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A drawing of me reading by my 8-year-old son Jules is at the top of my most recent newsletter.
Guest post by Alexander Noyes
On May 17, the president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, dissolved the country’s legislature in the midst of impeachment proceedings against him. Did Ecuador just have a self-coup? Opposition leaders say yes. But the answer is no, at least for now. This matters greatly for the country’s democratic trajectory and for the international community’s response.
After a recent lull, coups and coup attempts are front-page news again, from Sudan to Brazil to the United States. This surge in coup activity prompted Antonio Guterres, the United Nations chief, to decry an “epidemic” of coups. Perhaps more troublingly for democracy worldwide, coups-plotters have evolved. Scholars have traditionally defined coups as: “overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting head of state using unconstitutional means.”
But now, these softer, more subtle self-coups—whereby a sitting chief executive uses sudden and irregular (i.e., illegal or unconstitutional) measures to seize power or dismantle checks and balances—have become the new mode of coup. Self-coups, also known as auto-coups, are much more sophisticated than soldiers in fatigues taking television stations by force in order to announce the overthrow of a country’s leader. Self-coups are rarely bloody, but can be just as harmful to democracy as the more traditional military overthrows.
A raft of countries have experienced successful self-coups or coup attempts of late. There have been nine successful or attempted self-coups over the last decade, according to the Cline Center at the University of Illinois, which collects comprehensive information on all types of coups around the world. Self-coup illegal power grabs have occurred across a range of regions and political systems, including in semi-autocracies, such as Pakistan in 2022, as well as semi-democracies, like Tunisia in 2021. Worryingly, full democracies have not been immune to this trend, with the United States suffering a failed self-coup at the hands of President Trump on January 6th, 2021, which the Cline Center labeled an auto-coup.
Ecuador has been lauded as a strong partner of the United States in a region that has experienced democratic backsliding. Yet the country has recently experienced a host of crises on Lasso’s watch, including rising crime, corruption scandals, government crackdowns on the media, and protests that have often turned violent. The current impasse is the opposition’s second attempt at impeachment.
Is Lasso’s dissolution of Ecuador’s National Assembly the latest example of a self-coup? Leonidas Iza Salazar, the head of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities, which has led a series of protests against the president over the last several years, says yes. On May 17, Iza Salazar accused Lasso of launching “a cowardly self-coup with the help of the police and the armed forces, without citizen support.” Viviana Veloz, the opposition lawmaker leading the impeachment, said: “The only way out is the impeachment and exit of the president of the republic, Guillermo Lasso.”
Lasso defended his decision as a chance at a fresh start and a way to resolve recent political turmoil. Lasso proclaimed that the dissolution was “the best decision to find a constitutional way out of the political crisis… and give the people of Ecuador the chance to decide their future at the next elections.” Lasso’s decree calls on the country’s electoral authorities to set a date for fresh elections, now set for August 20, and allows him to govern with limited powers and without the National Assembly until these new elections. The measure is referred to as a “mutual-death” clause, since it leads to new elections for both the sitting president as well as the legislature. Lasso has promised that he will not seek reelection in the coming polls.
There is little question that dissolving the legislature during his embezzlement impeachment trial and slumping political support is an opportunistic move by Lasso. Yet while Lasso’s action was indeed extraordinary—it is the first time this constitutional provision has been used since it was adopted in 2008—it is legal, at least so far. On May 18, the country’s constitutional court upheld the decision, dismissing six cases aimed at blocking the legislature’s dissolution. This means that Lasso’s maneuver does not yet fit the “irregular” provision that must be fulfilled to meet the definition of a coup, including a self-coup.
This “coup or not a coup” distinction matters greatly for Ecuador’s democratic future, and should guide how the international community responds. If Lasso’s action did indeed fit the worrying rise of self-coups globally, it would be dire for Ecuador’s prospects for democracy, and likely plunge it towards autocracy. International actors would need to condemn the coup, push for regional and global sanctions, and apply strong pressure to reverse Lasso’s illegal power grab.
Since Lasso’s decree is unusual but legal, Ecuador’s shaky democracy—which democracy watchers rate as falling short of a full democracy—is on precarious, but at least constitutional footing, for now.
At this precarious moment, the United States and other like-minded, pro-democracy countries should not sit idly by. While fully recognizing the country’s own struggles with incumbent power grabs, the United States should urge Lasso to strictly keep to the letter and spirit of the law, reign in the security forces—ensuring their political impartiality—and ramp up support to help Ecuador arrange free and fair elections in the coming months.
The role of the military along with unified international pressure has proved crucial to stopping or reversing past self-coups around the world. The current situation in Ecuador fortunately does not yet fit that definition. But the international community would be wise to actively keep it that way, first by strongly and consistently reminding Lasso—and other key regional partners—that the world is watching, and by also increasing democracy support to Ecuador ahead of the coming polls.
Alexander Noyes, PhD, is a political scientist at the non-profit, non-partisan RAND Corporation and former senior advisor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy.
Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, in his study at the President’s House on the Bard College campus in Annandale-on-Hudson.
Leon Botstein has led Bard College for nearly five decades.
Meg and I had an amazing morning yesterday out in Elgin at Austin Wildlife Rescue: we got to spend some time up close with Thurston, a 4-year-old eastern screech owl, just like the Coconuts who live in our back yard.
One thing you might notice is just how tiny Thurston is! The screech owls look larger than life through the spotting scope, but they’re just itty bitty raptors.
Here’s a comparison of our screech owls to the famous Flaco, the eagle owl now loose in Central Park:
What’s funny about this is that one reason I love looking at pictures of the magestic Flaco is that I recognize so many of the postures and behaviors I’ve seen from my little owls:
I don’t know why this pleases me so much, this juxtaposition of the grand Flaco with the more modest but still majestic Coconut. Finding majesty in the mundane is one of my favorite things, I guess. The little behavior the same as the big behavior. (And I think a lot about how photography scales — big and small scale to the same size on the phone screen.)
It’s like Hedda Sterne said: “For the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you don’t have to look far away. You have to know how to see.”
This video is a just a little fun Leonardo Officina Italiana x Casa della Stilografica Furore Grande HT Fountain Pen - this was sent to me as a gift by Casa della Stilografica, in celebration of another year of their sponsorship of this blog! Part of the excitement is the discount code for your purchases! Visit Casa della Stilografica and use the code "FLORENCE" when checking out for 10% off your order.
If you enjoy and/or appreciate it and you want to lend your continued support, please do check me out on Patreon. You can pledge your support and/or undying love for as little as $1. You are in no way obligated to do so. I appreciate your readership, viewership, and your support so much - thank you!
(Jeff Abbott is a regular contributor at The Pen Addict. You can find more from Jeff online at Draft Evolution and Twitter.)
This Leonardo Supernova that I've had on my desk the last couple of weeks has really stolen the show in terms of my stationery rotation. I couldn't pass it up when I saw it online, but seeing the pen in person is even more striking.
The Leonardo Supernova is a regular edition that features a beautiful marbled acrylic that is made in Italy. The color I have is called Star Light Blue with Ruthenium Trim, but there are three other colors options as well. All four materials are gorgeous, but I'm a sucker for bright blues and turquoise with hints of green.
The swirl of color in this material is one thing, but Leonardo added a little extra character by including a sprinkle of reflective particles that subtly sparkle and twinkle under the light. The sparkle gives the acrylic just a little more depth and visual interest that makes the pen pop.
The fit and finish of this pen is fantastic, and I was impressed by how well-made it is for the price. Everything lines up perfectly and feels solid in the hand, and the dark trim complements the bright blue body beautifully. The wide band features a geometric design that looks great without drawing attention away from the acrylic. Aside from the band, there's also a small ring at the bottom of the pen and a functional clip on the cap. The clip is a sleek shape and has a wheel at the end that makes it just a little easier to clip onto things while still keeping the pen secure.
The Supernova sports a steel #6 Jowo nib with some decorative scroll work and the nib size inscribed at the base. The dark nib matches the rest of the trim on the pen and continues that delicious contrast between the dark metal and bright acrylic. The fine nib on this pen was smooth and crisp out of the box, and flows well with the couple of inks I've already tried with it.
Writing with the Supernova is fantastic due to the smooth nib and even balance of the pen body. You can post the cap on the back of the pen, but I prefer leaving it unposted since it's a full-size fountain pen. I like the balance without the cap a little better, but just know that the cap posts securely if you like to write with the additional weight. No one likes a loose cap on the back of the pen when trying to write!
Along with the pen and gift box, Leonardo include a standard cartridge converter so that you can ink the pen up with your favorite ink. I wish more pen manufacturers would do this instead of including a couple of generic black or blue ink cartridges!
From when I first saw the Leonardo Supernova on Goldspot's website, I had high expectations. At $152, it's not a cheap pen, and straddles a really interesting and competitive price point. At a minimum, it needs to perform like other amazing pens that you can buy at this price. I'm happy to say that this pen exceeds my expectations. It's a pleasure to use, and it looks so awesome on my desk. I can't help but pick it up and twirl it around under the light to admire the personality in the acrylic.
Aside from the fine nib, you have the option of extra fine, medium, broad, elastic extra fine, elastic fine, and 1.5mm stub. And good luck picking just one color out of this exceptional lineup of materials!
(Goldspot provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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From Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (2005):
If it is your destiny to be this laborer called a writer, you know that you’ve got to go to work every day, but you also know that you’re not gonna get it every day. You have to be prepared, but you really don’t command the enterprise.
Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise — we somehow embrace the notion that this vale of tears, that it’s perfectable — you’re not gonna get it all straight.
I found that things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to win….
You understand that, you abandon your masterpiece, and you sink into the real masterpiece…
And also: “You have to write down what you’re going to abandon.”
This week we’ve made a rare exception, rather than a single individual we’re talking to twin brothers Jordan and Steven Neman of House of Léon. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, the two realized that the interior design market was missing creatively designed pieces available at an affordable price point. From there, furniture and home decor company House of Léon was born in 2022.
Since opening the doors a year ago, Jordan and Steven have launched two full collections with a third on the way this spring. With a focus on regions, cultures, and concepts, the brand believes every piece of a collection needs to work with one another to allow for mixing and matching.
But House of Léon is more than furniture. The brand also releases sculptural decor pieces based on the ceramic work of Jordan. When furniture and decor pieces come together with affordability, clients can uniquely express themselves within a living space in a delightful way.
Today, Jordan and Steven Neman are joining us for Friday Five!
Jordan + Steven Neman \\\ Photo: Still Vika
Photo courtesy BDDW
One of our favorite furniture designers is Tyler Hayes and his team at BDDW. It’s fascinating to see the creations that a multidisciplinary artist like himself is able to make. His use of mixed media and materials across pieces show a level of craftsmanship that we think is quite incredible.
Photo: Eric Roinestad
Jordan’s favorite ceramicist has always been Eric Roinestad, and his work inspired Jordan to get into ceramics himself. Roinestad’s sculptural pieces, made using a clay he makes himself, show a level of refinement you don’t see quite often in ceramics.
Photo: Batten & Kamp
Our favorite gallery for furniture is Love House in NYC. Jared and Aric do an amazing job of sourcing incredible designers. A piece from their collection that we think is worth highlighting is the Steel + Stone Lounge Chair by Batten & Kamp. It’s a true show-stopper.
Photo: Carla Cascales Alimbau
For art, we have always loved The Tappan Collective. The furniture selected for a space can only take you so far – it’s the art that sets the stage for those pieces to shine and create the perfect setting.
Photo courtesy Azotea
Outside of the US, in Mexico City, the gallery Azotea does such a great job of restoring vintage pieces and creating new designs of their own.
Delphina Candle \ The Delphina Sculpture Candle, inspired by the figure and shape of the feminine form, brings an abstract and artistic touch to any space. Based on the work the co-founders’ mother, Firoozeh Neman, the Delphina Candle is a celebration of the glory and power of the female figure. “The jagged edges allude to the strength and power of women who are so often illustrated as delicate in nature,” describes the artist. \\\ Photo: Still Vika Photography
Shinto Dining Chair \ This summer, we came across the 13th century art of “Kakishibu,” the traditional Japanese dying technique that pulls color from fermented persimmons. The dye was used on materials from wood to fabric and became the inspiration behind our favorite piece from our new Kyoto Collection, the Shinto Dining Chair. A quarter inch thick leather wraps a hand-crafted frame, with a leather seat that will patina as it ages, just like the vintage pieces you grow to love more and more. \\\ Photo: Michael Piliero
Face Vase \ The Face Vase is the first piece of décor based on the ceramic work of co-founder, Jordan. An accident in the studio led to what looked like a shoulder on his vase, and the head was sculpted as a response to that happy accident. \\\ Photo: Michael Clifford Photography
Sofita Coffee Table \ The Sofita Coffee Table uses a soft, natural stone with a raw edge to create a piece that feels organic to any space. \\\ Photo: Michael Clifford Photography
In the pre-scientific world, in the blind old world with its old language, we had a word for those people most awake to the sacred wonder of reality, most capable of awakening the native kindness of human beings — the kindness that flows naturally between us when we are stripped of our biases and liberated from our small, constricting frames of reference. That word was “saint.”
Saints still walk our world, though now we might simply call them heroes, if we recognize them at all — heroes whose superpower is love.
Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016) — one of the modern heroes — explores what makes a saint in a passage from his 1966 novel Beautiful Losers (public library).
He writes:
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men*, such balancing monsters of love.
A year later, Cohen contemplated what these “balancing monsters of love” do for us in his song “Sisters of Mercy”:
If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.
Complement with Walter Lippmann’s magnificent meditation on what makes a hero, inspired by Amelia Earhart, then revisit Leonard Cohen on creativity at the end of life, language and the poetry of presence, democracy’s breakages and redemptions, and when (not) to quit a creative project.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
A new study published in the journal Nature Communications Biology suggests that whale songs may actually just be nature's emo croon. Using an 18-year dataset of humpback whale behavior, the researchers noticed that whale song had become an increasingly less successful mating tactic for the male humps as populations have recovered from the height whaling. — Read the rest
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| The box sleeve for the Momento Magico Collection (right) has the special geometric art that is also the pens' cap bands. Inside the box are the Momento Magico Emerald fountain pen and a Certificate of Authenticity. |
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| Leonardo Officina Italiana Momento Magico Emerald |
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| The Magico can be fully disassembled for cleaning. |
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| Inspired by Greek art, the Momento Magico's cap has a different band from most of Leonardo's fountain pens which are mostly simple bands. The fretwork central band in a letter M pattern comes from the Geometric Art period. |
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| While other Leonardo pens have markings on their barrels, the Momento Magico has its branding on the cap, above the ascending geometric lines of the cap band. |
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| The Emerald's body is so shiny! I love the vibrant color and glossy finish of Leonardo fountain pens. |
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| The Momento Magico's new ink window is shorter and has matching ring bands. |
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| The Emerald's Medium nib writes smooth, juicy, and very comfortable to use. |
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| The marking to indicate width is engraved on the nib shoulder. |
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| Momento Magico Emerald (2022) and Millefiori (2021) – the packaging and presentation for both pens remain the same. |
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| The cap, clip, and clip band are all the same. |
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| But the gap in the ink window that is visible in the 2021 Millefiori is no longer visible in the Emerald. |
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| Here is the comparison of the ink windows of the two fountain pens. The 2021 Magico has a longer and simpler ink window. The 2022 Magico has a shorter ink window with matching ring bands. |
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| The Momento Magico is a full-sized fountain pen that shares the same length and diameter as the Momento Zero and Furore. It also looks very similar to the MZ, but the differences are also very obvious: slimmer clip, cap band design, ink window, and piston-filling mechanism. |
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| From top: TWSBI ECO Turquoise, Laban 325, Leonardo Momento Magico Emerald, Esterbrook Estie Gold Rush Frontier Green, and Lamy Alstar Aquamarine. |
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| I chose this happy song because the Magico Emerald reminds me so much of the sea! |
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| This postcard tells the Leonardo story. |
Caltech researchers re-created an experiment on gravity and acceleration that Leonardo da Vinci sketched out in his notebooks. (credit: Caltech)
Caltech engineer Mory Gharib was poring over the digitized notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci one day, looking for sketches of flow visualization to share with his graduate students for inspiration. That's when he noticed several small sketches of triangles, whose geometry seemed to be determined by grains of sand poured out from a jar. Further investigation revealed that Leonardo was attempting to study the nature of gravity, and the little triangles were his attempt to draw an equivalence between gravity and acceleration—well before Isaac Newton came up with his laws of motion, and centuries before Albert Einstein would demonstrate the equivalence principle with his general theory of relativity. [Edited for clarity.] Gharib was even able to re-create a modern version of the experiment.
Gharib and his collaborators described their discovery in a new paper published in the journal Leonardo, noting that, by modern calculations, Leonardo's model produced a value for the gravitational constant (G) to around 97 percent accuracy. What makes this finding even more astonishing is that Leonardo did all this without a means of accurate timekeeping and without the benefit of calculus, which Newton invented in order to develop his laws of motion and universal gravitation in the 1660s.
"We don't know if [Leonardo] did further experiments or probed this question more deeply," Gharib said. "But the fact that he was grappling with the problems in this way—in the early 1500s—demonstrates just how far ahead his thinking was."
Enlarge (credit: Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology)
Borealopelta markmitchelli found its way back into the sunlight in 2017, millions of years after it had died. This armored dinosaur is so magnificently preserved that we can see what it looked like in life. Almost the entire animal—the skin, the armor that coats its skin, the spikes along its side, most of its body and feet, even its face—survived fossilization. It is, according to Dr. Donald Henderson, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, a one-in-a-billion find.
Beyond its remarkable preservation, this dinosaur is an important key to understanding aspects of Early Cretaceous ecology, and it shows how this species may have lived within its environment. Since its remains were discovered, scientists have studied its anatomy, its armor, and even what it ate in its last days, uncovering new and unexpected insight into an animal that went extinct approximately 100 million years ago.
Borealopelta is a nodosaur, a type of four-legged ankylosaur with a straight tail rather than a tail club. Its finding in 2011 in an ancient marine environment was a surprise, as the animal was terrestrial.
My introduction to Davon Loeb was his essay, “Breakdancing Shaped Who I Am as a Black Man and Father,” a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2022. I was captivated by the vulnerability and relatability of Loeb’s writing, and quickly pre-ordered his debut lyrical memoir, The In-Betweens (West Virginia University Press, 2023). The book explores his growing up in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey as the son of a Black mother and white Jewish father. Loeb’s experiences growing up Black in a predominantly white-suburban neighborhood are often painful, yet not without joy. While the memoir is masterfully told—Loeb employs a variety of craft techniques that have a powerful effect—what makes The In-Betweens so special is the thoughtfulness Loeb brings to his work. Grappling with accountability and authority, Loeb leaves the reader wrestling with an important question we should all be asking: What is our culpability in systems of oppression?
I spoke with Loeb via Google Docs to discuss the transformation of the lyrical voice in The In-Betweens, developing trust with the reader, and the stickiness of relatability.
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The Rumpus: I noticed in the acknowledgements how many of the essays have been previously published. It made me wonder about the genesis of the book. At what point did you know these essays were part of a larger work?
Davon Loeb: When completing my MFA at Rutgers-University Camden, I submitted many of the essays I workshopped to literary journals, partly because of literary affirmation. I wanted to get published so badly, which at times, trumped why I wrote. I think there’s real danger in that, submitting work just to get published versus writing good work to better your craft. However, the chapter, “Alabama Fire Ants” was first published in Portland Review, and when this happened, I felt like my writing succeeded, as if I reached a new level. “Alabama Fire Ants” was the chapter that inspired the entire collection, and that chapter can stand alone. Because of that, I wanted the rest of the book to mostly feature standalone pieces. I wanted to build context on a micro and macro level—that you could read The In-Betweens in medias res or from start to finish.
Rumpus: These read as individual essays, and there’s a strong narrative arc, but the book is described as a ‘lyrical memoir’ rather than an essay collection. Is that how you see it? As a memoir?
Loeb: I do see The In-Betweens as a memoir. I think the ultimate goal of writing this book was to explore the story of a boy trying to find himself throughout specific time periods. The lyrical voice is stretched, as if a muscle, in each chapter, and each chapter challenges the length of storytelling—challenges the notion that storytelling can be only a five-hundred-word paragraph or a two-thousand-word essay. This book is as much of a memoir of arrival as it is an exercise on craft, on how a book’s structure can be narratively and, concurrently, lyrically driven.
Rumpus: You use the first-person plural in many of the essays that explore childhood. Can you share what was behind that stylistic choice?
Loeb: Using the first-person plural was my very intentional attempt to tell an individual story universally. While my experiences as a person of color, as a person of color who is half white, as a heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied man, as a college-educated teacher, as a middle class American, as someone with privilege but also without privilege, I wanted readers, regardless of their subjectivities, to see themselves in my book—that my story was their story. And so much of this is done with place, with summers in Alabama, with riding bikes in the Pine Barrens, with tropes of trying to fit in in middle and high school—all of which is purposeful, stylistically. The “we” is a syntactical choice to bind your story to mine.
Rumpus: Another compelling craft decision is the use of direct address, and the person being addressed varies. Two in particular have a chilling effect: “For My Brother,” in which the narrator addresses your brother who struggles with mental illness, and “On the Confederate Flag,” in which the narrator addresses a former friend who comes to school wearing a shirt that alludes to lynching. Why was it important to use direct address?
Loeb: The narrative voice evolves throughout the book. When we’re reading, “For My Brother” and “On the Confederate Flag,” there is a change in the narrator, a maturation. I wanted this redirection to reflect the narrator’s growth, to reflect his coming of age, and what better way to do that than to redirect how I told the story? That being said, these chapters use a direct address because I am more sure of myself, of how I tell the story and who I am talking to. Will my brother read this book? Will that friend feel racist guilt? There is no ambiguity here because I want you, whoever you are, to feel something, to feel an intimacy.
Rumpus: The growth of the narrator, including their growing confidence, is part of the narrative arc that creates intimacy, and brings us to a vulnerable space. Was this your intention?
Loeb: Writing a memoir is writing with authenticity rather than just the authority of the narrator. Because of this, I have a responsibility to write people accurately. These characters, often my family and friends, are as vulnerable as I am, and to be authentic is to write them fully—that they are never just one thing, and that was really important for me to prove. This book is not a collection of pointed fingers. This book is not to blame wrongdoers. This book never takes me off the hook. This book is about the hurt I have done and the hurt that has been done to me. I am accountable and should be—and that is the intimacy I am after.
Rumpus: How do you manage to center love in your work? Even when you’re writing about difficult topics or hurtful things?
Loeb: The In-Betweens is very much about love, and love is where the book starts, at the chapter, “A Love Story,” which is a retelling of my parents’ relationship. It seemed pivotal to begin my story here, before I’m born. My mother and father’s love story is an in-between—an in-between of age, race, culture—that “…he was white, and she Black, and this was America.” Love marries all the chapters, even if love is a criticism, even if love is a celebration. We can love our family but still be in conflict. We can love where we grew up but still criticize it. In “Something About Love,” my mother tells me that love instinctual, is an undeniable trust, is a comfort in knowing undoubtedly that you are safe and wanted and accepted, an irrefutable thing, like the sun coming out tomorrow, and there’s nothing more or less you can do on any given day to be unconditionally loved. Love is this, something unconditional, but love is not this; love can be a father’s inability to love unconditionally—and yet, love is also a man who is a verb, is an action, is a doer, a giver. Experiencing the duality of love, on many levels, is imperative to understanding the driving force behind my work.
Rumpus: Our society often takes a binary approach—you’re either this or that—but your work resists that. Why is it important to explore liminal spaces, or make room for the in-between places?
Loeb: I was raised in a Black-Latino family, my mother is Black, my stepfather is Panamanian, but I was half white, half Jewish. I grew up in a white town but was half Black. My culture and my ethnicity have always been in juxtaposition. For my entire life, I have always been in the in-between—not Black enough, not white enough. Society demands categorizations—demands our blood to be defined, whether we like it or not. I want to challenge that, the rigid belief that we are defined by one thing, one identity—because we are so much more than just our race, though, for many people of color, we cannot simply shed race, for we will still be Black, still be whatever thing society tells us we are.
Rumpus: Let’s talk about the town where you grew up. There were some very disturbing abuses you and your family were subjected to. One example is your brother’s teacher asking him to be O.J. Simpson in a class project in 1995.
Loeb: The town I grew up in is often the setting of both my creative nonfiction and fiction. I absolutely loved my experiences as a kid growing up in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. I spent my days after school riding bikes on backyard trails, playing basketball on neighborhood courts, chasing ice cream trucks down quiet suburban streets, drinking beers at parties in the deep woods. Growing up here, I was seemingly safe and wanted for nothing. I had a freedom that felt absolute. My writing celebrates this place with consistent image-driven narratives that intend to draw the reader in, from chapters like “The Settlers Inn” to “A Backseat and a Fire Pit”, my intention is for you to be here with me, with all of your senses. When I write about place, it is very poetic; however, place serves a greater purpose, which is to juxtapose joy with trauma. In the chapter, “On the Confederate Flag,” I am especially troubled by this, by loving my hometown, even though my classmates sported Confederate flags on their trucks at our football games. It’s the same when writing about Alabama: As a person of color, I think, “How can you write about the South without including racism?” Those years as a boy coming of age were joyous, but I was still an outsider to that place, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, to that culture. So my family and I absolutely encountered racism, like my brother did in “O.J. and the Wax Museum,” and yet, we had a good life, and I am so grateful for that.
Rumpus:. How do you balance writing about hard things while allowing room for pride, joy, and love?
Loeb: My life is not just hardship. So the pacing of the book follows joy and trauma shared in the same space, within the same chapters. Good memoir can marry joy and trauma because that’s how life is, and my book wants you to believe this marriage can exist in a literary form. On a craft level, many of the chapters embrace fragmented storytelling, whereas, I structure the narrative in vignettes, challenging traditional storytelling. A paragraph will celebrate while the next paragraph will critique, and this back-and-forth structure is a consistent thread that weaves all the chapters. Joy, love, trauma, rage—it can all exist together, in the same breath. My readers need to trust me, even when I will not tell them the entire story, even when details will be excluded, even when time has elapsed, even when the endings are ambiguous simply because memoir is life-writing, and life is messy but still demands balance.
Rumpus: That brings up interesting questions about the relationship between the writer and the reader—how is trust inherent to our engagement with a person’s story? How do you build trust on the page? By making it an invitation rather than an imperative?
Loeb: I think the invitation is when the reader sees themself in my memoir. Relatability is a power force, and I hope, as that happens at whatever point, the engagement intensifies. Once they’re on my hook, the stories resonate more, and we can approach the uncomfortable, like when readers experience the N-word, which is an experience, and the response, for many readers, is visceral and should be. I think getting there, when the -isms accumulate, takes trust. Readers will learn something from me, if they are not of color or of whatever thing I am and they are not. I believe, undoubtedly, there is learning, there is nuance, and there is growth happening between my narrator and my readers.
Rumpus: Does good storytelling challenge the idea that “relatability” comes from experiencing similar circumstances and events?
Loeb: Relatability is clearly an important narrative tool in The In-Betweens. But good writing and good storytelling has to exceed the relatable. As much as I want my readers to connect to my work because they can relate to it, I also recognize the danger here. Relatability can devalue and diminish a writer’s work. Just because a reader cannot relate does not mean the work is not important. Publishing can absolutely operate like this, using relatability to solely dictate what is publishable and what is not, which marginalizes already marginalized writers. Having a book that is relatable is great but saying a book is not relatable padlocks it. Relatability, especially for marginalized writers, is an exclusionary term that further narrows an outsider’s viewpoint on a literary work. “I cannot relate,” is synonymous with “this story does not matter to me.” Therefore, I think relatability is necessary and is demanded for non-white writers.
Rumpus: That reminds me of recent debates about empathy in writing, specifically who carries the burden of relatability, when it comes to feeling others’ pain.
Loeb: I was really adamant about not writing trauma as guilt-reading, but writers of color, especially, cannot write our histories without including trauma. My mother is Black, and we are a people from slaves, and it is impossible to tell you my story without including the traumatic history of Blacks in America. I do not need or want readers’ guilt, however I do expect readers to understand that my history is indefinitely tied to Black trauma—that I cannot tell you this story of being in between apart from it—that guilt is not required but respect is. And that is honest writing—writing that cares about the readers’ but cares more about the story it is trying to tell.
Rumpus: You write that your mom said you should always take injustice personally. Did your mom’s words fuel the heartbeat of much of the book?
Loeb: In the acknowledgements, I refer to my mother as the orator of our family history. Her role in my memoir, as the narrator, is as significant as mine, but she has a greater purpose that exceeds our relationship. My mother represents the Black voice where there is none. I do not have the authority to tell all parts of my story because I am only half Black. So I relinquish storytelling control over to her, and in many of the chapters, she takes narrative ownership and teaches me about my Blackness, about where I fit in America as a boy and young man of color. This is my mother’s duty and how she tries to protect me, which is a universal quality of most mothers, one that is as much about race as it is about survival. My mother’s omnipresence is clear and constant, and as we transition towards the end of the book, my mother and my voice become one, and I take injustice personally, like she taught me. The In-Betweens wants you to take injustice personally, to take my story personally.
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Author photo by Frank Apollonio
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