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

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

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

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

Their responses were simultaneous.

Use your wand.

Are you a witch or not, Hermione?

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

It was exactly what I needed to hear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you a witch, or not?

______________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

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

The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene

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

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

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

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

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

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

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

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

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

Monsters by Claire Dederer

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

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

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

 __________________________

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kennedy’s boyhood copy of Mythology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

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

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

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

From the episode: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

JL:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Write-minded: Weekly Inspiration for Writers is currently in its fourth year. We are a weekly podcast for writers craving a unique blend of inspiration and real talk about the ups and downs of the writing life. Hosted by Brooke Warner of She Writes and Grant Faulkner of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), each theme-focused episode of Write-minded features an interview with a writer, author, or publishing industry professional.

With her new memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, guest Maggie Smith provides an example of how to break conventional form to gorgeous results. This interview covers narration, structure, and Maggie’s process of constructing this memoir, as well as how her background as a poet informed her approach to the writing. Join us for a wide-ranging conversation mostly about narration, but we also touch upon writing about others and Maggie confesses she’s surprised by the gigantic success of this book. You’ll want to tune in to hear why.

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

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Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, and more. Follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

I have a lot of bad ideas. For instance, remember way back when I started this essay by saying I have a lot of bad ideas? That was probably a bad idea.

I bring up my bad ideas because the act of writing satire — something I do between stretches of deciding whether I’ll ever write again — hinges on the patience to discern bad ideas from ideas that really work. But this raises two questions: 1) What does it mean when a piece of satire writing “works?” and 2) If a piece of satire “works,” should it look into unionizing?

To answer the former and, like any great leader, ignore the latter, let’s start off with two simple rules: 1) There are many ways to write satire, and 2) There is also only one way to write satire.

To make sense of those diametric statements, I will invoke the philosopher Albert Camus while using the word “diametric,” so that I might sound like I know what I’m talking about. In short, I believe it is the job of satire “not to be on the side of the executioners.” Or, rather: If satire is on the side of the executioners, it is not satire at all. And so long as satire is not on the side of the executioners, it can be anything. Although it really should be funny.

Satire dances on a knife’s edge between comedic commentary and complete disaster. To that extent, I’d like to speak to the origin of a specific piece in my forthcoming essay collection, This Won’t Help: Modest Proposals for a More Enjoyable Apocalypse.

One day, not too long ago, I found myself barricaded in a supply closet during a shelter-in-place as a gunman was on the run near the building where I work. We had very little information from the outside, but I had cell service. (I will not name the provider, as I don’t do unpaid promotions. Reach out, young wireless reps!)

The group I was hiding with and I were all texting with our families. I decided to try and tune in to a local police scanner to get more accurate information. I found one, and when I went to play it, I was forced to listen to a two-minute ad. Perfect — American capitalism at its finest.

A couple hours after it began, the shelter-in-place ended. Nobody in the building was hurt, and now it’s almost as if nothing ever happened. But that day, after leaving that closet, I couldn’t sit down for hours. My adrenaline was at an all-time high. I sat with the experience for weeks—and eventually found release in writing a piece for my book called “Thank You for Calling the Active Shooter Hotline. There Are [EIGHT] Customers Ahead of You in Line. Please Enjoy This Message from Our Sponsors.” As a means of getting my head back after that incident, writing that piece did, at least a little bit, help.

Satire is a reaction to being alive and aware of the world at-large. And because history tends to repeat, satire sometimes feels like a prediction — months, years, decades, even centuries after it was written. Satire can speak truth to power. It can be a defiant act. It can deliver new ways of thinking about the world. It can reinforce community and remind people they’re not alone. But at its core, it is catharsis. It is an immediate and tangible way to grapple with the hardness and weirdness of life and of being a human.

In many places around the world and at many times throughout history, writing satire could get you banished from society — or, worse, a job in politics. Luckily, so far, I have avoided both of those fates. And I feel fortunate to live in a time and a place where I can write something like the above chapter in my book and be relatively confident that I will not be forced into exile. But we’re certainly headed in a direction that makes me less confident every day that a book like mine won’t be banned or, turning Bradbury into Nostradamus, burned. Perhaps that’s how you know a piece of satire really works — when it’s been set on fire.

It’s often said, in our age of absurdity, that satire is dead. It died when Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. Or it died with Trump. Or it died yesterday, suddenly, in its sleep, and we’re just barely too late to revive it. Sometimes I try to stop writing satire altogether. I think to myself, I should just write a movie in which Tom Cruise has to run somewhere. That would do well. Who do I get in touch with about that?

But then I put pen to paper. Or, much more often, fingers to keyboard. And, of course, much less often, quill to parchment. And when I do that, even when I’m writing in new structures or longer works, I find it almost impossible to center my writing — if only by way of a subtle nod — anywhere other than satire.

Out of curiosity, I googled the word “satire” before writing this essay. Now’s a good time to remind you that I have a lot of bad ideas. For instance, it may have been a bad idea to tell you I googled something to write these final paragraphs.

In my ensuing search, I found that among ancient humorists like Aristophanes and Zhuangzi, one of the earliest and most explicitly satirical collections was written by a Roman poet named Juvenal who lived about two thousand years ago. (I say all this, once again, to look like I know what I’m talking about.) It turns out Juvenal had the same disease I do, since my google search told me he once wrote the following, roughly translated:

“It is difficult not to write satire.”

Some things never change.

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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.

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

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

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

“Work where the work opens.”*

This was a favored phrase of Dr. Ann Preston, a physician and professor at one of the first medical schools for women, and one she often told her students.

I was doing research for my novel, a medical mystery set in 19th century Philadelphia, at Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. I would often be moved by an old photograph, a painting, or a fragment of a diary entry. The bulletin board above my desk was loaded with postcards and scraps of paper with quotes, the visual inspiration that sparked my imagination.

“Work where the work opens.” I wrote it down on a Post-It note and placed it on my computer monitor. The words became a guide for me.

Becoming an author was a daunting prospect and I was hardly an ideal candidate. I had no background in a writing career and little qualification other than being an avid reader, with a love of mystery and crime fiction. I had long dreamed of writing a mystery novel but only started writing when I was in my mid-forties, while working as a doctor.

I had lived in Philadelphia as a medical student, walking the same cobblestone streets as my characters. Yet I knew little about the history of unique institution that was “Woman’s Med.” I was fascinated to learn of Dr. Caroline Still Anderson, one of the first Black women physicians in the US and an 1878 graduate of the college. Or Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, scientist and professor, the first woman to become a member of the Academy of Medicine. I often looked at a striking studio portrait of three international students, Dr. Anandibai Joshi, Dr Keiko Okami and Dr. Sabat Islambouli, who returned to their home countries to practice medicine.

But it was Dr. Preston’s straightforward phrase, from a diary entry in October 1861, that resonated deeply with me.

Dr. Preston was a Quaker, an abolitionist and pro-temperance activist. She had been a schoolteacher and a children’s book author before entering medical school at 38. She would later become dean of the college, a vocal advocate for women’s medical education.

But the moment in 1861 was one of devastating setback, as the personal and professional collided for her. The country was on the precipice of a long and terrible war. Due to limited funds and lack of enrollment, the medical school’s board of corporators voted to suspend the 1861-2 session. The college would close its doors.

Dr. Preston wrote:

I have been sad for my country, because it is slow to learn the wisdom which would bring prosperity…sad in the prospects of the Institution to which I have given so much of my time and strength, for there now seems no possibility of success; and I fear that, after all these years of toil, we may be doomed to succumb to the weight of opposition.

But then she offers this: “Tonight the inward encouragement is do thy best; work where the work opens, applauded or condemned, speak and write thy grandest inspiration, thy noblest idea…for thy work has been no failure.”

The words were old-fashioned, weighty with religious overtones. But I was so moved by the courage she draws upon, the call to face an uncertain future and keep going, to focus on the things that you can control.

“Work where the work opens.” There was something fluid and expansive about the phrase, its meaning open-ended. And I took the words to heart: there would never be an ideal time to start writing the novel. There was only now.

My routine developed simply. I sat at the kitchen table, writing in the early morning before going to work, or late at night, after my three kids were asleep.  My initial efforts were full of starts and stops. There were many days when I felt so overwhelmed and I would put the work away, frustrated by my lack of progress.

But I kept going, and a stubborn resilience emerged. My years of medical training had given me skills that were well-suited to a writer’s life. I knew how to pivot from a challenge and to start again. I knew how to set a far-off goal and work towards it slowly, to not get discouraged easily. The long hours of reading and research were a natural extension of what I already loved to do.

And I was captivated by the lives of these pioneering doctors. There were schoolteachers, missionaries who lived and worked abroad, journalists and writers, temperance activists. Some were the product of progressive families with an activist bent, encouraged in their studies. Others had to forge their own path, funding their medical education by working other jobs. And in the midst of serious work, there was the joy of living. I was delighted by an old photograph of students dressed in full costume for Halloween. That single image inspired one of my favorite scenes in the book.

I understood firsthand the rigors of medical training, and marveled at what they had done. And though our lives were separated by more than a century, their words felt modern and relevant: the need to feel valued for their life’s work, to have the same opportunities as their male colleagues.

Many were wives and mothers, and this had resonance for me, as my oldest son was born during my second year of residency. Those days are seared into memory: I remember being pregnant, while working on call in the hospital and caring for patients. Or of being a new mother and toting my breast pump into work. I would slip into a call room or the nurses’ station, using moments on a break to pump. Or years later, studying for national board certification exam, while working full time with three young children at home. The tenuous balance of the professional and personal was woven through my career.

So the lessons from the “lady doctors” helped me write the book: a willingness to be bold and not be limited by circumstances, to try and fail, and to free myself from the outcome. And over time, the writing became a place of creative renewal. Even on the most difficult days, it never felt like an obligation. It was an expansive space, not a constricting one.

And this was never truer than during the pandemic. I would spend long days working and caring for patients, uncertainty and anxiety closing in around me. My three children were at home doing remote schooling. And it was then that the writing became a lifeline—I looked forward to the pleasure and freedom of that space, my imagination unfettered. Even when I felt tired, I would edit a paragraph, or read a few passages of poetry, or delve into an article on early autopsy science. Even a small step would keep the momentum flowing.

“Work where the work opens.” And so it was not in the grand gesture, but in the consistent small steps that the book was written. The post-It note with Dr. Preston’s phrase has curled with age, the ink faded. But the words still ring true. You never know the surprising and fulfilling places it may take you.

* Note: Dr. Ann Preston, diary excerpt, October 1861;  from Peitzman, Steven J., A New and Untried Course, p.21-22; Rutgers University Press, 2000.

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Murder by Degrees by Ritu Mukerji is available via Simon & Schuster.