This Ark’s Not Going Down—Or Is It?

Imagine that it’s 2020, and you’re under the dim lights of your cozy multiplex with a bucket of the best butter-slathered popcorn that money can buy. It’s the premiere of Wes Anderson’s latest colorfully stylized masterpiece in comic absurdity. You’ve been watching carefully, and it’s already maybe scene ten, and amidst all the beautiful frames, you keep seeing a book in the background that is absolutely stunning. Anderson’s giving some major praise. The book’s cover is pink and baby blue. Maybe there are some Manhattan buildings in the background—yeah, that’s what it is. It has a thick, brush-like font written in white, bold letters. I’ll go ahead and tell you: the book is Julian Tepper’s Ark, and it, in all of its quirky eccentricities, is downright brilliant.

Set in the aforementioned city of Manhattan, Tepper’s sophomore novel, Ark, follows three generations of the Arkin family who have mostly lost at life. Ben is the (extremely) wealthy patriarch, and he’s a helpless and hilarious mess. His children—Sondra, Doris, and Oliver—run a record label, and they’ve never had any success. Ben has rescued them on countless occasions from shutting down. Tepper tells us that Ben “put at least two million into Shout!” The reason he gave them the money wasn’t that he actually believed in the business; no, it was because it was a way “just to keep the kids busy.”

Ben’s a lot of things, but mostly he identifies as a self-proclaimed artist. Tepper writes of Ben, “His art supplies alone were seven to eight thousand a month.” There’s a big problem with his expenses: he’s never sold any of his work.

For most artists not selling anything—literally nothing in a lifetime—would be emotionally defeating, but that’s not the case for Ben. He, with the help of his assistant Jerome, likes to create for the sake of creating: “You see this? These paintings? These sculptures? They are perfectly meaningless things. And yet in making them, I have felt what it feels like to be a king. And that stimulus to my brain, that knowledge of creation which I have gained… that, Jerome, is what all this making is about.”

Tepper never misses a beat throughout Ark. The pacing is quick, and the dialogue snaps. The fictional setting in which Tepper plants us feels as vibrant and alive as the New York that I know and love.

Where Tepper’s at his very best is in the novel’s early scenes with Ben, when the artist is at work. Tepper gives us a glimpse at how Ben creates:

He filled a pot with water and placed it on the stovetop. Once the water was boiling, he dropped the chicken carcass, as well as the bones that had been on his plate, into the pot. For just over eight minutes he stared into the pot, thinking. Then, he drained the water, cleaned the remaining meat off the bones and brought them into the studio, found a shallow wood box one foot wide by one foot long, took some short nails and a hammer from a drawer, and put everything on his desk, and began arranging the bones inside the box. The legs were along the edges, the breastbone was placed centrally, the wings stuck out from beneath the breastbone. He hammered the nails through the bones into the wood. After which he went into a back closet and found a bag of sand, and poured it over the bones until they were halfway submerged. Then he had Jerome cut a piece of glass, which the artist glued to the box, closing the bones and sand.

The description is almost breathtaking, both in the scope of artistry and in the level of strangeness in which Ben exists. The odd patriarch could come off as being aloof and unlikeable in other hands, but Tepper gives him a genuine, dynamic dimensionality that transcends any kind of flatness.

As Ark progresses, there’s more to savor. Rebecca, Oliver’s daughter and also the only ‘successful’ member of the Arkin family, enters the picture after a lawsuit involving the family’s record label. She struggles to understand her family, and she doubts that she ever will. Rebecca is a strong character and helps to ground the novel in its more far-reaching moments.

Tepper’s novel is about art, for sure, but it’s also about the bonds that tie families together. How deep can blood really run? And, even more importantly, how deep should it run?

Ark has it all. There is heartbreak: we wind up at a cemetery. There is laughter: we encounter a fight at the cemetery. There’s also a sense of hope. By Ark’s end, the Arkin family has endured about as much as any family could take. Still, however, they remain a family. They are the Arkins. They’ve always made it, and there’s no reason to give up on them now.

Women in the Study Reported Feeling Pain

Sometimes, when I’m having trouble expressing myself, I wish that I could somehow give people access to my brain, so that they could experience what it’s like in there for a while. I consider how my mind would work as a piece of art or literature. I repeat the phrase publish my brain to myself. With The Second Body, Claire Donato has succeeded in publishing hers. By opening this book you are submerging yourself in a mind. Thoughts and ideas flood in through your ears and nose. Words bully their way through your pores. Your entire being becomes saturated. You are at once inside of the book/mind and it is inside of you. While you explore its passages and personality, it is probing you at the same time. I had the disconcerting feeling that the book was creating a mold of my own mind, studying it and making adjustments.

In her blurb of the book, Kate Durbin asks, “What is The Second Body?” This is a valid question. While this collection is full of bodies, they are rarely identified. The focus is not on their external features but the experience of being inside them. There in no joy to that experience in these poems. Just as pain is one of the inherent features of having a body, pain is a feature of this book. Durbin’s question is answered in the title poem, where Donato writes, “We can expect painful experiences (the first body)./ The second body is the suffering.” This suffering takes a range of forms, from the everyday (“Later, at home, a translucent blister”), to the more unexpected (“Antlers germinate like lumps and extend outward from my mind”), but it is all female suffering.

It seems clear that The Second Body is the female body. The title a reference to Eve being created after Adam, the literal second body, or an echo of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. But, as should be expected, the title refers inward as well: there is plenty of doubling and mirroring happening here. Throughout the collection, the speaker refers to “My friend Claire”, suggesting that this voice doesn’t belong to Claire Donato but to some second, unknown body. And bodies aren’t the only things that are twinned. In the poem “The Second Body Is a Shield”, Donato writes, “Imagine a pure gold ring. Divide it in half, then keep/ Dividing and dividing and dividing.” This type of multiplication by division appears throughout the book, but another example comes from this same poem: “Now she carries a dense/ Second body in her brain, a second body not unlike/ The first”. The woman herself is divided in two. So perhaps The Second Body isn’t simply the female body but the imagined female body, which in itself has been the cause of plenty of pain.

Although The Second Body focuses on pain, that is not its only preoccupation. This is a book of obsessions. In addition to bodies and pain, it is also full of time, language, architecture, the environment. Donato is even preoccupied by obsession itself as she writes about cataloguing and exhibition. But everything always returns to the body. These other things can only be experienced through the mediation of a body. And so boys become horses and women mutate into light and tables. Death is ever present in the collection, from the epigraphs at the front of the book to “Manifesto La Terre / Mori”, the title of the final poem. But while death may be the end of a person, it is not the end of a body, so the book continues forward as the corpses fall behind it.

No matter which of her obsessions she is focusing in on, Donato treats her subject with a light, deft hand. One note I made while reading was: “Assured voice. Masterful. Unexpected turns.” Whereas I often have trouble expressing myself, with these poems Donato shows no such difficulty. She is always in complete control, not only an expert on whichever subject she is addressing at any given time but also approaching it in the perfect way, whether that is scientific jargon or humorous line breaks, eight words scattered across a page or lines so long they must be printed landscape. The emergence of a writer with such command of both form and content is rare and it should be celebrated when it does occur. Having mastered both body and mind, I have no idea what Donato will do next, but I’m excited to find out.

A Conversation with Bonnie Jo Campbell and Andrea Scarpino

One might make the argument that two of the strongest voices in contemporary Michigan are Andrea Scarpino, representing the Upper Peninsula poetry scene, and Bonnie Jo Campbell, representing the Lower Peninsula fiction scene. The strength of their voices comes from a combination of having unique, distinctive, and passionate style and subject matter on the page, furthered by both authors willingness to tour extensively, notably to rural communities in the state. Scarpino is the 2015-2017 U.P. Poet Laureate whose latest book is What the Willow Said as It Fell (Red Hen Press). Bonnie Jo Campbell is a previous National Book Award finalist whose current book is Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories (W.W. Norton & Company).

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RR: Both of you are brilliant with titles. I’m a big fan of the cryptic Once, Then and the best title of 2015 might be Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories with its lovely double-entendre of “Mothers, tell your daughters stories.” Can you talk about your book titles?

AS: Thank you, Ron! Your compliment means a lot to me because I really struggle with titles. When I was doing my MFA, one of the recurring criticisms of my workshop submissions was that I needed a different title, and I often go through dozens before I find one I really like. They just seem so final—like naming a child.

I really like titles that simultaneously shape the reader’s expectations and withhold a little bit of information from the reader. I want the reader to be interested in opening my book, but I also don’t want to be too explicit about the book’s content. In both my poetry collections, the titles developed from lines within the book itself which I hope readers will recognize when they’re reading. In my second book, the line, “what the willow said as it fell” is followed by, “Take this body, make it whole.” So I liked What the Willow Said as It Fell as a title in part because I’m hoping the idea of wholeness, and obviously the fact of the body, shines through the poetry.

BJC: Thank you, indeed, Ron! I’m with Andrea that titles are hard. And I might even go so far as to say that a work is not finished until it has the right title on it, and for me the title is often the last element of the story or collection to come to me. That said, after I get the right title, by settling into the final understanding of my work, then I have still more work to do, adjusting the whole work slightly to the title. The titles to all three of my collections have great stories behind them, and I’ll say that I spent months coming up with Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. I had this story collection, but didn’t quite know what it was about. After trying out hundreds of other titles, arguing with my editor and agent, and stressing endlessly, I finally came upon this one. It resonates especially for me because it’s a line from the song “House of the Rising Sun” when sung by certain female artists. Once alighting on that title, my editor and I made some adjustments to the collection, leaving out a few stories that no longer fit and requiring me to write two new stories, including the title story. American Salvage has a similar story behind it, in that the title story was the last one I wrote. My novel, Once Upon a River, has a different story behind it.  My agent came up with that title in the shower. We sold the book with that title, and I didn’t like it for a long while. Finally, when I saw the title allowed me to be fantastical, I embraced it, and I still like it.

RR: You both write about suffering frequently. What role does suffering play in your fiction and poetry? Do you handle it as redemptive or existential?

AS: I don’t think there is anything redemptive in suffering. It’s just suffering: it just hurts. I actually respond very negatively to suggestions that suffering makes us better people or enriches our lives in some deep way. I know some people derive meaning from their suffering and I’m glad for them when that’s the case, but the only meaning I’ve been able to derive from painful moments in my life is this sucks. I want this to end.

Suffering is an integral part of being alive and being human, which is why I so often write about it—I don’t think a single human being is spared suffering. And yet, we so often like to pretend we don’t suffer. We’re told to put on a brave face, and women especially are told we should smile no matter what is happening in our personal lives. So I think it’s incredibly important to acknowledge and sit with suffering, to understand it as a central human experience, and to appreciate the suffering of others around us. And writing and reading about suffering can help us with that.

BJC: I tend to write about what worries me, and the suffering of others worries me immensely. We fiction writers tend to write about suffering that comes about both because of circumstances and also because of the nature of one’s character—it is most interesting when a character has at least partially brought about his or her own suffering. I don’t write as a sociologist, and my main interest is in exploring the human character, but I am glad when my readers tell me that they have more sympathy for the sorts of folks they encounter in life because of my stories. Like Andrea, I see suffering as universal. Nobody’s life is easy when you come down to it—we want to pretend some people swim effortlessly through life’s waters, but life is hard for everybody a good portion of the time. And while I don’t see suffering as inherently redemptive, I do think it can sometimes spur a character into action.

RR: What religion do you identify with? What’s your religious/spiritual background?

AS: I don’t identify with any religion in all honesty. My father was Catholic so I have spent a fair amount of time in the Catholic Church, and my mother identified as Quaker for a while, so I spent time at Friends Meetings. I also grew up with dear friends who were Jewish and Muslim, and as an adult, I’ve read some about Buddhism. So I guess I have a bit of a smorgasbord religious background, which also means I don’t have a deep understanding of any one tradition.

BJC: Andrea, you and I need to have a beer! How have we never sat down together?

RR: The following is quoted from Mothers, Tell Your Daughters:

“I’m not going to hell,” he whispered.  “God is leading me home.  He has shone his light on the path to Him.  God has forgiven me.”

“For what, Carl?  What has God forgiven you for?”

“Forsaking Jesus.”  He sounded exhausted, his voice a hiss.

“What else?”

There was a long pause before he whispered, “Jesus is my Lord and Savior, my light in the darkness.”

“How about forgiveness for hitting your wife?  And your son?  Is God forgiving you for that?”

Could you talk about this passage?

BJC:  The passage is from the story, “A Multitude of Sins,” a man who has abused his wife and son finds Jesus right at the end and so figures he’s saved. When the husband is dying of cancer, the wife begins to discover the seeds of her empowerment. She finds herself furious at the notion of her husband receiving forgiveness. I enjoy seeing this woman become angry after a life of submissiveness.

RR: Andrea, in your poem “Homily,” you repeat the phrase, “She didn’t believe in God.” Why that repetition?

AS: My poem “Homily” was based on an experience I had while visiting Paris and walking into Notre Dame on Christmas Day: the priest was saying the mass in Latin, and the air was filled with incense and evergreen, and I was completely in love with being there and being present in the moment even though I don’t identify as Catholic. So I guess I tried to capture the feeling of wanting so badly to believe in something because the present moment is so special, but also knowing, deep down, that belief is just not there.

RR: Do you find you struggle with your religious beliefs through your characters?

AS: I don’t know if I struggle with my own religious belief through my poetry, but I definitely am a person who questions almost everything, including religious belief, in my life and in my poetry. I like feeling open to the world, and I like questioning, and I like hearing about other people’s beliefs, and I like learning how other people experience the world around them. And I find religious belief endlessly curious and interesting and rich with possibility.

BJC:  I’m not interested in my own religiosity, but I am interested in the religious beliefs of others, and as a writer, I’m interested in seeing how those beliefs inform character.

RR: Bonnie Jo, Halloween appears in Once Upon a River and Q Road, notably in the passage on “Halloween [where], he’d soaped windows, strung toilet paper across people’s front yards, and once he’d found a veined, milky afterbirth from his sister’s horse foaling, and in the middle of the night dragged it onto a neighbor’s front porch.”

Are you attracted to what an old Religion professor of mine, Dr. Hough, called the Jungian shadow aspects of humanity?

BJC: Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love has an epigraph from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a line Prospero says of the monster Caliban: “This thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine.”  I, too, acknowledge mine!

RR: Earlier, we spoke of suffering.  Both of you are connected to metaphorical center points in Michigan—Marquette and Grand Rapids. Grand Rapids/Kalamazoo is emerging as an economic and spiritual powerhouse of the state, as well as important for Michigan publishing with Zondervan and New Issues Press. There is also the complication of poverty in the far southwest regions that grinds up against Grand Rapids’ wealth. Hate groups are in that area and the recent Uber driver murders. Bonnie Jo, where you live is a very complicated place. Can you talk about good and evil in your writing, how it fits with the complexities of southwest Michigan?

BJC:  I was just reading Plainsong by Kent Haruf, and I was noticing how he makes very clear who is good and who is evil in his stories. I am more interested in gray areas of human nature, in people who try to be good, but fail, and in people who make trouble sometimes. The person who has a decent job and a good family situation might go his or her whole life as a productive law-abiding citizen, while the same person, after losing a job and a spouse and children might become a meth-addicted criminal. What amazed me about the Uber shooter is just how ordinary and normal he was; that showed me that crimes are not committed by devils or evil people necessarily. Crimes are committed by people who make bad choices, and they make them for a variety of reasons, some of which we will never understand.

All we can do, it seems to me, is pay attention, keep our minds open to all the possibilities good and bad, and work to care for one another at all times. We can strive to never be cruel or judgmental.

RR: Who are the great spiritual writers in fiction and poetry?

AS: I love Marilynn Robinson’s writing, particularly Gilead. I first listened to that book as an audiobook on a road trip many years ago, and I remember just weeping while I was driving because I was so moved by the quiet spirituality throughout her writing. And that quietness is really the kind of spiritual or religious writing that I most appreciate: a quiet attention to those around us, a quiet attention to the world, a quiet attention to the connections that make us human.

RR: What issues of religion do writers need to talk about now?

AS: Acceptance and appreciation of different opinions, viewpoints, and religious traditions. Our country’s hate speech deeply troubles me, particularly as it is directed toward Muslims. But we’ve never been particularly good at accepting differing viewpoints and that’s something that writers and religious leaders and teachers and parents and politicians all need to address.

BJC: As a writer I spend a lot of time imagining how it feels to be in someone else’s shoes, and that helps me be more humble and generous toward my fellow human beings, even the difficult ones.

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Interviewer Ron Riekki’s latest book is the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Award-winning Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (Michigan State University Press), which includes writing from Bonnie Jo Campbell and Andrea Scarpino.

An Interview with Chris Wiewiora

I first met Chris Wiewiora in 2008 when he was still an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida. I was the managing editor at The Florida Review. Chris came on as our assistant editor on work-study and quickly proved that he was one of our hardest working staff members. His work ethic and editorial chops were one thing, but soon I got to see some of his stellar early writing and we started exchanging comments on each other’s fiction and non-fiction essays.

In the years since, we’ve grown in different directions. I’ve gone on to pursue a career in information security, and Chris has ventured onward bravely to see his non-fiction anthologized in Best Food Writing and The Norton Reader, and non-fiction essays about things like marriage, bus driving, killer whales, good pizza, and the water supply published in all sorts of excellent places.

So it’s a pleasure to get the opportunity to revisit this interview I did with Chris regarding “Riding Solo,” one of my favorite essays that I’ve had the opportunity to help Chris work on.

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EB: “Riding Solo,” your essay just published by Thought Catalog, brings together a lot of disparate themes: motorcycle riding, recovering from an injury, a failed relationship, pornography, casual sex encounters. How did you start writing it?

CW: There was an epigraph from another creative piece I was using as a diving board, a jumping off point, about motorcycling. The epigraph was from “Novorapid” by Tyler Enfield, from The Florida Review issue with the underwater woman’s face on the cover.

“… death is sexy when you are twenty-one, when you are invincible, when your skin is electric with the glory of youth and you are clueless, vital, assured.”

I have a folder an inch thick of all the drafts. I outlined the essay too, which was weird, because I don’t think I had done that before. Originally this started as a story, I think it was first called “Riding Solo,” and then it changed to “Now,” and finally it went back to “Riding Solo.” It was first written as a mid-length essay that primarily had to do with the relationship and motorcycling. Then it brought in more of the casual encounter and the pornography and those different worlds. And as those sub-worlds expanded the narrative world, that made the essay longer. At one point it was nine thousand, ten thousand words. Then at one point I cut it down to fifteen hundred words, when it was just about monikers of casual encounters. At another point I cut out all the Kisha stuff, all the motorcycling stuff, which was very weird. So it’s gone through a lot.

EB: You described stories to me as pearls before, where there’s a grit at the center. What do you mean by that?

CW: The grit is the little piece of sand that an oyster creates this nacre around, and that’s called mother-of-pearl, and it hardens. I’ve thought of that as the origin story of essays. There’s always a little piece that rubs against you, like a pebble in your shoe, and then you’re creating this protective layer, and out of that comes this pearl.

EB: So after you had said that to me so long ago I went and read about pearls.

CW: Oh, am I way off?

EB: No, no. The story we tell, of course, is that they are grits of sand that turn into a beautiful pearl. But I read that it’s most often a harmful parasite, or an infection, and the oyster creates the pearl to quarantine itself against it. It’s an immune system response.

CW: I like hearing that it’s not sand, that it’s a parasite the oyster makes a pearl around. The best writing that I’ve written is when I feel uncomfortable. I’m getting at those things that need to be discussed.

It’s uncomfortable and it takes work, but it’s necessary because at the core of it there is this thing fucking feeding off of me. And I think that’s many times what essaying is about. It’s cathartic, like recovery.

EB: So what was the thing at the center of this essay that set it off?

CW: Well, the story isn’t the traditional inverted checkmark of rising action, climax, resolution. It’s this mirrored, opposite checkmark. More like a plummet. Everything gone bad: My relationship with my girlfriend Kisha, gone bad. Addiction, gone bad. Using people, gone bad. Motorcycling, gone bad. The despair of this empty situation, everything is being destroyed and then just at the end it’s maybe redlining, topping out on the motorcycle. No recovery, it’s just survival.

I remember driving with my buddy DJ a few months before I wrote this essay. I think it was when Kisha and I were sleeping together, fucking each other. DJ and I were stuck in traffic, and he said, “Sometimes I can’t wait for a relationship to be over so I can write about it.”

And it was just such a fucked-up thing, where you can steer your life to be able to make that into a story that later on you’re going to write about. For him, it was fiction. For me, I was a nonfiction person, and I could say, “Wow, I could change the way I interact with somebody because later on I could write about it and it would be better.”

So later I asked myself, “Did I end the relationship so I could write a story about it?” And the answer is no. But those are the grits that rubbed me a little wrong.

EB: I remember in an earlier draft we talked about the difference in the diction in the sex scenes, between “sex” and “fucking,” the words themselves.

CW: Yeah. That was an eye opener for me. I think I was just writing whatever, put “breasts” there, put “sex” there, put “fucking” there. And then I realized through the drafting process that the language is defining the action, and this is seeping in. Why not just say what it is? Fucking each other.

The draft changed, then. You know, Kisha and the narrator fucking each other, they’re not having sex. When sex changes to fucking, and “I love you” means “Thanks for doing that.” What’s spoken is not true to the actions in the way that language has to be accurate to portray what’s going on truthfully.

EB: The story begins with the search for a casual sex encounter, one you eventually find with the character Ashley. What was it that pushed you toward seeking out casual sex, and how was it that you came to use Craigslist to search?

CW: Right. There’s a plummet from porn and the relationship to the casual sex. From the beginning there’s an awareness that there’s another world out there. I don’t believe the theory of evangelical groups, like Focus On The Family, when they said that Jeffrey Dahmer had used porn when he was younger or maybe even as an adult and that that had led to tendencies that then led to the murders.

I don’t know if porn leads to behavior. It does affect people, for sure. It’s something that people do when they’re wanting to find something, but it’s not a substitute.

I remember the relationship was over and then being a young American male—it’s very accessible. You can just search “casual encounters” and see the photos and the possible thrill. I thought, being in a college town in a big city, that maybe I could do this activity without anybody knowing and find somebody else, maybe not like me, but in the sense that they want the same thing. It’s inherently wild and dangerous.

The question is when you cross that line: When is it that you transition from looking at the photos to setting up an e-mail account and trying to find somebody? And then when you do find somebody, how do you react?

In the essay there are four responses: There’s “Zorro Couple,” there’s “Barb,” there’s “College Girl” with the black bar over her eyes, and there’s “Ashley.” And then there’s a lot of fake ones and spam. There was even one that I thought was funny, a posting that turned out to be a suicide hotline number. And at the time Craigslist was having trouble with prostitutes. They’d be vague, and you have to call to set up like it was a dentist’s appointment. Instead of your annual teeth cleaning, call for your blowjob. And sometimes I got responses that were women saying how much it costs, and I would say that I’m not going to pay for sex, and they cursed me out, saying I wasn’t going to find sex for free. It’s almost a challenge.

It’s way more difficult for a man to find a woman. Let’s say you do a post, in about a day your post is cemented down by a hundred other posts by other people. So you have to constantly repost. And you want to have a catchy post, you don’t want to be like everybody else. So you’ll look at the others and say, “Okay, everyone’s just putting up a picture of their dick.” It’s like marketing yourself.

One of the eeriest things was, and I didn’t write about this in the essay, I actually saw some guys I knew on the men looking for women list.

EB: Wow.

CW: Yeah. I was like, “Holy crap, I don’t want to put a picture of my face on there.” Still, there is a certain security in place. You’re not going to talk about somebody who’s on it because if you say that, then they know you’re also on it. It’s like, “You don’t talk about Fight Club.” Well…not quite.

EB: You mentioned that when you do something like a casual sex encounter, it’s because you’re looking for something.

CW: You’re looking for something that you think is there and that you can’t get elsewise. There’s a cost to that.

EB: What’s the cost?

CW: The cost is that it’s not real. You’re putting on a mask and you’re protecting yourself. Think about the names, the usernames. You’re not Chris Wiewiora. You’re verbChrisverb. You’re not Ashley. You’re “Black BBW.”

EB: The black boxes over College Girl’s eyes.

CW: Yeah, you’re hiding yourself. Not only are you not showing yourself truly to somebody else, you’re also deconstructing yourself to a certain degree. Breaking yourself down to “I am this: ____.”

EB: Sounds a little like writing nonfiction, doesn’t it?

CW: Right. It’s like, “I am this, this physical characteristic, and that’s it, that’s all I have to offer. That’s all you want. That’s all I’m going to give you in this moment. If I give you more than that, then this moment is not what it’s supposed to be.”

EB: What do you think Ashley was looking for?

CW: You know, there was a certain sweetness, I guess, to the moment. I think everybody wants to be found this way, be accepted, even despite their faults or perceived faults. And what happened was that moment changed from being an encounter, a desire, to being more. Ashley asked if I wanted to make it a regular thing. And I said, “I don’t ever do this more than once.”

I think for her she wanted to find some kind of acceptance of who she was. But that’s not the way to it, that’s not a moment of love.

EB: One of the most striking things about “Riding Solo” is its uncompromising honesty and intimacy. For example, the sections on your relationship to pornography might have been glossed over by a more timid author. What is the impulse behind being so honest with the reader, sharing things that are not so sterile or flattering?

CW: Writing in this kind of shockingly honest way, it’s not confessionalism. Even though I talked about it being cathartic, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have to write this.

I write about these explicit things because it’s what happened. People won’t necessarily be in those situations. Not everybody rides a motorcycle or has an interracial relationship that fails or goes online to find casual sex. So you write it as is, because you want it to be like they were there. Writing is constructed. It’s like a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional object. I know it’s three-dimensional. And I’m saying, “Hey there’s things creating this image on the wall with fire behind it and there’s shadows, I swear to you it’s three-dimensional.” That’s my contract with the reader. This is the best way that I can tell you how it was and what happened. That’s what I’m doing.

EB: So you’re recently engaged, soon to be married. Has Lauren, your fiancé, read the essay?

CW: She has read this essay as part of a larger collection. And we’ve talked about it, just briefly, to say that this is something wild that I’ve done before, and it doesn’t perturb her that much. It’s just kind of one of those passes you get for being younger.

One of the reasons I wanted to marry Lauren is that I love her for who she is but also that I love that she allows me to be who I am and I don’t have to hide that. She respects me. She’s the first person I’ve been in a relationship with that has read my stuff and is also just fine about being written about. I wouldn’t be. I’d be pissed. I’d be like, “Don’t put me in that, I didn’t say that, I didn’t think that, this isn’t written well.” I’m the worst person to turn the tables on. I’m a pushy editor, and I push back against editing.

EB: “Riding Solo” occupies an interesting place in your overall body of work. This essay is about struggle and so it takes us to some darker places. We get that plummet and then it ends on disconnection. But many of your other works, on The Good Men Project and in literary magazines, show a return to a connected life—stories that talk about love, Lauren, spirituality, and family. How does “Riding Solo” fit into that?

CW: A lot of what I write now is about being younger. It’s not as much about who I am immediately now. I rarely have written about things that have happened in the past two years. This essay “Riding Solo” is from a collection called Toro! which is about failed relationships, masculinity, illness, faith, all things that happened to me when I was younger.

There are other stories in Toro! that are moments of failed or failing relationships where the narrator recognizes the start of that plummet, and that recognition stops him from going down again. It’s a reminder to myself of making it through. It’s a survival story, and that needs to be told. Constantly saving yourself, getting out.

Exuberant and Engaging: Bob Proehl's A Hundred Thousand Worlds

Confession: I can’t get enough mother-son relationship books. I mean it, too. If every text I read contained some kind of mother-son crisis, friendship, or adventure, it wouldn’t get old. These stories are surely not unusual. Some of the most celebrated pieces of literature revolve around mother-son bonds. For example, Emma Donoghue’s Room, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and James McBride’s The Color of Water each celebrate motherhood and sonhood in special ways. Part of what makes these types of stories so appealing to me is that they create a rare, globally intersected reading experience. It’s with a glad heart that I announce the latest worthy addition to the mother-son canon: Bob Proehl’s smart and kindhearted A Hundred Thousand Worlds.

Proehl’s novel follows Alex Torrey, a moderately precocious and fully captivating nine-year-old boy, and his comic convention staple of a mother, Valerie, as they travel from the East Coast to Los Angeles with the (unfortunate) goal of meeting up with Alex’s absent father. To say why Val is taking Alex to see his dad would be too much of a spoiler, but it’s safe to point out that the dad isn’t someone you’ll be rooting for.

As A Hundred Thousand Worlds makes its central road trip, there are many comic convention stops along the way, where a host of fun and eccentric characters pop up. There’s an unlucky comic writer, a woman who’s tired of the male-dominated world she tries to inhabit, and illustrators and fans galore. Each adds a nice layer to the larger novel.

The world Proehl creates is exuberant and engaging. It’s impossible to deny that Proehl’s novel is an infectious read.

While A Hundred Thousand Worlds possesses a tonal lightness, there’s also something deeper at work in the novel’s heart. There’s the obvious symbolism of Proehl having his protagonist venture westward. There’s a death. Don’t worry; I’m being metaphorical here. Alex loses his innocence. He grows up. Proehl writes of Alex’s changing mannerisms: “He becomes more adult when she’s not there. His gestures are broader, more sure. He is taller, maybe, or stands up straighter.” Also, Alex wants to go on trips into the nearby cities to buy books and explore with a friend–not his mother. He desires to understand adult complexities. Why can’t all relationships be as simple as he sees them? Why don’t his mother and his father have a relationship?

The most riveting sections, as you might suspect from my opening, are the moments in which Proehl shows the full workings of the mother-son pair. One of the supporting comic-con regulars notes, “It’s a basic rule of nature: you don’t come between a mama bear and her cub.” The love Val shows toward her son makes this statement particularly resonant. Proehl’s prose highlights the intense bond the two have together:

Any time they spent apart was always defined by place and duration. I’m going to the store, I’ll be back in twenty minutes. I’m going downstairs for a drink, I’ll be back in an hour. It seems impossible to think that soon he will not know where she is all the time, and she won’t know where he is, either. His position in space has always been in relation to hers and now, without that, he wonders if he’ll be like a boat on the whole ocean, where you can’t see land in any direction, and the sun cycles over you day after day.

The love Alex has for his mother is just as intense. In one of the book’s best lines, Alex says, “Stories can be true even if they’re not real.” He frequently asks his mother to tell him a story, knowing fully that the truth isn’t always what he gets from her. But what she tells him is what he needs to hear, and he, in turn, finds comfort in her words.

As I was reading, I found myself feeling amazed that the novel is a debut. Proehl’s fine craftsmanship is as evident on the first page as it is on the last one. The dialogue pops; the prose is fresh; the pacing is quick.

Bob Proehl’s A Hundred Thousand Worlds, with its pitch-perfect ending, might just be the best road trip that I’ve taken all summer.

Rehabilitation of Language: A Review of Solmaz Sharif's Look

Solmaz Sharif’s debut collection of poems, Look (Graywolf Press 2016), embodies the imperative mood. For the United States Department of Defense, the title word also refers to a timespan “during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence” in mine warfare. The corrective Sharif applies to this word in her opening poem is the book’s central line. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me LOOK at you in a light that takes years to get here.”

In the work that follows, Sharif works to rehabilitate terms used by the United States government in reference to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. “Daily I sit/ with the language/ they’ve made/ of our language,” she writes. Words retrieved from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms—neutralize, lay, patient, permanent echo, dormant, penetration aids—are writ large, all caps, so their double meanings can’t be missed.

There is so much here that compels—indelible details (“DAMAGE AREA/ does not include night sweats/ or retching at the smell of barbeque”), formal variety (the halting rhythms of state-censored letters; a partial list of military operations, i.e. CAVE DWELLERS, RAMADAN ROUNDUP, ARMY SANTA), and the poet’s courage to stand and aim squarely at such a high-value target. What makes the book most memorable to me is the clarity and shape of its argument. Sharif draws our eye to the tools of propaganda and swiftly flips them, illuminating their underpinnings, their casualties. Again and again, we encounter stark contrasts: estrangement and intimacy, vulnerability and power, gravity and humor, delicacy and force. These are not simple poems, but their mechanisms work simply: here are some words you’ve heard kicked around on TV, and here is who feels the effects of that kicking when the cameras cut away. Here is my baba holding up his pants at a security checkpoint, here are thimbles traced with sweat. Here is the fallout radius of weaponized language—it extends past the ground meat of ruined bodies to spare change that jumps at the slam of a door.

It may take some time to acclimate to Sharif’s dexterity, the layered voices. Throughout Look she samples (among others) the boastful voice of the U.S. military, detainees, an uncle slain in the Iran-Iraq war and dispassionate onlookers. There is noise and discomfort at seeing words in all caps invading poetry, which tends to be a domain of reflection and intimacy. A poem I have long been obsessed with, Frank Bidart’s epic 30-page “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” came to mind the first time I read Sharif’s title poem. Bidart’s Nijinsky also shouts on the page. Outwardly, there isn’t much yelling in poetry, but a deeper relationship between the two works can be seen here as well. In Sharif’s “Desired Appreciation,” a conversation with a psychiatrist reveals that the speaker feels like she must muzzle herself, that she feels dangerous, feels like a threat. In “Nijinsky,” the protagonist’s mind is poisoned by his proximity and relationship to World War I. Nijinsky wrestles with the question of whether he is insane or evil, and resolves it through his ultimate and final performance: he will dance the story of the war and in doing so “become the Body through which / the War has passed.” This same quote from “Nijinsky” opens Sharif’s last section, a clear signal from the poet: I live inside this war. Look at me, twisting from its paradoxes.

The length of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq habituated so many passionate dissenters into a kind of resignation, the slinking posture of but-what-can-we-do. But Sharif’s collection activates the role of observer by stunning back into awareness the wounds that still suppurate, lighting the holes cut from language and their respective tears in American thinking. We can look, look differently, persist in looking—that’s a thing we can do.

A Hollywood Playboy Meets Frankenstein's Creature: A Review of Liz Kay's Monsters

Let me make this clear: I’ve never reviewed a book before. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve reviewed hundreds of books. I’ve reviewed them in my head while I read them. I’ve reviewed them, most hastily and judgmentally, the moment I read the last line, unfairly comparing them to the first book I ever loved – Voltaire’s Candide and its last line, “We must cultivate our garden,” which is a really shitty thing to do, right, because it’s Voltaire and it’s Candide.

It’s just uncool to compare last lines of every book I read to the last line of Candide, a classic, sarcastically brilliant book that has the ability to mess with your head for decades to come, change meaning as you grow older, and keep you thinking about how you might live with just one butt cheek.

I do realize, however, that it wasn’t the last line of Candide that I really loved; it was the last line of a book made of up of thousands of lines that moved perfectly toward that last line. If Voltaire hadn’t written thousands of great sentences that made a wonderful book up to that last line, it would have been a bad book, even if the last line was freaking perfect.

When I read the last line of Liz Kay’s Monsters: A Love Story, I judged it, immediately, of course, throwing it up against the Candide wall and seeing if anything stuck, and, I will tell you, it did.

At first, I was angry with the protagonist and the author.

In her debut novel, Liz Kay sends a widowed, Nebraskan poet into the arms of a big-time Hollywood movie star via a movie adaptation of the poet’s novel in verse about a female Frankenstein’s creature.

The poet had recently lost her husband, and before fully dealing with the grief, she is volleyed between the lavish lifestyle of Hollywood and the day-to-day living of her Nebraskan home with her children who, very understandably, are lost. First, their father died, and right after that, their mother enters into a relationship with a Hollywood playboy. (Did I just use the word playboy?)

Kay writes monsters well. She writes them really well. The two main characters in the book, Stacey the poet and Tommy the playboy (again?), can be complete assholes, especially to each other (and to others). But they’re not the only monsters in the book, and Kay writes these little assholes just as well as she writes the big ones. The author uses dialogue to pinpoint the little things that people say in everyday life that are just nasty, but they get away with it.

Monsters delves precisely into the intricacies of human behavior, examining how awful people can really be to each other on a day-to-day basis by only using two or three words to do so.

Throughout the book, I found myself underlining truisms in speech, the places where the tiniest words could inflict the deepest pain, where loved ones who know the protagonist, Stacy, use their knowledge to dig little needles into her eyeballs.

Kay is an expert at portraying the human experience, as we all sadly know it.

But I was still angry with her at the end. When I closed the book, I grumbled aloud for two full days, digesting the ending that Kay had given me in the world that she created, a mashup between a middle American small-world view and the heavy drinking, stab-you-in-the-back Hollywood, and after another full day of thinking about it, the anger started to leave me.

I had to admit to myself that even though I didn’t want the ending that I was given, it was the only possible ending for the Monsters that Kay had written. It wouldn’t have been true to the people I had followed for hundreds of pages and thousands of sentences to get to the last line.

If the last line were different, the whole book with all of its precise, snarky, mean, and genuine dialogue that honestly showed the human experience would have fallen apart. The characters did what they had to do because Kay had written such a cohesive world that they could do nothing else without falling into being disingenuous.

And you know me; I judge everything by the last line (and every other line that leads up to it).