An Interview with Carmiel Banasky

Carmiel Banasky and I sit at Crema Bakery & Café in SE Portland a couple days after her recent reading at Powell’s City of Books. We chitchat about Portland (where she’s originally from and where I currently live) and the giddy significance of reading at a landmark like Powell’s (a bit more on that later). After the interview, we talk for a while about agents, publishers, writing conferences, and things you might say when seeing somebody’s baby for the first time—like “hope he doesn’t grow up to be a serial killer.” Carmiel’s a delight, and her book is filled with the same wit, weirdness, and touches of humor.

Carmiel’s debut novel, The Suicide of Claire Bishop, is out now from Dzanc Books. It’s a story with two concurrent protagonists: Claire and West. A decades-old painting binds these two characters together. Claire is the original subject of this 1959 painting; fast forward to 2004 and West becomes obsessed with the idea that it was painted by his ex-girlfriend, the enigmatic Nicolette. The more West weans off his schizophrenia meds, the more real this connection becomes. As the story progresses, coincidences and clues pile up, and the reader wonders whether West is onto something. The novel moves deftly across generations and crafts an interwoven narrative of two lives, inexplicably bound together yet worlds apart. The novel delights in its own contradictions and challenges the reader’s assumptions of truth and untruth. In short, it’s a book about doubt; it’s about negative space; it’s about the fragility of the human mind. So where to begin? When the tape recorder rolls, I decided to dive into the most obvious question first; I’ve heard Carmiel answer this question before, but she always has more to say on the subject.

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James R. Gapinski: Why did you write a novel about schizophrenia?

Carmiel Banasky: I have been trying to find new ways to tell this story, but the basics are that I had two friends who were diagnosed with schizophrenia. I was just blown away by their experiences, but mostly I was blown away that I had never heard of those experiences before, and I had never read those experiences. I was just trying to write something that I wanted to read, and I wanted to write an experience that they could recognize on the page in a way that they might not have read before in literary fiction. It was also about my own fear of their experiences too. These were my friends, who I had known on both sides of their diagnoses—and just seeing how fragile the mind is—I wanted to investigate my own fear of madness too, and our own fragility as humans and our bodies. If I ever had an agenda, it was to make sure that West was relatable and that this disease was not so off-putting. The images that we see as schizophrenia are so often linked to violence because that’s what makes the nightly news, you know?

JRG: Yeah, I know what you mean.

CB: We’re not going to see a peaceful portrayal of schizophrenia on the news, so I just wanted to offer this other narrative.

JRG: We’re not seeing that on the news for sure—but we’re also missing it in other literature and pop culture too. I feel like people get this one view of what schizophrenia means, and it’s used in a specific way on the page for this over-the-top effect. Besides these sorts of violence stereotypes, what other preconceived ideas did you have to fight against or research more?

CB: Colloquially schizophrenia—the term schizophrenia—is used completely wrong. It’s used to mean multiple personality disorder. When you hear someone say “I feel so schizophrenic,” what they mean is “I feel of many minds” or something, and they feel like a different person one day to the next, but that’s not what schizophrenia is at all. That was interesting to realize. The other thing about schizophrenia is that when it has been portrayed really empathetically—like in the film A Beautiful Mind—the hallucinations were portrayed visually. Because how can you portray hallucinations on the screen if not visually? Usually with schizophrenia its actually aural hallucinations. Those kind of sound hallucinations might translate and feel visual or of this space [Carmiel gestures to the café table and surrounding physical space], but it’s more like sounds that you hear echoing throughout the day, dialogue you might’ve heard that morning, it feels like it’s happening right now. That’s how some people explained an episode, or feeling like a metaphor is real. Like if someone feels like their heart is broken metaphorically, to a schizophrenic person it might feel like their heart is physically breaking. I had to figure out ways to show West’s hallucinations on the page without making them visual.

JRG: And you mentioned earlier about an intrigue with how fragile the mind is. Without giving anything a way, at a certain point in the book you get into Alzheimer’s too. Did that all stem from this same exploration of the mind, or is that a personal connection too?

CB: I did know somebody with Alzheimer’s, so a lot of my research was recalling my time with her. It was another avenue to explore how easily our mind’s change. Alzheimer’s was another way to explore how we change and ask the questions “How can we trust our own selves?” and “How can we know our own selves” if our minds can so easily change. I think about that a lot about. I tried to write a short story that I think failed—it’s in a drawer somewhere—about someone with a brain tumor who becomes a pedophile because of this brain tumor pressing on their frontal lobe, but that wasn’t who they were before this growth on their brain which completely changes them, changes how the world sees them, and their family, and how their family sees them. Just finding ways to ask that question and explore it.

JRG: You mentioned some of the research involved with Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia, but what sort of research did you do into different time periods? The book jumps between time periods, but the reader is with you and accepts it.

CB: A lot of it was trying to figure out the language of the time, and reading things from that time—like newspaper articles—and I read a lot of Village Voice articles from the ’60s, and language from then to now isn’t that different, but little key signifiers are important to both gain the reader’s trust that we are in this time period and to point out that context but without drawing attention to itself. That was important, and usually that was just through one phrase or one terminology. Also watching how Claire’s own language changes throughout the book. She calls black people in 1959 “American Negroes,” and in the ’60s she finally has to talk to a black person for the first time in her life. Thinking about that and how Claire changes—it was as much about character development as setting development. Listening to music, reading memoirs, but also interviewing. That was fun. I got to interview a lot of people who were both young enough and old enough to remember the ’60s and ’50s in New York City, and they loved talking about it and wanted me to use certain stories and details.

JRG: New York is prominently featured, so are different locations like Port Townsend, Washington. There’s a definite sense of place. How much of that was born out of your residency-hopping versus research, or pulled out of thin air, or what?

CB: I lived in New York for four years—all over the city and in Brooklyn—but I didn’t really start writing about New York until I left it. I think that leaving New York was a way for me to get back at it and to be able to write about it. It was the people at residencies who I met that I interviewed mostly—the older writers and artists who I met there. Of course, between residencies I always went back to Port Townsend, and I started working at Goddard in 2011. But I’d always gone to Port Townsend at least once a year. It was probably where I really first took myself seriously as a writer at the Centrum Writer’s Conference. Port Townsend had to be in the book. I tried to cut out Port Townsend completely—for a while West did not go back home. There’s two homecomings in the book—Claire’s and West’s—they both go back to their childhood homes. I fought leaving New York and tried to cut that section out, but then it didn’t seem full or whole anymore. We had to leave New York—just like how I had to leave New York—to come back to it. To come full circle. Does that make sense?

JRG: Yes, of course. There are too many novels that are all about New York anyway.

CB: Yeah, there are a lot of New York novels, that’s true [Carmiel laughs].

JRG: What are some books or authors who have influenced you?

CB: I love Michael Ondaatje, he was a huge influence. Coming Through Slaughter had such an impact on me. Colin McCann—especially Let the Great World Spin—and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Specimen Days. Stylistically those . . . [Carmiel pauses and grins] . . . those three white men [both laugh] were very influential on this book. But the first stylist who I think influenced them—and me in turn—was Virginia Woolf. With Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, how she portrays his view of the world, and how everything’s interconnected, and the language she uses to show his ideas of interconnectedness—I learned a lot from that on how to portray West’s ideas. The way she shifts between points of view. I love Mrs. Dalloway so much—not everybody does, but I do—and also some of Virginia Woolf’s books are not accessible, but that one is. A lot of modernists are not accessible, so learning from her on how she can still have everything she wants out of her prose and still write with such beauty. She’s always putting story first with Mrs. Dalloway, as opposed to Orlando which is maybe more about rhythm and sound than story. Also Ursula K. Le Guin. I love her work so much. We exchanged a couple letters many years ago, and that had a huge impact on me as a writer, and what it could mean to be a writer, and how to just do what you want.

JRG: What sort of context? Like “fan letters” or what?

CB: [Carmiel laughs] I totally wrote her a fangirl letter, but then it became a correspondence. I spent weeks writing as beautiful a letter as I could. Then she wrote back and told me how beautiful the letter was [both laugh], and that made my life. Then we wrote back and forth and then switched to e-mail. It was just really important to me—that tiny exchange, which lasted around seven exchanges or something. We talked about Karl Jung; we talked about love and characters. It was good. It was special.

JRG: I think a lot of writers are more accessible than people think as soon as you actually reach out and say “Hey, I like your work” and make the attempt.

Writers want to hear from readers—or some do anyway, and some are standoffish, but most want to connect with people and that’s why they’re writing. A newer writer who has influenced me is Melinda Moustakis, she’s really wonderful. She’s an example of someone who just writes so beautifully and experimentally but is also super accessible—the writing I mean.

JRG: This whole first book whirlwind thing: is it exciting or just long and drawn out and tedious?

CB: [Carmiel laughs] It’s anxiety provoking and exciting. I guess there’s tedium in there. I haven’t been writing for the last couple months. I’ve been sending e-mails about my book with all my spare time. I’ve been as proactive as I possibly can be, but it really takes a lot of time and energy to do that. But yes, it’s exciting. I’m never going to have the kind of homecoming that I had in Portland for any birthday or even like a wedding. It felt more like a bris or something the other night at Powell’s. Seeing all the people and love that I have in my life and the community that supports me and is excited for me—that has been really special. There’s ups and downs. There’s this weird high. This spotlight that I never had or ever sought out, so there’s obviously a come-down from that. Thinking about reviews, and will the book get reviewed, and questions like that—you know, questions about sales—mostly, I would like to just be protected from any information that I don’t need to know and just go about doing the events that I can and sending the e-mails that I can, but that’s in the back of my head too.

JRG: Even after you’re hit with the logistics and the reviews and numbers, then you still have this lull between your next release when you’re just working and not having all this spotlight.

CB: I’m looking forward to that—the quiet—because I would like to get back to writing and really living in the next book rather than mostly in this book and a tiny bit in the next project. That’ll be nice.

JRG: You had mentioned at Powell’s that you have a couple things on the burner. Do you know where you’re probably focusing or what your next project will be?

CB: I don’t know which one I’ll really dive into and spend the most time on yet. I have a couple things. I have drafts done of the fantasy book and of a TV pilot that I wrote—which my editor told me I should turn into a novel and then rewrite as a pilot, and I don’t know, I’m not sure how I see it anymore. But the thing I’ll probably write—which I did not mention the other night, I don’t think—is another book about suicide. And I don’t feel like The Suicide of Claire Bishop is about suicide, but it has it in the title [both laugh], and this next one is actually about suicide. I don’t really want to pigeonhole myself as a suicide writer—that sounds horrible—but that’s the story that I really want to write and has been really difficult to write. I’ve been writing it for years now, just in really short spurts, because it’s really sad and has been hard to write. I need to just do it. Maybe now is not a good emotional time to do it, but we’ll see. I think a lot about self-care for writers, so I’ll just need to figure out what I can do for myself to make sure it’s okay to write this thing.

JRG: What’s your usual self-care?

CB: I don’t have a ritual, but I do think about rituals of others. Like my friend Melissa Chadburn is writing a novel that comes out next year about a serial killer—from the point of view of his victims—and it’s so dark. So she lights a candle when she’s ready to write, and she writes for a couple hours, and then she blows out the candle, and it’s just a symbol to not take that darkness with her into life, into her every day. That helps her a lot, so maybe I need a ritual like that. Also things like making sure I’m exercising—I don’t exercise at all—but I need to be in my body, especially in times of writing dark things and being completely in my head. Meditating. Going dancing. Getting out of your room and going to be part of your writing community and talking to people who get it. That’s all part of the self-care.

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If you’re interested in getting out of the apartment, connecting with the writing community, and practicing some self-care, a list of Carmiel Banasky’s upcoming events are available on her website. The Suicide of Claire Bishop is available now.

We Are All July: A Review of Kyle Harvey's July

Sometimes, books have hemispheres. Sometimes, books embody a hemisphere so completely that they become a season, a point on a map, a specific place and a specific time. Kyle Harvey’s July is its own month.

I have this image in my head of a camper van – the tiny kind you’d hitch onto the back of your car – fitted out as a writer’s nook with rows of books and a wooden desk that I think Kyle posted to a Facebook group some time last year. There’s an easy chance it could have been someone else, that I’m conflating the whole thing, but I associate this image with Kyle when I think of him: waking up, starting his day, then strolling out to his office and writing. This is where I imagine July took place.

Firstly and most obviously, July is a beautifully crafted book. The design, layout, and cover in addition to the words are all attributable to Kyle Harvey and printed by Lithic Press. The style is simple. The cover features a map that looks vaguely hemispheric, vaguely solar, in primary colors. The paper has a durable, almost synthetic feel to it, reminiscent of the Field Notes Expedition memo book, which has been sent to the South Pole (wrong hemisphere). One translucent red blank sits on top of the title page for protection and significance, and then we’re in.

Harvey begins, ‘July is the only way in/ &/ the only way out’. July is terminal; it is a journey with a finite beginning and an end: you ‘board & debark/ the ship’. Harvey’s July is deep in a Southern State: ‘July is the map/ of honey in a jar’. It is wet with heat, in spite of its deserts. Harvey’s July is summer, it is encompassing, it has mass. It is obvious by now that Harvey’s July is the July of the northern hemisphere. It is the July of my childhood, the July of denim and mosquito bites, ‘a color/ in the key/ of C’.

This July is very different than my current Julys, here in the southern hemisphere where July lies next to the darkest month of the year. Here, July is wet with rain, July is shadow and mist, July is cold and windy and filled with hibernation. The July of this hemisphere’s poets is not the same as July. But Harvey asks the reader to believe: ‘why not/ July’ and I do; I remember this July and I believe in its existence, for all the po-ets of Charles Olson.

This July I will spend straddling both hemispheres, because ‘July itself does not change—‘and I will take a plane to Los Angeles and spend a week in its northern heat until ‘July/ spills out all around me/ in all directions’ and then I will fly back South because ‘July is me/ as much as/ I am July’ ‘&/ you/ too/ are/ July’, because we are all July.

What Certainty In Reaping: A Review of Kristina Marie Darling's Failure Lyric

In the throes of my divorce a couple years ago, I heard Elizabeth Bishop in an old radio interview pointing out that we humans get divorced all the time. She was answering a question about the damage divorce might inflict on children. My son was 5 at the time and I pulled my car over, trembling, to more safely hear Bishop forecast his fate from her grave. She went on to explain that we are divorced from things constantly—we are divorced from loved ones who die, we are divorced from places we lived, we are divorced from stuffed animals. I thought of the time my son lost his favorite blankey by the Mall in Washington, D.C.

Bishop was saying we are fooling ourselves if we think the dynamics of divorce are somehow discreet from so many other aspects of life that children and the rest of us all have to get used to. Loss is a constant. I extrapolated: what distinguishes divorce may well be all the good that came before it, and the sheer possibility that goodness could go on forever. As opposed to the life cycle that will inevitably cease, love—placed under glass by the act of marriage—might just never end.

Until it does.

Kristina Marie Darling’s Failure Lyric is a certain post-mortem in that regard. A stirring meditation on her own divorce, Darling’s work turns a wintered eye to that dimension of the good that came before. If it’s possible for poetics to be clinical, Darling has done it. And that’s only part of what makes this work remarkable. Far from sentimental, Failure Lyric is artful in its meticulously limited scope. This work does not chart a rise and fall; it doesn’t depict the good times. It does not rage or blame. The only nod to “the way we were” centralizes around conspicuous disaccumulations (remembered references to “his last wife,” her ex’s inattention at ripe moments).

Instead, Darling populates a menagerie of haunting creatures and notions around her varied tracings of the past. A common theme is loss of voice, stopped-up throats. Both bride and groom stutter, cough, clear their throats; “when I saw you again, the trees swallowed their tongues,” “I tried to eat but the (wedding) cake lodged in the hollow space of my throat,” “I tried to kiss you but my mouth was frozen shut.”

Through this image-rich, serial misrecollection, Darling’s work affixes a death mask onto her marriage. Her text offers over and over—with more fervor as we approach the conclusion—“let me tell you a story about marriage.” And indeed she does. By remembering and re-remembering her dress, the cake, waiting at the altar—as a macabre parade towards disaster—these items (broken glass, fire and ice, dead birds that “said nothing“) come together to retrospectively call for the union’s severance, precisely at the site of its high ritual.

Towards the end of my marriage, my ex mostly shot a massive blank. It’s been four years since I moved out, and we talk all the time about practical matters. About the larger impracticality of splitting up after 10 years and a child, however, he just never had much to say for himself. I told him I was leaving and he pretty much said “I thought so.” By then he had developed a tic of saying “I love you” at times when things were most certainly not sweet, forget timely. I knew this meant he wondered if I still loved him. But more than anything it highlighted the fact that he had nothing to say for himself. No sound came out when it really mattered. I don’t remember the last time I told him I loved him, but I surely stopped sooner than I would have, since he made it a cringe-worthy meme.

Nowadays I throw away most pictures I find of our early days. Not because I’m mad, but because they are over, and a preserved fistful is enough.

Darling’s work has its culminating image in [Memento] (Conclusion to [A Garden]) where the author is viewing butterflies pinned under glass, and a docent informs her “the placard can’t be trusted … at the time the glass case was built, the specimen wasn’t quite dead.” It was “not quite dead” (as opposed to “alive”) even upon its glass encasement. This work is about what happens after the glass has been smashed. It dwells in the end-space. By remembering its key moments as already dead, in fascinating variations, the text haunts the marriage itself. I am left convinced that this is not a book about love. It is more properly about death.

So what though? Who cares. What failure?

Let’s be clear that in the hearts and minds of most who have passed through it, “divorce” is a linguistic foil for “failure.” You usually decline to own it by calling it “my divorce,” in the same way as many demure referring to “my cancer.” There’s something definitive about an experience that is so highly personal yet eschews ownership. There is usually no pride involved. You “get” a divorce (much as you “get” cancer). You never “make” a divorce, but you often “go through” one. You pass. It is a space between spaces, a River Styx if you will.

The word “divorce” itself sounds so legalistic, and can’t help but conjure images of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in War Of The Roses. But what divorce actually feels like, no matter whether you willed it or not, is quite simply, failure. The linguistic “failure” foil is mostly unspoken, though crushingly experienced for anyone up close to it. After signing my final divorce papers with my ex, I broke down sobbing in the corporate courtyard outside. This came as a surprise given how much distance I thought I had gotten from the whole fact of it. No matter how tired I was of dealing with the various debt streams and custody arrangements and microtasks associated with the legal process; no matter how much my loved ones were cheering me on to finish up and how boisterously I was parroting their encouragement and getting it echoed back at me by my ex cum co-parent in the form of chest bumps; I was stunned to find myself walking out of the mediator’s office feeling plain and simple like I had failed. All the student loans and cars, credit cards, family planning and career moves had amounted to this. It was a feeling very different from regret or dreading the future, but sad and painful like full sinuses on an erupted tooth root, electricity to the nerve.

Failure may be beside the point, except to state the obvious about what divorce feels like. In its calculation, Failure Lyric reminded me of this core truth. In spite of its empirical poetics, this is a dead-on work, grounded in deep pain. Darling nails the hypnotic, heart-stopping thrall that awaits you at the end of your (not “any”) marriage.

I’m still not sure if my ex-husband is ok with being divorced. Four years later and he’s as close to getting remarried as I am, he’s as indifferent and supportive towards me as I am towards him (which is to say a lot, on both counts). We are both 100% engaged in the joint endeavor of teaching our son about what’s immortal and what’s finite, how and when to move on from the scene of a crime, and all the ways in which life cannot be a Disney musical.

Was there a moment when it could have been saved? A needle that could have been threaded? One thing my ex did say around the time it was all falling apart was “no one is fighting for us anymore.” It marked his submission to what was inevitably happening, by virtue of the engine of me, what certainty in reaping I was able to muster for once in my life. No one is fighting for us anymore. Maybe if I had answered back, “well why don’t you try?,” that would’ve been the moment. At the time I assumed it meant his various pseudo-Catholic relatives were no longer urging him to make it work; that they had pulled down their anti-sin sails in deference to that larger sin which was me. It was surrender with a stink, so I shut up.

I didn’t care that no one was fighting for us anymore. I wanted it over. But the thought of him settling in with this knowledge almost wrecked me that night- the first we first decided to sleep separately. Knowing he was alone in the guest room with his legs sideways clutching a pillow the way he did whenever I travelled overnight throughout our marriage, I heaved with pain the likes of which I couldn’t survive many times again. It was seeing his utter desolation, taming my heart into beating normally around him as a separate object, which I had abandoned.

Failure Lyric mentions twice the notion of threading the eye of a needle. That if something was to be done, it would need to be precise. In “Prayer,” the author envisions her lost love appearing before her “like a white horse through the eye of a needle.” Precise, and very romantic—as laughably out of place in the surrounding text as a man on a white horse. The second iteration refers to “cities where we lived” as “threads spinning through the eye of a needle” and goes on to illustrate loss of familiarity in the quotidian: “the freeway no longer led to the subway station” (read: your ex is not on a business trip, she has left you; your ex still exists, you just kicked him out of your bed). The reference to lost cities calls forth that faithful Bishop divorce poem “One Art:”

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

One of the last lines of Kristina Marie Darling’s Failure Lyric states starkly, “I’ve travelled only to stop.” Darling’s work itself is a stop. A glottal stop. defined as “a consonant formed by the audible release of the airstream after complete closure of the glottis.”

You must will yourself to write that it isn’t a disaster. But I’m happy Darling paused before she did that. When you are no longer moving, you are afraid you’ve travelled only to stop. You get wrung in by your own ghosts. Darling’s opening to her Preface Erasureasserts what I managed to tell myself that first night alone—“you can’t fight for the dead, only sleep.”

How Much We Compromise: An Interview with Vanessa Blakeslee

RACHEL KOLMAN: Before Juventud, you’ve been known primarily as a short story writer. How was the process of writing and putting together this book different than your collection, Train Shots?

VANESSA BLAKESLEE: I don’t find one form particularly more challenging than the other—just different challenges, and I enjoy both. I found constructing the novel with the compactness of a short story to forever be a challenge—I’m an over-writer, certainly in the long form, and so I have to cut and cut and cut. Even when I think a scene or passage is tight, chances are I have to cut. Hopefully I’ve learned something about this when I sit down to draft the next novel, about focus and concision. On the other hand maybe that’s just my process, and those tangents shed light on other characters or as-yet-unforeseen places where the story needs to go. Occasionally you can repurpose what you cut, although not most of the time.

I see the main challenge between the two forms residing within the impulse at inception—asking myself what container the conflict is calling for, and what kind of meaningful satisfaction am I chasing? For the satisfaction of writing a short story is entirely different than that of a novel. I love both, I can see myself working in both for the rest of my life because I’m a dedicated reader of both forms. And yet there is nothing quite as gratifying as an epic story well told. As humans we are awed by sublime creation on a grand scale; it’s embedded within us. Or so Longinus pointed out centuries ago. I tend to agree, although that just may be my mood of late—a longing to lose myself in a bigger world, an epic story.

RK: This novel is heavily rooted in history and the Catholic Church, and is remarkably researched. Can you tell me about the research that went into this novel? How much of the story was formed before research, and how did the story evolve through the process of research?

VB: When the premise for Juventud took root in my imagination and I knew the story largely took place in Colombia, I had two main concerns: 1) how to set high dramatic stakes (life or death) and 2) how to keep my own interest in the material for the months or years it takes to write a novel. Many Americans have a cursory, if erroneous, understanding of the conflict in Colombia, gleaned from sound bites they’ve picked up about the drug war, cartels, perhaps the FARC, but little else. The more I researched the history of the guerilla movement and the formation of the cartels and the key incidents on the timeline, both on the Internet and in fairly dense scholarly works, the more riveted I became in telling a story that more truly captures the sociopolitical landscape of Colombia—one that shines a light on the atrocities of the paramilitaries as much as the guerillas, and includes the millions of displaced alongside the wealthy. The depictions we’re so used to seeing from the movies play up the “sexy danger” of Latin America: armored cars, bodyguards, lavish estates, gorgeous women. Those exist in Juventud, too, but in a way that I hope is much more balanced, lyrical, and revelatory.

Not surprisingly, the more facts I unearthed in my research fed the shaping of the characters: their wants, actions, and the eventual themes. I studied everything from YouTube videos of Colombian peace rallies from the time, to AP releases on hostage crises, to interviews with paramilitary leaders. I also reached out to Latin American Studies experts for the most recent, reliable, and often dense, texts on the subject. The brutality of the guerilla and paramilitary atrocities’ in the lives of peasants is unbelievably horrifying, and propelled me onward—the book became much more than a love story I wanted to tell, but about the voices of so many in Latin America who scrape by day-to-day in terror, and are silenced. I wrote a lot that didn’t end up making it into the final manuscript, but I hope that those who are moved by the novel will seek to uncover more about that part of the world on their own.

Characters are literally born from whatever fictional earth your story takes place. And in that sense, I felt it was inevitable that Diego have been a cradle-Catholic who came into manhood at the height of the cartels, lost his faith, and when ego brought him down, struggled to reclaim it. And when I came across the event in spring, 1999, of the ELN kidnapping the congregation of La Maria Church in the wealthy Ciudad Jardin district of Cali, I knew this had to affect my characters in some way, and La Maria Juventud was born. I had been wondering what kind of occupation—or preoccupation—to give the young man who was to become Mercedes’ lover, that her father wouldn’t like but would make him sympathetic to the reader, and this was it—that Manuel and his brothers would head up a youth movement for peace, and Manuel would reveal himself to be a natural leader. Through this lens, I found I could also explore other facets of Catholicism in a natural way—that the sexual awakenings between teenagers would clash with the Church’s doctrines on birth control, marriage, and the like. Mercedes is an atheist at the book’s beginning which allows her to observe her Catholic friends (and father) neutrally, although I see her as more of an agnostic by the end.

From early on in my research and drafting, I understood that to not include the Church would be impossible, if I was to be true to the story and the setting. Colombia is an overwhelmingly Catholic country; the very philosophy behind the guerilla movements in South America is that of Marxist liberation theology, which interprets the Christian faith from the perspective of the poor, and in the early days of the guerilla movements, the 1950s and 60s, adopted Marxist teachings in their advocacy for social justice. I was also in the midst of shifting away from the fervent Catholicism I’d been practicing in my mid-twenties because I couldn’t reconcile my personal stance on women’s and gay rights with the Church’s doctrine, but found myself reluctant when it came to Catholicism’s stance on social justice—a cornerstone that I believe Christianity, but especially Catholicism, very much gets right. I’m a huge proponent of “faith in action,” in that respect—the only way spiritual principles make sense to me is if they are lived out in practice. Otherwise, what’s the point?

The Catholicism also prompted me to bring in the Jewish thread to the book—I’m always looking how to complicate threads further to create more contrast and meaning. Wouldn’t it be interesting, I thought, if her mother is not only American but Jewish, and if her mother is on an identity-quest of her own, and if Mercedes eventually goes to visit her in Israel? And then we have the contrast between another decades-long conflict, that of Israel and Palestine, and the Colombian civil war. So in the latter half the book expands outward to reflect not just the issues of social justice and violence in South America, but the global conflicts still raging today. The common ground between Judaism and Christianity is unearthed, but also the divide between the religious and secular. Not to mention the resonance of what Mercedes has escaped from, after she learns the history of her maternal Jewish family prior to World War II.

RK: Tell me more about Mercedes, our narrator. Spending so much time in her voice, I imagine you grew very close to her. How did you develop her character? How was it to write her as fifteen, young and in love in Colombia, and then again as an adult?

VB: From the beginning the voice posed many challenges, not in the least that I didn’t know the ending to the story—the adult section—for quite a while. When the why? behind the story eludes you, the answer lies in probing the dramatic question more fully. Because the dramatic question focuses on how the events of her youth, and most crucially, how she sees them, impact her life long-term, the story belongs to Mercedes. Once I got there, I felt more certain that the book speaks solidly to a mature audience, not excluding the sophisticated younger reader. I suppose I could have structured the narrative differently—say, three third-person narratives, one following Mercedes, the others following Manuel and Diego—but I was more interested in Mercedes as an embodiment of the global citizen of today, the highly-educated Millennial who inhabits several different identities and cultures, and how she navigates the paths available to her. Education and access to birth control are enabling women around the world to make strides and command their destinies for the first time in human history; I found myself more invested in giving a female protagonist full rein, seeing how her roots in a conflicted country leave their imprint on her emotionally as she otherwise achieves success. I wasn’t so much interested in following Diego or Manuel as closely; their inner struggles wouldn’t have touched so much on the identity issues I was intrigued by in Mercedes. Structurally, I felt it should be fully Mercedes’ story in that it is presented as a memoir she’s writing—there’s a self-consciousness about the narrative, then, which hopefully allows the book to transcend the themes of love and career and illuminate her relationship with herself.

By following her out of Colombia and into adulthood, we also get the parallels and contrasts between the developing world of South America and the U.S., the violence Mercedes grew up with in 1990s Cali and that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when she takes her birthright trip to Israel. Much can be learned, I think, from studying how some countries long ravaged by war, corruption, and atrocities eventually do arrive at a lasting peace—even though this hardly means that the inequalities, prejudices, and the like have been solved. Far from it, but if this novel illuminates how no one escapes unscathed, by no means the elite, then I’ve done my job.

RK: There’s a great theme in this novel about the power of the truth and the idea of using lies to protect the ones we love. Was this a concept you meant to explore, or did it sort of fall into place? To you, how important is the idea of finding “the truth?”

VB: I love mind-bending novels where you find out, at the end, the way things happened turns out to be very different from what it seemed: The Blind Assassin, Atonement, Never Let Me Go, The Secret in Their Eyes, to name a few. In such stories perspective is key. So I wanted to explore those limitations, but didn’t exactly know how, nor if I could pull it off. I do believe that sometimes, it’s necessary to have reservations about what we divulge to those we care about. As a fiction writer, I’m always fascinated by the grey zone of moral ambiguity and how we navigate that as humans.

There are different types of truth: the kind we perceive, which is shaped by our own perceptions and flawed by our limitations, the truth that resides in facts and evidence, and the emotional truth. The diligent research required of the project only emboldened my interest and commitment to the book, for the more facts I uncovered, the more harrowing and urgent and true I found the themes. Juventud translates to “youth” in Spanish, and speaks to not only the singular world of the novel at a certain place and time, but the ongoing humanitarian crises in South and Central America—tens of thousands of children illegally crossing the US border, the continuation of horrific cartel violence in Mexico and other nations. Eventually Mercedes flees Colombia for the U.S. and her mother’s family, fully embraces her American identity, works first for the State Department and then becomes a journalist. I can’t think of another major work of literary fiction that so vividly illustrates the outcome of neoliberal economic policies in South America, their impact on the guerilla and paramilitary violence of late 1990s Colombia entangled with drug cartel operations, and how through these characters, the crises facing Latin America today are precisely and poignantly illuminated. In Juventud, landowners and upper class such as Mercedes’s father, Diego, Uncle Charlie, Ana’s parents and others wield a firm grasp on their wealth by secretly funding paramilitary armies who violently “cleanse” the countryside of uncooperative peasants or those they believe sympathetic to the guerillas’ (FARC and ELN) cause. Through the artifice of fiction, the novel stirs up disturbing and necessary questions about the decades-long crisis in Colombia, and the very “grey” role played by the United States in the implementation of solutions.

My hope is that readers of Juventud will gain a sharper understanding of what it means to live in Colombia and to greater extent, Central and South America, where the disparity between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is much greater than in the US—although the gap is widening here, quickly— and how violence and bloodshed arise from such disparity to negatively affect everyone, rich, poor, and in-between. This is also a story of how our perceptions very much shape our desires and decisions, not always to our own best interest. Inevitably we are molded and driven by what happens to us in our youth and how we perceive those events, a perspective which is limited and therefore flawed, yet unbeknownst to us at the time, and often for many years afterward. Through Mercedes, the novel reveals how we grapple to make sense of these formative individual experiences – and how as adults, we have the opportunity and means to gain clarity, responsibility, and forgiveness, and ultimately understand and transcend our past even if it will always remain part of us.

RK: The novel also explores some great feminist issues: there are times that even the 15-year-old Mercedes can see how she is being controlled and stifled. How does feminism inform your writing? Do you feel it’s important as a woman writer to contribute to the feminist conversation?

VB: First, I’m so glad to hear Mercedes’ cognizance of how she’s being manipulated at times by the men around her came through; getting her burgeoning awareness to hit the right notes took numerous drafts. I am a feminist, and I am a writer. Your questions remind me of the quote by Flannery O’Connor, from her wonderful collected writings, Mystery and Manners: “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.” Because I believe in a woman’s right to have control over her own body, no matter what, in access to safe and affordable birth control, that as soon as any state power gains the ability to control a body, it has then seized control of the individual, male or female—these beliefs naturally trickle up through my imagination and into my fiction. Was I to consciously impose them upon the work, the whole experiment would turn brittle and fall apart, because the rules of art won’t allow for it.

Prostitution remains much more peripheral in the novel than the contraceptive subplot, but no less important. The openness and prevalence of prostitution in Latin America is perhaps what shocked me most during my travels. Colombia has laws similar to Costa Rica regarding prostitution, meaning that it’s legalized and regulated to certain zones, bars, brothels, etc. This, along with mandatory STD testing, serves to protect women (and society at large) as well as eliminate pimping. I hesitate to say “empower” because I find the practice of selling sex hardly healthy or empowering; if you’ve ventured into any of these “whore bars,” the mood is unmistakably sad. Mercedes’s brief brushes with putasare crucial to contrasting the different social classes: paths available to women, and lack thereof. This, I hope, illustrates the privilege of Mercedes and her circle—there are only so many jobs with airlines, hotel chains, or zip-lining tourists through the jungle, and far more women who must fare for themselves and provide for children, with far more limited options. I hope these subtle, more tertiary notes shed greater light on Mercedes, her dreams and fears. At one point when her plans to flee to Medellín with Manuel are taking shape, she mentions her fears of ending up in a barrio among prostitutes and the displaced. How quickly may any of us fall, without a safety net? Again, in this context, her fixation on a flight attendant career path ought to make more sense. I hope astute readers will see some of the broader social justice issues that the storyline barely scratches.

I also wanted to explore the assertiveness in Mercedes’s character through her sexual coming-of-age—to show a young woman who is comfortable enough in her body and her relationship to be proactive about losing her virginity in a healthy way, and up front about experiencing and deserving her own pleasure. She and Manuel “wait” a respectable amount of time before having intercourse, so they get to know each other’s character; I saw them as trusted friends by that point, and hope readers will, too. There are too few instances, in books and on the screen, that tastefully depict young men pleasuring young women, which prompted the bedroom scene with Manuel and Mercedes on the night of her birthday party. I’m not aware of cunnilingus concluding a chapter elsewhere in literature. Please enlighten me if such a scene exists!

RK: The second half of the book shows Mercedes in her twenties, with many of her decisions informed by the way she views her past in Colombia. I love the idea of how our misconceptions distort our worldview. Can you talk more about that idea and how it played into the novel?

VB: As we grow older and gain experience, we witness our ideals smacking up against practicalities that compel us to bend, to compromise if we want to keep after our missions at all, versus throw in the towel. When we’re young we usually can’t see the other factors at play, or if we’re aware of them we can’t yet understand the gravity nor nuanced entanglements that come along with the territory, and so it’s easy to profess a cut-and-dry approach. I suspect this reflects the gulf in generational thinking and subsequent behavior across the globe, cultural differences aside. The younger generations organize protests and take grassroots action; the elders legislate and hold summits. The youth cry, “Do something now!”; the elders say, “Let’s step back and discuss first.” To act wisely requires making decisions from somewhere in the middle—from the head and heart, so to speak.

How much we compromise, now that is the stickler, isn’t it? For I believe young people’s ardent convictions are a crucial reminder to older generations of the human spirit not standing for what is unjust, absurd, against liberty and basic human decency, and to press forward to behave better. So the trick as we age is to learn how to bend and accept realities that we can’t change, those that are relatively benign, and still work feverishly with the end goal in mind, without growing jaded and bitter.

Moreover, the overarching lesson in Juventud is a warning about what happens when emotions are running high, and we jump to conclusions and react impulsively. Nothing can change the past, and Mercedes has got to reap what she—and La Maria Juventud–have sown. But I think it’s also important to see the events through the cultural milieu, and consider that in a nation rife with corruption and vigilantism, “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law” is not necessarily in the citizens’ mindset—and likely wouldn’t have been in Mercedes’, until she came to the U.S. True to her upbringing as the daughter of Diego Martinez, in ultimate crisis teenage Mercedes learns to “take matters into her own hands” and unfortunately pays the price.  But I think it’s very possible for her to forgive herself and heal the rift within her family.

RK: Some of my favorite parts to read were the moments of gorgeous imagery: walking the streets of Colombia, lying in Manuel’s bed with the fan whirring above, the image of her father in his bandana. Do you have a favorite moment or scene in the novel, or something that is of particular significance to you?

VB: The scene where Mercedes is on her way to Ana’s engagement party, and her driver stops on the valley road for her to talk to Papi as the sugarcane burns ranks among my favorites for imagery and lyricism, but also emotion. Still, whenever I read that passage, the poignancy of the moment between father and daughter moves me almost to tears.

RK: What were you reading while writing this novel? What works inspired you?

VB: Caucasia by Danzy Senna helped me hone the voice in later drafts, as Senna’s is very much a novel about identity and estranged parents, and how the narrator perceives her reality as a child vs. how she later comes to view those events as a young adult. Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, also about memory although structurally different and rendered in present tense; I often turn to Atwood for her astounding imagery, and smart, fresh, often funny turns-of-phrase. I suppose The Lover was an influence, for the lyrical way Duras depicts a fifteen-year-old’s discovery of forbidden sex in the tropics. The Kite Runner, for plot and story; even though it centers on a friendship and not a love affair, the novel still deals with the subject of the now-Americanized global citizen returning to a homeland long ravaged by war, confronting individuals from the past, and navigating family dynamics. And many more of course: Julia Alvarez, Ben Fountain, the Greek playwrights, all at some point influenced Juventud.

In Slot's New Book, Poetry Becomes Both An Homage To Tradition And An Intervention

Andrea Witzke Slot’s finely crafted first book echoes with the voices of writers past and present.  H.D., David Baker, and John Keats are only a few of the poets whose work informs this refreshingly well-read debut. With that in mind, Slot’s poems raise compelling questions about the role of the individual in an established literary tradition:  If poetry is a conversation, how does one define originality? Does it exist only as variation, refinement of what’s been written before? To what extent does homage blur into destruction? As Slot teases out possible answers, her haunted and haunting poems allow myriad literary influences to coexist gracefully in the same narrative space.

Slot’s treatment of her Modernist predecessors proves to be especially fascinating as the book unfolds. Frequently drawing attention to female figures whose work has escaped the widespread recognition seen by such male writers as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, Slot suggests that poetry may redirect the focus of our discussions of literary tradition. In many ways, poetry affords the opportunity to revise the cannon, redefining its terms to suit a changing cultural landscape. In Slot’s new book, poetry becomes both an homage to tradition and an intervention. It is this blend of reverence and destruction that makes her work so intriguing. Consider “Hawks Nest, St. John, USVI,”

The hills tongue their way to sea
as if the sea begs the land to slide
into its waiting, open mouth.
The slick blue mirror
is deceiving… (13)

Here Slot appropriates numerous tropes of Imagist poetry. The poetic image becomes a point of entry to complex philosophical and emotional questions, which it is the reader’s job to unravel. In many ways, the structure of the book is especially significant. By prefacing this poem with a line from H.D.’s “Sea Gods,” and placing this piece at the front of the collection, Slot jostles the hierarchies that have been imposed upon the literary cannon. Likewise, the placement of the stylistic tropes associated with Imagism at the forefront of the collection suggests their largely overlooked influence on contemporary poetry.

With that said, Slot’s use of epigraphs to comment on prevailing interpretations of the cannon is equally impressive. Frequently excavating overlooked gems—a phrase, an image, a metaphor—Slot cautions us against becoming entangled in the sweeping manifestoes and ambitious claims that populate literary history. Rather, she highlights the value of the smallest, but often most dazzling, accomplishments of her predecessors. It is these modest masterpieces that provide some of the most valuable material for contemporary poets. She writes in “Ode to a Bear:  Part I,”

That night we slept curled in one sleeping bag.
I dreamt of Ben, saw Boon’s knife slash his throat.
Lion was ripped to shreds.  But in this dream
the bear did not die; he moved to the forest’s edge
and turned to stare with yellowed eyes.  In fear,
I clung to you—and realized why you brought me here. (17)

Prefaced by a quotation from Faulkner, this poem is fascinating in that it presents the landscapes of his novels through the eyes of a female protagonist. The epigraph is effective in situating the poem within an existing literary tradition, which the text proceeds to revise, adapting Faulkner’s aesthetic to a rapidly shifting social terrain. Slot’s epigraphs frequently exist at the intersection of homage and revision. But this is what makes her work so fascinating. She envisions literary tradition as being constantly in flux, a work in progress that is always subject to revision.

For Slot, the past does not limit us, but rather, serves as the starting point for one’s own contribution to an artistic conversation. Appropriation, reinvention, and dialogue afford exciting possibilities, which are not available to those working outside of an established literary tradition. It is her liberal approach to this received source material that renders her work so rich from an interpretational standpoint. With that in mind, the poems in this collection lend themselves to careful attention, and reward re-reading. To find a new beauty is a book that’s as well-read as it is engaging. This is a wonderful debut from a talented poet.

Zachary Thomas Dodson's Bats of the Republic Invites Us Into Its World Even As It Enters Our Own

Bats of the Republic is a book that straddles the line between artist book and trade publication. Part epistolary novel, part political drama, part naturalist guide to creatures both real and fantastical, it contains a novel-within-a-novel, pamphlet guides ranging from zip line use to minefield navigation, numerous maps, family trees and technical diagrams. It is as much a collection of objects as it is a single one and in this Bats of The Republic is a story that pushes the boundaries of what narrative can do.

Traditional narrative makes up only a small part of the book’s contents. These passages follow Zeke Thomas as he navigates a political drama set in the year 2143. We also follow the story of Zeke’s relative Zadok in 1843 through letters he writes to his love, Elswyth as he travels a reimagined American West. Elswyth’s own story is described through a novel written some time later and based on her life, being read by a character in the future to try and piece together the past and understand how it shaped the present. Complimenting these three primary narratives are a host of letters, drawings and pieces of ephemera from within the story. The Police State that Zeke inhabits in the future transcribes his telephone conversations and we have access to those transcripts. The narrative on Bats is not so much told by Dodson as it is presented. It’s an experience more than a vision and I was drawn through its mystery not by cliffhanger chapter breaks or Dodson’s concealment of information, but instead by a genuine curiosity brought on by each new piece of information discovered.

I found that I often came to understand new evidence in tandem with the book’s characters. Zadock’s drawings grow increasingly fantastical as his journey through Texas progresses and as they did I wondered if the animals inhabiting this fictional past really were so strange or if they were the products of Zadock’s imagination. Just a few pages later, in a letter Zeke’s would-be father-in-law writes, “There is evidence of insanity in these late letters. Zadock becomes more liberal with the attributes he gifts his fantastical animals.” Much of the narrative is carried out in this way, with me wondering if a piece of information meant what I thought it did, and the characters then making their own interpretations and assertions.

The effect is a story you can never quite trust. It is somehow more true and less clear that a typical narrative. The conclusions proposed aren’t the conclusion Dodson necessarily believes, but are instead the interpretations of characters imbedded within the story. They, like the reader, uncover the mystery of the past in pieces and try to put together a story that makes sense based on what they find. But in the end there is no final authority, no definitive answer, no clean conclusion. There might be one, but it is inaccessible, ever obscured by the rich, contradictory, half-remembered way in which the past makes itself available to us. With the available evidence, we are able to construct a picture of what the fictional past was like, and how it laid the road to the dystopic present, but we will only ever have our belief, never a firm knowledge of cause and effect. Bats of the Republic is a narrative that must be excavated, rather than merely found and there is a pleasure in this. It’s a true mystery, a puzzle, something to mull over and think about in an age of increasing ease of consumption. It’s a long read, though filled with pictures and diagrams, because a simple cover-to-cover examination isn’t enough. I had to go back, re-read, confirm, examine, explore in a way that books rarely demand. Bats of the Republic is a book that requires close attention and it’s well crafted enough to warrant the time.

Not only this, but the book is fun. It’s deeply engaging, complex, and experimental, but in the end it’s simply an enjoyable object to engage with. When I was a kid I typed out letters in gothic typefaces, dyed the paper in tea and burned the edges with my parents’ help. I drew maps and made objects for the players of my Dungeons and Dragons games. I wrote histories from within the settings of my imaginary worlds. I have always had a deep love for fiction that enters the real world, that can be drawn out as much as it draws you in. I have a geeky affection for the artifacts of fictional worlds. Bats of The Republic is this kind of object. It’s a case file, a documentary reader, a collector’s archive. It invites us into its world even as it enters our own.

Out of the Depths: Wendy C. Ortiz's Excavation

When I first read Wendy C. Ortiz’s Excavation: A Memoir, I was living in a house at the top of a hill overlooking the harbor. I sat on a couch in the lounge, reading in the sun while my friends watched My Girl. I had only just returned to New Zealand from a trip to the United States, where had seen old friends from the Internet and made some new ones. And then, the same week I sat down to read Ortiz’s memoir, someone back in the States whom I care for quite a bit had stepped forward and named a mutual online friend in a string of revealed sexual offenders in our community.

So I sat and I read and I kept reading, but it was hard and slow going. I felt carved up, learning about these men back in the States, most of whom I had trusted and thought I had known, and the personal stories of women coming forward, some far younger than the men they had trusted and thought they had known. And Excavation bled into this, My Girl bled into this, every crush on an older man, a high school teacher, a friend’s older brother, an older cousin’s friend bled into this and what could have been, this and what was.

Wendy C. Ortiz writes about herself and for herself, for her former self and her present self and everything she lost and gained from knowing Mr Ivers. Her style is easy and accessible, and without all of my emotional baggage I saw myself flying through the book. If only I wasn’t feeling so shitty about everything, I thought, I’d have this read by now. I was doing her a disservice, I thought. I felt guilty for liking Excavation, guilty for being swept up by Wendy and Jeff and Nicholas and Veronica, guilty for not being able to give them my undivided attention. In the end, it took me about three weeks to read Excavation cover to cover; it took eight months to process it enough to get past saving an empty word document.

Ortiz writes devastatingly well. Excavation is crafted to be effortless, eyes racing over the page, caught up in prose easily attributed to the language of one specific, articulate teenager, prose that reads like poetry in its fluidity. This is writing that sounds great when read aloud, which is alarming, given the measure of its content and the weight of its impact. This is writing that carries the feeling of summer, a carefree sensibility the reader surely cannot, should not, be feeling but that teenaged Wendy so desperately craves. This placement bears an emotional toll on the reader – lassitude chained to gravity, and an inability to separate the two.

Wendy the teenager is an everygirl pushed to the extremes. She is myself at fifteen, heavy black eyeliner and dark clothing, a penchant for danger and poetry and darkly soothing music. She is someone else’s self in her tie-dye and her wild mother, someone else’s self in her recklessness, someone else’s self in her choice of friends. She is all of us in the details, staying up late talking to her crush on the phone and then writing about it in her diary, sneaking around, feeling alive and ecstatic and above, removed from, parental understanding.

Except, with Wendy the crush on the phone is in his late 20s and Wendy is 13, she is 14, she is creeping toward 15. The crush is her teacher and he is a manipulator, he is playing a game so well he’s forgotten how to stop. Wendy is so smart and she knows it and she wants to learn everything, and he is a bad man (but they all are, aren’t they?), such a bad man he can make himself look good.

This is how Ortiz makes it work so well – writing compellingly, consumingly, about this thing. Because it would be consuming, it would be darkly compelling, it would feel sexy and dangerous in the good way at 13, at 14, at 15, and terrifying only later, terrible only in contemplation, as all sorts of risky behaviors are; Ortiz knows this because she lived it, and that makes it all the worse on the reader. It is Ortiz’s ability to reflect, to slip back into this headspace and write from the depths of Wendy at 13, 14, 15, that allows the reader this insight, this extent of connection, and this power of knowing.

And that is why I sat, mourning Wendy the child, as Wendy the woman ‘looks back at that fossilized time’, mourning for the Wendy pushing her daughter’s stroller around the tar pits, for the piece of her that ‘feels trapped in time’, for the women on the Internet and for all of us, for Ortiz the author who carries it all with her, the Wendy who finally feels a ‘sense of belonging’ in her current life, the Ortiz who was ready to pull it up from the tar pit and excavate it all.

These days, I am living in a house on the other side of the city at the top of a valley. From here, I can see my old house, the window I looked out of while I was reading Excavation. I can see a tiny version of the harbor I gazed down upon. I can almost see a tiny version of myself and my friends watching My Girl that October afternoon so long ago.