy.

But can I ask you quickly about the Whitney Houston book you’re writing now, which I’m so excited about? I assume these questions about authorship are also relevant to what you’re writing, because Whitney was a genius vocalist who did not write her own songs. How are you handling that, with regard to these dominant narratives we’ve just talked about?

EL: Yes, all of this is definitely relevant. I’ve been thinking about the cultural narrative that people with great voices are just born that way. You say in the book that flaunting this kind of voice is almost like a supreme act of vanity, like preening. But I love this idea of just letting your light shine, not hiding it. And there’s an undervaluation of the amount of work that goes into cultivating a naturally beautiful voice. Whitney talks about this in interviews, that her singing is “more than a notion.” You have to practice and rehearse, and she certainly trained for years with her mother, Cissy Houston.

People do talk about Whitney’s instincts—which is an idea that makes me nervous, because of its proximity to the idea that Black art is just a primitive, spontaneous expression of natural abilities. At the same time, I do think some people get to a place where they just know what to do! They weren’t born knowing, but they have a particular capacity to learn very quickly and integrate musical information from different sources and then use it in the service of their own art. So, I guess this is all to say, I am trying to mediate between the discourse of “naturalness” and the idea of rigorous study when discussing Whitney’s art.

AC: I love that we’re talking about this. There is something that I note in a section of my book that focuses on the influence of gospel music on Mariah’s singing: I say that she has an intuitive sense of how to fill and decorate musical space. And though their vocal styles are quite different, this intuition, which is obviously the result of years of study, is true of Whitney as well. Both of these women are masters of the art of ad-libbing, which you examine so magnificently in your book The Meaning of Soul. I mean, listen to a Whitney song like “Exhale (Shoop Shoop),” and you realize that all the choruses are basically built out of ad-libs!

EL: OK, as a last question, I want to ask you about Mariah and the sublime.

AC: Well, you’ve hit on something in the book that I’m a little insecure and self-doubting about. I was worried about the invocation of the sublime and the ecstatic being a turnoff to some readers. This kind of talk felt like it could easily get overwrought or overblown. I was nervous that people just wouldn’t take me seriously if I brought the language of spirituality into my analysis. You can’t prove that something is sublime.

But at the end of the day, I had to just be honest about my experience of Mariah’s music. The words “transcendent” and “sublime”—these have a long history and tradition behind them. If we’re going the literary route, we could talk about Edmund Burke, or Emily Dickinson’s idea that poetry is the thing that takes the top of your head off; if we’re going the cinema route, which is my main professional background, we can talk about directors like Carl Dreyer or Andrei Tarkovsky or Kenji Mizoguchi.

This might sound silly to some people, but I believe Mariah, in her way, belongs in this tradition. I was thinking about my young self listening to Mariah, getting head-to-toe body chills. What is sublimity if not that? Whether it’s Dickinson or Tarkovsky or Mariah Carey, these artists operate at the edge of what’s possible, and they use our capacity for awe to usher us into another reality.

The only thing I could do to help prop up this claim was to break down the elements that help Mariah achieve these effects. In the book, I talk about a pivotal moment in a deep cut from 1997, called “Outside”; she performs most of that song in a very wispy, fragile, breathy tone, but at the climax, all of a sudden her voice explodes into a powerful belt, with almost no warning. It’s a shock to the ears, but it comes from a place of raw emotion; this is an autobiographical song about her experience growing up as a mixed-race girl.

That stylistic choice is strategic; she knows that she is creating a rupture and asking the listener to dive into it with her. In neuroscience, there’s the concept of mirror neurons—when we witness someone doing something, we are simultaneously imagining and sensing ourselves doing it too. When we hear Mariah singing, those neurons are firing away in our brains. When her voice moves, we can’t help but move with it.

*

Andrew Chan writes regularly about music, film, and books for 4Columns. His work has also been published by the Criterion Collection, Film Comment, NPR, the New Yorker, and Reverse Shot.

Emily Lordi is a writer and critic who has published three books on Black music and culture: Black Resonance (2013), Donny Hathaway Live (33 1/3 series, 2016), and The Meaning of Soul (2020). She is currently writing a biography of Whitney Houston (forthcoming in 2025) that reassesses her genius and impact. Her essays and profiles have appeared in several venues, most frequently the New Yorker online and T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where she is a writer at large. She is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, and lives in Nashville.

________________________

Andrew Chan’s Why Mariah Carey Matters is available now from University of Texas Press.

Fire season in California goes from the driest months of summer until the first rains come, if they come. (Traditionally October 31 was the date to circle.) It’s a time when people stay alert to rising winds, the smell of smoke, sirens and alerts signaling that a wildfire is on the prowl and it’s time to evacuate. Daniel Gumbiner’s immersive second novel, Fire in the Canyon (after The Boatbuilder), captures the surreal landscape of the fire zone in the Sierra foothills and how it challenges and transforms the Hecht family and their rural community. Having evacuated from wildfires in Sonoma County multiple times, I read it as a richly detailed and truly told chronicle of our times.

 *

Jane Ciabattari: How have the past few tumultuous years been for you? Managing your work as editor of The Believer, which was folded by the University of Nevada, its archives sold, then resurrected after a community-driven campaign and change of ownership back to McSweeney’s with you as editor? Writing, editing and launching this new novel?

Daniel Gumbiner: They’ve been surprising and uncertain—but also quite rich. When the magazine was defunded, I really believed it was the end. So I started to look for other jobs, and was trying to think about what my next steps would be. And then there was this miraculous turn of events, where we were able to bring the magazine back to McSweeney’s, and that was an exciting, busy time. There was this outpouring of support from so many people who helped make that happen. And that was a really special thing to witness. We had a party for the first issue back and it was wonderful to see so many writerly friends all in one place. I think magazines are such important community hubs. As writers, we often operate in our isolated silos and we need excuses to come together. Like my friend Oscar Villalon said the other day: you can’t be a bohemian by yourself. 

JC: How does Fire in the Canyon draw upon your own life, your early years? What was the initial spark that began the project?

DG: I think it draws on my own life in many ways—and probably in ways I don’t even realize. I remember I first saw the impact of a wildfire when I was on a bus going up to the Sierras, to summer camp, in Desolation Wilderness. I was struck by the magnitude of what the fire had done. And also, honestly, a bit terrified by it. It was one of those moments where you realize that the adults in your world can’t control everything, that there are powers larger than them.

So since I was a kid, I think I’ve had a lot of respect for wildfire. And of course, in recent years, due to the climate crisis, we’ve seen increasingly destructive fires. Almost everyone I know has been affected by them in some way—some more than others. We could all sense that something was shifting. So I wanted to write about witnessing this shift, about the experience of living in the midst of these more intense fires.

Wildfire continues to be frightening and awe-inspiring to me. I was up in Placerville at my family friend’s farm a little while ago, and he took me over to Grizzly Flats, the town that was basically entirely destroyed by the Caldor Fire. We drove around the burn in that area, where loggers are felling trees to salvage the wood. We probably drove around for three hours or so and everything you saw was burned forest. The scale of that fire’s impact is just indescribable. It is so vast.

JC: Fire in the Canyon implies no way out. At least it does for those of us who have been evacuated during wildfires or followed the trajectories of disastrous fires. Is that what you had in mind with the title?

DG: I think there are a few ways you can read it. And I like that interpretation. One of the reasons I liked the title, too, is because the canyon is a kind of boundary, to the people in the town. There’s a certain way in which they’ve understood how fire works in their community, how it interacts with the canyon. But this dynamic is shifting, and that’s part of what the characters are confronting.

JC: You introduce Benjamin Hecht, 65, a former cannabis grower (he served 18 months at Lompoc for growing medical marijuana) turned winemaker who has lived for decades in the gold country. The fire season grows worse each year, yet he persists, with a farm that needs constant tending: “ten new chickens, two dachsunds, honeybees, a small flock of sheep, one guard dog, ducks, geese, several CBD plants, one acre of Primitivo, two of Grenache, two of Barbera, three of Gamay, and three of Syrah.” (Plus two baby emus.) How were you able to capture the daily routine of the farm over the months of the novel?

DG: I spent a fair amount of time hanging out on vineyards and meeting winemakers over the course of researching the book. I have several friends in that line of work too, so I relied on them at times. But I also just read a lot. I love getting absorbed in that kind of research, reading about sheep forage or what have you. In that way I’m a bit similar to Ben. He’s someone who likes diving into these new hobbies, new interests. In his case, he’s always adding these new elements to his farm.

I think I was drawn to writing fiction, in part, because I’m a generalist in this way. If I had to study one thing, one subject, my whole life, I’d probably get bored. But writing novels allows you to move through different universes, spend time with them, and then continue on. I think my fiction writing is a kind of odd ledger of my general interests over time, as a result.

JC: Ben’s farm is near the small town of Natoma. Is this based on a real place? How did you craft the details about the Gold Rush history, the shifts in the land and in industry, the ebb and flow of rain and wind and heat, in this region?

DG: The town is fictional but it draws on some aspects of other towns in the foothills. I’ve always loved that region. It was an area we used to visit as kids, and it always had a mythic quality to me. It’s kind of a passed over place, in some ways. Most people from the city go straight through it to get to the mountains. But it’s a beautiful region and I always thought it would be an interesting setting for a novel. When I started writing about Ben moving around on his farm, I knew he was in the foothills, but I didn’t really have an idea of what kind of town he’d be in, or what the setting of the story would be, more specifically.

So I began to build out the setting in more detail as I went. I really enjoy developing the setting of a story, though it’s always a challenge. For it to work, you need to weave setting into the fabric of every scene, through all these discrete details, like you mention: climate, history, etc. I know a setting is working well when I feel like I could keep spinning a story in that world forever. I could just open another narrative thread and let it unfurl in the environment that’s been created. So that’s the feeling I’m striving for. Once I get to that point, I know the setting has depth to it.

JC: The novel unfolds as Ben, his novelist wife Ada, their son Yoel, who has stopped speaking to his dad but is visiting from Los Angeles, face evacuation as a fire comes precariously close. Your descriptions of the wind, the flames, the damage, are spot-on. Have you experienced wildfires? How many? Were you evacuated?

DG: I’ve never been evacuated for a wildfire myself. For those passages, I was relying on interviews I did, with friends and strangers, about their experiences with fires and evacuations. I also listened to a lot of oral histories about people who had been forced to evacuate. Friends would share photos and videos with me too. I really wanted to understand that experience as closely as I could. In a lot of ways, it’s the most common experience related to this crisis. Not that many people die from wildfire—though of course all these deaths are terrible—but many people are evacuated, many people lose their homes. And that is its own kind of devastation. So when I was thinking about those evacuation scenes, I tried to tap into my own experience of times when I’ve thought I might lose something really important to me. That helped me try to understand what the characters in the book might be feeling in those moments. What do you do when you’re on the precipice of that kind of grief? When you know something might be truly gone and there’s nothing you can do about it? I think that’s something we can all relate to. And unfortunately, it’s an experience that will become more common in the years to come.

JC: Fire in the Canyon could almost serve as a primer for a contemporary winemaker, as you trace the cycle of the crop, the harvest, the fermenting, and so forth. How did you learn so much about the traditional forms of winemaking in Europe, Argentina, California, as well as the new style of making natural wines, which currently fascinates those in the wine industry?

DG: I’ve always been interested in wine, but I never knew that much about it. The book was a fun excuse to explore that world in more detail. There’s something alluring and elemental about winemaking. As one of the characters says in the book, it’s kind of like midwifery: you are guiding something into existence. You take what the particular conditions of a season give you and you work with that. So you are not entirely in control—you’re responding to the natural world. I just really fell in love with the nuances of that process. Perhaps a bit too much at times…Part of the editorial process was trimming back some of the winemaking details.

For Ben, I think, growing grapes and making wine is a chance for him to reinvent himself. He was a cannabis grower for years, and made lots of money doing that, but then he was prosecuted for one of his grows, and ultimately, growing cannabis was no longer an option for him. Moving onto wine felt like a natural development to me. So many of the people I’ve met in the wine world come from unusual places. Often they’ve lived many lives. I’ve met winemakers who used to be club promoters, philosophers, pharmacologists. The craft seems to attract a certain kind of searching, experimental character.

JC: The community of Natoma—the winemakers, the new bar owners, the fusty sheriff, Yoel’s high school friends and the newcomers in his life, including Halle—arrive on the scene as organically as shifts in the natural world. You describe their interactions beautifully, including the awkward moments, the long-held grudges, and the helpfulness. Halle and her friends, Argentine natural winemakers Seba and Yami Garcia, help Ben and Yoel and Ben’s old friend Wick, whose band is popular in the area, and others at harvest time. The evacuations bring people into contact, helping strangers, reaching out to friends and neighbors by text. How do you think about plotting when you’re pulling together a community devastated by fire?

DG: One of the things I wanted to show was the way in which the fire puts all these characters into relationship with each other. This was a story I heard over and over when talking to people about how fires had affected them: it connected them with their neighbors in new and surprising ways.

I was interested in showing how a fire might shift the social landscape of a town. In terms of plotting, that was definitely something I had in mind. I don’t tend to plot out my fiction too meticulously, but in this case, I did know that I wanted a fire to set in motion the different narrative threads of the book. From there it was a matter of following the characters, considering how they might change and grow in response to it.

I met a group of people, up in El Dorado County, who banded together to help protect their property from the Caldor Fire. They called themselves the Ant Hill Army. This was a group of people that really ran the gamut culturally and politically. You had people who lived on communes working side-by-side with ex-Marine Trumpers, cutting a fire line in the forest. Some of them didn’t have insurance or they had bad insurance, so they had everything on the line, in terms of saving their homes. They worked nonstop for two days straight and they were successful in stopping the fire from moving in on their properties. And they’re all still closely bonded now. They had an anniversary party where they commemorated the fire together. And one guy who I was talking to there told me that they just don’t talk about politics together. Obviously, it’s not a perfect situation, but I find stories like that inspiring.

JC: Yoel joins other younger members of the community and an activist group called the San Andreans to protest climate change and the attitudes of fossil fuel companies. Are the San Andreans based on real environmental activists in these times?

DG: No, they’re not connected to any real activists, but I think they represent something that a lot of people feel, which is that the response to this crisis is still deeply inadequate. We are dealing with an existential emergency but we all go about days as if it more or less doesn’t exist, which is pretty crazy. I think Yoel, as a sensitive person, feels the desperation of the situation quite acutely. So he is pushed to action more rapidly than others are.

At various points in the book, Yoel’s sensitivity is a hindrance to him, and the family. I think, at times, he feels like it’s a challenge he needs to overcome. But it’s also kind of the source of his strength and value to others. I think the parts of ourselves we feel we need to reject are often the most powerful. I’m interested in the ways in which we can all be of use, despite our flaws or hang ups. 

JC: What are you working on next/now?

DG: I’m not sure. Have a few ideas I’m excited about but I don’t feel fully committed to any of them yet. Stay tuned!

__________________________________

Fire in the Canyon by Daniel Gumbiner is available from Astra House.

Jayne Anne Phillips’ Night Watch is a dazzling and original masterpiece that evokes little-known aspects of the Civil War and its aftermath. The settings range from a sheltered ridge in the Appalachians to the Battle of the Wilderness to the West Virginia Lunatic Asylum that follows the teachings of a humane Quaker physician. The characters are idiosyncratic, consistent, vivid, and haunting. Phillips makes a case for this Civil War era as a prelude to our own turbulent times. “Night Watch is about the post-apocalyptic world of the Civil War years, the tribal divisions, the search for scarce resources, a specific family fallen apart and struggling to survive,” as she put it during our email conversation. “Now we seem to be living in a slowly unfolding apocalypse, climate emergencies everywhere, online-assisted conspiracy theology, ever-evolving viruses. It’s somehow reassuring to enter a turbulent (novelistic) past in which changed characters adapt, and stay in our minds. Time is a bellowing freight train, and it’s also the floating presence of all things, in all times.”

*

Jane Ciabattari: How have your life and work been going in the post-quarantine world? How have the years of pandemic and turmoil affected the writing, editing, and launch of your new novel, Night Watch?

Jayne Anne Phillips: The pandemic closed down the world, but it was mostly during those years that I began to understand the layering threads of the novel, and I wrote the ending. I felt as though the isolation and turmoil, the need for safety and refuge, were present inside Night Watch—the cyclical nature of history, the cycle of creation/decline, felt compassionate, comforting, mournful, yet hopeful. Science and technology in the 1860’s-70‘s included railroads and daguerreotypes, whereas today technology is seen as both savior (Covid vaccines) and devil (the pathogen that escapes the lab, bots that agitate political dysfunction, disinformation that undermines trust of legitimacy itself). Launch of my novel? More and more stacks up against the literary novel, the book of poetry…Feeling a true passion for literature is almost like membership in a medieval guild, a time when artist monks wrote out illumined texts and comprised most of their readership. Flashing forward, one can imagine, after the dystopian Long Pause or Full Stop—the cessation of the machine, the end of readily available electricity—forest dwellers and urban survivors breaking into structures looking for canned food and…books.

JC: What drew you to write about characters immersed in the Civil War and its aftermath in West Virginia, your home state, with a focus on brain injury, trauma from sexual abuse, and the healing theories of the Quaker physician Thomas Story Kirkbride, who created the philosophy behind the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum?

JAP: I grew up twenty minutes from what began, in 1858 Weston, Virginia, as the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. It was the only appropriation Virginia ever supported in the mountainous western “frontier” of the state. Many educated Americans don’t know that West Virginia seceded from Virginia to fight for the Union. And the asylum itself, like most of the vast State asylums built in that era, followed guidelines laid out in Thomas Story Kirkbride’s 1854 book, On The Construction, Organization and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane. Kirkbride emphasized “moral treatment,” strict regimens of physical exercise and activities, the asylum as healing refuge with gardens, barns, dairies; he demanded a strict maximum of 250 patients, each with a private, well-ventilated room. Trans-Allegheny, its wings extending a fourth of a mile, enclosed nine acres of interior space on nearly three hundred acres of farmed land and marked walking trails. Today the asylum, part ruin, part restored fantasy, is open to the public and remains one of the largest hand-cut sandstone buildings in the world, second only to the Kremlin. I visited several times and took some of the photographs that appear in Night Watch; other images are documents housed in State archives.

But my novels begin with the voice of a character involved in an ongoing, specific situation; I saw ConaLee and her mother, Eliza, on a journey to the room I photographed in the “restored” asylum. War is trauma. Abuse of “civilians” and sexual assault of women is common, even weaponized, in every war, then and now. Soldiers maimed for life in the 1860’s remained devastated. Imagine, in an American population of roughly 30 million, 1.5 million dead, wounded or captured (according to the Battlefield Trust). Numberless widows and orphans. Night Watch invites the reader to survive that devastation in the experience of one family, already rendered nameless, fleeing one hard won refuge for another, and another…

JC: What inspired your title, Night Watch, and the character known as Night Watch, and John O’Shea, among other identities?

JAP: There are always those nameless, forgotten individuals who are moral fulcrums no matter what threat or loss they suffer. Dearbhla is such a character, and refers to her adopted son as “her one.” He’s known as “Sharpshooter” during the war, and later “lent” the name, John O’Shea. His identity shifts as he inhabits one ‘life’ after another. “Night Watch” is a position at the asylum, and namelessness is a theme in the novel. Even before the War, ConaLee, Eliza, Dearbhla, and her adopted son, keep their family name secret for reasons that unspool in the novel. Think of Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” that massive, moody portrait of guardsmen charged with defending their cities. Night Watch is a moral and physical necessity, comprised within one man in the novel—a man secret even to himself—whose nature it is to protect, defend, survive, thrive, if given the chance.

JC: You begin Night Watch in 1874, as a mute mother and her daughter, who pretends to be her servant, arrive at the asylum in Weston, Virginia, and are welcomed by Night Watch and Mrs. Bowman. What research did you do to be able to re-create this asylum for 250 women and men with multiple activities, its chief physician, Dr. Thomas Story, and complex staff, including the Hospital Cook, Mrs. Hexum, with her staff and the group of children she nurtures?

JAP: The novel starts in 1874, nine years after the war, inside the immediacy of ConaLee’s voice. A twelve-year-old girl, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, she undertakes a journey with her mute mother and the man she’s been told to call “Papa.” And so our story begins, while the novel, after we “know” the characters, moves back to 1864, amidst the War, to reveal what made and changed them, though revelations continue throughout the novel. Research included Kirkbride’s book and books about him, my own preoccupation with the irony of “moral treatment” within such a brutal, tortured era, and, well, shelves of books about the War and the times: Ken Burn’s PBS series, “The Civil War;” The Civil War Told By Those Who Lived It, four volumes of diaries, military accounts, letters, published by Library of America; Rankin Sherling’s The Invisible Irish, Keri Leigh Merritt’s Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South and numerous books on herbal medicine and medical practices of the time. Realizing the enormity of national trauma and the myth of “the good death” as characterized in Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Republic of Suffering: Death in the American Civil War, was key.

JC: You include illustrations—maps, photographs, drawings. How did you choose them?

JAP: There were originally many more illustrations, but those that remain are intrinsically connected to the narrative: the ladies’ magazine page, referred to as “thee and thine” in the novel; historical photographs of the asylum that comprise spaces the characters actually know. All are meant to. History tells us the facts, but literature tells us the story, and these images help underscore the reality behind the story. Night Watch almost begins with “You’ll tell the story,” a phrase tossed off to ConaLee as she’s left behind. Without story, we don’t truly penetrate history.

JC: Your characters Eliza, and her daughter ConaLee, the daughter of the sharpshooter, are at the heart of the novel. In 1864, Eliza knows about “woodcraft, home craft, trapping, hunting.” She and Dearbhla “used woods medicine, cooked, grew vegetables in sunny patches of ground.” I’m curious about the archival information about such homesteading in those mountains, and how you were able to detail the herbs, animals, garden produce used in these times?

JAP: Herbal remedies were the only medicine for most, and babies were born at home, in whatever served as home. I loved entering this world unspoiled by industry, in which nature dominated, when it was possible to survive in the mountains, devoting all one’s time to daily provisions and preparing stores for the next season. Living “off the grid” was hard, grinding work nearly two hundred years ago, when the grid itself was so limited; the resourceful and fortunate succeeded. Years of continual research, including films, books of photographs and Appalachian folklore, accounts of the past, family stories, and familiarity with real places still reminiscent of the wild, like New River Gorge and the “hills beyond hills” I saw from my childhood home.

 JC: In 1874 Eliza, now known as Miss Janet, is mute, admitted to the asylum. How were you able to render her trauma so powerfully through the flashback scenes leading up to the asylum days?

JAP: I was living inside her, I suppose. And Dearbhla and ConaLee were witnesses to pieces of her experience.

JC: The vision of Dearbhla, descended from Protestant Irish indentured servants, infuses the novel’s narrative throughout. Is she based on a real character? Or immigrant group?

JAP: Dearbhla is not based on a real character, but on what is known about poor Irish whites, illiterate for generations, who migrated with nothing and served long terms as indentured manual labor. The Irish in the South, particularly, were judged by the rampant alcoholism of the men, who could not find work in economies based on slavery, many of whom gave up, leaving their women and children to lives of bitter poverty.

JC: You describe the sharpshooter’s brain injury, the battlefield hospital where he recovers, his treatment, his gradual return to awareness and ultimate state, in great detail. What was the process of writing these scenes like? How much did medical professionals know about brain injuries at that time?

JAP: I’m fascinated by consciousness itself, by simultaneous time as reflected in the floating mind, the blinkered mind. Medical doctors knew very little about the brain then, or they subscribed to myths about “humors.” The Civil War hospitals in Alexandria, a city given over to the treatment of the wounded, were probably among the most enlightened of the day. “Old” Dr. O’Shea and his assisting nurse, Mrs. Gordon, are two more of the mostly unsung heroes in Night Watch. Their close attention, their common sense, their encouragement of the injured to help one another, their recognition of their patient’s innate abilities despite his maimed appearance and diminished faculties, are still at the heart of what healing humanity can manage.

JC: Are you visualizing the country’s current state of division as resembling this time in American history?

JAP: Absolutely. The Civil War, with its migrating populations, separated families, displacements and broken governments, entrenched points of view that lead to heartbreak and breakdown, casts a long shadow, and that shadow emerges more and more starkly. I see Night Watch as the third of a trilogy of war novels, beginning with Machine Dreams (the Vietnam war as experienced by one American family) and moving through Lark And Termite, which imagines a real event in the Korean War and its generational impact on two motherless children. In a sense, we are all those children. Statistics vary, but the Union that survived the War saw 4,743 lose their lives to lynching between 1882 and 1968 (NAACP). The Tuskegee Institute puts that number at 3,446, of whom 72% were Black, and 1,297 were white “provocateurs,” or those seen to be aiding Blacks. Entrenched institutional attitudes still reflect Civil War tropes. Foreign entities, effectively undermining what was once referred to as Western Civilization, actively support division and domestic terrorism.

A soldier character in Lark And Termite believes “It’s all one war,” implying that locations, weapons, ideologies, change, but the same fires flare up.

Yet the timeless nuances of human identity pull in an opposite direction, the direction of whoever and whatever stands as night watch, acting to protect and sustain despite chaos, to gather up, to survive to a time when all of us can finally say our names.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

JAP: I’m working on a collection “about writers and writing” that includes memoir and addresses the very recent lost past, and the idea of origins in a world obsessed with origin stories.

__________________________________

Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

From King Lear to Succession, the sad, mad, and pretty bad dad remains a captivating, if polarizing character in art. What makes a flawed patriarch so transfixing? The more they push us away, the closer we want to get.

In Claudia Dey’s third novel, Daughter, “To be loved by your father is to be loved by God,” or so claims her protagonist Mona Dean in the first line of her play, a biographical study of Margaux Hemingway. A recent graduate from theatre school, Mona is a reluctant daddy’s girl in thrall to her novelist father Paul, who only turns to her for dispensation when, as Mona puts it, he is betraying his life. These betrayals relate to the three daughters, two wives, and multiple lovers that the feckless Paul retains in constant, if meandering orbit.

But Daughter belongs to Mona, a self-professed minor character, working towards centrality. From the very first page, Mona traverses the frightening space between being her father’s daughter and belonging entirely to herself: woman, artist, lover, partner. Dey mixes theatrical drama with epistolary directness, staying close to Mona while occasionally inhabiting other limited points-of-view. The conditions are intimate—nearly every character is family—luxuriating in vivid imagery while remaining urgent in its landscape of feeling.

I spoke with Dey, a playwright, novelist, and co-designer with her best friend, the writer Heidi Sopinka, of the cult fashion brand Horses Atelier, a few days after she launched Daughter into the world, surrounded by friends and family. “I feel a fundamental relief that it is no longer mine,” she tells me. Dey answered my questions from the comfort of her Toronto home, patiently illuminating some of what went into this deeply personal novel.

Naomi Skwarna: You’ve previously described writing Daughter as a process of transmitting. One of the ways I felt that more instinct-driven narrative path was how the first-person narration will switch into the third-person perspective of a character who is not Mona, but is, in some cases, observing her. It struck me most intensely in the scene where Cherry is watching her in the sculpture garden—the way she’s staring daggers into her bare back. I could feel that gaze on my own back, since I still felt myself to be in Mona’s place.

Claudia Dey: I went into the novel with direction—a list of constraints—but was open to disruption. The transiting points of view fall into that classification of disruption (laughing), but I knew on some level they were critical to the book—to its forward-motion and to its balance or even, realism.

I loathe a hero-villain set-up. It thinks it is dramatic when it’s anti-dramatic. Life is far more tangled, far closer to soap opera. The transiting POVs did show up immediately. My friend called it “the ghostly writing” and my editors referred to these moments as “cameos.” The fact that you felt Cherry gazing into your own back thrills me.

NS:If it’s possible to answer outside of “that’s just how it came out,” I’d love to hear how you handled [the cameos] on a craft level, because it’s very deft. It has an eerie, almost dissociative feeling, like Mona is watching herself. How does it feel for you?

CD: A novel should be a bodily experience. It would be an understatement to say that I wanted to get into the “matter” of Daughter—for the novel, for the reader. I wanted to create closeness with the reader by “transmitting” Mona’s imperfect, smoky, fortified soul—but I also wanted to create dimensionality for the characters in her orbit—how they saw Mona, but also the inner debates, lusts, fears, jokes—how each character translated the world back to themselves.

Practically, it made the title reflect and resonate in a more profound way. Naomi, I could not help myself. I’m a vessel. “That’s just how it came out.” (Laughter.)

I also carried around this quote from The Odes to Solomon: “For the swiftness of the word is inexpressible, and like its expression is its swiftness and force; and it knows no limit. Never doth it fail, but it stands sure, and knows not descent nor the way of it.” This worked on me as an instruction.

NS: Mona, an actor and writer, at different points in the novel, remarks that she was “[r]eordered by the act of performance” and “a minor character in [her] own minor life.” I’m interested in how you think of performance in Mona’s life. Performance—of self, and as an art form—seems like ways of making herself legible in a world that is not very good at seeing who she is or what she needs. Another character, her husband Wes, describes his discomfort around being an actor as a crisis of “being a man playing other men.”

There is a lot of tension around being versus performing! Did writing a novel about different types of performers and performances inform or update any beliefs that you have on the subject?

CD: Is performance an act of deflection, confrontation, elucidation? Escape?

Where to begin? Yes, exactly, I read and I write for new feeling—and echoing back: what is the new feeling generated by Daughter about performers and performance specifically? I think for me the most volatile or sexy insight was in discovering the odd twinship between writing and acting.

I went to theatre school as a playwright, not as a performer. I was surrounded by actors, and felt they possessed a gift that was alien to me. They could, to my eye, just turn on for the world (when I just wanted to turn off and be alone with my mind, I hated to be interrupted and wanted to sit in darkness with my thoughts.) They were like solar eclipses or something phenomenal and bright that you stand in awe of, but feel peripherally frightened by too. Of course, I was in love with all of them. They were so magnetic.

NS: You are a novelist, a playwright, an occasional actor, a designer of clothes. Much of your work engages with more benign, artistic expressions of performance. Daughter embraces the act of performance, but it also seems skeptical, or aware of the skepticism that performance cues—the possibility of duplicity, manipulation of others. How does Mona navigate the differences between the performing self and the writing self?

CD: In Daughter, by writing Mona, I saw in fact that these [acting and writing] are not oppositional but entwined—one feeds the other—I got to combine the forms in Mona alone, and then of course could see how they combined in myself, how when I write I am speaking my writing as lines, testing their validity, how when I build a scene, I am inside the scene, again to test its solidity. Mona is the only character who practices both forms—Wes, her boyfriend, and Paul, her father, occupy the poles of acting and writing, and are, in their way, stranded by this, tormented.

I write women who have more nerve than me. My own panic dream is in the novel—it is about being sent out on stage to play an elderly king; of course, I feel miscast and like a fraud, and then I remember that I have the script in my hand, and think I might save this after all, so I look down to prompt myself, but the script is in comic strips, alphabets I don’t speak, indecipherable. I have a subterranean fear of performance when there is a huge component of performance in writing—going for what is precisely true and alive without adorning it.

Mona describes the electricity she feels when her work is working, the seduction of it, the immersion. This is writing exactly for me. I’m awake to sensation. The act of performance is functioning on so many levels in the book—for others, for ourselves, for fame, for invisibility, for self-protection, for self-construction—each character, in a way, breaks their own fourth wall in the course of the novel.

An aside, maybe. I did act in a horror film months after my second son was born. The state of new motherhood set off a fearlessness in me, a hunger. I played the lead in the film and it was intensely liberating for me. It was a love story—between myself, a lone woman in an isolated cabin, and a lake creature. Daughter is, in that way that all novels are, an accumulation of these experiences—lived and performed (which is also, I see now, lived.)

NS: I appreciate your point about Paul being stranded in his role as a writer. It makes his desperation more urgent, his transgressions more worth the risk, especially around authorship. I’m thinking about how you write on a few occasions of Mona’s awareness that her words will end up in her father’s novels, something she resigns herself to at the beginning of the novel, but then expresses with a little more wryness later on: “I knew someday I would read the detail I’d told Paul at the restaurant, about smelling the glue binding the slats of wood, in a novel of his, as if he had pulled that detail from the sensitive sprawl of his brain.”

To be a bit gendered about it, do women writers in particular have to be more judicious of what they share, lest it become consumed into a man’s story?

CD: Writing Daughter, I thought a lot about how little men have had to do to be worshipped, to be canonized, and how much women have had to do just to be seen—to be seen as equals and equally sublime at the writer’s table. To be gendered about it. I built Paul out of the matter and junk and heat of the writers of my youth—my reading lists were of course patriarchal and so male writers were mentally central, important. Sam Shepard, Leonard Cohen and then Henry Miller—Miller was a massive influence on me; I wrote my undergraduate thesis about Tropic of Cancer arguing that Miller was a feminist writer—in form.

I read a ton of women writers, but I had to seek them out in a different way—like a subculture. Why didn’t I write my thesis about Anaïs Nin? She was my true obsession. Decades later, I still read reviews of women’s work—work that has reordered me, been a revelation—criticism that competes against the work, needs to win against the work rather than engage with it. To be gendered about it. Some of Daughter came from this fury, this fury of women artists being distrusted on a foundational level.

NS: What are your thoughts on approaching biographical writing, or any writing in fact, with the awareness of how casual the human mind—and ego—can be around information and its provenance?

CD: On this note of provenance, originality—is it thieving? Parasitism? In Paul’s case, it is. His talent is not germane, it is borrowed, and he knows this and it undoes him. He is at war with himself. He deceptively presents his work as his own when it relies critically (I mean this on the life-death art scale) on Natasha, his first wife, and Mona, his middle daughter.

I wanted to understand the unguardedness of daughters and why Mona, who perceives with total clarity her father’s insatiability continually reveals herself. What is this addiction we have to our fathers? Why do we fall into a trance with them, a trance of handing over?

She has far more privacy in her love relationship with Wes—he never asks to occupy her psyche, her soul, whereas for Paul, this appears to be his ultimate goal, to consume his daughter. That Goya painting, Saturn Devouring His Son, with the gender of the child inverted. Though Mona, of course, is possessed by her own insatiability—a drive that cannot be explained other than to say that making art is making personhood—what is the effect when the art is not your own? What does that do to a person?

I did write a biographical play about the poet, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and in order to do that—to feel squared with her ghost—I spent years immersing myself in her world, those who populated it—her writing, her writing, her writing. So much so that I went to view an apartment and realized as I toured the rooms that it was one of her former apartments.

The whole project took on this porosity. She would visit me in my dreams. (Laughter, she was like: get on with it.) I felt the weight of the responsibility—writing this genius—this sensuous, funny, avant-garde genius who could speak Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, who published prolifically in every form, who died badly and alone. I understood that I needed to write my version of her rather than try to imitate her life.

______________________________

Daughter by Claudia Dey is available via FSG.