For the reader and for Cory, the sense of dread and panic rises chapter by chapter, as we see her become increasingly isolated on the remote island, cut off from Wifi and her sense of self. Interspliced with these sections, we get the perspective of Emer, Cory’s mother, who is frantically searching for her missing daughter and, in the process, is dismantling her own life. “If our relationship can be characterized in any one way,” Emer tells us of Cory, “it is this:  I can’t keep up with her… When she was a preteen, dangerous moods began to overtake her. As a teen, she learned how to lie, to brush me off, affect false dignity, conceal her pain or shame, to disappear.” The prose, especially in the mouth of a desperate mother, is gorgeous and wrenching, and recalls for us the dark knowledge that women have always carried.

Fruit of the Dead, pulsing with life, is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, and I was thrilled to talk with Lyon about it from my apartment in Philadelphia and her home in Massachusetts.

Annie Liontas: Why do we need the myth of Persephone in 2024, as told in this way?  What does the myth remind or warn us about?

Rachel Lyon: When I first began Fruit of the Dead, I was envisioning it as a beach read—a little sexy, a little light, but maybe a bit sinister at the same time. It started as a romp about a young woman who becomes involved with her employer. This was the beginning of the “Me, Too” movement, and I was thinking a lot about power dynamics and relationships, especially between men and women. And then two years into the project, I was having this conversation with somebody about the project, and they were challenging me on it, asking what makes this story different from any other love story about power dynamics.

I noticed that the shape of my book, the shape of my work in progress, mirrored the shape of this myth. So I started incorporating the Persephone myth more consciously and pretty soon it became a contemporary retelling. I think we need to be reminded that some of these cycles that we find ourselves in today are ancient stories. As human beings, we are constantly telling and retelling the same narratives, and that’s worth examining.

AL: Let’s talk about the power differential between Cory and Rolo. She is young, impressionable, eager for money, freedom, luxury. He is lonely, wealthy, accustomed to having his world view acknowledged and perpetuated. How are you thinking about power vs. choice, free will vs. the narratives that that shape us? 

RL: That was absolutely the heart of the project for me—examining these questions of freedom, power, choice, and youth. I think Cory has a different idea than her mother does about what freedom looks like and what free will looks like.

Rolo knows certain things about Cory that Cory can’t know about herself. There’s a window, I think, in the life of anyone who isn’t a cis-white man between the ages of 16 and 22 or so, where the feeling of freedom can be quite misleading and leads you into danger. The differential between your worldliness and your eagerness for freedom can be a little destructive. I wanted to examine this thorny space where Cory’s yearning for independence is actually in some ways the source of her foolishness. But she can’t know that, of course. She thinks this is a good choice, even though it leads her into some darkness.

AL: I love your description of this as a “thorny space.” I also appreciate how Cory is deeply ambivalent about Rolo. “Opposing thoughts nag at her simultaneously,” you write. “She wants Rolo to want her and she wishes he’d never look at her again.” This feels like a familiar narrative, one that Cory has inherited. How do you see it reflected in the larger world?

RL: We are told to be attractive and we are told we are not attractive enough. We’re created to be consumed, and then we worry we’re not consumable. I was very much writing my own experience as a young woman into Cory, and that ambivalence of, “Look at me/never look at me.” That’s the heart of a certain kind of young woman’s self-consciousness and experience in the world. It can be exquisitely painful to walk through the world feeling like your whole reason for being is to be consumed and to be delicious enough to be consumable, but that you’re never going to achieve that.

AL: Do you recall that viscerally from your own adolescent experiences?

RL: Yeah, I mean, I went through a period when I was maybe 19 where I really had a lot of trouble looking in the mirror. I was smoking a lot of pot, and that of course can change your sensory experience, your perception. I remember staring at my own face and my own body and being unsure what I objectively looked like. And for a long time—for years, actually—I avoided looking into mirrors for that reason. I just found it so upsetting, so confounding. I believe that’s more common than I realized at the time. The selfness of it all, the idea that we’re a container for these multitudes. That felt completely irreconcilable.

AL: Were those also irreconcilable with the world? Or do you think it was like really internal?

RL: I mean, both, right? Cory is an exaggerated proxy for me. She’s tall and she’s objectively beautiful, and she’s very bad in school and has made a lot of mistakes early on. I had that same, or perhaps similar experience, that she has of having completely fucked up before the age of 18 and having nowhere to go. Like me, she’s very gullible and seems to see the best in people to her detriment.

AL: What I love about Rolo is that, while he projects the role of Hades, he is far more man than villain. How were you able to preserve his humanity even as you revealed his flaws?  Specifically, what versions of him did you have to cast aside to get at this complexity?

RL: I think it would have been harder for me to write Rollo as a true villain, a true antagonist. I can’t imagine what that would be like, to be someone like that. It just doesn’t feel believable. Add to that, for the sake of the book and the plot, I needed him to be seductive on some level. I needed him to feel human. I mean, I had models that are despicable in the world. I watched the Jeffrey Epstein documentary—it was a horrible experience—and I read a lot about Harvey Weinstein. But Rolo is not one of those guys, exactly. Rolo is in the gray area. He falls into that general category of powerful male predator or semi-predator, but my intention was always to make him human on the page. What feels more poisonous is a self-perception that is really positive or really self-forgiving. He thinks of himself as a victim of circumstance and as someone who’s worked really hard and tried really hard, and comes from humble beginnings, and essentially deserves what he has. Those to me are the scary poisonous parts of the brain.

AL: As part of the novel’s drive towards cultural criticism, you also call out class discrepancies and capitalist mythologies. Fraud is the most common crime among men like Rolo who own such remote, private islands. “Tax fraud, bank fraud, market manipulation, securities commodities—but there is also evasion, embezzlement, falsification, kickbacks, laundering, racketeering, sedition, insider trading.” What did you uncover in your research for this book?

RL: We all take for granted that the vast chasm between the wealthy and the rest of us in this country is based on a tremendous legal sleight of hand, particularly regarding fraud and “bloodless” crimes. In my research, I talked to someone who works as the personal assistant for a very powerful person whose name you would know—one of those big, big campaign donors. The things that he told me about his work, the people at the parties! This person had a story about Leonardo DiCaprio that—my jaw just dropped. It’s not news to anyone, though, right? The flying around in helicopters and private planes, the proliferation of NDAs. These people live in a world that’s above the law. They don’t have to answer to anyone most of the time, and they don’t live in one country. Their money is all over the place. They don’t live within the same frameworks that we do.

AL: Granadone, which is a fictional powerful addictive in the novel, emerges as its own mythological artifact. What did introducing it do for your understanding of the narrative and Cory?

RL: When I started writing Cory, I was newly sober and thinking a lot about my own experiences of intoxication and the dark places that took me to when I was a young person—and then later on, too, for a while. In terms of making this specific fictional drug, I was looking at the story of the Sackler family. They’re a great epic contemporary mythological model for Rollo, but I didn’t want to comment directly on the opioid crisis, I didn’t want to write about opioids specifically. It just honestly felt more fun to me to toy with Cory’s perception in a more psychedelic register. Granadone is somewhere between the opioid family and the benzo family and the psychedelics family.

AL: What kind of world would have to exist for us to no longer need the story of Persephone?  Is there another myth, a generation from now, that we might tell instead?

RL: One of the things that feels so appealing about the Persephone myth is that inherent descent-and-rise shape. The cyclical shape. If we were to revise the myth to save Persephone from that experience—ideally, she wouldn’t have to go down there, right? But for me, a descent into the underworld is necessary. It’s almost integral to youth itself to pay a visit to the underworld. It helps you become a more whole, more compassionate adult later on.

The post A Trip to the Underworld is a Rite of Passage for Young Women appeared first on Electric Literature.

While some stories are speculative and others realistic, each story plunges you into a deeply lived world where fucked up things—be it a toxic relationship, racial objectification, or climate doom—unravel in a way that is both bold and, often, hilarious. There is a guilty pleasure in reading these stories. You feel like you’re in the hands of someone who has a sharp eye for the strangeness of existing in today’s world and doesn’t have anything she is too afraid to say.

Marshall is an award-winning playwright and she spoke to me by phone from her farm about leaving New York to become a writer, claiming space, and the role of physical labor in her creative process.

Sasha Vasilyuk: There is a line in a story called Sister Fat that says “And you will be a perfect father. Being dead, you will not interfere.” What do you think is happening to women and feminism today?

Jessie Ren Marshall: Everybody should define feminism for themselves and think about what that means. I do think that this is a feminist book because unfortunately, at this stage of literature, it is still a radical act to show the point of view of characters who are not white men. Each story in this book explores a different woman’s point of view and within that, there is a lot of diversity because I think women aren’t just one thing and feminism isn’t just one thing. The act of claiming space and claiming your voice is going to be necessarily multitudinous and weird and unexpected.

In my writing in general, I am really drawn to women’s voices and women’s relationships. Part of that is because I can draw on my own experience and it’s just kind of a selfish thing to do. But at the same time, I do see it as an act of defiance against the norm. An act of inclusion. I really love stories about women’s relationships with women as well, not just their relationships with men or being defined by a romantic relationship because we’ve all seen that story a million times on Netflix. I’m really interested in exploring motherhood, particularly non-traditional kinds of mothering, or mother-child relationships. I myself am not a mother, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have an understanding of that relationship. And sisterhood is a huge one for me. And then of course, there are also queer relationships between women.

SV: The collection has both speculative stories (a sex bot, a woman traveling to populate Planet B) and realist ones—a woman getting divorced, a teacher flirting with a male student, a strip club dancer in London, a reluctant teen piano player—that reading those I often found myself wondering what of your own past experiences had found a place on the page? Or do you try to keep yourself entirely out of your fiction?

JRM: I kind of love the framing of this question because I think there’s a little bit of a reluctance to say this fiction is based on my life, because then readers will want to find the answer. And the answer is not this really happened, whereas this other thing didn’t happen. It’s not a puzzle in that sense. It’s more that I have experiences and obsessions that then work themselves out on the page because I think I’m always seeking to address questions and to write around questions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean answering questions on the page.

For example, one of the more speculative stories, which is told from the point of view of a sex bot, is very personal to me and I think is one of the stories that is based more on my own life experiences than perhaps something that seems more realistic. The divorce story for example, I wasn’t going through a divorce. I hadn’t even met anybody yet. I was a lot younger, but the Annie 2 story [the opening story about the sex bot] was written during the anti-Asian violence that was happening, particularly in New York City. And it was a response to that feeling of helplessness that I had, being so far away from where I felt like the crux of the violence was happening. At the same time, even though I wasn’t there, I understood that violence in a deep sense, because I had experienced it in a million different small ways. I think that’s what happens with micro aggressions: they pile up, but if you point to any one individually, they don’t seem like a big deal. But the accumulative nature of racism and sexism is a violence that I think many Asian American women would recognize. In that story, even though it’s told in a humorous way and the reader is distanced from the narrator because we are not robots, it’s that play of narrative distance that I think is so interesting to explore and to reflect what it means to be human. So I hope that a human reading that story feels the gravitas of sexism, racism, othering, even though the story itself is more speculative in nature.

SV: Have you ever dreamt of a man sweeping you off your feet or coming to your rescue? Is it a dangerous narrative for girls to grow up with? 

JRM: It is absolutely the baseline of what I grew up with. I think it is my generation’s baseline narrative of what you hope for as a young girl, and it is hard to escape. Any expectation for your life is going to be problematic. Anything that’s done by society is probably not going to work perfectly for anyone. But it is more complicated than just trying to work against this narrative of someone sweeping me off my feet, Princess Bride-style. It’s more complicated because there’s also this feminist counter narrative which was also shoved down our throats of “You need to save yourself. You need to be your own hero. Women are badass.” That is also problematic because it makes you feel wrong when you want someone to sweep you off your feet. What is wrong with wanting to be supported and saved and loved and adored? All of those things are part of human existence and I don’t think we should push them away as a kind of weakness. It’s all about balance, isn’t it? This is what being an adult is: we are trying to find a balance between what others want us to be and what we need to be in order to get through another day.

SV: What was it like coming of age as a writer in New York?

JRM: What I said before about having to navigate the trench between the way the outside world sees you and what you need in order to survive another day. That definitely applies to being a writer in New York. There was a lot of anxiety of influence that I felt when I was there, particularly in terms of the literary scene. At that time, which was a while ago, the literary world was so based in New York City, the American publishing world was not as diffuse as it is today. It felt like everyone in my MFA program was reading the same stories in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s. We were being fed the same books and we had similar goals because what you read is kind of what you end up wanting to write. I really enjoyed the social aspect of the MFA program, but at the same time, I don’t think it was the best place to develop as a writer because of that anxiety of influence that I felt. So I overcorrected and moved to Hawaii. And that became a really amazing place to settle into my voice more deeply, and figure out what I wanted to write about or what I was interested in. Because I didn’t think about what was being published in the New Yorker that week.

SV: You live with your dogs off the grid on a remote farm on Hawai’i Island. It’s a dream of many a writer, but the reality of very, very few. What does it do to your brain to be away from society?

JRM: You’re right in that it is a very romantic notion that in order to be an artist, one has to remove oneself from society and be alone. I mean, everyone from Thoreau to Andrew Bird has said that it is a helpful thing to do. Andrew Bird, the musician, I think it was one of his earlier albums, where he just went to a cabin in the middle of the woods and knocked it out himself. There is something about the idea of being totally in your own created world that is very appealing, especially for a fiction writer because you don’t need other people to create that world. It’s a self-sufficient space. I think also being in nature is incredibly helpful for the creative process. It allows me to remind myself that I am a part of something larger than myself. And since I’m not religious, I think I need to find that reminder somewhere else and it comes from the natural world for me. In terms of not being a part of society, that has been quite difficult. I am a hermit by nature, I enjoy being alone, I don’t often long for company. But society is more than people. There is an aspect of society that I really miss, which is cultural connection, going to the theater, going to a restaurant, seeing what new things other people who are creative are creating. It’s sad to be apart from that for most of my days. And at the same time I do think one of the most wonderful things about having a book published is that it connects you to so many people in your work in public.

When your work becomes public, it’s like you’ve debuted into society. That’s actually a wonderful side effect that I wasn’t aware of is that I’m connected to all these people that I might not have met if my work weren’t becoming public soon. It is hard to be not in a city. I think when your book comes out there’s some anxiety that I feel because I would prefer it if I could have that permanent sense of community around me, of literary community, of creative community, friends and family, but at the same time, that’s what writing retreats are for.

SV: You’re working both on your farm and on your novel, Alohaland. What role does physical labor play in your creative process?

JRM: I try to spend a portion of every day doing something that is either working on the land or working on the house and both of those are definitely works in progress. I have a burgeoning garden, I build fences, I build furniture. I’m trying to make the world a little bit better, the world inside my space bubble. I’m trying to improve things and I think that that can be really useful as a writer because you spend so much time in your head creating a fake physical world. It’s nice to return to the actual physical world, where objects have permanence that you can touch and lift and move.

I think there are a lot of helpful parallels to when you look at the way that things grow and things decay and things die. There is a cycle of life to, particularly, the gardening and observing the land that keeps things in perspective. When you’re creating something like a book, which seems permanent, it seems like an object, but really everything is impermanent, because that’s just the cycle of time. So let’s not get too attached to the things that we make.

SV: Do you ever feel like a woman in peril?

JRM: I mean, I do get hurt sometimes, physically. So in those times, I think that I do curse the fact that I’m alone and trying to do things myself, but I also really like the self-sufficiency of knowing that I can lift really heavy things and, although it’s challenging, I can prevail. I think that has made the act of writing a book seem a little bit less daunting, because it is hard. It’s so fucking hard to write a book! It takes so much perseverance, it takes so much faith in yourself. And the way you build a fence is bit by bit. You don’t build it all in one day, especially when you’re doing it yourself without a lot of large tools to help you. But if you’re doing it with your own two hands, then it happens slowly and that’s the same way a book gets written.

The post In “Women! In! Peril!,” Defying Societal Norms Is an Act of Reclamation appeared first on Electric Literature.

This book is her answer: turn to her community for help.

Over the course of 20 essays, each accompanied by photographs she took, Raboteau looks at different ways concerned global citizens are responding to the crises that face us, all of which are undergirded by climate collapse. Like a blanket for a new child, Raboteau’s book quilts together their wisdom. Many pieces stay close to home, as Raboteau travels by foot through various neighborhoods in New York City (most often Harlem, where she and her husband, novelist Victor LaValle, lived for many years), profiling people trying to affect change on a local level. Some are topical, diaries of the months before the pandemic, or reflecting on specific days, like May 25, 2020, when bird watcher Christian Cooper was threatened by a white woman in Central Park because his Blackness frightened her, and, later, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. And in one tour-de-force of narrative reporting, Raboteau recounts a 2016 visit to the West Bank of Palestine, where she witnesses virulent Islamophobia and colonialism that today fuels the decimation of Gaza by the Israeli Defense Force.

Rarely have I read a book that speaks so vitally to our current moment, which illustrates how entrenched these social and environmental crises are. I spoke to Raboteau about parenting, resilience, and the emotional journey she took while writing Lessons for Survival.

Brian Gresko: Sometimes when the news gets too awful, I find it negatively impacts my ability to write, so I choose to disengage for a couple of days for the sake of my work. It feels like in Lessons for Survival you’ve done the opposite. I’m curious to know about your emotional journey while composing this book, and what you did to protect yourself from spiraling down while writing. (Or, if such spirals happened, how you moved through them.)

Emily Raboteau: I’m not sure I’ve done the opposite as you, Brian! Choosing to disengage from the news cycle for the sake of your work is choosing engagement of another kind–deep thought instead of reactionary panic. What is apocalyptic thinking, really? The word “Apocalypse” comes from the Greek apokálypsis “uncovering.” My friend, the writer Ayana Mathis, just reminded me of this. It doesn’t actually mean the end of the world. I wish to see things as they are, with the scales wiped from my eyes.

For me, writing these essays, most of which focus on resilience, was a way to engage with others and to keep from doomscrolling or spiraling downward, as you put it. For example, I responded to the news cycle in 2019 by keeping a kind of climate diary that gathered expressions by dozens of people in my social network about how they were experiencing climate change in their bodies and local habitats. I did that because climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe said that one of the most important things we can do to combat the climate emergency is to talk about it widely among family and friends. I feel less despairing and alone when I can study large-scale problems, and possible solutions, in community. Writing is one way of doing that.

That said, while I was editing this book, my therapist prescribed watching fun TV for the sake of my mental health. I watched Love on the Spectrum, an incredibly heartwarming show. I recommend it!

BG: I’m glad you mentioned that essay-as-diary, “It Was Already Tomorrow.” I love how it gives us a taste of your joyously busy social calendar through the year, but there was one small moment that especially stayed with me: when your then eight-year-old asks you to “rummage through my head and take out the fire thoughts and eat them” before bed. This was so sweet, that you held his anxieties in your belly. Can you talk about how you address the climate crisis with your sons, as a mother? And how that’s changed and developed as they’ve aged, and you’ve engaged more directly with the topic via writing these essays?

ER: That was the bedtime ritual for a while. He would name all his fears and ask me to eat them one by one, and I would pantomime doing so. I was his grief eater. We have to be careful about how much grief we consume, don’t you think? A diet like that can make us sick. But I also wanted to validate my kid’s fears and let him know that he didn’t have to carry them alone.

This is how I address climate change with him and his brother, too. By diverting them from the fallacy that they can fight it by themselves. We now know that the idea of the individual carbon footprint, that is, how much we are each contributing to the problem as a way of pushing us to change individual behaviors (drive less, don’t have kids, fly less, recycle, etc..) was a marketing scheme cooked up by British Petroleum. Why? To deflect responsibility from the fossil fuel industry by tricking us into thinking it’s we who need to change. The only way we can take this fight on is in community with others, on local and global scales. So I talk to my kids about what is going on in the community to fight climate change and environmental justice.

For example, in our neighborhood in the Bronx, they are in the process of daylighting (unburying) a stream as an act of climate mitigation. I try to bring the climate emergency down to Earth and out of the realm of cosmic dread. And I talk to them about historical resilience. How we come from a historically resilient community that has survived existential threats before. As they get older, I want them to know more about careers in sustainability, though the paths they will walk are their own to choose. Ours is described as the last generation who can turn things around. Their generation—Alpha—they are inheriting a terrible burden. I think a lot about intergenerational justice; about what we owe them. I’m curious, because you’re such a thoughtful parent yourself, how are you thinking through this?

BG: A lot of this resonates with me as a parent. My son is almost fifteen. His room is verdant with houseplants, terrariums, aquariums. He loves life and science. He’s also a technophile, and he believes that while things are going to get real bad, ultimately technology will allow us to survive, that ingenious humanity will find a way. I appreciate his optimism but I don’t trust capitalism or corporations, especially big tech. Have you experienced anything similar with your boys?

ER: I’d like to hang out in your son’s room. It sounds amazing. Our kids are somewhat younger than yours. They’ll turn eleven and thirteen this spring. We’ve not yet gotten into disagreements or debates about best practices moving forward, like degrowth. Maybe that will come, when they’re truly teenagers, like yours, with strong opinions of their own. Or maybe they’ll want to join task forces, like the Sunrise Movement or Fridays for Future. Who knows. Right now they’re into playing video-games.

We do try to inculcate values, like experiences and relationships matter more than stuff. It helps me to know I’m not the only one educating them, and I hope that solutions-oriented curriculum about the climate crisis will become a bigger and bigger part of their education in middle school, high school, and college. The Ecopsychepedia is a good resource I turn to for current research and thinking on how psychological factors drive the climate crisis, how the worsening crisis affects us psychologically, and what we can do about it. And I’m encouraged by the two New York State climate education bills afoot that would mandate K-12 climate education. I’m also gaining a lot of insight about parenting in these times from Anya Kamenetz’s thoughtful newsletter, The Golden Hour.

BG: This talk of parenting makes me think of Lessons in Survival’s subtitle: “Mothering Against ‘The Apocalypse.’” What does the word mother mean to you and why did you choose to use it in this context?

ER: I’m aligned here with feminist thinkers like Gloria Steinem and Alexis Pauline Gumbs who use “mother” not as a noun, but as a verb. Mothering can be a revolutionary stance on the power of nurture and empathy—an ethics of care. People sometimes forget that when Julia Ward Howe invented Mother’s Day in 1870, it was supposed to be a day of unity for peace and opposition to war. It was about coming together to combat violence. It wasn’t about Hallmark cards and roses. It was in recognition, as Steinem puts it, that “when mother is a verb–as in to mother, to be mothered–then the best of human possibilities come into our imaginations. To mother is to care about the welfare of another person as much as one’s own.” Even if we aren’t biological mothers, we may be mothering.

BG: The essay “Mother of All Good Things,” where you report on the Israeli occupation of Palestine on its fiftieth anniversary, in 2017, is an incredible piece of journalism and artistry. You write that just as W. E. B. DuBois said “the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line, I’d heard it said the problem of the twenty-first century was the question of Palestine.” This hit me differently now, as the occupation and total destruction of Gaza continues unabated, then it would have a few months ago. Can you tell me the circumstances that led to that piece, and also update it for us?

ER: The Question of Palestine, with a hat tip to Edward Said. I was solicited by married writers Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon to write that essay for an anthology called The Kingdom of Olives and Ash (along with a lot of other international writers including Anita Desai, Hari Kunzru, Helon Habila, Porochista Khakpour, Eimear McBride, Raja Shehadeh) to examine the human cost of the occupation. It was a partnership with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence—a radically humane organization made up of former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories, witnessed firsthand the injustice there, and conscientiously objected to it, often at a high cost.

I wrote specifically about inequitable water and electricity use in one part of the West Bank. I visited with Palestinian shepherds trying to stay on their land. I wasn’t in Gaza. I was in the South Hebron Hills. It was my first explicit piece of environmental writing, and it was about the abuse of power. I am still in touch with many of the folks I profiled in that piece. They say that the settler violence has grown much worse since I was there, and it feels like the world doesn’t care. They’re praying for a ceasefire, yet feeling despair. I’ve been thinking a lot since this war broke out about the words of Lama Hourani, a community activist I met in Ramallah: “Does the US really care about Jewish self-determination? No. They wanted an ally for resources. Their main interest is energy. The main energy is in the Gulf. All of us are suffering because of that.”

I hope this essay gives readers some context about the violence that led up to October 7.

BG: The ways in which water and access to water has been weaponized by the Israeli government rooted that essay into the collection, as so many of the pieces have water on the mind, from rising seawater to hurricanes and floods, and the ancient pond that hides in plain sight in front of your house, returning to swamp the sidewalk whenever it rains. How did you settle on topics for these pieces? They each stand alone and yet speak to one another, with recurring themes and characters, like songs on an album.

ER: Water is one of the book’s leitmotifs. I don’t know. I think I just followed my curiosity. I looked as hard as I could at the places where something was wrong, to understand how it got that way, systemically. You mentioned the pond in the street in front of my house in the Bronx, for example. It’s an eyesore and it’s surely bad for resale value. But why is it there in the first place, and why doesn’t it go away? Well, it turns out I live on backfilled wetlands, and that pond is only one of many ponds in my area, which also floods, in places. It’s the water remembering where it wants to be. And why is flooding of this kind more common in Black and brown neighborhoods like mine, that were historically red-lined? Because plundered peoples are made to live in plundered places.

I’m glad you feel that the book hangs together like an album, with refrains. There are a lot of visual refrains and echoes. I’m a street photographer as well as a writer and I included over a hundred photos in the book. The majority of these images are of public artworks that reflect on social and environmental issues. As with the pond, I had to ask, what’s that mural doing there? What is it saying? Who made it? Who was it meant for and why?

BG: Can we return to the word resilience? What did you learn about resilience in the process of writing it, and profiling people like Luz, who, after Hurricane Sandy destroyed her home, now lives as a climate migrant in an RV?

ER: Luz, in particular, has taught me a lot about resilience. I credit her for wiping scales from my eyes in terms of the merits of disaster preparedness. One of the essays profiles her story. She didn’t own her home in Staten Island. It was a rental in her brother’s name. She lost everything she owned to that hurricane. So there was no way she could get government funds to “build it back better.” Luz was forced by circumstance to radically change her life, to critique consumer-culture, to downsize. She now lives much more sustainably and happily in an RV. I’m interested in learning from people like Luz, and from frontline and fenceline communities, who have a lot to teach us about survival, and what Anya Kamenetz would call “post-traumatic growth,” even though they’re seldom treated as environmental experts. If we come from a stance of thinking of economics as the chief measure of human welfare, we are missing out on a more wealthy understanding of resilience. Setting aside financial resilience, what does it mean to be spiritually resilient, emotionally resilient? What resources and reserves of strength does it take to make it through calamity?

Are you familiar with the gospel song, “How I Got Over”? Mahalia Jackson recorded it. So did Aretha Franklin. “My soul look back and wonder, how I got over…” I interviewed a lot of survivors in this book about how they got over. I also asked people what they do with their anger.

BG: What do you do with your anger? And how do you nurture hope?

ER: For a long time I internalized it and experienced it as depression. An elder I talked to in Alakanuk, Alaska, a real ground zero of climate collapse, told me that the best thing to do with our anger is to take care of other people. That resonated with me in a deep way, as a mother. As for nurturing hope, this may sound too simple, but the purest practice I’ve found is to garden. To nurture life with my hands in the soil, and be nurtured in return.

The post Emily Raboteau on Mothering in the Face of Climate Collapse appeared first on Electric Literature.

The central mission of their book is to find a way to overcome division by cultivating its opposite: solidarity. To do so, the authors look to the past, finding there a rich history of seeing solidarity as a political reflection of our absolute dependence on one another. They also look to the history of social movements to offer readers examples of moments when people from all walks of life have built power together. These examples are important because Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor do not want to overcome divisiveness simply for its own sake, nor do they want anything to do with erasing the differences among us. Rather, they believe that solidarity—the type that respects and retains our differences—can transform society. Their book leaves readers with a real sense that solidarity is the only way out of the mess we’re in. As they write, “Either solidarity forever or our time is up.”

We spoke by Zoom about the history of solidarity, how the right uses “reactionary solidarity” to divide people, how we can counter it, and whom they hope to reach with their book.

Lynne Feeley: You say in the introduction that we’ve entered a “new period of instability and change” and that “we sit at a moment of significant opportunity and threat.” I was wondering if you could say a bit about how you see solidarity as an answer to the threat and opportunity of the moment.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix: There are a number of reasons. On a really macro level, we’re writing this in the midst of feeling like neoliberalism is coming to a crisis point. Both of us started our activism work during the period of financialization, the global justice movement, Occupy Wall Street, economic inequality. So it feels like we’re at a moment of paradigm shift, and either it could become worse, or we could enter a new paradigm that is more just and equitable. The neoliberal era was created—we have the power to create the economic systems that we live in. So what is the intellectual history that we need to create new paradigms? If neoliberalism is really grounded in a concept of freedom and the individual—good things—but went to an extreme, can we bring back the idea of solidarity as we think about a next economic paradigm? So that’s like a macro level.

Then on a more visceral, current political level, obviously we are in the midst of a crisis of democracy, with the election of Trump once and maybe twice. We’ve been thinking about the crisis of democracy as a crisis of solidarity. We let ourselves get so fractured, and we’ve succumbed to these “divide and conquer” tactics and politics—it might mean the end of the American democratic experiment. So can we survive those forces of division by identifying and resisting them?

Then a third piece—even more micro—is on the left itself. The left itself has, since the 1800s and 1900s, always been caught up in sectarianism. We’ve seen that today, too. How do we, as progressives, think about our own coalition? How can we work together to create change and not let ourselves be divided from each other?

Astra Taylor: And how do we not let ourselves be divided without adopting a simplistic idea of unity, which is something we really belabor in the book. We’re not after unity for its own sake.

I think moments of breakdown can be moments of breakthrough, and it’s telling that right now, we speak of crises, or poly-crises, or intersecting crises, and nobody blinks an eye. But Leah and I take seriously the threats that are put upon us. We take seriously the threat of climate change. We take seriously the threat of intensifying white supremacy. We take seriously the threat of authoritarianism. But we’re also pretty adamant in the book that a kind of centrist liberalism won’t get us out of the mess we’re in and that you do need to have a kind of robust, progressive politics counter to that. And I think you build that progressive politics by speaking to people’s actual experiences of the crises, experiences of oppression, and turning that into solidarity. 

So, that’s where it’s a moment of peril, but it’s a moment of possibility because through the alchemy that is organizing, we can turn a lot of this terrible shit into power for ordinary people. 

LF: One of the things you are both making me think about is the point you make about solidarity having to be cultivated. On the one hand, you write about solidarity being a reflection of an inherent interdependence. Yet, on the other hand, you write about solidarity having to be actively cultivated through organizing. This duality is in relation to another duality, which you trace in the book, between cohesion and upheaval.

AT: There’s a strong tradition of thinking of solidarity as social cohesion. But we’re also very invested in and inspired by the vision and the fighting spirit of solidarity that you see all through the labor movement. So solidarity, in our definition, isn’t just about cohesion and keeping things how they are. It is very much about transformation. That’s why we felt compelled to name the kind of solidarity we’re after “transformative solidarity.” 

As organizers, I think what we aim to do is to create that conflict and upheaval, that transformative energy to bring about a new consensus, a new cohesion. We don’t want to be debating whether trans people are people, or whether we should have a habitable environment. We just want that to be the new common sense, and then the process can go from there. So I think cohesion and upheaval for us are not at odds. They’re part of the inherent process of societal evolution.

LF: Could you define the difference between reactionary versus transformative solidarity? I do think the key intervention of the book is this idea that just as solidarity must be cultivated, division also has to be cultivated and mobilized and maintained and reinvented over again. So I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about reactionary solidarity, how you see it, how it’s different from transformative solidarity.

LHH: I think there is a notion that solidarity can just be sort of mundane and neutral. But on the other side of that, we see reactionary solidarity as exclusionary and really pitting outsiders against insiders to solidify the “we.” You just see that constantly in politics. Often there’s an external enemy—like China or Russia—but often it can be internal: immigrants, people of color. 

We see transformative solidarity as an alternative to that. It’s like deciding that we have something in common, that we have a common fate, a need for each other, and deciding to stick together to overcome whatever obstacles are in the way. There is still a polarization, but it’s a much broader sense of the “we.” I think Occupy is a good example of the 99% versus the 1%. 99% of us have a lot in common, and the only people we don’t have a lot in common with are the people who are dividing us for their own profit and for their own benefit. But even they will benefit from a society where there is a stronger social safety net. 

So transformative solidarity doesn’t say that these people are enemies that must be demolished or annihilated. It asks: how can we improve conditions for everyone, even the 1%, who right now have to build fortresses around themselves and have private security to fend off the pitchforks? I think the difference between reactive and transformative solidarity is, in part, how we relate to the concept of the other or the outside.

AT: Transformative solidarity is bridging out and trying to build a more inclusive “we” but with the aim of also changing the social structures. We are also channeling that fighting spirit of solidarity that you see historically in the labor movement. Reactionary solidarity is based more on a politics of scarcity and is more about splintering the coalition. But it offers people a real sense of belonging. 

I’m tempted to say that in transformative solidarity, identity is a doorway, and in reactionary solidarity, identity is a destination. Reactionary solidarity is a white, male, working class that does not want to share its gains or a hyper-aggressive nationalism. We did wrestle a lot with where identity fits into all of this. Solidarity is not identity, but I think identity is often the portal through which we have or do not have solidarity with other people and groups. It’s something we couldn’t ignore because it’s so fundamental, but the question of whether it’s a doorway or a destination is key.

LF: I was really interested in the genre and intended audience of the book. I noticed that, in my reading, it moves around various rhetorical modes or even different kinds of study. We’ve been talking about the intellectual history piece, the social movement history, there’s some personal narrative there in how you came to the project and your work in different movements. There’s also organizer strategy. Could you talk a bit about how you were able to fold all of these approaches into the book, or why you did so?

AT: We genuinely wrestled with the theme and were learning as we wrote. We had to figure out: what do we think about solidarity? What is the intellectual schema that we’re going to use? And so, for me, one of my mottos as a writer is to take the reader along on that journey of discovery. And the book kind of does that–it is a document of our investigation and our learning. 

I think the mix of different registers and voices is an attempt to hold the reader. Because if it’s all just dry intellectual history we’re gonna only reach a very select audience. And there’s a very select audience for a “how to organize” strategy guide–and Leah and I know those people very well, they’re our comrades, we organize with them. But wouldn’t it be neat to get some liberals reading an “how to organize” guide, who might otherwise never pick that up? 

I think the personal elements are important because, as we say in the introduction, solidarity is always invested. It’s not an abstract concept. It’s messy, it’s rooted, it takes a stand, it’s positional. It felt like we had to name our positions and where we’re coming from.

Every writer wants to reach readers, but I think we really do want to put solidarity on the American agenda, as something that’s critical to getting us out of these intersecting crises but also as something that can be institutionalized. When we say we’d love to see someone running on a solidarity state platform, we mean it. Let’s create solidarist policy feedback loops instead of ones that demean and demoralize and divide people. We want to see these ideas taken up and not just put into practice but put into power structures. 

LF: It seems like the book is really interested in moments where this almost happened–or these glimmers of the solidarity state. These moments seem to be seeded in the book as moments of real promise and possibility that can be recovered now as examples that we might take a lot from and model on. I’m thinking of, for example, the Community Action Programs and the Black Panthers, the National Welfare Rights Organization, and the citizens’ assemblies on abortion in Ireland.

AT: “Glimmers” is a really good word to describe them. How do you tell the stories of things that broke through but then were shut down? The assemblies in Ireland are ongoing, and I think are a really positive, interesting example of creating forums where citizens can debate across difference and create new kinds of alliances and new space to find common ground. So I find that example really interesting and engaging. 

In terms of the Citizen Action Programs, the minute I heard about them, I was like what? The U.S. government was funding, at scale, these organizing initiatives as part of its War on Poverty? In fact, as its premier program. It’s such an interesting example of how the state can create space for citizen engagement and the kind of transformative solidarity we’re talking about. Transformative solidarity on both levels: holding space for people to start organizing but also enabling those folks to then pressure the state to create change. 

One thing that we discussed was that we didn’t want all of the examples to be from Sweden and Finland and other Nordic democracies. It was really important to us that we really scoured American history because we don’t believe that it’s impossible here. We think it’s totally possible. The problem is there’s far more investment at the level of the state in reactionary solidarity and division. We wanted to hew close to American examples not out of parochialism but because Americans are so quick to be like, “Well, nothing good can happen here.”

LHH: We are interested in asking, how do we think of each other as citizens and agents and protagonists, and what policies would support that mindset? We can think of mundane things like Vista and AmeriCorp, where there’s much, much more demand to participate in these programs than there is money for them or positions in these programs. Imagine if we had a service program where, instead of going to the army, you did community service or a WPA-like program, working on trails and climate-related things. The state could fund these things, which could be productive, could be good for the economy, good for society, and also could create a feedback loop of educating each other about the different communities that make up America and our different responsibilities to each other.

AT: As imperfect and flawed as they are, and even though they’re factories of student debt, which I now spend my life fighting, public universities are kind of that, right? That’s part of why we’re seeing an intense attack on universities (especially since the war on Gaza started) and this insistence from the right that what universities are doing is dividing people by bringing up issues of race and diversity and equity and inclusion. They’re like, “Why are people going to these schools and turning out liberal?” Because that’s actually where young folks get out of their bubbles, are introduced to new ideas, encounter difference—and it is, imperfectly, state subsidized. So you see a little tiny thing that could be a critical building block of the solidarity state. And the right wing is going after it. I think we are of the position that it’s really important to protect what we have and build on it instead of acting like you could just create utopia ex nihilo. We have to protect what we have and gain new ground.

The post Transformative Solidarity Can Empower Ordinary People in This Terrible Time appeared first on Electric Literature.

This question launches our conversation about her new novel, Beautyland. Given that the story opens with spaceship Voyager 1 leaving planet earth, it makes sense that the author is attentive to the semantics of “departure.” I’d used the word as I referenced Bertino’s previous works, specifically the novels Parakeet and 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas. The dustings of magic, the uncanny, and the absurd in these works came from the fanciful imaginations of human characters. Beautyland follows the life of Adina, an alien. Adina is born to her mother Térèse as Voyager 1 fires its jets, and this simultaneity is significant. Voyager 1 carried the golden record, a gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth to any being who found it. Similarly, while Adina presents as human, it’s her duty to observe human behavior and report back to extraterrestrial beings. “In a way,” says Bertino, “Voyager 1 became Adina’s sibling.” 

Adina’s reports are filed via a fax machine she and her mother find discarded on their street in Northeast Philadelphia. This pocket of Northeast Philadelphia; Adina’s mother, a single parent and a steely Italian-American; Adina’s eventual rise to literary fame and public controversy: These aren’t standard ingredients for a work of speculative fiction, the genre term Bertino uses to describe this work. The thing is, Bertino has always had a knack for cracking blunt reality to reveal its wonderous strangeness, for capturing the possibility of resolution and joy beyond hardship. 

About halfway through the novel, Adina writes in a fax to her superiors:

“There’s a reason it’s called alien-ated. Because I’m an alien, I am alone.… When you’re alone, you are in the right place to watch sadness approach like storm clouds over an open field. You can sit in your chair and get ready for it…. When it passes and you can drink coffee again you even miss it because it has been loyal to you like a boyfriend.”

Genre and categorization don’t really have a place in the context of a work like Beautyland, which might be part of the reason it was Dakota Johnson’s first choice for her new and vanguard book club, Tea Time. To paraphrase one of Adina’s faxes, Beautyland is a beautyland that magnifies Bertino’s philosophical acuity, her lyrical charm, and her syntactical skill. Over the course of a conversation that ranged from writing alienation to turning towards fear, I realized that rather than a departure for Bertino, Beautyland is an author’s homecoming.

Lucie Shelly: The premise of Beautyland is a remarkable: A bildungswoman narrative of an alien in Northeast Philadelphia who sends fax reports about human behavior. Can you talk about the origin of your idea for the novel? How did you start thinking about Beautyland?

Marie-Helene Bertino: The story originated many years ago, 2010, 2011, when I wrote the short story that Beautyland is based on for my first collection, which was called Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours. It was about an unnamed woman who believed that she was an alien taking notes on human beings. It was first person, it was very voice-y, and it was very short. 

The reason I wrote that story is because I’ve always had a hard time understanding why people do what they do. I’ve always had a really hard time understanding casual cruelty and indifference, the rituals of human life. I grew up Roman Catholic, and the rituals and beliefs in Roman Catholicism always confounded me. That story came about because, eventually, I began keeping notes on human beings. 

I put them into a folder, these little things that I’ve just never been able to understand. And that folder grew and grew. Even after that original short story was published, I was like, I wonder if I could write a novel from this. That idea thrilled me because it was from the deepest chamber of my heart, and it was the most fun I could think of having. To do it, I had to think of the character who would be writing these notes. But this is closest to my own life that I’ve ever written. And I think that was kind of necessary because Adina’s voice is so singular and so specific. I don’t think I could have given her to a totally fictional person.

I feel, especially in this moment, very on the inside of the experience. For this book, specifically, I feel less and more aware of how it’s coming across. And maybe that just means that it’s more connected to my actual veins and blood.

LS: I think writing alienation requires almost conflicting mindsets. On the one hand, an author must preserve that sense of distance and disconnection in order to capture it. On the other, you have to connect deeply with the protagonist, the heart, that you’re portraying. In a recent conversation, the screenwriter Andrew Haigh (All of Us Strangers) suggested that a sense of alienation is actually necessary to being a writer. How do you resolve the work of writing alienation with the state of it?

MHB: For me, being at a distance has always been necessary for writing. But it was the cause, not the effect: I was already at a distance, and then I realized that distance was necessary. I keep thinking of this quote, that used to mean a lot to me from Archimedes, the philosopher. He says, “Give me a long enough lever and enough distance, and I can move the world.”

He meant it literally. But what I got from it was that you had to be at a distance to be able to evoke true emotional movement. And I think a writer does. At least for me, that’s the way it has always been.

LS: As we’re talking about alienation, we’re also talking about the compulsion to observe others. I came across this idea from Einstein that “experience without observation is at best conjecture.” And when we read an alienated character, we the reader are observing them. I wonder if that’s another task of a writer, to kind of validate atomized experiences—perhaps even the life of the reader—by observing and writing them. 

MHB: One thing I will say is that you can absolutely never know if anyone will be interested in what you write, let alone moved by it. You don’t know whether it will emotionally resonate for anyone. This question of, how do you offer up an experience or offer up a piece of work and attract readers? has powered a lot of academic classes, a lot of marketing meetings, a lot of book club discussions, I’m sure. 

I have never been led by or engaged with that idea, I think because of the nature of my work. That said, one of the questions I was thinking about when I was writing Beautyland was, if you triple down on the song that only you can sing, if you get as specific as you can get, could it be more universal?

For example, I’ve always been very hesitant to write about being Italian American, and to write about Northeast Philadelphia, all for the same reason: Because they’re not the terrain of “high literature”. I think some of that has to do with the Italian American in the American imagination and the popular renderings of Italian Americans. But a lot of it has to do with my own fear. When I realized that fear was a driving force, I decided I had to turn towards the fear and get as specific as I could about everything. I allowed Adina to be Italian American. I made her friend Toni Italian American. A friend of mine read the first draft I did where the characters were Italian. I’d written, “Be Italian,” at the top. She said, “So, this is what it’s about.” And I said, “I’m just working through something.”

LS: When talking drafts, I love hearing what writers choose to leave in, take out, and add. I feel like this novel’s kernel was captured in a very early line, a sentence Adina faxes to her superiors: “I am an Adina.” How did you refine what needed to be “explained” about Adina and her nature, and what needed to be left out?

MHB: I don’t leave a lot out. I write from short to long, I think it’s because I spent my first 25 years trying to be a poet. The first draft of Beautyland was practically a haiku. Then it was, like, 50 pages. I was changing the person from first to third, it was growing little by little. I thought I was proceeding apace, like everyone else does, but apparently most people write, write, write and cull later.

But you’re hitting on a really important aspect of speculative fiction—how much do you explain, and when? I had to carefully place where and when she was activated, and when she was able to know for herself what she was there to do. I decided to plant the first point in a moment of domestic violence because of what I’ve always wanted to say about trauma—about the way we’re formed in some of our worst moments. Those moments can open up understandings that hopefully make us better humans. 

I only ever had to know as much as Adina would know, at any given time, and I wasn’t trying to hold anything back from the reader. Toward the second half of the novel, her superiors go silent and that is devastating for her. That’s when the subjective nature of her reality becomes an undeniable question. Like, is she really here to report on human beings? Are the superiors real? Are these messages real? Her faith in them was tested just like anything you believe in without seeing is tested, like religion. Or vocation, or love for a partner. Belief in marriage, belief in friendship. Ultimately, I just stuck with her. 

LS: You spoke about wanting to foreground Italian Americans in Northeast Philadelphia, a milieu that hasn’t frequently appeared in literary fiction. In a way, you were establishing new precedents. How did you approach writing the queer characters and narratives from this background and setting?

MHB: It was massively important to me to have three queer characters at the helm of this book: Adina, Toni, and Dominic. Not only to reflect the world where I grew up but also to reflect my own experience. I identify as bisexual, and Adina is still figuring herself out in many ways. She’s leading a life that is not conventional. She, Toni, and Dominic are leading queer lifestyles but that word probably would not have come into the general parlance until the end of her life. Growing up, like me, she would have heard the word “gay,” and that would have been something she would have been encouraged to keep hidden. Adina’s authentic self, the fact that she is an extraterrestrial, that’s a reflection of the kind of lifestyle where you have to keep a giant part of yourself hidden. When Adina reveals her authentic self—three times in the novel—I very much wrote those scenes with the understanding that they were scenes of coming out to people she loved. And when Toni comes out to Adina, she says, “I knew but I didn’t know that I knew.” It just wasn’t a big deal between friends. Like the way Dominic comes out to Adina [reads]:

Adina asks if he’s dating anyone in New York and he tells her no one special. A boy he liked in his Life Drawing class turned out to be too in love with drugs. This is Dominic coming out to her. He says a boy in his class loves drugs and Adina says, “That’s too bad.”

This is the way a lot of my guy friends came out to me. I knew the moment for what it was, and that they were asking me to hold that for them—but not to broadcast it in a way that would make life any harder for them. So, it was important for me to have Dominic hold so many of the personalities and experiences of men in my life. 

LS: We started this conversation on the idea of departure, but that says nothing of how deeply personal this work is for you. It’s a story about Adina’s pursuit of self-understanding, and I wonder if it’s also an answer to the question, how can I be true to myself as a writer?

MHB: Absolutely. I’ve been so lucky because I have toiled in obscurity, and that obscurity has protected me. I had the space to be as strange as I wanted, and that’s all I ever really wanted.

I tell my students, the role of the first book is essentially to prove to yourself that you can write a book. After that, you will never have to prove to yourself that you can write a book again. And that’s an enormous weight off. That’s an enormous relief. And because that anxiety is off, I’ve been able to settle in and go easy on myself in in important ways. I understand that writing is so much broader than the actual act.

 I’m 46 and I’m so grateful that this is my fourth book, and that people seem to be relating to Adina. It feels like a gift. Adina takes her name from a friend I lost in 2017, Adina Talve-Goodman. Adina was one of my dearest friends and she died when she was 31 from cancer. So, it means so much to me if readers find that this book resonates with them. I’ve experienced some pretty intense loss that has utterly prioritized an understanding: The only thing that matters is the connection we have with each other.

The post In “Beautyland,” An Italian American Extraterrestrial in Philly is Humanity’s Sharpest Scribe appeared first on Electric Literature.

One year following a secret suicide attempt that only Jules, our narrator, knows about, her sister Poppy moves in with her in New York City, a temporary arrangement that slowly transforms into an uneasy, long-term situation that forces both sisters to examine their separate malaise. Poppy, riddled with hives and titular worry, tries to move forward with her life (in part by adopting a three-legged dog named Amy Klobuchar). And Jules, in an attempt to escape the bleakness of her days—characterized by unfulfilling content writing jobs, the end of a long term relationship, an increasing sense of loneliness, and a sense of angst about the death of real art— loses herself to the internet, where she pores over posts made by anti-vaxxers, influencers, and internet mommies. 

With wit and brilliant insight, Tanner explores the nuances particular to sisterhood, set against a landscape riddled by capitalism and consumption. I had the chance to talk with Tanner via Zoom about social media’s terrible pull, the allure of the illusion of choice in a world that so often feels out of control, and the ways siblinghood can serve as a reflection of our truest selves. 

Jacqueline Alnes: A few years ago I read your essay, “My Mommies and Me,” about a collection of Mormon mommies you started following during the pandemic. I remember feeling like, is she in my brain?

Alexandra Tanner: I love that. 

JA: Can we just start by talking about your internet mommies? Actually, I mean Jules’s internet mommies because this is fiction. 

AT: I was thinking this morning about how it’s like a chicken-egg thing. I knew I wanted to write about all the insane shit I was looking at on the internet, and I didn’t know how to do it. Do I write a nonfiction experimental book that’s me scrolling through the internet every day? Do I write a novel? I had this idea for siblings living together and I was getting deeper and deeper into the mommies in 2019, early 2020, and just being a victim of the algorithm where it shows you ten beautiful children lined up in order, wearing matching pajamas, and two months later it’s like “Look at this holocaust denial shit.” I understand how people who are on the internet looking for that in a non-ironic way or non-voyeuristic way are caught up in that, because it’s completely compelling. It’s hard for me to even articulate what I love about them. It’s like an alternate universe.

JA: It feels riddled with holes.

AT: I remember writing that essay and wondering, what’s my way in? Is it just that I’m different from them? And that’s not even it. It’s a part of it, but it’s so much more wrapped up, for Jules, specifically, she has mommy issues, she has internet issues, she’s not getting what she wants from her mother, she’s not getting what she wants from the internet, so I think her experience of them is different than my experience, which is just consume, consume, consume. I think she thinks there’s some end point where they are going to help her arrive at some end point about herself. They’re… maybe not. 

JA: I like the part where she intellectualizes her interest in the internet mommies at one point by saying she is “interested in how femininity is coded and recoded on image-centric platforms like Instagram.” I always think, when I’m scrolling, that I’m going to discover something, and that someday I’m going to understand why I spend hours doing this, but I don’t. Why do you think we obsess over lives of strangers in this way?

AT: I have so many thoughts. I think it’s the gamification of the internet. It’s set up to feel like the Skinner box where the pigeon pushes the button and they get a treat. It’s set up to feel like you can win, like you’re finally going to hit on the prize and something’s going to be bestowed upon you, whether it’s attention or free stuff or an understanding. 

I think a lot about stalking strangers on the internet versus looking at people you went to high school with and the people you know, you’re like, I can still get inside their head, I know why they’re posting like this. With a stranger, it’s more wrapping yourself in someone else’s consciousness and seeing what that feels like, and transporting yourself a little bit. 

JA: I’m starting to feel like this is therapy. Alex, please diagnose me. 

AT: Please help me with my internet recovery.

JA: Can we talk about evangelism? There’s so much here I don’t even know where to start. People selling products, religion, conspiracy theories, and a mom who becomes an evangelist in her own way. What draws you in about evangelism or what did you learn from interacting with these different forms?

AT: I want to say that evangelist consciousness is so counter to Judaism’s consciousness, which is inheriting something and having your own private relationship with it versus getting everyone on board and getting into people’s brains and saving them. The religious saving is one aspect, but MLMs and innocent moms getting pulled into pyramid schemes and into debt and home foreclosure, like that LulaRoe documentary, is another. The evangelism of the MLM is that it can save you from the drudgery of work, and the drudgery of parenting and being trapped in this hamster wheel life. You can make your own choices, you can make your own money, you don’t have to rely on anyone, you don’t have to rely on a corporation. That’s been really interesting to me as I’ve looked at religion and these specific kinds of consumerism. There’s a promise of salvation from something.

JA: It almost reminds me of how you were talking about social media. It must be this hit of adrenaline you get if you’re in an MLM, where you get a feeling of “I did something” or “I sold something” even though parts of it aren’t really real. You get constant affirmation.

AT: Absolutely. If I have a great tweet today, I’m saved from paying attention to work; I can pay attention to likes. If the right people like it, someone’s going to reach out to me with a book deal or a brand partnership. Something greater is coming.

JA: What is meaningful is often so boring. What is meaningful in life is often not the Instagram story. It’s the work of figuring out yourself or your faith or your community. I feel like so much about the world we live in is veering toward quick hits. There’s this theme of people making fear-based decisions in the book instead of coming from a place of hope for what might be different.

AT: Jules is definitely motivated by fear. I think she’s completely stuck because of how afraid of everything she is. I think Poppy is a little more about trying to make a beautiful life, even though that’s vulnerable. Jules is like, why try? What are you going to get? It’s all about the moment and if you think too far beyond the moment or try to chart a life for yourself beyond “what can I look at that’s going to piss me off online today,” it’s scary.

JA: Both these characters are in their twenties, in New York City. It feels like it might be a good time, but they are so bleak about things. It made me think a lot about our current landscape. I teach a lot of 18 to 20 year olds and I feel like there’s something that’s happened the past few years where it seems like they are more realistic about life than I might have been at that age. What do you think contributes to this bleakness?

AT: I think it’s everything. Political apathy, climate apathy, the structures that are in place that are making people feel bad and forcing them online or to stay in their apartment or go about their lives. I’m hesitant to talk about millennial vs. Gen Z, but there was this sense of being a kid in 1999 and being like, “The future is here! It’s possible! Everyone has unlimited capital and potential!” The swiftness with which that came crashing down and the long reticence to accept that none of that was ever true, it was only true for a moment, was so many people’s formative moment. I think people are starting to realize that there is so much structural misery and inequity and devastation in the world that it is prompting us to focus on our own little capsules of happiness, moment to moment. It’s selfish, but I think we live in a selfish world.

JA: The system makes us want to be selfish sometimes, and makes us believe that the only way to survive is to be out for ourselves. There’s very little that incentivizes us to be in community. 

AT: It de-incentivizes it. If you care, you’re a sucker. There are all these memes about your non-profit boss. If you sacrifice certain aspects of your life because you believe in a mission you’re, I don’t know, you’re a pancake. 

JA: Did you learn anything for yourself about the gulf that exists between screen life and real life from writing this novel?

AT: I mean, yeah. Once I realized I was going to center this book around social media, particularly ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorists (horrible parts of the internet that no one should look at), I threw myself into it 100% and gave so much of myself to it during the drafting of the book. While I was selling the book and revising the book, I still had my foot in the door there. Once I was done feeling like I’ve had to pay attention to this stuff, I’ve been meditating and trying to be more conscious about the time I spend on the internet and the things I look at. 

The things I see online aren’t just a game, it can affect me, it can make you a worse person, not even a worse person morally, but the internet promises that it can show you how to be the best version of yourself—drink a gallon of water every day and take your vitamins and lift weights Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and take long walks—it gives you this plan that’s not attainable because it’s just content. Even the good parts of the internet that are wellness TikTok—go on a cleanse, you can reclaim your body—that’s not real. None of it’s real. The only thing that’s real is being in the present with yourself. Writing this let me get in the mud of being addicted to the internet, look at where I was, and then lift myself back out of it. 

JA: For me, it always has preyed—I mean, I guess it can’t say, “It preyed on me,” because it’s the internet—

AT: It preys on you! TikTok tried to show me a video of a snake eating a little baby mouse last week. It preys on you. 

JA: It feels like when you’re at your most desperate or unsatisfied, which, going back to where we are in the world, where a lot of people are feeling that way, the internet offers the illusion of something better. 

AT: Yeah.

JA: I don’t have a sister, but reading this, I felt like I did because these sisters are so mean to each other but also cannot be without each other. 

AT: Siblinghood is just having another you, but it’s not you. You have the same psyche in a lot of ways. You grew up in the same house, in the same environment, learning the same things, having the same worldview pressed upon you, which is all very obvious, but once you go out in the world a little bit, have an adulthood, and then come back together, it’s interesting. I think it’s part of what’s unique about their situation in this book, is that these sisters are living together after they haven’t been for a while. They are confronting their shadow selves, Jungian shadow selves, and also trying to assert their differences from one another, while also mirroring one another, because that’s what you do when you’re a sibling. I loved thinking about starting from the kernel of my relationship with my sibling, who I did live with for a short period of time, and saying, what if that never ended? What if it was longer? What if it was more pressurized? I’m fascinated by how siblings know exactly what to do to help one another, hurt one another. They can say one thing that can snap you out of the worst mood you’ve ever been in, or they can throw you into psychological trauma. 

In a lot of ways, if you have a certain kind of sibling relationship, there are moments where you have no boundary. Even with a partner, you maintain a boundary of “I have to be nice to this person” but with a sibling you don’t really have that. 

JA: It almost feels like the siblings are oppositional to the internet. It seems like it’s uncomfortable for them to have to confront their real selves. When they live on the internet, they don’t really have to think about who they are or what they are doing, but the person sitting next to each of them is a direct reflection of who they really are. 

AT: I want to write that down for myself. The fakest thing in the world and the realest thing in the world.

JA: What do you hope readers take away from this novel? 

AT: That’s hard, because I think I wrote this book so much to press up against the idea of lesson learning. I wanted it to add up thematically and to that amazing revelation that you had, I want things like that to come out, but I don’t know if there’s a takeaway. Have you seen A Series Man, the movie? 

JA: No.

AT: It just ends. Bad thing after bad thing and then confirmation that the worst thing is bound to happen. I didn’t quite want it to be that. I wanted it to be about how it’s up to you to look at what your life adds up to and what it means, and make something of the randomness, if you can—but you might not be able to. 

The post “Worry” is the Novel of the Online Generation appeared first on Electric Literature.

Set in a future of forest fires and submerged cities (the year is unspecified, but eating meat is considered a barbarism of the distant past), Obreht’s third novel, The Morningside, is the author’s first foray into climate fiction. Instead of depicting a world blown apart instantly by an asteroid or pandemic, Obreht imagines what might happen if the crises of our own era—rising temperatures, mass displacement, stark wealth inequality—continue unchecked. 

The novel’s heroine, 11-year-old Silvia, has spent her entire life in transit. She barely remembers the homeland, a country destroyed by mudslides and ensuing civil wars, and her tight-lipped mother refuses to discuss the past. When they land in Island City, a half-submerged metropolis that resembles both New York and Obreht’s native Belgrade, Silvia believes they’ve finally found a place of safety. And she’s delighted with her aunt Ena, a gruff building superintendent eager to share stories from “Back Home.” Ena’s favorite story concerns the Vila, a Slavic nature spirit known for taking revenge on humans who encroach on her land. But when Silvia becomes convinced that her upstairs neighbor is a real-life Vila, her investigations lead her to trespass on this mysterious woman’s domain—a mistake which, just as the folk tale warns, unleashes a series of curses that threaten her tenuous stability in Island City. 

I talked to Obreht about the folk tales that inspired The Morningside and the immigrant experiences that influenced her vision of “climate calamity.”

Irene Connelly: How did you come to know the story of the Vila? 

Téa Obreht: I grew up with it. My God, our folktales are so dark, and so long. The Vila is part of the epic poems of Serbia; the first place I studied it is in “The Building of Skadar,” which is about how the city of Skadar came to be built. With the exception of certain flourishes, Ena delivers the tale pretty much the same way. It’s been foundational to my knowledge of the world since I was a kid, probably too young to hear it. 

In some ways, the novel is indicative of my changing relationship with the folk tale. When you’re a kid, and you learn these tales of old, the women in them tend to be either divine or monstrous. In this case, the Vila is something to be feared, and she makes these monstrous contracts with the king. As I’ve gotten older, and studied literature and life, it has become very apparent the way those kinds of folk tales were intended to act as devices of hatred and repression and fear. There’s a lot more sympathy towards the Vila in this novel; there’s nothing about her that’s grotesque. 

IC: Many works of climate fiction envision a future in which society has completely fallen apart, often by way of one dramatic catastrophe. In The Morningside, you depict a much more gradual form of disintegration. How did you think about what this dystopia would look and feel like? 

TO: I wanted to write towards calamity, not catastrophe—seeing little pockets of society that would erode as a result of incompetence, or vulnerability, or bureaucratic malfeasance. I didn’t want there to be one large apocalyptic event.

Coming from the former Yugoslavia, and having family and friends from parts of the world where these breakdowns of nation or society have happened more recently, it’s surprising and inspiring and at the same time sort of depressing to see how people persist in trying to piece together a semblance of their lives from before. Of course, it’s the life from before that gets you to the collapse of society. But it is remarkable how much, in the West, there’s this idea of a massive apocalyptic event; whereas elsewhere, smaller apocalyptic events happen all the time, and people get through them. 

IC: In a lot of ways, this novel uses the experiences of immigrants today to envision what life might look like for everyone in the future. 

TO: My experience as an immigrant was that wherever we arrived—and we moved a lot after the collapse of Yugoslavia—there was this idea of arriving into a kind of utopian society. There was this notion of, “Here, things are functional. It’s not a disaster like it is back home, so something must be working.” And then you’re introduced to a new culture, new language, new people, new map, and realize slowly that things in your new home are also fraying at the edges. 

IC: Folktales, especially the legend of the Vila, play a big role in this novel, which makes a lot of sense: in a world characterized by disruption and uncertainty, oral traditions are a way of preserving knowledge and continuity. Which came first for you, the legends or the setting? 

TO: I’ve been trying to write a novel about the Vila for a long time. She’s flitted through the back of a couple projects that turned out not to be the right ones to contain her. I do think that folk tales are a way of passing down information; they’re also a way of navigating the present, because they can have a parable-like quality for the person receiving the story. Having the Vila in the back of my mind and beginning to write this novel, it was interesting to see the folk tale’s connection to climate change and human encroachment. It was all right there. 

IC: Ena tells Silvia folk tales to give her a sense of connection to their lost homeland. But Silvia’s mother sees her reliance on these stories as a way of romanticizing their past and eliding the ostracism that Ena, who is queer, faced in their native country. In that sense, folk tales have a more sinister function. 

TO: I think Sil ends up sharing her aunt’s attachment to folk tales as a way of seeing a more informed, rounded reality. She takes tremendous solace in the belief that her folktale-infused way of seeing the world is the correct one. When we look at the things that religion, for example, can do for a person of faith, it’s a very similar kind of protection from outside violence. I hope that Ena’s attachment to folk tales reveals the complexity of being unable to reject and unable to accept the realities of home. Those are things that a lot of immigrant cultures also grapple with. You left for a reason, and those reasons were very real: They had to do with resources, with the attempt to provide your children a “better” life. However, there are also these magnificent things about the culture that you left behind that inform you. 

IC: You wrote that this novel “crept up on me between pandemic and pregnancy.” Can you talk a little more about that? 

TO: I’ve never written something in a more fragmented way. The novel had been knocking around in my mind for a long time and then, during the pandemic, the commission came to write a story for the Decameron Project. I used it to force myself to put these thoughts down on paper, and then I wrote a very messy first draft of the novel. Then I was pregnant, and I wrote a slightly less messy second draft. I wrote the final drafts after my daughter was born. There were physical, emotional, psychological shifts between drafts that forced me to write in different ways. 

IC: Did your consideration of Sil’s relationship with her mother change once you were writing as a mother yourself? 

TO: I think so. Writing that draft in that particular phase of life really crystallized what the novel was trying to say. One of my rules for myself is that if I get to the end of the first draft and the novel hasn’t revealed an underbelly of meaning, it’s not working. By the time I finished the first draft with this project, I did have access to that. But when I became a mom, there was this whole other layer of meaning couched in sympathy for Sylvia’s mother—and obliquely, my own. There was this idea of being raised by a parent who had been raised in an authoritarian society, of being very careful about what you said, very secretive, and using language to circle the wagons when you feel a threat in your new environment. These things felt really, really close to the bone. 

IC: Silvia’s bond with her mother is stymied by exactly these survival tactics. They only become close once her mother realizes that she can’t protect Silvia from harm, no matter how careful she is. 

TO: A lot of that has to do with the inability of immigrants to have a place for self-reflection, or to have a community to air their particular difficulties. If you’re an immigrant, you’re on your own, and you have to navigate deep emotional turmoil, and there’s a reflex to plaster it over with all these rules intended to keep you safe and chugging along. It ends with many years of chugging along without access to that emotional core. 

The post Téa Obreht on the Serbian Folktales that Inspired Her Dystopian Novel appeared first on Electric Literature.

Jim (or James, as we come to call him) is a force to reckon with even if it is something he’s not aware of at the time when he decides to run because he refuses to be sold to a man in New Orleans. On Jackson Island, while hiding out and thinking about how to reunite with his wife and daughter, Jim bumps into Huckleberry Finn who, in line with Twain’s plot, has faked his own death. The two seek shelter in a cave where Jim gets bitten by a rattlesnake and in a feverish delirium, is visited by Voltaire—yep, that French philosopher. This is one of the many scenes where Everett’s irony shines as Jim argues about slavery and race with old white philosophers, poking holes at their hollow claims for equality. Jim, we learn, is intelligent and witty. He reads. He writes. He maneuvers language, speaking only in a dialect around white people. As we follow him and Huck sailing on the Mississippi, encountering racist con men like the Duke and the King, and some not-so-obviously-racist ones like Daniel Emmett, we realize that Jim can learn to harness anger that has been building for years, that he can (and does) take control of his life.

Percival Everett needs no introduction. His work is wide-ranging—notable titles include The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award), and Erasure which was most recently adapted into the film American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright. In conversation, Everett’s speech, like his prose, is measured, thoughtful. We spoke over Zoom about deconstructing freedom, anger as a tool to reclaim agency, justice being asymmetrical for the marginalized and more. 

Bareerah Ghani: Language is a complex throughline of the novel. In an early scene, Jim offers children a lesson on how to speak in coded “slave” language, which is essentially “correct incorrect grammar.” He says, “White folks expect us to sound a certain way.” This got me thinking about how I’ve encountered people who are surprised that I speak good English despite being raised in Pakistan, and suddenly speaking well in English gives me an authority to take up space that I couldn’t otherwise. What are your thoughts on “incorrect/broken” English being associated with inferiority and even illiteracy? 

Percival Everett: Well, increasingly, at least in the United States—and I see it also in Britain—correct grammatical usage is not all that common anymore. Bad English is practiced throughout journalism in the U.S. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard sportscasters lack any concept of a past participle. So there’s that. But language has always been, you know, a dynamic and fluid creature. It’s always changing, not only meanings, but usage and not only slang, but common usage. So it’s hard to simply specify something as good English. That said, accents and poor grammatical construction are frequently used to designate inferiority. And it sort of causes people to forget that there is a distinction to be made between stupidity and ignorance. There are people who don’t have the privilege to learn correct grammar who are geniuses, whereas there are many people who use English perfectly and they’re idiots. So none of it is a clear marker but language has always been used by the oppressors to isolate the oppressed.

BG: There’s been a lot of talk about this novel being a reimagined Huckleberry Finn and I can see that in terms of the plot. But the protagonist, Jim—he’s your own character. A man seeking freedom. I love Jim, I love his voice. And a critical component to his journey toward reclaiming agency is Jim embracing his anger. I am curious about your thoughts on anger as a luxury for the marginalized but a necessity for resistance?

PE: Anger is necessary with the caveat that that anger is controlled. There’s a difference between rage and outrage. To go into the fight with only rage negates strategy. The outrage can persist and needs to persist. One of the failings of American culture is that its outrage only lasts ten days at any given time and then it disappears into other news stories. So yes, the anger is necessary but what’s also necessary is an understanding that the anger is justified—not acting out of anger, but understanding that the anger should be there. And those are slightly different things.

BG: Absolutely. What about in the instance where it is justified, but the mainstream narrative does not justify it?

PE: Well, it is justified for those who feel it. My point is that anger is never unjustified but it requires some second order thought to act outside the anger in order to address it.

BG: So I’ve been thinking about liberation these days, given everything that’s happening in the world. And your novel got me thinking about freedom in more complex ways. So for example, Judge Thatcher is free in a physical sense. But mentally and morally he’s held captive to social doctrine that perpetuates slavery. He can’t think for himself, or allow his moral conscience to guide him. And then speaking about contemporary day, where we have our social media hashtags and like you said, American culture does not allow a movement for justice to last beyond the ten days. There is a lot of performative activism happening. I’m wondering how you deconstruct freedom and agency.

PE:  Well, I think the notion of confinement perhaps should be expanded. Using Judge Thatcher as an example, you stated quite nicely, he is actually in his own way, enslaved in his thinking. It’s not an excuse for the character at all and it might even be convenient for someone in that position. But he is certainly, because of his culture, trapped in this world and that’s really what Huck is facing. As a young person he’s trying to navigate through this wilderness and emerge from what has confined the adults around him. Slavery enslaves more than just the slaves. It punishes the slaves but it still exists as a cultural phenomenon that has consequences on everyone.

BG: And what about modern times? Do you think we’re free?

PE: No, not really as you ask it. Perhaps in that Orwellian sense we’re less free every day if one views freedom as not being observed. On the other hand, there’s so many of us that anonymity, it’s kind of a chimera, you know. We’re not anonymous. But we are. There’s so many of us that we just fade into each other. But our own private worlds are our own, but they’re not private. If there are fewer of us that might be even more terrifying than it is. But being humans, and the whole idea of commiseration is, if you can show people that other people are suffering from the same thing, for some reason they suffer less—it makes no sense at all, but that is exactly how America has managed to address and also subvert complaints of the oppressed in the culture. Look! It’s not only happening to you. It’s happening to this group over here, too. And that takes power away instead of adding power to a problem.

BG: That’s so well-articulated. Thank you. You know, now that we’re talking about the mirage of freedom and also, justice, I want to talk about this particularly striking, and heartbreaking moment in the novel where Jim says, “I hated the world that wouldn’t let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice.” This resonated with me because I’ve faced my fair share of racism and Islamophobia, and I’ve met all of that with an acute sense of how I can’t retaliate. I can’t push back because there will be consequences. And I know, currently given what’s happening in the world, a lot of people are facing backlash for standing up for things that they should really be standing up for. How do you contend with justice being asymmetrical for the marginalized and do you think humanity has the capacity or equality?

PE:  I think a lot of us want to be fair but it only takes one person to not be, in a way.  It comes back to that, the Rousseau-Hobbes idea, Are we basically good or basically bad? 

Personally, I think it’s a trap to think about reducing our understanding of humanity as any kind of basic wants and desires and needs. It’s a good question. You know, if you look at human history it doesn’t appear that there’s been any movement collectively toward equality at any time. There’s often been some language about it. When the Greeks talked about equality, it wasn’t for everyone. They weren’t talking about women. They weren’t talking about slaves. They weren’t talking about native peoples. So what does equality mean? Maybe that’s the way humans have always talked about equality. Now, when people talk about equality, they’re not talking about people who have non-traditional gender ideas or feelings. So I don’t know what equality means. I guess the first thing that has to be defined in any discussion is what we means. Once that’s clear, then I guess you can have a conversation about whether things are equal or just more equal for some than for others.

BG: So I suppose you’re saying that it’s been the case for humanity and probably will continue to be? 

PE: Well, I hope that doesn’t continue to be the case. But all evidence points that way, and the rhetoric of so many people within this culture. It also feels as if we’ve taken steps backward. And I don’t know if that’s historically what we have done as a race of animals, move forward and then fall back over and over again.

BG: It’s an unfortunate situation.

PE: But always, the first casualty is language—that is always what’s attacked first. The language is taken away from from people

BG: I was fascinated by the way you’ve brought in Daniel Emmett as a character. Your novel gave me the opportunity to learn more about Minstrels and blackface performance. Then I started thinking about clips I’ve recently seen circulating of comedians Dave Chappelle and Katt Williams calling out Hollywood for making Black actors wear dresses in the name of comedy, claiming this to be part of a larger agenda to emasculate the Black male identity. How do you contend with mainstream depictions of the Black identity and in what ways has that impacted the way you’ve approached your writing? 

PE:  Well, when I was a kid, and I would look for literature, so often the only books I could find with Black characters were set in the Antebellum South, or the inner city, neither of which were my experience in the world. And so I wasn’t represented in popular culture, as far as I can see, certainly not in movies and television. What is so strange is that even now, just maybe several months ago, staying up late, I noticed that there was an old Abbott and Costello movie about Abbott and Costello in Africa, and they’re showing wide-eyed Black Africans afraid of ghosts and things like that. But it never occurred to anyone that maybe they shouldn’t continue to show that. Likewise, continued airings of other movies with those depictions, and things like The Three Stooges which have those kinds of racist depictions of Westerns, that depict native people in the same light. But in a way those microaggressions become little badges of honor, for we people of color. They’re like little signs at the edge of a minefield that tell us our mines may be necessary. And so the culture figures out that the depictions are wrong and should go away.

BG: Would you say you’ve always been thinking about this as you’ve approached your work?

PE: Well, how can I not? Whether I’m thinking about it or not, it’s a part of my make up. It’s just how I have to address the world and see it all the time. We could be having a very nice day, and we go into an antique mall, and I turn the corner, and there’s a pyramid stack of really offensive Aunt Jemima jugs, made from the syrup bottles and no one sees anything wrong with it. And it’s the lack of a perception of that irony that really is more affecting than the presence of the jars.

BG: You talk about it in one of your other interviews that irony is a huge feature of how you see the world. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about that and how you’ve come to have an affinity with it as a tool to address complex issues in fiction.

PE: I think almost all writers of color, all the people who create art while oppressed experience and survive the world because of irony. It’s not unique to me certainly, it’s just how we have to move forward. If we were completely earnest about everything, we would never see tomorrow. Why would we bother?

The post In “James,” Percival Everett Does More than Reimagine “Huck Finn” appeared first on Electric Literature.

Love the World or Get Killed Trying is a glorious, soul-shaking, vibrant manifesto of a novel. As its title suggests, it is a voice-driven testimony about how hard it can be to remain soft, while living in a world where trans people’s rights and autonomy are increasingly under political threat. 

Over a combination of email and Google Docs, Chamberland and I spoke about a range of topics including: the importance of breaking rules and bending genres, transmisogyny as a heightened version of misogyny against cis women, the uses of humor as a tool of survival and transcendence, and the manifold problems that result when straight men are unable to fully face, name and own their desires for trans women.

Shze-Hui Tjoa: What made you start writing this novel? 

Alvina Chamberland: I started mainly for two reasons. First: to survive. Ever since I was 19 and first fell madly in love, I’ve needed writing to not be driven out of my mind, and to try to make myself and my experiences of the world understood. It’s an escape route from death-spiraling anxiety, through giving the darkness form I create a moment where it can’t take over my life. 

Second: because I haven’t read many other books like this, and I need it to be out there in the world, a novel written by a trans woman that dares to be literary and poetic and abstract and realist and non-linear and dreamy. A novel which politically confronts straight men’s behavior towards us and demands change, and personally exposes both the universal and specific experiences that have shaped my life—my hope is that this vulnerability can connect and build bridges between people with very different structural positions.

ST: There’s so much humor in Love the World or Get Killed Trying! I especially love your protagonist’s quips about place as she travels – I laughed out loud to read her description of Iceland’s “Scandinavian Design temples dedicated to the fear of inflicting stains and the feeling of being dead inside.” What roles do humor and observation play in your writing?

AC: Oh my god, so many! First of all, trans girls need a wicked sense of humor in order to survive all the extremes and hypocrisies this world throws at us. In turn all these experiences make us so clever, sharp and witty in our observations. I can break down and build up social structures with my trans woman friends in ways I can’t with anyone else. This of course translates into how I write—or all the dark experiences portrayed in this novel, the humor goes even darker. 

One of my favorite terms in the world is “gallows humor,” but in order to inhabit that term, one must spend a lot of time in the gallows. I think I can say I have, and although I am dead serious and want to make a reader cry a hundred times, I also want to make her laugh nearly as much. It’s through this combination one can transcend the role of a one-sided victim without foregoing honesty, or denying the pain and tragedy and injustice of far too many things in our world.

ST: One of Love the World’s big themes is around “spotlighting straight men’s frequent and secret attraction to trans women.” And of course, the opening epigraph cites several statistics about the commercial popularity of transgender porn, explaining how “Transgender porn has presumably become the largest, most popular genre of porn among heterosexual men.” 

Could you say more about why you chose to write a book that spotlights this subject? I’m also curious about the differences between being desired and fetishized, which is one of the related themes your novel touches upon.

AC: I suppose the simplest way to describe the difference between being desired and fetishized would be: is a guy interested in me predominantly because I’m a trans woman or predominantly because I’m Alvina? The latter brings us closer to desire, as it allows me to be an individual. Of course, other factors also play in, like if the guy is keeping me secret, if he sees me as viable for a long-term relationship or just a fling/one time thing, if the desire’s solely sexual, about my body, or if it’s also about my personality etc. Unfortunately, not more than 1-2% of the rows of straight men who want to have sex with me live up to all these criteria, and straight men really have to start grappling with their hypocrisy, objectification and cognitive dissonance towards trans women. One rarely sees “feminist men’s groups” addressing these topics, rather they can often be the most silent and intimidated by trans women of all straight men —too busy pretending to “tolerate” us to ever date us. Like, my experience is that white middle class liberal northern European men may be the most transphobic in the world. 

The whole issue of straight men’s desire is of course extremely relevant to me as it encircles my, and most straight trans girls’, lives. I mean the reason trans women, especially trans women of color, are the group within the LGBTQI+ umbrella facing the most murders and extreme violence, isn’t that straight men harbor more hatred towards us, but rather that they harbor hatred towards themselves for desiring us. And yet, any and every trans girl knows just how common and normcore this desire actually is. In our current society it wouldn’t be safe for many of us to do so, but if trans women one day collectively decided to out every man who seeks us out, a full-blown revolution would ensue by nightfall. There’s just so many of them and they’re almost completely invisible.

ST: I love that phrase—“a revolution by nightfall.” What kind of revolution are you thinking of, what do you hope it will dismantle or change?

AC: Allow me to get a bit abstract here as I’m talking about something that goes beyond our imaginations of liberation for minorities/subgroups. It’s about straight men finally being placed in a position of vulnerability, outside of their comfort zone, getting into contact with our very queer life experiences and thus not staying in the heteronormative echo chamber most of them have lived their entire lives within. This carries with it so much potential for collective freedom and liberation and a radical shift of fragile masculinity, thus far built on hiding, shame, and obsession with other men’s approval. 

What may not be as revolutionary—but would cause an important shift in many trans women’s lives—is creating an understanding of what transitioning really means in a physical sense, beyond identity. Of course if someone looks like society’s definition of a man, yet identifies as a woman, most straight men won’t find her attractive. But if a woman lives up to the beauty standards for women, she’ll be desired by most straight men, whether or not she is trans. For us to be held to the same beauty standards as all women isn’t revolutionary, but it’ll at least mean we won’t have to look perfect in order for a guy to even consider a date with us in daylight. The goal however is to eradicate these cisnormative patriarchal beauty standards altogether…

ST: Your novel is so incisive about how transmisogyny is a heightened version of regular misogyny. And as a fellow writer, I’m curious how (or if) you think this dynamic plays out in the careers and public reception of trans writers.

AC:  To begin with, most well-known trans women authors and intellectuals are lesbians. That has a lot to do with the messy extra trauma and hyperfemininity straight trans girls often endure and express, which has us deemed less competent. For similar reasons trans men may be deemed even more competent than lesbian trans women by institutional powers. Us straight trans women are generally granted visibility as models, actresses, or sex workers—the desire for us is hidden like gay desire was in the 1950s, and we are largely limited to a few select occupations like cis women were in the 50s. And if we’re very beautiful, we get reduced to that beauty and accused of “pandering to the male gaze.” At the same time cisnormative society defines a successful and respectable transition as one which leads to beauty and passing. It’s a double bind, damned if you, damned if you don’t.

I notice that this doesn’t happen to normatively attractive trans men, who reap rewards in a more linear fashion. The more I’ve started passing, the more I’ve noticed that queers and feminists expect me to be a bit stupid and conservative, until I prove them otherwise. Meanwhile, straight men are now the ones who seem the most eager to give me compliments for both my beauty and my intellect. Yet, before I became beautiful in a cis passing way, they completely ignored me and my work. So, I guess beauty is the prerequisite for them to pay me any attention at all, and I still deem it unlikely that they’ll be lining up to buy my book…

ST: There are many fantasies of romance woven through Love the World. The protagonist develops all these imaginary relationships in her head—with Cristiano Ronaldo, or the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. But also, she’s in a kind of imaginary relationship with us—her readers—as she’s always breaking the fourth wall to talk to us directly. Was writing this book about finding connections, for you? 

AC: Since writing is such a solitary process, I think the real answer would be that the deepest connection I am seeking is one with myself. My hope is, however, that all this intense digging—all this openness and vulnerability and honesty—will make others feel connected to me as well. But that’s up to them to decide. I have no control over where the text goes, though I wish I could put it in the hands of more straight men, who perhaps are the ones who need to read it the most.

Most of all though, I don’t really have a target audience. I hope what I’ve written is heartbreakingly human enough and good enough as literature to traverse beyond static identity borders. And not because I’ve compromised and watered down my reality to make it more palatable—quite the contrary, real bridges are built through being adamantly real, getting humanized by showing just how human you are. 

I don’t want cis people to read this and be like “I’m a good ally, I read a novel by a trans woman, and it has nothing to do with me.” And neither do I want trans women to read and only feel empowered (although perhaps that too), but rather seen and understood in all the complexities we’re forced to live through. Or not—because in the end this is a novel, and I can only represent my own voice in it, and that voice may resonate with some and not with others. Its resonance may indeed occur in the most unexpected directions, which is the beauty of it.

ST: I keep coming back to this line near the end of the novel, which has stayed with me over all the months since I first read it: “Cool, composed, self-assured, professional—all characteristics we try to attain in order to better become machines. I don’t possess these qualities, and I have quit trying.” 

Love the World makes such intentional room for “too muchness”, instead of eliding it like other novels do. I’m curious what you feel it brings to the reading experience—or to the reader—when a writer doesn’t shy away from showing the contradictions, messiness, or complexities of their “behind the scenes” world…  because I feel like Love the World does this with such style and flair, and in a one-of-a-kind way compared to other books I’ve read. 

AC: I feel literature can capture the complexity, battles, and contradictions going on in our inner monologues to a deeper extent than more visually focused art forms. It’s difficult to make a film that only showcases what is going on inside a person, but it’s much easier to write a book based on that foundation. I find this especially important in today’s social media world where Twitter allows 240 characters, Insta-success comes from establishing a simple and consistent brand, and activists are seen as the most radical and worthy of visibility if they present themselves as 100 percent certain. The thing is though, most of us are neither simple nor consistent nor completely sure, which doesn’t mean we are total messes who can’t articulate any opinions… But honesty lies somewhere in-between and in this novel I’ve tried to enter various questions with that broad embrace. Indeed, I guess you could say I approach politics more as questions than answers…

The post Alvina Chamberland Takes a Scalpel to Straight Men’s Secret Attraction to Trans Women appeared first on Electric Literature.

Then, at the end of 2021, she went viral again. This time for her scathing but truly hilarious review of her experience at the Michelin-starred Italian restaurant, Bros. What came next was another wave of attention on DeRuiter and her work. Perhaps most notably, this included a rebuttal profile piece of the restaurant’s owner and head chef courtesy of the New York Times’ Rome bureau chief. To say she felt her credibility was questioned would be an understatement. 

In her second book, If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury, DeRuiter explores what it means not only to be a woman writing about food, but also what it means in the larger context of being a woman who must make daily decisions about the role food plays in our lives. From making it, eating it (or not eating it, as is much of the messaging women receive), working in it, and examining our heritage, family, and life choices through food—DeRuiter shares her stories with great candor, while providing important historical and academic research throughout. 

I had a wide-ranging discussion over the phone with DeRuiter about the history of “ladies’ menus,” who is allowed to be successful in the food world, and her last great meal.

Kelly Hoover Greenway: The cover of your book is this beautifully manicured hand smashing what I’m assuming is a cinnamon roll. It’s quite funny, but also such a strong visualization of what’s to come inside. How did you land on that?

Geraldine DeRuiter: I had it pretty clear in my head that I wanted cinnamon rolls, but there was a lot of  discussion about whether or not that would be too literal, and I understand that. It is such a big association that people have with my work, so it was a question of, do we lean into that or do we try to deviate from that a little bit? We explored a couple other concepts. There was an earlier iteration of the cover that was of an eggplant.

KHG: Oh, that’s funny. The eggplant signifying the emoji used for a penis…

GD: Yeah, that one was tough because it was funny, but I did not want the focus of this book to be about “the patriarchy” itself, right? The eggplant would have communicated that in this ridiculous way. It’s not about the eggplant. It’s really about what we as women experience. So I said less eggplant, more cinnamon roll. 

KHG: Like a lot of people, I first became familiar with your work when your Mario Batali cinnamon roll apology letter essay went viral in 2018. In the book, you talk about the backlash from that, and I have to tell you, reading it made me never want to go viral. The flip side is that you won a James Beard Award for that essay. And, I imagine it didn’t hurt in the selling of this book. Can you talk a little bit about the extremes of how that one essay impacted you?

GD: Oh, absolutely. I think that a lot of the nature of going viral as a writer is a double edged sword, right? You write something you want to do really well, it does really well, a bunch of people see your work, and your career usually has a little bit of a boon from it. And also… you get vitriol, hate, death threats, and a backlash of people telling you that your work is garbage. That is baked into the system. And so what happened with the Batali piece was exactly that.

I think I wrote that blog post in about 45 minutes because it was just pure rage coming out of my fingers; I just sat down and it all came out. Obviously, I did not expect it to do what it did. It started to pick up and then it was just like wildfire. Martha Stewart is retweeting it and Pete Wells from the New York Times is retweeting it. It got picked up by Eater and all of these outlets that historically didn’t publish my work. And then I got, just a stream of insults. My Twitter account got hacked. I got death threats.

KHG: You end that chapter by saying that after not checking Facebook messages for a while, you logged on to see a threat from a man you didn’t know. Underneath the threat, he’d typed out your home address; it’s chilling to read. I can’t help but then ask, how do you feel about wading back into those waters with this book?

GD: Scholarly detachment makes it easier to talk about things, in that if you are writing about something in the context of a book and if you are using academic citation to talk about what this means in the greater scheme of feminism and food writing, it does make it somewhat easier to talk about your own experiences because it gives you a bit of distance from it. 

That being said, oh my god that was a horrible experience to write about all of this again! At the same time, I think it’s really important, and I realize how much of this experience is unfortunately, so universal. The overton window has just gotten moved way too far over into thinking that we are allowed to be treated like crap on the internet and no one thinks it’s a big deal, and that is horrible. That is horrible. So, I wanted to talk about that. There was no way I was not gonna talk about it. Even if it sucked, there was no way. So, what do you do? You try and you try and get a little distance, you try and properly cite your sources. You take a couple deep breaths, and maybe take a break. When I was writing that chapter, I was in Oaxaca. So I was like, all right, let’s go to a couple of art galleries and maybe get some tacos. And then I went back to it.

KHG: You’ve mentioned not wanting to center the patriarchy, but you do take the patriarchy on in quite a lot of your  work.

GD: I don’t know if I take it on so much as complain about it. 

KHG: Well, there aren’t a lot of people who talk about how the patriarchy fits into the food world. How have you seen the patriarchy’s influence be the most destructive in that space?

GD: I think one of the ways in which it is so destructive is who is allowed to be successful in the food world. If you look across the industry, what you see is the people who are allowed to succeed are white men almost across the board. There are women in the industry as well, but how they are framed and how we look at them is different. Men are allowed to be great chefs and women can merely be great cooks, and that has existed for forever. And that kind of ties into this idea of when you do work within the home, it is devalued. The vast majority of cooking that happens within the home is done by women. The vast majority of meal prep, of grocery shopping, and of cleaning up afterwards—that is almost universally done by women. There are exceptions, but the majority of James Beard winners, Michelin star holders, head chefs, and executive chefs are all all men.

KHG:  That’s what we call the math not mathing.

GD: Right? And somebody might say, well, it’s a pipeline issue. First of all, that’s still a problem, right? Then we need to address the pipeline. We need to address why we’re only letting guys into the pipeline. But it’s actually not true because more women are graduating culinary school than men. So what is so toxic about this industry that is pushing women out? What is so toxic about it that it isn’t letting women and non-binary people succeed? There is a lot of toxicity that is baked in, and it also just seems to inherently reinforce a lot of shitty gender stereotypes and a lot of really harmful constructs that are bad for both men and women. 

KHG: You created this book as a memoir in essays, and I have been told that genre is quite hard to sell. Was it always a memoir in essays? And, what was the process of selling it?

GD:  It was always a memoir in essays, but I feel like the original concept that I had was perhaps not as ambitious as the book is now. I think now the book is better and speaks to broader issues and more important issues, which really speaks to my editor, Aubrey Martinson’s, work on this. 

It did not take me long to write the proposal; I wrote it in a few days. Part of that was because I had such a clear idea for what the book was going to be. We offered the book to my old publisher, and they made an offer we were not thrilled with. So we walked away. We shopped the book around and there were multiple publishers interested, and it went to auction. I do believe that part of the reason there was so much interest—and this is the difficulty and the brutal honesty of it—is because there had been such virality around the [Batali and Bros’] pieces. 

And so that virality was directly related to me being able to sell these books because I said, look, here’s what the New York Times said about my piece. The Corriere della Sera called me the heir to David Foster Wallace. Is that true? I don’t think so. Did that help me sell this book? Hell yeah, it did. It also helped that Twitter was still a thing at the time, and I had nearly 140,000 Twitter followers. So if you look at all of that, it makes it easier to sell a book that is perhaps in a genre that is a little bit more difficult. 

So it went to auction, and I got a six figure deal which was pretty phenomenal. 

KHG:  That’s incredible! One chapter I want to ask you about is, “Paying the Price.” It really captures all three buckets of food, feminism, and at least for me when I was reading it, fury. 

GD: That story explores the concept of “ladies’ menus,” which historically have been menus that don’t have prices on them. And these have existed because back in the day, restaurants were gathering places for men. If a woman did go to a restaurant, she would go in the company of a man who was escorting her. And so it was expected that she wouldn’t pay. If you think about this, women have only been allowed to have credit cards since 1974, it puts things in perspective.

And so I write about going out to eat and receiving these menus without prices when I’m with my husband. And what it also means to go out to eat on a date. If you are a woman and you’re going out on a date with a man, what that expectation is and how there can be a feeling, not justly, but there is a feeling and perhaps expectation that this is transactional—that if you allow someone to buy you dinner, you see them as a potential romantic partner and that certain things are to be exchanged and that is not something that we should be expected to do, but it becomes a horrible sort of prevailing societal mentality that we get caught up in. And what I compare it to is asking someone,  “Well, why did you go up to his hotel room? Why were you walking down that alley? Well, if you didn’t want him to think that you were this, that, or the other, why did you let him buy you dinner? So it kind of falls into that pattern.

KHG: Am I remembering correctly that a server at a restaurant where you did receive one of those menus said that women don’t want to think about money?

GD: That’s precisely what happened. We were at a restaurant in the north of Italy and we were with our friends, Ollie and Nicole. Nicole and I got menus that didn’t have prices. And we were so confused. If you’re looking at a menu that has no prices, your brain kind of glitches out. One of the main purposes of a menu is to inform you of how much things cost. And so, my husband, Rand, and Ollie were saying the prices are quite reasonable and Nicole and I had no idea what they were talking about. We finally started to put it together and the maître d’ comes over and says that women don’t like to think about money. Nicole and I said it is very important that we think about money. That is something that I advise every human to do. Not because I think money is great, but because I think income equality is great. 

KHG: It’s amazing the larger context of conversations that take place with relation to food and dining.

GD: Absolutely. Someone asked me, “Is there a reason why you picked food? It’s a great vehicle to talk about feminism.” And I was like, food is a great vehicle to talk about everything!

KHG: Before I let you go, I do have one more question. I feel like you’re always in search of a decent meal to eat. 

GD: This is accurate. 

KHG: So what was the last great meal you had? 

GD: I don’t know if this counts, but I just flew back from my aunt’s memorial yesterday. My husband, Rand, had flown back the day before. He came to pick me up from the airport and when he opened the trunk to put my suitcase in, it was filled with groceries so he could make me dinner. He started listing all the different things he could make me, and even though he makes me dinner almost every night, I knew that he was exhausted too. It was such a beautiful and loving act. 

He ended up making pan roasted steelhead and he got the skin super crispy, which is so good. He served it with roasted asparagus and smashed garlic fingerling potatoes. I was looking at the plate and it was just so beautiful. It was 10 out of 10, five stars, no notes. 

KHG: One of my favorite quotes in the food space is by Virginia Woolf. She said, “One cannot think well, love well, or sleep well if one has not dined well.” When you were telling me that story, that’s what I thought of. Thank you for sharing that.

The post In Her New Book, Geraldine DeRuiter Takes on the Patriarchy, but Really All She Wants Is a Decent Meal appeared first on Electric Literature.