An Interview with Chris Wiewiora, Author of The Distance Is More Than an Ocean

The Distance Is More Than an Ocean is a recounting of Chris Wiewiora’s experience coming to America from Poland, his father’s home country, as a child and then returning as an adult, forcing him to reconsider the homeland that framed his childhood and wrestle with the tenuousness of memory. The moments of The Distance Is More Than an Ocean are situated distinctly in place, but also in places: from a Polish elementary school classroom to an imagined Mississippi River, from Florida’s Coco Beach to the gray, rainy streets of Warsaw. Set against varied landscapes, these reflections on travel, memory, and childhood show the complex ways in which our environments both shape us and are reshaped by our recollections of the people we were in those places—and by the people we became when we left them.

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You chose specifically to subtitle/categorize The Distance Is More Than an Ocean as a “travelogue memoir.” Where do you see the line drawn between those two genres? Why was it important to you to have readers consider this as both?

I wanted to label my chapbook with the genre of nonfiction, since the publisher Finishing Line Press’s books and most chapbooks are poetry. I wanted to make sure that readers knew that my chapbook, while lyrical, isn’t poetry. Still, nonfiction contains so many sub-genres.

Nonfiction is the only genre defined by what it isn’t: not-fiction. Who knows why it isn’t labeled non-drama or non-poetry; perhaps since it contains both? Anyway, I wanted to define my chapbook by what nonfiction it is—not just that I didn’t make it up like fiction—and so I used the subtitle of travelogue and memoir.

Both a travelogue and a memoir follow records. A travelogue is a record of travels, while a memoir is a record of memories. I wanted readers to know where I was going in my writing: traveling from the United States to Poland, but also traveling from my adulthood to my childhood.

In The Distance Is More Than an Ocean, I switched between present tense for my travels back to Poland and past tense for my travels back to my memories of Poland. I used tense as a line between the two sub-genres. I saw the line between them as what happened (travelogue) and what I remembered (memoir), but the chapbook walks that line between the sub-genres like when I returned to my family’s Warsaw neighborhood and I was confronted with mis-remembering our duplex, which could serve as a metaphor for the sub-genres under nonfiction: a house split in half with two entrances but under the same roof.

There is also a relationship here between prose and poetry. A poem by James Seay serves as an epigraph to the book, and these pieces reflect the way poetry thrives on compressing, fragmenting, and extending beyond singular moments. What roles do the processes of compressing and fragmenting memory play in writing about the past?

Ten years ago I began The Distance Is More Than an Ocean as a poetry collection titled Side by Side. The poems explored my mother’s West Virginian family as well as my father’s Polish family. My poetry sprawled and swelled and contained multitudes. Side by Side contained much too much!

Seay’s poem “Patching Up the Past with Water” gave me a colander to strain through the flood of my writing. I wanted to sift through my past. I wanted to find the quicksilver. I needed to find a way to contain what mattered, but it felt so slippery.

Six years ago, I began to write the poems into essays that became The Distance Is More Than an Ocean. First, I wrote an essay titled “Welcome Back”—where I visited my family’s old duplex on a beautiful summer day in Warsaw, while I remembered the cold and gray and cramped other seasons there. The walk through the neighborhood made me confront what I had remembered with what I then experienced.

I felt like my memory was being rewritten. My memory was fragmented and so my writing needed to reflect that. About three years ago, I began to distill those essays. I compressed them from my mother and father’s family to only my father’s family, and then from the United States to only in Poland, and then within Poland to only Warsaw, and I continued to compress my travels and my memories until I could contain them in a chapbook.

When we write about a place from our past, I think we’re not evoking so much as recreating what we remember of that place. How did you negotiate Poland as both a historical space and a personal one?

If the past is prologue, then place is the past’s foundation for the present. I read some Polish history and travel books, but I didn’t use any of that in my chapbook. I wasn’t writing about the historical past and place of Poland, but rather I was rewriting the personal.

I started the chapbook with flying back to Poland—to the same airport, but renamed—and I finished it with my walk through our Warsaw neighborhood. At the end of the chapbook, I considered how the Nazis destroyed the capital’s Old Town area but after the war the Poles rebuilt it from preserved paintings. I had written a personal way from my own history: I had my poems from ten years ago and I had my memories from decades before that—both served as foundations for me to rebuild Warsaw from my return trip and from my childhood.

As a child you viewed yourself not as Polish, but as an American growing up in Poland, longing for the country you considered your real home. But your father was a Polish immigrant, making Poland, to an extent, your family’s homeland. How has writing about these places allowed you to explore the personal/internal tension of being pulled between them?

I used to only say, my last name is Polish. Now, after writing about my past, I say I’m half-Polish.

I want to specifically thank an editor, Tina Schumann, who anthologized my essay, “M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I,” in Two-Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents. That essay served as the undercurrent through my childhood in The Distance Is More Than an Ocean, where I had moved from a Polish kindergarten to the American School of Warsaw and when I had refused to learn more Polish while also not fully knowing English. Tina welcomed me to claim both places.

However, both places don’t exist anymore. The United States that welcomed my father’s family after the war doesn’t philosophically exist anymore, but also the Poland of my family’s homeland doesn’t literally exist anymore. When my grandmother was dying, my father showed her Google Maps and she traced a river back to the valley where her father had been a sort of border patrol agent. However, their village is now in Ukraine.

More recently, my father found out from his cousin that his grandfather’s wife’s family name might be Ukrainian! Some of my father’s family refuses to accept that. However, my first thought was, what Ukrainian writers do I know?

Language itself is a part of this tension as well, as the child version of Chris Wiewiora rejects the language that makes him less American. In one vignette, you’ve returned to Poland as an adult and, as you observe your father and a family friend converse in Polish, narrate that you “don’t remember enough of the language to follow their conversation.” “Remember” is a conspicuous, telling word to apply to language.

Could you talk about how lacking (or losing from memory) a language creates a barrier between a person and a place in which that language is spoken? In what ways would knowing that language allow one to access that place differently?

Language makes us human and allows us to connect to other humans. Language accesses history and thoughts and dreams. Language allows us to remember.

We tell ourselves stories. As Joan Didion would add, “In order to live.” We retell those stories so we continue to live on. But if you don’t know a language—can’t speak it, can’t hear it—then you can’t tell stories and those stories die.

During my return visit, the way I “heard” Polish was my Dad translating it into English for me. At the same time, I had been immersed in the language of Polish while growing up in Poland. I had grown up hearing it and speaking some of it, but thinking I forgot most of it. However, when tapped memory seeps and then trickles and then flows. By the end of our return visit to Poland, I found myself babbling small phrases and then the concepts of what people said formed like shapes in clouds, readying to rain understanding.

The Real United States: A Conversation with Matthew Baker

Named one of Variety’s “10 Storytellers To Watch,” Matthew Baker is the author of the story collections Why Visit America and Hybrid Creatures and the children’s novel Key Of X, originally published as If You Find This. His stories have appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, and Conjunctions, and in anthologies including Best Of The Net and Best Small Fictions. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center For The Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Prairie Center Of The Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he has an MFA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the founding editor of Nashville Review. His other projects include Early Work. Born in the Great Lakes region of the United States, he currently lives in New York City.

I’ve been a fan of Matthew Baker’s work since 2013, when, as an editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review, I was introduced to his story, “Goods.” A year later, the journal published another of his stories, “Html,” a story partially written in code.

When I read “Goods” for the first time, I was a first-year MFA student, writing a series of unsuccessful stories and struggling to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be or could be. Baker’s stories were playful and idea-driven, but simultaneously had heart, had the ability to move me. He provided me with an example of the sort of writing I might want to do.

I jumped at the opportunity to read Baker’s new collection, Why Visit America, forthcoming in August, and I was not disappointed. The stories he tells are funny and heartbreaking and familiar and surprising all at once. In this interview, Baker discusses writing high-concept narratives, how speculative fiction can allow us to grapple with controversial topics more genuinely, and the films that inspire his writing.

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Dana Diehl: Many of your stories seem to be driven by “What if…?” questions. What if men became obsolete? What if children were raised by the government instead of parents? What if people could become data? I love how deliciously high-concept this collection is. Did all of your stories begin with a concept? Did any of them begin instead with a character or image, for example?

Matthew Baker: I’m embarrassed to say that every story began with a concept. The book itself began with a concept: thirteen parallel-universe stories (one for every stripe in the flag) that would span all fifty states of the country, and that together would create a composite portrait of the real United States: a Through The Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.

I once submitted a story to a prestigious literary magazine, and the editor rejected the story with a note that said: “too high-concept for us.” For a writer like me, what that note actually said was: “don’t submit to us again.” I can only do high-concept.

DD: What was it like to write a short story collection with an overarching concept already in mind? Did it make it easier? Did it ever feel restrictive?

MB: It was a tremendous challenge. I loved that about it though. That was what made the writing fun.

DD: Despite these stories being very high-concept, they are also movingly character-driven, grounded in an individual human experience. Do you think character is key to writing narratives that move beyond a concept and become stories? What advice do you have for writers working in a similar genre, who struggle to move beyond their initial concept and develop character or find their inciting incident?

MB: I think about storytelling less in terms of “plot” and “character” and more in terms of “idea” and “emotion.” Strategically, I don’t approach a story thinking “how can I develop a plot?” or “how should I develop this character?” I approach a story thinking, “Given this premise, what combination of events and desires will maximize its emotional impact?” In my experience the nature of the work becomes very clear very quickly when plot and character are viewed as ingredients in an emotional reaction in the reader, rather than simply as necessary elements of a story.

DD: Was there a story in this collection that especially challenged you? What do you do when the right ingredients are difficult to find?

MB: “To Be Read Backward” was the greatest challenge conceptually—trying to imagine the physics of that universe accurately, and to be consistent in how the narrator uses language, especially verbs, to describe the events of the story. But the story that was the greatest challenge narratively was “Testimony Of Your Majesty.” I wrote about half of the story and then got stuck. I knew the emotional reactions that I wanted to synthesize, and I had assembled some reliable ingredients, but I still couldn’t quite figure out how to achieve what I wanted. I set the story aside for a couple of years, came back to the story, struggled with the story, set the story aside again, came back to the story, struggled with the story, set the story aside again. That was the process. Years of failed experiments. That story was a work in progress from 2013 through 2018.

DD: Were there any concepts or ideas or stories or experiments written for this collection that ultimately didn’t make it in?

MB: There were a number of concepts that didn’t work on the page. And there’s one story that I actually completed and even published—a story called “The Eulogist” that appeared in New England Review in 2012—that I was still planning on including in the collection as late as 2018. Ultimately, though, I decided the story was just too rudimentary and clumsy. Also, I wanted the collection to have a neutral emotional pH—there could be stories that were depressing and there could be stories that were uplifting, but I didn’t want the collection overall to register as depressing or uplifting—and “The Eulogist” would have given the collection an overall unneutral pH. So that story got replaced by “The Sponsor.”

DD: The issues tackled in these stories are painfully familiar. You explore violence against women, parents struggling to accept their transitioning child, and flaws within the justice system, just to name a few. But by placing these issues within parallel universes or dystopian (or utopian) futures, you allow readers to see them with new eyes. Why do you prefer speculative fiction for these stories instead of straight realism?

MB: In any human society, having a constructive conversation about social or political issues can be difficult, and we live in a country so radically polarized that at times it seems to be on the verge of a civil war. If you try to have a conversation with somebody about a topic like climate change or gun control, immediately these walls come up, these psychological barriers as thick as brick. It’s become impossible to talk about anything important. There’s no way to do it—unless you disguise what you want to talk about, cloak the topic in a seemingly harmless form. I turned to speculative fiction in hopes of giving readers a space to genuinely grapple with the ideas behind these issues and to genuinely access the emotions involved.

DD: If you had to live inside one of these futures you’ve imagined, which one would it be? Why?

MB: “A Bad Day In Utopia.” I wouldn’t mind having to live in a menagerie, and I honestly do think the world would be noticeably improved.

DD: How would you spend your time in this hypothetical menagerie?

MB: Probably reading, writing, napping, and trying to convince the guards to play chess with me.

DD: You’ve also written a really wonderful children’s book titled If You Find This. Can you talk about the experience of writing this novel and how it differed from your experience writing short stories for adults? Were the experiences surprisingly similar in any ways?

MB: Well, If You Find This was also high-concept: a children’s novel narrated partly in music dynamics and math notations. And like Why Visit America, If You Find This is a book that’s about place. It’s a Michigan novel, a Great Lakes novel. But If You Find This was also a very personal book for me. It’s not autobiographical, but in that book I was writing about my childhood and about my family and about my friends back home. Why Visit America is different in that I wasn’t writing about my own life in any of the stories in this book. In Why Visit America, what’s personal are the issues.

DD: Who or what are your inspirations outside of the literary world? Are there any filmmakers or artists or musicians who influenced the stories in this collection?

MB: The films Her and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind had a tremendous influence on the book, as models of emotionally rich sci-fi. The anime Sword Art Online, which for me was a master class on sincerity and vulnerability and the virtues of sentimentality. The video games BioShock and BioShock Infinite, which deliver social and political commentary with such supreme grace and skill.

But—I hadn’t thought of this until just now—maybe the biggest influence was an old VHS tape that I discovered at my father’s house when I was a child. Written on the tape in my father’s handwriting were two words: “The Wall.” I distinctly remember watching that tape later that afternoon, alone in the basement, lying on the carpet, gazing up at an old cathode-ray television. It was Pink Floyd — The Wall, the film adaptation of the rock opera by Pink Floyd. Seeing it was a revelation for me. I hadn’t realized until that moment that a music album could be more than a collection of random songs—that together the songs could tell some larger story. From the beginning I’ve thought of Why Visit America as a concept album, and that old VHS tape is what taught me what a concept album is.

DD: Is there a short story collection that you feel like does this especially well?

MB: Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, although that’s composed primarily of nonfiction. And Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, along with Invisible Cities, although that’s technically considered a novel. I especially adore The Periodic Table.

DD: Who should read Why Visit America? Who is your ideal reader?

MB: All true Americans.

A Review of Little Feasts by Jules Archer

“If I could marry a myth it would be monstrous, but not monstrous like frightening — monstrous as in a monstrous love” states the narrator of “How to Love a Monster with Average-Sized Hands” in Jules Archer’s collection Little Feasts. It is a monstrous love that is explored in this collection, the women are desirous, hungry, for it, while the men are monstrous and running, running towards the women or away from them or away with them. The stories team with this hunger, this passion — the absolute heat and power of it. Hunger begins to feel a lot like love and love becomes all consuming, powerful, monstrous. Jules Archer skillfully examines and explores the desire to devour and be devoured.

The struggle to fulfill the need to be loved only serves to fuel this hunger. In the opening story “In-n-Out Doesn’t Have Bacon” the narrator, Catherine, who hungers for meat, who sleeps with Tom while grieving the death of her husband, puts it best: “My stomach feels greasy from the burger, from Tom, from some strange artificial sense of connection.” Food and love are basic human needs but she is filling herself with the wrong things, with fast food and a man who is more interested in her sister than in her. Her grief, her hunger have driven her to these things and she has filled herself but is still left wanting. “Hunger never felt so hard.” Catherine says.

It’s the same for Elizabeth in “Everlasting Full” Elizabeth who was cold and hungry until she ate her husband Eddie when he said that he would stop cooking for her. Ginny in “Hard to Carry and Fit in a Trunk” eats but is still hungry to be chased, wanted. So much so that she fantasizes about being kidnapped, particularly by Buffalo Bill who covets her size, who would celebrate her hunger. There is a striking and terrifying honesty in the way Ginny wants to be skinny enough to be considered ‘prey’. Here, Archer is holding up a mirror to society with our beauty standards, our rape culture and we deserved to be loved, but not like this. These stories push wanting to the extreme but that is what wanting to be loved feels like — a huge overwhelming hunger that we would do anything to get, and anything to keep.

The dangers of women loving men run under the surface of all the stories. There is a never-ending reminder of how our desires mix with our vulnerabilities, how our hunger puts us at risk. Forever in the back of the women’s minds is the fact that they love, they hunger, for someone who could kill them. In “My L.A Jerry” the narrator exaggerates this knowledge by having an affair with a man, a stranger who visits the Museum of Death where she works. “Nothing says romance like a dismembered headless torso.” She muses.

In these stories, however, the women get angry and they fight back. In these stories expectations are challenged, tropes are subverted and the men get eaten or beaten and the women take power into their own hands.

In “Far Away From Everywhere” the narrator, only a teenager, is in a family taken into a cult by the father. Her anger buzzes in her body like bees, her anger is hot. Her friend Sissy lights a match and burns everything down and the narrator, with her sister, move to warmer Phoenix with their grandmother. This transition from cold and hunger to warmth and safety repeats. Elizabeth is angry about the cold and hunger she experienced as a child and vows to keep herself safe whatever the cost. When Elizabeth meets the man she is to marry she is in a cold bar but his hands are hot and warm her up, she does whatever it takes to keep this warmth. In “Backseat Blues” Maybell’s mother drives into the cold lake while Maybell, angry at her mother and more attracted to the light and warmth outside of the car, was spared. In “Skillet” a pan is passed down, daughter to daughter, sizzling and cooking. The narrator practices swinging it high as she looks at her mother’s face, bruised by her boyfriend. The images of anger mixing with heat, coupled with the idea of warmth equaling safety, leads to the idea that a woman’s anger can keep her safe.

Archer also plays with form, updating tired old horror movie tropes. In “The Ice Cream Cone” the narrator is running from a man, she notes how he should not being able to chase her so well due to his weight and lack of grace but this is how a typical horror movie goes; the woman stands no chance regardless of what the man looks like. Archer lists what this woman has had to learn as a result of growing up in this world “the boy in high school sticking his sneakered foot in your crotch beneath your conjoined desks.” And because she has escaped before (over and over), she escapes again. She stops, turns and pokes his belly with her pink ice cream spoon. The spoon, an image reminiscent of childhood, like a nod to how girls are forced to learn the possibility of danger so soon. And with that the trope is quite literally stopped in its tracks.

Archer’s matter-of-fact language faces head-on the realities of what it is like to be a woman in our society. She pairs this style with beautiful turns of phrase and fantastical elements to create a dreaminess and playfulness that evokes childhood. The overall effect being that Little Feasts presents a complex picture of what it is to want to love as a women who has grown up in this world. Her stories are bold, unapologetic, honest, and tender. It is a beautiful collection that encourages its readers to explore their desires and needs, and to confront their ingrained fears. We cannot fight the wanting but we can fight for what we want.

A Review of The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross by Geoffrey Gatza

The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross by Geoffrey Gatza is a collection of modern day fairy tales that are each unique and yet have a strand of connectivity between them. I was immediately interested in picking up this collection of short stories as I was curious to see how Gatza balanced relatable messages in a modern setting that is still filled with magic and imagination. The cover — and its subsequent images inside — seems to convey a message of fun antics in store for readers of all ages. Inside they will find six short stories ranging from a few pages to multiple sections, but more importantly, they will read tales of determination, excitement, and the meaning of family.

The collection starts off with the story of the book’s namesake. It follows the young Albert Ross as he befriends a wild albatross who let him escape beyond his home. Within his home, Albert’s family is constantly focused, ironically, on other modes of communication: his mother is constantly on her phone, his father is on his computer, and his sister stays in her room with hints that she is communicating to friends via some kind of technology. They are all distracted by these means of escapism and yet they fail to see the truth of Albert and the Albatross. While their technology allows for them to hear about the albatross, they each ignore that he exists beyond their technology. The albatross is a means for escape for Albert and he takes the young boy away from home to meet a family that spends time together and gifts him a decoratively carved rock. Albert is the only one who experiences true escape via the albatross as he experiences what it is like to spend time with a family who is focused on one another. It is not until he comes back and his mother sees him being happy that it begins to change his relationship with his family. We are left with hope that his family members will put down the technology and spend time with him and each other instead of by themselves. Being able to spend time together as a family is the most important escape of all as seen by this story.

Talking about family, we are led into reading “Emory Bennett’s Halloween,” which follows a young Emory and his friend Henry. Henry’s mom is going through chemotherapy whereas Emory’s dad is learning how to walk again as an amputee. The boys discuss a riddle about the “one word of human knowledge” that could be death, life, or even recovery before going to a friend’s house to look for a ghost that lives in the attic. While Henry discovers that the ghost is actually a cat and keeps the secret to him and Emory, Henry understands that “sometimes we need our ghosts” in order to move forward. As both Emory and Henry have seen each of their parental figures go through near-death experiences, it only makes sense that in order to live they must focus on recovery and the future. People must understand what haunts them and their personal pasts in order to move forward whether that be away from cancer or losing a loved one like Eliza’s mother. It’s important to understand their grief before they work towards a brighter tomorrow.

In “The Butterflies of Cranberry Chase,” Gatza continues on the individual focus of relationships between children and parents. Crispin and his mother turn into butterflies by a spell put upon them by their neighbor who happens to be a witch. After spending the evening together flying around the witch’s garden, she turns them back into their normal selves. Living the afternoon without its threat of wildlife — like the witch’s pet crow who we later find out is harmless — and potentially being squished makes being a butterfly more exciting and full of life. Gatza addresses the idea of living a life even if afraid that it might be the last day or moment makes life cherished more and those who you spend it with more precious. Life is not truly lived until wings are grown and challenges are taken on with those we love in order to push ourselves.

The longest and last of the stories is “A Rocket Full of Pie,” which follows a young rabbit, Freddie, as he is challenged by his uncle to think outside of the box when Freddie has to remember a poem for school. The pair reimagine the familiar nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence” to it being about a rocket full of pie. This whimsical change surprisingly allows Freddie to win the poetry presentation in his class and he later presents it to his family and the school. His usually stern and strict teacher surprisingly becomes the one who truly wants Freddie to challenge what he is taught and look at it from new angles — a lesson useful to all regardless of age.

Gatza’s collection of short stories highlight important ideas such as connecting with family members, living the fullest life, challenging how to think beyond the obvious, and learning how to handle grief. Each of these lessons are truly important for both children and adults alike. What connects each of these stories, however, is the ability to experience each day with someone that readers care about whether that be a family member, a parent, a friend, or a sibling. This collection has magic and mayhem that increasingly gets more and more whimsical with each passing story that makes it enjoyable for readers, but its heart beats powerfully throughout it all. The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross by Geoffrey Gatza is a moving and playful collection of short stories that will appeal to both children and their parents.

Once Upon A Wild(Ness)

What would it be like if land came to life? If it murmured muddy syllables and moved in moss and tidal swells? Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood is a book where land moves, speaks, and breathes new life into our world. With mystifying lyricism and illustrations, these collaborators conjure a realm of ruin and rewilding — a realm in which the land reclaims its own sacred magic. 

On a mysterious salt-and-shingle island stands a decaying concrete structure known as The Green Chapel. Inside the structure, a nuclear ritual is underway, led by an ominous figure known as The Armourer. However, crossing land, sea, and time, five non-human forces converge to stop this ritual from being completed. These five totemic forces are she, he, it, they and as, and together, they become Ness. 

This island Ness seeks to reclaim was inspired by the Orford Ness National Nature Reserve on the Suffolk coast of England. During the Cold War, Orford Ness was used as a testing site for the atomic bomb by the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment and the Royal Aircraft Establishment. Continuing through the 1960s, half-buried concrete structures were built to contain these lethal weapons. Now, Orford Ness is a sanctuary for wildlife. 

Chinese water deer and the elusive hare roam the landscape, and barn owls and marsh harriers mottle the skies. From its brackish lagoons and reed marshes to its mud flats and vegetated shingle, Orford Ness offers a sliver of wildness to surrounding plant and animal life. The former Bomb Ballistics Building and other military structures on the island have been converted into nature viewing spots for visitors.  

Similarly, the landscape in Macfarlane and Donwood’s Ness is a place of contrasts. The island in Ness is a site of potential hostility and danger because of The Armourer’s nuclear ritual, yet the landscape aches for freedom from human violence and domination. This island has a protector: Ness. Willow-boned, Ness moves by hyphae and sings in birds. Ness speaks in swifts and has skin of lichen and moss. Ness breathes in rain and exhales rust. Ness has hag stones for eyes. Ness sends “flints through time to foretell their seeings.” Ness is here. Ness is now. Ness begs to be heard: “Listen. Listen now. Listen to Ness.” Ness is multiple; it is being, place, and time, and it has come to reclaim the land. 

The image at the core of Ness is the hag stone, as it’s known in Great Britain. Found in dry riverbeds and along the seashore, hag stones are stones with naturally occurring holes in them created by water erosion. According to folklore across Europe, hag stones are believed to possess a variety of magical properties and offer protection for those who find and carry the stones. It’s said that to look through such a stone is to see into the future or the past—to open a portal between realms. Ness acts as a hag stone itself, giving us a glimpse of the deep time that enfolds us, and as we peer through it, we can see the past and the future we face. 

Ness is a feral and startling incantation that pushes against the extinction of wildness. Weaving threads of ancient myth and Middle English storytelling, Macfarlane and Donwood create an illustrated poem-prose-play that brings to life the fundamental crisis of the Anthropocene: climate change and rapid globalization. As a response to the incipient threat of climate change, this modern mythical tale ruminates on the relationship between humanity and Nature.

At its core, Ness asks us how we defend ourselves from the dangers we inflict upon Nature, and consequently, ourselves — the dangers mankind creates as a result of our own hubris, ignorance, and taste for dominance. These dangers are visually realized by artist Stanley Donwood. Donwood’s shadowy illustrations capture a rooted sense of place that sprawls and anchors Macfarlane’s lilting words. Through this illustrated poem-novella-fable, Macfarlane and Donwood remind us that Nature is the force that tethers the past and future to the land and that humanity and Nature are bound to one another. 

Ness is a timely book that speaks to the power of Nature and its indomitability—it reminds us of a world beyond human. Macfarlane writes with the vision of Nature reasserting itself and reclaiming its power to flourish and provide life. Though humans are now considered to be the dominant species, our legacy will pass, and everything will once again return to the land, the wildness. 

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.”

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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.