An Excerpt from CORA’S KITCHEN by Kimberly Garrett Brown

May 16, 1928

A strange thing happened this afternoon at the Fitzgeralds’. I had started supper and settled into the alcove next to the window to work on the cardinal story. The words poured onto the page as if the pen had a mind of its own. I didn’t hear Eleanor come in. When she called my name, I jumped.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” she said as she unpinned her hat and laid it on the table. I closed the notebook and slid it into my apron pocket.
“I hope you don’t mind. I had some time while the roast was in the oven,” I said, standing up.
“Of course not. So, you write!” she said, as if it were a shock that a black woman could write. “I have always wanted to keep a journal, but I haven’t anything of interest to write about.” 
I opened the oven to check the meat. The room filled with the smell of baked onions and potatoes. The juices sizzled and popped against the edges of the pan. I had a spoonful up to my mouth when I realized Eleanor was watching me. She asked what I wrote about.
“People I grew up with back home,” I said, pouring the spoon of juice over the roast instead.
“Memories?”
“Stories.”
“Like the ones in Vanity Fair?” she asked.
“Nothing like that. Far from it,” I said, though I suppose it isn’t that far from it. A story is a story. But unfortunately, the editors haven’t changed since back in the days when I wanted Mama to write down her stories for the Ladies’ Home Journal. White editors still aren’t interested in a colored woman’s stories, because she is always going to be more colored than she will ever be a woman. They don’t believe white women have anything in common with colored women.
I moved around the kitchen to look busy while we talked. She asked how I got interested in writing. I told her my mother took me to the library as a girl and I fell in love with books.
“Cora, come sit down,” Eleanor said. “You’re making me nervous, flitting around the kitchen.”
I slid into the seat across from her. She leaned forward, her elbows propped on the table in front of her. Her green eyes were alert and bright, not like the day I found her in the dining room crying. “What did you think of The Awakening?” she asked.
The first thing that came to mind was how much I identified with Edna. But that felt much too personal to share, especially since I knew Eleanor was the type of person who always asked why. I didn’t want to have to explain why I thought being married was the same whether you’re colored or white. A woman is a woman. The only difference is a white woman has the luxury of her race and money.
“It made me think about how unfair life can be,” I said.
“I know exactly what you mean. Men get to make their own choices. Why should a woman have to live a prescribed life because of her sex?” she asked.
Or a Negro because of the color of his or her skin, I thought. She went on about the roles and expectations society places on women.
I thought about the place in Genesis 3, where God says to the woman, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” 
“God gave men dominion over women,” I said.
Eleanor considered the idea, but then suggested it wasn’t God’s intention for women to be so unhappy. “Why would He have given women thoughts and ideas, if all He wanted us to do was service the men in our lives? We were made to experience life, too. To find contentment. Peace. Don’t you want to experience life, Cora?”
“Where I come from women are supposed to find a husband and have children. Folks have a name for women who try to experience life. But men are supposed to get out and see the world. When my brother jumped on a cargo ship to Africa, my father practically threw a party to celebrate his independence. If I had done that, I wouldn’t have been able to ever show my face in town again.”
“But you came here. Isn’t that your way of experiencing the world?”
“I didn’t come here. My father sent me. He wanted me to get a good education.” 
Eleanor sat back, her eyes losing some of their earlier glimmer. “Many decisions have been made for me, too. I often wonder what my life would be like if I’d had a real say.”
Earlier this morning I heard Mr. Fitzgerald scolding her like one of the children. He didn’t like what she was wearing and instructed her to change before she left the house. “Spend that healthy allowance of yours on a decent dress, for God’s sake,” he said. For some reason it reminded me of how Bud talks to Agnes as if she is the stupidest person in the world.
I wanted to ask what she would have done differently, but that was prying. Besides, folks, especially white folks, are only going to tell you what they want you to know. There’s plenty they don’t want you to know, but the biggest secrets tend to be the most obvious. 
“If I had more of Edna’s resolve, I wouldn’t be afraid to do what I want to do,” she said.
“Edna ended up walking into the ocean,” I said.
“I know. But if we are too afraid to step out of our comfortable lives, we risk dying, too,” she said.
I wanted to laugh. I step on the trolley at 6 a.m. in order to make it to their house by 6:30 to make coffee. And before I worked at her house, I’d have to be at the library by 7:30. Comfortable is how I might describe my shoes, but never my life. “I’m not as worried about living as I am about surviving,” I said.
Eleanor picked her hat up and tapped it lightly against the table. “Life can be so frustrating. But I refuse to accept that there is no hope. I want more. Don’t you?”
I glanced around her spacious kitchen. Small puffs of steam seeped around the edges of the white enamel of the oven door. The copper faucet glistened as sunlight reflected off the hammered surface. How could I explain that if I had what I wanted I wouldn’t feel envious of her porcelain cast iron sink with the attached drainboard? My house would be quiet during the day, but especially at night because I wouldn’t live in a crowded building with more families than apartments. Or pay twice as much rent. Or worry about my son walking to the store even though, thank God, we don’t live in the South. My husband would be able to play at Orchestra Hall with world-class musicians instead of Rueben’s rundown nightclub. And I would be in my own kitchen, cooking my own supper.
“Of course,” I said.
“What stops you?’” she asked.
My thoughts run through all the reasons why it’s hard for Negroes to accomplish anything. But I could almost hear my father’s voice saying that’s just an excuse.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Eleanor nodded and stood up, the lines in her forehead visible for the first time. She picked up her hat and left the room. I sat there for a few minutes, replaying our conversation.
Even now, as I lay here unable to sleep, I wonder why I let myself run on so. It’s so easy to talk to her. I forget that she’s not my friend. Tomorrow, I’m going to keep my mouth shut no matter what she says. 

Love, Graffiti, & Audacious Sentences: An Interview with Jackson Bliss, Author of AMNESIA OF JUNE BUGS

Bonnie Nadzam, author of Lamb, interviews Jackson Bliss, whose debut novel, Amnesia of June Bugs, was released recently.

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There are so many things I love about Jackson Bliss’ debut novel, Amnesia of June Bugs. In the first place, there is no voice like his voice, which is totally outrageous and utterly unapologetic in its audacity. In the second place, the content is as unexpected as the form: a Chinese American NYC graffiti revolutionary and his mixed-race partner (a tender elementary school teacher), painstaking level of description in every punk rock gastronomic feast, and the ruthlessness of Jackson’s embedded love stories, which always slay me. Finally, and maybe best of all, there is a tremendous, fundamental act of rebellion in this story’s formal experiment.

One of the curses of modern technology is that every single experience of beauty must be offered up to the great digital ledger—fixed in time and space, gathering data—as if the stutter of experiencing that moment a second (and third, fourth, fifth) time, wherever it lands online or in our devices, becomes the only thing that matters and makes us human. Jackson Bliss takes one such instance—one snapshot in time, as it were—and explodes the frame slowly, one page at a time. This novel is really an endlessly arising and endlessly unfolding human story that, for all the suffering at its core, remains one of community and empowerment. These are individuals who are as present in their joy as they are in their suffering, which made me curious about their author, whom I’ve still not met in person. Someday. And we’ll post no pictures of the event. In the meantime, here are my questions for, and responses from, an artist I respect and am grateful for.

Why graffiti? Why is this the necessary and only artform for our protagonist? 

I've always been fascinated with graffiti since b-boying (i.e., breakdancing) was hot. From my first trip to Chicago as a boy to my first trip to New York City as a teenager, I've been mesmerized by the way that graffiti tells stories about its people, its cultures, and its communities in a common visual field, not to mention the unique ways that BIPOC communities are represented but also reimagined in colorful caricatures. After I'd moved from California to Chicago when I was seventeen, I began studying graffiti in my neighborhood (Little Vietnam): they were full of these secret codes (numerical codes, visual codes, esoteric tags) I was dying to understand. During my MFA, I studied culture jamming and became obsessed. The basic idea of culture jamming is graffiti added to a billboard or advertisement that critiques market capitalism, that makes the advertisement self-destruct by using the ad against itself. Culture jamming is a cultural x-ray to viewers, showing them the truth behind the ad. Whether it's the squalid working conditions of factory workers making textiles in sweatshops in a FEZ (free economic zone) in South Asia for a Gap t-shirt, the starvation, anemia, and dangerous weight expectations of the modeling industry in a high-fashion billboard, or the inhumane living  conditions, abuse and destructions of animals, the deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, the environmental degradation, and the toxic runoff of animal waste, all of which are part and parcel of factory farming, in each instance culture jamming attempts to sabotage advertisements, hijack their message, and expose the hidden moral, economic, and cultural costs of those products and industries to the public. In that way, I guess you could say that culture jamming is sort of a declaration of war against advertising but also a wake-up call for consumers, many of whom would rather look away. Ever since I started studying it—thanks Naomi Klein—I’ve always appreciated how political, ideologically informed, and culturally incisive culture jamming is. In Amnesia of June Bugs, I wanted culture jamming to be much more normative than it is. Unfortunately, it has mostly died out. Maybe this novel will start a culture jamming renaissance!

Do you have any personal connection to or experience with the art form?

Not personally, but I have been faithfully taking pictures of graffiti in Chicago from 2004-2008, in New York from 2005-2006 when I lived in Bed-Stuy, in Buenos Aires from 2008-2009, and in LA from 2009-2019 because that's one of my things. I've also taken pictures of international graffiti in Hong Kong, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Bratislava, Vienna, London, Madrid, among other cities. If you scan my IG feed, you'll see a good amount of graffiti. I like to capture street art before it disappears because lots of graffiti is intentionally ephemeral. One minute it's there and the next something else has taken its place. Our collective memory fades so quickly, but pictures tend to linger in the cultural imagination. Graffiti, like many murals, is street art with an expiration date and in this novel, you can see my fascination for the way that artists see themselves and their own cities, the way they create their own cultural spaces using their own distinct visual vocabularies of reality and their own unique perspectives of graphic narratives. I guess this is why I think of graffiti as a unique narrative modality that locals can use to tell their own stories about themselves to their own people in their own way. That’s powerful shit! And maybe that's one important reason why Winnie, the culture jammer in Amnesia of June Bugs, feels so important to this novel, why his Buddha Maos show up all the time in this book. Even though Winnie is deeply in love with Ginger and would do anything to be with her, that tenderness and devotion he has for her is matched by the intensity and the righteous fury he has for his art (and his frustration with the incessant economic exploitation of capitalism that exploits AAPI workers). Dude is not playing around with love or politics! Interesting aside: when I lived in Chicago, quite a lot of teenagers I met thought I was a graphie (i.e., graffiti artist) because I was a mix of preppy and hip-hop and I went everywhere with my backpack. The backpack, as it turns out, was one of the most important accessories for graphies because they used them to store their spray-paint. So, every time someone asked me if I did graffiti, I became more and more fascinated with it. Truth was, I was just another nerd with a sensitivity to language, music, and love who read novels and wrote bad prose and did my homework at cafés and started smoking.

The story of the novel unfolds during 2012, but it is so much a novel of the current moment. It's a world that seems both on the point of collapse and on the verge of transformation. Which does the author think it is? 

I hate the answer I’m going to give you, but I actually think it's both. I think both regionally, nationally, and globally we are are at an inflection point as a species where we are either going to cross the Rubicon and sadly say goodbye to this beautiful planet that we failed to be good stewards of, or we will be forced to make a series of radical decisions over the next decade that will fundamentally change our relationship to this planet and to each other and to the economic systems that we work in. As awful as the pandemic has been (and it's been atrocious for so many people), it's also been a unique opportunity to reimagine and question reality too, which crises give us permission to do uniquely. Questions Americans normally don't ask themselves like, do I actually like my job? Is this how I want to make money? Am I willing to work in these conditions? Am I being paid my worth? Was I ever? Is anyone? Is this horrendous world all that there is? Is there even a point of starting a family when earth is a giant fireball? What's the point of human existence? Why are Americans so goddamn selfish? Is this really the life I want to live? All of these questions have sprung up everywhere and I think that's a good thing. And I feel like in its own way, Amnesia of June Bugs wants readers to know that love, rage, hope, and hopelessness don't cancel each other out. They're part of the emotional counterpoint of being alive in 2022. This world damages us so much of the time, but it doesn't have to be that way. We live in a dysfunctional, violent, greedy, and myopic reality, but we could code reality differently if we really wanted to. In fact, we'll have to if we want to survive and not lose hope. So, Amnesia is both a scathing critique of the damage we cause each other (e.g., racism, sexism, violence, historical amnesia, classism, xenophobia, numbness, dehumanization) but also a love song for the endless beauty of this world and the importance that love can play in protecting, nourishing, and saving ourselves from ourselves. At least, that’s how the story goes.

Why are your characters vegan? Did they emerge that way or was it a point the vegan author wanted to integrate? How do you manage this formally, giving the characters space to develop and surprise you while discovering or even insisting that they share some of your values? 

Not all of them are vegan! I’m not even vegan, lol. Ginger and Winnie’s younger sister, Tian-Tian are, but Winnie is a pescatarian, Suzanne is a vegetarian (paneer and daal give her life), and Aziz is an ecotarian, so he'll fucking eat anything that’s locally available, the little food slut. But this is such an interesting question. I definitely have omnivorous characters in other books of mine, but the more I construct characters, the more I need some of them to understand the value in living and eating consciously. That doesn't mean they have to be like me because that shit would get boring fast, but I do want some of my fave characters to have considered the impact that meat eating in the form of factory farming has on the environment because it's environmentally unsustainable and bioethically harder to justify in 2022 unless you raise your own livestock. The reality is, not only are we cutting down hectares of forests to create farmland for livestock (that purify the air and give us a tiny security blanket against global warming) but then there's all the pollution of groundwater, the recombinant bovine growth hormone, the use of grains (which could be used to feed humans directly), the methane emissions, the inhumane living conditions for the animals, the dehumanizing working conditions for workers, and the medical and financial consequences of red meat consumption. It's literally a predictable but avoidable catastrophe. But I don't need—or even want—my characters to be morally perfect in any way because flawed characters are real characters as far as I'm concerned. I do want some of them to embody a spiritual, moral, and bioethical value system in some way that aligns to my own as a (admittedly terrible) Buddhist. I don't care if the shitty characters in my work eat hamburgers because that's what I expect asshole characters to do, to not give a fuck about anyone or anything, but I want some of the main characters to have considered these issues much more deeply, whether or not they eat meat, because those are the type of people I want to center in my fiction. At the same time, I intentionally don't make all of my characters straight-up vegan because vegans can be hella obnoxious and also, veganism can be incredibly ethnocentric, a surefire way of erasing your or another person's cultural, racial, and culinary histories, which are so often embodied in the food they eat. My wife and I are both mixed-race and both 90% vegan and 10% pescatarian, so the instant we got fish back, we felt like we got our families’ cultures back. I'd like to believe that's one reason why Suzanne (the Indian American character in this novel) eats dairy and why Winnie (the Chinese American character) eats fish, and Aziz (the Moroccan French character) eats lit everything is because these flexible eating strategies allow them to eat so much of the food connected to their own histories, identities, and cultures. Last thing, most of my characters do end up making some big choices for themselves that I didn't predict, want, or intend, and I'm cool with that. Once I have a strong idea of who they are, I usually let them decide for themselves what they end up doing. Not every decision, mind you, but some of their biggest decisions were their decisions and I felt like they just made more sense than what I'd planned for them.

This book includes a few of the most unbearably beautiful, heart-breaking love stories I have ever read. And that's saying something. How do you tell a love story? If you had a 10-step process—like a recipe—what are the necessary ingredients? 

That’s such a huge compliment! I'm trying not to cry right now, but it's kinda hard not to! Thank you so much for saying that. That really means the world to me. Tragically, I have no idea. I really don't. Mostly, I just focus on the humanity of my characters first and foremost and then let them kinda take it from there. Because I do give them leeway with their own decisions and because I value and fight for their humanity, above all else, I feel like the love that's sparked between them mostly happens organically. What’s interesting is that in Amnesia of June Bugs, half of the love is counterfactual (i.e., it doesn’t actually happen, but it could have happened under different circumstances) and the other half is real, but comes with tragedy, heartbreak, and disappointment.

The only rules I have for my characters with love stories is that at least one character must be capable and/or willing of falling in love. They might not make great life choices, they might have shitty taste in partners, they might make the same damn mistakes over and over again because human beings, but at least one person must be in a space where they're willing or capable of being vulnerable in some way. Otherwise, love can't happen. It'll just bounce off the characters if they're not in the right place. I think love becomes self-destructive if it’s offered to someone who is not self-aware, courageous, empathetic, and vulnerable enough to value and reciprocate that vulnerability. Interestingly enough, this is also why I don’t believe in falling in love with someone who isn’t ready to fall in love. You can't make someone love you and they won't value your vulnerability either if they're in a bad place. Other than that, I don't have rules for love. I think love defies, contradicts, and resists most rules, whether inside our heads or inside books, so I try not to use them in my life or in my writing.

Your sentences are outrageous. Over and over I'd read one and think/feel: How dare he? How does he get away with this? Tell me about your influences at a sentence level?  

Lol, this is like, one of the kindest things anyone has ever told me before. Considering how much I loved and admired Lamb, this is an even bigger compliment than you can imagine. My influences on the sentence level are Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, Karen Tei Yamashita, Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, John D'Agata, Leslie Jamison, Jamaica Kincaid, Kendrick Lamar, Noname, Jay-Z, and Rick Moody. My influences on the conceptual, cinematic, and macrolevel are Wong Kar Wai, early Sofia Coppola, Haruki and Ryu Murakami, Life is Strange, Fallout, Mass Effect (all video games), and movies like Run, Lola Run, City of God, Amélie, Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, Coffee & Cigarettes, Les Trois Couleurs trilogy, and Pulp Fiction.

What are you working on now? And why? 

Ugh, so many things! In addition to doing PR for Counterfactual Love Stories and Amnesia of June Bugs, which takes up so much time, most of it leading to absolutely nothing because I'm not famous and I don’t have a publicist, I have a choose-your-own-adventure memoir coming out in late July called Dream Pop Origami about mixed-race/hapa identity, AAPI masculinities, love, travel, and metamorphosis, which I'm kinda proud of. Mostly because it took me over ten years to write and rewrite. I'm also working on a couple screenplays. The one I'm most excited about right now is called Mixtape. It's about two mixed-race/AAPI/BIPOC almost-forty-something friends and fiction writers who meet up after ten years in Silverlake. They've had divergent literary careers after graduating from USC where they’d worked with all the writers you and I know from our time there. There’s always been a spark between Misha and Taka that was never explored. Mostly, they just talk and reminisce for ninety minutes, slowly making their way to Venice where they eventually say goodbye.

Beyond that, I'm working on a novel about a family of mixed-race/hapa/AAPI prodigies and a literary fiction trilogy about Addison (formerly, Hidashi) who makes three major life decisions, each decision becoming the premise of one novel. So, in the novel you read, Ninjas of My Greater Self, which is a postmodern novel about racial self-discovery, Addy breaks up with his girlfriend, moves to Japan, and discovers that he's part of an ancient ninja clan. In We Ate Stars for Lunch, Addy stays with his girlfriend and moves with her to Argentina where he realizes that she used him to start her new life without him. He moves back to Chicago where he meets a mixed-race/hapa daughter he didn't know he had from his ex in Argentina. They move to LA to help her acting career where Addy eventually publishes his first novel. And in the third novel, The Light Which Slices Through Me is a Lost Dream, Addy breaks up with his college girlfriend, gets his PhD, abandons his literary career to adjunct, and eventually searches for clues of his best friend who was killed by her partner. This novel will be in epistolary form. Don't hold me to the plot structure in the last two books because I might change them both in a heartbeat, those are just the plot lines I've been considering. So, yeah, I guess I have a lot of shit going on.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you're not part of the creative writing teaching circuit anymore. What's it like out there in the wild as a poet and fiction writer in an expensive and sometimes unforgiving city? How do you make it work? 

Word. After the pandemic hit, LB (my wife) and I kinda re-evaluated all our major life decisions and decided that we were much happier in LA and that living in California for over a decade had irrevocably Californicated us. We didn't fit in the Midwest the way we used to. And we missed our Asian, Black, Latine, queer, and indigenous friends so much. We missed the food! We missed the cafés and restaurants. We missed the style. We missed the beach. We missed the endless flow of creative energy here. I told LB to follow her heart and center her needs. I said I'd figure my shit out eventually. This is me still figuring my shit out, by the way. She wanted to return to LA, so we made that decision together and I decided to leave my tenure track job, so now I'm trying to break into TV writing, trying to get my books optioned by a production studio (I just had lunch with Aimee Bender today where we talked about this very thing!). I'm considering doing some extra work because LA, applying to a bunch of writing jobs that actually pay real money, and oh, also investing in cryptocurrency and the stock market too. I've become such a stock market/crypto geek and I kinda love it. So, I'm considering all of my options right now because money gives you freedom and in my case, money helps me help those I love, which is probably my biggest motivation right now. I'm not sure what my next job will be yet, but I have faith something is gonna work out. I always do. Maybe that's one of my problems.

That said, I've always felt like LA is the best place to live in when you're rich AND poor. When you've got money, it's so easy to drop it like it's hot and there's so many places to drop it, but when you're poor (as all of us were in grad school), many of the best parts of LA were and will always be free: the beach, the blue sky, those 70º days in the spring, those indescribably beautiful drives through picture-perfect weather, the sun pouring into your office window, the bleeding sky after sunset. And for seven bucks, you can get a vanilla oat latte and it will be so damn good. I might be fashion conscious, but so many of my fave things here are free. It is true that LA can be such a tough city to live in because it's fast, rich, dirty, and it seems like everyone is doing it better than you are. At the same time, this might be the only city left in the whole country where it's possible to live off of your art if you make the right connections. You can’t do that shit in New York or Chicago for different reasons. You def can't do it in SF. But LA has a range that I appreciate. There's literally something for everyone here. You just have to find your muse, your mundito, and your medium.

Subverting Heroism and the Trojan War: A Review of A THOUSAND SHIPS by Natalie Haynes

In this subversive novel shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, Natalie Haynes produces a bold reading of the women featured in Greek mythology, who have “always been relegated to the edges of the story.” Until now…

A Thousand Ships presents a narrative with a feminist twist on the myths surrounding the Trojan War. Haynes brings to life a series of fierce accounts told by the women affected by the war’s bloodshed and betrayals. Although some might claim that these figures are not forgotten, in original sources such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Heroides, they are only briefly mentioned and tend to function as possessions subjected to the abuses of men. From these mythological origins, Haynes assembles her own emotional masterpiece packed with elegant language which can be implied through her descriptions of grief and love. For instance, when Amazonian queen Penthesilea shoots and kills her sister, Hippolyta with a bow and arrow in a tragic accident, she vows to avenge her by surrendering herself to death. Having lost the one person who was “dearer to her than life itself,” Penthesilea proudly leads her own army of women, her “bright jewels of the mountainous north” into battle to defend Troy. Haynes not only dismantles the rules of heroic traditions evident in Homer’s epic the Iliad, such as the value of glory for men who fought on the battlefield, she also provides perspective on behalf of the women who were motivated by their love for friends and family.

In The Odyssey, Homer portrays Odysseus as a brave leader with good judgement, whereas Haynes challenges the validity of this notion by insinuating how incapable Odysseus is of returning home in one piece to his family, especially when some of his own men return to their former lives. Odysseus’ lack of progress and attempts at warding off any unwanted distractions prove to be a comical failure in Penelope's letters, as Haynes incorporates sarcastic humour throughout her novel. Years after his departure, Penelope who is riddled with frustration by her husband’s impulsive need to seize opportunities and endanger himself in the process writes:

“They say that Circe, your witch friend, told you the consultation was necessary. I suppose I should be grateful that she only persuaded you to sail to the end of the world to do her bidding. Some women really will do anything to avoid returning a husband to his wife. But honestly, Odysseus, did you believe this journey was necessary?”

Penelope now mocks Odysseus’ irrational decisions as he roams around like a restless child, always looking for the first sign of trouble. While he is waylaid by storms, detained by a giant one-eyed Cyclops, and led astray by a charming sorceress, Odysseus barely considers those he has disowned, and purposefully bides his time so to speak in relentless pursuit of opportune moments to prove his worth. Just as men strive to gain greatness, so too do they get side-tracked in their endeavours, and Haynes summons her readers to consider more openly the ways in which women like Penelope could survive without their lovers.

Haynes ranges well beyond the male-centric scope of The Iliad, as well, to highlight how there is more to being a hero than creating war and causing conflict to solve issues. Oenone, Paris’ wife, is abandoned after he pursues Menelaus’ wife, Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships”—from which the novel draws its title. Helen’s beauty is believed to be what drove Paris and Menelaus to fight for her affections in the war after she embarks on a scandalous affair. Evident in Ovid’s Heroides, Paris writes to Helen “No woman of beauty is like you,” which points out how his love for her will “attempt to conquer any obstacle” in his way. A betrayed Oenone is thus left to raise their son on her own. Menelaus, on the other hand, despite his efforts to retrieve his wife loses Helen to Paris and all hell breaks loose. As a result, Menelaus recklessly decides to rally his troops to “bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves.” While Oenone resents Paris who she swore loved her and their son and holds him accountable for the grief he has inflicted, she spares herself from giving him the satisfaction that he has won. Instead, he lies wounded and begging before her. Both Oenone and Menelaus are victims of their partner’s deception. Yet while Menelaus resorts to selfish drastic measures to claim back his wife, Oenone, directs her pain in a more rational manner. Instead, she selflessly accepts her responsibility to be the best mother she can be for her child and renounces the defining characteristics of what heroism was believed to be, simply by surviving without the man she once loved by her side.

Haynes refers to The Iliad in the afterword to A Thousand Ships, as quite rightly “one of the great foundational texts on wars and warriors, men and masculinity.” However, unlike Homer who fails to acknowledge the valuable contribution women made, Haynes conveys how heroism is something that everyone regardless of gender can exhibit through various forms other than fighting between men alone. I thoroughly admired how Haynes reconstructs the tale of the Trojan war through an assortment of female characters, including those more minor women who have always been side-lined in relation to its male-centric history.

In conjunction with The Iliad, Ovid’s Heroides plays an essential role in Haynes’ novel through the device of letters inspired by the heroines of Greek mythology, “in address to their heroic lovers who have in some way mistreated, neglected, or abandoned them.” Penelope writes to her husband Odysseus who was obliged to join the Trojan voyage and help return Helen of Troy back to Menelaus. However, what she did not realise was how long he would be away for, that he would miss his son growing up, or that she could risk losing him altogether on his travels to another woman. During those twenty years, Penelope, similarly to Oenone, is left to raise their child singlehandedly, and anxiously awaits the return of Odysseus. Yet unlike Oenone, Penelope knew that Odysseus still loved her and always intended to return to where his duties lay as a father and as a King to his people on the Island of Ithaca.

Due to not being as familiar with Greek mythology as others may be, I was fully expecting A Thousand Ships to be a somewhat challenging reading experience. As such, I found Haynes’s brief List of Characters before the beginning of the book to be a very helpful introduction for guided reference, in that it encouraged me to seek out who they are and how they all relate. The further I read, the more I understood how these courageous women dominate the novel and how Haynes passionately reimagines them throughout their personal journeys of resilience. It becomes more apparent amid the harrowing repercussions of armed conflict that the “casualties of war aren't just the ones who die,” but the ones who, by further extension, fight for survival amid the war’s trials and tribulations. These include the Trojan women who are captured and become exposed to the sexual desires of Greek men, Briseis who mourns the loss of her slaughtered relatives, and young, selfless mothers like Oenone and Penelope who are cast aside by their ignorant husbands. Each woman has in turn “waited long enough” to be heard, and Haynes grants them all the honourable voice that they deserve in their stories. Given the compact size of the novel, which is just short of 350 pages, Haynes does a commendable job at displaying a diverse range of heroines who were involved in one of the most notorious events ever recounted in Greek mythology.

The Letters In Your Novel: An Interview with Brooks Sterritt, author of THE HISTORY OF AMERICA IN MY LIFETIME

Stuart: I think about our conversation in San Antonio after the Clementine Was Right show. We were talking about how realism can sometimes mean what people don’t do anymore. Tao Lin & etc. used g-chats in their writing when people were still g-chatting. Those writers were, in many ways, mocked for their realism. But by the time Sally Rooney & etc. write g-chats into their fictions, nobody uses g-chat anymore. Because it’s over, it somehow seems realer in the novel than when it was real in real life. Is Realism the future, or is Realism a memory?

But I really want to start with a personal incident. It happened after I finished your book. There are so many letters in your novel. So many glyphs. They are a source of comfort and anxiety for your Subject. They move the plot along. You write about the backward C, the Claudian letter. You write “again, a connection to previous symbols was apparent, though the logic of their transformation escaped me.” Or, “the shape of the driver’s name calmed me.” How does the shape of a name calm you…

Brooks: …speaking of letters, your title is great. Jenny in Corona. The four Ns. I’m sure you’ve thought about that.

Stuart: Your title is great, too. The History of America in My Lifetime. One of those titles where you feel like you had it early on.

Brooks: I had it early on. It was a working title for so long that I ended up keeping it.

Stuart: So I was walking in Andersonville thinking about the Wallace Stevens poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.” I stopped at one of those Free Libraries. Inside the library was a book called Criticism of Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ and I was like, holy shit! I looked up. I looked around and over my shoulder. Who was watching me right then? Who is watching me right now? Am I, too, a Subject from Bevacqua’s film in Brooks’ book? Are we in the same film? I won’t soon forget that moment. Or answer these questions. And then I was thinking about how coincidence…

Brooks: …synchronicity…

Stuart: …exactly, yes. This is always happening to the Subject. Letters seem to cover him, in the sense they both cover for him and they are the raw materials of his impersonation. Like one of those old definitions of film. The film of death: “a layer of skin covering the eye and obscuring the vision of a dying person.” Used in Tristram Shandy: “The film forsook his eye for a moment.” So here’s my first question: are we being followed?

Brooks: The feeling of being monitored has been my experience for many years. Films like Gene Hackman’s The Conversation, or that moment in Enemy of the State, with Gene Hackman and Will Smith. The satellites that can read the language off a dime. That was made up at the time, but now it seems quaint. We’ve assumed for a long while our phones are being tapped. Not that anyone’s watching me specifically, which could happen at any time, of course. All of this seems negative, perhaps, but I like to think about the spiritual side to being watched, too. Encountering a book in a Free Library, like you did, or a person, at the right time. Maybe in that sense, we hope we’re being watched. We hope someone’s looking out for us.

This reminds me of the ending of Jenny in Corona. Your idea of “another person” who is just like me. You write, “remember that time I told you not to meet another me? I think I’m another me now.” Imagine yourself being watched. It turns you into another you.

Stuart: Did you ever think your Subject was anything but another him? As a reader, I sometimes felt like he didn’t have his own agency. “As a film subject he was one of the best I’ve ever seen.” He was ready to be in his film, ready for the novel’s structure, ready for the novel’s letters.

Brooks: Well, I don’t think anyone sets out to write a novel where the protagonist has no agency. I wanted it to be propulsive and if anything keeps him going it’s the search for truth, for mystery. In the end, he’s not just one guy. I’m not one guy. I mean, obviously I’m one person. But depending on the situation, we’re multiple and competing subject positions and desires. Why do you think he didn’t have agency? It feels like we must, right, otherwise we’d give up.

Stuart: The Subject starts off with friends, the relationship with Blanche, day-to-day stuff. But then his journey gets exponentially stranger. What does lived experience feel like today? We know multiple collapses are always already happening, but we still tweet, or boil water for tea. Climate change isn’t really happening anymore, it’s over. So climate change fiction is Realism. I think of this Elizabeth Bruenig-ish line when I’m on Zoom: everything will be OK, just worse and worse.

Brooks: I think that’s really perceptive. How the novel starts from real life, and then drifts. What happens to you, when you set out. How much of your life are you using. How bound do you think you are to yourself?

Stuart: Were you bound to yourself?

Brooks: Not really. There are memories I dig through. But then on the page I change it so it’s not mine. Reading your work, I think this is different for you. Like your setting, your Queens, you can’t have it start raining frogs. I mean, you could.

Stuart: They’ve rained a lot of stuff on Queens, so why not frogs. Makes me think of something Poirier said about Dreiser in A World Elsewhere, that no matter how much you write “Chicago” you can never really write down “Chicago.” As a writer deeply connected to place, I love that challenge, a pillar of failure to ascend. A History is different because you’re not in Queens, or Los Angeles, or Chicago; or you’re in all those places. You’re everywhere because they’re watching.

Brooks: Surveillance is a social problem, but it’s also now just part of our place. There are novels by some chance that manage to cause social change, which is great. There are novels which expose evil, which is great. There are novels that through their perfect form reveal how messy the world is by contrast. I try to connect the strands and deliver an experience. I believe in truth. I think it exists. But in the novel it’s pretty hard to find it. What do you find yourself driving toward. Epiphany, conclusion, growth, change?

Stuart: To me, Jenny has a very ambiguous ending. Some readers told me otherwise, even took other sides, which I found so inspiring. I’ve always been interested in human relationships being endless. You’re never going to get resolution, or if you do, the other person might not. Why would a novelist be interested in resolution. In The History, the movie is over, in some way, but also not resolved. You feel like the Subject could star in this film again. Have you seen Sofia Coppola’s film Somewhere? He’s riding the sports car around in circles. He’s made it. I thought about that at the end of your book.

Brooks: You might be on to something with Somewhere. Or in Even Dwarfs Started Small…

Stuart: …now that’s a title…

Brooks: …this early Werner Herzog film. They tie the steering wheel of this old jalopy to one side and a bunch of people are chasing it and it goes round and round, makes a rut in the dirt. Do you believe in Realism?

Stuart: I do. I don’t know about raining frogs. Which I think is a pretty good benchmark. I can’t write a traditional magic realism sentence. I don’t think you can either.

Brooks: You just write: It’s raining frogs.

Stuart: But what about your second sentence. You know that Didion thing. “What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. By the second sentence, it’s all over.”

Brooks: Do you want it to be over after raining frogs? Or does something happen next. Before I could define magical realism, I’d have to know what realism is.

Stuart: Realism is getting a turkey from the bank on Christmas.

Brooks: I think you’re more magically realistic than you’re admitting to. You wouldn’t make it rain frogs, okay, but what about in Kafka’s Amerika. The Statue of Liberty holds not a torch, but a sword. Taking liberties with the Statue of Liberty. That’s Realism. What are you bound to? What are you willing to shake up?

Stuart: I can’t start with a straight world. To me raining frogs is a straight world. I must start in the wrong world, where it rains rain. I hold close this idea attributed to Hemingway or Stein, that after the horrors of the First World War words like truth and beauty and honor and especially hope didn’t mean anything as words anymore, as concepts. And I feel that way, right now, I think most of us do. Hope is for the prizewinners, and more executive power to them, but leave me in the ruins of legislative gridlock.

Brooks: Your book conveys a sense of love and hope and truth, without using those words. There’s emotional heft. I think you’re tied up in all these things you think you’re refusing. A lot of writers I love, Lydia Davis or Don DeLillo come to mind, are accused of lack of emotions. Wry! Arch! Cerebral! Cold! I don’t find them cold. There are certain emotions we think we’re avoiding in contemporary writing, but our devotion to the writing means they come through whether we want them to or not.

Stuart: I want to quote a block of text from your novel.

“Bevacqua’s words produced the effect of a puzzle piece fitting into place. Not the final piece, not the penultimate, not even close, but the puzzle piece whose arrival suggested what part of the final image might look like. A single vast, expanding text, consisting of all language produced in America—this text, in a sense, was America itself. America, its history, its language would be unreadable, at least to an individual.”

That’s very moving. Whitmanesque. And it reminded me of the spiritual exit available, what you hinted at earlier, from the doomsday message effortlessly rerunning in our brains. It also reminded me of something we once talked about at the Hopleaf, how Twitter is an endless scroll that can never have the same two eyes on it at the same time.

Brooks: Bulk data collection.

Stuart: I got this hopeful feeling from the block text.

Brooks: I hope so. If it’s all there, there’s possibility there. Call me crazy but we could use data for helping people instead of exploiting them, not only to sell stuff but to deliver what’s actually needed. There’s this line of Francis Bacon’s I find fascinating: at one point he claimed his goal was to capture “the history of Europe in his lifetime” in a single image. Impossible, obviously.

Speaking of raining frogs, I have to ask you about the DeNiro passages in Jenny in Corona. Here is the line: “A co-worker who is obsessed with the 200 movies DeNiro may or may not have filmed between 1974-1976.” Please elaborate.

Stuart: Maybe that’s my theory of Realism.

Brooks: It’s the kind of Realism I can get behind. It sort of reminded me of Steve Erickson’s Zeroville, featuring a guy in Hollywood who discovers something hidden in every film. Or earlier in your book, when the grandmother says, “this is the oldest church in America,” and Ty says, “she was wrong, but I still believe her.” That’s Realism. The 200 films he may or may not have filmed, that’s realism. So why DeNiro?

Stuart: Why not?

Brooks: What resonates?

Stuart: Someone said to me once, “you remind me a lot of a young Bobby D” and that person went on to do a series of horrible things to me. But I still love them. They were always surprised I thought they were hurting me so much.

Brooks: They’re always surprised, aren’t they. I’m reading Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, and the first half is a lightly fictionalized account of her relationship with Philip Roth. It’s neutrally delivered—she’s going along with it—and there’s a moment where she says, “I don’t know if this is good for me.” And the Roth character says, “do you think down the line this is going to damage you?” Love and pain are obviously concerns of yours, and I like the way they’re handled. It’s emotionally hard to read some of your stories. They’re really well rendered. But DeNiro…

Stuart: Bobby D.

Brooks: What would it take. The 200 films.

Stuart: I want to see those movies.

Brooks: It reminds me of Fassbender, who did 40 films in 40 whatever, drug-fueled years. He died young. It’s an alternate history. The lost films reveal something about the films DeNiro could have made.

Stuart: We have nothing. But at least we also don’t have the lost films.

Brooks: It’s something, isn’t it? Lost films have always interested me.

Stuart: They’re so important in The History…

Brooks: Maybe those 200 films gain their potency from the mere fact of being lost.

Stuart: Blanche leaves the Subject, but she also leaves him Glenn Gould’s recording of Brahms’ late piano pieces. They had a kind of one-night-stand, the Brahms was playing, and that’s what he was able to hold on to. He wasn’t able to hold on to her.

Brooks: Your reading makes me see that section in a more positive light. He takes the record away.

Stuart: In other places you write:

“a fragment isn’t merely something that appears unfinished. The very idea presumes the existence of some sort of whole. Choosing to stop therefore meant the work had arrived at completion.”

And this related moment, about paper shredding:

“The next time I fed a piece of paper into the shredder, it hit me. Shredding felt nearly as good as watching a Bevacqua fragment. What I did was mindless, but it accomplished what I was sure the creation of art accomplished: it allowed me to stop thinking.”

How many films did Bevacuqa make?

Brooks: More than the lost films of DeNiro?

Stuart: I don’t feel like fragments are having a very good run right now. Lauren Oyler picks on this really well in Fake Accounts. Anything can be a fragment, sugar! Just type something half-baked, hit return a few times and, voila, fragmentary writing. But that’s not what a fragment is.

Brooks: No, it’s not. Really, it’s the opposite of that. That’s like a whole and taking pieces out. For me fragments go back to German Romanticism and ruin obsession. Making a “whole” fragment is a cool thing. Like the Brahms pieces. Intermezzos. Ten in-between things. I mean, if you found an arm at the bottom of the ocean, yeah, there’s your fragment. But you have to be dedicated to the form. You have to sink that low.

Stuart: I want this popular idea right now to go away: the world is screwed, therefore my work is a fragment.

Brooks: In that sense fragment is just a synonym for choppy. Which is not the same. For me it comes down to being pro-form or anti-form. Formlessness has to be patterned and arranged. Even chaos is ordered.

Stuart: I wanted to read one more passage, keeping in mind your “single vast expanding text that would be unreadable.”

“Things must circulate—the interstate highway system, the blood in Eisenhower’s failing body—circulation, but no conclusion: once you’re a star of a Bevaqua film, there’s no way out.”

Circulation, the circle, the record on the turntable…

Brooks: …I’m fascinated with those movements. The highway system is tied to surveillance, and of course the circulation of capital. It must flow. A Cosmopolis thing. After 9/11 there was a huge panic and Bush came on TV and said, please go shopping. In the pandemic Trump and Biden said, please go shopping.

Stuart: And there’s no way out. You can’t square the circle, unless you’re on television.

Brooks: We’ve talked about Lauren Binet’s book HHhH. He calls it an infranovel, infared meaning “having a wavelength just greater than the red end of the spectrum.” He says he uses all of the resources of the novel except for one: fiction.

Stuart: That feels like exactly where I want to go.

Brooks: When you use your life as material, is it material, or is it different?

Stuart: Paul Valéry’s confession that he couldn’t write a novel because he couldn’t write the sentence: “The Marquee went out at 5.” Do you want to write, “Last year, they went out for an hour,” or does it get better if you delete last year, if you delete an hour, and you just write, They went out.

Brooks: IRL, deleting last year would be a great idea. 

Stuart: Everything becomes exact when you forget about time.

Brooks: In fiction there’s an obsession with giving information. Why not 4:58? Why not 5:02. Blue eyes, green eyes, 5’8, 6’3.

Stuart: It needs to be said that “taking all of the fiction out of your fiction” takes time. It took me a long time to write Jenny in Corona, it took me a long time to finish my new book.

Brooks: Took me too long to write mine.

Stuart: The next one will be faster.

Brooks: Let’s tell ourselves that.

Stuart: You write, “I never had a master plan, or any other kind of plan, really. I had merely embarked upon a course of action whose every contour pushed me forward in a way I couldn’t control.”

Brooks: When I hear you read that, it sounds like it’s about writing.

Stuart: Usually true of true sentences.

Brooks: For sure.

Stuart: I’ve noticed this funny yet profound thing that as I get older, I must write more about the lived experience of writing, because I’ve just spent so much time living the experience of writing.

Brooks: There are authors who write about being a writer, but then others who write about the process of creation. I’m interested in the latter.

Stuart: Roth feared, or maybe he was happy about it in his retirement, that the novel would become more and more specialized. So why not write about being a writer. Do it for the other writers. There aren’t a lot of them out there. Contrary to the received opinion there are more writers than ever.

Goals, Detours, and Persistence: A Joint-Interview with David Borofka and Caitlin Hamilton Summie

Caitlin Hamilton Summie: David, we have known each other a long time, meeting when I was handling your publicity for your novel, The Island (MacMurray & Beck, 1997). Before that, though, you had published a story collection called Hints of His Mortality (winner of the 1996 Iowa Short Fiction Award). Now your latest collection of stories, A Longing for Impossible Things, will be published in March 2022 as part of the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction Series. We both can take a lot of time to write our stories and novels, something like 25 years. I know why I end up working at a slow pace, but what in your process takes you a long time to complete your projects?

David Borofka: I don’t know if I really work that slowly… Sometimes, I feel as though I’ve been a victim of my own laziness and sloth, and other times, subject to life interruptions—parents who were dying, children who were growing, a teaching schedule that became more demanding. Maybe I was subject to a mind less able to juggle disparate obligations and assign them their proper place. There were too many days, weeks, months, and years when the writing wasn’t being done at all, at least not on paper. Thinking, yes; writing, no. (Sometimes even that thinking made me preoccupied, much to my daughters’ or my wife’s frustration. Then again, my wife named the upstairs room where I work “Clarissa” [after Clarissa Pinkola Estés], as though every time I climbed the stairs, I was going to visit a mistress. Maybe I was…) I also know that I’m not the most fastidious writer in the world. If it’s a question of sending something out before it’s ready or revising overmuch, I’m guilty of the former more so than the latter.
You have a collection of stories that came out in 2017, and now you have a novel, Geographies of the Heart, coming out in January of 2022. That’s a gap of only five years, but before the collection came out, you were a student in an MFA program and you were working in the publishing industry before you branched out as owner of your own publicity and marketing agency. Were you writing that whole time? How much of your time was spent in your various “day jobs” or family obligations as opposed to writing? What about your MFA experience—was it solely dedicated to writing fiction, or did you find you were distracted by other obligations there as well?

CHS: I began writing pieces of this novel in my MFA days so with breaks and years spent doing other things, it has been a twenty-seven-year journey to see this novel into print, if my math and memory are correct.
I wasn’t writing that whole time. I was writing between work and parenting, all of which I celebrate. Even during my MFA, I couldn’t write the whole time because we students had to pass a comprehensive literature exam before defending our theses, so I was taking literature courses and reading.
The MFA at Colorado State is three years long, and it was a wonderful three years. I’d majored in Middle Eastern History in college and was not as well read as some of my colleagues in the program, and I’ve often thought that I landed at exactly the right school for me, pursuing the best MFA for me.
Also, during my MFA, I made time for fun, hiking or eating Sunday brunch out at one of the lovely small restaurants in Fort Collins on the weekends. Things like that. A favorite memory is riding down Poudre Canyon on the back of my friend, Dave’s, Harley.
Do you think our work benefits from our pace? If so, how?

DB: Seeing one’s work from a distance of time is an odd experience. That telescopic perspective can be a reminder of how much historical as well as personal time has passed; it can also be a reminder that the writing that one did so many years earlier had something of value, a little like looking at a snapshot of yourself from twenty years ago and being shocked to realize that you thought you were fat then. I like some of the writing I did twenty-five years ago. I like it much better now than I did then. All that stuff that went into the drawer? Pull it out… It may not be as bad as you once thought, just written by a younger you.

CHS: Would it bother you if, after spending decades working on a book, it was not published? I ask because the marketplace is so tough, even tougher lately, and it is a real possibility that some beautiful books may not see print. I know it would disappoint me if my dedication and time did not merit publication.

DB: My honest answer? I know myself well enough to admit that I’m craven. I want publication and I like (no, love, who doesn’t?) external validation; there’s nothing like the thrill of someone else telling you that your work has value. However, I also know how cringe-worthy it can be to see something in print that is not one’s best work.
I had a novel manuscript that I finished around the year 2000. On the strength of that manuscript, I got the attention of an agent with an outstanding track record. However, I don’t think we were a particularly good match. She liked the novel well enough to take me on, but she didn’t like it as it was; she wanted the book to resemble another recent bestseller. Without getting too much into the specifics—the agent’s name, the subject of the book, etc.—I will say that I never felt comfortable making the changes that she suggested, nor do I feel that I was very good at turning the story from what I had originally envisioned into the story that she felt would be more marketable. After about a year and a half of mutual frustration, we parted ways. But for several years after that I kept trying to repair it. I took what I thought were the best parts of the revision and the parts of the original story that I was loathe to discard and tried to stitch them together. Did it ever work? Not according to the publishers that she sent her version to and not according to the small presses to whom I sent my cobbled-together version, subsequent to our divorce. Finally, I stopped tinkering and submitting, but it was a tough project to let go and let die. Was it “beautiful”? I don’t know, but I am still fond of the story I was trying to tell, and I still grieve the fact that it didn’t see the light of day.
That’s probably the biggest reason why I’ve continued to churn out stories as opposed to working on novels. I’m a chicken at heart, and while I can stomach the cost in time of a story that goes sidewise, the thought of investing a decade in another novel that turns into quicksand scares me to death.

DB: How quickly do you send your work out? When do you know it’s time? What does it take to convince you that a story is ready to be sent out to journal or a novel manuscript out to an agent or publisher? Have you ever talked yourself out of submitting work that you later decided was publication-worthy?

CHS: I don’t send much out anymore because I don’t have stories I want to share right now, but when I was younger I talked myself out of sending out some pieces. Later, far later, I decided life was short and if I was going to try to publish ever again (I had had some acceptances in my twenties), I needed to try again. I started submitting and had a handful of stories accepted, which inspired me to revisit my invitation from Marc Estrin at Fomite Press to send him a story collection for consideration.

DB: Given the length of time before you published To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, what is the time span of your writing life that the stories represent? What do you think of the writer who was responsible for those earliest stories?

CHS: I spent 25 years on To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, from beginning to end, with breaks and distractions (all happy ones). I think the writer who was responsible for the earlier stories unwound her stories faster, but then again, they had clearer conflicts as well. I think my later work shows more clearly the messiness of life, the way conflicts can multiply.
After such a long time away, how do you feel about the publishing industry of today?

DB: Gosh… after being away from book publishing for twenty-five years, it feels like an alien world to me. Does it seem that way to you as well? In the early- to mid-1990s, most everything was printed manuscripts, snail mail, and postage for return envelopes. Now nearly every facet of the submission process is conducted online, which is easier but also even more impersonal. What we don’t have to pay to the post office or Kinko’s, we’re paying in contest fees and Submittable charges. I have to confess to a slight case of masochism; I miss going to the mailbox and seeing what’s there. Emails are not the same.
The marketplace that writers, editors, and publishers are collectively facing also feels significantly tougher to me, and it’s not as though the 1980s were a book paradise. Forty years ago, we were bemoaning the dwindling numbers of readers and the nearly impossible business model of publishers and booksellers. Has that improved in any way?
You, on the other hand, know publishing from several perspectives: author, a small publisher’s marketing/publicity director, a Big 5 imprint’s marketing/publicity director, and for eighteen years as owner of your own marketing agency. What do you think of the publishing world that first-time authors are hoping to enter? What about the grizzled veteran, who is hoping to rejoin the party after some time away?

CHS: I think in some ways this industry is harder to be a part of than ever before, and in some ways it is more welcoming than ever before. I’d tell any writer to be strong. Publishing a book is not easy and takes a lot of perseverance and grit and hope.
As a former writing professor, what advice did you give to students who also wrote at a slower pace?

DB: For about the last twenty years of my career at Reedley College, I taught mostly online. (It is an abiding irony to me that I retired and then a year later the entire world was online.) I told students in my online classes of the past that they had the opportunity to know truly what writing is like—you’re alone in your office, nook, carrel, or closet, and you only periodically come up for air. The real world does not give a shit if you can crank out a 500-word essay in forty-five minutes—that’s an artificial skill that only academia seems to care about—but readers do care about whether or not you are willing to think hard. In an online class, the students had the opportunity to manage their time in the way that was most workable for them. Life always hands us deadlines of one kind or another, but you have the autonomy to do the work that needs to be done and the timeframe in which it must be completed. If it takes sitting at one’s desk for three weeks in six-hour chunks, then do it.
During our grad school years, my wife made cross-stitch samplers as a way of relieving stress. She made me a small one that still hangs over my desk; the message is simple: “Never work quickly but always work.” It seems as true now as it did then, maybe more so…

CHS: Your new book is due out in March. Can you tell us a bit about it? How long have you been working on it?

DB: In one form or another, I’ve been working on A Longing for Impossible Things for about twenty years. A collection of thirteen stories, Longing has gone through several iterations. Under the title My Life as a Mystic, it was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award, and under the title Christmas in Jonestown, it was a finalist for the inaugural Donald L. Jordan Award. That last near-win forced me to reconfigure the book one more time. I took out several stories and added several others. Rather than taking the title from one of the stories, I found a passage from Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet to use as an epigraph and took the title from that. The passage is as follows:
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd—the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
In one form or another, it seems that I keep coming back to this notion: that sense of longing for, yet never finding, that transcendent “thing” that hovers on the edge of perception. The word that refuses to swim to consciousness.
When did you begin writing Geographies of the Heart? Before or after the publication of Ghosts? What was the gestation process for the novel? Do you feel as though you have a better idea of navigating the publication process now as opposed to when you were writing the stories in the collection?

CHS: Three of the stories in the collection inspired the novel, made me want to finish the character’s stories, but one chapter was written long before the story collection. “Cleaning House” was written in 1994 or so, and I revised it to be chapter two in my novel. A number of other pieces not included in the collection were written before I decided to pursue the novel. I’ve spent half of my lifetime to date writing Geographies of the Heart. A heck of a long time, but I was compelled by these characters.
The novel is about how much of an anchor family is in the life of my main character, Sarah, and what happens when family stress and loss develop. It’s about how our hearts guide us, and fail us, literally and figuratively. It’s also about getting overwhelmed and resentful and learning to let that go, to forgive others and oneself.
I think what taught me about the publishing process has been work more than publication. I have been a book publicist for nearly two decades. That experience has certainly helped me navigate publication. My publicist is my husband and business partner, Rick, and that has been wonderful, having someone else handle my campaign. It lends perspective and also is a great support.

DB: What new projects are you working on currently? Do you set yourself anything like a timetable for a project’s completion? How do you measure a good writing day’s work?

CHS: I’ve never had the privilege of having time to write each day, and because my writing takes ages to complete, I never have a timetable. Right now I have a middle grade novel which I have worked on for ten or eleven years that I hope to revise again and send out. But other than that, there is nothing in the hopper and nothing in my mind, and I am enjoying the silence. We are finally getting some household projects done. That feels great.
How about you: what's next, and, if I may, how long do you think it will take to complete?

DB: What’s next may be a relative thing… Since my retirement in 2019, I’ve written another novel (Wanting) and a slew of other stories, all of which are currently making the rounds. Who knows what will become of them? Now, I’m starting to dance around the next novel idea. I have to be careful though; I’m Medicare eligible, and I don’t have the time (nor do I have the energy) to extricate myself from the sinkhole of any further failed projects.

Place Births a Braided Novel in Erin Flanagan’s New Book Deer Season

Of all the starting points available to writers of fiction, setting has always confounded me the most. Landscapes and cities have always felt neutral. There’s a cliff, a river, a mountain. There are buildings and streets. But they have no meaning compared to cliffs, rivers, buildings, and streets elsewhere. And a place’s inhabitants have always felt too varied and complex to ascribe them meaning. Thus, I was thrilled when the opportunity arose to talk to author Erin Flanagan, whose new novel Deer Season began with setting. I was eager to find out how place drove Flanagan’s imagination and how she used it to populate a novel that still felt character—not author—driven.

A quietly subversive story about a small town in Nebraska in 1985, Deer Season features three perspectives: Milo, a twelve-year-old boy whose sixteen-year-old sister Peggy has gone missing; Alma, a native Chicagoan in her mid-fifties who now drives the local school bus and works begrudgingly on her husband’s family farm; and Clyle, Alma’s husband who convinced her to move to his hometown to take care of his ailing mother, then pressured her into staying. After Milo’s sister Peggy goes missing, an employee of Alma’s and Clyle’s on the farm comes under suspicion, ostensibly due to blood in the bed of his truck and evidence of damage to his fender. Hal is intellectually disabled, though, and Alma and Clyle come to his defense, feeling him vulnerable to scapegoating.

But without Peggy’s body, no one can say for sure what happened. Milo and others wonder if she ran away. And so we arrive immediately at how place can drive a novel. Why would Peggy run away? Because she lives in a small Nebraska town and feels stifled by it. Immediately place has become both motive and stakes. If Peggy stays, her life will be about local football games, school plays, and weekend parties in cramped basements. If she goes, her life will be about very different things. What exactly those might be her brother Milo can’t say, but he does know that he too feels like he belongs somewhere else.

For her part, Alma feels like she needs to be someone else—namely a mother, a role that is the organizing principle of her neighbors’ lives. Not taking part in high school sports, bake sales, and PTA meetings leaves Alma firmly on the outside of everything meaningful in Gunthrum, Nebraska, and while Clyle recognizes that not being able to have children has been a big disappointment for his wife, he can’t see how living where they do—a place which is so familiar to him as to be invisible—makes it far worse.

Deer Season, like its writer and its setting, has no pretensions. The language is clear and precise. The pleasures and difficulties of small-town life are looked at straight on, with neither exaggeration, romanticism, or arch judgment. Instead, this is the perspective of an insider, someone who knows this place and these people at this time and has the great skill and compassion to let us sit beside her and watch how life happens to them—and how they make it better or worse for themselves.

Now Flanagan lives in Dayton Ohio, where she teaches writing at Wright State University, but she grew up in a small town in Iowa, and when I talked to her, she identified place as her starting point immediately.

I had always wanted to write about small-town life in the 1980’s, so I started with the setting, then moved to characters. Some of that came out of my parents’ experience. When I was four or five, we were living in a suburb of Chicago and my dad was taking the train in for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. For a while he had a room at the “Y” he’d stay at during the week. He decided he had a farm in the family and would like to move there. My mom was like, “Say what?” It ended up being the best thing they ever could have done.

Though Alma and Clyle were based on Flanagan’s parents initially, the characters quickly diverged to serve her interest in portraying the darker side of small-town life. Shut out of community concerns because she’s not a parent, Alma has closed up into a hard shell, and in response, Clyle has turned to other sources of connection.

I’ve looked back and realized that Sanborn was not what I thought it was as a teenager. There were a lot of affairs and drama I wasn’t aware of. There was also a grisly murder about an hour and a half away from my dad’s farm. The murdered woman had been emailing with a man my father knew. The police came to talk to the man and found blood in his truck, but he had an intellectual disability like Hal and couldn’t easily communicate that it was from a deer he’d shot.

The novel might be mistaken for a mystery when described this way, but Flanagan takes it in a psychological and emotional direction, exploring how Peggy’s disappearance and the suspicion Hal falls under drives the characters to face uncomfortable truths they’ve been ignoring for years.

Setting also drove Flanagan’s structural choices. All three point-of-view characters represent different aspects of the rural/city divide. Milo grew up in a small town and longs to leave. Alma grew up in a big city and feels (at best) ambivalent about small town life. Clyle was raised in a rural community, tried a big city, and ultimately chose to return home.

I wanted the town to be central to the story, so I wanted more than one point of view. Milo is closest to who I would have been in Sanborn at the time. He’s shadowed by his sister, who’s hitting a lot of the markers for what makes a successful teenager. My sister was like that, very popular, beautiful, athletic, honor roll. I always felt in her shadow, had the sense that I wanted to get out of that town, but no idea how that would happen.

Flanagan didn’t consciously switch the gender though. Like many aspects of writing, instinct took over, and she only understood in retrospect how Milo being male benefited the story.

A sister is more mysterious to a boy. Throughout the novel, Milo wonders what Peggy’s been up to when she sneaks out of the house at night, and what makes her tick. He ruminates on it, but he’s not thinking, “That’s what I’m going to be in four years.” There’s tension because she’s athletic and he’s not, so even the things he’s supposed to excel at, she’s better at, but there’s also distance.

Creating distance so that the novel remained focused on the town’s culture is also why Flanagan chose not to use either of Peggy’s parents as point of view characters.

If your child goes missing, that’s all consuming. I wanted Milo to have his own life still going on so that he’s processing in that self-centered twelve-year-old way.

Place also drove subtler aspects of the plot and characters’ personalities. Flanagan was aware that Alma and Clyle are limited by the culture of the rural Midwest at that time, and it shows as much in what they say as in what they don’t say. Neither Alma nor Clyle seems to recognize how big a sacrifice Alma made in moving to Nebraska from Chicago, and neither entertains the idea that it might be time for Clyle to return the favor and move back to a more urban environment.

That’s one way that my mother is very different from Alma. She would not have put up with that sexism, not even in the 1980’s, but in the town I grew up in, what the men said went, and people didn’t question it. I didn’t question it. I remember when I was nineteen someone asked me what my future looked like, and I said get married and have five kids. It was a long time before I questioned that.

It’s not just Alma and Clyle who demonstrate embedded sexism. As everyone tries to figure out what happened to Peggy, she is refracted through their speculations, viewed as a temptress and troublemaker while the men who orbit around her go uncriticized. And in a spectacularly deft, quiet series of scenes, Flanagan shows how Peggy’s mother is crushed by the old trope that it’s always the mother’s fault. She went back to work, leaving her children unsupervised, and when Peggy went missing, she deferred to her husband’s desire to keep up appearances and waste precious time carrying on as if nothing were wrong—thus whatever harm Peggy may come to is laid at her mother’s feet.

To me the novel is about how people don’t get the life they sign up for. Every single character is dealing with the question of what you do when this is not how you thought it was going to go.

Another way the place and time drove the story was in Hal’s drinking. Much of the suspicion and confusion around where Hal was the night Peggy disappeared and whether or not he intentionally or unintentionally may have hurt her centers on his habit of drinking to excess, driving under the influence, and not remembering all his actions while drunk. This too spoke of small-town habits and attitudes in the 1980’s. No one, including Alma and Clyle, considers that driving while intoxicated is wrong, or that Hal in particular may not have the good judgment necessary to drink.

Small towns are weird that way. Hal hangs out with guys in their twenties, and they do look after their own, but also, they might make fun of him. It turns on a dime in small towns, especially in the 1980’s.

I won’t tell you anymore about the surprising ending of this lovely novel about disappointment, compromise, tragedy and new beginnings. It’s too subtle, surprising, and complex to summarize or spoil. It’s also a useful lesson on the interconnectedness of people and their place, proving that story can begin with setting and blossom from there to contain the whole world.

How a Little-known Historical Event Inspired a Decade-long Writing Project: A Conversation with Joan Schweighardt

Thank you, Joan, for allowing me to interview you about this incredible and compelling trilogy. What gave you the idea to write about rubber tapping in the Amazon?

A freelance job that came my way required me to read a brief annotated diary by a man who worked tapping rubber trees in the middle of the South American rainforest during the rubber boom in the early 1900s. His story was riveting, as was the dramatic and dangerous setting in which he found himself. Since I knew nothing about the rubber boom, I began to read other books on the subject. Around this same time, an opportunity arose for me to travel to South America with a group of sustainability advocates. We spent part of our time visiting an indigenous tribe that had been uncontacted as little as twenty years before and was seeking help to keep oil drillers from destroying their lands. The experience, which included a cultural exchange, was lifechanging. Since I could not—and didn’t want to—shake it off, I decided to write a novel that would take place, at least in part, in the deep rainforest, during the rubber boom.

When did you know this would become The Rivers Trilogy? Did you write the first book, Before We Died, knowing that there would be two more books?

As I got to the end of the first book, which tells the story of two brothers traveling to South America in 1908, I knew there would have to be a second book because the impact of what happened in the jungle had to be felt by people awaiting my characters’ return back home, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Same thing with the second book; it begged for a follow up. As I was finishing the third book, I wanted to write a fourth, because I wanted to continue on with the same characters I’d been with for so long. But there wasn’t a need, really. What needed to be resolved had been. 

Tell me about your research for these books. Each volume seems to have required much research. You seem so well informed on so many topics. Did you travel for some of your research? Please talk about how you managed all of this and how long it took you to do it.

When I first began, I needed to research the short history (1879 to 1913) of the rubber boom in South America, and of course the flora and fauna of the rainforest, etc. But my characters had to be from somewhere. I choose Hoboken, NJ, because it has shipping docks from which they could sail to South America, and because I’m from that part of the world. I began to research the history of Hoboken in the early 20th century and learned that it had had a diverse immigrant community, mostly German, Irish and Italian. The second book in the trilogy takes place in part during WWI, which very much impacted Hoboken. In fact, all the German ships in the shipyard there were taken over by the American army when the U.S. joined in the war. The doughboys left from and returned to Hoboken. Of course this bit of history got woven into my novel. For the third book, River Aria, I had to learn everything I could about Manaus, Brazil, which was the headquarters of the rubber boom, and especially about the city’s opera house, which plays a major role in the story. I made a second trip to South America at that time, to visit Manaus and to explore the rivers surrounding it with a private guide and see, among other things, rubber trees. Then I had to research the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York, because one of my characters, a student of opera, travels from Manaus to New York to work in the Met Opera House, albeit in the sewing room. I also had to research speakeasies and rumrunning.

All this research was a thrill for me. It was like exploring a cave that you expect to be straightforward and then finding all sorts of sub-chambers and sub-sub-chambers leading to new and wondrous discoveries along the way. The writing of the three books took ten years, because I was working as a freelancer, writing for private and corporate clients at the same time. Sometimes I could only steal one day in an entire week to work on my own projects. But I never really minded, because it stretched out the period of time I stayed immersed in the project.

Many authors stick to writing their own gender, but you seem to be equally equipped to write men and women. Do you find it more difficult to write men than women? The men in these novels seem so true to character.

I don’t think men and women are all that different in these times, in the way we think, at least. I have written several men over the years, many in first person. But writing Jack and Baxter Hopper—two Irish American brothers, both dockworkers from a rough immigrant neighborhood in 1908—was difficult. The challenges they had to face were particular to the setting and the times. Unlike most “good” men today, Jack and Bax are as ready to throw a punch when they feel themselves the victims of an injustice as they are to spend the last penny in their pockets sitting in on a poker game. I’m not saying they were unknowable, but they were harder to know than the women in the three books. It took several drafts, and a lot of consultations with my husband and sons and male writer friends, to feel I’d come close to portraying them authentically.

In all three of the novels, Jack Hopper continues to appear, sometimes the story is told by him, but not always. Other characters take precedence at times, telling the story through their eyes as Jack Hopper takes a back seat. In some novels I’ve read, this throws me off balance, but in these novels, I never had that feeling. Your structure is flawless. How did you decide who to make the narrator and when?

Because Jack, the narrator of Book One, suffers through a long convalescence when he returns from the rainforest, he was never really a candidate to narrate Book Two, Gifts for the Dead. Nora, who was both Jack and Baxter’s love interest in the first book, seemed to be the best character to take the baton. Before We Died is necessarily full of adventure. Thanks to Nora, the second book is able to continue the saga while focusing on adventures of a more domestic nature. The first book reveals a lot about the men in the Irish American character contingent. The second book shines a light on the women, on Nora herself, but also Maggie, Jack and Baxter’s loving mother, and even on Maggie’s fortuneteller, Clementine.

What was the most difficult scene for you to write in each of these books? As a writer, I find there is always a place where I struggle to get the blood on the page and as a result, much rewriting takes place. Can you speak to this?

In Book One, Before We Died, Jack and Baxter are captured by an indigenous tribe living not too far from their camp. They are already in a bad place at that point, and their abduction could have dire consequences. But they have something the tribal chief wants, and thus they are treated well. The capture chapter was challenging for me. Most of the tribal people I read about in my research were both extremely spiritual and entirely capable of violence when they thought the situation called for it. I wanted to get that balance right. I didn’t want to idolize them.

In Book Two, Gifts for the Dead, Jack, the wild, somewhat moody, adventurer from Book One, must begin to change as a result of both the things that happened to him in the jungle and the fact that he is aging, moving from his late teens into adulthood. I worked hard to make sure his transition didn’t feel too jarring.

I wrote Book Three, River Aria, in a few drafts and thought I was done. Then I sent it to two wonderful writers who regularly critique my work—and both of them shot it down. It just wasn’t happening. It lacked the je ne sais quoi of the first two books. It was flat. I wanted to fix it but I really didn’t know how. For maybe four months I didn’t work on it at all. And then one night, when my husband and I were sitting in a concert hall, waiting for the performance to begin, it hit me. I saw clearly what was missing and I knew what I had to do to repair it. But I didn’t have a paper and pen, and I wouldn’t have been so rude as to take out my phone and start typing notes. So I kept repeating the gist of my literary epiphany to myself over and over throughout the night, and as soon as we got home, I ran for my notepad. I basically had to rewrite several sections of the book.

There is always a bit of the author in most of our characters. Which character would you say is most like you and why? What traits does the character possess that you also possess?

When I was a younger writer, I forced my traits on almost all my characters without even realizing it. But over the years I made a concerted effort to keep myself out of my writing—unless of course I was writing nonfiction. I think I was finally able to do this because my freelance background includes ghostwriting books for clients. Obviously you can’t insert your own traits into a book you’re being paid to write on behalf of someone else. I’d like to say I’m assertive, like Nora, or exuberant, like Estela, but if I’m like anyone in the trilogy, I’m probably most like Maggie, the mom, cherishing her domestic life above all else and fretting when it feels threatened.

I am so impressed with your attention to detail. You are quite an observer of people and places. Can you say a little bit about this quality?

Thanks. Being shy as a kid—and really into adulthood—made me a people watcher. Unfortunately, I’m not as good at picking up on the details of places as I would like to be. Thank goodness for the Internet, where refreshing my memory is always only a click away.

Tell me something about your writing process. Do you write as you go, or do you plot everything out beforehand?

I do a little of each to get through the first draft. Thereafter each draft becomes an act of accretion.

Please say something about how you came up with the title The Rivers Trilogy and the titles for each of your books.

There are two main locations that run through all three books: Hoboken, NJ and Manhattan, NY on the Hudson River, and Manaus, which is on the Rio Negro, and the rubber camp locations on the Rio Negro’s tributaries. None of the plotlines would work without a river running in the background.

As for the titles of the individual book titles, Before We Died is a phrase that comes to Jack at some point in the book, when he feels he and his brother are as good as dead. Gifts for the Dead has a funny story. I couldn’t think what to call the darn thing, and then I remembered that years ago, when I was too young and immature to be writing a novel, I wrote one, about a confused older woman who believes herself to be Aphrodite, and I called it Gifts for the Dead. Since that manuscript never went anywhere (except into a box beneath my bed), I borrowed the title for Book Two of the trilogy, and it turned out to be a good fit. River Aria is basically the story of a river brat from an impoverished community who is offered a twist of fate opportunity to study opera with a master, so that title was a no-brainer—though I did later learn there is a European cruise ship by the same name.

The Rivers Trilogy is so cinematic. Can you envision it becoming a series of films or an adapted series for television?

Thank you again, and to that point, I have written a story bible to spell out just how such a TV series might unfold. The problem of course is getting someone in the film world to read it.

Share a few of your favorite authors and what genres you like to read.

I love fiction, especially literary fiction and literary historical fiction. I just read Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell. And my favorite novel last year was Circe, by Madeline Miller. The Dogs of Babel is another favorite, as it most anything by Emma Donahue, T.C. Boyle, Dave Eggers. . . There are a lot of writers whose books I will pre-order as soon as I hear about them.

Do you have another project in mind and if so, can you tell me something about it?

I have been working on a non-fiction about my sister, who died three years ago. I came into possession of a stack of poems she wrote during a particularly difficult period in her life. Because I was essentially her caretaker (her health was compromised in a variety of ways), I never got to be her friend. Reading her poems after she died revealed her to me in a different light. The manuscript consists of chapters describing how I saw her journey through her too-short life, separated by her poems, which tell a different story.