The Whirlwind of Beginning and End: A Review of Our Last Blue Moon

I knew how the story ended before I picked up Our Last Blue Moon—the short version, at least. Alan Cheuse, a widely published author, fiction professor at George Mason University’s MFA program, and the longtime “Voice of Books” on NPR’s All Things Considered, died suddenly and tragically in 2015. In the years following his death, I’ve met Kris O’Shee a couple of times at various literary events in the Washington D.C. area. People at these events who knew Kris, who knew who she was, would tell me, in a low voice like the ones usually reserved for funerals, “That’s Alan’s widow.” The gravity of his loss was clear in their furtive glances, their stares, their whispers—the awkward sympathetic motions made by people struggling with how to deal with a loss.

I never met Alan. I came to Fairfax, Virginia, and the graduate creative writing program where he taught four years after his passing. Still, though, his presence looms large. The Alan Cheuse International Writers Center, founded at George Mason University soon after his passing, constantly puts out great work bringing the work of international writers and translators to a broader audience. They constantly honor Alan’s lifelong passion, as the son of a Russian immigrant father, for gaining experiences and wisdom to broaden his own cultural understanding. Faculty and alumni who knew him talk about him often, remembering their time with him fondly and continuing to share stories, like the way he always kept chocolate in his desk at school, just in case somebody came by and needed a pick me up. Even though Alan has been gone for years now, and the students currently working through the program never met him, he is still very much a part of our educations.

It is because Alan’s spirit and memory permeates every aspect of the writing program at George Mason that I was so excited to pick up Kris’s book. In addition to his teaching and his kindness, one thing that people always talk about is how much Alan and Kris loved each other. Opening Our Last Blue Moon was like stepping into a fairytale, even though I knew the ending was anything but a happily ever after.

From the first chapter, I was swept away. Kris has a skill in writing that many writers practice their entire careers to achieve and that some never master; her writing is genuine, undramatized, brutally, breathlessly real. The craft elements we learn in formal writing courses— narrative distance, pacing, emotional balance—all seem to come naturally to Kris, like she’s picked up these skills through osmosis over decades of spending much of her social time in Alan’s circle of writer friends. She invites you warmly and completely into her life, her story, creating a feeling of a personal relationship with her, one where calling her Ms. O’Shee feels too formal and cold. When Kris starts telling the story, there is no need to imagine how she must have felt picking up the phone to learn her husband had been in an accident. It bleeds through the page.

This raw authenticity never lets up through the whole book. In both the happiest and most tragic moments, Kris manages to walk the line between putting enough power behind her words to bring the reader into the room with her without falling into the melodrama one might anticipate of a debut author. The moment Kris and Alan meet, their first kiss, their first shared apartment in Washington D.C., their final conversation; all of it is imbued with life and careful finesse.

The structure of the book, too, is a testament to how deep their connection went. Oscillating in time, mostly between the week they first met and the final weeks of Alan’s life, Kris shares their picturesque love-at-almost-first-sight meeting at an artist’s retreat right alongside the moments where their love was at its most intense. Kris did not have to convince me of their bond; I felt it from the way she wrote, the words Alan wrote that she chose to share again within her own work, and the moments she decided to share with the world. Theirs was a romance that needed no evidence, no verification from the world. In this way, Our Last Blue Moon is unlike any love story I have ever read.

Ultimately, I walked away from this book wanting to sit down and have a conversation with Kris O’Shee. I wanted to hear more of her stories, learn more of her life and her life with Alan, and to become her friend. The way she tells her story made me feel like I had already made a significant step toward friendship, toward sipping sweet tea on her screened-in Washington D.C. porch chatting and gossiping like old friends. I don’t know that I’ve ever had such a strong wish to really know an author after reading their work, but Kris made that desire encompass me. Her writing is an open invitation into her world, her love, her grief, an experience I found myself not wanting to part with. So, in lieu of tea on her porch, I have recommended this book to anybody I can—young and old, writers and nonwriters, romance lovers and memoir enthusiasts alike—urging them to get a copy as soon as possible so they, too, can feel as I have. While I wait, I’ll just pick up the book and start again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer Child: An Essay by Lisa Renee

Kathe and I are Olympic swimmers, passing the summer days in her tiny blue above-ground pool. We score each other (9.7!, 8.9!, 10!!) after magnificent flips and dives and she almost always wins because she’s older and a little bit mean. We are absolutely convinced of our superior skills. We are quite possibly the best at everything.

Kathe is my neighbor; when you’re a child, the most important quality in a summer friend is proximity. She’s a little older, she has a pool, and her father takes us to the 7–Eleven for Coke Slurpees when the afternoon gets so hot that we begin to melt and complain. On Tuesday evenings, her parents take us to Rustler Steak House and I get a rib-eye, well-done because of the crusty black char that we now know causes death. She’s my very best friend, until school swallows and separates us in the fall.

We spend the summer almost exclusively at her house because she’s sort of an only child and I’m the oldest of four. Her house is bigger, quieter, and cooler, in both temperature and amenities. She has access to endless soda, the best of 70’s junk food, and a servile mother. She also has a basement where her much older brother’s record collection awaits with bean bag chairs and a vaguely dangerous, psychedelic vibe. It is there I learn about the Beatles and Ringo is my crush, to my enduring quiet shame. We listen to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on a near endless loop and I still wonder what that did to me.

Upstairs, we playact Cher — Half-Breed Cher, not Sonny and Cher Cher — and I always have to be Cher’s little sister because I’m younger. I ask every time if I can be Cher and the answer is always no. Kathe tries to convince me that this little sister is cool, maybe even cooler than Half-Breed Cher, but I never buy it. We dress in a child’s found version of the befeathered diva and parade down stairs and out the front door to stand on two tree stumps and sing made-up songs in our best full-throated approximation of the half-breed amazon.

We walk into town carrying a small bag of dog shit for the veterinarian (“stool samples,” my mother says, and she has somehow convinced me this is normal). After dropping off the parcel, we head to the drug store where we pool our change and purchase one package of fake nails. Later, we lie in the lush grass, each of us admiring one elegant long-nailed hand. I feel very beautiful and womanly with these nails and I brush them on my cheeks and drag them through my hair, gently.

We sit on fence rails under the mulberry trees and pick the ripe fruit, stuffing our mouths, staining every exposed bit of ourselves and all of our clothing. My mother will yell at me later about my purple feet and ruined shorts. We sit on the fat pony in the field and chatter about nothing and everything. The pony is so warm and alive and I love the way it smells. Sometimes it kicks, shrugging both of us off in one swift gesture, one of us flying over the pony’s head, the other over the tail. We bruise but we laugh in our shock and surprise, infused with the power that comes with cheating death.

We cross the lilac-choked gardens, where we half-heartedly pretend to be brides, to visit Kathe’s ancient grandmother. She has great bowls of hard lemon candies in her living room and she leans imperiously in her chair to fart. Our mad glee is barely contained. We sit in the barn loft and wonder when we’ll die.

We play Monopoly for hours when it rains. One game lasts for days in an effort to break the Guinness World Record. Eventually, we tire of the challenge and spend hours scouring last year’s thick Sears catalogue, building our Christmas lists, fantasizing about all the things that will make us happy and beautiful and popular.

We make butter, mustard and sugar sandwiches and marvel at our culinary genius. We eat baloney and neon cheese and bags of snacks that are vaguely like packing material and we drink gallons of soda.

In the upstairs bathroom, her father keeps a stack of Playboy magazines by the toilet, right there in the open. I make excuses to go to the bathroom sometimes because it’s the most incredible, scandalous thing I’ve ever seen and I can’t believe I can just sit there and look. I feel fevered and weird about it, a thing like thrilling shame, and I snap the magazines shut and force my confused self back downstairs for the next game, afraid that my absence is suspicious.

I cut my finger on a corn stalk in the back field and, while cleaning it in Kathe’s bathroom, I look at the white cream mixing with the red blood and I faint at the vision of pink, smashing my head on the washing machine. Later, in our profound boredom, we sprawl on the kitchen floor with knitting needles, scraping the dirt out of the swirling designs in the linoleum. This is a mesmerizing and oddly satisfying endeavor. 

All summer, I run the yard back and forth between her house and mine, my mood dependent on the hour and the direction. Off to Kathe’s in the morning, eager for a summer day of purple feet and ponies, swimming and Slurpees, dreamy Ringo and furtive glances at impossible naked ladies. Silver medals, chasing records, catalog shopping and forbidden food. Home in the evening, anxious antennae alert to snakes in the yard, a tangle of little people, and the tepid drama of my own house with its buried thread of menace. The low waning days of summer.

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Author’s Note: "Summer Child" was published by The Hairpin sometime in 2017, when the publication was a presence on Medium. Silvia Killingsworth published a few of my essays there that year and her previous affiliation with The New Yorker (and her kind editing) made it feel that the sun was briefly shining on me.

Fossils: A Flash Fiction by Joe Kapitan

Fossil me, she says, on a Sunday afternoon when snow strikes and shackles everything tight under its belly.

She larvaes in front of the fireplace, cocooned in quilt.

Explain, I answer, watching the flakefall from my chair, noting that my car has become a tumor beneath thick porcelain skin.

Rediscover me, she says. Search for me, but do your homework first: organize an expedition, hire a local guide, endure hardships, read the strata, hypothesize, then dig. Dig, like nothing else matters.

I’ve loved you for fifteen years, I say. Without Sherpas. Isn’t that expedition?

Long expeditions are deadly, she says, they breed institutions. Discoveries disappear into textbooks. 

You want some time away? I ask.

I want to be unearthed again, she says, marveled at, brushed delicately, cradled, magnified, examined, taxonomied, announced at symposiums. 

It falls harder, that downy sediment.

Cephalopod or gastropod? I ask her, in that way of mine.

Neither, she says, yawning. Something that flew once, before the sap, and before the amber. A dragonfly, maybe. A careless one.

Ah, no bigger than a grapefruit then, I figure. So how would I find you?

She turns to me. You found me once, she says.  

Something in the fire snaps.

We played this game, once:

Me: What’s sadder than a shovel buried?

You: A fossil reburied.

Outside, the lump that had marked my car is no longer visible.

We stop talking, to conserve oxygen.

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Author’s Note: This flash fiction piece was first published in Fractured West 3, way back in 2011. Editor Kirsty Logan gushed about it, and it was the encouragement I really needed at that moment.

An Ever Present Love: A Review of The Breath by Cindy Savett

It is said that to lose a child is to lose the future. But just a few pages in, this collection of poems, these illuminated memories and imaginings convinced me that Cindy Savett’s daughter was not lost to her when she died at the age of eight all those years ago. As long as Rachel “… lingers, sounds out / the curvatures of my breath / with her phantom tongue…” then she is as real as ever, her all too brief existence immortalised in the souls of those who loved her. And with that love, you feel their future is assured.

The Breath is a series, an arrangement of stuttering emotion and almost mythical imagery summoning the poet’s departed child and relating her sorrow in an even and considered way which only magnifies its intensity. It is both a quiet release of anguish and a heightened recollection, skillfully composed and with an overwhelming honesty that urges you on to discover more about Rachel and her abiding presence.

A mother’s love is a mother’s love and is unfathomable, but of course the whole family carries the burden of such a devastating impact on their lives, each experiencing and coping with it in their own way. Savett gives us fleeting impressions of their responses, including the son who “… grips the whispers / around him, listens for the dead child and the stories / she once told him.” and the surviving daughter “clothed in the needles of old love.” Her husband Rob features prominently throughout; his strength and support, the unfailing and unconditional love he provides, as well as his own grief, are recorded touchingly. These four lines, from the poem “Of Rob,” are a nice illustration of just that:

Rob, iron weaver,
binds us down to the dirt,
loosens the acres
inside my breath.

As individuals, as a couple, as a household, Cindy, Rob, Alison and Sean are necessarily reconstructed by force of circumstance; their history, their very DNA adjusted to cope since Rachel’s leaving; since they:

… were a house
with sinking beams, set apart
from the many.

Within these pages, the work of a born poet, are what might be called momentary poems, poems of the here and now like entries in a diary which document Rachel’s reappearances over time, along with meditations and a kind of philosophical searching. The whole is a dignified lament and a potent, a near hypnotic insistence of the child’s continued presence. What appeals is the utter artlessness of the poetry: there is nothing contrived or mannered here; everything is natural, and the desired aim of conveying the heartache and the love is achieved purely through sincerity and candour. Every poem in the collection succeeds in doing just that. Consider the following, called “Faded, Rachel, Gone”:

When you fled
I threw out the bedclothes
and your shuddering scent, you

were the watchgirl who lay beside me
and split dawn’s light from the dark.

Me, aimless
dwarfed by your single last gasp.

There is a guileless sensitivity, an unselfconscious openness in these lines, where each word feels natural and right, serving to highlight the awful reality of the moment. That “shuddering scent” is almost unbearable.

Cindy Savett, who teaches poetry workshops in psychiatric hospitals, has previously published a full-length collection of poetry about Rachel, Child in the Road, so why another now, fourteen years later? The answer is abundantly clear in each of these manifestations of the girl’s continued reality. Rachel still breathes, still visits her mother, her father, the unfortunate siblings starting out in life with both the blessing and the pain of their sister’s memory, and Savett is eager to preserve these moments. Perhaps even obliged to do so. I can imagine that it took a good deal of thought deciding to share them with an unknowing public, but I applaud her courage in doing so; indeed, I am grateful for it.

The sweet memories, the comforting reminders and the very act of realising her daughter’s existence still, are positive and are generously sprinkled throughout, but unsurprisingly the tone is overwhelmingly that of sadness, a quiet melancholy no better expressed perhaps than in this rather piteous poem titled “Sublime”:

I track you, my endlessly dying daughter,
for the shadow in your breath, ragged prize
drawn from your mouth to mine,

and pin you shaken and pulsing
to the dirt. I stumble over
pieces of your gray iron coat

to my hour that howls,
my burying shovel twisted, my home
overrun by your hollow eyes.

This collection, without doubt the most affecting I’ve read for a very long time, is divided into what the author terms incantations, (and I can’t think of a better word to describe the ritualistic nature of the language used, the repetition, the weight attached to certain images) the last of which is but a single poem. It’s an intense summing-up of Rachel and consists of a series of epithets describing her “used-to-be-girl”, each followed by a figurative finger to the lips and a plaintive “silence”. It’s a prayer, an invocation, a quite beautiful calling out to her absent child.   

It’s not my place as a reviewer to comment directly on the personal tragedies and consolations of a poet, although it’s almost impossible in this case not to, but it is my job to evaluate the work resulting from them. Do the poems convey the reactions to those experiences in such a way as to draw the reader in, to give the reader insights, revelations of bare truth, that a more prosaic recording could not? Well, in respect of this equally powerful and tender collection, I can answer emphatically yes. Cindy Savett has let us in on her and her family’s grief, their strength, their togetherness with good grace and astonishing candour, and I believe that, as readers, we are all the better for it.