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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

______________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

______________________________

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

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

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

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

________________________

Subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

Teju Cole’s Tremor, Sly Stone’s Thank You, and Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

*

Fiction

1. Tremor by Teju Cole
(Random House)

11 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Pan

“As a form for capturing the meaning and matter of our lives, novels still feel wholly up to the task. And anyone who doubts how effectively this elderly literary genre might survive and evolve to reflect an impossibly complicated world would do well to read Teju Cole’s involute new book, Tremor … t does not disappoint. Cole continues to demonstrate just how elastic a novel can be and how trenchant he is. His book crosses national boundaries just as confidently as it crosses literary ones. The eclectic structure may be challenging, but, given the continuity of Cole’s vision, it’s never baffling … Has little traditional plot but never lacks for interest or incident … To read some of these chapters is to see the essay form in its most elegiac, elastic and epiphanic mode.”

–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)

2. The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
(Bloomsbury)

6 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The House of Doors here

“Outstanding … Eng ingeniously inserts a further shocking twist. But what most gives his novel its grip is his masterly conjuring up of Maugham’s imaginative world and the steamy tropic latitudes in which it burgeoned … Occasionally the prose becomes overclamorous … Beautifully detailed and encompassing the vagaries of Maugham’s life, the contours of his creativity and the personal and political tensions covertly quivering through the sultry colony around him, The House of Doors is a finely accomplished piece of work.”

–Peter Kemp (The Sunday Times)

3. Vengeance is Mine by Marie NDiaye
(Knopf)

3 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an essay by Jordan Stump on translating Marie NDiaye here

“The characters in Marie NDiaye’s novels are an unsettling brood … A master at agitating, probing and upending expectations … She presents a new litter of misfits and constructs one of her most beguiling and visceral tales … NDiaye deals in impressions and captures a particular kind of emotional delirium in Vengeance. She leans into jaggedness, twisting her narrative to mimic Maître Susane’s fraying psychological state as she searches for a kind of truth.”

–Lovia Gyarkye (The New York Times Book Review)

**

Nonfiction

1. The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie
(Knopf)

7 Rave • 1 Positive

“Ogilvie has provided a sprightly, elegant tribute to the ordinary readers…who made up the bulk of the O.E.D.’s work force, largely unpaid and unsung, filling in millions of slips in their spare time … An engrossing survey … The real joy of The Dictionary People is to be reminded that any group of people pinned at its intersection will still burst forth every which way, a tapestry of contradictions, noble and ignoble, wild and banal.”

–Dennis Duncan (The New York Times Book Review)

2. Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir by Sly Stone
(Auwa)

 3 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Sly Stone has been MIA for so long, many people will probably be surprised to learn that he is still alive. Actually, at age 80, the incredible and unpredictable funk music pioneer has, once again, surprised us all by producing a frisky, remarkably vivid and cogent account of his life and career.”

–Joel Selvin (The San Francisco Chronicle)

3. The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid
(Knopf)

4 Rave • 1 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Lumumba Plot here

“Reid…has arrived with a carefully researched book that warns us about what is lost when tensions between great powers play out in the developing world … Reid develops his main characters beautifully, especially Lumumba, who passes ‘like a meteor’—to borrow the lovely phrase of his daughter Juliana—through its pages … Lumumba is re-elevated by the end of Reid’s book, mainly through the sea of indignities he suffered as a captive … argues convincingly that by ordering the assassination of Lumumba, the Eisenhower administration crossed a moral line that set a new low in the Cold War.”

–Nicolas Niarchos (The New York Times Book Review)

Sometime in the early twentieth century, a large subgroup of Arabic words and expressions referring to sex and sexual organs began to disappear from printed books, as if the educated classes had signed a code of honor agreeing never to set them down on paper. This was why, when they found me guilty, the court of appeal would not record the turns of phrase I had used that they claimed to find so scandalizing. These words haven’t vanished because speakers of Arabic have stopped using them, by the way; if anything, they’re probably being used even more than before. It’s only the immortality of being written down that is denied them.

Shunned by contemporary literature, the words gradually disappeared from new books. They were proscribed altogether from the lexicon of the newly coalescing Modern Standard Arabic that filled the airwaves and the pages of newspapers and magazines. They could be found in reprints and editions from the historical canon.

But soon bowdlerized versions of those works, which omitted the offending words entirely, started turning up on the market. The words were chased not only out of literature but out of the entire realm of the written word, to be replaced by utilitarian terms like penis instead of dick or cock, and vulva in place of cunt. If the machine defined the modern period, then the genitalia, too, were to be reduced to mere functions.

To be clear, this repudiation wasn’t because these words were too vernacular or low-class: I’m talking about words possessed of a fine classical pedigree, words that can be found in historical dictionaries and encyclopedias of the Arabic language. And at the same time, they’re some of the most commonly used words for the sexual organs in a whole slew of contemporary Arabic dialects. Personally, I’ve never heard anyone use the Arabic equivalents of penis or vagina, and yet they’re regularly bandied about in the written language.

Part of the reason for this is colonization. After being subjected to decades of brutal rule by the Ottomans, the French, and the British, institutions of authority in Arab nations have attempted to erase indigenous terms and replace them with their European counterparts, declaring that the Arabic word for “cunt”—kuss—is obscene and pornographic, while vagina is perfectly acceptable.

Erotica and the various forms of writing that deal with sex never went away; they just had to make do without the correct, dictionary-sanctioned vocabulary that described the matters at hand in terms that people actually knew and used. Educated Arabs of the twentieth century created their own peculiar kind of language around sex, which used functional, instrumental terms, and was ornamented with rose garden metaphors that involved women revealing their “blossoms” and men savoring the juice of their “fruit.” These were the kinds of descriptions of love that filled the Arabic novels of the period. But sex as pleasure, lust, motive, desire—once so common in Arabic literature—was confined to dusty books of the past.

While the West was masturbating furiously over the erotic tales of the Nights and the writings of Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, Arabs themselves were burying those stories. What use did they have for tales of genies and flying carpets when they were attempting to liberate themselves from European occupation and colonization, armed with a national self-conception created in the image of European modernity and buttressed by essentially Victorian values?

These stories were forgotten and erased in favor of a more seemly version of the canon, and merely saying some of the words they used came to equal profanity and insult. These words have become freighted with all sorts of other negative implications, too, prime among them class connotations. Since the educated classes of the modern period have abandoned Arabic sex terms for English and French alternatives, these terms connote a speaker’s proletarian vulgarity. No cultured, well-mannered person who’s been brought up properly would ever use that sort of language!

Despite all this, written usage of these words exploded with increased access to the internet, first in the form of insults and expletives, and then in the erotica and pornographic writing that became so popular online. The genre was a crucible in which multiple dialects fused and readers encountered the rich variety of sexual language that each local version of Arabic had produced. The internet also saw morality campaigns that aimed to ban that same language, but they were no match for the frenzied outpouring of sexual self-expression by Arabic-speaking internet users who were damn well going to use their own words after being deprived of them for so long by respectable, educated elites.

These words are slowly returning to the world of literature too. They’re peering out from behind the layers of shame imposed upon them by the Arab projects of enlightenment and modernity. For some commentators, this is tantamount to apostasy, and columns and think pieces fulminate on the moral backslide represented by internet obscenity, but what’s happened is the opposite: people are liberating and reclaiming their language.

Of course, it’s hardly surprising that under the Sisi presidency, the establishment has reacted so cagily. Straining to regain control of the country after it nearly slipped from their grasp altogether, they’re coming down harder than ever before on any sign of social or cultural rebellion.

The state avoids prosecuting solidly “political” cases, because those kinds of actions are readily perceived as state oppression, and run the risk of rallying the opposition. But the powers that be see social and cultural cases as a golden opportunity to flex their moral muscles and show society that they’re defending family values.

Like the public prosecution lawyer who was so obsessed with the sex scenes in my book, and the judge that found me guilty, they view these cases as a chance to paint themselves as defenders of morality, society, and the family—all of which are gravely threatened by writing. The powers that be think that when they blow the whistle of religion and morality, the masses will rush to fall in behind them. And they think that the unlucky victim who stands accused will simply keep their mouth shut, because how could such a filthy pervert dare to open their mouth once they’ve been shown for what they are?

The judge in my first trial was taken aback to find out we were going to call witnesses; they’d all been expecting us to be embarrassed and apologize. That’s why their reaction was so hysterical when we went on the offensive and attacked them for overstepping their legal and constitutional role. In my second trial, the public prosecution lawyer screamed as he brandished a stack of my writings that had nothing to do with the case. Having tracked down everything I’d ever written online, he alleged that I had defended the use of the objectionable terms in question, and had even published an article in which I frankly announced that I was opposed to societal mores and values that constrained freedom of opinion and of expression.

He was so obsessed that at one point in his oral pleading, he turned to the bench and told them that on my website he’d found a short story called “La Señora,” which he’d arbitrarily decided formed part of my novel Using Life, and then spent a tedious four minutes narrating the story. It centered on the same protagonist as the novel—when he said this, he pointed his finger at me—who has sex with a female drug dealer and helps her grow and sell hashish.

I stared at the floor for the whole hearing, trying to hide behind my lawyers—Nasir Amin, Mahmoud Othman, and Yasmine—and hold in my laughter. The lawyer’s performance reached its dramatic climax as he bellowed his demand that the harshest punishment possible be brought to bear upon me in order to avenge the families I’d destroyed, the children I’d corrupted, and the youths I’d cast into a pit of drug use and depravity. I had my hand clamped over my mouth, and I was so desperately stifling the urge to laugh that I ended up letting out a deafening fart instead.

Day 284: Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Extremely anxious. Trying to get over my fantasies of a presidential pardon. The date of our challenge at the court of cassation is approaching. I don’t even know if I’m going to appear in court for the hearing or not. The guys here are saying no one gets sent to their appeal hearings. But if I don’t, how will I know what the verdict is?

Day 290: Tuesday, December 6, 2016

The hearing’s been postponed from December 4 to December 18 because the public prosecution hasn’t submitted their brief. Apparently the judge called my lawyers “you human rights lot.” As far as I can understand, the cassation prosecution has accepted the paperwork for the appeal but hasn’t submitted its opinion on the merits.

The judge told them he wanted to hear oral statements and rule on the merits himself, so my lawyers requested a postponement that will give them time to see the public prosecutor’s brief, once it’s submitted, and prepare a detailed response. I’m ignorant and confused, even more so than Kafka’s man from the country, who spends his lifetime sitting before a gateway in the desert in the hope that it will open so he can seek the law.

Day 300: Friday, December 16, 2016

I dream a lot. I’m visited by friends and distant acquaintances, but Yasmine hasn’t come to me in my dreams for a long time. I miss dreaming about her.

Day 303: Monday, December 19, 2016

Finally, by asking multiple sources, I’ve been able to find out that the court of cassation ruled that I should be released. It’s confirmed—one of our cellmates even heard it on the radio—but the prison administration denies knowing anything. “We’ve heard nothing,” they say.

______________________________

“Using the Right Words,” an excerpt from Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison by Ahmed Naji, now available from McSweeney’s.

Poet, editor, and writer John Freeman and novelist Omar El Akkad join co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about the final issue of Freeman’s, a literary magazine founded in 2015. El Akkad, a contributor to the volume, describes founding editor Freeman’s intense and uniquely broad interest in literature, as well as his unusual ability to curate collections of pieces that are in conversation with one another. Freeman explains the work and support that made the magazine possible, and reflects on the moment when he decided to pursue it, as well as how he decided to conclude it. They discuss the publication as a project that created a valuable network of literary connections and gave many writers a new context and outlet for their work. El Akkad reads from “Pillory,” his story which appears in the final edition of Freeman’s, and talks about how he came to write it.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf and Todd Loughran.

EMBED FROM MEGAPHONE

*
From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: I’m teaching a creative nonfiction class right now. And I tell students: think of when you’re doing a polemic, you have to define terms like… Tom Frank in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas defines this term called the “great backlash” as a way of explaining what conservatives were doing in the late ’80s. And what I love about that piece is how easily you can quickly define these terms that don’t exist in our language, but we understand how they work, and they fit really easily into the flow. But the piece wouldn’t work without you creating a terminology for what’s happening.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, I mean, I spend a lot of my time trying to think about the price of admission, because a lot of my stories end up in a place where there is a price of admission. I wrote a story a while back called “Government Slots” about this world in which there’s something like a post office and everybody gets a little box. And whatever you put in that box is believed to follow you into the afterlife. It disappears the moment you die. And so the whole story, which has almost no plot to speak of, is about what kind of things people would take with them, if they thought it would follow them into the next life or whatever comes after. And so, some of these boxes are full of Bibles, resumes, condoms; people have very different ideas of what’s coming next.

But that was another story where we had to think about the price of admission, like, here’s what you need to know about this setup. Because once I give it to you, I’m not interested in that anymore. We’re going on the emotional aftershocks of that. But it’s something I have to think about a lot. And I do it to varying degrees of success.

WT: I mean, it’s very hard to do world-building concisely, right? I think that story does a great job—it’s not a very long story, and it creates an entire world very quickly. Can you talk to us a little bit about, as a writer, you mentioned a little bit earlier that you were aware of Freeman’s and were reading it? When did you start reading it? In your mind is there such a thing as a “Freeman story”? Are there particular things that you value about the journal? We’re trying to start… find somebody to do a long book about this later, criticizing John for somehow doing something wrong, and the people that he’s brought into the novel like they do with Iowa.

OA: I make fun of them a lot. And then immediately send them an email saying, “Please don’t drop me. I beg you.” If I’m being perfectly honest, my ignorance knows no bounds. And the first time I came across Freeman’s was when I was researching John, so, the backstory, for whatever it’s worth, is that in the middle of working on the edits to my second novel, this book called What Strange Paradise, my editor Sonny Mehta passed away. And in fact, the last trip I did before everything went to hell because of the pandemic was to his memorial service in New York. And I was in a really bad place. I sort of won the lottery, with respect to my first agent, my first publisher. You’re a first time novelist, and you have no idea what the hell you’re doing and suddenly, you’re put into this position where you’re working with people who are among the best who have ever done it.

I didn’t want to do anything else with writing as a commercial endeavor. And John comes into Knopf, and I have no idea whether he asked for me to be working with him on another novel that still doesn’t exist, that I’m still working on. I have no idea what the backstory is. And I start looking up this guy, and I’m like, “Oh, he has a magazine named after him. That’s something. I guess I better read this thing.”

I think Arrivals was the first one that I picked up. And I just became obsessed with it. It was a great introduction to the kind of person John is, which is the sort of person that you can sit with and say, “Tell me your five favorite Nepalese poets,” and he’d be like, “Just five?” And you’ll have to come up with another container, or sub-container, to put it in, because the extent to which he really cares about literature as an individual effort, but also literature into how the stories speak to one another, I think is unlike almost anyone I’ve ever worked with. And so that’s how I became acquainted with the entire endeavor.

It was weird reading somebody’s work and reading the thing they’ve created before, I think, we ever had a discussion in person. Or no, we did have a discussion in person at the Vancouver festival, when I had no idea why you wanted to talk to me at all, because I had no idea what was going on, on the other side of this. But it was part of my introduction to who John is, as a literary mind. And that is a facet that continues to astound me.

John Freeman: Vancouver is a great place. I go to these festivals, in part in order to meet people like Omar. And for the last 10 years, Vancouver Writers Fest has been generous enough to schlep me out and in exchange for me moderating an event or two, I get to mooch around and listen to people whom I don’t know read, and it’s been a wonderful education, not just in Canadian lit but in literature from around the world. And Omar’s frequently roped in to moderate events as well as be in them. And so I had seen Omar both on the end of questions and on the questioning end. And it’s very unusual to see a novelist be able to do both. You two are particularly quite odd in that regard. Because most novelists are world builders, but they’re not necessarily journalists and interrogators, and both of you have worked in some capacities as nonfiction writers yourselves.

And Omar, of course, has spent a lot of time as an overseas reporter, sometimes in conflict zones. And it’s exciting when you see someone’s mind framing stories by the questions they ask. And then you can see them do that but in the fiction way, which is to create sort of invisible structures of enchantment, which are asking questions, but are not necessarily visible.

So, you know, with American War, what would happen if everything that ever happened around the world as a result of America’s imperial flex happened within American borders? What would that feel like? And you know, similarly, in What Strange Paradise, what would happen if you reset the story of Peter Pan but on the island of Lesbos, or in the middle of the Mediterranean, with two children trying to walk to safety? But I think that there are some people who have worked as journalists and are novelists – Colson Whitehead is another – where you can see that the skills are related and enhancing each other.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: John, you’re talking a little bit about questions. And you wrote about that in your introduction to the issue and you also write at some length about the late Barry Lopez. And you write about how keenly attuned he was to living and the intensity with which he paid attention to everything. And the issue includes, incredibly, a never before published story by him, and also includes a never before published poem by the late Denis Johnson. Can you talk a little bit about including those pieces in Conclusions?

JF: Yeah, there’s also a poem by an 11th century Chinese poet translated by Wendy Chen, who came to me as a submission at Knopf, and I was just completely bowled over by these poems. Li Qingzhao, who’s sort of regarded as highly as Li Po, but has a kind of Sappho-like quality to her poems. They’re poems of longing and love. The voice feels so immediate. And those poems have been known and been around and Wendy has just done a new translation.

In the case of Barry and Denis Johnson, those pieces were found recently. I’m friends with Barry’s widow, the writer Debra Gwartney. And when I went to Barry’s memorial up in Oregon, in his study there was a poem open on a kind of pedestal facing the woods, which had been recently scorched from one of the big Oregon fires. And it was a kind of poem that was about stewardship. And I had no idea Barry had written a poem and it was dated 1980-something in Port Townsend. And I asked Debra, I said, “What is this?” And she said, “I think he wrote this as a broadside in benefit for Copper Canyon.” So I asked if, at a later date, we could publish that. And she said, “Absolutely.” Because it’s a beautiful summary of all the ways in which maybe we underestimate our footprint on the world, but also, how much more improved our lives would be if we saw stewardship as not an “also” but just as a primary function of our reason to live.

And in the course of laying that out, she wrote back to me and said, “Hey, I’ve been looking through Barry’s papers, and I found this essay, do you want to look at it?” And she gave it to me on my birthday last year in Seattle when we were having an event for Freeman’s. She has a harrowing, beautiful piece about driving out of the fire that eventually claimed a big part of their house. They survived, but that was probably the beginning of the end of Barry’s life. They lived on a salmon river, and the river was really damaged, and the salmon suffered as a result of it. And in the course of this event, she just handed me a printout of this piece. And it’s a gorgeous piece of writing of walking home along this river. And for whatever reason, maybe someone commissioned it, and he never liked it or decided not to turn it in, or maybe the magazine folded, all those things can be very likely. But it’s a perfect piece of writing and a perfectly observed walk home. And it’s at the end of the day. So it felt like the most obvious place to begin the issue.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento.

*

JOHN FREEMAN

Freeman’s • Wind, Trees • Maps • How to Read a Novelist • Dictionary of the Undoing

OMAR EL AKKAD

“Pillory” • American War • What Strange Paradise

OTHERS:

Freeman’s Conclusions | Vancouver Writers Fest • Freeman’s Conclusions – The Nest – Vancouver – Oct 20, 2023 · Showpass • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 3, Episode 22: “The Unpopular Tale of Populism: Thomas Frank on the Real History of an American Mass Movement” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 3, Episode 17: “Poetry, Prose, and the Climate Crisis: John Freeman and Tahmima Anam on Public Space and Global Inequality” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 1, Episode 5: “Is College Education a Right or a Privilege?” featuring John Freeman and Sarah Smarsh • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 2, Episode 17: “Emily Raboteau and Omar El Akkad Tell a Different Kind of Climate Change Story” • Denis Johnson • Barry Lopez • Wendy Chen • Li Qingzhao • Li Po • Debra Gwartney • Michael Salu • Colson Whitehead • Jon Gray

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

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

*

from the episode:

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

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

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

JT: Yeah, exactly.

MK: And that’s nonfiction, so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MK: And it kind of creates this counter narrative.

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

*
Recommended Reading:

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

__________________________________

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

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Fatima Bhutto on Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, Julian Lucas on Teju Cole’s Tremor, Hermione Hoby on Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine, David Roth on Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite, and Kristen Roupenian on Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

*

“The two halves of Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s slim, searing novel are bound by both minor and major details: a brutal gang rape and murder, the punishing heat, the eerie presence of a dog in distress and two nameless characters. The first is a fastidious, quietly malevolent Israeli platoon commander who organises the gang rape and murder of a young Bedouin. The second is a woman in Ramallah who stumbles upon the story in a newspaper decades later and becomes haunted by one minor detail—the fact that the girl’s assault happened 25 years to the day before she was born … The Negev gang rape at the heart of Minor Detail is a true story, carried out by Israeli soldiers in 1949. Another minor detail: according to declassified documents, the real-life commander answered his superior’s question on whether the girl was eventually returned to her village by reporting that his soldiers killed her because ‘it was a shame to waste the petrol.’ The atmosphere is one of unbearable tension, measured by the increasing anxiety of the dog who stands as helpless sentry over the girl. He howls and cries, pants and trembles, barking endlessly. Shibli’s writing is calm and tightly controlled, lyrical in its descriptions of cruelty and uncertainty. The terror Shibli evokes intensifies slowly, smoldering, until it is shining off the page … The second section of the novel follows a Palestinian woman as she hunts down information about the crime decades later. What ought to be an ordinary search—visiting two museum archives—becomes a logistical nightmare for someone living under occupation … All novels are political and Minor Detail, like the best of them, transcends the author’s own identity and geography. Shibli’s writing is subtle and sharply observed. The settlers and soldiers she describes in the second half of the novel are rendered with no malice or artifice; she writes of an elderly settler’s veined hands with tenderness, and as an author is never judgmental or didactic. The book is, at varying points, terrifying and satirical; at every turn, dangerously and devastatingly good.”

–Fatima Bhutto on Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (The Guardian)

“His great theme is the limits of vision, and the way that these limits, when imaginatively confronted, can serve as the basis for a kind of second sight … An elegant and unsettling prose still-life, which reflects on art’s relationship to theft and violence, to privacy and togetherness, and to the way we mark time … If Open City was a bellwether of the last decade’s autofictional turn, Tremor occasionally sounds like a defense of the now-beleaguered genre … At least half of the novel, which hews rather closely to its protagonist’s consciousness, consists of ideas about how to live, listen, think, and see well … It’s tempting to characterize the novel as what the critic Becca Rothfeld calls ‘sanctimony literature,’ a mode of fiction designed to showcase the author’s ethical awareness. But there’s more going on than virtue signalling. Tunde’s worries over various moral problems—art restitution, the portrayal of the dead, artificial intelligence—converge on a dilemma that bedevils both him and his creator: Is there a way to represent the world and not ‘cannibalize the lives of others’? … A work of autofiction with the ambition of a systems novel, aspiring to illustrate the world’s interconnectedness without recourse to the fictional conventions of plot and psychological portraiture. Instead, it moves like an essay, interweaving slices of life with musings on Malian guitar virtuosos, astronomical phenomena, films by Ingmar Bergman and Abbas Kiarostami. Cole’s mind is so agile that it’s easy to follow him anywhere … There is a method to the meandering. Cole uses the resonance between fragments to imply a dimly apprehended totality, like a seismologist integrating measurements from different sites to map an earthquake … Fiction takes the transparency of other minds so much for granted that it can obscure the rarity of true communion—which doesn’t always require explanation, or even the exchange of words. Tremor, with its vision of separateness and synchronicity, is obliquely about the pandemic, much in the way that Open City revolved around 9/11.”

–Julian Lucas on Teju Cole’s Tremor (The New Yorker)

“No one could legitimately call Marie NDiaye ‘overlooked’…Nonetheless, the magnificence of her writing, in all its shocks of perception, makes you feel that by rights her name should come with the same pantheonic glow that attends, say, Annie Ernaux or Elena Ferrante. What makes her a master? In part, it’s NDiaye’s deft interweaving of those narrative traits we associate with genre fiction, specifically crime thrillers—suspense, mystery, intrigue, a touch of the supernatural—with a high-modernist sensibility in thrall to the shifting, refractive nature of memory, unsettled selfhood, and intersubjectivity tout court. To attempt to summarize NDiaye’s approach—this blend of the heady high and supposed low—is to properly appreciate what an unruly mix it is, one that surely risks chaos, or, worse, pretension. What a feat, then, that the author invariably marshals these strains into lucid sophistication, not least in her newest book, the superbly controlled Vengeance Is Mine … The plot is accelerated by these enigmas, while the prose fruitfully resists this velocity, submerging you into time-stretched and sensation-heightened dimensions. A friend once played me a Justin Bieber song that had been slowed down by 800 percent. ‘U Smile,’ a trite little burst of sugary pop, was now transfigured into thirty-five minutes of shimmering, transcendent washes of sound that felt like an appropriate score for the cosmos. It remains one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. NDiaye does something like this with words. No life, no matter how modest or compromised or confused, is banal; through her telling and her talents, stray, lone consciousnesses are magnified to the epic.”

–Hermione Hoby on Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine (4Columns)

“Between Going Infinite and Walter Isaacson’s enormous biography of the increasingly daffy and grim Elon Musk, it has been a rough time for the Heroes of Capitalism genre. The future prospects for that type of book are certainly still bright; Americans aren’t going to stop revering rich people just because they are ‘awful’ or ‘boring’ any time soon. But the ways in which Going Infinite falls short suggests a problem that goes beyond a national shortage of sufficiently compelling or just acceptably non-sociopathic rich guys. The fact that Isaacson’s ‘The Genius Biographies’ series has declined from Leonardo Da Vinci to Steve Jobs to Elon Musk suggests not only that the heroes are getting less heroic, but that these books’ usual signifier of genius—vast wealth—has completely decoupled from any personal merit … Much of the satisfaction of these stories comes from how deftly Lewis explains those bigger issues and the artful, affectionate way that he colors in those characters. Lewis protagonists are not always admirable, and their motivations are not necessarily pure, but because they are correct and bold and often outside of an Establishment that is more smug or more self-interested or just slower than them, they tend to make for effective heroes. Going Infinite fails to deliver on either half of that formula. It’s not clear in the book, as it has never really been clear anywhere else, what social or economic problem is being addressed by cryptocurrency. This is doubly true of the ad hoc lawlessness of FTX … while he seldom fails to note the abstruse grandiosity that allows generalities about benefiting humanity to justify various smaller-scale inhumanities in the moment, Lewis does not doubt that Bankman-Fried wants to make many billions of dollars so that he can then give it away, at some point TBD, for some socially useful end, as effective altruism prescribes. The comedy is in the contrast—the reminder that all these strange, selfish, toweringly disagreeable people doing these socially useless things in a liminally legal space are actually doing them all to save humanity … Bankman-Fried is a weird guy and does plenty of weird things, but he is also never quite as brilliant as this story or the usual Lewis template would require. He’s absolutely high-handed and cold and difficult to be around in the ways that geniuses are, but any sense of his genius seems to have been reverse-engineered from how unstintingly, exhaustingly reckless and unpleasant and uncaring he is. As with Musk, the fact that Bankman-Fried was a billionaire when Lewis started reporting the book seems to not just color but retroactively justify what a turd he otherwise is; why else would this distinguished author be writing a book about him?”

–David Roth on Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (New York Magazine)

“…a ghost story conjured by representatives of a deceased author’s estate. It all sounds a little uncanny. Isn’t that the case, though, whenever we try to resurrect dead writers? In the past decade, a resurgence of acclaim has fully established Shirley Jackson as the queen of dark literary fiction, and there is no surer sign of an author’s success than the arrival of a new generation of writers eager to channel her spirit, rereading and reimagining her work. So much for the death of the author … These days, the more sophisticated literary estates may be less likely to hire ghostwriters to imitate a deceased writer’s work; instead, they authorize established writers to continue the work (and share cover credit) under their own names. The premise of a seamless transition, in which the original author slips off into the afterlife unnoticed, has been replaced by a Frankenstein-like chimera of the living and the dead…Such collaborations tend to be respectful, reasonably successful, and positively reviewed, but there often is, nonetheless, something unnervingly lifeless about them. Like all the undead, the books’ resurrected protagonists are free to perform only a few limited actions, shadowy repetitions of actions they took in life—solving mysteries, spying on behalf of England, channelling the One Power. It’s hard to read them without imagining those unseen authorities peering over the writer’s shoulder and wondering about the limits of their good will … the creation of official sequels and spinoffs is inevitably haunted by questions of agency, power, and control. To join Elizabeth Hand on her journey to Hill House is to be reminded of the slippery dominance of genius, the way it both establishes and breaks its own rules, tempting then trapping those who dare to follow them. Faithfully adhering to the rules doesn’t guarantee success, yet breaking them will inevitably invite accusations of failure and betrayal. Each reader who arrives at A Haunting on the Hill hoping to return to the original Hill House will feel disappointed in her own way, although the shape of her disappointment will speak more to the nature of her loyalty to Jackson than to the qualities of the new book. Perhaps unsurprisingly, A Haunting on the Hill is least successful when Hand directly imitates Jackson, most successful when she draws on her own talents—and becomes truly fascinating when Hand lets those anxious whispers about authority and influence take over the tale.”

–Kristen Roupenian on Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill (The New Yorker)

I’m reading a book about New York in the late 1970s and it begins with a perennial observation that you can live many lifetimes in the city due to the unsentimental way it demolishes the past. I have a spooky feeling, peering over the shoulder of the writer, Paul Goldberger, forty-five years later. Most of the thrilling new items he describes – buses, which are all painted white, phone booths one cannot molest—are now in 2023 things in the past. Some of it reads like a prophecy: about Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mercedes Benz showroom at 430 Park Ave. Goldberger asks: “why Wright did this is a mystery… the idea of having sleek European cars appear to the purchaser to be gliding toward him off a curving ramp is an appealing one, but it doesn’t stand a chance of working in such a low cramped space.” And now that that show room is gone.

Working as an editor, especially within literary journals, can sometimes feel like a similar experience in hyperactive obsolescence. Not that writers’ manuscripts are gliding toward us in a low cramped space—but rather every week brings a new foreclosure. This month it’s The White Review and The Gettysburg Review. Next month it will be others. This is the way of literary magazine publishing. For every Virginia Quarterly Review or Paris Review, there are dozens if not hundreds of other small journals that open with fanfare, continue for a few issues and then close quietly in the night before the chill has gone off the wine for their launch parties. I’ve lived in New York City almost thirty years and my memory is cluttered with issue parties for little magazines like Open City or Astra, or Black Clock, beautiful journals which are no longer in circulation.

It can make you feel a bit gloomy, unless you accept that like New York City itself, literary magazines are by nature—most of them, not all—meant to be ephemeral. If they were part of a biosphere, little magazines wouldn’t be the tortoises swimming along well into their hundredth year, they would be the Great Danes of our planet—lovely, clumsy, a little slobbery and gone too soon. And of course, even though we know, otherwise, their days are numbered, we grow attached to them.

All of this is on my mind because Freeman’s, the literary annual I started in 2014, is also coming to a close this fall with its tenth issue, which is themed to conclusions. Yes, there was a time when I believed it would last for 70 years, and I fathomed going over proofs at age 114 with a looking glass and a pipe and stories of being at Ocean Vuong’s first public reading. I imagined having an office. I dreamed up the ways that it could become permanent. None of them were feasible. (Incidentally, these are reasonable things, by the way—and magazines which are striving toward semi-permanence, which employ people, like Gettysburg Review, absolutely deserve them, especially when people’s livelihood depend upon it)

That last parenthetical might sound like a bum-covering caveat, but these issues are important. I edited a literary magazine in the past, Granta, a magazine you might have thought had a license to burn money, since it was owned by one of the wealthiest women in Europe. It didn’t. And the unbuilding of the team I worked with was one of the most painful experiences of my professional life. What is one person’s choice is another person’s livelihood, and this is one of the challenges of working in a form that requires money, since virtually all literary magazines lose it, some of them quite a lot of it. Benefactors, institutional or individual, tend to have a different idea about money from the people who work for them.

John Freemand with with Garnette Cadogan at City Lights.

When I started Freeman’s one of the things I wanted to set in place was a support structure free of these hang-ups. It was a pipe dream, but I felt like it was possible in a world in which so many great things happen through mutual aid, not patronage. I wanted to pay writers first, everyone else who worked on it, and then see if it could make money. This meant, in essence, finding a book publisher who was willing to see if their existing system could take on some of the production tasks of the magazine: luckily, Morgan Entrekin at Grove, which has remained independent minded for almost eighty years, was willing to do this.

As a result, for the last ten years Freeman’s has benefited from some of the best young minds in publishing who were, essentially, moonlighting on their day jobs. Before his authors won Pulitzers (Viet Thanh Nguyen) and Booker Prizes (Douglas Stuart, Bernadine Evaristo), Peter Blackstock was its editorial assistant; followed by Alison Malecha and Dhyana Taylor and Emily Burns. For almost the whole run I had a managing editor, Julia Berner-Tobin, who made time out of her time to shepherd it along. If you’ve ever met a managing editor, the most minute-pinched people in all of publishing, you will appreciate what a lucky break I’d received. Freeman’s also had great copyeditors, production designers, and publicists. For a few year it’s had a home on this website thanks to Emily Firetog and Jonny Diamond, which brings it a distribution far greater than any post office can provide.

I knew this set-up had a time-limit. It was not, make money or else, it was rather: go for it, and let’s make sure not to overtax everyone involved. So I knew I’d have to treat every issue of Freeman’s like it might be the last. This was fine given my goals, which seem a little utopian when I set them down. I wanted to create a literary magazine that was a beautiful object, and whose pieces felt as warm and funny and sad, and intense as life itself. I wanted it to feel spoken to you. I wanted it to feel like the best dinner party you’ve ever been to, not because people are performing or dominating the table, but because one story built off another off another, and that in the exchange, something greater than the singular, came together, like a kind of music.

Storytelling and enchantment have come under criticism recently, perhaps because of the ways they are sold to us in a world in which our attention is a commodity. I never feel like this when I’m listening to a very good storyteller, or when a writer has plunged me into a world that they have created. It is astounding that the interior sonics of voice can change our minds. It can add new neural networks, alter blood-flow, it can literally change what we are made of, or what we care about.

Aminatta Forna and Binyawanga Wainana telling stories.

Little magazines have a history of utopian thinking and short life spans: I knew that if Freeman’s were to get beyond it’s third issue, it was going to need help. Freeman’s didn’t really have a promotional budget: so the only way to get it out there was to make it a place. Not just a paper bound book, or the corner of a website, nice as both are. I’ve always felt like events can do that, by creating a culture around a publication, and by occurring in spaces that already have acoustical mojo of their own: like independent bookstores. So for each issue Freeman’s had a series of events: more than 500 of them in all over the last decade, from Talking Leaves in Buffalo to City Lights in San Francisco, to Shakespeare & Co in Paris. I would say ninety percent of them at indy bookstores. There’s one this Friday at the Vancouver Writers Festival with Omar El Akkad and Tania James, this annual fall literary gathering has hosted no fewer than six launches.

This volume of events is glorious and wildly unsustainable, and yet I wouldn’t trade it for anything. To listen to and watch writers exchange ideas and think, even in the sometimes cynically tilted era of the book tour, the tidied model of the festival, is thrilling, especially when it’s people who aren’t often put together on stages. Literature is too easily slotted when we talk about it publicly. Sometimes it doesn’t have to involve physical travel either. I will never forget hearing Mieko Kawakami, Daniel Mendelsohn and Valzhyna Mort discuss the ways we talk about love in an event hosted online by the Vancouver Writers’ Festival.  Or to hear David Searcy talk about drag racing in Corsicana, Texas.

I love events because I went to many of them in my twenties and thirties. When I moved to New York City in the mid-1990s I didn’t know anybody, I was often lonely. A little bit less so in libraries and bookstores or sitting in an audience with the lights turned low. The first year I arrived I went to three or four a week. I can’t believe some of the people I got to see read and speak aloud: Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Adrienne Rich, David Foster Wallace, Gloria Naylor, Wanda Coleman. W.G. Sebald. Kay Ryan. Dagoberto Gilb. Svetlana Alexievich. The list is my library.

Of course, as Jane Jacobs has argued, urban planning and greed and accidents make a city; but it’s people, too, which means their stories. The space those tales open up. The New York City I moved to was made possible by the social space of defunct magazines. I lived in the village in areas kept sane and informed by Christopher Street, which ceased publication in 1995, but whose writers, those who had survived, remembered and paid testimony in ways that lasted. Andrew Holleran’s Ground Zero, his essays from Christopher Street about living and dying in New York during the days when there were successful treatments for HIV and AIDS, returned to relevance during the terrifying opening days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a model for a little magazine, it was hard to find a better one. A publication which made itself feel needed during a time when stories were important. (And if you want to revisit that time, check out co-editor Michael Dennehy’s book, On Christopher Street, published in March this year). So many crises—and explosions—have had their versions: journals, small newspapers, chapbooks. Fire!—the magazine which ran for just one issue during the Harlem Renaissance, fueled by the work of Gwendolyn Bennett and Wallace Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston’s. Robert Bly’s great window to the world, The Fifties, connected anti-war activists in America to those around the world, from Tomas Transtömer to himself.

One of the great powers of a little journal is that, even when it is geographically pinned to a place, it opens up an alternate imaginary community to the ones of a nation, or at least of the nation as it is defining itself currently. In her great book, Bad Mexicans, Kelly Lytle Hernandez describes the ever evolving role of Regeneración, the newspapers which began calling out of Porfirio Diaz in the build-up to the Mexican Revolution. Doing so landed its editors, Ricardo Flores Magón and his brothers, in jail, so in the early 1900s they crossed the border into the U.S. and continued publishing it from there, borrowing the presses of Spanish language publications across the borderlands, printing it there, and then smuggling it back into Mexico.

Aleksandar Hemon after a Freeman’s event in Sarajevo.

It’s an astonishing story, a harrowing one too, since the U.S. and Mexico collaborated to track down the Magonistas, the men and women who worked on these publications, and in so doing created many of the apparatuses of our current carceral and borderland states. Against histories like it, tales of little journals blinking out in the dark can sometimes seem like mandarin complaints in hard times. This both is and isn’t right—there ought to be room in publishing for all kinds of journals, from the silly and obscene, to the fabulist or realist, Apollonian or Dionysian. A healthy literary landscape includes all types: and this is why even though we accept their lives are brief, the ending of literary journals causes concern.

It would be a shame if, in the future, all we had were the well-funded magazines we all know. I have nothing against them, including this one—they are essential. Were it not for a set of Paris Review Book of Interviews, I’m not sure I would have become a journalist. Yet having edited a little journal myself, I can say that all of us at the bigger reviews depended on the work of littler magazines. Would Barry Lopez have gone on to publish Arctic Dreams if Skywriting hadn’t existed on the West Coast in the late 1970s? Probably, but they were there when he was writing his first book and few others were—and that first brush with oxygen of an audience is hard to measure.

A decade later, Corazon de Aztlan was covering life in East Los Angeles in a way few newspapers cared to, including the crisis in Chicano schooling. Out of this engagement a great many writers of that movement found faith. Now there’s still a bookstore in the San Fernando Valley, run by former East LA resident Luis Rodriguez and his wife Trina, a bookstore/cafe named after Rodriguez’s aunt. Now Tia Chucha Press are also publishing strong books, too, including the latest poems of Claudia Castro Luna. It’s impossible not to feel these tributaries are all connected. At one point, PEN had a syndicated fiction project—and thus the early stories of Lydia Davis ran in newspapers around America in the 1980s, if you can believe that.

Can we change some of these trends? Actually, yes, we can—not to the point journals or newspapers or the bookstores that sustain them will live forever, but they might survive another issue, another month. What if that PEN syndicated project were resurrected today? Would it give a lifeline to all the tiny alt weekly newspapers in America struggling to earn readers, if they had stories in them by Lydia Davis, or say Jon Fosse, who recently won the Nobel and excels at vignettes? What if more people who wrote short stories or poems subscribed to just one journal which published them? Denver Quarterly, Zyzzyva, The Caribbean Writer, by some accounts, there are nearly 1,000 of them. What if the hundreds of MFA programs around the country which earn money from the aspirations of writers subscribed to just a few more of the journals their students are submitting to. So many of them could afford it.

Valeria Luiselli reading at a Freeman’s pop up event in Portland, 2016.

If you’re reading this and care about literary journals, and don’t subscribe to one—and can afford it—please consider subscribing to one. What a novel thing it still is, I find, to receive in your mailbox something other than a bill. I recently began subscribing to my current favorite literary journal—in Icelandic. It’s called The Moon’s Poemletter and it’s a verse equivalent of One Story, which mails out one poem a month from Iceland. Every thirty days a poem chosen by the Icelandic poet Ragnor Helgi Ólaffson arrives in my mailbox in New York. It’s not printed on anything all that special, but the day it arrives time slows down a little bit. Click here to subscribe, or encourage Rangar to do one in English: it’s not much to ask for, but in a life where our minutes are finite, not to mention quite a few of our enterprises, it’s quite a lot to provide..

—John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, which completes its run this month with an issue on conclusions

__________________________________________

The final issue of Freeman’s, a collection of writings on conclusions, features work from Rebecca Makkai, Aleksandar Hemon, Rachel Khong, Louise Erdrich, and more, is available now.