Feeling Haunted: A Review of In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

When I was a girl I used to read with a kind of anxious-joyful intensity that bodily took me over. I would wedge myself into the space between my creaking bedframe and the wall of my bedroom, and the sunbeams would slant overhead, and the dust would get in my nose, and I would get lost for whole weekends—maybe even weeks if it was the summer. The physical sensations were specific: too-rapid heart beats, short and shallow breaths, a wildness rising in my throat, a wide and unconscious smile, a shivery feeling in my spine, eyes moving rapidly and without blinking until I’d realized periodically that they hurt like a sonofabitch. That specific mania-joy-wonder doesn’t happen for me as often now; I’ve read enough books, and lived long enough, and narrowed my palate. When it does, though, I feel twelve again, and I am once again in my childhood bedroom. I smell the particular smell of the dust and the warm sunbeams and the detergent-rich sheets on my bed.

In Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House, she explores what it means for a space to be haunted—“It means that metaphors abound; that space exists in four dimensions; that if you return somewhere often enough it becomes infused with your energy; that the past never leaves us; that there’s always atmosphere to consider; that you can wound air as cleanly as you can wound flesh.” This is undeniably true. But I think that haunting can work in the reverse too. A feeling can be infused with a specific space, a specific time, and a specific body.

The book haunted me in this way. It haunted me by being unspeakably beautiful and new and clench-my-jaw-hands-are-shaking brilliant. It made me twelve-and-thirty at once; it overlaid my no longer really there Midwestern childhood bedroom over my New York kitchen; it possessed me with all those old familiar drugged-up sensations. I sat rigidly still for hours in the same attitude without even noticing that this is not something which is particularly bearable for me anymore. I ignored fourteen phone calls; four were from my mother. I cancelled one set of plans and declined another. I skipped several meals. And all because I had to—absolutely had to—finish this book, which I did within twenty-four hours of getting my hands on the ARC. And then I flipped back to the front and started again.

It also haunted me with past versions of myself—the “You”s I contain as the book itself takes on a convention of a “You” and an “I” to differentiate the narrator’s self in the timeline of the story. (“You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved; a neat loop that took first person—that assured, confident woman, the girl detective, the adventurer—away from second, who was always anxious and vibrating like a too-small breed of dog.” From that cleaving, I left and lived on the east coast, lived the most triumphant notes of her life that we think of associated with an artist like Carmen. You’s biographical points are the points which live in her time in Iowa and Indiana, and in the dark of that relationship. I thought you died, but writing this, I’m not sure you did.”) This haunting arises from a number of key biographical parallels which were joy-light-tear-bringing to read, since they are lived experiences I do not often (ever) get to see made vivid on the page. I am suddenly remembering the dedication of the book—”If you need this book, it is for you.”—and at the risk of sounding like an unconscionable egoist, it feels like it is for me, at least when I am alone, in my room, at my desk.

And it is.

And it is not.

This book is, yes, for you (me) if you are someone who can relate to any portion of the experiences or identities outlined and may want to feel a tin bit less alone and more seen.

It is also, explicitly, for The Archive. For a “you” that is collective and historical in context. Which is part of Carmen Maria Machado’s incredible mastery of craft; she can write something at once erudite, personal, and formally complex and experimental, and generous, and contrary, and natural, and meta, and snappy. It’s deft and as weightless as air. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a creative work which has so explicitly engaged with an awareness of the reader, the act of reader, the mind of the reader parsing the text, the idea of text, and the act of writing, while still remaining warm and engaging and funny.

But what can you expect when you pick up the book? (And you should, whoever you are.) Something that feels new. On one hand, Carmen weaves a personal narrative which progresses more or less chronologically through an abusive relationship with a woman she met and dated mostly during her time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. These are presented in a series of what amount to medium-length personal essays, and the language and insight in them is beautiful and touching and clear-eyed. But if this is the more traditional base, the book as a whole is far from traditional, because that more traditional memoir fodder is only one strand which Carmen deftly braids with personal essays dealing with other periods of her life—as the information may become relevant—academic and cultural essays on topics ranging from Louise Bourgeois, the Gaslight films, Saidiya Hartman’s “violence of the archive,” queer history, Gothicism, Doctor Who, folktales, features of abusive relationships, A Star is Born, the concept of hauntings, and more and more. Each essay is playful and smart and different from those around it, starting with “Dream House as…” and taking on variously the form and genre conventions of a bildungsroman, a choose your own adventure, a libretto, a murder mystery, and so on, and so on.

In the Dream House is also, before you get too far into this review thinking that the book is going to be some kind of alternatively maudlin and hyper-intellectually dry tome, very much playful and funny. In the very first section, or essay, or whatever I am meant to call it, “Dream House as Overture,” she begins the whole book with “I never read prologues.” The very next section, when you turn the page, is “Dream House as Prologue.” This tongue-in-cheek, double-back-upon-itself dance permeates the whole work. So too does a sense of interrogating the purpose and use and limitations of the work itself (“the memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection”), but also the strength and power and necessity of it—of memoir and memory. While she explicitly acknowledges that hers are just one person’s—with just one person’s constellation of identities—lived experiences, Carmen addresses early on, and then again and again throughout the book the problem of the archive: of history, and queer history, and the lack of literature and documentation and study of abuse in relationships between people with the same gender identities. History is incomplete, and that has individual and communal implications. So, with her memoir, she “enters into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this.”

The truth is I’m a little bit in goofy-sappy love with this book, just like I was a little bit in goofy-sappy love Carmen’s debut collection of short stories Her Body and Other Parties, when my good friend Patrick (who reviewed it for this very site) pressed the book into my hands and said ‘no really, you need to read this, YOU especially need to read this.’ And so when I saw that the ARCs were coming in for her second book I leapt at the chance to “dibs” reviewing it (umm, sorry Patrick). So now I arrive at the third way I am feeling a little haunted while writing this review, which is with a tinge of embarrassment. Both the reflexive embarrassment I always when I have a crush (and, yes, I get crushes on books), and also with the lightly mortifying memory—persistently lingering in my consciousness as I write this—of the time that I met Carmen (briefly) at a reading she did with NYU at the KGB bar. When I fainted right there in front of her. (It was hot and overcrowded, I had low blood pressure, let’s just… leave it.) I can assure everyone that she could not have been kinder, or more concerned and gracious. She offered me a granola bar and I was a little out of it, but I remember getting really weird about how I couldn’t possibly, not her granola bars, oh my gosh. I did however take the opportunity to introduce myself and dizzily say “hi, I’m a big fan.” She talked to me for a while to put me at ease, and drew smelling salts in my copy of her book when I asked her to sign it, and very kindly did not make fun of me even a little despite how weird I was being.

So, if none of the praises I’ve heaped on In the Dream House have swayed you thus far, here’s one last salvo: it is a good thing in this world and in our community to support and lift up the lovely ones, by which I mean the writers and artists are brilliant and funny, and still warm and kind and human. And Carmen Maria Machado seems, really seems, like a good one.

The Gain of a Deaf Republic

Much of the recent responses to Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic have rightly focused on its metaphors of silence and their tense relationship to political resistance. While such metaphors are crucial to the way Kaminsky imagines political resistance, the reduction of deafness to metaphor undercuts what I contend is a much larger project of “deaf-gain” that he explores in his volume. Deaf activists have long worked to undo reductive stereotypes of deafness as lack or loss by insisting upon it “as a means to understand the plenitude of human being.”[1] As opposed to a medical model of disability in which an individual is entirely reduced to their deafness, Deaf identity embraces deafness as a valuable part of biocultural diversity. Members of the Deaf community share rich cultures, histories, and languages grounded in deafness as a particular embodied orientation to the world. Such orientation enables a unique form of knowledge-making unique to Deaf people. But within the traumatic conditions of wartime, what does deafness afford? What is at stake in claiming “to be of deaf people” in the face of violence?

Deaf Republic reads like a two-act political drama in which lyric poems trace the experiences of citizens living under martial law. Armed militants come to occupy the fictional Eastern European town of Vasenka and ultimately murder a deaf boy, Petya, who spits at a sergeant during a local puppet show. As public gatherings become banned all together, Petya’s childish yet brazen act of resistance becomes one of martyrdom. One of the puppeteers, Galya Armolinskaya, rallies the townspeople around his death as the bloody symbol of the soldiers’ cruelty visited upon one of Vasenka’s most vulnerable. Here, Kaminsky considers how resistance can take unexpected, subtle forms. Some of the townspeople choose to be deaf as a strategy of silent protest. Deafness becomes a means of refusal: to speak, to hear, to comply, to resign, to forget. “In the name of Petya, we refuse,” the chorus of townspeople proclaim. Such an act feels deeply fraught, for able-bodied citizens seem to be performing deafness as “their only barricade” against tyrannical authority. Yet assuming deafness here is not tokenism nor the petty exploitation of disability for political gain. Rather, it is a communal act of mourning for and solidarity with the fallen Petya that animates their rebellion, that makes his deafness insurgency. Kaminsky frames deafness in explicitly crip terms: a politicized, community identity—mobile and adaptive— whose practices resist dehumanization and subvert authority.

Out of such meaningless violence is born a deaf community whose experiences shape not only their identities but their language. “The townspeople invented their own sign language. Some of the signs derived from various traditions (Russian, Ukranian, Belarusian, American Sign language, etc.). Other signs might have been made up by citizens, as they tried to create a language not known to authorities,” notes Kaminsky at the end of his book. Vasenkan deafness is thus characterized not by quietism but by prolixity—a ingenious talking back in the face of oppression that enables the townspeople to “testify” to the atrocities happening daily, poem after poem while the rest of the world “lived happily during the war.” In the form of printed representations of these signs, Kaminsky invites his reader to navigate a deaf poetics that deftly eludes the censorship of the soldiers. Scholars of Deaf Studies have argued that sign language’s rhetorical power lies precisely in its unique capacity to express complex ideas through visual-spatial metaphors.[2] We see this linguistic ingenuity both in the hybrid origins of the Vasenkan sign language, produced collectively by the townspeople living in precarity, and the hybrid forms of the poems in both verse and sign. Seemingly singular, localized signs come together in an embodied essay that expresses what might otherwise be silently witnessed during the occupation. When the traumas of war become nearly unspeakable, the hands unbound in turn speak volumes. The same hands that manipulated the puppets when Petya died. The same hands that, in retaliation, dragged the bodies of the dead soldiers to the back of the theater.

The first act of Deaf Republic traces the intimacies between Alfonso Barabinski and his wife, Sonya, who is pregnant when the military occupation occurs. After giving birth, Sonya is shot and Anushka, the baby girl, is immediately taken as Alfonso is hanged. The traumatic violence of civil war, this tragic family story suggests, is often intergenerational. Yet, as Kaminsky reminds us, cultural memory and forms of resistance also passes from one generation to another: “And yet, on some nights, townspeople dim the lights and teach their children to sign.” The Barabinskis are survived by Vasenka’s children, by the very language they helped to invent and share. Deafness remains a means of survival, the means of radically imagining “a peaceful country.” A deaf republic.

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[1] H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray. “Deaf Studies in the 21st Century: ‘Deaf-gain’ and the Future of Human Diversity.” The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education. Eds. Marc Marschark and Patricia Elizabeth Spencer. 2 (2010): 11.

[2] Bauman and Murray, 14.

An Interview with Daisy Johnson

Daisy Johnson is the author of debut short story collection FEN as well as her first novel, Everything Under. The East Anglia native currently lives and writes in Oxford, England, after earning her Master’s in Creative Writing at Oxford University. She won the AM Heath Prize in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Berlin Prize that same year. Her first novel, Everything Under, has been longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. I spoke with her over e-mail about FEN and Everything Under, her creative process, and going from writing short stories to writing full novels.

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A. Poythress: I’ve been reading Peter Orner’s Am I Alone Here? for my writers on writers class with Patricia McNair, and in it he says, “finishing is agony because you know you will never again read this book for the first time”. I know I felt that way when reading FEN. I put off finishing the last three pages because I didn’t want it to be over. Are there any books like that for you?

Daisy Johnson: I love that, almost elegiac, feeling. I’m pleased that FEN did that to you. The Bone People by Keri Hulme made me feel that way, I think, because I felt as if I was a different reader after I’d finished it, saw the world in a different way. Also a lot of Stephen King because of those shock, gasp moments. I’ll never forget the first time I read The Shining.

AP: Place plays such a pivotal role in FEN. How could it not? The fen becomes a character in its own. How did you develop this characterisation?

DJ: The characterisation was there already because it is the way I feel about that land. I grew up there so my memories of it are tainted by those strange teenage years. I did really want the land to feel like a character in its own right though, I think maybe that’s where there are so many stories about language in the collection: I wanted it to feel as if the land could speak. I tried to develop it by intensify a few characteristics the fen has: it’s flatness, the fact that it used to be under water, it’s isolation from other places. 

AP: Do you think that specific small town claustrophobia felt in FEN is a universal feeling for all small towns? Or particularly locked into East Anglia/Eastern England?

DJ: I think it’s probably something that everyone in small towns feels at one moment or another. I imagine in the States, or Australia for example, you must feel it even more because there is simply great distances between places. I think what is specific about FEN is that these are characters who, because of who they are, really feel the isolation; a lot of them are teenagers who can’t drive and if they could would have nowhere to go anyway. The rest of them are trapped for other reasons and I think their claustrophobia comes from this, from knowing that they will probably always feel this way.

AP: When I first started reading “Starver”, I sat back with some overwhelming feeling that told me pay attention. Why did you decide to start FEN off with “Starver”?

DJ: Starver was actually the first story I wrote. I had been working on and off on a novel and I needed the immediate gratification of a story, the joy of actually finishing something. I think it, also, is a good introduction to the collection, to the landscape. The protagonist, is an observer, a quiet watcher and she — I hope — invites the readers in, shows them what they might expect in this strange, weird place.

AP: How long did it take you to figure out the order of the short stories in FEN?

DJ: It took a while. I tried a lot of different orders based on themes in the stories or the similarities in characters. One of the difficulties was trying to read the collection as a first time reader would. In the end I think the collection is based, loosely, on age. The women in the second half — after the long middle story — are a little older, a little more isolated.

AP: The Guardian review of FEN describes you as having “restraint of [your] language”. I must wholeheartedly agree. Yours are not the lengthy short stories of yesteryear. Was that restraint a natural style or a difficult and deliberate choice?

DJ: It is probably both just the way I write and also a consequence of the sort of short story writer’s I was reading. Writers such as Sarah Hall and Kelly Link.

One of the things I love about short stories is how little can be left out, how much exists in the gaps and the spaces.

AP: Would you consider FEN a horror collection?

DJ: That’s an interesting question. Particularly as my third book, which I’m in the early stages of, is a horror novel. Writing FEN didn’t frighten me the way writing this one did. I spend a lot of time jumping at noises in the house or writing by the back door so I have a good exit strategy. But I think FEN and everything else I write shares tropes of horror; those beats of unease that gradually grow and grow until they’re unbearable, that way of putting characters up against something and seeing how they deal with it.

AP: In both “The Hunt” and “The Cull”, it’s the men who hunt the foxes while the women come to live with them. Is there a deliberate relationship between women and animals as co-conspirators while men and animals are seemingly natural enemies?

DJ: I think a lot of the collection focuses on characters that are otherwise often silenced and that this is why there seems a relationship between the women and the animals. In the collection they are given a voice and the ways they use this voice are often a violent retaliation. A lot of the collection is about taking or stealing language, about trying to gain autonomy and often the men come out worse.

AP: I’ve seen many reviews compare FEN to works by Angela Carter. How do you feel about this comparison?

DJ: It’s obviously a great honour to be compared to someone like Angela Carter. She did things that no one else was doing at the time and her short stories are fireworks of weirdness. However I am always, I think, a little flinty when the comparison comes up. There are so many fantastic female short story writers doing amazing weird things and I think we need to make sure we are reading them, are comparing ourselves to them. I was not reading Carter when I was writing FEN, I was reading pretty much solely contemporary short story writers.

AP: Did you always believe you would write short stories? Personally, I always thought I’d write novels that would change the world, but more and more lately, short stories have consumed me.

DJ: I am a child of the creative writing workshop so my first encounter with writing was the short story. I understand that urge though; while studying I was always working on a novel in my spare time. It was only, really, in writing FEN that my love for short stories became fully fledged. A good short story can, I think, change the world in the way a novel can.

AP: Once a reader finishes FEN, it seems almost like a novel as opposed to a collection of short stories. Possibly my ignorance is showing — I read anthologies instead of published collections more often than not, and novels more often than most — but that surprised me. Was this an intentional choice or incidental?

DJ: It was intentional. I wanted — to add to the feeling of claustrophobia — to set all the stories in one, imaginary, town. The characters rarely encounter themselves but they frequent the same pub, hear the same anecdotes. I wanted the reader to come to know this place, to believe that it was somewhere where strange things happened.

I do think, though, that short story collections that are not linked can certainly feel novel-like. One of my favourite things about reading collections — which you get in a very different way with anthologies — seeing the links, the things the writer returns to again and again, the way they have structured the collection to lead us through these links.

AP: Do you feel FEN is a feminist story collection? Or just a collection that happens to centre on the female?

DJ: In the same way as, I suppose, everything I write will have threads and threats of horror in them I think everything will also be feminist. What, though, do we mean by that? That the writing will focus equally, if not more, on women as well as men? That the female characters will not be limited to roles as the girlfriends and wives and mothers of more interesting male protagonists? Sarah Hall was once asked why she wrote so many female characters and she replied that she would stop doing it when they stopped asking that question. I feel the same way. No one calls out writers for having too many male characters.  

AP: You said in an interview with The Guardian, “I didn’t write thinking that it would ever be published”. I think a lot of writers feel, or at least start off feeling, that way. But what compelled you to write these stories if you didn’t think they would be shared?

DJ: Good question. I suppose the same reason any of us do creative things in our spare time. For me reading was certainly the beginning, a joy of literature, a curiosity in seeing if I could do what my favourite writers were doing. I will say, also, that I am a guilt ridden worker. My degrees were churned on the back of guilt and a lot of what I have written is spurned on by it too. Also, though I certainly wasn’t convinced of their publication, the stories were being shared with those around me, particularly the other writers on my MA.

AP: Has your process for writing your new novel changed from how you wrote FEN? Does anything feel easier? Do you feel more pressure?

DJ: Oh god! My second book, Everything Under, which is out next year, has been the bane of my life. Is that too extreme? It’s been a hard slog, four years from conception to copy edits. A lot of time spent weeping in cafes and at my desk. There are probably enough words cut from this novel to make up three more. I love it now but I didn’t always love it. I hope everyone will love it too! And yes, of course, there was that old pressure in knowing that short stories were well and good but the novel was the important thing and I had to write one to start to make a living.

However: my third book is a novel and so far it’s a joy. I float to my desk. On good days I can write 5,000 words. I’ve learnt, of course, from FEN and Everything Under, I’m hopefully making less editing work later. I also think though that some books, as with some stories, are just harder to write. They need to be harder.

AP: You said in American Short Fiction, “Maybe that is the landscape I like writing about: where it’s so quiet you can hear the strangeness you might not in other places notice”. I don’t have a question about this — I just think it’s profound and speaks to why I like writing about isolated settings as well.

DJ: I live in Oxford now and it’s always what I notice when I go to visit my parents who still live close to the fens and very much in the middle of nowhere. It’s so quiet until it’s not! That strange switch from the quiet of the day to the hunting, noisy night.

AP: I know you stated that while reading FEN, you read collections primarily written by women. Is this the same for your current project?

DJ: I think I tend to read more by women anyway but yes there were a couple of books I returned to while writing Everything Under. Evie Wylde’s All the Birds Singing, Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, Weathering by Lucy Wood. I also read quite a bit of Alice Oswald’s poetry. Everything Under is an Oedipus rewrite so I also read books that rewrote in that way. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley is fantastic and I would really recommend The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski.

AP: You say writing “seemed accidental” in American Short Fiction. I think all writers who are voracious readers first feel that way — I know I certainly do. Do you have a certain “how-to” guide for your writing? Stephen King says, “write every day,” but does that work for you?

DJ: I try and not over think it. It’s easy to get caught up in the ritual of writing and then not to write anything. That I suppose is my how-to guide: just do it. At the start of a project don’t think about publishers, agents, magazines, competitions, editing: just write.

There are some things that I’ve learnt work best for me though. Writing a lot is a good one but also having days off, giving the project time to work itself out in your head, feeling that wonderful anticipation of going back to it growing. Carrying a notebook around, particularly on those days but all the time, letting the work compost and gestate, allowing it to change and mutate. Changing where you write, being adaptable. I love my desk and the quiet house when no one else is there but sometimes that’s a bit much. Cafes are good, pubs with happy hours you can work towards are better! Finding other writers to write across the table from was quite momentous for me. Their hands are moving so fast so you keep yours moving too. Each project is different so it’s feeling your way forward, groping around until you find what works.

AP: Do you try to limit yourself to one project at a time? I know personally if I work on too many things at once, I end up jumping ship and never finishing anything.

DJ: I agree. I have very bad memory and working on more than one project makes my brain feel very mushy. I’ve got better, though, at editing one project while writing another. I think the processes are different enough to do both. 

AP: I now have a list of authors a mile long to consider because of past interviews of yours. Who else are you currently reading/obsessing over?

DJ: I’m having a good reading time. I really enjoyed The Good People by Hannah Kent. I haven’t read much sci-fi but V.E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic was really great. I’m also, while writing a couple of new short stories, rereading some of my favourites: the Sex and Death anthology is really wonderful.

Despite myself — I was wary — I also liked My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent whose amazing writing definitely saved this from being another book by a man about a girl being abused.

My to read list is also rather massive. I’ve just discovered Anne Enright who has changed my life, I’m also really looking forward to: All Rivers Run Free by Natasha Carthew which is out next year and a lot of the books that were longlisted or shortlisted for the Booker including Elmet by Fiona Mozley and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

AP: I found FEN because I was wandering around a bookstore café and the cover design called out to me as being stark and creepy — just the mood I was in for reading. Then I got hooked. Are there any books that have been like that for you?

DJ: I came to the US this year and this happened to me a couple of times in bookshops. Seeing amazing covers and sneaking them up to the counter before I could stop myself. A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume got me because it has a fox on the front and I can never resist foxes, I really enjoyed that. Communion Town by Sam Thompson was another book that really drew me in by the look of it. 

AP: “Daisy Johnson was born in 1990.” Every time I see that, I feel both hopeful and despondent. I was born in 1991 and all I can hope is to one day have a collection half as good as yours out. Do you see other people our age and younger performing and producing and get inspired or feel the push to do more?

DJ: I can’t wait to read your collection! Yes of course. I get jealous all the time, sometimes or prizes etc but mostly of other people’s writing that is doing something I would like to do.

Though there’s a balance to find in productive jealousy and the sort that just makes you feel a bit sad.

AP: What’s the strangest thing that ever happened to you? The most FEN-like thing?

DJ: I’ve always been a bit of a weird sleeper. I used to sleep walk (or run actually I think) around my room when I was younger and it’s only got worse as I’ve got older. The story in “The Cull” of a woman waking and thinking she has a fox on her chest happened to me. Sharing a room with my sister at Christmas apparently she woke up and I was walking around her bed shining a phone light and saying: they’re here, they’re here. She won’t share a room with me anymore. My partner, however, doesn’t have a choice. I’ve woken him screaming or shouting that there’s something on his shoulder. It comes in waves, right now I’m not even dreaming, and I’m sure it can be attributed to many things but it always feels, in the middle of the night, as if there actually are things in the room. On the bad nights I leave a light on. On the really bad nights I get paralysis in my mouth and hands, won’t be able to feel myself moving even though I’m told later I said things I don’t remember.

AP: I think you would do well in this class, Writers on Writers. We have to do what you seemed to while writing — see how a writer does what they do, think analytically with one finger on our own writing. Any tips for someone going from academic learning to this new way of reading?

DJ: That’s tricky. I suppose read authors whose writing you feel is similar to your own in some way, read for pleasure but with half an eye on what you like and, perhaps more importantly, what you don’t like. Don’t read at your desk because then it will feel like work and really you are trying to read like someone who has just picked this book up for fun. Talk to other people about the books your reading, share them, see what people agree and disagree with about them. Steal, steal ideas and lines and characters. You can always cut them later or you can make them your own enough no one will notice. 

AP: Did you always know you wanted to Be A Writer?

DJ: I couldn’t do very much else which made it easier I suppose. I was good at all the subjects no one is supposed to be good at. Art, Drama and English Literature. Luckily my parents were really supportive, they never would have suggested I did anything other than what I wanted to. I’m also good at dog walking and recommending books.

AP: Sometimes you feel a story deep down in your bones. Did you know FEN would be made up of connected short stories when you set out to write it?

DJ: No that was a thought that came later, perhaps about half way through writing the stories. I always knew all the stories would be set in the same landscape but not that they would be so linked.

AP: Is writing and completing a novel more difficult than short stories? Do you feel the short story mentality creeping in, sometimes?

DJ: I love that image. Short stories are creepers, getting into your head, they stay with you. I think what I learnt from FEN is that the way I wrote short stories and novels are similar in many ways. I’m a messy drafter and my editing is often more like rewriting. Rewriting a short story is obviously a lot easier than rewriting a 70,000 word novel. A short story I’m working on always feels different, somehow, in my head. I can hold it all in my mind in a way you can only really do with bits of a novel.

Still I think the rules are the same. Don’t worry about your first draft, think about your character arc, read aloud, edit freely and madly and a bit wildly.

AP: And now for a silly one: If there was some sort of worldwide calamity and you could only save two books from being wiped out of existence, which would they be and why?

DJ: Such a good question! We have something over here called Desert Island Discs that I think you would enjoy…. There is one book that I read when I was a teenager and that has stuck with me. I buy it every time I go into a charity shop because I give it away so often. It’s called Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg. I’d definitely carry that around in my pocket during the apocalypse. I think maybe some poetry would be a good end-of-the-world read. Sharon Olds or Robin Robertson.

AP: What was your final process for Everything Under?

DJ: The final few months of working on Everything Under were a strange time. I think often writers spend so long with a piece of work that it is easy to forget anyone else is ever going to read it. The editing process had been mostly entire rewrites, tens of thousands of discarded words, but towards the end it was small line edits, moving punctuation around, reading each sentence out loud to see if it worked.

AP: And how did you feel when you learned that Everything Under was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize?

DJ: The day I found out about the Booker Longlist I was babysitting for some friends. My editor phoned and said she had something to tell me and could I go somewhere private. I immediately thought something awful had happened. She told me what had happened and I danced around the garden screaming.

AP: I know Everything Under has just come out, but are you still working on your third novel?

DJ: Amidst the madness there is, as ever, writing to be done. To get back to my desk after a busy day is calming, to bury myself in the story once more. Except that the next book I’m working on is a horror novel set in Yorkshire and writing the scary bits disrupts my sleep, makes me sleep walk. I’m hoping that is a good sign.

AP: Thank you so much again for agreeing to be my interviewee. I’ve been telling as many people as will listen to read FEN, so hopefully this interview will push them to do it. I’m so, so excited for your novel, Everything Under, and everything else you produce in the future.

DJ: Thanks so much Amanda!

Tomb Song: A Novel by Julían Herbert

Julián Herbert’s mother is dying from cancer in the Saltillo University Hospital. He sits by her side, keeping notes, remembering her life as a runaway and a prostitute, cataloging their family’s slow ascent into the middle class, sharing, at times, in her fever dreams. His bedside thoughts become the novel Tomb Song, a piece of lucid autofiction that finds its structure in association and metaphor more than in any conventional plot. In one chapter, we move from the history of the small fighter squadron Mexico committed to World War 2, to the construction and architecture of the University Hospital itself, to eavesdropping on two orderlies having sex in the morgue in the present day. In Tomb Song, the present serves as more than a framing device, it constantly resurfaces with acute descriptions of Julián’s mother’s failing body and the machines attached to it, of the Kafkaesque hospital bureaucracy, of Julián’s own excursions around the complex. Though any small association can lead from the present to a memory, or story, or dream, we always return, eventually, to the reality of the hospital room, the helpless son, the dying mother.

The primary point of departure from other contemporary autofiction like Knausgaard or Lerner, is Tomb Song’s willingness to abandon the truth. Specifically, Julián seems interested in the corrosive effect that narcotics and fevers have on both actual and narrative reality. During an opiate binge in Cuba, we are introduced to a degenerate artist named Bobo Lafrauga, who Julián follows to a bar called El Diablito. We later learn that Bobo was the intended protagonist to a novel that Julián scrapped when his mother fell ill, that Bobo and El Diablito are aborted fictions blurred into autobiography. In one breath, Julián will describe a prolonged, heated affair with a television weather woman and in the next he’ll claim that none of it was true. Fiction and non-fiction intersect in this way throughout much of the novel and Julián is always present to help or hinder the distinction between the two.

The associative propulsion from one tangent to another, from the real to the unreal, is often smooth but, due to the distractibility of the narration, topics are sometimes dropped before they have a chance to develop into anything substantial. Micronarratives start off focused then wander. In one instance, Julián remembers what he characterizes as his complicity in the death of a neighborhood boy and how this complicity has haunted him. He then steps back, describes how his family had come to live in the area and only later mentions that the extent of his involvement, in what turns out to be an accidental killing, was that he was there when the murdered boy’s brother bought the gun. There is little reflection here to guide the reader to understand Julián’s self-blame. The benefits of fiction could be used, in instances like this, to enhance these tapering anecdotes or to better calibrate suspense.

Early in the novel, Julián takes stock of the state of fiction while setting a challenge for himself, saying: “we demand it (narrative art) be ordinary without cliché, sublime without any unexpected change of accent.” The real achievement of Tomb Song lies in Julián’s solution to this paradox: his narrative voice. Throughout Tomb Song, we have access to Julián’s lucid, honest, perspective. His voice provides continuity and allows for beautiful and unusual motifs (including a particularly strange sea cucumber metaphor). Though the subject matter is often clinical and bleak, and though he is far from the first narrator to wax poetic by the side of a deathbed, Julián provides so many fresh perspectives, analogies, and turns of thought as to make avoiding cliché in such weighty moments seem simple. It should be noted that it is Christina Macsweeney’s excellent translation deftly brings Julián’s pin-point word choice to English.

In Tomb Song Julián Herbert draws unexpected associations between dozens of disparate topics, stories, observations, and dreams. In the last chapters, from this kaleidoscopic fabric, a larger picture takes shape, a unique perspective on life and the living of it. Readers looking for a current, honest, and unique novel or fans of Ben Lerner, Michel Houellebecq, Samanta Schweblin, and even Roberto Bolaño, will find a lot to love in Tomb Song.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

There is no book I have wanted to recommend more than Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. I have always had favorites. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy is one the most crushingly believable dystopias I’ve ever encountered, James S.A. Corey delivers a nuanced and heartbreaking look at oppression and the cycles of history in The Expanse, and no matter how many times I read it, I never made it through John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle without Doctor Burton’s monologues moving me to tears. Yet, despite their beauty and the deep sense of wonder these books inspire, I recommend them selectively by audience. Despite its brevity, few of my friends have completed In Dubious Battle; despite its painful plausibility, Atwood’s work can be straining; despite its fun, The Expanse is not a masterwork at the level of the sentence.

Machado’s work is not like my other favorites because there is no audience to which I am not desperate to give it. After reading the collection’s first story, “The Husband Stitch,” I told my girlfriend she had to read it. After reading the collection’s second story I sent an email to my professor telling him that she displayed the concept of maneuverability that we’d discussed in class perfectly. After a friend posted on Facebook asking if anyone had recommendations for books by women, particularly that dealt with mental illness, the collection’s penultimate story jumped to mind.

There was very little in this collection that I did not fall in love with. The stories are beautiful, horrifying, and filled with a cutting observational eye. Machado’s characters are so fully rendered, so empathetically engaged, so painfully confused, that they feel more real than the constructs of any writer I’ve yet read.

Machado breaks every rule of a creative writing workshop. Some of her stories are lists, one dictates impossible instructions for how it should be read out loud, one is a summary of twelve seasons of Law and Order SVU. They display the deepest tenant of writing, not to show instead of tell, not to write what you know, but that if you can break a reader’s heart with every sentence, you can do whatever you want. Machado’s prose is so good that even in the SVU recap, which is long, I hung on the edge of every episode summary, wondering what strange and seemingly random place the next one would take me. Even when the stories in this collection feel at their most dissonant, an underlying logic drives them forward. In this Machado is able to achieve an atmosphere of horror, without ever having to throw a bucket of blood onto the wall.

This atmosphere is perhaps the book’s most interesting aspect, and I think the one that makes the most powerful and unifying statement. In one of the collection’s stories, the protagonist is clearly at the center of a horror cult. Strange boils appear across her body, the mutilated body of a rabbit appears on her doorstep, the name of one her companions remains elusive no matter how many times she interacts with the woman, teeth come up in detail again and again in a way that made me sure someone’s mouth was going to be removed by the end of the story. Still, despite the cloying, ominous environment that Machado establishes, the story’s conclusion was nothing like what I expected.

Horror in Machado’s work doesn’t come in the form of a disgruntled ancestor, or a monster on the hunt, or a dispassionate alien abductor. Instead it comes in the lingering look of a suspicious friend, the insistence on the part of a husband that his wife have no secrets, the realization that one’s doppelgänger is out in the world, living a more perfect version of one’s own life. Horror is something to be lived with, worked through, either accepted or confronted. Machado is able to levy the every day cruelties that we heap upon one another and give them the narrative weight that turns them into menacing signs of what awaits on the next page.

The trouble then is that Machado doesn’t even need to imbed a monster within the stories’ conclusions. The signs she uses are self-referential. The horror is the act of living. In her stories, Machado reveals that to be alive and conversant, especially for a woman in our society, is to live already in a sort of horror story, one in which the people around you are suspicious of your motives, your feelings, your dreams. To be a woman in the world of these stories is to feel something looming even when everyone around you asserts that everything is fine, that your fear is unfounded. In this way Machado’s work feels truer than anything I’ve ever read, she’s able to pull something deep, spiritual and wondrous out of the banality of the every day. As heartbreaking as Her Body and Other Parties is, it is equally important. Each time the stories in the collection refuse to flinch away from the uncomfortable truths they encounter, they demand that the reader, too, look into that horror, no matter how small, and acknowledge it. The compassion this book demands is extraordinary, and it’s exactly what the world needs.

If there must be a drawback to Machado’s work then it is this: It pains me that there is not yet a vast library of Machado’s work for me to seek out, there is no long list of books for me to track down. I, and hopefully you, will have to wait, counting the days until this extraordinary writer gives us another glimpse into her mind.

Rehabilitation of Language: A Review of Solmaz Sharif's Look

Solmaz Sharif’s debut collection of poems, Look (Graywolf Press 2016), embodies the imperative mood. For the United States Department of Defense, the title word also refers to a timespan “during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence” in mine warfare. The corrective Sharif applies to this word in her opening poem is the book’s central line. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me LOOK at you in a light that takes years to get here.”

In the work that follows, Sharif works to rehabilitate terms used by the United States government in reference to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. “Daily I sit/ with the language/ they’ve made/ of our language,” she writes. Words retrieved from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms—neutralize, lay, patient, permanent echo, dormant, penetration aids—are writ large, all caps, so their double meanings can’t be missed.

There is so much here that compels—indelible details (“DAMAGE AREA/ does not include night sweats/ or retching at the smell of barbeque”), formal variety (the halting rhythms of state-censored letters; a partial list of military operations, i.e. CAVE DWELLERS, RAMADAN ROUNDUP, ARMY SANTA), and the poet’s courage to stand and aim squarely at such a high-value target. What makes the book most memorable to me is the clarity and shape of its argument. Sharif draws our eye to the tools of propaganda and swiftly flips them, illuminating their underpinnings, their casualties. Again and again, we encounter stark contrasts: estrangement and intimacy, vulnerability and power, gravity and humor, delicacy and force. These are not simple poems, but their mechanisms work simply: here are some words you’ve heard kicked around on TV, and here is who feels the effects of that kicking when the cameras cut away. Here is my baba holding up his pants at a security checkpoint, here are thimbles traced with sweat. Here is the fallout radius of weaponized language—it extends past the ground meat of ruined bodies to spare change that jumps at the slam of a door.

It may take some time to acclimate to Sharif’s dexterity, the layered voices. Throughout Look she samples (among others) the boastful voice of the U.S. military, detainees, an uncle slain in the Iran-Iraq war and dispassionate onlookers. There is noise and discomfort at seeing words in all caps invading poetry, which tends to be a domain of reflection and intimacy. A poem I have long been obsessed with, Frank Bidart’s epic 30-page “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” came to mind the first time I read Sharif’s title poem. Bidart’s Nijinsky also shouts on the page. Outwardly, there isn’t much yelling in poetry, but a deeper relationship between the two works can be seen here as well. In Sharif’s “Desired Appreciation,” a conversation with a psychiatrist reveals that the speaker feels like she must muzzle herself, that she feels dangerous, feels like a threat. In “Nijinsky,” the protagonist’s mind is poisoned by his proximity and relationship to World War I. Nijinsky wrestles with the question of whether he is insane or evil, and resolves it through his ultimate and final performance: he will dance the story of the war and in doing so “become the Body through which / the War has passed.” This same quote from “Nijinsky” opens Sharif’s last section, a clear signal from the poet: I live inside this war. Look at me, twisting from its paradoxes.

The length of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq habituated so many passionate dissenters into a kind of resignation, the slinking posture of but-what-can-we-do. But Sharif’s collection activates the role of observer by stunning back into awareness the wounds that still suppurate, lighting the holes cut from language and their respective tears in American thinking. We can look, look differently, persist in looking—that’s a thing we can do.

The Twittering Author

The particularity of a writer on Twitter: this is not People magazine’s best-dressed list or a dance competition, an improv comedy show or a submarine mission. These are words, the fodder and folly of writers and the element in which they should excel. We can only expect so much from Lindsay Lohan’s tweets, an update on her sobriety, at best. And, while, yes, Twitter was designed for just such exhilarating celebrity news, this social media is also a neatly crafted space for writers to test their wordsmithing skills. As for the metalsmith, the work becomes more difficult and more intricate with smaller objects.

Some authors — the more famous ones, mostly — have found an ease in creating public personas on Twitter. Neil Gaiman (1.6 million followers) and Margaret Atwood (270K followers) both excel at engaging with Twitter users and, essentially, being “normal,” link-sharing, retweeting people who happen to write bestselling books. These are not the Twittering authors who interest me.

No, I am interested in the lesser known. The writers I love tweet about nonsense. They tweet because it’s amusing. They tweet stories and dreams and observations that succinctly demonstrate why they write, that they must. They tweets shards of wisdom so sharp that I feel the dullness of my own tweets, and I hope that my RTs do not debase their gracefully worded morsels.

Let’s begin with the poets, who have less presence than the (always louder, longer, always clamoring) novelists. I present D.A. Powell, an award-winning poet and 2011 Guggenheim Fellow (2.2K+ followers):

@Powell_DA: I constantly doubt my vocation, even though I’m not a young nun.

@Powell_DA: Sometimes I forget my own esophagus

Powell’s last book of poetry, Chronic, garnered the following remark from critic John Freeman in the Los Angeles Times: “There are poets who show us the exterior world and poets who ferry news of their inner turmoil. Yet very few possess the double vision required to do both.” Freeman may as easily have been commenting on Powell’s Twitter account. Few writers (few anybody) have successfully used Twitter to interact with readers by exposing their vulnerabilities while maintaining a high standard of language and revelation — but Powell has. Sometimes, I, too, forget my own esophagus. The reminders of the little things, like esophagi, are exactly the gems I expect from a poet as great as Powell.

I would not be surprised to read either of these tweets in one of Powell’s poems. The former, a confession of doubt despite success, both reveals the poet as a real person — the tweet received 4 replies and over 10 retweets — and, in characteristic cheekiness, reiterates his cleverness as Powell turns only 64 characters into a commentary on life choices.

Enter Arda Collins (350+ followers), a young poet whose less prolific Twitter account nonetheless offers up:

@ardacollins: Vespers at Target.

@ardacollins: I just went into my toolbox and took out a hammer and I have no idea why. In a parallel universe I am doing something w. a hammer now.

In Collin’s first book of poetry, It Is Daylight (a Yale Series of Younger Poets winner), she excels at creating just the same unsettling dichotomies, a world (or a parallel one) that is both trivial and inexplicably captivating. What would Vespers at Target be like, I wonder — the combination of America’s religious past and consumerist future? In only 18characters, Collins conjures a wholly original scene that teems with images and sounds embedded in the readers’ memories, or, at least, in their imaginings of Target and vespers. I can see the choir in front of the lawn furniture, can smell the glowing scented candles.

And have we not all retrieved our hammers, our fountain pens, a roll of cellophane, and promptly forgotten why? Give a poet the chance, and she will create a new universe to explain our actions.

Will 140 characters ever be enough to tell a story? Probably not, but the poets, at least, have long found solace in compressed images and simple but weighty strings of words. Enjoy Collins and Powell, but when the tweets tease you or leave you with a lack, read their books.

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In the next installment on tweeting writers: the unconquerable Blake Butler gives me pleasurable headaches, and Ben Greenman writes a lot of puns. . . .