From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: The Anniversary

This was originally published at The Rumpus on April 24, 2017.

By mid-morning, it was so hot her breath felt as if it were being drawn back into her. She took the tin washbasin out to the front yard, filled it with cold water, and shampooed her hair. If she turned her head, she could watch her reflection in the kitchen window as she leaned over the tub. Her hips seemed so wide in that position, tapering down from the wraparound skirt to legs that were girl-like. She watched her hair turn from yellow to brown with the wetness.

Around noon, with her hair now sticking to the back of her neck with perspiration, she heard the screen door slam once, then again. It was odd for him to come home in the middle of the day.

She went to the kitchen but he was already gone. This was the way he did things. She looked at the kitchen table for a box, some sign of the gift she was sure he would sneak in and leave her just as he had every anniversary. She heard his truck backing down the dirt drive. There was no chance she’d catch up with him.

This time of day, the sun came in through the slatted windows and settled on the yellow linoleum in stripes. Now she saw it. There lay her gift, basking in the sunlight. A gray-green lizard the size of a shoe. It stood so still she thought it was fake. A joke he had played on her, like the time he told her he was fixing the kitchen faucet and put a gag faucet where the real one had been. She remembered how she ducked and screamed, thinking she would be splashed with water when the new faucet came off in her hands.

But this was not plastic. He had tied a long piece of thick string from one of the lizard’s ankles to the kitchen table. Around the neck was a thin yellow crinkly ribbon that she had seen him pull out of the junk drawer the day before. She had suspected it was to wrap her gift. The ribbon was tied sideways around the animal’s neck in a bow. The lizard squinted as it turned its head slowly to look around the room. Its bulgy, liquid eyes scared her. She moved and the thin plates of skin on its back stood up. Now it turned its head swiftly and the scales rippled as if it were shivering.

She heard herself sigh, rubbed her hands on her skirt, and walked toward the white pine cupboards, making a full circle around the lizard’s body. It watched her. She found an aluminum pie pan under the sink and grabbed the pitcher of cold water from the refrigerator. She put the pan on the floor, poured the water in, and inched it over to the animal with a broom, backing away quickly and waiting to see if it would drink. The lizard sat on its squat legs and narrowed its lids into slits like cat’s-eye marbles. It appeared to be asleep.

Throughout the day, she kept going to the kitchen to check on it, afraid it might get loose in the house. In the late afternoon, she stood a distance away and threw a leaf of Bibb lettuce by the pie pan. She didn’t want anything to do with it, but she didn’t want it to starve. The creature, startled, was set into motion, skittering back and forth, first in one direction, then another, yanking itself back again and again by the string. For a while, she took a seat across from it, leaning forward. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she said.

She finished cleaning the house and had no choice now but to come back to the kitchen. She had to clear out everything to wash the floor, which meant moving the tables and chairs and putting it somewhere. Outside was where she wanted it. She could tell him it escaped, ran away. But that wouldn’t be honest and if they had promised each other anything when they married, it was honesty. Letting his gift run away, or rather, pushing his gift out the door, wouldn’t be a white lie. It would be flat-out deception.

She moved the chairs into the hallway and tried to untie the string, cursing him for making a knot she couldn’t undo. She went to the junk drawer, took out the scissors and, grasping the string, clipped it quickly and led the lizard toward the kitchen door, then the porch, like a dog on a leash. When she opened the screen door, the lizard tried to run back inside, as if it were afraid of the outdoors. She pulled it along, but it planted all four paws firmly on the floor. Its nails made a pitiful sound on the linoleum, then became stuck on the doorjamb. She gave a tug and over it rolled, like a child’s toy truck. Another tug, and it was up again and furious and ran towards her. It followed her the whole length of the porch until she scooted over the banister and tied it to one of the posts. She walked around to the back of the house and let herself in.

What a gift, she thought. Her present for him was wrapped and put away in a bedroom drawer days before he suggested they skip gifts this year. She had bought him a new jacket and white shirt. She undid the ribbon to look at them, then replaced the clothes and surrounded them with tissue paper. They looked so nice she took the shirt out again and held it up to her cheek. It felt so crisp and cool.

When the day had cooled, she bathed and changed into a fresh cotton dress and lifted her hair away from her neck to pin it up.

*

“What’s it doing out there?” he said when he came home. “Don’t you like it?”

On the table, she had put a candle and the gift box in navy blue paper and the good dishes, but he didn’t look at those.

“What’s it doing?” she said absently, for she had taken him to mean that the thing was doing something interesting or different and that she should go and look.

The lizard stood very still, as if it might be dead. The bow was gone.

“Why’d you put it out there?” he said.

“Because it belongs out there,” she said as she closed the screen door.

From the heat, his black hair had separated into individual strands, making him look older and scraggly.

“You didn’t like it,” he said and began to follow her around the kitchen.

She retrieved his favorite pasta dish from the oven and the salad from the refrigerator and he followed right behind. Their bodies made a shadow on the yellow floor that looked like the silhouette of two shy, hesitant boxers in a ring.

“Oh, I like it,” she said. She was intent on getting the dinner ready and didn’t look at him. “I like it just fine. You didn’t pay any money for it, did you?”

His face looked tight.

She motioned toward the window with her cooking mitt. “It’s just that there’s a million of them out there, and it’s a shame to throw away good money after one.”

“I bought it, all right? Cheap. From a guy at work. I thought you’d like it. I thought you’d think it was funny.”

“I do think it’s funny. I laughed.”

“It’s really neat,” he said, trying to convince her. “It looks prehistoric or something.”

She made him sit through dinner before opening his package.

She expected him to say, I thought we agreed, but he didn’t. Instead, he looked eager, put his glass down, and said, “Well, let’s see what this is.”

He seemed stunned for a moment when he saw the clothes and then whistled low as he lifted them out of the box. He felt the material, ran his fingers down the length of the lapel, and smiled at her. “This is a good one. But what‘s it for? God knows there’s nowhere around here to wear this.” And then he laughed and said, eyes crinkling, “What have you got up your sleeve? I think you must be up to something, baby doll.”

“They’re interview clothes. You’ll need something nice to interview in if you try to get transferred back home or if you go to another company. Isn’t that why we came here? So you’d have a better job after this one? The next step up, you said.”

He went back to examining the jacket, rose half out of his chair and sat down again.

“Isn’t it?” she repeated and motioned with the back of her hand to the open bedroom door. “Try it on.”

He was standing now. He had the jacket on and went to the mirror, looking at himself this way and that, sizing up every angle.

“I told you,” he said. “I’ve got to put in a couple of years first before I’d even try to move on. You don’t just go looking for another job when you’ve hardly been here. You have to pay your dues.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I was hoping that once you were here for a while, you’d like it.”

“What’s there to like?” she said. She began biting some ragged skin on her bottom lip. She fingered the rim of her glass. She knew her voice sounded bitter but she didn’t care. “You told me about the place. Patience, you said. You’d have to be brain-dead to have this much patience. To want to live here. You’d have to be a fool.”

He stepped in front of her. “I’m a fool then,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets.

“You’re a fast learner. Everyone has always told you that. You’ll find another job. You don’t have to stay at that place.”

“You don’t want me to blow what I have, do you? If they get wind of me applying other places it won’t look good. And if I go in there now and ask the boss for a transfer back to where I came from, they’d die laughing. There are other guys, ahead of me, willing to pay their dues.”

She thought of those other men and what they and their wives must be like to be so patient, so accepting. She found herself wondering, for the first time since they had been together, what other kinds of men she could have married. Maybe I should have waited, she thought. And then she thought, I’ve heard about this. This is how things change.

“You act as if I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said. “They said I’d have to wait two years for a transfer. At least two years.”

“Oh, great,” she said, fingering the glass again. “I’ll be dead in two years in a place like this.”

He smiled at her.  “There she is. My melodramatic sweetheart.”

He removed his jacket and draped it neatly over his chair. He stepped behind her and put his arms around her.

“Look,” he said. “Baby doll. This is nothing. We’ll laugh about this later. It’ll be a story. Like a joke about how many miles we walked to school when we were kids.”

She looked through the window to where there was a thin stream of orange light across the horizon and nothing more. Some people might think the sight was beautiful. To her it had become barren.

“Let’s eat,” she said. “It’s getting cold.”

And in the end, after they had finished dinner and lain together and after she waited for the movements of his body to cause hers to shiver, she turned on her side and closed her eyes. He put his hand on her hip and said in a whisper, “Baby doll? You still awake?”

She was in the lazy space between wakefulness and sleep and, so, didn’t answer. She thought she heard the animal stumbling off the porch, down the steps, and into the night, finally free.

Before she dreamed, an image came to her of the liquid eyes. As she began to fall asleep, her body jerked, quick and hard. She felt as if she were jumping straight up into darkness.

***

Rumpus original art by Aubrey Nolan.

The World is a Shitting Bird: A Conversation with Emilie Moorhouse

During her MFA, Francophone writer Emilie Moorhouse serendipitously discovered the works of a little-known Surrealist poet, Syrian-Egyptian-English Joyce Mansour, who chose to write exclusively in French. Mansour, a glamourous, married woman who came of age as an artist in 1950s Paris under the wing of André Breton, existed as a kind of glitch in the French literary scene—an upper-class, Arab, apolitical woman who refused to become a sex object while making unapologetically sexual work. Emerald Wounds (City Lights Books) is the result of Moorhouse’s deep dive into the fringes of Francophone literature, translating Mansour’s wide-ranging poetry and asserting her right to be known. In this career-spanning edition, Mansour exists as a writer’s writer, a reluctant feminist, an Arab Jew, and most blatantly as a kind of queer “uber-wife,” pissing in her husband’s drink while flying on the freeway between sex and death.

I recently spoke to Moorhouse on Zoom about the life and work of Joyce Mansour as her Wi-Fi was being changed—the warbling sound of a hole being drilled somewhere above.

***

The Rumpus: How, technically, did you find Joyce Mansour?

Emilie Moorhouse: I was taking a translation course—this was in 2017, and the #metoo movement had just exploded and I thought, “I need to translate a woman who is controversial, someone who the literary establishment doesn’t approve of” which, okay, many women have not had the approval of the literary establishment. But I think I was looking for raw emotion, for a woman who could express her sexuality and who could speak her truth whether it fit in with the times or not. So that was kind of the criteria that I set for myself. And I did find quite a few women like this in Francophone literature, but in the Surrealist tradition or practice, a lot of it is stream-of-consciousness writing. And so, what Mansour was writing was naturally uncensored.

Rumpus: Reading Mansour’s origin story as a writer, I found it obviously compelling but also kind of curious, because there’s this story of her being in a state of grief, both from her mother dying when she was fifteen and from her first husband dying when she was eighteen, and the story is that her grief forced her to write. It was either the madhouse or poetry. That’s obviously a very compelling story behind a first book, right? Especially with the title of Screams from a beautiful, foreign, young woman in 1953 arriving on the Parisian literary and art scene. I wonder if there’s anything problematic in this origin story in your opinion. Is it constructed? Or do you think, in an alternate timeline, Mansour could’ve just been a happy housewife with her rich, much older, French-speaking second husband?

Moorhouse: Well, I think she would have been involved in the arts. There is this really strong personality in Mansour. And as much as she was shaped by the events of her youth, she does have such a rich background as well. She was bilingual before she met her second husband, speaking fluent English and Arabic. So, she obviously had this very rich and interesting life, you know, in tandem with these early events. But at the same time, and I’ve never heard it mentioned in any of the interviews, or, in any research that I did, that she was writing poetry, prior to these events. I guess life is life.

Rumpus: So, in sticking a little bit with her biography before getting to the work, when reading about Mansour’s second husband—which sounded like a problematic relationship in that he had lots of affairs—I feel like in a way that Mansour had this despairing, mourning and grieving personality versus a kind of desiring personality, especially desiring of men who she couldn’t really possess. Do you feel that her second husband supported her, especially the notion of the confessional in her work? I wonder if he even read her work?

Moorhouse: Yeah, I also wondered about that. I know that her son read her work and he actually helped correct her grammar, her French mistakes. And I do know that she never discussed her first husband with her second husband but that her second husband sort of swept her off her feet. He kind of gave her life again after the death of her first husband. But her second husband was not someone who was initially very involved in the arts. Apparently, André Breton hated him! Breton did not consent to Mansour’s husband, basically. He came from a very different world than Breton.

Rumpus: I have a lot of questions about the relationship between Mansour and Breton. In Mansour’s poetry, there’s a lot of female rage against the husband or the lover, even as she is taking pleasure in them. It reminds me of the line in one of her poems: “Don’t tell your dreams to the one who doesn’t love you.” I wonder if there’s this irreconcilable split in Mansour’s life between her domestic life and her artistic life. I was thinking a lot about Breton and his mentorship of her in this way. I think it’s interesting in your intro that you state that they were definitely not lovers.

Moorhouse: I was never able to explicitly find any information that Mansour and Breton were sexually involved, and one of her biographies explicitly states they were never lovers. I think Mansour’s artistic side was really nourished through Breton. They went to the flea markets of Paris every afternoon together in search of artwork. And I do think that Mansour’s second husband, through Mansour, started to develop a greater appreciation of artwork. But it wasn’t something that he was involved in initially and so I really don’t know how present he was in her artistic practice.

Rumpus: You label Mansour’s poetry as erotic macabre. Can you break that term open a bit? I am thinking of her work’s relationship to 60s and 70s French feminism (like écriture feminine) but I’m also thinking of the somewhat contrasting pornographic strain in her work, akin to Georges Bataille.

Moorhouse: I do see it as both. I think she gets inspiration from both. Bataille was very erotic macabre, or maybe he’s a little bit more twisted than that even, but this whole idea of la petite morte (death is orgasm), I do see influences from that in her work. But I don’t think Mansour was loyal to any kind of movement. I mean, she was obviously very loyal to the Surrealists, but when she was asked to write for a feminist magazine, she bristled and said, “Feminism, what do you mean?” I think Mansour liked to remain independent and have her creativity be independent from these different movements. She was apolitical. And I think some of that comes from Mansour’s experience in Egypt, being exiled because she was part of this upper-class Egyptian society, her father was imprisoned and most of his property and assets were seized by the government and apparently, he refused to ever own a house again and lived the rest of his life in a hotel. Then you have the Surrealist movement, which Joyce Mansour was a part of, which was more aligned with anarchism. She was kind of caught between two worlds.

Rumpus: It’s interesting, this idea of Mansour being apolitical and having a sort of disconnect from feminism, because it seems to bring up things around the Surrealists having issues with women, with women being objectified or fetishized in their work, this idea of “mad love” trumping all, even abuse. And so, if we just, say, insert Mansour into our present-day politics—and this is a totally speculative question—how do you feel she would fit into our polarizing and gender-fluid times?

Moorhouse: Well, my impression of her work is that it is very gender-fluid, she plays around with gender in her writing quite a bit, so I feel like she absolutely would, in a way, fit into our now. In terms of the political, that’s a good question because, yeah, everything is very polarized and politicized today.  Also, I don’t know that she wasn’t necessarily political. I think she obviously sympathized with many progressive movements and that’s clear in her writing. That includes feminism. She was openly mocking articles that appeared in women’s magazines imposing unrealistic housewife-style standards. She mocked beauty standards and even the condescending tone they had when advising women on how to behave “nicely.” So she obviously did have certain strong leanings. But I think outside of her art, Mansour wasn’t necessarily willing to pronounce them. It was more like my art speaks for itself.

Rumpus: I think that’s probably still the best way of being an artist. And also, it’s not really a speculative question, because we will soon see how Mansour’s work is received with a younger, contemporary, potentially genderqueer readership, right?

Moorhouse: Yeah. I’m excited to see how her work will be received. I do feel that much of her writing is, in fact, very contemporary around gender. But she wasn’t intellectualizing it. It came out in her voice, which rejected any gender confines without having to announce that she was doing so.

Rumpus: Did you find as a translator that you had to make some harder choices around some of the more dated language, especially in terms of race? Terms that people don’t use anymore?

Moorhouse: There were certainly some words that gave me pause. The word oriental comes up a few times, and this is obviously a word that is dated, perhaps more so in English than in French. What is interesting for me though, is that when I read it in context, I think she is using that word in a way that acknowledges the history behind it, the colonialism, the fetishizing, the exoticizing. For example, Mansour speaks of “oriental suffering,” or of a “narrative with an Oriental woman.” I don’t think, even though she was writing in the 60s at this point, that she uses this word lightly. The way I read it, she uses it to evoke her own nostalgia, or longing for her life in Egypt. And to clarify, when Mansour uses oriental in French, it refers to the Near East. It refers to her own Syrian and Egyptian roots. She never returned to Egypt, so even though she did experience a lot of suffering there, she is still a woman living in exile. This is definitely a challenge of translating older work, especially with an artist who, I think, does not use these words lightly.

Rumpus: Interesting. Because what’s making headlines right now is this political urge to kind of clean up certain language that was used in literature in the past that is hurtful or flat out racist today. So, I still do wonder if there was this urge at all for you to clean up the language?

Moorhouse: I didn’t want the language to be offensive. I would hope that I’ve succeeded with that. I don’t want any dated language to draw attention to itself because that’s not what the poem is meant to do.

Rumpus: But the French is the same. You never changed anything in the French.

Moorhouse: No, I never changed anything in the French. I don’t think I’m allowed to do that. The French is word-for-word.

Rumpus: I think this speaks to its time. And it also—yet again!—points back to the Surrealist problems with women. I mean, sometimes Mansour’s work is so radical and standout, and there are also moments in it when it does feel a bit retrograde. I’m inserting her relationship with Breton in here again because I wonder if she was one of those women who lived as an artist aligning herself with powerful men?

Moorhouse: Well, I think that she would have definitely been outnumbered in those groups, right? I mean, women to men. I don’t know if she was loud, and what her personality was like surrounded by all those men. It’s hard to know. But she did smoke cigars!

Rumpus: Right. That is a very alluring look. Also, she was a mother. I think that’s kind of a big deal in a very male-centric artist’s space.

Moorhouse: Yes, and she was a very doting and overprotective mother. But, you know, even though Mansour may have aligned herself with Breton and other men, I don’t feel like she would have been one to just do things to appease them. And you can see that in her poetry, how she rejects the male gaze that objectifies her. So we can’t just put her in a box or in a category of militant feminist or someone who just goes with the old boys’ club, right?

Rumpus: Yeah, you’re right. She’s both an individual and of her time. In terms of her being a woman, what do you make of her disappearance in the canon? You talk about this in your introduction, her work being perceived as “too much.” Do you think this quality relates to the forgetting of Joyce Mansour?

Moorhouse: Being very familiar with the French culture, I would say yes. I use the word chauvinistic because I think that certain French literary elite have this very precise idea of what “French” literature is, and what “great” literature is. And mostly, it’s been men, White men, who write “great literature” and historically women were allowed to write for children. I think it’s a shame because there are so many Francophone voices that are just so rich, so different. And I think that some in the literary elite just don’t know what to make of these so-called different voices, so they kind of dismiss them. And it’s too bad, because these voices enrich the literary landscape. French literature has been very France-centric, right? Which, obviously, has its roots in colonialism. So even though Mansour was somewhat respected as a Surrealist, the wider French literary establishment very easily could have dismissed her. When I was working on getting some of the rights from one of her publishers—and it’s really hard to get through to them—when I finally had a conversation with them, even they dismissed her! This man said to me, “You know, Joyce Mansour would be nothing without Breton. Without André Breton, there would be no Joyce Mansour.” So even one of her publishers in this day and age still doesn’t take her seriously.

Rumpus: There is this suspicion that Breton created her?

Moorhouse: Yes, and that she’s only recognized to the limited degree that she is because of her affiliation with him.

Rumpus: It feels that this relationship with Breton is really at the crux of a lot for Mansour. I mean, he clearly was incredibly important to her, he was her mentor and she loved him, and I don’t know—these very close artistic relationships they can be difficult for others in the world to understand. Maybe it’s why #metoo resonates differently in France, to be honest. And now I’m thinking of Maïwenn and Luc Besson, which is totally different, but still. . . . When did André Breton die? Was it 1968?

Moorhouse: I think it was 1966. I’m not sure.

Rumpus: Because it’s interesting, I was thinking of Mansour’s 1960s publication White Squares and her last work from the 1980s, Black Holes. Her later work is really kind of dark. My favorite line from one of her late poems is: “The world is a shitting bird.” I mean, I don’t want to say that Breton had an unnatural or too strong of a hold on her or a shitty hold on her, but maybe he did. Maybe her work matured after Breton’s death. Maybe it got even wilder.

Moorhouse: Yeah, I mean, I definitely do see that difference between her earlier work and her later work. It’s not just that the poems in her earlier works are shorter. The later ones are more macabre and her identity is more explicit—both her Jewish identity and her Egyptian identity. Also, Mansour evokes disease and aging and the history of cancer in her family. She died of cancer, like her mother did, and I don’t know if her battle was a short one or drawn out. There is another collection of her poems—prose poems that we couldn’t publish because of copyright—but there’s one about the hospital, and it sounds like it’s her visiting someone in a hospital and it’s very much about the human body falling apart and this industrialized hospital where all bodies are falling apart together.

Rumpus: Her mixing of the sexual body and the dying body is so powerful. I love Mansour’s use of urine, actually. Sometimes, it is this incredibly liberatory thing, like, pissing in the street. And then it’s poisonous, or it’s hedonistic, she’s drinking it like honey. Piss is this ubiquitous substance and act in her work. I love that.

Moorhouse: It’s almost like the soul, your soul comes out in your urine. What else can I say about that?

Rumpus: Nothing. That’s perfect. Your soul is in your urine.

 

 

***

Author photo by Selena Phillips Boyle

The Presence in Absences: A Conversation with Gina Chung

I first met Gina Chung at a going-away party for a mutual writer friend. In a warm back room, during the final days of summer, I wedged myself into a small circle and caught the final bits of something Chung said. She paused to clue me into their conversation. I was struck by her kindness and easy generosity, the way she openly shared her writing routine and practices with a group of old friends and new acquaintances. Months later, I heard about her debut novel, Sea Change (Vintage). The book sucked me into its effervescent, marbled world and ultimately buoyed my spirit, just like its author had at that summer party.

Sea Change follows Ro, an Asian American woman who is floating into her thirties on her own. Partly struggling, partly aimless, Ro is estranged from her mother, and grieving her father, who disappeared on a sea exhibition a decade earlier. Ro’s only companion is a Giant Pacific octopus, Dolores, the last remaining link to her father. As Dolores is about to be sold to a private investor, Ro has to reframe her understanding of past and present to make sense of her new world. Chung’s prose bubbles with delectable humor and metaphors, burrows into hard truths, and sets out to explore uncharted emotional ranges.

Chung is the recipient of the 2021 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship and a number of literary awards, including a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and the Rumpus, among others. She has a forthcoming short story collection, Green Frog (Vintage, 2024).

I spoke with Chung about Sea Change over Zoom a few weeks before her book launch. We talked about the role of silence and the unsaid in Asian American families, humor’s proximity to grief, subverting conventionality in character tropes, and how to take care of oneself in service of one’s art.

***

The Rumpus: I noticed that a lot of your work, Sea Change and a number of your short stories, often features the natural world. What drew you to ocean life and sea creatures as subjects and counterpoints to the characters in your novel?

Gina Chung: I’ve always loved writing about the natural world and thinking about animals that live in different ecosystems than us because it reminds me that we as human beings are also animals. I think we often forget that about ourselves; it’s really easy for us to see ourselves as being somehow apart from or above nature when in actuality we are very much a part of it. Whereas humans can and often do lie about what we need, animals can’t hide or be dishonest about their needs. Thinking about animals and what they need to survive and thrive inspires me as a writer to also try to be more honest on the page.

Rumpus: Within the characters’ environment, money is an oceanic force, capitalism as much a precondition to existence in the novel as it is in current modern life. With our protagonist, Ro, it seems there are few things that she can do in opposition to these forces, but she actively defies, withdraws from, and avoids this system in her own ways. Can withdrawal and avoidance be a form of agency?

Chung: In a lot of ways, withdrawing from or avoiding a decision can seem like a way to surrender one’s agency in a situation, but at the same time—my therapist and I always talk about this—not making a choice is still kind of making a choice as well. For Ro, avoidance is a huge part of how she navigates her day-to-day life because she’s been hurt and carries a lot of pain. That makes her feel afraid to engage directly with things that might hurt her or that she might be in disagreement with. When it comes to the impending sale of Dolores, it is one area where, even if she’s not consciously doing anything to fight back against the sale, she feels a direct kind of no in response. I wanted that to be an inciting incident for the book, too, because it gets her to understand how much this octopus means to her and how much she stands to lose if she were to lose this one point of connection.

Rumpus: This inciting incident also pits her against her best friend, Yoonhee. I was fascinated by their relationship. They grew up together with similar backgrounds but end up in very different positions at the aquarium and have different levels of motivation to rise the ranks. Why was it important for you to juxtapose their ambition and upward mobility?

Chung: I loved the idea of, as you said, pitting them a little bit against each other with this development that happens in their workplace. I wanted Yoonhee to feel like a character who has genuinely been a part of Ro’s life for a long time. They’ve seen each other through different ups and downs and phases of life since childhood. I’m always fascinated by the topic of friendship, in particular, old friendship. What does it mean to have old friends who have been with you for many years and who have been witness to all the different past selves that you’ve inhabited? It’s such a gift, but it can also be such a challenge because when you are friends with someone for that long, you both start to feel a little bit of ownership over past versions of one another. People change and grow over time. Friends can grow apart. They can also come back together.

I wanted Yoonhee to feel a bit like a foil to Ro but be a real person herself, too, as someone who has such a completely different outlook in life. She’s someone who is pretty straightforward, knows what she wants, and doesn’t hesitate to go after it. Just because she tends to be more conventional doesn’t mean that she’s a flat or two-dimensional character. I also wanted to examine what happens in a person’s life when they get to a certain age and feel like, “Oh, my gosh! Everyone is leaving me behind.” Because they’re so close, Ro can’t help but look at Yoonhee and feel, even if she doesn’t necessarily want the same things that Yoonhee wants, that she should want them and that she’s nowhere near getting them.

Rumpus: Craft-wise, how do you write someone who might fall into some of these tropes but also honor their individuality?

Chung: One thing I wanted was to have them interacting and bickering over small things—the way you do with siblings, old friends, or anyone you’ve known for years—and just see the ways in which they are both able to call each other out. That’s what really felt like the core of Yoonhee to me, this person who deeply cares about her friend. Sometimes there’s no other way of expressing it than, “Why are you this way?” in this exasperated but also deeply loving way. I also wanted to show, with the flashback sections of earlier versions of themselves, how vulnerable Yoonhee is. Just because she seems to have her life together doesn’t mean she doesn’t experience pain or doubt or fear.

Rumpus: Through flashbacks, the book alternates a lot between the past and present. How did you kind of conceive of this structure? I felt very taken care of as a reader to get into the story in this way.

Chung: I’m so glad to hear that. I love an alternating structure in a book, and there are so many books that do this amazingly well. One that was particularly close to my heart at the time of writing was Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, which is also a later-in-life coming-of-age story, against a backdrop of family dysfunction that shows how she’s gotten to this point in her life. In that book, those scenes from the main character’s childhood and upbringing really helped me as a reader anchor the choices she was making in the present day. I wanted to do something similar with Ro: give the reader a vivid picture of not only who this person is today and how she is navigating the world but also what has led her to this point, including her parents’ choices. In those past sections, I especially wanted to excavate who Ro’s father was, since he’s not around in the present day of the novel. I wanted to give the reader a chance to get to know who he was and what he meant to Ro.

Rumpus: As you mentioned, the men in Ro’s life, her father and also her ex-boyfriend, are a bit more phantom than flesh. They are bigger figures in her head through her memories than they are in the present. They exist through their absences. What did you want to portray about absences and the stories we conjure about the people who are no longer in our lives?

Chung: You’re so right in saying that a person’s absence, once they’re no longer in our lives, can almost become stronger than their presence was back when they were around. There’s a kind of danger in that, since the person who is mourning might get caught up in imagining that things were better than they actually were with that person. Maybe they think that in losing that person, they’ve lost some irretrievable part of themselves too. With Ro, the book starts off with her having gone through this breakup with her boyfriend, who is leaving her for a privately funded mission to colonize Mars. As anyone who has ever been through a breakup knows, the things that you didn’t quite appreciate about that person when you were together seem to come back in full relief when they’re no longer in your life. That’s what she’s going through, in the process of mourning that relationship, and also the loss of her father, who was hugely influential in how she sees the world. Her father introduced her to this love for animals that they both share, and he encouraged her to be curious about the world. His absence is so clearly felt throughout her later adulthood. I wanted to show just how searing that kind of loss can be and how in the process of mourning someone, whether it’s because you broke up with them or because they’re literally gone and you will never be able to connect with them again, the mourning is never linear. Of course, it’s not that we shouldn’t remember or grieve the ones we’ve lost, but I wanted to explore what can happen if you get too caught up in that mourning.

Rumpus: I feel like silence, too, is more of a presence than an absence, in the way it pervades relationships between family, friends, and romantic partners in the novel. Silence feels particularly pertinent in my own Asian American community, especially in how it persists in the first generation and is continuing to manifest in other ways in future generations. What roles did you hope for silence to inhabit for the characters in the book?

Chung: I feel that so deeply. The silences of ancestors, the silences of our parents and grandparents, as well as the silences that we inherit as children of immigrants. It’s hard to ask folks about the past because there’s a lot of pain within those memories. It’s definitely something that I’ve noticed a lot in my own family. In many Asian and Asian American families, there’s an acute awareness of what it would cost for the other person to relive their story just by telling it. That’s something I’m always thinking about and living with. I don’t want to perpetuate the trope of the silent, sad Asian American family either, but I do think that silence exists for a good reason, and a lot of those reasons are bound up in pain and trauma. With Ro, I think we see it most with her mother because she and her mother have never been able to talk about things like her father’s disappearance. They’ve never really been able to process what they’ve both experienced and been through. In writing Ro, I wanted to investigate what it would be like to grow up with that silence and not even know how to broach it with your mom, your friends, or even yourself. Ro doesn’t have the language to name any of the feelings that she’s grown up experiencing.

Rumpus: One of my favorite passages in the novel is: “I used to wonder if we would take better care of our bodies if our skin was transparent, if every little thing we did and said and ate was observable. If every hurtful or careless thing we ever said to one another manifested itself visually in the body.” It’s interesting how everyone has their own version or perception of self-care, especially when we consider the juxtaposition between what we think we need and what others think we need. Could we talk about your intention with writing about self-care?

Chung: Ro is not very good at taking care of herself throughout most of the book. I think taking care of yourself—and I mean real care, not just the commodified ideas of self-care that we’re all sold nowadays—is actually very difficult, and it’s a practice. As someone who also struggles at times to take care of myself, I wanted to explore a character who has never really learned how to do this, and this is something I feel like I haven’t really seen much of in contemporary literature when it comes to portrayals of Asian American women and women of color. There is a sort of larger cultural moment right now around what I’ve seen some people refer to as “the disaster woman trope,” but I feel like those characters are almost always white women, and their meltdowns are still usually played for laughs. But I wanted to show what it would look like to have a character who is so afraid of everyone leaving her behind that she can’t help but leave herself in all these ways, whether it’s by drinking way too much and driving home afterward or avoiding important conversations with the people in her life that she loves. I wanted to show all the small and big ways that we as humans abandon ourselves when we’ve been abandoned many times before.

At the same time, I did notice throughout the course of writing the novel that whenever I put Ro in the position of having to take care of someone else, she was actually not bad at it, much to her surprise. It’s sometimes hard and uncomfortable for her, but she’s able to stay present in those moments in ways that she can’t always be for herself. I wanted to show how she is able to learn how to do those things and, in time, show up for herself too.

Rumpus: As someone who balances full-time employment with writing, do you have self-care practices that help you continue creating art?

Chung: I’m very used to thinking of myself as a brain in a jar. I don’t always remember to consider my bodily needs, especially when things get really busy or when I’m in the middle of an engrossing project. I’ve had to remind myself over the years to slow down when I need to and to take care of the container through which I experience the world.

My main tip is to listen to your body as much as you can. Take breaks and sleep when you need to. I’m someone who can easily ignore all my body’s warning signs and just keep going until the point of exhaustion. It’s just not worth it most of the time. There’s no need to flagellate yourself in the name of your art, and the wellspring of your creativity can’t be replenished if you don’t rest, no matter how guilty you might feel for not getting down a certain number of words per day. I’m still learning how to be gentle with myself in doing this. Now, whenever I feel like all the creativity is gone and I’ve lost it for good, I’ve at least learned to believe that’s not true. It’s my lizard brain panicking. I know it will come back. The only way you can care for your art is to care for yourself.

Rumpus: I laughed throughout the book, sometimes out loud, but it surprised me because some of my laughter was near moments of strife or grief. To what extent does humor and absurdity color your understanding of grief? How can humor be a tool in explaining grief, if at all?

Chung: Humor is so important to me, both as a writer and as a human being. Humor oftentimes hinges around this element of surprise. There’s this idea that writing about grief or difficult experiences can’t be funny or that it’s one note. So much of life isn’t like that, though. There have been times in my life where I’m going through heavy situations, but that doesn’t mean I don’t laugh if I see something surprising or ridiculous. Even in moments of my own despondency, I sometimes laugh at myself because of how dramatic I know I’m being. I think it’s important to be able to do that because otherwise life can be overwhelmingly difficult, and having those moments where you’re either laughing at yourself or at the situation is healthy and also lifesaving in a way. In terms of writing, I think funny scenes can sharpen the emotional quality of the sad ones, and vice versa. It’s like in cooking, where you have complementary but contrasting flavors, they heighten each other.

 

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Author photo by S.M. Sukardi

Voices on Addiction: Anchor Point

The National Wildfire Coordinating Group glossary gives this definition of an anchor point:

 An advantageous location from which to start building a fire break or line. If done properly, this will prohibit fire from establishing itself on the other side of an unsuspecting crew who could otherwise end up being surrounded, with little chance for escape.

The first thing you learn at fire school is the acronym, LCES. LCES stands for Lookouts, Communications, Escape routes, and Safety zones. You will repeat it to yourself while sharpening your Pulaski and your chainsaw. You’ll say it again while wearing your stiff new boots into the shower, and later when you hike up steep trails with your new crewmates, each of you carrying around 40 pounds of gear strapped to your backs in 100-degree temperatures. It’s printed on the back page of every firefighter’s pocket guide, and on stickers handed out, which will later show up on helmets, bunks, notebooks, and water bottles.

Next comes the video you’ll sit through at the beginning of every fire season until you retire. Short, low-budget clips featuring interviews with survivors of tragic fires. Close-ups of haunted faces recall having spent interminable moments pressed tight to the ground in their foil shelters taking shallow breaths, breathing prayers against the dirt to their families and Gods while roaring flame fronts consumed the oxygen outside.

The camera pans away from the faces of the survivors to several small, white, weathered crosses high on a lonely mountainside that soon fade to black, and you can practically taste the ash and smell the faintest whiff of burning flesh coming from the bodies of firefighters who lived just long enough to stop thinking or feeling anything.

 

You are going to need a mantra. Throughout your career, you will have many. “LCES’ is as good as any to start with. The “L” in LCES stands for “lookouts.”

Post a lookout, whenever there is a need for one. There is always a need for a lookout.

Now, if you can, imagine another kind of fire; the kind of fire that starts within a human being. Alcoholism is that kind of fire.

Trying to control alcoholism is as complex and harrowing as learning to fight wildland fire, and because I happened to undertake both labors at the same time, the lessons I learned from each informed the other until I eventually rose from the ashes of my former self.

Barely into my first fire season, I began to notice I was no longer able to rocket out of bed in the mornings after nights spent drinking with the crew, no matter how much water I drank or how hard I exercised in an attempt to sweat it out. I was tired all the time. At thirty-six, I was the oldest firefighter in a close-knit fire crew of twenty and thirty-somethings. Maybe I was just too old to be playing with fire.

Older though I was, I was the happiest I could remember having been because I had finally stumbled into the work I was born to do.

Still, the beginnings of more serious health problems related to my alcohol consumption began to show themselves and by autumn there was a persistent hollow ache in my stomach.

When you decide to stop drinking only to discover that your willpower can’t keep you stopped, posting the analog of a fire lookout is a good idea. Survivors of tragic fires and late-stage alcoholism each told me in the early days that retreating into a survival shelter to wait out the fire is a tactic one should never rely on. Sure, you might survive fire or early sobriety by insulating yourself from the world in a hot, airless cocoon, but the ultimate goal is to expand your world by developing healthy interdependence with others. Together and connected, everyone increases their chances of surviving whole and resilient, instead of suffering alone beneath a heavy blanket of smoky darkness.

The first step I took toward sobriety was accepting that the fire had been there for a long time, quietly burning my life down.

 

The “C” in LCES stands for communications. Many tragedies could have been prevented had supervisors listened to lookouts’ warnings, or if someone—anyone—had spoken up in time to retreat from oncoming disaster.

Similarly, many alcoholics could have avoided lost time and opportunities, and later grave injuries to health and relationships, if they had only listened when their friends and family told them, “we’re beginning to worry about you.”

Abstinence isn’t sexy, no matter which social media influencer decides to take a public journey on the wagon. Although moderating is no big deal for a person whose alcohol problem is minor or temporary, for a real alcoholic, “dry January” is edge play.

When I fully removed alcohol from my life, I suddenly felt skinless, with all my nerves exposed to the air wherever I went. My body and mind felt like riverbanks being overrun by waves of unprocessed grief and trauma. It was necessary to find or create alternative escape routes and safety zones until new pathways developed through my interior moonscape of fading fire scars, which at some point miraculously began to fill in with new green growth.

 

The “E” in LCES stands for escape routes. What is an escape route? In wildland firefighting, it’s simple: Pick two directions. Face the danger. Make sure your pathway is clear, even if you have to cut your own path through chest-high brush with your saw. When first becoming sober, finding an escape route seems impossible: Alcohol is everywhere, and it feels like a social mandate. Work, sports, vacations, and activities of every kind involve the ever-present friend that one must now treat like the traitor it has become.

At first, sobriety feels at once like a death of a best friend, loss of comfort, and a beloved version of one’s self. On some level, it is exactly these things; it is also another kind of deceptively simple escape route from the need to use a substance to deal with life’s pain. You’ve probably known people who have ultimately chosen one of the others; sickness, insanity, or death.

Phone numbers of friends who can be counted on to call back, and taking my own car to social gatherings were among the first and most effective escape routes and safety zones I developed early on. Years later, I still rely on them although recovery no longer is about the fear of drinking again. These days, I use my tools to help remain steady in a world that is often on fire and in an upheaval of its own.

 

The “S” in LCES stands for “safety zones.” Safety zones are meant to be large, well-considered areas easily accessed from the fireline, but in reality, they rarely are. On the ground and in life, crews learn to prepare the best they can with the resources and time they have.

When fighting fire, the last step is called cold trailing. I learned to take off my thick gloves designed to protect firefighter’s vulnerable hands from burns and feel for any remaining heat around the blackened edges of the former blaze where it bumps up against the green. Where heat is found, the hot dirt is dug up and spread, allowing it to cool. Unbelievable amounts of heat can be found sometimes in deep pockets of warm soil. All it takes is a breath of wind and one spark for a drowsing fire to be reawakened.

While I still occasionally stumble upon hidden hot spots in my sober life, it’s been many years since I’ve stopped trying to put my own fires out with alcohol. I regularly invite other seasoned sober people to help me cold trail the edges of the old burns. Together, we take up our collective tools and legacy knowledge to open up the haunted ground, exposing our still-smoldering secrets to sunlight and air. Somehow, this is how we stay sober.

It took years from the time I realized I wanted to be a wildland firefighter for me to begin to walk toward that goal, while also leaving the biggest obstacle to achieving it behind.

 

 

 

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Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.

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Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen

Killing One to Save Many: Javier Marías’s Tomás Nevinson

Would it be morally justifiable to murder Hitler before he became the Fuhrer? In Diary of a Man in Despair, the author Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen recounts the time he chanced upon Hitler dining alone in 1936 and his regret at not having murdered the man although he had a loaded gun. In his defense, Reck-Malleczewen acknowledges that he could not have known the monster Hitler would become. Had he known, he surely would have pulled the trigger.

Another could-have-been is portrayed, this time in fiction, in Fritz Lang’s movie Man Hunt. It is 1939, and British Hunter Captain Alan Thorndike, hiding behind a bush with a rifle, entertains the idea of assassinating Hitler, but just as his determination sets in, he is captured by a guard. Without that moment of hesitation, the captain would have saved millions of lives.

These two instances are repeatedly mentioned by the narrator in Javier Marías’s new and final novel Tomás Nevinson (Knopf), who often reminds himself that “nothing is certain until it happens.

Nevinson has reason to repeat the truism. A retired British secret service agent in his forties, he has been living quiet and uneventful days when his past superior Betram Tupra reconnects with him. One last job, Tupra says, trying to recruit him for a new mission: assassinate a suspected terrorist before she plots an attack with mass casualties. The scene depicting the initial conversation between Tupra’s methodical speech to lure Nevinson out of retirement, and Nevinson’s deliberation on whether or not to accept, consumes the first hundred pages of the novel. Nevinson succumbs because he can no longer bear the purgatorial state of his life in retirement; he would rather choose hell where the action is than the safe haven where it is not.

Once on the job, he finds himself in his old world of “assumptions and permanent suspicion, distrust and callousness, of pretense and deliberate betrayals.” Supposedly, his target is an IRA-trained terrorist who masterminded the Hipercor bombing in Barcelona by the Basque Separatist Group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna: “Basque Homeland and Liberty”) that killed 22 innocent civilians in 1987. But there is one caveat: While there is only one terrorist, there are three female suspects—an unmarried restaurateur, a schoolteacher married to a criminal, and the socialite wife of an aristocrat.

Transferred to the small town where the three women live, he pretends to be a novelist writing about the town, befriending a local journalist, a drug dealer, and a politician, all to winnow down the suspects. Nevinson acquaints himself with the women, cautiously at first, although the restauranter soon becomes his lover. But the hiatus during retirement has impaired his acumen. While meeting these suspects is easy enough, he finds it more difficult to lure them into his vicinity, become a trustworthy companion, and bait the true terrorist into revealing herself.

When Tupra threatens to kill all three women to prevent a bigger catastrophe, Nevinson uses deduction to select a target, a conclusion with a large margin of error, an educated guess at best. The rising suspense culminates in his attempt to assassinate the supposed terrorist, though he worries that none of these women may be the criminal he is led to believe. Nevinson becomes equivocal: if he had been sure of the suspect’s culpability, would he have murdered her with no sense of guilt? Should he believe, as he did so during his active years, that by killing this woman, he is saving many lives? Nevinson comes to fear the consequences of his decision, quoting Macbeth, “‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy, than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.” The novel puts into question Kant’s idea of categorical imperative when the standard of ethics in our world cannot divorce itself from consequences.

Javier Marías passed away last year, and Tomás Nevinson—his last and longest novel at 650 pages—was translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa, who had worked with him for the last 30 years. Tomás Nevinson is a companion piece to Marías’s previous novel, Berta Isla, Nevinson’s wife and protagonist of that novel. Tomás Nevinson continues where Berta Isla leaves off, but from a different perspective. A prior reading of Berta Isla is not necessary, although the emotional impact may be heightened by knowing the couple’s past, which is briefly sketched in the new novel. If Berta Isla probed the limits of knowing in human relationships, Tomás Nevinson explores the limitations of moral certainty. If Berta Isla toyed with the idea of the espionage novel, Tomás Nevinson consummates the genre.

Indeed, it is an espionage novel, which employs Marías’s signature style: digressive reflections, allusion to diverse literary works, and philosophical musings. Once again, his sentences rove with a compass rather than with a map, exploring uncharted psychological and philosophical territories of human affairs. His narrative enters a maze in which every possible route is inspected. Elliptical turns and backtracking are frequent, yet rather than being exhausting, they offer nuances and emphases.

In one sentence, Nevinson contemplates his illogical decision to accept the mission: “[T]he only way not to question the usefulness of what you have done in the past is to keep doing the same thing; the only justification for a murky, muddy existence is to continue to muddy it; the only justification for a long-suffering life is to perpetuate that suffering, to tend it and nourish it and complain about it, just as a life of crime is only sustainable if you persevere as a criminal, if villains persist in their villainy and do harm right left and center, first to some and then to others until no one is left untouched.”

Such sentences progress like blood flowing into all the channels of a vein, supplying the narrative with life and zeal. Marías is one of those gifted writers whose style sets him apart from other writers, whose authorship is apparent on every page he writes.

The plot of Tomás Nevinson includes a few real-life events that transpired during the long political conflict between Spain and the Basque Country, including the kidnapping and the subsequent murder of the Spanish politician Miguel Ángel Blanco by the ETA. Nevinson joins his neighbors marching to the town square in demonstration, perhaps to earn their trust, taking advantage of solidarity forged by the maddening atrocities incurred by the Basque nationalists. To Marías’s credit, a sense of urgency pervades the novel despite his introspective prose.

Endearing scenes between Nevinson and his wife Berta Isla, who have two children together, provide comforting reprieve from Nevinson’s stumbling undercover work. They care for each other, but long years of absence from the household during his active service rendered their marriage void. They no longer live under the same roof; Tomás is more like an avuncular figure to his children. Although they sometimes share Berta’s bed, Tomás does not probe into Berta’s private life, believing that he has no right. But the novel ends with promising notes as he recites Yeats’s “When You Are Old” to Berta:

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

With Marías’s untimely passing, we will never find out whether Berta and Tomás will rekindle their love, and yet as his final work, Tomás Nevinson, with his perennial theme of secrecy and betrayal, Marías has left us a towering works, a rightful culmination testifying to his genius.

 

 

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Rumpus Original Fiction: Fantasyland

The spotlight belongs on Portia Control. For tonight’s final number, she takes the stage wearing the highest hair in recorded history. Her wigs are always an event, but this creation is most enthralling—a leaning tower three units tall, generous scoops of pistachio green. Loyal patrons of the bar brace for disaster, place their bets on whether the stacked wigs will fall. But Portia is no amateur. She works magic with spirit gum and bobby pins. Tonight, she is the fantasy, rhinestoned to death in her thrift store dress. No one can tell her otherwise.

The other queens are notorious outfit repeaters, worshippers of stretch fabric. They trot out their faithful standbys, the crowd-pleasing numbers they know will get wallets out of pockets. They don’t perform. They do laps around the bar, kissing cheeks, collecting dollar bills from drunk bachelorettes. At curtain call, they return to the stage a parade of half-drag. One of them, a newly minted queen whose name Portia has already forgotten, wears a T-shirt advertising the Iron Pit Gym—at curtain call!—and then the show hostess, a queen named Dawn Deveraux, emerges from backstage wearing flip-flops. It’s no wonder Dawn must remind the audience to applaud. On the mic, Dawn is a kindergarten teacher, pleading with her students to form a line. There are drink specials that Dawn needs to repeat—the vodka that nobody can stand is now only two dollars; Boozy Bottoms are half off—but the spotlight ignores Dawn and searches for Portia instead. Twenty minutes have passed since Portia’s last number, the one where she breathlessly lip-synced the side effects from a pharmaceutical commercial, and still the wigs sit heavy on her head, defying the laws of physics. Below the neck Portia wears a new look just for curtain call, a houndstooth overcoat the audience hasn’t seen before and will never see again.

After the curtain closes, the queens stream onto the dancefloor, choking the air with their department store perfumes. Portia cannot understand why these queens are treated as minor deities. Worshippers flock to them with offerings of well liquor and gas station cigarettes. Portia won’t accept such gifts. Her taste is far too particular. She drinks lemon drops out of champagne flutes. For her ceremonial post-show cigarette, she only smokes Fantasias, the luxury brand that comes in bright colors she can coordinate with her lip—cherry red, strawberry-milkshake pink. Any sensible queen knows that the performance doesn’t stop when you leave the stage. There is still an audience watching, even in the alley behind the bar, where Portia smokes next to the graffiti that reads BE GAY DO CRIME.

That’s where the new boy finds her, the new boy operating the spotlight. He has no theatrical experience, nor was he given any formal training, only this suggestion by Dawn an hour before the show began: “It’s a light. You take it, and you move it around.” But the spotlight moved of its own accord. The new boy swears this. The light is simply drawn to Portia.

She rewards the new boy for his flattery with a drag on her cigarette. Shivering in his corduroy jacket, he accepts readily, as if the cigarette might bring him warmth. “I’ve never done lights before,” he says. “Did I do okay?” His jacket has a fur collar, but in no way is it appropriate for winter. Portia feels a sudden motherly stirring. The jacket, she estimates, is at least a size too large for him. In the jacket, he looks like a child playing in Daddy’s closet.

“You were pretty good for a virgin,” Portia says.

A new song starts playing inside the Closet, the bump and grind favorite that comes on every Friday and Saturday when the party reaches its peak. The throb of bass is so heavy it shakes the whole block. “I bet the twinks are going wild in there,” she says. “Sucking down their vodka sodas. What is it about being skinny and hairless that makes you order vodka soda?”

The new boy laughs. “I love your name, by the way,” he says. “So funny. Portia Control! I kept cracking up.”

“Why?” she says. “What’s funny about it?”

“It’s. Ummm.”

“It’s what?” She takes pleasure in watching him squirm. She is having fun with this new boy. They are having fun together, both of them.

“Well,” he says, “uh, you know—”

“I’m kidding,” she says. “I’m messing with you. Yes, I’m a big girl. That’s the joke.”

“It’s hard to tell. If you guys are joking.”

“Guys?”

“Ladies. Gorgeous ladies.”

“That’s better.”

Holiday lights twinkle down where the alley meets College Ave. Christmas is over—New Year’s, too—but the city is in no rush to put away its decorations, and while some people might find this tacky, Portia can appreciate it. What’s so wrong with keeping that festive mood going long enough to see them through the winter?

She realizes she is staring at the new boy’s jaw, the empty threat of his stubble. For how long has she been staring? She can’t remember. She says, “Have you ever thought about doing drag? You have the face for it.”

“Yeah?”

“Cheekbones,” Portia says, “are very important.”

The new boy considers this. He finds a wall to lean against, strikes a pose that says I, an intellectual, am considering cheekbones. To complete the look, he takes a long drag on her cigarette. The smoldering end burns red, burns orange, bright bursts of color in the January gray. “Your name’s Dustin, right?” he says.

“I’m Portia,” she says.

“Yeah, but like, your actual name.”

“I don’t do government names. I hear that enough out in the real world. Don’t make me live in the real world any more than I already have to.”

The new boy takes one last sip of the cigarette. “I’m Miguel,” he says, and passes it back to her, but the greedy little thing has left her nothing but ash.

 

She invites him over to keep her company while she does her stoning for tomorrow night’s show. It’s a long and lonely process, applying rhinestones to fabric, but just how long she keeps to herself. She does, however, issue the requisite warning about the E6000 fumes upon their arrival at her apartment. She believes those fumes have mind-altering properties. You have to take a break every hour or so, step away from the glue and fill up on fresh air.

At Portia’s apartment, overhead light is forbidden, its cruelty toward drag queens well-documented. Lamplight is kinder, more flattering, and a lamp is yet another object Portia can adorn with fringe and beads. To someone who has never stoned before, her apartment with its low light and scattered syringes probably looks like the den of a heroin addict, but the truth is much sadder—she’s a drag queen who buys secondhand and spangles every garment herself. Portia visits the women’s section at Vintage Wearhouse so often that the cashier who merely cocked his eyebrows at her selections in the beginning has started asking questions. Her answer is always that she’s shopping for her homebound mother, her poor mother who likes to dress up in the mirror because it makes her feel alive.

“And he believes that?” Miguel says.

“People like him will believe anything,” she says, “as long as they don’t have to believe queers exist.”

Anyway, Vintage Wearhouse is a crapshoot. Only sometimes is their selection worth the homophobia. Where Portia most reliably strikes gold is estate sales. None of the other queens at the Closet will shop a dead woman’s wardrobe. They find the practice morbid; they prefer to sew their four-way stretch swimsuits and serve the same look week after week. Portia’s standards are higher. Whenever a big girl croaks, Portia is there to rifle through her closet. That’s how she found the houndstooth coat, the coat. Does Miguel remember it? Of course he remembers it; Portia says so before he has the chance to respond. Even if her haul is not up to par, even if she comes home from a sale with trash, it doesn’t matter. Portia knows how to make trash look good.

 

Miguel is newly twenty-one, a student at the university enrolled in a full slate of business classes. Majoring in business—that was his dad’s idea, he says, not his. It is the most essential of the strings attached to his dad’s offer to help pay his tuition. His dad works in landscaping. He and a team of four other brown men are shuttled around the Indianapolis suburbs in the back of a pickup truck to plant flowers for white people with money to burn. This has been his father’s workday for nearly twenty years now. Miguel will make something more of himself—thus, business! Miguel will not spend his life down on his knees.

“Your dad is right,” Portia says. “I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life on my knees, and I regret every minute of it.”

“Ha ha,” Miguel says.

“Does he know?”

“About what?”

“Your appreciation of artisanal meats.”

“I think so. But if I don’t say it out loud, we can go on pretending. And as long as we keep pretending, he’ll keep covering tuition.”

“So this is a long con,” Portia says. “You’re scamming him. Look, as a rule, I respect the hustle, but in this instance, I’m not sure.”

“It’s not a scam.”

“Sounds like one to me.”

“A degree in business can take you anywhere.” Look how precious he is, trying to believe his own line. He gnaws on the skin around his thumbnail, his teeth as square as a woodland creature’s.

“The longer you put off telling him,” Portia says, “the harder it’s going to be. I’ll just say that.”

“Thanks for your input,” Miguel says, “but it’s fine. I’ll be fine, Mom.”

“Not Mom. I’m not that old yet.”

“Tell that to your hairline,” he says quietly, as if already apologizing for it.

Here is a lesson Portia learned years ago—you can get away with being rude and nasty if there’s a twinkle in your eye. Miguel’s eye has no such twinkle.

“Was that okay to say?” he says. “Your hairline really isn’t that crazy.”

“Oh, stop. No backpedaling!” She gives him full permission to read her into the dirt. Nothing is off-limits, save for her government name, which is not to be repeated. “So,” she says, “where were we? My hairline. Go on. Destroy me.”

 

He needs to know the backstage gossip if he’s going to work with the queens up close. Has he heard about the amateur porn? The oldest queen at the Closet makes amateur porn with her two mustachioed lovers. She is the cabaret singer, the queen with the terrible, caked-on makeup. Miguel nods as in yes, the terrible one, I remember. You can look up the terrible one on PornHub, where she and her Super Mario boyfriends have a decent following. Portia can show him right now if he wants.

“I think I’m good,” he says.

“Oh, it’s hilarious,” Portia says. “I’ll send you a link. Homework for next time.”

The biggest story is Dawn, the show hostess. Dawn is mother to nearly a dozen Deveraux girls, several of whom—this is not to be repeated—have sucked her toes in exchange for bookings. Dawn is going through a divorce and milking it for all it’s worth. The divorce is her excuse for repeating stale material on the mic: I’m a little distracted right now. Maybe you heard? Miguel should avoid friending her on Facebook, where she posts only photos from the latest furry convention or mopey updates about how quiet her house is now. Never mind that Dawn was out on the dance floor every Saturday night slobbering all over some local twink, back when things at home were bliss. These days she hovers near the bar after her shows, collecting pity drinks. Meanwhile, her husband—“A total sweetheart,” Portia says, “he worshipped her, the dumb fuck”—has been banned from entering the Closet ever again. Dawn made sure of it.

Miguel says, “Is that true about Dawn’s toes? You’re for real?”

“Oh yes,” Portia says. “Those little piggies get around.”

“That’s nasty.”

“Foot stuff isn’t nasty. Dawn is nasty. Let’s get that much straight. We don’t kink-shame in this house.”

 

He asks her what his drag name is. He does not ask what his drag name might be or could be. In Miguel’s mind, it seems, there is a right answer, one that Portia is uniquely qualified to intuit. And perhaps she is. Portia will play the role of drag prophet. She will do her best to communicate with the showgirl in his subconscious.

“Her name is Chiquita,” Portia says. “Like the banana.” For her signature number, Chiquita would do a bit of burlesque in a yellow dress with marabou trimming. The dress would be built to be torn away; it would peel in four different places: neck, shoulder, back, shoulder. Portia points to those places on her body, miming a little striptease.

Miguel objects to this moniker. The name, the whole concept—it all sounds like a crude stereotype to him, the exotic Latina covered in fruit.

“That’s drag, babe,” Portia says. “Stereotypes and stupidity. You have to own it. You take the dumb shit people say to you, and you wear it like armor.” She has been stoning her gown, her armor, for hours now, an effort she can count in calluses. The night has slipped away, and light begins to filter through her velveteen curtains. Still, the garment barely glimmers.

She asks Miguel if he has any advice for her on how to manage her money, and he says, “You’re a drag queen, you don’t have any money,” which stings, but it’s the truth. In the daytime, Portia works at a cellphone store, convincing townies to upgrade to unlimited plans they don’t need. She won’t tell Miguel which store it is; Portia isn’t meant to be seen in the world of strip malls. She makes decent money in the realm of lanyards and slacks, but that income goes to her drag closet. Portia is a costly venture that has not yet yielded profit. Portia is a long-term investment.

“In other words, you’re going to be broke for a while,” Miguel says. Nothing wrong with that. Miguel is, too. For months he had a steady gig working the line at Build-a-Bowl, but just after New Year’s, Miguel showed up five minutes late to a lunch shift, and his manager told him he should go home and reflect on his issues with authority. In his file—this mythical file, often referred to yet never seen—there are multiple strikes against him, complaints describing him as uncooperative and lazy. So claims the day manager. All the managers there are white. Everybody else who works there is white, actually, and none of them have ever been told they have an attitude problem. Only Miguel.

“That place is fucked up,” he says. “A Philly cheesesteak bowl, that is such a fucked-up concept. But the tips are good. The tips are so good, you don’t even know.”

“Tips are great,” Portia says, “but let’s not neglect the shaft.”

“Um, yeah.”

“I was trying to make a joke.”

“I’m describing racism. What about that is funny to you?”

“I believe you were describing a Philly cheesesteak.”

“Fuck off,” he says, but actually, this is her house, so if anything, he should be the one to fuck off. He shifts in his chair like he is signaling his intention to leave. He slides an arm into a jacket sleeve, but slowly, tentatively, a burlesque in reverse. She suspects he’s bluffing. In the event that he isn’t, certainly he has fumbled the opportunity to make an impactful exit.

“Sorry,” Portia says. “I guess the joke didn’t land.”

“I’d like to speak to whoever cleared it for takeoff,” Miguel says.

The next night, they show up to the Closet together an hour before showtime. Portia carries her triple-stack wig on a mannequin head. Miguel, ever the gentleman, lugs Portia’s suitcase, which is no easy feat. The suitcase weighs at least thirty pounds. It is packed with her costumes for the night—a different outfit for each of her numbers, and of course, a last look for curtain call that is stoned within an inch of its life.

Outside the bar, stationed as close to the entrance as is legally possible, is a street evangelist in a crisp white polo, his flesh pink and wet like smoked ham. This man has been accosting the queens for years, condemning them to hell for as long as Portia has been doing drag. A venue will close, a new one will pop up in its place, and Mr. Ham will be there to let them know that they are sluts, they are whores, they are Satan’s foot soldiers in the cosmic war between good and evil. Tonight, as Portia and Miguel roll past, he barks, “Abomination! God sees this perversion and frowns upon you.”

Portia says, “I like to think so,” and blows the man a little kiss.

Miguel scurries along like a frightened rabbit. To him, the man’s words strike like hate, but Portia doesn’t see it that way. For a man to inquire about the state of her soul and not the state of her hole—that’s love, she says. Anyway, hate and love, they’re both expressions of passion, aren’t they? Portia is blessed to have the most passionate fans in the world.

She arrives at the bar in full face. It isn’t like TV, the queens getting ready together backstage, painting their faces at a row of identical vanities. No—there is room enough for only one mirror, and that mirror belongs to Dawn. The position of show hostess comes with certain perks.

Backstage, Dawn is scrolling through Grindr, dragging French fries through ketchup. “Love your new puppy,” she says to Portia. “You’ve trained him well. All that’s missing is the leash.” She taps a ketchupy fry on her fast-food wrapper like she is stubbing out a cigarette. Dawn wears athletic shorts and a tank top so distressed it looks like a pillowcase. Only Dawn’s face is ready for the stage, and even that, Portia thinks, is debatable. Dawn’s makeup is spray-tan orange. She has carrot undertones.

“Thanks,” Portia says. “He’s a rescue.”

“Who rescued who?” Dawn says.

“Me, obviously. I rescued him.”

Dawn puts down her phone, looks to Miguel. “We’re paying you to run lights,” she says. “You know you don’t have to hang around her, right? It’s not your job.” She chomps a fistful of fries, waiting for him to say something.

What he says is: “I need a drink.” He excuses himself, leaving Portia and Dawn alone backstage.

“Portia Control,” Dawn says, “corrupting America’s youth.” She unzips a garment bag to reveal the same lemon-lime swimsuit she wore last Saturday and the Saturday before.

“He’s a sweet kid,” Portia says. “He just needs some guidance.”

“Just fuck him already,” Dawn says, “and be done with it. That’s what this is all about, right?”

Portia’s showstopper tonight is another estate sale gem—a boatneck dress in Scotch tape tartan, hunter green and navy blue. Draped across her shoulders is a burnt orange boa that curls like a telephone cord all the way down to the sticky bar floor. What is the mood tonight out in the crowd? Portia can’t tell if they want what she’s giving. Perhaps she is stiffer than usual now that she knows who wields the spotlight. But why should that matter? She lip-syncs to a mix of rants by unruly drive-through customers, and the tips are meaningful but sparse. Some nights, she tells herself, she cannot grab the Top 40 crowd. Some nights she is only for the enlightened few.

She leaves the stage before her mix is over. Portia is not a showboat; she is not desperate to soak up every last drop of the audience’s adulation. Backstage, congratulatory messages wait for her on her phone. Miguel, who is out operating the spotlight, has sent a series of gushing texts, along with many exclamation points. KILLED IT!!! HOW ARE DAWN’S TOES TASTING BACK THERE?

SALTY, Portia replies.

 

After the show, she takes him to the bar to do celebratory shots of Fireball. He asks what they are celebrating, and she says, “Do we need an occasion?”

On the dancefloor, they dance close enough that it’s obvious they are there together, but not so close that they could be mistaken for anything more than friends. Portia is not wooing him; that is not happening. Miguel, baby-faced Miguel, has been of legal drinking age for how long? Less than a year, certainly. Meanwhile, Portia has been perfecting her drinking for the last decade. Portia is a nightlife professional. She has no business rooting around in this boy’s cellar or letting this boy root around in hers.

Miguel, bless him, has no rhythm. He closes his eyes when he dances, flinging his arms and doing a sorry step-touch. It’s almost cute, Portia thinks. The bump and grind song, the song, is up next. People scream for it; they love the song so much. The song hasn’t even started yet, not really—that familiar synth bassline is only just creeping into the mix—but people are already pressing their bodies against each other and thrusting dramatically to the beat they know is coming.

“I gotta take a piss,” Miguel says.

“How very macho,” Portia says.

“Did you want to come with?”

“You’re a big boy. I think you can manage.”

“Are we going to make out tonight?”

She considers his lips, cracked and peeling, crying out for a coat of ChapStick. “No,” she says, “I don’t think so.”

“Oh, right. Because I’m just your fucking dog.”

“That was a joke.”

“Yeah, and it’s sooo funny.”

“It is,” she says. “It can be if you’ll laugh about it. Drink some water.”

“Okay, Mom.”

He leaves, and she is alone in the pink club light, surrounded by theatre majors doing the choreography from a pop star’s Vegas residency. Then he fights his way back through the arms and elbows, returning to their spot not with water but with drinks.

“Thank you,” she says, and gives him a pat on the head. “Good dog.”

“What?”

His drink of choice is some ungodly mix of peppermint schnapps and white chocolate, the sort of drink only a rookie goes for, a drink where the burn is disguised by sweetness.

Louder now, so he can hear her over the music: “All I said was thank you.”

“You’re lying.”

She says, “I’m lightening the mood.”

“You’re not, though. You literally are not.”

Portia can’t see his face. The blurry disco lighting at the Closet gets blurrier the more you drink, yet less flattering. Everything looks smudged. “Don’t be so sensitive,” she says. “You’re making it into something way too serious. We’re just cutting up. We’re having a good time.”

As is tradition at the Closet, the DJ starts playing “Last Dance” by Donna Summer to let patrons know the bar will soon be closing. Over their heads, the disco ball stops turning, but the crowd continues dancing as if the night will not end.

“You are such bullshit,” Miguel says.

“It doesn’t matter,” Portia says.

“What doesn’t?”

“What you think.”

The lights come up. The spell is broken. She can see him clearly now—how sweaty he is, how small.

He says, “The audacity to come out here tonight with this crunchy wig. That took guts.”

“You don’t know anything about anything,” she says.

“I know your shit is fucked up.”

“You run lights. You’re nothing.”

“Right,” he says, “I’m nothing.”

“You are. We all know this business school nonsense is a joke. Come summertime, you’ll be riding around in the back of a truck with dear old dad.”

“Bitch.”

“I am,” she says. “A musty old bitch. You didn’t know?”

“Oh, everybody knows, Dustin. It’s actually kind of sad. You come out and do your little skit, and the whole bar takes a cigarette break. A bathroom break. No one wants to look at you.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m buzzed.”

“You need to eat something.”

“I could keep going.”

The bar staff turn chairs over, recite their mantra to the patrons still lingering on the dancefloor: “Love you, but go the fuck home.” There is something shameful about seeing this space so brightly lit, Portia thinks. In the dark, the dancefloor bursts with possibility, then the light comes on and exposes everything for exactly what it is.

Portia offers Miguel a ride home, which he declines. “I’ll walk,” he says, “I love walking,” and then he trips over an object that only he can see.

“Why don’t you let me take care of you tonight,” Portia says. This is more announcement than question.

They drive through Rally’s on the way back to her apartment—it’s the only restaurant still open at this time of night. Miguel protests; somebody told Miguel once that they found a fly in their burger here. “It’s four in the morning,” Portia says. “Lower your standards.” They order off the value menu, value cheeseburgers and value tenders and value fries, whatever sounds good. Does Miguel want the cinnamon apple pie? Portia will buy him the cinnamon apple pie. “I don’t want the cinnamon apple pie,” Miguel says. “Jesus.”

“Cancel the pie,” Portia tells the illuminated menu.

He makes a show of not speaking to her. An admirable effort, a fine performance, but isn’t that his hand in the Rally’s bag, searching for fries? Back at the apartment, she fluffs him a pillow, drapes him in the softest blanket she can find, and still he commits to the bit, horizontal on her futon.

Other priorities spring to mind, priorities that are not Miguel. Water, for one—she goes to fetch water, and perhaps an aspirin. It is imperative that Portia stays awake long enough to sober up. If she falls asleep now, she’ll pay for it in the morning. She can’t bounce back like Miguel can. For her, the carriage will be a pumpkin again soon enough.

The faucet runs. She makes herself keep drinking despite the sour taste on her tongue. On her phone, she finds a text from Dawn: 2 BOTTOMS DON’T MAKE A TOP…

Portia types her reply: LOVE FINDS A WAY. Then, because it’s Dawn: LOSE THIS NUMBER.

The next morning, it’s afternoon. Miguel is gone, the blanket folded into a perfect little square.

She isn’t interested in staging a reality TV reunion episode about it. They don’t need to rehash last night’s stale drama, do they? She goes out to Vintage Wearhouse to find something his size. Lucky her, she ends up finding a gown with serious potential, and on top of that, a ridiculous fuck-off hat straight out of My Fair Lady. Who, she wonders, would give these treasures away to a thrift store like they’re nothing? The hat looks like an elaborate birthday cake. The gown is studded with blue raindrops. Portia brings her discoveries up to the checkout counter, and the cashier says, “Your mom’s lost a lot of weight, huh?”

“These aren’t for my mom,” Portia says. “These are for my gay lover.”

“I knew you were some kind of fag,” he says.

“Incredible detective work,” she says, “truly. Now ring up my items, please. I’m a fag on the go.”

Miguel would rather not see her. He makes that clear. She calls him, and he says, “So now you’re calling me?”

“Yes, I’m calling you,” she says.

“I’ll pay you back for the food.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“What do you want from me, then?”

“Nothing,” she says. “I don’t want anything. I found something in the back of my closet. A gown.”

“I’m happy for you.”

“It doesn’t fit me,” she says, “not anymore, but I think it would fit you perfectly. Can I convince you to come try it on?”

He wants to know what the occasion is. There is no occasion. The gown is the occasion.

The story of last night is that he wants nothing to do with Portia, yet here he is at her kitchen table, his face so close to hers she can feel his breath hot on her cheek. It’s bad luck to try on drag without lashes and lipstick, Portia says. 301s and a cherry lip—those are nonnegotiable.

Miguel is not shy. He undresses when she asks him to undress. She watches his clothes collect on her living room carpet—the corduroy jacket with the fur collar; the unreasonably baggy jeans that make it look like he has no ass whatsoever. Now that he has stripped down to his tiny red briefs, she can finally confirm an ass is there. A pair of legs is connected to it.

“Yeah, I have chicken legs,” Miguel says. “Don’t make fun of them.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Portia says.

“Literally all you do is roast people.”

“Only the people I like.”

“Is that how it works?”

He steps into the raindrop gown, and she zips him, her thumb tracing a delicate line up his back.

The hat is a little much on him, though that does not surprise her. A hat like that—frills and netting and polka dots—you have to wear with intention. But the gown. He needs hips, that much is a given, but already, he is a confection. Of this she is certain. “Walk around a little,” she says. “See how you like it.” Miguel is a terror, clomping around in her heels. He is a tornado, ripping his path through her kitchen. But look—he shimmers any way the light hits him. The gown she bought is covered in stones, hundreds of them. In the gown he is so bright and so brilliant, Portia can only have a glimpse of him before she has to look away.

 

 

***
Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen

“Actually, I’m Not Grateful”: A Conversation with Stephanie Foo

After graduating from college, Stephanie Foo created a podcast called Get Me On This American Life. In an effort to make this dream come true, she borrowed radio equipment and hitchhiked to the world’s largest pornography conference in Texas to find stories. She interned, then became a producer of the radio show Snap Judgement. In 2014, Foo landed her dream job at This American Life—where she remained as a producer for five years and, in the process, won an Emmy. She was a 2019–2020 Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism and has published essays in the New York Times and New York Magazine.

In February 2022, Foo released her memoir, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (Ballantine Books). It’s the story of her real self, a woman functioning with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), a condition that can develop over the years following prolonged abuse. Foo’s memoir told the story of childhood trauma, parental abandonment, and the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. Finding limited resources to help her, Foo set out to heal herself and map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.

We met via Zoom, where we spoke about the paperback release of her book (now a New York Times bestseller), how writing for the page is different from writing for the ear, why childhood trauma is often excused by traditionalists, and what she would tell her younger self if she had the chance.

***

The Rumpus: What about journalism appealed to you?

Stephanie Foo: Journalism brought me out of my box, forced me to talk to others. I could have these social interactions that are scripted in a safe way. Everybody knew what their role was. I appreciate it made me a more curious, open person. Brought logic to the chaos. I could bring order to other people’s stories even if I couldn’t bring order to my own. It was satisfying and fun and made it easy to completely throw myself into it and dissociate from other things like trauma.
Rumpus: So after years of telling other people’s stories on This American Life and elsewhere, why did you decide to tell your own?

Foo: Every time I was able to showcase somebody’s story, one that represented a larger group of people, there was always a great response from our audience. I found myself as a potential representative of a larger group, which had no representative. There wasn’t a first-person story about Complex Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, so I thought, “I know how to do this.”

Rumpus: Writing is different from radio, of course, but exactly how different?

Foo: Writing a book is so much more relaxed than making a podcast or a radio show. There’s so much more time to consider the topic, do research, and go over many drafts to shape it into what I think is ultimately my voice rather than chaotically panic and put something out every week.

Rumpus: I read your powerful New York Times Mother’s Day piece. How have you evolved as a writer?

Foo: I think I was always a writer. However, I just didn’t let myself think of myself as one because I hadn’t published much since college. Even though radio producing is just writing—it’s the exact same thing except you read it out loud—I shouldn’t have needed the validation of the book or the New York Times article. It certainly helped, since I don’t have an MFA or anything. I didn’t know if my writing, after so many years of being written for the ear, translated to the page anymore.
When I was writing for radio, especially at This American Life, it wasn’t really my voice. It was my voice through the lens of an entire room of between three and ten people shaping my voice into the ideal of what it could be. But this book was mine, which was both intimidating and fun and freeing.

Rumpus: What kind of book did you set out to write?

Foo: I read a lot of memoirs and science-y books written by clinicians and experts, which I found to be lacking because they didn’t show the healing process. Meanwhile, a lot of trauma memoirs are just descriptions of all the horrible experiences that have happened for like 290 pages, and then in the last thirty, the person gets better. Everything is okay. I thought, “No, I’m sure that journey was a lot more arduous.” I wanted to learn from their journey. It was the same in the clinician books, as well, a long exploration of all the negative effects of C-PTSD on people’s brains and then a very small section in the back about what would actually heal.

My goal was to write a book that would be a resource, to show you’re not alone in what you’re going through, to normalize a lot of the feelings. I provided the basic science and psychology behind complex PTSD, so people can know what they’re up against. I hoped to educate them and provide a lot of the resources I found helpful. I aspired to show it is very much possible to get better. This book would be a roadmap for other people who didn’t know where they might go. I wanted the book to provide hope because I didn’t have it when I was diagnosed. Sometimes trauma memoirs can be so difficult to read, and if there is hope, it’s just a little at the end.

My desire was for the book to come from an optimistic place because having C-PTSD is painful enough. I didn’t want to make the process of reading the book agonizing throughout the whole thing. It was very important to me that only the first fifty pages detailed my abuse.

I wanted it to be the book I wished I’d had when I was first diagnosed, which I feel would have made my healing journey so much shorter.

Rumpus: Why do you think your healing would have been briefer if you had a book like yours when you were diagnosed with C-PTSD?

Foo: I would have felt so much less shame and despair. Mental illness is so pathologized. It’s so isolating. C-PTSD is not in the DSM, and it’s a relatively new diagnosis. I think there is societal prejudice around PTSD. The history of PTSD has been focused on soldiers, men at war. I think there’s a lot of sexism, a sort of racism within. That, and an underappreciation for childhood trauma and its lifelong effects. It’s been normalized. Judith Herman writes a lot about the lasting trauma in people who have experienced sexual assault. This is not to shit on survivors of war, which is very real and terrible, but trauma is much wider. I feel like it’s taken society a long time to catch up to that understanding.

Rumpus: Was it healing to write the book, and was it difficult to write the traumatic scenes?

Foo: Different authors have different processes. For some, writing heals. It was important for me to have the healing come before the writing in order to locate that optimism. There was a lot of casual writing that happened during the healing process, but I didn’t take the organization and the real writing seriously until I felt like I had gone through a year and a half of a very intensive healing journey. And I felt like I was in a really good place, so this made the writing easier. I was able to have a lot of empathy and generosity toward myself at those times instead of feeling the self-loathing I’d felt earlier.

The first fifty pages were the most difficult to write, and I wrote those many, many times. I just had to practice a lot of self-care. Those were tough to relive. I think my dissociation protected me. Dissociation helped me to force out what I could, then go play video games for the rest of the afternoon.

Rumpus: Did your feelings about your parents change over the course of writing the book?

Foo: I don’t know. It hasn’t brought forgiveness, if that’s what you’re wondering. It hasn’t made me less disappointed or angry. I think the healing process, if anything, made me angrier at them because it made me realize what I deserved as a child. Learning to treat myself with kindness has taught me that what I received was criminal and unacceptable. So yeah, I don’t think it’s made me forgive them. I hold them accountable for what they have done.

However, their cultural context was important—they had a lot of their own unresolved and untreated trauma—but instead of making me less angry at them, writing the book made me angrier at some of the societal forces that contributed to my parents’ situation. I’m just sharing and spreading that rage around.

It’s also made me angrier at our health care system in the United States and how it really doesn’t serve. It’s made for white, privileged, educated people. There is just such a distinct lack of culturally responsive care. People like my parents could have gotten the help that they needed if that care was more accessible.

Rumpus: What has been the response from people who have read this book?

Foo: It’s overwhelmingly positive. The book has received over 11,000 five-star Goodreads reviews. I receive a dozen messages a day, for the past year, from people saying, “You’ve changed my life, you saved my life, you’re giving me hope, you make me feel less alone. . . .” It’s exactly what I set out to do with the memoir. The fact that it worked is a great relief and a great honor. I feel very proud, and I hope this opens the door for more narratives like mine. A lot of people have told me my book has inspired them to write. I hope to see those books joining mine out in the world.

Rumpus: How does it feel that therapists and educators have started using your book as a tool?

Foo: It’s so affirming! It’s wonderful to know I’ve had this impact because I have so many complaints against therapists, not therapists in general, but against some of the ways therapists practice and the mental health care system. I just want it to be easier for those who come after me.

Rumpus: Did you feel pressure about representing the Asian American community?

Foo: Yes. I was charting new territory by writing about domestic violence and child abuse in the Asian American community. It’s sort of hinted at but excused in The Joy Luck Club, but the story is always Asian American parents can be difficult, but you must be grateful to them because they have provided so much. I was writing something edgy and dangerous, saying, “Actually, I’m not grateful. This wasn’t unacceptable. This was abuse.” We need to talk about abuse.

Rumpus: Is it strange that trauma has also driven you to become the writer you are?

Foo: Sometimes I feel I have this success because of my PTSD. It informed my drive. Literally, I wouldn’t have written this book if I didn’t have PTSD. I would trade not having so much success for being happier. I would rather have been loved than not have had to write this book.

Rumpus: About healing, how would you describe your current state?

Foo: I am healing. I have done a lot of healing. I wouldn’t say I’m done, but it’s much better than it was before.

Rumpus: What would you recommend to someone who is in a survival mode or being abused?

Foo: I think what I would tell my younger self is this: “You need to know you deserve love. You deserve better. And go chase that love. Run as fast as you can away from those who aren’t going to give it to you. Run as fast as you can toward anyone who knows you deserve love, even though it’s scary and you’re going to be skeptical of them. Run toward the love.”

 

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Author photo by Bryan Derballa

Speaking to Men at Parties

“The thing you love most when you are thirteen is the thing you love forever,” Adi says. He has his leg crossed over his lap, hand on his knee in a scholarly position.

“You’re bound to it,” I add, leaning forward. “You can’t put it down.” I am drunk and twenty years old and my voice aches—I have been shouting for most of the night, but the music isn’t really that loud. I tilt my body toward the group to understand them, a hand around my ear in what feels like a theatrical gesture. The boy Adi and I are chatting with is soft-spoken mumbling-drunk, with dark eyes that scrunch up beautifully when he smiles. “Say again?” I repeat over and over. He stands up to grab a beer off the table between us, jeans slipping down his narrow hips, and Adi and I look at each other with our eyebrows raised. I giggle and he glares back—we are always passing sly glances back and forth like handwritten notes between school desks.

The boy’s name is Alan and he is disarmingly handsome, the kind of man I would have avoided in high school out of shame and fear. I am fascinated by beautiful men, their ease of movement, the carelessness of their limbs. I watch them and think of Margaret Atwood: “When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss…My love for them is visual: that is the part I would like to possess.” A desire that stems from a sense of possession; I would like to inhabit them, to take up space and know that everyone around me feels grateful. To be a beautiful white man and never know fear—how simple and glorious.

 

There are moments when the light passes just right over the high point of someone’s cheekbone and I imagine my whole life as it would have been in a different universe, tracing the events of this imaginary life from that spot on their face to my death. In another world, I fall in love with this boy who shares my taste in music and laughs generously at my less-than-clever drunken commentary. In another world, things are easier. In this world, we dance and sing Talking Heads to each other across the kitchen as we spin in circles: I guess that this must be the place. In another world, I do not go into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror, watching my reflection careen across the glass. In another world, I do not make myself sick with want and worry at every turn.

Alan sits back down beside Adi and we talk about California. Whenever I meet someone who’s left California for New York, they can never shut up about being from California and how much they miss it, as if they hadn’t chosen to leave. Alan tells us that in California he met Paul McCartney once, and I clutch my hand to my collarbone in a mockery of a swoon because that is what I loved when I was thirteen, what I am bound to forever, the thing I cannot put down. There will always be a part of me that starts at the mention of The Beatles, that blip of recognition when you come across your own name in an unexpected place.

“I know this sounds corny,” he says, “but I swear to God he just made the whole room brighter.”

The enthusiasm in Alan’s voice strikes me. He tells me he saw Arctic Monkeys seven times in one year because he was in love with Alex Turner and again I am envious of him, this time because I never allowed myself to notice any women as a teenager. I instead fixated on male celebrities and characters, as if I could convince myself that I loved them the way I was supposed to love them. I want to know, suddenly, if he went to those concerts because he knew he wanted to see the lead singer, or if he had convinced himself it was because he just really liked their music. But I do not ask. Instead I stare at the mole on his right hip, made visible by his low-slung trousers. The mole is largish, about the size of a dime, and raised slightly. I try to imagine myself putting my mouth on it, on this bit of flesh which has so captured my attention, and am immediately repulsed.

This is where it always stops, the insurmountable stutter of my fantasies. This is the part I find difficult to explain even to myself, the way I can simultaneously want and so clearly not want. I picture the thoughts in my mind as a strip of film: reversed, softened, made grand by my drunkenness, mimicking how things are always beautiful onscreen. I can desire this boy as if from afar rather than with the blistering intensity I feel when a girl sits too close to me on a stranger’s bed at another party as she speaks to someone else, the air soft with smoke, my insides folding in on themselves. The universe is reduced to the point at which our hips are touching and I cringe at the clichés this meaningless contact inspires in me.

I think about Paul McCartney, his boyish features still apparent in old age: wide, down-turned eyes and full cheeks and always that charming smile. My favorite Beatle fluctuated between him and George, whose quiet demeanor intrigued me; I have always been inclined toward the fantasy of quiet men. I would watch videos of early performances for hours, unable to tear my eyes away from George’s legs, how dreadfully slender they were in his dark slacks as he stood off to the side of the stage. Ringo was about as attractive to me as a post (though darling) and John looked far too much like my father, so my desire, or what I thought was desire, had to be cast onto Paul and George. This was how I amused myself throughout most of my early adolescence: poring over photographs and watching footage from decades earlier of a half-dead, long-fractured band. Maybe The Beatles were easy to love because the group had already run its course—I could discover new information but nothing new would actually happen, and there was a comfort in this impassable distance. I cannot say that if, in another world, I would have been reduced to tears like all the girls in A Hard Day’s Night, wordlessly mouthing George-George-George as the crowd around me fell into hysterics, or if the illusion would have been ruined by seeing them in the flesh.

I think about the sightless stare of a Roman bust in a museum, terrifying and opalescent, made lovelier by the fact that I cannot touch it. In another world, I step past the line on the floor of the gallery and run my fingertips over the marble despite the docent’s protests. In another world, I tell Alan the truth: I will never be happy with what I have or what I am.

Says Alan of Alex Turner: “I don’t think I even realized who he was, the first time—he walked right past me, in those fucking Chelsea boots, and I was just so turned on,” and I laugh because it’s always those fucking Chelsea boots. The Beatles wore them, too.

I tell Alan that I’ve been in the same room as David Byrne, white-haired and gracious, those darkly intense eyes gentle with crow’s feet and laugh lines, and Alan concedes that this is indeed “very, very cool.” In high school, I would have recorded such a statement from a hot boy in my journal. Now it just seems obvious. It was a screening of a documentary about competitive color guard that David Byrne had produced, with a Q&A afterwards. My friend was a huge fan of Talking Heads and I came along because I was a huge fan of her; I barely paid attention to the the Q’s that David A’ed because I was swept up in the thrill of watching someone I love watch something she loves. Her sardonic voice was made sweet as she described her enjoyment of the evening, tucking herself into a red raincoat ill-suited to the frigid March weather. Now whenever I listen to Talking Heads’ bizarre, frenetic music, I think of her with a twinge in my chest not unlike heartburn. People sometimes ask me about her, mention her to me in passing: didn’t you know—? weren’t you—? I smile, tight-lipped, and nod. In another world, I tell Alan that I buy the shampoo she used because I miss the smell of her dark hair as it wafted toward me, head on my shoulder.

“Stop, don’t talk about it,” I say to Adi when he mentions her. “If I talk about it, I’ll cry.” I’ve been saying this for the past few months, begging friends to help me maintain the illusion that I wasn’t deeply hurt by her decision to return to Texas. The less we say about it the better.

We talk about how it would be nice to leave New York, but none of us stay away for very long. We all have our reasons. Mine is a sense of obligation to my younger self, the anxious, dirty-haired creature who collected postcards from Manhattan and watched The Beatles with a thumb-sucking compulsion and dreamt of someday ending up in a different body in a different place. She needs me to remain in this city, for at least a little longer, regardless of the people who come and go and the women I watch and want and the men I may or may not speak to at parties.

Most people have left the party by the time Adi and I declare mutiny and claim the aux cord for ourselves. Alan stretches as he makes room for me on the couch. His grey sweatshirt again rides up across his belly and I think about Saint Sebastian: his long, muscled torso, the agony and eroticism of his death as it is depicted in art. How I should like to be an arrow and glance off the flesh of some beautiful thing before falling, unbroken, to the ground. I think about Louise Bourgeois’ drawings of Saint Sebastienne as a martyred pregnant woman, the same sketch repeated over and over in a monotonous procession of bodies, smudged and headless: the grotesquerie of gestation. How awful is the practice of becoming alive.

Weeks later in Boston, my friend Laura and I discuss the dreams we’ve been having since we were little girls, nightmares in which we are pregnant despite never having had sex and everyone tells us we should be grateful to be so immaculate. But Laura is Jewish and I was never baptized and neither of us believe in anything beyond the miracle of blood and tubing that is the body itself. The nightmares persist as a reminder of what that body may be capable of, both within and without ourselves.

Hours past midnight, Adi and I walk to my apartment from the party. “Do you wish you were straight?” I ask him. He shrugs. I say, “I do, sometimes. I think it would be easier. Don’t you think it would be easier?” I hope he knows I mean easier just in the simple act of existence: would it be easier to be alive? Would I hate myself for something else if not this?

Adi doesn’t answer, but his gaze is warm behind his glasses, his jaw set in the near-pout he wears when he considers something seriously. He is a dear friend, one of the first I made at college, and one of the first people I heard utter the word “lesbian” with a gravity that implied strength and meaning rather than disdain. I lean into his shoulder and we stand like that, quiet, until Adi’s Lyft arrives.

A month and some weeks later, I stand in the living room of another apartment, once again speaking loudly over the music to an acquaintance. The theme of the party is blue, as in Maggie Nelson’s seventh book, as in Derek Jarman’s final film, as in Nina Simone’s debut album Hey, blue, there is a song for you. My acquaintance’s eyelids are a bright teal, in lovely contrast to her copper hair that falls into her face as she leans in to hear me. I feel a touch at the back of my neck and I turn around and it is Alan once again, tucking the tag back into the collar of my shirt. This is an urge I have to resist when I glimpse a misplaced tag or loose thread on a passing stranger, the same compulsion that makes me check the locks on the front door nightly before bed, a desire for security through control. Alan has not shied away from this impulse to put things in their proper place. His face, cast in cobalt, grins back at me when I turn.

 

Already I can feel the sense of infatuation ebbing away as I greet him, repeat my name, raise my arms around him in a clumsy approximation of an embrace. Names are important, and it bothers me on a primal level when people forget them. Alan is still handsome with his watery-drunk smile and half-lidded eyes. The man asleep, like the man in quietude, was another adolescent fixation of mine: a feral animal tranquilized to be observed more safely.

The apartment is so small and so full of bodies that we can hardly do more than shuffle in time with the music. While waiting for the bathroom, I get into an argument with a man about Kate Bush, and how would he understand the anguish conveyed in her warbling falsetto, anyway? I don’t know what’s good for me I don’t know what’s good for me.

 

I spend the next two years moving farther away from my body. I try to date casually and discover that I am perhaps incurably afraid of intimacy. I become catatonic in the presence of my own desire, though I spend a summer trying to convince myself that it’s the heat and humidity rather than the rush of blood in my ears that makes me nauseous every time someone tries to touch me. I sit across from a man on the subway and stare at the soft curve of his jaw as he tilts his chin downward; his dark eyes rove across the pages of a book whose title I can’t quite make out. In another world, it is the 1950s in the United States of America and I am engaged to this beautiful man whom I will never love and this is better, somehow. It’s a mid-century sitcom marriage where we sleep in separate beds and only ever kiss on the cheek. I am miserable, but it’s better than being miserable in reality because in this dream I have what feels like a justifiable reason to be miserable. My life is unfulfilled, uninspired. I see East of Eden at the cinema and masturbate to the thought of James Dean the same way I did as a teenager, silently rocking back and forth in a chair, disgusted by the idea of actually touching myself. In this world I never figure out that I’m a lesbian because I could barely figure that out in 2016 with contemporary resources. It’s easier anyway, following an assigned path, filling a prescription month after month at the pharmacy—doctor’s orders. In another world, my sadness has sharp contours, clear edges that I can press into my skin. It is not amorphous and it does not expand to fit every space I inhabit.

I try to describe some of this world to Laura in a taxi, drunk and newly twenty-two on the hottest night of last summer. “Do you ever wish that’s how it was?” Laura tells me she doesn’t—she’s tired, and she turns away from me to look out the window as we arrive at my apartment. “It’s almost light out,” I say to change the subject, waving a hand in the direction of the sky.

I am glad that I didn’t tell her the extent of my dreams, the tragic details that lull me to sleep. It is so perversely appealing to me, this fantasy of a loveless, sexless, meaningless existence in which I am freed from any expectations of self-possession or choice. In another world, no one asks me what I want to do with my life because they do not assume that I will ever do anything. I know this way of thinking is self-indulgent and wildly privileged, and that Laura’s reaction to my modest proposal was appropriate: a snort that went from surprised to scornful, a firm “No.” And yet I greet sleep that morning with dreams of pin curls and bathroom tiles scrubbed clean and never being touched by my beautiful imaginary husband, asleep beside me in his bed across the room.

 

Adi and I watch A Hard Day’s Night and he touches my arm when he notices I’m crying and we can pretend, briefly, that we knew each other when we were thirteen. Laura tells me that she is a lesbian, too, and this more than anything makes me feel like I may someday be able to overcome my shame because Laura is someone who did know me when we were thirteen. Through my love for her I may be able to forgive myself the trespass of being who I am. She tells me she sometimes still dreams of having children, but since realizing she is a lesbian she is no longer so afraid of the possibility.

I see David Byrne again and this time he sings. I wonder what it’s like for him to play those songs from another time when his band all lived together in the same room, cutting each other’s hair, muddling through waves new and old only to end up estranged forty years later—no talking, just head. John, Paul, George, and Ringo were dogged by other people’s hopes of a reunion from the day The Beatles broke up until that night at the Dakota, and I wonder if it bothered them to know that the best thing they ever did was be part of something beyond themselves. In another world, rooftops are only for concerts, never for leaping. In another world, I am not afraid of heights or the way my body moves through time and space, toward the ground or toward another body.

 

 

 

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Rumpus original art by Lisa Marie Forde

What to Read When You’ve Made it Halfway Through 2023

We’ve asked Rumpus editors to share the titles forthcoming between now and the year’s end that they are most eagerly anticipating. These books transport us to different worlds, give us glimpses into lives we might never otherwise know, share new perspectives to consider, and offer us respite from reality.

If a title is marked as a Poetry Book Club selection, you can receive this book before its release date and participate in an exclusive conversation with its author! Just head to our store and become a member today! Our subscription programs help keep The Rumpus running—so you can connect with your favorite writers and support The Rumpus with just one click.

Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake–a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led–her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila. But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets: her sisters are hiding things, too. And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own. Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City. Told with Elizabeth Acevedo’s inimitable and incandescent voice, this is an indelible portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces–one family’s journey through their history, helping them better navigate all that is to come.

 
 
Forgive Me Not by Jennifer Baker
All it took was one night and one bad decision for fifteen-year-old Violetta Chen-Samuels’ life to go off the rails. After driving drunk and causing the accident that kills her little sister, Violetta is incarcerated. Under the juvenile justice system, her fate lies in the hands of those she’s wronged–her family. Denied their forgiveness, Violetta is now left with two options, neither good–remain in juvenile detention for an uncertain sentence or participate in the Trials. The Trials are no easy feat, but if she succeeds, she could regain both her freedom and what she wants most of all: her family’s love. In her quest to prove her remorse, Violetta is forced to confront not only her family’s grief, but her own–and the question of whether their forgiveness is more important than forgiving herself.

 
 
The New Naturals by Gabriel Bump
Drive by the abandoned restaurant on a hill off the highway in Western Massachusetts, and it doesn’t look like much. Definitely not a destination. But that’s exactly what it becomes, after a young Black Boston woman sees the country–in fact, the whole world–as an increasingly dangerous place. After losing their child and looking hard for a safe place, she and her husband begin to construct a separate society: somewhere nurturing, where everyone can feel loved and wanted, where all the Spike Lee movies play, where the children learn actual history–and somewhere underground, where they won’t need anything or anyone from the world above ground to make it work. She locates a Benefactor and soon it all begins to take shape. Two homeless men are told about the place and begin their journey by bus to get there. A young and disillusioned journalist stumbles upon it and wants in. And a former soccer player, having lost his footing in society, is persuaded to check out this place too. But it doesn’t take long for problems to develop, for conflicts to surface, for food to become scarce, for the children to crave life beyond this place.

 
 
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas
a Rumpus Poetry Book Club Selection (subscribe by July 15!)
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times takes its inspiration and concept from the cult classic film The Wiz to explore a Black woman’s journey out of the South Side of Chicago and into adulthood. The narrative arc of The Wiz–a tumultuous departure from home, trials designed to reveal new things about the self, and the eventual return home–serves as a loose trajectory for this collection, pulling readers through an abandoned barn, a Wendy’s drive-thru, a Beyoncé video, Grandma’s house, Sunday service, and the corner store. At every stop, the speaker is made to confront her womanhood, her sexuality, the visibility of her body, alcoholism in her family, and various ways in which narratives are imposed on her. Subverting monolithic ideas about the South Side of Chicago, and re-casting the city as a living, breathing entity, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times spans sestinas, sonnets, free-verse, and erasures, all to reimagine the concept of home. Chicago isn’t just a city, but a teacher, a lingering shadow, a way of seeing the world.

 
 
Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter
A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley start-up, Cassie finds herself trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses, and unethical projects, she also struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty and suffering. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of houseless people bathing in the bay. Start-up burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains, and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets. Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, a miniature black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, growing or shrinking in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever closer as the world around her unravels. When her CEO’s demands cross an illegal threshold and she ends up unexpectedly pregnant, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are really worth it.

 
 
Every Drop is a Man’s Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai’i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise and the boundaries of the real, where the superstitions born of the islands take on the weight of truth. A childhood encounter with a wild pua’a (pig) on the haunted Pali highway portends one young woman’s fraught relationship with her pregnant body. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in a giant flower. A kanaka writer, mid-manuscript, feels her raw pages quaking and knocking in the briefcase.

 
 

Son has lived his entire life inside the mansion. He is a good child. He reads, practices piano, studies, and watches ghosts tend the farmland through a window in the attic. When Father decides it is time for Son to venture outside, Son’s desire to please Father overpowers his fear, and he must contend with questions he never wanted to face. What are the relentlessly grinning ghosts hiding? Has a ghost taken control of Father? What answers or horrors lie in the forest? And who will stop the mysterious encroaching shadows? Nghiem Tran’s debut inverts the haunted house tale, shaping it into a moving exploration of loss, coming of age in a collapsing world, and the battle between isolation and assimilation.

 
 
Blackouts by Justin Torres
Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay–playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized–has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories–moments of joy and oblivion–and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

 
 
Hush Harbor by Anise Vance
After the murder of an unarmed Black teenager by the hands of the police, protests spread like wildfire in Bliss City, New Jersey. A full-scale resistance group takes control of an abandoned housing project and decide to call it Hush Harbor, in homage to the secret spaces their enslaved ancestors would gather to pray. Jeremiah Prince, alongside his sister Nova, are leaders of the revolution, but have ideological differences regarding how the movement should proceed. When a new mayor with ties to white supremacists threatens the group’s pseudo-sanctuary and locks the city down, the collective must come to a decision for their very survival.

 

 

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From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: Em

This essay was originally published at The Rumpus on September 11, 2019.

I. Sister

For her twenty-first birthday, Kiều’s younger siblings set fire to her bed.

It was intentional, of course, and when she came home from work to find thick black smoke billowing out from under her shared bedroom door, as she stood before the remains of her pitted mattress crackling merrily in shades of red and gold, she wondered if it was time to leave at last.

This was a futile contemplation—they would have to murder her and roll her stone-cold body to a crematorium before she’d abandon them—but in the moment, her pulse leaped in time with the flames, her blood heated till she thought it might combust and melt her into fuel.

“Mai!” she screamed. The culprit could very well have been one of the boys, but no one was capable of stirring up trouble on the level of her little sister.

The pattering of plastic flip-flops reached her before Mai did. “Wow, Chị Kiều,” said Mai, tipping up her face to frown in mock concern. “You don’t look so good.”

Indeed Kiều’s eyes were blistering and tinged crimson from the smoke, and her teeth were bared in a twisting snarl. She stabbed a finger at the fire, which, while burning strong, was unnaturally contained to her half of the room. “Put it out.”

Mai pouted, though her almond eyes were gleaming in satisfaction. “I can’t put out something I didn’t start.”

Minh and Kỳ Lân materialized at the end of the hall, looking considerably more cowed at the sight of both sisters, one towering and furious, the other four feet tall and grinning. “Who?” Kiều snapped. “Which one of you little shits did this?”

Kỳ Lân, the second-oldest at fifteen, opened his mouth first to confess—which meant the culprit was quiet Minh, easily swayed and forever tucked under his older brother’s protection. “Minh,” she said. “Come here and put this out. Now.”

He shuffled forward, not meeting her eyes. The smoke parted around him, twined about his skinny legs but never touched, and when he raised his palms, still chubby with baby fat, the fire shrank as if it were a foal being coaxed, and finally sputtered out. “Sorry,” he mumbled in Kiều’s general direction. “I thought it’d be funny ‘cause we didn’t have candles or a cake.”

Kiều hadn’t the slightest inkling of how setting fire to her bed might come off as funny, but she was always softest on Minh—he so often had peculiar notions like these, and it never helped that Mai was there to play them to her advantage—and she’d just come off a ten-hour shift, and her weariness drove bone-deep. The smoke dissipated, inconsequential to their nonexistent alarms.

“Did you eat?” she said at last, addressing all three. The question was habit; it was comfort, a crutch; it signified home.

They all nodded.

“Homework?” It was a Saturday night, but a necessary follow-up. They nodded again. “Then go to bed.”

Kỳ Lân asked, “Where will you sleep?”

She glanced at Mai, at the anticipation and guilt warring across her little sister’s face. She knew Mai had hoped to get a night—tonight, of all nights—of sleeping alone. Minh’s pyromaniac idea had simply been a convenient tactic.

Kiều also knew she could repair her own bed with a wave of her hand and a bit of concentration. But she was exhausted, and her sister needed the space. “I’ll crash on the couch tonight. Go to bed now—we’re up early tomorrow.”

 

In the cold quiet of the living room later, unable to fall asleep, Kiều played with stars. A twitch of her fingers, wiggling them above her face the way an infant discovers its hands, and bursts of light perforated the darkness. Not exactly stars, in the astronomical sense; these were a multitude of colors, the shapes that swam across her eyelids when she rubbed her eyes too hard. Kiều watched them zing across the stucco ceiling. Tiny shreds of magic in a land otherwise devoid of it, a land intent on breaking down people like them. You had to seize such joys when you could. She liked to imagine the little powers they possessed had originated in the depths of an untamed jungle across the Pacific, where tigers ran rampant and spirits ruled the rivers and mountains, and a many-greats ancestor had been blessed or cursed with the ability to conjure fire and stars, and it had tracked their lineage across generations, across an ocean, to provide comfort in this lonely land. Immigrants who might lack in power of the institution, but whose veins ignited with an innate power all their own.

Down the hallway in their split room, Mai might have been doing the same—if she shared the same strange blood that ran in the others’ veins. Mai was their youngest sibling, of that there was no doubt, but she had never been able to raise or quell a flame, conjure sparks at her fingertips, drench a room with sudden rain. She blamed herself—no. She blamed Kiều. Especially on two particular days of the year: today, March 29, their father’s sixth death anniversary, and April 30, their mother’s third.

Kiều wasn’t around often enough to feel that blame directed at her. She blamed herself for that, too.

The photos taped on the wall above the couch crinkled and wailed as they sensed her sorrow. Only the two photos propped up on the altar in the far corner, one portrait for each parent, was framed. Pictures left to hang without barriers of glass or plastic tended to make more noise, audible only to their ears, and none of them could yet bring themselves to un-mute their parents.

“Shut up,” she muttered to the loose photos, and snuffed out the stars, and forced the sleep to draw to her like a rushing tide.

 

II. Younger Than

The temple was a sea of brown. Brown robes over brown skin over brown earth, from monks to nuns to regular Sunday devotees. The sea undulated with the pulse of the masses as people shuffled in and out between two meditation halls and the kitchens, chattering in rapid Vietnamese, bearing platters of homemade and temple-cooked offerings, discarding sandals at the doormats and thumping cushions on the bare wood floors. Usually Kiều would not have dragged all three children to Sunday prayers, preferring to leave them home and drop by before her shift to catch the final chants. But today’s weekly remembrance service would feature their father—and Mai knew her sister was nothing if not a dutiful daughter.

Mai bit down on her protests as Kiều shouldered a path through the crowd, instructing them all to keep their heads down. Orphans drew attention, invited sympathy. Especially at a gathering of a community with too little power and too much to prove. It’s on us to survive, Ma had said. Family means family and no one else. Subtext: dependence was a weakness when exercised outside the bonds of blood. Even Mai had understood that at eight years old. The only thing she didn’t understand was why Ma hadn’t brought her along to the supermarket that day nearly three years ago instead of Kiều, because Ma knew she was going to die, had possessed a terrifying ability to predict the time and place of a person’s death, and Ma knew Mai was not powerless, knew that her youngest daughter had been practicing bringing freshly dead little birds and mice back to life. But Ma chose Kiều—was always choosing Kiều, the hardest worker, the smartest student—and in the last desperate moments of her life, her oldest daughter was unable to save her after all.

By the time the four siblings found cushions in the back row of the meditation hall, Mai was throbbing with fury. The temple always brought this out in her. Maybe it was the constant battle of faith and loss exuded by the devotees’ breath, or the wall plastered with the wailing unframed portraits of late sangha members, or the simple fact that there was no escaping people in general. It wasn’t fair—her older siblings thrived off collective energy, siphoned threads of it to amuse themselves, perfectly at home in the community. Mai could only quash her irritability and anger, the effort blocking any possible concentration needed to resurrect even a fly. She was forever em, the younger and youngest, the pronoun connoting love but also less. Nothing she could do would ever measure up. Well—saving Ma’s life would have, but that chance, too, Kiều had stolen.

As she shifted to stretch out her sleeping feet she noticed a drop of condensation track its way across the floor. Minh brushed his index finger in an idle circle in front of his cushion, and the water answered, drawing from the exterior of cold bottles and the moisture in the walls, slowly pulled to the stirring of his finger. Kiều noticed. Said nothing. The monks leading the chant at the fore of the hall droned on and on.

Another time, Mai might have ignored them both. But yesterday’s attempt at getting Kiều to crack had been far from fruitful and the rising late morning heat broke her out in sweat and all she wanted was for Kiều to punish Minh as she would punish her, for life to finally be fair, and she was so, so close to boiling over.

Crowds and anger were blocks to her power. Fine. There were other cards to play. She was still a child, after all.

With a deep breath she threw back her head and let loose an ear-splitting wail. The intoning monks stopped short. The entire congregation twisted, still cross-legged, to stare at the little girl shrieking and weeping in the back. Kiều’s entire face blotched red. She snatched up Mai’s arm and towed her to the doors, smiling awkwardly and holding up a hand in apology, the boys hurrying after.

To Kiều’s credit, she waited until they were all piled in the battered family van before whipping around and screaming, “What’s wrong with you?”

Mai had ceased her display the moment the van door snicked shut. She glared at her sister, not knowing how to condense all her wild fraying thoughts into words on her tongue, not knowing how to say you’re not being fair, you don’t understand without sounding even more like the child she didn’t want to be.

So instead she yelled back, “I don’t want to be here! I don’t want this! I hate you!”

Kiều just clenched her jaw and faced forward and sat for a long, pregnant pause before turning the key in the ignition. The van was dead silent the whole way home.

 

III. Less Than

Kiều didn’t show her face at the temple for a month after Mai’s episode. And just like all the previous times when Mai had acted out in one way or another, she never brought it up again other than confiscating her dolls for a week. She had no idea how to prevent her little sister from pulling such stunts—in fact, she was fairly sure Mai no longer even played with dolls, but she had no other possessions to take away as punishment.

And so life continued as it had for the past three years. Kiều went to work, six and a half days a week. She’d gotten her AA in accounting from community college last year, and was always meaning to apply for a bachelor’s program, but there were endless bills to pay even though the mortgage itself had been covered before Ma died, and how could she leave her siblings even more alone?

Once every so often a well-meaning woman from the temple would call her, offering to babysit or inviting them to birthday parties. Kiều always declined, politely. She enjoyed being around other families, but she had also been raised to be self-sufficient. Slacking on responsibility was not, would never be, an option.

Their little house was quiet—subdued—for the next weeks, until one Friday night Kiều returned to find a large shaggy dog loping about the living room, barking like mad as the boys laughed and tossed it bits of last night’s beef.

“Mai!” she yelled immediately. “What is this?”

To her shock, Mai dashed out of their bedroom with a wide grin that was pure elation, no malice. “Chị Kiều! Look what I did!”

“What’d you do? Where’d this dog come from? Why is it—”

“His name is Tiger, and look at his left side!”

The dog slid to a halt before her, panting happily. She leaned over to peer at its side and almost gagged. There, sunken in and nearly concealed by its shaggy black fur, were undeniable tire marks of reddish-pink skin. She looked up at her little sister in horror. “Explain.”

“I’ve been practicing for years—just the little sparrows I find in the front yard sometimes, and one time a mouse—”

“Practicing … on dead animals?”

“I’m not powerless!” Mai cried in joy. “I can do what all of you can!”

“None of us can bring back the dead,” said Kiều, even as her mind whirred, dredging up terrible memories she’d worked so hard to bury—the car ride, the final words—

Mai was already frowning, withdrawing, sensing her older sister’s distress rather than the astonished pride she had hoped for. “Well, I can,” she snapped. “I found Tiger down the street coming home from the bus and Minh helped me drag him back and Kỳ Lân got home and screamed a little but I did it, I saved his life!”

“Dead things are meant to stay dead,” hissed Kiều. “We don’t understand how our own powers work—what if it took your life to revive it? How do you think I’d feel, coming home to find you dead or hurt over a dog?” Fat tears brimmed over Mai’s eyes, but Kiều drove on. “Don’t try this again. Kỳ Lân, go put the dog outside. It probably wants to go home to its family.”

“No!” screamed Mai, but Kỳ Lân silently rose and herded the dog to the door. There was no arguing with Chị Kiều when it came down to it. Fear forbade it; hierarchy permitted fear. Mai and Minh and Kỳ Lân were all little siblings after all, em to chi, loved but still lesser.

Mai let out a shriek of helpless fury. “You’re always taking things away from me!”

They all dispersed to separate corners of the house after the dog was gone.

 

This time, the stars were ice. Frost webbed over Kiều’s hands as she manifested the miniature stars, again sleeping on the couch to avoid Mai’s temper, and she welcomed the bite. She considered making up with her sister by getting a real dog from the pound and immediately dismissed the idea—there was no way she could afford another mouth to feed.

Was this destined to be her life? Was she doomed to play guardian to three children who weren’t hers, not exactly, until they grew up, if they grew up? They weren’t an American family, even if their passports, bound in neat navy blue after Ma and Ba passed the citizenship test, said otherwise; she couldn’t just kick them out once they turned eighteen.

A twinkling shard of ice, illuminated from within by a heatless red light, fell on her brow. She brushed it away irritably. A traitorous shred of her heart jumped at the color, even if it wasn’t the exact shade she had come to fear.

Three years ago, that icy winter day, shifting in the passenger’s seat as Ma raced down the highway to get to the supermarket before closing, Kiều’s hands had glowed red. It was sudden—one second she was staring out the window and in the next she’d glanced down and shrieked, because the only other time her palms had shone that violent crimson was when Ba was in the operating room and five minutes later the surgeon had walked out with somber, pitying eyes. Ma looked over at Kiều’s hands and an inexpressible sorrow had clouded her gaze.

“There’s a reason for everything, con,” she’d murmured to Kiều. “I can see a lot of things, most of them things I don’t want to see, but there’s no preventing what’s meant to happen.”

“Ma,” said Kiều, a sick feeling ballooning in her stomach. “What do you mean?”

Ma only gave her a small, weary smile. “Con, nhớ chăm sóc em nha.”

My child, remember to look after your little siblings.

And then the car slipped on ice to the left, into opposing traffic, and the ringing went on forever.

Lying there beneath the twisted metal, Kiều had believed she was paralyzed. But that was only the shock, the doctors told her after, because she’d escaped with not a scratch on her body. She’d never broken a bone or experienced a major injury before in her life—she’d never had an opportunity before the crash to realize she was unbreakable.

Now, with floating ice dotting the living room ceiling, her head spinning years away, Kiều squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think of nice things, bland things, anything to drive away the memories: electric bills, grocery lists, Sunday pizza nights, upcoming birthday gifts—

You’re always taking things away from me.

In the chaos of the dog, that particular cry had gotten lost. Of course, Mai had meant the dog, or the dolls that had been confiscated—

Kiều recalled how Mai had begged to go to the grocery store that day, how Ma had refused with a firm and knowing glance, had chosen Kiều instead. And Kiều had turned out to be unbreakable, but Mai—Mai had turned out to be a resurrectionist.

Ma had known. Said nothing. What was more, Ma hadn’t needed to bring anyone with her in the car, if she’d known she was going to die.

The great family arsenal of guilt, ancient and brutally effective. Kiều had been drawing from the seemingly bottomless well of it ever since that day. Had used it to keep herself working, praying, moving at all times; had used it to maintain that distance between herself and her little siblings. Nhớ chăm sóc em.

She sat up and got to her feet.

There were things that needed to be said.

 

 

***

Rumpus original art by Dara Herman Zierlein.

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A note on Vietnamese pronouns: Chị is used to address an older sister or general older woman. Em is more versatile, and can be used to address a younger sibling or general younger person (regardless of gender), though it does tend to carry a connotation of femininity. It can also be used to show affection (a boyfriend to a girlfriend, for example) or to call out a person’s lesser status in a social hierarchy.

National Poetry Month Day 3: Rajiv Mohabir

 

 

 

To the Formless God

          By mid-morning the grey fog burns off Biscayne Bay. 

          Land surfaces, a silver glint under the veil. 

          I trust it’s there—I’ve seen its bottlenose before. 

          For years I’ve prostrated before marble, black stone, brass, burning incense, repeating
          God’s name. 

          There is no one to ask me anything. 

          Rain floods the highway under construction.

          The Bible says, Add enough clay and it becomes slip: sediment and water at once. 

          No matter how much I read, I am a city of charred rubble folding my
          streets-turned-canals in prayer. 

          On the highway I cross the bridge. 

          Mist vapors up from the water like the Holy Ghost, like resurrection. 

          When the city burns away does sea ferry rock back to its prior self? 

          What becomes of the idol where there is no one to ask anything of—clay doesn’t know
          itself as clay. 

          I’ve never been more flooded yet parched with hymns. 

          I strain my eyes searching the streets for dolphins. 

 

 

The Garden Walls Fail

          It’s summer and I don’t believe myself nor 
          my meds of gila monster saliva transfigured 
          into a chemical that lowers A1C, my summer 
          body buried so far in the past, it was never a body. 
          My overall plasticity of joint, of grey matter 
          long since began its decay. I once prized 
          your squash, salting slices, squeezing water, 
          breaking the web of cheese cloth. I can’t recall 
          what I made of all that yellow. Or your face 
          in marvel. We too, one summer past the summer 
          before, no miracle serpent to spit antidote. For now
          I’m lost in the strawberries, my hands in cow shit. 
          The house of us stands. Renovations can wait 
          until next year. Yes. Next year will be better. 

 

 

 

***
Author photo by Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada

The Spiritual Fact of Our Oneness: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan’s second poetry collection, Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023) is a stunning tryptic that powerfully explores themes of mixed-race identity, time, mortality, and queer love. At the center of the collection is the poem, “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a meditation on the meaning of belonging, home, and the mysteries of fate. Shanahan wrote it after sustaining serious injuries in a bus accident in Morocco, while he was a Fulbright Scholar researching his mother’s homeland. Shanahan’s poems ask difficult questions for which he provides no easy answers. He encourages us to engage with complexities, nuances, and narratives that may differ from our own. There is pain in these poems, but also joy and hope. At the heart of Shanahan’s work is love and the belief we are all interconnected, changed by every encounter we experience. One cannot read Shanahan’s words without being changed.

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and a Lambda Literary Award. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Shanahan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco. Originally from the Bronx, he is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University.

I had the great pleasure of speaking with Charif Shanahan over Zoom about identity constructs, the complexity and nuance found in life, and the “spiritual fact” of our oneness.

***

The Rumpus: Congratulations on this truly amazing collection. Can you share how it came about?

Charif Shanahan: In 2015, I left my job and my apartment in New York and went to Morocco for what I thought would be a year on the Fulbright to research my family genealogy and representations of Blackness in the Maghreb. About two months into my time there, I was on an overnight bus that crashed. I was badly hurt and medevaced to Zurich, where I was in the hospital for two months. I had three surgeries. After I left the hospital, I ended up back in the Bronx, where I was born and raised, for a long convalescence—in my childhood bedroom.

That experience is the genesis of the book, and its center. The other two sections of the book, which is a tryptic, take up themes of mixed-race identity, time, mortality, queer love and sexuality.

The beating heart of the whole thing, of my first book also, and probably of my vision as an artist, is love, in all its expressions, what denies it and what makes it possible. The grief that accompanies that love has to do with the separateness of our species, how we have divided ourselves, sometimes in ways that feel positive, sometimes in ways that are apparently neutral, and sometimes in obviously corrosive and violent ways. I believe that a unified sense of “us” is our initial state of being in the world– before we are named, gendered, raced, and cultivated into a self, a person. In my poems, I am trying to return us there, to bring the singing voice of the poem and the reader back to that space.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about the poem that centers the collection: “On the Overnight from Agadir.”

There’s tension, deciding whether to make the trip to your mother’s homeland, the tension between the desire to discover and the desire to disappear—or maybe to just get a dog. The search for place, for home, for meaning, your thoughts about time, about the meaning of your work. The poem is so huge in its reach and heart. While you were recuperating, in a forced stillness physically, did you do a lot of writing? Even if it were just in your head?

Shanahan: Poetry was nowhere near my consciousness in the acute moments after the accident, or in the months after. There was supposed to be only one surgery, then there was a second, then a third. With complication after complication, I just wanted to get the fuck out, to get to the other side of it.

I began to explore the experience in poems when I arrived in California, the September after the accident, and it’s amazing how fate carried me into that process. My first book was picked up shortly after I had arrived in Morocco, so my intention that fall had been to apply for fellowships and university teaching positions around the country, to see where I would end up after Morocco.

The accident happened at the time when I would’ve started doing that. While I was in the hospital one morning, between surgeries two and three, I thought to myself, If you get out of this, you’re going to need something to do! It was December 2. I remembered that the deadline for the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford was December 1, so it had passed that midnight. I was disappointed. Then it occurred to me that because Zurich was nine hours ahead of California, the deadline hadn’t yet passed in local time! I had thirty-five minutes to throw together the application, which I managed to do, using pre-existing application materials. Months later, recovering in the Bronx, I was lamenting my circumstances, wondering what was next, when ding! an email came in from Eavan Boland. I arrived in California that September, and it was there that I began to metabolize the experience creatively. 

Rumpus: It feels like this was a poem you had to write.

Shanahan: The experience was so complex and layered that I needed to process what had happened to me, and language is one of the tools I use to contemplate, to process experience. The poem was the eventual byproduct of that process, which, at its start, was about something else, about integrating experience. Somewhere along the way, the processing had occurred and I began thinking aesthetically.

Rumpus: How did you decide to put that poem in the middle of the book?

Shanahan: The first question I had was whether it could be a book-length poem. I generated many, many, many, many pages. In my discussions with Louise Glück at Stanford, from whom I had the privilege of learning, and in my own thinking about the poem, it became clear that it could be a book-length poem, but didn’t need to be. I whittled down the pages and distilled the poem into its current form. In its shortened version, it would exist alongside other work, and centering it then felt intuitive to me.

Rumpus: You write a lot about social identity and physical positioning. All of this is done to find the place of belonging we call “home.” Has the accident, the aftermath, and the process of metabolizing the experience into poems changed your concept of what constitutes home?

Shanahan: It returned me to an understanding, a wisdom, that had always been inside of me that I had lost touch with somehow. There is a truth, I believe, inside each of us, whether we are connected to it or not, that we are at home wherever we are. We are at home in the body. Sure, certain spaces might comfort or energize us more than others. There are places where we feel a sense of kinship to the physical earth, the people, the culture that’s expressed there. But we are diminished, I think, when we begin to depend on something outside of ourselves for a sense of safety, or self-possession.

I have an older poet friend who, in a long spiritual conversation we once had, said, completely earnestly, “Home is a sentimental fantasy!” I understand now more clearly what she meant.

Rumpus: “‘Mulatto’ :: ‘Quadroon,’” a brilliant poem that appears early in the collection, begins with what seems like a universal need to express one’s self: “I want to tell you what for me it has been like.”

The barriers you experience to that expression are not universal, however: “To speak at all / I must occupy a position / in a system whose positions / I appear not to occupy.” You are both, as you say, “A part and apart.”

This feels like a really impossible situation. Can you speak to how that position/non-position and language are connected and how existing in that liminal space adds both an urgency to the need to be heard and, at the same time, a questioning of whether that’s possible?

Shanahan: The poem meditates on that very question and, importantly, I think, doesn’t reach a conclusion. I’m not really interested in posturing at irrefutable conclusions, or easy answers; I want instead to put a spotlight on complexity, on nuance. I believe that racial discourse in this country is often flattened into one of a few mainstream narratives, probably in part because many people are resistant to even the clearest and most urgent issues—police brutality, for example. I don’t mean to say those narratives, or the portions of the conversation, that are most central today should not be as central as they are. I’m saying that there are many narratives. If you are in a body, you are racialized. You are having a racialized experience. What if integrating an experience, like my own, seemingly adjacent to larger mainstream narratives, or other narratives that are less familiar, into the larger racial discourse, can actually help us advance that discourse? I believe it can and does.

As for the poem, one cause of the limits on expression is the tendency to conceive of race, myopically, in terms of a static presence or absence of privilege, when privilege is dynamic. I have privilege in one room, then I absolutely do not in the next. And the reason I lack privilege in the second room is the reason I have it in the first. How do you “position” (name) that? So yes, let’s keep talking, let’s put everything, and everyone’s experience, on the table.

Rumpus: The way you write about your mom is so beautiful. I’m thinking of “Not the Whole Thing, but a Large Part of the Story,” of “Trace Evidence,” and of “Two Rooms Down the Hall,” in which you write “When she tells me not to put forward that I am Black, she is saying I love you. / She’s saying I want you to live. I see now. When she told my brother she wished / He’d just find a nice blonde girl and settle down, I took her by the face / And, staring into her even-keeled nonchalance/ told her I love you, and you are crazy.”

Your mom taught you a lot about identity, and while her own view of herself seems solid, it didn’t match the spaces in which people saw her.

Shanahan: That dissonance has been a primary question of my own identity and has required me to examine the instability of identity constructs, and in particular racial constructs, over time and space. My mother is from the Maghreb, born and raised in Morocco, identifies as Arab, as Muslim, as Moroccan, as woman. These were the identity markers germane to her experience.

It wasn’t that the color of her skin did not have meaning in Morocco. It of course did. But when my mother arrived here, to a new cultural and national context, with its terms of identity, its pathologies, her Blackness took on new meaning, new significance—and often contentiously. Now, it’s not that I think a person in her circumstances would need to revise their self-concept, but I think it becomes especially important to consider those circumstances when children are involved, when a first-generation Black American experience is happening outside of an African American lineage. I’m writing into that generational dissonance. As I ask in a poem that didn’t make it into the collection, “Why are the parts of her that she cannot see / the only parts of me that I can?”

Rumpus: This title made me laugh: “While I Wash My Face, I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me,” because, Charif, you ask impossible questions all the time!

Shanahan: Guilty.

Rumpus: What I found interesting in this poem and several others is that you address yourself in the second person. You directly ask yourself questions. How did that choice come about?

Shanahan: The first piece is the distancing effect of using the “you as I,” the permission it grants you to inhabit a different mind space around your subjects, to separate from them in a way. The self that I’m addressing is part of me, is inside me, but I’m able to inhabit or situate myself in a different internal position vis-a-vis the material at hand.

The gesture is also necessitated by something I believe and that I think a fair amount of people I know would find difficult to trust: the self speaking to you right now, is not the self I inhabited (or that inhabited me) at the beginning of this conversation. We have changed one another in this dialogue of thirty or forty-five minutes. It doesn’t mean that this change needs to be profound, or on a constitutive level. It means a shifting occurs, by virtue of our “contact.” There is information about living, art, human connection, language, race—about everything that is alive inside this interaction—that you have integrated, or that at least is inside you waiting to be integrated. The same is true for me.

Rumpus: We talked about interpretations, and the way people bring with them their views of others when they meet them. Is it scary to put yourself on the page this way, while knowing people are going to hear what they hear and see what they see through their own lens?

Shanahan: I love what you’re saying because it’s an element of my work that can be easily misunderstood. A reader might say these are “confessional” poems or poems that seem generated by a psychological or emotional compulsion to reveal, to be seen. I wouldn’t agree with that at all. I think honesty, or transparency, is an aesthetic choice.

We shouldn’t assume anything that happens within the body of any poem is an event that has actually been lived. In the moments when I am most apparently honest about experiences that one might be expected to hide or keep to themselves, I am more than sharing myself or reflecting myself to an individual, I am reflecting the reader back to the reader. I am reflecting you back to you. One of the lines in “Fig Tree” is, in a similar vein: “Do I apologize? I am of this same world.” I didn’t ask for any of this, and I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I genuinely believe that I am you. It’s a notion that, again, many find hard to accept, or trust. I don’t mean to flatten our differences or to suggest that we’re having the same experience. The constructed world, though constructed, is real. In a way, it’s the first level of experience. My story has to be your story on some level, and yours, mine. We are beholden to one another. We are here at the same time.

Rumpus: What would you like people to get from this book?

Shanahan: I would like them to recognize themselves in a life that isn’t theirs, or maybe even like any they’ve known. I’d like them to be reminded of, again, the spiritual fact of our oneness—in a way that doesn’t feel irrelevant to how we live but can actually animate how we live, that can shape how we move through these lives and these bodies, at this time. I hope there are people who inhabit identity positions very different from my own, who can nonetheless see themselves in this book. I hope the book will awaken some people to the complexities of racial identity, especially today in an increasingly globalized world. I hope that the book can reach people’s hearts and souls and generate new conversation around the subjects I’m exploring.

Rumpus: Do you find that message, this book is especially necessary today?

Shanahan: I often ask my students, “The world is literally and figuratively on fire. Of all the things we could do with our lives, why write poems?” There are many answers to that question, of course, but chiefly, for me, it’s about the elevation of consciousness, the understanding of portions of human experience, even when that experience is far from our own, that poetry enables.

As a species, we can’t even agree, for example, that the climate crisis is real, or, as I put it in a poem in the book, that “we are all the same animal.” We can’t get on the same page about scientific fact, even when it requires our urgent, collective attention if we’re going to make it. And that must be rooted in the competing priorities generated by our separateness.

So yes, I think now is as good a time as any to spread a message of oneness.

Rumpus: What’s next for you?

Shanahan: I am working on a memoir that treats, in prose, the same subjects as the books of poetry, and I’ve also started my third book of poetry—a book-length epistolary poem to Whiteness. The poem is poly-vocal, written by many “authors,” and moves across time and space. There’s a section that comes out of the seventh century Arab slave trade, for example, preceding a section that comes out of the contemporary Bronx. It’s very global in orientation, as I am as a person and a poet, and I’m excited to keep ‘finding’ it.

 

 

 

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Author photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

 

Cloistered

 

 

 

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A story is like a nomad: An Interview with Geetanjali Shree

In the past forty years, South Asian writers writing in English have made a significant showing at the Booker Prizes, the literary awards for the best book published in the UK and Ireland. Previous winners include Salman Rushdie (who has been nominated seven times, and whose novel Midnight’s Children won in 1981, introducing South Asian literature in English to the world with a bang), Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga—and even in 2022, Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka won for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

 

But the big news was sixty-five-year-old Indian writer Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand—translated by Daisy Rockwell—bringing home the Booker International Prize, the first time a book translated from Hindi had won in the prize’s nearly twenty-year history. Shree’s experimental and playful novel tells the story of Ma—an eighty-year-old bedridden woman who gets a new lease on life and goes on a journey back across a border that she thought she would never cross again. The English translation was originally published by Tilted Axis Press in the UK, and is now available from HarperCollins in the United States.

 

“Behind me and this book lies a rich and flourishing literary tradition in Hindi and in other South Asian languages,” Shree said in her acceptance speech. “World literature will be richer for knowing some of the finest writers in these languages, the vocabulary of life will increase from such an interaction.”

 

I spoke to Shree on Zoom one late night in California / mid-day in Delhi in between a flurry of events and appearances that have flooded her calendar since the prize was announced in October of 2022. The author of four other novels, Shree’s melodic voice and serene and vibrant demeanor made me wish I could teleport to her city and hear her speak in one of the many storied literary spaces there.

 

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The Rumpus: Why do you write in Hindi?

Geetanjali Shree: The question itself says so much! That a person should be asked why she writes in her mother tongue, when it should be an absolutely natural thing. What else should I be writing in except in my mother tongue? It’s the first and most natural choice for a writer to be writing in her mother tongue. I think the question to be asked, normally, should be why you’re not writing in the mother tongue. But this says so much about our history, about our colonial past, about the place of English amongst the educated in [India], that it becomes almost unnatural that anyone who is educated to be writing not in English, but in another Indian language.

So yes, I write in Hindi because it’s my mother tongue. And I think, like a lot of us middle class Indians, I’ve also grown up with an English medium education. But when it comes to something like the arts and literature, it’s somehow so close to your bones that almost automatically you go into your mother tongue rather than in the language you have learned formally in school. I must add, because too easily it becomes a story about English versus other languages, that there is no such prejudice in my head or heart about it. Those who find for whatever reasons that English is the language they’ve expressed themselves in—they’re most welcome to do it.

Rumpus: Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi) was such a pleasure to read! The playfulness of the language really comes across, and the humor—also the deep themes of women and families and mothers and children and borders. You write: “Women are stories in themselves, full of stirrings and whisperings that float on the wind, that bend with each blade of grass.” Do these themes come up in all your books, and what was the inspiration for this one?

 

Shree: I haven’t sat down and studied what all themes I have written about before, since I don’t think of my books that way; but yes, all the themes you name and a few more as well. It is very pluralistic and very polyphonic and variegated. But yes, women easily and family, these are themes that I am interested in, but the trigger each time would be different.

 

In terms of inspiration, what has more and more become my way and more and more something that I have understood is that you don’t have to go for anything dramatic and big. The daily and the mundane are imbued with the big and the momentous. Every small and completely inane looking thing is also strangely connected to much bigger things, and each thing can have so many reverberations and echoes. What’s important is to find those layers, you know, as you go along. In almost all of my other works, I let small curiosities take me along.

 

The great poet and translator A.K. Ramanujan, in one of his diaries, he’d written that you don’t have to go looking for the poem, you just have to put yourself in a place where the poem will come to you. I really feel at one with that. You are carrying all your stories in you, from your surroundings, from your imagination, from your reality, from your observation, from your history, from your tradition—you’re carrying them all with you all the time. They’re building up. You just want to find the place where the story, for that moment, is going to emerge and begin to take shape and you can go with it. I just tried to put myself in a kind of mode of retreat and empty myself out and let the layers and whispers and the murmurs from within me become more audible and visible. And then I go along with that.

 

In this case, I think what set me off was just an image of an old person, an elderly person, lying with her back turned to the family, which is a very, very ordinary image, which is there in every family or everywhere, you know, elderly people who look like they have nothing more to do with this world. That image somehow formed inside me. Maybe it was there, maybe I picked it up from somewhere. And it stayed with me. And then that image stirred up my curiosity. What is it that this back is doing? Is it turning away from the world and from life, or is it turning away from the immediate family behind her? I followed that curiosity and that character, and that character started to do various things, which began to amaze me and amuse me and then a whole novel was on the way to being created.

 

Rumpus: Your book is dedicated to the Indian writer Krishna Sobti, another Hindi writer. Can you tell us about your relationship with her, and about the Hindi literary community in Delhi. It feels like a real community, as opposed to the United States where it is very institutionalized in terms of MFA programs.

 

Shree: The literary community in Delhi, well, it’s a very informal community at one level—and there’s everything that goes on within a community—there’s intrigue and politics and pettiness and support. In terms of Krishna Sobti, I consider her my guru and a great writer. She’s someone who people refer to as a “difficult writer,” which I find very unnecessary. I mean, why shouldn’t writing be difficult? The more important thing is whether it is good; difficult and good. Krishna Sobti was not an easy writer. You couldn’t just pick her up and read her in one second. But she was a writer of tremendous variety, and strength, and she was a person of great strength and forthrightness, and a person who you could absolutely iconify. She died a few years ago at the ripe old age of ninety-four, and right to the end she was very alert and aware about everything that was going on, very disturbed with the politics that were shaping up—and very upfront about whatever she had to say.

 

She was always very senior to me, and when we met, I was very much a new writer, but she was always very encouraging, not just to me but to others also, and she took all of us very seriously. She remembered what we were doing, and she would question us when we met. So right from the start, whenever I had the time, I would go and see her, which was actually not that often, but we just developed this relationship of great respect and affection. She was very, very kind and generous. We would sit down with a small brandy in the evening, which she would almost never finish, and she would ask about my work, and we would have that little evening together. It was lovely.

 

Rumpus: Your mentorship and community with Sobti makes me think of the many lines in your book about storytelling, and all the references you make to other writers. “Here’s the thing: A story can fly, stop, go, turn, be whatever it wants to be. That’s why our wise author Intizar Hussain once remarked that a story is like a nomad.” Is this an important part of your storytelling?

 

Shree: It is a line of thought which has probably been growing in me, perhaps something that I’ve been thinking more and more about. Perhaps it also comes from the fact that I am born into a literature which is in its modern form. Hindi literature very much belongs to the period just before [Indian] independence, and then concerns what went on after independence. And I think it was a period when social realism had a huge meaning and purpose for everyone who was writing because it was a new society, and everyone wanted to steer it towards a better future. So, this express purpose became the overriding concern for all the writers. Now that makes complete sense and I’m not deriding them at all, but I think it did become the sort of tacit rule and guideline that when you were writing, that you had to write about society for the betterment of society, and you had to do it in a way which is very easily communicable. You had to follow a certain sort of way which can be comprehended, the proper sort of story that a reader can immediately connect with.

 

I think somewhere I—when I say ‘I,’ I am not only talking about myself but a whole community of writers and artists—began to push back against social realism. Society comes into your work in so many different ways—it doesn’t have to be a verifiable, empirical, descriptive way. I think that spurred a lot of us on, and freed a lot of us. It’s like that Ramanujan quote again. I would say that we don’t have to go looking for the society, because almost whatever we do, society will come to it. So, just let yourself free in the field of literature and creativity. And, if you’re letting yourself free, then also realize that stories will not just go straight. Stories will go this way and that! There’ll be non sequiturs! There’ll be all kinds of breaks and incompleteness, and it’s okay to celebrate all that and see what happens.

 

Rumpus: Along with the meta-fictional elements in the book, there is also so much playfulness with the POV and characters and the way the story is being told. Do you feel like there is a lot of experimentation happening amongst modern Indian writers and artists today?

 

Shree: I don’t know if writers are thinking about that word “experimentation,” but it is happening in the course of searching out ways of saying what we are trying to say. Is there a lot of that kind of writing happening? Yes, the literature is very, very vibrant and many different things are happening. But I’ll also say that it’s not as if this is happening for the first time. I mean, if you go back to ancient literature, perhaps anywhere, and certainly in [India], you see it—look at our epics, take the Mahabharata. And what you’re calling experimentation I mean, come on, it’s full of every way of storytelling. It’s doing everything! It’s almost like there’s nothing new for you to do. In a way, I’m only copying. We carry on from things which have already been done, and we keep renewing them with our zeal and reinventing them and we keep trying to do something new. And sometimes, we manage with the same ingredients. And sometimes perhaps, we discover that we thought we were doing it for the first time, but it’s been done thousands of times before.

 

Rumpus: You speak so highly of your translators, not only mentioning your English translator Daisy Rockwell in your Booker acceptance speech, but also mentioning your French translator Annie Montaut. Tell me about what your relationship is like with your translators, and what the process of translating Tomb of Sand was like.

 

Shree: I’m so lucky to have these two translators for this book of mine. With both, actually, I’ve had a very, very rich relationship. I knew Annie, but I only met Daisy in person a few days before the Booker Awards Ceremony. It started with Daisy sending me a sample of the translation. When I saw those few pages, I felt that here’s somebody who really got the sense of things and is clearly enjoying the way I’m using language a bit crookedly—here’s somebody who seems to be in tune with it immediately.

 

After that, Daisy was sending me long questionnaires about lots of things that she needed clarified, which included messages where she said: “You know, it’s not really needed for the translation, but I need for myself, to have the context in my head when I’m translating.” So it was very fascinating, but quite excruciating sometimes for me because my work is not research based. I had to go back to my work and start sort of researching where I got certain metaphors from, what was the story behind my use of language, because when I am writing it’s just coming out. So, it became a conscious exercise of going back and researching and sometimes just guessing at what made me come to certain points in certain words and so on.

 

What’s important between the translator and the author is to share a rapport about the way of looking at things, you know, and feeling intensely about those things. So, I think the fact that Daisy felt as much love for language or playing with language made for a very strong foundation, and I think the outcome has been wonderful.

 

Rumpus: There has been a great deal of attention paid to the fact that Tomb of Sand was the first Indian language book to win the Booker International Prize. Why do you think Indian literature is not being recognized and translated as much as other languages and recognized on a world stage?

 

Shree: We must return again and again to the whole issue of hegemony of the English language. I think it’s unfortunate that English should become the pool where all literature is to be viewed. There should be more translations across languages; in fact, even across Indian languages. Why should Indians from different parts of the country have to read each other only in English? There’s a lot of things which are skewed in this whole translation story. In fact, in recent years, the quality of translations has really, really improved, so that’s a very hopeful sign. In fact, most of [the literature] that’s going out of South Asia is only literature written in English by South Asians.

 

Also, I don’t think there’s such a lot of translation being done of Indian languages. So, I think it’s a matter of accessibility—that it’s not been worked on and created. I think the world is really opening up, but it’s also made people quite insular. I hope something like the Booker win might do that. I was told that at the Frankfurt Book Fair, publishers were really interested in tapping translated works from Indian languages, rather than just going for the English. So, I think that’s a change one can immediately see, but it would only mean something if it becomes a sustained act.

 

Rumpus: How does it feel to be an artist in India, at this moment—or really in the world—with such a prevalence of right-wing and Nationalist leaders?

 

Shree: I’m really, really glad that you added in “the world.” I think that’s important because too often people talk about some places, like that’s where something is happening only. And there are other places where things are really, you know, hunky dory and you can do anything and get away with anything. That’s just not true. There are some trends in the world today, which are disturbing. There’s a tidal wave, you know. The world has opened up, but it’s also become more constricted. Vigilance has increased. Vigilance has become much easier than before, so everyone’s being watched. So, I’m glad you’re not making it India versus the world.

 

What’s happening in India… look, I mean, we respond to things at various levels. And let me tell you this: In some sense, the word has been endangered for a very long time, perhaps from the beginning. If the word is going to threaten the social order, it has to be stopped. Anything which is going to threaten the social and political order has to be stopped. And this has been going on perhaps forever. But I think writers cannot stop because writing for us is like breathing. We cannot stop. We have to carry on. By and large, I think that is what the situation is in India. So many people are writing and, indeed, I think there is a whole community which is carrying on saying what they want—even in this atmosphere of fear.

 

 

Language as Possibility: Renee Gladman’s Plans for Sentences

If you look at any scripted sentence, especially written in cursive, without any concern for reading or meaning, what do you see? Something like looping lines scrawled on the page, strange glyphs making little drawings and patterns. There is a kind of open mindedness involved in this activity, a willingness to try to see what you normally read. Also a willingness to not know the difference. When I adopt this approach it’s hard to describe the kind of enjoyment I get out of Renee Gladman’s poem drawings or prose architectures.

I first encountered Renee Gladman’s work when she came to speak at my university. It was a strange meeting for a couple reasons. My professor John Beer, a great poet in his own right, relayed to me that he first met Gladman at St. Bonaventure University in New York where he worked with Robert Lax. My uncle Bill taught chemistry there for several years before retiring to my home state of North Carolina. It was an innocuous synchronicity, but enough for me to take as a sign that I needed to attend Gladman’s reading. When Gladman zoomed into the reading, I was struck by the combination of wonder and humility in her voice. She spoke slowly, with a sense that she wasn’t exactly sure where the words were coming from but that they were very real, felt, immanent—the same impression I get when I behold her work. She began reading from her novel Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge. Admittedly, being uninitiated to her style, I had no idea what was going on, which is the best place to be for a poet.

For those unfamiliar, it helps to think of Gladman’s work as engaging the imagination the way an architect approaches three-dimensional space with a two-dimensional blueprint. Her art is all about blurring or renegotiating where we draw the line—between writing and drawing, seeing and reading, between knowing and not-knowing, and, by extension, between social constructs. Through the poem-drawings in her newest collection from Wave Books, Plans for Sentences, this latest installment follows up the 2016 book of drawn-writings Prose Architectures as Gladman continues “using the space and time of drawing to explore more deeply the impact of blackness, futurity, and moving/erupting architectures on topographies of the sentence.”

These will set something at the back of something and make it larger; what is smallest

will be at the forefront but also below. These will bend, will contort. They will grain

 

These sentences will dome the thought; they will make complex gestures and grain on a

curve. They will set memories in overlapping modes of slope and cover, making hollows. (FIG 12. p. 25)

Intricate, yet understated, the poems embody a kind of opacity between specific and vague— buildings, “domes of thought,” “propositions of houses,” compositions that “scaffold the unwritten.” However, the supposed impasse between ‘the specific’ and ‘the vague’ becomes overgrown by all ‘their’ (the sentences) self-allusion. In this way, the book is, referentially, a closed loop, as it recursively gestures to its own structure. Yet, despite the recursive (pun intended) looping, these sentences also endlessly open and bloom and “dream themselves into figuration[s] of planets and satellites.” The very core of language as structural possibility, lends animacy to the things being enacted, so that

one thing leaning and the other sloping will divide the plain just below the densest language and will launch the language of the grain.

The topography of the terrain insinuated through the poem-drawings use this “dense language of the grain” to build and rebuild what might be called various ‘architextual’ structures. “Silos” and “spires” lean and loom. “Sanctuaries” “seamed” in clausal “corridors,” by and for “blackened gatherings.”  Take the poem accompanying Figure 23:

They will out quietly in a thin single line of fanning, they will turn, they will counter; they will turn and land and lift off and turn within the meditation, and will blacken gasps into the page

These places will inscribe their own topography: make their shape with their shape. And

will sonar inside the void

These sentences will wind tightly around who we are and how we live and will grow habitations as they wonder; they will cleave from the ground in enclosures of grief and will knoll

Thus, “they” (the sentences) will “blacken gasps onto the page” as the page becomes a space and a surface for “tiny communities,” a multifaceted “substrate” (a word seemingly standing in for “page” used several times throughout Plans for Sentences). A substrate is a surface material for electronic circuitry, or in biochemical terms, a material for enzymes in cell-matrices. In scientific terms, substrates are highly “context-dependent” (Wikipedia), much like the poems’ relation to the drawings. In terms of blackness and futurity, context remains contingent, fluctuating between “a blackening of the figure and a blackening of the ground.”

Legibility is equally context-dependent to the manner of inscription and transcription. Reading these poems is one way to approach the book of drawings. Each stanza lends myriad connotative shades to each meaning, structure, or action described (or inscribed) in the book. For instance, various “castellations” crop up throughout the book, a word defined by Merriam-Webster as “defensive or decorative parapets; battlements.” While ‘the thing being defended’ remains unspecified, the reader can insinuate socioeconomic inferences, where black gathering can stand for the marks on the page and the marked bodies subject to political structures throughout recent space and time.

Gladman’s work literally makes space for blackened gatherings through “geometr[ies] of support.” The significance of the future-subjunctive mood in these sentences not only makes space, but also plans for future spaces—hence the lack of periods at the end of each stanza and proliferation of semicolons, which signifies both separation and continuance, a closing-and-opening. Thus, for all these structures, there are no monoliths. There are plenty of places where ‘they’ “fail” or “void” or “buckle” or “ache;” they even become, colorfully, “a figuration of birds flying above a ground on fire, under fire.”

Readers familiar with Gladman’s work may find a pleasurable surprise in Plans—the increased incorporation of watercolor in several of the drawings. In Fig. 36, the drawings have crooked strokes of ochre and tiny dabs of turquoise. The poem tells us that the sentences “will name little waters that comma” and contain places that “let evening glow through them.” It seems the color gestures or loosely corresponds to certain elements conjured in the poem-drawings. Figures 47 through the end (60) all feature gray (fog), greens (moss, grass), ochre (evening glow). However, these gestures also, in no way, should be reduced to mere symbolism or illustration—a point of contingency Gladman notes in her Acknowledgements. Rather, the color seems to be strictly gestural, they are part of the sentence’s future-plans in the same way the directions, walls, shapes, and other architectural objects are integral to the plans.

Sometimes, looking at the drawings feels like looking at a scape (whether land or city). Then one reads something like: “these places will operate inside a thinning…they will up and over and grain.” We are left, however, only able to guess at the scale of the scape.

(Fig 33. Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/157379/plans-for-sentences-33)

 

Are we looking at miniscule close-ups, magnified to scale, or are these structures massive and faraway? Where are we? Who constitutes ‘we’? Are we spectators, tourists? One gets the sense of being a visitor and the visitation is facilitated by Gladman, but she isn’t so much a guide or host as a kind of purveyor. The visitation purveyed by the writing which is also the drawing, that we are somehow looking at and looking on and looking (with)in(side).

Oftentimes, prepositions are treated as verbal, so that “out” and “over” enact movement that simultaneously gestures and figures. Or prepositional phrases function nominally “these sentences will narrow in an out-and-through (Fig 43).” Plans for Sentences draws out and through and all throughout various plans and planes, sometimes plainly sometimes diaphanously. This method of re-tooling or re-building prepositions, situates the reader in a place where ‘figuring out’ what the poems mean, is really an activity of ‘figuring up’, literally drawing a conclusion based on how you use the sentences to configure or shape the meaning. I find my imagination acting like a cursor drawing in a computer program as I follow the ‘lines’ of words:

These sentences will funnel the plain in a bout of weather between the boundary and the

front; they will rotate above and grain below. They will over and back above, will grain and

blacken below. They will make an underground for your breathing, a repeating of devoted

enclosure (Fig. 29)

The sparseness of the “plain” language throughout ex-plains itself in the recursive looping-around and laying-out of words and drawing. Script is conscripted by drawing and re-scripted in each sentence so that the “poetry” occurs in the interstitial spaces between seeing and reading, visualizing and imagining. The writing/drawing involves planar existences and planning becomes a form of forming.

All this is to say, one of the beauties and joys of engaging this book is that there are multiple ways to engage. There is even a section at the end titled “Descriptions of Future Sentences, An Index,” if a reader wants to just browse intriguing and awe-some sentences. The index is broken into something like ‘stanzas’ based on typified beginning phrases throughout the book. For instance, “these places…”, “these sentences…”, “this chapter…” etc. The effect of this realignment of sentences is even more structural variation and possible figurative building.

Gladman’s art is literally figural and figuratively literal. Her renderings turn abstraction substantive as substance becomes abstract. In order to ‘follow’ the lines she’s following, it’s as if the reader must completely invert their own sense of how to make (create) sense. I cannot help but try to ‘read’ the drawings and ‘visualize’ the writing, rather than the other way around. However, the other way around can be just as compelling and constructive in creating an understanding of the ‘architextuality’ of the poems.

An incompleteness, or voided substance, fills and frames each drawing-poem. Each one feels both fixed and in-progress, simultaneously—much like black futurity, within which Renee Gladman’s vision is a beautiful part. Through a particular strain of defamiliarization, Gladman’s book reminds us that we don’t know, maybe can’t ever really know, what we are looking at. We can, however, adjust accordingly—either with or against the curve or the grain or the gathering, but there will always be escapement, void, the unfinished becoming of those sentences that will be.

 

 

***

From the Archives: The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Bad Blood

This essay was originally published at The Rumpus on April 30, 2017.

Sophomore year of college, on my school’s monthly blood drive day, I was seduced by a sign outside of a Big Red Bus that decreed, “You can be a hero! Donate blood and save three lives today!” The sign was written with hot pink dry eraser marker in cheery, swirly letters as if advertising today’s lunch special: Destiny. Of course. I have always known that I’m destined for greatness—a triumph so epic you could hear my name drifting in the winds if you simply stood still and tuned your ears to history: Edgar Gomez is a hero. Or maybe: Edgar Gomez, the hero. Whichever is easier on the winds.

I had skipped breakfast that morning and wondered if they were offering anything more substantial. On the back, in case being a hero three times over wasn’t enough of a draw, the sign continued: “Free small pizza and movie ticket with every donation.” A small price to pay to save three lives.

Giddy at the arrival of my big break, I climbed aboard the bloodmobile, vibrating with the knowledge that this was finally my chance to prove to everyone what has been so obvious to me my whole life. I had been waiting for a sign for so long, and here it was at last, so satisfyingly literal. Inside, I was promptly greeted by the check-in nurse in the customary heroic way.

“We don’t have time for you,” she said, shifting her eyes to the packed bench where a queue of students sat waiting to be harvested. I stared at her blankly, my mouth struggling to find the words that would communicate to her how vital it was that I be allowed in, that this wasn’t just about donating blood, that this was larger than the both of us, her rejection could very well likely forever alter the fabric of history and space and time.

“I have time,” I said.

“Okay,” she shrugged. “You can wait if you want.” At that, she turned and disappeared behind a thin screen door. Another nurse motioned to a rack on the wall stacked with clipboards.

“Fill out one of those,” she said, gesturing with a Ziploc bag stuffed with a foam rubber ducky. “Try to be as honest as possible. Oh, and fill the boxes out completely,” she added as an afterthought. “The machine doesn’t recognize partially filled out boxes.”

On a nearby donor bed, a pale woman nodded off with her hand raised like she was asking a question in her sleep, a dark purple spot bleeding through the gauze where the needle had punctured her skin.

*

To give blood in the United States today is like joining an elite, profoundly uncool, hyper-exclusive club. If you are under seventeen years old, depending on the state, you must have your parents’ permission. There are cruel limitations as to where and when you may have travelled. For example, you may not have spent more than five years at the Sorbonne in Paris getting your doctorate degree about French movies about trains. You may not have had a tattoo done within the past twelve months, even of a really tough looking anchor on your chest. You must weigh a minimum of 110 lbs. As per American Red Cross eligibility requirements, there is no upper weight limit for donors “as long as your weight is not higher than the weight limit of the donor bed/lounge you are using.” To give blood, you must be able to fit on a donor bed. Add to the reasons you might be denied at a blood donor center: the summer you spent in Ireland in 1993 looking for Bono, the lip piercing you got after your last break up two months ago because you desperately needed change, the pill you took this morning.

I scanned through my donor questionnaire, making sure to answer each question as honestly as possible.

“Feeling healthy and well today?” There was no box for “Sometimes I feel like I died 400 years ago and every now and then my right arm has a strange spasm which makes me suspect that I may be a demon who took over some poor kid’s body and he’s desperately trying to get out one limb at a time,” so I shaded in the box for “Yes.”

“Have you taken anything with aspirin in it within the last twenty-four hours?” No. Demons don’t need medicine.

These requirements are not particularly stringent, yet still only an estimated 38 percent of the population is eligible to donate. Of that, less than ten percent actually do, and that is in part because to give blood in the United States today, you must answer the question: “From 1977 to the present, have you had sexual contact with another male, even once?”

I was wearing cut-off jean shorts, an extra small plain white tee that bordered dangerously with crop top territory, and dollar store glittery nail polish chipping at the edges. No, I decided, my pencil carefully outlining the box, thoroughly shading it in so the machine would have no trouble understanding. Not even once.

*

On paper, I know why gay men are not eligible to donate blood. The rationale for these regulations is straightforward. Aside from making sure we don’t find thumbs in our chicken nuggets, it is the responsibility of the Food and Drug Administration to minimize the threat of the public contracting through blood transfusions infectious diseases such as human deficiency viruses or hepatitis. Men who have sex with men are the population most heavily affected by HIV infection. Among the nearly 50,000 new cases of FDA reported by the Center for Disease Control in 2012, more than 30,000 were transmitted from male-to-male sexual contact. In order to keep as few contaminated donations from entering the national blood supply as possible, several safeguards have been set in place, from rigorously testing donations for everything from syphilis to West Nile Virus, and beginning with the initial donor screening process, which takes the form of a mini-physical and a questionnaire that is designed to weed out potential risks.

Despite the dozens of tests performed on each unit of donated blood—to establish blood type and test for infectious diseases—the FDA stresses that these tests are not foolproof. However, to put your potential exposure into perspective, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), “your risk of getting HIV from a blood transfusion is lower than your risk of getting killed by lightning. Only about one in two million donations might carry HIV and transmit HIV if given to a patient.” Though the source of these infections are not always linked to gay men, it is the policy of blood centers, under current FDA regulation, to place all gay men who admit on their questionnaire to having had sexual contact with other men within the past twelve months on a one-year deferral list, which is a way to soften the reality that gay men are simply not permitted to donate. While ostensibly this is an improvement on their previous ban on gay men, it’s still less “come back next Wednesday,” more, “we’ll call you when you decide to move to the Andes, shave your head, and take a vow of celibacy.”

Besides the FDA’s implicit verdict that two gay men in a monogamous relationship pose the same threat to the national blood supply as a heroin addict, or the propaganda ingrained in children at birth that only gay people contract HIV when, according to the Center for Disease Control, most new HIV diagnoses in women are attributed to heterosexual sex, not to mention the outright homophobic logic couched in the idea that the nation cannot trust gay men to know their own status, the FDA fails to account for one crucial fact: I am a hero. I am special. I am destined for greatness.

*

How my greatness will manifest itself is unknown to me, a mystery that has filled every moment with a sense of sweet, mouthwatering opportunity. Even as a kid I knew the world needed me. Whenever I was out in public, I would openly exhibit my karate skills, demonstrating perfect horse stance for the passersby outside of the mall JC Penney’s, waiting for my choice sensei to pluck me from obscurity and launch my career as the martial arts champion of the galaxy. In my fantasy, I told myself he had only planned to stop by Yankee Candle to shop for candles for his dojo, a quiet masculine scent like Motor Oil or Sports Tears, yet seeing me and my ability to stand with my legs splayed and bent at the knees, my arms akimbo, my fists locked tight at my waist for over fifteen minutes while my mom perused the clearance racks inside, he would instinctively know, like a mother penguin can pick out her chick in a colony of thousands, that we were lost kin.

“Is it really you?” he would ask, recognizing something ancient and powerful within me. Without waiting for my answer he would sweep me away to someplace majestic where he would rededicate his life to teaching me how to snap two by fours in half with my palm. Initially, my mother would be devastated by my disappearance, throwing herself completely into her job at Starbucks where she would make crude drawings of my face with the foam in her customer’s lattes, but over time she would grow to accept it, knowing deep down that I was out there being the hero the world needed of me.

As a teen, I would stalk the aisles at my local bookstore with my eyes opened as wide as I could hoping that something would irritate them and I would be reduced to tears. Sobbing, I would sink myself into the nearest seat with an intellectual looking book, something like The Diary of Malcom X, and squint my eyes, letting the tears roll down my cheeks, imagining that an agent would see how emotionally raw and unguarded I am and, unable to control himself, yell, “Look everyone! It’s the next Nick Jonas! I have to sign him immediately!” I would be plucked from my humdrum life and become an overnight celebrity and an ambassador for UNICEF, traveling around the globe teaching children the value of environmental sustainability through interpretive dance.

“Life on land is finite!” I would shout into the crowd of kids gathered around to watch one of my performances in a remote village in Nicaragua. “Return to the sea is inevitable!” My work done, I would hop into the back seat of my Hummer limo and speed away to my next humanitarian destination, listening as the chorus of applause trailed off in the distance.

*

My blood pressure was too high. Classic superhero—always overachieving.

“It needs to be below one hundred for you to be eligible to donate,” reported the nurse taking my vitals. She had her hand wrapped around my thumb, squeezing it in a python grip so that my blood dripped onto a glass slide.

“One hundred and seventeen,” she droned, holding my limp hand like a jaded psychic fed up with telling her clients how old they would grow to be. I imagined her tracing her sage fingers down my palm, stopping dramatically to investigate a fine line.

“Just as I suspected!” she would announce, pulling me in with an all-knowing squint. “You were really good at basketball in a past life!” Then, rolling her eyes to the back of her head in a state of supernatural bliss: “Oh, and you’re totally gay.”

“Wait a little while and we’ll test you again,” she interrupted, throwing a glass of ice water on my fantasy and forcing me back to reality. Five minutes later, she tested my other thumb, pricking my finger with a medical tool that resembled a mechanical pencil. She squeezed more of my blood onto a fresh slide. Now it was too low, meaning that my blood pressure is in a constant state of flux between extremes.

“You can go ahead and donate,” she concluded, then turned around to tune her radio dial until she landed on a breezy R&B station. She hovered there for a minute, mouthed along to a few words, and gave me a this-is-my–song look. Maybe my blood pressure would just even out.

*

According to the official American Red Cross website, the average process of giving blood, from arriving at your local Big Red Bus blood drive to stepping off with your complimentary cranberry juice cocktail and sugar cookie, takes approximately an hour and fifteen minutes. They also maintain that every two seconds, someone in the US needs blood, meaning that for the national blood supply to remain sustainable, in the amount of time it takes for one person to give blood, enough of the stuff must be collected nationwide to meet the demands of over one thousand people. The most alarming aspect of these figures? They get it. In a year, the American Red Cross and similar organizations collect 15.7 million donations in the US, over 700,000 more donations than needed. I imagine a nurse splayed out in a blood bank vault making blood snow angels with the amazing surplus of donations she collected that day, which is to say, they are very good at their jobs.

Why, then, are stories such as “The Nation Has a Major Blood Shortage” being relayed on major news outlets like ABC? One ominous headline from Wisconsin Public Radio’s website alerts: “Urgent Donations Encouraged As Nation Faces Looming Blood Shortage.” Another, from Georgia’s Albany Herald, reads: “American Red Cross facing possible emergency blood shortage.” These headlines stand in stark contrast to the Food and Drug Administration’s claims that “the blood supply in the US has been very stable.” So, which is it?

Technically, the FDA is not incorrect. The US blood supply is indeed stable. The catch: the blood supply is just about the only national resource that is, in fact, stable. With decreasing mortality rates, a rapidly growing population, and a rise in complex therapies such as cancer treatments and heart surgeries that require large amounts of blood, the public doesn’t need the blood supply to be stable, it needs it to flourish. This is because the national blood supply is constantly, literally, hemorrhaging. Not only are approximately 41,000 blood donations used every day, but donations are expiring. Red cell donations, for one, have a shelf life of forty-two days, so they must be perpetually collected for the supply to remain “stable,” which leaves the nation’s blood banks playing something like blood whack-a-mole. Every time they block one hole—the 41,000 donations needed each day, a new natural disaster that requires the acquisition and distribution of thousands of new donations—another emergency threatens to deplete their resources, which brings us to not-too-optimistic headlines like U-T San Diego’s “Local blood shortage worsens,” a close cousin of “Blood Good, Supply Bad.”

*

One by one, the donors in line in front of me were escorted to beds, plugged into blood sucking machines, and ejected back into the wild with a soft drink and their free loot. When it was finally my turn, I asked my nurse if I could have a juice.

“We have apple and orange,” she said, then, in a sudden, manic twist, added: “But we just got Pepsi and Mountain Dew!” She plugged me into her blood-bot and I lay back and drank my Pepsi in a napkin cozy, watching my blood travel through a silly straw into a bag on the floor as she explained the new donating procedure I had volunteered for.

“All we’re taking is your platelets,” she said.

I nodded in understanding. Of course. My platelets! Who needs those? I pictured a cabinet in my dining room full of fancy dishes, my platelets, withering away unused.

“The blood we extract today goes into this machine,” she continued. With her foot, she tapped what looked like a miniature crib on the floor rocking my blood back and forth, lulling it to sleep. “Once the machine is done separating your platelets, the rest of your blood will be returned back to you.”

I tried to hide my horror at this new revelation with my impression of an easygoing, I’m-not-freaking-out-at-all smile. Inside, I tried to process what she meant by your blood will be returned back to you. They were taking my blood out, sending it to a bag on the floor, then shoving it back in where it would touch all my important inside parts. This had to break the three-second rule.

Passing me my very own rubber ducky in a Ziploc bag, she instructed me to squeeze it every five seconds and left to help out other donors. Every few minutes she would come back, look at the bag that was slowly filling up with my blood, and ask, “ARE YOU OKAY?” as if she’d seen a spider crawl out of my veins, or just discovered that instead of blood, I was running on red Jello.

“I’m fine.”

Ten minutes would go by and again I would be pulled out of my phone’s trance by a shadow hovering over me.

“YOU STILL OKAY?”

“Yes.”

“Sure?”

“Yes, thank you.”

I thought she might call an ambulance, but then I remembered that I was already in one.

*

After the procedure, I called my best friend, Arthur, and we drove to the pizza place twenty minutes away to redeem my free voucher. Over cheese slices and Coke, we played “Would You Rather?” It was the middle of the day so we had the restaurant all to ourselves, him in his Christina Aguilera t-shirt and me picking at my nail polish. A vaguely Italian song chimed in through the speakers. Would you rather have spaghetti fingers or always look like you just came back from a long, grueling run? Would you rather only be able to bathe in soup or be Osmosis from Osmosis Jones? Arthur phoned his in: Would you rather be an octopus or a squid?

“If I choose squid, is someone hunting me?” I asked, attempting to add drama to his scenario.

“Why would someone be hunting you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m a monster?”

He told me that when people are cremated, most of the ashes they give to the families belong to someone else. I told him that when I die, I want my ashes scattered over an ant-hill. I confessed that I lied on the questionnaire.

“It’s so weird that they make you choose,” he said. “You can either save someone’s life or you can check that you’ve had gay sex and let them die.”

“I kind of wish I was cool enough to tell them I’m gay,” I told him. “Like, as an act of revolt?”

I wondered what that might look like. Putting myself first.

A little boy named something devastatingly cute, a name only a kid can pull off: Max. As an adult, he will go by Maxwell, but for now, he’s just Max. He has a gap tooth and freckles, the kind of kid you can see on the cover of an off-brand box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. He has a rare cancer, so rare his parents are considering an experimental treatment that requires huge amounts of blood. We share a blood type.

“Sorry Max,” activist me would say. “I can’t donate. I’m making a political statement.”

*

Back on campus, it was still too early for my night class, so I made my way to my favorite quiet spot on the third floor of the cafeteria to read. Usually I have no trouble lugging my body up three flights of stairs, but this time I felt nauseated, so I gave up my original plan and saddled myself into the nearest seat I could find. At the table next to mine, an athletic couple studied silently from a mess of books and papers laid out before them, the man pausing every few minutes to take a gulp from a Herculean gallon of water.

I looked down to the first floor where I could see hundreds of students dashing in and out, a few daring ones riding their skateboards right through the cafeteria, late to class again. Another hurried student stepped on a corner of the Pegasus insignia printed on the floor. University legend warns that stepping on the Pegasus ensures that you will never graduate from the school, which is why it’s usually partitioned off by velvet ropes. An icy shiver passed through me. Rubbing my hands for warmth, I noticed that they were a shade lighter than usual, and suddenly they shifted into a blur and I couldn’t discern what color they were at all. I stood up to go to the bathroom, hoping I could make it to a stall before throwing up.

Sometime later, I woke up on the floor crumpled up in a ball and blind. I could hear two girls exchanging feverish words next to me, but we were separated by a wall of black.

First one told the other: “He’s waking up.”

Then, to me: “You passed out. Are you okay?”

I closed my eyes, figuring it wouldn’t make much of a difference because I couldn’t see with them open anyway.

“Don’t go to sleep!” a voice ordered, shaking my arm back into existence.

“You’re probably dehydrated,” someone speculated. A red-headed blob gradually came into focus.

“Can you bring me water?” I asked, feeling self-conscious.

Was I being too demanding?

I once heard on the radio that people regularly die choking alone in restaurants. Instead of asking anyone for help, they rush to the bathroom not wanting to bother anyone. They pretend they’re just having a run-of-the-mill teary-eyed, claw-at-your-neck coughing fit, and once inside they choke quietly by themselves.

People don’t want heroes. We want to be able to save ourselves. I closed my eyes again.

You’re not going to die in such a wimpy away, I told myself. If you’re going to die, it better be being hunted as a squid.

A third girl came up to me with water. I snatched it from her hands, but within seconds she took it back.

“Actually, if you’re dehydrated, you shouldn’t be drinking water,” she said.

I now saw that I was surrounded by a swarm of white girls. Maybe I was already dead, I thought, or in limbo: an infinite series of white girls bringing me water and taking it away.

“Are you sure?” I wanted to ask, gazing longingly at the cup of water in her hands, but I was too confused and out of it to reason with her. Instead I just curled back into my ball. Maybe she’s pre-med or something.

Soon, the paramedics arrived. They measured my blood pressure and told me I was dehydrated. They told me I needed water.

“Have you had any water?” one asked. I looked at the cup the girl brought me, still full on a table too far for me to reach.

“No.”

They plugged me into an IV. An Evil-Dead quantity of blood squirted out of my arm. The paramedic wiped it with a tissue.

“Why did you donate blood? For the movie tickets?” he asked straightaway, maybe not his first time doing this.

Partly. But don’t forget that I’m a selfless hero.

“Was it worth it?” he asked, not waiting for a response to his first questions.

I leaned my head against the wall and felt the cool liquid from the IV travel through my veins, a million microscopic glasses of ice water splashing along the insides of my limbs, gradually waking my body up.

“You have two options,” he went on. “You can go to the hospital or you can stay here and drink a lot of water.”

I am asked to monetize my life. I could probably survive if I stay, I calculated half-conscious. This wasn’t my first time fainting. A few months before, while staying at my mother’s house, I sliced my thumb trying to open a can of tuna. I woke up a few hours later in her bed. I had passed out. Not sure what to do, she had simply dragged my body to her bedroom and resumed cooking dinner.

“I’m really poor and have really bad insurance, so I think I’ll just stay here,” I said.

“You will almost definitely pass out again if you stay,” he countered, more stern.

Then why even give me the option? Is this some kind of fun game paramedics play: put the patient in a life or death situation, ask them to choose death, then force them to live anyway? Still, I thought I had a shot at making it on my own. There was a water fountain a few feet away. I was lucid. I said out loud, “I’m lucid,” figuring that anyone who can remember the word lucid must be it. Besides, if I couldn’t afford breakfast, I sure as hell didn’t have money for an emergency room.

“I think I’ll stay,” I repeated.

“We’re taking you to the hospital.”

*

In the ambulance, I discovered that my phone’s flashlight feature would not turn off. Thank God: I had broken my fall with my new cellphone I’d saved up for months for. I turned it around in my hands, not really sure what I was looking for. A hidden magical switch that would help me in exactly this kind of situation? I didn’t care about the phone. I was worried the battery would die and I wouldn’t be able to call anyone to pick me up from the hospital. I had twelve percent battery left. I called my mom. No answer. Eleven percent. Again. No answer. I called my brother and went straight to voicemail. Nine percent. I called Arthur. He’s coming.

Later, I will find out that after my call, he rushed out of bed and ran out of his parent’s house, frantic to see that I was okay. His mom was maneuvering into the driveway, coming home from work, and parked an inch from the driver’s seat of his car thinking it would be funny if she made it hard for him to get inside. Assuming he was overreacting over her innocent joke, she roared into her steering wheel laughing hysterically as he flailed his arms and shouted at her to cut it out. Meanwhile, I was in the back of an ambulance plugged into an IV with a computer printing out a series of zig-zag lines quantifying my life. I still think she’s funny.

I went back to trying to fix the light.

“You trying to take a selfie in an ambulance?” the new, younger paramedic riding with me asked, disapproval thick in his voice.

My eyes jumped from the tribal tattoo on his arm to the hurricane of wires coming out of mine. I didn’t answer, not wanting to explain myself to him.

“You got a girlfriend?”

Again, I looked down at my cut-offs and painted nails to what I thought was an obvious declaration of what type of boy I am.

“There’s lots of girls around here,” he continued.

I folded and told him that I didn’t have a girlfriend. Not really a lie. A part of me worried that if I told him I’m gay he would purposely mess something up. I was plugged into a lot of tubes and they all presented an opportunity for an “accident.”

“Is my water level thing better now?” I asked him.

“Your water level thing?”

“I don’t know what it’s called,” I said, “but the first paramedic told me I was dehydrated and needed water and he kept looking at a measurement I think might have been my blood pressure. I’m not sure though.”

“Are you pre-med?” he asked.

“No.”

“Thank God.”

“Well, how is it?” I asked, caring less and less about the possibility of an accident now.

“It’s fine.”

“What kind of tests will they do on me at the hospital?” I went on, running up the tab in my head.

“Are you anxious?” he asked.

“Only when I’m in an ambulance.”

*

It had been over an hour since I had fainted. Even so, the paramedics insisted that I be wheeled into the hospital on a gurney. A nurse behind the reception desk looked up at me.

“There’s my sixty-three,” she smiled.

“I’m your sixty-three,” I said back, then turned to the young paramedic. “What does that mean?”

“It means you’re her sixty-third patient today. You win a prize.”

“Like an Olive Garden gift card?” I asked, or free healthcare?

Her eyes flashed to my hands as I fumbled with my phone.

“Need a charger?” she asked.

“Yes! Please!”

“I’ll go get one for you,” she said, getting up from her station. She pushed through a set of double-doors and moved into the room next door. I never saw her again.

Classic hospital prank.

From there, I was wheeled into an emergency room about the size of a walk-in closet.

“Do I have to do these tests?” I asked my doctor. “I feel perfectly fine. There’s no way I

can afford this.”

“You look fine,” he said. “I’ll just give you another IV and you can go.”

My mind flashed back to the water fountain that was only a few feet away, the cup of water probably still on the table. Arthur arrived just as my doctor was about to go, his curly hair still matted down in the back from his nap. On his way out, the doctor warned me, “Watch out. The person you least want to see is on her way.” Minutes later, an Ursula-like woman entered the room pushing a laptop on a cart.

“Name?” she asked by way of introduction. Date of birth. Social Security number. Religion? At this, I felt myself losing my temper. Why did it matter what my religion was? In case you die, a voice whispered in my ear. The winds were betraying me. What do they do for agnostics? I wanted to ask. Throw their ashes on ant-hills?

“None.”

“Health insurance card?”

“How much is this going to cost?” I asked, digging through the several-month-old receipts and expired coupons stashed in my wallet.

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “You’ll get a bill in the mail.”

But I’m right here. Let’s skip the middle man.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Well, I can tell you your health insurance kicks in after $900. After $900, you pay ten percent.”

After $900? Ten percent of what?

“Don’t worry, though,” she said. “You’re on your mom’s insurance. She’ll pay for it!” I smiled politely, again doing my impression of someone who’s got it all under control. Of course, my mom will just hock one of the diamonds she bought with her glamorous, high-paying gig at Starbucks. No worries.

“It’s fine! I’ll just sell some more of my blood for money!” I yelled, but she was already out of the room.

Arthur, who has had cancer and been through the hospital bureaucracy before, explained: “Your health insurance only kicks in after the first $900. Anything before that, you have to pay.”

We waited ten minutes. Twenty. I could hear the nurses in the reception area talking about Game of Thrones. A main character had died, apparently. They were distraught. Thirty minutes. The monotonous beeps prompted by the wire connected to my finger started alternating their rhythm. Beep. Three seconds. Beep. Sometimes two consecutive beep, beeps—no intermission. I tore the wire off, feeling like a bad-ass action movie star, except twenty-two and puny. The same tired, limping woman walked back and forth down the hallway. There was a glitch in the Matrix.

“If you don’t go to the reception area and bring me a doctor, I’m going to get primal,” I told Arthur. He hurried out.

*

Driving out of the hospital, it was finally okay for me to be gay. Arthur blasted our best friend song on his CD player, B*Witched’s “Blame it on the Weatherman.” We listened to it when he was first diagnosed with cancer, now when I was released from the hospital, and years later driving by our old club, Pulse. Each time, we blamed it all on the weatherman, pleading at the top of our lungs for him to leave us alone. We stopped at a convenience store to pick up a bottle of water, my total coming out to a little over two dollars. I winced at the idea of paying for water. A week later, my bill would arrive notifying me that I owe $3,412.67 to the hospital for donating blood. A measly sum to a hero.

We talked about boys. I slowly came back to life describing Zac Efron on the cover of whatever magazine was in the checkout line, laughing in hindsight at the paramedic’s girlfriend comment.

“I asked the paramedics to let me stay,” I told Arthur, taking a massive swig from my water. “Even if it meant I would die.”

“Well, now neither of us can donate,” he told me.

“What do you mean?”

“In high school, on our blood drive day, I tried to donate,” he said. “But when the nurse handed me my questionnaire, I didn’t really know any better, so I marked that I wasn’t a virgin.”

He told me she informed him he would not be able to donate. When he asked why, she explained that it was because his blood wasn’t safe. The bus was packed with other high school students, jocks who agreed to be heroes so long as they could get out of fourth-period Biology.

“Everyone heard,” he said. “So I hid in a bathroom stall until the end of the blood drive so I wouldn’t have to go back to class.”

I watched as his grip on the steering wheel tensed, his knuckles white.
“Did you notice how all the guys that worked at that hospital were beautiful Aerie models?” I asked.

We played Would You Rather all the way to the university parking lot where he offered to drive behind me till I made it home. I accepted, letting him be the hero this time. I didn’t want to choke alone in the bathroom.

*

In the grand scheme of things, gay men donating blood might rank as a low-stakes issue, especially when compared to high publicity causes like marriage equality, the right to serve in the military, and LGBTQ bullying. After all, donating blood is inconvenient and time-consuming. Shouldn’t gay and bisexual men be grateful to have their hour and fifteen minutes spared? Why, that’s enough time to watch a couple episodes of Golden Girls and have a quick round of high-risk sex!

Amidst the controversy of whether gay men are too great a gamble to the nation’s blood supply, it’s the less overt threats that come with current discriminatory eligibility requirements that have largely gone ignored: that of supporting the false belief that heterosexual people who participate in high-risk behavior are at low risk for HIV infection, the danger that comes with reinforcing negative stereotypes about gay and bisexual people. When the American Red Cross cites that the two most common reasons people choose not to give blood are “never thought about it” and “I don’t like needles,” it suggests that gay and bisexual men are not interested in helping others and don’t particularly feel like being heroes, which is problematic, particularly when blood drives occur in workplaces, high schools, and colleges where donors may worry about the employment or social implications of not donating, all because needles hurt.

This battle isn’t Stonewall and the small victory that will come from gay men being eligible to donate blood will not drastically improve the lives of the LGBTQIA community. Yet, despite the near triviality of this issue, if anything, because of it, because lesbian and gay marriage is now a reality and because gay bullying is gradually becoming more of a taboo, it is the small battles that need to become a focus of the gay civil rights movement. It is the institutionalized homophobia, like that of a gay Iowa teenager who took his life and was not eligible to donate his eyeballs because his mother could not answer whether he was sexually active, that is the most insidious of all, because it hides under its apparent insignificance.

What’s most nefarious of all is that the FDA revising its policy on gay men to a one-year deferral as opposed to its previous lifetime ban is being heralded by many as a courageous move, as if the perception of equality is just as meaningful as equality itself.

 

 

 

***

Original art by Eva Azenaro-Acero, an artist, writer, and musician living in Chicago. Their work has appeared in Fanzine, Witchcraft Mag, The Parks Exhibition Center, and more. Find them on Instagram @birdlets or online at evaazenaroacero.squarespace.com.

Learning from Grief: Claudia Putnam’s Double Negative

Among the meanings of Claudia Putnam’s cryptic title is a mathematical one, based on the lower left quadrant of graphs; it is a meaning that she chooses, explicates, and explores from many angles. But negative infinity is much harder to get your mind around than the grammatical concept of the double negative, so a reader may well fear that this idea is too cerebral for a memoir about the loss of an infant son, on the fourth day after his birth, to a dire heart defect known as HLHS (hypoplastic left heart syndrome). The worry would be misplaced. 

Putnam has been thinking about (as well, of course, as enduring) this experience for more than thirty years, and her conclusions about it are bravely earned and are by no means mainly cerebral. But the brain and mind are parts of the self, even the feeling self, and her thinking does matter. So her memoir necessarily includes both many emotions and many kinds of information and analysis. Its genre is memoir, all right, but it incorporates ethics, epistemology, clinical history, philosophy, language, historiography. She speaks as a bereaved parent but also as a friend, a thinker, a mother, a skier, a writer (she has published extensively in poetry and short fiction).  

There are two braided narrative threads in this essay of less than fifty pages. One is a recollection of a mostly joyous pregnancy, followed by the traumatic day of Jacob’s birth and the grief-laden, complicated decision that his parents suddenly faced upon learning from their physician that their newborn son “will not be able to live.” (In 1989, “high-resolution ultrasounds at eighteen or twenty weeks were not routinely performed.”)  

Even today, when the evolving clinical probabilities have opened more space for hope, the decision to seek a transplant or to commit to a different surgery—one that would reconfigure the infant’s heart so that it can sustain life with only two chambers—even today such a decision is problematical and fraught. Putnam’s discussion of how the context has and has not changed is thoughtful, specific, and compassionate as she considers the choices available to parents now. In 1989, when a recent transplant case had involved the use of a heart removed from a baboon, the dizzying odds informed the language (quoted above) of the Putnams’ physician. In recounting her and her husband’s agonized decision—”an awful choice between a worst thing and another worst thing”—Putnam includes a lucid description of her son’s fatal heart defect itself. Occasionally she attaches a footnote that qualifies a claim about probabilities; this practice is one of many signs of her good faith. 

The second thread is the narrative of Putnam’s mourning and thinking, some of it colored by her raising of her (healthy) second son, Julian, born two years after Jacob’s life and death. Putnam recalls her experience of Jacob in her womb and in his few days of post-natal life, which gave her a sense of him as a distinct self, one with a robustness of spirit, a readiness to take things on; she sensed that he was “a difficult person, perhaps, someone with a hard energy, driven.” An early intimation was also true of her second son, Julian, who then seemed “sensitive, artistic, musical, resistant to enclosure.”  

One set of Putnam’s observations has to do with how our first selves fare over time—how they may change even as in other respects they remain the same. “I only had enough to go on to be able to say for sure that a distinct person appeared inside me one day and was born to the world. Beyond that, I have no idea who he [Jacob] would have become.” She also thinks about how adults may change. One of her themes is how unprepared she and her husband were for Jacob’s terrible diagnosis, how young they were, how confident they were until Jacob’s birth that all would be well. 

Putnam’s thinking about parenting does not lead her to criticism of her husband, even though the marriage eventually ends. Throughout her account of the couple’s decision not to pursue surgery, she uses the first person plural; in this period the marriage is a living partnership, and the decisions about care and surgery are made jointly. 

Putnam understands and sometimes shares the reader’s likely skepticism about one’s ability to think clearly in bereavement. And she is wary of religious consolation because she fears it would be a form of self-deception, something that might well serve her but would in some way be disloyal to Jacob by embracing a made-up version of his experience. But she also doesn’t see death as absolute, especially because her maternal experience of intuitive connection makes her wary of empiricism as well. This is where an Emerson poem becomes helpful.   

“Threnody” was begun shortly after the death of Emerson’s young son but completed several years later. The poem sees death as not just a deep price we pay for life but as itself a form of participation in the larger design. Putnam welcomes this idea. Parents sign an implicit contract when they conceive a child. Eventual death is of course among the contract’s major terms, but the fine print includes a very small chance of death almost at the moment of birth—a very small chance that this will happen to your child, and in that sense to you. What Emerson arrives at is a reaffirmation of the contract even when he discovers that the small print applies to him. In Putnam’s eyes Emerson has standing in this context not only because he too is a bereaved parent but because he has language for spirit, for soul: 

Death, with solving rite, 

 Pours finite into infinite. 

Wilt thou freeze love’s tidal flow 

Whose streams through nature circling go? 

Putnam’s own evolving understanding is both intellectual and spiritual. She has read and drawn on (or respectfully declined to follow) other parental histories. Ultimately she chooses “a version of Pascal’s wager”—the conviction that Jacob’s spirit, his soul, “never was not.” She does so in the manner of many more orthodox religious believers, i.e., with tolerance for her own imperfect certainty:

Which kind of jerk would you rather be? The kind who doesn’t want to be made to feel foolish, suckered out of extreme need into having a little faith, or the kind that might dismiss as superstition an attempted communication from your own dead child? Which mistake is more awful?

Her questions are not defensive aggressions aimed at the reader but rather a recollection of Putnam’s own decision-making. The book’s style and tone vary with the nature of the topic at hand—its presentation of clinical information is precise, even professional, while its reflections are unpretentious but searching. What unifies these elements, besides the subject, is a strong personal voice, somber and determined. 

Perhaps what Putnam fears most are the seductions of rationalization, which would feel to her like an abandonment or at least a subtle betrayal of the actual Jacob. The book is in a way an elegy, a gesture of loyalty and respect. “Perhaps”—and its less formal equivalent “maybe”—is a keynote of this bold book. It confronts very difficult questions, questions not just about what we fear but about what is real, some of which is radically contrary to what we wish. Putnam shares not just her pain and her qualified consolations but her methodologies, whose harvests are not guaranteed to align. She is trying to be true both to her son—her sons—and to herself. 

Double Negative transcends its own title, at least for the reader. In a world so full of self-justification and blaming, Putnam’s eloquent and unflinching definition of her own tested truths—clinical, psychological, philosophical, relational—is itself a challenging inspiration.

When The Pipes Inspired the Poets: A conversation with the Boiler House Poets Collective

In November of 2015, a dynamic group of poets convened in MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) studios, some of which overlooked the old boiler house building, for a week-long intensive. The eponymous boiler house is left over from Sprague Electric Company, the former factory campus the museum now inhabits.

The bonds the poets forged during that week were so strong that they’ve returned each year (except for the first pandemic year of 2020) to continue writing, working, and growing together. Some poets left the group; others since joined. But as the collective itself evolves, the focus is always on the work. I was lucky enough to attend the reading they did of their work at MASSMoCA during their 2022 session, which was the inspiration for requesting this interview. Poets Joanne Corey, Ann Dernier, Merrill Douglas, Jessica Dubey, Hope Jordan, Marilyn McCabe, and Kay Morgan answered interview questions about their unique collective.

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The Rumpus: Can you tell me a little about that first session?

 

Ann Dernier: That first year we organized an “unsanctioned” reading in the Boiler House, and videotaped it. That day, in what had been the former boiler room of the Sprague Electric Company, our voices, mixed with the recording component of Stephen Vitiello’s “All Those Vanished Engines” merged us with MASS MoCA and we became The Boiler House Poets.

 

Marilyn McCabe: The Boiler House held a magic, as it turned out, for all of us, with its sound installation clanging and pinging in the background, sun slanting through the pipes, pigeon feathers drifting, an occasional passerby pausing to listen.

 

Kay Morgan: That [reading] was the moment that the Boiler House Poets became a reality.

 

Dernier: The museum itself is partly why I returned year after year. The ever-changing installations helped to electrify the very thing we writers were endeavoring: to channel our own voices.

 

Many of the original poets created ekphrastic poems born from the galleries; responses to Louise Bourgeois, Titus Kaphar, Anselm Kiefer, Sol LeWitt. There is an atmospheric charge in that place, like a live wire. I wanted to be a part of it again and again.

 

Morgan: I shared a big studio with Gail DiMaggio and I can’t write this without mentioning the fantastic view of the Airstream Trailer installation which really became a touchstone for me in writing and thinking about the American dream. It is titled “All Utopias Fell,” by Michael Oatman.

 

Joanne Corey: Because most of our evenings were unstructured [that first year], we took to reading a selection of our poems for each other after dinner. It was the first time I had ever read more than three poems of mine at a time. It was so much fun! We learned a lot about each other’s lives through the poems and our conversations over those evenings. There was a lot of laughter, too.

 

Rumpus: How is a day working at the retreat different than a typical day set aside to focus on your work?

 

McCabe: It is incredibly inspiring to know that everyone around me is (theoretically) hard at work on their ambitions for the week, so out of that creative milieu I’m generally far more productive and focused there than a typical day. Also, it became my practice after that first retreat to do a group project, so I also think hard to come up with something I can engage everyone in. I made a video of each poet reading next to a piece in the museum that had inspired a poem that week, a soundscape using everyone’s voice speaking and singing a word that had significance for them, a videopoem based on an exquisite corpse we generated over the week. Those projects really pushed me out of my comfort zone and into some creative tinkering.

 

Hope Jordan: There’s really no such thing as a typical day set aside for my writing. I have a full-time job and a family, and I spend a great deal of my energy on those. In a typical week I can steal an hour or two for my writing. At the retreat, I could spend all day every day writing and it was absolutely glorious. I never had to think about making dinner or doing my job. I could focus just on what I wanted to write.

 

Jessica Dubey: Home is a cacophony of distractions. The beauty of having several continuous days dedicated to the art of writing is that the only distractions are ones that feed my writer’s soul. The first half of the day is what I make of it. I can plant myself in my studio and devote time to writing or editing. I can spend it at the MASS MoCA galleries, taking in new art or reexploring long-term exhibits. I have the town of North Adams to inspire and the Clark Museum as well. It’s up to me how I utilize this time. The rest of the day I’m with the group, critiquing poems, talking shop, or catching up on the lives of these amazing women who I’ve gotten to know over the last several years. Every minute is stimulating and inspiring.

 

Dernier: The excited pressure of having work upcoming in the afternoon workshop is the best difference.

 

Rumpus: How has being a member of the collective changed your process?

 

Corey: While I had written a few ekphrastic poems prior to our first residency, my interest and involvement with ekphrastic work has multiplied because of the BHPC. Several of our members, including Kyle Laws and Gail DiMaggio, have been an inspiration to me to pursue more ekphrastic work. With Kyle’s example and encouragement, I’ve taken part in The Ekphrastic Review Challenge series and had some poems chosen for publication. Also, I’ve recently assembled a chapbook manuscript of MASS MoCA ekphrastic poems and there are a number of ekphrastic poems in my full-length manuscript that centers on the North Adams area, its history, and my personal and family ties there.

 

My use of space in my work has been enhanced by being a BHPC member. In our initial year as a workshop-in-residence, convened as a collaboration between The Studios at MASS MoCA and Jeffrey Levine of Tupelo Press, we had an illuminating session led by Cassandra Cleghorn on the use of space in poems. Inspired by that and the example of BHPC poets Ann Denier and Jessica Dubey, I have continued to develop my skills in using spacing as an expressive technique in my work.

 

One of the things I love about the Boiler House Poets Collective is the opportunity to create collaborative works, such as “Avalon,” the videopoem Marilyn mentioned. It was accepted by the REELpoetry/Houston TX 2023 festival.

 

Merrill Douglas: The luxury of spending many hours alone at a desk while on retreat reminded me how important it is to be able to experiment, write badly, make false starts, take risks, etc. When writing time is limited, I feel pressure to produce something that seems “finished.” That’s not a good way to go at things! I think one needs (or at least I need) room to stretch out and mess around when working on poems. I get that on a retreat.

Dubey: Being part of the BHPC has made me accountable to work hard throughout the year and show up ready to contribute. Every poet who I’ve had the pleasure of sharing this time with is a poet worthy of respect and admiration. There is a tremendous level of creativity and talent amongst its ranks. From day one I’ve wanted to prove to myself that I deserved to be there.

 

Morgan: The intensity of Boiler House has taught me to listen more carefully to feedback and to appreciate revision instead of resisting it. It has also forced me to clarify my intention in my poems.

 

Dernier: I am able to confront issues faster. When I’m working alone at my desk and write a line that is too romantic or too remote, I can hear all the probable comments of those fellow poets.

 

One year we each had the opportunity to workshop an entire collection or chapbook of in-progress poems with the group. I recorded the group’s responses to my collection on my iPhone, knowing I would not be able to digest it all at once. I have listened to that recording many times. Those generous, hard-core responses help me back into the work.

 

The continuity of our years together has made the difference too. I know if I can just get myself and my jotted-down poems to North Adams, there is hope. Time folds. We get right back to work. We know how to help each other. We dive in. If something is thorny, confusing or worse, I hear about it. I could not ask for better readers.

 

Rumpus: Is there a specific line or set of lines that changed through discussion and feedback at one of the sessions that you would be willing to share?

 

Jordan: I had drafted a poem called “Song for My Grandchildren” and it ended with “Bloom, bloom, bloom.” The members of the group suggested I end it with “Sing, sing, sing,” to make it resonate more with the title and subject of the poem. That made a lot of sense to me. I ended up with “Sing, bloom, sing,” which felt just right to me.

 

Morgan: In just about every poem I’ve ever written, I have needed to “to cut the connective tissue,” and “get rid of the last two lines.” I am finally internalizing that as I revise!

 

Inevitably in a workshop session, someone voices an opinion about a line or a phrase, or the structure of the poem and someone else will immediately contradict and say they like it the way it is. That is the nature of the workshop beast, and in the final analysis, it’s up to the writer to decide what to do.

 

Rumpus: Has being a part of the collective helped you take more risks in your work? Would you be willing to share a specific example?

 

McCabe: I would never have done those group projects without a group of people I trusted to go on the adventure with me. I was always just kind of feeling my way along, so I would propose an outline of a plan, and the group would just say, “Okay, we’re in!” What a gift.

 

Corey: Definitely! I grew up near North Adams and attended high school there, so I thought I’d try to write a chapbook about the area and my relationship with it. The chapbook grew into a full-length collection, which I showed to BHPC. They thought I could do better, so I re-conceptualized it and presented it again to the group in a year in which we decided to workshop manuscripts instead of individual poems. Because of those discussions, I tore apart the manuscript, re-imagined, and assembled a third major revision, which I am currently submitting to publishers. It is definitely stronger than anything I would have been able to assemble without their counsel and encouragement. They helped me to take the risk of major revision rather than abandoning the project.

 

Morgan: For me, it’s just been an inspiration to send out my work more and to see myself as a “real” poet. In the last couple of years, I have taken more risks in terms of writing about some of the more painful parts of my past. I was married for ten years to an abusive husband. Below is a poem I wrote in a class I took with Tracy Brimhall in 2020, focused on The Body.

 

After Seeing Titian

 

I thought of you as a bison of a man

and I your blow-up plastic doll

used and squashed flat.

The obligatory you called it

Sunday mornings

after breakfast in bed.

I had no Titian to paint me

with a circlet of flowers in my hair

a long white dress, stark contrast

to your furred body. As hooves

dug into my shins and you bucked

and galloped across the bed,

lightning bolts flashed, thunder

boomed all around the field of sheets.

I never saw cupids fly across the ceiling

bows and arrows at the ready

only the digital clock

red numbers changing

with every minute that passed.

Like Europa,

I grabbed your horn,

then closed my eyes.

 

after Titian, The Rape of Europa

 

Dernier: [For me] it all began with Sol LeWitt. I can only describe it as an epiphany in the multi-floor gallery of LeWitt’s “Wall Drawing Retrospective.”

 

I knew LeWitt wrote “how-to” instructions, and an artist collective created and installed the actual work, but I didn’t know his instructions read like this one:

Within a circle, draw 10,000 black straight lines and 10,000 black not straight lines. All lines are randomly spaced and equally distributed.

LeWitt embraced intentional vagueness. He provided space for interpretation. He set an expiration date, requiring that the walls be painted over at the end of an exhibition. Impermanence was a part of the art. (Returning to the museum year after year and being confronted by massive, elaborate installations; well, honestly, taking a risk in a poem didn’t seem like a very big challenge.) That day, in that space I wanted to embrace vagueness, to allow for varying interpretations and to anticipate impermanence. I was in the presence of those enormous tents of Francesco Clemente’s “Encampment,” Marco Ramirez Erre’s orange jumpsuits in “Them & Us,” and Jenny Holzer’s over-sized redacted detainee documents in “Deeper Look.”

At the center of this residency is the shared experience of the museum and its ever-changing contents. We were ready for anything any one of us tried. We were already on that same page.

 

What we share at MASS MoCA involves so much more than poems and art and conversation. It is the confluence of inclusive, expressive, impermanent, visionary, passionate yawps. Shout it over the rooftops. It is thrilling!

 

 

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Installation photo supplied and used with permission from MASSMoCA

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Left to right: Kay Morgan, Wendy Stewart, Joanne Corey, Jessica Dubey, Kyle Laws, Marilyn McCabe, Merrill Douglas, Hope Jordan (kneeling)
Photo supplied by Marilyn McCabe

Voices on Addiction: Washed Clean

When I was a kid, our house flooded. Twice. During heavy summer rains, water from the creek in our front yard flooded the basement and then the first floor, ruining almost everything we owned. Soggy couches, mud-encrusted carpets, and moldy mattresses filled our manicured front lawn. It felt like weeks that my family spent our days breathing moldy air and sitting on the floor, surrounded by buzzing high-speed fans and gurgling dehumidifiers hammering at floor tiles till they cracked and came up. Everything was mold coated and had to be removed. A few years later, when I was in high school, I was home alone for what was almost a third flood. My parents were out of town when it rained hard for two solid days. On the third day, the creek began creeping slowly toward the house. I felt sick to my stomach as it rose above the front step and lapped at the front door. I was planning my escape through waist-high water when the rains miraculously stopped, and the creek receded.

So I know a few things about how we humans deal with an impending, slow-arriving disaster. When the water first begins to rise, we tell ourselves it’s not going to happen. We are firm in our disbelief. Thirty minutes later, as the water rises higher, we tell ourselves it will stop. When the water is a foot away from the front door, we think about leaving, but we wait. We deny. We bargain. We hope. Maybe we pray. Only as the water crosses the threshold and begins to consume our furniture do we decide that now is the time to leave. But the water is now so high that we must wade or even swim to safety.

Deciding to be honest with ourselves during hard times is like watching floodwaters rise. We don’t face ourselves when we should, but we wait, deny, bargain, hope. By the time we’ve run through these feeling states, the only remaining option is to act; if we don’t, we will be subsumed in our own psychic floods, forced to swim through the muddy water of our minds, desperate for safe shores. We will flail.

As I drove across the golden moonscape that is the Judean Desert, with its wide-lens views of the barren Judean Hills, resembling massive breaching whales, the water of my life was lapping at my door. Having waited too long for a calm and sensible self-rescue, I was scrambling desperately for high ground. Every time I blinked, I saw Paul’s dead body lying on the hallway carpet, then my own. Blink. Paul. Blink. Brad. I couldn’t touch the memory of our last conversation, when Paul told me, in so many words, that he planned to end his own life. I couldn’t face the seven years I’d just wasted in a miserable, drugged-out haze. That floodwater had filled the basement, and I was terrified to open the door and look down into that watery darkness. It was time to swim to safety. I needed hope. I couldn’t say exactly how traveling across Palestine, how following in Jesus’s footsteps, how baptizing myself was going to lead to my healing. I just knew that this was what I needed to do. Some deeper part of my psyche—my soul?—was guiding me. Perhaps it was steering the car. Was the road back to me out there somewhere in this moonscape?

At the same time, I did feel ready to get real with myself. I knew I had to make corrections in how I was moving through the world, but I didn’t know how. I was confused about my life, particularly my experience with my own family. As I drove, I fell into melancholy self-pity. I felt like an orphan. It’s painful not having the support of family; it’s worse when they really don’t like you. After I grew up, my outspokenness about my family’s issues made me their enemy. Slowly, I was pushed out and treated like a pariah. When I did return home for an occasional holiday visit, I faced a family that seemed to see me and my desire for openness and honesty as “the problem.” I had been in weekly therapy since I was twenty-five, and I’d read countless self-help books about how to heal my codependency and other effects of growing up with my dysfunctional family. But the one thing I didn’t learn—or I was in denial about—was just how reluctant dysfunctional families can be to look at themselves. And how in denial I was about my family. I get it now. Most people don’t desire radical honesty. But that more naive Brad, who came home at Thanksgiving or Christmas hoping for a different family experience, couldn’t fathom that they didn’t want to talk about feelings or relationships, let alone discuss a path to healing ourselves. And although my father had learned to drink less, he still drank, and, in my experience, he never did a thing to face his own emotional issues or to repair the damage he’d done to our family. At holiday dinners, I sat at the table, sipping my sparkling water and listening to everybody present blather on about trivial things I didn’t know or care about, feeling unseen, frustrated, and angry at the lack of emotional intimacy. By dessert, we had all removed our gloves. Insults flew freely, and my mother cried.

And yet I knew I couldn’t heal all by myself. I needed community—even advice, maybe fatherly advice. But there was nobody I trusted. My father and the rest of my family was off the table. They treated me like a fraud as if I’d never led the life of a successful magazine editor and adventure writer, though that’s how I’d made my living for fifteen years. They laughed and rolled their eyes when I said anything about my successful travel-writing career.

I now understand the dynamic better. Or I think I do.  My family needed to see me as a Walter Mitty, the ordinary guy who fantasized constantly about a more adventurous life than the one he lived. When those Dos Equis beer commercials featuring the Most Interesting Man in the World appeared on television, they laughed and said that’s you, Brad. In my family’s narrative, like the Most Interesting Man in the World, I was a raging narcissist, a ridiculous liar, and my years of success as an editor, adventure travel writer, columnist, and author of a collection of my nature writings by a major publisher was a figment of my imagination.

This narrative, as hurtful as it was, later became an essential piece of information in my reaching an understanding about what had happened to me: to my life, my spirit, my sense of self. It also highlighted the denial, the dysfunction, the extreme masculine power struggle, and perhaps the toxic narcissism that formed our familial paradigm. Later still, after Donald Trump became president, I found more insight. Trump and his supporters referred to facts as “fake news,” which was exactly the way I felt my family had treated the facts of my life and, essentially, who I was as a person, as a man: in their eyes, I was a fake. Whatever was going on with my family, I appeared to have become fake news to them. My stories became fake. I was fake. Ironically, they cast me as the family scapegoat to avoid looking at themselves, their own patterns of behavior. s

And yet, looking back on this time, I can see that I was causing myself more suffering by not accepting the reality of this family tragedy. Perhaps they wished they had a different son–and I wished I had a different family. I couldn’t yet accept this about them–about me–and save myself from the toxicity by walking away.

By the time I arrived in Palestine, I was struggling to regain my own story. I had been willing to abandon myself, my own truth, and the memories of the things I had accomplished. I had believed others’ version of me more than I trusted my own. Now, in this holy place, I wondered, What was the true story about my life? I honestly didn’t know. Coming here to walk in Jesus’s footsteps was my way of seeking a new model, a different paradigm, a solid story to lean on. Jesus was a vital figure from my youth. When you take away the religious aspects of the story, he was the ideal man. He was accepting, generous, kind, and sought justice for all. He was someone that we imperfect humans, driven by impulses and fragilities beyond our control, could strive to emulate. Jesus was strong, compassionate, merciful, outspoken, and he wasn’t a pushover in the face of powerful men and social organizations. He spoke his mind, and he faced the ultimate consequences. Who wouldn’t want to be like Jesus?

With all of this in my mind and heart, I drove across the Judean Desert. Could this weird journey through history, sacred religious scriptures, and my own past show me anything useful about how to rebuild my life? I had to find out.

I saw the turnoff for the baptismal site at Qasr el Yahud on the western bank of the Jordan River, slowed down, exited the highway, and pulled into the parking area.

I was mesmerized—not by the meaning I believed I was about to experience but by the red sign posted on the barbed-wire fence to my right: “Danger Mines!” Beyond the sign and fence was what you’d expect a minefield to look like: acres upon acres of dirt built up into little gopher-like mounds. After the 1967 war, when Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the army placed four thousand explosive devices in the ground to prevent anyone from taking back the land.

Qasr el Yahud was also the site of significant Old Testament events; this bend in the river was the place where, according to Jewish tradition, the Israelites crossed the Jordan and entered the Promised Land for the first time. It’s also the place where tradition says the prophet Ezekiel ascended to heaven.

Wow, I thought as I stepped out of the car and onto the hot pavement. A minefield next to the site where Jesus experienced his spiritual rebirth and where the Jewish people first entered the Promised Land?

I walked toward the cluster of palm trees that lined the river. The pavement stuck to my flip-flops like chewing gum. The minefield disturbed me deeply, even if it was on the other side of a fence and I could easily steer clear. That wasn’t possible with another frightening thing, parked under a palm tree: a massive bus with a sign in the windshield indicating its passengers were members of a church in Dallas, Texas.

I couldn’t help but smile.

The church folks from Texas mobbed the visitor’s center, though I admit they were less scary in person than in theory. It was a quiet, sweet, multiracial group of men and women huddled on the wooden steps, all descending to the water. I smiled and waved to an older woman who looked so ecstatic—as if she’d just won the Texas Powerball. I kept moving to the far side of the steps to sit and take in the scene.

That’s when I noticed John the Baptist standing chest-high in the middle of the narrow, easy-moving river. A heavyset, blond man with a matching goatee, I figured he was the pastor, playing the part for the group. He wore a white robe that exposed his hairy chest. It wasn’t a camel-hair shirt like the original John the Baptist was said to have worn, but this modern John fit the part perfectly. His face beamed.

A middle-aged woman with a boyish haircut stood in the water next to modern John. His hand rested on the crown of her head, and he was reciting a prayer that I couldn’t make out. She was crying joyfully and appeared to be in a state of blissful spiritual overwhelm. Then he looked her in the eye and seemed to ask, Are you ready? She nodded. He placed one hand on her shoulder and the other against her lower back. He pushed her back gently until she disappeared under the water for a full second. After helping her resurface, he cupped his hands and poured three successive palmfuls of water over her head. By now, she was weeping loudly. He hugged her, and then, with one hand resting on his own heart, he gestured with the other hand that it was time for her to wade back to shore. She climbed out of the water and back onto the wood steps, at which time another church member—an elderly man with short gray hair, wearing horn-rimmed glasses—stepped gingerly off the riser into the water and waded out.

The baptisms continued, but I had seen enough. I moved to a dry patch of grass far enough away that I couldn’t hear the others. I reflected on the story of Jesus’s baptism, which I still knew quite well a good thirty years after I’d studied it so intently.

Sometime around his thirtieth birthday, Jesus left his home in Nazareth and traveled on foot roughly a hundred miles to Jerusalem. It was there he learned about John the Baptist, a renegade, wild man figure who had made a reputation for himself performing a new type of spiritual cleansing in the Jordan River, an adaption of the longstanding Jewish ritual of frequently purifying oneself by bathing in blessed water. Jesus walked east, toward the Jordan, to receive this purification. John doused him and blessed him. Then, according to the biblical narrative, the heavens opened, and the Holy Spirit descended “like a dove,” landing on Jesus. It was then that Jesus fully embraced his identity as the Son of God.

Now, thousands of years later, I was sitting on a patch of grass at the location where Jesus received his first hit of divine inspiration and launched his world-changing spiritual crusade. I had felt a pressure in my body, a necessity, to see this place with my own eyes and to experience it in my own body. I hoped it would help me see something new about myself or remember something—I wasn’t sure which. Could I find divine inspiration here, too, like Jesus had? I was no savior, I knew that. Far from it. I lacked a job, let alone purpose. But I was still a seeker, and I came here seeking something. I’d been housebound for so many years, slowly trying to rid myself of all that ambition and ego that had driven me to be an adventure writer.

The word “ego” is confusing. In Eastern spirituality, it has a negative connotation: it is the selfish part of us that gets in the way of achieving enlightenment. But the ego has a far different meaning—and purpose—in the Western psychological tradition. Ego is how we relate to the world. We need a sufficiently strong ego to earn a living, negotiate relationships, live with meaning and purpose, and so on. Many people who show up in treatment for mental illnesses have an undeveloped or fractured ego. Our ego is the part of our minds that must face the bumps and curves of the real world. After my collapse, all that high-test ambition drained away, revealing the truth that ambition and grandiosity overcompensating for my toxic shame and unworthiness had functioned as my ego. What was left of me when you took away the career, the relationship, the family, the pills? I felt as murky as the muddy Jordan.

I wouldn’t have described it like this in 2012, but I now see that I needed to build a healthy ego, which had been squashed during my childhood years. I needed to rebuild myself, but there was no map because I was unsure of starting point—me. I knew I did not want to become just another asshole American man, overly focused on achievement, money, acquisition, competition, woefully disconnected from his feelings apart from anger. I had played that game, and I wasn’t interested in rebuilding my life, only to fall back into the same traps that led to my breakdown in the first place.

The only thing I knew—a small, quiet part of my gut knew—was that spirituality might play a significant part in what I needed to structure a life that mattered to me. Every spiritual path I was aware of asked the same thing of its followers: humility. I was ready for that. I didn’t have any reason not to be humble. I had very little going for me. Everything I’d done to try to feel better had failed: sex, travel, drugs, self-help books, relationships, psychiatrists, life coaches. How was it that I was forty-six years old and felt no better than I did during those sleepless nights of my youth when I remember reading the Bible after walking my drunk dad to bed?

Full of self-pity, I tossed a small stick into the river and watched it float southward toward the Dead Sea. I knew it would never arrive there. I’d read that the Jordan River was drying up; a few miles from here, this gently flowing stream slowed to a trickle and eventually became sandy riverbed. I felt like doing a disappearing act myself.

I had hoped I would feel differently here; I’d hoped to feel inspired, invigorated, ready to take on the next chapter of my life. Even if I didn’t believe in Jesus Christ, I’d hoped that if I sat by the Jordan, maybe I might feel the Holy Spirit entering me—or some kind of spirit. I’d hoped for so much, but writing this now, I understand that hope—is useless. On that day, I was still leaning too heavily on hope.

As the stick I’d tossed disappeared around the bend, I noticed that it was quiet and I was alone. The Texans had left the river and were back at the bus waiting to board. I felt a little prickle of heat move through me. A small sense of excitement about being alone in this popular sacred spot pushed through the lethargic, deadening weight of my hopeless thoughts.

I don’t think I consciously decided to do what I did next.

 

I looked around once more to make sure I was truly alone. I removed my sandals and shirt. I pulled my shorts up around my waist and removed my sunglasses, setting them on top of my sandals. Then I turned my gaze to the center of the river to the deep spot where the contemporary John the Baptist had just been standing, blessing his flock with gentle dunks in the water. I stepped off the wooden stairs and into the river. Ankle high. I took another step. Knee high. And another. Thigh high. And then waist high. Until I was standing in the middle of the Jordan River up to my chest. The water was tepid and murky, unlike the fresh, cool streams from Colorado near my home. But at this moment, that didn’t matter. It felt deeply cleansing, even life preserving. Unlike the floodwaters of my youth, I welcomed the murkiness, too, as the water rose against my torso. Instead of fleeing these waters, I wanted the stream to fill me up, replace my own blood.

I looked up toward Jerusalem. I was still alone, which felt like a small miracle in and of itself. I inhaled. I exhaled. And then again. I felt nervous. But why? What was the point of any of this? And then I took a breath so big I thought I might float into space. I bent my knees and let my feet off the river floor. My head dropped under water. I stayed there. I paused, my eyes squeezed tight against the muddy water, my breath slowly exiting my nose.

Do I have to come up? My mind drifted back to that May afternoon of my childhood on the White River in Arkansas where I almost drowned, and my father made no motion to save me. I felt the hard, rough log against my skinny-kid torso. I felt the broken branches dig into my skin. I felt the upriver current pushing me hard into the log. I felt the downriver current pulling at my spindly limbs. In that weird way in which so much can happen in an instant, I found myself wondering how big a container I’d need to hold all the pills I’d stuffed down my throat over the years with the hope that they would save me, make me different, make me whole. A pickup? A dump truck? A garbage truck? Then I imagined the drugs, which still were in my bloodstream at a disturbingly high level, being washed away downriver. I imagined my sins washed away. All of them.

I found my footing on the sand and stood up. As my head emerged from the water, I felt a wellspring of emotion rise from my belly through my chest, neck, and jaw, and then tears burst from my eyes. I wept loudly.

Jesus Christ, where the hell are you? Where’s the love? Where’s the kindness? Where’s the fucking grace?

As I stepped out of the river, a new vitality pulsated through my body, warm and full. It moved like energy but felt solid at the same time. Strong, too. This current streamed through my legs and then my torso. It felt like hot, liquid steel was being poured into the mold of my body. It felt like power but without the edge. It was directed at nobody. It simply was. I tried to make sense of it with words: it felt like survival. I was here. Still here. I was alive, in this body, in this river, in this moment, right now. I had made it through the darkest days when I was convinced that I might not make it through the night, too confused about who I was, why I felt so alone. At times, I had felt like I was truly dying from the inside.

But I didn’t die. And I was not going to. Not now. I was going to find my way back home. Not to Kansas. To me.

Back in my car, the hot vinyl seats seared the skin on my legs. My clothes felt swampy after the river dunk. I started up the car and drove slowly past the sign “Land Mines!” How enthusiastic, this sign, and how deeply sad. I rolled past the barbed wire and mounds of dirt and rejoined the highway.

I was confused about what I’d just done, and yet I felt hopeful that it had been more than a silly recreation or a passing moment of folly or fear. I desperately wanted it to mean something more, to mark what I craved to be true: No more chaos. No more shame. No more suffering. Admittedly, I was a little too hopeful. I was again placing my hopes on something external that might save me, contain me, heal me. But this time, that thing wasn’t a pill or a woman or a promotion or a hot story or an accolade. That, I knew, I believed, was a start and a deeply important one. The trance of my life—the shame, the avoidance, the escapism, the cocktail of medication—hadn’t been washed away. I was still in that trance. The difference was that I’d spotted the exit. Now the only question was, How do I open the door?

 

 

***
An excerpt from Into the Soul of the World, forthcoming later this month.

***
Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.

***
Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen

Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Todd McKinney

 

KAMA SUTRA: CLASSIC LOVEMAKING TECHNIQUES REINTERPRETED FOR TODAY’S LOVERS BY ANNE HOOPER

¢50

Don’t be afraid to educate the Dionysian in you,
in your lover. We all have a lot to learn
about pleasure. “How to enjoy it”
should be near the top of this list.
“How to give it” should be up there too.
Think of watching a breeze move through
a flowering dogwood on a bright, hot day.
Think of pouring a bath with huge, shiny bubbles.
Don’t worry about the missing pages.
Instructions are mostly easy to follow.
Believe it or not, you can reach beyond
the skin of your fingertips. You can imagine
being a songbird flying from tree to tree.
Think of this book as a fake book.
Get a candle and a ukulele. Pretend
love has never been made quite right before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TABLE TOP TILE SAW

$10

Was it 2Pac who said
“Every beautiful thing
contains some kinda pain?”
Maybe it was Red from
that prison-break movie.
A luxury automobile ad?
Truth is: could’ve been
Ms. Colquitt across the street.
She’s a Reiki Master and
says it’s good to get all
out of whack, no joke. Says,
it’s a fool’s dream to hope
for never-ending harmony.
Elsewise, she adds, no feeling
what harmony feels like. So
back to this table top tile saw.
It could contain the next
great je ne sais quoi,
Ms. Colquitt might say,
you just never know. And
that’s the truth, Ruth! Mister
Señor Love Daddy says that.

 

 

 

HALF A GLOBE (THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE)

Free

To spare you the long sad
story explaining what
now seems like complete nonsense,
here’s the short version:
a do-it-yourself fuck-up.
Without a doubt, it could still be—
with much love and patience,
some nerve and imagination—
it could be something yet,
like a salad bowl or the new shade
for a pendant light hanging above
a dreamy kitchen island.
Of course, it’d be wonderful to have
the Southern Hemisphere back.
The equator not so jagged.
The two huge cracks mended.
And to undo the hole
drilled near the North Pole.
You just don’t fuck with magic.
That was the lesson forgotten here.
Forgotten ahead of time.
Forgotten many times.
Just don’t fuck with magic.