Through her interactions with administrators and students, the narrator’s idiosyncratic worldview comes into relief. She fixates on the victimization of students—those manipulated and adultified by the very authority figures who are meant to guide them—and recalls the “multiple pedophiles and ephebophiles” (adults with sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents) who ran unchecked at her own high school. At the same time, she nurtures an idyllic admiration for Joseph Stalin, focusing on his difficult upbringing and childhood mistreatment rather than his autocratic reign. Her family relationships are similarly warped; through her contentious (albeit humorous) relationships with her mother, sister, and father, we come to understand how the narrator has been shaped by both personal and intergenerational traumas.

Offseason is a character study, but it’s also a love letter to literature. The narrator teaches Charles Dickens with unbridled (and occasionally inappropriate) excitement. She projects onto a younger female student, and recommends literature as the antidote to her imagined turmoil. She throws herself into books, turning away from the pain and violence in the world, but Offseason still manages to bring it to the surface. In reading, we’re reminded that this contrast—the potential to harm and heal in turn—is the very thing that makes us alive.

I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with Avigayl Sharp in person at Stories and Books Cafe in LA’s Echo Park. We discussed literature, sincerity, and trauma-plotting infamous historical figures over the din of a bustling cafe.

Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas: Like Offseason, your short story “Animals in the Dark” is set at an all girls school. What drew you to this setting? What were you thinking about when you were trying to render it?

Avigayl Sharp: After my MFA, I was working at a girls’ school. I never taught, but I worked as an administrative assistant. There are weird things that obsess you as a writer and that emerge out of necessity. A character needs to have a life, a job, and a material world that they operate within. So in a way I was searching for something that could serve a purpose, and it felt like a very functional decision. At the same time there’s something about the way that large groups of girls operate with one another and with older authority figures that began to really preoccupy me. I was interested in reversals of authority. I also love campus novels, especially weird campus novels. I love The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I love Lucky Jim, you know, all these novels where there are teachers behaving in insane and erratic ways.

LRT: It was very interesting to see the books that came up throughout. At one point the narrator recommends Lolita to a student she suspects of being groomed by a male teacher. I was thinking about this canon of literature while reading—Lolita, My Dark Vanessa, Disgrace, among others. Were there other books from that canon that you were thinking about while writing?

AS: Nabokov was big for me. Lolita and Pale Fire, and Pnin was another that I didn’t put in the book because I decided not to directly reference super campus-y novels. 

I’m interested in characters who put on a voice and narrativize their own lives to themselves and to the readers. Then, it’s through the cracks and slippages in their story that you come to understand reality. So Nabokov was a huge influence in that way. Muriel Spark was also really important for me and important for the book. She’s both extremely comic and also cold and serious and fierce at the same time. 

LRT: I was intrigued by how you handled the older male teacher, Thomas. When the reader learns that he’s taken a leave from the school we’re guided to assume one thing, but he ends up being a different kind of character than we might have initially suspected. In thinking about relationships where abuses of power can happen, was there something you felt was missing from the existing canon that you wanted to show in more complexity?

AS: I mean, it’s an interesting question. One thing that I was thinking about was projection. I’m interested in the way that we can experience harm by seeing harm everywhere. We do live in an extraordinarily violent world.

What was important to me with the Thomas character is setting up this idea that there’s a mystery that you can get to the bottom of. The narrator has this preoccupation with getting to the bottom of things. She also has this conviction that she knows more about the world around her than anyone else, and this fear of the mysteriousness of other people. I wanted to write a book in which one thing that hopefully happens by the end is that the narrator and also the reader know certain characters less well than they do at the beginning—their mystery increases. 

LRT: It feels true to life that someone would become more opaque over time, rather than more legible.

AS: I think people can appear transparent to us before we know them, and that to know someone is sort of to unknow them. In a way the book is a classic bildungsroman because the narrator receives a moral education and gains a moral sight, I hope. She has an extreme anxiety and ambivalence around questions of victimhood—who is a victim and who is an aggressor—and a longing to remain on one side of the line. I was also interested in the association of victimhood with moral purity, and as a result, her belief that she can be cleansed by never growing up.

LRT: Instead of teaching multiple books to her students, the narrator spends the whole year teaching Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. Both that book and the topics of her class discussions relate to the city, but Offseason takes place in a small beach town that empties out for half the year. Why Bleak House? 

AS: Some things are just the timing. I read Bleak House shortly before I started the novel. I hadn’t read a lot of Dickens, and I ended up having a transformative experience with this book. It was just a book that contained every kind of novel within it. It’s so ambitious. So funny and bizarre. It’s a mystery. It really is every kind of book. And I was thinking about the novel as a form, and I thought that this kind of obsessive commitment to literature at its most excessive would be a funny fixation for the narrator to have. [Bleak House is] a book that’s ironic about a lot of the things that it’s also serious about. 

LRT: I have to ask about a figure that looms over this book: Stalin. The narrator’s fixation with him is revealing. I saw connections to her relationship with family and also her volatile one with truth. What were you thinking about by including this fixation and how did it connect to the narrator’s other relationships?

AS: [Stalin and the narrator’s mother] are tied inextricably because her mother was born in the Soviet Union. There is an identification with the aggressor, and a fantasy around a type of power that could really bend the world to its will. But of course, she’s also trauma-plotting Stalin all the time. She has a longing to create a story around Stalin that can fit into a narrative arc of victimhood. In addition to the familial history aspect, I think it comes from an inability to confront the failures of the left. The book is interested in communism and utopian socialism, but the narrator also can’t look at failure and loss. She can’t accept Stalin as a figure of extraordinary violence. There are times when she turns toward it and then she looks away because she longs to maintain a fantasy in which the Soviet Union worked. I think she has a desire to map the world in a very rigid way and to maintain her status as a victim in a victim lineage, but one who can forgive. She can be at the bottom, but she also really sympathizes with these figures that she imagines as aggressors. She sympathizes with the pain they feel over the powers and the violence that their families have enacted. When she has to face the complexity of the world, it’s extraordinarily painful for her. She has to reconfigure the story that she’s been telling herself, and she does not want to do that.

LRT: The novel is structured around each semester, but there’s an interlude where the narrator visits home and we see more of her relationships with family and a traumatic experience from her teenage years. How did you write this interlude section and how did you want it to function?

AS: I was very interested in writing about trauma—the experience of trauma, the lingering effects of trauma—without ever giving the readers information about what this traumatic experience is. I wanted to create the sensation of reading to find out what happened, because I think we have a cultural obsession with understanding what exactly happened to someone, how bad was it, what did it mean, etc. I’m interested in psychoanalysis, and in understanding an experience through the symptoms that emerge around it. There’s a way that the preoccupation with what exactly happened can allow us to move away from what is actually traumatic about an experience. There’s also a question of privacy in the book. There are themes that the narrator is too open about, but there are also things that remain hidden. 

LRT: Yes, exactly. She doesn’t give us the satisfaction of being able to slot her experience into a hierarchy of pain.

AS: As a reader you only know what she is now. That was really important to me. I knew I wanted to write a book about the past that only looked at the present.

LRT: This is more of a structural question. How did your experience of novel writing differ from writing short fiction? What was the process of crafting this novel specifically?

AS: It was so different. I spent a long time not knowing if I would ever write a novel because I love short fiction. I think it doesn’t get enough love. As a writer in institutional settings, there’s a lot of you gotta write a novel. I was like, I won’t do what anyone tells me to. The problem is that I actually love the novel as a form so much. When I started to write the novel, I realized how you have to reinvent the form. There’s no container; you have to create the container that your book needs to become itself. There are three sections, the first section and the third section are mirror images of each other, and there’s a hinge in the middle. As I was writing the first section of the book, there came a point where I realized that the narrator had too much control. Certain ways that I figured to structure the book were attempts to throw things in her path so that she was unable to exert this narrative control as strongly. I wanted it to feel like you think you understand the type of book you’re reading, and then it becomes a different type of book, and then becomes a type of different book again. 

LRT: It’s funny, at the end I was trying to figure out if the book is hopeful or not. And I think it might be more accurate to say it’s a book that feels open to possibility.

AS: Yes, yes. Maybe open is a better word. It’s definitely a book that’s about the novel, but not just the novel. I think it’s a book that has a very sincere belief in the transformative power of literature.

LRT: There’s a certain amount of repetition in the prose—which is so funny and sharp and pointed, with so much dishonesty and slips of truth—but was that decision to repeat certain images or ideas coming from any particular place?

AS: Yeah, it was. I do think that the book is constructed musically with leitmotifs. I am drawn to that kind of patterning, but I’m also interested in repetition, compulsion, the sense that we are acting out the same things over and over again and that this can be terrifying and that it can also be beautiful and that the way we change happens through repetitions that vary slightly. We repeat stories about our lives, and we repeat certain lexical ways of speaking. In the second section, there’s a lot of repetition with the family. My hope is that it modulates between being horrible at certain points and also, at other moments, there’s a beauty in that cycle.

LRT: What do you think readers will be most surprised by in terms of what’s on the page vs. the description of the book?

AS: I think it’s both more funny and more dark. But I also think it’s a very sincere book. It’s a comic book, but not ironic. 

The post A Campus Novel For a Post-Ironic World appeared first on Electric Literature.

Now, instead of envy, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for her new book, The Future, which continues to teach me how we can maintain an urbane, old-soul sensibility in the mundane horror of the new world order. The poems strike the most inevitable and surprising balance among the myths and archetypes from the past, the technological artifacts of the present, and the signs of mortality and rebirth always on the horizon.

Monica and I met to talk about The Future: its influences, its anxieties, and ultimately, its optimism.

Zachary Pace: Both You Darling Thing, your second book of poems, and The Future contain so much of the modern world, where your first book of poems, Beasts for the Chase, takes me back to less technological times. For example, the computer appears in a few poems of The Future. Has your writing process changed at all now that computers are such a central part of daily life?

Monica Ferrell: I wrote a lot of the first book by hand, in notebooks, and would transfer poems over to the computer, but by the time of writing the last poems in that book, I was typing directly into the computer. The second book was definitely written into the computer, but if I had writer’s block, I’d try experiments like writing on a typewriter. The Future was also written at the computer, and I felt a one-to-one relationship with the screen as opposed to the pen or notebook.

I’m also writing fiction, and in the last two years, I’ve gone completely longhand. For one thing, it’s too easy to move text around on the computer; I feel like I’m just rearranging chairs most of the time. When I’m writing a piece of fiction longhand, I feel like I have a single thread that I’m spinning through the pages. I feel continuity and forward motion.

When I open the computer now, as opposed to when I was a student, my main associations are bad news, work emails, or internet shopping. These things take me so far away from the sacred space of writing, that’s also why I’ve turned to writing fiction by hand. But the poems are still written on the computer, mainly because it’s so easy to move around the line breaks that way, and to change the stanza shape. Formal plasticity. Formal changes can be made instantly.

A lot of poets say that a first book is the invention of the self—inventing the myth of the self. My first book was made out of everything that I read as a child—stories that spun the thread of who I was making myself to be, those cultural artifacts that we cleave to as young people and derive a self out of. Some of the poems were inspired by travel. I was living in Brooklyn, but I don’t think much of Brooklyn is in there. My second book was more real-worldly, but the scenes are centered in romance, with some recognizable places: St. Petersburg in Russia, for example. I think of the second book in an urban setting. People are meeting each other in places of contemporary reality.

ZP: This new book is rooted firmly in a rural setting. How did moving to a new place change your writing?

MF: The Future contains so much Vermont. It’s on the first page: “Monica, you live in Vermont: / There are no volcanoes.” The pandemic was one reason for that. We were stuck at home for three good years there. The most exciting thing was planning dinner or having a package delivered, instead of the primary experiential quality of our lives being relational with others in a broad scope. During the pandemic, we also moved from Brooklyn to Vermont. I’m thinking of a line in a novel by a friend of mine: “In New York City, it’s easy to mistake the city’s bustle as your own.” It’s easy to get swept up in the great flows of financial capital and feel like you’re a part of it. In Vermont, that flow feels far away. The house you’re living in doesn’t touch other people’s houses. The silence is different. The month of March is different. A few of the poems are set in March. You hardly notice March in the city because of all the lights. In Vermont, there’s not a lot of bustle. The drama and the movement have to come from you.

The Future also has a lot to do with having kids, and being responsible for their reality. Nothing gets made unless I make it. These constitutive elements of their reality, which probably seem so firm to them—a toy chest, for example—only got there because somebody chose it. Having to provide a built environment for people who rely upon it is a big part of The Future.

ZP: “The future” itself is most tangible in the experience of having a child, in creating a life that extends beyond your lifetime. I was so moved by “The Life of Mary,” in how it imagines not only Mary, mother of Christ, but the mother of Mary, Saint Anne, who created a future that created the future that is the bedrock of our history.

MF: I applied for a grant to go to Munich because I wanted to see where Rilke was when he wrote his collection Life of the Virgin Mary, or Das Marien-Leben. While I was in Munich, I went to the Alte Pinakothek and found a room devoted to the Meister des Marienlebens, “Master of the Life of Mary,” where I saw a cycle of paintings with the same title as the Rilke cycle. It’s very clear to me that he was inspired by these paintings. But he hid his traces, because he never mentions this painting cycle. Actually, many years later, in his letters, he said he was thinking about Titian. I think he was trying to obfuscate the fact that he was heavily indebted to these paintings that had the exact same title. For my “Life of Mary,” I decided to go back to the source text, the paintings in Munich, and write one-to-one ekphrastic poems from those canvases.

The poem wound up thinking about my own experience of giving birth. I got out some of my resentments about how the mother and even the father are left behind in the sacralization of and wonderment around the baby. Over the course of the sections, the poem moves away from Jesus to see that every birth is a miracle. It’s really so crazy how we come from other people. Leaving aside Jesus, I was also thinking about the mother of John the Baptist—what it is to raise a child who will have his head cut off. All the children we raise . . . many of them will die horrifically, or struggle with schizophrenia, or perpetuate violence against somebody else. They’ve left your hands. Still, we keep spinning on into the future, with no idea how they’ll braid into the tapestry we weave together.

ZP: One of my “subway takes” is that misogyny has everything to do with the paranoid, phobic, and even envious response that male-bodied people have to the life-giving power of a woman’s body.

MF: I 100 percent agree. So many of the mythologies around the world are trying to wrest this power and accomplishment from women in order to reframe it as negative. I’ve always been so interested in prehistoric people, and they are a big focus of this book. Prehistoric art is overwhelmingly preoccupied by fertility and its crazy power.

ZP: In a few poems, when the speaker imagines the future, I sense a wistfulness around the language that the children will have to invent for things we don’t even know about yet.

MF: In my “Duino Elegies,” I’m thinking about everything invented in the past—guns, woodwinds, all the random crap in the world—and how the child starts out with no language but will go on to invent names for all the things that will be invented in the future. And at the end of the poem “Subclinical”—“To greet this revelation of a future / With those new names it will need”—I’m thinking of a dystopian future, and how the child will have to invent new words for the horrors of climate catastrophe; these will be part of the child’s lingo, but we don’t know what they are yet. In the “Cosmos” poem, I give language to my children: “By filling their mouths with the whole jar of marbles: / English words in mincing syntax.” 

To see a child start out with no language, and to explain every idiom or cultural artifact—even answering a question like, “What is an advertisement?” Well, an advertisement is used to sell someone something they don’t need. “Why would anyone do that?” Because people are greedy—to explain every word, you’re unveiling part of the cultural complex. It’s not as simple as giving a dictionary definition. I also don’t want to be too over-determining. I want to give the space for my children to reach their own conclusions. 

You asked about wistfulness. That comes from an awareness of my mortality. I just turned 50. Like many young people, I once thought death was glamorous, reading Sylvia Plath and Thomas James. Now, among my peers and friends, we keep seeing people of our generation with their lives cut short. My dear friend Paul La Farge died of brain cancer at age 52. So, I’ve been grappling with this topic. 

ZP: The speaker is put in touch with mortality in a profound way in the two poems that take place in a supermarket: “At the Stop & Shop” and “At the Price Chopper.”

MF: I hate supermarkets. They super-depress me. As a single person in New York, I could get by for a long time on very little in the way of food. But now . . . when we moved to Vermont during the pandemic, we’d go on one stock-up trip for the whole week. It was a horrible enterprise. 

But in a rural place, especially in winter, it’s one of the only places you see anyone. It’s like the town square. It’s where you get to know who you’re living with. And in those poems, I’m thinking about where we are in relation to our ancient ancestors. Going to the supermarket to buy a jar of hot honey is so absurd compared to the life-and-death, communal quality of having to hunt the mammoth together and break down its body into parts. The animals that they were hunting became totems in their religious culture, so it was meaningful to their spiritual life, how they were feeding themselves. Now . . . there’s just so much plastic. You can’t go to the market without encountering plastic. The poems are a way for me to think about how I’m poisoning myself and everyone around me, even as I’m trying to nourish them. In the same way, the grocery store is a very intimate space, you’re standing at the conveyor belt watching a stranger’s Styrofoam tray go by with its cold chicken breast—that’s going to be part of his body pretty soon.

ZP: On the flip side of this communal feeling, I’m remembering the encounter in “You Can Fold Me,” when the speaker is belittled at a voting booth while the children are having a tantrum and responds: “Fuck you // I invented the future / What the hell is it // You do you think / You’re so big?”

MF: That really did happen, at a voting booth; a man cut in front of me in a queue of voters and said that I seemed to be too occupied. And it was already such a challenge for me to be standing there with my baby carriage and squirming little kid. I didn’t actually say “fuck you.” But the idea of having invented the future came out of feeling like to him my vote didn’t count or that I had less of a say because I had my two kids there, when in fact, I should probably have three votes. 

Part of why I didn’t originally think I would have kids is because I wanted to give more of myself to writing. This is often a question for a female writer. And historically, there’s been a cultural bias against “domestic” subjects. Poets wouldn’t write a single word about cleaning the floors or tidying the house. It meant that you weren’t a serious writer, that your mind had been corrupted by the mundane. That’s why I laugh to myself about a poem like “At the Price Chopper”—why not put Alexander the Great alongside an Alas-poor-Yorick moment about my late father, all while the speaker is out looking at some Granny Smiths in the grocery store.

ZP: I think that has to do with how, historically, many writers were wealthy and had staff or spouses to do that work. I think it’s beautiful how the diurnal stuff comes into poems because we have to do it ourselves.

MF: Agreed, class is such a big part of it too: people thinking, “This is beneath me; let some other class of person handle it.” That need to categorize—this type of work is for women, this is work for lower-class citizens, this is work for people of color—that kind of societal hierarchical thinking is absolutely reflected in what shows up in the literature. And then if the domestic sphere becomes subject matter only for women, the working class, and people of color, that’s part of the machinery of how these groups of people can get dismissed as writers. 

ZP: Literature is another one of the most tangible forms of the future, in this book and in your work at large. But in your “Duino Elegies,” the speaker says, “Every word of writing is a form of goodbye.” What do you think of that paradox?

MF: Writing is one way to have futurity. We nourish ourselves on the words of others. Their writing enters your bloodstream. And when I finished writing my first book, I thought, I can die now, because part of me is going into the future. My words will be part of the circulation, the discourse, and these words will keep getting inflected with other people’s associations. We become part of an inheritance—the cultural legacy. I’m thinking of something a professor once said: Even if you’ve never read Dante’s Inferno, you know Dante’s Inferno because it’s a part of cities; it’s a part of how we think about organizations of space. The interpenetration of literature and nonliterary realms is so intense.

I’m also interested in chemical traces and what happens to our bodies after we die. If I can somehow manage being left outside as a corpse, I will do it, because I want to put the magnesium and other elements back into the earth and have them reform into other things. The words we create are like that. And it’s not just literature, it’s being part of each other’s dreams. I’m going to go on remembering my dead friends. They are a constituent part of my present experience that goes into what I pass on as well. And that’s pretty joyful. As much as the book has to do with mortality, it has a joyful element: looking around and saying, hey, if I die, it’s okay, because others are carrying on—yes, the children, but so many other things I’ve entered into, just as I have been entered into too.

The post Writing Is a Way to Have Futurity appeared first on Electric Literature.

Readers expecting a conventional World War II narrative will find something more searching here. Chung’s novel is about the “Forgotten War” and threads together the personal and political—the human cost of conflict, the burden of inherited history, and the question of who pays the true price of war. Her writing dwells on the mothers and daughters whose lives have been shaped, and sometimes erased, by forces larger than themselves.

Chung’s debut, Daughters of Shandong, was intimate and propulsive, and The Young Will Remember expands her canvas, offering history as backdrop while inviting immersion into what it must have been like.

When I spoke with Chung over e-mail, we discussed what it means to write about the atrocities of war without replicating their violence on the page, the challenge of portraying ordinary lives under extraordinary pressure, and the responsibility artists carry when turning collective trauma into narrative.

Cherry Lou Sy: As I read the novel, I was constantly aware of Ellie’s racial and ethnic background as a Taiwanese American woman moving through spaces we don’t often imagine Asian Americans occupying—particularly war reporting in that era. I found myself checking my own assumptions about visibility and belonging. Did questions of plausibility or historical erasure shape how you imagined Ellie’s movement through the world? Were there moments where you felt you were writing against the archive?

Eve J. Chung: It was important for me to write an American war story with a main character who is a woman, and specifically, an Asian American woman. As someone who studies war and history, I’ve generally found it difficult to find media about the 1940s and 1950s that address how BIPOC Americans might have experienced WWII, and the Cold War after that. Ellie’s Taiwanese American heritage is crucial to this story, because she is able to blend in somewhat in North Korea, and speak both Japanese and Chinese as a result of Taiwan’s colonial history. Thus, Ellie can communicate with some Koreans and some of the Chinese soldiers. 

In order to write Ellie, I had to combine research, because Ellie, as a BIPOC woman, faces at least two different forms of discrimination. For this, I relied on Maggie Higgins’s books, which detailed the difficulties she faced as a woman journalist during the Korean War, and also biographies of Hazel Ying Lee, which described how “orientals” were banned from many establishments. Segregation was still legal during the Korean War, but the Korean War was the first war with integrated troops. However, integration in the military was difficult to enforce—despite the presidential order, commanders in the field still insisted on segregating their troops. This background would be important for someone like Ellie, who is fully aware that different types of Americans receive different treatment from their government. Most notably, the Korean War takes place only four years after the Japanese internment camps closed, so this is a major fear for Ellie. Today, even though it has been 80 years since those specific camps closed, I still worry about being put in one—and indeed, these camps are already operating right now, for immigrants who are allegedly undocumented, many of whom were taken without due process, so even their status as being undocumented is questionable. It is the present that makes me care so much about learning from the past, and much of my motivation for telling these stories is to fight against the erasure of history.

CS: Alexander Chee has written about the ethical questions writers should ask themselves when writing beyond their own direct experience. What questions did you return to while writing this novel—especially as it moves across cultures, languages, and borders?

EJC: Interestingly, my husband, who is half-Korean, read the first draft of my novel, and commented that things would be logistically easier if I made my character a Korean American who could speak Korean. I did not want to write as a Korean American [main character], because a Korean American would have a significantly different inner thought process during this war than a Chinese American. In the US, there is a tendency to lump East Asians together, and while there are certainly overarching cultural similarities, Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese people have important distinctions, especially when it comes to geopolitics. Perhaps because I myself am of Chinese descent, I was particularly interested in the interactions between the US and the Chinese soldiers and the rising rivalry between the countries that continues to this day. For background, I was an international relations major, with a masters in international criminal law, and I currently work in international human rights. The perspective that I wanted to write from, and what I had more to say about, was that of someone who is ethnic Chinese, in an era in which American and Chinese relations were so bad that they were physically in combat, and General MacArthur was pushing to drop nuclear bombs on Manchuria. Like Ellie, I have at times found myself torn between being proud of my American identity and my Chinese heritage, but also able to see some of our global conflicts through a different lens because of that duality—and sometimes, I am deeply ashamed of the violence that my government is perpetuating abroad. 

Writing as Ellie felt natural to me, but there were other challenges. Though Ellie herself is not Korean, the setting was in Korea, and I had many Korean characters, so I wanted to be able to portray them accurately. I do have many Korean friends and extended family members (though most of them are either Korean Americans, or Koreans who immigrated to the US decades ago), so I interviewed my mother-in-law about her childhood in Seoul, and also asked other friends about their parents’ experiences during the war, and did additional research about refugees and survivors, not just from the Korean War but also from World War II and the Japanese Colonial period. I had Korean friends, including fellow authors, who were kind enough to beta read my drafts, and I also had a Korean linguist, who I found via my mother-in-law, check as well. Despite having tried my best, I am sure that there will be things that I got wrong—but I hope that they are minor, and that readers will know that it certainly wasn’t from lack of care or effort! 

There is the added complication of time, since culture in the 1950s is also different from what it is now—though I didn’t feel obligated to make my characters conform to gender or social norms, because they, like most women’s human rights defenders, purposefully defied the standards around them. Still, I asked myself how each woman might consider her juxtaposition with the rest of society. I wanted to ensure there were references to how difficult it was for them to break the conventions that they did, and how irritating or daunting it might have been for them to constantly defend their decisions. 

CS: I was struck by how multilingualism functions almost as a form of mobility in the book—Ellie’s ability to move, blend, and survive is tied to language. How did your understanding of the formation of the 38th Parallel and the emergence of modern nation-states shape the way characters encounter one another across linguistic and cultural lines?

EJC: I love languages—I’ve loved learning them, and have noticed how being able to speak certain languages has opened opportunities and friendships for me. For context, I am conversationally fluent in Spanish, French, and Mandarin, but also studied Japanese and Korean. Just as Ellie manages to get her posting as a foreign correspondent because she is trilingual, I’ve also been hired for certain jobs because of my language skills. In the human rights field, as with the journalism field, gathering information depends on being able to converse with the right people, whether those are witnesses, government officials, or partners. Speaking through an interpreter works, but it is different when you are able to connect with a person directly. Through her language skills though, Ellie is able to connect with some Koreans, and some Chinese soldiers. 

However, just as language connects us, we also see, from various colonies around the world, how language is also a tool for dominance and erasure. I was conscious of this while writing this story. From interviews, I understood that older Koreans who grew up under colonial rule hated having to speak Japanese—so Ellie also couldn’t randomly strike up conversations in Japanese either with the average Korean at the time. Pastor Pak ends up being someone she can speak to safely because he too has such a varied linguistic background. Through Pastor Pak and Ellie, I also hoped to show how learning another language does also open one’s mind to other people, and other ways of thinking. 

CS: Imo’s character stayed with me, particularly as the novel reveals the moral cost behind her comfort and stability. Reading her made me think about how nationalism can both protect and obscure—especially when viewed from our current, globalized moment. How did you think about patriotism and complicity while writing her? Did your understanding of “our country” shift as the book took shape?

EJC: I think I wrote this story as a response to my understanding of “our country.” There are several conversations in this book that are meant for the diaspora reader. For example, Ellie’s conversations with Pastor Pak about those who stay to fight, versus those who run from war. I am the granddaughter of refugees, so my family fled war. There is, in many contexts, a tension resulting from that decision, and resulting loyalties and affiliations are also personal to the individual. 

I consider divisions such as nationality and religion to be arbitrary. Often, we choose a particular religion because it is what we grew up with, and yet, so many wars are fought along national and/or religious divides. Imo is a character who is willing to reject her own privilege when she understands that it comes with a tremendous cost to others around her—a decision that arises from seeing the common humanity between people, versus whatever categories that we choose to divide ourselves with. This is a quality that is not necessarily uncommon, but unusual enough that her actions stand out. In many countries, criticizing one’s government for human rights issues is considered unpatriotic. I try to emphasize that true patriotism is holding your country to standards, and trying to make life better for everyone in the country. This being said, my concept of “country” and citizenship are very fluid, because my grandparents, parents, and I were all born in different countries, and the same for my husband, so our children are a mix of ethnicities. I don’t know if I would have a different understanding of nationalism had I been born in China, for example. In the book, Ellie too wonders the same thing—how her life might be if her parents hadn’t come to the United States—but then she also later acknowledges that maybe the world would be a better place, with less war, if more people were between worlds, and knew that it is natural to love across those boundaries. 

CS: The novel carries a great deal of historical research, and I know parts of the story are connected to your husband’s family history. Why did this story need to be a novel rather than nonfiction or memoir? What could fiction hold that those forms couldn’t?

EJC: One of the main reasons I wanted to write about the Korean War is because it is a nexus between American, Chinese, and Korean history, which are the cultural influences of my family, and also offered points for me to tie in human rights issues that are important to Taiwanese people as well, namely justice for survivors of WWII military sexual slavery. My husband’s grandfather was a pastor from Pyongyang, and I based many aspects of Pastor Pak’s character on him, but otherwise the stories do not overlap much. My grandfather-in-law fled North Korea because he was concerned about being persecuted for his religion, and was already in the South when the Korean War began. He ended up meeting his wife in a refugee camp, and together they came to the United States. I did end up using snippets of what he told my husband and my mother-in-law, but more for research about how life had been during the war than for the storyline itself. This being said, I know that my husband’s grandfather had been working on a memoir for himself, but nothing ever came of it. Perhaps that will be something that one of his grandchildren (or maybe great-grandchildren) will do!

CS: One of the most powerful moments for me is Ellie’s encounter with Song Yun-Hee while she is living as Lin Yan-Xi—it felt like a kind of haunting, as though identity itself had become spectral. Do you see this kind of transformation and silence as specific to war, or as something shared by many survivors of trauma? Did you always know this would be how their paths crossed?

EJC: When the idea for this book first formed, I had thought about calling it The Changeling, because of Emma substituting Ellie for her daughter. The message that I wanted to get across can perhaps be best summed up by one of James Baldwin’s famous quotes: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” It ties into the atrocity of mass bombing, which makes it impossible to distinguish between military targets and civilians—and notably, from the US military record, there seemed to be cases in which there wasn’t any effort to do so. Emma, as a name, is a play on “Emma,” and she is indeed meant to be “mother” because I intended for her character to represent motherhood in war. All mothers suffer in war, whether directly from violence, or from the loss of their children. I believe that what some of the leaders of this world have done to mothers is unforgiveable, and this book is the result of my anger at the willingness of men—often old men—to sacrifice young lives for their own legacies, or even just to keep themselves from losing power. I always imagined Ellie and Yun-Hee meeting, and saw the ending of the book early on. Professionally, I have previously worked on the issue of enforced disappearances as a form of torture. This was a type of violation that I wanted to make clear with Emma, and show that not knowing what has happened to a loved one who was taken by the State is indeed a pain amounting to torture. 

CS: What did you learn while writing this novel? And what do you hope readers carry with them after finishing it?

I learned a lot of military history! Before deciding to write this book, I only knew the basics about the Korean war but was ignorant of the scale of damage. Though I had known that Chinese soldiers had fought in Korea, I did not know about the Battle of Chosin—I did not know that at one point, there were more Chinese soldiers than North Korean soldiers in North Korea, or that Mao had been poised to send a million more men across the Yalu River. From a Taiwanese perspective, I had known that the Korean War was essentially what saved Taiwan from invasion. At that point, Mao’s soldiers had been preparing for amphibious assault, but the US crossing the 38th parallel led him to divert those soldiers to the North, where they eventually clashed with UN troops in North Korea. I hope that readers will leave this story with more knowledge about this history, which is relatively forgotten in the US.

I also intended for this book to call attention to the lack of justice for survivors of sexual violence, then and now. Sexual violence remains the most difficult crime to prosecute because it is so normalized in this society—this idea that men will be men, and that certain powerful men never have to apologize. No one should be above the law, and the horror of sexual violence should never be minimized for the convenience of those in charge. 

Lastly, I hope that people who finish this book might become more committed to opposing war. Lately, I find there are leaders who are willing to risk escalation, largely because they and their loved ones will not be at the front lines, and also to use war itself as a justification for holding onto power or saving themselves from prosecution for other crimes. It is always ordinary people who suffer more during armed conflict. In this sense, protecting our democracy is intimately tied with the prevention of war, because we must be able to hold our leaders accountable when they fail us.

The post A Novel That Refuses the Korean War’s Erasure appeared first on Electric Literature.

When Ziad Idilbi, a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, meets Salma, a Lebanese refugee fleeing the war in Beirut, they are bound by a shared longing for their homeland. A desire to settle, build their own roots, leads them to buy a corner store in Toledo, across from the General Motors factory, amid a vibrant Arab community. Over decades, their lives and those of their children unfold. Mustafa, their oldest, navigates identity as a Lebanese American in the aftermath of 9/11. Walid, their youngest, broods and writes poetry, and later in life, becomes invested in his father’s refugee past. And Nawal, the only daughter, often remains in the shadows except for one tale about friendship and betrayal.

Hasan Dudar is a Toldeo native, based in Washington DC. In conversation over Zoom, Dudar told me he approaches fiction as a place to explore otherness, as a Palestinian, as a Muslim, and as an Arab. This resonates through Carryout, where the lives of this one family bring us closer to their experience, that of many Muslims and minorities trying to battle the nightmare that is America. We spoke about the Palestinian struggle, living in the US as Muslims under the shadow of Islamophobia, Western imperialism causing cultural and linguistic erasure in other parts of the world, and more.

Bareerah Ghani: I love the opening story, following Ziad in his early years in the US, especially the line, “That was no way to live, we knew, with half a mind on hold, treating every place like a hotel.” It is particularly poignant in Ziad’s case because his family are Palestinian, and they can’t return home. How do you contend with this fact that Palestinian refugees and others from war-torn places are essentially sentenced to a life of perpetual unease and false hope?

Hasan Dudar: That was one of the big questions of the book, and also one of the big questions in my own life, and that of my family. I’m a Palestinian-American, also Lebanese-American, by way of my mother. But the Palestinian identity somehow sticks through it all, and I think it’s because it’s one of those things that’s been unresolved. It’s a wound that really hasn’t healed. 

This is what we see with Ziad. He is a Palestinian who was born in Lebanon. He grew up among Arabs, and yet he feels different. That is the essence of Palestinian identity––wherever you are, you feel a little different. And for the Palestinians in Lebanon, their predicament hasn’t been addressed properly. They’re still non-citizens after nearly 80 years. That has been felt through the generations.

I don’t want to generalize. There are so many different facets of the Palestinian identity. But I think one of the key parts is this sense of exile and displacement. You’re denied the acknowledgement of what’s taken place. And whether you’re born in Gaza, or West Bank, or Akka, where my father’s family came from, that sense sticks with you.

BG: I’m curious about the epigraph. “On and on and on and on!” from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. To me, it reflects displacement, but also resilience and survival. Can you share how and why the quote spoke to you?

HD: It comes from a longer passage that’s talking about our human capacity to both fall into error, and to find glory. And to experience the full breadth of life, you have to fail, taste something of your own folly. The passage ends with that line, which I thought captures life very well. How it doesn’t stop. And you continue to fail, and you continue to succeed, and it’s winding, sometimes you go backwards, sometimes sideways, sometimes you don’t know what direction you’re going, but you’re going on and on.

That constancy, the ability for life to surprise us, to upend us, is something I was after in my own work, especially dealing with characters who are displaced—something which is upending as much as it is full of constant surprises. You are forced to start over in many ways. And not just immigrants—for all of us this may be the case—we just sense it acutely in the life of the immigrant and the displaced. There are setbacks, major and minor, daily or yearly, but continuing may be its own form of glory.

BG: In “The Howara”, Walid talks about his family getting together and remembering the past but nothing is remembered as it was. What are your thoughts on the power of nostalgia in sustaining the idea of and sentiment around the homeland?

HD: Oh, it’s so strong. This book was born of nostalgia. When I began this, it was the first time I had really left home in a way that felt permanent. I had gone to Berkeley. From Ohio to California, it all felt different, and I was young. I really started to miss home, and that was very surprising to me. Because when you’re growing up, your whole being kind of rebels against being home. But in Berkeley, I found myself yearning for the life I had in Toledo, and the people that I was surrounded by. My father was sick at the time, and I would take any opportunity to go back home. On those visits, I really started to see the place with fresh eyes, what I’d left behind. My family, my community. Toledo, among the Arab community, was very village-like. People just dropped by. My parents had sold their convenience store, pretty much retired, and so had a lot of their friends. They had time on their hands, and they’d just visit my father. On those breaks, I would sit and listen as they shared their own nostalgia, about old Toledo when they first came, how good it was, and then sharing stories about Beirut, and if they were from different parts of Palestine, what it was like there in the cities and the villages.

I see nostalgia as a yearning to get back to an ideal that maybe you didn’t know was an ideal at the time. I think identity is so much molded by memory, and nostalgia is a way of forming yourself. You can never go back, but in that futile effort of attempting to go back, whether through telling stories, remembering, misremembering, a lot is gained. Your identity, personality, community, it can all form from there.

BG: Families in the book want Ziad to marry their daughters because they worry their later generations would lose their identity as Arabs, as Muslims. I wonder about the traumas we carry and how those might be broken through marriage. I would love your thoughts on this in connection with marriage as a way to influence identity, preserve heritage, especially for later generations.

HD: Marriage is a very personal choice. To each their own, but in the context of being a minority somewhere, like in the US, wanting to stay within the same religion or ethnicity are serious, valid concerns. In terms of future generations, I can only speak from my own life. My wife is Lebanese, she mostly grew up between here and Lebanon. Our daughter speaks some Arabic, and this year, she got really into Ramadan. I wonder, would she have those things if both parents were not Arabic speakers, Muslim?

Another way I view this––with everything that’s been going on, my wife and I are chatting about the news in Lebanon, Iran, and we’re being careful of what we say around our daughter, because she’s young. But she still has the idea that Lebanon means something to us, and Palestine means something to us, and she’s now kind of starting to ask questions. It’s one of those moments that remind me of what it was like growing up. Every day my parents would turn on the news, my dad would always say in Arabic, ولّعت , like, it’s on fire now, and there was always this idea, that this is something important to him. That’s sort of where I learned from my parents about what was going on in Lebanon, in Palestine.

BG: In one place, you write that Lebanon hardly belonged to those who remained. And earlier in that chapter, Ziad meets a business contact in the Middle East who says something to the effect that soon, everywhere will be the same. I couldn’t help but think about Western imperialist notions driving cultural and even linguistic erasure in many parts of the world.

HD: The West has been influential through its culture’s ability to attract talent, viewers, and imitators. Worldwide, especially in the last 30 years, there’s been a struggle within cultures and countries, with people left wondering, do you assimilate to this more homogenous, westernized notion of the world or do you hold on to what’s more specific to you? And in a way, something specific to these characters, and to the Arab world more broadly, is the issue of Palestine. These characters are holding on to it, because it still needs holding on to, and where does that put them in relation to the world around them?

So the notion really came from the characters, how they viewed returning to the Arab world and Lebanon, in particular. I always try to take the character’s lead. They often know best. How did they view Lebanon, where even the Lebanese were being displaced? How did they view the Arab world, where you didn’t have to uproot yourself to live a life of Western comfort? And is this, in a way, its own uprooting? Perhaps there are many ways of being displaced, and the Palestinians, like Ziad, have mainly experienced one of those ways. It’s a terrible displacement, and through it, I sense Palestinians have held on to the identity to avoid having uprooted what’s left. In many ways, when it comes to assimilating, others may feel less guilt about it than someone like Ziad, who is more burdened, who feels there is more at stake.

BG: For Muslim immigrants in the US, this question of assimilation has been especially pressing in the last two decades. You masterfully depict the climate of terror in the Muslim community post-9/11. Given that Islamophobia continues to persist, how do you as a Muslim living in the US grapple with this reality, especially in your work as a journalist?

HD: I think there’s a lot of pressure on immigrants, on minorities, and on Muslims, more recently in the U.S. Things are asked of those groups that aren’t asked of others. There’s a sort of perfection that’s demanded of us. If someone screws up, does something illegal, it comes down on the whole community. The margin for error is very narrow. And there is a fear, a sense of doubting yourself, questioning your belonging.

I was fortunate to grow up in a community of Arabs and Muslims. The Arab community in Toledo goes back to the 1880s, and the Muslims maybe, the 1920s or so. It’s a very historic community that has really integrated itself in a lot of ways, but also remained itself in a lot of ways. I always found it kind of miraculous. I think that’s something the immigrants have, especially the children of immigrants and minorities, that other communities may not have access to. You get to come here, and you get to do it all over again. You get another chance at life, at your own self. And I think that’s something very original. That’s sort of what inspired me as I wrote this book. A lot of the people who were in my parents’ circle of friends in the Muslim or Arab community, they were eccentric. Which is to say, they had their own center. I felt that these people were so free, and authentic. They could be talking about wanting to go back to Lebanon, or the West Bank, wherever, and how life in America is awful, and why they came here and are regretting it. And then in the next sentence, they will say how wonderful it is. And all of it is true. They mean it all, and it’s sincere. They’re not apologizing for that mess of contradictions. I think that when we come here, we are asked to kind of give up all of that contradiction. It’s like, just sign up for this identity, and that’s it. But it’s so much more complex than that.

BG: In my own community, I’ve noticed that people who migrated back in the day had this resolve to stay true to their roots, to hold on to our culture and identity. I feel like over time, my generation has slipped away. I see many Pakistanis whose kids don’t speak Urdu, and I find that appalling, because I think your language is so much of your culture and your identity, and you’re not passing that on. But their explanation is it’s just easier for the kids, and they can assimilate better in schools.

HD: It’s tough. I think we’re less social in a lot of face-to-face ways than we used to be. Growing up, we lived one house over from my uncle’s, and people were always at each other’s place. There was just always something going on in the community. I think that that impacted people’s identity, their language, their relationships with the community. I don’t want to speak for Toledo, because that may still be the case. I haven’t lived there in a while, at least as a father. But there was a kind of casual intent to get together, and that allowed so many other things to happen. Now you really have to fight for it.

My daughter understands Arabic. She can speak it, but she only really has me and her mother to speak Arabic with. When she went into daycare full-time, she was mostly speaking Arabic, but she quickly realized, where is this going to get me? I need food, I have needs. And so, it’s a fight, just on Arabic alone. For me and my wife, it’s not like: you have to learn this, this is important to us. It’s more like: this is part of who we are, and how we understand the world, so why wouldn’t we pass it down, or expose her to it? Once she’s old enough, if she wants to keep speaking it, it’s up to her.

BG: In “The Litani,” in the face of yet another experience of discrimination post 9/11, Mustafa notes his dad is always saying “Leave it to God.” For me, this idea of surrender is so integral to being Muslim, but I’m curious about your thoughts on the line between surrender and inaction, especially in face of injustice.

HD: That was kind of a recurring line, a recurring sense among the characters. I wanted something that felt true to where they were, to how they viewed the world. I think it can be many things at once. Leaving it to God can kind of be a capitulation. “I’m powerless here in these worldly matters.” But I also think that it can be a guiding principle; sometimes when you let go, things fall into place. And in these characters’ lives, I wanted to explore how they were in a world that they perhaps couldn’t change. And the only thing that they could really change is their approach, and it’s not to see the other side as right. It’s like when Ziad tells his son, let them have it-–don’t go after what’s not yours. It can be a liberating thing.

In the face of injustice, you should fight, stand up for your rights. But in that particular story, they’re facing the question of: Is there any changing this? You know who you are, and know what you stand for, and sometimes that’s as much as you can do. Sometimes, it’s not so much a capitulation or surrender as it is to understand that this wouldn’t change the reality of the injustice. I don’t have the answer for what would change a lot of these injustices. I think if people had those answers, it’d be a much simpler and better world. But I think through fiction and literature, you look at how people respond to these issues of power dynamics, of powerlessness, of being othered. And you try to look for what’s true to that character in that moment.

The post Othered Into Belonging as a Palestinian American in Toledo, Ohio appeared first on Electric Literature.

These questions resurfaced as I read Jiyoung Han’s debut novel, Honey in the Wound, which begins in Korea in 1902, the year before my own great-grandparents left Korea for Hawaii. Moving across time, borders, and generations, the novel chronicles one Korean family’s story of survival against the violence of the Japanese empire. The narrative revolves around Song Young-Ja, who is one among thousands of women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during the 1930s (euphemistically known as “comfort women”). Young-Ja, along with her ancestors, and her descendants, are blessed with magical abilities that allow them to persist—and resist. Power is not merely a blunt-force tool of the oppressor, but is found in information-sharing networks that women create through gossip; feeling and expressing rage; and symbiosis with the natural world. 

Blending magical realism and historical fiction throughout the novel, Han illuminates the dark chapter of Japanese occupation in Korea spanning five generations and 90 years. As Han’s novel suggests, the aftermath of Japanese colonial rule during the 20th century continues to ripple into contemporary life. Even during my 2019 trip, many Koreans were boycotting Japanese goods, in part to protest Japan’s wartime atrocities. 

Over Zoom in January, Han and I discussed her folkloric inspirations, learning about the legacy of comfort women, and the subversive possibilities of magical realism. 

Morgan Ome: I was really moved by the letter of introduction you include in the advanced copies of your novel. You explain that you were compelled to write this story after reading about the nine surviving comfort women in Korea. Can you tell me more about this inspiration?

Jiyoung Han: I started writing this book because I was so upset about comfort women. Part of the reason I’m so angry about comfort women is the contemporary aspect: how they’re treated by the far right and the Japanese government. But you also have to go back and understand the spread of Japanese imperialism in East Asia from before the comfort women system was established in the ’30s. So it ballooned from that initial moment of inspiration and urgency. 

Comfort women have not felt like they’ve gotten a sufficient apology that was meaningful from the Japanese government, and there still are acts of historical erasure happening today. 

Around when I moved to California, San Francisco put up the Comfort Women Memorial in Saint Mary’s Square [in 2017]. It’s this lovely statue that symbolizes comfort women from all different nationalities, including Korean and Chinese. There’s also an older woman looking up at the three girls who’s supposed to be in the image of Kim Hak-Sun, the first Korean comfort woman to come out with [public testimony]. She’s the only real person in my book. Osaka actually ended ties with San Francisco, which was its sister city, because this Comfort Women Memorial went up. 

MO: What drew you to magic and folklore when writing into this history?

JH: Magical realism is one of my absolute favorite genres. I read Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and Beloved by Toni Morrison, One Hundred Years of Solitude—all of these big works before my prefrontal cortex had even fully developed. I really love the genre and what it’s able to achieve.

What I particularly like for my approach to this novel is that magical realism offered a tonal counterbalance, because the history itself is so brutal. I wanted to be able to fold in elements of magic to not make it more palatable per se but make it something that people could hold on to with elements of hope. The magical realism in the book gives a lot of the female characters, especially, agency in ways that they might not necessarily have always had. So it was very intentional on my part to be this countervailing force with these atrocious truths. I don’t want to say that magic was the only way that they were able to survive and overcome. But it’s a way to amplify the existing agency, strength, and resilience of the people that were in situations like this.

MO: Can you talk about how you came up with the different magical abilities? I particularly loved Young-Ja’s ability to imbue emotions into her food. 

JH: With Young-Ja, I thought it could be really powerful to subvert qualities like being emotional, or domestic duties such as cooking—things that are seen as liabilities or too feminine—and turn them into an asset for her. Her ability allows her to bring comfort to those around her, as a balm for colonial wounds, but also as a literal weapon that she can wield against people that might otherwise wish her harm. 

MO: And Jung-Soon has the ability to force people to tell the truth so she can gather intel. We often see gossip as women chatting in their communities, but gossip ends up being this powerful information sharing network. 

JH: With Jung-Soon, I wanted her to be someone that was otherwise set up to be completely underestimated. She had horrific scarring on her face. She was a second child, a daughter, and kind of quiet and shy. Because everyone else underestimates her so much, it allows her to extract truth from people without necessarily bringing attention onto herself, which is a great asset for her, especially as she’s engaging more in resistance against these colonial forces.

MO: I don’t want to spoil too much for readers, but in the beginning of the book, one character, Geum-Ja, turns into a tiger. In Korean folklore, the tiger is a symbol of courage, strength, and national identity. Why was that symbol important for you to include in your novel? 

JH: Tigers have a funny role in Korean folklore. All the things that you said are true. If you look at the Korean peninsula, Koreans will often say it’s in the shape of a tiger. But in folklore, tigers are also a buffoonish villain that’s often tricked by children or the noble farmer, whenever it’s trying to eat people. I love that duality. 

The reason I wanted to specifically have tigers is that it was yet another element in which colonial oppression was wiping out Korean culture. Tigers were essentially hunted to extinction under Japanese colonial rule. A lot of them migrated up north and then eventually out of the peninsula. I wanted to incorporate that historical fact as something that was both poignant but could speak to this natural folkloric magic that was in Korea at the time. 

MO: The novel concludes in the ‘90s with a character named Rinako, who is Young-Ja’s granddaughter. She feels like a bridge between Young-Ja and the reader, as if she’s calling us to continue the work of remembering and memorializing. Did you plan for Rinako to function in this way?

JH: Absolutely. Rinako has the ability to look into others’ dreams, which is a way for her to commune and connect with the past and all of these hidden truths. The huge theme in that section is about people trying to hide their truths. And not just the Japanese government doing historical erasure, but Young-Ja trying to hide her experience as a comfort woman from her family, or Rinako being conditioned from a very young age that she needs to keep quiet in order to preserve the peace. 

It was also really important for me to make Rinako Japanese. I want to make sure that people don’t look at [the novel] as condemning all Japanese people. I’m an American. I love Americans, but I don’t always agree with what my government is doing, and in a similar way, I wanted to show that there are tons of Japanese scholars and activists that have been really instrumental in getting some of these stories and histories and research to come out. 

MO: Rinako gave me a lot to think about. I’m Japanese American on my mom’s side, and a lot of the children of incarcerees didn’t talk to their parents about the internment camp history, but the grandchildren were the ones who talked to their grandparents. Maybe in the time that grandchildren come of age, there’s more discussion about resurfacing histories.

JH: I was really moved by what you said about grandchildren in general being better equipped or better able to talk about the trauma that their grandparents face versus the children of the grandparents. That’s absolutely true for Joon [Young-Ja’s son and Rinako’s father]. He’s actually quite a tragic character, because for obvious reasons, Young-Ja had such horrible PTSD that she was just not able to be a good parent at all. That’s the element of intergenerational trauma that affects him. And even though he turned out in this really flawed way, it’s not necessarily his fault, and I have a lot of sympathy for him. He’s perhaps a little too close to the trauma that was inflicted on him by his mother’s PTSD for him to have engaged in good conversation with her, or resolved it. 

MO: What was your research process like?

JH: I immigrated to the U.S. when I was seven and went through the public education system here. I grew up in the Midwest, which probably contributed to the fact that if Asia was ever mentioned in any of my classes, it was around three historical events that were all connected to American imperialism: the Vietnam War, the atomic bombs in Japan, and the Korean War. I actually don’t think I even knew Korea was colonized by the Japanese until I was a teenager or in college. And that’s around when I learned about comfort women. 

It wasn’t until I started writing this book that I started reading academic texts about the different systems at play, the way that women were recruited, the way their day-to-day life was in these comfort stations. I found lots of oral histories and testimonies from comfort women themselves and I ended up watching YouTube videos of comfort women talking about their experiences. That was a wake-up moment for me when I realized just how horrifying it was, in graphic and granular detail. 

We talk about this as history, but sexual violence is still happening every day. Perhaps not in this systematized state endorsed kind of way, but in many of the conflict zones that are active now across the world, there’s rampant acts of sexual violence. 

MO: The section where Young-Ja and other women are experiencing sexual slavery is so disturbing. But I also felt like it was important for the reader to actually understand what they had gone through. The comfort women are given Japanese names and many of the names end in “ko.” You highlight that “ko” is the Japanese word for child.

JH: A lot of the comfort women were really young. In Korean, “ja” has the same connotation as “ko” in Japanese names. A lot of young women born in those decades have names ending with “ja.” Young-Ja is a really common Korean name for women born in the 20s and 30s. I chose that name for her simply because I wanted her to be the every woman of that era. 

MO: One part of the book that has stuck with me, especially in the historical moment we’re living through, is where you write: “Their capacity to experience joy, no matter how fleeting, was a sign of the inextinguishable spirit of their people. Something they swore would never be taken from them.” This line seems specific to your book and to Korean identity, but it could also be interpreted universally.

JH: It was really important for me to depict moments of joy and even humor or levity. I wanted to make sure that these women weren’t just getting together to be super serious all the time and engage in acts of resistance. Of course they still felt fear, they still felt panicked, they were anxious. But having the solidarity of that community enabled them to laugh about the fact that they put dog shit in the rice cakes for the cops. 

Joy as an act of resistance may be a little bit more contemporary and could feel potentially anachronistic in the book, but I think that’s just true. People go through atrocities, but in the little folds and corners, you still have people laughing or finding moments of solace or relief, and that’s what we as humans are wired to seek out. 

The post A Debut Novel That Writes Magic Into a Difficult History appeared first on Electric Literature.

Eisenberg’s newest story collection, Fat Swim, carries forth this ethos across 10 luminous, visceral stories. Within its pages, the body acts as a setting where desire, hunger, and loss can transform. 

I was honored to get to speak with Eisenberg about pushing through writer’s block, bad film adaptations, and the joys of trampolining from one sentence to the next.

— Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas
Editorial Intern

1. Describe your publication week in a six-word story.

Emma Copley Eisenberg: Getting lost on I-95 on my way to Philly bookstores.

2. What book should everyone read growing up?

ECE: Fairytales. Specifically, Princess Furball. It’s a lesser known retelling of a Grimm’s story. Also In the Night Kitchen, and the Alanna books by Tamora Pierce. And Anne of Green Gables. Oh, and Tuck Everlasting. I just reread and it mostly holds up except for the weird age gap dynamic.

3. Write alone or in community?

ECE: Both, I have to say. It’s very bisexual of me. I need to be alone for the generative parts and the focus, but one can’t really write alone. You need people to walk the path with you.

4. How do you start from scratch?

ECE: I have been getting up early to write, which doesn’t come naturally to me. But there’s something about that dawn hour, where night brain and daytime brain are both online at the same time, that helps me. It makes sense because dawn and dusk are when people pray, too. Also playing, reading, swimming, and not being too precious about anything is important in the scratch phrase. And sometimes writing longhand with a fun pen.

5. Three presses you’ll read anything from:

ECE: Graywolf. Dutton if they’re edited by Pilar Garcia Brown. McSweeney’s.

6. If you were a novel what novel would you be?

ECE: It feels aspirational, but I’d be The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers because it has so many different points of view and weird risks and it’s sad but also funny.

7. Describe your ideal writing day.

ECE: Similar to Ursula Le Guin’s ideal writing day. Wake up early for dawn brain, coffee, breakfast (lots of it), more writing, a walk, lunch, a movie or doing something out in the world, reading, then dinner, then bed early with the cats. 

8. What’s a piece of writing advice you never want to hear again?

ECE: I never want to hear that something “doesn’t have a plot” or to “give it more plot” because I don’t think people really know what that means. A lot of books that feel really propulsive have a plot, they just aren’t incident-based. I had a student at Temple say “I think what people mean when they say something doesn’t have a plot is that they don’t care about it.” Or they don’t care about the character. And I think that’s true. If you care about the character or what’s going on then the incident becomes sort of extraneous.

9. What’s a piece of writing advice you think everyone needs to hear?

ECE: Writing gets done sentence by sentence. 

10. Realism or surrealism?

ECE: Impossible bind. I’m more comfortable in realism. That’s the tradition I was raised reading. But realism is also surreal and weird and strange. Kelly Link and Hilary Leichter are writers who show us that all the time. There’s one story in Fat Swim that has non-realist elements and it was hard but we did our best.

11. Favorite and least favorite film adaptation of a book:

ECE: Well speaking of, I hate the Tuck Everlasting adaptation with Rory Gilmore. Makes it so boring when it’s really an open, soulful book. The Sophie’s Choice movie is also really bad. For best adaptation . . . maybe The Devil Wears Prada? I’ve never read the book and I don’t want to, but I will watch The Devil Wear Prada when I’m sick 4,000 times.

12. Edit as you go or shitty first draft?

ECE: Shitty first draft. I don’t understand the edit as you go people. That would break me.

13. Best advice for pushing through writer’s block?

ECE: This is stolen from Alexander Chee so credit him. He says there’s no such thing as writer’s block, there’s only unmade decisions and shame, which I think is basically true. When you’re blocked you’re avoiding making a decision about the draft, or you’re feeling shame that you haven’t written. Easier said than done.

14. What’s your relationship to being edited?

ECE: Into it. Very into it. Good editors are such a gift, and they help you see what you’re doing more clearly. The editor for my first book also changed the structure of the book in a way that helped me understand what I was trying to do. I wish that editors had more time and space to edit in today’s landscape. Huge appreciation to editors, they’re doing the Lord’s work.

15. Write every day or write when inspired?

ECE: Everyone’s life is different, and I think either can work. I sometimes do the latter, but I would say I’m most productive when I’m doing the former. Conditioning your brain to be creative is like a muscle, it does strengthen and start to come online more consistently if you can be consistent with it. Maybe a better way to say that is write around the same time and around the same place as much as you can.

16. What other art forms and literary genres inspire you?

ECE: Collage, ceramics, and film. Films have helped me figure out the shape of what I want to write more than once. For Housemates, the quest was to make it as good as Thelma and Louise.

17. The writer who made you want to write:

ECE: Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver when I was in high school. And James Baldwin.

18. How do you know when you’ve reached the end?

ECE: I think there’s an intuitive body sense where I’m just like, this is the furthest I can take this thing. There’s this concept in sociology called saturation where you ask the same question of different people and you start to get the same answer over and over again. That’s how I feel when I’m asking my characters a question. My first book was nonfiction, and I was asking real people questions, and you start to hear what you’ve already guessed or imagined over and over.

19. Describe your writing space.

ECE: I’m very lucky to have my own little room now. All my books in one place. I do have my little woo-woo objects (tarot cards, James Baldwin candle, some little rocks). And I also have a really big fat pink chair now.

20. How do you keep your favorite writers close to you?

ECE: I have a tattoo of Grace Paley’s face on my arm. I’ll leave it at that.

21. What’s the last indie bookstore you went to?

ECE: There’s a little used bookstore that just opened in my neighborhood in Philly called Little Yenta Books. And then in Baltimore, I went to Greedy Reads when I was there for AWP. 

22. What does evolving as a writer mean to you?

ECE: It’s seeing what I want to do more clearly and then knowing if I’m doing it or not.

23. Outside of literature, what are you obsessed with?

ECE: I got really into the Winter Olympics figure skating. Alysa Liu and also the evil French ice dancing team. I used to be pretty obsessed with making my own ice cream. I’m pretty into knitting and making babushka triangle scarves for my friends now. And seltzer, my favorite brand is Polar.

The post Emma Copley Eisenberg Is Tired of the Plot Police appeared first on Electric Literature.

The novel follows writer Dan Moran as he returns to his childhood home in the Midwest in search of answers about the circumstances of his brother’s life and suicide. His family is surprised to see him, even as they prepare a memorial for his brother—one that Dan was not invited to attend. Unfazed, or perhaps simply accustomed to his ostracism as a trans Asian adoptee, Dan forges ahead with his investigation. From the outset, it is clear that Dan is spectacularly ill-suited to the task—he misreads clues, follows dead ends, and cannot seem to stay on track. It is important to note that Dan doesn’t simply consider himself a detective, but rather a “metaphysical investigator,” a designation that shifts the terms of the inquiry from facts to interpretation. More than that, the term signals Cottrell’s larger project, which lies not necessarily in arriving at answers but in the act of reading deeply. In both Afternoon Hours of a Hermit and Cottrell’s first novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, there’s a strong extra-literary dimension: Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is filled with direct quotations from well-known authors, and Afternoon Hours of a Hermit similarly weaves in references to writers like Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald. 

Moreover, Cottrell’s characters are marked with bibliophilic tendencies. At one point Dan thinks, “My constant curiosity got in the way of my suicide,” a line that reads as his own but is in fact a direct quotation from Bernhard’s The Loser. Dan doesn’t simply think about his life; he thinks through literature. It is no surprise that a reader like Dan would be drawn to detective work—they are engaged in similar pursuits, trying to locate truth, to distinguish between what one thinks and what one knows. In this way, Dan Moran’s investigation stages a kind of deep reading of his brother, yes, but also of himself, probing the gap between reality and how one is perceived. This foregrounds a central tension of the novel form—and of reading itself: the desire to enter another consciousness, and the impossibility of ever fully doing so. If Afternoon Hours of a Hermit reveals anything, it is that truly knowing another person is the greatest mystery of all.

Patrick and I spent a few weeks exchanging emails about detective stories, metafictional doubling, lessons drawn from Thomas Bernhard, and more.

Evander James Reyes: This novel leans into the detective/noir genre, but Dan Moran is—there’s no other way to say this—a terrible detective! What draws you to the detective story and how are you interested in playing with/against expectations?

Patrick Cottrell: The word that comes to mind for me is atmosphere. Rain, fog, cars. I grew up in Milwaukee and I don’t remember many sunny days. I wanted to conjure the mystery/noir atmosphere which means driving around at night, spying on people, questioning them, showing up at places you’re not supposed to, but I didn’t want to be beholden to managing all the plot conventions. The noir genre seems to be about justice so there’s some added propulsion on a narrative level, but that’s also where the humor comes in. Sometimes the most justice-inclined people are also the most delusional and the least self-aware. Dan Moran believes he is attempting to restore justice by writing his psychological thriller, but in reality, what is he doing? 

For me the ending was the most important part of the book and I really struggled with it for a long time. I had to do a major rewrite that involved deleting multiple chapters. When I landed on this ending, I felt a huge sense of relief because I believe it works. I don’t think it answers things in a tidy, traditional mystery sense, but I deeply believe in it on an emotional and gut level. 

EJR: Did you have any detective stories in mind while you were drafting this book? 

PC: I’m indebted to the blurbs in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. I hadn’t read it at the time, but I read the blurbs and something about them made me want to write the book they were describing: private, existential, a fairy tale, philosophical. I tried to imagine what that book could be. The blurbs were actually inspiring which is weird to say. Drive Your Plow is an off-kilter mystery. 

Another detective influence is Bennett Sim’s story “The Postcard.” I love how he refuses to explain the circumstances of what his narrator is doing, the set-up is fairly vague and mysterious in a purposeful, ominous way. Of course, Kobo Abe was a master at refusing to explain things. It can be frustrating for the reader, but there’s something productive about the frustration. Marie NDiaye’s My Heart Hemmed In is not a traditional detective story, but the protagonist is trying to find out why she and her husband have been (seemingly overnight) shunned by their community. It’s a psychological horror novel. The protagonist sets off on an investigation of sorts through her city while her husband is bed-ridden with a festering wound. NDiaye’s imagination is boundless.

EJR: Dan Moran’s decisions often feel frustrating, even self-sabotaging, but they also seem to drive the novel forward. What do you think about frustration as an engine in the book?

PC: Frustration is always part of the mechanics of plot: someone wants something and they face obstacles or they get in their own way and this pushes the story forward. I’m never thinking about plot when I’m writing though. I am mostly thinking about humor, or whatever’s funny to me on the page (I honestly don’t know what’s funny to other people). Frustration and humor go hand in hand. If you’re not a particularly plot-driven writer, you have to find other ways and means to move the book forward. Claire-Louise Bennett is good at that. I always want to stay in her world even though she’s never beholden to plot. She conjures a particular mood or atmosphere via her sometimes-outlandish, embroidered sentences. Caren Beilin does this, too. Sometimes if I’m stuck, I go back to Amina Cain’s description of narrative: “[ . . . ] when objects and characters, and also landscapes, appear together, that is how narrative happens for me.” Amina Cain’s work is always a guiding light.

EJR: The title Afternoon Hours of a Hermit exists both as the book we’re reading and as a book the narrator abandoned writing—what drew you to this doubling?

PC: I think it was a self-serious conceit that’s supposed to be absurd and funny. The narrator seems to take writing seriously but at the same time erases and abandons what he’s doing, as you’ve rightly pointed out. I enjoy the game within the game, the little corners where you can play around to see what you can get away with. I love doubles, twins, doppelgängers, mirrors, etc. because I feel as if, when I was adopted, I myself was doubled in some way—when I was adopted, it’s almost as if there were two directions my life could have gone and it went one particular way, but then there’s the shadow of other possibilities. And transitioning, there’s another doubling, but not.

EJR: Another doubling: In Afternoon Hours, Dan Moran is the author of your first novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. I find this ontological weirdness really intriguing! It creates a strange loop of interpretation—when I went back to Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, I could only read it through the Dan Moran of Afternoon Hours. The same text exists in two contexts at once. What kind of textual game are you playing with that move?!

PC: I love that! I think that’s really cool and funny. Yeah, it’s a weird meta-fictional game. I wanted to try to establish that the world of this book, Afternoon Hours, is not unfolding in the same world as the first book. When I first started writing this book, I had the idea that the narrator would transition in between books. I had never heard of anyone doing that or exploring that. But, I wanted to do that in an indirect way. So, is the Afternoon Hours narrator the same character in the first book, pre-transition, or a fictional invention of Dan Moran? Again, it’s a hall of mirrors. I like that the books can exist on two different planes of reality. 

Someone asked if this is a sequel or if I simply rewrote my first book with a trans narrator. Absolutely not. But I understand why a person would ask that or think that, I really do: suicide, siblings, Korean adoptees, returning home, detectives, etc. Honestly, I think a lot of what I was thinking about with Dan Moran (as the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace) goes back to the fact that my former name will always be tethered to my first book. I wanted to reclaim it with a new name, in a sense.

I also want to put in a good word for McSweeney’s here. Perhaps some of the larger publishers can pulp backstock, reprint copies with a new name, and take the financial loss, but McSweeney’s is a small non-profit organization and they did the right thing and reprinted my book with my name on it. I’ve always felt deeply grateful for them, especially Amanda Uhle and Rita Bullwinkel, both amazing authors. They get it.

ER: What draws you to characters whose relationship to literature is so immersive?

PC: A novel can be a vehicle or container of influence, conversation, and perception. The novel as a form is so capacious. I mostly write to be in conversation with other writers, their traditions, techniques and so on. I spend more time reading than writing. Even though I love writing, I don’t do it every day, but I read every day (for work and for my own purposes). When I was in high school, I didn’t have many friends but I spent a lot of time reading and going to bookstores. Friday nights, two friends and I would go to Barnes and Noble or Half Price Books and browse and sit on the floor and read. So to answer your question, I guess I see that my book is made up of other books and writers and it seems silly to ignore that fact or avoid it. I feel hopeful that this acknowledgement adds depth to the narrative and some minor excitement. When I read Bolaño, I’m always excited to read the writers he mentions. I suppose these mentions of other writers also situate my book in the real world, half-in, half-out.

ER: What is your relationship to Thomas Bernhard? I notice certain stylistic echoes—repetition, the constant returning to earlier thoughts and images, which take on different valences as the novel unfolds. At the same time, this novel doesn’t read to me as a strictly “Bernhardian” rant—how do you see your work in relation to his, and where do you feel it diverges?

PC: I’ve read some of the writers who mimic his voice on a syntactical level and I really enjoy those books. But . . . that’s not really what I’m trying to do at all. I think what Bernhard offers me (as a writer) is permission to sidestep descriptions of physical movement and descriptions of people’s physical appearances, which I’ve always had trouble with. A character can spend pages upon pages physically static but Bernhard creates a mood and atmosphere that’s addictive, so as a reader I don’t care if the character is moving through the world or not. My greatest affinity with him is a way of viewing the world. You understand that at their most basic, people can be incredibly grotesque, selfish, small-minded, and cruel. And the world continues to become more absurd by the day. And yet, there’s compassion in his books, they’re not heartless. To be Bernhardian, you have to have an eye (and ear) for absurdity. He is truly a very comic writer. His sense of humor holds up, it’s not dated at all. About divergence, that’s an interesting question. I might be more aligned with the detective/noir genre although The Lime Works could be considered a crime novel, I guess. I could talk about him a lot. Once you know his tricks and techniques, you can spot his influence everywhere.

EJR: It’s been about eight years since Sorry to Disrupt the Peace—how did writing Afternoon Hours feel different this time around?

PC: It took a lot longer. I’m older and slow. I felt blocked for a while because I needed things in my personal life to settle down. During that time, I would write little stories here and there and interview other writers. Writing doesn’t get easier; I think it gets harder because you expect it to get easier the more you do it, but it actually doesn’t, at least not for me. The only time I feel writing is relatively easy is when I’m working on a really short story, and that’s because my short stories are so short, they’re probably closer to prose poems.

This will sound weird but I felt at peace with taking a long time between books. I didn’t want to write a book just for the sake of writing it and trying to get it published. Not everything has to be published, not everything needs to turn into “a book.” 

All of this is to say, I’m not a very strategic writer, I’m almost pure intuition. With my first book, I felt very anxious while writing. What felt different this time was a sense of enchantment. I wanted to be submerged in something weird and uncanny, and I felt that while writing this. I didn’t feel as anxious. Once I knew what I wanted to write about and the particular angle I wanted to explore, writing the book became challenging in a pleasurable way. 

The post The Deepest Readers Do Not Make the Best Detectives  appeared first on Electric Literature.

Via a lyrical and grotesque collage of patent drawings, PowerPoint templates, tables, corporate jargon that feels less appropriated than leaned into, flash fiction, and Barthesian semiotics, /face proposes that first we first need to look in the mirror, then stop conflating looking inward with knowledge of ourselves. For instance, given that every smart phone camera and photo app is now a weapon of surveillance, self-portraiture no longer means what it has long meant in the realms of art, history, and global culture.

Happily, /face’s hybridity doesn’t feel like the product of a project or a dissertated hypothesis. The more one reads, the more /face reveals itself to be a piece of speculative software neither wholly analog nor digital in origin. Like any work of literature, it requires input from readers to make meaning. That /face asks for so much input, and that it activates routines and protocols that feel very different from those employed by other hybrid forms is the most tangible innovation it risks.

Using our own personal modern-day memexes, William Lessard and I spoke via email, Zoom and DMs about day jobs, MAGA plastic surgery disasters, barn poems, predictive algorithms, Billie Holiday, and the architecture of /face.

Joe Milazzo: /face opens with a dedication that also serves as a gentle, maybe even affectionate, provocation: “To Judith and all the readers and poets that know what century this is.” How would you define this century, and how would you say some readers and writers are failing to recognize the times we’re inhabiting?

William Lessard: I think we’re living in a very retrograde time. I don’t think anybody wants the future. While we’ve embraced the efficiencies of technology for the past 30 years, we have resisted the deeper implications. You have people saying, “I don’t want any AI in anything I consume.” But the truth of the matter is that we’ve all been using AI for years; we just haven’t thought of it as such. Spell check, autocomplete, automatic login when you’re buying something online in the middle of the night (or when you’re half in the bag). This is all AI.

When it comes to poetry, as I’ve discussed in a series of essays I’ve written for Jacket2, I don’t see poets giving much thought to the materials they’re using. Even if they’re typing on a laptop, they might as well be composing with a quill by candlelight. And so much poetry gives no thought to experiences or occasions like: “I spent my entire day bouncing between, you know, X/Twitter updates and text messages and all this hypermediated hybrid content.” But, if you have any type of algorithmic intelligence responding to what you’re doing, you’re collaborating with technology. And even if you are the most analog, crunchy, academic poet and you’re writing poems about barns, you’re going to want to show it off. So what do you do? You take a screenshot of it, and you post it on Instagram or Facebook, and guess what? As soon as you do that, your barn poem or your erasure or your Matthew Arnold poem becomes part of the monster that you supposedly hate.

JM: I’d wager that most people who open to the first page of /face would say to themselves, “I am in the presence of an experimental text.” But do you believe the kind of 21^st century poetry you’re describing is necessarily experimental? And is that experimentation necessarily self-reflexive?

WL: The impulse for the book comes out of my day job. For most of my career, I’ve worked as a technology publicist. Anybody who’s ever worked as a publicist, anybody who has been in media knows something about the sixth “w.” On top of who, what, where, when, why, why now. How and why do we continue writing poetry in the age of surveillance capitalism? Experimentation is one way to answer that question. But here’s how I think about experimentation: it just means that I’m going to do something even though I’m not sure it’s going to work out. I don’t see a lot of enthusiasm for experimentation in that sense because of all the precarity in the poetry world—in publishing, in getting acclaim, in landing a teaching job. Creativity seems to be sublimated to those careerist impulses rather than the kind of defiance you find in experimental work.

JM: I feel that defiance most in how visceral /face’s language is. On page 14 alone, we encounter knuckles, fists, chin, cheek, eyes, lips. All of which makes sense from a narrative perspective, as the book is a kind of gloss on the synecdochical violence (and violation) that is facial recognition technology. Can you talk about where the book’s language comes from?

WL: The language in the book is an attempt to capture the texture of contemporary life in a realistic way. And I think the reality that we’re dealing with here is that language isn’t expression in the poetic sense so much as it’s a mediated object. Language is something that inhabits us rather than we inhabit it. With AI, language is being disrupted more than any other technology or medium right now. 

As Americans and people who grew up on democracy, we tend to view speech as sacred. But I don’t think speech is necessarily sacred. I think speech likes to be commodified, and that’s been true for a long time. Take search engine optimization (SEO). Certain words are worth more than other words. Certain words will appear at the top of this algorithm and others won’t. Now we have AI summaries and GEO, which is generative engine optimization which, in a lot of ways, feels like a further advancement or devolution if you will of that concept. Certain language is privileged over other language, and when you see that privilege you understand that language is outside of us. We borrow it for a little while, maybe we move it around a little bit. But how do we make the language matter? I think keeping the language concrete is essential to it mattering.

JM: In a strange way, you see this in the technical documentation that supplies much of the language that creates friction with /face’s visceral, embodied language. What was the poetic potential you saw in that technical documentation?

WL: I’ve been obsessed with documents and technology for a long time. Back in the Web 1.0 era, when you had all of these dot coms that were exaggerating their value, I would read S-1 filings on the SEC website. Because in those documents, companies were legally compelled to tell the truth. And, in so many words, that’s where you would find companies confessing that they had no business model and didn’t foresee making any kind of profit anytime soon. Similarly, later in my career, I was working with a company that was doing real-time animation software. The idea was you would hold your cell phone to your face and it would capture your expressions. So I started looking up all of the Google patents related to facial surveillance. And in those documents, just like in those S-1 filings, the companies would plainly state their intentions: that breaking facial expressions down to micro-expressions is a way of monetizing human subjectivity. The whole idea that we’re each just a series of preferences and behaviors looks really nice if you’re doing some sort of analytics presentation. But the reality is that we are still people. And there are people attached to all of this technology.

JM: /face is, in part, a sampling of the text and imagery from patent documents. How would you describe the different formal elements of /face, and how did they help you make a book out of the themes and concerns you wanted to address?

WL: The book is structured in three parts. There’s the first part, “techniques for creating facial animation using a face mesh,” which is the documentation. Then there’s this hybrid section, “do we have a plan B?(*),” that I wrote during the pandemic. Here, I took PowerPoint templates and improvised language around them. Then there’s a final section, “head template,” where I took a single PowerPoint slide that I worked variations on, changing the colors and tag lines. The idea is that you start with the theoretical, but you always end with the individual.

JM: That’s also a journey from the face—which we believe gives us insight into what someone is feeling and thinking—to the mind, which we view as the seat of thinking and feeling.

WL: We start with the front of the head and end at the back. That’s the path of the book. But in terms of form, /face is also meant as a satire of how blind we are to our social vigilance. So many of us can’t live without taking pictures of ourselves. We take those selfies without thinking about how much damage that does to the environment. And it doesn’t matter how socially vigilant we are. All we care about is our personal brand.

JM: Yet, at the same time, what is a self these days? Is it, to build on the title of a recent essay by Oxana Timofeeva, “The Soul: A Vintage Concept”?

WL: The “Subject Comments” in the book speak to that. If you think of this book as reimagining a social media feed where there’s received language and ads and algorithmic language, the “Subject Comments” were intended to give it some personal heat and show the physical consequences of using technology.

JM: Right. The “mesh” in “facial mesh” isn’t diaphanous or easily escaped. And, even though it’s surgical, this mesh doesn’t heal. This is what the machine is using to analyze people so the people who operate it can predict behaviors and therefore guide those behaviors more efficiently.

WL: I was drawn to “mesh” because, of all the technology buzzwords, it seemed the most organic. You could create a virtual version of yourself or you could compile every one of your preferences into some sort of agentic AI or bot, but it would never really capture the perversity of who you are. At the same time, there’s this impulse of wanting to get beyond the limitations of subjectivity driving technology like this. We now have the monetization of the face down to micro-expressions. We can turn ourselves into revenue streams in ways never before possible. But that only exaggerates every insecurity that we have. 

Lately, everybody’s been talking about looksmaxxing and Scott Galloway’s new nose and Jim Carrey’s new face. To me, this situation exposes just how much the romantic self no longer exists. You could make the argument that it hasn’t existed for at least 60 or 70 years. Meanwhile, people have always wanted to change into something other than human that somehow feels more like themselves.

JM: It seems to me that /face understands that. It’s poetic in that it’s smart enough to allow a reader to do what readers do: occupy an imaginative space where languages (theirs, the book’s) can meld into something I’d call an intelligence, even if it’s ephemeral. But the artificial intelligence /face defies can’t understand it. It can’t really read the personal stories in those “Subject Comments” and know how life experience shapes a face.

WL: Your face is something that you earn and the whole idea that you should erase it in order to make it more monetizable—or in the case of MAGA face, in order make it more appealing to some great leader—is a bad deal. It utterly destroys your face’s value. I was watching a video of Billie Holiday recently. It’s from near the end of her life, and she’s singing some really sad stuff. When she stops singing, you get to watch her listen to the other musicians: Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, Lester Young. You see her smiling and bobbing her head. And you can’t help but think about her face, her ruined face, like the ruined face of Chet Baker. I think that’s the whole story right there. The human truth is far more complicated and beautiful and joyously inexplicable if you only accept it.

The post How to Write Poetry in the Era of Face-Eating Algorithms appeared first on Electric Literature.

Both Mahreen Sohail and Dur e Aziz Amna’s work reflects a turning point in Pakistani literature: a move toward portraying lives as they are, unburdened by Pakistan as an ontological subject. Together, they represent a new guard of writers probing ambition, morality, and selfhood with nuance and precision. Sohail’s debut novel, Small Scale Sinners, is a kaleidoscopic story collection that interrogates what it means to be good across moments of intimacy, betrayal, and quiet rupture. Amna’s latest novel, A Splintering, follows Tara, a woman navigating class, ambition, and desire as she moves from a rural village to the capital, pushing against the limits of the life she’s been given.

Basmah Sakrani: If you think about the protagonists in your books—Tara in Dure’s, and any one of the women from Mahreen’s stories—what would they recognize in each other? What would feel familiar or unfamiliar?

Dur e Aziz Amna: I can go first. In full disclosure, I read Mahreen’s book a long time ago, so apologies if my memory is murky. But the one line that really stuck with me in “The Newlyweds” is that what really makes a woman is the flexible way in which she is able to change the nature of who she is, depending on her relationships. I am paraphrasing, but it struck me so much that I remember highlighting it.

I feel like that is also Tara, putting on the face she needs with every new person, being flexible in her idea of who she is, adapting based on who she is with.

Mahreen Sohail: Dure, I was looking through your book again this morning. Something that felt very familiar to me was that Tara is always reaching. And I think the women in my stories are also reaching, either for love or for something else.

Another thing I noticed was this disappointment with men, a slow, creeping disillusionment. I think that would feel familiar to many of the characters in my stories as well. 

BS: Both of your books feature characters who commit transgressive acts. As you are writing your characters and they become more real to you, how do you both decide where that moral line lies? What are you thinking when you decide to push something further or ignore that line?

MS: I am not sure that when I was writing, I was thinking about moral lines. Maybe that comes later, in the editing process, and certainly now, as I’m talking about the book.

Overall, there is this idea of women just living their lives. When you are in the midst of living, you are not thinking, this is the line I am crossing. And if the characters are well-rounded enough, it feels believable that they cross those lines, even in the context of a culture or a society like ours.

I am thinking about the story with the child soldiers, which is ambiguous. The sisters in it commit this act of kidnapping a girl. But I am hoping that the sisters’ backstory and their grief over their mother are enough to show how those choices could come about. So, it is not necessarily about crossing the moral line as much as it is about what kind of situation would allow someone to cross it. And often that happens organically. The characters do take over.

DAA: It’s funny you say that it’s in talking about the book when you realize these things. With Tara, she’s telling the story in retrospect, right? We start off with her saying, hey, I’ve done something really bad, hear me out. But it’s the fact that she can see those moral lines more clearly because she’s looking back at them.

In the moment, as Mahreen said, she’s very much just living her life and making the choices that she needs to, to survive or thrive or get ahead or whatever we would like to call it.

BS: I want to talk about being Pakistani writers. Pakistan appears differently in both your books, and I think both of you make this decision of kind of not naming the thing. Dure, you made up the village where Tara comes from, and Mahreen, you don’t name Pakistan at all, but it’s very evident in the description. How consciously do you think about that when you are creating something?

DAA: Yeah, that’s such a great question. I feel like I either have nothing to say about this or way too much.

With American Fever, it was a book very cognizant of the fact that it’s about this girl who’s from Pakistan just by the nature of what she’s doing, which is this exchange program. She feels like she’s representing the place, and then she feels the oppressiveness of that expectation.

With A Splintering, I wanted to leave all of that behind, which is why a lot of things are not named. Even the city that ends up being named, Mazinagar, is fictional, mostly because there’s so much vitriol in Tara’s language about the place that I didn’t want any small town in Pakistan to receive that.

I would have really liked to just completely strip away the proper nouns of places and markers. I also didn’t want there to be any Urdu in the book and sometimes that puzzles people, but I think I’m still trying to figure it out.

I fear that anytime you put in too much specificity, it detracts from the experience because the book can become this anthropological text versus just the story of the people who the story is about. But I’m not convinced that’s the exact solution.

MS: Yeah, I feel you, Dure. I found when I named places, they became associated with all of my specific feelings and attachments to a place. So not naming gave me this way of writing a range of experiences, a range of women who can do whatever they want, whereas otherwise, I feel like if I had named Pakistan, specifically Islamabad, I would have pigeonholed these stories into my version of it.

In some ways, it also feels like a lack. Would I be able to write a story that is very specifically Pakistani and named as such, and would it be good? So I don’t know if it’s me putting a Band-Aid on something or if it’s a good narrative choice. This one is tough for me as well.

DAA: I love that. I think naming things can also be a bit of a block for the writer.

BS: I loved how you both approached the answer to this question because in your responses, there’s this element of protection of Pakistan. Dure, you’re protecting the place from other people projecting things because of how you describe it. And Mahreen, you’re also very protective of your own ability to write beyond the place and write bigger than just the place.

DAA: Post 9/11, there was a lot of literature, some of it very good, which dealt so consciously with Pakistan as this place that either had to be explained or defended. Pakistan with a very capital P. Perhaps I was working against that. Just a small-p pakistan where it’s just a place, the way any place is a place where people live their ordinary lives.

BS: I want to transition to a question about form. Dure, you’ve written two very distinct novels. And Mahreen, you’ve got this collection, and you’re playing around a lot with form inside it. Does the form come first? Do you find relief or comfort in the conventions of the form you’re writing in?

MS: For some of the stories, the form does come first, and it helps contain the story. It defines the nature of what the story can be. But for a lot of them, it was the voice, and I don’t always know what’s going to come first.

“The Sisters” was written as a very traditional short story with a beginning, middle, and end, but it felt a little bit boring to me, so I went in and picked the lines I liked and was like, what if I just had this?

DAA: With both the novels, the voice emerged first and then the form followed.

But I’ve also learned to leave a lot of the certainties of writing by the wayside. You are always surprised and changed by your understanding of who you are as a writer. With the first book, there was an emphasis on language, culture, and cultural assimilation. That completely went by the wayside with the second. And with this third book, it doesn’t feel as voice driven, it feels more like a book about ideas.

BS: So, with that, I’m curious to understand something about how you both create. And I’ll preface this by saying I hate the word process. It just feels so erudite. But in terms of your writing style, are you outliners and planners, or are you feelers? Or is it a mix of both?

DAA: I’m not a planner at all. I still try to make notes, but then those notes get lost and they’re always, for some reason, loose leaf. So, I never know where they are. They’re never in a diary assigned for that project.

At some point you realize that’s the kind of person you are, and you live with it. But at least with the first two books, I knew what would happen at the end. I always know how the book will end, but the way we’re going to get there is very much a discovery.

MS: Yeah, I am so not a planner as well. I also do not even know how the thing will end. I find that if I plan something, it takes the magic out of it.

BS: That is very reassuring and validating, I have to admit. I’ve tried, and I’m now at the point [of] realizing I’m not one of these people. I can’t maintain this thing in a spreadsheet.

What is something in your books or your stories, a small detail, that you’re like, oh my God, I’m so proud of this?

DAA: I wish I had something I could turn to, something to hold onto in my moments of low self-esteem. This will be my homework. I will go back and find something to be proud of.

MS: I will tell you, Dure, one of the things in A Splintering that I thought was amazing was our relationship with Hamad, the husband. It was so nuanced, so well done, both his characterization and Tara’s evolving feelings towards him. It’s hard to believe you are not a planner.

For me, it’s the title. My editor came up with the title for the book, and I do quite like it. So maybe this is a moment for low self-esteem, I couldn’t even come up with a title.

BS: But you had the phrase in your story, so it was there. Who came up with your title, Dure?

DAA: The book initially sold as Farewell, Province. I came up with it and was still somewhat attached to it, but every single person hated it. It was a resounding failure, and the title we ended up with was one of 10 I’d sent in an email. It’s so funny, because I had to reverse engineer the part where it’s mentioned in the book.

BS: What are you reading right now?

MS: Just last night, I think I finished it in a day, was My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. I had preconceptions going in because the books are everywhere, but I loved it. I thought it was beautiful, calming, steadying. It was like reading someone’s diary.

I also just finished Mohammad Hanif’s Rebel English Academy and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This is Where the Serpent Lives.

DAA: I’m thinking of Elena Ferrante’s interviews where she says that all books she grew up reading as a child were by men. Thankfully, I never had that problem. I’ve actually placed a moratorium on myself after getting so saturated with thinking about women while writing A Splintering. So now I’ve vowed to read books by men. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a novel with a fully male protagonist. So part of it is subconscious research, an anthropological interest in what are men exactly.

BS: How about you, Mahreen? What are you trying to do next?

MS: I am not writing much. I have a two-year-old, and I just do not know where the time goes. I do have another book I finished while I was pregnant that I’m hoping to send out. I have the ideas of a novel, but you never know where that goes.

BS: Are you both early morning writing people?

DAA: Sometimes people who don’t have kids ask me this question. I’m like, do you understand what it’s like to have this little thing that can entirely disrupt your day? This is what decides what my routine is for the day. Truly, my routine is at the mercy of the kids, but when things are working smoothly, I write in the mornings after breakfast and tap out by the afternoon.

The one thing I know is that it comes in spurts. There are times when I really, really want to write, and then I have to get all of that done, it becomes a distraction, a thing hanging over my head if I don’t do it.

MS: Before I had a baby, I could write at night. Now, after I get home from work and do bedtime, my brain is done.

Something strange also happened to me after having a kid: It’s become harder to write because the stakes for my characters don’t seem high enough. And in my life, they suddenly seem very high: I have this thing to keep alive. 

DAA: So what exactly does that mean? Did you mean your work as a writer feels like it has to now compete with your role as a mother? Or are you saying that what your characters are going through seems minuscule compared to your role as a mother?

MS: It seems terrible to do things to my characters, to do terrible things to them in a world that my son is growing up in. You know what I mean? That’s what it feels like to me. And it’s a very strange feeling.

BS: Last question. Mahreen, I was going through your other interviews, and in your interview in The Offing, you said this:

The women in these stories, and in some way many of us in real life, are wrestling with the question of how to be the best version of ourselves in our relationships—as sisters, brothers, wives, husbands, aunts, mothers—while still maintaining our independence. How do you keep some of yourself for yourself, and what is lost in the process?

So, with the discussion we’ve had today about womanhood and motherhood and being writers and having relationships and jobs and dreams and ambitions, how do you both keep some of yourself? And what do you feel like you lose in the process?

DAA: There’s this line by David Brooks, about how growing up, becoming an adult, is just how well you give up your individual freedoms and take on responsibilities.

Motherhood was really the first time where I truly felt a full abdication of the person I used to be. It was irrevocable. More than marriage, more than anything else. Now, I can’t even think of myself as anything else. The person that you are, there has to be a new person who comes in and takes that form of you.

I will stop talking now because I think I’m trying to say something, but it’s not coming out the way I want it to.

BS: It’s making sense to me.

MS: You are both further along the journey than I am. I think I have struggled to come to terms with the fact that I am fully this new person because of the small being that is co-opting me completely.

I am always finding ways to see, how can I get this part of my mental space back? It was useful to hear you say you have to just fully embrace who you are now, because I have been seeing it almost as a failing that I haven’t been able to get that version of my brain back. It is good to hear that you can’t go back to who you used to be.

The post Pakistani Literature That Refuses to Pigeonhole Its Setting appeared first on Electric Literature.

When I read Nana’s name, I skidded cartoonishly across the floor to tell my husband and then responded to the email as quickly and coherently as possible that I needed to switch into his class. I had a deep admiration for his words and how he chose to bare them to the world. My gut is always loud and demanding, but I had just started to try this new thing called “listening to it.” It was the right choice. During the semester, Nana and I found common ground over our very millennial memories and growing up in New York. We were both also dissed for having Android phones and being born in the 1900s. But most importantly, I discovered that we were united by the belief that genre is a prison. 

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has defied conventions his whole career. His writing blends surrealism with radical portraiture and horror with hope, often providing social commentary on the world around him. His short story collection, Friday Black, and debut novel, Chain Gang All-Stars, both received awards and critical acclaim. Nana’s also hell-bent on pursuing new creative challenges. So, when I learned that he was releasing a debut album,The Pisces Sciatica, I was curious about how music as a medium would evolve his work. I couldn’t wait to hear how installing new wings allowed him to fly again.

Ashley Leone: What about music liberates you to write more autobiographically?

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: People consider me a prose artist. But The Pisces Sciatica was gonna be a look at my life, and I didn’t want to do that in the same medium. In some ways, the things that I fear about music made it very attractive to me. I’m so craft-focused as a writer, but there’s a rawness in my naivete as a rapper. And I’m not saying that craft makes you a liar, but I can curate the truth into oblivion if I really want to. There was something powerful to speaking about these last couple years of my life with my actual lived-in voice, which is a less finely tuned instrument. It just felt more honest.

AL: What is meaningful to you about rap as a genre for storytelling?

NKAB: I’m from a place called Spring Valley, Rockland County, and even before I ever wrote for real, people were sitting in cars and freestyling. Music is the medium I take in most, probably, because it’s so easily embedded into your day. The artists whose work is closest to my heart are musicians.

For me, making music has a lot to do with needing something for my mind to do when I’m stressed or scared. I think on a loop. So, I listen to instrumentals and write raps to them. I have some obsessive tendencies, anyone with anxiety can connect to that. But with music, it feels natural and kind of fun to be in these repetitive loops.

AL: Is there a specific track on the album that felt most vulnerable for you to write? 

NKAB: “The Pisces Sciatica” is a song about my father and his passing, and me working with him through his cancer. The end of that first verse is “I hate it half the time, because I’m the one who signed Do Not Resuscitate.” Even saying it right now, it’s hard. It’s not something I really talk about, but for me, that was one of those moments that justified the entire project. It’s almost like I have to scream the truth in a forest where no one’s there before I go on with writing it. The music felt like this kind of empty forest for me. I’m slowly getting myself ready to write about those things in some way, shape, or form. But I am scared of it. I have so much admiration for memoirists.

AL: Have you written any fiction that’s felt just as raw and intimate to write?

NKAB: In my first book, there’s a story called “Things My Mother Said.” I think if you’re an artist, you feel this often: I just gotta say this thing. Then “The Hospital Where” is my first version of meta-analysis about writing. You could see I was already getting critical about the pursuit of an artistic existence. Those stories are like the prequel to The Pisces Sciatica.

AL: On this album, there are various references to arts, artists, and culture, like Icarus, Smokey Robinson, Emperor’s New Groove,“making weight” in sports . . . What are the mediums that influenced this album but maybe didn’t make it in as a reference? What are the artforms this album couldn’t exist without?

NKAB: Some of the important ones are the ones you named. I like big, mythic, well-known stories that have a universal lesson, that you can interpret differently if you want to. Like Icarus—the album pretty much starts on that idea, which is kind of dark.

AL: But Icarus gets off the ground. He’s figured out how!

NKAB: Exactly. My best friend messaged me, “People forget he can fly.” 

The album wouldn’t exist if I didn’t have exposure to rap artists like J. Cole or Kendrick, especially their deep-cut, soul-sampling songs. I couldn’t make this without a project like The Water[s] by Mick Jenkins. And I would never in another context name my own stuff, but I just know that I couldn’t make this without writing “Things My Mother Said” or “The Hospital Where” first. They helped me feel brave enough that I could.

AL: Something that I love about hybrid art is that it can only exist because of the artist who makes it. Because you’re coming from your own context, all your positionalities and intersectionalities, whatever makes you you, including your artforms. How do you feel this album specifically contextualizes you in the world? What are you representing of yourself? I heard that Goku reference, and I was like, 12-year-old Nana is so pumped that he could put this in a song.

NKAB: I actually got chills when you said that because I just did therapy before this, and we were talking about that kind of stuff. Doing inner child work has been a big breakthrough for me in general.

The front cover of The Pisces Sciatica is a place I lived in when I was young, and the back cover is of the place I lived in when I was even younger than that. So, it’s absolutely teen/adolescent Nana who’s been trapped in this context because he’s decided he has to fix this thing, and he’s been killing himself trying to become an author.

I wouldn’t say I’m a super happy person, but the people pleaser in me, with the people I’m codependent with, that part of me really likes presenting in a certain kind of heroic way. It’s savior complex stuff. My professional life also really likes that part of me, too. I’m not the most zodiac-y person, but my rising sign is Leo, and I think that part of me is the part that people see. 

There’s [a] little bit of hype and cool on the album, but the inner sad boy is powering everything else. 

AL: In fiction, some of the most compelling characters are the ones that live in their contradictions. “Best Right Now,” which is a more vulnerable, “sad boy” track, is juxtaposed with “And The Miracles,” which is a confident, boastful song. That tension is a good example of how to build a character. So, I wondered how your experience writing fiction informed how you compiled your album. How did you order your track list? How does that compare to assembling a short story collection?

NKAB: I feel like a huge part of being a writer is being able to oscillate between a macro and micro attention to whatever it is you’re doing. I would say macro is more like the structure of a song or a story, and then mega macro is the order. In [ordering] the short story collection, I was imagining it like it was a playlist. 

Now I’m actually making a playlist. The album intro is “Faith and the King.” The vibe is melancholic, the BPM is less, it’s serious. Then “Best Right Now” right after that is a really sad song. In terms of vibes, I can’t just depress everybody. So, then, “And The Miracles” is a fun moment. I do rapper shade. It’s braggadocious. I’m trying to be cool, like, “I’ve been catching bodies” but in the alley of work. You gotta keep some playfulness. I’m always thinking about that. 

The micro-level is the thing I pay most attention to. In this project, I am interested in how I can tell the truth but still be vigilant. Like, being aware of syllables, keeping the rhyme, double entendres. I am thinking with that same level of acuity. I hope.

AL: Revision is an important part of your practice as a prose writer. I know a bit about how that works for you on the page, but how does it work for you when making music? You’re considering many layers—writing lyrics, making beats, working on tone and BPM—lots of elements to be revised.

NKAB: For me, the first stage of revision is somewhere written down, and I just keep doing it until it feels perfect. It’s not that dissimilar to [prose] writing on some level. I have to be able to say it in my head without tripping once. If I trip, it means some syllable’s off, something’s a little weird.

Then, I get to the stage where I start singing out loud to myself, and it changes again. I start moving this word or that word, I look for additional meanings, see if I can get some double, triple entendres. Revision is even more of a discovery in rap. 

In “Ellison,” I said something about medaling, but I was like, wait, medaling sounds like meddling, like meddling kids. So, “Mystery Machine or Team USA, we meddling/medaling.” 

Then, one of my favorite bars in this whole album: “In this life, you could be Vince or Frédéric Weis.” Frédéric Weis is the guy Vince Carter jumped over on the USA basketball team, that famous dunk. “And if I’m offered the choice, always gonna write/right,” like right-handed dunk over him. Then I said, “going straight over your head, black boy flying, they prefer if he was dead.” Black Boy, Richard Wright. Wright like “write/right” from before.

You start digging, you find a little gold, and then you keep going. I wrote that in a hotel when I was working on Chain Gang on a four-day staycation, and I remember being like, wait, am I the best? Revision in rap is crazy because you find explosive gems, which is maybe as, or more, satisfying than revision in fiction.

AL: This goes back to being a hybrid artist and having your hybrid interests inform all your work. Because every reference you make and all the wordplay is so specific that it could only be from you.

NKAB: Yeah, what you reference creates a portrait of who you are. I don’t know how many NBA fans also know Richard Wright, but you could tell I wasn’t worried about other people getting it.

AL: You’re just bringing every part of you, and then when someone understands it or recognizes it—

NKAB: That’s a cool feeling. I feel very grateful for a moment where someone’s caring and they’re being attentive. But even with book stuff, it’s somewhat rare. There’s not enough specificity in general. Maybe it’s just inherently easier with music.

AL: How has collaborating in music inspired you to shift your fiction writing practices, if at all?

NKAB: I think I’m less afraid of collaboration in general now. I just wrote and directed a short film that we shot a little bit ago, and it’s one of the most gratifying artistic experiences I’ve ever had, actually. And that’s all collaboration. With writing, it’s just us.

Getting edited is a very intimate experience, you know? I’ve obviously read your work. You can tell when someone cares and puts effort and thinks about it deeply in a serious way. And it’s a special kind of thing. Getting engineered is almost more intimate than that.

My experience was particular because Mike Mitch is a rapper’s-rapper and the engineer on the entire project. I look up to him. He’s one of my best friends and I’m getting his mentorship. It took us several years to do this, and over the course of the project, his dad was alive and then he wasn’t. So, to your point previously, he understands The Pisces Sciatica more now.

And talk about being obsessive, engineers have to listen to the thing a million times.

My regular writing process is still very solitary. I need to be a little bit alone sometimes. But you know what? I’ve sent some stuff to my agent earlier than I ever have, and maybe that’s influenced by the music. I’m trying to get a little less precious about everything. Sometimes I take a really long time. I’ve had stories for 10 or 12 years that no one has seen. And I like them!

But conversely, I finished a story yesterday that I started probably three months ago that I’ll send her. I’m trying to be more open to the idea that collaboration is not a thing that taints something, but that grows something. Whereas music is different for me—I share unmixed demos with people. Maybe what music has helped me remember is that I trust my vision enough that a wayward eye won’t destroy the project.

AL: To quote S.A.A.M: “What’s the point of dropping gems just to leave it in the vault?” The novel you wrote in college—will it ever see the light of day?

NKAB: No, no, no. That’s not a gem. I’m gonna try . . . you know what? I’m gonna completely redo it.

AL: Well, there’s something that inspired you to make it, and whatever kernel of truth exists in that is worth holding onto.

NKAB: There is a cool kernel. Everything else is not good. I just didn’t have the craft. I didn’t have the ability.

AL: Are there any other modes of artistic expression that you feel drawn to do or that you want to venture into next?

NKAB: I’ve been into photography and film, but I’ve stepped into the short film stuff right now, and it’s really sickening. It’s my whole personality. I’m sorry to my students because we screened like four short films in our last class. 

AL: Any last thoughts to share?

NKAB: I’m really grateful for every single person that listens to this. I’m really grateful that you listened to it. Even one person enjoying [it] is really nice for me. 

I also want to highlight the mix. Mike Mitch did so much cool shit in the mix. It’s just very impressive. That’s another thing about collaboration. You feel better about saying how good your shit is, because it’s not just you.

The post Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Turns to Music appeared first on Electric Literature.