A Ritual of Grief in New Waves

In New Waves, Nguyen tells a story of an Asian American — half Chinese, half Vietnamese — twentysomething working in the tech startup space just after the 2008 stock market crash. What is included is often just as important as what is not. The theory of omission. The bottom of the iceberg. Lucas Nguyen, male protagonist, was not line-driving into a blossoming future as an engineering mastermind but he was flittering about in his parents’ bed-and-breakfast before stumbling out of Oregon into tech as a customer service rep. And maybe it would have been more resonant to operate with this sort of Silicon Valley archetypal Asian male who codes at breakneck speed because he was born a mathematical genius, bred with discipline, and by such hard work, has climbed the ranks to become another version of the model minority in a technocratic American Dream. Instead, he strips away the stereotype-clad character lest we mistake economic rise with visibility of the Asian American. 

This ambitious debut speaks about the world of tech intelligently, always being critical but never anti, always hoping to evolve it and expand it to become big enough to include us all and never to cancel it. It doesn’t trivialize tech but asks the tough questions. How does our value in data and expediency in algorithms coexist with human labor? Can it? If not, is there not something fundamentally compromising, fundamentally inverted, fundamentally absurd in our incommensurate value system? Should it not cause us to both laugh at such a farce and cry at such a tragedy of replacing humans with machines? For those who default to “business as usual” methods, these questions might not have clear answers. Otherwise, they may seem merely rhetorical. On the contrary, if coexistence is possible — and it must be — how can we maintain such a world? Nguyen does not seem to go as far as to answer this.

It is no surprise that Nguyen’s ability to critique tech is razor-sharp since he is an editor on The Verge, a media platform that largely covers tech and science, but that’s not all within his repertoire. New Waves does not stay in the abstract world of ideas or the belligerent space of confrontation. It is grounded by so many lines of dialogue washed in wit and comedy that I was left shaking my head in deep satisfaction again and again. 

Much of the use of dialogue comes through Lucas’ memory of Margot. Margot was Lucas’ best friend, a no-nonsense engineer of great talent, unafraid of contention, and perpetually hampered by society’s reminders that her body was racialized. “Being black means you are merely a body—a fragile body.” In the very beginning, they commit a data heist in a drunken moment of retributive angst after Margot is unreasonably fired. “What is any company’s most valuable asset? . . . its information”. It was a sly way to expose a rhetorical point — a point that ruthless capital-hungry companies seem still to miss — that we have mistaken the dispensability of human workers with the dispensability of data. The theft of data leaves no void. The loss of people leaves one that cannot be filled. Margot is snatched from us almost immediately once the story begins. She dies suddenly by a car accident Lucas was not present to witness. The heist merely hands Lucas his best friend’s login credentials as a flashlight that guides him through the aura of mystery surrounding her death. Nguyen lays out an entire stage for grief to speak.

Leonard Cohen famously sung, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”, as an interplay of the holy and the broken, the truth in the mess. The pessimist in me wonders whether or not this interpolation of hope in life’s tragedies is just our own willful conjurings. Our need to formulate redemption when there is none. But Nguyen’s elegiac prose is not meant to inspire fatalism or to discuss objective reality. He acknowledges the tendency of the living to write narratives for the dead whether or not those narratives are given consensus. We are human and that’s just what grief does to us. It isn’t an act that is only selfish but also an investigative ritual where grief hands us a spade and challenges us to probe deeper and longer than we once did. The plot structure ebbs and flows from Lucas’ reality to memories of his dead best friend in such a way that invites the past to whisper secrets into the present like grief swimming with resurrection.

This commingling is the flagrant act of a rule breaker demonstrating that the boundaries that limit our world only serves to restrict us from innovation. As Lucas breaks into the first of Margo’s accounts, he is faced with the dilemma of how to give meaning to her death by the constricting choices laid out before him. “Memorialized or deleted. The only two states for a dead person’s Facebook account. . . . A memorialized Facebook account was preserved in stasis, frozen in time like a caveman in ice. Deletion was, on the other hand, a complete erasure.” Stasis or obliteration. Our world, at least the technocratic dimension, suffocates the substance of death and allows a binary to be oozed out. Nguyen is clearly not satisfied with this and insists instead to innovate it.

As Lucas goes on a reluctant rampage, hacking into Margot’s accounts, he discovers her online presence on a forum for sci-fi aficionados, harking back to his shared history with Margot on another online forum. He becomes privy to her threads of conversational content with Jill, Margot’s virtual friend and published sci-fi author, who quickly becomes co-conspirator. A stark difference exists between Margot’s virtual identity, when cloaked with anonymity, and her embodied identity. She seems liberated to empathize, to opine, and to create. At every moment of pause Lucas has with this conquest, his grief betrays his integrity. He eventually finds a library of WAV files with recordings of Margot drunkenly creating fictional worlds. “Grief isn’t just the act of coping with a loss. It’s reckoning with the realization that you’ll never discover something new about a person ever again. Here it was, though. Something new.” Nguyen snidely stages an existential coup on the limits of death, ripping the ceiling wide open. Grief is not the twist of the knife or the apotheosis in dying. Grief gives us permission to revolt against stasis; to continue creating even past disembodiment. 

The novel is layered with a metanarrative conducted by Margot’s resurrected voice, breaking through the forcefield of mortality to communicate that she too lived with her own grief. The illusion of dialogue.

“She had a way of seeing the world for its composite parts. Everything could be broken down into systems, each with their own rules and consequences. I think engineering data architecture was effortless for her. It was so self-contained. But when she’d look at the world more broadly you could see her trying to piece it together, but it was just too much at times. Systems of sexism, systems of racism, systems of social class, all interlocking and tugging at each other in different directions.”

As Lucas irresistibly shuffles through her deeply stowed audio files, his portrait of Margot becomes clearer. She imagined blasting into intergalactic realms to resettle on planets with no trace of life like drawing on a blank canvas. She spoke presciently of the dissolution of a world ruled by a cacophonous tribunal that would sail into its eventual extinction by natural causes. Grief compelled her to write new realities that were unencumbered by the infrastructural chaos rendered her world uninhabitable.

Like Margot, the entire cast of characters find themselves living in an equally restrictive world — a white CEO who wants to build something noble but is forced to alter the shape of his company according to market demands, a customer service staff that is marked by dispensability where hard work will never reward them in an industry that refuses to assign them value, an author who’s best work comes not from herself but from an anonymous online legend that proofreads her copy. What if we could rip open the ceiling to create a new world?

In many ways, New Waves celebrates the human achievement that has ushered us into the digital age. Without the dawn of the internet, the luxury of anonymity which re-humanizes us for community would never have been possible. End-to-end encryption has secured confidential messages which is crucial to virtual organization for social activism. Algorithms are mystifying to most, but they have also built realities and systems for us that once existed only as a figment of our imagination. 

This doesn’t mean that Nguyen coddles the tech industry. All innovation with noble origins can become corrupted and co-opted for the most egregious means. At one scene, a CEO of a startup searching for funding from a venture capital has an idea for a facial recognition application because a photographer once took a picture of him and his ex-girlfriend happily in love on the subway. Sentimentality frozen in time. He combed through the entire internet and could not find the lost photo floating nebulously in virtual erehwon. The next time he appears, he has sold it to a government sector using his application for comprehensive surveillance. To make sure that the metaphor does not drive us down the edge of the cliff because this fiction is bordering on reality, he decides to call the company Panopticon, satirizing tech with a double entendre hiding behind the shadows. 

Nguyen recognizes that there is no formula to striking that balance or to how humans and machines are to coexist. Algorithms and data may never get humans right and our worlds may continue to feel restrictive to us, but in the face of it, we must write habitable worlds if only that we could live. Grief does not become any less liminal, but rather than a prison we are trying to escape it can be a shelter that allows us to create. Instead of being paralyzed by stasis or releasing by oblivion, it can be tossed with the waves of resurrection to bring about something new.

Speaking of The Pelton Papers: A Conversation Between Margot Livesey and Mari Coates

Margot Livesey and Mari Coates first met at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. At the time, Margot had published one book of stories-plus-novella, Learning by Heart, and one novel, Homework. She was “assisting” the famous writer Mari had signed up to work with, who had disappointed Mari by not offering comments on the short story she’d brought. Mari then turned to Margot who provided Mari with her first serious critical evaluation. Mari had read the stories in Learning by Heart during the conference, saving the title novella for later. Reading this at home in San Francisco, she was stunned to see that here, Margot was accomplishing with ease what Mari aspired to: fiction based on real life. She wrote Margot a note, extolling the novella and thanking her again for reading her story. Margot wrote back and they began a correspondence. It was Margot who suggested Mari apply to the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, in which she was teaching. They worked there together and have remained friends.

This interview—a conversation, really—comes out of that association and was conducted via email, before everyone was ordered to shelter in place. Along with Margot’s warm and generous friendship, she has provided Mari with literary shelter for more than twenty years, which Mari calls “above and beyond anything I had a right to expect.”

*

Margot Livesey: I’m delighted to be talking about your wonderful novel, The Pelton Papers, which follows the life of the early twentieth-century modernist painter, Agnes Pelton. Your novel is so beautiful and atmospheric that I couldn’t help feeling that Agnes’s story had just sprung onto the page, but I know it has been in the works for a while. How did The Pelton Papers come to be? Can you tell us the origin story?

Mari Coates: I think there were a couple of origins, if that’s possible. First, I was interested in Agnes Pelton because I grew up with some of her paintings—the more conservative realistic ones. My grandparents were friends of hers, and she was a presence in our house with portraits of our family and a couple of lovely landscapes. Years later, after I moved to San Francisco, I discovered that she had also painted abstracts. A retrospective exhibit, the first major curated study of her art, was taking place just across the bay. When I saw those pictures, which are luminous—I don’t know how she did that—I was stunned. There were so different from the work I knew! I was enthralled and wanted to know everything about her. Once I started reading the exhibition catalog—Agnes Pelton: Poet of Nature, a brilliant rendering of her life and work by curator Michael Zakian—I was amazed at who she was and how difficult it must have been for her to make a life in art. I was very moved, awestruck actually, at her persistence in spite of a difficult family history, her delicate health, crippling shyness, and constant worries about money.

ML: But why fiction? Why not a biography?

MC: As I was beginning my research—the exhibit took place in 1996—there was nowhere near as much information on her as there is now—I found a few other short publications and brief mentions of Pelton in other exhibition catalogs. I was struck by a recurring phrase— “We don’t know this, or we can’t know that…”—things I wanted to know. Did she have a partner or love interest? Was she gay, as many have suggested? I spoke to Michael Zakian and asked him, and he said there was no evidence to substantiate that claim.

ML: So, Agnes’s romantic feelings, which you portray so intensely at various junctures in her life, before her time in Europe and later back in America, are all invented?

MC: They are.

ML: She did have a fraught background, though, and a lot of discouragement, didn’t she, even as she made a name for herself early on with the Armory Show in New York in 1913, and then later in Taos with her patron Mabel Dodge. But I also was touched by the novel’s account of her childhood in Brooklyn, with her mother, a piano teacher, and her grandmother.  You describe the household in a very intense, almost gothic way—a house of secrets.

MC: Yes, that’s exactly right. It was a house of secrets, and also, sad to say, a house of shame. But I was captivated by the idea of three generations of women, all living together and caring deeply for one another. It could not have been easy growing up there, but it is a fact that Agnes did not move away until after the deaths of first her grandmother and then her mother.

ML: You mentioned your grandparents were friends of hers? How did that connection come about?

MC: As a student and young man, my grandfather had been her neighbor in Brooklyn, and both their families were members of a religious sect called the Plymouth Brethren. In reading Zakian’s book I learned about the 1875 scandal that had led to this family connection. Agnes’s grandmother was Elizabeth Tilton, who admitted to an affair with her pastor, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and a famous abolitionist in his own right. This affair led to a lawsuit by Elizabeth’s husband Theodore and a six-month trial that the tabloids covered with great enthusiasm. The notoriety devastated Elizabeth. She was banished from Beecher’s church, Theodore divorced her and exiled himself to Paris, and she was left abandoned. The Brethren welcomed her, and she spent the remainder of her life as a member. Elizabeth was modest, shy, and deeply religious, and refused to allow visitors or newspapers into their house. I believe that Agnes was permanently scarred by all of this.

ML: I suppose that is why the novel’s near romance with her friend Alice is so poignant. And you hint at something along those lines with her friend Dane Rudhyar. Both of these characters were actual friends of hers, right?

MC: Yes. Alice Brisbane, later Thursby, was herself a Paris trained artist, but then she married and gave up her art. After she was widowed, she moved to New York and established herself as a socialite—there’s a fantastic portrait of her by John Singer Sargent—and did indeed decide to take on Agnes Pelton as a project. It makes total sense to me that one could fall in love with a patron like Alice, who firmly believed in Agnes and did everything possible to further her career. She met Dane Rudhyar on her first stay in California. He was a composer who became a famous astrologer and wrote many books on the subject. He struck me as almost feline in nature, which I thought would be attractive to Agnes.

ML: I know that this book took a long time to write and I admire your persistence in figuring out Agnes’s story and the best way to tell it. Can you talk about the difficulties you encountered?

MC: Well, it did take a long time and I tried to quit more than once, but somehow Agnes would come back into my consciousness and I would pick it up again. I was inspired by how she herself persisted in painting her abstracts no matter what else happened. I wanted to do likewise. Some of the difficulties were entirely self-inflicted. For instance, the decision to cover her entire life. I felt a sense of obligation about this, that what I was learning about her life simply demanded inclusion. It seemed that Agnes herself was insisting on this. She also had very clear ideas about what I could and could not say! When I was given a month at Ragdale, I was elated about the unrestricted time and the freedom it implied. I reminded myself that this was fiction, and therefore I should be free to turn the story in any direction. But my fumbling attempts did not lead to anything. I was also using my time there to read and absorb the research material I had brought. I had heard Agnes’s voice in solitude and had thought of the project as just me and Agnes, communing with one another. But so many others came into it! Every time I dipped into another reference, it felt like I was opening a door to a room crowded with laughing, chattering people, and it was all overwhelming and terrifying.

ML: But like Agnes herself, you persisted, so you must have been enjoying the work even though it felt daunting.

MC: Oh, I was. I loved seeing the places where she had lived and traveled. I loved learning about the Armory Show. I read Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoirs and loved the bristling excitement of the 1910s in New York City. And we, my wife Gloria and I, did things like travel to Cathedral City and Taos. We also flew south for the day to Orange County from San Francisco to see a marvelous exhibition that paired Agnes with Georgia O’Keeffe—seeing her paintings up next to O’Keeffe’s was a complete thrill. And made us ponder yet again why O’Keeffe was so successful and Pelton was not.

ML: Did you come to any conclusions about that?

MC: I did. The obvious one was that O’Keeffe had Alfred Steiglitz championing her in his 291 Gallery and then marrying her and taking care of the business side of things. Also, I think temperamentally O’Keeffe was always absolutely confident about her talent, whereas Pelton suffered anxiety about hers and stopped painting for years at a time. There’s also that background of growing up with two women who had retreated from life. And lastly, she treated the making of art as a spiritual practice, which meant she needed solitude and inspiration, and she took all the time she needed with each painting. Many of them took years to complete.

ML: And now she is again the focus of a major museum exhibition.

MC: She is! It’s so exciting. It was put together by the Phoenix Museum of art, traveled to Santa Fe, and will open in March at the Whitney in New York before returning to her desert and ending at the Palm Springs Art Museum. I cannot wait to see it.

ML: And how fitting that The Pelton Papers is being published in this year of Agnes’s rediscovery. For me, one of the deep pleasures of your novel is how beautifully you write about both Agnes’s life and her work—the two deeply intertwined. Reading your pages, I felt I could already see her work, but I am very happy that I will now be able to see her paintings not only in your words but in the world. Many congratulations on this wonderful accomplishment.        

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MARI COATES lives in San Francisco where she has been an arts writer and theater critic. Her regular column appeared in the SF Weekly with additional profiles and features appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle, East Bay Monthly, Advocate, and other news outlets. Her first novel, The Pelton Papers, is due out in April from She Writes Press, and she holds degrees from Connecticut College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Find her on Facebook (Mari Coates Author) and at maricoates.com. 

MARGOT LIVESEY is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Flight of Gemma Hardy, The House on Fortune Street (winner of the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award), Banishing Verona, Eva Moves the Furniture, The Missing World, Criminals, Homework, and Mercury. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vogue, and the Atlantic, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She was born in the Scottish Highlands, currently lives in the Boston area, and is a professor of fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

Blood Ties, Mystery and LSD: A Review of Paul Vidich's The Coldest Warrior

Paul Vidich’s The Coldest Warrior is a spy novel that teeters the line between reportage and fiction, history and the imagined. In the novel, Vidich writes the character of Charles Wilson to reflect former real-life CIA employee and biological warfare scientist Frank Olson. In the novel’s world of CIA cover ups and LSD experiments, the plot anchors itself in the true events of Frank Olson’s life and death after the CIA administered psychedelics to him against his knowledge and will in the 1950s.

In the novel’s opening chapter, Charles Wilson is murdered by CIA, and his character and all he knows of the truth, is silenced for the rest of the story. The following chapter picks up twenty years later with Jack Gabriel, a former colleague and friend of Wilson. The new director of intelligence asks Gabriel to find out what really happened to his late friend: who was there the night he was given LSD, what lead to his death, was Wilson’s death more than a suicide and how can the CIA keep whatever they find quiet.

Throughout the novel, Gabriel fights to know the truth, and—much like what happened in reality—Charles Wilson becomes a ghost of sorts, haunting those who remain through guilt, tightly-kept secrets, and a reminder of what can happen when one questions an organization like the CIA. With ever-political and self-serving motives, most of Wilson’s killers hide under the mask of do-gooders and innocent country club goers, but those whose conscience still eats away at them decades later, find themselves facing a fate unlike that of Charles Wilson himself.

The Coldest Warrior defies the ordinary spy thriller genre as Vidich grounds the novel deeply in the life story of Frank Olson, a CIA employee and scientist overseas. After growing concern and questioning of the CIA’s newest projects such as those having to do with biological warfare and mind control, Frank Olson was given LSD during a weekend trip with his colleagues at the CIA. This psychedelic experiment was a small part of the CIA’s MK Ultra project, a biological warfare project with the goal of testing and utilizing various substances for mind control. This drug-induced weekend sparked a series of tragic and many still unknown events which lead to Olson’s death in New York City, November 1953 when his hotel room window was found broken and he was found dead on the city sidewalk.

The Netflix documentary Wormwood tells Frank Olson’s story, all that we know of it, through Olson’s son, Eric. Eric Olson has spent his life digging for the truth: figuring out how, why, and because of whom his father plunged to that New York City sidewalk that November. For decades now, Eric Olson has dedicated his existence to definitively answering the question: a suicide, a slip or a murder? Despite a lifetime of searching, even digging up his father’s body, Eric Olson has been unable to uncover the whole truth due to the silence and secrets of the CIA.

By taking inspiration from true events for his latest novel, how does Vidich defy not just the spy thriller genre but the ordinary spy thriller author? Through his blood.

Paul Vidich, author of the The Coldest Warrior, is Eric Olson’s cousin and Frank Olson’s nephew. Vidich utilizes his uncle’s story as the grounding plot point for this new novel and incorporates verbatim quotations from Wormwood, press conferences and his cousin, Eric Olson, into the text. The novel touches upon the primary twists and turns of the actual Olson story: the question of jump or full, the politics of exhumation and CIA insiders with the tight-lipped truth.

Though Vidich utilizes his family history to write The Coldest Warrior and the character of Charles Wilson, Vidich doesn’t tell the story of the internal psychical turmoil that lead up to Olson or his character Wilson’s death. While Vidich touches upon the dark side of the CIA’s LSD use, he focuses more on the aftermath of what such secretive and unethical operations do to those involved: how it changes it their lives, catapults their career, and can even, years later, still get them killed, birthing a whole new set of secrets to be unveiled.

The Coldest Warrior reminds us that there are not only two sides to a story, but many intersecting sides to an infinitely-sided story that was ripped and torn apart, some of its contents buried for safe secret-keeping, some of them never having existed in the first place. Between the lines of his story, Vidich seems to ask: in the pursuit of truth, how can we piece together an infinitely-sided unfinished story? We can’t…or at least we can’t without getting some blood on our hands.

With Eric Olson’s life-deteriorating search for the truth and Vidich’s imagining of the truth, one could see The Coldest Warrior as a writing therapy of sorts, an exercise in filling in the blanks, imagining the unknown in order to help the family reckon with the mysterious death of their loved one. Paul Vidich’s The Coldest Warrior makes me wonder: can we heal from the pain of the unknown by writing light into the darkness?

The Price of Living Your Beliefs: A Review of Her Sister's Tattoo by Ellen Meeropol

Failing to learn from history is an unspoken warning in the new novel, Her Sister’s Tattoo, by Ellen Meeropol. Spanning decades and told from multiple points-of-view, the repercussions and lessons gleaned from the protests of the Vietnam War are rendered viscerally through the story of two sisters raised to be activists. Social activism has been present in all of Ellen Meeropol’s fiction. She comes by it naturally. She is married to Robby Meeropol, one of the surviving sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed as spies in 1953. Robby and his brother were later adopted by the Meeropol family.

Rosa and Esther have twin red star tattoos on their left breasts but their temperaments are not alike. Rosa, red-haired and fiery, sees activism as vital and necessary. The atrocities of Vietnam weigh heavily on her and she acts accordingly, sometimes without considering the consequences. Esther, the mother of an infant, is more cautious, as is her husband, a pediatrician. When the two attend an anti-war protest and mounted police begin to attack the protestors, Rosa suggests throwing the hard green apples they are carrying in their bag. Like many stories, a seemingly innocuous incident explodes into a major life-altering event when one of the apples hits a horse, causing the animal to throw the mounted policeman. A paralyzing injury is the result and both sisters are charged with felony offenses that could result in lengthy jail terms. Esther, in consultation with her attorney, testifies against her sister to avoid prison. This act leads to the estrangement of the sisters and Rosa’s disappearance for a time. Once she resurfaces and is charged (and labeled Red Rosa), the relationship that was once an anchor for both seems over.

Our current perilous times make this novel all the more relevant. My Sister’s Tattoo shows that sometimes well-intentioned actions can have longstanding consequences. Vietnam War protests did accomplish the goal of ending the war but many were maimed and killed both fighting and protesting. The implicit question never asked is if the price of living your beliefs is worth it. The story picks up with the next generation, the now young teen daughters of Rosa and Esther who meet at an activist camp their parents attended. Esther’s daughter, Molly, has trouble hearing the story she wasn’t told about her mother and the aunt she never knew. Emma, Rosa’s daughter “repeated the whole story again, about cops beating people and throwing apples and the horse rearing up and the cop falling down. Except this time she told it with two sisters, Rosa and Esther. This time it was worse because I knew what was coming, and her sentences punched holes in my lungs, up one side and down the other.”

The book demonstrates the costs and responsibilities of standing up for one’s beliefs. Has the country learned from Vietnam? What is the price of freedom? Is protesting a catalyst for change? Ellen Meeropol doesn’t answer these questions, but her characters wrestle with the consequences of both inaction and activism. Can families bridge differences? In our current times, lines have been drawn politically and it’s often difficult to open a dialogue with people of opposing views, as it is in this story. Esther contemplates her choices as the novel moves toward its conclusion. The years that have been lost will not be recovered but forgiveness and empathy can manifest in future generations. Perhaps the lessons of history are imperfect and ongoing and by staying active and alert, her characters, like all of us, claim the right to a more optimistic future.

An Interview with Cris Mazza, Author of Yet to Come

Kristina Marie Darling: Your novel, Yet to Come, will launch soon from BlazeVOX Books. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

Cris Mazza: I’d like readers to assume that Yet to Come can provide different gratifications or provide different responses from different kinds of readers . . . and that any kind of response or take-away is interesting to me. Among the various elements — for example the “setting” of the characters’ mid-lifespans being from the 80s to 2010, the aspects of male-victim spousal abuse, or the subplot of female sexual dysfunction — will come to the forefront in different orders for different readers. I wish I could hear from every reader to see which parts, characters, or story-lines spoke loudest. Basically, I always tried to write books that my mother could read and also my English professors could appreciate.

KMD: You’ve worked with many outstanding literary publishers over the course of your distinguished career.  What drew you to BlazeVOX Books for this particular text? 

CM: First, one of my former PhD students had a recent novel from BlazeVox, so I knew there was an appreciation for literature-off-the-beaten-path. Also, when I looked at the books, they each had a personalized size, shame and design, appropriate for the book itself and not a standard for all of their books.  I knew I would need a publisher sensitive to the repeated postcards in the book, which required the use of different fonts, an image of a postcard, etc. BlazeVox is open to a writer having a mental image and actual production input for what a book looks like as a finished product.

KMD: I admire your experimentation with form, which frequently encompasses templates that are not germane to literary texts:  postcards, lists of problems, handwritten notes, and more. What do these non-literary or found forms make possible within a given narrative? 

CM: I began doing this in earnest in my 2014 memoir Something Wrong With Her because my college journals were essential to the book containing a “me-then” who was not the same person writing the “real time” text. I realized I had to use images of the journals rather than retype the passages I wanted to use — to prevent myself from editing the earlier me. While researching my own cache of artifacts for that book, I found more: the handwritten notes, yearbook inscriptions, hand-drawn cartoons, etc., that I knew had to be seen and not just described. I think the book was able to be urgent and alive in more than one time-zone, from the “real time” text to 40 years earlier.

KMD: Relatedly, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the gender politics of genre. Is experimentation with — and challenging — received forms of discourse an inherently feminist act? Why or why not? 

CM: It traditionally largely hasn’t been. In the 70s and 80s when so much literary prose experimentation was disproportionately by male authors, a simple explanation was provided (I can’t recall the source): these men were rebelling against the established canon; but that canon, being predominately male, was not what women writers were moved to rebel against — they had to create their “canon” first. Instead, the mere act of speaking out at all, having a published written voice, was the initial “rebellion.” Then when I co-edited the “chick-lit” anthologies in the mid-90s, the publisher launched the project as a talent search for unknown or emerging women writers who were beginning more and more to challenge popular expectations of writing-by-women.

It’s difficult for me, personally, to say how the forms in my own writing is or might be a feminist or gender-related gesture because most of the writers who influenced me in terms of form were male since most of the writers taught to me in college were male; and yet the work of one of the female inclusions, Kathy Acker, for whatever reason did not speak to me. Female writers who later participated in my development, from Erica Jong to Alice Munro, were not experimenting so much with form.

KMD: As you promote YET TO COME, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?

I plan to be in my car heading west, to California where the novel is set, and making as many stops along the route was I can manage to arrange. Anyone interested in an event can feel free to contact me. 

KMD: What are you currently working on? What’s next?

CM: Related to my answer about the insertion of image-artifacts in my work, I’m working on a series of linked essays that make further use of this technique, or using form to “concretize” what the essay is saying. This concept is best characterized by “Ask The Depot Commander” in which the narrative of my father’s recollections of his experience in 1946 Nuremburg, Germany — plus original photos he took there — is formatted to lie side-by-side with researched historical details that correspond to the substances of his memory. For example, he described giving an orange from the Army mess to a German man, whose wife and child ate one segment a day and made the orange last two weeks; this personal anecdote is juxtaposed beside original text of a different tone, explaining U.S. occupation policies that stipulated sharing food with German citizens was against military orders.

Each essay, with a different topic but involving my family, will have a form that suits its needs.

Chasing Memory: A Review of Walking on the Ceiling by Aysegül Savas

Unreliable narrators abound in literary criticism. They are certainly no stranger to graduate seminars, where suspicious reading approaches interrogate what lies beneath and beyond the text. Yet Aysegül Savas’s Walking on the Ceiling transforms this uncertainty into a novel of longing and self-creation—a subtler tribute to Joan Didion’s insistence that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Nunu, a Turkish woman recounting her experiences in Paris and Istanbul, acknowledges embellishments and failures of memory. Far from a stale device, these distortions offer compelling glimpses into her psyche and motives. Even as Nunu upends the traditional writer/muse dynamic after meeting a British author—described only as M.—in Paris, she confronts her mother’s complex legacy.

The brief chapters that populate Walking on the Ceiling, some only a sentence long, fit well with Nunu’s early warning. Though she will “set down some of the facts” of her friendship with the writer M.,“stories are reckless things…When you tell a story, you set out to leave so much behind.” Large amounts of white space confirm this observation, creating room for what remains unsaid. Nunu’s friendship with M. reveals a similar dynamic; she becomes his de facto guide to Turkish culture. Meeting M. after a bookshop reading, she ingratiates herself with him as they trade impressions of Istanbul.

At first glance, we seem headed for an old story: a well-known male writer becomes fascinated with a younger woman. This initial take proves deceptive, however. M. admires Nunu as a perceived insider, praising her mastery of the Turkish language and intimate knowledge of Istanbul, but she may be the outsider and creator of the two. Though she remembers her mother fondly when speaking with M., she does not share less picturesque aspects of her childhood, including her father’s suicide. Nunu claims she is working on a novel about “Akif amca,” her mother’s former neighbor with western ties. While she assures M. that Akif amca was a great but undiscovered poet, she reveals elsewhere that she finds his writings to be “amateurish” and “didactic.” These fabrications seem typical of her interactions with others, as she convinced one former boyfriend that she was abused. But Nunu grows increasingly uncomfortable with their correspondence, accusing M. of using her as a “jukebox” of ready-made stories. Readers are left with the impression of an intriguing social chameleon, curating her self-image for every person she meets.

As the dynamic between the two unfolds, it becomes clear that this fractured, non-chronological narration is more than an end in itself. Nunu’s brief anecdotes about being a woman adrift in Paris feel especially poignant. Horrified when she orders a hot chocolate with steak tartare, an arrogant waiter mocks her when she dares to ask for a takeout box: “Sure…You can have it for breakfast, with a hot chocolate.” Not since Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight have I read a novel that captures the embarrassment and disorientation of a grieving expatriate so effectively. However uneven these reflections may be, a core emerges quickly: Nunu’s late mother. When her mother dies after an illness, she collects the remembrances, nostalgia, anger, and resentment that defined their relationship, attempting to form a cohesive story. But with each turn of this narrative kaleidoscope, her mother’s image keeps changing. She is alternately an eccentric, according to her sisters; a cold manipulator who ignores her husband’s despair; a distant mother grappling with family tragedy; and a sick woman desperate to reconnect with her daughter. Their failed attempts at connection are stark. As a child after her father’s death, Nunu plays what she calls the “silence game,” finding ways to give her mother space while claiming she is the one who needs solitude. Later, when her mother is eager to become closer, she uses that silence for rejection. Throughout Walking on the Ceiling, Nunu frets about the “damage” words can cause and the loss they incur, but it is clear that she cannot cast off the various lenses that color her memories.

Walking on the Ceiling adopts the well-worn tactic of unreliable narration with empathy and originality. Its elegiac prose confronts loss and emptiness with a deceptively muted tone, inviting readers to face the hollowness, inconsistency, but ultimate necessity of storytelling.

Camels in Kansas: The Alternative History of Farooq Ahmed's Kansastan

Farooq Ahmed’s Kansastan is a lush and poignant portrayal of familial rivalry set against the backdrop of a Civil War-era dystopian Kansas. The story of our anonymous narrator begins when he is a young stowaway in leg braces on a cart piled high with corpses. After his delivery to the mosque where he would spend his formative years, a woman named Maryam (apparently his aunt) arrives with Faisal, the narrator’s cousin, in tow. Faisal is believed to be a prophet, and from the beginning of his arrival at the mosque, the local community is in awe of his feats. (Faisal, at one point, creates a small geyser that people from miles around come to witness.) The narrator, however, finds himself feeling like the village idiot. He’s pushed aside and ridiculed, while Faisal’s “magic” affords him not only preferential treatment but also intense — and dangerous — reverence. From that point the story shifts to what is, in my mind, the overarching theme of the novel: competition. When Faisal and the narrator fall in love with the same woman, the mysteriously named Ms. A_____, their competition only heightens.

The unreliable narrator often dispenses sour thoughts about his cousin, but even before Faisal and Maryam’s arrival, he is plagued with adolescent bitterness that can only come from being continually referred to as variations on a theme of “the ‘malformed urchin.’” As such, he reads like a Civil War-era Muslim Holden Caulfield. Sarcasm and an overinflated sense of injustice constitute the brunt of the narrator’s personality, which makes an even more interesting character juxtaposition with Faisal, whom we recognize as insufferable in a pious sort of way based on the narrator’s point of view. Anyone who has ever been an angst-filled teen can relate to the narrator, and I often found myself chuckling at his internal monologue. At one point, following a festivity at the mosque, the narrator remarks, “And like that, my cousin and I passed into official man-hood. We shook hands and then hugged, though I had to fight the urge to smother him in my embrace. As I have said, I was merciful.”

It’s important to note that Ahmed has chosen to write from an often under-represented perspective in a completely novel way. In regard to a wider conversation about religious fanaticism (present both in this novel and in our society), the narrator’s home is Kansas, which is embroiled in a bitter battle with Missouri (“spit after saying it.”) Early in the novel, during a moment of anger and inspiration, the narrator decides he will be the one to take charge of the crusade against Missouri. He says, “I resolved that I would undertake this labor in a manner befitting a stalwart Fanatic — a hard veteran of Kansas! I was all on fire for it.” Throughout the novel Ahmed expertly provides poignant examples of zealotry from both Kansans and Missourians, reinforcing the idea that fanaticism in any form is, of course, a scourge.

While Muslims, of course, existed in America during the time of the Civil War, we very infrequently hear about their contributions to society in any way. Here, Ahmed has rearranged history so that Muslims are at the forefront. This provides readers with much-needed perspective on the effects of historical alienation. Kansastan is full of references to Islam and the Quran, which was exciting to discover for a person unfamiliar with the religion. The novel itself reads as a sort of mythology, with a deep sense of humanity and humor.

With this novel, Farooq Ahmed has created a vivid world in which the history very nearly mirrors our own — with several unexpected, devastating, and delightful amendments.