In this episode we discuss censorious forces then and now, including the Moral Majority, Tipper Gore, Ron DeSantis, and the liberal and left-leaning scolds currently being dubbed “Woke 1.0.” We also talk about Tony Soprano, , , , Judy Blume, Mark Twain, Bret Easton Ellis, Anthony Burgess, Harold Bloom, Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Leonora Carrington, and others. Finally, we scratch our heads over (and attempt to ban) the fiction of Clarice Lispector, and memorialize the late, great fantasy (and so much more) author John Crowley.

The Literarian Gazette

Censorship!

Topics: Did you know that since 2021 PEN America has documented 23,000 book bans, more than at any other time in US history? In July, Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself” caused a stir at South Florida State College when a professor was suspended for teaching it by college president and inbred moron Fred Hawkins. We also discuss online pile…

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21 days ago · 1 like · The Literarian Gazette

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Herein and I also discuss: Philip Roth, Raymond Queneau, Honor Levy, Madeleine Cash, Kobayashi Issa, Ted Hughes, Morgan Bassichis and their show Can I Be Frank, Frank Maya, and much more. Listen here:

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Ambition!

Are you fighting enough? Are you centering yourself? Are you making enough? Hitting the gym? Cracking the whip? Are you high status enough? Are all your enemies dead? Are you cool enough? Are you elite enough? Are you killing it, serving cunt, whipping ass, beating down doors, turning over desks, clasping your dreams by the balls and slaying, crushing, …

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a month ago · 1 like · The Literarian Gazette

Also, does Cass Sunstein seriously believe Obsession is the greatest movie ever made? What did the New Yorker fiction editor see in the Ayşegül Savaş story “Many Worlds”? Do you have a commonplace book? Ever memorize a poem? What do 6,000 people around the world have in common? These and other questions, and I attempt to answer in this, the third episode of our podcast, The Insufferable Bastards.

The Literarian Gazette

Episode the 3rd: Mediocrity!

This episode is for true Insufferable Bastard fans. We issue an important correction regarding the Granta/Commonwealth Prize A.I. scandal. We also discuss why we began the show, Roger Ebert, Lars von Trier, physically going to the damn movie theater, long-ass movies, the standards of art in our time…

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2 months ago · The Literarian Gazette

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The movie’s marketing campaign hinges on a secret, the supposed source of the titular drama, revealed by Zendaya’s Emma when her friends push her to tell them about the worst thing she’s ever done. It doesn’t matter much whether you know her secret going in, because what moves the plot is the ways in which her fiancee, Robert Pattinson’s Charlie, attempts to assimilate this shocking information into his understanding of Emma, in the week leading up to their wedding.

The truth is that Emma didn’t actually do anything, but rather came extremely close as a teenager to committing an act that is horrific and very American. In the aftermath, Charlie forces her to delve into the details with him, searching desperately for a reason—a trauma—that explains how she was driven to such a point. He searches, too, for the crisis of conscience that stopped her from carrying out the act. But there’s no obviously satisfying origin story, and Emma didn’t go through with it due more to random circumstance than out of the goodness of her heart. What’s incredible is how hilarious “The Drama” manages to make all this.

I don’t think Charlie ever considers calling off the wedding, but he does struggle in increasingly buffoonish ways to make it feel okay (all hail the unself-conscious Pattinson, maybe our best and weirdest Millennial movie star), in the process committing a number of misdeeds himself. Under the surface of the story are the obvious questions about what constitutes a “red flag” in a romantic object, about the essential unknowability of others, about what we can live with in a marriage. And on a deeper level, the film considers the latent violence that could lurk in anyone or perhaps everyone, and what it is about this country in particular that pulls it out of people in such frequent and devastating ways. All this comes to a head in an—again, hilarious—conversation Charlie has with the friends (Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie) who compelled Emma to confess in the first place.

Alana Haim’s Rachel is, I think, the movie’s villain and the true source of the drama. Her own “worst” is grotesque in a way she doesn’t seem to entirely own up to, and she turns on Emma and holds onto her outrage and contempt in a way that suggests projection. The film’s director, Kristoffer Borgli, previously made the movie “Dream Scenario,” which was marketed as a fantastical comedy but was actually about cancellation and punishment. “The Drama,” on the other hand, is about mercy. By the end of the film, Charlie has created his own disaster that Emma must find a way to assimilate into her concept of him, and we believe that she will.

I’m surprised by how mixed the critical reception has been, and especially thrown by Manohla Dargis’ review in the New York Times, which seems to miss several essential points of “The Drama.” She notes, for instance, how Emma is played by another actor in the flashbacks to her troubled teen years, which

means that Zendaya never gets the opportunity to develop her character with the same complexity or flamboyant expressivity that Pattinson employs with such madcap brio. Unlike Charlie, whose inner life emerges as he falls apart — his raw emotions seeping through the cracks of his being — Emma remains essentially, disappointingly unknowable.

But she must be, to some degree, unknowable. Charlie is really our point of view character, for one, and what Emma almost did is unfathomable, so she she also should remain a little out of reach. It’s clear she feels horror and shame about it—she vomits every time she’s compelled to tell the story—and we are shown her isolation as a teen, and her confusion, and the worrying amount of time she spends at her computer. That there is no moment of: See? This is why she almost did what she did! is a strength.

Dargis concludes her review in an even more baffling way, focusing on ethnicity:

The most shocking thing about “The Drama,” though, is that despite its roguish humor, flashes of surrealism and bellicose outrageousness, it is finally an old-fashioned story about a guy, who happens to be white, consumed by his fear of a beautiful, intelligent woman who happens to be Black. That Borgli avoids engaging with race — Emma and Charlie never discuss it — is certainly a choice, one that sticks with you longer than anything else onscreen.

That’s the most shocking thing in this, yes, provocative film? Perhaps if you live in a perpetual 2016. At what point does preoccupation with people’s physical traits to the exclusion of all else that’s fascinating about them horseshoe around to being racist? Charlie is certainly intimidated by Emma from the jump, and if that turns to fear it’s the fear of her being so much more complicated than he realized. Why would you want to take a rare instance of a female character being granted such complexity and boil it down to a matter of black and white?

I don’t think race is avoided—what’s avoided is making subtext text. One could easily deduce that the bullying Emma experiences in high school is at least in part racially motivated, and that maybe some of Rachel’s animus toward her is, too. (Rachel is married to a black man, of whom at one point she says, wrongly, that he “grew up around guns.”)

I was reminded of another subversive dark comedy, Vice Principals, in which the characters played by Danny McBride and Walton Goggins set out to destroy the black woman who has been hired as principal at their high school. Of course their campaign of terror is informed by her gender and race; McBride’s entire career has been spent skewering a particular brand of white masculinity, entitlement, and resentment. It takes a special kind of control—and trust in the viewer—to keep all this implicit.

One senses that what Dargis wanted was for Emma to tell us, explicitly, that her near-crime was a response to racial trauma, as though that would make it make sense. But that’s not what this movie is about, making it all make sense. Nor should it be, because the real horror it satirizes never will.

Then there is the robust body of contemporary fiction by women that paints motherhood, at best, in an ambivalent light. In Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, the protagonist becoming a mother means sacrificing her preferred identity as an “art monster,” that is, one of those people who “only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.” In the film adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, about an overwhelmed stay-at-home mother who each night transforms, or believes she transforms, into a dog, the main character, played by Amy Adams, is asked by her baffled husband what happened to the woman he married. “She died in childbirth,” she says.

noted that these stories equating the birth of a child with the death of a mother’s self aren’t exactly encouraging people to start families:

Indeed, what feels actually transgressive now is to cop to relishing one’s role as a mom. “Really enjoying motherhood. Am I crazy? Or just naive?” one mom asked on a parenting subreddit. Yeah, lady, you’re out of your mind! Who could possibly delight in a thing like their own child? Friends and I have spoken (very much in private) about how strangely taboo it feels to share our parenting joys. It’s not like it’s exclusively bliss—we are not Stepford Wives—but kvetching about the challenges tends to be far better-received in the wider world.

The bulk of the motherhood regret stories have to do not with the real and devastating structural and material issues that make child-rearing a struggle for poor parents but with intangibles, like loss of freedom and loss of self, which I’d think well-to-do moms have comparatively more time to think about. No question one’s own needs can be easily and swiftly subsumed in caring for another, but is this the same thing as annihilation? Does you really risk being lost forever?

I have trouble with these questions because they assume a fixity of the self that I am not convinced is there. Buddhists hold that what we call the self is the result of the process of thinking, that is, that there is no “self” that exists independently of that. And in the process of brain-mapping, the Big Think reports, neuroscientists have yet to find any neural location in which the self resides. That said,

Your illusionary self — the voice in your head — is very convincing. It narrates the world, determines your beliefs, replays your memories, identifies with your physical body, manufactures your projections of what might happen in the future, and creates your judgments about the past. It is this sense of self that we feel from the moment we open our eyes in the morning to the moment we close them at night.

This illusionary self—and its narrative powers—is perhaps what is causing the most anguish for these women who feel they have been destroyed by becoming mothers. The stories they’ve told themselves about themselves—I’m a this sort of person, not a that sort of person—have been effaced by the massive transformations having a child brings about. Elsewhere in Dept. of Speculation, the protagonist reflects:

How had she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

Call me crazy, but I find that beautiful. This is the description of a humbling, a mind opening, an expansion. I’ve been told that since becoming a mother, I’ve also become a number of other things I used to view derisively. If there is no self, if we are not a fixed constellation of traits, beliefs, opinions, etc., then that is less hypocritical than it is inevitable. And it is not only becoming parent that will bring this about, make us into people for whom there is nothing we are sure we will never be.

A 2019 New Yorker article touches upon this in its exploration of decision-making and the impossibility of making a truly “informed” decision about something as transformational as having children. “Are we in charge of the ways we change?” the author, Joshua Rothman, asks:

Before having children, you may enjoy clubbing, skydiving, and LSD; you might find fulfillment in careerism, travel, cooking, or CrossFit; you may simply relish your freedom to do what you want. Having children will deprive you of these joys. And yet, as a parent, you may not miss them. You may actually prefer changing diapers, wrangling onesies, and watching “Frozen.” These activities may sound like torture to the childless version of yourself, but the parental version may find them illuminated by love, and so redeemed. You may end up becoming a different person—a parent. The problem is that you can’t really know, in advance, what “being a parent” is like.

The person I was pre-motherhood slept in; the person I am now is awake by 7 am every day at the latest—one of countless shifts since having my son. And yet I feel within myself continuity. The self I believe myself to be now isn’t now walled off from the previous one, though I can recognize plenty of changes, and surely there are many more that I don’t see but others do. “Whatever is there to discover at the bottom of your soul, whether dross or treasure, motherhood will help you find it,” writes Lisa Marchiano, a Jungian psychologist, in her book Motherhood: Facing & Finding Yourself. Whether you believe there is such a thing as a soul or a self to face and to find is obviously a matter of contention, but parenting does seem to pull out of you things you didn’t know were there.

One of my favorite literary depictions of motherhood is Karen Russell’s short story, “Orange World,” in which a new mom is blackmailed by a demon into breastfeeding it in the gutter across the street from the house where her newborn sleeps. The demon has told her harm will come to the baby unless she does this. These nightly nursing sessions are terrifying and painful. And then there is the nursing of her actual child:

The milk satisfies hunger and thirst; it moves softly between their bodies, quieting both of them. Joy has been the great surprise of motherhood. The flood of love for the baby is so fierce that she is always trying to qualify it to herself, to hide it from her own inner sight. Hormones—of course it’s all hormones. Hormones? Under her chin, the baby burps. He is wearing pajamas that make him look like a tiny medieval friar. The love winging around the room scares her with its annihilating force. It’s loosening the corset strings of her history, the incarcerated fat of “personality.” She and the baby are one body again, nourishing itself.

Russell sort of splits the difference, with annihilation as the perhaps-happy product of previously-unknown joy and love (and note how “personality” is in quotes). And she captures, at the end of the story, what has been for me the most significant change that comes with becoming a mother, when the protagonist realizes during a phone call that her own mother felt for her exactly how she feels for her child:

She cradles her son. She cradles the phone. Remotely, her mother is cradling her.

Finding oneself to be a link in a great chain, part of something unfathomably huge: well, I may not be a self, but I am that.

To tell the truth, I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave. That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe. Whenever I spent time with my pious Uncle Ricky, and the moment came for everyone around the table to bow their heads, close their eyes, and thank God for a plate of escovitch fish, I could all too easily convince myself that I, too, was a witness of Jehovah. I’d see myself leaving the island, arriving in freezing England, shivering and gripping my own mother’s hand, who was—in this peculiar fictional version—now my older sister.

I don’t claim I imagined any of this correctly—only compulsively.

And then another question came up, toward the end of the class, as the conversation turned more directly to writing. A girl asked me if I thought it was okay to write about a character of a different background from herself.

Usually what people mean when they say “different background” is race, ethnicity, sometimes gender or sexuality. This question used to come up all the time. Without fail, I fielded it in every writing class I taught, for years. The anxiety around this seemed to have subsided lately, a fever that broke. But maybe not. It’s the question Smith takes on in that 2019 essay, arguing that yes, it is “presumptuous” to enter in fiction the worlds of people unlike yourself, but that presumption is, in fact, the whole point. She took up this argument again recently at the Hay Festival, speaking against the “policing of correctness”:

It doesn’t make any sense that a Frenchman writes inside the body of a woman so convincingly that women around the world say, Madame Bovary, c’est moi. But it’s what happens, what’s possible in fiction. There’s no defense for it. It’s irresponsible. Fiction is fundamentally irresponsible.

That it still needs to be said, that fiction’s irresponsibility still needs to be defended, suggests that there is still a lot of fear and suspicion around writing characters who do not match, in whatever way, the author’s own traits.

This is roughly what I tell my students who are worrying about this: Of course you can write about someone different from yourself. Because a beauty of fiction is how it allows us to enter the lives of others. Because we can find there, in those others, much to connect with. Because we’re all drawing from the same pool of human experience. Because when you write about an x or a y or z, it’s not incumbent upon you to express the experiences of every person with x or y or z traits. Your responsibility is to make that one x or y or z person feel real and alive. Because even if I write about a mostly-straight middle-class Jewish woman from Long Island, which is what I “am,” if we are reducing what we are to such traits, there will be many other mostly-straight middle-class Jewish women from Long Island who do not find themselves particularly spoken for by my depiction.

So why not go further afield? But, caveat: do so with intention. Don’t just toss in characters with randomly selected traits. Just as you would with any character’s psyche or personality or history, you give them, as their creator, not a random grab bag of qualities but ones that add up to, again, someone who feels real and alive.

Although I must admit that I myself don’t always make these choices, or any creative choices, entirely consciously. Should my second novel ever find a home, if some critic were to ask me why I made one of its main characters a black woman, if I were being honest, I’d say, “Because that’s what she is.”

As in, that’s how she showed up. Which sounds mystical, but it is that way sometimes. And which I do think is different from randomly selecting qualities, or from assigning a character x identity to fulfill some sort of quota or attract some sort of audience. Many artists have remarked upon being smarter, better on the page than they are in “real life,” that is, when they are operating intuitively or in a flow state or whatever you want to call it. When I was in grad school, a woman in one of my workshops wrote a short story which ended in the protagonist biting a stranger who was waiting on line in front of him at the store. And another student argued that it would better serve the story to have him do something other than bite. Why does he have to bite?

“But that’s what he does,” the writer answered.

That’s right, I thought. This particular character of mine, her traits do serve the novel, I think, because she’s the colleague of my narrator, a white man, and their work requires the two of them to travel the country together, and the way people respond to him and to her, and their comfort levels, and the roles they are obligated to take on, are strikingly different in the various settings of the book, due to their traits, which also affects their relationship, which helps us to learn more about them and the places they go and the people they meet. Did I, a white woman, get it “right” in my depiction of a black woman? But what would that mean? Smith again:

What does it mean, after all, to say “A Bengali woman would never say that!” or “A gay man would never feel that!” or “A black woman would never do that!”? How can such things possibly be claimed absolutely, unless we already have some form of fixed caricature in our minds? (It is to be noted that the argument “A white man would never say that!” is rarely heard and is almost structurally unimaginable. Why? Because to be such a self is to be afforded all possible human potentialities, not only a circumscribed few.)

I guess if I ever get the book published I’ll find out what I got right or wrong, whether I was irresponsible to the point of becoming unpalatable. I would argue that I got things “right” with my character if she feels—you guessed it—real and alive.

Those who would police correctness, as Smith puts it, those on the hunt for mismatches between the traits of author and character, may be conflating this with the separate problem of opportunity and representation for writers from “different backgrounds” (which I put in quotes not mockingly but because I think that phrase stands for so much as to be impossible to really capture.) But that problem is not the responsibility of the writer whose characters might not all look, worship, fuck like her. And this policing, mostly if not entirely conducted by people who consider themselves liberals, can end up eerily echoing far-right rhetoric.

This is what I noticed when I had a run-in with one such policing person. I had published a short story in the journal Shenandoah, and the editors asked if I’d be interested in participating in a conversation over e-mail with another contributor. Both our work included themes of displacement, albeit in different genres, and I imagined we’d engage in a discussion of craft, process, preoccupation as artists, and so on. Instead the exchange swiftly became an interrogation of my creative motives. My story’s narrator, you see, was a Japanese woman, one who had spent many years living abroad in the United States and had now returned to her hometown. As I told the other writer, in my introductory email, I was interested in writing a character with an inverse experience to my own, which was that of an American who had spent years living in Japan.

When the writer replied, they told me they struggled with my story once they learned that I was a “White American.” (Once they learned that—not before.) I had not identified myself as such to them; I suppose they looked up a photo of me. It’s certainly not the first descriptor I’d use for myself, if asked, but I wasn’t asked. When I responded, I focused on other aspects of the writer’s email, their reflections on their own creative process and interests, but then they returned again to the matter of my identity. My years in Japan, they asked—was that my first time ever feeling like an “outsider”? What did I think of the history of “White American authors writing characters of color”? What did I think of my own “positionality” when I “decided to write in the first person as a Japanese woman”?

Never mind the mysterious matter of conscious and unconscious decision-making in fiction writing. Never mind that there exists a robust Japanese literature that I could not possibly disturb with one short story, never mind the dubiousness of calling a Japanese woman from Japan a “person of color” in the way that Americans use the term, never mind the implication that a “White American” could not possibly ever feel like an “outsider” until moving to the other side of the world. At that point I decided to opt out of this exchange of ideas.

Smith, in the 2019 essay, notes: “The old—and never especially helpful—adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane.” Indeed, I felt like I’d just been sent to sit at the naughty kids’ table for straying out of what was, apparently, my lane, as a “White American.”

There’s something about it that nags at me, even though I disagree so fervently with everything about this writer’s outlook on creativity, ownership, commonalities to the human experience. It’s the censoriousness, it’s the implication I didn’t and couldn’t know this character I dreamed up. And I think, at bottom, it’s the fear. Fear that is the archenemy of creativity and imagination. Fear of what? That someone’s story will be wrongly taken from them or wrongly told, that readers will be given the wrong impression? But what is the rightness this is all veering so dangerously away from? Who is the someone who owns the right story, who can tell it to us?

(I should mention, my short story includes a kappa—a mythical Japanese river monster—who sucks out people’s souls through their anuses. So as far as accuracy in representation goes, I am not certain where that leaves us.)

Another reason why I remain troubled by this years later is that the writer’s umbrage at my story resembled that of a horde of far-right nutjobs who have occasionally bombarded me with slurs and threats across a number of social media channels, ever since I published an op-ed on immigration to Japan, way back in 2014. They, too, think I should stay in my lane. “Jewish reporter Alanna Schubach wants to bring multiculturalism to the noble Japanese, ending millennia of tradition and homogeneity,” goes one of a number of posts still up online, and it devolves from there. These critics—I might also call them “Nazis”—objected to any outside intervention into what they perceived as Japan’s ethnic purity.

And yet years on from the moral panics that seized media and publishing after Trump’s first election, and later, the 2020 George Floyd protests, we keep doing this. Just yesterday, New York published a piece titled “How Should a White Woman Writer Be?” taking issue with the ways in which a crop of young women novelists are telling stories, apparently, about “whiteness,” which is never defined, although the author mentions these books seem to take inspiration from Ottessa Moshfegh, who is, I believe, Iranian American. But these novels succeed, the author goes on, when they take on the “white anxiety of irrelevance and narrative rootlessness.” I haven’t read any of these books, nor do I know their “White American” authors, but I have to believe this sort of vague and racially essentialized reading does them, does us all, a disservice. To paraphrase the old commercial ditty, I’d like to buy the world a copy of the Fields’ sisters’ book Racecraft.

Beyond protecting the integrity of fiction, by which I mean protecting the irresponsibility, presumption, risk, and freedom of fiction, I think we must also be careful to not unwittingly echo the “stay in your racial lane” rhetoric of far rightists. And yet if you search the Manuscript Wish List site you will find hundreds of literary agents continuing to prioritize #ownvoices narratives, that is, stories with neatly matching authors and characters, as though it were fiction’s task to maintain the sort of homogenization better left to white nationalists, or, better yet, in the fucking dust.

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I’ve also been watching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is essentially the answer to the question, “What if Game of Thrones was funny, and had no rape?” (Those two things are perhaps connected.) No rape, and also no sex, and no female nudity, in sharp contrast to Thrones, where a set of bouncing breasts appeared reliably every ten to fifteen minutes. Knight is a male bonding story, and thankfully a chaste one, given that the bond is between an adult and his child squire. When there is nudity, it’s male and it’s for laughs: an aging knight emerging from a brothel in his birthday suit, complete with a 10-inch prosthetic seesawing about.

The nude male form is rather easily mined for comedy. I think of Elaine from Seinfeld telling Jerry and George, “I don’t know how you guys walk around with those things.” And in some ways, it’s refreshing to see swinging dicks finally made the butt of the joke. Like most American women I’ve spent decades consuming media for which the default audience is the straight male, and finding what I could to connect with amid all the T&A on display for their viewing pleasure. I can clearly recall watching Clerks with my guy friends at age twelve or thirteen or so and forcing a laugh at the protagonist calling to his girlfriend, whom we are supposed to find charming but also a bit of a slut, “Try not to suck any dick on the way through the parking lot!” The joke is about his insecurity, but it’s also about the amount of oral sex she’s engaged in prior to coupling up with this charmer—and her humiliation for it. (Let’s not even get into the other major female character in the film and what happens to her in the end.)

The male body, and the pleasure men find in each other’s bodies, is less of a joke in Pillion, though there are plenty of laughs—often uneasy ones at the protagonist’s total subjugation, which he maybe finds arousing, or maybe only tolerates because he believes this is the closest he’s going to get to having a boyfriend. There are certainly no boobies in Pillion—there’s barely even a woman, save for the protagonist’s cancer-stricken mother, who manages to tell off Skarsgard’s cold-blooded dom before she dies. And that’s fine and fitting for this particular story. Does anyone even give a shit about the Bechdel test anymore?

But it has gotten me thinking about the sharp decline of female nudity, and eroticism more broadly, in film and television. The Economist reported in 2024 that sexual content in films made since 2000 had fallen by 40 percent. At the same time, prostheses like the one in Knight are popping up (har-har) more than ever. It’s almost as though nudity and sexuality is okay if it’s funny or gay or both, but if there’s to be any fooling around that involves a woman, it’s time to bring in the hall monitors:

Intimacy co-ordinators play an important role. On set, they liaise with the director and actors to choreograph scenes with sex (and sexual violence). Ita O’Brien… likens her job to that of a stunt co-ordinator who wants to keep actors safe while choreographing the most exciting fight they possibly can. Sex can still be explicit, she says, but “it’s in service of the character and storytelling”.

As a result, intimacy co-ordinators will often ask film-makers to consider why the moment is important in the narrative. (After all, viewers who want to watch sex without a credible story have easy access to pornography on the internet.)

If anything, I think the ease of access to internet porn should encourage filmmakers to include more eroticism in their work. Do we really want to cede that territory entirely to pornographers, and allow their at best dubious and at worst violent and misogynistic representations of sex scratch that itch for people? Like so much about the way we consider women post-#MeToo, this feels like an overcorrection for—admittedly—a storied history of actresses being pressured and exploited and served up on the proverbial platter for the male gaze.

But gazing isn’t inherently evil, and us gals like to look, too. What troubled me most about #MeToo (aside from the actual horror stories) was how we began speaking about how to protect women, the quick slide into Victorianish paternalism that implied women were delicate, lacking in agency, unable to advocate for themselves or, like, simply laugh in the face of a creepy male co-worker trying to make a pass, all of which in turn served to stoke the sense of heightened vulnerability and sexual paranoia in young people, mainly young women, that Laura Kipnis observed all the way back in 2015.

Perhaps it’s no mistake that the only actress today who appears to revel in displaying herself on film is the conservative-coded Sydney Sweeney. I don’t know what her politics actually are, and I don’t think she’s much of an actress, but if she’s taking ownership of her assets and having a good time, which seems to be the case, then I have to tip my hat to her.

It’s depressing to think that in addition to the funny dicks of Knight and the kinky queer romance of Pillion, there’s no longer much room for eroticism involving women, and by extension, women characters being granted their full humanity. A female Paul Verhoeven or Brian De Palma—or even just these directors themselves making new films—sure would be interesting. (I don’t count Emerald Fennell, whose movies are incoherent and descend inevitably into sexual violence, as though this were the only possible outcome of unfettered eroticism.) Because otherwise, if the media we have to choose from now is either mostly-chaste movies or hardcore porn, I think we’re in big fucking trouble.

For homework: check out Verhoeven’s 2016 Elle, which is genuinely transgressive and stars Isabelle Huppert, probably the most audacious actress alive, as a woman who gains the upper hand over a rapist. “Sometimes I see American performances and I say to myself, They’re missing something,” Huppert told the New York Times when Elle came out. Well, yeah.

In a similar vein, the opening lines of what was the bible for post-war parenting, Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, are:

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.

It’s interesting to me: two super-credentialed men speaking from on high to mothers about child-rearing. You’d expect a tedious, condescending lecture, something obnoxiously paternalistic, but they’re saying we really don’t need their expertise. We already know what to do.

Meanwhile, today, the new mother seeking out guidance or reassurance will find her preferred social media channels absolutely clogged with self-styled parenting “experts” (read: influencers) pushing interventions ostensibly designed to optimize her child’s development—but even more so, to undermine her instincts, make her feel clueless, and spur her to hire them, subscribe to their programs, etc.

In the New Yorker this week, Rebecca Mead writes about the ever-moving target of how to be a “good” mother, from the advent of the 1980s “supermom” to today’s very online moms who are inundated with so much of the kind of instruction Winniccott once warned doctors against that no matter what they do, they feel mediocre and incompetent.

I certainly felt this way in the early days of motherhood. And I was especially vulnerable to advice, product recommendations, and so on from the dubiously-credentialed professionals of Instagram because I had an unusual birth complication that left me physically incapacitated. (It’s called pubic symphisis diastasis—a traumatic separation of the joint at the front of the pelvis, and it makes most normal movement excruciating.) For the first several weeks of our son’s life, my husband had to do everything, from diaper changes to swaddling to taking him to his first pediatrician appointment, because I literally couldn’t walk, couldn’t do anything but lie around, breastfeed with a lot of assistance, and go completely insane from the hormones, the pain, and the belief I was failing to bond with our child or mother him properly.

I was convinced I was significantly delayed in learning how to become a mom, and I couldn’t relax about it for months, even after I started to heal and was able to get around. The intuition Winnicott talked about felt like something only other mothers had. But what ultimately helped me locate it within myself was getting to know and hanging out with other new moms and their babies, in real life. No influencer’s tips could come close to that.

This is perhaps the storied “village” we are told time and again all mothers need, and many struggle to find. Am I a tradwife if I gravitate toward kinship networks and the guidance of dead white men like Winnicott over the author of the widely-hailed sleep training book Precious Little Sleep, who “has degrees in technical writing and finance”? I don’t know, but I’m sure as shit not going to start dressing like them.

What Mead doesn’t mention in her essay is that when she’s describing the neurotic moms facing “a tempest of a different, close-to-unbearable order,” she’s writing about a subset of moms, the moms of the professional managerial class. Of course, the New Yorker at large is written by and for the PMC; poor and working class moms may as well not exist.

But they do, and I suspect they are not agonizing over whether to get a “Maclaren or Bugaboo” stroller—one of Mead’s examples of contemporary mom fretting—because they cost over $1,000.

Back to my pal Catherine, who writes at length in her book Virtue Hoarders about PMC parenting mores:

From the very moment of conception, which for professional managerial class (PMC) parents is always a “choice,” the future child and infant possesses “potential” that has to be both optimized and maximized…

managing the development of children into successful adults dominates the ethos of PMC parenting…

the PMC home has become a laboratory of increasingly lavish and expensive childcare equipment and demanding child-rearing techniques that now include outright bribes and elaborate cheating strategies to help their children succeed at any cost.

And there are innumerable parenting “experts” only too happy to serve up the equipment, the techniques, and the strategies to guide PMC moms to making good (expensive) choices.

Another friend, Liz Wolfe, who I met in a new mom’s group after we had our boys, wrote about this for the Free Press. Of some of the moms in our group, based in Park Slope (PMC ground zero), she observed:

while their organizational abilities and propensity to research and plan have served them well in their careers, my few months of motherhood have taught me that babies seem unimpressed with these skills. Raising a new life is a realm where intuition reigns, chaos ensues, and no success is ensured by having completed hours of research.

I can see how the impulse to optimize everything is borne out of the belief that these executives-turned-mothers can perfect their son or daughter’s childhood. But so often the underlying theme is fear.

Fear is absolutely what I felt in those early days. I’ve come a long way. Now I often feel like a “Type B mom” among other mothers, waving my hand and telling them it’ll be fine. Of course I worry about my son and will continue to do so for my entire life, but not about things like his drinking the water at the neighborhood splash pad. (It’s New York City tap! It’s fine!) The quest for optimization strikes me as fruitless, especially given the fact that those executive-moms may be optimizing their kids for the kinds of careers that will be turned over to AI in a few years. And that we already know how to “optimize” a child: ensure they feel loved and safe.

Meanwhile, in the 2024-2025 school year, 1 in 7 NYC public school students were homeless. I would think this impinges a bit on their sense of safety. Why, then, is it the anxieties of affluent mothers that we hear so much about? Mead touches briefly upon the pathetic state of infrastructural support for mothers of young children, mentioning “the inadequate provision of early-childhood care and the structural inequities of even supposedly liberal workplaces.” The matter of infrastructure is rather dry, but in its absence it can be quite difficult for a mom to be good enough.

The subject also got me thinking more broadly about the infantilization of mass culture, of which I think YA is just one example. Grown-ups, in meaningfully larger numbers than before, are reading books for kids, and they’re also reading comic books and playing video games and seeing superhero movies and building elaborate LEGO sets, as Ben Fong describes in Damage:

In a deindustrialized society, perhaps it’s no surprise that the LEGO Group has a large and growing catalog of adult products... In addition to these adult enthusiasts for adult sets, there’s also a large group of so-called “AFOLs” (adult fans of LEGOs) who collect, trade, and sell regular LEGO sets for children. It’s estimated that a household containing an AFOL will spend about 20 times more on LEGOs than the average household where LEGOs are purchased for children in the house. Combined with the 5-10% of sales that the adult market brings in, that’s a lot of grown-ups buying toys for themselves.

Fong posits that this sort of infantilization “probably goes back to that of the culture industry itself.” The desire to retreat from the stressors of adulthood is certainly nothing new, and human beings can’t help but do their best to avoid facing reality, whether through substance abuse or gambling or tinkering with kids’ toys. Fong writes, of LEGO’s highly lucrative partnerships with various entertainment behemoths,

Marvel would not want to team up with LEGO if people did not want LEGO-ized Marvel characters, and people want LEGO-ized Marvel characters because you can build worlds for them.

Building worlds: this reminded me of a sophisticated form of creative play that some children engage in, wherein they invent not only imaginary friends but entire imaginary worlds, which researcher Michele Root-Bernstein calls “paracosms.” Her book, The Creation of Imaginary Worlds, argues that this sort of “worldplay,” and a child’s capacity for it, will have positive implications throughout their life, particularly for “creative potential and its relationship to adult productivity.” Probably I’m drawn to this thesis because it flatters me: as a child, I created an imaginary friend named Lollyboo who lived in a land on the other side of the mirror, complete with made-up foreign phrases I used to greet her.

Obviously this has implications for me as a fiction writer today, though it’s hard to say whether it’s done much for my productivity. As a creative writing teacher of adults, I do often encourage my students who are new to the form to allow themselves to tap back into a childlike sense of exploration, to engage in imaginative play. But I intend this imagining to be unassisted by the ready-made worlds of existing IP (no fan fiction, please.) That this is the way most adults who are “world-building” are doing so—with LEGOs, or YA novels, or the now-way-more-popular romantasy genre—does seem novel. Escapism isn’t new, but sheer number of vehicles for escapism specifically into juvenilia, delivered to us by mass media, does seem to be on the rise.

One theory for this I’ve seen bouncing around is the economic conditions faced by today’s adults. Extended childhood has been forced upon Millennials, this theory goes, by wage stagnation, rising home prices, etc., that have delayed or done away entirely with their ability to reach milestones like home ownership, having kids, and so on. And our helplessness and dependence is quite useful to those in power. “Make no mistake: the capitalist elites want you to think of yourself as a silly little goose,” writes James Greig in Dazed.

Catherine Liu in Damage goes back further, describing this silly-little-goosedom as a centuries-old achievement of the bourgeoisie:

The prolongation and cultivation of the period of childhood dependency is an achievement of bourgeois societies, with surplus value expended on the children of elites, beginning most dramatically in Europe during the Renaissance with the growing power of Italy’s merchant class… Professional-class people [today] look to prolong the period of childhood dependency in order to promote juvenile optimization in preparation for a lifetime of intensive competition.

The Millennials and Gen Z-ers who are these optimized children grown up faced tremendous disappointment when they were at last released into the marketplace: the conditions under which their parents competed and succeeded have drastically changed. Plus “everything is terrible”; “the world is burning”; “we live in end times.” At least we can retreat into books about women jacking off centaurs (this is real.)

I don’t know about the we-live-in-uniquely-dark-times mentality. Victor Frankl developed his groundbreaking psychotherapeutic technique in a fucking concentration camp. (Though he did also say that the size of human suffering is absolutely relative.) Liu’s antidote to infantilization is that the Left must work to

demand a skeptical, honest, engaged and responsible attitude toward both history and politics. To honor the student or child within would require telling her to overcome the need for immediate recognition in order to do the hard work of struggling against the powers arrayed against us in the name of collective and material good.

As this pertains to writing, reading, and publishing, I think building egos “strong enough to resist the ideological emollients of liberalism’s nihilistic narcissism,” as Liu writes, would also mean an embrace, or at the very least tolerance, of challenging, troubling, provocative ideas in literature, and a capacity to withstand criticism and disagreement; viewing literature not as another vehicle for escape from, but instead enthusiastic engagement with life.

But this sounds bootstrap-y, and I think an ongoing issue is availability and ease of access. You have to really hunt down these kinds of books, films, etc., especially if you’re really busy / depressed / exhausted and everyone in your social circle is busy playing with LEGOs. Robust state support for the arts would certainly help, but we know that ain’t gonna happen. So I’ll turn it over to you, readers who are hopefully out there: any ideas?

Talk soon,

Alanna

In the New York Review of Books, “That Sinking Feeling” by Jé Wilson (full disclosure: friend of the newsletter; that is, friend of me.) Jé, a seafarer herself, reviews narratives of sailors adrift at sea. The essay is very funny—for example, regarding a memoir written jointly by a formerly-shipwrecked couple:

“We talked without the encumbrances of modern living; we explored the hidden depths of each other’s character, we threw away the trappings of so called civilization and reverted to a simple prehistoric way of life,” writes Maralyn, but she offers absolutely no detail as to what those “hidden depths” are or what conversation “without the encumbrances of modern living” might mean for them. You start to suspect it’s little more than the intimacy of directing one’s diarrhea into a biscuit tin in front of one’s spouse.

Yowza. It’s also very profound:

“The existential dream of childhood,” writes Roland Barthes in an essay on Jules Verne, is “to enclose oneself and to settle,” hence a child’s passion for tents and cubbyholes and small cabins, such as those on boats, where everything necessary for survival is comfortably near at hand while outside the infinite “rages in vain.” A life raft is a kind of tent where the infinite has come inside: with few supplies and little protection from the surrounding sea and weather, there’s almost no division between the two.

This made me think of Lila from Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, and her terror of “dissolving boundaries,” a sensation that comes over her from time to time of the breakdown of borders of people and things. The outside gets in and all becomes a nightmarish entropic mass.

I also thought of Freud’s discussion of the “oceanic feeling,” which he saw as the experience of breastfeeding infants before they have a notion of self and are therefore undifferentiated from their mothers and everything else—or as mystics would have it, at one with everything, apparently a desirable and transcendent sensation, though it doesn’t really sound that way to me, nor would it be were I adrift at sea.

One of the shipwreck survivors mentioned in the essay, Steven Callahan, deals with the intrusion of the infinite into his lifeboat by forming a relationship with the dorados that follow it, and even starts to turn a bit fishlike himself. Whatever it takes.

I also loved this short story in the New Yorker, “Safety,” by Joan Silber (a former professor, to my great luck!) She does that amazing thing Alice Munro did of capturing decades of life in the short story form, without it ever feeling overcrowded or like something that should have been a novel. But she does it with a New York sensibility, a worldliness and a curiosity about the world that is more expansive.

“Safety” begins in the early nineties but turns out to be very much of our time. Or perhaps of all times, the story suggests, with its eye for repeating patterns of history and of authoritarians who, as the opening line wryly notes, “like to move people around.”

My favorite bit was this part, about an Uzbek American girl in NYC whose mother abruptly decides she must stop riding the subway:

“Subway crime isn’t that bad,” I said.

“It’s about the war,” Yasmina said.

The war Anya drew her lessons from had been over for sixty-odd years. In 1942, when she was just a four-year-old girl, her family had taken her to Kazan Station, where trains left for the east. Thousands of evacuees were huddled on the floor and all along the surrounding streets, sleeping on piles of luggage and bundles of belongings, having waited days to buy tickets. When a train arrived, the crowds surged toward it, hauling their baggage, throwing boxes through windows. Tiny Anya was knocked over by someone’s sack, and she lost hold of her mother’s hand. She might have been trampled if a stranger hadn’t lifted her up and helped her over the steps onto the train. She was safe, on someone’s lap, when the wheels began to turn. But that was the last she ever saw of her family. She was stuck in the car, shouting and calling and crying. At each stop, she leaned out of the doorway and yelled, “Mama!” The train moved slowly, through stretches of bombed landscape, past desolate villages, alongside fields on fire. Eventually, someone took Anya to a car where a woman was watching over a group of orphans from a children’s home.

Did Anya really remember all that? It had been related to her by adults who had pieced their guesses together into a form that could be told. She remembered yelling, and she remembered trying to get off the train and being held back. She made friends with one of the other children, a little girl who didn’t know her last name. Anya knew hers, but it did no good.

Once they reached Tashkent, she was settled in a state center, and eventually taken in by an Uzbek family. She’d loved that family.

And now, in New York, in the twenty-first century, her daughter needed to take the subway. Not everything was in our neighborhood. Oh, Yasmina walked for blocks, and she took buses sometimes. One night, I saw her count out some wrinkled bills for a cab. But, more often, she secretly rode along our winding underground passageways, in subway cars that moved clamorously through the dark, and honored her mother’s fear by lying. Anya never followed or spied on her; she was asking Yasmina to construct a fictional world, a better world. Yasmina was O.K. with that. They didn’t argue. She simply waited for her mother to get over this inconvenient obsession. I thought she never would, but what did I know? The summer after graduation, Yasmina informed me that her mother didn’t mention trains anymore.

The collapse of time and space into these few paragraphs, the extent to which you can understand your loved ones’ motives and to which they remain mysterious, the way that lying can be an act of filial piety, and above all, the fact that forces much larger than yourself might wrench you in the span of seconds from the track you thought you’d continue moving along for good and onto another—that’s what the story is about.

What is the show “Pluribus” about? I’ve been enjoying it a lot and have also been struck by the theories of its underlying themes. Apparently, a lot of people think it’s about AI. I’m not so sure it is “about” one thing, but the last episode I watched seemed primarily “about” isolation and the need for connection, and how far people will go and how much they will compromise their principles or sacrifice their bodies for it. Which in turn makes it seem like a very post-Covid show, the way The Leftovers was maybe a post-9/11 show.

But in any case I’ve always liked what Kelly Link has to say about the idea of a work of speculative fiction having a central and consistent metaphor:

The big question for the writer is whether you want to tether the fantastic element to some symbolic meaning. Some writers seem to think that this is the whole point. But I don’t want a reader’s grasp of a story to come down to a one-to-one meaning. I want there to be some (actually, a lot) of drift. That seems desirable. The more closely and specifically you anchor the fantastic element to one particular symbolic meaning, the less room you leave readers to attach their own insights, questions, perturbations. Even worse, you lose psychological realism. The characters flatten out.

Why limit yourself to one central symbol? Why not go oceanic, let the infinite in?

See you next time,

Alanna

First, my pal Liz Wolfe managed to spark days of Discourse, with such luminaries as Jill Filipovic of the New Yorker chiming in, by asking whether she might bring her newborn to an ostensibly child-free wedding. A lot of women, both mothers and non, seemed to receive this as a personal attack. To do this, they claimed, would be to endanger the child and oneself, disrespect the couple-to-be, etc. etc., but mainly, what they were saying was, “I would never.”

At the same time, another one of those TikToks, in which a child-free woman demonstrates how great her life is sans kids, was circulating. This was also received as a personal attack (and to be fair, I think, unlike Liz’s question, it was sort of intended that way.) The main response was, this child-free woman’s life is empty—and perhaps the lives of all people without kids are?

All this taking umbrage, this chest-thumping about how to live and how to parent, is what my friend Jeanette calls “justifying life choices.” I’m sure we’ve all done it. Because it’s really scary to be confronted with other ways of living that diverge from our settled-upon methods of running out the clock. Have we chosen poorly with our “one wild and precious life”? (Blech, sorry.) No, better to go on the attack than admit that destabilizing possibility. I’m not sure how legitimate I think evolutionary psychology is, but I’ve read that the human mind perceives disagreement as akin to a physical threat, since until fairly recently, social cohesion was key to survival.

Maybe next time someone flips out at you on social media, you should reply, “Hey. It’s okay. You’re not gonna die.”

But they are—that’s the problem. A disagreement about life choices is in some ways worse than a physical threat. It’s a threat to one’s immortality project. In The Denial of Death (which I am annoyingly obsessed with), Ernest Becker describes the immortality project as a way of coping with our inevitable annihilation. It’s the lifelong work of building something that will outlast our physical bodies and therefore allow us to transcend death. Having children, making art, starting a foundation, amassing a fortune and putting your name on a building, etc., all these qualify; and when people can’t find the immortality vessel that fits them they might turn to hedonism, addiction, other methods of escape. None of this works, obviously, but take heart: as Elvis Costello says, you’ll never be alone in the bone orchard.

Becker doesn’t suggest you shouldn’t pursue an immortality project, even though it won’t accomplish what you hope. Indeed, I think he felt it was the only thing that made sense, given that a constant unobstructed view of your impending doom would just make you go insane. And he held up art-making as a particularly effective project:

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist.

In 2022, I published my debut novel and then a few months later, had a baby. “The immortality project is going well,” I thought. But becoming a mother has brought me a much deeper sense of okayness with my mortality than the book. Well, yeah, Becker might say, because having a child persuades us we are leaving a legacy, our name, our blood, will go on; and the complex labor of raising a child makes us feel heroic. So I think the natalism wars, the mommy wars of course stem from things like: scarcity of material resources and support and the resulting anxiety; constant scrutiny and criticism of mothers internalized and projected; conflicting religious values; etc. but beneath all that, it’s about the threat to one’s immortality project. And the reminder that whatever project you’ve selected, you’re heading to the same place as everyone else—including those awful bitches on Twitter.

One of my favorite poems about having a kid is Yehuda Amichai’s “A Child Is Something Else Again”. I’m struck by this stanza:

A child is vengeance.

A child is a missile into the coming generations.

I launched him: I’m still trembling.

There’s the obvious masculo-sexual dimension to launching a child like a missile, but the warlike nature of it—yeah, pretty much. No wonder we’re fighting. “A child delivers you from death,” he writes later.

If you say so, pal.

Till next time,

Alanna

The rich are going to leave. “Every single Jew” is going to leave. Rank and file cops. Job creators. Good people. The smart ones, “fleeing socialism.”

It got me thinking about the Leaving New York City Personal Essay Industrial Complex, for which I mostly blame Joan Didion. I’ve never been a great fan of hers. For a while I thought I just couldn’t connect with her WASPiness; too aloof, to use a word amusingly applied lately to the soon-to-be First Lady of NYC. But then I love John Cheever, so it can’t be that. I guess, to crib a phrase from this great Zadie Smith essay, Joan Didion and I are simply not in profound communication.

I can certainly acknowledge the significance of her essay, “Goodbye to All That,” but it’s unfortunate how that farewell to New York has led seemingly thousands of younger writers to the mistaken impression that anyone cares why they, too, are leaving the city. So many, in fact, that this genre of essay was anthologized in the 2013 collection, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and then a 2014 follow-up/rebuttal, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. And still, new takes are coming. Earlier this year, the New Yorker published Lena Dunham’s “Why I Broke Up With New York.”

Did anyone ask these people? The urge to justify our life choices to others, in particular others who have made quite different life choices, is probably universal, because it’s too frightening to admit the knowledge that we’ve only made one of God knows how many possible choices, and God knows which, if any of those, are actually the “right” ones for us, if such a wonderful thing can actually exist in this world. But the choice of moving out of NYC seems to inspire a particular frenzy of justifying. Do other major world cities have their own explanatory pieces? Is there a corresponding series of Why I Left London/Beijing/Paris/Singapore/etc essays?

Or is it only NYC because New Yorkers are so goddamn protective of their city, and, let’s be honest, all the ways that it makes them suffer? My two oldest friends and I, whenever people go or threaten to: “Fuck outta here!” We survived, we say, terrorism, a financial crisis, a hurricane, a pandemic, not to mention transit strikes, predatory landlords, rodent infestations, and all the other lesser indignities, and never thought of fleeing, not because we’re chumps or idiots but because we’re loyal, because we understand that in spite of (because of?) it all, this is the only place to live. There is nowhere else. (John Updike: “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”)

I don’t totally believe this, by the way. I have lived, in some cases for years and of my own volition, in other places, and I understand well the most compelling reason of all to get the hell out of New York City: because you can’t fucking afford it. The new guy in charge ran on solving that problem. Let’s give him a chance, I say.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share my favorite essay on living in and loving New York City in spite of, because of: Ian Frazier’s 1990 tour de force, “Canal Street.” A sample:

The unit of exchange on Canal Street is the dallah. Dallahs are dollars crossbred with dinars, pesos, yen, dirhams, zlotys, rubles, piastres. Salesmen in storefronts and sidewalk venders who know almost no other English yell “Fifty dallah!” and “T’ree dallah!” and “Ten dallah!” up and down the street. Dollars often exist only on paper or video-display terminals; dallahs are always real. Dallahs are green, of small denomination, faded, crumpled, marked with ink and duck sauce and fingerprints and smears of blood. Dollars are carried in a bankbook or a wallet; the proper way to carry dallahs is in the right-front pants pocket in a folded wad with a red rubber band around it. When I ask Gary to lend me forty, he says, “Take sixty.” He pulls his wad from his pocket and peels off three twenties. Then he stands looking at me with his eyebrows raised and his thumb poised above the bills, in case I might want more. He says, “All you got to do is ask.” He says now if he gets robbed that’s sixty he won’t lose.

Have a lovely weekend,

Alanna

Let’s begin:

Aphantasia

This disorder, an inability to form mental images, a total absence of a “mind’s eye,” I figured was like the other many diagnoses that seem to have exploded in recent years—totally overblown, identity scaffolding. This Larissa MacFarquhar piece in the New Yorker, though, is persuasive that aphantasia is more than just an interesting affliction to claim on social media. The aphantasics profiled lack autobiographical memory, and by extension, a strong sense of self. An Irish artist named Isabel Nolan describes her struggle, when out with friends, to recall even how well she knows them. She finds the silver lining to this, but—

It would be nice to remember all the funny stories that people told, but in the end she didn’t mind too much. She could just sit there and bask in the pleasure of being with old friends. It was the feeling that was important; she didn’t need to know what had happened years ago. In some ways, this made things easier—she mostly didn’t remember arguments or bad feelings. She hoped that the significant moments in her life, good and bad, had left their imprint on her in some way, but it was impossible to know…

I found this pretty haunting. It strikes me as a cousin to dementia. On the other hand, there are the hyperphantasics, plagued by a constant fusillade of mental images that impedes everyday functioning. One sufferer can’t get over her cat’s death because she keeps seeing him around her home, a ghostly projection cast by her overactive mind’s eye. I thought of OCD, intrusive thoughts. On the flip side, she can entertain herself at a silent meditation retreat by replaying the first Harry Potter movie in her head:

She wasn’t able to recall all two hours of it, but watching what she remembered lasted for forty-five minutes. Then she did the same with the other seven films.

If it were me I think I’d end up getting through several seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I’d like to flatter myself and say I, too, am a hyperphantasic, because while it sounds like a torment it’s also special, and who doesn’t want to be that, but I think I’m just ordinary good-at-visualizing. I can “watch” scenes in my mind, but then I run out of steam. For better or for worse, a lot of my fiction is episodic.

Both groups are haunted by what isn’t there: for hyperphantasics, the disruptive pictures in their mind; for aphantasics, their memories. Interestingly, people from both groups have managed to become artists. One woman became aphantasic after a stroke and assumed her career was kaput, but then ended up doing work far more interesting than the figurative paintings she’d made before. (The image for this section is one of her post-stroke works.)

It’s hard to imagine, though, an aphantasic becoming a writer, for their lack of personal history. I thought of a line from Jeffrey McDaniel’s poem, “Disasterology”:

I run through snow and turn around
just to make sure I’ve got a past.

Happy Halloween,

Alanna

In his essay “Time After Time,” John Crowley writes about secular time (in which “each year, month, second is a unique and unrepeatable unit that disappears even as it appears in the infinitesimal present”) versus sacred time (“a primordial mythical time made present”). He describes the historical efforts of great Catholic thinkers to reconcile these calendars, and finally his own sense of timekeeping, as a lapsed Catholic:

I keep one calendar, though: one so singular and private I can’t know if everyone, or even anyone else, has one like it—though I suspect some must. It’s without dates; the occasions that fill it have no fixed number and don’t recur in any sort of chronological order. Each is a return of some long-ago circumstance in a kind of momentary entirety: the flavor, the taste, the total sensation of it; a past moment in the present… For almost all of mine I can’t discover an original, though I believe an original is what I’m visited by. I can’t keep them; the calendar is self-erasing.

Today’s poem and story both capture the shock that comes from recognizing oneself as existing in time that, no matter how filled with memory and sensation, will, eventually, run out.

Northern lights in Yukon by Leigh McAdam from Hike Bike Travel

Poem

My Dream About Time

a woman unlike myself is running
down the long hall of a lifeless house
with too many windows which open on
a world she has no language for,
running and running until she reaches
at last the one and only door
which she pulls open to find each wall
is faced with clocks and as she watches
all of the clocks strike

                                             NO

—Lucille Clifton

Who is this person?

Lucille Clifton was born in 1936 and grew up in Buffalo, NY. Shortly after graduating college (she attended Howard University and SUNY-Fredonia), she married a philosophy professor and began working as a claims clerk while writing poetry; she and her husband had six children together. She published her first collection, Good Times, in 1969, and the New York Times named it one of the 10 best books of the year. A major breakthrough came when Langston Hughes included her work in his 1970 anthology, The Poetry of the Negro. Clifton went on to publish a number of collections, children’s books, and a memoir, was a professor of poetry at several universities, and served as Poet Laureate of Maryland. In 2007, she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for her lifetime accomplishments. In the New Yorker, poet Elizabeth Alexander noted Clifton’s ability to create “physically small poems with enormous and profound inner worlds.” Clifton died in 2010.

Story

Director’s Cut

Maček Smolansky was a filmmaker, entrepreneur, and philosopher. But, above all, he was a perfectionist. Which was why no one was particularly surprised when he announced that his new film, “Life,” would be shot on three cameras and would correspond, minute by minute, to a human life span. Filming began with the birth of Mateusz Krotoczowski, the film’s introverted protagonist, and lasted seventy-three years. On the set of the final scene, in which Mateusz hangs himself in his basement after being diagnosed with late-stage prostate cancer, the entire crew wept. Not even the soundman’s desperate shushing could stop the tears.

Post-production took a hundred and fourteen years. Maček died of old age a few months after it started. Sound-editing continued for another ninety-six years, and still, when the film was released, there were several complaints on social media that it was rushed and sloppily done.

All the leading film critics were invited to the première, and the few tickets offered to the public were sold on the black market at exorbitant prices. The film, as promised, was seventy-three years long. When the closing credits rolled and the lights came on, the ushers found that, with the exception of one viewer, the entire audience was dead. Most of them were giving off a pretty good stench. Among all the decaying corpses sat the lone surviving viewer, naked and balding and sobbing like a baby. When his tears finally stopped falling, he wiped his eyes, stood, and walked calmly up the aisle.

This aging man was the son of a famous film critic, who hadn’t even known that she was pregnant when she sat down to watch the film. He was born eight months into the screening and grew up in the dark cinema, transfixed by the screen. When he opened the doors and stepped out into the street, he was blinded by the sun. Dozens of reporters waiting outside the theatre thrust microphones at him and asked what he thought of the movie. “Movie?” he stammered, as he blinked at the sunlight. All along he’d thought it was life.

—Etgar Keret (translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen)

Who is this person?

Born in Israel in 1967, to Polish parents who survived the Holocaust, Keret is known for his “oblique, breezy, seriocomic fantasies that defy encapsulation, categorization and even summary,” per Michael Lindgren in the Washington Post. He is the author of several short story collections, comics, two children’s books, and a memoir, as well as a play and a short film. In 2018 he was awarded the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award, for his book Fly Already. You can read that collection’s title story here.

Prompt

Do you have a private calendar like the one Crowley describes? Write about an experience of a sensation returning to you “some long-ago circumstance.”

Alanna Schubach is a fiction writer, freelance journalist, and teacher. Follow her on Twitter @AlannaSchubach and read her work at alannaschubach.com. Send questions, recommendations for future newsletters, and the results of writing prompts (if you’re so inclined) to info@alannaschubach.com

A year into lockdown, our inner resources (of patience, imagination, perseverance…) are running low. Last month The Guardian published a story about writers who are finding themselves unable to write. They say they feel “stultified,” “completely cut off from material.” They note the irony: aren’t we writers always claiming what we need most is to be able to shut ourselves away and focus on our projects?

Clearly that alone isn’t the key. Imagination and inspiration are fueled by all our senses take in: “things like the clothes a stranger is wearing, the smell of their perfume, their body language, seeing a couple interact in a bar,” writer Gillian McAllister says. “I’m having to mine my memories for this stuff, which is less authentic and lacks a kind of specific detail that I like to write about in ordinary times.”

The article concludes with novelist Linda Grant noting that at least there’s solidarity to be found in this predicament: It’s “a once in a blue moon example of every writer being affected by exactly the same situation,” she says.

We have that, and the kind of travel we can do through reading. In today’s poem, written after many years in Brazil, Elizabeth Bishop considers what the ideas of here and there mean to an unsettled self. In the story, Ted Chiang takes us to a fantastical ancient Baghdad and then, through several stories within the story, far beyond that.

Fushimi Inari Taisha (Shinto shrine in Kyoto, photo taken by me quite a while ago)

Poem

Questions of Travel

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home, 

wherever that may be?”

—Elizabeth Bishop

Who is this person?

Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 and grew up in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia. She attended Vassar College, where she was mentored by Marianne Moore and founded the literary journal Con Spirito with other women writers, including Mary McCarthy; after graduating, she traveled extensively before settling in Key West. Her first poetry collection, North and South, was published in 1946, and her second, Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring came out in 1955 and won a Pulitzer Prize. She lived in Brazil with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares for many years, but the relationship deteriorated; the influence of her time in Brazil comes through in the collection Questions of Travel (1965). Though she published only 101 poems in her lifetime, Bishop has been deemed by many critics one of the most important American poets. There’s a great essay about her biography here.

Story

The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate (Excerpt)

O MIGHTY CALIPH AND Commander of the Faithful, I am humbled to be in the splendor of your presence; a man can hope for no greater blessing as long as he lives. The story I have to tell is truly a strange one, and were the entirety to be tattooed at the corner of one's eye, the marvel of its presentation would not exceed that of the events recounted, for it is a warning to those who would be warned and a lesson to those who would learn.

My name is Fuwaad ibn Abbas, and I was born here in Baghdad, City of Peace. My father was a grain merchant, but for much of my life I have worked as a purveyor of fine fabrics, trading in silk from Damascus and linen from Egypt and scarves from Morocco that are embroidered with gold. I was prosperous, but my heart was troubled, and neither the purchase of luxuries nor the giving of alms was able to soothe it. Now I stand before you without a single dirham in my purse, but I am at peace.

Allah is the beginning of all things, but with Your Majesty's permission, I begin my story with the day I took a walk through the district of metalsmiths. I needed to purchase a gift for a man I had to do business with, and had been told he might appreciate a tray made of silver. After browsing for half an hour, I noticed that one of the largest shops in the market had been taken over by a new merchant. It was a prized location that must have been expensive to acquire, so I entered to peruse its wares.

Never before had I seen such a marvelous assortment of goods. Near the entrance there was an astrolabe equipped with seven plates inlaid with silver, a water-clock that chimed on the hour, and a nightingale made of brass that sang when the wind blew. Farther inside there were even more ingenious mechanisms, and I stared at them the way a child watches a juggler, when an old man stepped out from a doorway in the back.

"Welcome to my humble shop, my lord," he said. "My name is Bashaarat. How may I assist you?"

"These are remarkable items that you have for sale. I deal with traders from every corner of the world, and yet I have never seen their like. From where, may I ask, did you acquire your merchandise?"

"I am grateful to you for your kind words," he said. "Everything you see here was made in my workshop, by myself or by my assistants under my direction."

I was impressed that this man could be so well versed in so many arts. I asked him about the various instruments in his shop, and listened to him discourse learnedly about astrology, mathematics, geomancy, and medicine. We spoke for over an hour, and my fascination and respect bloomed like a flower warmed by the dawn, until he mentioned his experiments in alchemy.

"Alchemy?" I said. This surprised me, for he did not seem the type to make such a sharper's claim. "You mean you can turn base metal into gold?"

"I can, my lord, but that is not in fact what most seek from alchemy."

"What do most seek, then?"

"They seek a source of gold that is cheaper than mining ore from the ground. Alchemy does describe a means to make gold, but the procedure is so arduous that, by comparison, digging beneath a mountain is as easy as plucking peaches from a tree."

I smiled. "A clever reply. No one could dispute that you are a learned man, but I know better than to credit alchemy."

Bashaarat looked at me and considered. "I have recently built something that may change your opinion. You would be the first person I have shown it to. Would you care to see it?"

"It would be a great pleasure."

"Please follow me." He led me through the doorway in the rear of his shop. The next room was a workshop, arrayed with devices whose functions I could not guess—bars of metal wrapped with enough copper thread to reach the horizon, mirrors mounted on a circular slab of granite floating in quicksilver—but Bashaarat walked past these without a glance.

Instead he led me to a sturdy pedestal, chest high, on which a stout metal hoop was mounted upright. The hoop's opening was as wide as two outstretched hands, and its rim so thick that it would tax the strongest man to carry. The metal was black as night, but polished to such smoothness that, had it been a different color, it could have served as a mirror. Bashaarat bade me stand so that I looked upon the hoop edgewise, while he stood next to its opening.

"Please observe," he said.

Bashaarat thrust his arm through the hoop from the right side, but it did not extend out from the left. Instead, it was as if his arm were severed at the elbow, and he waved the stump up and down, and then pulled his arm out intact.

=I had not expected to see such a learned man perform a conjuror's trick, but it was well done, and I applauded politely.

"Now wait a moment," he said as he took a step back.

I waited, and behold, an arm reached out of the hoop from its left side, without a body to hold it up. The sleeve it wore matched Bashaarat's robe. The arm waved up and down, and then retreated through the hoop until it was gone.

The first trick I had thought a clever mime, but this one seemed far superior, because the pedestal and hoop were clearly too slender to conceal a person. "Very clever!" I exclaimed.

"Thank you, but this is not mere sleight of hand. The right side of the hoop precedes the left by several seconds. To pass through the hoop is to cross that duration instantly."

"I do not understand," I said.

"Let me repeat the demonstration." Again he thrust his arm through the hoop, and his arm disappeared. He smiled, and pulled back and forth as if playing tug-a-rope. Then he pulled his arm out again, and presented his hand to me with the palm open. On it lay a ring I recognized.

"That is my ring!" I checked my hand, and saw that my ring still lay on my finger. "You have conjured up a duplicate."

"No, this is truly your ring. Wait."

Again, an arm reached out from the left side. Wishing to discover the mechanism of the trick, I rushed over to grab it by the hand. It was not a false hand, but one fully warm and alive as mine. I pulled on it, and it pulled back. Then, as deft as a pickpocket, the hand slipped the ring from my finger and the arm withdrew into the hoop, vanishing completely.

"My ring is gone!" I exclaimed.

"No, my lord," he said. "Your ring is here." And he gave me the ring he held. "Forgive me for my game." I replaced it on my finger. "You had the ring before it was taken from me."

At that moment an arm reached out, this time from the right side of the hoop. "What is this?" I exclaimed. Again I recognized it as his by the sleeve before it withdrew, but I had not seen him reach in.

"Recall," he said, "the right side of the hoop precedes the left." And he walked over to the left side of the hoop, and thrust his arm through from that side, and again it disappeared.

Your Majesty has undoubtedly already grasped this, but it was only then that I understood: whatever happened on the right side of the hoop was complemented, a few seconds later, by an event on the left side. "Is this sorcery?" I asked.

"No, my lord, I have never met a djinni, and if I did, I would not trust it to do my bidding. This is a form of alchemy."

He offered an explanation, speaking of his search for tiny pores in the skin of reality, like the holes that worms bore into wood, and how upon finding one he was able to expand and stretch it the way a glassblower turns a dollop of molten glass into a long-necked pipe, and how he then allowed time to flow like water at one mouth while causing it to thicken like syrup at the other. I confess I did not really understand his words, and cannot testify to their truth. All I could say in response was, "You have created something truly astonishing."

"Thank you," he said, "but this is merely a prelude to what I intended to show you." He bade me follow him into another room, farther in the back. There stood a circular doorway whose massive frame was made of the same polished black metal, mounted in the middle of the room.

"What I showed you before was a Gate of Seconds," he said. "This is a Gate of Years. The two sides of the doorway are separated by a span of twenty years."

I confess I did not understand his remark immediately. I imagined him reaching his arm in from the right side and waiting twenty years before it emerged from the left side, and it seemed a very obscure magic trick. I said as much, and he laughed. "That is one use for it," he said, "but consider what would happen if you were to step through." Standing on the right side, he gestured for me to come closer, and then pointed through the doorway. "Look."

I looked, and saw that there appeared to be different rugs and pillows on the other side of the room than I had seen when I had entered. I moved my head from side to side, and realized that when I peered through the doorway, I was looking at a different room from the one I stood in.

"You are seeing the room twenty years from now," said Bashaarat.

I blinked, as one might at an illusion of water in the desert, but what I saw did not change. "And you say I could step through?" I asked.

"You could. And with that step, you would visit the Baghdad of twenty years hence. You could seek out your older self and have a conversation with him. Afterwards, you could step back through the Gate of Years and return to the present day."

Hearing Bashaarat's words, I felt as if I were reeling. "You have done this?" I asked him. "You have stepped through?"

"I have, and so have numerous customers of mine."

"Earlier you said I was the first to whom you showed this."

"This Gate, yes. But for many years I owned a shop in Cairo, and it was there that I first built a Gate of Years. There were many to whom I showed that Gate, and who made use of it."

"What did they learn when talking to their older selves?"

"Each person learns something different. If you wish, I can tell you the story of one such person." Bashaarat proceeded to tell me such a story, and if it pleases Your Majesty, I will recount it here.

—Ted Chiang (Read the rest here)

Who is this person?

Born in Port Jefferson, New York, Ted Chiang began writing science fiction in high school. He has published two story collections, but his influence in both the sci-fi and literary fiction worlds is expansive. His short story, “Story of Your Life” was adapted into the movie Arrival; he has received, since 1991, a number of Hugo and Nebula Awards for his stories, novelettes, and novellas. He also works as a technical writer, and today lives in Washington state. In a New Yorker profile, Chiang told Joshua Rothman, “I’m curious about what you might call discredited world views… It can be tempting to dismiss people from the past—to say, ‘Weren’t they foolish for thinking things worked that way?’ But they weren’t dummies. They came up with theories as to how the universe worked based on the observations available to them at the time. They thought about the implications of things in the ways that we do now. Sometimes I think, What if further observation had confirmed their initial theories instead of disproving them? What if the universe had really worked that way?”

Prompt

Write a poem or story about an experience of dislocation (external or internal.)

Alanna Schubach is a fiction writer, freelance journalist, and teacher. Follow her on Twitter @AlannaSchubach and read her work at alannaschubach.com. Send questions, recommendations for future newsletters, and the results of writing prompts (if you’re so inclined) to info@alannaschubach.com

That American work culture is deranged is widely accepted, but at the same time, hard to see. I suppose it’s like how you assume as a child that your family is entirely normal until you’re confronted by other ways of growing up. So much of our value seems to hinge on what we do to get by, so little on how we spend those other hours when, presumably, we’re frantically trying to squeeze in all the things that actually matter to us. Why is it then, asked John Lanchester, that in so much contemporary writing, work is “as much a marginal detail of a character’s life as her hair color”?

In today’s poem and story, work is a consuming, defining force. It gives characters a sense of purpose that shapes their lives, but is also what keeps them from something more significant, something they are only able to brush up against briefly at the end of the day, when at last they have a few moments with their own thoughts.

You know I had to do it.

Poem

Poema 18, from Then Come Back

Comes back from his blaze, the fireman,

from his star the astronomer,

from his disastrous passion the obsessive,

from one million whatever the ambitious,

from the naval night the sailor,

the poet returns from his slabber,

the soldier from fear,

the fisherman from his wet heart,

the mother from Juanito’s fever,

the thief from his nighttime high,

the engineer from his frosted rose,

the native from his hunger,

the judge from fatigue and unsureness,

the jealous from his torment,

the dancer from her exhausted feet,

the architect from the three thousandth floor,

the pharaoh from his tenth life,

the hooker from her Lycra and falsies,

the hero comes back from oblivion,

the poor from another day gone,

the surgeon from staring down death,

the fighter from his pathetic contract,

someone returns from geometry,

stepping back from his infinity, the explorer,

the cook from her dirty dishes,

the novelist from a web of lies,

the hunter stamps out the fire and returns,

the adulterer from rapture and despair,

the professor from a glass of wine,

the schemer from his backstabbing,

the gardener has shuttered his rose,

the bartender stoppers his liquor,

the convict takes up his plea again,

the butcher washed his hands,

the nun quit her prayers,

the miner his slick tunnel,

and like the rest I take off my clothes,

inside the night of all men, I make

a smaller night for myself,

my woman joins me, silence bears down

and the dream spins the world again.

—Pablo Neruda

Who is this person?

Poet, diplomat, and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda grew up in southern Chile and showed astounding literary talent from a young age, publishing in papers and magazines while still in high school. He published his first collection, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, at the age of 20; it was widely translated and brought him critical acclaim. When his second collection was published, Neruda was serving as consul in Spain; the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War radicalized him, and his pro-Republican poetry cost him the post. In the 40s, he wrote the epic Canto General while serving as a Communist Party representative in the Chilean senate. He later went into exile after criticizing the Chilean president, who issued an order for his arrest. Upon his return, Neruda’s work became less ideological and focused more on themes of love, nature, and the everyday. In the 70s, Salvador Allende appointed him poet-ambassador to France, and during this appointment Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1973, days after Allende was killed in a military coup.

Story

I Stand Here Ironing

I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.

“I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I’m sure you can help me understand her. She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping.”

“Who needs help.” …Even if I came, what good would it do? You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me.

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.

She was a beautiful baby. The first and only one of our five that was beautiful at birth. You do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her now-loveliness. You did not know her all those years she was thought homely, or see her poring over her baby pictures, making me tell her over and over how beautiful she had been—and would be, I would tell her—and was now, to the seeing eye. But the seeing eyes were few or nonexistent. Including mine.

I nursed her. They feel that’s important nowadays. I nursed all the children, but with her, with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I did like the books then said. Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed.

Why do I put that first? I do not even know if it matters, or if it explains anything.

She was a beautiful baby. She blew shining bubbles of sound. She loved motion, loved light, loved color and music and textures. She would lie on the floor in her blue overalls patting the surface so hard in ecstasy her hands and feet would blur. She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all, for I worked or looked for work and for Emily’s father, who “could no longer endure” (he wrote in his good-bye note) “sharing want with us.”

I was nineteen. It was the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression. I would start running as soon as I got off the streetcar, running up the stairs, the place smelling sour, and awake or asleep to startle awake, when she saw me she would break into a clogged weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I can hear yet.

After a while I found a job hashing at night so I could be with her days, and it was better. But it came to where I had to bring her to his family and leave her.

It took a long time to raise the money for her fare back. Then she got chicken pox and I had to wait longer. When she finally came, I hardly knew her, walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin, and dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin and glared at the pockmarks. All the baby loveliness gone.

She was two. Old enough for nursery school they said, and I did not know then what I know now—the fatigue of the long day, and the lacerations of group life in the kinds of nurseries that are only parking places for children.

Except that it would have made no difference if I had known. It was the only place there was. It was the only way we could be together, the only way I could hold a job.

And even without knowing, I knew. I knew the teacher that was evil because all these years it has curdled into my memory, the little boy hunched in the corner, her rasp, “why aren’t you outside, because Alvin hits you? that’s no reason, go out, scaredy.” I knew Emily hated it even if she did not clutch and implore “don’t go Mommy” like the other children, mornings.

She always had a reason why we should stay home. Momma, you look sick. Momma, I feel sick. Momma, the teachers aren’t here today, they’re sick. Momma, we can’t go, there was a fire there last night. Momma, it’s a holiday today, no school, they told me.

But never a direct protest, never rebellion. I think of our others in their three-, four-year-oldness—the explosions, tempers, the denunciations, the demands—and I feel suddenly ill. I put the iron down. What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?

The old man living in the back once said in his gentle way: “You should smile at Emily more when you look at her.” What was in my face when I looked at her? I loved her. There were all the acts of love.

It was only with the others I remembered what he said, and it was the face of joy, and not of care or tightness or worry I turned to them—too late for Emily. She does not smile easily, let alone almost always as her brothers and sisters do. Her face is closed and sombre, but when she wants, how fluid. You must have seen it in her pantomimes, you spoke of her rare gift for comedy on the stage that rouses laughter out of the audience so dear they applaud and applaud and do not want to let her go.

Where does it come from, that comedy? There was none of it in her when she came back to me that second time, after I had to send her away again. She had a new daddy now to learn to love, and I think perhaps it was a better time.

Except when we left her alone nights, telling ourselves she was old enough. “Can’t you go some other time, Mommy, like tomorrow?” she would ask. “Will it be just a little while you’ll be gone? Do you promise?”

The time we came back, the front door open, the clock on the floor in the hall. She rigid awake. “It wasn’t just a little while. I didn’t cry. Three times I called you, just three times, and then I ran downstairs to open the door so you could come faster. The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.”

She said the clock talked loud again that night I went to the hospital to have Susan. She was delirious with the fever that comes before red measles, but she was fully conscious all the week I was gone and the week after we were home when she could not come near the new baby or me.

She did not get well. She stayed skeleton thin, not wanting to eat, and night after night she had nightmares. She would call for me, and I would rouse from exhaustion to sleepily call back: “You’re all right, darling, go to sleep, it’s just a dream,” and if she still called, in a sterner voice, “now to go sleep, Emily, there’s nothing to hurt you.” Twice, only twice, when I had to get up for Susan anyhow, I went in to sit with her.

Now when it is too late (as if she would let me hold and comfort her like I do the others) I get up and go to her at once at her moan or restless stirring. “Are you awake, Emily? Can I get you something?” And the answer is always the same: “No, I’m all right, go back to sleep, Mother.”

They persuaded me at the clinic to send her away to a convalescent home in the country where “she can have the kind of food and care you can’t manage for her, and you’ll be free to concentrate on the new baby.” They still send children to that place. I see pictures on the society page of sleek young women planning affairs to raise money for it, or dancing at the affairs, or decorating Easter eggs or filling Christmas stockings for the children.

They never have a picture of the children so I do not know if the girls still wear those gigantic red bows and the ravaged looks on the every other Sunday when parents can come to visit “unless otherwise notified”—as we were notified the first six weeks.

Oh it is a handsome place, green lawns and tall trees and fluted flower beds. High up on the balconies of each cottage the children stand, the girls in their red bows and white dresses, the boys in white suits and giant red ties. The parents stand below shrieking up to be heard and the children shriek down to be heard, and between them the invisible wall “Not To Be Contaminated by Parental Germs or Physical Affection.”

There was a tiny girl who always stood hand in hand with Emily. Her parents never came. One visit she was gone. “They moved her to Rose Cottage” Emily shouted in explanation. “They don’t like you to love anybody here.”

She wrote once a week, the labored writing of a seven-year-old. “I am fine. How is the baby. If I write my letter nicely I will have a star. Love.” There never was a star. We wrote every other day, letters she could never hold or keep but only hear read—once. “We simply do not have room for children to keep any personal possessions,” they patiently explained when we pieced one Sunday’s shrieking together to plead how much it would mean to Emily, who loved so to keep things, to be allowed to keep her letters and cards.

Each visit she looked frailer. “She isn’t eating,” they told us.

(They had runny eggs for breakfast or mush with lumps, Emily said later, I’d hold it in my mouth and not swallow. Nothing ever tasted good, just when they had chicken.)

It took us eight months to get her released home, and only the fact that she gained back so little of her seven lost pounds convinced the social worker.

I used to try to hold and love her after she came back, but her body would stay stiff, and after a while she’d push away. She ate little. Food sickened her, and I think much of life too. Oh she had physical lightness and brightness, twinkling by on skates, bouncing like a ball up and down up and down over the jump rope, skimming over the hill; but these were momentary.

She fretted about her appearance, thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple. The doorbell sometimes rang for her, but no one seemed to come and play in the house or be a best friend. Maybe because we moved so much.

There was a boy she loved painfully through two school semesters. Months later she told me how she had taken pennies from my purse to buy him candy. “Licorice was his favorite and I brought him some every day, but he still liked Jennifer better’n me. Why, Mommy?” The kind of question for which there is no answer.

School was a worry to her. She was not glib or quick in a world where glibness and quickness were easily confused with ability to learn. To her overworked and exasperated teachers she was an overconscientious “slow learner” who kept trying to catch up and was absent entirely too often.

I let her be absent, though sometimes the illness was imaginary. How different from my now-strictness about attendance with the others. I wasn’t working. We had a new baby, I was home anyhow. Sometimes, after Susan grew old enough, I would keep her home from school, too, to have them all together.

Mostly Emily had asthma, and her breathing, harsh and labored, would fill the house with a curiously tranquil sound. I would bring the two old dresser mirrors and her boxes of collections to her bed. She would select beads and single earrings, bottle tops and shells, dried flowers and pebbles, old postcards and scraps, all sorts of oddments; then she and Susan would play Kingdom, setting up landscapes and furniture, peopling them with action.

Those were the only times of peaceful companionship between her and Susan. I have edged away from it, that poisonous feeling between them, that terrible balancing of hurts and needs I had to do between the two, and did so badly, those earlier years.

Oh there are conflicts between the others too, each one human, needing, demanding, hurting, taking—but only between Emily and Susan, no, Emily toward Susan that corroding resentment. It seems so obvious on the surface, yet it is not obvious. Susan, the second child, Susan, golden-and curly-haired and chubby, quick and articulate and assured, everything in appearance and manner Emily was not; Susan, not able to resist Emily’s precious things, losing or sometimes clumsily breaking them; Susan telling jokes and riddles to company for applause while Emily sat silent (to say to me later: that was my riddle, Mother, I told it to Susan); Susan, who for all the five years’ difference in age was just a year behind Emily in developing physically.

I am glad for that slow physical development that widened the difference between her and her contemporaries, though she suffered over it. She was too vulnerable for that terrible world of youthful competition, of preening and parading, of constant measuring of yourself against every other, of envy, “If I had that copper hair,” “If I had that skin….” She tormented herself enough about not looking like the others, there was enough of the unsureness, the having to be conscious of words before you speak, the constant caring—what are they thinking of me? without having it all magnified by the merciless physical drives.

Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him. It is rare there is such a cry now. That time of motherhood is almost behind me when the ear is not one’s own but must always be racked and listening for the child cry, the child call. We sit for a while and I hold him, looking out over the city spread in charcoal with its soft aisles of light. “Shoogily,” he breathes and curls closer. I carry him back to bed, asleep. Shoogily. A funny word, a family word, inherited from Emily, invented by her to say: comfort.

In this and other ways she leaves her seal, I say aloud. And startle at my saying it. What do I mean? What did I start to gather together, to try and make coherent? I was at the terrible, growing years. War years. I do not remember them well. I was working, there were four smaller ones now, there was not time for her. She had to help be a mother, and housekeeper, and shopper. She had to set her seal. Mornings of crisis and near hysteria trying to get lunches packed, hair combed, coats and shoes found, everyone to school or Child Care on time, the baby ready for transportation. And always the paper scribbled on by a smaller one, the book looked at by Susan then mislaid, the homework not done. Running out to that huge school where she was one, she was lost, she was a drop; suffering over the unpreparedness, stammering and unsure in her classes.

There was so little time left at night after the kids were bedded down. She would struggle over books, always eating (it was in those years she developed her enormous appetite that is legendary in our family) and I would be ironing, or preparing food for the next day, or writing V-mail to Bill, or tending the baby. Sometimes, to make me laugh, or out of her despair, she would imitate happenings or types at school.

I think I said once: “Why don’t you do something like this in the school amateur show?” One morning she phoned me at work, hardly understandable through the weeping: “Mother, I did it. I won, I won; they gave me first prize; they clapped and clapped and wouldn’t let me go.”

Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as she had been in anonymity.

She began to be asked to perform at other high schools, even in colleges, then at city and statewide affairs. The first one we went to, I only recognized her that first moment when thin, shy, she almost drowned herself into the curtains. Then: Was this Emily? The control, the command, the convulsing and deadly clowning, the spell, then the roaring, stamping audience, unwilling to let this rare and precious laughter out of their lives.

Afterwards: You ought to do something about her with a gift like that—but without money or knowing how, what does one do? We have left it all to her, and the gift has as often eddied inside, clogged and clotted, has been used and growing.

She is coming. She runs up the stairs two at a time with her light graceful step, and I know she is happy tonight. Whatever it was that occasioned your call did not happen today.

“Aren’t you ever going to finish the ironing, Mother? Whistler painted his mother in a rocker. I’d have to paint mine standing over an ironing board.” This is one of her communicative nights and she tells me everything and nothing as she fixes herself a plate of food out of the icebox.

She is so lovely. Why did you want me to come in at all? Why were you concerned? She will find her way.

She starts up the stairs to bed. “Don’t get me up with the rest in the morning.” “But I thought you were having midterms.” “Oh, those,” she comes back in, kisses me, and says quite lightly, “in a couple of years when we’ll all be atom-dead they won’t matter a bit.”

She has said it before. She believes it. But because I have been dredging the past, and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I cannot endure it tonight.

I will never total it all. I will never come in to say: She was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. There were years she had care she hated. She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a world where the prestige went to blondeness and curly hair and dimples, she was slow where glibness was prized. She was a child of anxious, not proud, love. We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother. There were other children pushing up, demanding. Her younger sister seemed all that she was not. There were years she did not want me to touch her. She kept too much in herself, her life was such she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably little will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear.

Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom—but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know—help make it so there is cause for her to know—that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.

—Tillie Olsen

Who is this person?

Born in Nebraska in 1912, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Tillie Olsen was known for her quick wit and noncomformity. As a high school student, she excelled academically and started her own humor column, but dropped out at 15 to start working. Influenced by her parents’ socialism, she became a union organizer and was arrested in 1931 for her role in worker protests. Throughout the 30s, she published political poetry, reportage, and a chapter from an unfinished novel about workers in the Great Depression; she also lived and had childrne with Jack Olsen, a longshoreman whom she met while supporting striking workers on San Francisco’s waterfront. In the 50s, she won a writing fellowship from Stanford and was finally able to publish her first story collection, Tell Me a Riddle, in 1961. Her essay collection Silences looked at the effects of discrimination and exploitation on writers. This made her into a feminist icon, and inspired the founding of the Feminist Press. Later in her career she taught at a number of universities, was the recipient of many honors and fellowships, and was memorialized in a 2007 documentary.

Prompt

Write a poem or a story set in a workplace (however you define that. As is clear in Olsen’s story, a home can be a workplace.)

Alanna Schubach is a fiction writer, freelance journalist, and teacher. Follow her on Twitter @AlannaSchubach and read her work at alannaschubach.com. Send questions, recommendations for future newsletters, and the results of writing prompts (if you’re so inclined) to info@alannaschubach.com

Today, a tiny antidote, in the form of a poem and story about empathy—rejecting it, seeking it, offering and rescinding it—and about our need for other beings with whom to share burdens, terrible as that need may sometimes be.

Alex Prager — Applause (2016)

Poem

Vectors 4.2: All of the Above

When the power goes off, the silence wakes me.

ε

Take us away from our crowd and we see faces in cliffs, hear voices on the wind, read the thoughts of animals, and feel watched by we don’t know what. We’re unplugged from our peripherals, like the newly blind who hallucinate because their brains are desperate to see.

ε

Silent or silenced?

ε

Experience teaches that the world is a blaze in my head, pain hurts me most, only others die. The rest is Imagination.

ε

Phone rings. The house has sprung a leak!

ε

Spring, and the soil exhales like a pot whose lid has been lifted. The air itself has greened: sound is blurrier and slower, blossoms send out waves of intoxicants. The woodchuck knows exactly how long ago the fox passed, a leaf smells that its neighbor is under attack by insects, from 300 feet up the hawk spots the tenseness of a vole. No wonder we feel suddenly less and more alone, like someone in a crowd who doesn’t know any of the languages.

ε

His lip’s pierced with a ring, last link in some invisible chain.

ε

Faith is a kind of doubt…of everything else. And doubt….believes deeply it can do without believing.

ε

Zeal: shark that swims hard lest it drown.

ε

My resentment is a child who needs attention. I’m out of here, he says. Don’t let me go.

ε

At last I break my chains, only to find that those I was chained to are more relieved than I am.

ε

Rage, like infatuation, thrives on silly details.

ε

All that time trying to do what they wanted, when even they weren’t quite sure what it was.

ε

Even at 10000 feet, yellowjackets, and they are angry.

ε

Silly to have such a strong lock when the door itself is so weak, and the window is weaker, and my head can’t keep anything out.

ε

She thinks her frenzy is a victimless crime.

ε

We should be reasonable is a feeling. Feeling is more genuine than thinking is a thought.

ε

I’d listen to my conscience if I were sure it was really mine.

ε

Anxiety hunched over, eating its hands.

ε

They are our friends, or they slump next to us on the subway, or they are close-ups on the news: the sufferers. Next to them, we feel like innocents. Natural enough, but maybe it’s analogous to the old sentimentality about The Happy Poor: if we envy life’s victims for being realer than we are, will we also owe them, will we help them?

ε

Realism is false when it cares a little too much that you think it’s real.

ε

Empathy’s the human grid: a voltage surge, and we might shut down so as not to burn out, often least responsive to the troubles that are most like our own.

ε

Pain knows you don’t really know. Over and over and over it says No you don’t, no you don’t.

ε

On the Kelvin scale, which runs from Absolute Zero to a zillion degrees, we’re most comfortable way down at the chilly end: 293 degrees is room temperature. Only a little higher and water boils, molecules break, life becomes impossible. The universe is a cold place. Good thing!

ε

More moving than someone weeping: someone trying not to.

ε

Some are naked through their clothes, some never naked.

ε

Suffering builds character? Or the fear that every touch will be a blow?

ε

My pain has to be greater than yours, lest I owe you something.

ε

Values fluctuate wildly, prices considerably, but change is given to the penny.

ε

In heaven we will be known to the core and loved for exactly who we are. Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of.

ε

Somehow it’s easier to believe people are better than I am than that they’re smarter.

ε

There’s no one less rebellious: maybe I think I’m in power?

ε

How messy and wrecked the house has gotten, I think, and start Spring Cleaning. There must have been a Winter Dirtying I didn’t notice, a blindness or lethargy that evolved to protect us from wasting energy during the hard months. But what leads to those much darker days when, maybe helped by a mirror or a sharp word, I look up and suddenly see how badly I’ve neglected everything in my life that really matters?

ε

Evolution provided physical pain to keep us from damaging ourselves, sympathetic pain to keep us from damaging others. Don’t feel too good.

ε

Self-criticism: superiority to the idiot I was a minute ago.

 ε

Sometimes I’m the only one in the loud bar not talking, a rock in the stream listening for the sound water makes hitting it and turning white.

ε

Are these new storms, or has everything all together reached the age of falling down?

ε

Not till I walk out of the sea of noise into the night do I know I’m drunk.

—James Richardson

Who is this person?

Born in Garden City, NY in 1950 (a fellow Long Islander!), James Richardson is a poet, aphorist, and critic, as well as a professor at Princeton University. He is the author of several collections of poetry and aphorisms, most recently FOR NOW, out from Copper Canyon Press; his awards include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award in Literature and an NEH fellowship. In The Believer, Sarah Manguso wrote of Richardson’s blend of verse and prose that it “seem[s] to indicate that this poet has recently synthesized, in some laboratory setting, a designer hybrid form. Think glow-in-the-dark mice, but with letters and words.”

Story

Misery

The twilight of evening. Big flakes of wet snow are whirling lazily about the street lamps, which have just been lighted, and lying in a thin soft layer on roofs, horses' backs, shoulders, caps. Iona Potapov, the sledge-driver, is all white like a ghost. He sits on the box without stirring, bent as double as the living body can be bent. If a regular snowdrift fell on him it seems as though even then he would not think it necessary to shake it off.... His little mare is white and motionless too. Her stillness, the angularity of her lines, and the stick-like straightness of her legs make her look like a halfpenny gingerbread horse. She is probably lost in thought. Anyone who has been torn away from the plough, from the familiar gray landscapes, and cast into this slough, full of monstrous lights, of unceasing uproar and hurrying people, is bound to think.

It is a long time since Iona and his nag have budged. They came out of the yard before dinnertime and not a single fare yet. But now the shades of evening are falling on the town. The pale light of the street lamps changes to a vivid color, and the bustle of the street grows noisier.

'Sledge to Vyborgskaya!' Iona hears. 'Sledge!'

Iona starts, and through his snow-plastered eyelashes sees an officer in a military overcoat with a hood over his head.

'To Vyborgskaya,' repeats the officer. 'Are you asleep? To Vyborgskaya!'

In token of assent Iona gives a tug at the reins which sends cakes of snow flying from the horse's back and shoulders. The officer gets into the sledge. The sledge-driver clicks to the horse, cranes his neck like a swan, rises in his seat, and more from habit than necessity brandishes his whip. The mare cranes her neck, too, crooks her stick-like legs, and hesitatingly sets of....

'Where are you shoving, you devil?' Iona immediately hears shouts from the dark mass shifting to and fro before him. 'Where the devil are you going? Keep to the r-right!'

'You don't know how to drive! Keep to the right,' says the officer angrily.

A coachman driving a carriage swears at him; a pedestrian crossing the road and brushing the horse's nose with his shoulder looks at him angrily and shakes the snow off his sleeve. Iona fidgets on the box as though he were sitting on thorns, jerks his elbows, and turns his eyes about like one possessed as though he did not know where he was or why he was there.

'What rascals they all are!' says the officer jocosely. 'They are simply doing their best to run up against you or fall under the horse's feet. They must be doing it on purpose.'

Iona looks as his fare and moves his lips.... Apparently he means to say something, but nothing comes but a sniff.

'What?' inquires the officer.

Iona gives a wry smile, and straining his throat, brings out huskily: 'My son... er... my son died this week, sir.'

'H'm! What did he die of?'

Iona turns his whole body round to his fare, and says:

'Who can tell! It must have been from fever.... He lay three days in the hospital and then he died.... God's will.'

'Turn round, you devil!' comes out of the darkness. 'Have you gone cracked, you old dog? Look where you are going!'

'Drive on! drive on!...' says the officer. 'We shan't get there till to-morrow going on like this. Hurry up!'

The sledge-driver cranes his neck again, rises in his seat, and with heavy grace swings his whip. Several times he looks round at the officer, but the latter keeps his eyes shut and is apparently disinclined to listen. Putting his fare down at Vyborgskaya, Iona stops by a restaurant, and again sits huddled up on the box.... Again the wet snow paints him and his horse white. One hour passes, and then another....

Three young men, two tall and thin, one short and hunchbacked, come up, railing at each other and loudly stamping on the pavement with their goloshes.

'Cabby, to the Police Bridge!' the hunchback cries in a cracked voice. 'The three of us,... twenty kopecks!'

Iona tugs at the reins and clicks to his horse. Twenty kopecks is not a fair price, but he has no thoughts for that. Whether it is a rouble or whether it is five kopecks does not matter to him now so long as he has a fare.... The three young men, shoving each other and using bad language, go up to the sledge, and all three try to sit down at once. The question remains to be settled: Which are to sit down and which one is to stand? After a long altercation, ill-temper, and abuse, they come to the conclusion that the hunchback must stand because he is the shortest.

'Well, drive on,' says the hunchback in his cracked voice, settling himself and breathing down Iona's neck. 'Cut along! What a cap you've got, my friend! You wouldn't find a worse one in all Petersburg....'

'He-he!... he-he!...' laughs Iona. 'It's nothing to boast of!'

'Well, then, nothing to boast of, drive on! Are you going to drive like this all the way? Eh? Shall I give you one in the neck?'

'My head aches,' says one of the tall ones. 'At the Dukmasovs' yesterday Vaska and I drank four bottles of brandy between us.'

'I can't make out why you talk such stuff,' says the other tall one angrily. 'You lie like a brute.'

'Strike me dead, it's the truth!...'

'It's about as true as that a louse coughs.'

'He-he!' grins Iona. 'Me-er-ry gentlemen!'

'Tfoo! the devil take you!' cries the hunchback indignantly. 'Will you get on, you old plague, or won't you? Is that the way to drive? Give her one with the whip. Hang it all, give it her well.'

Iona feels behind his back the jolting person and quivering voice of the hunchback. He hears abuse addressed to him, he sees people, and the feeling of loneliness begins little by little to be less heavy on his heart. The hunchback swears at him, till he chokes over some elaborately whimsical string of epithets and is overpowered by his cough. His tall companions begin talking of a certain Nadyezhda Petrovna. Iona looks round at them. Waiting till there is a brief pause, he looks round once more and says:

'This week... er... my... er... son died!'

'We shall all die...' says the hunchback with a sigh, wiping his lips after coughing. 'Come, drive on! drive on! My friends, I simply cannot stand crawling like this! When will he get us there?'

'Well, you give him a little encouragement... one in the neck!'

'Do you hear, you old plague? I'll make you smart. If one stands on ceremony with fellows like you one may as well walk. Do you hear, you old dragon? Or don't you care a hang what we say?'

And Iona hears rather than feels a slap on the back of his neck.

'He-he!... ' he laughs. 'Merry gentlemen.... God give you health!'

'Cabman, are you married'?' asks one of the tall ones.

'I? He he! Me-er-ry gentlemen. The only wife for me now is the damp earth.... He-ho-ho!....The grave that is!... Here my son's dead and I am alive.... It's a strange thing, death has come in at the wrong door.... Instead of coming for me it went for my son....'

And Iona turns round to tell them how his son died, but at that point the hunchback gives a faint sigh and announces that, thank God! they have arrived at last. After taking his twenty kopecks, Iona gazes for a long while after the revelers, who disappear into a dark entry. Again he is alone and again there is silence for him.... The misery which has been for a brief space eased comes back again and tears his heart more cruelly than ever. With a look of anxiety and suffering Iona's eyes stray restlessly among the crowds moving to and fro on both sides of the street: can he not find among those thousands someone who will listen to him? But the crowds flit by heedless of him and his misery.... His misery is immense, beyond all bounds. If Iona's heart were to burst and his misery to flow out, it would flood the whole world, it seems, but yet it is not seen. It has found a hiding-place in such an insignificant shell that one would not have found it with a candle by daylight....

Iona sees a house-porter with a parcel and makes up his mind to address him.

'What time will it be, friend?' he asks.

'Going on for ten.... Why have you stopped here? Drive on!'

Iona drives a few paces away, bends himself double, and gives himself up to his misery. He feels it is no good to appeal to people. But before five minutes have passed he draws himself up, shakes his head as though he feels a sharp pain, and tugs at the reins.... He can bear it no longer.

'Back to the yard!" he thinks. "To the yard!'

And his little mare, as though she knew his thoughts, falls to trotting. An hour and a half later Iona is sitting by a big dirty stove. On the stove, on the floor, and on the benches are people snoring. The air is full of smells and stuffiness. Iona looks at the sleeping figures, scratches himself, and regrets that he has come home so early....

'I have not earned enough to pay for the oats, even,' he thinks. 'That's why I am so miserable. A man who knows how to do his work,... who has had enough to eat, and whose horse has had enough to eat, is always at ease....'

In one of the corners a young cabman gets up, clears his throat sleepily, and makes for the water-bucket.

'Want a drink?' Iona asks him.

'Seems so.'

'May it do you good.... But my son is dead, mate.... Do you hear? This week in the hospital.... It's a queer business....'

Iona looks to see the effect produced by his words, but he sees nothing. The young man has covered his head over and is already asleep. The old man sighs and scratches himself.... Just as the young man had been thirsty for water, he thirsts for speech. His son will soon have been dead a week, and he has not really talked to anybody yet.... He wants to talk of it properly, with deliberation.... He wants to tell how his son was taken ill, how he suffered, what he said before he died, how he died.... He wants to describe the funeral, and how he went to the hospital to get his son's clothes. He still has his daughter Anisya in the country.... And he wants to talk about her too.... Yes, he has plenty to talk about now. His listener ought to sigh and exclaim and lament.... It would be even better to talk to women. Though they are silly creatures, they blubber at the first word.

'Let's go out and have a look at the mare,' Iona thinks. 'There is always time for sleep.... You'll have sleep enough, no fear....'

He puts on his coat and goes into the stables where his mare is standing. He thinks about oats, about hay, about the weather.... He cannot think about his son when he is alone.... To talk about him with someone is possible, but to think of him and picture him is insufferable anguish....

'Are you munching?' Iona asks his mare, seeing her shining eyes. 'There, munch away, munch away.... Since we have not earned enough for oats, we will eat hay.... Yes,... I have grown too old to drive.... My son ought to be driving, not I.... He was a real cabman.... He ought to have lived....'

Iona is silent for a while, and then he goes on:

'That's how it is, old girl.... Kuzma Ionitch is gone.... He said good-by to me.... He went and died for no reason.... Now, suppose you had a little colt, and you were own mother to that little colt.... And all at once that same little colt went and died.... You'd be sorry, wouldn't you?...'

The little mare munches, listens, and breathes on her master's hands. Iona is carried away and tells her all about it.

—Anton Chekhov

Who is this person?

Does Chekhov really require an introduction from the likes of me? You can read a thorough celebration of the writer, from the 150th anniversary of his birth, here. I also like Peter Orner’s analysis of Chekhov’s work (Orner was featured in Issue 8 of this newsletter), especially this bit: “Chekhov is as realistic a writer as Kafka, and vice versa. I read ‘The Metamorphosis’ not as an allegory but as a rough morning. Gregor Samsa, you might want to call in sick today. Yet Chekhov, in his unobtrusive way, is often gloriously weirder. It's all in the things he notices about human beings, and there is nothing Chekhov does not notice. Few writers in history have been as gifted a noticer.”

Prompt

Two options:

1) Taking a cue from “Misery,” write a poem or story in which a character is trying desperately to communicate an important message—their own grief, say, or a dire warning, or something else—but is going unheard.

2) Write a series of loosely-connected aphorisms.

Alanna Schubach is a fiction writer, freelance journalist, and teacher. Follow her on Twitter @AlannaSchubach and read her work at alannaschubach.com. Send questions, recommendations for future newsletters, and the results of writing prompts (if you’re so inclined) to info@alannaschubach.com

The poem here qualifies to me as an unsolved mystery for its final line (an echo or response, maybe, to the final line of this Rilke poem.) In the Paris Review Patricia Hampl puzzles over whether that line is an admission of defeat, a cry of triumph, or something even larger, an articulation of awe, spoken from outside time. I think the beauty of mysteries like this one is that the reader will find a different possible solution each time they read it, informed by their movement through life and their accumulation of experience.

The story concerns an investigation into a mysterious figure, calling himself Billy White Feather, who leaves a note one morning on the protagonist’s front door. The protagonist is unnerved by the intrusion, even more so when he finds that Billy is hard to pin down; no one he speaks to has seen the man with their own eyes, and everyone describes him differently (a white man with blonde hair; an Indian with a jet-black braid, a small man, a large one) but all seem to agree that he is “bad medicine.” What does it mean when a shapeshifter like that shows up at your home?

from Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (2003)

Poem

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   

Down the ravine behind the empty house,   

The cowbells follow one another   

Into the distances of the afternoon.   

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,   

The droppings of last year’s horses   

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

—James Wright

Who is this person?

Born in 1927, James Wright is among the most celebrated contemporary American poets, and for over 25 years there was an annual poetry festival held in his honor, in his hometown of Martins Ferry, Ohio. Although his first two collections were seen by many critics as too conventional, he would later become well-regarded for his experimentation with language and style. Wright and his son, Franz, have the distinction of being the only father-son pair to both win the Pulitzer for poetry. James Seay said that what makes Wright’s poetry special “is not that he has any new philosophical insights into the problems of existence but that he has the gift of using language in a way that the human spirit is awakened and alerted to its own possibilities."

Story

Finding Billy White Feather (Excerpt)

Oliver Campbell had never met Billy White Feather. He had never heard the name. But the note tacked to his backdoor had him out on the reservation at nine on a raw Sunday morning. Twin Appaloosa foals at Arapaho Ranch, the note said. To purchase, find Billy White Feather. The note was signed, Billy White Feather. He’d stepped out to find the note and no sign of anyone. He looked at his dog on the seat next to him. The twelve-year-old Lab’s big head hung over the edge of the seat.

“You’re not much of a watchdog, Tuck,” Oliver said. “You’re supposed to let me know when somebody’s in the yard.”

The dog said nothing.

Oliver didn’t want to make the drive all the way up to the reservation ranch just to find no one there, so he stopped at the flashing yellow traffic signal in Ethete. Ethete was a gas station/​store and a flashing yellow light. He got out of his pickup and walked through the fresh snow and into the store. He stomped his feet on the mud-caked rubber mat. The young clerk didn’t look up. Oliver moved through one of the narrow aisles to the back and poured himself a large cup of coffee. He picked up a packaged blueberry muffin on his way back and set it on the counter.

“Three dollars,” the young woman yawned.

“Three dollars?” Oliver said in mock surprise.

“Okay, two-fifty,” the woman said, without a pause or interest.

He gave her three dollars. “I’m looking for Billy White Feather.”

“Why?”

“He left me a note about a horse.”

“No, I mean why are you looking here?”

“I think he lives here. On the reservation, I mean.”

“Indians live on the reservation.”

Oliver tore open his muffin and pinched off a bite, looked outside at the snow that was falling again. “Do you know Billy White Feather?”

“I do.”

“But he’s not an Indian?”

She nodded.

“His name is White Feather?”

“That’s something you’re going to have to talk to him about. He ain’t no Arapaho and he ain’t no Shoshone and he ain’t no Crow and he ain’t no Cheyenne. That’s what I know.”

“So, he might be Sioux.”

“Ain’t no Sioux or Blackfoot or Gros Ventre or Paiute neither.”

“Okay.”

“He’s a tall, skinny white boy with blue eyes and a blond ponytail and he come up here a couple of years ago and started hanging around acting like he was a full blood or something.”

Oliver sipped his coffee.

“He liked on Indian girls and dated a bunch of them. Bought them all doughnuts ’til they got fat and then ran out on them. Now he’s in town liking on Mexican girls. That’s what I hear.”

“His note said there are some twin foals up at the ranch,” Oliver said. “Heard anything about that?”

“I heard. It’s big news. Twins. That means good luck.”

“So, what’s White Feather have to do with the horses?”

“I ain’t got no idea. I don’t care. Long he don’t come in here I got no problem with Billy whatever-his-name-is.”

Oliver looked at her.

“Because it sure ain’t no White Feather.”

Oliver nodded. “Well, thanks for talking to me.”

“Good luck.”

The door opened and in with a shock of frigid air came Hiram Shakespeare. He was a big man with a soft voice that didn’t quite fit him.

“Hiram,” Oliver said.

“Hiya,” Hiram said. “What are you doing up this way, brown man?”

“I came to see the twins.”

“Word travels fast. Twins. Something, that. How’d you find out?”

“I got a note from somebody named Billy White Feather.”

“You know him?”

“Never met him.”

“Stay away from him, though. He’s bad medicine.”

“I’m gathering that.” Oliver looked at his cup. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee if you take me up to see the foals.”

“You drive.”

“You bet,” Oliver said.

“I hate driving in snow,” Hiram said. “Can’t see shit in the snow. Course I can’t see shit in the bright sunshine.”

Hiram grabbed his extra-large tub of coffee, and Oliver paid for it. They walked out into the wet falling snow and climbed into Oliver’s truck. Tuck moved to the middle and sat, his head level with the humans.

Hiram rubbed the dog’s head. “He’s looking good.”

“For an old guy,” Oliver said.

“I wish somebody would say that about me.”

“I’m saying.”

Hiram looked through the back window into the bed of the truck. Oliver had thrown a bunch of cinder blocks in the back wheels to keep the truck from fishtailing on ice. Hiram nodded, “That’s good, them blocks.” He then started to fiddle with the radio. He settled on a country station.

“You like that crap?” Oliver asked.

“It’s country music,” Hiram said. “Indians are country people.” He sang along with the song. “So, how do you know Billy White Feather?”

“I don’t know him. Never heard of him until today when I got the note saying to contact him about buying the foals. When were they born?”

“Last night. It’s George Big Elk’s mare.”

“So, they don’t belong to Billy White Feather.”

Hiram laughed loudly. “Billy White Feather?”

“His note said that if I was interested in buying the foals, I should contact Billy White Feather.”

“More like Billy White Man. He doesn’t own the shirt he’s wearing. If he’s wearing a shirt.”

“George’s, eh. Did George know she was having twins?”

Hiram shook his head. “The mare looked plenty big, but not crazy big, you know? Nobody up here was going to pay for a scan.
Nobody does that. You know how much them scans cost?”

Oliver nodded. He turned his defroster on high and used his glove to wipe the windshield. “You must breathe a lot or something.”

“Indians breathe a third more than white people. A quarter more than black people.”

“Why is that?”

“This is FBI air.”

“FBI?”

Hiram laughed. “Full Blooded Indian.”

“I wonder why that guy put that note on my door.”

“Bad medicine. I wonder how he knew about the foals. I heard tell that Danny Moss and Wilson O’Neil run him off the reservation a few weeks ago. Beat him up pretty good.”

“I wonder if I’ve seen the guy without knowing who he was,” Oliver said.

“You’d remember him, all right. He’s a big guy with red hair and a big mustache.”

Oliver took the turn onto a dirt road that had not been plowed. “Think we’ll be okay on this road?” he asked.

Hiram shrugged. “Long as the tribe hasn’t plowed it yet. Those guys come by and make everything impassable.”

“County does the same thing. They can take a messy run and turn it into impassable in a few hours.”

“Two gallons of shit in a one-gallon bucket. Probably go to the same classes.”

“Have you seen the foals yet?”

Hiram shook his head. “I hear tell they’re damn near the same size and pretty strong.”

“That’s unusual.”

“I heard that. I haven’t seen them. They say the mare’s good, too. Vet came up and couldn’t believe it.”

“Who’s the vet?”

“Sam Innis.”

Oliver nodded.

The snow let up a bit.

Hiram was looking out the window at the Owl Creek Hills. “My father wouldn’t set foot in these mountains,” he said. “Scared him. Said there were witches out here.” Then he laughed.

“What’s funny?” Oliver asked.

“That priest over at Saint whatever-it’s-called asked me the other day if I believed in God. I looked him in the eye and said, ‘Why the hell not.’ Then I told him the question is, does He believe in me. He didn’t like that. I don’t think he liked me saying hell in church.”

“What were you doing in the church?”

“I go in there for that communion wine. It’s the only booze I get. My wife won’t let me have beer or nothing.”

“Mine, either.”

“You’re married? Who would marry you?”

“She’s crazy,” Oliver said. 

Oliver pulled the truck into the yard of the ranch. There were several people standing outside the barn corral. The snow had stopped falling, and the sun was even breaking through in the west. They got out and walked over to the huddle of men standing near the gate. Tuck stayed close to Oliver.

The foals were standing, spindly legged clichés next to their mother, a fat-rumped, well-blanketed Appaloosa. The two colts were identical, buckskin in color, with matching blazes. Like the sire, Oliver was told. Who could tell yet whether they would thrive, but they were standing.

“What was the birth like?” Oliver asked.

A fat man named Oscar threw his cigarette butt into the snow. “I knew it was happening at about nine last night. I called Innis and he drove up, got here about ten. Then it went real fast. Vet pulled the first one out, but it wasn’t easy. The head and hoof were showing. He said a bunch of stuff, talking to himself. You know how he is. He reached his hands in there to untwist her leg and I heard him say, ‘What the fuck.’ I never heard Innis swear before. He said he couldn’t believe it, but he felt another head. I couldn’t believe it, either.”

A couple of the men whistled even though they’d heard the story.

“Vet said there was another one and there he stands. He gave them some shots and left a couple of hours ago.”

Oscar looked at Oliver. “What are you doing here?”

“I got a note about these guys.”

“Sam Innis was here all night,” Oscar said.

“The note was from Billy White Feather.”

The men grew quiet.

“How do you know him?” one of the men asked.

“Never met him,” Oliver said.

“Why is he leaving you notes?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s an asshole,” Oscar said. “He owes Mary Willow two hundred dollars,” Oscar said.

“For what?” Hiram asked.

“Something about a horse trailer. She paid him to rewire it, but I guess he skipped with the money. Asshole.”

“So, nobody suspected twins,” Oliver said.

“Naw,” Oscar said.

George Big Elk, a Northern Cheyenne man, came out of the house and moved to the rail. He greeted Oliver. “News travels fast,” he said.

“Around here,” Oliver said.

“Looks like they’re okay.”

“They’re beautiful. Has she thrown before?”

“Twice. Lost the first one. Almost lost her, too. It was a mess. I thought she was all torn up inside, but then she had a foal the next year.”

Oliver looked at the mare. She was tall for an App, with great conformation. “The sire as pretty as she is?”

“You bet,” George said. “Handsome. He’s handsome.”

“Billy White Feather offered to sell them to ol’ Ollie,” Hiram said.

“I wish that wasichu would come around here,” George said.

The men laughed.

“Well, I can now say I’ve seen the twins,” Oliver said. “I will see you men later. Hiram, do you need a ride back down to Ethete?”

“I’m all right. But if you want to come back later, I’ll have some buffalo triplets to sell to you.”

“Come on, Tuck.”

—Percival Everett (Read the rest here)

Who is this person?

The prolific Percival Everett, who has written novels, story collections, and poetry, is known for his thematically and stylistically wide-ranging, genre-defying body of work. Last year, for instance, he published his novel “Telephone” in three different versions—and readers who purchase a copy will have no way of knowing in advance which one they’re getting. (Best of luck to the book clubs discussing this one.) “I’m interested not in the authority of the artist, but the authority of the reader,” he told the New York Times of this latest work. And on the topic of unsolved mysteries, he told the Los Angeles Review of Books, “I never speak to what my work might mean. If I could, I would write pamphlets instead of novels. And if I offered what the work means, I would be wrong. The work is smarter than I am. Art is smarter than us.” Everett is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Prompt

Write a poem or a short story that in some way incorporates conventions of the mystery genre.

Alanna Schubach is a fiction writer, freelance journalist, and teacher. Follow her on Twitter @AlannaSchubach and read her work at alannaschubach.com. Send questions, recommendations for future newsletters, and the results of writing prompts (if you’re so inclined) to info@alannaschubach.com