By Ladane Nasseri

Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, she was a staff writer at Slate, where she wrote about language, culture, and politics, and hosted the Slate Audio Book Club podcast. She is the winner of a 2018 American Society of Magazine Editors award for journalists younger than thirty. I met with Katy at the New Yorker’s headquarters at 1 World Trade Center, where this interview was conducted.

You wrote in a piece this year “the never-ending-ness of such a practice—of all critical practice, done right—is occasionally paralyzing.” As a literary critic, do you have a methodology to review a book in particular one that has been assigned? 

When a book is assigned I will read it once, the pleasurable first read when my brain is starting to scrabble around and figure out what might be a good argument. I will probably go back and reread passages that seem to be stepping stones to an argument. On that second read I start to take notes and eventually to group the quotes in different categories all spatially arranged on a word document. It depends on the book. Sometimes you see the shape of the review that you’re writing before you start writing. A lot of other times I don’t really know where things are going until I start doing it

Is that initial reading done as a commonplace reader or with the critic’s hat on? 

That’s such an interesting question because I am not sure when the last time I was able to access a book as a non-critic was because I studied English in college and in high school. By the time I was in college even my pleasure reading was through the lens of someone who worked on texts for a major and I don’t know that I’ve ever been able to disconnect that plug.

Do you feel some type of professional deformation as a result of having reviewed books for so long and that it’s now difficult to read for pleasure alone?

I love that you say deformation because it feels like a handicap sometimes: if the job of the reviewer is to conjure for the reader how they might feel in response to a book, then I’m not actually transmitting that by manufacturing nits to pick.

Journalists are asked to think of their audience when they write, and the advice given to writers is to write with their ideal reader in mind. Who do you have in mind when you write?  

It’s another great question. You’re right that criticism straddles these two modes of art making and relaying information. It’s important to think about whether your reader will follow, will understand, will enjoy the work you are doing. I would never advise someone not to think about their readers, but I think there is a certain arrogance that you have to have as a reviewer to pronounce judgement which involves shutting out the hypothetical voices of readers and just saying what you think and then you can let them filter back in. 

What is your main goal as a reviewer?

I think you are trying to solve two equations at the same time and do them both to the best of your ability. The first equation is how can I write something illuminating and interesting and useful to my readers and the second equation is how can I produce a piece that seems idiosyncratic, persuasive, beautiful to me according to whatever my standards are. 

You recently reviewed Elizabeth’s Tallent memoir ‘Scratched’ and wrote about her effort to defeat procrastination, perfectionism and the dreaded writer’s block. She suggests you wrote, that the cure for perfectionism is love. Do you sometimes suffer from writer’s block and what’s your suggested cure? 

Yes! I related very much to that book. Not to the producing rarified sentences that are to die for part but to the part of not being able to produce to my satisfaction and needing to do it anyway. Dwelling inside the fantasy of the gorgeous words that you have not written is so much more fun than mucking around the wreckage of what you actually have on the page. I look out of the window and daydream about how good my review is going to be when it’s done. Then the real thing goes up and I can’t even look at it. 

Your second question is harder. I do a lot of trickery with the fonts on Google Docs. I’ll read a piece that I really admire and then I’ll use the font of that piece in my Google Docs to persuade my brain that the good piece is the piece I’m reading. Then, when I write, I’m just helping the good piece be what it already wants to be. It has nothing to do with me! 

But to be a little less cute about it, just reading other work that I admire whether it’s fiction, journalism, other articles... and that’s one of the nice things about working at the New Yorker, there is a trove of inspirational writing wherever you turn.

Would you say it’s best for a critic to develop an area of expertise and review from that stand point? Or is there something gained by approaching a book with minimal prior knowledge? 

There is tremendous value in both. When James Wood who knows everything about everything reviews a debut novel he’s bringing the weight of literary history, the weight of many, many authors attempting the same thing that he has read and that is a really wonderful and invigorating experience - the wealth of expertise and context and hard-won insight. At the same time books are not written only to experts and so there is both value and delight in someone else’s virgin mind sparking off the book. Certainly, when people bring pre-conceptions that verge into misconceptions or biases about a topic that’s a problem. 

Is it important for a critic to develop a strong voice? 

Yes. Yes. When I think about the critics that I admire the most, Parul Sehgal for instance, Vinson Cunningham, they are un-mistakable on the page. It evokes all the good work that they have done before when you are reading a particular piece. There is a kind of secondary pleasure of character that emerges. Getting to know what Parul likes and dislikes through her body of work is its own adventure.

You’ve been a literary critic for the New Yorker for over two years and were a words correspondent for Slate for 2 years before that. How has the role of criticism changed during this time and how do you see it evolving?

Things that were happening when I was at Slate are happening faster and more. Certainly, the ubiquity of opinion on social media, the idea that everyone can be a critic if they so desire, the idea that critics themselves are code switching depending on what platform they are operating on. A linguistically conservative writer may be on Twitter, tweeting out memes because that is the idiolect of that community and if they don’t then they will lose a lot of potential audience members. So, there are incentives in place to be fluent in lots of different types of speech and writing. 

There is a bigger question about diversity that is happening all over literature. Having more diverse critics is extremely important and seems to be happening to some extent but not fast enough. There is definitely a righteous and definitely still insufficient effort to review and assign books by authors of color and that needs to continue to happen.  but I’m glad that that seems to be more on the radar screen than it was in 2015.   

That takes me straight to my next question: a renowned author recently caused an uproar when they suggested creative excellence should be blind to questions of race, gender or sexual orientation. Do literary publications and the media have a responsibility to bring to the spotlight the work of certain authors who may not naturally have access to a wider or more mainstream audience? 

Yes. The fallacy embedded in the comment that merit is blind is that if we were to lift up the very best voices they would not be diverse voices. That is just not the case. There is true excellence distributed across human writing and unfortunately our system has been structured so that only certain manifestations of that excellence are elevated. So, what we need to do is to fight against that rigged system. 

Is there a book that you reviewed or didn’t get a chance to, and did not get as much attention as it deserved? 

I read a lot of books that are good and should get more attention. I really love the Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto and commend her to everyone. Start with her novellas. There are three great ones collected in the anthology “Asleep.”

Are there particular publishers or authors you feel are being particularly creative or innovative and worth following closely? 

Yes. Indie presses are all great, Soft Skull Press, Catapult. There is a lot of fragmentary literature being written right now which is perhaps less novel than it used to be, but I still find it seductive. I want to see someone do something to push it forward and am not quite sure who the person is to do it. But I think it will probably be a poet.

What are some of the practices that your turn to in the realm of your job or outside to inform and enrich your work? 

I used to play piano and sing, and I haven’t really done much of that recently, but I would like to get back to it. I feel like when I was younger, music and writing always fed into each other and fed off each other. Reading is important, walking, roaming. I know that sometimes when am stuck taking a stroll helps. And I look a lot at animal pictures, especially dogs and yaks.

Are there podcasts or websites that are references and that you see as complementing the literary work you do? 

There are instances of very intelligently wrought podcasts that do approach literature in some ways. S-Town by the Serial creators was an instance of that. I listen to a ton of podcast but none of them are in the same orbit as the type of literary criticism that I try to do. Certainly, the storytelling of Invisibilia or some episodes of this American life, I enjoy. The Culture Gabfest is really wonderful and helps me think through pieces of culture that I have and haven’t consumed.

Is there any advice from a mentor or colleague that has stayed with you throughout your career? 

A lot of it would have to boil down to some variations of ‘just file the piece‘, which is less advice than a kind of clenched teeth imperative. 

And what’s the one advice you would give to young writers who are inspired by your work and your role?    

Just file the piece [laughs]. I would say no one is going to have the exact same response to a book as you do, and your job is not to obfuscate that fact but to lean into it and present your reaction in as compelling and interesting a way as you can.

Ladane Nasseri is a journalist and writer whose work has been published in the New York Times, Businessweek, Newsweek, The Telegraph and Liberation amongst others. She was a Bloomberg News reporter for over a decade, covering politics and economy out of Tehran, Dubai and Beirut. She’s now based in New York City and completing an MFA at the New School’s Creative Writing Program. Follow her on Twitter: @LadaneNasseri

By Jessalyn Johnson 

In his book Deaf Republic, award-winning poet Ilya Kaminsky explores political disorder in a community where the people are united in a time of tragedy, uncertainty, and death, using the power of sign language to illustrate their rebellion. Kaminsky, a 2018 Guggenheim fellow, takes readers through a compelling and timely narrative that moves family and neighbors alike through a time of pain, fear, and violence, taking into question the way silence is used as a reaction to disaster. I had the pleasure of discussing Deaf Republic with Kaminsky over email. 

Deaf Republic tells the story of a town that goes silent after a deaf boy, Petya, is shot and killed by a soldier. It then goes on to discuss the rebellious response as a commentary on corruption of political authority. Do you think it takes a significant amount of inherent strength and selflessness for a town as a whole to stand up for its people in times of desperation the way it is displayed in your book? 

The reason why it took me 15 years to finish this book is: I wanted to write a text that is true to both my experience in Odessa, a city where I was born in former USSR, now Ukraine—and the United States, where I have lived since age sixteen. 

Now, Ukraine is at war, a part of its territory is occupied by Russia. So the events in Deaf Republic speak to that part of my life.

But, then, there is also the American part: as Americans it seems that we want to distance ourselves from a text like this one. We want to say all of this happens somewhere else. But there is pain right here in our neighborhoods: We see stolen elections, voter suppression. We see photographs of children in cages. Is this happening in a foreign country? No. A young man shot by police in the open street lying for hours on the pavement behind police tape, lying there for many hours: That is a very American image. And we talk about it for a bit on TV and online. And then we move on, like it never happened. And children keep being killed in our streets. This silence is a very American silence.

That image of a shot boy lying in the middle of the street is central to Deaf Republic. Of course, the book is a dream, a fable. But it begins and ends in the reality of the United States today. That is intentional. It is a warning of what we might become. Of what kind of country we have already become.

Americans seem to keep pretending that history is something that happens elsewhere, a misfortune that befalls other people. But history is lying there in the middle of the street. Showing us who we are.

What your question seems to really ask is: what kind of strength might it take for people who do see all of this to protest? 

But if we don’t protest: who are we? What it is that we don’t see, refuse to see? Our own complacency, yes. 

As a poet, I am interested in language as an active force. Not information, but a medium itself that wakes the senses. Poetry is not about an event. It is the event. Art is the resistance of complacency: It always stands in opposition to numbness. 

It seems that your question implies this: majority of people in our country are numb. Which raises a question: what is the role of language in this? The normative language of any time—but especially the normative language of 21^st century capitalist empire (e.g. words like “collateral damage” instead of an evocative image of a child shot dead in the street) is specifically intended to numb us. 

Poetry, by definition, opposes the normative. The poem wakes us up; it must actively cast a spell on the reader now. Regardless of its subject. If it doesn’t, it fails, whether the poem is about a face that launched a thousand ships or about a woman standing in a line outside a prison wall or about plums in the icebox. That freshness of speech ravishes the human in us. 

For me, this is what poetry is: not a kind of public posturing but a private language of music and imagery that is strange and compelling enough that it can speak privately and evocatively to thousands of people at the same time. 

That is why it just doesn’t die, poetry—despite so many death notices. It is always there, waking us up when we get numb, poking us in the eye.

You moved to America from Odessa at the age of 16 before acquiring hearing aids. How did your reality change when this happened? 

Yes, I did not have hearing aids until I was sixteen: As a deaf child I experienced my country as a nation without sound. I heard the USSR fall apart with my eyes. 

What did this mean, in day to day terms? walking through the city, I watched the people; their ears were open all the time, they had no lids. I was interested in what sounds might be like. The whooshing. The hissing. The whistle. The sound of keys turning in the lock, or water moving through the pipes two floors above us. I could easily notice how the people around me spoke to one another with their eyes without realizing it. 

But what if the whole country was deaf like me? I liked to imagine that. Silence, that last neighborhood, untouched, as ever, by the wisdom of the government.

And, yes, those childhood imaginings feel quite relevant for me in America today. When Trump performs his press conferences, wouldn’t it be brilliant if his words landed on the deaf ears of a whole nation? What if we simply refused to hear the hatred of his pronouncements?

As for what changed: I could hear my mother’s voice. Imagine that: suddenly hearing your mother’s voice.

But my father died too soon after our arrival: so I didn’t get to hear him; I often wonder what his voice might have been like. 

Although I already wrote poems in Russian when we came to USA, when he passed, I understood right away that it would be impossible for me to write about his death in the Russian language, which he taught me, as one author says of his deceased father somewhere, “Ah, don’t become mere lines of beautiful poetry.” I started writing in English: because no one in my family or friends knew it; no one I spoke to could read what I wrote. I myself did not know the language. It was a parallel reality, an insanely beautiful freedom. It still is.

What changes for you as a poet when you write in a second language?

Even the shape of my face changed when I began to live inside the English language.

But I wouldn’t make a big deal out of writing in a language that is not one’s own. It’s the experience of so many people in the world; those who have left their homes because of wars, environmental disasters, and so on. 

What’s important for a poet speaking another language are those little thefts between languages, those strange angles of looking at another literature, “slant” moments in speech, oddities and their music. 

Could you say more about those oddities?

The lyric itself is a strangeness inside the language. No great lyric poet ever speaks in the so-called proper language of his or her time. Emily Dickinson didn’t write in “proper” English grammar, but with a slanted music of fragmentary perception. César Vallejo placed three dots in the middle of the line, as if language itself were not enough, as if the poet’s voice needed to leap from one image to another, to make—to use T. S. Eliot’s phrase—a raid on the inarticulate. Our contemporary, M. NourbeSe Philip, has created her very own music out of the language of colonial power. Paul Celan wrote to his wife from Germany, where he briefly visited from his voluntary exile in France: “The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.”

How important is language or nationality to your identity as a poet? Do you consider yourself a Russian poet? An American one? Is that a meaningful distinction to you?

Well, I still write in Russian from time to time. And I read in Russian a great deal. But do I consider myself an American poet? Yes, I do. But, then, I must answer a question: What does it mean to be an American poet? What is my American experience? It is laughing with my friends, making love to my wife, fighting with my family, loving my family, loving the ocean (I love water), loving to travel on trains, loving this human speech. But we all have these things, don’t we? Yes, we do. And therefore, I fiercely resist being pigeonholed as a “Russian poet” or an “immigrant poet” or even an “American poet.” I am a human being. It is a marvelous thing to be.

“A City Like a Guillotine Shivers in Its Way to the Neck” you write “At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow this? / And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow this?” This is one of my favorite stanzas of Deaf Republic, and not the only mention of God throughout, of course. What sort of role does religion play in your life, and how deeply does it affect the way you write? 

Since I grew up in USSR, religion wasn’t encouraged at all. It was actively discouraged, in fact. 

But on weekends, they gather at the kitchen table, my parents and friends of my parents, shouting at each other well into the night: who is a better poet, Akhmatova or Tsvetaeva? What will happen to Gorbachev’s reforms? Is there a God?

During the day, Mother and Father stand in lines for milk and walk carefully around their Soviet supervisors. But at night, someone always shouts things like: I am not a religious person! but I do believe that there is a divine in us!

That’s my early 1990s: the great debates of my childhood always involve little glasses of flavored vodkas that Father brings to his friends on a tiny tray: pepper vodkas and plum vodkas are in high demand.

If there is a church I am willing to subscribe to, it is the Church of the Kitchen Table at 33 Sovetskaya Militsia Street, apartment #1 in Odessa. That’s where on Sunday nights they crowd into a little space and shout at each other: is there is a God?

Years later, in America, I become a writer and find that some questions are not to be asked in a polite society. Some things are not to be shouted about in American literary world. Writers don’t ask each other questions such as:

Do you pray?

Yes, in extreme situations, I pray. Prayer exists when no world stands between me and the void. 

In extreme situations: I speak directly to the void. The answers are often silence. But if that’s the case, then surely the language was invented to ask questions. For example: 

Is there a God?

This desire to ask; this need to poke the silence; it explains something about us as a species.

But I am in the United States, a country which has invented TV evangelists. Here, anyone who tries to observe things, quickly realizes: organized religion in America is simply another form of corporation. 

So, I don’t recommend it.  But having said this, having acknowledged religion generally causes more wars and misfortune than perhaps any other institution in the history of the planet, what now? Is there a mystery—or none?

What I am interested in is the strangeness of our being here at all: the miracle that is this planet. 

How has your background in law impacted your writing? Additionally, how has it impacted the way you view society? 

Yes, I went to law school, and have at one time worked for Legal Aid and the National Immigra­tion Law Center. Before I moved to Atlanta last year, I did some pro bono work as a Court-appointed advocate for kids who are or­phans on the California/Mexico border. I enjoy doing that that kind of thing, and look forward to doing more of it in Atlanta.

Does this work influence me as a poet? Surely: losing a case on which someone’s health benefits depend certainly taught me about the urgency of language. But then, all of our daily activities and interactions with others influence our vocabulary; if we are to believe Yeats, a poet should always be revising for a more passionate syntax. 

But don’t poets see/hear/touch language every­where? Going to the beach with my nephews fills the afternoon with language. Kissing my wife is a moment in which nouns understand their pas­sion for verbs and adjectives shyly watch. Nouns start flying around the room when I engage with my brother in a shouting match, and the cats hide. And is there a better lesson in pacing and line-break for a poet than botching the delivery of a joke? 

I love human beings. Time squeezes us from both ends like accordions, and I love this mu­sic we make. One might choose to see it from a distance. I prefer to see it from the inside, in the midst these person-to-person interactions. If I fail to be a human being first, I fail my poetry.

Jessalyn Johnson is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She received a bachelor's degree in English Literature from Grand Canyon University and currently attends The New School’s creative writing MFA program for fiction. Her work is featured in Maudlin House, The Inquisitive Eater, and Barren Magazine, among others. Find her on Twitter @jessalyn451 and Instagram @jessalynjohnson. 

By Ramya Ramana

Thanks to the cooperation of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) and Creative Writing at The New School, as well as the tireless efforts of our students and faculty, we are able to provide interviews with each of the NBCC Awards Finalists for the publishing year 2019.

Mira Jacob is a novelist, memoirist, illustrator, and cultural critic. She is the author of the novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, which was shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, and the graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations, which shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book.

Ramya: So first I want to say thank you for writing this, from the bottom of my heart because it was just so refreshing to read a story that I could see myself in, and so much of your journey. I felt like I see myself and I could see my sister and I could see so many other South Asian women in. When you were writing this book, did you expect it to resonate with so many people? There's also a lot of people who aren't South Asian that find themselves in this story. Was that something that you expected, or what was that for you? 

Mira: Yeah, it's a really interesting question because it gets to the heart of something which is the difference between what is your experience as a writer in the world, and what is your experience as a writer in this industry? And those are really different things. So as a writer in the world with a lot of other people of color around me, and a lot of other writers from marginalized communities around me, I was like, of course this is going to resonate. We're all in this. But as a person who's at the mercy of an industry that is largely guided by whiteness, I wasn't sure if it would get out in the form that I wanted it to be in. If the editing process was going to let the parts that I knew were vibrant shine through, if the team behind it was going to really be behind it or if they were going to get what was important about it. Like all of those things, the business parts were parts I didn't know. If the question is simply, did you know when you were writing it that other people would find themselves in this? For sure. I just wasn't sure they would find the book. 

Ramya: And how was that process for you from finding the editor? 

Mira: The editor who bought the book is not the editor that I ended up doing most of the editing work with, only because he moved on to another house. But when that happened, there was a moment where they briefly about giving me to the associate editor or the assistant editor at the same time. and it was somebody who would be inheriting the book. It was also a less senior person. It was also a white woman who I'm sure does fantastic work, so this is not about her work. Just that I understood very quickly as they were explaining it to me, I was like, oh no, this is somebody who doesn't have the seniority to battle back what I know is going to be a tide of insecurity about putting out a book like this. 

I think what happens when you're writing about race-specific topics is white editors can get so cagey about what rights they have. Because they don't have the conversation deeply, they react from a place of paranoia and marketing, rather than a place of knowledge and a place of 'if that comes at us, we do this. If this comes out...' There's a way to talk through these things and to these things, and I knew that that person probably wasn't going to be adept in that. So I specifically requested that it go to an editor named Chris Jackson, and finessing that was was a bit of a thing. There were two things that happened that helped that. One is that I talked to Alex Chee who's a good friend and just a real friend to so many of us, so many writers of color in the literary space in that he's been there for longer than most of us, and he's been through a lot of these difficulties before. And he was the first one that said to me, you know, you can ask for an editor of color. And when he said it, I started laughing and I was like, there were like three, what do you mean? And there are many more than three. But yeah... Like I remember going home and being like, you need somebody that's going to call you on your bullshit, because that was actually, to be honest, that was the harder part. I wasn't worried that a white editor was going to censor me as much as they were not going to engage with it. 

Yeah. You have to fight for everything. There's not a part that you don't have to fight for. 

Ramya: You do such a great job of incorporating specific moments in telling your story. What was that process like in choosing what to put in the book, and choosing what to keep out? And then also like as far as memory, did you have any practices that helped you remember certain parts of your life? 

Mira: That's really interesting. Okay, so let me answer the first part first.... the second part first, which is that I don't have memory practices. I would write things that I remembered, scenes that I sort of remembered from my life because I do remember things almost as like movies and in that way, because memory is unreliable, I will totally own the fact that I remember them in a way that someone else might not. And that is actually to me just how memory works. We will all remember things differently. I had no problem with being like, yeah, this is how I remember it. I'm writing it. I also know because I'm a fiction writer when I'm making something up. So I knew like if I was like, Oh, it'd be better if it happened this way and I'd be like, yeah, but this is a memoir, so you don't get to have it happen that way. 

What's really interesting with that particular point and going between fiction and memoir is that when you don't get to have an event happen the way you would want it to happen for dramatic effect, you have to look really hard for what made it have that dramatic effect on you. Like, Oh I want to write this moment bigger than it is, but that didn't happen. So what is the thing that happened and then what was the thing? What was the beat of conversation or the moment or the pause that shaped me, and how do I let that live? And then there's one thing with like how do I let that live in normal prose? And there's another thing with how do I let that live with basically paper dolls that I've drawn in the shape of myself and conversation. so it was not that I had practices so much for remembering, as much as I had practices for once I knew what I was going to write, for how to get to the vulnerable part. 

Ramya: Obviously it's your story, so nobody can experience the same exact thing that you experienced. But there's a space where when you cringe, I feel like I can cringe with that moment. Is there a specific way that you choose to craft dialogue that insinuates that emotion or insinuates that feeling where the reader can also feel what you're saying? 

Mira: Yes. I have to always think about, so dialogue for me is every bit as much about what isn't said as what is said. So I feel like when people craft dialogue, they're always looking at it from - not they're always, but one of the things I see often, especially with writers who are less seasoned, is they're always looking for a kind of information exchange. Like, how do I get this point across, rather than what can this person not say? And I jumped from what can't be said to what can't be said. 

Ramya: So another question I have is, you speak a lot about love in your book, and specifically like journeying through romantic love and what that looks like. We come from cultures where you get married and you don't marry for love really. You just kind of get married because it's tradition and it's just what everybody's done, and so those are the people that raised you, and then you grow up in this country and everything is about romantic love. 

Mira: Everything! 

Ramya: And I wonder if there was ever a point where when you were young, when you were navigating all of this, a point where you knew you deserve this romantic love, even if that's not what your parents had or the generation before had? Or was it something of desire that felt distant that you kind of had to journey towards, and what was that journey like? 

Mira: I mean, there's so many complicated parts to me about being a South Asian woman and being a South Asian young woman, and specifically when we're talking about romantic love, I think you're right that we're expected. In families that have had arranged marriages, I think we're supposed to actually also do that, have an arranged marriage and it's very much about supporting your community, being part of your community, supporting your tradition. 

But also if you look at the fantasy within that, there's also the fantasy that you fall in love after you've had your arranged marriage. That's the unspoken part of it. Everyone says like, Oh, then you just get married. But then, and there is this kind of silent "but of course then you fall in love", and you know and I know, because I've seen so many of those marriages that that doesn't always happen for everyone. That happened for my parents and I feel really lucky. I know it's happened for some of my friend's parents. I also know several friends' parents for whom it never happened. They didn't like each other from the get go. They didn't like each other 30 years later. It was never happening. So one of the things is you have to unpack ...the fantasy of romantic love is present in both. You have to look at that and just decide where they're placing it. So it's not actually ever that you're just not supposed to want romantic love. It's that you're not supposed to pursue it in one. 

And in the other, you were allowed to pursue it, but then what happens in that too is this kind of funny ... because pursuing it in the Western sense comes with betraying your culture, you make an equation in your head, which is more or less if I pursue romantic love, I'm betraying my culture, therefore I'm doomed to fail, and when I fail, it'll be on me cause I'm the one that left my culture anyway. 

So like in the way that we were just talking about dialogue and what can't be said, to me it's really interesting always to unpack the part of the fantasy we don't say out loud. So the part of the fantasy that we don't say out loud, especially that one is if I pursue American love and it backfires, I will deserve all the pain I get, and then I will be alone with it. Yeah. I think I had to go through a point many points where I'm also... part of that also is just acknowledging sexual hunger, which we're also not supposed to acknowledge at all. You're supposed to be a virgin when you get married and again, other things like good sex will just happen automatically. Whatever. 

Ramya: Nobody even talks about it. 

Mira: Nobody talks about having sex. The babies just appear, but you're supposed to believe sort of in the glow of a Hallmark card that something happens that's great, and foggy lens. Anyway, I'm a person with a pretty active sexual appetite. I knew that from the time I was young and I knew that if I was going to be sexual, people I knew it was always much better when it cared about them. And so it was like letting my body inform me as much as my culture informed me. Which can feel really.... I think it's a real threat to my culture that I would do that, and at first when I was doing it, it was just sort of like, Oh my God, what does this mean about you? What does this mean that you're going to listen to your body as much as you listen to your parents, as much as you listen to your culture, your relatives? What does that mean? And everything in this world will lead a young brown woman to believe that if you listen to your body as much as you listen to everyone in your life, you have failed everyone in your life. I just don't fucking think that's true. 

Ramya: Yeah, and also the idea that everybody owns you. 

Mira: Yeah, exactly right. That is the sure-fire way to make sure that everybody owns you but you. And then what? When do you get to be yourself? When do you get to feel the joy of being in this brown woman's body? So I think for me it was like I came at it sideways through the lens of shame, and sort of sneaking off to be with people and really loving it, and then sneaking back into my own culture. A culture that, by the way, also rejected me for my skin color, because it wasn't attractive and I wasn't what anybody wanted for their son. Surely I had some feelings. I don't know, hold those feelings about, that's my body. 

Ramya: I think even from what I see in my own growing up in what I've spoken to a lot of South Asian woman, you learn to kind of compartmentalize both sides of yourself and function and code switch in each world. 

Mira: Well that's why it was so important for me to draw myself naked. I had to explain that part to my son. And it was really wild to say that to him, because when the book was coming up, one of the big conversations, we had a lot of conversations about how do you feel about this part? He didn't read many of the parts that were about the drugs, the sex, whatever, but he read all the parts that are about him. And then I was like, there's one other thing I need to tell you about in the book and he's like, okay. You might hear about this from friends of yours, but I drew myself naked and I want you to know before anyone else tells you. And he was like, okay, you know. And I was like, yeah. And he's like, okay. And I was like, do you want to know why? Is it important for you to know or do you not want to talk about it yet? And he's like, no, you should tell me why. And I was like, I grew up in a culture where I wasn't supposed to enjoy sex and I wasn't supposed to pursue it and I wasn't supposed to enjoy my body, and the amount of shame that I grew up with was so present that it took away a level of conversation I could have been having with myself the whole time about what my needs and my wants were. I couldn't even look at them directly because I wasn't allowed to feel powerful in my body. And I was like, it took me until I was 20, in my twenties and away from my family and living in New York to be like, I'm just, okay, wait, no, I am doing this. The sky's not falling down. I'm just able to enjoy myself. Life goes on. It took me that long and I can't imagine how much more powerful I would have felt if I would've been able to see that sooner. So I'm drawing myself naked for all the young South Asian women. And I was like, what I'm scared of is all of the aunties and uncles and the patriarchy and all the people that are going to be like, that whore! Why did she do that? And I was like, but why I'm doing it is because there's probably some young South Asian woman that's going to look at this and it's going to relate to other parts of the story, and sooner or later she's going to go back to the part where I was naked and I'm not ashamed about being naked on the page because I have a body and I love that body. I don't want her to remember that. And he goes, okay, so it's like for feminism, and I'm like, yeah, it's like for feminism. He goes, okay, cool. He was like, great. So done. 

Ramya: On page 75 , there is this diagram of your brain. There’s a lot of anti- blackness that is perpetuated in our culture and it's interesting because especially South Indians, if you look at some of us, we're just as dark. 

Mira: Oh yeah. Darker. 

Ramya: Darker, but nobody ever wants to admit that. How did you demystify the stereotypes or anti-blackness in your own journey growing up? And what did that process look like for you? 

Mira: Part of the reason I drew that diagram of my brain is because that is basically a diagram of what was happening in my brain before I said some stupid racist shit and ruined the night of two boys who really didn't deserve it to be ruined. That night that I still wake up regularly remembering saying that and remembering what was so haunting about that moment was that I saw their faces and I was like, oh my God, I just did the thing to them that's done to me. I just did it to them, and knowing exactly what they were feeling because it had been done to me so often and having done it myself, it was just this real moment of like, Oh, just because people say racist shit to you doesn't mean you're not going to say to someone else. Doesn't make you bullet proof. What's really interesting to me about this moment that we're in right now is I think that there's this tendency to identify as people of color. I've already said it several times in this conversation. We say that in response to Trumpism and to whiteness and this need to kind of say, I am not of you. My experience is different than yours, but within that our experiences - blacks and browns - is so, so, so different. 

So one of the things that I'm trying to do really interrupt in this is how Indians specifically, and some, I would say South Asians, there are many different groups of South Asians, but Indians specifically come here with a lot of white privilege and we come here and what is given to us, we take and then also I've heard more than one uncle be like, we made it here. Well, I don't know. Were you shipped here without your choice, separated from your family? Were you routinely raped? Were you routinely subjugated? Did you have your family stripped away from you over and over 400 years? Is that something that you survived? No. Oh, you mean the government just let you in the country? It helped you build systems and you wonder why you think that you can compare that to what black Americans have gone to through. Is that really what you're comparing with? Let's take that apart. I could just as easily have written a chapter about some horrible racist shit an uncle said to me, but what's the point of that chapter? If I'm confronting an uncle, we can all do that work. We all want to be the hero, and so what does it matter if I can be the hero over and over and over again if I can't actually really show where my I thinking has fallen short? I say that to you also knowing that if America progresses, and I hope to God it will, they're going to be chapters of this book that people pull out and they're like, oh my God, she was such an idiot. Look what she wrote here because we will have thought past it. Because we'll be able to look back. I will be able to look back on this and say, wow, I still had a blind spot about that. I still did this thing there. Wish I wouldn't have done it and grow from that point. You have to be willing to put something down on paper, which is much less than glamorous. I think it's really important for South Asians especially because our population does tend to rate with the highest income earning population is very small, but we're the highest income earning. I think it's really important for us to take that apart and look at what system are we benefiting from and why? And also what do we keep in check so we keep benefiting from that system? Because if the only way that we can continue to thrive in America is to step on the necks of other brown and black people. then we are inherently deciding to buy into a system which will never see us as fully human at the expense of other people, of other people. Yeah. It is just a shit show. That way it goes, the shit show. I'm so uninterested in my community becoming part of that shit show. 

Ramya: There's certain characters that have the same image used multiple times. So for example, it will be a character, but in one scene they will appear as a teacher and another as a relative. Is there a reason you chose to do that? 

Mira: So much of this book was creating a visual language. So what you're talking about there is every character in here is presented almost as a paper doll. They never moved their expressions and they never changed their bodies. They present one way, and there's reasons for that. I never changed the expressions because I don't want to have to perform racial pain, and I realized if I don't ever put an expression on their face, then the viewer has to hold what's happening. The other part of that is just this idea where when I was in bed one night, I was like, so is the thing you're saying then that whatever body you're born into is just how you act in the world? Is that what you believe? 

Like you believe that a person that's born white is always gonna feel this, and a person that's born brown is always going to feel this? And I was like, no, I actually don't believe that at all. Okay, so then what's the visual solve for that? What is the visual way to confront that? Oh right. You have to have the same potty repeated in completely different situations. You have to like allow that to be real. And I don't do it with any of the main characters because it would be too confusing. But with the side characters, I do it. I've done it a lot. What's really funny about it too is when the book was being edited, a lot of people pointed out to me the white characters I had repeated, but they never pointed out the black or the Asians. So it was what it was, but what was really fascinating to me is how we're taught to recognize white faces over every other face. 

Ramya: How did you give yourself the permission to write this book? 

Mira: There is something when you are in a brown body that has always belonged to everybody else, giving yourself permission becomes such a wild thing because you want it from your mother, you want it from your father, you want it from your boss, you want it from your husband. There's a million different ways to ask for permission. And then running up against all of that was this idea that all of those people who I would wait to give me permission were not going to save my son from what was happening in this country. And I was like, I'm the only one that's going to care that much. I'm the only one that's going to... I definitely wrote this book for a segment of America that I felt was drowning and couldn't see themselves anymore and didn't feel recognized or cared for or held, because they didn't feel real anymore, because they'd been turned into a gross caricature by a dictator basically. So it's like, how do you run in the face of a caricature? You make it as complicated and specific as possible. You make yourself, if you're writing a memoir, as complicated and specific as possible. You air things about yourself you're not even quite comfortable with to say, this is how I've lived. 

My friends have known forever that I was bi. It was no secret to absolutely nobody, and it's even funny cause I even had to go back to some of my closest friends in college and I was like, I forget. Was I openly out with you from the get-go? And they're like, yeah, you were out from the get-go, and it was really interesting cause I was like, that's cool. That's good. I'm glad. Cause I knew what I was, but I also was like, did I tell you? And they're like, yeah, you were totally clear about it. I was like, okay, thanks, but also deciding like I've been married for 20 years, there's no reason to talk about it, unless you feel like, okay, wait a minute. This is a part of my life. This is a part of my life I could safely tuck away to make this less complicated, and then we're just talking about race, but that's not who I am and that's not who I ever was. And also it feels so weird to have any of my ex-girlfriends reading this and be like, so you just erased us, for the sake of talking about what? You just erased us for the sake of talking about your identity in this very uncomplicated way. So you know, when you ask who did you ask for permission was less, or how did I give myself permission? I gave myself permission because I felt like the thing that I was trying, the thing that I was up against was the monolith of the idea of a person of color. And the only way that that was going to become a human was if I got specific. So I just got more and more specific and every time I got specific and every time it landed an ugly place and every time I felt vulnerable and exposed. Yes. this is exposing. This is awkward. Probably some of your aunties are never going to look at you again. That's true. But also there's a little more room for your boy in the world if you do this. There's just a little more room. 

Ramya: What is your message to young Indian, brown girls and boys? 

Mira: Yeah, I mean I wrote this book for you guys. What would I say? I mean it's so funny cause it's a huge thing. But I think I feel like the one cultural trait that we all share is wanting to respect tradition in a way of caring for our parents and holding onto those community bonds, and I believe in those same things, but you can never do it at the expense of yourself. And if that community makes you ashamed of who you are, if that community can't see you and can't hold you, then you have to redefine community. You have to find your people and look for each other, because there are many of us. There are so many of us. I know now for sure, I'm sure I've got several aunts and cousins and other people that are like, this is tremendously embarrassing and they talk about it with the family. Oh my God, can you believe this girl did this? But also I feel like sure, you will be able to bandy that about as gossip for the rest of your life. But also I've got this life. I love this life. I'm okay, and we will probably meet and have open conversations, but in your version of how things should have gone, I would have never been fully myself. I'm just fully myself. That's all. It's really not bigger than that. 

Ramya: Thank you so much Mira. 

Mira: Oh wait, I want to tell you something. 

Ramya: Of course. 

Mira: And one of the most amazing things is while I thought it would resonate, I was like, there are so many reasons that a book like this will never be taken seriously, partially because I'm funny, and I think right off the bat when you're funny about things, it gives people an opportunity to pretend that it's not serious. It's a mechanism by which people will dismiss you and I've always known that, but I'm writing for my readers. The critical will dismiss you and then there's your reader who you're like, I don't give a fuck. I'm just trying to reach you. You know this, I know this. This shit's funny. So I think I always knew it would resonate with people. I've been really surprised and sort of just really gratified about the critics getting this one, specifically with this award. This is one of my favorites. Favorite book of all the book awards. I always read this list, because I always feel like it's the people who really delight in books and really take them apart and put them back together the way I do. So that's why this is such an honor and I didn't think that would happen. That has been both baffling and deeply wonderful, like really, really good, that part. 

Ramya: And you deserve that and so much more. So I'm rooting for you. 

Mira: Thank you.

Ramya Ramana is an Indian-American poet and New York Native who performed at over 200 venues in one year as the Youth Poet Laureate of NYC and was mentioned in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Brown Girl Magazine and many more. Ramana released her first manuscript, “Don’t Drown Her in the Baptism”; the collection of poems explored femininity, faith and race. As a first-generation Indian-American, Ramana’s work illustrates both the immigrant experience, and exploring existentialism. Ramana is currently receiving her MFA in poetry at The New School. 

by LaVonne Elaine Roberts

Thanks to the cooperation of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) and Creative Writing at The New School, as well as the tireless efforts of our students and faculty, we are able to provide interviews with each of the NBCC Awards Finalists for the publishing year 2019.

Sometimes a book comes along and, long after it is absorbed, nothing is the same. Rachel Louise Snyder's No Visible Bruises demands that we have a conversation about an insidious national epidemic—domestic violence that our nation has avoided for far too long. One in every four women is a victim of domestic physical violence at some point in her life, and the Justice Department estimates that three women and one man are killed by their partners every day.

You point out that most (54%) mass shootings intersect with domestic violence. As a Texan, I grew up hearing about Charles Whitman, who, on August 1, 1966, after fatally stabbing his mother and his wife, killed 14 people and wounded 31 others. Is there any hope that convicted domestic violence abusers may be required to surrender their firearms and prohibited from purchasing any more?

That, in a nutshell, is the holdup for the reauthorization of VAWA's 2018 bill. The NRA came out against it because they don't believe convicted abusers should have to give up their 2A rights. It's maddening--guns at all costs, guns at the expense of human lives. It shouldn't be political, but it is. That said, I'm speaking in a different state nearly every week at the moment, and across the board, the people I'm meeting are against guns. I spoke in Dallas last week to a ballroom full of people of all political stripes who believed abusers should lose their guns. This gives me hope.

You point out that while the link between mass shooters and domestic violence is slowly becoming known, yet strangulation as a specific sign of lethality in the context of domestic violence remains largely unknown. What policy changes would you most like to see?

We must reauthorize VAWA and expand its budget, and we must rewrite some of our body of jurisprudence within the context of domestic violence. I'm referring here mainly to self-defense and stand your ground laws, which don't account for the different ways victims in such circumstances act versus, say, a stranger picking a fight with someone.

While reading your book, I kept thinking about how the #MeToo movement has united women in supporting each other more vocally. I loved that you brought attention to Martina Latessa and what a difference it makes having a female officer working with victims. What can we do to make sure there are more women like Martina out there helping female survivors?

It's not just that Martina is a woman; it's also that she meets victims where they are most comfortable — in their own homes or spaces. This is psychologically so important to gain trust. Of course, I also think we should send Martina overseas to wherever they're doing the most advanced cloning! She is a singular force. The DV homicide rates in the Cleveland districts where she operates have gone down since her pilot project began, incidentally. But you mention the #MeToo movement, and I'm so glad because, to me, the #MeToo movement offers a roadmap for how to share our stories without judgment or shame. There is so much shame to being a victim of DV, and a lot of that comes from cultural messages we all receive about DV as a priority for law enforcement and judiciary, or DV as a circumstance because someones' made a bad choice. #MeToo got us all sharing our stories in such a powerful way, and that needs to happen in the context of domestic violence next.

You write about studying fiction in graduate school and then gravitating to nonfiction because you understood it to be a more direct source of change. Did your background in fiction help on a craft level?

Yeah…my background is in fiction, which turned out to be lucky because my task was: I want to write a book that I think no one will want to read. So how can I write a book that covers an unpleasant topic, but yet is so compelling you can't put it down. That was my charge. In fiction, you're always writing toward a conclusion that — unless you are John Irving — you probably don't know ahead of time. With my book, I knew I wanted it to read like a novel, but I also knew where the stories were going to wind up. I couldn't pretend Michelle Monson Mosure wasn't going to die. So, as a creative writer, how do you get around that? The idea of surprising your reader? It took me a long time to figure out — several years. I realized that the tension in her story would come, not from how her life ended, but from the intersections where system after system failed her. Those were the heartbeats, as it were. That's where the emotional depth would really reside, and readers, the more they got into her story, would start to see these systemic failures, and so her doom begins to carry this enormous, terrible weight. I really did think, "Well, we have 400 years of not caring about this subject in this country. We'll probably continue to have more. So I have to make readers care about this one person, this one loss. And then she becomes a stand-in for hundreds of years of our collective culpability." The writing of it was so intense for me that I also could only read poetry during the actual writing process, too. Writers of different genres have more alike than different; that's my view. I probably get it from my grandfather, who was a journalist and a poet.

Based on book sales, media coverage, and The National Book Circle's nomination, you've brought a lot of attention to domestic violence. Any changes you'd like to see that haven't happened yet?

Oh my god, SO MANY! We need to get VAWA signed. We need to do much more comprehensive programming in middle and high schools (shout out to One Love Foundation for all the great work they do with this age group). We need to put more resources into batterer's intervention, so we learn what works and what doesn't. I think we should have the National DV Hotline phone number on every package of pads and tampons in this country. I think we should have interactive teen dating apps where kids could post questions anonymously and get answers in real-time. I think we should have sponsors for abusers who graduate from batterer's programs in the same way that AA has sponsors. I think we should have an abusers hotline in the same way we have a suicide hotline. We need to be able to hold abusers pre-trial if they are particularly dangerous. Prosecutors need to do more evidence-based prosecution. Our self-defense laws need to be adjusted to take gender, physical ability, and strength into consideration. Restorative justice and gender inequality education need to be front and center of any batterer's intervention.

How did you come up with the term intimate terrorism?

It's not my term, really. Researchers and advocates have been calling it intimate partner terrorism for a long time now. I just took out the partner because domestic violence can come in a lot of different constellations: siblings on siblings, parents on children, and vice versa.

As someone who facilitates writers' workshops in shelters for survivors of violence, I appreciated that you wrote about the work being done to predict domestic violence homicides before they happen. As you so rightly said, "escaping a dangerous relationship hardly ensures the danger is over." For anyone close to someone living in an abusive situation, what can they do to support the victim?

This is a difficult question — and I get asked ALL the time. The problem is, there's no one way to intervene. It depends on the dynamics of the relationships, and the resources available in any given jurisdiction. But in general, I would say that victims need to be acknowledged when it comes to what's going on. They can't just be told to leave, full stop. For many, that's simply impossible. It's too dangerous. But they can create the space just to get victims to talk. They can not give up on their family members who are in these situations. So often you hear from families who say, "She was with him for 20 years. We just couldn't take it anymore." And they close themselves off. I understand this proclivity, but they should take time to understand the dynamics at work — it's in my book--why any given person can't leave. Family members can also share the risk factors of DV homicide from the Danger Assessment to get a sense of the level of danger; the DA is easily findable via Google.

I confided in a female psychiatrist that a woman in a shelter for victims of violence who was in my writing program returned to her abuser. She responded, "I don't buy it. Why would any woman stay." I kept thinking—she's a mental health practitioner. She's a woman. If she doesn't get it, how will anyone? You point out that "we mistake what we see from the outside as [a victim] deciding to stay with an abuser, when in fact we who don't realize what a victim who is slowly and carefully leaving look like." Does your No Visible Bruises speak to someone in an abusive relationship as much as someone who doesn't understand domestic violence? Was that your goal?

Totally. It is validating. Remember that the goal of emotional abuse is to destabilize someone emotionally and psychologically. Abusers will say it's all the victim's fault, and at some point, that message sinks deeply into a victim. My book tells them they're not crazy, and they're not wrong, and the choices they're making make sense in the context in which they're living. It's been stunning to me how many victims have gotten in touch with me and told me their stories. At the same time, police need to read it, and judges, and family members and politicians.

You pointed out that it is well known in the domestic violence world that most survivors leave seven or more times before they can achieve self-agency, free from their abusive partners "Leaving is never an event; it's a process," stood out to me. As you know, it's acutely painful to watch a person return to an abusive partner, especially when there are children involved. What can we do to be supportive when people we love make compromised decisions?

I think the first thing is to realize the decisions might not be compromised at all. There might be real barriers to their leaving. And those barriers — even if they're emotional or psychological — are every bit as powerful as, say, economic barriers. This is what I mean when I say open up the space to share without judgment. The phrasing of the question carries an inherent judgment.

One critic suggested that your book doesn't fully represent marginalized communities, so I want to ask the following: Do you feel that your book is inclusive of all identities experiencing or associated with domestic violence?

I've gotten that a lot, and it makes me realize just how much we see the world through the white gaze. There are a TON of people in my book who had their identities and names changed for various reasons of protection. Those protective measures also include race. Michelle and Rocky are white, but one of the primary narratives is a person of color who, through my careful use of a very white-sounding pseudonym, has their identity entirely hidden. At the same time, native communities and immigrant communities and other communities of color DO face unique challenges that white communities often don't face. I am fully aware of that, but this is really the first narrative reportage book on domestic violence. You can't cover everything. You have to make decisions. I also don't talk about the crisis in our family courts today. And I don't spend much time on kids who grow up in abusive homes. There's a lot that I don't include, and I hope my book is just the first of many more to follow by others.

Thanks to your book, readers know more about cohesive control laws, which exist in countries like the UK and France. Do you feel like your writing is inspiring more conversations and creating more awareness around these issues?

I hope so. Idaho just became the first state to pass a coercive control law. We'll see how that works.

Are you still in touch with Donte and Community Works?

Community Works, yes, a bit. Jimmy, no—as I mentioned in the book. He still struggles with addiction, but he's trying. I think we exchanged a Facebook message once or twice, but that's it. I haven't talked to Donte since the book came out. He was transferred to a different penitentiary, and I don't know where he is at the moment, but I have faith that he'll find me. He knows how to find me…And I hope he will soon.

One of the things I struggle with the most is suffering from secondary trauma when working with survivors of violence. Despite trauma-informed care training, the stories get under my skin and haunt me, especially the children. I can't begin to imagine the emotional toll of speaking to men who inflicted violence. How did you practice self-care while researching and writing your book?

I'm still working on this. I'm not very good, especially because I am traveling and speaking somewhere nearly every week, so my body clock is all off. The other day I couldn't remember what state I was in for, like, ten minutes. But I quit drinking, and I'm taking boxing classes and both help. When I was researching the book, I took a whole year off at one point and just painted and read poetry. I also wrote a memoir, which I'm revising now.

When you wrote, "the most significant cultural barrier existed between the police Dept. and the crisis center." You pointed out the police dept. employs men primarily, and the crisis center employs women primarily. Before the formation of a High-Risk Team, police officers viewed the female workers at the crisis center as the "Men Hate Us Club." You wrote that one of the crisis center advocates said she and her colleagues were known as the "feminazis" and that they thought of the police officers as "they were the assholes who only cared about overtime." I think it's essential for all the stakeholders fighting for survivors of violence to break down barriers to work together. Do you see other areas where conversations should happen?

Yes, of course. In our homes. In our places of worship. In our schools.

I imagine the need for a book for children of domestic violence and family members who fear for loved ones subjected to abuse. Any thoughts on your next book? I completely agree--something like how Jason Reynolds and Ibram Kendi partnered together for an anti-racist book based on Kendi's incredible work. That's in my mind a bit. But my next book will be my memoir.

And of course, the real question I'm sure most people are hesitant to ask--have you ever experienced violence in a relationship?

I get this a lot. My ex-husband was definitely verbally and emotionally abusive, but I would say I was too sometimes. We didn't bring out the best in each other. My father was violent a few times — beyond just spanking, say — and that's something I'll delve into in my memoir. My father was not a man prone to violence, but I was a very, very difficult kid. I was just walking rage, and pain. I did a lot of drugs. I ran away more than a dozen times, and sometimes I'd be gone for days. He literally did not know how to handle me. So it wasn't a kind of classic abuse situation in that I fought back, but it's something I very much want to examine. My father died six weeks ago, and it's still pretty devastating to think of him gone from my life.

What has happened since your book came out?

Washington, DC's local government, has now put forth a felony statute for strangulation as a result of my book. I'm speaking every week somewhere different about the book, and I think I've spoken to thousands of people in the past six months. I was a keynote speaker at the NYPD conference this year. One county in Massachusetts has made the book a roadmap for revamping their entire DV systems, so the DA has made evidence-based prosecution a priority in her administration. She has also made sure the police are trained in strangulation (50 had been trained at my last count), and she's creating a high-risk team in her county. This is all in Pittsfield, MA. The DA did this fantastic thing where they partnered with the local bookstore to make it a community read, and the bookstore donated 20% of their profits to the local DV advocacy group. That advocacy group, in coordination with local government, created funding so victims could get the book for reduced cost or free. And they had me come and present to 500 community members at their local theater.

There were reps from DV, the police, the DAs office, law enforcement and a couple of judges, as well as healthcare workers, social workers and teachers from the local schools. It was an amazing virtuous circle and it struck me as a perfect roadmap for actual real change. I heard recently that the undersecretary for the Dept of Health and Human Services read the book and wants to create a task force to talk about oversight with their DV grantees. For those that have read the book, Cleveland's numbers from the first and fifth district, where Detective Latessa works, have come back and shown huge reductions in DV homicides, so they're expanding their program to all five of Cleveland's Districts. I'm also working on meeting with various folks to try and get the national DV hotline phone number on every package of pads and tampons, and all the ideas I gave you below? I'm giving those ideas away to every group I meet with freely. I have no ownership over them. I don't need to get credit. But I very much feel like this issue is being taken seriously in a way that it has' t in a very long time, maybe ever, and we can do so much. Mine is the first book of its kind: a social issue written from a literary journalism perspective, as opposed to an academic text, or a memoir or self-help book. It offers endless possibilities. My agent and I are also beginning talks about turning it into a YA book.

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Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade, the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing, and No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us. Her print work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, Slate, Salon, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the New Republic, and others.

LaVonne Elaine Roberts is a short story writer, essayist, and memoirist. She is the 2020 Diversity Fellow for Drizzle Review and a member of the Blue Mountain Review Southern Collective. Her work at Drizzle will include curation of a special issue on ageism in literature, due out summer 2020.  Her essays, short stories, and poetry have been published widely, including in Our Stories, Too: Personal Narratives by Women, WordFest Anthology 2019, The Blue Mountain Review, LIT Magazine, Thought Notebook, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Litro, among other publications. She is the founder of WRITE ON!, which facilitates free writing workshops for marginalized populations. She resides in New York City, where she is completing an MFA at The New School and a memoir called Life On My Own Terms.

by Michael Schmale

Thanks to the cooperation of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) and Creative Writing at The New School, as well as the tireless efforts of our students and faculty, we are able to provide interviews with each of the NBCC Awards Finalists for the publishing year 2019.

For American expats living in China in the first decade of the 2000’s, Peter Hessler was already something of a household name—not just as The New Yorker’s China correspondent, but as a public intellectual whose books became fixtures of laowai bookshelves almost as soon as they were published. His ubiquity was well earned. He wasn’t just a better stylist than most, or a more intrepid reporter, or a stronger researcher—he was all of these things. At a time when much media coverage of China contented itself with aggregate statistics about GDP growth and internal migration, Hessler’s work stood out for its frank, vivid, and humane portraits of how these unprecedented economic and social changes were playing out in the lives of individual people.

Fast-forward a decade and Hessler has taken this approach to the next level in his latest book, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution. A departure from his previous China-focused work, The Buried got its start when Hessler, along with his wife and their twin daughters, moved to Egypt in the fall of 2011. He spent the next five years there covering the political turmoil that began with the popular protests of the Arab Spring and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak.

For a writer so closely identified with China, the move to Egypt was a noteworthy change, but in many ways it also proved to be a superficial one. The fundamental character of Hessler’s work remains very much the same. In The Buried, he digs into the promise and disappointment of the Arab Spring, the lives of ordinary Egyptians he befriended, as well as Egypt’s rich archaeological history, weaving together these disparate strands into a portrait of a place and a people that—contrary to what the title may imply—is, in fact, brimming with life.

MS: You spent the first decade of your career in China, and your first four books were almost entirely China-focused. How did you end up in Egypt covering the political tumult of the 2010’s?

PH: My wife, Leslie, and I had planned to go to Egypt long before the Revolution started. China is a world unto itself, and it’s a place that can completely dominate your thoughts and your perspective, sort of like the United States. We felt like, before we were too old, it would be nice to have another place where we spent serious time and gained some level of knowledge and familiarity.

Still, I went with somewhat mixed feelings because, first of all, it was an intense time to move there with small children, but also I knew it was going to be overwhelming and difficult. But I saw it also as a challenge and something different from China and a very different experience as a journalist, and so I did cover events more directly than I had in China, but I continued to do the kind of work I’ve always done: focusing more on individuals and places that interest me. Really the goal with the book was to combine these things. I wanted the readers to understand some of the issues behind the Revolution. It was a very important moment and I felt like it would be wrong to be living there and not engage with that. But I also thought it was important for readers to meet people like Sayyid and also be introduced to places like Abydos, in Upper Egypt, which don’t get the same coverage as Cairo.

MS: Were there any particular surprises or challenges going from China to a place like Egypt?

PH: One thing that we realized is how unusual China is. I think sometimes when you start in China, it becomes one of your points of normalcy because you’re accustomed to it. The trajectory I witnessed from the 90’s to now doesn’t happen in the developing world very often. Egypt, on the other hand, has longer sustained dysfunction in a lot of ways, and deeper rooted issues than China has, and that’s more common.

But a lot of the methods that you’re using are the same. Language is critical. I wasn’t able to get my Arabic to the level of my Chinese but I got to where I was comfortable in my Arabic and I could hang out with Sayyid and his family and communicate with them very well and travel by myself, do a lot of interviews on my own, and that adds so much to your understanding of a place. It’s really essential. I think, also, the strategy of trying to get out of the capital is important. You have to try not to get too focused on the big place that everybody always reads about, try not to get too lost in the big characters and the important people.

You also have to be willing to spend time and do projects in a longitudinal fashion, where you’re watching things develop over time, like seeing how Sayyid’s family is changing and how his ideas are developing, or what Manu’s path is over the long haul. Or even in a place like Abydos,  looking at the different phases of political change or political development that they are going through in the wake of the Revolution in a village like that is telling, and it’s similar to what I did in China. In China I would often follow people and places over a period of years and I tried to do the same thing in Egypt.

MS: More than your previous work, The Buried takes as its object a discrete geopolitical event—the political turmoil bookended by the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and the coup of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—and yet a substantial portion of the book focuses on the lives of Sayyid, Manu, and Rifaat, three ordinary Egyptians who you built relationships with in your time there. Why do you focus on these individuals in a book that’s ostensibly about a revolution?

PH: Even if they’re not directly involved as leaders or major activists or something, they reflect a lot of the issues that made some people feel like it was necessary to have change. You look at Manu and you see this social conservatism and the pressure that puts on people. You look at Sayyid and you see the failure of the education system, as well as the deeply entrenched sexism in the culture. And with Rifaat, you get this sense of decline. It’s really tragic, when you’re in a developing country, to feel like the past is a better place.

These were all things that in their own ways created the environment that led to the Revolution. Sadly, in my opinion at least, the Revolution didn’t address these things very directly. And that was the tragedy of those years—it didn’t happen. They didn’t get the revolution that they needed.

MS: One astonishing fact you mention in the book is that Egypt underwent a 2,000+ year period without a single Egyptian ruler, a period that only ended in 1952. Do you think this long history of colonialism played a role in what you witnessed there?

PH: The last person who called himself pharaoh was in the second century BC. From then until 1953 there wasn’t a single Egyptian in charge of the country. That’s like the Western Han dynasty to Mao Zedong, as if there hadn’t been a single Chinese administration running China. Imagine what the place would be like. The sense of ownership you have is very different. When I was in China in the 90’s when it was still quite poor, people kind of realized that they’d screwed up. They felt like we made some mistakes, we made some bad decisions. Whereas in Egypt everything was always blamed on the foreigners.

There’s a high level of truth to that, in the sense that it was a country run by foreigners for millennia, but when you don’t have ownership over the problems, it’s harder to solve them yourself. The direct history of colonialism is a real psychological issue for the country. It also probably contributed to the gender disparity. There’s a lot of evidence that the treatment of women became more conservative partly in reaction to colonialism.

In China it was never quite like that. For all the ways in which the Chinese have been traumatized, for all the ways in which there are many levels of dysfunction, they did have some ownership over their problems. And they did feel like they could solve them. You could see them working on a lot of things. For example, I always felt like the status of women improved significantly even during the ten years that I was there. You could really see it in the way people talked about daughters and the status of women who were working.

MS: Getting to the craft aspects of your writing, one thing that sets your work apart is an almost novelistic approach to telling these stories. Not just in terms of the narrative structure and the characters, but down to the observed details and descriptions—the empty nails on the walls in the local rayis’s offices, for example, and you have a beautiful passage about how the sunlight changes in Cairo in the fall. How do you think about this aspect of your work? Is it an aesthetic decision or do you see it as something more fundamental than that?

PH: It’s really fundamental. Often with non-fiction, especially with journalism, there’s a sense that the writing is the icing on the cake. You’re just trying to punch it up or something. But to me it’s just as important as the material, the research, and the thinking. It’s really the essence. I care a lot about the quality of the writing and I spend a lot of time on it. I go through a lot of drafts.

I sort of trained as a novelist—I majored in fiction as an undergraduate and planned to be a novelist at the time. I ended up feeling that non-fiction was the best path for me and I still think that’s true. I like combining the skills of a researcher with the skills of a writer. But the writing is not secondary. It’s sort of like if you’re a documentary filmmaker and your lens is foggy, your film’s not going to look very good. If you can write beautifully and sharply and capture people and places in their essence, you’re helping people see, you’re conveying it more accurately. I think a lot about this. It’s really a focus for me.

MS: You’ve said in the past that you like approaching your subjects as an outsider. What does that mean for your work and how you approach your writing?

PH: At this point I’m sort of an outsider everywhere. There’s no place where I feel totally like a local. So everywhere I go I’m seeing things through the perspective of other experiences and other countries. I think that’s the role that I try to take as a journalist. I also find myself attracted to characters who are outsiders, to people like Sayyid and Manu, to people like the Chinese in Upper Egypt. My father’s a sociologist and I was influenced by those ideas as much as I was influenced by the ideas of fiction. There was a very early German social scientist, Georg Simmel, who wrote an essay called “The Stranger.” The stranger is the person who is in the community but not of the community. He’s not a total outsider, but he’s also not a traveler. He’s somebody who’s there on a regular basis, somebody like Sayyid who comes there everyday and picks up the trash, but he’s of a different class, a different neighborhood. Those people often have really interesting insights, and people respond to them in different ways.

I’m also a stranger, so everywhere I go, people will tell me things that they wouldn’t tell other locals because I’m different. Like those Chinese who could sell lingerie in Upper Egypt—people said they don’t gossip, they don’t talk. That’s why we trust them.

In terms of understanding a country, local perspective is fundamental. You need to have Egyptians writing about Egypt, just as you need Chinese writing about China. But it’s also very useful to have an outsider’s perspective. I feel like that’s one thing I can do in these places: get a framework of expertise and familiarity at some level, but also maintain some of the distance I have as an outsider and as an observer. In the end you need every kind of perspective. You need to have local perspectives. You need to have outside perspectives. You need to have male perspectives, female, young, old, and so on. And I’m particularly aware of that because Leslie and I have different profiles here in China. She’s a Chinese-American woman, and I’m a white American man. People respond to us in different ways and we develop different kinds of projects. We did the same thing in Egypt. The things she was researching I couldn’t research. And so the goal is to find the thing that works for you, the thing that you can do that’s a little unique.

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Peter Hessler is a writer of narrative nonfiction and the author of five books. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2000 and is also a contributing writer at National Geographic Magazine. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011. He currently resides in Chengdu, China, with his wife, journalist Leslie T. Chang, and their daughters.

Michael Schmale is pursuing an MFA in fiction writing at The New School in New York City. He lived in China from 2008 through 2011.

by Gina Chung

Thanks to the cooperation of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) and Creative Writing at The New School, as well as the tireless efforts of our students and faculty, we are able to provide interviews with each of the NBCC Awards Finalists for the publishing year 2019.

Mary Ruefle is the author of several collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce, was longlisted for the National Book Award and is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the LA Times Book Prize. She has also published two collections of prose (My Private Property and The Most Of It) and a book of collected lectures (Madness, Rack, and Honey).

In Dunce, Mary Ruefle examines death, endings, and our relationship to the everyday objects and rituals that remind us, even while they provide comfort and solace, of the fundamental frailty and uncertainty of life. We spoke recently by phone (the “Contact” section of Ruefle’s website states, wonderfully, that she does not own a computer and that “The only way to contact me is by contacting my press, Wave Books, or by running into someone I know personally on the street”) about duncedom, balancing the contradictory needs for attention and solitude, and the importance of wonder.

I thought we could start by talking about the title of your book. What do you think are the benefits of embracing one’s own “duncedom”?

You know, we’re all dunces, to begin with, and I guess at my age, I am not afraid to be one. We’re all, when we’re young, self-conscious, and we judge ourselves against other people, and we’re embarrassed or ashamed to be who we are and often feel stupid. I know I did. And I’m no longer embarrassed or ashamed to feel stupid.

Do you think that that’s extended to your writing life as well?

Yes, I’m not afraid to write stupid poems.

There’s a line in one of the poems in Dunce where you say, “I hate my poems,” which I related to a lot—it encapsulates that feeling of being in the midst of writing and having a moment of self-consciousness but persevering through it.

Oh yes, absolutely. One perseveres. One can only persevere when one, ultimately and finally, doesn’t care. You do what you want to do and what makes you happy. I always thought that people would say, “These poems are so stupid.” And then I could say, because of the title, “That’s the point!”

Many of the poems throughout Dunce touch on the idea of uncertainty. Do you think it’s important for writers and artists to become comfortable with uncertainty?

Absolutely. It’s essential. If you’re not comfortable with uncertainty, you wouldn’t continue to create. Because you never know if what you’re doing is worthwhile. You can’t presume to know if it’s worthwhile or how others will react to it, if you’re going down the right path, the wrong path—there is no certainty in creative activity. The only thing that’s certain is that it gives you joy to do it, to engage in it.

In an interview you did with the WMFA Podcast, you mentioned that a lot of writers, especially younger ones, have to learn how to balance the need for community with the need to be alone and write. How have you managed to balance those two needs throughout your writing life?

It’s a constant struggle. [laughs] There have been periods in my life where it was easier to do. Part of the problem with work getting attention is you always want to be left alone. But at the same time, you want attention. Everyone does. I’d be lying if I said that artists didn’t want attention. But they also want to be left alone. It’s a rack—I use the word rack as in, an element of torture. It’s difficult, I’m not always successful at it. I don’t know how I do it. I get overwhelmed very easily. I’m not a person who likes a lot of activity.

What does a successful day of writing look like for you?

A successful day of writing would be a day in which I’ve written something. It could be a letter, it could be a poem, it could be jotting something down. A successful day of writing is getting anything at all done. I do not think of myself as highly disciplined, but I feel grateful every day that writing comes naturally to me. I don’t necessarily run after it. It finds me, knock on wood. I write something every day. It might not be what you or I would call creative work, but it all is. I keep shopping lists; that’s writing. They look like poems, right?

Yeah, I think that so much of the work you’re doing as a writer is unconscious, and it’s happening while you’re doing other things.

That’s how it is with me. My writing—I do it while I’m doing other things. It’s taking place in my head, and I could be driving or washing dishes, and I’m writing in my head.

Has your relationship to your poetry changed throughout your writing life, including, perhaps, how you feel about poems you’ve written a couple years ago?

No, that’s pretty much stayed the same. I know a lot of poets, and I know many of them have the same experience, when you write something and you think “Oh, this is great. This is the best thing I’ve ever written.” And then you look at it the next day, and you see that it’s miserable, that you’ve failed once again and it’s terrible, and you hate it. And then after ten years, you look back on it, and you’re kind of fond of it. I think every ten years our relationship to our prior work changes. It’s like looking at old photographs. You know—the girl who thinks she was very ugly when she was a teenager and is absolutely convinced it’s true, then at 50, she looks at old photos and says, “Hey! I wasn’t.” My relationship to my work does fluctuate. I don’t spend a lot of time actually thinking about my relationship to my work. It’s just something I do because it gives me the greatest pleasure on earth, and my head would explode with pressure if I couldn’t write.

Many of the poems in the collection seem to be coming from a place of wonder. Is that a perspective that you have to consciously cultivate for yourself in your writing?

I wouldn’t say I cultivate it. It’s how I perceive the world. I perceive the world as being absolutely full of wonder. And things are wondrous to me that are quite ordinary to other people. Many years ago, I remember there was some discussion online about an old poem of mine called “Peeling an Orange.” And it was these young students trying to figure out what it was about, and it made me laugh because it was me describing peeling an orange, literally, peeling the fruit. And later I said something like, there’s nothing more wondrous than to peel an orange. And someone else completely thought that was the most ridiculous statement in the entire world. To them, it was this ordinary, boring, un-wondrous thing. But to this day, I think peeling an orange is pretty cool. [laughs] So I suppose it’s extreme in my case and perhaps that’s unfortunate, but again, I don’t care. Look, electricity, running water is miraculous to me. Just miraculous. I still don’t know how electricity works. But it’s amazing, you know? You touch a switch and there’s light.

I feel like a lot of what poetry is trying to do is asking us to slow down and take a look at the things that we take for granted, to think about what it means to turn on a switch and suddenly have a room filled with light.

Hopefully, poetry does help us see the world in fresh ways or consider very serious problems as they unfold on earth. There are many different aspects to wonder. We can wonder how it is that our species fucked up so badly and destroyed the planet. It’s not always wondering about delightful things. Sometimes we wonder about the sources of evil in the world. I say that because it’s important at all times to see the fuller picture. Wonder does not belong exclusively to joy. Wonder also belongs to grief and sadness.

You also work as an erasure artist. Do you find the process of creating by erasing to be similar or different from the process of writing poetry?

They have a lot in common but they’re also very, very different. One is much more of a visual activity, and I am very disciplined about that. It’s about the only thing I do that I am very disciplined about. I work on erasure every single morning first thing, every morning that I’m home. Very often, I use the text that’s left on an erased page. If I really love it, it will go into a poem. So there are lines in my poems that come out of erasure. I’m sure there are in Dunce.

What do you think is the most important trait for emerging writers to cultivate?

Patience. Patience. Patience. Which would be acceptance that things aren’t going to be easy and that this evolves over a very long period of time, a lifetime. So many young writers are miserable if they don’t publish a book by the time they’re 25. That’s outrageously stupid. Get a grip. Patience.

What kind of advice would you give yourself as a younger writer?

I would tell myself—but my younger self would not believe me—that all the things I thought mattered, none of them mattered. The only thing that mattered was writing. In other words, writing is the key to my own personal happiness. But when we’re young, we’re searching for many other keys, right? I think I’ve said this much more eloquently in an essay, but if the only thing you need to be happy is writing, you’ve got it. But you’re looking for community, you’re looking for love, you’re looking for a job, you’re looking for money, you’re looking for attention, whatever you’re looking for—you already have it, if you have an activity that completely satisfies you.

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Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce, My Private Property, and Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. She is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow. Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.

Gina Chung is a writer and editor pursuing an MFA in Fiction at The New School. Originally from New Jersey and now based in Brooklyn, she is the Communications Manager at PEN America and is currently working on a collection of short stories. Find her on Twitter @ginathechung.

By Vanessa Chan

Thoughtful, quiet, and yet at times troubling and terrifying, Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive refuses to conform. It is a story of a road trip, a journey of an evolving family, a snapshot of a dissolving marriage, an interrogation of who gets to write what, a history lesson, a political awakening, an investigation of the issue of undocumented children, an exercise of breaking tropes, and that’s just the first twenty pages. A pair of unnamed parents are driving southwest with the man’s ten-year-old son and the woman’s five-year-old daughter. Over the course of the trip, we observe the internal struggle of the primary narrator, Ma, as she observes the dissolution of the couple’s marriage, while becoming more absorbed by the plight of undocumented refugee children that she comes to call the “lost children.” Eventually, the narrator’s own children go missing, culminating in a 20-page single sentence climax that breaks every convention, and that the reader is unable to look away from. On top of this wide range of themes, Luiselli also creates a novel-within-a-novel – a book called “Elegies for Lost Children” that is interspersed throughout Lost Children Archive, about children who live atop train cars, trying to make their way through rough jungle and desert terrain to an unnamed land of their dreams. The metaphor is a clear spotlight on the current immigration crisis but does not feel over-wrought. Despite its range, Lost Children Archive remains incredibly readable, with the second half is so engrossing, one is unable to put it down for fear of missing something.

Luiselli spoke with New School MFA student Vanessa Chan about Lost Children Archive, how her background informed the novel, and her writing process. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You are a child of many places – Mexico City, South Korea, India, to name a few. How has this very global upbringing influenced your chosen profession, and what you choose to write about?

The decision to devote my life to writing is something that sprung from a life of constant mobility. I had to find some kind of axis around which to organize the chaos of my experience. I found that axis rather early – in the page, and in putting my pen down on a piece of paper to make sense of things. All my books are about displacement. One thing that has emerged over and over again for me is how to move between languages. I speak four languages. I try find a space in which both languages that I speak natively, English and Spanish, can enrich each other and contaminate each other. Not necessarily in vocabulary but in cadence and flow.

More recently, there have been intense debates about who gets to write what – and the challenges of writing histories and stories that do not belong to the author. You even discuss this within the novel (and you obviously wrote this novel with care). How did you interrogate this concern with yourself, and how did that influence the narrative decisions you made in Lost Children Archive?

This is definitely an important question and one that I’m very attentive to. That’s the reason why at some point I stopped writing the novel all together. At one point when I was writing the novel, I realized I was trying to use it as a space to denounce what I was witnessing as a volunteer translator at immigration court. As I was writing the novel, I was also translating testimonies from undocumented children in immigration court from Spanish to English to help them find lawyers that would represent them before an immigration judge. I was transferring what I was witnessing at court into the novel and realized I was not doing justice to either the novel or the immigration situation. The novel was getting swamped, raw and heavy with not-well-thought-out material. At the same time, I wasn’t doing any justice to the issue because I was trying to fix it in some kind of fictional form. So, I stopped writing the novel, and I wrote [the narrative nonfiction book], Tell Me How It Ends, which was written from the point of view of a close observer of the court. Then I was able to go back to Lost Children Archive and not think about the novel as a novel about immigration at all. It’s a novel that thinks about the problem of how to build political narrative, and how to write political and historical violence.

Do you think writers should write stories that do not “belong” to them?

I think that writers have the freedom but also the responsibility to write about what they don’t necessarily consider close to home. It is part of our task to imagine others, and other worlds and other minds, but it has to be done with common sense and intelligence and sensibility. It cannot be done thoughtlessly. You have to find, as a writer, and as a creator of any kind, an intersection between your aesthetic, your aspirations, and your ethical stances.

Lost Children Archive is written in journal-like fragments, and in two sections (mother and son), interspersed with the story from a made-up book Elegies for Lost Children. What is your writing process – do you write from beginning to end, by scene, in fragments, or some other way entirely?

I write some other way entirely. My writing grows in many different directions at the same time. I don’t choose a form before I begin or in the early stages of the writing process. I like the form to emerge from the process itself and the research. That’s why I don’t have any fixed structure or process before I begin, or during the early stages of the writing.

Towards the end of the novel there is an incredible 20-page single sentence which was a marvel to read.

I worked on that single sentence for a disproportionate amount of time, if you consider how long it took for me to write the novel. Those 20 pages might have taken me more than a quarter of the time I took to write the novel. It was necessary and also the hardest thing I’ve ever written.

Can you talk a bit more about the process of crafting that 20-page sentence?

I had to have a very clear and detailed sense of the imagined geography. My characters were coming from opposite directions moving towards a single center, above which there was a storm brewing, shifting, changing. That storm, that sky the characters had in common was an axis, but it was a mobile, moving axis. I had to provide a lot of clarity to move in a single sentence through that terrain. Plus, the sentence was not just a sentence – it shifts from second person in the past, to third person in the present. That constant shift had to be well-calibrated in order to work. And then that sentence had to branch out into descriptions of other scenes that were present in the minds of the characters who were brought together because they were a part of the same geography, like the woman that maps dead people in the desert. It was a hard section to write but it was one of the things that I enjoyed the most.

Congratulations, I thought it was incredible.

Thank you.

What was the first thing you wrote in Lost Children Archive?

I don’t remember what I wrote first because everything grew in such an organic mess like live matter. But I do remember the beginning as written, was the beginning. It took me about a year to write that beginning – a year of taking notes by hand until I felt the courage to jump into an electronic format. And when I did, the beginning I wrote then – the image of the children in the backseat of a car – was the beginning that stayed. It was also the seed of the novel, children in the backseat of their parents’ lives, but who slowly take control of their parents’ story and their parents’ way of telling their story.

You’ve received tons of compliments about your ability to write the children in this novel. My favorite line is when the girl says, “The point is, the point is, the point is always pointy.” And of course, the boy’s voice in the second half of the novel, is both observant and innocent. How are you able to access these children’s voices?

I have friends who are actors. I sometimes feel that part of the writing process is similar to what actor does when preparing seriously to embody another person, to become another person. In the novel, the character of the boy’s consciousness brewed inside me for a long time. And it was like once I felt fully inhabited by this other consciousness, I was able to write it. It came out swiftly because I had knowledge of this imagined person, once I sat down to write. That’s why for me the preparatory stages of writing are so important because it is where everything is slowly brewing. After that the writing process is much more joyful.

You’ve mentioned reading aloud parts of the novel to kids in your family.

I was very lucky because I have a lot of children around me – kids, step-kids, nieces, nephews, and I consulted with them a lot. I would say, “Would you do this” or “Would you say this” and they would say, “No that’s ridiculous, it would be like this.” Or I would read out loud and they would criticize and comment and give input. I was very lucky to have a very great team of experts in childhood. 

Sounds like it was really fun.

I asked them, “If you ran away, what would you do?” And then, “What you would you do next if you couldn’t have a phone, what would you do then?” Just like, consulting, and imagining with the kids was an incredible process.

What book do you keep by your bedside or go back to over and over for inspiration or comfort?

I really read [German-American philosopher and political theorist] Hannah Arendt often. I don’t always agree with what she says but I reread her. I reread Maria Zambrano who is a Spanish philosopher. I go back to Anne Carson a lot. I go back to Ovid’s Metamorphosis. There are a bunch of books go back to; there isn’t a single one.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of Faces in the Crowd, Sidewalks, The Story of My Teeth, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, and, most recently, Lost Children Archive. She is the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in New York City.

Vanessa Chan is a Malaysian writer scribbling about race, colonization, and women who don't toe the line. Her stories have appeared, or are forthcoming in Porter House Review, Atticus Review, Jezebel, Fiction Attic Press, Fiction Factory, Mekong Teahouse, and more. Recently, she was a finalist for the Porter House Review 2020 Editor’s Prize, judged by Carmen Maria Machado. Vanessa is based in New York where she is an MFA candidate at The New School, and an intern at One Story, after a ten-year career in public relations, most recently as director of communications at Facebook in California. She is currently at work on a novel.