These are some things that happen after both of your parents are diagnosed with stage four cancer: they fall down stairs, they refuse wheelchairs, they reminisce, they nap a great deal. For your part, you begin to imagine your father’s death—he is the sicker of your two parents—arriving via text message. Dad died will appear on your phone and you will crumple in the adult diapers section of Costco. You don’t want your dad to die and you think that by writing the scene he won’t. He loves shortcuts and would appreciate this one: write about it and it won’t happen.You are writing. You have your own cancer to deal with.

An hour ago, your mother called your sister asking for help, which means something has gone terribly wrong. During the night, your father fell down the stairs. Now it’s after noon, but your mother has only now called your sister. Mom needs help taking Dad to the emergency room. Your parents would never call an ambulance because they wouldn’t want to pay the bill and, who can blame them? Also, by not calling, the problem might go away. A shortcut.

However, comma. This is one of your dad’s favorite phrases.

The night you think your dad is dying, you start baking. You’ve already cleaned the apartment. You innocently turn on Spotify and find a mellow playlist. It’s all love songs. You note how when someone close to you is dying, love songs sound a lot different, like they are meant for you and your dying loved one, in this case, your dad. Should I tear my heart out now? Everything returns to you somehow. And you think how your father, unlike most of the fathers of your friends, didn’t beat you or drink himself to death or otherwise abuse you. You know the father-bar is set low in this part of the world and yet your father was above the bar and you feel lucky. Very lucky.

It occurs to you now that the last time you saw him, days ago, he stood alone on the front walk waving goodbye serenely, as if he were giving you a gift, his last, as if he were saying, This is how I want you to remember the last time you saw me.

Your sisters are drinking and you are baking. Then you start writing while the cake is cooking. Narrating helps somehow but you aren’t sure exactly how since you are blubbering as you type. But it’s your habit to write, so you keep going. Write about it and it won’t happen.

It’s dusk, March. The robins are calling outside, cheerily, cheerily, but the lyrics are taunting: I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me. You wonder if you will make it through this year. Maybe your own cancer will come back from the stress of this shitstorm and it will kill you. You have been sick for three and a half years with a debilitating illness that no one has ever heard of. Then you got a cancer you hadn’t heard of. Then your parents got cancer. It has indeed been quite a year, or rather, a number of years.

Time is meaningless when someone is dying. You make tea and realize it’s late afternoon. It’s raining. You’ve been texting with your sisters for hours. You talked with your mom on the phone, upbeat as ever, all is well, not to worry despite all evidence to the contrary, and now the day is over.

Walking on the tarmac out to the plane you remember two summers ago when you went to Mexico and how difficult it was to travel when you were sick. This morning the air is humid and cool, but at least not raining. Portland. You are in Portland. Oregon. Flying to Sacramento. You are no longer sick with your stupid illness no one has ever heard of. The chemo killed it or at least kicked it into some sort of remission. You have passed your first cancer checkup with no evidence of disease. That’s what they call it, no evidence of disease. No evidence. You ponder that phrase in particular late at night when you can’t sleep. No evidence of disease. Evidence, none. Not there, but was there. Was there, but not there now. You remember you are getting on this plane to visit your parents who are dying. It is your parents who are sick with cancer now.

Weeks pass. Your dad is in and out of consciousness and your mother relives each day like the previous one, groundhog day, rinse, repeat. Her regrets. Her family grievances. Your absent brother. Weepy anxiety about your father and the feeding tube. A month ago the doctor was doubtful about whether or not your father could survive the insertion of a feeding tube and now your mother is insisting, “If he could just eat, he would get better.” Your father agrees in whispers because the tumors have pressed his vocal chords into silence. He wants to start working on the house again.

You say over the phone during a family meeting, Dad has cancer and he is going to die at the end of this. He is not going to get better. For days afterward you feel awful for speaking the truth and don’t call them. When you do, you talk about yourself and how much better you are doing. You try to sound cheerful. For them. For them who are dying. So they won’t worry. So you don’t have to feel bad about having said Dad is going to die.

You ask your best friend to step outside your parents’ house so you can talk about your radiated vagina. After your father fell down the stairs, your sisters moved your parents permanently into your middle sister’s house. Your parents won’t be coming back to this house, ever, so you and your friend are cleaning it.

Standing on the front walk, you start by drawing pictures in the air with your hands and fingers, and keep your voice low because neighbors.

“You know how you can circle your cervix with your fingertip?” you ask. She nods, crow’s feet straining, clearly dreading where this is going. Years ago she was the first person to tell you about feeling your cervix and why you might want to.

“Well, I can’t do that anymore.” You slide your finger back inside your fist, demonstrating. “It’s merged. From the radiation.” You wiggle your grasping thumb and index finger. “It’s called ‘tethering’. It’s fused together here.” Wiggle-wiggle. “And that is preventing me from having sex completely because my cervix can’t move back and away like normal during sex.”

Her face drains, ashen. She already knows about the so-called “dilators,” hard plastic dildos for stretching the scar tissue. However, comma. You soldier on, “The doctor gave me a topical hormone to use in there to keep the tissues moist and I have to increase the dilator fucking to every day.”

“Every day?” She cringes, and you are so grateful she gets it. She gets that every day is unbelievable, unfair. Every day is trauma on trauma, its own kind of loss.

“Every day,” you repeat. Your friend has known you since you were thirteen years old. She knows that you and your vagina have suffered enough anguish for a lifetime.

“And if you don’t?”

“I won’t be able to have sex again, like now.”

Later you will ponder the words never and ever. Your parents are never coming back to this house, ever. For your vagina, there’s still hope.

You and your friend return inside and continue where you left off with the mop and the vacuum cleaner.

Days before your father dies he is delusional and at times, incoherent. He is restless and sits on the side of the bed in your sister’s guest room all night long in nothing but his diaper. One of his delusions requires him to screw a small plastic bottle onto his big toe. It is deep in the night and you are sitting with him because he fell again a few nights ago trying to get to the portable toilet in the corner of the room that the hospice nurse brought. Your father has bandages on his shoulders and scratches down his arms from the fall. Now you and your sisters, your best friend, your husband, and your brother-in-law are taking turns sitting with him during the night in hour-and-a-half shifts.

“Dad,” you say, trying to take the plastic bottle away. “You’re having another delusion, remember?” This worked the previous night and you both had a good laugh about it in the morning. He remembered that he was sick and that the morphine was making him crazy. But tonight, not so lucky.

“Melanie, take this and put it outside in a warm bucket.”

“Okay, Dad.” You take the plastic bottle of something-or-other—is it eyeglass wash or your mother’s homemade linen spray?—out into the hall and make a show of shutting the door so he thinks you’re really gone for a minute. You return to the room and sit next to him on the edge of the bed.

“Did you do it?”

“Yes, Dad. I put it in a bucket of warm water like you said.”

“Show me.” Suddenly he is standing and pushing past you toward the door. He hasn’t been able to stand by himself and now he is strong, much stronger than you realized.

“No, Dad. You’re having one of your delusions. You can’t go out. You’ll fall like last time.” This is not delivered in a light tone as if you are talking to a child, how most people speak to the old, sick, and dying. No. You’re strong, firm.

“Melanie, I’m going to slap you if you don’t let me see the bucket.” He repeats I’m going to slap you while pushing against you until you are crying and yelling for your brother-in-law. For some reason your father listens to him. Maybe because he is a big guy, your ailing dad’s alpha-male.

Later you will think how strange and frightening it was that your father threatened to slap you. He was never like that—you almost wrote in real life and realize that this is real life and he is still alive. After this incident, you all agree his morphine needs to be on a schedule, not just when he seems to need it.

In the morning you hug your father. He is lying on the bed and you awkwardly reach for one another.

“Do you remember last night, Dad? You said you were going to slap me.” You try to make light of it, act shocked. He smiles.

“Don’t worry about it,” he whispers. This is another of his favorite phrases. Don’t worry about it.

You say, “I won’t.”

Four days later he dies. A Saturday.

Seven weeks have passed and your mother becomes even more ill, so ill that she says she wants to stop her Keytruda immunotherapy infusions. “I’m done fighting,” she says. That was Thursday.

On Saturday you and your sisters are with her, holding her hands in the same bed, the same room, that your father died in. The noon light is the same, and the goldfinches in the sunflowers outside the window are the same. But unlike your father, your mother is crying out for “Mama,” as she has been for the last twenty-four hours despite full doses of morphine. Her final hour is traumatic for all of you. Her final rattling, gasping breaths even worse. What is beyond traumatic? What is beyond bearable? Beyond description and narration?

In the days following your mother’s death, you put things in odd places. A week passes and your husband finds a cooked sweet potato in a covered dish in a kitchen drawer. You are grateful you have slept and fed yourself. You schedule a mammogram for your left breast that has been swollen and painful for weeks.

You ask yourself, when is all of this going to end? Is it going to end? Or is the end that you, too, have a recurring, incurable cancer and that is how it will end? Or do you still have a future, something beyond the grief and loss of these number of years?

Almost a year has passed since your parents died. However, comma, you are at the airport again. Now because of your father-in-law’s congestive heart failure and a final surgery, with final words.

As you are walking through the concourse, a thickly gray-bearded man plays a guitar, the airport’s entertainment. Walking along, minding your own business, you realize the man is playing “Freight Train,” the song your father played almost every day of your childhood after dinner on the banjo. When I die, oh bury me deep. You nearly buckle in the middle of the concourse and hightail it to a restroom to sob in a stall. You know by now that this is how grief works, in odd, blindsiding moments without warning. Though your father loved shortcuts, with grief, there aren’t any. This is what you have learned. That, and that the losses keep coming. There is no higher truth. You simply must keep going.

You rinse your face and barrel through the concourse to the gate where a plane is waiting.

What makes a great beach read? What makes vacation reading different from our everyday reading? Is there an everyday canon of beach reads?

We also learn about a ton of new authors and books from someone who fields questions all day long about what to read at the beach (hint: Dostoevsky).

Give a listen and let us know what you’re reading this summer. So sorry about Liz’s video dropping in and out. We blame technology, always.

Meanwhile, there are two stores worth your pilgrimage, both owned and operated by the Portwood family in Lincoln City, Oregon:

• Here is Diana’s father, Bob Portwood, giving a quick tour of Robert’s Bookshop (used books). Here’s their FB page.

  

  @hereisoregonWho wants to get lost among the 1.65 miles of books at Robert's Bookshop? #lincolncity #oregoncoast #books

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• Bob’s Beach Books (new and used books) is on IG and FB. Of course Diana is always happy to see customers in person and she does all my personalspecial orders by phone.

Highlights from our conversation include:

• 1970s hysterics about the Rapture

• Cops of the soul and Miss Unity’s Who Killed Mabel Frost?

• Kidnapping Clavicular and making him read Elizabeth Gaskell (if this makes no sense to you, start here with Rafael Frumkin).

That’s it, dear readers. Let us know what you think. We’re here for it!

My hunch bore fruit. Trust Me got under my skin.

I’ve been interested in cults my whole life because I grew up with one foot in speaking-in-tongues Pentecostalism (my own family), another in Jehovah’s Witnesses (my best friend’s family), and my whole body inside the New Age zeitgeist of the San Francisco Bay Area, where I grew up. As a teenager standing in line to see bands at the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco’s Japantown, my friends and I would point to Jim Jones’s People’s Temple down the street to freak each other out. Every year on the anniversary of the Jonestown tragedy in Guyana, local TV stations aired commemoration broadcasts and interviews with surviving family members. Anyone can visit the memorial at the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland.

From Helter Skelter to Under the Banner of Heaven to A Well-Trained Wife to Educated to Philadelphia Fire, I “love” all of these stories. I even wrote a novel about a woman who tries to save her aging parents from a female, big-church charlatan, an antagonist loosely based on the late Gwen Shamblin, the founder of the Remnant Fellowship/Weigh Down Workshop. Shamblin reminds me so much of my childhood and a particular brand of televangelist positivity (shoutout “The 700 Club”) mashed up with New Age/Tony Robbins/NLP ideas. Here in the West, these ideas are endemic, like native weeds. I’ve recently been told that, as a Gemini, I’m entering an unhinged era of reinvention as part of my “Chiron Return” (we live in hope; I’ll keep you posted). And to be honest, I like most (not all) faiths.

But getting back to cults and their moms…

First, let us acknowledge that the bar for dads is so low as to be almost non-existent. Certainly my own dad, may he rest in peace, was considered a model, and yet he barely spoke to me, literally, for the first eighteen years of my life while we lived in the same suburban house. To be clear, I loved my dad. But he grew up in tents and government camps fruit-tramping across the Western states à la The Grapes of Wrath. His father was an elder in the Pentecostal church. If you’ve ever heard the term “extreme religiosity” or have looked it up in the DSM, surely you’ve seen a picture of my turquoise-bolo-tied granddad staring pie-in-the-sky back at you. I loved him, too. My dad, clearly, had things he was working out in his silent years, and I’m happy to report that once I reached adulthood, he became a lot more talkative. By the time he died, we couldn’t shut him up.

Cult moms are bad because we expect so much more from them. They are, after all, mothers. And women. As moms, they are supposed to be the most nurturing person in one’s life, from childhood through adulthood. Mom is the one we can rely on. Except that, I collect stories, movies, and books. And so many moms are just the worst.

In Trust Me: The False Prophet, mom Julia Johnson is the person I felt most badly for, aside from the abused girls. To have the scales lifted from your eyes, to truly reckon with your wrongs – especially as a mother – ooof. I choked up watching her confession. I was surprised, and impressed, that she left her husband. Not everyone would make that decision.

When Julia’s husband “gave” their underage daughters to the newly self-proclaimed prophet, Sam Bateman, she recalled that she didn’t believe her husband would make a decision that would harm her. He was, after all, a conduit to God. He knew what was best for her and their family.

But did Julia really have a chance? She was raised inside the fundamentalist-polygamist Mormon sect led by Warren Jeffs, convicted child rapist currently serving a life sentence (for a documentary about Jeffs, see Prophet’s Prey). In such a community/family, one is already primed to obey authority, specifically men’s, in service to “bringing the Kingdom” (or whatever they call that idea in Mormonism). Even today, some of “false prophet” Sam Bateman’s wives still claim him as the prophet even as he serves a fifty-year sentence in prison.

In a cult film or book, there’s often a moment where the main character either falls in line or goes her own way. Mom Julia began to participate in the covert investigation being led by the documentary filmmakers, providing them evidence of the abuse of minors. Julia’s moment of going her own way, against everything she’d been raised to believe, arrived too late for her daughters, but it did arrive.

Because I’m interested in cults, people often say things like this to me: “How could anyone become involved in that kind of thing?”

I find that sentiment baffling. The truth is anyone can become involved in these kinds of things.

Did you have a religious upbringing? Were you exposed to any kind of New Ageism? Have you felt passionately about politics? Did you have a domineering father or grandfather? Have you been so broke that you sold products for an MLM, or sold your own body? Did you grow up in a Western American state where religion of all kinds, extremism, and conspiracy theories are just everyday life?

In other words, a “cult” can come in a lot of flavors. Hence, “high-control group” has more truck nowadays; it’s more descriptive of what actually happens and how people are, essentially, groomed and lured.

Combined with my religious background, absent father, and chaotic upbringing (a tale for another time, or you can read a personal essay of mine here), I quite easily could have found my purpose in a church that wanted to change the world. I could have become an eco-warrior. I could have joined a group committed to humanity’s enlightenment. I am in twelve-step recovery and struggle daily with the cultish aspects of it. Maybe it is a cult. Certainly many people say so.

So tell me, why does everyone love a good cult story? I see myself in them, but maybe you don’t. Why or why not? And maybe I should write about my own mom next…

For some cultish goodness around Substack and elsewhere recently:

• Put your protection roses firmly in place to read this stunning piece about Buddhist gurus in Oregon, and their lawsuits. There’s a terrific interview with the author, Leah Sottile, here.

• I’ve been admiring Christian patriarchy and Quiverfull movement survivor and author, Tia Leving’s recent Instagram crusade calling out young trad wives’ proselytizing of a lifestyle they little understand. How can you understand the consequences of your actions when you haven’t yet lived your decisions for decades? To paraphrase Tia, hard pass on taking life advice from twenty-year-olds. In Tia’s case, she very much earned that pass from fleeing a domestically violent, very “Christian” marriage.

• Anne Hawley describes her experience with what she calls “the cult of Story Grid.” Fascinating and disturbing.

• My amazing friend Sarah Flocken’s debut novel dropped this week! It positively gleams with culty vibes. Get yours!

Until next time, dear readers. Thanks for being here.

Our first guest is the inimitable Joe Frick, marketing exec by day, voracious reader of Robert Caro, Stephen King, and Ta-Nehisi Coates by night. Joe showed us exactly how books can change our lives. Give a listen and let’s discuss! No doubt someone needs to tell us how to pronounce Chuck Palahniuk’s last name.

Books (& songs and TV shows) mentioned in this episode:

• The Power Broker, Robert Caro

• Carrie, Stephen King

• Cujo, Stephen King (og book club edition!)

• The Guinness Book of World Records, 1963

• The Runaway Bunny, Margaret Wise Brown

• Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown

• Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

• The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

• Stranger Things, Netflix

• “The Trooper,” Iron Maiden

• The Passion of the Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis

• The Road, Cormac McCarthy

• Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk

• Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk

• Choke, Chuck Palahniuk

• Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon, Chuck Palahniuk

• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

• Dracula, Bram Stoker

• Books of Blood (Hellraiser and Night Club), Clive Barker

• Strangers on a Train (and the Ripley stories) Patricia Highsmith

• The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson

• Chinatown film

• Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote

• Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin

• The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin

• The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson

• Macbeth, Shakespeare

• Hot Fuzz film

• Shaun of the Dead film

• Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

• Anything by Colson Whitehead

• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot

• “There Is a Light that Never Goes Out,” The Smiths

I lived in Hillcrest, Normal Heights, La Mesa, Jamul, and North Park, in that order, over the course of ten years. I went to grad school for half of that time and worked in high-tech the other half. Recently, I spent three weeks house-sitting for friends in the Ocean Beach neighborhood. Locals in the ‘hood are proud. From bumper stickers to license plate frames, the OB mantra is this: “Three square miles surrounded by reality.” They’re not wrong.

Like most southern Californians, I spent a lot of time in the car. I wanted to see all my old haunts and explore new ones. I kept thinking about being thirty, a time when I was trying to line up my education, my career, and a romance for the life I wanted.

All of my San Diego apartments were full of books. Back then I read with the idea that novels could teach me something, solve my problems, or just give me courage. I still read that way, but I’m here reporting from middle age that you read differently, more urgently, when you have your whole life ahead of you.

I remember during a particularly low time finding Mastering the Art of French Cooking at the parking lot sale of the La Mesa public library and thinking, Julia Child might save my life. She certainly changed it. I’d always wanted to learn to speak French and a few years later, I started. Now I’ve been all over France in search of my joies de vivre: cheese, small-town brocantes, and sprawling Sunday lunches. Here’s that actual book twenty years on. Like me, it’s a bit beat-up but still useful.

I drove by a taco shop I used to love, a place that dripped with grease and smelled almost bad. It’s called something else now, is clean, and made me sad as hell. My La Mesa cottage, too, is all spruced up. The kids at San Diego State look like hardened corporate professionals ready to tackle their Miranda Priestly eras. My Hillcrest apartment is now a fenced-in pile of rubble awaiting transformation into a boxy high-rise that, like mushrooms, are taking over the neighborhood. My Normal Heights apartment has sunk into disrepair.

Things change. I understand. As the great Stephanie Nicks asks me, “Can I handle the seasons of my life?” Landslides everywhere, I’m still finding out. I drove back to OB weirdly unsettled and on the verge of tears.

It’s odd to think about myself as a young woman trying to set up her life: writing her first novel, finding her first non-waitress-non-admin-assistant job, and her true love. I’m proud of her. She’s still a reader. Still a writer. Still in love.

Of course later there was a major illness, a cancer, my parents’ cancers, their deaths, and all the normal-life tribulations. Even so, that girl – now grown up – has a life beyond her wildest dreams as they say in recovery.

My fantasy-addicted brain is always like, “Could I move back here? Should I?” I run neighborhoods and scenarios through their paces. Mission Hills? La Mesa again? I think about my finances, the hassle of moving, and what I’d get in return: sunshine, old friends, real Mexican food, palm trees, and perhaps a younger, more optimistic sense of self. I always feel young in San Diego.

But the answer is No. For one thing, I’m older now. I’m the person I was hoping to become when I lived in San Diego. That person now lives in Oregon, owns a house, has a partner, friends, favorite bookstores, and long stretches of wild beach. Sure, I could have sunshine and my beloved friends and deserts again in San Diego, but the truth is, it doesn’t call me to anymore. Or, rather, when it calls — always in the gloomy monsoon season — I can visit.

I worked for a few years at Girl Scouts - San Diego-Imperial Council in Balboa Park. Delightfully, they have maintained a bi-monthly luncheon of former employees and volunteers. I joined them last week on the terrace at Il Fornaio in Coronado, looking across the water at the spiky downtown skyline. It reminded me of the time my mother told me that my grandmother’s first stop when she migrated to California in the forties was Lemon Grove, a suburb of San Diego.

“Your granny took the ferry to Coronado back before they built the bridge…as a Sunday outing, something people did back then,” my mother said.

I was thirty and living in Jamul at the time. “But why did you never tell me this before? I’ve been living here all this time.” And I’d always thought of my people as Central Valley Okies, not San Diego Okies.

“You never asked,” she said. This is something my parents often said to me and my siblings. It became a running joke over the years.

Sitting at lunch with the Girl Scouts alums, I looked out at the water and imagined my grandmother on the ferry. I hoped it was before her husband died and left her with five children. I hoped it was before her husband, on his deathbed, told my grandmother not to marry anyone else.

I thought, My grandmother took the ferry before there was the bridge. My family is part of San Diego history.

On my last night of house-sitting, I walked down to the ocean in the dark, took off my sandals, and strode onto the beach. The sand was cool between my toes. There was no wind, just the tinkling sounds of people talking and drinking on the seawall.

Goodbye for now, I thought, crying before the crashing waves. You are a city I loved and still love. Goodbye, younger self. You’re all grown up and more or less the person you wanted to be. I love you, girl, and always will. You’ve come so far and have so much to be grateful for. Life ain’t perfect, but you got grit.

Writing this now, I think, P.S. Reading and writing gave you everything you ever wanted. Don’t stop.

**

If you’re new here, thanks ever so much for reading my words. I’m mostly a fiction writer, but I procrastinatemoonlight with journalism, poetry, and bookish memoir like the post above. I’d love to have you along on my journey to literary stardom. For a sampler of the kinds of stuff I write, here you go:

• Scenes from the Literary Blacklist, Persuasion, co-written with my literary work-wifey,

• Poems about a jellyfish and a crab, The Drift

• On Finding a Pedophile’s Notebook, The Republic of Letters

• The Big Five Killed Literary Fiction, Persuasion, again with EKC

For a deeper dive, all my Substack posts are here, and my website has a list of my creative work here.

Thanks again! I’m looking forward to chatting books and life, and bookish life, with you in the comments…

I first met Sarah Flocken a few months ago in a social media class taught by Leigh Stein. In that class were Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Anna Rollins (author of FAMISHED). We became fast friends after discovering that we each have evangelical backgrounds. (If you’ve been following the Yesteryear drama here, here, here, and here, we have not only thoughts but real-life experiences). Since the class we’ve met monthly to decode the mysterious world of publishing and to cheer each other on as we climb our writerly mountains.

Sarah’s debut novel, BE WELL (Heliotrope Books), is available now for pre-order on Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon (if you want to know why pre-orders are so important, check out Sarah’s own post here; #3 is my favorite). She’s already working on her next novel, so this is your chance to get in on the ground floor and discover a great new voice. Sarah will be reading from the novel around southern California and elsewhere in the coming months, so be sure to follow her on Substack and Instagram for dates.

Here’s a little interview we did together so you can learn more about BE WELL.

MJ: I’m wondering if we can do things a little differently and start by having you tell us about the themes of your novel and how you became interested in them.

Themes! I feel like I’m in high school AP English class all over again.

OK, here’s a big one: how easy it is to fall into unquestioning belief in anything if you feel like your circumstances are desperate or hopeless. This is something I think we saw a lot of during the Recession years (2007-2009), and don’t talk about as much as I think we should. As time went on, America got more visibly polarized, and more people I cared about began to cling almost cultishly to religion, wellness trends, diets, or MAGA. I wanted to know why people were so prone to thinking this way. As I was working through early drafts of BE WELL, this theme seemed to emerge naturally.

I’m pretty used to giving the pitch for BE WELL at this point, so here it is!

“An awkward young woman graduates straight into the Great Recession in Los Angeles in 2009, does increasingly desperate and stupid things to avoid moving back to her childhood home, and gets involved with a maybe-cult along the way.”

Sounds fun, right?

Is this the first novel you’ve written or are there others abandoned in a drawer somewhere? How did this project come about?

BE WELL is actually the first novel I’ve ever written start to finish. It all began in October 2019, while I was taking a UC San Diego Extension class called “How to Start a Novel.” The initial idea for the novel sprang from a writing exercise where we had two minutes to write down words or phrases representing things that interested us. Then, we had to circle the top three that jumped out. I think the words/phrases I circled were “the feeling of taking a shower after exercising,” “heat ripples,” and “the gem room at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.”

From there, I wrote ten more drafts over the course of five years. The story has evolved significantly since I wrote that terrible first draft in the terrible first months of 2020, and I’m so proud of that fact. Once this book sees the light of day, it will have gone through 13 revisions.

It’s safe to say I’m fairly stubborn and persistent.

What’s your process like? Do you get up early for quiet hours or do you write during a commute or in cafes?

To be honest, I write whenever I have any kind of window of time during my day. During periods where I’m in “drafting” mode, I set myself a goal of 500 words per day. That’s purposely pretty low, and it feels easy to accomplish, so it often motivates me to do more. I’m a recovering perfectionist, so the point is to just get something on the page that I can edit later because, as I’ve learned, whatever I write will probably go through a dozen revisions anyway.

The pockets of time I have to write tend to be in the evenings after all the chores, etc. are done. If I’m really on a roll with something, I will often stay up much later than I intended. I’m a night owl with creative work, I guess. Mornings are for cheerful, coffee-fueled, client-facing Sarah in her PR day job.

Sometimes, though, I will sneak some writing in between work projects or Zoom meetings on a slower day. Don’t tell my boss (I’m my own boss).

Do novels still matter? What’s your take on this evergreen hot button?

I have a master’s in English literature and wrote my thesis on two novels (albeit two short ones: The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh and The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon). They’d better matter!

But seriously, as long as there are people who are willing to buy and read novels, I say novels matter. So do other written works like poetry, novellas, plays, prose poems, screenplays, essays, memoir, etc.

I think instead of asking this question, we should just keep writing novels that we would want to read ourselves, instead of focusing so much on what the market wants, because the market is always going to change.

Who are your favorite novelists? Did any particular writers or books inspire your own?

While I was revising BE WELL, I read SELF CARE by Leigh Stein, and that was a huge jolt of inspiration. Obviously the world of Sagebrush is very different from the world of Richual, but some of the characters might have crossed paths at a wellness retreat in a parallel universe.

I love Leigh Stein’s other books, and I’m also hugely into Ottessa Moshfegh, Rufi Thorpe, and Mona Awad. Basically, cringe-funny weird-girl lit is my jam.

I would, however, like to shout out the incredible novelists who have reviewed and written nice things about BE WELL. Please go out and buy books by Charlee Dyroff, Nic DiDomizio, Jessie Gaynor, Deborah Hemming, Holly James, and Candice Wuehle.

Who should read BE WELL?

Aside from everyone? I’d say I wrote this for the elder millennial who graduated in 2008-2013. Maybe she was a humanities major. Maybe she has a really cringey sense of humor. Maybe she yearns for the years of the iPod shuffle and skinny jeans. Maybe she’s aghast at the lack of critical thinking around her. Maybe she’s furious at the absurdity of our world, but keeps on trucking because what other choice does she have?

That’s what I mean when I say that I write goofy-ass fiction for smiley people who are silently enraged. Unhinged plots, real human emotions – if you’re into that, I’m your gal.

What do you do besides write these goofy-ass books?

I run a public relations business in San Diego, and I’m a comedian, improviser, and pun contest host (yes, competitive punning is a thing).

I’ve got a lot going on, but take a wild guess at which thing people want to talk about the most when they meet me at a networking happy hour. I won’t WINE about it.

Thank you, Sarah! I hope you get some weirdinteresting questions in the comments…

• New essay out in The Republic of Letters about the time I found a pedophile’s notebook on the side of the road in eastern Oregon.

• New poems coming up in The Drift; be sure to subscribe to this terrific mag!

• New poem in Ploughshares, right alongside Alice Hoffman, hoo-wee!

• Lost my contract job suddenly so am determined to conquer Instagram @mjennings26 and write more here.

And now, to the book!

There are so many things to say about this book. As a book. As a controversial book. As a book that, once again, has forced me to state what I will and won’t put up with from fellow book lovers. In a way, this book has just made me very sad. In fact, devastated. Instead of celebrating a fantastic new voice, this book may vanish. It’s already been disappeared.

But all of that happened after I read Who Killed Mabel Frost? (SF/LD Books, 2024) by Miss Unity.

The book, first and foremost, is a page-turner. A juicy, over-the-shoulder, bff goss sesh that follows the young life of a…hustler? A drugged-out misfit? An adorable young queer trying to find her way? A struggling grad student? There are a lot of ways to think about the protagonist. Mostly what I thought was, Wow, thank you.

I, too, have been a messed-up, confused young adult trying to figure things out amongst people who wanted to take advantage of me. I, too, had to grope along each day. I, too, questioned my sexuality, my gender, my place, and my purpose in life. I, too, emerged on the other side. That’s what Who Killed Mabel Frost? is about. It’s a finding-myself-after-walking-through-fire memoir.

The line between fact and fiction has never mattered much to me. But if it does to you, this book is intentionally coy as to whether it’s personal essays or fiction. In the flap jacket we have this disclaimer: “The entries herein are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, as well as to actual events or locales, is entirely coincidental.” There is no indication of “novel” or “essays” anywhere on or inside the book. One of the epigraphs states, “Absolutely none of this is true.” When my freelance writing partner, Elizabeth Kaye Cook, and I interviewed the author, he told us it was all true. My love, my heart, forever to Miss Unity/Mabel Frost/the author for having the guts to walk this line and let the judgements fall where they may.

Because whether it’s true or not, it certainly feels true. And that is simply a testament to Miss Unity’s bonkers talent. Here are a couple of samples so you can judge for yourself:

And this:

I first read Who Killed Mabel Frost? two years ago. I kept meaning to write about it, and I certainly told a lot of people about it, but it fell through the cracks of my reading life, lost in the ever expanding piles of books around my house. A couple of weeks ago, it reappeared somehow and I remembered how much I’d loved it, so I decided to re-read it and finally write about it.

It doesn’t always happen that you love a book just as deeply on a second read. But Who Killed Mabel Frost? is just a compelling, weird, charming, and unique book. The prose is alive. I feel deep inside this troubled world and running through Hell with Mabel, Peter Pan, and Oliver Twist, all in the same drug-induced breath. Page after page, Miss Unity’s style is close, heart-thumping, and immediate. The wild swings between grounded, real-life descriptions and surreal flights of fancy are perfectly rendered. It’s exactly the kind of writing that isn’t the “literary pablum” Liz and I wrote about in our blacklists essay in Persuasion. I’m going to stop here because, honestly, I don’t want to say too much. I hope you’ll take my word for it and read the book.

Which brings us to the controversy. Again, I didn’t know there was a controversy when I read this book. Not that it matters. I stand by my love of Who Killed Mabel Frost?

In a nutshell, when Liz and I interviewed Elizabeth Ellen of Short Flight/Long Drive Books for our literary blacklists piece about her experience with cancellation, Ellen referred us to a writer (Miss Unity) who had had a prize-winning essay taken down from a website after a reader complained it was offensive (the essay used the n-word as a direct quote from someone the writer knew online). We interviewed the writer about that experience. Later, we read his book, Who Killed Mabel Frost? Elizabeth Ellen then told us that some bookstores had refused to stock the book. Why, we inquired innocently. Because the protagonist, Mabel Frost, decides to detransition.

Yes, detransitioning is part of this story. More of it details the decision to transition and what happens while living as a woman.

When Liz and I interviewed the book’s author, Mathias, about his cancelled essay, he was eating a filet o’ fish in his car because of Lent. He was working at a McDonald’s, enjoying his coworkers, and loving serving customers there while doing community theater at night. He was exploring his spiritual-religious side. Like the protagonist of Who Killed Mabel Frost?, the author had lived as a trans woman and then detransitioned. I had zero problem with that. I continue to have zero problem with that. But again, strange times, where people on the internet – and in bookstores – want you to think and feel how they think and feel. Who Killed Mabel Frost?, however, is a work of art. It’s concerned with truth and beauty, and it comes from an inspired soul, not the Thought Police.

I remember back in the aughts, or thereabouts, an essay going around my SFO lesbians circle. It was a personal piece by a woman who had transitioned to male, but then, after years of living as a dude, decided to detransition. At the time, I didn’t think much of it because it seemed all around me people were transitioning and detransitioning. I remember thinking that all the butch dykes were now transitioning and how much I would miss butch dykes. I lived through the migration to the word “queer” and all the additions to the LGBTQIA+ alphabet soup.

Questioning one’s gender seems like a very human experience. Then again, I grew up in the SFO bay area, went to a women’s college there, lived in SFO for a time, and then Portland for many years, and always in a queer circle. I questioned my own gender and still do. What the heck is gender? It is so weird to live inside my body! People have told me I’m dude-like. Others say I’m femme-y. Cis hetero-normative – I am married to a man though I am bi. That people feel free to comment on my gender seems absurd, but fine. I actually love talking about gender and its absurdities. What I’m saying is…perhaps my view on these things is skewed.

It remains a crying shame, however, that random bookstore browsers won’t have the chance to come across this book on the shelves. A quick Google search for reviews rendered nothing at all, zero book reviews, though 19 people on Goodreads loved it.

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Aren’t books supposed to challenge us? Don’t they help us see inside the lives of other people – perhaps even people who do things we disagree with? To be against Who Killed Mabel Frost? is to be against trans experience and against the experience of being human.

My biggest fear is that Miss Unity won’t have the long publishing career that she very much deserves. I suspect that this will be a book, like the aforementioned SFO lesbian/detransition essay, that’s passed from tender hand to tender hand, friend to friend, like I’m doing with you now. Perhaps so many people will love it that they’ll pass it on, too.

Because Who Killed Mabel Frost? is a bang-up celebration of life, of what it means to be young, living on the edge, and muddling through. If you hate this book and want to argue with me about it, please do. This is a book we’re talking about, not a nuclear bomb.

Sadly, you may not find it at your bookstore, so go ahead and order it here.

Until next time, dear readers.

Liz and I have been talking to everyday readers since we went to the first ever Stephen KingCon in Las Vegas in 2024.

An “everyday reader,” to my mind, is someone who reads for pleasure in ever disappearing spare moments. They aren’t attached to reading in a professional capacity and they don’t want to be a writer. They read because they love reading. They’re people like Lisa, who at the tender age of ten snuck Stephen King’s Carrie from her dad’s nightstand and got hooked on reading forever. Or the young guy who had given up reading only to obsessively dive back in after his librarian-girlfriend suggested King’s short stories. Some stick to a genre, such as horror, while others are wanderers who pick up whatever looks good in the moment. Or there’s my bff, who reads only absurdist humor, and even within that narrow vein, she is incredibly picky (hats off to knowing what you really want).

KingCon was so much fun that over the summer Liz and I went to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld in Germany and Jane Austen-land in the UK. This led us to write pieces about Colleen Hoover, small presses, a writer’s imagination, anti-censorship, and the literary qualities of The Shining. While these may seem disparate topics, the through line was meeting our tribe of everyday readers, which changed the way we think about reading and our own writing.

A common introductory chat with a fellow reader went something like this: when did you first get introduced to <author/reading in general>? Why is <author or novel> your favorite?

Reading offers one of the most unique and profound human experiences: to be inside another person’s mind, and another world. A painting can’t do that. Nor can a symphony. Maybe a poem. There is something particular and extraordinary about living inside The Goldfinch for days on end.

There are readers I don’t like, too. People who read in bad faith. People who want to control a writer’s imagination. People who look to fiction for answers instead of questions. If I had to characterize this kind of reader…they have generally been younger people who are online a lot and want to “look good” with their literary opinions. They often have degrees in English. They are perhaps scolding by nature. To each her own.

So what is an everyday canon? Can there ever be one?

I would never want to wield a stick about what you (or anyone) should or shouldn’t read. (I do have a doctorate in American Literature, so to be clear, my questions are not at all academic, e.g., the canon wars). It’s more about…reader neighborliness. Some notion that reading brings us together, so why not lean into it? At a time when we all feel so atomized by social media and disconnected by real life bullshitchallenges, can reading help us come back together, find our people, and restore our faith in humanity? That’s how I felt at KingCon anyway (and how I hope to feel again in October at KingCon Atlantic City, join me!) There’s nothing like bonding – and arguing – over scenes, plotlines, and characters, so why not learn more about what other people are reading, especially if we want to make more connections with fellow book lovers?

Why am I so intrigued by the idea of an everyday canon?

Two thoughts. One, I’m curious by nature. Two, I write fiction, so I can’t help but wonder how to make my work more compelling. Okay, three. I’m also a big reader. And I do want to connect with more book-loving nerds.

So, open questions: what are the books you find yourself talking about most with other big readers? What are the foundational books in your favorite genres (romantasy, sf/f, litRPG, horror, classics, memoir, thriller, etc.)? If you had to recommend five books in your favorite genre, what would they be and why?

Prompt: I have read very few thrillers aside from some Patricia Highsmith (and she’s so bonkers good that maybe I should just stop there). I’ve heard that Tana French and Ruth Ware are great. Thriller fans, what do you think? I’d love any opinions on your top 5.

Here’s a whack at five bestselling writers I’ve been reading lately, to at least have some familiarity with, so that I can have bookish conversations at a barbecue this summer or in the grocery store checkout line:

• Stephen King

• Colleen Hoover

• J.K. Rowling

• Suzanne Collins

• Emily Henry

That being said, I mostly read literary fiction. Here are some of my faves of the last several years. These are the books I routinely tell people about:

• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk

• The Core of the Sun, Johanna Sinisalo (her Troll is also pretty great)

• Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter

• A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

• I Hotel, Karen Tei Yamashita

• The Queue, Basma Abdel Aziz

Now that I’m looking at this list, I realize how preposterous this entire idea is. My picks are totally idiosyncratic! They speak to my interests: often set in the American/Canadian West or available in translation (should probably be its own category), often written by women, often a little weird. Well, so be it. Reading is individual. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Of course our choices will be unique! And of course I still want to hear your picks and why you love them.

XO, dear readers.

One ray of light this week: I have a poem in the current issue of Ploughshares. Their incredibly kind editorial staff is hyping up the issue all over the socials and it’s just been so wonderful and exhilarating to be a part of. I’m still in a state of shock that my name will forever be associated with Ploughshares. On an even bigger note, my poem appears in the same issue with my queen, ALICE HOFFMAN. I mean…wut?!

On that note, here it is in French (my own translation, which I’m extremely proud of. Mistakes my own.)

Je Lis Depuis Longtemps Beaucoup de Thomas Hardy

Les landes balayées par le vent et les villes sales, retournant à la maison qui n’est plus la maison, des triangles amoureux — quand mon triangle amoureux commence. Comment ça se fait, je me demande. J’avais été tellement pieuse et chaste, comme un personnage d’Hardy — au début. Eustacia Vye et Clym Yeobright me semblent même plus vrais avec ma nouvelle expérience, comment on peut vraiment aimer plus d’une personne au même temps et on comprend que tous les deux sont sables mouvants. Mais on ne peut pas les rappeler. La bonne chance est trop pas à tolérer, on ne peut pas fonctionner. Peut-être la vie est comme un roman d’Hardy. Quand il pleut, on se noie.

On more prosaic fronts, my work-wife and I sounded off about the unique disdain of Colleen Hoover in Persuasion this week. In the past I’ve avoided the comment section, but I’m trying to come out of my shell these days and found the commenters to be fun, informed, and generally good-natured. My how the internet has changed.

I hope to have a more substantive update next month. Until then, I’ll leave you with a new poem. Stay safe, everyone. All the best to you.

Certainly Carvan was aware of Benedict Cumberbatch in the Before, but in the epiphanic After, Cumberbatch takes on the glow of a sexual-spiritual lodestar, in other words, a Cumberbitch. I didn’t make this up; this is what his fans call themselves.

It happened in the midst of Carvan’s new motherhood years, “either pregnant or breastfeeding, I was simply hostage to my chemistry.” The loss of time for herself results in the most perfect rebellion:

What came first: the chicken or the eggs Benedict? Correlation or causation; Sherlock Holmes would have something to say about that…As soon as Sherlock finished, I wanted to watch it again. Again! What a waste of my time that would be!

Radical thoughts for new mothers: you feel a feeling all of your own. Total subversion: you act on it, just because you want to.

An obsession with Benedict Cumberbatch might seem a bit teenage girly. Carvan interviews fellow Cumberbitches who discuss various strategies for managing the inevitable Cumber-judgment, ranging from doubling-down to hiding the obsession completely – for the most part not out of shame, but to protect a private sense of self and/or deflect/protect a romantic partner’s feelings. One middle-aged Cumberbitch described her approach this way: “You know, there are a lot of people, their lives revolve around golf. They don’t feel guilty.” Indeed. Carvan writes:

When you’re a girl who really loves a thing, it’s never just about you and your thing. Everyone else makes it their problem. You can’t love the thing unseen, not even in your bedroom, alone.

While Carvan concludes that her obsession with Cumberbatch is teenage girly, she argues along the way that it is precisely that girl and her enthusiastic joy who need to be celebrated, not shunned. Carvan comes to understand that the so-called putting away of childish things was exactly the wrong decision for her, and maybe for us all.

I recognized so much of myself in Carvan’s journey to adulthood. As a teenager she fangirled hard with U2 and INXS. In my twenties I once saved up and followed my favorite band (Swervedriver) on their entire West Coast tour, seeing them in LA, SFO, and Seattle, by myself. It was the best time!

I still love music, but my interests have changed. Or rather, how I prioritize my “list of interests” (a term coined by a friend of Carvan to deflect judgy nonsense) has changed. Spoiler alert: fromage.

The book made me think about the difference between writers/artists and people I might call…normies. No doubt tons of people have a great story or series of paintings deep inside them. The difference is the compulsion to pursue it, to put in the hard work and focus required to study the artform, to write a novel or paint a body of work and then, crucially, bring that work to the public. There’s certainly not much of an incentive. Artists toil away for no money and little prestige 99% of the time. You have to believe in yourself to the point of delusion. We toil because, one hopes, we enjoy the work.

I met a painter recently who told me she worked twelve hours a day on one painting for three months, which made perfect sense to me (it was a huge, beautiful painting). She’d had to organize her life (work, money) to be able to carve out those three months to paint. I’ve met plenty of other artists and writers like her.

In other words, no one is holding a gun to our heads to create art. We are simply compelled to do it. And, importantly, we make time for it. We organize our lives around it, around joy.

This past year I doubled-down on joy with my literary work-wife, . We went full-metal fangirl on Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, and Jane Austen, traveling thousands of miles to hang out with other fans and attend the author-cons of each writer. Did we feel bad about it? No. We felt great about it! We felt like the giant book nerds we one-hundred percent are! And, the sharing of book-nerditry returned on investment in ways I can barely describe. How to describe waiting in hours-long lines with fellow King fans for King-artists to sign copies of our King-related art? How to describe chatting into the night with our randomly assigned roommates during Discworld at a castle in the middle of nowhere Germany? How to describe nibbling through an exquisitely prepared high tea with other Janeites in the literal Pump Room described in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion? (Psst, article about our Austen pilgrimage here.)

My plan for 2026 is to lean into my list of interests. One’s interests don’t have to be monetized, projectized, or serve any other purpose in life but to bring one joy. My current list:

• learning French

• kicking around weird places

• reading

• wild swimming

• collage-making

• cheese-eating

Looking at this list, I’m delighted that none of them can be monetized. They serve no other purpose than that I love them. I do them purely for my own enjoyment. Again, gun to head, none. I am simply compelled to do them. Perhaps this is the art of living, everyone’s birthright.

Here’s how I will try to arrange my life in 2026 (and do let me know if we’ll cross paths):

• Do a two-week French immersion program somewhere in Europe (taking recommendations if you have them). This one is aspirational for sure and will take some planning.

• Return to KingCon in October in Atlantic City. So excited!

• See more of Ireland. I’ll be in residence at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Aug/Sept working on my new novel.

• Learn more about how to edit photos for this newsletter so that they are artsy and beautiful. Related, I just hit 140 subscribers! A million thanks for being here! I’m going to try to pretty it up for you all next year.

So, my Cumberbitches – and all fan-adjacent peeps – I see you. And I know you see me. To you, my real, unjudging friends, I wish you a 2026 filled with your unique, inexplicable interests. My hope is that you get into one of them really hard this coming year and go completely ham on it.

Bonne Année!

This past summer my literary bestie Elizabeth Kaye Cook and I took a pilgrimage to Jane Austen’s corner of England to pay our respects (story in Lit Hub and be sure to read Liz’s post about why Jane feels so Christmas-y).

One of the places we loved most was the bookstore and bindery, George Bayntun, conveniently located next to the train station in Bath. We stumbled in one morning not knowing anything about it and were immediately overwhelmed, in particular by the cases and cases of nineteenth century classics and the custom-bound books from their old-ways bindery. Basically, it’s the most perfect bookstore I could imagine. These pictures simply do not do the experience justice. Please picture me gasping in delight at every turn.

Certainly no Jane Austen pilgrimage would be complete without a visit to this bookish paradise. Below Joshua Bayntun-Coward shares what makes the store so special.

Enjoy, dear readers.

Can you tell us a little about the store and what makes it so special?

We are a fifth generation, family run antiquarian bookshop and book bindery, established in Bath in 1894 by my great-great grandfather George Bayntun. We are considered the last of the great Victorian trade binderies and pride ourselves on continuing to bind entirely by hand.

We moved into our current premises in 1939, a difficult period as most of the staff joined the services, but it was during this time that Her Majesty Queen Mary, who spent the war years at Badminton, near Bath, became a frequent patron and in 1950 granted us the appointment of Bookseller to Her Majesty. To this day we continue to bind the occasional book for the Royal Family, the most recent being a miniature book in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House at Windsor Castle. We also bind for many private customers all over the world, many of them being in the US.

The shop has changed very little in appearance since 1939, although the books do come and go and we now have an online presence. We are fond of the old fashion ways and hope to continue the craft of traditional book binding despite this ever changing and fast paced world we live in.

Which Jane Austen-related books (or adjacent collections) do you tend to show Janeite customers? Is there anything you’re particularly fond of?

We make an effort to always have a range of Jane Austen’s works in stock, inevitably by being in Bath she is a firm favourite for customers. Of course after the 250th anniversary celebrations we are running somewhat low on Austen related books, however I am particularly fond of a newly bound five volume set of her works illustrated by Hugh Thomson and Charles Brock which has just come out of our bindery.

George Bayntun was featured on the Jane Austen Character Trail, a map created by the city of Bath and the Jane Austen Centre to highlight Austen-related places in Bath as part of the 250^th birthday celebration. Did you see an uptick in Jane Austen fangirls like me and Liz this past year?

There was a considerable uptick in admirers of Jane Austen and her works this year. It was estimated that 3500 people attended the celebrations, most dressed in Regency wear. Of course it took a few days to adjust to the sight of groups of people walking around Bath in bonnets, top hats, waistcoats and pelisse, but eventually it seemed almost natural and seeing customers walk into the shop sporting elaborate cravats felt like the norm. We hope to see a return of the splendidly dressed crowds next summer.

I’m inspired by collage artists who make beauty | disturbance | art | wow from the literal scraps of our world. Looking at a collage, I feel invited into the artist’s deeply symbolic, layered, poetic, and complicated world.

Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was a German artist who helped invent the collage form. She’s most famous for her Dadaist-weirdo-creations that explore (and satirize) women’s roles in society, often incorporating crafts associated with women (embroidery, sewing patterns, etc.).

In the spirit of a picture’s worth a thousand words, here’s Höch with her puppets:

But for me, it’s Höch’s collages that make my heart pound. Check out the online collection at MoMA. Hoo-wee, I would love to see those in person. If you’re in NYC, please go for me.

Which brings us to poetry. I had heard of ekphrastic poetry in the long ago, but confess that if you’d asked me what it was, I couldn’t tell you. So for all of us, a refresher: it means a poem that describes a work of art. The Poetry Foundation has a nice page about ekphrastic poetry here, with links to examples.

This was all an extremely long wind-up to today’s poem. I’m still experimenting with zero punctuation and having a lot of fun with line breaks instead.

Torn

[after Hannah Höch’s Untitled (from an ethnographic museum), 1930]

Swimmer posed and contemplative

in goggles and cap atop

a goddess in stone-pleated skirt

red above

blue below

what is she thinking

sinking into the sea

serene she tells herself

it’s acceptable to die

my arms may save me

certainly my expression floats

in the heather-gold

the color of heaven ironic

why hadn’t she known

it would all be upside-down

and history would tear itself

in half like me

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Thanks for reading. I’m so glad you’re here. As always, let me know what you’re reading and loving these days.

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Today – October 30, 2025 – is exactly one year from when we first met in person . . . at the Stephen King convention in Las Vegas, of all places. We’d been editing and writing together since 2019, but Mel’s a West Coast beach dweller and Liz an NYC straphanger. The time had never been right.

But when Mel saw the KingCon announcement, she texted Liz right away: Would this be bonkers? Should we go?!

You should know that neither of us knew a thing about Stephen King.

We hugged for the first time in the Vegas airport, concluded we weren’t serial killers, and hailed a taxi to the Strip, ready to meet other bookish nerds in the flesh.

It was the week before the presidential election and people were…feeling it. KingCon’s organizer, Kris Webster, welcomed us and warned the seven-hundred conventioneers. “The person sitting next to you is your friend. Don’t be unkind to your friend.”

We looked at one another, surprised and relieved. We’d spent months interviewing writers who had been ostracized and punished for daring to cross the lit mag world’s rigid lines. By happy accident, we’d landed in a politics-free zone. Praise the Lord and let’s mingle.

We quickly realized that every person we met had a Stephen King origin story, the memory still searing hot. Lisa, a grandmother and former Vegas cabbie, told us, decisively, “Carrie. Ten years old. ‘76. Took it off my dad’s nightstand.”

Lisa wasn’t the only Constant Reader we met who started reading King “too young” and never stopped. Moms and dads of the 70s, we salute you. The secret to raising a generation of bookworms, apparently, is to leave horror novels lying around where your children can find them.

Reading King “too young” (and loving it) was such a common theme that we found ourselves seriously questioning the entire concept of age-restricted fiction. In conversation with his fellow writers, the horror novelist Kalvin Ellis shared that he saw his brother drown when he was a small child. Then he read It at eight years old. One of the book’s main characters has a brother who dies in a similar way. Ellis said, “This person [King] who had never met me saw me for who I was.”

Ellis’s story reminded us how complex and sophisticated readers really are, even the very young. Right now, Stephen King is the most banned author in American school libraries. But reading difficult fiction isn’t what causes children (or adults) harm. Chances are, life’s harms have already happened. And they’ll certainly keep happening. We never know how a book will meet its readers. The self-appointed book police are much more dangerous than evil, imaginary clowns.

Not all our conversations were so serious. Every reader we met was eager to educate us on King’s work and why it matters. One of our favorites was the male witch Bonez. Melanie, in innocence, asked, Isn’t that a warlock? Bonez politely explained that many in his coven find the term “warlock” insulting – but reassured us that he took no offense. Then, he gave us an eager overview of how King’s storytelling had evolved through the decades. No amount of fame had blunted King’s appetite for trying new things; He could not be pigeonholed; His books would last for hundreds of years.

We’d arrived Thursday afternoon, and already it was Saturday night. We’d watched Stephen King short films (“Dollar Babies”), admired countless Stephen King tattoos, and learned more than we ever expected about the variety of Stephen King cottage industries. (There are tours! Rare bindings! Anything you want in miniature!) For our last hurrah at the Shining Ball, we donned our Grady Sisters costumes and practiced our dead stares in the bathroom mirror, musing about how thoroughly these King readers had worked their magic on us. They weren’t stuffy snobs; they were enthusiastic fans.

In the ballroom, aka a conference room with the most corporate hotel carpet you’ve ever seen, two human-sized lobsters helped themselves to the olives. Prom-dressed Carrie, dripping with glittering red blood, buttered a roll. Elegant women in long gloves and velvet dresses laughed with handsome men in natty suits. A farmer with a mossy face, Dustin, had come all the way from Canada to meet the Stephen King readers he’d known online for years.

“In real life, I’m very shy,” he said. “I don’t strike up conversations with people. But here, as soon as I arrived, I recognized people I knew, and we started talking right away.”

When we bumped into an enormously swollen spider holding hands with yet another mossy dude, we heard a similar story. Josh confessed that he had pretty much stopped reading as a boy. Though he loved the first three Harry Potter books, he felt intimidated by The Goblet of Fire’s length. Until, that is, he met the spider, a children’s librarian with a sweet smile. She encouraged him to give reading another try, starting with King’s short stories.

“Now reading is what I do more than anything,” Josh said. “I don’t really watch TV or movies or do social media. I read.”

“He’s a writer, too,” the spider said proudly.

The news is full of stories about the loneliness epidemic and despairing, isolated young people (particularly young men). But the Stephen King readers we met had friends, creative hobbies, and community. Most were married. What made them so different from their peers?

It’s pretty undeniable that many Americans have dropped out of social connection entirely, preferring the blue light of their phone to the pain and pleasure of connecting with other people. And even though the average American spends far less time socializing now than twenty years ago, they’re reading less than ever. In twenty years, there’s been a 40% drop in reading for pleasure, and students’ literacy scores have plummeted. In contrast, King’s Constant Readers are still – well – constantly reading.

We’ve had a year to reflect on our KingCon experience, and what we’ve concluded is that the reading crisis and the loneliness crisis are two expressions of the same emptiness. If you don’t think connection is possible, then you won’t reach for a person, and you won’t reach for a novel either. After all, every book is a chance to encounter another mind across time and space. Some we love, some we hate. Some we fly across the country to meet in person for the first time. Is there really such a thing as reading alone?

Hugging at the airport once again, we bid our teary goodbyes. When Liz got home, she read an article about England’s upcoming celebration of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday. She texted Melanie right away: Would this be bonkers? Should we go?

Readers, have you ever gone to a book convention like this? Not anything stuffy and academic like AWP, but reader-led and reader-focused? If so, tell us about it! We want to know everything: What was it like? Who did you meet? Did you have fun? Would you do it again?

The autumnal mood has me so incredibly grateful to have over 100 subscribers. I can’t tell you how thrilling it is that real people are reading my words. Thank you! I’m so glad you’re here.

I’ve been musing about what I want to do with this newsletter moving forward. I think it’s to continue simply sharing new writers I love, books I’m thinking about, and poems I’ve written. And if you’re more of a short-form type (no judgment here), I’ve been a lot more active over on Instagram.

• My sister and I have been nerding-out on Karen Russell’s The Antidote (deep, weird, awesome).

• I’ve almost finished Leigh Stein’s If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant For You (delightful).

• And I’m listening to the audiobook of Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark (a must for murderinos)(perfect).

• I hope it goes without saying that I always want to know what you’re loving right now. Do tell. That’s what the comments are for.

I’ve got potentially big magazine news in the hopper. Here’s the candle I’ve been burning every morning to reel in the magic:

And on that note, I’ll leave you with a new poem. Oh, and I’ve got another about Thomas Hardy coming out in Ploughshares soon. You can follow them on IG here.

Have a great October, everyone!

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Within ten minutes of meeting Anna Rollins, I knew her book, FAMISHED: ON FOOD, SEX, AND GROWING UP AS A GOOD GIRL, would change the life of any woman who read it (psst, pre-order here). Anna’s experience of growing up inside the twin ideologies of purity and dieting is, sadly, an extremely common one.

We conducted this interview over e-mail and I’m just so delighted to share it with you all. Again, pre-order here. This book is going to knock you sideways.

Tell us a little about FAMISHED and why you wrote it.

If someone had asked me twenty years ago to guess what I would eventually write a book about, I would have said something like, ‘a book about food, sex, and God. But no way will I ever write that — because I would be too scared.’ When I was in undergrad studying creative writing, everything I naturally was interested in had to do with these topics. But then when I would go to turn something in for my workshops, these topics would feel too sensitive, too vulnerable, and I would end up writing something else.

Eventually, I worked through my fears of having my obsessions perceived by others -- in part because I had to. Around the time my second son was born, I had a traumatic postpartum experience (I detail this in my book) that led to a faith crisis. The beliefs I'd held about my own body and womanhood were making it difficult to continue on in my faith tradition. Writing this book -- narrating my personal story, deep diving into research, and speaking with dozens of other women who'd grown up in similar backgrounds -- helped me deconstruct the moralism, perfectionism, and prosperity gospel I'd been taught in my religious upbringing.

How did you start writing the memoir? Did you have a moment of inspiration or was it a slow burn?

I started working on the memoir during the pandemic. I'd certainly been writing toward it before then, but the pandemic was the catalyst for me to take my story seriously. I was newly postpartum, and my entire family had been through multiple health crises before the world shut down. My husband was an essential worker, so I was teaching remotely from home and trying to parent a baby and a toddler in the midst of it all. But I had this moment where I, quite frankly, felt my own mortality. I realized that I could die -- that we could all die. And I didn't want to get to the end of my life without telling this story.

So, even though I had so little time, I worked in the tiniest chunks (dictating scenes through voice notes as I pushed my sons on swings in the backyard, working after my children's bedtimes or early in the morning, you name it -- I found moments where I could write because I felt like I absolutely had to).

What has your spiritual journey been like? What was it like while writing the book? Now?

I grew up Baptist, and I attended a private Christian school that leaned fundamentalist. I was a very good Christian girl: quiet but ambitious in church, small but bold in my faith (imagine little me with big blue glasses and frizzy brown hair winning Awana clubber of the year, and then going home to proselytize Christianity to strangers on internet message boards). Though I didn't know it at the time, I struggled with scrupulosity (religious OCD), and I turned myself inside-out, grappling with belief and faith and whether my doubts damned me. It was excruciating. I coped with these private crises with disordered eating behaviors.

When I went to college (a public university in my home state), I began to search for relief in the form of less religious rigidity -- but I was still very involved in campus organizations like Cru and RUF. My husband and I connected in one of these organizations. We married young, and we were actively involved in our evangelical congregation. During my early adulthood, I was certainly unpacking white Christian nationalism, and I was disgusted by the way conservative politics had infiltrated so much of the church. But while I was frustrated by the lack of nuance I saw in evangelical spaces, I still identified as evangelical.

I had a pretty significant faith crisis after my middle son was born. At the time, my husband became severely ill, and looking back, he, too, suffered from scrupulosity. He wanted to give away all our possessions for the sake of the cross; he was convinced he committed the unpardonable sin. It was earth-shattering. And at the time, I remember just thinking, is this what Christianity does to people? Does it just wreck them?

I was ready to walk away from it all. The pandemic gave me some relief from going to church, and that break was really healthy for me. I wrote my book in the midst of this. When I began my memoir, I wasn't sure how it would end: I didn't know if I would remain a Christian or not. I think this is probably apparent on the page -- my narratives are often told with little commentary. I try to approach my story with little judgment. But in the process of unpacking (deconstructing?) all that I'd been taught, I experienced a really arresting encounter with grace and forgiveness.

I continue to unpack the moralism, fundamentalism, and prosperity gospel that I grew up with. I am still a Christian, and I remain in many evangelical spaces, though 'evangelical' is a label I'm hesitant to give myself because it is so bound up with far-right politics (something I do not align with).

What has your relationship with your body been like? What was it like while writing the book? Now?

My book examines the rhyming scripts of evangelical purity culture and diet culture. Growing up as a Christian in the 90s/00s, I was taught that a good girl was small, submissive, and quiet. I learned to value fear, discipline, and control, but that left little room for risk, surrender, and faith. Like many women who grew up in the midst of "the war on obesity" (and all the fatphobia that resulted from it), I struggled with disordered eating behaviors.

My husband and I were committed to waiting until marriage to have sex -- but when we got married, even though I intellectually knew that sex was sanctioned as right and good, my body was unable to let go. For about half a decade, I suffered from a psychosexual condition called vaginismus (this condition is widely connected to purity culture trauma). Vaginismus causes involuntary spasming of the pelvic floor muscles, and this makes penetrative sex incredibly painful and often impossible. I sought out help from medical professionals, but it took me a while for someone to take my problems seriously. For many years, I just thought my body was broken, and I felt like a failure as a woman.

Eventually, around the time of my faith crisis, I sought help for both disordered eating and sexual dysfunction. And as my relationship to my body began to heal, this impacted what I believed about God, too. This is something I detail at length in my book.

You live in West Virginia, not exactly a pipeline to agents in NYC. I know it took some years to find an agent, so I think people will be interested to hear how that went, what kinds of struggles you encountered, and how you landed with Morgan Strehlow at the Bindery Agency.

So, my memoir started out as just my personal narrative. But eventually, after I received some interest from agents who suggested I broaden my scope, I began to report the book out.

I connected with women who grew up in evangelical purity culture, and I asked them the question, "how did your experiences in evangelical purity culture impact your relationship with your own body?"

One woman I interviewed was Morgan Strehlow. She was not a literary agent at that time -- but months later, she reached out to me and told me she was taking a position at the Bindery Agency. She said she'd been following my writing online (I'd been publishing dozens of essays trying to get agent attention), and she said she couldn't stop thinking about my book after we'd finished our interview. She invited me to submit my book proposal to her. I sent it on her first day on the job, and she ended up signing me. I was her first client and the first book that she ever sold.

What are you working on next?

I have a few projects. I have a rough draft of a memoir about motherhood, work, community, and deconstructing the individualism in the trad wife/girlboss binary. I also have a collection of essays that examine girlhood through the lens of the Olsen Twins. And I'm playing around with a few ideas for children's books, too.

Thank you, Anna!

Readers, please feel free to post your questions for Anna in the comments. She’d love to hear from you.

***

Anna Rollins is the author of Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl (out December 9, 2025 from Eerdmans). Her groundbreaking debut memoir examines the rhyming scripts of diet culture and evangelical purity culture, both of which direct women to fear their own bodies and appetites. Her writing has appeared in outlets like The New York Times, Slate, Electric Literature, Salon, Joyland, and more. She’s also written scholarly articles about composition and writing center studies. She’s an award-winning instructor who taught English in higher education for nearly 15 years. She is a 2025 Tamarack Foundation for the Arts Literary Arts Fellow. A lifelong Appalachian, she lives with her husband in West Virginia where they’re raising their three small children. Follow her on Substack and Instagram @annajrollins or at http://annajrollins.com.

Greetings, new subscribers! I’m so glad you early adopters are here, patiently reading as I figure out what this newsletter is about. As I mentioned in the last update, I just got an agent! I hope to have thrilling updates for you soon. Meanwhile, if you were wondering how the cuts and chaos at the NEA have affected small presses, head on over to my literary bestie’s latest piece in LitHub here.

I posted a Note the other day that got a fair amount of traction. While reading Stephen King’s The Shining (1977), I wondered why there was so much bashing about King not being literary. Because The Shining definitely is.

The most liked comment on my Note, by far, was this one from Sherman Alexie:

The Literarian Gazette disagreed with me in a restack, which was also popular, so I interpreted that as a healthy chorus of boooos:

Of all the comments, Images of Broken Light offered my favorite sentiment:

And yet, worry I do, so I figured I’d write my personal manifesto about The Shining and what “literary” means.

First, a little backstory.

I spent decades turning up my nose at the mention of King. Word on the street – my MFA-literary street – was that King wasn’t literary. And my jam was, and still is, literary. Off the top of my head, some of my favorite living writers are Margaret Atwood, Olga Tokarczuk, Elena Ferrante, and Donna Tartt. In addition, I’ve never met a classic I didn’t love. Two years ago I read King’s Firestarter, then The Outsider, Holly, and The Shining, and I will definitely read more.

Second, a framework for understanding what follows.

I very much enjoyed Leigh Stein’s point about literary + [genre], but I actually think it might work better swapped, like this, [genre] + literary. In other words, the best genre novels have literary components: depth, style, and character texture and development.

When a book is set in a remote, haunted hotel-mansion in which a father loses his mind and tries to murder his whole family, lingering a fair amount on the gory bits throughout, we must say it is a horror novel. Therefore, The Shining is horror + literary.

If we can agree (and maybe we can’t) that “literary” means depth, style, and character texture and development, The Shining has it all, plus consequential action: this happens, then this happens, and because of that, this other thing happens (i.e., plot).

Third, the gristle.

Jack Torrance accepts an over-wintering caretaker job at a remote, upscale hotel, bringing his wife and young son with him. We learn the family’s backstory: Jack has a history of alcoholism and has been fired from his cushy teaching job in New England. Wendy has struggled with the fact that her husband has been physically and emotionally abusive, and wonders if she should have left him after Jack broke their son’s arm in a scuffle. Five-year-old Danny can communicate with other people using only his mind and has disturbing spells of premonition. (I’m checking the box for depth here.)

Each of these characters start the novel in one place (emotionally, physically, spiritually) and end in a different place. Along the way, we come to know them, their external histories and their interior lives. Along the way, they are changed. (Check, character texture and development.)

If real estate is about location, “literary” is about style. Style encompasses stuff like diction (unique or uniquely used words), interesting/beautiful/striking sentences and turns of phrase, unusual or inventive form, and bold imagery and metaphors. Literary merit helps a book stand the test of time. It’s no small feat that The Shining is almost fifty years old and yet still punches me in the face while I’m reading it.

Throughout the novel, King uses words we don’t see every day on the page: bazoo, roque, mewled, ruck, redrum, Lloydy-my-boy, el birdos, skinny-shanks wife, Overlookiana, knurled, squittering, and more. Wow but these are fun! Unique! Upon reading them, my wee little eyes shoneth with joy (in particular Overlookiana, which I mulled over while cooking dinner that night since in addition to being an avid reader, I’m a bit of an antiques whore. I love -iana everything). Joy is the beating heart of reading a great novel. A great novel engages all of your senses. You feel it. You smell it. You think about it while cooking dinner. Joy!

As for the sentences and turns of phrase, here are a few I found intriguing.:

• “His eyes were soaped windows.”

• “His relationship with his father had been like the unfurling of some flower of beautiful potential, which, when wholly opened, turned out to be blighted inside.”

In addition to these being lovely, they are also seamless. They don’t feel out of place or call attention to themselves. If they did, they would break the fictive dream, which would pull us out of the joyful experience of reading this terrific story.

As for inventive form, any time Danny or Jack hallucinate, the words on the page become unhooked from grammatical rules and sentences and more like free verse poems. King relies in these scenes on italics, brackets, all caps, and parentheses to convey the disorientation of the action. In fact, Danny’s mental journey is one of the most deep, disturbing, and memorable in the novel. Reading these scenes, my senses are once again alive. I’m delighted by what I see visually on the page and how it mimics what the characters are experiencing, a complete unhinging.

I’m getting tired and rushing now, so – quickly – on the topics of striking imagery and metaphors: the fire extinguisher (who is going to put out this family’s wildfire with this old thing?); Jack with the topiary (Jack’s becoming unglued); dead lady strangles Danny (Danny is not having a good winter); unmasking at midnight (each of these characters, and reality itself, will be completely unmasked by the end of the novel).

Ultimately, if you stripped away The Shining’s style, you’d have a different, lesser book and it wouldn’t have the same gut-punching, memorable, and lasting impact.

That’s the thing. Style, depth, and character, working well together, deliver strong emotional impact on the reader, which is the difference between, say, a pulp fiction novel you breeze through and a literary novel (whether it’s genre + literary or just straight up literary fiction). A pulp novel doesn’t typically achieve pyrotechnical emotional impact. It might deliver a surprising idea or a neat trick, but it doesn’t stay with you and rearrange your mind and heart in the same way. That’s why people love literary fiction (or genre + literary): it rewires you. It surprises and delights you page by page, even when a dead lady is strangling a little boy.

And with that, love until next time.

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I’ve been writing poems. I’m always nervous about posting family-related poems because I know my sisters read this and I would never want to hurt them with anything I write. Also, I know that a poem is not truth, but a different kind of truth. In the same way a novel is not truth, but a different kind of truth. With your own family, however, you worry. Might need to write a full post about this. Anyway, here are the poems:

This one I posted on Notes, but not all of you are glued to your computers so…

Buy this bard a cuppa!

Until next time. Thanks for being here, readers.

Though we started our friendship online as editors of a literary magazine (it didn’t end well), Liz and I have now traveled the world together to attend Stephen KingCon in Las Vegas, Discworld in Germany, and various Jane Austen sites in England. You might know Liz from our Persuasion pieces, or her short stories, or maybe you know her as that chick at your dive bar gabbing about G. K. Chesterton.

Though I’ve known Liz a few years now, I wanted to understand more about the role writer-friends play in her writing life. Her answers to my interview questions perfectly capture why “Don’t do it alone” has become our bedrock principle.

Who are your literary friends and why do you love them?

You’re my most literary of literary friendships! It’s almost like we’re in a long-distance marriage: I turn to you for advice, encouragement, critique, gossip, speculation, and just general chatter. Also, you recommended I join a writing workshop with some of your friends – and that’s been really life-changing for me. I’ve learned so much from sitting at the feet of these more professional writers. They give me brilliant insight on a weekly basis. It’s such a varied crew; I read my pages aloud, and they advise me on the proper slang for a Cornish Catholic recusant, what type of houses host which type of ghosts, how it feels for a teenage friendship to transform you from child to adult, and even about the history of rumble strips on the highway.

I also earned my MFA, something I am grateful for because it gave me time, space, and money to write, as well as friends that I cherish very much. I’m always cheerleading for my friend Elin Hawkinson, who writes the most beautiful, unsettling stories. Someday, she’ll write her book, and then I’ll read it and give a copy to everyone I know. She’s so talented.

My other MFA fiction friend is JP Vallieres, and he inspires me to have both unceasing energy and a feral imagination. He spent the night on our couch last winter to see one of his “dead advertising” scripts turned into live theatre, then we stayed out downtown until like two or three am. His plane left so early in the morning that I’m sure he only got an hour or so of sleep before he flew back home.

The poet Danielle Weeks and I don’t exchange work, but we talk about our projects and our lives. We also have the same middle name, Kaye, which is perhaps yet another source for the deep bond we share.

When I lived in New Mexico, I ran with another group of poets. I still admire and appreciate them very much. They’ve released so many chapbooks and collections. I make sure to buy each one.

Why are literary friends important?

Friendship is important for its own sake, but to my mind, a literary friendship can only be truly intimate if we share core principles: love of truth and beauty, a respect for all artists’ freedom of expression and freedom of association, and the idea that, contrary to the soothing porridge of postmodern criticism, a book should be read and understood on its own terms. Not everything is about us. Especially not books. If a book makes you preen like a parrot in the mirror, then either it’s an abomination or you’re misreading it, and I think deliberate, egotistical misreadings are basically a spiritual crime.

Literary friendships can be very damaging, too, for example, if the friend is a cop or a scold by nature. Someone who monitors, or even makes me feel like they would monitor, my reading and my friendship, is someone that I don’t invest time in. However, considering that I came out of an MFA in 2016, I did have a lot of friends that made me feel like this. I’ve let those connections fossilize, though I’m polite about it.

What does a good literary friendship look like?

A good literary friendship. . . wow. It’s everything. During the pandemic, Elin Hawkinson and I wrote a series of short essays about our shared memories. It was really wonderful, seeing those moments from the other person’s eyes. We never published them, but I reread them recently and was blown away.

And then of course, there’s you, Mel. We’re running in a two-legged race. Whenever I get tired of the ignored pitches or constant rejection, you’re there with a fresh burst of energy, and whenever you need a second opinion, I’m there to say, Maybe change this or It’s perfect; they’re crazy.

Someday in the future you and I will be blurbing each other’s novels, and it’s our friendship that has given me the complete confidence to say so. I think you said once, “Of course, I’ll be a success now. You’re depending on me!” And that’s exactly how I feel, too.

Readers, do you have a favorite literary friendship? Or maybe even a friendship inside a book that you love? Possibly more to come about this topic in the future, so share away!

Caffeinate me!

Taken aback, I said nothing. Later I took it as a win, as positive feedback, deciding it meant the story was good since my friend felt it was true of me, the writer. Maybe my friend still thinks I’m schizophrenic. I’ve never asked. Maybe I am schizophrenic.

I have a poem coming out in a literary magazine that’s about falling into a love triangle that namechecks Thomas Hardy’s characters in The Return of the Native. Have I personally enjoyedexperienced an adulterous love triangle? Yes. No. Maybe. I’ll never tell.

For me the point of writing is to tell a great story with emotional ups and downs, and maybe some truths, but not the actual truth. I’m not a memoirist. Or am I? Again, maybe.

When Liz and I were editing a literary magazine, it struck me how often the short stories in the slush pile did not have a conflict. A short story, at its core, is conflict. There must be desire that causes tension.

Writing in obscurity for twenty years has been helpful here. It gave me a lot of time to marinate on what I believe – about fiction, literature, and writing. It gave me a chance to gravitate toward writers I admire, writers who always speak their truth, come what may. They are oddballs, rebels, mysteries, entertainers, and survivors. They are storytellers. It’s none of my business who they are as actual people I might meet on the street. Obvs, plenty of people, all on the internet, disagree with me on this. If I’ve lost your respect, I’m okay with it.

I’m trying to find the readers who like great stories, unforgettable characters, bold weirdos, and morally complicated situations. I’m talking about letting readers think whatever they want about a piece of writing and about me, the person who wrote a thing that provokes unease or outright disgust and rejection.

Here’s a lesson I’ve learned. Don’t try to be “good.” Nothing puts a reader to sleep faster.

I don’t want to come across as a badass (ugh! there I go again trying to tell you what to think of me). Really, I’m just a tenderhearted, messed up, vulnerable human being like everyone else who struggles with internetting. Before Liz and I publish an essay, I worry about what people will think and who we’ll offend. What helps is reading the greats.

Tony Tulathimutte is a literary genius. In Rejection he writes very believably about awful characters. Do I believe Tulathimutte is a bad person? No. Does it matter? Not to me. How about Nabokov, Bret Easton Ellis, or Otessa Moshfegh? Again, no, no, and no. For me, it’s the opposite. I read their work and study it. I try to figure out how they achieve their effects, how their words make me laugh, cry, or shudder in horror.

Here’s an experiment for any writers reading this: be bad on the page. Be morally suspect. Find the drama, the controversy, the taboo thoughts and actions. These are characters after all, not you. Try it and see what happens. I won’t think you’re a bad person. Other people certainly will. Maybe it’s time to practice being okay with that.

If it goes well, one of your closest friends will take your hand and say with tender concern, “You never told me you were a schizophrenic adulterer.” Bravo!

If all this makes you squeamish, write about that. Write about what you could lose: the respect of everyone at church, the fantasy that you are a morally superior person, the conviction that you always do the right thing and never lie, cheat, or steal. In real life, maybe you don’t. But words on a page aren’t real life. They should just feel like it.

After he published his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane was mocked by reviewers. After The Red Badge of Courage came out and was well received, Crane wrote to a friend: “When I was the mark for every humorist in the country, I went ahead. Now when I am the mark for only 50% of the humorists in the country, I go ahead.”

Which brings me to nuns. I’ve been thinking a lot about them lately in all their wild multitudinousness.

Writers are a kind of nun. We must give up things – looking good, nice, and smart – to follow our calling because we are devoted fanatics who write, mostly, in complete obscurity. When we have a hit and actually find readers, some of them are going to misunderstand, laugh at, and scorn our holy visions. And they may not like us as people, not just writers. We must go ahead, like Crane. Letting people hate us is part of our vow.

So what do you think? Share your comments below, internet people. Be honest. I can take it . . . I hope.

Buy this scribe a cuppa!