Each Thursday this May, The New School Creative Writing program is collaborating with the New York Parks Conservancy to write poems in the park. This week's assignment was list poems. 
Join us each Thursday 12:30-2pm. Our subsequent themes are Haiku, Love Spells, and Walt Whitman.
Last night at The New School, Sarah Schulman accepted the 2018 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. We are honored to publish the text of her speech, as delivered at the award ceremony.
Thank you, friends. Trent asked me to speak briefly (well, forget about that) on the state of LGBT literature: where we are and where we are going. So, I am going to share some thoughts.
My focus tonight is to investigate what it means to be a successful writer while Donald Trump is president.
Now, I grew up in a family where being a smart female was an insurmountable problem and being gay was the ultimate disaster. And like many of you I have long lived in a dual reality, where I can walk into one room and find support, appreciation and intensely productive engagement, and walk into another room and be made to understand right away that I have absolutely no value. I have been praised and rewarded, and I have been discarded and overlooked. It depends on the room. Sexism, of course, is everywhere but even more importantly, point of view is the most strictly enforced element of any work of art accepted for public display by private entities. Within a few minutes of entering a room I can tell who allows themselves to notice lesbian work and who does not because one person says “Sarah you are doing so much” and the next one says “so Sarah, what do you do?” It is this disappearance in plain sight that speaks, in some ways, to the state of our literature.
I started publishing as a grassroots journalist and writing plays in 1979. I wrote for queer underground and subcultural newspapers: WomanNews, Gay Community News, The New York Native. My first novel was published in 1984 by a lesbian press out of Tallahassee Florida. My first play was self-produced in a jazz loft on East 7th called University of The Streets. I would have loved to have started at the NY Times, or had my first novel at Grove or Algonquin, or my first play at MCC or The Vineyard, but the hard reality of the time was that if a person had primary lesbian content and made art in which a queer person could recognize themselves authentically, then you were excluded from everything connected to a corporation and the legitimacy of reward that corporate culture grants to itself. The advantage was that I started out writing for the people I was writing about, and they turned out to be very demanding and responsive, and through all the ups and downs it is still that way.
People who are ignored care very deeply when they are represented. Since then I have bounced and bounced from the mainstream to the margins to oblivion and back. Ten years and four books at Dutton, 1 at Avon, ten years where I wrote four books that no one would publish, then they all came out at once, and everyone thought I had a manic episode. For the last few years I have been in academic presses like Duke and University of California from both corporate and public universities, most recently at the scrappy, hardscrabble Feminist Press, that is publishing my next book, Maggie Terry: a novel of murder and intrigue, in the fall and a few years from now a new nonfiction book will come from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. So in and out, high and low, grassroots and corporate, visible and hidden. While there already was a community of queer writers for me to come out into, that included such luminaries as Jaime Manrique and Jennifer Levin, Bob Gluck and Eileen Myles, many of my queer female peers who were also born in the 1950’s with talent and drive, made the decision to repress or marginalize the lesbian content of their work and point of view so that they could have viable careers. But I couldn’t do that because it was boring. People in struggle are the most fascinating people on earth. They produce new ideas and new formal strategies and transformative visions of social and artistic possibility that are the soul of new ideas in art and culture.
We are living right now in a very sick society, currently in the throes of a national cataclysm, and so, among the other twisted logics of white supremacy, male power, and violent nationalism, we also have this constant false messaging that repetition of what is already known is good writing, and familiarity equals quality, when in fact it is the other way around: the most culturally valuable work is the invitation to question ourselves, how we think, and to vigorously question how we live. Someone once told me that Picasso said “The innovator makes it ugly and the derivator makes it beautiful” – meaning that the struggle to break through to a new place that has never been seen before is classified as “wrong” while watering down those discoveries and innovations until they are entirely palatable is what we are told to strive for. And this applies to LGBT work as well.
Unfortunately there is absolutely no relationship between quality and reward. I say this as a person who has been rewarded and at other times eliminated. Most art that is rewarded in an unjust society is work that re-enforces that society’s operative values. And when you look at the LGBT work that has been canonized, much of it makes the dominant culture very self-satisfied. Occasionally something or someone that is actually of great value does get rewarded, but usually not because of their real accomplishment, it’s usually because the person or the work also fits the agenda of the gatekeepers’ need to see themselves as liberal or inclusive. It is important that we not be fooled by the allure of acceptance, as much as we all want it and should have it. For, too often the introduction of some queer person of great gifts into the reward system produces tokenism instead of cultural expansion, because that person’s individual success does not represent a paradigm shift, but actually enhances the gatekeepers’ power.
The worst thing we can do to ourselves is to like something because it has official approval. We should always be asking each other what a work that is approved of is actually saying, what it actually means and stands for, and what it actually represents. Beware of LGBT work that is Too Big To Be Questioned. So, even though I sincerely hope that all of us who are creating art in the world that actually matters can become the kind of person who can get heard and seen, if success happens let us not confuse that integration with any illusion of actual superiority, because corporate praise itself is often just a kind of entertainment. The difference between Entertainment and Art is that entertainment tells us what we already know in the ways that we have been taught to think, and art expands how we think and feel and what we come to understand. The Chinese-American novelist Gish Jen once said to me about the straight, white domination of American letters, “We are the center of the culture, but they have the apparatus.”
So how do these parameters express themselves today in the context of a completely corrupt America that is in a putrid state of long-term and on-going decline, fueled by racism? Obviously we see gay things everywhere in corporate culture. We see trans people on corporate television, we see mini-series about AIDS on corporate television, we see Ellen on corporate television, we see Pulitzer Prizes and MacArthurs and Tony Awards and Oscars going to gay things, some of those things that we actually love. And so it is confusing but necessary to parse how and why some of these gay things re-enforce the power of the already dominant, some are oppositional but still enhance the self-concept of the gatekeepers, and some are relegated to the margins because they would upend or destabilize the self-concept of those with the power of selection. There is a logic to inclusion and exclusion, but it takes some original thought to be able to understand it.
Remember that when the NY Times looks at the brutal murder of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza and calls it a “conflict” or “clash” instead of “a war crime”, that is the same machine that is telling us which are the year’s most notable books. The government that told us that Sadaam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, is the same machine that gives out NEA grants. From the perspective of people struggling for existence, mass murder is not a “conflict” just as corporate rehash of dominant cultural values is not the year’s most notable. But it thinks it is. Our challenge is to resist these false categorizations, which is emotionally very difficult because even if we have given up crass patriotism, we all still cling to the myth of the American dream of meritocracy, of being discovered, and making it – of breaking out, and being the next big thing, these wishes are branding and marketing techniques to keep us from fully refusing the falsity of the American façade.
One of my heroes, Wilhelm Reich, said that while he could easily understand why a starving man steals a loaf of bread, he could never understand why a starving man did NOT steal a loaf of bread. And in America today the reason that writers whose basic rights – both civil and representational – don’t steal that loaf of bread is because they think that doing so might keep them from being Discovered, Breaking Out and Making It. So, the fantasy that we could be one of the tiny, tiny handful who end up well paid becomes justification for our intellectual and artistic servitude to the aesthetics of corporate power. But what made you become a writer in the first place? And we will get back to that.
So here are some structures that I have noticed in the past few years that help me to understand what obstacles LGBT literature is facing in Trump’s Americas. Let's start with the ever important question: Who has the power?
1. I recently noticed that young white straight women are the current occupants of entry-level power. They are usually not the big bosses, but they are at the front desk of every institution of cultural production. They don’t have enough power to let you in, that belongs to their bosses, but they do have the power to keep you out.
2. A second trend I observed recently is that young editors and critics are more respectful to queer literature if they read an author’s books in college. The legitimizing practice of having a professor assign and enlighten the value of a book stays with the cooperative student and influences their taste and standards for life.
3. I recently had the opportunity to meet a man who has long been a power player of American publishing. I was delighted with myself getting into his presence, but all that self-congratulatory glee disappeared when he asked me, in all sincerity “Have you ever been published?” Later I had to process this. For thirty of my forty years in publishing, and my 19 books, I have been in places, consistently, where this man looks. I have been in the New York Times Book Review and on the Op-Ed page, I have been in The New Yorker and Harpers, and Publishers Weekly year after year. What I realized is that even when we appear in the places that these people with real power value, when a quick glance reveals that the article or book review is about something lesbian or AIDS, the fact is, they turn the page. They just turn the page. This is an obstacle to LGBT literature. But it is also a lesson. Being among them is not enough.
4. Some of you are aware, and Alissa Solomon wrote a piece about this in American Theater, that there has been a trend of three white gay male classic plays revived on Broadway this season. Why? This is the year that fascists took over the White House, the year that people from seven Muslim countries were denied visas, that immigrants are being rounded up and deported, that white vigilante violence is on the rise, that police violence is a daily reality, abortion is barely available this year. So when we are told by the media that these plays are important right now, when they are not, I think we need to understand this as an obstacle to LGBT literature.
Now, this year we saw one of the most significant pieces of American journalism come from our own community. Linda Villarosa wrote two cover stories for the NY Times Magazine: one on the impact of racism on Black motherhood, and one startling work of reporting showing that Black gay men in the US south have higher rates of HIV infection than any country in the world. But while the coverage of Angels In America told us over and over again that this revival is “relevant” and “necessary” without ever telling us exactly why, they never mention that Black gay men in the US south have higher HIV rates than any country in the world. This is an obstacle to LGBT literature. How could they not reference the reporting of Black gay journalist Steven Thrasher for the Guardian of London on the case of Michael Johnson, the black gay athlete who just served 3 years in prison because of HIV criminalization, one of the scariest trends in global AIDS? How could the people promoting these works being touted as the representative voices of our communities have not integrated Linda’s articles right on the cover of the Times Magazine into their public discourse? I guess those guys just...turned the page. This is an obstacle to LGBT literature.
So, what’s the good news? The good news is you. That there remains another room to walk into, a parallel yet fragile world of people held together by fragile institutions, who welcome oppositional and visionary voices, like The Publishing Triangle, or the MIX Festival, or Queer Art Mentorship, or Le Petit Versailles, or the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging Writers Retreat, or the Bronx Academy of Art and Dance, or Saints and Sinners in New Orleans, or Cave Canem, or Dixon Place, Snister Wisdom, or The Bureau, or Queer Memoir, or the queer people of color underground of the annual AWP conference, and small presses like Arsenal Pulp and Nightboat and the crucial work of Topside Press in creating audiences for trans writers – these sidebar necessary cultural constructions are where our real literature is born.
The good news is that the mantle of lesbian and bi-sexual queer women’s literature is being carried on by out young women of color writers, with overtly queer content in their work like Melissa Febos, Myriam Gurba, Reina Gosset and Catherine Hernandez and many others. The good news is that the grassroots, community-based structures, all of which rely on models of mentorship and mutual aid, are still providing new and old artists from the margins with places and spaces in which to develop their voices without being molded into one dimensional parodies of queer lives, easy to contain, consume and dismiss. And even as more and more of us are finding places inside the apparatus, and I hope we all get the rewards and opportunities that we each want to have, yet simultaneously it should be clear to everyone here, that the corruption of our government, the domination of our thinking and our taste and desires by branding and marketing, the endless greed and dehumanization of American media, is not fixed by some queer and/or brown and/or female/nonbinary people getting a slice of the pie. It’s great for them, and they can do some good for others, but it does not signal actual change, the kind created by coalitions and movements and counter cultures, the kind of change created by diverse communities working in tandem. Not by individuals – deserving and otherwise – with special access.
As we make our work, we also have to model behaviors and ways of having personal and social relationships that can facilitate a whole new and completely different way of living, a kind of – to be old-fashioned – liberation way of living. And you know that for me, as I expressed in my most recent book, Conflict Is Not Abuse, part of liberation means a community ethic to stop shunning, pick up the phone and talk about your differences, get together in person with the people you’re in conflict with instead of enlisting your clique or community or religion or corporate shield or race or nation to obliterate them. Stop being mean to a person or a group because someone you identity with told you to hurt them. Instead, ask the contested person what they think it going on. Why do they think this is happening? And whether that is your friend’s ex-friend, or people excluded by the Muslim ban, hear what the excluded person is experiencing. And we have to stop calling the police as a way to cover up our own unjust anxieties. Because what we have got in America right now is a system that is just cruel, in which the people in power are criminals, and people’s basic needs are ignored, and lives are ruined at whims of political game playing. So, any queer individual making it in that system is not a signifier of actual change. It’s great for that person, which has its own value, but it’s not enough.
And just to close, I want us all to remember that, in the end – what a writer wants more than anything, more than fame, more than money, even more than approval, is to feel deep in their hearts, that they are a good writer. And that someone cares about what they are writing, that it means something to the people at the heart of their work. And you have made me feel that way today. And I am so grateful to you for that feeling. Thank you.
Sarah Schulman is the 2018 recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, named in honor of the legendary editor of the 1970s and 1980s. She was presented with this prize, which carries an honorarium of $3,000, at the 30th annual Triangle Awards, a ceremony at the New School in New York City on April 26, 2018. Linda Villarosa, the director of the journalism program at the City College of New York and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, presented the award to Schulman.
Schulman is a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, and AIDS historian. Among her novels are The Cosmopolitans, The Child, and Rat Bohemia (winner of the 1996 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction). Her works of nonfiction include Conflict Is Not Abuse (winner of last year’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction), The Gentrification of the Mind, and Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences. Schulman’s nineteenth book, the novel Maggie Terry, will be published in September 2018 by the Feminist Press.
She is on the advisory boards of Jewish Voice for Peace, Research on the Israeli/American Alliance, and Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute, and she is faculty advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine. Besides her two earlier Publishing Triangle Awards and many other prizes, Schulman has also won a Guggenheim in playwriting, a Fulbright in Judaic studies, and two American Library Association Stonewall Awards. A fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, she is distinguished professor of the humanities at CUNY/College of Staten Island. She also teaches in such non-degree community-based programs as Queer Art Mentorship and Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.
By Kelly McHugh-Stewart
MFA alum Sharisse Tracey's latest essay "Picture Perfect" will be featured in the forthcoming anthology, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (Harper Collins, May 2018), edited by Roxane Gay.
"After learning of the call for submissions, I dedicated weeks to solely focusing on that one piece which ended up being a collage of things I’d written or wanted to write about the complexities of trauma," Tracy explained. "Although in fairness, I’ve been mentally composing, 'Picture Perfect,' for the past 34 years as a sexual assault survivor."
No easy story to tell, Tracey's "Picture Perfect" chronicles her story of being raped by her father at the age of 13 and the struggle to come to terms with that ultimate and subsequent betrayal.
"There were four excruciating months of waiting after submission, what would happen if I got in? What would happen if I didn’t? And then all the mixed feelings I experienced about a potential good thing being wrapped in a tragedy," she explained. "I tried my hardest to put the essay of out of my mind, and worked on my memoir, In Spite Of, all while having the proposed notification date circled on every calendar I had and etched in my brain. When the email arrived, I held my breath, and opened it. As soon as I saw the words we’d love to or congratulations…I hit print. I might have even hit print twice and then made a copy of the email. I’m a little OCD that way. I had to have it in both email and on paper, for proof.
"I was grateful. Grateful after so many decades that somebody listened to what happened to me."
Not That Bad will be released on May 1, but is available for preorder through the Harper Collins website by clicking here.
Along with sharing her story in Gay's upcoming anthology, Tracey's story will be read as a part of the play Not Someone Like Me on April 30, 2018 at SUNY Oswego as a part of their Sexual Assault Awareness campaign. The play, which was first directed by Chris Sarandon (the voice of Jack Skeleton from The Nightmare Before Christmas), features Tracey's story in addition to four other rape survivors.
"During the first reading of Not Someone Like Me written by Susan Rice in 2013, I had no idea of what to expect. I’d recently had my first essays published in Babble and the New York Times, while taking Sue Shapiro’s, class but never anything like someone reading my words, my life on stage in front of a live audience," Tracey said. "For so long I’ve been torn on the inside from having an experience like that set upon me by my own father. And after watching Moore’s performance it threw me into an out of body experience that lead me to the same questions I’d been asking since I was 13, why didn’t anybody listen? Why didn’t anybody help me? Why didn’t anybody care? I’m reminded of that devastating experience every time I look at my own daughter and wonder how can anyone hurt an innocent child.
"Just last Saturday, ABC’s news anchor Diana Williams hosted a special called "Protect Our Children: Sexual Abuse, The Law & Justice." I watched in horror listening to similar stories of childhood sexual abuse where the majority of the survivors didn’t tell because they were afraid or being threatened or manipulated in some way, but the one thing that always stands out in my own abuse is that I did tell. I told over and over again, and nothing was done. That still hurts. I think it always will. Now thanks to Tarana Burke’s #metoo movement, and organizations like RAINN and The Voices and Faces Project (where I’m an alumni of The Stories We Tell workshop) survivors stories are being heard.
"Although it’s important to note that this epidemic is far reaching and needs to focus more on the stories of the not-so-famous, the everyday women or men who don’t have the platform some of these celebrities do," Tracey continued. "Diane Sawyer’s special report "My Reality: A Hidden America" touches on this very topic. This I why for me, little Sharisse from Pasadena, California, having my story featured in a play like Not Someone Like Me means so much. It means everything."
At the first showing of the play in 2013, The New School alumni, Adrienne C. Moore (MFA Acting, 2009), who currently stars in the hit HBO series Orange Is The New Black, played the role of "Sharisse."
"Adrienne C. Moore’s portrayal of my character was palpable, captivating and overwhelming, but in the best possible way," Tracey said. "I felt so much empathy for the 'Sharisse character,' I forgot for a moment that was me. Now that’s a performance. Shortly after the second reading a few years later, I learned that she was cast as Black Cindy in Orange Is The New Black. I felt honored that a person of that caliber would play me. I just wish it was under a different set of circumstances. Happy times.”
For more on Tracey, you can check out MFA alum Paul Florez’s (Fiction, '15) interview with her about her time at The New School as well as her first time publishing with the New York Times. Read the full interview by clicking here.
The New School in New York City offers what we believe to be the country's premier urban writers colony. Each June, writers convene from around the country and around to world to transform their writing practices and immerse themselves in new possibilities for their work.
In writing workshops, students receive individualized feedback and the support to push their writing into new territory. In literary salons, students study notable new books and join their authors in conversation. Students also participate in specialized craft sessions and publishing talks all at the national epicenter of literary production.
The 2018 Summer Writing Workshop faculty include Sharon Mesmer (fiction), Madge McKeithen (nonfiction), and John Reed (Multi-genre).
This year’s visiting writers include acclaimed authors Stephanie Burt, Teju Cole, Sarah Gerard, Lisa Ko, Layli Long Soldier, and Hannah Tinti.
This year’s Summer Writers Colony takes place from June 4-21, 2018.
Undergraduate students who attend the Summer Writers Colony will have the opportunity to earn 6 credits for transfer, however the Summer Writers Colony is open to noncredit students as well. Registration for the colony is currently open.
For more information about the Summer Writers Colony, and to register now, please click here. You may also contact program director Laura Cronk at 212.229.5611 or summerwriters@newschool.edu
More information on the Creative Writing Program at The New School:
The New School has been a vital center for writing since 1931. Over the years, our writing and literature faculty has included many of America's most acclaimed poets, novelists, and nonfiction writers. The Summer Writers Colony alone has brought some of today's most exciting writers to join us in Greenwich Village, including Joan Acocela, Paul Beatty, Anne Carson, Lucille Clifton, Lydia Davis, Stephen Elliot, Mary Gaitskill, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rick Moody, Maggie Nelson,Gary Shteyngart, Brando Skyhorse, John Jeremiah Sullivan, James Tate, Jean Valentine, and Colson Whitehead.
A look at the 2018 Visiting Writers:
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University and the author of several books of poetry and literary criticism, among them Belmont, Parallel Play, Close Calls with Nonsense, The Forms of Youth: 20th Century Poetry and Adolescence, and The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary Poems and How to Read Them. She grew up in and around Washington, DC, has lived in Connecticut, New York, England, New Zealand, and Minnesota, and now resides in Belmont, Massachusetts, with her spouse Jessie and their children Cooper and Nathan. Her most recent book is Advice from the Lights.
Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975 and raised in Nigeria. He is the author of Every Day Is for the Thief and Open City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the New York City Book Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His photography has been exhibited in India and the United States. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
Sarah Gerard is the author of the best-selling book of essays Sunshine State and novel Binary Star (Two Dollar Radio), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and appeared on best book of the year lists for NPR, Vanity Fair, Buzzfeed, and Flavorwire. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review Daily, Vice, BOMB, and other publications. She teaches writing in New York City.
Lisa Ko is the author of National Book Award fiction finalist The Leavers. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Apogee Journal, Narrative, Copper Nickel, the Asian Pacific American Journal, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Writers OMI at Ledig House, the Jerome Foundation, and Blue Mountain Center, among others. She was born in New York City, where she now lives.
Layli Long Soldier is the author of the 2018 National Books Critic Circle poetry award winner Weheras and is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Hannah Tinti is the author of The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley. Her short story collection Animal Crackers was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her bestselling novel The Good Thief won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and an American Library Association Alex Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Tinti is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning literary magazine One Story.
The Creative Writing Program is excited to announce John Reed will be teaching a multi-genre workshop at this year's Summer Writers Colony.
This literary arts workshop will cover narrative storytelling (prose or script), poetry, hybrid forms, and essay writing/nonfiction. Classes will consist of writing workshops; writing prompts; sharing exercises; and instruction and discussions about creative structures, forms and work strategies. Guests will visit the workshop to talk to students about different creative approaches, and to demystify the publishing process. The course is designed to introduce students to a spectrum of creative possibilities, and to encourage new projects, as well as to strengthen the revision process for projects currently underway.
John Reed is the author of the novels A Still Small Voice (Delacorte Press/Delta), The Whole (Simon & Schuster /Pocket/MTV Books), the SPD bestseller, Snowball's Chance (Roof Books/Melville House), All The World's A Grave: A New Play By William Shakespeare (Penguin Books/Plume), and Tales of Woe (MTV Press); Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love Poems (C&R Press).
Seats are still available in the Summer Writers Colony Fiction workshop with Sharon Mesmer, and in the Nonfiction workshop with Madge McKeithen.
Join the Creative Writing Program, in collaboration with The New School's Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, on Wednesday, April 18 for an evening of readings and conversation by renowned authors Valeria Luiselli and mónica teresa ortiz, around the politics of borders and belonging.
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. A novelist (Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth) and essayist (Sidewalks and Tell Me How It Ends), her work has been translated into many languages. In 2014, Faces in the Crowd was the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award. The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the 2015 Los Angeles Times Prize for Best Fiction.
mónica teresa ortiz was born and raised in Texas. Her work has recently appeared in Winter Tangerine Review, Texas Review, and her first poetry collection, muted blood, is forthcoming from Black Radish Books in summer 2018.
This event is part of the Zolberg Institute's performance and film series pictures in motion. of motion. for motion.
*photography credit for mónica teresa ortiz (left): gloria delgadillo alvarado
*photography credit for Valeria Luiselli image (right): Alfredo Peleastre
Congratulations to 2018 Summer Writers Colony visiting writer Layli Long Soldier who has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry!
Layli's award winning book WHEREAS: Poems will be read and discussed as a featured book for this summers's writers colony. Other visiting writers include:
2018 Literary Salon Visiting Writers:
• Stephanie Burt, critic, poet, and author of Advice from the Lights: Poems
• Teju Cole, acclaimed writer, critic, and photographer, and author of the innovative new photobook Blind Spot
• Sarah Gerard, author of the critically acclaimed essay collection Sunshine State
• Lisa Ko, author of the novel The Leavers, a 2017 National Book Award Finalist
• Hannah Tinti, best-selling novelist, co-founder of One Story, and author, most recently, of The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley: A Novel
Registration for this year's Summer Writers Colony, which takes place from June 4-21, is now open.
This intensive three-week program provides a supportive yet challenging atmosphere in which to develop as a writer, whether you are embarking on a new writing project or developing a work-in-progress. You and your peers share and critique one another's ongoing projects in a daily writing workshop moderated by a member of The New School's distinguished writing faculty. Instructors also provide detailed written feedback on all work submitted. In the evenings, our literary salons bring notable writers into conversation with the students and faculty of the colony.
Through additional craft sessions and publishing panels, you can try your hand at specialized writing activities such as experimental fiction, food writing, or writing a walking poem during a literary tour of Greenwich Village. The entire Summer Writers Colony community gathers for celebratory readings of student and faculty work.
• Courses meet from 12:00 noon to 8:00 p.m., Monday through Thursday.
• Mornings and weekends are reserved for individual writing practice and for enjoying your summer in New York City.
• Undergraduate students can earn 6 credits for transfer.
• The Summer Writers Colony is also open to noncredit students.
For more information on the Writers Colony, please click here.
To read MFA student Melanie Curran's interview with Layli Long Soldier, click here.
By Chelsea Wolf
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 2017.
Chelsea Wolf, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, reviewed Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Harper), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.
I want to tell you about my skin or rather, the scars that pepper my skin. I haven’t been able to stop talking about them, writing about them, and photographing them since I read Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay. My wounds are self-inflicted, but not in the way that you think. They’re the result of 20 years of picking at the little red bumps, otherwise known as chicken skin, that riddle my body. Picking at myself started as a kind of self-soothing after my father left and eventually morphed into a way of saying, “You marked me and now I want to mark myself even worse.” They are a way of letting people know that while I can’t always say what happened to me, I can wear it on me always. Or, in the words of Roxane Gay, “I am going to keep telling them even though I hate having the stories to tell.”
Hunger has been described as brutal and it is a beautifully brutal read. In just over 300 pages, Gay ruthlessly takes the reader through the events of her childhood that led to her significant weight gain, the subsequent dieting- weight loss - weight gain cycle she has been in for over 20 years, and the ways in which she moves through a world that is not only made for thin people but hates fat people.
At the age of 12, Gay was gang-raped by a group of boys, including a popular boy she loved and trusted. Not wanting to bring her shame to her parents, hard working Haitian immigrants, she turned to food. “I was hollowed out. I was determined to fill the void, and food was what I used to build a shield around what was left of me.”
Soon after, she entered a private high school in New Hampshire, away from the watchful eyes of her parents, where she gained 30 pounds in two and a half months. During the summers, she would attend weight loss camps or subsist solely on liquid diets, always at the suggestion of her well-meaning parents. She would return to school thinner and to praise from her classmates, only to be overcome with anxiety about the dangers of her shrinking body. Always she would gain all of the weight back and then some. This cycle continued into her college years, even when she left Yale in her sophomore year to move to Arizona with a man she met on the internet during what she describes as her “lost year.”
At her heaviest, Gay weighed 577 pounds. She discloses this number early in the book with a frank honesty, as if to say, “now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…” She has succeeded in making her body a “fortress,” a “cage.” Gay convinces herself that if she makes herself as big as possible, she will no longer be attractive to men, thus keeping her safe.
Interspersed with her own story of her “unruly body” are observations on how women are taught to hate their bodies from a young age. Between the celebrity endorsed weight loss commercials, the idea of the “revenge body,” and gossip magazines criticizing or praising women based on their weight, women are inundated with the notion that what we are is never enough, even when it is too much.
Hunger is not your typical survivor story. Even the title, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, alludes to the fact that this story isn’t hers alone. Gay doesn’t consider herself a survivor, instead preferring the word victim, explaining, “I don’t want to diminish the gravity of what happened. I don’t want to pretend I’m on some triumphant, uplifting journey.” I sat with this explanation for a while, rolling the words around on my tongue before swallowing, hard. The way one does with the truth.
Gay lays herself bare in a way that most writers aren’t capable of doing. It is not just a memoir about the body but about the ways we learn to protect ourselves after trauma. At one point, Gay wonders about the person she would have been if the day in the woods had never happened. “When I imagine this woman who somehow made it to adulthood unscarred, she is everything I am not.” And that’s the scariest thought, isn’t it? To imagine who you could have been without your trauma?
Roxane Gay gave me permission to look at parts of my life and say out loud, “this is not okay.” She gave me permission to imagine a life where I don’t need to tear my own skin apart in order to not feel my father’s hands on it.
What Roxane Gay has achieved in writing “Hunger” is not only taking back her body, her story, but giving a voice, or some sense of courage, to other struggling women, both survivors and victims. We are all trying our best, to rewrite our story not for what it isn’t but for what it is, one body, one scar, one truth at a time.
Chelsea Wolf is a writer and musician living in New York City. She is an MFA candidate in Nonfiction at The New School. When she is not working on her memoir, she enjoys short walks on the beach (weak ankles), binge-watching "Law & Order: SVU,” and wrangling feral cats. Performing under the name Noie, she recently released the EP “Blue Devil Fits,” which can be streamed at SoundCloud.com/Noiemusic. Her musings can be found on Twitter @ChelsWolf
By Mika Bar-On Nesher
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 2017.
Mika Bar-On Nesher, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Ludmilla Petrushevskaya about her book The Girl From the Metropol Hotel: Growing up in Communist Russia (Penguin), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.
The Girl from The Metropol Hotel is a thin book, but contains an unspeakable terror: the collective memory of Russia during WWII and the turbulent decades that followed. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s family belonged to a long line of prominent Bolsheviks who were labeled “Enemies of the State” during The Great Purge. They were brutally murdered. Cast out of the luxurious Metropol Hotel, a former Bolshevik headquarters, the few remaining women of Petrushevskaya ’s family were stricken with political stigma and forced into the darkest outskirts of Soviet society. It is in this setting we encounter the voice of the young Ludmilla, a child who not only survives but possesses the power to make the terror beautiful with her unique imagination.
Today Petrushevskaya lives in Moscow, at seventy-nine-years-old she is famous for her paintings, books, and more recently a career as a cabaret singer. Her courage and resilience have helped an entire generation of war children express what was mute and unspeakable. The book shows a young girl who never gives up her power, never checks the resonance of her powerful voice. As a child she was a political outcast, but the power of her genius kept her intact. She never cared about publishing or fame, yet she has been a consistent pillar, always herself, forever attuned to finding the beauty in any setting and the truth in every story.
Translated by Angela Fox & Christopher Jeffrey
Mika Bar-On Nesher: What was your artistic process like when working on this book? How did you find writing a memoir different from writing short stories?
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya: I wrote that book - as it happened - when my aunt Vava was dying. She was 93 years old and it was her first time in a hospital. She was very upset there. I, too, found myself beginning to die. I couldn’t eat. I lost 14 kilograms during the time of her gradual deterioration. Every single day, I was writing The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, and I was feeling such guilt, that at nine-years-old, I had run away from them with my grandmother. Vava had already completely lost her memory, and I visited her to put her to sleep. Together with the nurse, I changed her clothes, tucked her in, mumbling to her, as a mother to a child, despite knowing that she didn’t understand anymore. And suddenly, she wriggled out (slipped out) with some strength and kissed my hand. And I thought, that I would never let her read my book.
A writer doesn’t control his or herself - I don’t, in any case. I have the impression, that from the first moment of a work, the entire text is already sitting in my head, from the first to the last word. So this type of process that you’re asking me about doesn’t depend on me. I don’t control this dictation. It comes all on its own. It’s up to you to catch it and write it down. That’s why I always carry a notebook and pen with me. One time, a story came to me, but I was on the metro, in a crowd. And I didn’t have a pen. I arrived home, but to my complete despair, the story had gone. Only the following day, already at work, I went to the library, and by sheer willpower, knowing the story’s content, I forced it back. But it was already a different version. The poetry was gone. The rhythm was gone, the intensity, the word order, that can only be brought on by inspiration. By the way, one critic wrote that if stories match with their rhythms, then they are vers libre… but I thought in response, that’s a very long vers libre. You know, I very rarely edit a written text. I believe that it has been dictated to me as it’s meant to be. It can overtake me anywhere - on the street, on the train, in a store. Besides, as a rule, every tale is a true story. It’s true, the characters do not recognize themselves, I crucially change the surrounding circumstances. Regardless of whether the text is magical or far removed from reality - like in the book There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby, for which I received the World Fantasy Award in the USA in 2009. All the things in that book were also written down instantly, at once. When I was raising my children, in the neighboring room lay a sick mama, and so I got to work, right away. Now, I live alone and time has started to drag. I’ve almost finished two books, but I wait for the right moment to finish them. The finale of one of them, by the way, is inspired by a James Bond film.
MB: You are one of those rare artists who possess the ability to express yourself in writing, music, and painting. What is the limit and benefit of each medium for you? What can come across in a song that cannot be expressed in a story; how is the process of painting in private particular and distinct from that of performing in front of an audience?
LP: I draw constantly on a scrap of paper or in the notebook that I’m writing in. These sketches - just hand movements, some sort of profiles, and then it appears to me - I seem to be making up some sort of stories with these characters. This is how many children behave, they draw, they create and compose. But serious work - watercolors, illustrations for my books, comics, cartoons, portraits, pastels, engravings - for these endeavors it takes a whole day, or even a week, when I cannot spend time on anything else. Over the last few years, I started to sell my work, to raise money to support disabled orphans whom I take care of. Harvard University’s library has purchased 21 of my works, and the proceeds support these children.
As far as the concerts, it seems, I am a born actress, who sings for morsels of bread (like Edith Piaf). This ability to stand before people and sing has long sustained me. I performed on school and university stages. And I even earned acceptance at the Conservatory, since my youth I developed a strong voice with a three-octave range. The concerts were held in grand halls, and from those experiences emerged my passion for being in front of an audience. But I stopped making appearances. Then, I only sang songs for children - or in the summer in the fields when no one could hear me. But I was always singing at home, sitting at the piano, when no one was around. Mainly French chansons. I recorded myself with a tape-recorder, then I’d listen. I’d erase it, and record again. I was trying to sing in my own way somehow. I taught myself on my own. After all, in private singing, you don’t need a strong voice. More important, you must find your own style, your own individuality. And suddenly, again I returned to the stage at 69 years old. It was World Theater Day, and we were celebrating in a small cafe; after all, I am a well-known playwright. Everyone came - my actors, directors, my fans and students. And I decided among these acquaintances and dear listeners to sing four songs in French. I was, all the same, terrified. But as I began to sing, I suddenly realized, that the joy of the audience was beginning to move me - to my left and to my right, we were all together in the music! All of us! At that moment, my fear left me, and in its place, happiness arrived - I returned to the stage and began to give concerts, I assembled my own musicians and formed the Kerosene Orchestra.
I began to compose my own songs. Waking up in the morning, already fully formed melodies sounded in my head. Ability arises in a person when it is needed after all… and writing the words to a song, that I could do. I am a poet, I’ve filled books with verses. Above all, I began to write songs like monologues, like little one-woman shows. Mostly about lost love. Of course, there are lots of songs about that.
I’ve toured all of Russia with my concerts. I’ve sung in New York (at the Russian Samovar), in Sao Paulo, London, Paris, in many European cities. I not only sing, but I read my rather amusing poems. I design my own hats, rings, dresses. I do my own makeup. The stage - it’s such a joy. And I consider my show to be my very own.
MB: Were there specific fictional characters that inspired you and shaped your worldview as a child? How do you think reading and fables shape identities?
LP: I drew inspiration not from books, but from the children’s groups in the summer camps and in the tuberculosis sanatoriums, where there was one caregiver for every thirty children. And we were alone in the bedrooms. And all throughout the night, I was telling scary stories. I made them up. But the collective is stern and educates children what not to do, according religious traditions - thou shalt not brag, thou shalt not be proud, thou shalt not lie, nor steal, nor sin. Thou shalt not be smarter than others, nor more talented than others. And the punishments are severe. But I always performed in the children’s shows, sang in the concerts, drew in the studios -- that was my answer to the collective. I was beaten. I answered. Art is the only place for the outcasts, for the poor, for those who have it worst. The collective opinion cannot conquer them, they can only be ruined by their own inclinations and weaknesses. Alcohol, narcotics. How many of my colleagues, young writers, are dead. Even I, myself, smoked, and at gatherings of all kinds drank wine, and then, when I was pregnant at 37, I quit it all. I stopped eating meat too.
MB: Can you tell me what it was like when you first started writing and trying to get published Russia?
LP: I began writing at the age of 30, and my first story “Such a Girl, The Conscience of the World,” immediately went out to the public, and was mass copied, reprinted on typewriters. But everyone said that they would never publish it. It was published twenty years later. My first play, “Music Lessons” (written in 1973), was forbidden for more than ten years. And my second play, “Love” (1974), was permitted in 1980 and immediately was picked by the three biggest theaters in Moscow. And at 50 years of age, in 1988, came my first book of short stories with a circulation of 30,000 copies. That book, by the way, sold out in a few days. But even after I was widely known, my stories and plays were retyped by different people and were passed from hand to hand. Perhaps, back then I was even more well known than today. Actors put on my plays in apartments.
MB: Do you have any advice for young writers and artists?
LP: One word of advice: listen! Listen to those who tell the story of their lives. There are many of them. Remember, HOW these people talk, and remember each person speaks for themselves. All of a sudden, someone’s story will hook you and it will lead you to write.
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. She is the author of more than fifteen collections of prose, including the New York Times bestseller There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (2009), which won a World Fantasy Award and was one of New York magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year and one of NPR’s Five Best Works of Foreign Fiction, and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories (2013). A singular force in modern Russian fiction, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. In 2002 she received Russia’s most prestigious prize, the Triumph, for lifetime achievement.
Mika Bar-On Nesher is a writer living in Brooklyn
By Yasmin Zaher
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 2017.
Yasmin Zaher, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Mohsin Hamid about his book, Exit West (Riverhead), which is among the final five selections in the category of Fiction for the 2017 NBCC Awards.
In a way, Exit West is nothing like Mohsin Hamid's previous books. Yes, it follows the intimate relationship of two brown lovers, Said and Nadia. Yes, its setting is a failed state, and in a larger sense, a failed world. But Exit West tells a story of refugees with such compassion that I couldn’t help but wonder, ‘Where's Mohsin's grit, cynicism, moral complication?’ And then later, once my writer-of-color paranoia hit in, 'Who are these likable Muslim characters performing for? Where is the dirty laundry of the East?'
It is this paranoia that is at the heart of my questions for Mohsin Hamid, the little voices in our head that want to depict the good without being apologetic and the bad without feeding into stereotypes, but at the same time want to write freely and for oneself. Exist West found the answer to these questions, perhaps because of Hamid’s humanist politics or perhaps because of his belief in a kind of spiritual unity or a maturity of age, recognizing that the Western gaze is part of his singular voice that him and they are not separate and have never been.
Yasmin Zaher (YZ): I was surprised by the narrative voice of Exit West. It is straightforward, reliable. You said that it was inspired by the tone of children’s books, so I’m even tempted to say that it’s naive. Is that a reaction to the cynical political climate, or is it a personal trajectory of yours?
Mohsin Hamid (MH): I think both. My first novel, Moth Smoke, has cynical characters, an untrustworthy narrator, all sorts of corruption: personal, political, and emotional. It was a reaction to growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, a supposedly Islamized and pure place. I wanted to show it as the opposite. But I do think that in this moment, politically speaking, truth and honesty have become debased and denied. I wanted to write something that tries to be true, with characters that are trying to be decent.
But it might as well be personal. I’m 46 years old, I have two kids, I have been writing novels for 25 years and living with my family in Pakistan where I am the middle generation: my parents the older ones, my kids the younger ones. I think I have been looking personally, for myself and in my own life, at these sorts of issues. What sort of person should I be and how should life be lived? I think as a father and also as a son I’m trying to figure that out. In some senses I’m looking at older forms. Not just children’s books, but for example, I’m re-engaging with ideas in Sufi literature, or Zen thought. I’m trying to look at traditions of older wisdom and investigate if there is something useful there for me. Something that can be described as not specific to one religion but open to everybody.
YZ: You talk about writing decent characters, but decency is not a neutral term. What constitutes decency for you, and as a writer, how is the experience of constructing decent characters different than the morally questionable characters of your previous books?
MH: Well, I think that decency is not necessarily a state that a character inhabits, so much as an orientation that they value. Said and Nadia are not perfect human beings, they do things which they each individually regard as potentially wrong - for Said leaving his father in the novel is something that he doesn’t know if it’s the correct thing to do. So it’s not that people are fundamentally decent or indecent, but rather the impulse towards decency is an important impulse to take seriously. And many people do. This is why even in situations of enormous ethnic tension or political pressure we have people not behaving violently. The story of humanity is not the story of genocide and murder it’s the story of so many genocides and murders that do not happen, because decency holds. It doesn’t mean that their sense of decency is the correct one, but it’s something of meaning to them. This notion is almost old-fashioned. But it’s something I’m interested in because I think this old notion is actually true of many and for most people much of the time.
If we write only of characters who feel no strong compulsion towards decency, then we are only writing about one facet of humanity. I’ll give you an example of this. My daughter likes to write songs. She’s eight years old, she plays the guitar, and often she’ll be singing something like “From the center of my loneliness... I can see the darkness...” And I asked my daughter, she’s a very happy kid, “What is up with all these dark lyrics that you’re writing?” And she said, “Baba, happy stuff is really difficult to write, and also the dark stuff just sounds better.” When I was younger, the inclination to explore the darker side of oneself was very strong, and I’m not sure if it’s because I thought it was easier to write, or if I thought it sounded better. But at this point for me I am interested in the exploration of the other side. Unless we reckon with the potential for goodness, seriously, then we end up leaving on the table a big part of human capacity. And if literature doesn’t reckon with this then I think we’re failing culturally as a society.
YZ: I really admire your female characters, how independent and strong-willed they are, some would say “liberated.” What is your approach to writing female characters?
MH: The nicest thing I’ve heard about Exit West recently was a woman who said that she kept feeling as if it was written by a woman. And that was an interesting thing for me to hear, because what does it mean for something to be written by a woman or by a man? For her, the main character was Nadia and the sensibility of the book, the way it approached certain issues, was a way that she associated with woman-ness. I was really touched by this remark, in the same way that if you were writing about America, or California, or Albany, NY, and somebody would say “Wow I really felt that this was written by somebody from Albany,” then it is quite a generous comment. So when I write a female character, I imagine being a woman, and more than being just a woman, I imagine being that woman. For me writing characters is about imaging being specific people. What’s it like not just to be a woman, but a particular woman, a singular woman, an individual woman.
My approach to that comes from the fact that I have been surrounded by women my whole life. [I have a] very strong matriarchal family. But of course there is a political dimension to being a man writing a character who is a woman, and I’m aware of that. I tend to try to write characters who are both liberated and not at the same time, as we all are. Nadia in some sense is liberated in other ways she isn’t, to herself. Same is true for Mumtaz from Moth Smoke. I’m also interested in the ways in which men can be strong by having characteristics we are told are female, like gentleness, being nurturing. Said, for example, is a gentle man. But it takes incredible strength to be gentle in the way that he is in the circumstances that he finds himself in. It takes less strength to not be gentle. In this way these two characters are both strong but in different ways, and each are me imaging myself to be a different person.
YZ: The part of the book when Nadia and Said arrive in London is very interesting. First you envision the refugees occupying the wealthy neighborhoods of Kensington and Chelsea, and then later, the characters find themselves bonded in a labor camp. Are you saying something about border divisions being based not just on nationality, ethnicity and religion - but primarily on class?
MH: I think it is very much based on class. I think what we are seeing in the world today is that there is a cosmopolitan class. By virtue of education, wealth, social connections, cultural capital, whatever, it is able to move fairly effortlessly around the world and be exempt from the rules that apply to people who don’t have these benefits. Kensington and Chelsea in London are very largely owned by foreigners, but because they are wealthy, we don’t hear much in the way of protest about it. So I think there is a class component to all of this.
There is an alliance which we see in the center left, for example, between incredibly wealthy cosmopolitan people - many of whom who are quite opposed to regulations or government intervention that would improve conditions of those who are not wealthy - and other people who themselves are not wealthy but believe protection of the rights of immigrants and minorities, equality of gender and sexual orientation, etc. I believe that this an unsteady alliance because it’s difficult to ally with somebody who does not believe in equality to pursue equality. This kind of billionaire alliance with minorities, women, queers, etc. is an unstable alliance.
So the novel, yes, does explore this aspect of how it all does with class. I think the class connections in the current populist backlash shouldn’t be ignored. I think that for example, in American politics, there is a very strong racial undercurrent at play [and] a strong class element at play as well, to the extent that the Democrats have failed to help people of working and middle class backgrounds. Had more work been done to help people of working and middle class backgrounds by the Democrats then they might have been able to bridge, or lessen some of the racial elements that Trump has exploited.
YZ: How has your idea of readership changed over time and with your international success?
MH: I think living in Pakistan in particular, I no longer imagine that readers will approach novels in the same way that I imagined when I lived in New York or London. Myself and a lot of my friends who are writers went to similar universities, and had a particular interpretive apparatus that we brought to reading fiction. But I now believe that I need to write novels that contain within them the equipment needed to decode themselves. Too many readers don’t exist in a world of critics or reviews or literary culture. In fact, almost no readers exist in that world. So I’m trying to write novels that can be understood by people regardless of their background, it’s important to me. It doesn’t mean writing simple novels, or avoiding difficult issues, or writing simple sentences, or anything like that. I just have to put in the book what is required to make sense of it. You don’t have to read other books to read this book. I meet many readers in Pakistan who will say that one of my novels is the only novel that they’ve read.
The novel is a uniquely powerful form because it is a mode of communication between two individuals, one writer and one reader, each both composed and received in solitude. A reader while reading a novel contains the thoughts of two human beings inside of him, their own and the writer’s, and at that moment the reader is not just one person, they are a kind of hybrid being. I think this is a magical, incredible, fertile, beautiful, powerful relationship. I believe in the novel. That’s why I believe in opening it up to any reader. I don’t really have a reader in mind because all people are different from each other. I try to write books that I would like, and I try to write them in a way that they build a relationship with a human being in the course of the telling.
YZ: So when you know that someone like Barack Obama, who has concrete power over the fate of refugees, has read Exit West, it doesn’t change the way you write?
MH: I was very happy that [Barack Obama] liked my book. Happy is an understatement. I was quite thrilled, really. But as a reader he is no more or less important to me in thinking how to create a book than any other reader is. The novel impacts the policy reader not as a vehicle of policy, but by touching the human being. If the human being who is the policy maker has been touched, then the novel has done something. But not because I’ve advocated a policy, but because I’ve touched a person. Barack Obama is no different than any other reader. He’s just a human being to be touched.
YZ: Finally, I want to ask about drugs, they seems to be a recurring theme in your books.
MH: Let us just say that I have considered them significant, and that there is an ancient tradition of intoxication in literature, particularly in the literature of South Asia, in the Sufi form as well as others. Intoxication is a moment in which the self begins to change shape and become something else and it’s a very interesting and fertile domain to be explored in literature, and not unrelated to the experience of writing and reading itself. There is an intoxicating quality to reading and writing, and in it the self can shift.
Mohsin Hamid is the author of four novels, Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Exit West, and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations. His writing has been featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the cinema, twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and translated into over thirty-five languages. Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.
Yasmin Zaher was born in Jerusalem. She is a fiction writer, translator from Arabic and Hebrew, and co-producer of Palestinian Hip-Hop drama Junction '48. She lives in New York City and is doing her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School.
By Brenda Ray
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 2017.
Brenda Ray, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Henry Marsh about his book Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon (St. Martins), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.
Brenda Ray: After writing your New York Times best-selling memoir, Do No Harm, what inspired you to write, Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon? How much time did you take in between each book? When did you begin writing it?
Henry Marsh: The first book was a re-writing of parts of the diary I have kept since the age of 12. That took about 10 years. The second book took less than a year and I started it two years after publication of the first book—some new material and some old, which had not been in the final version of the first book.
BR: In your book you speak so easily about surgical procedures. You did a great job translating these complexities into layman’s terms. Did you find this difficult to do—writing a medical memoir to readers who aren’t necessarily doctors?
HM: I didn’t find it especially difficult. Good doctoring (and I can only hope I am one) involves spending a lot of time explaining things to patients in language they can understand.
BR: I love your sentimentality towards animals, a theme that recurs again and again. I think people often associate surgeons with a removed, sterile affect, so it was refreshing to see this side of you—a surgeon who pities the pig cadavers. I wonder if it’s difficult to maintain this sentimentality in your vocation. Do you find it hard to strike a balance between compassion and practicality?
HM: Yes, it’s very difficult and it’s the central problem at the heart of medicine. Where you are on the spectrum between compassion and scientific detachment depends on many factors: your age, your personality, your role models, the culture of the department and country in which you work, and your own personal experiences, or your family’s, of being a patient (which most young doctors and nurses don’t have).
BR: As a nonfiction writer, I sometimes recognize things about myself whileI’m writing. Did you come to discover some things about yourself that might have surprised you? You speak so much about your family, your first marriage, your son William, your parents. Did you learn anything about yourself while you were writing that perhaps you didn’t quite realize before?
HM: No, I don’t think so. I have had psychotherapy twice during my life; I would like to think I am reasonably good at looking at myself. My wife [second] and three children are fairly good at gently criticizing me, and that helps—although I don’t always take it with a good grace.
BR: I was interested in your juxtaposition of English healthcare and Nepalese healthcare. This is, of course, beyond my depth but I actually really like some of the Nepalese practices. In one chapter you describe, “hand-bagging” which is family members physically squeezing a respiratory bag of their brain-dead loved one, so that they can take the patient home and have a dignified death. I like the idea of a death occurring in the home, surrounded by loved ones and familiar walls. I think Americans are afraid of death. In your time overseas were there are any Nepalese practices that you found you preferred to English ones?
HM: Dying at home, yes. In the UK, more than 50% of people die in hospitals. American healthcare—both patients and doctors—are especially bad at not knowing when to stop and let Nature take its course.
BR: I’ve been exploring mortality a lot lately—in my own family and in my own writing. Did you ever come across a patient who accepted their mortality well? Can you recall anyone who responded in an either peaceful or interesting way?
HM: As a neurosurgeon, most of my patients are not compos mentis when near death. Most people put on a brave face when they meet doctors and we only have a brief glimpse of what they really feel. As a clinician, I am often still holding out hope to patients that treatment might help a little. I deliver death sentences more often to relatives than patients.
BR: I love when you described your childhood dog, the experience of power and cruelty and its effects on a living creature. You describe the regret you felt and how this lesson has possibly made you a kinder surgeon, such a beautiful insight. Did this memory of your dog occur as you were writing your book or has it sort of always stuck with you in your work as a surgeon?
HM: It’s always been there and a constant pain, but usually submerged.
BR: I was moved by your renovation of the lock-keeper’s cottage. In the language you can tell that the property is very dear to you. My favorite part is when you’re feeling low about the ongoing vandalism and a stranger stops by and says, “Hey I used to live here!” I love the idea of many bodies living in a place, of passing through it, giving their life and memories to it.
In my mind, I see the cottage as a reconciliation to mortality, a way of finding peace and passing it on to the lives ahead. I see this when the stranger says, “My parent’s ashes are scattered in the bushes.” It’s so beautiful. I want to know, how’s the cottage these days? Are you still working on it? Does its meaning remain steadfast and have the vandals finally left it alone?
HM: Yes, I am still working on it, but I am also employing builders to do some of the work, having admitted I cannot do it all. I remain very busy medically—working part-time in London for the NHS but also abroad in Pakistan, Nepal, Ukraine, etc. And you are quite right, the cottage is a symbol of mortality, and our vain but essential struggle against it. I am giving the cottage new life and one day somebody else will live in it.
BR: What’s next? Are you still writing? Are you going to renovate another home?
HM: No more renovation once the cottage is done but I am always making things and starting to work on a new book—but in the very early stages.
Henry Marsh is the author of the bestselling Do No Harm, an astonishingly candid insight into the life and work of a neurosurgeon. It has been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction and the Guardian First Book Award. He read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University before studying medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1984 and was appointed Consultant Neurosurgeon at Atkinson Morley’s/St George’s Hospital in London in 1987, where he still works full time.
Brenda Ray, writer, singer, poet, and storyteller, is an internationally touring artist from Boise, Idaho and an MFA student at The New School in New York. Her memoir essay, "The Most Beautiful Thing" won Seattle's Arksey Essay Contest and her spoken word album, "The Blue Room" was awarded an invitation to England's Glastonbury Festival. Her work has appeared in Brooklyn Magazine, Yahoo Beauty, Acrobat, The Lingua Journal, and Four Chambers Press. Brenda's work has also been heard by Sofar Sounds New York, The National Endowment of the Arts' Poetry Out Loud, Boston's Cantab Lounge, The Seattle Grand Slam, The National Undergraduate Literature Conference, Chicago's Girl Radio, Radio Boise, and many many more places. Brenda has performed in hundreds of schools, community centers, prisons, homeless shelters, colleges, and universities across the country. She currently resides in New York, New York where she is a teaching fellow at Eugene Lang College.
By Wynne Kontos
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 Winners and Finalists for the publishing year 2017.
Wynne Kontos, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Carmen Maria Machado about winning the 2018 NBCC John Leonard Prize for her debut novel, Her Body and Other Parties.
Carmen Maria Machado’s writing considers the individual. Within her words the reader finds new questions—what does our pain make of us? Can truth be found within? And answers are found sprinkled throughout the text, sometimes in the most unexpected places.
Recipient of the National Book Critic Circle Award’s John Leonard Prize for debut fiction, Her Body and Other Parties, is a story collection rich in femininity, identity, uncovering trauma and independence. Machado’s sentences are lyrical, often poetic but never indirect. Her imagery is surprising, but in the same moment, intensely recognizable.
From her home in Philadelphia, Machado spoke with The New School MFA student, Wynne Kontos about grieving turkeys, the female experience and staying strong as a new writer.
Wynne Kontos (WK): Thank you so much for speaking with me; this is such an honor. I so admire your collection. Do you remember some of the earliest stories you ever wrote?
Carmen Maria Machado (CMM): I wrote a lot of poems, very dramatic essays and short stories. Of course I use these terms very loosely. The one I remember most clearly is a book I wrote on my father’s stationery called, “The Biggest Turkey Can’t Find the Farm.” It’s about a turkey who’s lost and trying to get home. At the very end he gets to the farm, and the final page is a roast turkey on a plate that says, “I wish I did not come here.”
My parents were really disturbed, but I was very interested in this darkness. It’s weird when I look back at stories I wrote as a kid because I have the same interests, I’m just a better writer now. It’s all about death and illness and sadness—all the same things.
WK: That was my next question, how has your writing grown and changed leading up to your debut collection?
CMM: Yeah, it hasn’t changed at all. I just write better sentences.
WK: The stories in this collection have recognizable bits of our world, but often include a twist. What was it like workshopping pieces like this? Have you ever received pushback from peers or editors to more clearly define the ethereal aspects of your writing?
CMM: Mostly, no. The only time someone responded super negatively was when I workshopped “Especially Heinous.” One classmate loathed it and wrote me a very mean and angry letter. That happened once. But the rest of the workshop was really encouraging and everyone was really nice. Generally speaking, my workshop experience was really positive and I felt really supported with my projects.
WK: What about in the publishing process?
CMM: I struggled to publish certain stories. For instance “Especially Heinous” took me a long time to sell. The biggest sort of obstacle I faced was that they were short stories, it wasn’t even about world building, or experimentation, it was short story collections are hard sells.
I’m really lucky I’ve been able to find a publisher, an agent and people who took a risk with my work, even though it was this completely unmarketable thing (laughs).
WK: What is some writing advice that you applied to this collection?
CMM: My beloved teacher Michelle Huneven, who was one of my teachers at Iowa, gave me a really hard time about my sentences. She was like, “You’re sentences are almost good, but you’re getting lazy about them. You really need to sit on them—work on your sentences.” That became something I really kept in mind, and was on my mind as I was writing and editing.
WK: How do you “sit on your sentences?” How did you work your way around that bit of advice she gave you?
CMM: I had to spend more time with them and not forget them. There were things I was sort of doing, that now I do all the time, like read my sentences out loud for example. Really thinking about each sentence and what it’s doing and not thinking of them as secondary. They become a really important way to get into a piece of writing.
WK: So much of the female experience is rooted in mental or physical pain, and your writing captures that in such detail. In “Bad At Parties” a woman lives with the aftermath of physical trauma, in “The Husband Stitch” you write about childbirth and the sexualization of an episiotomy procedure. But then we have “Inventory” or “Eight Bites,” which begin with the lead character’s discomfort. While physical pain is often part of the female condition, there’s also the reality of just—discomfort, and your characters experience this too. From these types of pain or discomfort your characters often find strength rooted in their experiences. Can you talk more about that? Why you’re compelled to explore these concepts in your work?
CMM: That’s a really good question. I just wrote an essay for Roxane Gay and I wrote about my body and the ways in which my body fails me, of which there are many, and thinking about the ways in which you are constantly trying to work around your own limitations whatever those might be. I feel like pain and suffering whether it’s physical or not physical is sort of a thing you have to work around—like you don't have to, but you do have to or you’ll die. You won’t be able to get where you need to go. That place is very interesting for me as a writer, and that comes from my own life and feelings about being a woman in the world.
WK: The novella in this collection, “Especially Heinous,” is 272 imagined synopsis of Law and Order: SVU episodes. There were several moments of humor, but this piece also reminded me how discomfiting it is to admit I’m a long time viewer of this program. It’s a show that tries to draw attention to issues around sexual assault and abuse, but it’s still using those traumas to entertain us. Is this novella a commentary of any kind?
CMM: I think it’s a combination of a love letter to a show I watch and have a lot of feelings about, and a critique. It’s a lens because the show itself is an interesting way to examine narratives about sexual assault and how they play out and how we consume them. It’s relevant to me that the only currently running Law and Order franchise is the rape one. But it has this real staying power that has outlived every other version.
It’s funny, I was recently re-watching some old episodes of Law and Order: SVU, and it’s so much better than the new stuff. The early SVU is actually pretty solid in a lot of ways, and I was kind of admiring how decent it was in an aesthetic sense. But [the novella is] a critique and a perfect lens to discuss this issue, it’s sort of weird how perfect it is. I felt like it gave me the space to talk about the things I feel strongly about which is the narrative of sexual violence and also what it feels like to binge something on Netflix.
WK: A favorite part of this collection for me is the conversations with other women that it inspired. There’s something extraordinary about reading powerful work about women, but also something overwhelming about identifying these common experiences we share. Why do you think that is?
CMM: Everybody sort of knows that feeling of someone saying a thing and you think, I thought only I felt that thing. It’s this shock of being recognized and the intensity of realizing the shared experience is a highlight of the trauma. [It can] feel like it’s a lot of pieces have fallen into place and can be a very uncomfortable experience.
I think that’s the reason the story “Cat Person” went viral because it’s a sudden moment of common recognition of a very specific, very relatable scenario that felt very familiar to a lot of women—this very varied sort of trauma that’s hard to talk about it, which in that case is technical consent, when you just feel like you can’t be bothered, or you can’t say no because it’s too much of a hassle.
WK: What does your ideal writing day look like?
CMM: I’m not at home, I’m somewhere in the wilderness, away from my whole life. I don’t write very well at home, I kind of need to be elsewhere. I write in my apartment or little coffee shops, but I prefer residencies. When I’m at home, there’s always something to clean, always something to do. I want to wake up really early and have coffee, have a little bit of breakfast and just write and write until noon and then read or hike for the rest of the day and then go to bed super early. That’s my ideal writing day.
WK: What can you tell us about your upcoming memoir, House in Indiana?
CMM: I can’t talk about it too much, because it is still very much a thing in flux, but what I can say is it’s an experimentally structured memoir about physical abuse in same-sex relationships, trauma and narratives of trauma and probably other stuff too. That’s what I can say about it, everything else is just sort of, who knows?
WK: What are some things you wished you’d known while you were in your MFA program? What would you tell your MFA self?
CMM: I would’ve said, “Calm down it’s going to be okay.” I was figuring out who I was as an artist and was very anxious about performing in a certain way. The agents who visited Iowa would tell me, “It’s very hard to sell short stories! Call me when you have a novel!” I’d feel very dejected and despondent. [Other writers] were getting picked up left and right and I was sort of like sad George Michael from “Arrested Development” thinking, I’m never going to get picked up, no one’s going to want me!
Every teacher I had, even Lan Samantha Chang said, just make good art, take the time, don’t get to overly worked up about the professional stuff, it’ll all work out. Just try to work on your work. I always felt like, easy for you to say, famous writer! But it’s true. In retrospect they’re one hundred percent right, that other stuff will fall into place, I just wasn’t there yet. I would try to get myself to be a little less anxious about the professional stuff, honestly. It’s fine and it all works out.
WK: That’s lovely to hear. All writers can do it; we’re going to survive!
CMM: Yes! Just make good art, everything else will fall into place. But you’ve got to make good art.
WK: Is there anything else you want to share about your work or your process, anything you feel would be good for emerging writers to know?
CMM: You don’t have to live in New York to be a writer; I say that as a rule of thumb. People always say that and I don’t think it’s true. You have to keep reading, because when you read a really good book, story or essay it’ll remind you why you want to be writing. People will always have more than you have, especially in a professional sense. That’s a given, and it’s normal to feel that way, but you just have to make good art.
Carmen Maria Machado’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, NPR, Guernica, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and Best Women’s Erotica. She has received the Bard Fiction Prize, and been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and Nebula Award. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, the University of Iowa, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.
Wynne Kontos is a Licensed Masters social worker currently receiving her MFA in Fiction at The New School. Her writing is featured in Love Sick: Growing Up with a Parent Who Has Cancer, Moonlit Wing and The Inquisitive Eater with interviews in Teachers and Writers Magazine, Critical Mass, The New School Blog and the One Story blog. She has performed her work with the writing collective, Lost Lit, and at the 25 East Gallery in Manhattan. She lives and works in New York City.
By Jeffrey Preis
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 Winners and Finalists for the publishing year 2017.
Jeffrey Preis, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed John McPhee about winning the 2018 NBCC Ivan Sandrof Award.
John McPhee has lived in Princeton, New Jersey for most of his life. He grew up around the campus as a young boy — his father was the athletic department’s physician — and he spent his undergraduate career there. He currently teaches a class on creative nonfiction — a genre some say he helped pave, and has taught it since 1974. McPhee has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than 50 years and his book, Annals of the Former World, won a Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction in 1999.
His last book , Draft No. 4,, was published in late 2017 and it’s dedicated to the writing process. The book touches on the emotions, hardships and frustrations that all young writers face at one point — I can confirm this to be true. He’s covered a range of subjects from an entire book on oranges to a geological history of North America and an essay on The Army Corps of Engineers attempt to control the Mississippi River. His tenured career has been rooted in his quest for knowledge and he is more than deserving of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
Jeffrey Preis (JP): What differences do you notice now versus when you started teaching?
John McPhee (JM): Well, of course, when I started teaching long ago, nobody was using computers then. There was no internet. I got into writing on a computer in 1984 which is fairly early and of course, that’s what we all do now. As far as the quality in their writing, there hasn’t been a trend up or down. They’re a selected group from an applicant pool of 50 or 60 or 70, and they’re good at what they do.
JP: In writing creative nonfiction, the writer’s skill in conveying a sense of place and local color can be key to his success. Do you use a formula or is it work specific?
JM: Work specific. I don’t use anything that could be called a formula. I have, however, certain methods that repeat themselves. In certain basic things, for example, all research is done before the writing begins, in distinct phases. Of course, you could violate these principles. The lead is written before the actual structuring is done and then you figure out what the structure is and where you’re going to go and then you go back and write the rest of it. As far as atmosphere and local color, that’s a matter of soaking up everything you can, perhaps in what you have spent scribbling down [what] you think might be useful later on about the world you’re in out there.
JP: While we're on structure, I read your book, Draft No. Four and you have a section on writer's block that appears towards the end of the book. In the Essay version in The New Yorker, you open up with that section on writer's block.
JM: The first word is “block.”
JP: Exactly. My question is how do you make the transition from essay to book; how much do you have to alter the structure of it?
JM: The pattern is, and has been true for all of my books from the beginning — I’m a New Yorker writer and everything has begun as something for The New Yorker. So, the books come along about a year, at least, after something’s been in The New Yorker. And if it’s a collection of New Yorker pieces, like Draft No. 4, I did that over a period of a number of years. One of [the essays] was in a previous book, but when I put all [the essays] together as a book, I don’t necessarily have to follow the publication dates in The New Yorker. I’d have to look at the book to see what order, but I thought the essay on “Omission” just made a good place to end this book, so that’s why it’s [the last in] this book.
JP: You don't necessarily paint the prettiest picture in terms of the writer's life, you refer to it as the “masochistic, self-inflicted paralysis of a writer’s normal routine.” After so many years, what have you learned most from this lifestyle?
JM: The negative side of it is important, I think. First of all, there’s a bit of hyperbole in that. And I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else but this. But every single day when you face the writing, it’s daunting and, basically what I’m talking about is the part that takes the longest, which is the first draft. After the second draft and the third draft, things are accomplished in a much shorter period of time, and you’ve got some confidence, you’ve got the thing there on paper and you’re working to improve it. So, we’re really talking about first drafts when you don’t really know where you’re going and hope that you can get to wherever it is. And as I said in the book, I think it is rational not to have confidence. Whatever you’ve written before isn’t going to write this one for you.
JP: What autobiographical influences do you nice in your writing? For example, did your love of kayaking and fishing lead you to the Atchafalaya River?
JM: No, what led me to the Atchafalaya was that a daughter of mine took a course with Robert Coles at Harvard. Robert Coles was teaching Walker Percy and Sarah got totally zonked with Walker Percy and she wanted to see Walker Percy country and [asked me if I’d] take her there on her spring vacation. I thought, ‘fine, we’ll go to New Orleans…but, what’s in it for Dad?’ [I got a hold of someone who] told me about Charlie Fryling at LSU…and the upside of that was that I got in Charlie Fryling’s canoe, Sarah too, and we [went] into the Atchafalaya. The story about [the Atchafalaya], I didn’t know about it at all…and [my friend] set me up with Charlie because she thought it was interesting. After hearing about it all day long, I thought so too. Of course, paddling around in the swamp was my cup of tea.
JP: Writing teachers often tell their students, especially when analyzing books that nothing is there accidentally, meaning, the author does not purposely include this or that detail, but upon completion, the writer has a sense of holistic completion that everything seems to go together. Do you notice this in your writing, especially given that a lot of your writing is heavily vetted by multiple departments at The New Yorker?
JM: I don’t know, listening to that quote and everything, it certainly sounds familiar. Of course, that’s what one does when one starts a project and collects the raw materials for the piece. And in the end, you want it to fit that description. I wouldn’t turn in a piece that I didn’t think did. [As far as] examples, well, really, just anything. That’s your goal. My goal is to do the best I can do, not the best that ever was done because I can’t do that. But I can do the best I can do and when I get there, I call it a day.
JP: What about those kismet or déjà vu moments when writing — do you ever experience that and, if so, how does it influence what you’re working on?
JM: That happens all the time and it doesn’t exclusively or even a majority of the time occur when you’re writing. It occurs for me when I’m out interviewing. Things occur that you just know are going to be significant in the book. At the end of my time in the Swiss Army, I was attached to some unit, and these guys [were] doing a war exercise where it was all concocted. Word comes in on the walkie-talkie that a petite atomic bomb had exploded. Well, I heard that, and I scribbled down exactly what the message was and I also thought, ‘right there, there’s my ending.’ Whatever my piece of writing is going to be, that’s how it’s going to end. This kind of thing happens, from time to time, when you’re interviewing when you hear something you just know just belongs in the subject you’re addressing.
JP: Any regrets in terms of your writing?
JM: No, I think I’ve been lucky. I got into a form of writing after trying different things. This whole business is about real people and real places and that somehow fit my psychological nature better than poetry or novel-writing and you find that out by experimentation. I feel lucky that I got into that good and early and tried other things and that I felt comfortable in this niche. William Shawn (editor of The New Yorker from 1952-1987) talked about this all the time — young writers take more time, he said, to figure out what kind of writers they are. I started doing this when I was pretty young and I’m very glad I got into this niche because I feel very comfortable there and I feel like that’s where I belong. I was also very lucky to get connected to The New Yorker where Shawn seemed to be particularly interested in long-fact writing. That’s what I do, so that was pretty lucky.
JP: What advice would you give to your 30-year-old self?
JM: Well, number one, I say stop worrying! I’m very concerned about writers in their twenties and into their early thirties because I spent most of my time fretting and fussing over the fact that I didn’t have confidence. I don’t like to see other people go through that. There’s nothing less promising than an over confident, inexperienced writer. That makes no sense at all. You’ve got to have a certain doubt in order to do a good piece of writing. I’d do anything I could to keep the thirty-year-old from biting his nails. When I turned 30, I was working at Time Magazine and I thought that that was terminal, that I was never going to get along with anything else, that as a writer, [I wondered] what kind of future did I have? I remember going into some restaurant on my 30th birthday in the Upper East Side and feeling particularly gloomy because I turned 30. When I tell these stories to young writers, about the fact that I started sending things to The New Yorker when I was 18-years-old and [didn’t sell] my first little thing to them until I was 31, and it was a little thing indeed. When I turned 33, I sold them something that changed my life and I’ve been there ever since. I don’t tell that story to depress anyone, I tell that story because this is how it worked for me. Writers grow slowly. And that’s why those years are taking the time.
John McPhee began contributing to The New Yorker in 1963. He has written more than a hundred pieces for the magazine, among them a Profile of Senator Bill Bradley during his days as a Princeton basketball star, an examination of modern-day cattle rustling, and several multipart series on a wide range of subjects, including Alaska; a voyage on a merchant ship down the west coast of South America as a Person in Addition to Crew; a stint with the Swiss Army; and the writing process. Between 1955 and 1956, he wrote for television, before joining Time, where he contributed pieces about show business until 1964. He has taught writing at Princeton University since 1975, and in 1982 was awarded Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Award for service to the nation. He is the author of twenty-eight books, all of them based on his New Yorker writings. Among them are “Coming Into the Country,” which was nominated for a National Book Award; “Encounters with the Archdruid”; “The Control of Nature”; “Looking for a Ship”; “The Ransom of Russian Art”; and “Annals of the Former World,” which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. His most recent books are “Uncommon Carriers,” and “Silk Parachute,” a collection of pieces ranging from North American lacrosse to the Cretaceous chalk of Europe.
Jeffrey Preis was born and raised in New Orleans, and moved to New York City in the Fall of 2016 to begin a Master’s in The New School’s Creative Writing program. He currently interns for The Points Guy and is working on his thesis on the Mississippi River and Louisiana.
By Chelsie Hinds
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 2017.
Chelsie Hinds, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Xiaolu Guo about her book, Nine Continents (Grove), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.
As a Chinese writer based in London, Xiaolu Guo is particularly concerned with the topic of transnational identity. In what is both memoir and Bildungsroman, Nine Continents takes us back to the start of Xiaolu’s peripatetic upbringing. She narrates her journey from the small fishing town, Shitang, to the communist center, Wenling, from the creative hub that is Beijing and to London where her career took flight, and does so with the panache and severity imbued in her earlier works. Years after leaving China, the birth of her daughter urges her back to her homeland and to the life she left behind.
I spoke with Xiaolu recently about the steps she took to confront her youth in 1980s-1990s China and about the way the past has shaped her present.
Chelsie Hinds (CH): Would you say that your formative years of illiteracy influenced or spurned your desire to write at all?
Xiaolu Guo (XG): I don’t think I can isolate one event from another in my early years in terms of the making of a future writer. It is all connected. For me it has to do with lack of imagination: if someone has that in her earlier years and wants to have an expanded life through imagination, she will probably begin to write. Also, it was the 1970s and 80s; we had so little other means to pass time. I treated diary writing as my entertainment in my teens.
CH: Each part of the book is broken up into essays. When you started to write, did you plan to format it that way? Or did it take that form as you recalled different aspects of your childhood? By dividing the narrative into specific subjects, was it easier to walk yourself through your own story?
XG: I somehow never believe the “perfect narrative." I trust more fragmented structure, especially because I was working with memories and reflections. Also, I felt like I was writing a diary again. I wrote some small essays on my childhood before the book was formed. It felt more natural this way.
CH: What methods or rituals did you use to tap into your childhood and access those memories? Did you find it more painful or therapeutic?
XG: Before I wrote this book, I wrote a few novels based on my past experiences as a struggling young woman in a mad world. So, there is this basic distance between a (not-so-young) narrator and his/her own past. After all, a writer cannot only use his body to write; his head has some distance with his hands and heart. And this distance is the method. It was painful from time to time, but I am not a first time writer, so I have gone through the digestion process of certain events in my life.
CH: You’ve written fiction and nonfiction books as well as quite a few articles. How would you say your writing process differs for a memoir?
XG: It is similar. Even with articles, I don’t write in a journalistic way.
CH: When reading the scene about leaving your grandparents, specifically your grandmother, I could feel the pain and confusion seven-year-old Xiaolu felt. There are other moments in the book that are equally as visceral and I imagine it must have been hard to put yourself back in those places. Were there memories included in the book you were especially reluctant to engage with or delve into? And how did you overcome that reluctance and reticence?
XG: Thanks. I actually always tried to delve into those moments. I tried to relive the past to feel that moment as if it was the first time I was experiencing it… I have never tried to avoid it. Isn’t that what writing is about?
CH: You’ve heard the quote, “What’s past is prologue?” I wonder how you feel about that idea after navigating through your own past. Do you view it as something that’s simply set the stage for the rest of your life? Or something that is constantly informing your decisions now?
XG: The past is prologue but also a constant-flowing present. It is inside a person’s psyche. As a person, I try to live in a creative or new way at each major stage of my life, but as a writer, I really rely on my past. It’s my major resource, and of course, I have gathered some intellectual resources, too.
CH: There’s a moment towards the end of the book when you’re visiting Shitang where you wonder if Moon looks at the ocean and sees it as “another part of her mother’s being.” Is that how you view the ocean? As part of your past? As part of your being? Would you say they’re one and the same?
XG: Thanks for such a lovely comment, and thanks for noticing that part of the book. I think you have answered the question with all of these possibilities.
CH: I read your article in The Guardian where you critique the English language because the lexical structure isn’t actually related to the meaning of a word. Whereas, in Chinese, characters and words relate to pictures and images. Would you say you were trying to do a similar thing here using the story of Monkey? As in, connecting your words and your written story with a familiar image?
XG: I think so. When I was structuring this book I tried to find a metaphorical layer to represent my journey—something from an ancient past, something to do with my cultural identity. Because I didn’t want the whole narrative to be a stab of concrete realness. It should have some layers. The monkey is me, and I was experiencing the creature’s journey in a very particular way in this book.
Xiaolu Guo is the author of Village of Stone, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, and I Am China. She has been named one of Granta‘s Best of Young British Novelists. Guo has also directed several award-winning films including She, A Chinese and a documentary about London, Late at Night. She lives in London and Berlin.
Chelsie Hinds is a Caribbean-American writer living in Harlem and an MFA candidate in fiction at The New School.
By Melanie Odelle
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 2017.
Melanie Odelle, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Layli Long Soldier about her book Whereas (Graywolf), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.
Layli Long Soldier’s debut collection of poetry, Whereas (Graywolf) was written in part as a reaction to the 2010 Congressional Apology to Native Peoples of the United States, which is a resolution located deep within a document called the Defense Appropriations Act. President Barrack Obama signed the apology without announcing its existence to Native people or inviting Native American leaders to witness the signing. Long Soldier’s debut collection unravels the language of treaty, apology, and everyday conversation into poetry. She is Oglala Lakota, and stresses that her work does not speak for the entirety of Native American people. She is herself, an electric current of “I,” a laughing beam of the first-person, currently living in New Mexico, and poet-ing in the glow of her PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, her Whiting win, and her recent NBCC poetry award nomination.
Melanie Odelle: What is your favorite punctuation mark, and why?
Layli Long Soldier: My favorite punctuation mark? That’s hilarious. I like the period. I often prefer using a period instead of a question mark. I don’t like what the question mark does to the voice. I don’t think a question has to change the body, the inflection, and the voice. I much prefer to use the period over the question mark. It’s so final. I just think it’s cool.
MO: I believe Layli Long Soldier has thought a lot about punctuation.
LLS: Punctuation is really, ultimately, to score your work, almost like musical notation. It indicates breath. It indicates rest, pause, and so forth.
MO: I know! Well, Whereas lets me think about the page and the markings upon it. One of my favorite lines in your writing is from the first Whereasstatement:
Pages are cavernous places, white at entrance, black in absorption.
Echo.
The page is a place where thoughts can have physical consequences. For example, the treaty. The treaty is the ultimate representation of words having physical effects. The “penning” of a treaty becomes the literal “penning” of, quote the congressional apology, “Indian tribes within their boundaries.”
LLS: Well absolutely! It is language. Language that has had a true physical binding upon Native people’s lives—a physical effect on how we live and where we live. I used to teach at Diné College, which is the tribal college on the Navajo Nation. One of the classes I taught was a fundamental reading class. It was a class to bring new students up to college level reading. Some of the students had not read much before starting college. But the very first thing I had them read in this class, even though we were supposed to start at a very simple level, was their treaty.
That’s very difficult language to unravel. We took it slowly. We worked in groups with each article of the treaty. That was the one thing I wanted to impress upon them, that this is what directly affects your people, your families, your community. We’ve got to become comfortable with reading this language. As young people, you are not in the same position as your leaders [who signed the treaties with X’s instead of their names]. You have the opportunity and the chance to unravel this language and understand it.
Language is a very physical thing. It affects you. We don’t always remember that.
MO: Maybe a poem is a moment of contact between the outer and the inner. I’m reminded of the incredible way you bring us to the image of Andrew Myrick’s mouth stuffed with grass at the end of your poem, 38. It’s then that the poem becomes so physical, both for the reader, and within the imagery. You write:
I’m inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem.
There’s irony in their poem
There was no text.
“Real” poems do not “really” require words.
But at the same time, we need the words of Andrew Myrick to the starving Dakota: “If they are hungry, let them eat grass,” to inform us why the action of the Dakota people is a poem. Do you remember where you were when you first got the image of the grasses, the image that runs throughout Whereas?
LLO: I remember. I had already sent a first draft of Whereas to Graywolf. They had written back to say they were interested in my work, but the manuscript needed more time. I remember [being] really disheartened.
Ultimately, it did need some more work. It took me about a year to send in a second draft. During that year, I worked on the ordering and orchestration of the manuscript a bit more. I felt like I needed a kind of through line. Around that time I would go up to visit my family in South Dakota. One of the things that would make me feel at home was seeing and smelling the grasses. That smell and the sight of these long stretches of grass—man, I just can’t explain it. It’s a sense of belonging.
I would go to visit and then drive back down to the South West. Where we live, there really is not much grass.
MO: When I heard you lived in New Mexico, I thought, but wait, there’s no grass there!
LLO: I know! I remember writing this piece, “Irony.” It’s a real skinny poem. It was a piece I made when I was living in Tsaile, Arizona. I was thinking about the fact that there was no grass there. I began to realize that I had this kind of longing. I looked through my pieces and I noticed there were a few other places I had written about the grasses. I started to recognize a pattern in the work and my emotional leaning. Then I became intentional with it, and drafted a few more pieces for the purpose of bringing the book together through grass.
MO: When did you hear the story of the Dakota 38? Was that before or after you decided on the through line?
LLO: I heard the story many years ago, when I was much younger. It’s one of those stories I heard as a young person. That moment had always stuck with me, for years. It was something I knew through word of mouth. Because it was such a vivid image, the moment of finding Andrew Myrick’s body. I wanted to write something about it. I began researching. That story is actually a documented story. There are different tellings of it, but they are all almost the same.
MO: You’re unraveling the bureaucratic language of treaties, of narrative language, or of the superimposed language of English on Native America. You show us the fallacy and the successes of language as it relates to apology. How would you define what a meaningful apology is?
LLO: In a way, I did define it poetically, in the 5th Whereas piece. I wrote about an apology I got from my father. This was many years ago, when I was much younger. It was probably the most effective apology I’ve had in my life. Really, it was so effective, so magical, that I was able to put away a whole lifetime of grievances, of hurt, and of pain. I was able to put all of that away within minutes, just sitting with my dad and listening to him, and seeing a kind of sincerity. Seeing it, and feeling it physically. Physically, you can feel it.
That was testament to the power of a real and sincere apology. I still cannot really define it in a formulaic way, but that was the closest I could come to defining meaningful apology – in a poem.
MO: What made you choose to use the singular “I” in your work?
LLO: A lot of the pieces in here do address aspects of Native history, or language, or identity in some way. Granted, not all of my work has to do with Native issues. Some of it is about writing or being an artist. Some of my work is about Motherhood. The “I” is important.
I’m very conscious about using the pronoun “we,” and not speaking for others, or representing others. I try to only speak for myself. If the work does resonate with others, and others connect to it, that’s a blessing. I have a very conscious relationship to the pronouns I chose.
MO: I think that’s very important—because people are looking to a queer poet, or a black poet, or a native poet, and thinking, this person speaks for an entire group. All we can ever do is speak for ourselves and our personal histories.
LLO: Absolutely. I can’t even speak for my own family. Within my own family, there are many diverse views and experiences.
It’s funny. I’m actually working on my next book, and it’s tentatively titled WE. The reason the working title is WE, is because it’s a book of collaboration. I’m working on pieces that involve others in some way.
MO: Who are you collaborating with?
LLO: They’re not straightforward collaborations. For example, I have a very, very, very long poem that comes from an exhibit I had in Canada. I had people submit little pieces of paper into these boxes that I made, on the subject of grief. I had certain instructions. They inserted names of people, or questions they had, or ways of dealing with grief. The gallery just sent all those little pieces of paper back to me. I have them spread out on a table in my house. I have a whole chorus of voices on the subject of grief. I’m working right now with those submissions. I’m meditating with them and orchestrating them on the page, and then writing my own responses.
MO: Can you speak to the role of motherhood in your poetry?
LLO: If I say anything, it’s probably going to sound pretty cliché. But my daughter is the center of my life. She’s the ultimate thing that gives me a sense of purpose and drive. She is the thing that makes me get up, keep going, and keep moving forward. Because I must.
Layli Long Soldier received a 2015 Lannan Fellowship for Poetry, a 2015 National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award.
Melanie Odelle is a musician and writer from a small island in the Pacific Northwest. She is an MFA candidate at The New School and currently lives in Queens, New York. Her website is www.melanie-odelle.com.
By Sam Roos
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 2017.
Sam Roos, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Kenneth Whyte about his book, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Knopf), which is among the final five selections in the category of Biography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.
In Hoover, author Kenneth Whyte delivers as intimate a portrait of the 31st US President as exists in the genre. Whyte presents the full life of a man for whom the presidency was only one of many chapters, including his difficult childhood, his rough-neck years as a engineer and mining executive in Australia and China, and his titanic humanitarian efforts during and after the first world war. The result is a deeply sympathetic portrait of one of America’s most misunderstood presidents. I spoke with Whyte to discuss his process and his subject.
Sam Roos: This book is incredibly well sourced, including over sixty-five pages of citations. How long was your research period?
Kenneth Whyte: The research really didn’t end until I stopped writing, so, about seven or eight years. I did it all chronologically, because I didn’t want to get too far ahead of the story looking back at his career with the knowledge that he had: A. become president, and B. that his presidency had been difficult. I wanted to experience his life as he lived it, from the beginning through the end, without a lot of preconceived ideas. So, I would go back and forth, from Toronto to [The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in] West Branch, Iowa, every six months or a year, to sort of pick up the next segment of his life and start anew.
SR: So you were trying to let the storylines guide you, rather than the other way around. Did that lead to specific storylines emerging that maybe you wouldn’t have found with a different approach?
KW: Absolutely. Every piece of it was different because of that approach. I think there’s a tendency in presidential biography to be respectful and ‘presidential’ in the presentation of the subject. So for instance, in Hoover’s boyhood there were some very difficult periods. After he was orphaned he was a neglected boy living with an uncle in small-town Oregon and having a very difficult time of it. I think this has been systemically underplayed by all the other biographers that have approached Hoover, because it doesn’t really fit the picture of presidential character. His business career as well: Hoover was much more ruthless and dastardly in his business activity than I had been led to expect by other biographical material. When you’re closing negotiations with other parties by waving a gun around and making threats, it doesn’t really fit with preconceived notions of how a president behaves.
Some of those in the last year might have changed a bit, but generally speaking, that’s not how we see our presidents.
SR: Do you think that’s the main reason people have this mischaracterized impression of Hoover as a failure? As I was reading, it felt to me like the biggest reason was FDR’s characterization of Hoover in the 1932 election.
KW: It’s never one thing in particular. Certainly FDR colored Hoover a certain way and was very effective at it. Hoover in his own speeches tended to idealize his background and make himself look like an ‘all-American boy’. He thought that would sell better to the electorate. So he’s kind of the author of his own cover up, as well as his biographers. They put in tangents, but mostly to try and make him look good, or look presidential, and that tended to highlight the more salubrious aspects of his career, and his childhood, more than the troubling ones.
SR: Many of the details Hoover’s personal life came through secondhand recollections and letters from people around him. Is there a reason you favor these adjacent accounts over, say, the George Nash biography of Hoover?
KW: First of all, George Nash wrote three volumes on Hoover’s career up to the age of 40… I think he’s done a tremendous job of researching and understanding Hoover. I learned a lot from him. That said, George’s biographical work was part of an official biography commissioned by the Hoover library, very much interested in explaining and understanding Hoover, the president. I was more interested in Hoover, the man. So I felt a need, not to look so much at public records, but to get a sense of what his life was like as lived by those around him as he lived it. He wasn’t an introspective person, he had no diaries, he wasn’t a letter writer, and he wasn’t inclined to sort of pick his own Boswell to tell a story, he just wasn’t tuned that way. But from a very early age he was surrounded by people who were really interested in him as a personality, saw something unique and great about him, and a surprising number of them kept very close records in their own diaries, notes, letters, about his comings and goings, his thoughts and his decisions. They allowed me to get a lot closer to Hoover than frankly I expected I would at the outset.
SR: We know from your last project, “The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst” that you’re interested in early 20th century America. Was there something specific that drew you to Hoover besides your interest in the era?
KW: Well, I don’t see much use in writing a book, and going to all that trouble, unless you’ve got something new to say, or you’re bringing someone to life that isn’t known. I was looking in the first half of the 20th century. I just wanted to move up a generation or two (from Hearst). So I was looking for a subject and reading a lot about the first world war, and Hoover kept popping up as this incredibly effective competent character— “a man of great capacities”— who was getting things done when no one else could get anything done, during the war and in the immediate aftermath. And the picture of him was so at odds with anything I’d read about Hoover that I got curious. You know, which was the real Hoover? How do you square the Hoover of the Great War with the guy who was a failed president? When I looked to see what was on the record biographically, I was surprised at how slight it was, and I started to think that he might be the subject. The fact that he has so little written about him, yet had such a critical role in American history, it was like this big gaping hole in the middle of America’s story. For me, that’s like the best thing you can find as a writer: some interesting, complicated subject, that nobody else has treated, that occurs at a very pivotal moment of history. So I felt like stumbled on a great opportunity.
SR: It feels to me like this book is meant to be redemptive for Hoover, or a least a correction of the record. How conscious of you were creating that narrative. Was it something you consciously did in your writing, or did you try and let his record, presented here in full, speak for itself?
KW: I felt that, in my Hearst book, I spent too much time arguing with other people’s estimations of [Hearst]. If I had to go back and do it again, I would just tell the story and let it speak for itself, rather than arguing with other writers and historians. So I went deliberately into Hoover determined not to think about ‘rankings’, what Arthur Schlesinger jr. had said about him, and just accept, good or bad, what I found. For instance, I came across, inevitably, the bonus army episode in 1932, which is one of the critical points in his career and in Roosevelt’s career. In the standard telling of the history of the period, Hoover screwed it up and Roosevelt, being more politically savvy, saw that immediately and capitalized on it and won the election of ’32 partially in consequence. What I found on the record was so completely at odds with that telling, I did feel I had to go out of my way at that point and note that there was this other telling of history in this period and this is what it was and this is why it was wrong. But, on the whole, I just let Hoover and his activities speak for themselves.
SR: Hoover’s legacy is inexorably tied to the question of who’s to blame for the Great Depression. You don’t shy away from the details when this subject comes up. There are times where you get very specific with statistics about economic policies and performance. How conscious were you of balancing that level of detail and keeping the book from delving into policy wonkiness?
KW: Yeah, that was a problem not only in the Presidency, but in the 8 years before that when he was commerce secretary, and I was very concerned about that, because it’s not a book about political science, it’s a biography. At the same time, he was a politician, so that was his business of the day so you have to sort of understand what he was doing and why he was doing it in order to understand the man. I tried to collect what, to my mind, were the most essential and illustrative examples of Hoover’s performance. I spend quite a bit of time on his efforts to fight the depression because I think that’s where he did a lot of his best work, in crisis-to-crisis management of the issues, coming up with novel, imaginative, creative solutions, sometimes very brave solutions, to the problems that faced the nation at that time. Not all of them were successful, you could argue that none of them were successful in that the economy never bounced back, but he went farther than any president had gone before him. When you admit how far Hoover went during his term, a lot of what Roosevelt does as his successor seems less novel, and the break between the republican era of the 20s and the new deal era of Roosevelt is then not anywhere near as sharp as it’s often portrayed.
SR: Were there parts of Hoover’s life that you researched and then ultimately left on the cutting room floor?
KW: I left books on the floor. One of the reasons that I think that Hoover was sitting there and really hadn’t been thoroughly done as a biography is there’s just too much! I think I spent one half sentence on Hoover in Poland and you could easily write a whole book on that. Or on Hoover in child welfare. The social science research that he commissioned as president was voluminous and informed 40 years of social policy. His work with Eisenhower and Truman on essentially reconstructing the administrative branch of government, I mean I gave it a few pages, but that was one of the most important episodes in the history of the presidency.
SR: You do that a few times, paying a paragraph or even a sentence’s worth of attention— oh by the way, he founded the FCC and the FDA—to these massive accomplishments.
KW: There’s just so much that he was involved in… the founding of the commercial aviation industry, the founding of the commercial broadcast industry, I said very little about the Hoover dam… But I wanted to get things in one volume, so you could get a good, close, honest rendering of his life, and that meant not going down all of the byways that were open to me.
SR: First Hearst, then Hoover… can we assume Hughes is next?
KW: Someone asked me if it was Hitler, another two syllable name starting with H. No, in fact, I’m not doing a biographical. And I’ve moved up a half a century, so I’m in the 60’s and the 70’s in this one, writing about what happened to American business in that time. There was a big shift with America ceasing to be a country in that Calvin Coolidge mode, “the business of America is business”, and becoming much more concerned about the consequences of economic growth and business activities. So I’m writing about that using the history of General Motors as my way into it.
Kenneth Whyte is the author of The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, a Washington Post and Toronto Globe and Mail Book of the Year, and a nominee for four major Canadian book awards. He is a publishing and telecommunications executive and chairman of the Donner Canada Foundation. He was formerly editor in chief of Maclean’s magazine, editor of the monthly Saturday Night magazine, and founding editor of the National Post. He lives in Toronto.
Sam Roos is a first-year MFA fiction candidate at The New School. His work has appeared in The New School’s own The Inquisitive Eater, as well as NBCSports.com, The Second City Network, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He’s originally from Portland, Maine, currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, and is the biggest Red Sox fan you’ve ever met. You can find him on twitter, @Roostafarian.
By Kaitlin McManus
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 2017.
Kaitlin McManus, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Caroline Fraser about her book Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Metropolitan Books), which is among the final five selections in the category of Biography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.
Kaitlin McManus: Laura Ingalls Wilder is a figure who, for the many of us who read the Little House books, we feel that we know fairly well. What prompted you to write a more telling biography of the real-life woman and her family?
Caroline Fraser: The “Laura” that most of us know from the books and the television show is, of course, a fictional character. Readers (especially younger readers) often believe that the books are memoirs describing the childhood of “Laura Ingalls.” But in fact they’re novels, so it’s a similar situation to movies that are “based on a true story.” That can mean anything, and indeed, the view of Wilder’s life presented by the books is fictionalized: There are invented scenes, characters, and dialogue, and the chronology of Wilder’s life was altered. The TV show, of course, is virtually unrecognizable from her life.
The childhood of the real Laura Ingalls differs significantly from the one described in the Little House books in ways that are potentially quite revealing. Most of her adult life is not as well-known, because the books end on the day when the fictional Laura gets married. So I was eager to tell the story of how she wrote these books during the Depression; how she arrived at her politics; and how she collaborated with her daughter. Those are very dramatic chapters in her life; as remarkable in some ways as the stories she chose to tell.
KM: As you mention early in your book, biographies of poor subjects are difficult for lack of records. As you say, “people of high status and position are likely to be rooted by their very wealth, protecting fragile ephemera in a manse or great home. They have a Mount Vernon, a Monticello, a Montpelier.” What was it like to research the Ingalls family, constantly on the move and seemingly always in poverty?
CF: The research was similar to the kinds of things that many of us do to learn more about our ancestors, searching through public records: federal and state censuses, military and church records, homesteading paperwork, property, tax, and bank records. That type of genealogical research can be tremendously rewarding. The fact that Charles Ingalls, Wilder’s father, for example, never served in the Civil War despite being prime age for militia service suggests that he may have sought to avoid the war. Public records also reveal the pattern of debts accrued by Laura and Almanzo Wilder during their early married life.
But these kinds of documents are limited, because they can’t reveal how people felt about their circumstances, or reacted to them. So, as with any biography, I had to piece out public documents with analysis of more personal things for hints about the Ingallses’ and Wilders’ emotional lives—photographs, poems, letters, diaries, articles, manuscripts.
KM: Discussions of factual truth versus emotional truth have become pressing recently. While the Little House series may not always be entirely accurate, You note that it is representative of Wilder’s emotional truth. Can you expand on some of the nuances of Wilder’s relationship with her childhood and memories?
CF: Wilder often said that her real motivation in writing the books was to memorialize her parents and their values, and it’s very clear that she elevated their heroism and stoicism in her portrait, leaving out things that might have cast them in a less-than-ideal light. This is true especially of her father. Her construction of a narrative that shows the family moving westward with a purpose is quite different from the reality, in which Charles Ingalls struggled to find jobs and put food on the table.
Their actual life had an aimless quality, and it’s clear that Laura Ingalls, as a child, often felt overwhelmed by their circumstances. The interesting thing about the books is that when you read them as a child, I think you focus on the cozy family and the happy endings. But when you read them as an adult, you start to pick up on some of those darker things in the background. So some of the more disturbing emotional truths did come through, even when Wilder may not have intended it.
KM: You credit Rose Wilder Lane, Wilder’s daughter, writing mentor, and very capable editor as Wilder’s catalyst to put her story to paper. But Lane was also a notorious yellow journalist with a tendency to write half-truths and outright lies about her subjects. What kind of influence did Rose’s editorial skills and background have on Wilder’s writing?
CF: Wilder spent several months visiting her daughter in San Francisco in 1915, where Lane had just taken a job working for the San Francisco Bulletin. Wilder had ostensibly come to see Rose and tour the world’s fair, the Panama-Pacific Exhibition, but she also wanted to become her daughter’s apprentice. So she was watching as Lane immersed herself in the world of yellow journalism, writing a fake “autobiography” of Charlie Chaplin and other serialized stories that were little more than dime novels. And the striking thing is that neither woman questioned the ethics behind this—in fact, Wilder told her husband that all these stories that Lane was embroidering or manufacturing were “true.”
This would have a huge impact on Wilder’s own work, first for a regional farm newspaper, the Missouri Ruralist, and ultimately in the Little House books, which present a unique mash-up of genres, including elements of memoir, biography, autobiography, and fiction. It’s very unusual to write a fictional memoir of yourself in the third person, as Wilder did, and the fact that she felt comfortable doing so came from her uncritical adoption of techniques used by her daughter.
KM: As you’ve said in past interviews, Little House books are children’s literature with a wide adult readership. What is it about these books that makes them so popular more than eighty years after their first publication?
CF: In terms of the way their reputation and readership have evolved, I often compare the Little House books to Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Twain, of course, was more aware of what he was doing, self-consciously satirizing and criticizing the institution of slavery. Wilder, I think, was more naïve. Less self-aware. But it’s that folk art quality, that guilelessness, that makes her portrait of settlers’ encounters with Indians in Little House on the Prairie such an unnerving and ultimately important work reflecting whites’ appropriation of native land and culture.
And her extended vision of pioneering and homesteading has been tremendously influential in shaping how generations of children and adults see that history. Many of Wilder’s most avid readers (including myself) have a connection to that past, because they come from farming families or emigrant families who settled in the Midwest.
But probably the biggest factor in the books’ enduring popularity is that they’re great stories, movingly told, evoking the warmth of Wilder’s family and her relationship to the land, which she loved.
KM: The Little House franchise, as you mention in the introduction, is a favorite among famous conservative politicians. You also describe how Wilder and Lane were increasingly conservative throughout the Dust Bowl. How does political-mindedness play into the books’ writing and legacy?
CF: When you consider the Little House legacy, I do think you have to distinguish between Wilder’s books and the TV show. Ronald Reagan’s fondness for the show, for example, has to have been connected in part to his own acting career in westerns and his relationship to Michael Landon, who was a friend and supporter. And I’m not sure that children come away from reading the books with a sense of a political message, which is largely confined to Pa’s anti-government outburst at the end of Little House on the Prairie, and the Fourth of July scenes in Farmer Boy and Little Town on the Prairie. They may well absorb Wilder’s insistence on the values ascribed to her parents—self-reliance, honesty, and integrity.
What’s fascinating to me—and which readers may not be as familiar with—is how Wilder and Lane reflected rural values in many farming communities as they reacted to the New Deal, vehemently denouncing government assistance. It’s especially astonishing when you realize that Wilder had worked for years for a government loan program and had herself taken advantage of favorable terms on a federal farm loan. But the intensity of their disgust with government wasn’t at all unusual, and it foreshadowed the political discourse that we have today.
KM: One of the things I loved most about your book is that while you disclose every truth about the Wilder family, their financial situations and social climate, it always seems fair, even warm to the individual. I sense a real love for the woman, her experience, and her work.
CF: I may not always agree with Wilder’s views or politics, and she wasn’t a perfect person (or perfect mother). No one is. She could be unthinking, even hard-hearted, by her own admission. Her portrayal of Native Americans is racist and traffics in stereotypes. But even with these flaws, which I don’t mean to trivialize, I think she was an extraordinary person, someone who faced truly heartbreaking struggle and persevered, at times heroically. Her work is a testament to the dignity of women’s labor. So yes, I do feel admiration and affection for her. And I continue to love her books.
Caroline Fraser was born in Seattle and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University in English and American literature. Formerly on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, she is the author of two nonfiction books, God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church and Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution, both published by Henry Holt's Metropolitan Books. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside Magazine, and The London Review of Books, among other publications. She has received a PEN Award for Best Young Writer and was a past recipient of the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writer's Residency, awarded by PEN Northwest. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband, Hal Espen.
Kaitlin McManus is a writer in Brooklyn. Originally from Normal, Illinois (which is absolutely a real place), she is wrapping up an MFA in fiction at The New School. She's currently sweating over a novel-in-progress about drugs and emotional commodification.
By Feiyi Xu
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 2017.
Feiyi Xu, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Jack E. Davis about his book The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea (Liveright), which is among the final five selections in the category of Nonfiction for the 2017 NBCC Awards.
In his book, The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea, Jack E. Davis explores and reveals the Gulf’s diverse world in a unique perspective by combining its history and natural environment. He grew up on the Gulf, knows the Gulf, and loves the Gulf.
Feiyi Xu (FX): When did you have the idea of this book?
Jack E. Davis (JD): 2010, months before the BP oil spill.
FX: What is your primary motivation to write this book?
JD: I grew up on the Gulf and wanted to write a cultural and natural history of a sea largely overlooked in in the traditional narrative of American history. After the oil spill, I believed it was especially important to recapture the true identity of the Gulf, to present it for what it is, which is more than an oil sump and sunning beach.
FX: Did you choose the title, “The Gulf: The Making of American Sea”? Could you please explain it?
JD: Yes, I chose the title. As I explain in the book, there are both historical and ecological reasons for why I call the Gulf an American sea. When Thomas Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase, giving the US its first Gulf-front property, the Spanish, French, and British were freely sailing the Gulf. He and other elected officials believed the Gulf was rightfully an American sea, the control of which would solidify American dominion in the region. He wanted the US to acquire Cuba, and other presidents tried. Eventually, the US secured half the shoreline of the Gulf, sharing the other half with Mexico and Cuba, but the US has since controlled the sea, dominating the seafood industry, for example, and oil extraction.
As for the ecological reason, the Gulf is one of the richest estuarine environments in the world, and the estuaries of the Gulf tend to concentrate around the five US states. Most of the freshwater that flows to the Gulf, and that is central an estuarine environment, comes down rives from the US states. The best sport and commercial fishing has always been around the US states, which is not to say one cannot find good fishing off Mexico.
FX: The Gulf is a massive work with substantial history, topics, and other information. What did you do before you start writing?
JD: I have been writing books since the 1990s. The Gulf is my third solo-authored book. I have also been a history professor since the 1990s. Before then I worked in the business world, attended college, and served in the navy, which I joined out of high school because I wanted to go to sea and travel the world.
FX: Could you please give a brief introduction of the history of the Gulf of Mexico? For example, the history of the Gulf of Mexico is a history of…
JD: My book is a history of the human relationship with Gulf nature over the course of nearly ten thousand years. It focuses on the five US states and gives most of its attention to the 19th and 20th centuries and how the American relationship with the Gulf evolved over time. The book is not just about people who lived beside the Gulf and their interactions with the sea, but how all Americans interacted with the sea, even from distant places. People of the Northeast and Midwest are just as relevant in the history of the Gulf as those who have lived beside it.
FX: Your book has a unique perspective on exploring a landscape by digging into its history. You have published several environmental history books. What attracts you to combining nature and humanity? How do nature and humanity cooperate with each other?
JD: Landscape is a place constructed by humans. I am interested in nonhuman nature as a historical agent, how it has shaped the course of human history. Most historians treat nature as a physical backdrop to a human-driven story and disregard how nature impinges on human activities. I organized the book’s chapters around natural characteristics of the Gulf to emphasize the power and influence of the nonhuman world in the human experience.
FX: In your book, you discussed the growth coast, with houses, hotels, and condominium towers replacing vital natural vegetation in less than two decades. It has become a controversial topic that how can we balance environmental protection and economic growth. Could you please share your thoughts on this topic?
JD: We know how to achieve that balance; we just don’t give it much priority. As a common practice, the Gulf states and others connected to the Gulf by rivers, for example, dumped raw sewage into the bays and bayous of the Gulf until the 1970s and the Clean Water Act. We nearly killed many of those bays, wiped out the greater majority of their seagrass beds—vital to healthy productive estuaries. When we stopped, when we cleaned up these waters, they came back to life. More people live on these waters today, but nearly all are healthier than when fewer people lived beside them. Bird life I never saw as a kid, including the bald eagle, returned to Gulf shores because sea life was thriving again. We could roll back the Gulf of Mexico dead zone quite easily if we stopped sending agricultural effluent down the Mississippi River. We have learned to protect mangroves and coastal mashes and recognized the benefits to ourselves when we do. What we lack is the political will to be smart about living with nature by not polluting it, not managing it, not altering it, not re-engineering it, not putting concrete and asphalt where the living shoreline exists or should exist.
FX: In July 2017, Premier Oil said that about 1 billion barrels of oil had been discovered off Mexico’s coast. What will the oil discovery bring to the Gulf of Mexico?
JD: In a word, controversy. More oil will mean not only more drilling and platforms over the water but an expansion in the onshore infrastructure that supports extraction. As I argue in the book, the real environmental damage from the oil and gas industry comes from the onshore facilities.
Jack E. Davis is the author of the award-winning An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century, a dual biography of the America's premier wetlands and the woman who led a movement to save it. His latest book, The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, to be published by Liveright/W. W. Norton in March 2017, is a comprehensive history of the Gulf of Mexico from the Pleistocene to the present.
Davis, who writes mainly for an intellectually curious audience rather than an academic one, has been teaching history at the university level for more than two decades. In 2002-2003, he taught on a Fulbright award at the University of Jordan in Amman. He is now a professor of environmental history and sustainability studies at the University of Florida.
Feiyi Xu is a First-year MFA student in Fiction at The New School.
By Tiziano Colibazzi
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 2017.
Tiziano Colibazzi, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Nuar Alsadir about her book Fourth Person Singular (Oxford University Press), which is among the final five selections in the category of Poetry for the 2017 NBCC Awards.
Tiziano Colibazzi (TC): Can you explain how you chose the title Fourth Person Singular?
Nuar Alsadir (NA): There was a period during which I was trying to figure out what kind of speaker to use. The poems I found most moving, which serves as my measure of a poem’s value, were written in the first person but, as I had developed an aversion to confessional poetry, I didn’t want to write about my life in a narrative, confessional way. I had been playing with the speaker in my poems, trying to figure out how I could keep the work lyric – have an “I” addressing a “you” – but not use an “I” that matched with me, the facts and narrative of my lived life.
As I was trying to figure out how I could write in the first person, but peel the emotion away from event that evoked it, in my sleep I heard my dream voice saying, “The fourth person singular exists in the fourth dimension.” When I woke up, I looked up the fourth dimension and the physics behind it, and I began to work out what the fourth person singular might be.
What began as an attempt to work out a fragment from sleep, had, in the end, broader implications. Four-dimensional space time—and there’s a diagram of this in my book—involves a moment in the present, which physicists call an event (P), and two light cones, the past light cone and the future light cone. The past light cone encompasses all the events in the past that can affect the moment in the present (P) by particles or waves traveling at or below the speed of light, and the future light cone encompasses all the moments in the future that can be affected by the moment in the present (P) by particles or waves traveling at or below the speed of light. Basically, the idea is that any moment in the present also includes a part of the immediate past and part of the immediate future.
All other events outside of the past and future light cones are in the elsewhere. An event in the elsewhere can enter our past or future light cones, but only after a lag—we don’t experience events in the elsewhere simultaneous to their occurrence. A classic example is if the sun were to suddenly lose all of its light, because the sun is in the elsewhere of the earth, it would take eight minutes before the event would travel from the elsewhere to our future light cone on earth and we would be able to perceive it.
The idea became relevant to me when I thought about it metaphorically, replaced the moment in the present’s letter P with the letter I, as in the first person. If the four-dimensional space-time model were applied to an individual, you could imagine events in the elsewhere of your psyche that you don’t feel the effects of simultaneous to their occurrence as nonetheless affecting who you are—the way a child, for example, can be influenced by the trauma of a parent even if it is never spoken about, or the sadness of someone sitting next to you on a train can affect you even if you don’t exchange words. This would force us to question our boundaries of self. Even if something happened long ago in a world you don’t share directly—or aren’t conscious of sharing—it can nonetheless influence your present in ways you may feel or experience but not know. This is the idea of quantum entanglement. And maybe also of humanity. The fourth person singular occupies this quantum-ly entangled position. I imagine the fourth person singular would be intuitively familiar to anyone who bridges worlds, such as an immigrant, the child of immigrant parents, someone from a different background than everyone around them, &c. I realize this may all sound very intellectual, but, to me, Fourth Person Singular is a very vulnerable book because taking up the position of the fourth person singular demands that you open the door to your interior.
TC: One aspect I found fascinating about your work is the use of redactions. Some words are redacted in a way that is not readable. In other cases, words are grayed out and can still be read with some effort. Can you talk about these choices?
NA: Maybe at some level, the redactions reflect the difficulty I had in baring myself completely. But also there were some things I knew needed to be in the book, though not necessarily in a completely legible form. They reflect, for me, the way the mind works, how it represses, with some things pushed all the way down into the unconscious, while others are only partially repressed and still accessible. They also reflect the way our world works—Washington Square Park, for example, has a burial field beneath it with something like 20,000 corpses still buried there. Without knowing this, as you cross the park, you may receive a transmission from that other level that you feel without necessarily being conscious of what you’re feeling. One of the fragments in my book describes something similar through Hemingway’s process:
Hemingway would record every detail around an event—say, a bomb exploding—then take out the event and leave only its reverberations. I have been walking through reverberations with no sense of what the event was.
I also record every detail, but, rather than taking out the event, I leave it in and redact—or partially redact—it. Like the unconscious, those redacted sections emit reverberations that play a role in the text’s meaning even if the content cannot be accessed directly. I believe this so strongly, in fact, that I was still editing what was beneath blacked-out lines after the book had been typeset.
TC: Your writing is part prose, part poetry. How would you describe it?
NA: I don’t think of poetry as being defined by form, but by effect. I elaborate on this in a piece I wrote for Granta about going to clown school while doing research for a book I’m writing on laughter. In it, I explore the connections between clown, psychoanalysis, poetry and political action. The instructor would refer to the moment when the audience felt moved as poetry. Of course, as a poet, I was jolted by that, thought about it quite a bit. But, ultimately, I agreed with him. You know something is poetry if you feel moved by it, if it stirs your interior. A piece of writing can look like a poem, use words that are considered poetic, but without the ability to pierce the reader, it’s what Derek Walcott termed a fake poem. I think of Fourth Person Singular as a book of poetry, but not a collection of poems.
TC: Your comments about Barthes and the way you described your experience of riding the Q train over the bridge as a « puncture » are very evocative. Is the act of writing a « puncture » for you?
NA: Definitely! It is that ability to puncture that makes something poetry. Barthes is talking about photographs there—he calls the studium the part of the photograph we understand, can connect to contexts of meaning we already know, and the punctum the part that pierces us, evokes understanding outside of systems of knowledge—the part that resonates with our interior and evokes a strong feeling. I am—in poetry and in life—more concerned with the punctum.
TC: How did you get from poetry to psychotherapy? Or was it the other way around?
NA: I’ve been writing poetry since I was a child (my first poem was published when I was nine). I used to think I had ESP because there were things I saw and felt—reverberations from beneath the surface—that no one around me was talking about. Poetry became the space where I could explore those kinds of perceptions freely.
TC: I enjoyed sketch 27 very much. The passenger on the train becomes an object subject to gravity. Can you tell more about how these sketches started?
NA: Thank you. I have a sketch book that’s separate from my notebook, which I carry around with me. Whenever I have a pocket of time, I sketch in it, mostly verbal sketches. It gives me a way of valuing all thoughts, feelings and perceptions equally, rather than seeing some as more weighty or meaningful than others. I am then free to find inspiration anywhere, even on the subway—maybe especially on the subway, as that’s where the knob to quantum entanglement is on high, which means I’m most likely to be punctured.
Nuar Alsadir is a poet, writer and psychoanalyst. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including 'Granta', 'The New York Times Magazine', 'Slate', 'Grand Street', the 'Kenyon Review', 'tender', 'Poetry London' and 'Poetry Review'; and a collection of her poems, 'More Shadow Than Bird', was published by Salt in 2012. She is on the faculty at New York University, and works as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.
Tiziano Colibazzi is a poet in addition to being a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He is currently a first year MFA candidate for Poetry at The New School. Originally from Rome, Italy, Tiziano lives in NYC and he is the proud father of twin boys.