Blog - Sarah Stone

Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices

Sarah Stone — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:17:16 +0000

Nothing in Penelope Fitzgerald’s funny, poignant, sometimes shocking work is actually lighthearted, but she lived in a time and place of more irony than outrage. Her own life was chaotic—she came from a family of literary men, began publishing biographies at 58, and was sixty when she published her first novel, a mystery. She wrote The Golden Child to distract her dying husband, a veteran whose alcohol addiction began during the war and whose legal troubles (including getting caught forging checks) made both of their lives difficult. That book was published without its last several chapters, which devastated her, but she kept going. She had a lot to write about. She raised three children (she writes wonderfully about children). Her life had been dramatic: homelessness after the check forging incident, a poltergeist, and the sinking of the barge where she lived (it actually sank twice). She wound up writing her extraordinary novels in all kinds of odd corners. Though she started late, she published nine “microchip novels,” three biographies, and a story collection (which came out after her death). Some of these books came from her life experiences, and then, later in life, she turned to historical fiction. Throughout, she kept her ironic curiosity and her sense of the constant presence of imminent disaster.

Some of her books I’ve read over and over (At Freddie’s, Offshore, The Blue Flower, Gate of Angels, and The Beginning of Spring), others only a few times. They’re all brilliant. I’ve just returned, for maybe only the third time, to Human Voices, a fond and sharp-tongued depiction of something rather like the job she had at the BBC, where she was a features producer in the 1940s. Sam, RPD, a charming, oblivious narcissist, and his superior and protector, Jeff, the apparently detached director, are doing essential and also inessential cultural work (Sam is obsessed with things like recording the creaking of a church door), but the heart of the book is with the young assistants. The novel gets quite abstract in places, and also gives us wonderful portraits of the assistants, in and out of love and trouble, full of absurd ideals and odd quirks. There’s also quite a lot of fascinating detail about how the Broadcasting House worked, or didn’t, even as the war came to England. In a moment of daily outrage and heartbreak, I found it weirdly reassuring to read about this very different community in a very different wartime.

Here’s the beginning:

Inside Broadcasting House, the Department of Recorded Programmes was sometimes called the Seraglio, because its Director found that he could work better when surrounded by young women. This in itself was an understandable habit and quite harmless, or, to be more accurate, RPD never considered whether it was harmless or not. If he was to think about such things, his attention had to be specially drawn to them. Meanwhile it was understood by the girls that he might have an overwhelming need to confide his troubles in one of them, or perhaps all of them, but never in two of them at once, during the three wartime shifts in every twenty-four hours. This, too, might possibly suggest the arrangements of a seraglio, but it would have been quite unfair to deduce, as some of the Old Servants of the Corporation occasionally did, that the RP Junior Temporary Assistants had no other duties. On the contrary, they were in anxious charge of the five thousand recordings in use every week. Those which the Department processed went into the Sound Archives of the war, while the scrap was silent for ever.

‘I can’t see what good it would be if Mr Brooks did talk to me,’ said Lise, who had only been recruited three days earlier, ‘I don’t know anything.’

Vi replied that it was hard on those in positions of responsibility, like RPD, if they didn’t drink, and didn’t go to confession.

‘Are you a Catholic then?’

‘No, but I’ve heard people say that.’

Vi herself had only been at BH for six months, but since she was getting on for nineteen she was frequently asked to explain things to those who knew even less.

‘I daresay you’ve got it wrong,’ she added, being patient with Lise, who was pretty, but shapeless, crumpled and depressed. ‘He won’t jump on you, it’s only a matter of listening.’

‘Hasn’t he got a secretary?’

‘Yes, Mrs Milne, but she’s an Old Servant.’

Even after three days, Lise could understand this.

‘Or a wife? Isn’t he married?’

‘Of course he’s married. He lives in Streatham, he has a nice home on Streatham Common. He doesn’t get back there much, none of the higher grades do. It’s non-stop for them, it seems.’

‘Have you ever seen Mrs Brooks?’

‘No.’

‘How do you know his home is nice, then?’

Vi did not answer, and Lise turned the information she had been given so far slowly over in her mind.

‘He sounds like a selfish shit to me.’

‘I’ve told you how it is, he thinks people under twenty are more receptive. I don’t know why he thinks that. He just tries pouring out his worries to all of us in turn.’

‘Has he poured them out to Della?’

‘Well, perhaps not Della.’

‘What happens if you’re not much good at listening? Does he get rid of you?’

Vi explained that some of the girls had asked for transfers because they wanted to be Junior Programme Engineers, who helped with the actual transmissions. That hadn’t been in any way the fault of RPD. Wishing that she didn’t have to explain matters which would only become clear, if at all, through experience, she checked her watch with the wall clock. An extract from the Prime Minister was wanted for the mid-day news, 1'42" in, cue Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.

I love that long first paragraph, which (in a very Fitzgerald move), meticulously explains the immediate situation, rather than giving us an overall look at Broadcasting House. It both plunges us into the middle of the action and offers lively, off-kilter exposition that creates curiosity rather than a weary feeling of being in a lecture we didn’t sign up for. Who are these people?

The opening paragraph is followed by dialogue that’s wonderfully theatrical, not in the sense of being highly dramatic, but in the sense of allowing the conversation to do the work of exposition, gracefully and swiftly. As in a play, the characters set up the situation, introduce offstage characters before they appear, and create narrative questions for us to follow. But unlike a play, the omniscient narrative voice is free to drop into the characters to give us their interior lives and to explain, as if offhand, the workings of their world.

Reading this opening, I’m curious about whether there will ever be any consequences for RPD, why Lise is depressed, why RPD wouldn’t pour out his troubles to Della, what will happen to Vi— who is probably the young worker actually keeping things together—and what is going to happen in this real/surreal workplace. How much, and at what points, will the real war smash into their lives? Also, what routines, practices, and peculiar moments are coming? Who are these people, and how do they damage or help each other in wartime?

In one way, it’s all too familiar a circumstance: these girls understand, and nearly expect, that they could be “jumped” by the men they work for. This doesn’t happen in the novel, but it’s the situation that Fitzgerald gives us in a book that looks closely at power dynamics. Why do they stay? What would be lost if they didn’t take charge of those five thousand recordings a week? Maybe not much, maybe something essential. In Penelope Fitzgerald, it’s often hard to tell whether something irreparable would be lost if people stopped their peculiar devotion to art, ideals, or the preservation of history. But it’s clear she thinks it would be. The book emphasizes the BBC’s commitment to telling the truth. In any war, in all the death and lies, there’s a hunger for that.

From the preface by Hermione Lee:

When Penelope Fitzgerald unexpectedly won the Booker Prize with Offshore, in 1979, at the age of sixty-three, she said to her friends: ‘I knew I was an outsider.’ The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romantic artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges. She wrote about the vulnerable and the unprivileged, children, women trying to cope on their own, gentle, muddled, unsuccessful men. Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.

The conversation I excerpted goes on, but we can pause, for the moment, on that splendid, funny, heartbreaking pair of sentences that so capture both Vi and the time: “Wishing that she didn’t have to explain matters which would only become clear, if at all, through experience, she checked her watch with the wall clock. An extract from the Prime Minister was wanted for the midday news, 1'42" in, cue Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.”

Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of this Book and A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction (plus Marriage to the Sea preorders and my upcoming events)

Sarah Stone — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:41:59 +0000

It somehow feels very like Elizabeth McCracken to write a craft/process book about writing that began as the footnotes of an earlier draft of another book. And then very like her to write about this in the craft book itself—an aphoristic, zestful, and darkly happy trip through her writing/teaching life, full of excellent, grandly amusing advice. Won over by the mixture of jokes, wisdom, and good sense, readers are likely to become partners in her defiance of the whole idea of a craft book. McCracken is a wonderful teacher—when I was a baby writer, she was my workshop leader for one splendid week at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She was kind and funny and made us feel like real writers. Very necessary, because, like so many writers trying to figure out what stories we wanted to tell and how, we doubted ourselves constantly, even as we piled up draft after draft of fortunately unpublished novels (some of the best luck of a writing life is in what we don’t get published). She also demonstrated to us the best way to use wipes to remove stains from clothes, dazzling us with her aplomb and lack of embarrassment about living as (in) a body in public. A constant theme of her writing and teaching: reminding everyone to create characters who live in the world in their bodies, to capture that experience.

Here is one of her dozens of notes (chapters?) in which she describes how the craft book began:

162 For instance, until the final draft, my last novel had an auxiliary narrative in the form of a writing manual, a running commentary on the novel proper. I kept tinkering with placement, footnotes or endnotes or marginalia. (Such notes are a structure; they change the shape of narrative.) The book was by far the most autobiographical fiction I’d ever written; I had to fool myself into doing it. In the ersatz manual, I critiqued and disparaged and undermined my fiction. Oh, I was clever, I thought, sincere in my soul (the narrative) and snarky in my exoskeleton (the notes).

In the end, it didn’t work. The snarkiness of the voice was abrasive and had no through line. About 10 percent of the notes—maybe—I folded into the novel. I retained a single footnote and realized it was the reason I had wanted footnotes at all. Can a book have a single footnote? you might wonder, and my answer is, This book has a single footnote. (That’s my answer to nearly any question about fiction that starts Can a book . . . ?: This one does. Similarly in fiction classes I’m baffled when somebody says, “I don’t believe this character would do this.” It betrays a curious lack of imagination in a writer. What do you mean you don’t believe the character would do such a thing? The character just did.)

Some structures turn out to be scaffolding, indispensable in construction, extraneous at the end. You take it away to find a complete edifice with an internal structure—loadbearing walls, vaulted ceilings—that allows the novel or story to stand alone. Sometimes structure is a trellis upon which you have trained roses, and cannot be removed without collapse.

My footnotes were scaffolding, or perhaps a series of jacks that held the earlier drafts up. There is no way I could have written the book without them. With them in place, I fooled myself into writing an autobiographical novel, and, simultaneously or consecutively, the craft book you have before you.

It gives away everything, and also nothing. It’s hilarious to think of her in workshop defending improbable or illogical character actions by standing up for this imaginary person. A moment when those of us who are more like auto mechanics poking around under the hood of a car might instead start talking about how you could lay the groundwork for what initially seems improbable, or how to study examples of beloved writers successfully pulling off character contradictions.

A Long Game is a dragon cavern, heaped with treasures of memory, instruction, opinion, craft notes, and a constant, encouraging refusal to suggest simple solutions. (The quirky, entertaining index may help with finding ideas or anecdotes we want to go back to, but probably flipping through the pages looking for a particular gold candelabra or sack of emeralds is at least as helpful.) This is not a book full of specific examples or systemic precepts: it’s a wonder cabinet, a book of delights. Reading it, I felt a burst of exhilaration at the good fortune of writing, reading, and being alive in this completely weird world. Though in this two-writer household, there is more than one bookcase of books about writing, I plan to return to A Long Game often.

It sent me back to the book for which this was “scaffolding.” The Hero of this Book, which Elizabeth McCracken calls her most autobiographical book, is an astonishing portrait of a challenging mother-daughter relationship. I recommend it often for people trying to write about such relationships without falling into bitterness, demonization, or sentimentalization of the mother. It’s a book about grief that’s full of delights: McCracken’s narrator travels to London after the death of her mother, after she’s done what she can with her house and turned it over to professionals. Then she goes to museums, remembers her mother, remembers a trip they took together, wraps up so much pain in the best aphorisms, and makes the reader laugh while also breaking our hearts. It’s presented as a novel and also acknowledged as a memoir where she can take liberties. In it, she keeps only one small, plain footnote. I won’t spoil what that is—I began weeping when I read it, but you may have a very different reaction.

Until the first time I read it, I did not know that she, like me, had a mother whose relationship to accumulating stuff went beyond eccentric and into the realm of possibly dangerous. She doesn’t use the word “hoarding,” but in her complicated, specific, loving portrait of her mother, she also gives us a look at that stuff in a long passage that’s an accumulation of words, images, horror show fears, jokes, memories, wishful thinking, and then the reality that emerged:

Once I moved away, I disowned the house; I worried about it. The place was a firetrap, crammed with stacks of paper, with Jazz Age wiring and addlepated appliances. I tried not to think about it, but I failed. The house might catch fire and burn to the ground. The fire might sweep through the neighborhood. Some municipal official in my hometown (though I never thought of that suburb as my hometown) might call to blame me. The head of the Board of Health. (“If I don’t bathe, I’m going to be condemned by the Board of Health,” my mother sometimes said.) Maybe the mayor would call me up. When I was a kid, the mayor was an exuberant man who, like my mother, was Jewish and dusky, who favored pale suits, and even now when I hear of a generic mayor it’s him that I see. Kid, he’d say. How could you have let this happen? How could you have allowed your elderly parents to live in this shithole?

What choice did I have? I couldn’t have them arrested. Also, when I moved out, they weren’t elderly. Then they were.

My mother liked the story of the Collyer brothers, eccentric New York millionaires who collected books and paper and detritus. The way she told the story, one was killed when a pile of books fell over and crushed him; his brother, an invalid, then starved to death. She invoked the Collyer brothers when she thought my father should get rid of some books or maybe find shelves for them.

Fire, book collapse, flood. At any moment a disaster could befall my parents. Or, worse, nothing definitive would happen, and I would have to make an assessment and a decision: No, you cannot live here another day. I don’t know where you’ll go, but this place will kill you, the house has given you that cough, the house is the reason the wound on your leg won’t heal—wait, you have a wound on your leg that won’t heal, too? The house doesn’t love you; the house wants you dead. I love you and want you alive. Easier to blame the house than my parents, who had let it lapse into this state. Monstrous house: It had eaten my parents and was digesting them.

When I was a grown-up but still young, I imagined that my parents would eventually face facts and move to a nice apartment in the Back Bay, near their jobs at BU. Maybe they’d give up their car and take cabs. A doorman building, with an elevator. Fresh walls for the art. A spare room with a sofa bed and shelves for books. They already had a sofa bed, purchased from Castro Convertibles, upholstered in a fabric called Herculon. They had the books and the art. All they needed was to get rid of a few things. I thought they might do it.

Weekends they drove to Maine and Western Massachusetts and bought antiques: entire encyclopedias, oak rocking chairs. Their own parents died, and household goods moved in like a series of avalanches. Stuff got crammed in till leaving seemed impossible. Some cousins only a little older sold their house and moved into an assisted-living complex. My mother was embarrassed for them.

For a long time my parents got rid of nothing. The rooms filled with objects and garbage, luggage and inherited love letters, cats. In my childhood there had been a lot of animals—four cats and two dogs at the height—but in my parents’ older age it was only ever cats and only ever two. My mother’s favorite cats were male and nervous and needed her. “Come to Mommy,” my mother would say to one of them. “Yes, I love you, too.”

“You are not that cat’s mother,” I said, sitting on the sofa during a visit.

“Don’t listen to her,” said my mother.

The Collyer brothers feel like expected, necessary guests, but where did that complicated, unsettling mayor come from? And then there’s a single moment that sums up the helplessness of trying to look after family: “What choice did I have? I couldn’t have them arrested. Also, when I moved out, they weren’t elderly. Then they were.” Easier to blame the monstrous house than the parents, and for what? That mixture of an OCD ability to concentrate with a wild enthusiasm for the possibilities of stuff that some a psychiatrist who treats someone dear to me calls the essence of what we think of as hoarding disorder?

Everything is in this passage, from the fantasy of what one might wish to say, to the reality of where it all came from, to the vanished hopefulness that it could all go back (forward?) to normal. Whatever that is. And then a little vaudeville routine of mother, daughter, and cat (Elizabeth McCracken loves vaudeville, and we can see where she got that love). In fact, the passage continues from here, and it weaves in and around other passages of the book, piling up treasures as she does in A Long Game.

Here’s one more example from that book, where she both shares and defys writing advice, taking on the role of oracle while also undercutting it:

56 Years ago I heard a student ask a writer, “How do you know when you’ve chosen the right scene to write?” What a good question, I thought. (When some writers say, What a good question, they mean, I have thought a lot about this very topic myself. I mean, I have no idea; I wonder, too.) The writer answered, “I figure it’s like life. You make a decision and you stick with it. You go forward.” As both life and writing advice, this astonished me, an inveterate ditherer. Who would I be without my regrets? What am I supposed to do with my hands if not wring them? I’ve grown to understand this answer, at least as writing advice. It’s more important to choose an interesting event in fiction than a meaningful one; that is, it’s easier to make something interesting and strange meaningful than it is to take a feeling of abstract import and try to guess what event might illustrate that in an interesting way. Moreover, as a writer, in fiction you might as well run counter to your own human habits. You might as well be decisive if given to dithering. Might as well be ruthless if you’re milquetoast, or tender and expressive if you’re repressed. All-knowing when in real life people stymie you; benevolent; unafraid of parties and confrontation. At the very least, it’s good practice for the rest of your life.

Both these books give me a vision of how one might be completely oneself and also better. At the very least, it’s good practice for the rest of our lives.

Marriage to the Sea

For those just joining us (hi and welcome!), what comes next is much more than I usually write about my own work and news. But my linked novellas, Marriage to the Sea—full of family bonds and misbehavior, unexpected love stories, ghosts, sustainability activists, and experimental theater people performing the sins and virtues at the Venice Biennale—comes out in two and a half weeks(!)

This is my favorite book I’ve ever written, and Four Way Books has been fabulous with editing, copyediting, proofing (many rounds!), and book production, including the beautiful cover. I’m excited to share it!

In fact, though the pub date is March 15, books preordered through FWB’s distributor are shipping now, people are already getting to know my characters, which is always both exciting and nerve-racking. Here’s the Four Way Books page with the actual book description, remarks from early readers, and preorder link (and after pub day it will ship shipping from everywhere else).

Here are my upcoming public events: A couple of these, though confirmed, aren’t yet on the venues’ websites, so the dates and time are accurate, but info on place will be coming later on. I hope that, if you can, you’ll join me! I would love to have a chance to say hi.

If you’ll be at AWP Baltimore, you can find me at four places for sure, and then at as many panels and events as I can make. On Friday March 6, from 11 am to 12 pm, I’ll be signing copies of Marriage to the Sea at the Four Way Books Booth, Number 1175, Bookfair. If you can come by, please do! Friday afternoon, I’m moderating a panel I’m very excited about, with a group of marvelous genius writers: Haints, Haunts, & Other Shape Shifters, Friday March 6, 3:20 PM - 4:35 PM, with Lillian Howan, Judy Juanita, Mary Slechta, and Marianne Villanueva. And I’ll also be in two off-site events: I’ll be reading at Across Time & Space: A Polyphonal Salon, Thursday March 5, 3 to 5 pm, Offsite Reading at Vinyl & Pages, 201 Light Street, Harbor Place (reading another writer’s work!) Autumn House Press and Friends, Friday March 6, 6 to 8 pm, with authors from Autumn House Press, Four Way Books, Carnegie Mellon University Press, and Barrow Street Books, at V-NO Wine Bar & Shop, 905 S Ann Street.

After AWP, I’m part of a virtual launch for Four Way Books: The Norwich Bookstore, Wednesday March 18, 4 pm PT (7 pm ET.), “Sarah Stone, Daniel Tobin, Daniel Barban Levin, Aiden Heung - A Virtual Evening With Four Way Books.” More information and registration here.

If you can come to a live event in San Francisco, Thursday March 19 from 6:30 to 8 pm will be my West Coast book launch, a reading and conversation with brilliant and fabulous writer David Haynes, a friend who makes everything more fun, and hosted by Paige Patterson Duff and Susannah Emerson at The Backstory Above, Mezzanine, Green Apple Books on the Park. It’s free, but you’ll need to RSVP here for the evening event. Live, in person, and we’ll have treats!

The next day, Friday March 20 from 2:30 to 5 pm David and I are teaching a class, also at The Backstory Above, on Writing the Family Constellation. Here’s our description: Families are full of constantly shifting dynamics and allegiances: feuds and friendships; competing interests, needs, and desires; disputed histories and circumstances. All of these become part of our projects, whether we’re writing a family saga that covers generations, a work that focuses on one relationship, or a piece that takes place over the course of an afternoon. This session is for writers at all levels and working in any genre, including fiction, essay, memoir, poetry, and plays. We’ll read short selections together, discuss the craft and process of writing families, and do a couple of writing exercises to explore family constellations from different angles. Along the way we’ll think about who gets included and how (are they central or peripheral?) and whether the piece stays with one speaker/central character or shifts among different consciousnesses and perspectives. We’ll also touch on the dynamics around writing family that happen off the page and the critical importance of dramatic irony when traversing the family multiverse. Please bring a pen and notebook or a laptop. Register here for the class.

For those who can join us in New York City: “Sarah Stone presents Marriage to the Sea, with Ann Packer & Joan Silber,“ East Coast book launch: in-person reading and conversation, P&T Knitwear Books & Podcasts, Wednesday, Apr 1. from 6:30 pm to 8 pm. More info and tickets here.

And I’ll be part of a group reading in Marin County on May 8. You can find more info on my events page as they go live.

Hoping to see you soon! It’s been a stormy winter, but I am as hopeful as Elizabeth McCracken (I have inherited hopeful enthusiasm, as well as a tendency to pile up books to the point where strangers visiting our place almost always offer a joke, comment, or warning.) Looking everywhere for signs of spring: listening to those like Rebecca Solnit and Heather Cox Richardson who think that, with everything still to be cleaned up, and lots to be done and sorted through, there are, actually, reasons to hope.

Jenny Offill, Lauren Elkin, and Marin Kosut, On Being (or Not Being) an Art Monster

Sarah Stone — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 01:13:35 +0000

The holidays are over, like a dream, and “real life” has started up again, like a very different dream. Did we do what we meant to? Or are we now trying to corral ourselves with goals, intentions, and to-do lists? No more treats! Get the work done! Many (most?) writers I’ve worked with spend so much time on the pleasures and requirements of daily life or the more stringent demands of caretaking that they have trouble believing they are real writers who can finish books and get them to their readers. I’m with these writers: family, friends, teaching, and community give me most of my life’s delights, bafflements, and worry. We want a full, rich life, don’t we? What could matter more than hanging out playing the Once Upon a Time card game with friends and family around a hospital bed, or serving on committees, volunteering, engaging in political action? But is there a small (or large) part of us that imagines a life of total, ferocious devotion to the work we feel we need to do? That longs to become what the narrator of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation thinks of as an “art monster”?

Here’s the opening of Offill’s short story version (“Magic and Dread”) in The Paris Review, where I first read it:

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.

Each day when he left for work, I would stare at the door as if it might open again.

The only thing the baby liked was speed. If I took her outside, I had to walk quickly, even trot a little. If I slowed down or stopped, she would start wailing again. It was the dead of winter and some days I walked or trotted for hours, softly singing.

What did you do today, he’d say when he got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote out of nothing.

I read a study once about sleep deprivation. The researchers made cat-size islands of sand in the middle of a pool of water, then placed very tired cats on top of them. At first, the cats curled up perfectly on the sand and slept, but eventually they’d sprawl out and wake up in water. I can’t remember what they were trying to prove exactly. All I took away was that the cats went crazy.

Those tiny islands of paragraphs. The numb, sleep-deprived associative quality. The no-time-to-waste clean prose. Véra licking the stamps. The perplexing puzzle of handing over a huge part of our lives to caretaking—physical, emotional, or psychological. So Offill jumps from the art monster fantasy to the sometimes lonely and demanding, but deeply rewarding, position of mother of a newborn to those cats losing their minds. The form plunges readers into dislocation.

When I first read Dept. of Speculation, I couldn’t wait to introduce it to other writers and showed up at my next MFA residency to find that multiple other faculty members or our grad students had the same idea. A little club. Finally! Art monsterdom! We would break all expectations, whether our own or anyone else’s. And maybe that involves breaking the forms. Offill happened on the narrative strategy of Dept. of Speculation when she was writing what might have been a domestic novel about having a baby and some marital trouble, a subject that seems infinitely intriguing but not plotty or “high concept.” But it didn’t capture what she was after. So she found this structure, which took both artistic and emotional daring. Offill has talked about finding the form for the book in several places, including a conversation with John Self for Asylum:

Dept. of Speculation deals with everyday life but is unusual in its form and content. (“She acts as if writing has no rules.”) Can you tell us something of how the book came about?

I had written a more conventional novel about a student who had an affair with her professor and later married him. The book was from the POV of the second wife and of her stepdaughter. I worked on it for years, but there was always something leaden about it. What I wanted to write was something darker and stranger, something that spoke more directly to the collision of art and life. Eventually, I screwed up my nerve and dismantled that original novel, keeping only a few tiny things.

I read a lot of poetry and non-traditional fiction and for a long time I’d wanted to write in a more experimental vein. Dept. of Speculation was the result of finally writing exactly the way I wanted to without worrying about whether anyone else would like it. (That anyone did was a thrilling surprise.)

The book’s appearance is also unusual: paragraphs appear as separate sections surrounded by white space (you describe it as “maddeningly formatted”). Each paragraph has a stand-alone, aphoristic quality. Was it important to tell the story in this way?

The white spaces in the novel are meant to be resting places for the reader, stop-offs before the wife wheels off in another direction. I thought it would be overwhelming to be in her head in a linear, uninterrupted way.

The aphoristic quality developed because of that constraint, but I liked it and decided to heighten the effect. One of the things I was interested in was making the seemingly trivial domestic moments have the same weight as the more obviously philosophical ones. The aphoristic style helped me to put the mundane and the sublime fragments on the same plane.

There are a lot of ways, of course, of keeping a more linear novel from being leaden: inventive events and plot turns, intriguing interiority, or possibly characters with very different desires and world views who find themselves in the same family, workplace, or marriage. Maybe there’s something about the juxtaposition of art monster and domestic life that trips the circuits of linearity; art monsterdom and domesticity can’t inhabit the same space.

Domesticity can exist as a fantasy (hi, tradwives!) but is mostly rooted in particularity: changing diapers, scrubbing the sink, telling silly jokes while watching TV, everyone under the same blanket. Art monsterdom is an entirely different fantasy: the illegal squat, the twelve-hour workdays, most of all the cost to everyone else. Rilke didn’t go to his daughter’s wedding and refused to let her stop by on her wedding trip for his blessing because he didn’t want his writing interrupted. And what about those artists willing to let someone else give over the major part of their life and attention to typing their manuscripts or licking their stamps (even while noting that gender and power play a big role in this, I don’t want to focus on those who succeed in being art monsters but those who perhaps feel they ought to be art monsters or at least more art monsterish).

This summer, an artist friend and mentor and I agreed that we were going to be art monsters (this didn’t last, at least for me, but felt wonderful at the time). My friend has a long history as an art therapist, teacher, creator of new fields and her own art and writing has a mysterious, bewitching magic. She sent me to Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, which is so much about the collision of art and motherhood and which chases its ideas in every direction and across different forms (and which refers repeatedly to Offill’s novel). Elkin writes, in defiant longing and celebration, about an “aesthetics of monstrosity”:

Pregnant, the art monster idea nudged me not towards vampires or zombies, but into art made of the everyday experience of having a body. Towards monstrosity as a strategy for making work that reaches us viscerally, which overspills its container, and threatens, in response, to make us overspill our own. I was drawn to feminist artists who interrogated notions of appropriateness and excess, breaking down and rerouting expectations, imagining life outside the binaries of gender, cracking open our ideas about beauty to show that it is a quality that is not diametrically opposed to ugliness, but one that sits next to it, and often overlaps with it. An aesthetics of monstrosity would not be about countering beauty with ugliness or vice versa, or even adhering to pure categories, but about re-aestheticising the aesthetic, bringing touch and feeling back into our encounters with art, centering the body and its viscerality, liberating it from patriarchal and normative control.

Elkin considers how this might blur categories, what it means “to take the monster out of the realm of morality, into some more subtle, harder-to-define ethics that is also an aesthetics.” Like Offill, she feels restricted by any kind of conventional form. She is bringing together all these connected ideas in an embodied rather than linear way. Rather than following the traditional academic path of setting out an argument and supporting it, she wants to break boundaries across disciplines and time.

Intrigued and perplexed by the book and trying to find out more, I accidentally came across Marin Kosut’s Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York. This multidisciplinary work spirals out into the romance and reality of life as an artist, grounded in Kosut’s experiences as artist, teacher, and curator, as well as those of other artists she knew (Kosut also credits Offill for the term and her title). So many topics and byways here, including ideas about what it means to be an artist in a late-stage capitalist world and a gentrified New York. Kosut sets out her understanding of who is, and who is not, an artist and what it means to make art (and to be an art monster). Here’s a very short and nonlinear chapter (most of the book is far more analytical):

Artists I Knew

The artist who made a square helmet out of plywood that looked like a 1960s robot head and wore it to basketball courts and tried to join pick-up games while his girlfriend filmed.

The artist who secretly lived in her studio, peed in a white plastic five-gallon bucket and washed her bras in the bucket.

The artist who painted bananas and wheel chairs, who was mainly interested in cats as subject matter.

The artist who had an aneurysm and didn’t die, who taught himself how to draw while he recovered and the swelling receded.

The artist who made a full-size replica of herself and brought the doppelganger to Sears to take a family holiday portrait with it.

The artist who painted tree stumps, who never watched or read anything to avoid being influenced by the culture.

The artist who used the lexicon of black metal and death metal imagery to sew crowning paintings, because giving birth is metal as fuck.

The artist who choreographed a human foosball game next to an abandoned warehouse, while a chef roasted a pig behind the goalpost.

The artist who preferred to play inside an attic room and a hidden crawl space as a kid, who spent six months building an elaborate two-story replica of his childhood home inside a gallery.

The artist who went undercover as the heir to a fashion dynasty for a year, who went to New York celebrity parties and posed for pictures with Hillary Clinton and Puff Daddy.

The artist who collaborated with his indigent father to attempt to assemble a 13,200-piece jigsaw puzzle depicting The Creation of Adam as a three-week public gallery performance, who unexpectedly died five years later, at the age of thirty-three, within a year of his father’s death.

The artist who threw a painting in a field, found it a year later and said it was better and it was finished.

The artist in me who was buried, and the artist who raised her to light.

These defiant islands of summary seem to offer so much clarity, as if someone can capture the essence of a big messy ongoing art project in a marvelous sentence (or paragraph): so many potentially nonart things that can still be art. But then this chapter’s immediately followed by a much longer, more detailed chapter on “Artistness,” an elegant rant about artists and creatives that winds up trying to fill a gatekeeper function as to who gets to consider themselves to be an artist, a task somewhat sideways to Kosut’s celebrations, in both form and content, of the act of breaking free of the expected. But then she’s not after consistency. She makes her points and then goes in another direction, maybe contradicting, maybe amplifying, with some wild, deeply researched specifics as materials. She also felt that “a standard scholarly book based on ethnographic interviews” was too formulaic (she talks about this in a conversation with Mary Karmelek for Hyperallergic.)

All three of these books wrestle with the nonlinear and unexpected. They’re full of ambivalent longing. The mother in Dept. of Speculation has no desire not to be a mother, but she’s also baffled by how hard it is.

Often what people—mostly, but not always, women—mean by being an art monster is more or less allowing oneself to live the life of an artist. Finding time to work by skipping other things. Believing in something, even if not one’s own abilities or promise, enough to keep going through the hard times. Before the world believes in you, after the world turns its back on you, or whether the world ever knows that you and your art exist. Not the Nabokov level of art monster but a person who has ideas or a desire to make something and creates some room for that to happen. And not via grand New Year’s resolutions or unrealistic page count goals or dreams of getting a lot of worldly validation, but through figuring out what we’re interested in learning and going back to the studio or desk pretty often.

When we lose the thread—maybe because we got temporarily stuck in our ideas and took a break or because we’ve been spending a lot of time with family, friends, and community—we might, without guilt or self-recrimination, give ourselves a few potentially challenging not-so-productive days to find that thread again. Living in the unromantic middle zone. Not as an art monster but also not giving up on being part of the whole long history of people making something new in the world and following their own curiosity to see where they wind up and what comes of it.

My News

The upcoming launch of Marriage to the Sea is getting a lot of time and energy, of course. Now just over two months away. Any time you publish a book, it’s like throwing a big party: right now, I am still setting up the table and then running out to do final errands. Over the holidays, there were some hard things but also holiday fun with friends and family and different communities. It rained like crazy, and the full book manuscript I was going to work on is delayed in coming in, so I had the chance to read several intriguing novels not completely unrelated to art monsterdom (Katie Kitamura’s Audition, Hannah Pittard’s If You Love It Let It Kill You, and Solvej Balle’s The Calculation of Volume I and part of II). And then a couple of beautifully written books that also expertly fulfilled romcom and thriller genre requirements: Alison Espach’s The Wedding People and Liz Moore’s God of the Woods. I’m glad that Nicole Holofcener will be writing the movie version of the first of these: it has so many good, weird tangents. Ron and I have been watching Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories, The Traitors s3, Hjem til Jul, and Astrid et Raphaëlle.

We have no idea what lies ahead this year. But I think a good intention, in art, in our lives, in politics, might be not giving up no matter what. Holding onto that as we embark on all the unknowns. Looking forward, as always, to hearing from you about how you are and what you’re up to: one of my favorite parts of these notes is the comments and letters from you. I appreciate you reading these thoughts and am curious about your own relationship to art monsterdom.

Zadie Smith, Dead and Alive: Essays (plus great books by friends and cozy escape fiction)

Sarah Stone — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 23:21:29 +0000

Here is a false memory: one of my writing instructors once said, “You do not need to find an organizing principle for your work. You are the organizing principle.” This was enormously freeing—we could write fiction, poetry, essays, plays, articles; we could return to the same material or styles over and over; we could try out wildly new voices. This would not be evidence of uncontrollable messiness and failure to understand our own projects as writers, not to mention our own purposes here on earth. This writer, at that moment standing in the oracular spot at the front of the classroom and therefore speaking The Truth, seemed to be saying that it was fine to write whatever came to us: our own obsessions and projects would inevitably emerge. In fact, this isn’t my memory at all, but belongs to my spouse and writing partner, Ron, who once took a weekend workshop with Kate Braverman. Ron told me all this more than once, and I ate that memory and made it my own. Thinking of the writer as an organizing principle, and also as a person who will hoover up everything around them and make it theirs, is one way in to reading Zadie Smith’s complex, sad, gripping new collection, Dead and Alive: Essays.

She has divided the book into five parts: “Eyeballing,” “Considering,” “Reconsidering,” “Mourning,” and “Confessing.” Because the organizing principle that is Zadie Smith is unstoppable and full of tendrils, the groupings are loose, with art more or less in “Eyeballing,” political essays more or less in “Reconsidering.” Then there’s “Mourning,” where Smith remembers her relationships with her literary heroes (including Hilary Mantel, Martin Amis, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin). Throughout the book, she mixes the analysis of art, bodies of work, politics, received ideas in every realm, and the contemporary mediated approach to life. She knows, as she does this, that people will misunderstand. She doesn’t have a “so what” attitude about any of this, but doggedly, courageously pushes forward even without any absolute certainty that she’s in the right or that it’s possible to be in the right. No sound bites or reels, just a mind at work on the page. Even in the most personal essays, she equivocates without giving way. She is ambivalent and nuanced but not uncertain.

“The Fall,” in “Confessing,” is one of the few essays that might be purely personal, if Zadie Smith ever wrote anything purely personal: the story of how she fell out of a window in her teens in a very dark time, when she’d been unrequitedly in love with a dear friend for seven years and had once again tried to convey this to him. In writing about all this and investigating what she identifies as a central topic (“volition”), she wrestles with how she could have been so happy and so sad, self-destructive but with no conscious intention of dying. Being Zadie Smith, she’s profoundly driven to give us context, to create an opening for us to understand who she was then, how she saw it, how she sees it now:

Back-story: I lived in a world of pure Prince then, and also in a filthy pit of my own creation. Sometimes when I am ranting at my own children about the state of their rooms, I suddenly remember what I used to think whenever my mother came in and tried to complain – over the blaring sounds of Prince’s ‘Sexy MF’ – about the bowls of old food stored under my bed, and the cigarette butts put out in the old bowls of food, and the candles I liked to burn and melt into the damp carpet. (Sometimes, if I got bored of a glass of water, I would just pour its remnants out onto the floor.) Yes, when my mother was making her case against me, this is what teenage me was thinking: You poor woman. If only you had a life of your own! What a pitiful existence is yours if the only thing you can think to do all day is worry about these petty ephemera! (Teenage me was reading the dictionary.) She could be standing right in front of me – perhaps holding a Brie sandwich with five cigarettes put out in it – having just come back from a long day as a social worker, dealing with the kind of children who did not get Brie to put into their sandwiches, and could not scream GET OUT OF MY ROOM, for they shared that room with their family. And still I would look at this single-parent, hard-working, immigrant mother of mine and think: Jesus Christ, woman, get a life. Every now and then, though, I took genuine pity on her. Genuine pity meant not changing any of my behaviours but rather lying and saying that I had. This particular April I’d sworn to her I wasn’t smoking. Therefore stolen cigarettes. Therefore windowsill.

Oh, what fabulous, disgusting, memorable details! That juxtaposition of Prince with the old Brie sandwiches full of cigarettes. Smith is judging her teenage self here so hard I’m reminded of Great Expectations and Pip’s retrospective agony in looking at his past self, his inability to value Joe Gargery, his blacksmith brother-in-law, as Smith could not understand her mother. She expresses even her pity by lying, and her pity is nothing like as vivid as her contempt. Pouring out water on the floor! Very appealing that she’s willing to expose this, while not exposing a single detail of what her own children are doing in their rooms (many contemporary writers would go ahead and add that in).

Smith’s mixture of piercing judgment and human understanding show up in how she examines herself, art, and the world (including the very hard political convulsions we’re in the middle of—Trump appears 19 times in these pages, and even Musk makes an appearance, though he no longer even seems like the right oligarch to focus on, but could well be by the time you read this, because who knows what will happen on any given day?). This mixture also feels key to her fiction, which functions by the organizing principle of Smith’s consciousness and awareness of all the facets of consciousness. (I’ve been rereading and teaching her novel On Beauty again—I meant to just skim it, but I sank all the way down into it and engaged in classroom conversations that revealed aspects of the book I’d never seen).

Here’s a passage from “Conscience and Consciousness: A Craft Talk for the People and the Person,” which started as her “very last Craft Talk,” which she gave “over Zoom, on 20 May 2021 to students in NYU’s Creative Writing Program.” Much of the essay focuses on James Baldwin. She also tackles craft as related to consciousness and identity:

I think of the craft of creative writing as a rare opportunity to communicate something of consciousness. It can of course do many other things. It can speak of history and politics, argue and debate, lecture and analyse. But many other kinds of writing can do all that. The communication of human consciousness is something only creative writing can do. That is what I love about it. When I am writing I am trying to convey the rhythms, operations and movement of my mind in the face of all-that-there-is. What I notice rather than what I am told to notice. What interests me rather than what I am instructed to be interested in. How I experience colour, or light, or birds, or other people, or the concept of race, or a table, or a dog, or history. I can use one character or a hundred to convey these impressions. I can write it in the first person or the third. Write it in a novel or a play. I don’t consider these formal differences as important as the unit in which I do it all. Ideally, when I write a sentence there should be something about it that is mine alone, a particular rhythm and shape. It should have a distinct vibe above and beyond its manifest content. I think all the writers I love have this distinction of distinctness. I can tell a James Baldwin sentence from a Toni Morrison sentence half a mile away, and not because one sentence is about Harlem and the other about Ohio. They could be describing the very same child standing on the corner and I would know the difference. Their quality of attention is different. They move through my brain a certain way. To use an inelegant twentieth-century metaphor, they take the software of their consciousness and run it through the hardware of my mind.

But that metaphor makes it sound easier than it is. What becomes clear once I sit down to write is that my first obstacle is language. As a writer, you want to make the language fresh and new, but you have to make use of the very same toolkit, language, with which people have previously ordered nuclear attacks and screamed at children. Far from being my intimate possession, the language I’m using as raw material is shared by millions in my nation and used for all kinds of banal pursuits like ordering a burger or asking where the toilet is. It’s mutilated in adverts, butchered by politicians. And out of this impure material you hope to make your own sentence? That’s just the lower half of the problem. The top half is the fact that this very same software has had some really rather impressive former users. George Eliot. Tolstoy. Kathy Acker. Teju Cole. To name four. What can you possibly do with it that has not already been done?

That’s not, of course, the end of her thoughts about what can be done with language. This is an essay that one could read many times, as her novels can be read many times. A couple of friends and I went to hear Smith speak a few years ago in an enormous auditorium. We had arrived so early (hours ahead of time: we ate our dinner in line) that we were very close to the stage. And there she was. I cannot tell you a single one of the many brilliant, warm, self-deprecating, complicated things she said on that occasion, because I was so stunned to be right there, trying to listen, trying to stop analyzing my own inability to listen because of my dazzlement. Still, I came out feeling like a slightly different (maybe better) human being and writer. And it’s moving to see her just as dazzled by Hilary Mantel or James Baldwin. I keep teaching Smith’s work to writers because she astonishes us, and it feels as if she’s always addressing both a vast lecture hall and each one of us, personally, individually.

A Month in Reading

Some other wonderfully human, inventive, and surprising books I read this month were by friends, including Ann Packer’s Some Bright Nowhere (madly love this novel and also found Oprah’s book club podcast, very moving, though I’m glad I watched it after reading the book) and also Marianne Villanueva’s mind-blowing stories in Residents of the Deep. Also, possibly as a result of reading a lot of Rebecca Solnit and Heather Cox Richardson and doing resistance trainings, etc., I have binged some funny, cozy books on love, baking, and chosen families: Sangu Mandanna’s A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches and Alexis Hall’s Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake and Paris Daillencourt Is about to Crumble (both from the “Winner Bakes All” series).

My father’s not-so-secret fantasy of an alternate life was to run away and become a woodcutter who’d live in a hut in a forest (he was a professor of health psychology and so profoundly a mentor that they named a room after him at his university: at its dedication, former post-docs from all over the country, who were all doing wildly useful things, showed up to say what his work had meant to them). My secret (until this moment) fantasy of an alternate life is as a writer of witch romances. And, given my fascination with narcissism and the ways we use our power over others, I’ve been obsessed with vampires since early teens and read a horrifying number of both good and awful vampire books. But my writing mind doesn’t work that way, and I’m fine with writing the books I actually write. Literary fiction feels like my real home, and I’m glad to go back to it after reading escape fiction (or those pop sociology books where the writer carries out some experiment in self-reinvention with lots of entertaining research).

I’m also glad to teach in a circumstance where people write not only literary fiction, both speculative and realistic, but every other kind of fiction, and sometimes nonfiction, for every kind of reader. I like being able to use in teaching not only what I learn from more literary works but also what I learn from popular fiction about wish fulfillment and how these books might also give us a chance to inhabit meaningful explorations of values and human life, c.f. Mandanna and Hall. (Though let’s not get into the neuroticism of every single thing in life having to somehow be of use to other people or the world.)

My News

Speaking of teaching—my upcoming class is a six-week, not-for-credit online course starting in January: “Lightning in a Bottle: Crafting Flash Fiction and Nonfiction,” through Stanford Continuing Studies. The emphasis is on the live/recorded 90-minute Zoom class, but there’s an asynchronous piece as well for people who want to post their flash pieces. Here’s more information, including the syllabus. Registration opens on Dec 1. at 8:30 am PT, and I never know whether courses will fill up instantly (7 minutes is my record) or stay open for a while. So if you’re interested, please mark the calendar.

Otherwise, I am turning from my next novel (like any writer, I want to live in a burrow with my next novel) to finishing some essays in progress. And meanwhile, we’re getting ready to host that complicated, problematic holiday, Thanksgiving, for (owing to health things) a currently unknown but noticeable number of family members. Can we call it a Harvest Festival? In one recent year, there was a rule that those of us who wanted to talk politics needed to go outside on our hosts’ porch. Like a smoking section, but more of a shouting section. Not that we disagreed. That only happens in primary season.

Whatever you have planned, I hope it brings you meaningful memories, delicious food, and deeper more nuanced relationships. Or at least, for the writers among us, interesting new material. Happiest possible holiday!

Christine Hale: On Kevin McIlvoy’s Willingness, and Handing It On

Sarah Stone — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:57:03 +0000

(Guest post by Christine Hale)

Willingness: A Writer’s Meditations on Crossing the Flood is a book in the world now (WTAW Press, October 21, 2025), but for most of the three years since the death of my husband Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy, finishing this book he’d begun has been a commitment fused equally with the black hole of my grief and the slender rope ladder by which I have written my way toward light. For him, this book—his only work of nonfiction among ten published novels and collections of fiction and poetry—was a project back-burnered for twenty years as he juggled jobs, family responsibilities, and health problems while writing those books (along with several others that never found publishers) and living his legendarily generous dedication to teaching, editing, mentoring, and uplifting other writers.

Many of you reading that last sentence will recognize—perhaps with a wince of anguish—the overload, frustrations, and uncertain rewards of being a writer in the 21st century. That difficult truth is part of what Mc meant, I think, by “crossing the flood.” But there’s more to it, that subtitle so odd for a craft book, than acknowledgment that writers face adversity.

At the core of Mc’s pedagogy is the concept of “the will of the work,” in tension with the “will of the writer.” He believed that the willful writer often imposed on their work an agenda (such as preconceived or received notions about structure, theme, or marketability) to the detriment of both the writing’s authenticity—the art—and the writer’s happiness. In Willingness, he says,

If…you give first priority to locating the problems in your early draft, you will correct and correct the draft, repairing and repairing the boat (the embodiment of your controlled technical skills) before you have gazed into the extraordinary qualities of the river (the embodiment of your inventive capabilities always carrying you beyond what you can consciously control)….You have placed your will over the will of the work. You are outside the work, answering and inventorying, feeling assured you are addressing your novel’s problems. You are not inside the work, questioning and inventing, feeling emboldened to explore your novel’s possibilities.

He acknowledged that the patience, attentiveness, and openness he suggested did not result in efficient process. He believed that unquestioned pursuit of efficiency—the shortest path to profit—is a capitalist value inculcated in us by a culture of teaching to the test; he asked that artists, and all genuine learners, “jeopardize that agenda.” And he urged writers to take pleasure in the sometimes awkward interaction between their plans for the work and the work’s independent energies.

This conversation between maker and materials, analogous to that of an artisan discovering and then working both with and against the grain of soft or hard wood, the particles of dense or pliable clay, can surprise both the writer and the writer’s audience with delight, astonishment, and maybe the shivers: a glimpse of the sublime—the dark and luminous beauty which strikes us with awe—may not be pretty, and will likely be judged useless by capitalists and other purveyors of agenda.

That near-magical experience—stumbling into serendipity amid unfettered immersion—is or should be, Mc believed, the writer’s truest motivation and reward:

If a writer asks how to undo Writer’s Block, I feel it should be fair for me to ask, “Is there no pleasure-taking and pleasure-making inside the work that you inhabit during your processes of composing and that you inhabit more intensely during your processes of revising? Are you defending yourself against your work’s most indefensible explorations of happiness?”

Willingness in its published form is made entirely from Mc’s words, excerpted and arranged by me from his lectures, class notes, essays, correspondence, and published interviews. At the time of his sudden death in September 2022, he had gathered his materials and settled on the subtitle and epigraph for the version of Willingness he meant to write. In the months before his death, he talked to me about his intentions, especially his wish that the book be not a prescriptive how-to-write manual, but rather a record of his “process of searching.”

As I sorted through his files, digital and handwritten, I came across notes for Willingness going back to about 2001. That face-off between the wills of the writer and of the work was always central: the necessary willingness to rein in the ego and to profoundly trust an uncertain path. But I was struck by how much Mc’s stance on his own willingness evolved. In the earliest plans for a book titled Willingness, he seems to conceive of a four-way Socratic interaction of questioning and respect among the writer, the editor, the work, and ultimately the reader. Two decades later, willingness has become the hard-earned insight of a spiritual seeker whose art is his path, as evidenced by that subtitle, derived from the epigraph he chose:

“How, dear sir, did you cross the flood?”

“By not halting, friend, and by not straining I crossed the flood…When I came to a standstill, friend, then I sank; but when I struggled, then I got swept away. It is in this way, friend, that by not halting and by not straining I crossed the flood.”

The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A translation of the Samyutta Nikāya by Bikkhu Bodhi

In Buddhism, this passage refers to the Middle Way, the Buddha’s teaching that peace is experienced through a daily practice of neither striving egoistically to get what we want nor collapsing into despair or passivity. “The flood” is samsara, life as we unenlightened beings experience it. I immediately understood this epigraph as personal to Mc in his 70th year: he had survived a lifetime of considerable personal adversity—ill health from infancy, financial struggles, a difficult divorce that ruptured relationships he’d relied on, and many disappointments in his literary ambitions. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, a thick tome, dog-eared and bristling with Post-it notes, lay beside his reading chair when I finally got myself to enter his studio, weeks after his death. I knew he’d been reading it for guidance, sensing that the end was near.

Only gradually, over the eighteen months I worked to complete a manuscript of Willingness, did I come to appreciate the relevance of that epigraph to my aspiration to create a record of Mc’s teachings and to release that legacy to those who might carry it forward. My task seemed frankly impossible at first. How could I, sick and grieving and half-blinded for half a year by a detached retina, do justice to Mc’s strange genius? I struggled, sank in sorrow, got swept away in tears and self-doubt, gave up, started again and yet again.

Eventually I granted myself a compassionate middle way: I would be thorough and painstaking, sorting through every page and file and rigorously keeping my own voice out of the book, but I would also accept that the result could be neither comprehensive of every nuance of his teaching, nor a perfect realization of his intention. In that way, I crossed the flood, finishing the book, and getting to know Mc all over again through immersion in his mind and materials. My process of sorting and seeking, of compiling and editing, was a conversation between maker and materials. My will to do justice to his gifts and his complexity evolved gradually into my willingness to assist his posthumous will in taking its inherent shape.

Among the papers and books and journals stacked in Mc’s studio was an issue of Black Warrior Review from Fall/Winter 2006 in which the writer Chris Bachelder, introducing two of Mc’s wildest short fiction pieces from 57 Octaves Below Middle C, celebrates “his range, his humor and humility, his regard for the possibilities of language…his curiosity and compassion, his deep and humane weirdness…and most of all: the fearlessness and selflessness of his art.” Bachelder goes on to say,

You’ll find few writers so willing to disregard ego and market, so willing to pursue voice and vision wherever they may lead, places lofty and low, delicate and dangerous. This gutsy pursuit frequently takes McIlvoy’s work beyond the bounds of the safe or conventional.…I believe his writing belongs to the very best and most honorable tradition of innovative fiction.

Reading that astute assessment of Mc’s nature and of his art of course made me happy. But it also brought to mind a story shared with me by a former student of Mc’s as we reminisced about that gutsiness and the conventional publishing market’s frequent rejection of it. Some classmates, this former student said, had disliked Mc’s ways of teaching and of responding to their work. They felt his approach was not practical and would harm the viability of their work in the marketplace. I nodded assent, familiar (as was Mc himself, of course) with this criticism from some students and colleagues. His fearlessness about the market could seem quixotic, even self-defeating. His advice to take happy-making, motivating pleasure during revision, in relenting to unexpected side trips driven by the work’s chaotic energies rather than the writer’s reasoned control, well, such a process is clearly not efficient.

Mc was far from insensitive to the judgments of the market and of other writers. Like most gutsy and non-conforming people, he experienced self-doubt and endured the sting of being overlooked, sufferings that made him compassionate toward other writers’ struggles. He wrote to a student,

In your letter to me you have addressed the challenging pressures you feel as a writer…engaged in writing as an art (what you have called an “act of faith”) that, in the end, might only offer you “an unloved job and a writing habit that has really come to nothing.” … In my “life”—a far different thing than a “career”—as a storyteller I have experienced a deepening vulnerable heart-sinew-bone-skin-brain connection to humanity (its dark and luminous beauty) that I would not trade for any “career” on this planet.

And in a talk to the North Carolina Writers Network in 2019, he elaborated,

And what is this humble practice you are engaged in—a practice that for 99.9 percent of us will not likely ever bring power or wealth?

What is the practice of gazing—and gazing—and more deeply gazing—and losing ourselves in the gazing—and seeing what is before us as never before—and becoming what is before us—and gazing—and seeing ourselves from within the thing or person that storytelling has allowed us to become?

What is this practice? Here’s what I believe:

It is the truest practice of selfless, pleasurable, pleasurably difficult compassion.

This advice reflects Mc’s aspiration to write and to teach as expression of his spiritual practice, initially as contemplative Catholic and later as Zen Buddhist. He cared deeply for the survival of the artist, whether addressing writer’s block or the necessity of day jobs. However, in arguing that art be created and celebrated as distinct from the dominant culture’s insistence on profit and power as its highest values, he advocated the stance we see emerging today as financial support for the humanities disappears and freedom of expression is under attack: the very act of making art is political resistance. Years ago Mc wrote that “21st century American culture values the controlling, tough, self-centered ideas of capitalism above the relenting, tender, self-forgetting ideals of democracy.” He cited among his models of activist artists Thoreau, who “made no distinction between matters of attentiveness, aliveness, awareness, and matters of conscience. To be fully aware, alive, attentive was to be a fierce conscientious objector to dangerous groups of people with delusions of separateness and superiority.”

At present, I’m reading another dog-eared book I plucked off Mc’s shelves, The Usefulness of the Useless, wherein Nuccio Ordine (trans. Alastair McEwen) decries “the barbarism of profit…corrupt[ing] our social relations and our most intimate affections.” Ordine suggests that literature, “by virtue of its immunity to any aspiration to make profit,” can and should offer an antidote to such selfishness. Given the long odds in the literary marketplace, and in this country the ever-narrowing definition of what forms of self-expression will be permitted and who will be allowed to live here, why not jeopardize that exclusionary, dehumanizing sociopolitical agenda in the stories and novels and poems we write?

Why not, as Mc suggests, engage in the self-compassion of pleasure-taking and pleasure-making discoveries as you compose and revise and share with others your literary works? Why not take this opportunity to practice your willingness to gaze deeply with patient, curious attention at all that surrounds you—human, animal, vegetal, mineral, corporeal and non-corporeal? And why not, in that way, connect to your deeper self and to the wide world, forever shimmering between terror and joy, and always a source—if you are bold and can bear to look—of dark and luminous, edifying and transforming beauty?

Christine Hale is the author of A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice: A Memoir in Four Meditations and a novel, Basil’s Dream. She completed Willingness: A Writer’s Meditations on Crossing the Flood for her husband Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy after his death in September 2022. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Arts & Letters, The Sun, and Hippocampus. From 2011- 2020, she taught in the Antioch University-Los Angeles Low-Residency MFA Program and the Great Smokies Writing Program in Asheville, NC. She served as a fiction editor of Orison Books from 2017-2020. She is now writing essays on a Buddhist path through widowhood, including the Pushcart-nominated “His Body” (The Cincinnati Review); “Wobble” (Still), nominated for Best of the Net; and “Inside Outside In-Between” (Southern Humanities Review), anthologized in Best Spiritual Literature 2025.

Kevin McIlvoy is the author of six novels: One Kind Favor, At the Gate of All Wonder, Hyssop, Little Peg, The Fifth Station, and A Waltz; a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico; two collections of short fictions and prose poems, 57 Octaves Below Middle C and Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels; and a posthumous collection of poems, Singing Lessons. Willingness is his only nonfiction book, on the craft of writing and the processes of creativity. For twenty-seven years he was editor in chief of the literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing from 1987 to 2019, and as a Regents Professor of Creative Writing in the New Mexico State University MFA Program from 1981 to 2008. He died in Asheville in September, 2022.

Hilary Zaid, Forget I Told You This (and new books by Joan Silber, Marisa Silver, and David Haynes)

Sarah Stone — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 23:58:42 +0000

Upstairs, twinkle lights garlanded the doorways of makeshift lofts, thin walls draped with heavy carpets to muffle noise. The floor felt solider up here, at least, and I was only half-alarmed by the sight of a piano—a black, squat baby grand, like my mother’s—under the scales of a wire-frame dragon. Around us, pressing close against our skin, all the warmth of the warehouse gathered like a thick blanket, heavy with weed, cut with the sharp tang of electricity and Blue’s midnight scent.

She led me into a glowing doorway, a tiny improvised jewel box just big enough for a small nightstand and a double bed. Chinese lanterns, gold and red, clustered in the high corners, the golden light heavy against the flimsy walls like ripe fruit bulging against a paper box. In the window above the bed, night had flattened itself against the pane. The room didn’t have a door, just a curtain—velvet, like the curtain on the back room of Crimson Horticultural Rarities. The velvet curtain, the close, warm smell of her perfume, the light seeping like golden liquid from the lanterns—all of it brought his words whispering again into my ears: Everything depends on you.

Hilary Zaid’s page-turner of a second novel, Forget I Told You This, focuses on Amy Black, dislocated by her not-very-empty nest after her son has left for college and her high-needs parents and brother have moved in with her, and just at the time of year when she’s reminded of Connie, who broke her heart years ago. Amy is face blind but has a gift for paying an obsessive, jeweled attention to all the other details of the world. Her story is also both realistic and magical – she’s an artist of letters, a scribe who, in writing a letter for a stranger, gets drawn into a plot involving dangerous men who want something very specific from her. She’s longing for an artist’s residence at Q, a world-dominating social media company, and her forays into the company raise intense questions about AI and surveillance and also give her a glimpse of a rare, gorgeous manuscript. The pressures she’s under create a high drama and also dreamlike plot.

In the paragraphs above, Amy’s spending the night with a woman she’s met online, not long after her first scary encounter with the men. She climbs up a set of terrifying warehouse stairs towards pleasure, a Jewish Scheherazade taking us into an unnerving cave, high in the air. The immersive imagery presses in, conjuring the smells of weed and perfume, the warmth, the glow, the sense of possibility. Amy and Blue only know each other through their online identities: this moment may never be repeated, since Amy can’t recognize anyone through the clues that most people use.

She’s middle-aged but feeling her possibilities, as an artist, as a person, as if she were re-entering her teens, but with a knowledge of herself and the world that both gives rise to doubts and also lets her take big risks. The rich, densely poetic description captures her danger, along with a magical sense that anything might change for her now.

Going through the book again has been a reminder that every paragraph here is marvelous. How perfectly worked, how beautiful. I first read the novel not so long after it came out, two years ago, and find myself thinking about it again surprisingly often, thinking about sharing it with you all, unable to choose a paragraph or passage to read. Everything feels dependent on everything else, and to choose one thing means letting all the rest of it go for now. Tangibility and beauty matter all the way through this novel, in moments of connection and also when it’s frightening. The way men use power. The perils of AI, data privacy, and corporate dominance. Her first book, Paper is White, took on both marriage equality and the legacy of the Holocaust (the protagonist of that book is an oral historian of survivors).

It would be possible to write books like these without making them gorgeous, but I think it’s helpful to have presents to give the reader. I’ve written before about the difference between dark and bleak writing in “The Pleasures of Hell” for the AWP Writer’s Chronicle (originally it was a lecture for the Warren Wilson MFA program for Writers.) And, as increasing numbers of writers talk to me about difficulties in writing during emergency times and trying to figure out whether and how to write about the emergency itself or what the hell to do, I want to quote a piece of my essay here.

As writers, we may have our ideas of what our work is about, but it will get loose from our own “moral demands” or preconceptions. Even if a poem or novel has a moral or political agenda, it will – at least if it is a work of art – make unsettling emotional or aesthetic discoveries that complicate its project. These books are never going to be pleasing in a sunlit-Bonnard-afternoon-tea-in-the-garden fashion. But a fictional or poetic world that’s stubbornly, unremittingly dark, in which no good thing can happen, and every character commits or endures horrors, tends to wind up as either comic – intentionally or unintentionally – or unreadable. And no matter how drastic the situation we want to hold up to the light, we have to offer readers a reason for walking into our world, then more reasons to stay in the world once they get inside. A very few books may exist that, in a spirit of stern purity, offer the readers no pleasure whatsoever, but most of us have never read, or at least never finished, one of these works.

A book that depicts some version of hell may be dark without being bleak. I want to consider the difference between “bleak” and “dark.” A hell can be dark without being bleak, though this is no calumny against all the gorgeous and bleak literary worlds out there, the depictions of real and metaphorical hells. Sometimes a work of art about hard subjects can and should be bleak.

In a bleak poem or work of fiction, an individual character may or may not survive, but the world in these books is always, in some way, a prison. The author controls the work’s tonal palette, generally keeping it in the gray range. A bleak work can be hysterically funny, like Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape or Waiting for Godot, but it will be a despairing humor, if so.

[There’s more of this, including some Paul Celan, but that’s another story…so skipping ahead!]

In William Trevor’s Love and Summer, hell is the ultra-realistic, gossipy, unspeakably narrow Irish town of Rathmoye, and the book a story of a love that can’t quite happen, a past that will never release its people to a better future, duty locking down any possibility of true life or pleasure. There is an ashy quality to the characters’ lives, just like the lives in Cormac McCarthy’s Road, in which – though McCarthy allows a temporary survival for one of the book’s two major characters – the world is lost to a gray post-apocalyptic life in which nothing grows, humans roam in a state of constant, cannibalistic semi-starvation, and survival is a bitter parental duty, the goal being to last as long as possible, to protect your only child even as you become less and less certain of how it would be possible to go on thinking of yourself as one of “the good guys.”

A dark, but not bleak, work tends to have a much broader tonal palette, contrasting the dark images or events with playful or comforting ones. It also tends to have more major characters, more of a sense of the group, of people having wildly divergent fates. Such a work is definitely more likely to show a world that, however terrible, has exuberance and even hope. A completely different post-apocalyptic hell, one both bright and dark, comes from one of McCarthy’s precursors, Octavia Butler: Parable of the Sower, told in the extremely spare language of the teenage narrator’s diary, with a vividly populated world. Though society is in complete disarray, there’s a believable mix of rapacious and altruistic people, as well as the contrasts of the evils of drugged-firestarters and the potential of corporate slavery and the hopeful signs of continuing humanity: hidden community gardens and cautious alliances of strangers. The novel could almost seem an answer to McCarthy’s carefully controlled tonal range of grays and absences if it hadn’t been written more than two decades earlier. The teenage narrator’s prophetic gifts, and her Earthseed religion, lead most of those she gathers to become her hopeful followers on a fraught journey north. Butler’s dystopia still retains, however marginally, poetry, imagination, food, sex, and potentially irrational moments of kindness.

Zaid’s work is heir to the kinds of questions Butler poses, though she is very different as a stylist. Forget I Told You This insists on the human scale and the possibility of sudden, unexpected change. But there are also hiding places in the book, part of what’s so delicious in the paragraph above: “She led me into a glowing doorway, a tiny improvised jewel box just big enough for a small nightstand and a double bed. Chinese lanterns, gold and red, clustered in the high corners, the golden light heavy against the flimsy walls like ripe fruit bulging against a paper box.”

High above the world (or, okay, the warehouse), there’s a jewel box, a place for pleasure, a place to escape from loss, confusion, into somewhere glowing and golden, a bed just large enough for Amy and Blue. The walls are flimsy and won’t last, the fruit will eventually go from ripe to rotten if it’s not savored right away. There is only this moment.

She brings this sense of slowed intensity even to fraught moments, as in the passage below, a grand, high-stakes party with a lot of risks for Amy (and the world). Zaid’s sentences wind through the crowd, languorous, intense, full of exuberant, celebratory invention:

The main hall was vast, high ceilings and arched windows, ornate moldings and marble steps in their flaking shabbiness evocative of that greater Age of Rail. White pillar candles burned everywhere in great organ-pipe configurations. The thick, warm smell of wax bleared the air and warmed it. People milling at high tables drank blue liquids from real glasses. Pastry flecked dark beards and wide cravats. Everywhere, people had dressed for a fin de siècle Sunday in the Park of Frozen Brimstone: women wore high bustles and straw hats; men wore frock coats and monocles dangled from chains; but their smiles unveiled shining fangs and all their eyes were blue as veins. They were drinking and laughing loud, roaring, while blue-sequined Satans with forked tails delivered cool blue canapés. So many shades of blue but the one I wanted.

At a table near the door, I found a scattered stack of temporary tattoos: the nude suspended inside a leafy O against a spangled sky. Press on with damp sponge, the instructions on the back read. Wash off with soapy water.

I wandered back outside toward the old ticket window under the graffiti-splashed trestles, to a dank little room where a large metal sign offered Fountain Souvenirs Cameras Films Sundries in sturdy, early mid-century block capitals. Among the crowd, I felt more displaced than ever, the costumes and the colors and the laughter accentuating my own oddness, my blindness. But, down the old refreshment window, I could imagine myself somewhere else, sometime else, alone at the start of a journey.

I stepped into the cool, abandoned space where travelers once bought newspapers, peanuts, and popcorn. The room echoed with dripping water, though I could not see water anywhere. Light spilled from the farther doorway and I followed it.

A floodlight blazed up the tiled phone vestibule, the telephone long ago ripped from the wall; at an eagle-gilded lectern stood a woman with dark, radiant skin, and a halo of hair spangled with silver glitter. She wore a shimmering white robe on which great, feathered wings had been mounted at the shoulders. From the darkened door behind her podium, I could hear laughter, echoed voices.

“Settle down, y’all!” she yelled out without turning around. “I’ll be there in two freakin’ seconds.” Then she pulled a bottle of Perrier from under the lectern, and with a hiss brought the bottle to her lips until all the water was gone. “Whew.” She wiped her mouth with the long sleeve of her robe and murmured, “Just let me find the damn script.” She shook her head and a cloud of glitter materialized around it before shimmering down into the dusk. “Everyone always has some new plotline to add to the damn script.” With a huge sigh audible over what sounded like the hammering of metal, she tucked the bottle back out of sight and began to turn away, one big wing brushing the side of the lectern. “And tonight is supposed to be a party.”

I stared a moment too long. Before she stepped into the darkened doorway, she spotted me and turned back.

“I’m sorry—” the Archangel glittered coolly on her perch, eyeballing my black skirt and top. “Are you lost? Witches are meeting up on the train platform—” she shook her robe up to her elbow and tilted her wrist awkwardly toward the light, revealing a thin, gold watch— “fifteen minutes ago.”

Amy is still displaced but can imagine herself “somewhere else, sometime else, alone at the start of a journey.” She’s stepping out of the crowd, going backstage; so much of this book gives the pleasure of going backstage and into rooms we would never have known existed, full of remarkably imagined treasures, some handmade, others acrobatic conceptual structures. The Archangel has lost the script, and there’s some new plotline. Amy, out of place everywhere, mistaken for a witch, is at home in the act of paying very close attention.

In an interview for I Heart SapphicFic, Zaid said, “There are a lot of Wonka-like elements to the world created in this novel, magical-seeming places around my hometown of Oakland, California, and they are all actually real places. I loved writing those scenes and having fun making the ordinary feel magical.” So, some magic in the middle of everything, for the character and for the reader. Nothing is ordinary right now. But the extraordinary ordinary feels like a place to go for hope, comfort, restoration, and courage.

News from MPP Contributors

This is a totally stellar month for new books from former MPP contributors. Joan Silbe r ’s Mercy and Marisa Silver’s At Last both publish today! Congratulations to Joan and Marisa, two astonishing writers, doing some of their most intense, extraordinary work ever.

“Joan Silber’s sweeping yet intimate novel traces the delicate patterns by which others, often from afar and unknowingly, may determine our innermost longings and even our fate. Mercy is a profound, gorgeously written reflection on identity, friendship, and love. A book that keeps echoing long after turning the last page.” —Hernan Diaz, author of Trust

“Here’s the magic of Marisa Silver’s books: they capture, beautifully, not only entire lives but the complex histories that pulse through our country. At Last is, quite simply, her best book yet.” —Paul Yoon, author of The Hive and the Honey

And then, in just a few days, on September 9, David Haynes’s Martha’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories, another fierce, brilliant book, will be published. Here’s what Natalie Baszile, author of Queen Sugar, has to say about the book, and I completely agree: “David Haynes is a master storyteller—intelligent, insightful, generous, and wickedly funny. Martha’s Daughter is a delight from beginning to end.”

My News

This summer, thanks to the meticulous generosity of Four Way Books, Rowan Sharp gave me four rounds of page proofs. They also did my copy-editing, so that off and on for the last couple of years, I’ve had the chance to be part of a prolonged, warm, insightful conversation that went all the way from my editing with Ryan Murphy through these stages with Rowan (after, of course, a lot of truly great help from early readers). Also this summer, I had the chance to teach a gifted, highly engaged group of writers in another intense conversation, on voice and style, and I took an illuminating book publicity intensive class with Leah Paulos of Press Shop. So though my sweetheart and I went to the beach exactly once this summer, with the family, for their birthday, and then took a few walks at the citified edges of the SF Bay nearby, it was a beautiful summer in our personal lives. Otherwise, the hellscape continues. I like the theory that it’s starting to come apart. There’s this photo of a chunk of the Berlin Wall that I look at sometimes. You never know when it’s going to fall: we’re always trying to find small ways to be part of making that happen. And meanwhile, trying to keep reading and remembering to pay attention to the small riches all around us.

Willa Cather, The Troll Garden

Sarah Stone — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 22:57:21 +0000

A surprising number of us have our own, apparently mostly secret, relationship with Willa Cather. Her authenticity, her moral clarity, her sharp wit that doesn’t feel mean, her understanding of a longing that’s close to the bone, her profoundly human characters and the way she sees them. Several of the writers I’m working with this summer got into a beautiful discussion about her online, and there was some gleeful surprise about how many of us loved her and how passionately. The Prairie Trilogy (O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia) are huge favorites with writers and readers, and so is Death of the Archbishop. I also have a special fondness for her first book of fiction (she’d published a volume of poetry earlier), The Troll Garden, a collection with some of her most famous stories, including a few I encountered when I was much too young to understand loss or disappointment, like “Paul’s Case” and “A Wagner Matinee.”

The wicked, marvelous “Flavia and her Artists,” the first story in the collection, is about a patroness of the arts: her ambitions, her pretensions, and her complicated marriage, seen through the eyes of Imogen, a fairly young and innocent observer. Flavia had been her mother’s friend, but has taken her up, ravenously, in part because “Imogen had shown rather marked capacity in certain esoteric lines of scholarship, and had decided to specialize in a well-sounding branch of philology at the Ecole des Chartres, [which] had fairly placed her in that category of ‘interesting people’ whom Flavia considered her natural affinities, and lawful prey.”

Imogen, on the other hand, has adored Flavia’s husband Arthur Hamilton since childhood. He “had been the magician of her childhood and the hero of innumerable Arabian fairy tales.” She wonders about her decision to go even as she’s on the way to Flavia’s grand house party and artists’ retreat, “the asylum for talent, the sanitorium of the arts.” At the house, she watches a great unraveling under the malicious and entertaining guidance of Flavia’s second cousin, Miss Broadwood, who reminds Imogen of a nice boy “who has just had his cold bath, and come down all aglow for a run before breakfast.”

She also watches, closely, her mother’s old friend, the wife of her childhood magician: “She was in the habit of taking people rather seriously, but somehow found it impossible to take Flavia so, because of the very vehemence and insistence with which Flavia demanded it.” Without giving away the delusions, betrayals, and sacrifices that make this such a Willa Cather story, I want to look at a moment that gets at the heart of the mystery of the apparently ill- suited love between Flavia and Arthur, as seen through Imogen’s attentive, jealous, puzzled gaze:

By this time Imogen had made out that here the plural pronoun, third person, always referred to the artists. As Hamilton’s manner did not spur one to cordial intercourse, and as his attention seemed directed to Miss Broadwood, in so far as it could be said to be directed to anyone, she sat down facing the conservatory and watched him, unable to decide in how far he was identical with the man who at first met Flavia Malcolm in her mother’s house, twelve years ago. Did he at all remember having known her as a little girl, and why did his indifference hurt her so, after all these years? Had some remnant of her childish affection for him gone on living, somewhere down in the sealed caves of her consciousness, and had she really expected to find it possible to be fond of him again? Suddenly she saw a light in the man’s sleepy eyes, an unmistakable expression of interest and pleasure that fairly startled her. She turned quickly in the direction of his glance, and saw Flavia, just entering, dressed for dinner and lit by the effulgence of her most radiant manner. Most people considered Flavia handsome, and there was no gainsaying that she carried her five-and-thirty years splendidly. Her figure had never grown matronly, and her face was of the sort that does not show wear. Its blond tints were as fresh and enduring as enamel – and quite as hard. Its usual expression was one of tense, often strained, animation, which compressed her lips nervously. A perfect scream of animation, Miss Broadwood had called it, created and maintained by sheer, indomitable force of will. Flavia’s appearance on any scene whatever made a ripple, caused a certain agitation and recognition, and, among impressionable people, a certain uneasiness. For all her sparkling assurance of manner, Flavia was certainly always ill at ease and, even more certainly anxious. She seemed not convinced of the established order of material things, seemed always trying to conceal her feeling that walls might crumble, chasms open, or the fabric of her life fly to the winds in irretrievable entanglement. At least this was the impression Imogen got from that note in Flavia which was so manifestly false.

Hamilton’s keen, quick, satisfied glance at his wife had recalled the image in all her inventory of speculations about them. She looked at him with compassionate surprise. As a child she had never permitted herself to believe that Hamilton cared at all for the woman who had taken him away from her; and since she had begun to think about them again, it had never occurred to her that anyone could become attached to Flavia in that deeply personal and exclusive sense. It seemed quite as irrational as trying to possess oneself of Broadway at noon.

Imogen’s judgments seem accurate in terms of how we experience Flavia through her dialogue and actions, but they are also tinged with the remains of the young philologist’s childhood fascination with Arthur Hamilton. Flavia and Arthur met in her family’s household; Imogen has an aggrieved feeling that he had been hers before he was Flavia’s. She seems to hate Flavia for the ways she underestimates Arthur, as well as for her ambition, her lack of understanding, her hard self-assurance and will. But then there’s this one sentence in her consideration of Flavia: “She seemed not convinced of the established order of material things, seemed always trying to conceal her feeling that walls might crumble, chasms open, or the fabric of her life fly to the winds in irretrievable entanglement.”

It’s a very close third person point of view, though not exactly a direct reporting of her thoughts (she wouldn’t have thought, “Did he at all remember having known her as a little girl, and why did his indifference hurt her so, after all these years? Had some remnant of her childish affection for him gone on living, somewhere down in the sealed caves of her consciousness, and had she really expected to find it possible to be fond of him again?”) Still, these assessments and ideas seem to be Imogen’s. She’s not compassionate about Flavia, but saves her kindness for Arthur, who she experiences as Flavia’s victim, still inexplicably enchanted by her. Her observation is, though, full of understanding. And then immediately retreats into a harsh judgment: “At least this was the impression Imogen got from that note in Flavia which was so manifestly false.”

Imogen judges Flavia, we judge Flavia (and maybe judge Imogen for judging her? Though if we were there, we probably would do the same and if we were in this grand house full of artists, we might well sit up late at night gossiping about her). Cather has set this up, in terms of what we can objectively see about Flavia, to suggest that she shares this judgment. And given her own deep authenticity and humanity, and her relative youth at the time of writing this, it makes sense. But she does allow Imogen that very precise insight into her enemy’s vulnerability, that almost tender sense of what it means to feel that everything can fall to pieces. It feels frantic, that sentence, not relying on a single metaphor, but a whole pile of them, suggesting the demolitions of time, the instability of the earth, and the fragility of a life.

The emotions and observations here are not the whole story of “Flavia and her Artists”—something happens with the artists and the marriage and Imogen. But the account proceeds all the way through by means of these moments of collision that don’t allow any comfort. Except, maybe, the comfort of feeling sure of the accuracy of these (invented) observations. We are not being lied to. It’s not the most urgent story, in our urgent circumstances, but, despite the occasional jolting idea or phrase that reminds us Cather was a woman of her own time, it’s a story that feels like it could be happening right now. Cather allows us to keep distinguishing between delusion, denial, truthful perception, coldness of heart, and then real kindness and, in the end, sacrifice.

During our class discussion, I found a piece about Cather on Literary Hub that I thought added to our conversation and dropped it into our forums. Looking for it again later, because I have no idea where it is on our boards (we have something over a hundred posts a week in our conversations), I searched for “Lit Hub” and “Willa Cather.” And the internet unlocked to pour a torrent of great stuff into my lap, essays about her domestic life and great secret (no, not her partnership with Edith Lewis, which wasn’t at all secret), how she inspired one extraordinary writer to get over her stage fright, her time in France, her attachment to the prairies, the sexist views of her war writing, her chronicling of theater, how she was a literary ancestor to so many people, including those from very different backgrounds…and that didn’t begin to touch all the podcasts and academic articles. Even reading only some of these, I was still impressed by how each of us have our own Willa Cather, our own relationship with her, our own ways of claiming her and sharing her with each other at the same time.

My News

Right now I have the first pass proofs for Marriage to the Sea on my desk. I’ve been able to change a couple of small but crucial things, and have the extraordinary close attention of brilliant writer and editor Rowan Sharp, who also did the wonderful copy edit. Often a publisher has different people do the copy editing and the proofing, but there’s something especially great about being in conversation with someone where you understand each other’s sensibilities and have a collaborative working relationship. Proofreading is not in the least a mechanical activity—there are hundreds of small decisions that affect the overall book, and we’re even still looking at a few sentences, at lapses in continuity, and so on.

I’m working through a PDF with comments now, so much better than in the old days. As I wrote Rowan today, when I first started doing page proofs, the publisher would send a printout of the book, I would print out my own copy, lay the two versions out side by side, and then sit there for however many days (as I recall often there were only about four days to do this) turning over the top page on each pile and scanning them both. (A friend used to work at a textbook company where one person would read the text aloud while another person read the proofs!) I usually didn’t even know the name of the copy editor, let alone have the option of writing them with questions, and we were discouraged, heavily, from making even the smallest changes. Having this work to do is a small good thing in the middle of massive, shattering disruptions.

Before the proofs arrived, Ron and I had a great time at the SF Art Book Fair, hosted by the Minnesota Street Project Foundation, “an annual multi-day exhibition and celebration of printed material from independent publishers, artists, designers, collectors, and enthusiasts from around the world.” Totally packed with hundreds of people mad about art and books. Great conversations, and we came home with a wonderful haul, including the bound collections of a project that I might write more to you about next time. In a way, it’s the complete opposite of Willa Cather, but in another, it’s all about the conversations between generations of artists, writers, and readers, over time, how we influence each other and how we absorb and play with the work and ideas of writers who’ve come before us.

A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories (plus Marriage to the Sea has a cover!)

Sarah Stone — Wed, 07 May 2025 23:27:48 +0000

A few weeks ago, I finally watched the film Three Thousand Years of Longing and afterward reread the source, A.S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. When I first encountered this book, I didn’t fall as wildly in love with it as I had with her Little Black Book of Stories, didn’t at that point sink into the density and delicious meandering of the mostly long stories in this volume, how they nourish and challenge the reader, the questions they raise. The title story/novella is about beauty and mortality, our relationship to art and storytelling, and how we try to make our lives meaningful.

Gillian, a British narratologist at peace with her life (her husband has left her and her children are grown), flies to Turkey for an academic conference. Wandering with her Turkish friend and colleague Orhan Rifat, she winds up buying an object that might be a hundred year old heirloom çesm-i bülbül bottle or might be a beautiful Venetian knock-off. It turns out to be the former, and the djinn inside wants to give her three wishes. Gillian, professional analyst of stories that she is, knows too much about how badly that can go. She stalls by asking for the djinn’s own history and how he came to be captured multiple times.

Gillian’s conference presentation is about Bocaccio’s/Petrarch’s/Chaucer’s Patient Griselda, who suffered terribly under her husband Walter’s cruel trials of her devotion, which included pretending to her that her children were dead while they were being raised elsewhere and having her wait on the young “wife” who he told her was replacing her. Gillian says to her audience that “the stories of women’s lives in fiction are the stories of stopped energies—the stories of Fanny Price, Lucy Snowe, even Gwendolen Harleth, are the stories of Griselda, and all come to that moment of strangling, willed oblivion.” (That sentence has no typos, btw—that’s syntax…) The men in “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”—Orhan, a mysterious djinn acting as a freelance museum guide and history teacher, and the djinn himself—are all storytellers, intriguing and mostly sympathetic figures.

The movie gives us Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, two glorious pros who can do anything with their faces, bodies, and voices. So that’s satisfying. And the decision to go in a camp direction with their memories feels interesting. But George Miller, director of Mad Max: Fury Road, has made Gillian skinny, ascetic, desiring nothing, very unlike the Gillian of the book, and, since there’s a lot about women, size, fat, taking up room, etc., some of the scenes read very differently with Swinton as our POV character. He has left out much, as he had to, but unfortunately that includes Griselda, baked clay Venuses, ancient crone figures, Orhan’s lecture on misogyny and the role of the djinns in The Thousand and One Nights…the movie becomes about the awakening of Gillian’s desires and a newfound ability to wish. Her encounters with the supernatural go against her sense that science has rendered magic irrelevant (the apparent topic of her fairly banal lecture, which Swinton makes as crisp and interesting as possible).

In the process, the movie strips away Byatt’s exploration of beauty and decay, women’s bodies, women in folktales and mythology, Gillian’s longing for her youth, and her fear of her own mortality. Her nightmarish visions seem random in the movie, but in the book are very much connected to death and women and the body. She feels the people around her in Turkey as quite different from her, far more ideal (a romantic, problematic vision, but underneath it there’s a respectful sense of the individuality of each of the characters).

She also feels other to her middle-aged self. When her lovely Turkish companions urge her to make a wish, long before she tries to clean the bottle and so releases the djinn, she resists, but feels weighed down by her physical self:

They made Gillian Perholt feel hot, anglo-saxon, padded and clumsy. She was used to ignoring these feelings. She said, laughing,

‘I am enough of a narratologist to know that no good ever comes of making wishes. They have a habit of twisting the wishers to their own ends.’

At other moments, she, and the book, spend more time on her aging body, her view of herself. Here she’s in her hotel room, alone, about to watch a tennis match (I’m including about a paragraph and a half of what comes next: this is about 90 pages into a 177-page “story”…):

A live match (Becker-Leconte) was promised within an hour. She had time for a shower, she judged, a good hot shower, and then she could sit and dry slowly and watch the two men run. So she turned on the shower, which was large and brassy, behind a glass screen at one end of the bath, an enclosing screen of pleasing engraved climbing roses with little birds sitting amongst their thorny stems. It had a pleasant brass frame, the glass box. The water was a little cloudy, and a little brassy itself in colour, but it was hot, and Gillian disported herself in its jets, soaped her breasts, shampooed her hair, looked ruefully down at what it was better not to look at, the rolls of her midriff, the sagging muscles of her stomach. She remembered, as she reached for her towel, how perhaps ten years ago she had looked complacently at her skin on her throat, at her solid enough breasts, and had thought herself well-preserved, unexceptionable. She had tried to imagine how this nice, taut, flexible skin would crimp and wrinkle and fall and had not been able to. It was her skin, it was herself, and there was no visible reason why it should not persist. She had known intellectually that it must, it must give way, but its liveliness then had given her the lie. And now it was all going, the eyelids had soft little folds, the edges of the lips were fuzzed, if she put on lipstick it ran in little threads into the surrounding skin.

She advanced naked towards the bathroom mirror in room 49 in the Peri Palas Hotel. The mirror was covered with shifting veils of steam, amongst which, vaguely, Gillian saw her death advancing towards her, its hair streaming dark and liquid, its eyeholes dark smudges, its mouth open in its liquescent face in fear of their convergence. She dropped her head sadly, turned aside from the encounter, and took out the hanging towelling robe from its transparent sheath of plastic. There were white towelling slippers in the cupboard with Peri Palas written on them in gold letters. She made herself a loose turban of a towel and thus solidly enveloped she remembered the çesm-i bülbül bottle and decided to run it under the tap, to bring the glass to life. She took it out of its wrappings-it was really very dusty, almost clay-encrusted – and carried it into the bathroom, where she turned on the mixer-tap in the basin, made the water warm, blood-heat, and held the bottle under the jet, turning it round and round. The glass became blue, threaded with opaque white canes, cobalt-blue, darkly bright, gleaming and wonderful. She turned it and turned it, rubbing the tenacious dust-spots with thumbs and fingers, and suddenly it gave a kind of warm leap in her hand, like a frog, like a still-beating heart in the hands of a surgeon. She gripped and clasped and steadied, and her own heart took a fierce, fast beat of apprehension, imagining blue glass splinters everywhere. But all that happened was that the stopper, with a faint glassy grinding, suddenly flew out of the neck of the flask and fell, tinkling but unbroken, into the basin. And out of the bottle in her hands came a swarming, an exhalation, a fast-moving dark stain which made a high-pitched buzzing sound and smelled of woodsmoke, of cinnamon, of sulphur, of something that might have been incense, of something that was not leather, but was? The dark cloud gathered and turned and flew in a great paisley or comma out of the bathroom. I am seeing things, thought Dr Perholt, following, and found she could not follow, for the bathroom door was blocked by what she slowly made out to be an enormous foot…

Byatt’s language, usually lapidary and seductive, feels drier, more ordinary, as Gillian and the narrator look at her body: “the rolls of her midriff, the sagging muscles of her stomach,” “she had looked complacently at her skin on her throat, at her solid enough breasts, and had thought herself well-preserved, unexceptionable.” A bit remote, almost cliched, though the rhythm of the sentences feels abundant, piling on these ordinary, upsetting descriptions. Possibly encouraging the reader’s resistance, though I’m not sure here what’s Byatt’s feeling, what Gillian’s.

But when Gillian touches the bottle, when she tries to clean off its crusted history, it comes alive in her hands, an animal, a “still-beating heart,” and all the descriptions and sentences become the wild, dark cloud she describes: “And out of the bottle in her hands came a swarming, an exhalation, a fast-moving dark stain which made a high-pitched buzzing sound and smelled of woodsmoke, of cinnamon, of sulphur, of something that might have been incense, of something that was not leather, but was?”

Exhilarating, one-of-a-kind language: Byatt pushes the description, the evocation of Gillian’s surprise, to the edges of legibility, bringing together the smells and feeling and sounds of something new and unknown.

In terms of her judgment of her own body, any of us with visible or invisible physical conditions might feel somewhat removed from her sense of emotional pain. Gillian is magnificently in shape for this strenuous conference and her travels. And anyone wrestling with life-threatening illness may feel this even more strongly. But Byatt explicitly connects Gillian’s feelings about her aging body as a response to mortality, rather than a lost dream of being appealing. In fact, we later learn that when Gillian was at her most beautiful, she was afraid of that beauty and felt endangered by it, for good reason.

Like the movie loosely based on this book, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye is a love story, and though Gillian and the djinn come to love each other in ways both free and compelled, the great love story here lies elsewhere. Byatt and Gillian are obsessed with gorgeous objects and multisensory experience. In the end, this story becomes deliberately less about narrative expectations, the demands of story, and more about beauty—especially beauty created by humans: the thing perfect in itself, precious, fragile, and enchanting.

And speaking of gorgeous objects…

Marriage to the Sea has a cover! A fabulous cover. My editor, Ryan Murphy, author of Millbrook, The Redcoats, and Down with the Ship, deeply and intuitively understood the book during the editing process. (I’ve had great good fortune in the editors for my books, and that streak of luck continues with MTTS, which will be out in March 2026.) Ryan has created many other great Four Way Books covers. Which makes sense to me as I think about it. So many artists practice in multiple forms, and this cover feels like poetry to me.

The Delacroix painting, A Young Tiger Playing with its Mother, is in the Louvre and makes an appearance in the book. But I also feel that Ryan, with the image, the fonts, and the reversal, has caught the spirit of the book. Or the spirits, because there are many of them. These linked novellas (which might also be considered a novel that breaks in the middle) are full of theatrics, personal and professional, and also the playfulness and dangers of family intimacy. In the first novella, two sisters, Katya and Arielle, escape new grief into living out wild dreams in Paris. In the second, their aunt Julia, having fled Hollywood back to the experimental theater, embarks on a risky new marriage in Venice. Those who read Hungry Ghost Theater will recognize Katya, Arielle, and Julia in the new book. Marriage to the Sea stands alone, but if you haven’t yet read HGT, it definitely adds layers.

You can see how at home MTTS will be with the other Four Way Books titles—here’s the gallery. Possibly because they have a long, proud tradition of publishing wonderfully diverse books, FWB has been one of the targets of the May 2 attack on funding for arts organizations. So if you see a book you’d like, or are able to support them in some other way, that would be a beautiful thing to do.

And summer registration opens for the Stanford CS creative writing classes on May 19, 8:30 am. I’m teaching a mostly asynchronous (but with live group and individual Zooms) course on voice, style, dialogue, and point of view. Ron will be teaching a live online novel workshop for manuscripts in progress. There are a number of great classes opening up, so you might check them out if you or a friend want to write in community this summer while playing around with the art and craft and process of writing fiction (or poetry, memoir, creative nonfiction, etc.).

What’s Inspiring This Month

Very excited about a couple of brand-new books by writers I know and admire: Karen Bender’s The Words of Dr. L and Lori Ostlund’s Are You Happy? Because literary events are one of the things saving my sanity right now, those links go right to their events schedules. Maybe there’s one near you, or a virtual one, if for any reason your spirits could use a lift.

Also, below are links to a couple of upcoming virtual readings, both enticing and nearly overlapping, alas, but here they are, and maybe you can find a way to be at both of them, whether live or via recording:

Joanna Choi Kalbus’s The Boat Not Taken is coming out this month. I haven’t read this one yet, though I’ve ordered it, but friends have really loved it. Here’s a description: “In 1946, Joanna Choi’s mother came to the orphanage in Seoul, Korea to take her daughter home. They were going back to the tranquil hamlet where her life began in what is now North Korea. But when they found the boat for North Korea that day, the boatman slapped her mother’s face and refused to let the pair board the ship. Joanna’s life unfolded as it did because of the boat she and her mother did not take that day. It wasn’t until decades later, after her mother’s death, that Joanna returned to Korea and discovered the full unsettling story.” And you can find the link to a virtual launch, where Kalbus will be in conversation with Jimin Han, on May 15 at 5:30 pm here.

Also, this month’s Alta Online California Book Club selection is Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, Thursday, May 15, 2025, 5 p.m. Pacific time. “[John] Freeman will lead a free hour-long conversation with Watkins, which will include a reading by her and questions from the audience. Joining them will be special guest Karen Russell, the acclaimed author of The Antidote and Swamplandia!, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among other books. Produced by Alta Journal for streaming on Zoom.” You can find essays about the book and info for the conversation with John Freeman here. (These events are recorded.)

It’s always a pleasure to hear what you’re reading—in the chat below or by email. In these increasingly unbelievable times, where are you finding comfort, inspiration, or clarity?

Mohsin Hamid, Exit West: A Novel

Sarah Stone — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 23:20:07 +0000

In the last month or so, I finally read Percival Everett’s James (just as great as everyone says—couldn’t stop reading it, wept over the ending, etc.), Miranda July’s All Fours (deliberately unnerving and squirmy, defiant, earnest, and very intriguing in its take on what it means to make a home, emotionally and physically), and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (devastating, in that Claire Keegan way). But Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West turned out to be what I wanted to write to you about. A lot of people are writing brilliantly about these brand-new books, so it feels like they’re covered. And although Exit West is the oldest of these books, it felt like the one most immediately in conversation with the news I also can’t stop reading. Also, Ron’s teaching it. So I also reread it, and we’re talking a lot about this novel that feels honest about the daily costs of war, the fear and boredom and dislocation of life as a refugee, but that’s essentially hopeful and a pleasure to read. The worst can sometimes happen. But there are other fates besides the very worst, for many people, and there’s something to be learned from inhabiting an experience that’s full of loss but not only loss.

Hamid has a high concept approach: what if doors/portals opened up all over the world so that people could escape war zones by stepping through the doors into other countries? Apart from this one fantastical element of the premise, the book is all realism. If such doors existed, some people would guard them, some people would profit by promising to show others doors and taking their money and disappearing, and some people would use the doors to help others. Hamid conveys how it feels to never know what’s coming next. Every move into the darkness is a risk, a hope that the disasters of somewhere else could be less intense than the disasters in your home country.

Saeed and Nadia begin their relationship in an unnamed Middle Eastern country (there are likely speculations, but I’m going to respect Hamid’s decision not to give it a specific name and history, with all of the apparatus of cause and effect). Here’s the book’s opening paragraph:

In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her. For many days. His name was Saeed and her name was Nadia and he had a beard, not a full beard, more a studiously maintained stubble, and she was always clad from the tips of her toes to the bottom of her jugular notch in a flowing black robe. Back then people continued to enjoy the luxury of wearing more or less what they wanted to wear, clothing and hair wise, within certain bounds of course, and so these choices meant something.

This distant, knowing narrator genially introduces us to a world where war is coming, but that war gets no more than an offhand clause so far. The tone is that of a tour guide at a lesser-known historical site: the narrator describes Saeed and Nadia according to their public presentations (his beard, her covering, and how the two fit into expectations that are not yet requirements). This sense of distance and observation persists, even when the narrative is most intimate, and yet as a reader, I feel fully immersed in their journey, their relationships with each other and with families, and what happens over the course of the novel.

The passage that I’m thinking about today covers a moment in the story when they have moved from extreme conditions to the relative comfort of a squat in London, where the “nativist extremists” have begun to react to the presence of sizable number of refugees:

In London, Saeed and Nadia heard that military and paramilitary formations had fully mobilized and deployed in the city from all over the country. They imagined British regiments with ancient names and modern kit standing ready to cut through any resistance that might be encountered. A great massacre, it seemed, was in the offing. Both of them knew that the battle of London would be hopelessly one-sided, and like many others they no longer ventured far from their home.

The operation to clear the migrant ghetto in which Saeed and Nadia found themselves began badly, with a police officer shot in the leg within seconds as his unit moved into an occupied cinema near Marble Arch, and then the flat sounds of a firefight commenced, coming from there but also from elsewhere, growing and growing, all around, and Saeed, who was caught in the open, ran back to the house, and found the heavy front door locked shut, and he banged on it until it opened, Nadia yanking him in and slamming it behind him.

They went to their room in the back and pushed their mattress up against the window and sat together in one corner and waited. They heard helicopters and more shooting and announcements to peacefully vacate the area made over speakers so powerful that they shook the floor, and they saw through the gap between mattress and window thousands of leaflets dropping from the sky, and after a while they saw smoke and smelled burning, and then it was quiet, but the smoke and the smell lasted a long time, particularly the smell, lingering even when the wind direction changed.

That night a rumor spread that over two hundred migrants had been incinerated when the cinema burned down, children and women and men, but especially children, so many children, and whether or not this was true, or any of the other rumors, of a bloodbath in Hyde Park, or in Earl’s Court, or near the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, migrants dying in their scores, whatever it was that had happened, something seemed to have happened, for there was a pause, and the soldiers and police officers and volunteers who had advanced into the outer edges of the ghetto pulled back, and there was no more shooting that night.

The next day was quiet, and the day after that, and on the second day of quiet Saeed and Nadia removed the mattress from their window and dared to venture outside and forage for food but there was none to be found. The depots and soup kitchens were shut. Some supplies were coming through the doors, but not nearly enough. The council met and requisitioned all provisions in the three houses, and these were rationed, with most going to the children, and Saeed and Nadia getting a handful of almonds each one day, and a tin of herring to share the next.

The compression and restraint of this passage echo the eventual pulling back of the Nativist forces, so that the tragedy stops short of the slaughter of thousands of people. But it’s already tragic, and Hamid doesn’t raise the narrative tone to try to emphasize the horrors. The voice of the narrator remains informative, apparently calm, nearly casual: “A great massacre, it seemed, was in the offing.”

We don’t need a heightened tone to feel the danger our characters are in as Saeed nearly gets locked out and Nadia yanks him inside. As they hide and wait, we don’t hear how they feel, don’t track their bodily sensations. It’s just a recitation of the facts, with the loudspeaker announcements shaking the floor, the rain of leaflets, the smells of catastrophe and violence and smoke.

The burning might be, as they hear later, something truly terrible, but there’s no official news, no way to be sure: “a rumor spread that over two hundred migrants had been incinerated when the cinema burned down, children and women and men, but especially children, so many children, and whether or not this was true, or any of the other rumors, of a bloodbath in Hyde Park, or in Earl’s Court, or near the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, migrants dying in their scores, whatever it was that had happened, something seemed to have happened…”

This event could have sparked a desperate counterattack or a shame-and-rage-driven further onslaught, but instead there’s a pause, and the soldiers, police, and volunteers pull back. After, there’s the quiet, the waiting for days before removing the mattress from the window. The household deals with practicalities, protecting the children, trying to manage everyone’s hunger. This doesn’t need more description than the specifics about the tiny amount Nadia and Saeed have to eat. The whole passage about the quiet, the slowly ebbing dread, takes only a paragraph. It is almost, but not quite, fable time. No matter what’s happening, the novel doesn’t follow every flicker of emotion or try to immerse the reader pornographically in the experience to work on our feelings.

The discussion of practicalities ends that passage, but the very beginning of the next section is an equally spare conversation during the aftermath:

They sat on their bed and watched the rain and talked as they often did about the end of the world, and Saeed wondered aloud once again if the natives would really kill them, and Nadia said once again that the natives were so frightened that they could do anything.

“I can understand it,” she said. “Imagine if you lived here. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly arrived.”

“Millions arrived in our country,” Saeed replied. “When there were wars nearby.”

“That was different. Our country was poor. We didn’t feel we had as much to lose.”

They are so philosophical, so reflective. Nadia’s last, telling remark here, however sharp in itself, in context feels almost soft. It’s striking to read this in a time of so much justifiable outrage. Like so many people, I have mostly been in a state of justifiable outrage, if not surprise—my first political march, at the age of seven or eight, was against the war in Vietnam, and then I was astonished to find that my government was napalming civilians, including children. When we’re older, there’s a constant fight to stay open to information, feeling, action, without going under. Sometimes people feel they can’t take in more than they already have.

Hamid’s restraint, though, the sense that this particular story might not end in total disaster, makes Exit West a novel that all kinds of people were able and willing to read. Rereading it, I felt again that Hamid had used compression, restraint, and a sense of how hope keeps persisting as a way of both reminding us not to look away and also telling a particular human story: how world events shape a couple of individuals and their relationship, who they turn into, what becomes of them. The news, mostly, has to present particular people as exemplars of disaster. Someone to feel for, to open our hard, exhausted hearts. Fiction can get more nuanced, more surprising, in its tones, its stories, the possibilities it presents.

• • •

Writing, Publishing, and Teaching

When a new work is forming down in the marshes, writers can fall into a state of an almost physical aversion to writing. We go to the desk or sit in the chair and are propelled away again before we can even open a document or notebook. Since for decades I’ve been writing, giving up writing, going back to writing, and giving up the thought that I ever can or will give up writing, I always hope that the voices that say I am no longer a fiction writer are lying or mistaken (they also don’t think I have any business teaching or writing about writing—they’re Dickensian, or perhaps these are Charlie Baxter’s famous “Fraud Police”). Fortunately, this time, this bout seems to have been, once again, the start of something new. Now the material for the new book is accumulating as if by itself, with constant new ideas, including a ridiculously ambitious additional level that appears to solve all kinds of structural problems. I’m researching and taking notes, happier than I have been in a while. (As long as I’m not looking at the news. Though mostly I am looking at the news.)

Also, I have a very gorgeous cover for Marriage to the Sea. Not allowed to show it to anyone yet. But I’m smitten with it and look forward to sharing it with you.

MPP Contributor News

David Haynes’s complicated, entrancing novella and stories, Martha’s Daughter, publishing this fall, is a book I’d love to see everyone read: full of deep, funny, often challenging character portraits. I was delighted to see his “exclusive” cover reveal in People. One for the “things to look forward to despite everything” list.

In thinking about this new book, I’m remembering something David said in a conversation with Piper Fitzgerald for The Kiln Project a couple of years ago:

PF: We pick a theme every year for The Kiln Project, and this year the theme is "Liminal Space." So, we are asking our undergrads to submit pieces that relate to the theme in some way. I was curious about how you interpret the theme.

DH: I think what's interesting about the idea of liminal space is that in those spaces that are between, there are always interesting things going on. Just as an example, people often ask when writing about identity, how I think about identity. My answer is often about liminal space. And I say, I'm less interested in the conflict of the harsh borders. There are interesting things going on in the liminal space between any kind of marker of identity. There's interesting work there, there's interesting ideas, and interesting energy there. The books that I read that explore identity-I'm much more interested in those that are inhabiting that space between rather than those that are sort of looking from one side or another.

Stuff that’s been inspiring me lately

Wound up watching hours of Cory Booker, which felt like a moral blood transfusion, and have been protesting in crowds of sometimes thousands, which feels great, and then doing necessary writing or calling, which feels less great but has to be done. Meanwhile, in the escaping-to-another-reality hours, I finally watched Mare of Easttown, which was entirely too addictive and also had such beautiful writing and character portraits. I appreciate how the character of Mare doesn’t try to justify herself when people are blaming her for the disasters all around them, mostly caused by someone they love or even their own dear selves. A learning experience, seeing how Kate Winslet pulls off those moments. Not in an apparently noble way. Not at all. It’s more as if Mare can’t be bothered or has no hope of being listened to. But her tired forbearance adds up, along with her other actions (including relentlessly risking her own life), to a deep generosity and a sense that what looks like a wall of complete, hopeless chaos might after all have a door that could well lead to somewhere better than the current reality.

Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police

Sarah Stone — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 22:10:41 +0000

Yoko Ogawa has said that the reason she became a writer was reading the diary of Anne Frank as a teenager. Writers tell ourselves—and other people—stories about where our writing comes from, historical accounts that seem to us at least partially true at the time. Maybe we grew up in a storytelling family, or one where it was not possible to say the important things aloud. And then a writer comes along who says what we didn’t know we could say or tells stories that resonate with the truths we wish we could read. Although, after all my years of writing and teaching writing, it also seems to me that the urge to say what happened, to make sense of it or alter it, starts so early that we can’t find the beginnings. Maybe, then, we were already writers but we wake up to our awareness of this when we come across a writer whose particular urgent project touches us profoundly.

Ogawa has set The Memory Police (translated by Stephen Snyder) on an island where objects and memories are disappearing, and the Memory Police round up those who fail to conceal their memories of how life used to be. The narrator/protagonist of the book, a writer, hides her editor, R, in her house in an old store room that can only be reached from the office above. His wife has begged the narrator to protect him, and they keep this plan a secret from R until the narrator has rebuilt the room with the help of her friend, “the old man.” In the novel she’s writing, another narrator/protagonist’s mysterious, cruel, beloved former teacher is eradicating her. In the “real” world of The Memory Police, it’s the outside world disappearing—roses, birds, novels, people, memories.

The writer is losing her memories, R is not, and in this poignant novel, their conversations are one way of exploring what it means to lose the past, as well as a kind of abandonment to—and also protection from—their sometimes awkward closeness. She talks with great frankness to her editor over the course of the book:

“I sometimes wonder what I'd see if I could hold your heart in my hands," I told him. "I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn't quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I sense I'd need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn't slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It's usually hidden deep inside, so it's much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember, there in my hands. Doesn't that sound marvelous?”

“Would you really like to remember all the things you’ve lost?” R asked.

I told him the truth. “I don’t know. Because I don’t even know what it is I should be remembering. What’s gone is gone completely. I have no seeds inside me, waiting to sprout again. I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes. That’s why I’m jealous of your heart, one that offers some resistance, that is tantalizingly transparent and yet not, that seems to change as the light shines on it at different angles.”

In the middle of this nightmare, this passage, with its visceral humanity, centers on the heart as both metaphor and the most necessary part of the body. The narrator is loving and tender towards the heart, but the image of removing it is inherently violent. R, though, responds with affection and curiosity, which opens the way for her to admit to her jealousy of his heart, “one that offers some resistance.” She’s hiding him; he’s helping her hang onto some sense of the world in her writing, which has become increasingly difficult the more she forgets.

Ogawa has said that after encountering Anne Frank, she went on to read Japanese writers, to be inspired by Kenzaburō Ōe and Haruki Murakami. Though she doesn’t sound quite like anyone else, their lineage shows in her mixture of emotional honesty and inventiveness. (She’s also named Paul Auster as a deep influence.) In an interview for Nippon.com, she talked about the experience of having The Memory Police, a 1994 novel, translated in 2019:

They were asking me political questions that nobody did 25 years ago. I had no intention of depicting a near-future setting as a political statement—it was meant to be more like the past, before I was born. But when I reread the book for the first time in ages, I was shocked that I’d included a tsunami, and it’s frightening to think that rather than getting further away from the world I created in the book, contemporary readers are connecting it with the near future.”

Living with the loss of memory is an ongoing preoccupation for Ogawa. Back in the early days of The Marvelous Paragraph Project, Ron, my spouse, wrote this in their essay about Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor:

The titular professor of Yoko Ogawa’s wonderful novel The Housekeeper and the Professor is the kind of math teacher one would most hope for—gentle and affirming rather than scolding, delighted to share the wonder of numbers and the orderly way they encompass the universe. The narrator, an unnamed housekeeper hired to clean the professor’s house, learns that he has only 80 minutes of short-term memory, the result of a car accident 17 years ago. Although he clips notes to his suit jacket to remind him of what he cannot remember, she must reintroduce herself to him every day, whereupon he always asks her shoe size or telephone number and then notes some numerical significance it possesses. They develop a rapport as his enthusiasm for whole math catches her imagination, and he bonds with her 10-year-old son, whom he affectionately nicknames “Root” after the flat top of the boy’s head—reminiscent, he says, of the square root sign.

Ogawa’s obsession with all kinds of loss, including the memory of what we have lost, feels very resonant right now, as we try to figure out how to live in a time when we don’t know what will be disappearing next, or at least what they will try to take away. I’ve been thinking for a couple of months about whether or not to write to you about this beautiful, sad book. It’s for those comforted by a fantastical book that still cuts down to the bone. One of the things storytelling can do so beautifully is to give a name to our dreads and painful experiences, to shape them and turn them to metaphor. Truth feels comforting amid all the lies and the accompanying bullshit about the lies (“It’s the teacher’s fault for having assigned homework too irresistible to dogs. Or it would be the teacher’s fault if the dog had eaten it. But of course it never happened.”)

Our minds need art and story to help us stay alive and not go numb. Sometimes I want escape right now, and sometimes the truth, and sometimes to take action with all the other people boycotting and calling and writing and giving money, and whatever else seems like the potentially useful thing to do in that moment. (Plus I am eating a whole lot of noodles these days.) I was going to say—though it is perhaps not the most inspiring motto—survival is, in fact, sometimes sufficient. But, truly, survival is insufficient. Even in the face of the reckless destruction, the self righteousness of vengeance or even glee. What Doris Lessing called “the joy in malice.” So I’m celebrating whatever anyone is doing, in whatever realms, on behalf of life, literature, compassion, and the celebration of human inventiveness (appreciating Waging Nonviolence reminding us of how much resistance is actually happening).

Meanwhile, we still have our memories of what we want to restore, our vision of what the future can still be. I appreciate Yoko Ogawa and how she brings beauty into the hard places.

Writing and Teaching

In addition to political life and a lot of medical events among my friends and family, things going on around here include having just finished teaching a beautiful group of novelists in my winter class, as well as a couple of big projects of editing people’s books. My next open class is in summer, so there’s some nonfiction and flash fiction happening right now. I’m still not as good about submitting or pitching things as I ought to be. Everything else seems to be a higher priority. Watch this space, and if you see any notes about my work coming out, then I did better. I’m also watching White Lotus and The Residence, because somehow bad behavior on the screen is a wonderful escape from bad behavior in real life.

MPP Contributor News

Marcy Dermansky, who wrote about Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here in relation to her own Hurricane Girl, has a marvelous new novel, Hot Air. A struggling writer, a single mother, is on a first date that’s not going well (although her daughter is happily playing downstairs with her date’s son, and there’s a gorgeous pool, as so often in Marcy’s books). Then a tech billionaire and his wife, out on an anniversary hot air balloon ride gone very wrong, crash into that pool, screaming at each other. The novel’s hilarious and touching and so smart about all the ways people use their power and privilege. Also very addictive. Marcy’s just published a new essay in Lit Hub called “The First Step in the Writing Process: Be Kind to Yourself,” and I recommend that too.

Stuff that’s been inspiring me lately

You never know what you’ll get from literary events. The whole idea can seem so simple: someone is standing at a podium, reading the thing they wrote. Or sitting behind a camera. Or talking with a stranger or a friend. Or occasionally putting on a multi-media performance.

Some of them can be less than thrilling, mostly when the writer clearly isn’t enjoying themselves. I have sympathy for that—I remember giving one reading where one of the organizers kept trying to photograph me from below (nothing good will come of that) and then looking down at his camera, shaking his head regretfully, and trying again. I literally started to lose my place and stammer at a certain point.

But when literary events are great, they’re like getting a, I don’t know, blood transfusion. The California Book Club’s monthly online events are a sure bet—John Freeman is an amazing interviewer, and this month’s conversation with Rita Bullwinkel and Lucy Corin was brilliant. I loved Headshot and was happy to learn more about it. Also, I’m a Lucy Corin fan. Fun, inspiring, full of ideas to think over. Here’s the recording.

And there was a wonderful online launch reading for a group of the new Four Way Books spring releases, hosted by Norwich Bookstore in Vermont: Aaron Coleman (Red Wilderness), Susan Browne (Monster Mash), Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. (After the Operation), Patrick Donnelly (Willow Hammer), Daniel Ruiz (Reality Checkmate), and Allegra Solomon (There's Nothing Left for You Here). The reading hasn’t (yet?) shown up online, but you can find these books, and others from this and prior seasons, here, including C. Dale Young’s beautiful new Building the Perfect Animal. All wonderful writers, and the reading itself felt intimate, intense, precise, full of surprises, and contained. I admire that combination of total passion and the ability to know when your ten minutes is up. Actually, that seems key in so many ways.

Wishing you some beauty and inspiration this month, along with courage and aliveness and the ability to hold onto the moments of joy. I always love hearing from writers and readers, and if you feel so moved, would be happy to hear how you’re doing right now.

Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days: Tenderness

Sarah Stone — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:06:39 +0000

Right now, I’m rereading Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days, one of my favorite books, because it is full of tenderness for human beings. The novel is honest about the characters’ flaws, cruelties, and deceptions, but Cunningham is also unafraid to focus on showing what is possible in our capacities for love and sacrifice. The very best way to read this book is not to look at the flap copy or reviews or anything else that will give away its project. I mean, you can of course. It is still pure delight after multiple rereadings. But I’m not going to be the culprit in spoiling Cunningham’s delicious surprises. So all I’ll say is that it’s three storylines, not intertwined as in its predecessor The Hours, but connected very differently.

Here’s the beginning of the first section, “In the Machine” (I’m including a series of marvelous paragraphs, the entire first scene):

Walt said that the dead turned into grass, but there was no grass where they’d buried Simon. He was with the other Irish on the far side of the river, where it was only dirt and gravel and names on stones.

Catherine believed Simon had gone to heaven. She had a locket with his picture and a bit of his hair inside.

“Heaven’s the place for him,” she said. “He was too good for this world.” She looked uncertainly out the parlor window and into the street, as if she expected a glittering carriage to wheel along with Simon on board, serene in his heedless milk-white beauty, waving and grinning, going gladly to the place where he had always belonged.

“If you think so,” Lucas answered. Catherine fingered the locket. Her hands were tapered and precise. She could sew stitches too fine to see.

“And yet he’s with us still,” she said. “Don’t you feel it?” She worried the locket chain as if it were a rosary.

“I suppose so,” Lucas said. Catherine thought Simon was in the locket, and in heaven, and with them still. Lucas hoped she didn’t expect him to be happy about having so many Simons to contend with.

The guests had departed, and Lucas’s father and mother had gone to bed. It was only Lucas and Catherine in the parlor, with what had been left behind. Empty plates, the rind of a ham. The ham had been meant for Catherine’s and Simon’s wedding. It was lucky, then, to have it for the wake instead.

Lucas said, “I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.”

He hadn’t meant to speak as the book. He never did, but when he was excited he couldn’t help himself.

She said, “Oh, Lucas.”

His heart fluttered and thumped against the bone.

“I worry for you,” she said. “You’re so young.”

“I’m almost thirteen,” he said.

“It’s a terrible place. It’s such hard work.”

“I’m lucky. It’s a kindness of them, to give me Simon’s job.”

“And no more school.”

“I don’t need school. I have Walt’s book.”

“You know the whole thing, don’t you?”

“Oh no. There’s much more, it will take me years.”

“You must be careful at the works,” she said. “You must--” She stopped speaking, though her face didn’t change. She continued offering her profile, which was as gravely beautiful as that of a woman on a coin. She continued looking out at the street below, waiting for the heavenly entourage to parade by with Simon up top, the pride of the family, a new prince of the dead.

Lucas said, “You must be careful, too.”

“There’s nothing for me to be careful about, my dear. For me it’s just tomorrow and the next day.”

She slipped the locket chain back over her head. The locket vanished into her dress. Lucas wanted to tell her--what? He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold, like stars; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance. He needed to tell her it was impossible, it was unbearable, to be so continually mistaken for a misshapen boy with a walleye and a pumpkin head and a habit of speaking in fits.

He said, “I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume.” It was not what he’d hoped to tell her.

She smiled. At least she wasn’t angry with him. She said, “I should go now. Will you walk me home?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

It’s a portrait of love and bravery and a passion for poetry. We begin with Walt Whitman and the death of an unknown character. It’s a time and place where the Irish have to be buried on the other side of the river, where a vision of heaven is “a glittering carriage to wheel along with Simon on board, serene in his heedless milk-white beauty, waving and grinning, going gladly to the place where he had always belonged.” This is a heaven of riches, beauty, power, and blessings, a heaven in which the favored boy knows that riches, beauty, power, and blessings belong to him by right.

But this is Lucas’s story, an unsettling and endearing child about to take over his brother’s dangerous job because the family has no choice. He doesn’t show up by name until paragraph four, though—he’s not thinking about himself, but about Whitman, Simon, and Catherine. He can’t tell her he loves her: when he’s moved, he can only speak “as the book.” He’s ambivalent about, and maybe jealous of, Simon, but he’s not expressing this to Catherine. He can’t. In his mind it’s all poetry, Walt’s poetry, and, by the end of this short scene, his own.

Catherine sees Simon, who was beautiful, as “too good for this world.” Lucas, like his hero, Whitman, loves the broken and vulnerable, the whole world, the one particular human being. This wild and misunderstood thirteen-year-old sees more than anyone around him and loves it all the same.

In “You,” Whitman wrote,

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands
Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,
Your true soul and body appear before me,
They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

The poem continues—I’ve linked to it above. A reminder of what beauty might still be here in the middle of all our fears, our losses, our suspicions, our suffering, our grief.

About his newest novel, Day, Cunningham talked about writing in desperate times in a conversation with Elliott Holt (it applied to the early lockdown days of the pandemic and applies to our moment now when every day brings wild changes. It also seems to me to relate to the kind of freedom and play he allows himself in Specimen Days, no matter how hard the circumstances the characters face):

How do you write a novel—which is, in a sense, a projectile shot into the future—when it starts looking like there may not be a future at all?

The answer, of course: all novels are gambles of one kind or another. If an era of particularly dim prospects stops us from creating anything at all, we’re that much more deeply in trouble. Still, I admit that I paused over it, over whether or not a new novel meant anything, in the face of actual annihilation. Then I got over it and got back to work.

There’s a truncation in “Then I got over it”—it may have taken him a while, or not; it may take us a while, or not.

But as always with Cunningham, I find comfort, and so, this month, I wanted to share that with you, my fellow readers.

Writing and Teaching

Having finished my copyedits for Marriage to the Sea and then my newest draft of the book that follows, I’m immersed in teaching a really great group of novelists for my winter term. I’m in favor, always, of taking and teaching classes, of informal writer’s groups, co-writing if that works for you. It’s a good thing to be surprised and delighted and to engage with people in problem-solving, thinking about how narratives work, reading and writing together.

I’m also looking forward very much to teaching a session for the Off Campus Writer’s Workshop. It’s on the question of what lies beyond simple unreliability, a subject I’ve tackled before, in lecture and essay, but our ideas keep evolving, of course. Right now, I’m thinking a lot about lying, telling the truth, deception, denial, and the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves and about each other. And how all of this not only shows up in our characters but in our narrative approach. This class is open for anyone who wants to register, so if you’d like to be part of our conversation, the link is above. And, in any case, for writers looking for inspiration, you might check out OCWW: they have all kinds of great sessions.

I’m also reading some beautiful forthcoming and recent books by friends, in between peering at the news and trying to figure out my small role in all that’s happening (including being counted as objecting to some particularly bad goings-on, which counts when enough of us are doing it: https://5calls.org/).

MPP Contributor news

Joan Silber wrote about her teacher Grace Paley for the MPP (Joan Silber on Grace Paley's "Mother" and "A Conversation with My Father"). She has a story in the Winter 2025 issue of Ploughshares, which has made the story free to nonsubscribers. I recommend buying the issue, though, if you can, because it has great work in it, including a new story, “Ghost,” by Charles Baxter (Charles Baxter on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers: Not Understanding—he was writing at the time that The Sun Collective came out, and before his wild new Blood Test). Here’s the beginning of Joan’s new story, “Mercy,” in Ploughshares (her new book, Mercy, will be coming out this fall):

What they did to Eddie the night he overdosed was put tubes up his nose and needles in both arms and then roll him into a room in the hospital where machines made dull roaring noises, and he had to hear the hissing inhalations from other bodies in other beds. It was not even quiet. It wasn’t at all where he wanted to die, and he tried to say this, but his mouth was taped over a tube. Get me out of here came out as Emmeowee, and Home was just a call like a bird’s.

He’d gotten it all wrong, what dying would be. The poetry of it was not in this room. Why wasn’t he alone? The sanctity of this time was clogged with strangers. He was next to the private gasps of other men, their muffled animal efforts. All men. He loved women—why hadn’t they at least put him with women?

He had no way to open his eyes to see, and he didn’t want to see. They were a mess, all of them. He knew that much. He was past the strength to look. The dark was fine with him.

And then he remembered he was supposed to be kinder. Weren’t they all in this together? All of them as fucked up as he was. Worse. He could hear how hard they were working for air, poor bastards, with lungs no good at it. Working, working. Did that mean he was really dying, if his mind could remind itself to make room for mercy? It frightened him to think so. And then it didn’t.

Wishing some mercy for all of you in this coming month. Thank you for reading, whether you’ve just joined the project or have been here for a while. I appreciate being together in our imaginations in this time.

Sabrina Orah Mark, Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales

Sarah Stone — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 22:10:32 +0000

At the end of this year, which had a truly Gothic amount of plot in it, we’re anticipating more wildness in the months to come. Into the Woods after the demise of the narrator. Over the holidays and in between time with family and friends, while reading lush and piercing work in process and building my winter course, I’ve been reading Sabrina Orah Mark’s beautiful Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales. She interweaves motifs and histories of Jewish and other tales with family stories and cultural readings, and grapples with how to both interpret and survive the world around us. Mark, whose poetry and short fiction live in the realm of tales and dreams, here digs into the sources and nature of these tales.

Essays in this book appeared as part of her “Happily” column for The Paris Review. In the early lockdown stages of the pandemic, so many of us read “Fuck the Bread. The Bread is Over.” That piece is in here as one of 26 stories/essays (along with a prologue and an epilogue). The pieces stand on their own, and Mark also threads her life as daughter, mother, stepmother, and wife through the book, one dropped-in moment giving context to later (and earlier) pieces. “There are doors no third wife should ever open,” she writes in “A Bluebeard of Wives.” In a meeting at her synagogue, after the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, someone accuses her of keeping her children in a bubble because she doesn’t talk to them about it. She says, “My children ask me if their Black father was ever a slave. They ask me if they will ever be turned into slaves. They ask me if I would ever be turned into a slave for being their mother. As Black Jewish boys, my children will never be in a bubble. But if there was a bubble big enough, I’d move there in a second.” Everyone gets very quiet. “Tell me where the bubble is. Where’s the bubble?”

She chases that impossible bubble all through the book as she reinvents and re-envisions the tales and as she tells (or alludes to) stories that her family would rather keep private.

A student asks me if I ever wonder if I should just stop writing. “Is it really worth it?” she asks. “All this vulnerability? All this exposure? Possibly hurting everyone you love?”

I tell her language is what I have, and I think without it I’d grow tentacles, and sharp little teeth would poke through my skull. She laughs. “I’m serious,” I say. “If I stopped writing, I’d go sea witch.”

The student asks whether certain things should be left sacred, like the children. Mark wonders, “How can I write about motherhood without writing about my children? Who would play their part? The birds in the trees? A stranger? The shadows?”

Her painful dilemma: wanting to keep the children in a bubble while also feeling compelled to write truths that expose them. But perhaps also free them. Wanting to protect them. Fighting her own mind and the sharp little teeth. Something writers face. Are we going to ask permission? (I do, not every writer does.) A friend of mine says her father didn’t speak to her for a decade after her memoir was published, and she’d thought her portrait of him was a kind one.

Mark’s family revelations often come with no explanation or follow-up, as mysterious as the tales she links them to. In “Children with Mothers Don’t Eat Houses,” she writes,

In the Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel,” it’s not the breadcrumbs but the moonlit pebbles that point the children home. The breadcrumbs, eaten by birds, are the vanishing path that lead Hansel and Gretel to an edible house inhabited by a ravenous witch. At first, Hansel and Gretel gently nibble at the house, like mice. Then Hansel tears off a big piece of cake-roof. Then Gretel knocks out an entire sugar windowpane. The children are insatiable because what they are really hungry for is a mother and their mother is gone. Children with mothers don’t eat houses.

As the pieces continue, Mark’s continual reporting of conversations with her mother shows us how entwined they are, but the book also gives a sense of their disconnections. The absences. Having a mother and also not having that mother:

For my whole life, my mother has periodically stopped speaking to me. For months. For weeks. Sometimes only for days. The reasons are as old as the oldest fairy tale. As old as pebbles. I have betrayed her by disagreeing. I have spoken up for myself. She has slipped from the center of my attention. And now she has stopped speaking to me again. For days my chest feels like it’s filling up with dry leaves. My head is bricks and glass. A shattering takes up residence in my body. I am middle-aged, and her silence still does this to me. I want sugar. I want to sleep.

In less than three paragraphs, the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” goes from mother to un-mother. First she feeds the children her house. Then she plans on eating them. She is as “old as the hills” because she is as old as all the un-motherish parts of all the mothers—since the beginning of time—added up. She is the stepmother’s hatred of Hansel and Gretel grown older and more feral. A hobbling, hungry hatred. A blind hatred with a “keen sense of smell.” What nourishes the witch are the children she despises.

“It’s always good,” says my mother, “to be a little bit hungry.”

When I was twelve and my twin brothers were nine, we three lived by ourselves in our own apartment in New York City. We had a television on a cart we’d wheel around the living room waiting for The Wonder Years to come on so we could disappear into a family. And we had a frying pan. We had small hands that our grandfather would close around thick wads of cash. We had a father we saw on Thursdays and every other weekend. We had a mother in the penthouse, eight floors above us. We went to yeshiva. We studied Talmud. We stole school lunch.

Mark—mother, stepmother, and daughter, poet and reader—is hungry, full of questions. She uses collage and juxtaposition instead of answers, though the questions get more numerous and urgent over time. Here, she doesn’t give us the fight with her her mother, but her interpretation and metaphors (“my chest feels like it’s filling up with dry leaves. My head is bricks and glass.”) She wants what we want (not to be shattered, and then, when we are, sugar and sleep).

She jumps from family to tale and then back. Mother. Witch. Unmother. Stepmother. In the story above, as in her elliptical writing about the stepdaughter who lived with them seven months, I think she’s both child and witch. Her mother didn’t feed or live with the children in this story. Mark doesn’t answer a reader’s questions (why can’t the children also live in the penthouse? Did she never come downstairs or they go up?) But the older she gets, the more life breaks into this world of wolvish independence. She has her own children; she cannot live in a bubble.

In our contemporary world, with the narrator gone and the giant stomping through the forest, any illusion of a bubble has disappeared. This book darkens as it goes on, and the darker it gets, the more it erupts into surrealist imaginings and reimaginings of the family stories, of the fairy tales. The old tales, the real versions, are often dark enough to start with. And that feels like the truth (part of the truth). I’m in the mood right now for very dark and wild stories that remind me we have no idea how any of this will end. Or who else we might meet in the woods as we set off to see our friends.

News

Writing

Recently, I’ve been working on shorter pieces in the marshy territory of fiction and “personal history” (I like the term Mark uses for Happily). Here are two pieces that just came out in LEON Literary Review (“Hiding Places” and “The Dinner Guest”). These pieces may be part of something longer in the end. And I wrote about holding on and letting go in Rachel Khong’s moving first novel Goodbye, Vitamin, for Alta Journal and the California Book Club. And after a second round of edits and copyedits for my next book, Marriage to the Sea, it’s gone off to proofreading and book design. My editor has come up with a couple of great cover images that capture the spirit of the book, so I’m excited to see what happens.

Submission call

The Big Moose Prize

My spouse, Ron Nyren won Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose prize a few years ago for The Book of Lost Light. BLP was wonderful to work with and is doing great work in the literary world, including heroically rescuing other presses after the SPD meltdown. Here’s the description of the Big Moose Prize (they also have other prizes and other calls for submission at various points in the year):

Each year Black Lawrence Press will award The Big Moose Prize for an unpublished novel. The prize is open to new, emerging, and established writers. The winner of this contest will receive book publication, a $1,000 cash award, and ten copies of the book. Prizes will be awarded on publication.

The Big Moose Prize is open to traditional novels as well as novels-in-stories, novels-in-poems, and other hybrid forms that contain within them the spirit of a novel.

MPP contributor news

It’s always exciting to see new and forthcoming work from past MPP contributors (and if I’m missing anything, please let me know). Last month, after my reading of Ali Smith’s Autumn, I did a roundup of full books. This month, I want to highlight shorter pieces: Maw Shein Win has work from her beautiful Percussing the Thinking Jar in the next issue of The American Poetry Review. And Beth Alvarado’s “Time in the Shape of Hills,” a gorgeous essay about walking the Camino de Santiago with her son, in January’s issue of The Sun. Meanwhile, I’m linking to an earlier essay published there, “Stars and Moons and Comets,” which you can also find in her amazing essay collection, Anxious Attachments.

Sharing with you a video that a brilliant writer friend sent me. A story of being lost in the woods that also brings a lot of comfort.

Hedgehog in the Fog - Russian cartoon + English subtitle

Welcome to the new readers joining us this month, and welcome back to everyone who’s been with the Marvelous Paragraph Project, whether for a short or longer time. Thank you for reading and being there. And thanks to those of you who wrote this year with thoughts about the books or just to let me know that you are finding these MPP pieces helpful. May there be comfort and great stories for you and everyone you love this year.

Ali Smith, Autumn

Sarah Stone — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:23:03 +0000

As we feel our way into how to adjust to our new circumstances, wherever we are in the process, I’m appreciating the pieces that writers are sharing to help us look after each other. One of the writers in my current advanced novel-writing class told us that Toni Morrison’s essay “Peril” had helped her through a very hard time right after the election. It’s an intensely useful reminder of how authoritarian governments respond to artists, as well as a reminder of why we have to keep reading and writing: “…stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art. Those writers plying their craft near to or far from the throne of raw power, of military power, of empire building and countinghouses, writers who construct meaning in the face of chaos must be nurtured, protected.” Another writer then shared a Vaclav Havel poem that led me to his writing on hope (as quoted in Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, currently available as a free e-book from Haymarket Books) not as “an estimate of the situation” but “an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” So as a way of reclaiming our minds and, yes, the hope Havel describes, I want to share some delight with you, from Ali Smith’s first novel in her seasonal quartet, Autumn, about friendship and mortality, bureaucracy and Brexit, “arty art,” time, loss, and the real-life artist Pauline Boty.

Smith collages voices and language—her writing is such a pleasure to read: so honest about family, friendship, the process of making art and making a life, and the ways big historical events touch our small private lives. Smith always reinvents what’s possible in the novel and in writing about real life. Rereading Autumn makes me think about how current events slide into history, as everything we’ve experienced since 2016 (when this book was published) pushes the unlikely and even unbelievable to new levels. In Autumn, the friendship between Elisabeth, a precocious and forthright child, and her older neighbor, Daniel, persists through their lives and opens up the world for her. He’s her friend, yes, but also teacher and alternate parent and guide.

At the start of the book he’s in his endgame, and we have some of his dreams and memories, so even though it is more her book than his, this window into life before death gives us some of the most rich and remarkable chapters in the book. Here is a whole sequence of paragraphs from Daniel’s POV, which begins as a memory of his sister, who died young, and then takes off (Smith’s writing often gives a sense of flying/falling):

But he has some pages, still, of the letters from when she was nursing their mother. She is eighteen. The clever forward-slope of her.

It’s a question of how we regard our situations, dearest Dani, how we look and see where we are, and how we choose, if we can, when we are seeing undeceivedly, not to despair and, at the same time, how best to act. Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all. But in that Augenblick there’s either a benign wink or a willing blindness, and we have to know we’re equally capable of both, and to be ready to be above and beyond the foul even when we’re up to our eyes in it. So it’s important – and here I acknowledge directly the kind and charming and mournful soul of my dear brother whom I know so well – not to waste the time, our time, when we have it.

Dearest Dani.

What has he done with the time?

A few trivial rhymes.

There was nothing else for it, really.

Plus, he ate well, when the rhymes brought in the money.

Autumn mellow. Autumn yellow. He can remember every word of that stupid song. But he can’t remember,

dear God, he can’t.

Excuse me, dear God, can I trouble you to remind me of my little sister’s name?

Not that he thinks there’s a God. In fact he knows there isn’t. But just in case there’s such a thing:

Please, remind me, her name, again.

Sorry, the silence says. Can’t help you.

Who’s that?

(Silence.)

Who’s there?

(Silence.)

God?

Not exactly.

Well, who?

Where do I start? I’m the butterfly antenna. I’m the chemicals that paint’s made of. I’m the person dead at the water’s edge. I’m the water. I’m the edge. I’m skin cells. I’m the smell of disinfectant. I’m that thing they rub against your mouth to moisten it, can you feel it? I’m soft. I’m hard. I’m glass. I’m sand. I’m a yellow plastic bottle. I’m all the plastics in the seas and in the guts of all the fishes. I’m the fishes. I’m the seas. I’m the molluscs in the seas. I’m the flattened-out old beer can. I’m the shopping trolley in the canal. I’m the note on the stave, the bird on the line. I’m the stave. I’m the line. I’m spiders. I’m seeds. I’m water. I’m heat. I’m the cotton of the sheet. I’m the tube that’s in your side. I’m your urine in the tube. I’m your side. I’m your other side. I’m your other. I’m the coughing through the wall. I’m the cough. I’m the wall. I’m mucus. I’m the bronchial tubes. I’m inside. I’m outside. I’m traffic. I’m pollution. I’m a fall of horseshit on a country road a hundred years ago. I’m the surface of that road. I’m what’s below. I’m what’s above. I’m the fly. I’m the descendant of the fly. I’m the descendant of the descendant of the descendant of the descendant of the descendant of the descendant of the fly. I’m the circle. I’m the square. I’m all the shapes. I’m geometry. I haven’t even started with the telling you what I am. I’m everything that makes everything. I’m everything that unmakes everything. I’m fire. I’m flood. I’m pestilence. I’m the ink, the paper, the grass, the tree, the leaves, the leaf, the greenness in the leaf. I’m the vein in the leaf. I’m the voice that tells no story.

(Snorts.) There’s no such thing.

Begging your pardon. There is. It’s me.

This is an exhilarating flight with just enough information to ground us. We know where the memory is in time (“…when she was nursing their mother. She is eighteen”) and get to read a bit of the letter, full of a precocious eighteen-year-old’s wisdom, which may not be so different from anyone else’s but still feels so young. We feel Daniel’s unhappy frustration as he cannot get back the essential fact of her name. Then there’s the surprise: the free-floating conversation with himself about time and memory which turns into a conversation with—who? (We don’t always know, in the remarkable, associative conversations here, who is talking, though we can often make a reasonable guess.) And then this finishes with a spectacular paragraph that’s a prose poem in itself, an assertion of the “I” of the world, in its glory and horseshit: “I’m everything that makes everything.” Everything’s assertion of itself.

The chapter goes on. I am so tempted to give you the whole thing, but I hope you will find and read the book if this calls to you—much of the novel veers closer to the conventional, but it all has this quality of freedom, of making its own rules as it goes to meet the challenges of the time. It captures—with a hope-filled orientation and a joy in beauty—what feels like the scattered, urgent, unexpected mixture of tones of our moment (the moment that has just passed, the moment we are in now).

In a conversation with Amy E. Elkins for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Smith said this about her seasonal quartet (she’d just published Spring, so she had a sense by this time of how to describe her project):

I’m writing these books instinctually, to a deadline, trying to allow the moment to pass through me and them like we’re a porous skin surface, with the novel form itself — a revolutionary and ever-hopeful, ever-socially-analytical form — as the mast to which we’re tied through the storm. Culture is porous like us, and it enters us as much as we make it. I’ve no idea how these books will read in 10, 20 years. I can’t think about it, I can’t even consider it. The books began as an experiment, a project, an attempt to ask, 1. why the publishing industry generally waits so long to publish a manuscript after it’s finished, and 2. why we don't allow the novel more to be what it says it is, novel, the latest thing, which is where it gets its name from, and is what people thought of it when the form first appeared.

Sometimes, when people run into trouble in novel-writing, it’s not because they know too little about their books but because they know too much, are trying too hard to figure out how the pieces connect before ever writing them, have too clear and commanding an outline. When writers abandon the approach of sinking in and writing instinctually, letting the characters surprise them, it all stops being fun. Smith, no matter how serious the times she’s describing, flies through these pages, allowing social analysis and the personal and poetry to emerge, surprising us as readers as well as herself as a writer. Surprising us into seeing the world again, into the stillness that’s not paralysis but art.

News

Writing

Right now, I’m working through a nuanced and memorably great (weird but there it is) set of copyedits for my next book of fiction, Marriage to the Sea. Although I’m taken aback to find out how little I know about what should be hyphenated, and mystified by some of my many references, in rereading as I go I remember that I love these characters and their journeys. I’m actively looking forward to sharing them with readers (who may know some of them from Hungry Ghost Theater). Meanwhile, here’s my newest flash piece, “Earthly Delights” in the new issue of Image Journal.

Upcoming class

If you’re interested in working on a novel in progress in community, I’ll be teaching a Stanford Continuing Studies online class on invention and revision starting in January. Registration opens Dec. 2. Course description, details, and signup link here.

Submission call

Four Way Books, which publishes gorgeous books, and where everyone has made the editing process of Marriage to the Sea a total pleasure, has a fiction open reading period (book-length novels, novellas, flash fiction, and short story collections) through November 30, so if you have a book you’re ready to share, take a look at their guidelines here.

MPP contributor news

It’s always exciting to see new and forthcoming books from past MPP contributors (and if I’m missing anything, please let me know):

New and Recent:

Charles Baxter, Blood Test: A Comedy (https://charlesbaxter.com/)

Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Tell the Rest (https://www.lucyjanebledsoe.com/)

Maw Shein Win, Percussing the Thinking Jar (https://www.mawsheinwin.com/)

Forthcoming:

Marcy Dermansky, Hot Air (https://www.marcydermansky.com/)

David Haynes, Martha’s Daughter (https://hayneswrites.com/)

[name of author], Afterword

Lillian Howan on Wakako Yamauchi

Sarah Stone — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 20:51:37 +0000

(Guest post by Lillian Howan)

I like the dry heat, the bitter landscape. I like the still sorrow of emptiness. I was born to it.

– Wakako Yamauchi, Rosebud and Other Stories

Wakako Yamauchi wrote into her eighties, often about the desert farmlands of the Imperial Valley where she was born in October 1924. The date on her birth certificate is October 25, but she was actually born earlier: there was a delay in officially recording home births in farming communities. During her long life, Yamauchi would explore this gap between an official account and reality, with all its layers of ambiguity.

In her story “The Sensei,” from Songs My Mother Taught Me, Yamauchi contrasts the narrator’s husband’s description of Las Vegas with a more sobering reality:

Jim heard about Las Vegas from these boys at the House. They planned systems and worked out mathematical theories, and Jim would come home all excited and tell me about them. There was gambling around the clock, night lit like day, money flowing like water, free drinks, free breakfasts; we had to go.

It was winter. I cashed my fifty-dollar bonus check, and we agreed not to write checks or use the tuition money. I tucked an extra ten dollars in the secret compartment of my wallet. I’d also heard of Las Vegas, of people coming home broke and hungry and running out of gas the last mile and pushing the car home.

“The Sensei” is set during the years following the World War II incarceration of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans in ten concentration camps under Executive Order 9066. The narrator and her husband Jim struggle financially, cramped into a tiny basement apartment, but there’s a sense of cautious optimism in this paragraph that nonetheless ends on a foreboding note. Yamauchi depicts the hardships of the Issei and Nisei, first and second-generation Japanese-Americans, as they face the complete loss of any financial stability that they had struggled to attain before their incarceration, as well as racism and blatant anti-Japanese sentiment following World War II. Her characters are angry and grief-stricken, but often plucky and hopeful. Her narrator dreams of painting, and, with Jim, she plays penny-ante poker games with his equally impoverished colleagues.

Las Vegas becomes a metaphor for the United States and, more generally, life itself, where the narrator and her husband lose “most of our money at the gaudiest, plushest casino.” The odds are stacked, the specter of failure is ever-present, but there is excitement and the distant allure of riches, an illusory mirage, a terrain of addiction, sparkle and lights, sounds and sights and dreams. Driving out of Vegas, the narrator reflects that “this whole trip had been a pain – a pain in the pocketbook and a big pain in the ass.”

A playwright as well as a fiction writer, Yamauchi focuses on the power of the spoken word, the unadorned way that people actually talked, rather than an author’s idea of how they should be speaking:

While we were walking to the door, Jim pulled my arm and said, “Look at the man at the water fountain.” I looked. He was small and thin, Japanese, about forty or more. His face kind of hung on his neck like a rag on a peg. He was deeply tanned, with creases like gullies on his face, his hair was thinning, and his eyes were terribly tired. His two-colored loafer jacket was faded and dirty; he looked like a strip of bent clay. “He asked me for money,” Jim said.

“Did you give it to him?” I asked.

“Hell no. I didn’t have any to give.”

Descriptions are written in the way the characters would speak: “his face kind of hung on his neck like a rag on a peg.” Poetry suffuses their words, but the voice remains informal, authentic, true: “Hell, no. I didn’t have any to give.” Yamauchi relies on the power of the plain word, on vernacular, everyday language.

For several years, I edited stories that Yamauchi wrote during her seventies and eighties, and I had the great delight of conversing with her at her home in Gardena, California. She was always focused on getting to the heart of the story, cutting away any artifice and embellishment. She continually emphasized the strength of simple words while, at the same time, writing with deep perception and subtle literary sophistication.

Concerned with the lives of women, Yamauchi wrote about housewives, women who cut and styled hair, women who worked in factories (including the narrator of “The Sensei,” who works at a shower curtain factory), and those who farmed in the harsh desert climate. Sensitive to the struggles faced by women and to issues concerning gender roles and identity, Yamauchi also wrote about the hardships that men experienced.

In “The Sensei,” Yamauchi turns to the fall of a formerly influential leader. In the words of Jim, the sensei was once “a powerful man in camp – feared and respected. He had a big following.” In Las Vegas, though, the sensei appears broken, and in the years that follow, he slips further into poverty.

Yamauchi explains that “sensei means master or teacher,” and as circumstances and his own frailties grind the sensei into destitution, he offers a last, dignified gesture:

He got out of the car and bowed. “Thank you for your kindness,” he said. He nearly stumbled on a piece of sidewalk litter, then walked on toward the lights of Little Tokyo. The Ginza Club, Miyako Hotel, Mikawaya – green, red, yellow, green, red, yellow – alternating, the colors blinked on the sensei’s shapeless hat. He stopped, waited for a light to change, then disappeared in the pedestrian traffic.

Yamauchi is unsentimental about the tattered appearance of the sensei, with his “shapeless hat” as he almost stumbles “on a piece of sidewalk litter.” The sensei is last glimpsed as he disappears “in the pedestrian traffic.” Pedestrian, as a noun, describes someone who walks on foot, but as an adjective, pedestrian means dull, unremarkable, ordinary, and uninteresting. Isolated in a pitiless world, the sensei nonetheless bows to the narrator and her husband, thanking them for their kindness. Yamauchi concludes with a last image of “pedestrian traffic,” but not before portraying the sensei’s fleeting, dignified gesture.

Yamauchi’s sensei, a Buddhist priest, makes his way through the landscapes of illusion, ever-changing and ephemeral, “green, red, yellow, green, red, yellow.” Once revered, the master eventually becomes a beggar until his form disappears into ordinary, monotonous traffic, but his story lingers on within the reader. In Wakako Yamauchi’s words, life is unrelenting and unsparing and wondrous:

“And all the tears that have stained the sleeves of men,” the sensei said. “Still I love Las Vegas.”

CELEBRATING WAKAKO YAMAUCHI, on October 3, 2024, will honor the centennial of the legendary playwright and author. Wakako Yamauchi (1924 – 2018) was a trail-blazing pioneer of Asian-American theater and literature who penned numerous short stories and plays, including the widely-acclaimed And the Soul Shall Dance. The event gathers poets and writers reading excerpts of Wakako Yamauchi's works, as well as original writings reflecting enduring themes of her legacy.

University of San Francisco on October 3, 2024, 6 pm PST, Fromm Hall 120, Xavier Auditorium, with Brian Komei Dempster, Lillian Howan, Brynn Saito, Maw Shein Win, and additional special guest. This event will be both in-person and live streamed.

Lillian Howan's writings have been published in Alta Journal, Asian American Literary Review, Calyx, Jellyfish Review, the museum of americana, New England Review, South Dakota Review, Vice-Versa, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Wakako Yamauchi's collection, Rosebud and Other Stories. Her debut novel, The Charm Buyers, received the Ka Palapala Po'okela Award for Excellence in Literature. Her novel The Spellbound is forthcoming in 2025 from WTAW (Why There Are Words) Press.

Venita Blackburn, Dead in Long Beach, California, Alta’s California Book Club's July book

Sarah Stone — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 19:09:06 +0000

Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California has made me think (again but also in new ways) about how we deliberately and accidentally splinter our consciousness in the face of the unbearable. I wrote about the book for Alta’s California Book Club: I am wild about the books they choose and the smart, great essays people post and the wonderful live Zoom conversations. Also, I count myself very lucky to keep learning from Anita Felicelli, brilliant writer and brilliant, respectful editor. Here’s the beginning of my piece about the book:

In Venita Blackburn’s original, fierce first novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, Coral E. Brown, a graphic sci-fi novelist, finds her brother dead by suicide and splinters into separate selves. As she fends off grief and horror, the futuristic machines she’s invented to narrate her own novel step in to tell the story with tender, wry curiosity about humanity. As these machines say from the start, “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot.” Of course, since the machines are her creation, she is telling the story, but obliquely, as a novelist does. They investigate her deep past and family and report on her thoughts and actions after her brother’s death. They draw conclusions about human relationships to destructiveness, debt, desire, minor fame, avoidance, denial, fan fic, and the devastating, insatiable human craving for “More.”

As the novel opens, Coral stands by while the EMTs deal with the body of her brother, Jay, her train of thought already unrolling into the machines’ analyses. Her brother’s phone “ding[s] and vibrate[s] like something hungry.” A message from her niece, Jay’s daughter, Khadija, postponing a family dinner: the phone is unlocked, and Coral reads it. Something simmers in her so that when she comes home from the hospital at midnight, full of rage-grief and questions about his life, she begins to search through his other text messages. He has only 30 contacts, which increases her fury at him. Even before his death, she was the only one in touch with other family members and the one who had to make all the arrangements and pay for family funerals. Now she will have to notify everyone of his death. In the middle of a long rant, aloud, to herself, she says, “I’m not some kind gay nun with a credit card. I have shit to do. Now I have to be the middleman in the family because you never talk to anybody.”

You can read the rest here. Alta’s site also has an excerpt from the novel, other essays about the book, and, as always, a reflective essay by the author (Blackburn writes beautifully about ghosts).

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about previous MPP pieces about characters trying to come to grips with (or evade) terrible realities, including Charles Baxter on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers: Not Understanding and on his own newest novel, The Sun Collective. Here’s a passage from that essay (and you can read the rest at the link):

I suppose peacefulness, calm, and bliss are to be welcomed. Literature almost but not quite promises that it can advise you on how to achieve those treasured moments of peace of mind. You are in possession of these qualities? Good for you. God bless you—or has blessed you. But in one paragraph of Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers, a paragraph that I go back to over and over again, Ivan Karamazov refuses all that. When it comes to the suffering of children, he says, there is nothing to understand; there is no way to put such suffering into perspective; there is no “answer” to it; and if some global, philosophical, political, or religious explanation is offered to justify or to explain away the suffering of children, Ivan refuses it. In the chapter titled “Rebellion” (sometimes translated as “Mutiny”), Ivan disclaims all that.

“‘I understand nothing, and now,’ Ivan went on as if delirious, ‘I don’t want to understand anything. I want to stick to facts. I gave up trying to understand long ago. As soon as I feel I want to understand something I immediately have to renounce facts, whereas I have decided to stay true to facts…” (Ignat Avsey translation)

And I wrote earlier about another couple of inventive, deeply influential books that take on personal and societal extremity: Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, and Jenny Offill, Weather: Imagining the Future.

Virtual Events

Alta’s California Book Club: Venita Blackburn will read and talk with John Freeman (so nuanced and remarkable at writerly conversations) on Thursday July 25 (fourth Thursday, not third, this month), at 5 pm PT. Here’s the link to register. I will hope to “see” you there…it’s a webinar, but there’s a chat.

The very enticing 2024 Yetzirah Jewish Poetry Conference is happening right now (like right now! July 2-5). Here’s the link to their public, virtual events.

Lit Youngstown: Uplifting Black Women’s Voices. Another enticing event, with previous MPP author Mary M. Slechta with Lesley Nneka Arimah, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, and Kortney Morrow, Thursday, July 11 at 4:00 pm PT. “This reading will be livestreamed via YouTube. To join, visit Lit Youngstown's YouTube Channel, and click on the "Live" tab.”

(Dear MPP readers, I’m starting to include a selection of upcoming virtual events, so if you know of a great upcoming (virtual only!) event, or even want to link to an event recording, please include it in the comments. And yes, you can absolutely include your own virtual events! Also, we’re interested in anything else you have to say about the books or the MPP pieces—I get wonderful emails from friends and readers about them: I always wish I could share them with you all. So if you want to post some of these thoughts for each other, I know other people would be very intrigued to read them.)

Zadie Smith, The Fraud

Sarah Stone — Tue, 21 May 2024 22:23:49 +0000

Zadie Smith is fed up. Her most recent novel, The Fraud, is about a famous criminal trial of a potential grand fraud and his obsessed followers, about the bombastic pettiness of the literary world (in 19th century London, but…), and also about the historical crimes and disasters that take place while we’re looking elsewhere, or that we’re seeing through our own layers of misinformation. In particular, she’d like us to actually face up to our tendency to place ourselves and our preferred stories about the world at the center of everything. She is, however, fed up in a particularly Zadie Smith way: insightful, nuanced, hilarious. She’s not just judging bad behavior, she’s curious about confusion and self-delusion. She wants to know everyone’s stories, and though she definitely has opinions, she understands how and why we get it so wrong. Which doesn’t stop her from being wicked funny about pretension, self-inflation, and the excuses we make for ourselves.

The novel mixes real people and events with imagined ones. The book’s first story revolves around Eliza Touchet, cousin, housekeeper, literary hostess, and editor for novelist William Ainsworth, a real figure, who is, in Smith’s novel, disconsolate at the attention and honors his frenemies have managed to grab (particularly Dickens, who he envies quite bitterly).

Her reimagining of the real people also has quite a bit of fiction in it, as she takes some huge, unnerving creative leaps. The novel’s been out long enough that many people may have read it, but in case you haven’t had the chance yet, to avoid giving away Smith’s many surprises, I’m going to leave it at that and focus on her maneuvering between the characters observing each other as she plays with the differences in their lives and perceptions.

By the time the novel begins, Eliza is also fairly fed up with waiting on and being expected to flatter William and his often drunken fellow authors as they hold forth. Also, it’s Eliza’s job to admire his novels, and it’s only getting harder:

Hilary St. Ives, 1869

No matter how briskly she tried to move through it, this new novel, Hilary St. Ives, proved disheartening. Old age had only condensed and intensified his flaws. People ejaculated, rejoined, cried out on every page. The many strands of the perplexing plot were resolved either by ‘Fate’, the fulfilment of a gypsy’s curse or a thunderstorm. It took over three hundred pages for young Hilary to work out that the servant who seemed unusually concerned with his future was his mother, and that the fellow who looked so very much like him that he could be his father was, indeed, his father. And for great swathes of the novel it was hard to distinguish it from the descriptions of a house agent:

No material change had been made in the mansion since its erection, and even the old furniture, chairs, beds, antique mirrors, and hangings were carefully preserved, so that it was not merely a capital specimen of Tudor architecture, but gave an accurate idea of the internal decorations of a large house of the period. The hall to which we have just adverted….

The Fraud is nakedly sharp-tongued, but Smith is committed to seeing everything through and from multiple voices and perspectives by giving us both the characters’ blind spots and their particular insights. In a Smith novel, no one is that character who doesn’t see or understand anything at all: even Howard Belsey in On Beauty or the badly behaved Victorian authors in The Fraud have their moments. Her characters are curious about each other, often unexpectedly compassionate, and also, less unexpectedly, often dense and clueless.

Outside, Looking In

The book starts with the arrival of a complete outsider, a boy we see through Eliza’s eyes at first, though she’s not even named: she’s an observer before she’s observed.

A Very Large Hole

A filthy boy stood on the doorstep. He might be scrubbed of all that dirt, eventually—but not of so many orange freckles. No more than fourteen, with skinny, unstable legs like a marionette, he kept pitching forward, shifting soot into the hall. Still, the woman who’d opened the door—easily amused, susceptible to beauty—found she couldn’t despise him.

“You’re from Tobin’s?”

“Yes, missus. Here about the ceiling. Fell in, didn’t it?”

The ceiling has fallen in (literally and also metaphorically, as we come to understand over the course of the book) from the sheer weight of books in the house’s second-floor library. We will never again see this boy who’s come to try to fix the mess, but Eliza observes him—his orange freckles, his “skinny, unstable legs like a marionette”—with more tender particularity than some writers give to their protagonists.

The book is full of revealing juxtapositions, both in the architecture of its construction and in the extreme differences of the characters, and we navigate many characters watching each other and trying to make sense of what they see. Next, the boy observes Eliza, an outsider’s limited view, with an omniscient narrator looking over his shoulder to comment briefly on what he does and does not understand:

He saw of course that she was an old woman, but she didn’t move or speak like one. A high bosom, handsome, her face had few wrinkles and her hair was black. Above her chin, a half-moon line, turned upside down. Such ambiguities were more than the boy could unravel. He deferred to the paper in his hand, reading slowly.

And then Ainsworth and his King Charles spaniels come in to heartily interrupt, and Eliza takes the boy to see the damage. Still amazed by the harm books can wreak, he says,

“So many books. What’s he need with them all?”

“Mr. Ainsworth is a writer.”

“What—so he writ them all?”

“A surprising amount of them.”

The boy stepped forward to peer into the crater, as over the lip of a volcano. She joined him. These shelves had held histories three volumes deep: the kings, queens, clothes, foods, castles, plagues and wars of bygone days. But it was the Battle of Culloden that had pushed things over the edge. Anything referring to Bonnie Prince Charlie was now in the downstairs parlour, covered in plaster, or else caught in the embrace of the library’s Persian rug, which sagged through the hole in the floor, creating a huge, suspended, pendulous shape like an upturned hot air balloon.

Young as he is, she seems old to him. And in both the literal event that starts off the book, and in her point of view as she considers the wreckage, history has all collapsed together into this huge, suspended shape. We are ready, the book lets us know, for big changes. What we have had in the past is a disaster.

Andrew Bogle and the Claimant

Eliza and another central character eventually become obsessed with the criminal trial of a man at the center of a controversy about whether he is a lost heir of a wealthy family or a butcher perpetrating a great fraud, a controversy that has gripped London (based on real life). The book moves to another level when they go to see part of the trial in person. There we’re introduced to a key witness: Andrew Bogle, who was once enslaved in Jamaica, and whose story makes us see all the other stories differently. Characters who appear minor at first will later become major parts of the book, but when Eliza sees Bogle, who will be witnessing for “the Claimant,” she’s already paying attention, not only to his physical appearance (the description of how she sees him is deliberately painful in places for contemporary readers), but also to his dignity: “But a dignity hard won: a dignity in need of constant vigilance and protection.” He is very much in the shadow of the Claimant. And yet, the crowd at the trial already has faith in him:

Speak, Bogle! You know him! We believe you, Bogle!

Later, Eliza could never decide whether it was the influence of the crowd or some mysterious and mesmerizing aspect of Bogle himself that had worked upon her. She was up on her toes, straining for an unobstructed view. It seemed that never in her life had she been more curious to hear a man speak. Before anybody could do so, however, the son left the stage and swiftly returned with the main event: the Claimant himself. A giant! The chin-strap beard had receded many inches – to make room for the several extra stone gained since last photographed – and every button strained at the sheer girth of the man. A gasp went round the room. It took a moment for Eliza to understand that this was a noise of purest approval, even of awe. For all professed themselves glad indeed to see that Sir Roger had been “enjoying himself”, drinking it up and eating it up, by the looks of it, and generally living life to the full, as any man would, given the chance. And why not? He who was so hard done by, the victim of so many lies from so many unscrupulous scribblers and moralists, all of them desperately plotting to bring down this fun-loving, beer-swilling, aristocratic man of the people, Sir Roger. Fellow only wanted what was owed him, after all! And what was justice, if not that? Wild cheering ricocheted round the room. Cries of Bogle! And Tichborne! Thrown up alternately, like tolling bells. No change came over Bogle: he stayed in his seat. His face retained that impenetrable glaze – impenetrable because so much itself – with apparently nothing hidden or masked about it. It was a confoundment, like honesty itself.

This portrait of the Claimant feels both frisky and outraged. That “And why not?” implicitly criticizes the crowd and also shows how they can see the Claimant as a victim, as a “man of the people,” who should have restored to him what they believe has been unjustifiably taken away. A phenomenon we recognize in our lives but understand more deeply through literature. This makes me feel that, after all, despite everything, Zadie Smith is voting for the power of books. (And, God knows, we had better vote.)

There’s another huge shift in voice coming, so brilliantly done that for the first few months of noodling away at this MPP piece (I can be a very slow writer sometimes), I included multiple long passages to consider how Smith accomplishes her switch, how the narrator prepares the ground, how the book’s perspective changes). But she has set up the novel as a series of puzzle boxes, and when you reach the inner boxes, they should rightfully be a surprise. So instead, I want to say to you, dear friends and MPP readers, that it’s just an extraordinary novel, and let Smith herself tell you a bit about her approach to empathy and judgment:

Emily Bazelon: I can’t resist asking you an actual historical question. You tell us that Charles Dickens, the real novelist, the famous novelist, was on the wrong side of the 19th century debate about Jamaica, about the rebellion of enslaved people in Jamaica. So, what are we to make of this? How do you think about Dickens when you include this fact about him in all the other things that we think about him and his great empathy for all his characters?

Zadie Smith: This is so far out of the logic of present life at the moment, but I don’t think you have to make anything of it. I mean, you can make what you like of it, but the idea that what we make of someone fundamentally affects them? Charles Dickens is dead.

So, whatever you make of him, it’s about yourself. You have the choice to make your feelings one way or another. For me, it’s just a fact. It’s an added fact to all the other facts about him. And it’s completely in line with that part of him which dreaded chaos. He dreaded fuss, chaos, violence. He didn’t really want to think about the Colonies, particularly apart from in their kind of most American fabulous version. But at the same time, when he went to America and went south and saw Southern American slavery, he was absolutely horrified and said he wouldn’t read in any of those states. So, he is a man of contradictions.

I don’t know why it isn’t possible to hold more than one idea in our heads at the same time. And I can hold in my head the idea that Dickens is an extraordinary writer and also was completely wrong on the Jamaica question.

This novel is a story about stories, with shifts in perspective that make readers think about who we’re listening to and what we believe. A story of the 19th century and a story of our own times. And all this mixed with both a passion for and despair about literature, including the successful men (Ainsworth, Dickens, and some of their friends really come off very badly in this book). I don’t think you can walk away from it without having to dig more deeply, sometimes more uncomfortably, into central questions: Who waits on who and how? What do these men do with their power? Why might people root for frauds and liars and feel them as representatives of the people? And what aspects of history, crashing through the floor, are we unable to see or fully understand, even now?

Jessica Hagedorn, The Gangster of Love, and Alta’s California Book Club

Sarah Stone — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 18:14:14 +0000

In a short essay that’s both a poetic spill of memories and an artistic manifesto, “Why I Write: Blood, Exile, Longing, Obstinate Memory,” for this month’s Alta’s California Book Club, Jessica Hagedorn writes, “I write to exist: to feel everyone & everything,” and, later on, “…& everyone’s a gangster & everything’s a story / guitar & gun / lost brothers / & black pearls & black tears & blood of a poet.” I’ve been loving these California Book Club meetings, the subtle and terrific interviews with a series of extraordinary writers, mostly in conversation with John Freeman and exciting guests. You can also read a variety of short essays about each month’s book. I was excited to have the chance to write one of these pieces about The Gangster of Love (note, the book club webinar is this Thursday, free and open to everyone…registration info below!). Here’s the beginning of my piece, “‘Only Because It’s Forbidden’: Seduction and loss in Jessica Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love”:

Jessica Hagedorn’s fiercely exuberant 1996 novel, The Gangster of Love, hurtles through a kaleidoscope of tones, mixing eruptions of imagination with elements from her lived experience as an immigrant child and then as a punk rock musician in 1980s New York. Hagedorn—novelist, playwright, musician, and multimedia performer—is, most of all, a collagist, including in her earlier novel, the American Book Award–winning Dogeaters, a marvelous cacophony of voices and modes set in Manila.

The Gangster of Love is also a collage, united by a panther-like omniscient narrator who roves across the book, offering knowing, witty, and sometimes mournful observations and orchestrating a variety of points of view, most often that of Rocky Rivera, the protagonist of the book. The narrator plunges us into a poetic examination of love, ghosts, betrayal, and gossip before introducing the Rivera family, who, splintered by divorce, move from Manila to San Francisco the year that Jimi Hendrix dies. “There are rumors,” the book begins. “Surrealities. Malacañang Palace slowly sinking into the fetid Pasig River, haunted by unhappy ghosts. Female ghosts. Infant ghosts. What is love? A young girl asks.”

Here's the rest of my craft analysis. It was a delight to have Anita Felicelli as an editor (so much of my life as a writer is about the great luck I’ve had with editors, often editors who are brilliant writers themselves.) And the more I read and reread The Gangster of Love, the more deeply I fell for it.

The event is this Thursday, April 18, at 5 pm PT. Here’s the page with more information, including the link to register.

Also, because I couldn’t resist sharing this with you, here’s Jessica Hagedorn’s TikTok tour of her writing space.

Although it’s a webinar, the comments and Q&A are open, so if it works for your schedule, dear friends and MPP readers, it would be great to see you there.

Debra Spark on William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow

Sarah Stone — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 18:42:30 +0000

(Guest post by Debra Spark)

This will be a celebration of a writer I love that begins with what I am weary of: narratives in which other people are the problem. This is because I am weary of people who cast others as the problem, when that very tendency is the problem. If we cannot see the harm we have done, as well as the harm that has been done to us, we cannot see. As a writer and as a person, I’m interested in what seems truer: shame, self-analysis, owning your own crap.

This mini-rant leads me to one of my favorite books, William Maxwell’s autobiographical novel So Long, See You Tomorrow. The author-narrator are one and the same in this book, and the only person Maxwell really blames is himself, and this even though the story concerns a murder.

I have read So Long (and recommended it) countless times. In fact, just yesterday, I ran into an undergraduate student to whom I had recommended this book, and he said, “I read that book. I loved it. Now my mother’s reading it.” Does she like it?

Yes, she does.

It’s a book with a sizeable fan club.

Lines from So Long, See You Tomorrow float through my mind at odd moments, as with this sentence, in which Maxwell describes items lost when he moves from one childhood home to another: “If they hadn’t disappeared then, they would have on some other occasion, life being, as Ortega y Gasset somewhere remarks, in itself and forever shipwreck.”

Maxwell summarizes his book’s subject and his purpose in writing at the start of the second chapter:

I very much doubt that I would have remembered for more than fifty years the murder of a tenant farmer I never laid eyes on if 1) the murderer hadn’t been the father of somebody I knew, and 2) I hadn’t later on done something I was ashamed of afterward. This memoir—if that’s the right name for it—is a roundabout, futile way of making amends.

Maxwell grew up in small town Iowa, but much later he ends up in Chicago. One day, while at school, he walks by this old friend—the son of the murderer—and does not stop to say hello. Part of it is pure shock. He does not expect to see the boy in the new school, but he never rectifies his error, never finds and talks to the boy. So he slights someone he should not have slighted. In admitting his failure, Maxwell moves his narrative beyond his own emotional pain. He’s not satisfied with simply saying, “I’m wounded,” though he is wounded, and the wound is at the emotional core of the book. Instead, he uses a larger story to spotlight the all-too-human response to failures, hurts, and losses.

Because his book tells the backstory of the murder, the plot is quite compelling, as a crime story that also involves a love affair is bound to be. The book has an emotional narrative that needs the dramatic plot but stands apart from that plot, something I particularly appreciate as I tried to do the same in my most recent novel, Discipline. My novel is about an art crime, though it is emotionally driven by a troubled mother-teen relationship.

Here is the mother in my novel after two tussles with her son over screen time that have had disastrous results:

She was a good parent 95 percent of the time. Still, what did that matter? The evil that men do lives after them; the good is often interred with their bones. Everyone made mistakes, as her favorite philosopher, Big Bird, said. True, not mistakes that made a teen want to hurt himself. It seemed impossible, but there it was: She was the third-person enemy in that most challenging of first-person games, Getting Through Adolescence Without Cracking Up.

The emotional narrative in So Long, See You Tomorrow concerns Maxwell’s mother, who died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, two days after she gave birth to her second son. “After that,” Maxwell writes, “there were no more disasters. The worst that could happen had happened and the shine went out of everything.”

Maxwell grew up in a time and place when processing emotions was hard, particularly for men, and certainly for Maxwell’s own father. What Maxwell does remember, though, of the days after his mother’s death and before the burial, is pacing the ground floor with his arm around his father, who is as shattered as his son.

So Long, See You Tomorrow cleverly uses the overriding metaphor of a house to shape the text, both because of Maxwell’s feeling about his childhood home and because he and the murderer’s son form their friendship by exploring a house under construction. Maxwell also references a Giacometti sculpture of a house and Giacometti’s writing about that sculpture, relating its creation to a dream and a love affair where things were constantly being knocked apart and being built over the course of a passionate night, a dream that is haunting in no small part because (as Maxwell writes much later in the book), in the dream, “What is done can be undone.”

Maxwell grew up to be the author of many books and a quite renowned editor at The New Yorker. In the penultimate paragraph of So Long, Maxwell writes:

After six months of lying on an analyst’s couch—this, too, was a long time ago—I relived that nightly pacing, with my arm around my father’s waist. From the living room into the front hall, then, turning, past the grandfather’s clock and on into the library, and from the library into the living room. From the library into the dining room, where my mother lay in her coffin. Together we stood looking down at her. I meant to say to the fatherly man who was not my father, the elderly Viennese, another exile, with thick glasses and a Germanic accent, I meant to say I couldn’t bear it, but what came out of my mouth was, “I can’t bear it.” This statement was followed by a flood of tears such as I hadn’t ever known before, not even in my childhood. I got up from the leather couch and, I somehow knew, with his permission left his office and the building and walked down Sixth Avenue to my office. New York city is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy.

I love this paragraph for the precision and beauty of the memory but mostly for the many moments of compassion shoehorned into this description—the analyst not only understanding that Maxwell needed to leave, but Maxwell understanding he was granted that understanding, and those New Yorkers! For years, I probably imagined that the line referred to their hard-heartedness, but I no longer interpret it that way. I read it as the New Yorkers offering Maxwell the space he needed in the moment. And not because they didn’t care, but because they got it. Without knowing any of the particulars—the very particulars that the book provides—they got it.

author photo: Nicole Wolf

Debra Spark's fifth novel, Discipline, was published in 2024. She is also the author of a book of short stories and two essay collections about fiction writing. She has edited and co-edited two anthologies, the most recent of which was Breaking Bread, a collection of food essays to raise money for a Maine hunger non-profit. More info here: www.debraspark.com.

Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job (Polly Barton, trans.)

Sarah Stone — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 21:59:31 +0000

I’ve been rereading Kikuko Tsumura’s weirdly hypnotic There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job. This book comes back to me often, like a song, where you remember the feeling and bits of the tune more than the words. The novel’s narrator, whose name we never learn, is trying, through her series of jobs, to find a place in the world that she can reasonably inhabit. An “easy job.” A job “practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not.” One that won’t tear at her heart. The character became completely burnt out in her previous work (we don’t learn what that was or what happened until quite late in the book). She’s been living listlessly with her parents, unable even to read, and when she returns to work, at first all she asks for is a job close to home. The book is funny, weird, and still captures something of what it means to earn a living at these precarious jobs: the mixture of confinement, repetitive tasks, tentative or unexpected companionship, loneliness, and a struggle against pointlessness, which the narrator here manages through a sprightly cheerful thoughtfulness. Her obsessively wandering mind runs underneath and around her helpful daylight self, both insightful and in denial. Her delightful, confiding direct way of talking to the reader offers an apparent intimacy that initially hides anything deeper, not only from us but, it seems, from herself.

Each chapter is named after one of her jobs, “The Surveillance Job,” “The Bus Advertising Job,” “The Cracker Packet Job,” “The Postering Job,” and “The Easy Job in the Hut in the Big Forest.” Along the way, we learn a very little more about what happened to her, what went wrong before the start of the book.

“The Surveillance Job”

At the first of these jobs, she watches surveillance footage of “the target,” a novelist suspected of receiving contraband packages. Mostly, though, he types, researches maté, and makes dinner. She’s hungry and wants to go out, but in a moment of great excitement, discovers that he’s jumping up to receive delivery of a mysterious box. Which contains cookies. She watches him sort them out, thinks about the effect of the eye drops she needs because of the job, and then directly addresses the reader:

I know, I know. This was the train of thought of a person with far too much time on their hands. But guess what: with this job I did have too much time on my hands. It was weird because I work such long hours, and yet, even while working, I was basically doing nothing. I’d come to the conclusion that there were very few jobs in the world that ate up as much time and as little brainpower as watching over the life of a novelist who lived alone and worked from home.

Although there is a reason for her to be surveilling him, and we learn more about it as the chapter goes on, she’s mostly obsessed with how and when she gets to eat and the office rules that keep her from getting food. She winds up in another job, then another, anxious about not living up to the expectations of the employment center and Mrs. Masakado, her surreally understanding and gentle recruiter, who places her in each of these jobs.

“The Postering Job”

Our narrator is touchingly, admirably conscientious, increasingly invested in each job, accepting the generally kindly people and their hierarchies (including the reality that it’s all men at the top; although tacitly, this may be part of what drives her away from the jobs where she has no power). She’s always looking for what she can contribute in small ways. As she gets drawn further and further in, each job turns into something else, as when writing entertaining copy for packets of rice crackers leads her into the position of receiving a flood of letters from people desperate for advice.

Stuck in between the feeling that others are after her job and also that she’s in too deep, she leaves once again and winds up with a job for a company contracting with a government agency to put up posters “promoting road safety awareness and so on.”

She sees this as a chance to work outside and alone and takes the job, which, once again starts out simply. She likes the “traffic safety, tree planting and water conservation” posters with their “eye-catching compositions” and a “bold yet simple colour palette.” They remind her, pleasingly, of “Eastern European or vintage Soviet poster design.” Before long, she’s once again becoming part of the culture and concerns of the company, even to the extent of investigating a rival organization that displaces her company’s posters with their own:

I hadn’t yet perfected the knack of bringing around those with Lonely No More! posters, but for the rest of the day I felt very high levels of professional commitment. Thinking that a better understanding of the people living in the neighbourhood would help with my work, I struck up conversations with everyone I met, listening to their complaints and concerns. Granted, there were the odd few who were having none of it, but I found that so long as you asked your questions earnestly, made it clear you weren’t trying to exploit anyone in any way, and then hung on their every word with great interest, the majority of people would share something that was on their mind. Their concerns ran the gamut – from how expensive vegetables were of late, or how they had become addicted to a game on their smartphone, or how dull TV programmes were – to how their grandchild didn’t seem to be warming to them, or how their husband had lost his job and was forever out playing pachinko, or how since being made redundant they’d noticed how wasteful their wife was with money, or how until now they’d been really content being single, but now the friends they went out drinking with were all sick and suddenly they were feeling quite alone. Leaving aside the question of whether said worries were reasonable concerns or had grown out of some kind of indolence on their part, there was nobody without anxieties of some kind. And so, Lonely No More! would muscle their way in and provide an explanation – ‘the reason you’re addicted to your smartphone is because you’re lonely,’ or ‘your wife wastes so much money because she’s lonely’ – to which their organization just happened to offer a seemingly perfect solution.

To believe that such tactics wouldn’t work for most, because the bulk of people had managed to procure the relationships they needed in their lives, and wouldn’t go leaping voluntarily into a connection that a strange young man or woman who’d popped up out of the blue tried to forge with them, was overly optimistic. In reality, when issued an invitation by a good-looking youngster who was sympathetic to their predicament, there were a lot of people who would fall for it.

Her investigative technique of listening to everyone’s anxieties and considering the nature of loneliness feels true to who she is, who she can’t help being. In craft terms, Tsumura’s found a great way of creating this character through her attention to everyone around her, especially strangers. Apart from our narrator’s passion for food, her biggest interest seems to be in these other little-known lives. The concerns she learns about feel both quite specific (a smartphone addiction, a painfully distant grandchild, a husband who’s lost his job and is out playing pachinko) and also universal.

Lonely No More! is not exactly wrong about their audience: all these characters’ willingness to tell their stories to a sympathetic stranger is more evidence that they are right. And the desperation of their new adherents, their individual predicaments, echoes what our narrator encountered in the cracker packet job.

Lonely No More! is also, naturally, profiting from their endeavor. Her older co-worker Mrs. Ōmae talks about their own office and Lonely No More! over tea and homemade inari-zushi:

‘I guess [the office] must have opened about two months after Lonely No More! turned up. At that time, everyone was accepting their pamphlets and going along to their socials, just like they suggested. I guess you could say they were all pretty lonely. That was when Mr. Monaga set up the office. At the start, it was him who went around putting up posters and asking people questions. He passed along the information he gleaned further up the chain, and then occasionally people from the town hall would come out to the area. The situation’s already a lot better than how it used to be.’

‘What is it that Lonely No More! want, ultimately?’

I could hardly believe that I’d managed to get to this point without grasping the answer to such a crucial question, but I’d been so absorbed in the nitty-gritty of my job that I hadn’t even thought it through properly. Mrs Ōmae shook her head as she raised her cup to her lips.

‘Oh, lots of things. They get you to confess your worries at their free socials, and then they ask you along to different, more serious socials. Those you have to pay for. From there, they sift out the people who are willing to pay whatever it takes to avoid being lonely, and invite them to dinner parties. Of course, those also cost money. They also list information about everyone who comes to their meets, including all their worries, and then they send around whichever Lonely No More! member they think a particular individual would be most likely to trust, and have them try to gain access to their house. I’ve heard that people rewrite their wills so as to leave the organisation all their possessions.’

‘I see,’ I said, nodding. I didn’t feel particularly angry. It struck me that these kinds of things happened everywhere. If old age found you lonely, maybe you’d want to leave your possessions to someone who’d made you feel less so, even if just for a little while.

The narrator’s response to this discovery perfectly captures the way she can’t help being drawn in. She’s torn, again, between the “nitty-gritty,” the daily details of her work, and her pragmatic generosity. She (and Tsumura) understands loneliness, betrayal, chicanery. And though, as a temporary worker, she’s never fully part of any of these companies, she’s always valuable to them, even if that rarely makes her situation less precarious. She wants to stay out of human life, in all its messiness and demands and uncertainties. Over the course of the novel, it becomes more and more apparent how impossible this is for her. There’s no such thing as an easy job for someone who cannot help being drawn into helping.

Dara Horn, Eternal Life, and Kevin McIlvoy, Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels

Sarah Stone — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 23:52:57 +0000

If you had lived for 2000 years and knew that you wouldn’t (couldn’t) die, how would you spend your days? (Not in a Groundhog Day way, but with a life where each day could potentially “count.”) What would be meaningful to you if you were immortal? Or, if you knew that you had very little time left to live, what would matter most to you? How would you see the world? In Dara Horn’s novel Eternal Life, a woman trades the possibility of her own death for a miracle that saves her son’s life. Through her centuries of life, first in Roman-occupied Jerusalem and then in a variety of places around the world, including in the U.S. in the 21st century, she gets very, very tired of being reborn over and over and especially of watching generations of husbands and children die. In Kevin McIlvoy’s Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels, a writer facing his imminent death breaks his perceptions, anecdotes, and secrets into tiny stories and prose poems, seeing the world in glittering, exact detail, longing even for its grotesqueries.

Eternal Life

Eternal Life begins, “Either everything matters, or everything is an outrageous waste of time,” and before we get to the moment where it all matters, Horn captures how much her protagonist, Rachel, doesn’t want to leave her current family and start over (literally burning herself up when it’s no longer possible to hide how long she’s lived, and then regenerating as the eighteen year old she was when she first made the pact that led to her immortality). By the time the book starts, she longs to die. She is possessed by all her memories, and it never becomes less devastating for her to lose each new family. (This is less depressing than it sounds, because we’re rooting for her to learn to accept loss on a grand scale and so to embrace life, no matter how long it goes on.)

As a spokesman for the cause of life, her lover, Elazor, the father of the child she gave up mortality for, comes to find her in various lives. He wants her to stop dwelling on the losses, disasters, endings:

“There must have been other times when you heard things about someone you left behind, good things, beginnings.”

“Of course,” she said. She remembered subscribing to synagogue newsletters in New York years ago, searching for great-grandchildren’s birth announcements. Occasionally she spotted one, though she couldn’t always be sure. Then there were the officially successful children, the ones whose stories reached her wherever she went. There was the daughter in Neapolis, who, at thirteen, had the bizarre idea of tying moldy bread to her brother’s leg where he had gashed it at the foundry. We want the skin to grow back, Mama, she had explained, and everything grows on old bread, so isn’t it worth trying? It certainly can’t hurt! Decades later in Rome, busy with new children, Rachel still heard legends about the woman healer of Neapolis, the miracle worker people traveled for days to see, the one who could cure any illness and who twice brought people back from the dead in the marketplace by breathing into their mouths and pumping their hearts for them with her hands. Rachel’s thirty-fourth son wrote a monumental code of religious law whose manuscript copies soon appeared in every community from Babylonia to France; wherever she heard someone cite it during a long sabbath meal, the world gleamed with unearthly light. For decades Rachel brought multiple copies of the novels written by her sixty-third son, giving them as gifts to his half-siblings. She listened to recordings of concertos played by another daughter, a violinist, until the wax cylinders were damaged beyond repair. Rachel often fantasized that death meant encountering answers, a revelation of the purpose of being alive. But instead she had the smaller revelations, moments when the curtain between the potential and the actual was suddenly pulled back, bathing the world in light. Those moments were fleeting, incremental. In the congregational newsletters where she hunted for births, she more often recognized the names in the obituaries. The wax cylinders wore away, leaving only grooves in her mind. But the grooves in her mind remained, waiting to be played again. She never forgot a child.

Horn characteristically mixes believable fabulism, realism, invention, romanticism, and scholarship in a passage which is both mournful and wishful. Although at this point in the book she is almost frantic to be done with her long life, the texture of these inventions in this litany of art, science, healing, and law-giving gives a profoundly optimistic view of the world and of her own past. Among all the generations she produced, some of the children she mothered have had large effects on the world around them. Even though a romantic love that lasts two thousand years but has no place in daily life functions as one of the novel’s narrative threads, the real love here is maternal, the real fear is for the children and grandchildren, and the real source of hope is in who the children have become and what they do.

Rachel’s determined, clever children and grandchildren explore not only the possibilities of moldy bread but also blockchains and gene splicing. When Hillel comes to dinner, her son understands his teachings as the adults cannot. The child for whom Rachel gave up mortality makes a decision during the battle with the Romans over Jerusalem—a decision she doesn’t understand—to save Torah and scholars over the Temple, the city, the people. So much is lost, but Rabbinic Judaism is born. Although some of her children suffer and go terribly wrong, a hopeful texture permeates the passage above, and the book as a whole offers a sense of devotion, of order, of the centrality of looking after family, and the promise of emotional as well as physical rebirth.

Dara Horn is herself the mother of four children, as well as the author of six books and a long-time Yiddish and Hebrew professor at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence, Yeshiva, etc.. The book captures the texture of a long full life, including Rachel’s great weariness. But there’s also the intensity and pleasure of the reawakening of hope, which a person doesn’t have to live 2000 years to experience.

Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels

The “glimpses, glyphs, & found novels” of this book live somewhere in between poetry, fiction, and memoir. In flash stories and prose poems, a portrait appears of a man on the edge of death wrestling with his life’s meaning and history. So much human, animal, and plant life in these pieces, including a broke Chaim Soutine painting over his own (and other artists’!) canvases, a “minor” dancer in Singing in the Rain, families of all configurations. Everything fits in this slim book, from natural wonders to eye surgery to a miraculously wise artificial parrot who knows just what to repeat. The figures appear as if in silhouette, sharp-edged and hypnotic, dancing, eating imaginary cake all day, and taking a final trip to The Office of The Clerk of Happiness.

Mc (May 7, 1953 ~ September 30, 2022), was the father of four children, as well as the author of eight books, a long-time editor for multiple magazines and presses, and a faculty member at creative writing programs that included New Mexico State University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Mc was a beloved colleague of mine at Warren Wilson, and I have many memories of him reading his startling, musical, brilliant, sometimes painfully honest, sometimes hilarious work in faculty readings. And memories of conversations, classes, lectures, meals, listening to him sing in the woods…. In writing about this book, I’m departing from the Marvelous Paragraph Project rule where I only write about books by people I don’t know or haven’t known personally (though some of these are by friends of friends: the literary world has, in general, about ¼° of separation). And I sometimes invite writers I know to celebrate a work they love (by an inspiration or mentor, or perhaps a writer who they feel should be better known). Is it So?, with a moving, craft-based foreword by his widow, writer Christine Hale, is Mc’s last work of fiction.

To avoid any hint of the squidginess of attempting to evaluate or praise a friend (as if I can be objective about any friend’s work, and especially now), I’m focusing on the craft and on the thematic link with Eternal Life, because this book also struggles with life in the face of death. Here, though, is Mc’s great urgency in trying to figure out what happened, what could have happened: the pieces jump through time and space. Mc imagines real and fantastical figures, in realistic and also wild situations. The book gives an experience of the imminent and ongoing breakdown of a body, and, as much as anything I’ve ever read, it embodies a particular, ferocious passion for the texture of life itself as it begins to slip away.

Part of that wrestling comes through the language, the often provocative, funny, startling, or suddenly moving imagery, part through the ways Mc delivered his mixtures of prose and poetry. (I can hear his voice, reading these pieces: if you have never had the good fortune to hear him read, you can hear him in online interviews or videos, and, with luck, hear him playing the harmonica as well.)

In the introduction, Chris describes the forms of the book:

The “found novels” in Is It So? wed Mc-the-novelist’s paradoxical fascination with the short form to this book’s focus on rendering transparencies. Set in Desordenada, North Carolina, a made-up town name suggesting disorganization, the novels Mc “found” there extend the concept of the found poem into a novel’s worth of suggested story. The few words comprising each novel are the transparency that avails and evokes prehension of the withheld narrative. The terms “glimpses” and “glyphs” in the book’s subtitle underline its fealty to radical compression and to rendering the mass and volume of what is only ever implied. The glyph is a symbol or pictograph, conveying more information than is visibly present. The glimpses offer a more complete narrative but shatter or torque it by unexpected shifts in time, perspective, or frame.

Even the table of contents is arranged by groupings of each of the three kinds of forms, rather than in chronological order. Here's the beginning of one of the glyphs, the first page of a page and a half of prose/poem:

To be opened in the event of

You said that in the event of, you would like instructions straightforward,
simple, which, you understand, I’ve never done.

There is a daylily named Curious. Available (I’ve prepaid) at Dorothy’s Dance Garden. Have one Curious bulb placed in my left hand and two bulbs placed in my right hand, making sure I hold both hands together under my left ear so I can hear the quickening, can think the effort of what is growing through me, feel the three breaking the closed shell of my hands, the shale of my head, naturalizing beyond me, causing me laughter at the comedy of winter failing to kill rot’s regenerating impulse to root, to be rooting, to drift in time-shifting twinning and tripling, to signal turning up and leafing before shooting out molten gold blossoms, the moist swellings and retractings and wet collapsings, the retreating from sight, the returning to my head and to my hands, the multiplying, the perennial drama of trying to hold too many, of letting them go, all of them in their cycles of emptying out and lasting too long, so much like me, like me becoming more sod than sot, more site than slot, while they slump, sift, slighten, disintegrate, disappear, lilt, reappear, lift as they feel, think, hear light.

I’ll let you know when I’ve solved the issue of the gravestone inscription.

The problem is, as all problems are, a matter of tense.

That denial of the possibility of simplicity is brief, but with the elided words and ideas and the intimate interjections, already complex. It sets us up for the elaborate, nonsensical, erotic, tactile, poetic celebration of ritual, decay, the human returning to earth and letting go. A bravura paragraph (I am crossing into that territory of praise, but I don’t see how anyone could be objective about this beautiful paragraph that contains the horror and glory of mortality).

And then a one-liner, a complete change of direction, the comical, down to earth but mysterious switch of subjects to the gravestone inscription. (Why is it an issue that has to be solved?)

In the position when we might expect an explanation, we find out that it’s a matter of tense. So the mystery has to do with time? How does this apply to the dead? And the short short, the glyph, keeps going, changing the rules. Discombobulating, but also heartfelt.

If Eternal Life could be said to be about motherhood, or love, or the breakage of the world over time, Is It So? is about the madness of what we do for art, or love, the visceral experience of life in, or as, a body. If Horn’s Rachel has to struggle against the impulse to give up in the face of so much loss, the protagonist contemplating death in Mc’s glyph conveys the urgency and constant morphing of life in which even ambivalence becomes part of what is so hard to let go.

Blog - Sarah Stone

Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices

Other Reading and Marriage to the Sea News

Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of this Book and A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction (plus Marriage to the Sea preorders and my upcoming events)

Marriage to the Sea

Jenny Offill, Lauren Elkin, and Marin Kosut, On Being (or Not Being) an Art Monster

My News

Zadie Smith, Dead and Alive: Essays (plus great books by friends and cozy escape fiction)

Christine Hale: On Kevin McIlvoy’s Willingness, and Handing It On

Hilary Zaid, Forget I Told You This (and new books by Joan Silber, Marisa Silver, and David Haynes)

Willa Cather, The Troll Garden

My News

A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories (plus Marriage to the Sea has a cover!)

And speaking of gorgeous objects…

What’s Inspiring This Month

Mohsin Hamid, Exit West: A Novel

Writing, Publishing, and Teaching

MPP Contributor News

Stuff that’s been inspiring me lately

Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police

Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days: Tenderness

Sabrina Orah Mark, Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales

News

Ali Smith, Autumn

News

Lillian Howan on Wakako Yamauchi

Venita Blackburn, Dead in Long Beach, California, Alta’s California Book Club's July book

Zadie Smith, The Fraud

Outside, Looking In

Andrew Bogle and the Claimant

Jessica Hagedorn, The Gangster of Love, and Alta’s California Book Club

Debra Spark on William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow

Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job (Polly Barton, trans.)

“The Surveillance Job”

“The Postering Job”

Dara Horn, Eternal Life, and Kevin McIlvoy, Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels

Eternal Life

Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels