Shokoofeh Azar, "The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree"
Europa Editions
Rachel Willson-Broyles, "The Helios Disaster"
World Editions
Jonas Hassen Khemiri, "The Family Clause"
Translated by Alice Menzies
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Anja Kampmann, "High as the Waters Rise"
Translated by Anne Posten
Catapult
Fernanda Melchor, "Hurricane Season"
Translated by Sophie Hughes
New Directions
Yu Miri, "Tokyo Ueno Station"
Translated by Morgan Giles
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House
Perumal Murugan, "The Story of a Goat"
Translated by N. Kalyan Raman
Black Cat / Grove Atlantic
Cho Nam-Joo, "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982"
Translated by Jamie Chang
Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company
Pilar Quintana, "The Bitch"
Translated by Lisa Dillman
World Editions
Adania Shibli, "Minor Detail"
Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
New Directions
Alex is a Fiction/Nonfiction dual MFA student at the New School, a WriteOn Teaching Fellow, public speaking teacher, and the host of TNS After Hours. She is currently sheltering-in-place in her Northern California hometown with her parents.
1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?
My favorite villains are all the evil stepmothers, witches, and hags in fairytales. Without them, we wouldn’t have stories.
My favorite protagonist as of late is Harry Potter. Not that I like him so much. He’s super annoying in The Order of the Phoenix. But I like that I can fully see him. The audiobooks read by Jim Dale are my soothing balm. I can’t count how many times I’ve listened to the series. I’m amazed by the new things I hear even now and how JK Rowling created another world I can escape to. I also grew up as the books came out. It might be just nostalgia. One day I will have a goldfish and name him Harry.
2. When did you know you were a writer?
Think the “I’m a writer” moment happened during my first semester of undergrad, or at least, the “I really like this and want to get better at it” moment. I went to Hampshire College and during my first semester took a class called ‘Writing About Sports’ taught by professor and fishing enthusiast Will Ryan. It was a nonfiction writing workshop where we wrote essays about our own experience with sports, any and all sports, fishing included, while reading books like The Best American Sports Writing of the Century and Friday Night Lights. It was the first time in my life I was asked to write about my own life besides my personal essay for my college application. My final paper for the class was on my grandfather. He was an amazing athlete and had passed away the week before I started Hampshire. I was already an avid journaler, not a word but should be, since I was in middle school. But this class made me think that maybe others would want to hear my stories, they didn’t have to only live in my notebooks, that I too could be a storyteller.
3. What are you currently working on?
I write mostly about my family. I don’t think I’ll ever stop but it would be nice to be done one day. I’m a dual fiction/nonfiction student so the project has two forms at the moment: a series of short stories based on my time living in my father’s small Florida Panhandle town and a collection of essays exploring my grandmother who was institutionalized for Hysteria in the early 1960s, a family story of how my Sicilian immigrate great grandfather killed an African American man to be accepted into White Southern Culture, and my own personal obsession with wanting to be a mother.
4. How has your writing process changed over the years?
My time at the New School has made me more rhythmic. I write every day even though most days it’s junk. I need external pressure and encouragement to write. I thrive off deadlines and cheerleaders. New School has given me both. Grateful to my writing buddies and professors.
5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.
Obsessive, a bit angsty with a thread of dark humor, always sifting in search of what I don’t know yet because I haven’t found it.
Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.
The next TNS After Hours is tonight, Friday, September 18th from7 - 8:30 pm ET. This month will be co-hosted by the fabulous Jessa Nagamoto (Fiction '21). Hope to see you all in the virtual Red Room!
I'm writing to check in with you during this heart wrenching time. I really appreciated President McBride's personal and powerful statement about the killing of George Floyd and its aftermath, and I was very glad to finally have someone like him in his position at The New School, writing about systemic and institutionalized racism, acknowledging that anger is an appropriate response to being terrorized.
This next year is not going to be "normal," in any way, but in spite of, or because of everything going on, I feel a kind of urgent hope. In this moment of pain, there's also clarity, with brutal reminders all around us that as bell hooks writes, we live in a "imperialist white supremicist capitalist patriarchy." The old normal hasn't worked. We've all been hurt by this system. We don't need to rush back to the old ways of doing things. We have a chance to write and teach and live in ways that make real change possible. What we do in the coming months can be better--more equitable, more full of love--than what we did before.
My dad recently retired after a very long career as a labor and civil rights lawyer. He's also deeply religious, and so I was kind of shocked when he told me that after all he'd seen, he didn't think that it was possible to change anyone else's mind. "If you want people to change their behavior, get a consent decree," he said, a much more cynical view than I imagined he had. But what he also meant is that the only person you can really change is yourself. We're not lawyers, not most of us anyway, and consent decrees may be out of our reach, but we do know how to work hyper-locally, on the page and in our hearts and heads. This is not to discount the political work that so many of you are engaged with.
I'm glad that we'll be working together over this next year to build an even better program, a stronger community.
Strength and Courage, Luis Jaramillo Director, Creative Writing Program
Jhon Valdes Klinger is a Colombian storyteller, filmmaker, educator, and writer. He is currently an MFA candidate in Fiction from the New School’s Writing Program. He was a Riggio Writing and Democracy recipient and studied Film Production in the school of media studies. He served as the editor of arts and media for 12thstreet literary magazine for the 2016/17 year. He is currently a research assistant for the writing program. In the fall he will be teaching English secondary school in San Jose. He is passionate about stories, film, education, and can’t seem to shut up about CrossFit.
1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?
My favorite villain is Lolita's (Navakov) Hubbert Hubbert. I enjoy a villain that I can love and hate. In terms of protagonists, I hate to love Sula. Toni Morrison wrote an endlessly-complicated character.
2. When did you know you were a writer?
When I was five-years-old I used to watch the news and reinterpret what I heard for adults in the funniest ways. I still do that, but it's not nearly as cute anymore.
3. What are you currently working on?
I am working on a novel-Bestia, which is a magical realism haunted house story set in New York and Colombia. I describe it as a terror-novela. The novel explores the horrors of being a new immigrant in America. I am also working on Olfacto, a book of nonfiction short stories that explores queerness and scents—being queer smells so good to me.
4 How has your writing process changed over the years?
I came from media studies and poetry background. I genuinely enjoyed brevity when I was younger (I still do in conversations). In the process of writing a novel, my paragraphs have become more expansive and detailed. I enjoy digging into what my characters are thinking and how they react to the world I created for them. I used to be scared of interiority because there is very little room for it in a screenplay. I am leaning to the poet in me to help with interiority.
5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.
In my writing, words blur between language, finding the common threads between English and Spanish, and juxtaposing the unconventional with the guiding hand of similarity.
Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.
Interview with TNS After Hours Coordinators by Carissa Chesanek
Virginia “Vinny” Valenzuela and Alex Vara open up about the off-campus reading series, the literary bar it’s held at, and the welcoming writing community
The New School (TNS) After Hours reading series is a cool and comfortable space to share your writing aloud for others to hear. Of course, that last part can seem absolutely terrifying to any writer. I should know. I was completely freaked out for my first reading at After Hours, but it was unlike anything I ever constructed in my head (stiff audience, blaring florescent lights, you know what I’m talking about). But the environment was relaxed and the lighting was dim. And most of all, people were drinking and having good time. Once I stepped into that space, I was able to relax, drink, and have a good time, too. And hey, my reading wasn’t terrible either.
I sat down with the After Hours coordinators, Virginia “Vinny” Valenzuela and Alex Vara to talk about the creation of the reading series, the importance of reading work aloud, and how the pandemic impacted the way we now share our work.
Carissa Chesanek: Can you tell us a little bit about how After Hours got started?
Virginia “Vinny” Valenzuela: The New School After Hours was founded by Hillary Adler in the fall of 2015, during her first semester as a student in the MFA. She wanted to create a space where students could perform without the stress of being at school at a departmental event. Many readers confess that the After Hours reading is their performance debut, which tells me that the series’ original mission continues to thrive, both in person and online.
Alex Vara: It’s another event for current students to show off their stuff and be off-campus together. I’ve heard some readers say they feel more comfortable at KGB than at school. There’s nicer lighting and hard liquor which helps some.
CC: Glad you brought up school readings. Talk to us about the differences (besides the cool lighting and on-point drink menu) between school readings and After Hours.
VV: The biggest difference, for me, is that TNS After Hours is a more relaxed setting and much more flexible. People usually read from the genre they are studying at school at the department readings, but students have been known to perform outside of their chosen genre at After Hours, encompassing music and theater as well. I also think that the allure of performing in a world-famous East Village bar adds something that feels special and professional, especially for writers who have moved to New York to join the program.
AV: It’s off-campus for one. It’s also open to the public. Friends and family, as well as strangers stumbling into the Red Room, can take a peek and watch our writers read. And while mostly current students read, it’s open to the entire New School Writing Community. We’ve had alumni, faculty (Lori Lynn Turner), and staff (Alexandra Kleeman) all read in the series.
CC: Why do you think it's important for writers (especially students) to read their work aloud?
VV: I have encountered dozens of people who confess to me that they have never read their work aloud, and those are the people I would encourage to read more than anyone else. Learning how to read your work aloud, and more importantly, learning how to perform, is an integral skill for writers. It not only allows you to get immediate and honest feedback on your writing (an audience never lies!), but it is also vital to how you will be able to communicate with audiences, impress agents, and find the kind of confidence that translates into better writing and a more successful career.
AV: After Hours is a supportive environment to practice your reading skills before hitting open mics and other more high-stakes readings. Plus, you make friends reading. Some of my best friends from the program have come from hearing them read and falling in love with their stories. After Hours and the on-campus Student Reading are the two events where students can be together as a community.
CC: I know from my own experience as a reader the audience is incredibly welcoming and kind. How in the world do you have such a cool audience time and time again?
VV: Most people who come to the After Hours readings are frequent readers and friends of the event, alumni and current students, which makes the event very community-oriented, friendly and relaxed. Something I dedicated myself to doing when I was the curator of the event, was to introduce myself to every person that walked into the space. Alex does the same thing. After Hours is about connecting people across the board to share stories, go on journeys, and to find inspiration from people around us.
AV: It’s crazy sweet. The New School Community feels special in the way we are supportive of each other. Maybe all MFA programs are like that, I don’t know. The last reading over Zoom was a love fest. It was our annual thesis reading and graduating students read from their projects and brought their best stuff. New School writers feel raw. We write about things we really care about and are brutally honest and vulnerable. I cried multiple times that night.
CC: I cried too. It was a glorious mushy love fest I will cherish forever.What will you cherish the most by managing After Hours?
VV: For me personally, I have been able to network with professors and alumni who I otherwise would not have had the opportunity to meet. I was able to learn about how the program has changed over the last two decades, and how alumni have been able to create their careers since leaving the program. And it’s not only motivational for me but also for the audience, who are mostly current students just dipping their toes into the literary world. The act of meeting new students on a monthly basis and being able to encourage them and help them make friends and learn about other opportunities to read, has been an extremely rewarding experience that has stuck with me after graduation.
AV: Beneficial to me? I get to invite my favorite writers to read and listen to their stories. I love watching writers read. As for the community, it brings us together for the purpose of supporting our readers and seeing each other’s faces. After Hours gives us an excuse to come together for a couple of hours every month. Nine to twelve writers share their work, and we are there for them, but also for the community.
CC: All this talk about the audience and community helps bring me to my next question about KGB. How did you snag such a cool spot?
VV: I think Hillary just liked the spot, and went in and asked if they had any open nights in their calendar. Lori Schwarz has been our contact from the very beginning, and she is just the coolest person to work with. She bartends the event every once in a while, and she always makes a point to be supportive. I learned from this experience that starting a reading series in New York City is not as hard as you would think. If you pick a neighborhood that you enjoy or a bar or restaurant that you would like to use as your space, it really is just a matter of walking in and asking if there are any nights that you could fill the space with a reading. Bars are usually really happy to host readings because it gives them business and a link to a new community.
AV: KGB host many other readings too, including other MFA student readings like NYU’s Creative Writing Program’s reading. Laura Cronk used to host the Monday Night Poetry Readings.
CC: Clearly, KGB is the place to be.But what’s your favorite thing about it?
VV: I grew up in the East Village so KGB has always been a place on my radar. I was always drawn to the fact that they support so many different kinds of live entertainment, from readings to jazz nights, to theater. I have also been drawn to their history as the only place for Ukrainian socialists to meet in secret in the 1950’s. The whole point of writing, and sharing it, is to have a voice, to go against the grain, to question society, and to innovate. KGB’s history stands as a strong metaphor for the job we have been tasked with as writers.
AV: My favorite is the mic. I feel crazy cool talking into it. All readers should practice on it before their reading. When we host in-person readings at KGB, we usually have time to practice with the mic. You have to be closer to it than you’d imagine. So when we return to the Red Room, I’ll be sure to have sanitary wipes on hand to use between readings. Another cool thing folks should know: The bathtub really works. I’ve turned it on. And I’ve recently been told about an elderberry martini that I’ve been missing out for two years. That will be my first drink when back in the Red Room.
CC: Speaking of sanitary wipes. You know where this is going. Let’s talk COVID-19. What’s been the biggest challenge switching from in-person readings to online due to this pandemic?
VV: I think the hardest part has been learning how to make an event feel “life-like” even though it’s taking place on a screen. Alex has been an inspiring director, spending time with readers the day before to make sure they have the right camera angles, lighting, and volume. She has also experimented with many different formats to allow for applause, smooth transitions between readers, and fun social mixers in between acts.
AV: The biggest challenge has been not having the physical space to hang out in after the reading. You can only be on Zoom for so long and how many times can you be put in a breakout room with strangers? I miss the after-party in the Red Room. The sound of the crowd jabbering together in the red booths or at the bar. That’s how I would gage a good reading by that sound. How loud and excited people were. I miss being with everyone in one space. And, not being able to take photos of the readers for our Instagram Account! Screenshots aren’t flattering.
CC: No, screenshots are not flattering. Did you see mine from the thesis reading? I looked like a deer in headlights, which was fitting since I read about them. But enough about me. And deer. Let’s end by talking about your hopes and dreams for the series in the future. Any advice to those who will host next?
VV: It’s hard to say, since I am not involved the way I used to be, but I will say that I am so happy that I picked Alex to take over for me when I graduated. She is an entertaining host, a competent leader, and genuinely cares about the event and its participants. I can’t wait to see what she does with it, and I can’t wait to be back in the Red Room with friends new and old.
AV: I feel super lucky I get to host for another year. I’m a dual student so will still be around. Hope we will get to return to KGB! But my advice to whoever will take over is know you aren’t alone. I will always support After Hours. Vinny has been a tremendous help this past year. Whenever I had a question or concern, she was only a text away. She was the one who reached out to me to get the reading on Zoom when the bars closed. As the world was in March, I was overwhelmed and couldn’t pull myself together to get the reading back on. Without Vinny’s push, I’m not sure we would have had a reading in May. Whoever will host next, you will never be alone in putting the reading together.
LaVonne Elaine Roberts is an American short story writer, essayist, and memoirist. She is LIT Magazine’s Live with LIT Editor, Cagibi Lit’s Interviews Editor, and the 2020 Diversity Fellow for Drizzle Review. Her essays, short stories, and poetry have been published widely, including in Our Stories, Too: Personal Narratives by Women, WordFest Anthology 2019, The Blue Mountain Review, LIT Magazine, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Litro, among other publications. She is the founder of WRITE ON!, where she leads writing workshops and provides literature for marginalized voices. She resides in New York City, where she is completing an MFA at The New School and a memoir called Life On My Own Terms. Her work at Drizzle will include curation of a special issue on ageism in literature, due out in summer of 2020.
1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?
The villain that casts a shadow over most of my writing is mental illness. I spent my childhood wrestling with what it meant to be a child of a mentally ill parent and my adult life advocating for child welfare reform. Naturally, I am drawn to memoirists who write about how mental illness highjacked their lives, from The Glass Castle to Mrs. Dalloway.
James Baldwin is my favorite protagonist, hands down. He's many things to many people: an oracle, a prophet, a champion of black rights, and a voice that transcends gender norms, but to me, he's a kindred spirit. He was a writer with an arsenal of artistic talent and moral imagination in search of identity and home, a theme I wrestle with. Mostly, he reminds me to build my house with words."You don't ever leave home. You take your home with you. You better. You know, otherwise, you're homeless"—James Baldwin.
2. When did you know you were a writer?
I was a precocious child with a vivid imagination that grew from escaping life with a mentally ill parent. My first distinct memory was when I wrote a Christmas play in 1st grade. Sadly, since 6 year-olds don't follow directions well, my production never made it off the page and onto the stage. I've been writing my whole life, but it's only after I began publishing that I started calling myself a writer.
3. What are you currently working on?
My memoir, Life On My Own Terms, takes the reader on an emotional ride through the complicated landscapes of child abuse and mental illness to examine the effects of trauma on identity. My self-reflective journey through loss, trauma, and the significance of self-worth illustrates both the resiliency of the human spirit and the determination to discover one's own identity without a roadmap. Ultimately, this memoir is about the loss of self as a result of abuse and what can happen when it is reclaimed.
Ironically, quarantined in Manhattan in a pandemic has helped me find new ways to build community. At 57, it seems surreal that after 7 years of studying writing and completing an MFA that I won't walk across the stage with 89 other graduates. At the same time, I realize that people across the world are fighting for their lives. Frustrated, I started funneling my energy in taking my book reviews and interviews online at LIT Magazine. I've lined up literary agencies like Idea Architects and Aevitas Creative Management for roundtables and organized for Literistic.com to give my graduating class a subscription to their submission call service.
4 How has your writing process changed over the years?
My road to an MFA was long. In Austin, I was inspired by an inclusive writing community, made up of multiple colleges and professionals, that rocket-launched my writing journey. I spent two years learning rules at Bard College surrounded by incredible talent. I lovingly tell my friends that I left with a hard-earned degree in Written Arts and a friendship with Cliff, Bard’s beloved security guard because I was one of two students older than 23. The New School gave me the confidence to break “the rules” and to defend my voice in a community as diverse in culture as writing styles. Studying craft and immersing myself in literature taught me to interrogate self-identity in relation to systems of power and oppression. I now feel compelled to write in a way that is conscious raising because my education at The New School has empowered me to embrace "the personal is political."
5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.
I write stories about redemption and unlimited second chances because I believe in the power of reframing every character's narrative (myself included) from victim to survivor.
Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.
Jessica Gross has contributed to The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and Longreads, among other places. Her debut novel, Hysteria, comes out in August.
1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?
Lolita's Humbert Humbert is by far my favorite villain-protagonist. Visiting his perverse mind is such a thrill.
2. When did you know you were a writer?
I wish I could say I first self-identified as a writer when I started writing, but the truth is it wasn't until my nonfiction was first published that I really felt comfortable using that moniker. (Over-investment in external validation: sigh.) But to answer the question differently, I knew I loved writing when I was a kid and would scribble half-stories on legal pads from my dad's office. (The protagonists were mostly kids who watched Full House -- exciting stuff!)
3. What are you currently working on?
My first novel, Hysteria, is coming out this August, so I'm mainly working on attempting to be calm. I'm also a few chapters into writing a new book, so I'm excited and relieved about that.
4 How has your writing process changed over the years?
Though in childhood I often wrote by hand, by high school I wrote exclusively by computer. My adulthood has been a long process of reacquainting myself with the wonders of writing and revising by hand. I don't exclusively write this way, but I do find it's a surer pathway toward discovery and surprise.
5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.
I love similes almost as much as I love em dashes.
Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.
Sam Farahmand on “Standing Out From the Sameness of Everything”
By Carissa Chesanek
New School MFA alum, Sam Farahmand recently published his debut novel, Chimeroin January 2020. Carissa Chesanek spoke with Sam about the structure of his book, why the beach always feels like home, and how his time in grad school helped figure out what he didn’t want to do. Purchase a copy of Chimerohere.
There's a lot of fun structural aspects to your novel, such as no question marks after questions, no chapter titles (only white space), no quotation marks, etc. Can you talk about how you decided to structure it this way? What were you looking to achieve?
A question about question marks feels like the perfect place to start—and again, I really appreciate you taking the time to think on the novel—because, in my experience at least, there is always this moment when you’re working on something when you start to feel less like the writer of the thing and more like the reader. I suppose the structural aspects were as much for me to make sense of the thing at the time as they are for the reader at this time, for the moment when the reader starts to feel like the writer.
The novel isn’t necessarily stream-of-consciousness in that strictly streaming sort of sense, but I think the novel is still in essence trying to get at the experiential nature of existence—with time being much more spatial than a traditional a to b plot and that sort of thing. While it isn’t free of form, or particularly freeform, I was hoping the form it is in is freeing and might function to create some more space for a reader.
The narrator is unreliable and unnamed. Did you always know this would be the case or did it come to you after you started writing?
This is a wonderful question and a hard one to answer. I think I is already so full of possibility as it is—and, of course, in the case of the narrator, providing a lot of potential for paralysis—so the narrator is as much who the narrator is as he is who he isn’t. I don’t think I would’ve been able to address that right from the outset in another way, though maybe this also goes back to your question about the structural aspects and being in the no.
I should also say that I’m not the best with names, so it might be possible that when I started I’d been meaning to name the narrator but just forgot the narrator’s name, but either way, I think I almost always start by overwriting then working my way inward.
The topic of "a lost generation" (not to be confused with "the lost generation") was discussed in the book. Can you explain what a lost generation is in this world and how you feel it applies to society in our world today?
Lost but not least, I think, could be a way to sum up alost generation as opposed to the lost generation. The difference between an a and a the seems to be significant to the narrator, who is trying to find the the hidden in all of the a’s—someone who, or even something that, stands out from the sameness of everything in their lives. That the characters start off by making so much of the difference between a and the reminds me of the significance placed on just a handful of letters to this generation, at least to the ones with all their degrees, and their subsequent insignificance.
There was always this notion of "going to the beach" the following day, and whether or not the narrator would actually go. What do you feel the beach really represents in this story?
Thank you for throwing in a beach ball question. Maybe it’s only because I’m a writer from Los Angeles, but going to the beach has always put things in perspective for me. The ocean always reminds me how insignificant I am, and the beach might be the only place where I feel at home. Strangely enough, when we started this interview, I was working on an essay about trying to get to the beach the last time I was in Los Angeles, so I suppose I haven’t outgrown the significance of the beach to me.
As for what the beach represents, I was thinking just the other day, with this essay I am working on, that I am closer to nothing than I am to everything but have more in common with everything than I do nothing. Maybe that’s one of those mean median things, but those seem to be the sorts of thoughts I have when I think of the beach.
I believe I read in another interview that you were working on this book during your MFA, correct? What were your desires for this book during that time? Did you expect it to be simply a thesis project or hoped to get it published?
Fortunately I’ve outgrown the hopes I had for the book when I was working on it during my MFA, but yeah, I’d always hoped it would turn into something. I don’t think I have enough of an ego to say this is all done without ego, but what I’ve learned since that time is that it already means a lot to be able to work on writing, even without thinking about anything other than the writing, and that people who work to get things published are called publishers.
What's the one best thing you feel you got out of your time at The New School?
Other than the opportunity to be interviewed to promote this novel, I met some very fine friends and faculty who, for some reason, are still incredibly kind to me and my writing. I also read a lot of work I wouldn’t have read if I hadn’t been given the time and space to do so by The New School. Higher education, in my experience, isn’t about figuring out what you want to do as much as it’s about finding out what you don’t want to do. The New School gave me the time to sort out what I wanted to do while putting me in a space to see what I didn’t want to do.
How's the writing going during this pandemic? What are some things that help inspire you now? Are they the same things that normally inspire you or something completely different?
I’m very fortunate that things are sort of the same for me as far as writing at this time, because structure has always been the most inspiring thing for me when it comes to writing—both the structure of whatever it is I’m working on and the surrounding structure that allows me to work on what I’m working on. I’ve always worked on writing in the mornings, and I still try to work on writing every morning, so I suppose as long as there are mornings, I’ll still try to work on writing.
What is different for me at this time is that I have had some more time to read, which has been good, though I’ve always been more inspired by artists who aren’t writers. But then again, I also have more time to listen to music and to watch films and think about them too. The two working artists who have probably had the most profound influence on me are the musician Lana Del Rey and the filmmaker Terrence Malick, and they’ve both had some new work within the past year. I’ve been thinking about the album Norman Fucking Rockwell! and the film A Hidden Life while working on what I’m working on. Both feel like relevant works for this time too.
Can you tell us what you're working on next?
Yeah, right now I’m working on a series of essays about a number of musicians I have admired, either from near or from afar, since moving to Nashville almost two years ago. I should say that after I finished this first novel I wrote another two novels, which more or less complete the cycle started in the first one—as much as one can complete a circle—but after that I worked on a lot of nonfiction. I might try to start working on another novel, maybe sometime this summer, but we’ll see.
Carissa Chesanek has worked as a journalist for many years, writing for publications that include The Rumpus, Food Network, The Village Voice, Miami Herald, and Zagat. She is a current MFA Creative Writing (fiction) student at The New School and a volunteer writing mentor for PEN America's prison writing program.
Born in North Carolina and based in New York City, Whitney Kenerly is a writer, music critic, and journalist.
1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?
To me, the best antagonist isn’t a character—it’s fate. I find the inevitable really tragic in that sort of classical way. We will all age. We will all die. We all have things in our futures that we won’t be able to control. There’s something profound about that.
Growing up, I felt like every female protagonist was some small, demure girl who was trying to overcome her shyness and find her voice. I could not relate less. I was always too loud, too opinionated, and too smart-mouthed. Then I was introduced to Jo March in Little Women. That electric moment of recognizing myself on the page will always be close to my heart
2. When did you know you were a writer?
In second grade, we started the “Writer’s Workshop” curriculum. We each had a laminated folder where we could keep our drafts and were encouraged to free-write for an hour a few times a week. All the other students dreaded it. Like, there were audible groans when our teacher would announce it was time to write. I was like, “THIS IS FREEDOM!!!” It felt so liberating to have permission to be as weird and creative as I wanted. I remember two of my story titles: “Tick, Tock: Banana Clock” and “Part 2 of the Tale of the Iridescent Goo” (there was no Part 1). With that said, a professor once told me, “Never call yourself a writer. Just be a person who writes,” and that has always stuck with me. I only know I’m a writer when I’m writing.
3. What are you currently working on?
For my thesis, I’m writing a lot of critical essays about music culture in this post-Napster internet era. We’ve lost physical record stores, we don’t make mixtapes for each other anymore, and we let algorithms pick the background soundtracks for our days. I think that has changed us in ways that we have yet to fully understand.
4. How has your writing process changed over the years?
I exclusively write in bed now.
5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.
I hope that I make people think while I’m making them laugh.
Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.
Due to community concerns about COVID-19, the 2020 Summer Writers Colony cannot run as planned. In lieu of an on-campus offering, we are offering Summer Online Writing Immersion workshops in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, available for three credits or at the noncredit level. Literary Salons have also been adapted into online courses, available for one credit each or on a noncredit basis. Matriculated New School students can view a list of credit offerings in the University Course Catalog. You can view noncredit offerings or credit offerings for non-matriculated students via our Open Campus website. For guidance on which credit option, workshop, and literary salon(s) is best for you, please write to summerwriters@newschool.edu.
2020 Summer Writing Workshop Faculty, June 1-18, 2020
Monday through Thursday: Asynchronous readings, discussions, assignments.
Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3-5 PM: Zoom workshops and discussions
Fridays: One-on-one consultations and Student Readings
Undergraduate students can earn up to 6 credits for transfer.
2020 Weekly Salon Visiting Writers
Salons meet online three times: twice for intensive discussion among the class and instructor, and a third time with the author for a reading and discussion.
Edwidge Danticat, author of Everything Inside, fiction and nonfiction writer, and MacArthur Fellow Juliana Huxtable, author of Mucus in My Pineal Gland, visual artist, poet, performer, and DJ Trisha Low, author of Socialist Realism, essayist, and performance artist Sarah Schulman, author of The Cosmopolitans, novelist, playwright, and AIDS historian Aaron Smith, author of The Book of Daniel, Lambda Literary Award finalist, and poet R. Eric Thomas, author of Here for It, memoirist, political and pop culture columnist, and playwright
Creative Writing 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, Russell Banks, Paul Beatty, Jericho Brown, Stephanie Burt, Anne Carson, Lucille Clifton, Teju Cole, Billy Collins, Lydia Davis, Jennifer Egan, Stephen Elliot, Jeffrey Eugenides, Mary Gaitskill, Sarah Gerard, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Jhumpa Lahiri, Layli Long Soldier, Leslie Jamison, Lisa Ko, Dorothea Lasky, Rick Moody, Maggie Nelson, Joyce Carol Oates, Jenny Offill, Robyn Schiff, Gary Shteyngart, Brando Skyhorse, Tracy K. Smith, John Jeremiah Sullivan, James Tate, Lynne Tillman, Hannah Tinti, Jean Valentine, Colson Whitehead, and Kevin Young.
Jochebed "Jo" Smith is a senior and Riggio scholar in the undergraduate BPATS program. She currently serves as the fiction editor for 12th Street Journal. Her dog, Kershaw, enjoys crashing zoom calls and is allergic to poultry.
1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?
My favorite villain would probably be Lady Macbeth. I admire her ambition. My favorite protagonist would have to be Jo March, for obvious reasons.
2. When did you know you were a writer?
The first time I ever got published was so bizarrely unlikely that it felt like I could henceforth be known as nothing else. I was 25 and miserable, living in Los Angeles and trudging through community college. I was aimless. I was literally bagging groceries when I got the news and the idea of being published was something so seemingly impossible that when it became completely real, it felt as if being named a writer was a stamp upon me, like I had no choice but to shrug and bear the title.
3. What are you currently working on?
My thesis, I SWEAR.
4. How has your writing process changed over the years?
As of now, with the madness of the times, my process has almost completely stalled. It’s been difficult to wrap my head around anything but feeding myself, walking my dog, and finishing Ozark on Netflix. To try and get back into my typical, not-in-the-epicenter-of-a-global-pandemic process, I’ve started doing activities around writing that isn’t exactly writing but might eventually bear fruit, like making playlists and mood boards of how I want my work to look and sound and feel. It’s been fun to think about the work in this three-dimensional way. Hopefully it comes across in the writing as well, should I ever write again.
5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.
Death-related magical realist crises of the heart (I am a lot of fun at dinner parties—remember those??).
Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.
Matthew Futterman is a native New Yorker, who earned his MFA in Writing for Children from The New School in 2015. He also holds a Masters in Mechanical and Bio Engineering from Georgia Tech, have flown in NASA's Weightless Wonder (the same airplane in which Apollo 13 was filmed). In addition, he is a high school physics teacher.
1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?
Hm, that's a tough one. Bilbo Baggins is my favorite protagonist. And who doesn't love Harry Potter, so for villain I'd have to say He Who Must Not Be Named.
2. When did you know you were a writer?
I knew I was a writer when I was about 6 or 7 years old. My father took me to FAO Schwarz one day and I found a beautifully illustrated edition of The Hobbit. I read it quickly and then wrote my own version. It was terrible and trite, but it showed promise. But it wasn't until after college that I finally realized writing wasn't just a hobby.
3. What are you currently working on?
Back in August I finished the book I was working on when I was at The New School. It's called Maxwell Archimedes and The Temple of Weights. I've been busy querying agents (crossing my fingers). My other project is called The Wizard of Whatever.
4 How has your writing process changed over the years?
I've gotten much better at silencing my inner editor while writing my first drafts. I can only write in the morning, from about 7 am to roughly 11 am. I also don't plan my first drafts anymore nor do I try to go in order. If I have an idea or a need to write a specific scene or chapter then I do it. Editing it patching everything together. Surprisingly, I've found that I enjoy the editing much more than I enjoy the first drafts. In fact, I prefer the revision process overall much more.
5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.
My settings are always easy to visualize.
Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.
New School Creative Writing Program faculty member Alice Eve Cohen has won a 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award. Alice is a solo theater artist, playwright and memoirist who is also a 1999 graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing Program. Alice teaches playwriting and cross-genre generative workshops to undergraduate students at The New School.
The Distinguished Teaching Award recognizes excellence in teaching including innovative pedagogical approaches, intellectual and artistic rigor, and significant contributions to the long-term success of students.
This is the highest award granted to faculty at The New School and we are delighted to celebrate this recognition of Alice's contributions to her students, the Creative Writing Program, and The New School community.
- The protagonist is a bit of an unreliable character. She has a lot going on and the reader is left to wonder what is real in her world. What do you think is so intriguing about an unreliable character both for the writer and the reader?
As I see it, every narrator—whether of fiction or nonfiction—is unreliable to the extent that each of us is limited by our singular perspective and history. There’s a great passage in Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and The Story in which she describes a rafting trip she took with her then-husband and a friend down the Rio Grande.
"The river was hot and wild; sad, brilliant, remote; closed in by canyon walls, desert banks, snakes, and flash floods; on one side Texas, the other Mexico: a week after we’d been there, snipers on the Mexico side killed two people also floating on a raft. Later, we each wrote about the trip. My husband focused brightly on the “river rats” who were our guides, our friend soberly on the misery of illegal immigration, I morbidly on what strangers my husband and I had become. Reading these pieces side by side was in itself an experience. We had al used the river, the heat, the remoteness to frame our stories. Beyond that, how alone each of us had been, sitting there side by side on that raft, carving out of our separating anxieties the narrator who, in the midst of all that beauty and oppressiveness, would keep us company—and tell us what we were living through."
So every piece of writing presents a worldview filtered through a very specific lens. In that sense, the narrator of Hysteria, who’s maybe or maybe not having some kind of delusional episode, only amplifies what’s present in any and every literary work. What really happened? What has she projected? What does it mean for something to really happen? That might go some way toward explaining what’s intriguing about this sort of character, for me and hopefully for readers, too: she offers an extreme version of something we encounter in literature and in life all the time.
I also think every piece of writing is propelled by mystery in some sense. I don’t mean that every work uses “What happened?” or “What happens next?” as a hook—though they’re very effective ones!—but that every work does use questions of some kind to string the reader along. The question of what is real, and what isn’t, is part of the mystery I wanted to set up in this novel: part of what I wanted to interrogate, part of what I wanted the reader to continue to be curious about the whole way through. Without any mystery (even, in a polemic, the mystery of how the writer is going to pull off supporting this argument), why keep reading?
- The bartender is such a fascinating and mysterious personality in the story. Without giving too much away, can you tell us about how he came about in the book? What was the intention behind his existence? And/or what do you think he means to the protagonist?
I’m really into psychoanalysis and have read a lot of Freud over the years, so I suppose the initial desire to plop him into the book arose from some kind of wish fulfillment. But as I originally conceived of the novel, before I started my MFA, it was quite different: the narrator was a young woman living in contemporary Brooklyn, as she is now, but in that book her dad died, which prompted her to go to Vienna to investigate her heritage, and there, she met Freud, who just happened to be living in Vienna today…somehow. It would take an hour, at least, for me to trace how that initial book evolved into what it is now, where she thinks she’s met Freud in a bar in Brooklyn, and both of her parents are very much alive; it involved many, many rounds of writing in response to classmates’ and professors’ feedback in the program. But that’s how the idea initially came about.
I also wanted to reflect the dichotomy in both practice and principle between cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, and psychoanalysis. The narrator’s parents practice CBT, and so represent that framework in the context of the book; in response, the narrator reaches for Freud—in some sense their ideological nemesis, within the bounds of contemporary therapeutic practice—as a kind of rebellion.
- You have a lot of juicy sex scenes throughout the book. Sex scenes are notoriously hard to write and you nailed them (no pun intended).. Any advice to those looking to write about what happens between the sheets?
Thank you! Here, too, I’m indebted to The New School. I remember submitting a chapter with a version of the blow-job-in-a-bar scene in my first workshop class. I was pretty nervous; I imagined I’d get feedback that it was off the mark, did a bad job of representing sex on the page, embarrassing for one reason or another—you know the kind of mental spinning that precedes being workshopped. Instead, I got encouragement, which emboldened me to try again with another sex scene, and then another, and then another. At each step along the way, my classmates and professors, and eventually my thesis group and advisor, pushed me to get weirder and wilder rather than to tamp things down, and that gave me the courage to keep going.
As far as how to write about sex from a technical perspective, I’d say corny euphemisms like “mounds” are where things start to feel icky, so I’d avoid those at all costs and just be direct. I don’t think that means you need to be as explicit as possible (though that’s my personal style, at least in this book): you can easily leave certain details out of a sex scene and include just a few salient ones. But I’d avoid replacing details with euphemisms. “He thrust his member into her fertile garden…”—just, yuck!
- I was really inspired by your prose and overall writing style. Can you talk a bit about your writing and revision process with this book?
Ah! Thank you so much. I far prefer revision to the initial drafting stage, which is lucky, since the vast majority of the time I spent writing this book was on revision. I tend to move back and forth between writing/revising by hand and on the computer. I’ll draft by hand, type up and revise as I go, print it out, revise what I’ve printed (often by literally cutting with scissors and pasting with a glue stick), type that up, do some revision on the computer: that cycle, or some version of it, happened over and over again as I worked on this book. I can get a bit obsessional, tweaking my sentences; it gives me so much pleasure when I feel I’ve got it exactly right.
- Has your writing time/practice changed during the current pandemic?
Initially, it came to a total standstill—reading, too. But I’m lucky to be spending the pandemic with my boyfriend, who’s a scholar and writer. We recently started setting aside time to write together each morning, no internet or talking, and that’s turned into a really enjoyable, fruitful part of my days. It’s one of the most regular writing practices I’ve had to date.
- Can you tell us about your experience in the MFA program. What did you find most helpful?
I had such a good experience! I loved how open the program was—it felt to me like any genre was fair game. Although I wasn’t writing genre literature myself, I think that ethos, and being exposed to classmates’ writing in various modes, helped liberate me to take my work in more bizarre directions than I might have otherwise. It was also a really encouraging, warm program, in my experience, and that too helped me feel safe enough to write outside the comfort zone I came in with (and to write, period—scary no matter what you’re writing!).
- What are you currently reading?
Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, and a book of Robert Frost’s poetry.
- What's next for you?
I’m working on a new novel, which I’m really excited about.
Jessica Gross has contributed to The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and Longreads, among other places. She earned her MFA in fiction from The New School. Hysteria is her first novel.
Carissa Chesanek has worked as a journalist for many years, writing for publications that include The Rumpus, Food Network, The Village Voice, Miami Herald, and Zagat. She is a current MFA Creative Writing (fiction) student at The New School and a volunteer writing mentor for PEN America's prison writing program.
The New School Creative Writing Program has moved four of our upcoming writing forum events online. Click each link below to register and receive information about how to attend, via livestream.
Amanda Petrusich is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of three books. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction and has been nominated for a Grammy Award. Her criticism and features have appeared in the Times, The Oxford American, Spin, Pitchfork, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her most recent book, Do Not Sell At Any Price, explored the obsessive world of 78-r.p.m. record collectors. She is an assistant professor at New York University’s Gallatin School.
Moderated by Honor Moore, faculty at the Creative Writing Program.
Cartoonist Kim Deitch reads from and discusses his new work, Reincarnation Stories.
Kim Deitch has a reserved place at the first table of underground cartoonists. He got his start doing comic strips for the East Village Other in 1967 and in 1969 he succeeded Vaughn Bodé as editor of Gothic Blimp Works, the Other’s underground comics tabloid.
His Boulevard of Broken Dreams was named one of Time’s “100 Best Graphic Novels Ever Written” and he has been awarded an Eisner and an Inkpot Award. Deitch remains a true cartoonists’ cartoonist, adored by his peers as much as anyone in the history of the medium.
Moderated by John Reed, faculty in the Creative Writing Program
Poets Gala Mukomolova and Phillip B Williams read from and discuss their work.
Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, IL native and author of Thief in the Interior, winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He received a 2017 Whiting Award and 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. Phillip is the co-editor in chief of the online journal Vinyl and currently teaches at Bennington College.
Gala Mukomolova is the author of Without Protection (Coffee House Press 2019) and the chapbook One Above One Below: Positions and Lamentations (YesYes Books 2018). She received her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her past residencies include Vermont Studio Center, Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists and The Pink Door. In 2016, Gala was a recipient of the 92nd St.Y Discovery Prize. She writes astrology for NYLON and is cohost of the podcast Big Dyke Energy.
Moderated by Camille Rankine, faculty in the Creative Writing Program.
Kate Messner is passionately curious and writes books that encourage kids to wonder, too. Kate’s titles include both fiction and nonfiction; she writes award-winning picture books, easy readers, chapter book series, and novels for young readers. Her books are frequently nominated for state book award lists and have been honored with the E.B. White Read Aloud Award, Golden Kite and Crystal Kite Awards, Riverby Award for Natural History Writing, and Nerdy Book Club Awards. Kate’s science themed books have also been selected as finalists for the AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize and named to the NSTA/CBC list of Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K-12. Kate is a frequent speaker at conferences for writers and educators and visits schools all over the world to talk with students about books, writing, and the power of curiosity.
Moderated by Caron Levis, faculty with the Creative Writing Program.
Honor Moore's Our Revolution: a Mother and Daughter at Midcentury has just been published by WW Norton and her first collection of poems Memoir (1988) was reissued last fall, The Bishop's Daughter, a memoir, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as Our Revolution and The White Blackbird (read by Stockard Channing) were released as audiobooks this spring. Moore was chief consultant for A Change of World, a podcast series and radio documentary about American women poets produced by the Poetry Foundation. She is the Nonfiction coordinator of the MFA in the Creative Writing program at The New School as well as a core faculty member.
1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?
My favorite villain is Iago in Othello– studying him taught me that villains are indirect and that stories are created by those who participate in them – a new idea when I was 20 and in college. Shakespeare’s Iago is an evolved version of a recurring character in early Tudor drama, the manipulator with a touch of the devil, a kind of sinister “show-runner” who in his lack of morality and conscience is a source of terror.
I don’t really have a favorite protagonist, but because I’m rereading The Lover by Marguerite Duras right now, I’ll say that the vulnerable “I” in contemporary autofiction and memoir is the kind of protagonist I’m interested in right now – one sees in The Lover how the narrator both forms and is formed by the story/stories she tells, moving from an “I” to a “she” voice and from past to present tense, from confessional reality to dream narrative – all in the service of telling an extremely complex story very economically. When planning a new book, and I say that I would like it to be “short”, a slender volume like The Lover, my agent just laughs. I don’t seem to be able to do it, but I long to. I've just finished a book I thought would be short and it's long… Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury. It's interesting because it has two narrators in a way...and my mother whose writing I integrate into the narrative.
2. When did you know you were a writer?
I didn’t claim writing until I was in my twenties and Second Wave feminism arrived to tell me a woman could be a writer – strange I know, but there were so few contemporary American women writers then, and the prominent were often suicides (Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton) or objects of ridicule that I couldn’t yet identify as objects of envy – (Lillian Hellman). But looking back, I would say that I knew I was a writer when I wrote a novel in fifth grade and the teacher read it aloud to the class. Yikes! I was both thrilled and terrified. Also confused. Unfortunately, the notebook — old-fashioned black and white splotched cover – has been lost.
3. What are you currently working on?
Our Revolution is just out (I am virtually touring because of the pandemic) and I am close to finished with a new collection of poems. As an editor, I am collaborating with Alix Kates Shulman on Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Sparked a Revolution (and still can) a collection of writings by Second Wave feminists, to be published by Library of America in 2021.
4. How has your writing process changed over the years?
I am less terrified. I’ve learned that early morning is the best and that if I don’t do it then, I’m apt not to do it at all, and that if I don’t do it, I miss out on being in the place where I’m most alive. Lately, too, I realize I have readers.
5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.
I am as direct as possible choosing language that brings the reader as close in as I can – I want to deliver a visceral experience.
Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.
Minerva Martinezis a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in Evergreen Review, W42ST Magazine and Newtown Literary Journal.
1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?
For favorite villain, I’ll go with Annie Wilkes from Stephen King's Misery. There’s a special place in my heart for clinically insane characters who rival what I encounter on the subway. Favorite protagonist… I’m choosing a minor character from Love in the Time of Cholera named Leona Cassani. She’s a badass black woman that appears the latter half the book. I wish Gabo would have written a prequal centered around her character. Or, maybe it was a genius move to place her where he did and make me long to know more about her all these years later.
2. When did you know you were a writer?
I don’t think there was a specific moment. But, at some point I started seeing stories in everything, even the most mundane things, and it felt unnatural to not write them down.
3. What are you currently working on?
I’m presently working on a novel set in Panama. It’s about a boxing cutman named Porfirio. He’s part indigenous and learns his unorthodox cut healing techniques from his mother who is a curandera (medicine woman/healer). I’m also writing a collection of essays about my former career as a publicist in the world of championship boxing and another essay collection about BDSM and kink, to round things out.
4 How has your writing process changed over the years?
It’s consistent and fluid, like eating. I do it in small increments or large sittings, but I’m always doing it.
5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.
My writing style often echoes my city—urgent, gritty, nostalgic, and unpredictable.
Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.
LIT Magazine has just launched a new book review and interview series. In this series, we offer a book review, a PDF of part of the book (when possible), and a live interview to be conducted via Zoom on Tuesday nights at 6.
In the first installment, LaVonne Roberts reviews Apartment by Teddy Wayne, which is a novel about two students in Columbia’s MFA program in New York, set in the 1990s. Apartment follows the lives of an unnamed narrator and his budding friendship with classmate Billy, a man with a background far removed—by politics, class, and geography—from the narrator’s own experiences. Once the narrator offers Billy the opportunity to live rent-free in his apartment, the pair’s friendship begins to change. And not for the better. What follows is a subtle, sly page-turner about disconnection and its impact.
Thanks to the cooperation of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) and Creative Writing at The New School, as well as the tireless efforts of our students and faculty, we are able to provide interviews with each of the NBCC Awards Finalists for the publishing year 2019.
CHARLES KING is the author of seven books, including Midnight at the Pera Palace and Odessa, winner of a National Jewish Book Award. His essays and articles have appeared in the The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic. He is a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University.
Zach:
In the Acknowledgements section of this book you attribute the original
inspiration behind it to a series of conversations that you had with
your wife. I was wondering if you could elaborate on how that took
place, and maybe the moment when you first realized that this was a book
you wanted to write.
Charles:
Yeah. Well, every home should have a house anthropologist, it’s a very
useful thing to have (laughing). But I think over the years I had
written a number of different books about various forms of human
difference, especially contexts in which forms of difference seem to
lead to really awful ends – ethnic conflict in Syria, the civil wars in
the Caucasus and elsewhere – and I think that in different combinations
across my lifetime what I became able to see is that the stuff I was
really interested in is where those issues of human difference come
from, and how we raise up these imagined, constructed human divides and
dividing lines in human society to the level of high politics. And what
I realized over time too was that I had a story here, or even White
American whole worldview. And I thought, in conversations with my
wife and other anthropologists, I remember being just arrested by the
way in which they had the ability to overturn a way of seeing the
world. Let me give you a practical example that’s one of the most
brilliant things she’s ever said to me – she’s so smart. We were having
some conversation about drawing. I can’t draw, I’m a terrible drawer.
And I said, “Gosh, why is it that horses are so hard to draw? I mean,
they shouldn’t be any harder than a rabbit or a dog, but I keep having
trouble drawing a horse, why is that?” And she said, “Well horses
aren’t any harder to draw than rabbits or dogs, it’s just that we care
more about what they look like.” And I thought “Oh my god, that’s
absolutely brilliant!” and it seemed so anthropological to me to go from
this statement which you think is a matter of, “Well, do you have the
manual dexterity or whatever to draw this or that part of the animal” or
“Horses must be very oddly or complexly shaped to be so hard to draw” –
well, it’s not that at all, it’s because you care about what it looks
like. And I thought about that kind of insight that anthropology gives
you, this ability to just overturn a way of seeing the world, and so
much of the book is about how for a set of issues that are really rather
more important than how you draw a horse, how this set of radical
thinkers did that with the issue of cultural difference.
Zach: So it seems that much of your original interest then was in how certain cultural frameworks work to inspire conflict?
Charles:
Well, how the things that we do that are products of human society, the
dividing lines that exist in society, the ways in which we naturally
group different types of humans – where all of those things come from,
and how they can end up inspiring really magnificent forms of human
achievement and really awful things too. So, given the fact that all
dividing lines in society are to a large extent if not entirely
human-made, why do they get made in so many different ways and why do
those different ways seem to have such social power to us. It’s also
the case that for years I had spent a lot of time in parts of the world
where issues of ethnicity and nationalism were right on the surface,
where they were the worst stuff of politics. In the Balkans, in
Romania, Southeastern Europe and so forth, and it dawned on me over time
that there’s nothing that special about ethnicity or nationalism or
race or caste or religion, the lines with which we were all raised
dividing up human beings, and essentializing the differences between
them. And I thought, what if I turned my expertise on these issues back
to my own country, and how can I understand the things that are
dividing us Americans in the United States, using some of these tools,
and so that’s also a theme that runs throughout the book as well. I’ll
tell you when I first started this, when I go back to the proposal for
this book, that I ended up selling to Doubleday, quite happily, it is so
triumphalist, because I was writing it during 2014 and 2015. And you
know, my wife and I had been standing outside the Supreme Court when the
decision for Obergfell v. Hodges was announced, and Obama was
president, and it just felt like oh my god, I’m going to tell the story
of how we all became so enlightened, and got over those awful
obsessions that used to haunt us. And then of course 2016 happened and I
realized, oh yeah, that obviously this was the story of a thread throughout American history, not an obstacle that’s been overcome.
Zach:
That’s so interesting. As I was reading I was wondering about the
extent to which it had been written in response to our current political
atmosphere. But it sounds like it was initially addressed to a
political reality that was very different from our current one.
Charles:
I think that’s fair. But then as I was writing the book, I was very
conscious of not wanting to make the book “president spite” – and I
think Donald Trump is mentioned maybe once in the book – but to not have
everything be tied immediately into the present circumstances, because
also I don’t really think any of this is new, in fact it closely
parallels the issues that Boas and so many of his students were battling
against during their lifetimes. I mean you can’t look at our racial
immigration policy now without thinking of exactly the same issues that
Boas was publishing articles against during the early twentieth
century, as other immigration historians have pointed out, and so on.
So I don’t believe that we’re in a giant circle, meaning I do believe
that things are getting better, but there are these perennial threads of
American social and political life that were there from the very
beginning of the country, and come up to the surface in different
ways across time.
Zach:
So then in what ways is this book tangibly different than it would have
been if it had been published before the fall of 2016?
Charles:
Well it would have been less good. For whatever one thinks about the
book I think it would’ve been an inaccurate book. Living with these
issues very much on the surface of American political life, witnessing
them in real time, made to me the book have much more resonance. And I
don’t mean in terms of the popular appeal, I mean with myself. I felt
an urgency of the story that I didn’t feel before. And I think for any
writer, feeling that the thing you’re writing about matters in the here
and now is really important. Even if you’re writing about things that
happened sixty years ago.
Zach:
So then on the whole, what do you think this book has to say to the
current American political discourse? Do you feel that it has a
platform?
Charles: Well, it’s not really a platform-y book. And hopefully it’s not preachy, I didn’t mean it to be preachy, but I also think that one of its take-away messages can be seen as addressed to some liberal cosmopolitans. It’s easy to identify the savagery somewhere else, whether that’s, you’re hiking, you’re exploring, and you can identify it within an allegedly primitive society that would have practices that might strike you as particularly foreign. But it’s also very hard for liberal cosmopolitans to see the way in which their own outlook on life, their own inconsistencies, their own deeply ingrained inconsistencies and mythologies, contort the way they see the world and behave in the world. So if you’re really going to jump off the high dive, you have to be willing to do that all the time. Not only for pointing at the nationalists on the right, or the ethnic exclusivists on the right, but pointing at one’s own behavior and asking, “Oh yeah, what preconceptions am I demonstrating that have the effect of dividing people?”
Zach Schwab is a fiction-writer currently pursuing his MFA degree at The New School. He received his Bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago, and taught undergraduate-level writing courses at the University of Arkansas before relocating to New York in 2018. He is working on a novel, and can periodically be found doing read-aloud's on Instagram Live under the handle @zchsch.
