A Decorous Way to Explode: An Interview with Avner Landes, author of Meiselman: The Lean Years

Control

Stuart: Martin Amis has this great line about early Roth, that he was “always looking for a decorous way to explode.” I don’t necessarily sense this in your meticulous writing but I do sense it in Meiselman himself. At one point he says, “Jews don’t believe in controlling emotions. Jews believe in controlling actions.” Meiselman might know this intellectually, even theologically, but it doesn’t always work out for him in that way. The novel deftly introduces this idea early on when you write: “After thirty-six years, Meiselman had reached a limit, a breaking point.”

Avner: Yes. Meiselman thinks the “breaking point” is that he’s done taking everyone’s abuse. In reality, the breaking point is that he’s done sublimating his emotions. Of course, this isn’t something someone simply decides to do, and, in Meiselman’s case, it swings too far the other way, where he suddenly can’t control his emotions or his actions. Most of us wrestle with this question of how do we know when to act on our emotions. We have to learn to hear what the world—people, situations—is telling us. It comes down to self-awareness, but even the most self-aware person will get it wrong some—or most—of the time, but we hope that awareness of getting it wrong will lead to a better outcome the next time. As the story progresses, Meiselman loses any ability to control his actions. Can he reverse this before the story comes to a close?

Fatalism

Stuart: There are so many strong observations in the novel about what I would call Meiselman’s fatalism; he’s doomed, he deserves it. When he has car trouble he thinks, “Meiselman would never pull over for Meiselman.” You counter this with a comical strain of American self-improvement: he’s reading Lee Iacocca and Sam Walton and Ray Kroc, he’s wondering what Colin Powell would do. Meiselman wants to change his luck, even though he thinks his “luck breaks even.” This is such a rich source of return throughout the novel. And in many ways it works for him. Toward the close of the book, he is playing to win. Where do you locate the origins of this, and how did you think about luck and self-improvement when writing the book?

Avner: Early on, when I thought about the book’s shape, I used Bruce Jay Friedman’s Stern as a model. In the beginning of that book, Stern’s wife suffers an assault and humiliation at the hands of a neighbor, although we’re never fully sure what happened. Stern determines that he will eventually have to confront the neighbor and defend his wife’s “honor.” I was taken with this idea of Meiselman identifying a possible moment of redemption or liberation, which he does right after suffering his own humiliations at the story’s outset. When writing the book, I believed that this was a make-or-break week for Meiselman. Everything would change or he’d be doomed to a life of repeating the miserable patterns that had defined his lean years up until this point. But when I finished writing the book, it occurred to me that maybe this isn’t a unique week, a moment when the light bulb went off. Maybe this too is a pattern, where Meiselman identifies an upcoming moment that will act as a test, a moment when he can take an unexpected action and change his luck. Meiselman says at one point, “Every day, every waking moment, we torpedo potential paths to redemption…” Maybe for Meiselman every week is a week like this one.

Jewish writers

Stuart: Meiselman is an orthodox Jew from suburban Chicago who works in a library, so let’s start crankily with what it means to be a Jewish writer. I’m thinking of recent takes on this question by critics like Adam Kirsch and Joshua Cohen, who generally conclude that it’s the non-Jewish lions – Updike and Franzen come to mind – who long to play the Jew, while writers like Roth and Bellow wanted only to be Americans. What does identifying as a Jewish writer mean to you? What does it mean to write a ‘capital J’ Jewish book; Meiselman is not a Jew because he likes pickles and Crossing Delancey — he’s a believer. What are your hopes in publishing such a Jewish book, an American book?

Avner: Roth, Bellow, and Malamud definitely influenced my writing early on, but I took the wrong lessons from them when it came to the question of being a Jewish writer. I appreciated that they wrote stories that were heavy with Jewish content and populated with Jews because this was their world. Even if one can argue that Roth, especially, does end up saying a lot about Jews and the Jewish experience in America —you and I have been discussing The Counterlife, to pick one huge example —it would be presumptuous to assume that this was his goal. Well, I made this assumption when I started writing. And I strived to do similar things with my own work. I wrote a story called "My Trip to Poland," about a formerly religious guy who goes on a JCC heritage trip to Poland with a bunch of retirees. He ends up getting drunk every night in the hotel bar with one of the Polish hotel workers, and too hungover to ever join the group for the tour of Auschwitz. Is that funny? Hell, yeah. But the story bothered me as I developed as a writer, because it had nothing to say about people and why they do what they do. The humor felt cheap and obvious. To paraphrase something David Bezmozgis once said, irreverence implies that something is revered, his point being, I guess, that irreverence isn't something a nihilist can pull off, and if we can't access a character's soul then it's tough to know what he or she reveres. Eventually, I grew as a writer and became more interested in the characters themselves, as opposed to using them as vehicles to deliver a message, Jewish or otherwise. Readers can feel free to identify me as such but they shouldn't expect any grand or guiding statements. I don't speak for Jews. I don't even speak for me when I write. I speak for the characters I'm writing.

Fertility

Stuart: Meiselman and Deena’s fertility struggles are a source of humor and pathos throughout the novel. This made for some colorful passages. “Deena ate mandrakes, drank willow water blessed by an Israeli seer, recited Psalm 145 daily, and visited the graves of rabbis. Deena’s barrenness, though, could not be cured, and frustration ended this routine.” Talk about what this plot line meant to you and what you were trying to accomplish.

Avner: It came from my reluctance to give Meiselman and Deena a kid. At the time I started writing the book, I didn’t have a child and wasn’t confident I could pull it off. But here was an Orthodox couple that had been married for four years, and, in that world, fertility issues are one of the only reasons why a couple like that wouldn’t have a child. In the end, this plot line did a lot of work of manifesting Meiselman’s delusions, starting with his blaming their difficulty conceiving on “Deena’s barrenness,” when it is his own sperm count issue that is the problem. Then there is his reluctance to consider adoption, his belief that genes are all that matter, and not because he believes in nature over nurture, but because he assumes adoption will paint him as a sterile, and, therefore, unmanly man. But the real question I hope readers will ask is, “Is Meiselman prepared in any way to parent a child?” On some deeper level, is this why he can’t impregnate his wife? The thought does eventually occur to him. 

Food

Stuart: When Meiselman acts out, it is often through eating. I would say he has a borderline eating disorder in these, his lean years. How did you think about using food (and candy) in the novel?

Avner: Meiselman eats the same bowl of oatmeal at breakfast every morning and the same peanut butter and jelly sandwich, bag of chips, and apple juice box for lunch. Every Friday night, Meiselman and his wife eat dinner at his parents. Mealtimes in Meiselman’s life, in other words, are ritualized, providing him with the order he strives for in every other area of his life. How else will he keep his impulses at bay? He has even come to expect certain types of conversations at each meal. Breakfast is lighthearted, he and his wife sharing news stories from the papers. Sunday lunch is for serious matters. As his wife, Deena, remarks at one point, “It’s fun watching you with your parents at Shabbat dinner. Everyone giving rundowns of their week.” In Deena’s mind, mealtimes are about connecting. In the book, however, mealtime usually ends up exposing the frayed lines of communication between the people sitting at the table. Because food can only occupy people for five, ten minutes. Then they are full. Then they need to do something with their traps, which usually results in talking and saying the wrong things. At one point Meiselman comes across the name of the actress Christina Ricci and we get the line, “Meiselman rented one of the actress’s movies thinking it was about football. Turned out it was about a miserable family sitting around a dining room table spewing bottled up grievances at one another.” This is a more accurate description of how mealtimes unfold in the novel. The movie is Buffalo ’66.

Our entire discussion could have been about food in the novel! But I’ll just add something about candy, or, more specifically, non-kosher food in the novel. When you grow up Jewish Orthodox, you are surrounded by people from your community and you have little awareness that most of the world doesn’t share your lifestyle. Food plays an outsized role in those moments when you make contact with the “outside world” and its divergence from how you live; ballgame hotdogs; commercials for candy; the bar and bat mitzvahs of cousins who don’t keep the laws of kosher. Through a child’s eyes, food, more than anything else, becomes the symbol for how the other half lives. So, yes, he acts out and briefly breaks free from his confinement through eating. But these forbidden foods he eats are also about his appetite for exploring new tastes. Change isn’t easy for any of us, and it usually does look juvenile.

Therapy

Stuart: I really enjoyed the resistance and acceptance of therapy in the novel. I'm curious how you see therapy functioning in Meiselman’s Orthodox community? You write that he doesn’t like people who think of God as your pal. Is a therapist your pal?

Avner: This book is a subtle love letter to therapy. Sure it engages in all of the stereotypes about therapy but only because they are all true and funny. Meiselman, we can all agree, is a prime candidate for therapy, the three-days-a-week variety. We learn he went in his twenties for a year, but, for an inexplicable reason, his mother took him out of therapy. From Meiselman’s memories of his time with Dr. Lin, we detect regret over his not having had more time with the doctor. It was having some type of impact on him, however small. Later, when it’s decided that he’ll return to therapy after an eight years absence, we sense his excitement but also his anxiety. He knows it’s what he needs to finally let go of certain things. But who will he be once he lets go of those things?

Now to answer your question about whether a therapist is a pal: It takes years and years of therapy to understand that the answer is no, a therapist isn’t a pal because what friend would put up with so much complaining; a therapist is a therapist.

Losers

Stuart: The Capitol Riots have gotten me thinking a lot about the history of losers. I read this provocative idea about losers recently, in an essay about how the Hebrew bible could be historical fiction to soothe a nation that lost. I was reading your novel at the same time and I couldn’t help seeing this “history of the loser” in Meiselman. I’m curious what you think about this idea in relation to Meiselman: “History may in the short term be made by the victors, but historical wisdom is in the long run enriched more by the vanquished  . . . Being defeated appears to be an inexhaustible well- spring of intellectual progress.”

Avner: “Soothe a nation that lost” seems to indicate a sugar-coating of history, which wouldn’t be enriching but impoverishing. But maybe a people, or a person, need both things along the way. We first need to feed ourselves a soothing explanation, something to get our breathing under control. Then, one day, we’re ready to confront what happened and deal with the cold, hard truth of it. That’s how I see Meiselman’s processing the history of his loserdom. So many books treat traumas as if their interpretations are clear-cut to the victims and readers. That they unlock a deeper mystery, explain motivations. (I want to be clear that I’m not talking about violent, severe traumas. We’re talking garden-variety traumas.) I’ve tried to treat the interpretation of the traumas in Meiselman’s past as something ongoing. At age forty, we’ll look at something from our childhood in a much different way than when we were twenty. We’ve identified other patterns. We’ve learned more about our own tendencies and the tendencies of others. Or maybe we’re not more enlightened and we’ve sunk even deeper into our own delusions.  

Subtitles

Stuart: Finally, the full title of the novel is Meiselman: The Lean Years. What made you decide on a subtitle? Was the book ever just called Meiselman?

Avner: There was a point late in the game when I considered dropping one of the titles, but my publisher, Jerry Brennan, urged me to keep both of them, and I’m glad I took his advice. The subtitle? I always thought calling a 420-page doorstopper The Lean Years was a solid joke, one that was even funnier when it was 550 pages. I also like the idea that we can look at this one week in Meiselman’s life and know that all of his years until this point have been lean. It does prompt the question whether fat years are on the horizon for poor Meiselman, a thought Meiselman has at one point in the book, although he can’t recall the biblical story and is unsure of what precedes what. But the book takes place in 2004, and Meiselman’s beloved, long-suffering White Sox haven’t won the World Series in 86 years, a streak that will end the next season. Why the Meiselman part of the title? Because this is not a parable. I want to make clear to the reader from the get-go that no matter what you may think of him, I’m here writing this book, standing up for him, when nobody else in the world will.  

In the End, It's All and Always Metaphor: An Interview with Rone Shavers, Author of Silverfish

Micah Zevin: Your book Silverfish reads like an instant dystopian science fiction classic that may have already happened in reality. What are your influences, and what are the origins of this unconventionally told narrative that employs dialogue and interviews with characters as a tool to move the plot forward?

Rone Shavers: In a way, it’s safe to say that Silverfish, like a lot of first novels, was influenced by almost everything I’ve ever read. But if I had to name names, I can cop to the fact that the thumbprints of William Gaddis and Samuel R. Delany—that should be fairly obvious—stain nearly every page, and the work of authors such as Ishmael Reed and Percival Everett loom large, too. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention or William Gass, Don Barthelme, or David Markson, especially for the latter authors’ use of fragments and fragmented narratives which nonetheless somehow add up to a whole. To be frank, also add a little Dos Passos into the mix, as well as Lynne Tillman. And frankly, I need to also shout-out Cris Mazza, who taught me equally as much about the hows of novel writing as she did about what it is that actually makes novels successful. Really, I should say that I’ve been stylistically influenced by a lot of male writers, yes, but reading and learning from women writers is what best taught me how writers actually think, make, and do, especially in terms of narrative economy and compression. I could go on about it, but instead I think it better to be clear, direct, and maybe even offensively assertive: read more fucking women writers! And read more BIPOC authors, too! In that vein, I wish I could claim Renee Gladman as somehow having an influence, but I came to her work well after my book was done. Also, a whole lot of people whom I absolutely trust have made comparisons between my book and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M Archive, but alas, I’ve yet to read Gumbs’ very well-acclaimed work. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m scared it might be better, and better thought out, than my own.

Still, that said, I also have to admit that I was as much influenced by music (and by both examples and the idea of the musicality of language) as I was by past literary production. In fact, there’s an almost criminally under-regarded American BIPOC author by the name of Ricardo Cortez Cruz who published several very interesting books in the 1990s (Five Days of Bleeding is one title; the name is an intentional riff on a Linton Kwesi Johnson song), and one can basically draw a line between his work and my own, especially in terms of how we both re/appropriate song lyrics as a means of signifying, doubling, and magnifying-meaning. His approach probably definitely floated around in my subconscious for a while. So yeah, really, music and the treatment of music as a form of text, as just another language, also played a part in how I conceived of the work. 

With that said, it’s somewhat hard to describe the novel’s origins; there is no origin. As Ishmael Reed or James Weldon Johnson would say, Silverfish “jes grew.” That is to say, all I did was think about the social conditions inherent to late capitalism—its avatars, its neoliberal posturing, its love of technological advancement as a means of geopolitical hegemony, etc.—and take things to their logical extreme. People keep saying how weirdly prescient the novel is, but that’s only because it reflects a future we’ve already chosen to inhabit. When everything becomes thought of and treated as a commodity that can be bought, sold, marketed or traded, everything including one’s opinion or identity (and yeah, I’m talking about all the social media “influencers” out there), then the future presented in the novel reflects our present reality; we live in a future that’s already here.

MZ: What does the character Sergeant Clayton symbolize or represent in this society totally ruled by the DOW, labelling anyone else as primitive and outside of society if they don’t or can’t follow the rules or strive to reach its heights in spite of their likely deaths?

RS: I’m afraid I don’t think that much about symbolism or write with specific symbols in mind, so for me, Clayton doesn’t symbolize anything other than what he is. He’s just someone trying to live the life he wants to live but finds himself beholden to (although hampered may be a better way to put it) social forces well beyond his control. If anything, Clayton is a bit cleverer than most, because he understands that the social system doesn’t work, not at least for people like him. Yet, while he’s well aware of the system’s flaws, he doesn’t know how to get around them. The way the world of Silverfish is set up, it’s set up so that he can’t get around them. At the very least, it’s set up in a way that makes it extraordinarily difficult to see or even think of a way around them. That’s a problem in Clayton’s world, but it’s also a contemporary problem, too. As the underappreciated French speculative writer Al Thusser pointed out in his groundbreaking work, “ISA,” capitalism is an ideology, and like any ideology, capitalism interpellates. And it’s hard, if almost impossible, to see your way outside of something when you’re interpellated by it. I’m paraphrasing one of his main themes, of course, but you get the gist. In Clayton’s world as in our own, we’re taught to neither question nor think too deeply, and instead are taught to act and react in ways that deflect or detract from any notion of real, radical, life-altering change. We can’t conceive of an “outside” of commodity capitalism because it’s totalizing. It’s our worldview and therefore there is no outside of it. And even when we imagine or actually do fight against it, our attempts are weaker than weak. I mean, how many of us are willing to give up our laptops and Instagram feeds and broadband access so that dozens a day (if not an exponential amount more) don’t suffer for our need of Coltan? How many would shudder a moment before they shrugged it off and opted to intentionally forget (what’s Coltan again?) about the whole thing before deliberately pulling out their phone in order to focus on something else? That, my friend, is interpellation. That’s how interpellation into a commodity capitalist system works. So no, Clayton’s not a symbol. He’s a subject. 

MZ: What’s the purpose of the Angel and the silverfish in bringing down a fragile world controlled and run by financial dealings that clearly seems to criminalize or penalize empathy, personal feelings and language?

RS: If you believe empathy and a belief in the dogged accumulation of wealth are compatible, especially within a neo-liberal capitalist system, then boy, have I got an exciting investment opportunity for you! All to say that Angels and silverfish are the products of a totalizing system that seeks to limit how those within it are capable of responding to (or even effecting change within) it. In other words, the “purpose” of the angels and silverfish are evident fairly early on in the book. The Angels destroy people, the silverfish destroy things. They do so because whatever is destroyed can then be rebuilt (in terms of things), or replaced (in terms of people). Destruction as a way to effect change, even if it’s unneeded or unwanted; planned destruction as an excuse, a necessary rationale for “growth”.

I know it sounds farfetched, but it’s really something that happens. Again, it’s just a neo-liberal, market-based solution taken to its logical conclusion. For example, here’s just one way this manner of destruction-as-growth plays out: If, say, you own a factory and you have a glut of non-unionized, low-wage workers doing jobs that require little training or skills, and one day something happens which threatens your factory’s profits, well then, one of the easiest ways to turn things around and ensure your costs stay low is by simply eliminating or replacing your workforce. And you’ve more likely to want to replace your workforce if there is pressure or talk of having increase their wages. To the owner, the worker’s wages are yet another expense, and the worker becomes not a person, but a symbol of that increasingly burdensome, frustrating, maddening expense. Thus, the best way to keep costs down in your factory is to hit the reset button by getting a whole new set of workers (or even better, machines—they don’t take breaks or talk back, and inanimate things certainly don’t ask for a living wage), because they’ll do the same job at what you can downwardly define as either a stagnant (or lower, if you can manipulate or misinform them enough, or well, just relocate the factory altogether) or a starter, “entry-level” wage. This happens all the time, and it destroys sympathy and empathy—yes, feelings—as much as it does families, all in the name of financial growth, aka, profit. I say that because even you, Mr. factory-owner Micah, even you, regardless of your sentiments and possible sympathy towards your workers, you can be forced to lay off your workforce. And especially if your factory is a publicly-traded entity or you have business partners who don’t feel the same way as you, if your partners or enough shareholders accuse you of deliberately denying them profit, well then, you can be sued and your ownership taken away and given to someone else. There are even some instances in which one is legally bound to turn a profit, with little regard to resulting emotional impact or cost. So then, basically, what I’m saying is capitalism has little room for feelings, save for those feelings which motivate people towards more accumulation, such as greed, avarice, and schadenfreude.

MZ: How is this story tied to the happenings in our present world’s troubles?

RS: See my response(s) to the question(s) above, as well as below.

MZ: In Chapter V, Dr Beagel’s ‘reprogramming of the Angel and its language speaks to the notion of repression of language, our human language as well as self. Can you elaborate on this and the purpose of the directions he plants in the Angel’s mind?

RS: What’s a “human” language? How does human language differ from a means of communication such as whale songs? Or birdsong? How does human prepositional usage differ from an ant’s use of complex movements to convey accurate and often extremely vital information? In other words, what, precisely, is language, and how do you classify it? What are the particular triggers that allow you to recognize a language as language? And yeah, these questions may come across as somewhat arch or trite, but I’m dead serious when I ask them. We may think of language as simply human (or species) vocalization that conveys clearly-defined sets and subsets of information, but then, what are doing when we hum or sing? For example, if I were to chant “fa la-la-lala,” or “scooby dee-do-bop boo,” from what globally-recognized language do those phrases spring from? It’s all to say that we yoke the concept of language together with what should be properly called rhetoric and rhetorical strategies, when those things are actually quite very different. (And yes, there’s even a whole heap of issues that need to be unpacked regarding the very idea of “our”—let alone “human”—language, but that’s a can of worms best left tightly sealed for now.)

But still, yeah. While I could kick these tires all day, it may just be better to say that rather than language, there is something more important to focus on, especially in terms of ways of intellectually framing the novel. More than the concept of language, one should focus on the concept of metaphor. Specifically, the use, misuse, and purpose of metaphor as a driving force in the work—even on a meta-level—because in the novel, “language” itself functions as a sort of metaphor: it becomes a way of ordering, organizing, creating, and reconceiving of the world. All to say that the book contains few overt symbols, but it does have an awful lot of stand-ins, things that represent something other than just themselves. One of the great contradictions of the society portrayed in Silverfish is that it’s one that attempts to enforce a type of communication that avoids all types of ill- or miscommunication, yet also totally relies on verbal indirection and misdirection. Nearly every conversation contains a word or a phrase serves as a stand-in for something else. Their attempts to avoid metaphor can only be done by speaking (and thinking) metaphorically, and it’s something the Angel figures it out halfway through: Their world, the ordering of it, the organization of it, even their perception of it, everything, it’s not some mild euphemism, it’s all one big, essential, extremely uncomfortable metaphor. Then again, in the end, it’s all and always metaphor, isn’t it? Because well, isn’t that what it means to be human? Seriously, asking for a friend…

MZ: Nerd question: Are Angel’s partly human or are they purely androids with implanted memories and information that can be altered or manipulated?

RS: Nerd answer: The Angels are human-based, cybernetic organisms; thus, they’re human. It’s mentioned in the text that Angels can be stripped down to their “chassis,”—that is, their organic parts (which are those things solely needed to maintain optimal brain functionality and individualized cerebral output: heart, lungs, and a few other equally as important squishy bits), so yes, Angels are partly human. But note that this is a world where cybernetic implants are not that uncommon. The combat associates, for example, have subcutaneous receivers and various other electronic “imbeds,” and if a silverfish detects an imbed, a silverfish will go after it and eat it. That’s what makes people so afraid of them.  

That said, as for your questions about memory, I was lucky enough to read Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella when I was young, and there’s a famous line in it that’s always stayed with me, if solely for its conceptual fecundity. In fact, I liked the line so much that I thematically alluded to it, if not outright included it in my own book. The line is, “An angel has no memory.” And when you think about what that means, the implications are totally wonderful, an almost limitless philosophical playground in which to explore. I mean, a big part of what forms our sense of self, as well as our moral and ethical core, is our collective and individual memory. But what would things look like if memory wasn’t there? How would we act and respond to events? In what strange, new, or staid ways would we think and react? The answers are as myriad as they are fascinating… and well beyond the scope of this one, small book. 

MZ: I dig the invented terms and phrases such as “species agnostic,” “webblind” and “wetworked.” How did you come up with this language? What influenced you?

RS: What influenced me? Science! Good old-fashioned, hardcore, word-nerd type, imaginary, made-up science! I mean, geez, show me the real-world ship that has matter transporters or can fire a photon torpedo! (Although to be fair, the subtle, referential elegance of “Heisenberg couplings” being essential to warp drive technology earns all the special merits. Kudos to the writer who thought up that one!) What I mean is part of the writer’s job, especially when writing about an imagined, possible future, instead of an improbable one, is to use words that are readily available as a means of describing what everyone either already knows or is quite capable of understanding through contemporary context. All to say that while I’m wary of any hard and fast rule, when writing sci-fi, a good rule of thumb is to invent new words only when absolutely necessary. The invented terms and phrases that I use in the novel are really just extensions—one-word summations, actually—of how we currently conceive of things.

That said, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I was also thinking about the concept of networks and the various forms of networks already present in the world. By way of example, and even to flesh out the three terms that you cite, there’s stuff like this (and what the heck; for shits and giggles, let’s define them in reverse order):

1. “Wetworked” came to me because most combat associates have intra- and internet-ready implants embedded just under their skin, thus their network capability, as well as their relation to their cybernetic devices, is biological, bloody, messy, sloppy, “wet.” Perhaps the most basic way to say it is that during the time of the novel, implants have replaced internet-accessing cell phones. The data networks still are there, only now you carry them in your body. Therefore, one acknowledges that the global network of information-as-capital exchange is a part of you; it’s in you. It’s not a cold, sterile “net,” it’s wet. There’s also another referential aspect to the term wetworked, but I won’t say what it is. An author has to keep some secrets, and in each life, there are mysteries.

2. Part of the Angel’s consciousness is housed on the internet, aka, the world wide web, aka, a network of information. I don’t go into great detail about it in the novel—it wasn’t necessary to the plot—but part of why people say that Angels can’t die is because if placed under extreme duress, they can simply shunt their consciousness from server to server, meaning that they can just travel the web, extracting, collating, and recombining information into new and novel patterns (in the book I call this process “spooling”). It’s what makes Angels so effective at seeing, knowing, and identifying things that other people can’t. Therefore, I thought up “webblind” to refer to those instances when an Angel—or anyone else, really—has somehow been cut off from the internet. With no access to information, it’s as if they’re literally blind to the events going on in the larger world. And given that the world of Silverfish is so relentlessly fast-paced, being webblind is a cause of great stress and anxiety. I guess a contemporary way to describe it would be if I were to ask you to imagine if you lost your smart phone, then tell you that whatever sense of anxiety and disconnectedness you may feel for having lost it, increase those feelings exponentially.  

3. As for “species agnostic,” even a first-grader can tell you that we exist within a network of living things, so…so well, we’re in the midst of a global pandemic, and what we’re actually experiencing every day is a species agnostic organism going through its motions. That is, the novel COVID-19 coronavirus has infected big cats, bats, humans, pangolins, if I’m correct the occasional dog, minks, domestic housecats, and about a dozen other species we haven’t discovered so far because we really haven’t been looking that hard for it in anything other than people. In other words, I used the phrase “species agnostic” because there are organisms such as viruses and microbes that really don’t care one whit what species you are; what matters more to them is their propagation and survival. If they can live and breed in the wet and possibly warm protein sack that is your species, then so be it. In short, the planetary network of living things is more than just the mammalian animal kingdom, and we’d be wise to remember it.

MZ: What makes this novel experimental and what is your opinion of the current landscape of experimental writing whether it is science fiction or other genres?

RS: What makes this novel “experimental” is that I’m completely uninterested in overinflated, supposedly “novelistic” concerns such as plot, characterization, or a reader’s emotional response to the work. All of it bores me. (And as an aside, the inane privileging of someone “feeling,” rather than thinking, while reading fiction has been the cause of many a writer’s and reader’s undoing.) If anything, I’m more of a Formalist. Aesthetically, I’m likely what you could call a “New Formalist,” but I digress….

What makes this novel experimental is that it doesn’t attempt to tell a conventional tale in a conventional way. That’s about it. (But of course, one should realize that the word “experimental” is often pejoratively used by publishers to indicate that a book has no mainstream commercial appeal. That wasn’t the case with Clash Books, my publishers, but a lot of the really big publishing houses still label and attempt to discredit books and authors through the use of a “Scarlet E”.) Still, to get at the root of your question, the one regarding the current landscape of experimental writing, I must say that my use of the term to describe the novel is quite deliberate. I chose to purposely call the book experimental because when it’s not used as a pejorative, the term experimental also unfortunately gets used in a very racialized way.

I know I’m going to stir up a whole hornet’s nest here, but BIPOC work that takes informed, literary risks in terms of either its form or its content often gets read and treated as something separate, something outside of the standard (basically, cis white male) tradition of literary fiction that tests the boundaries of narrative and novelistic conventions. Fiction by BIPOC authors is too often said to represent some sort of oral or socio-cultural tradition—it’s read as an expression of one’s particular ethnicity—instead of being read and treated as a literary object, and that’s just flat-out wrong. Of course, a book can do both things simultaneously, but you wouldn’t know it, at least not based upon how an experimental BIPOC work is positioned in both the literary and cultural landscape by both critics and PR people alike. That’s to say, with a few notable exceptions, the category of experimental literary fiction often gets treated as the last bastion of white intellectual activity, complete with its own methods of cultural and aesthetic policing. And if you don’t believe me, here’s just one example of how it all plays out, phrased in the form of a query: How many postmodern BIPOC authors can you name off the top of your head who get mentioned in academic discussions and writings on literary postmodernism? I bet the answer is not that many. In reality there are quite a lot of BIPOC postmodernists (and experimentalists—the two categories aren’t mutually exclusive), but part of the problem is that they never get labeled as such. Instead, they’re categorized by dint of their race, and in that way get recognized as something other than what they are, at least in terms of aesthetic groupings and categorization. To rephrase all of the above in a much more provocative fashion, it’s extremely tough for BIPOC authors to create experimental work that gets solely judged according to an aesthetic standard, mainly because of a deep-seated expectation that the work must be solely a reflection of one’s social (racial, gender, etc.) background instead of one’s literary background. In fact, the work is judged to have merit only according to how closely it hews, and in many cases, reaffirms preconceived ideas of what it means to belong to a specific social, racial, or cultural background. And when you’re trying to make work that does indeed depend upon the reader having at least a modicum of literary awareness as well as cultural awareness, you get doubly-marginalized, and that absolutely sucks. Basically, what I’m detailing is the same damning conundrum that Percival Everett wrote about in his aesthetically stellar and infamous work, Erasure—which was published 20 years ago! But unfortunately, the same problem still holds true today. 

MZ: I often hear the words ‘elegiac,” ‘prophecy’ and ‘incantation or conjuring’ used when describing or reading sci-fi novels or stories. How do these terms apply to this book?

RS: To be honest, I don’t really know if they do. I didn’t set out to write or do any of those things. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I was more concerned with questions and concepts of language and literary form than I was attempting to be prophetic. Really, I’d like to turn the question around, and instead ask you (and by extension, the novel’s reader), Would you apply the above terms to my book, and if so, why? In what particular manner? What is it about Silverfish that lends itself so easily to these descriptors? Better yet, what is it about the novel that doesn’t match the terms? What was it about Silverfish that surprised you?

MZ: In conclusion I really enjoyed and was fascinated by this book and would read it over and over to find clues and details I have missed. It reminds me of the best of J.G. Ballard, Asimov, Bradbury and Octavia Butler. How did you apply both past and present history to inform your work, which expresses many ideas related to class, technology, good and bad? What do you see in your writing future that you are ready to talk about?

RS: Well, I’m gonna say this is an instance where the question answers itself, in that I applied both past and present history to inform my work, as well as the ideas in it. It wasn’t that hard to do, really, and hopefully this interview explains several of the whys and how I did what I did, without straying too far afield.

That said, in terms of what I’m gonna do next (or what I’m writing now), well, lately I’ve been taking the idea of working in fragments to its logical conclusion by writing short prose works that resist easy narrative coherence. Basically, I’m writing crônicas. For those who don’t know, crônicas are a Lusophone literary form that perhaps can best be described as a combination of diary, observational flash fiction, and prose poetry. They don’t have to add up to highlight or illustrate a simple, unified narrative or meaning of any particular sort, and I’ve been having lots of fun writing these while ideas gestate for my next longer work. In fact, I have a chapbook of crônicas coming out in about six weeks through Magnificent Field Press, so if others want to get a more concrete idea of what I’ve been doing or what my crônicas are like, they’ll have an opportunity to read a collected volume containing a bunch of them. Other than that, I can’t talk too much about my future projects, except to say that in my next book-length work, themes and issues centered around the economy and the letter K will likely play a very significant role. For now, that’s about all I can say about it. 

[Scene Change] Good Job: A Conversation between Terese Svoboda and China Marks

The grotesque Pinocchio-nosed image on the cover of my new hybrid text Theatrix: Play Poems was made by China Marks. We met at a wild 70th birthday party. She was part of a friend's study of geriatric artists — ha! laughs purple-haired China, geriatric? Recent exhibits are accurately titled: “China Marks, Not Quite Human” and “China Marks: Time Traveler”. Although I found this sculpture most appropriate for my title, it is her more recent work, primarily “sewn drawings” and “sewn books,” that has most inspired Theatrix. We share hybrid forms, the seductive line, visual wit, an interest in patterns, appropriation of found objects and images,  narrative drive, idiosyncrasy and flamboyance. Here is an excerpt from Theatrix: Play Poems published by Anhinga in March.

What? is your line

I think I’m panicking
I think I’m panicking
etc.
crying practice

[windowless]

quick, a dream:
one of you accuses the other

What? is your line
the gun is fake but you need a license

Miss Vulgarity comes forward in
a lack-of-bathing-suit competition

a different voice speaking “I”
to an “audience”

and rants: and you and you and you
and it wasn’t like that

brief interview with an innocent bystander
before the lover slash narrator finds his way over

floating along and then the queen says
women were at best queens then

WE

the chorus     too loud
but that is opinion
answers back: even the building is burning

[insert choreography]
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage

Men and Their Ways

As ornery and subversive as a video by Matthew Barney, Marks' broadsides, books, and text-based drawings both invite and repel interpretation. Some pieces exercise Oulipian restraint, using only text found on the fabric itself, but more often texts appear in bubbles, titles, commentary and dialogue that she sews into the image by a computerized embroidery machine. Her visual iconography is often  found re-imagining 14th to 19th century tapestries in the style of Max Ernst meets Donald Barthelme. Part of the fun is trying to decipher the original. She's rethought a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens of “The Battle of Anghiari” and a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and she doesn't hesitate to acknowledge her sources, providing a link to the original. But it's hardly an imitation or even “in the style of” — the original is the springiest of springboards.

Winging It

“I don’t know if the fellow on the left really wants his wings washed,” writes Marks, “or has something else in mind. But their eyes have met. The one bent over her laundry, who answered his question with another question, is waiting for his answer. Something deliciously fraught is going on. Whatever it is, we have a ringside seat.”

To me "deliciously fraught" suggests play. And there's theater in "ringside seat” that depicts situations of tension and conflict, like a circus, play, film or novel. Like me, she is in the audience as well as on the stage, often, as China says, “surprised, sometimes thrilled at what I see, or so bored and restless or unhappy that I make drastic changes, until my own jaw drops….”

Terese Svoboda & China Marks

T: Theatrix: Play Poems is not so easy to appreciate read aloud as my other work, although there's still sonic considerations. More of the play in these poems occurs visually, in the spacing and typography. I make visual decisions that are not completely foreign to yours. My choosing where to place a piece of text is similar to your positioning text where it sometimes "rhymes" with a brush stroke of sewing.

C: Of course there’s drama in my work, because I tell stories. I am a compulsive story-teller, ask anybody who knows me because I answer questions in the same way. Though I suppose there are other ways to do it, I not only draw, but also must draw attention to my art. Story-telling is a useful strategy for women, to get children to go to sleep or eat their vegetables and to keep men from killing us and to get people to spend some time looking at at my latest drawing, maybe even buy it. Women who lived to tell the tale were probably the best story-tellers.  It must be built-in to at least some of us by now. Look at you.

T: Are we engaged in Q & A?

C: We are engaged, darling, kiss me.

T: I'm puckered.

C: How/why did you come up with Theatrix? I mean, there’s theatrics, but capitalizing it and changing  cs into an x changes everything.

T: Best to cap a title anyway, and it's all about play: “trix” as “tricks:” and even the multi-colored breakfast food. It's also a portmanteau of “theater” and “-trix" — the suffix that turns masculine agent nouns ending into feminine. You get to re-hear the last syllable of “theater” and gender-switch it, a performance all on its own.

C: Didn’t notice the gender switch, very nice! And why do you think you were able to “cut loose” with Theatrix?

T: You, dear. All the sotto voce's, those mutterings, lie at the core of what's important. In that, I believe, we are joined. I no more put down two words on paper and I see sparks between them and the page and the space and sometimes each letter, yet I endeavor to thread a story through, with bits that remind the reader of his own story. Your storytelling is never straight-forward narrative either.

Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans

C: Never straight-forward. A curator said she’d recently noticed (after 7 years) that the man sitting in the flower in “Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans” had a black eye and wondered why. I said I didn’t know why. The characters in my drawings live their own lives. As I keep saying, I am only part of the process, a process that wakes me up in the middle of the night with suggestions, concepts, apercus, most recently to reset the direction of something I’d already been working on weeks, but it was right to do so. The drawing is much better already.

Then also, seduction, to pull the viewer close, using the dynamics of the plot, if there is one, decorative elements, workings of the stitches and sewn lines, textures, what’s matte and what shines, the very plasticity of my figures. I make these drawings to have access to this material.  I am the first to be engaged and then my drawings pull viewers in. But I make it up as I go along, revising endlessly, simultaneously making it and watching it happen under my hands. I give myself over to the process and it all comes from that, the interminable process..

You mentioned the spacing and typography in Theatrix. Made me think about the charged spaces between elements in my drawing, my decisions about grounds, possible colors and patterns, what typefaces to use for certain texts but not for others. Text can take forever, re-written as the drawing changes. I draw the more-or-less human figure. I believe that there is an intuitive homologous knowing when human beings look at drawings of human figures and a need to see such things.

T: The cover image on my book, although singular, evokes a multitude of animalistic and human identifications, crippled, deceitful, yet innocent. Is that complexity evident early on in your work? Monochrome you are not.

C: I am after as complex a truth as possible. Your play begins before it begins and begins several times more in Theatrix. And it is as if there is a giant hand (the artist’s mind?) manipulating the characters and speaking for them. Simultaneously cozy and strange. Reminds me of when I was a child and we used the back of a sofa as a stage, with stuffed animals as the actors…. moving them and speaking for them as we liked….

T: That's exactly it. I have used my own tiny theater experiences, the ghost-texts of Shakespeare, Beckett, and downtown experimental theater and “sewn over it,” with some animation (see “Cast”) of characters that are not usually animate because why — animists are pre-animatronic.

C: Theatrix, the morphing, the high-jinks, the this-into-that, compression and expansion of time, etc.

T: All those things you do as well.

C: The only thing is, it goes both ways: my current drawing is derived, not literally of course, but formally, from Theatrix, which is crammed with tricky bits. The little drawing I began to work on a while ago, has been punching well above its weight, requiring many revisions, waking me up in the middle of the night to work on the text and title, insisting I get up at 4 this morning to finish the sewing, maybe. Have to look at it again, but I think so… Still must write the text file, sew it out and sew it on, clean up the edges, make and sew on the hangers. Another day or two… But I need to know.           

My title is a cue for applause, but of course this isn’t a theatre.

Will this do? “Applause” Or does it need parentheses ? Or should I put it in parentheses but without italics? Please advise.

T: Brackets.

[Applause]

A Compassionate Portrait: Leesa Cross-Smith's This Close to Okay

“Shattered energy seemed to pulse from him like sonar. Tight blips of loneliness. Tallie translated the echolocation easily. She was lonesome and blipping too.”

Leesa Cross-Smith is known for her beautiful imagery, lush and aromatic sentences that leave you breathless and pondering for days. Her two short story collections, Every Kiss, A War and So That We Can Glow and her debut novel, Whiskey and Ribbons have earned notable accolades from the literary establishment and praise from Roxane Gay. Her second novel, This Close To Okay, is less poetic, more straightforward, more accessible. It has all of the charm and anticipatory fizz of a rom-com but underlying all the quippy dialogue, shopping montages and rescuing of cats, Cross-Smith submits for our consideration a tableau of human frailty, the far reaching grasp of grief and mental illness, rendering a compassionate portrait of the sufferers and the caretakers.

The backdrop is Louisville, Kentucky. In the waning days of October, in a cold, driving rain, two broken people meet on a bridge, Emmett on the river side, “the suicide side” of the cold steel railing, Tallie on the other side, the safe side. Emmett staring down at the turbulent Ohio River. Tallie, the only person driving by, amidst a noisy shimmer of vehicles, to stop and inquire, to aid a stranger in need. With little more than words of care and musical offerings of Andrew Bird and Wilco playing on her cellphone, Tallie encourages Emmett to climb back over to safety. She takes him for a coffee and then offers him a place, her place, to stay for a few days. Over the course of a weekend, Emmett and Tallie construct a metaphorical bridge from the depths of despair to close to okay.  

This is a quiet novel. Cross-Smith acknowledges but doesn’t dwell in the unbearable. Most of the bad stuff has already happened off the page. Infertility, failed relationships, racial bigotry, mental illness, depression, PTSD. Suicidal ideation. Tallie and Emmett confront their demons through talk therapy. Conversation provides the driving force, propelling the plot forward. The details the characters choose to withhold from one another deliver the dramatic tension. Tallie confides her longing for children, her failed IVF treatments, her ex-husband’s affair but conceals that she is a professional therapist. Emmett confesses that he too used to be married although his true identity and source of pain remain a mystery throughout most of the book. He snoops around in her computer, her Facebook page. He secretly emails her ex. In his mind, he obsessively catalogues his surroundings. He never gives up the possibility of the bridge.

Told in alternating points of view, Tallie’s narrative offers a clinical assessment of Emmett’s emotional health noting his inability to regulate his body temperature, dimming, detached feelings, dizziness. She wonders if he’s confusing his exhaustion for hopelessness. Emmett’s narrative reveals that there is no straight path to wellness. His healing accordions in and out. Tears arrive without warning. At one point, he assesses, in detail, the damage his body will suffer should he jump off the bridge.

And yet, the relationship that blooms between Emmett and Tallie, from strangers to confidants, to friends to possibly more is both believable and aspirational. For the reader, their story serves as an emotional support manual. How to recognize the signs of emotional distress. How to help someone in need. How to reach out in very small but persistent ways.           

Talk, talk, talk, talking. Always talking and listening. Cups of tea, mugs of coffee. Food, eating, nibbling, snacking, cooking meals together, grabbing a bite at a diner. Sharing the intimacy and distraction of music, movies and baseball during The World Series. Discussions of the “big things, not little things.” Art, pop culture, literature, faith. Playing gin rummy. Reading Harry Potter out loud. Strolling through a shopping plaza. The gift of a fuzzy blue snow hat with flaps. A red one to match. Shopping for Halloween costumes. Choosing Mulder and Scully. Sharing a smoke. The ritual burning of emotional artifacts. Doing for one another, like fetching a glass of water or cleaning leaves out of a gutter. 

And then there’s hand-knitted chunky afghans and scented candles and the sound of rain thrumming on the roof. Clean fresh smells: soap and shampoo and lotions. The comfort of home. Hygge.

“Making things as comfy as possible…it’s what I do,” says Tallie to Emmett in response to his appreciation for the charms of her cultivated domesticity noting how her home quiets his anxiety.

Hygge (pronounced HOO-gah) is the Danish word for cozy, a contentment achieved by enjoying the simple things in life. Highlighted in The New York Times a few years back amidst a spate of books, websites and online venders, Hygge celebrates homespun pleasures: fuzzy wool socks, raglan sweaters, a wooden mixing spoon with a burnt handle, handmade quilts and fresh baked pies. Hygge captures the essence of a crackling fire and a mug of hot cocoa — the kind made with milk and miniature marshmallows foaming on top.

In This Close to Okay, what could be more hygge than sharing a late autumn weekend, pumpkin spiced latte, old fashioned donuts, kids bobbing for apples, mums — bursts of yellow, and orange and purple. Rain giving way to crisp clear skies, the promise of a Halloween party.

In addition to promoting the healing powers of hygge, Cross-Smith champions a new feminism with her elevation of home life and the purposeful cultivation of a nurturing space. Domesticity, long seen as a negative, demoralizing tug with demands that diminish women slavish to their homes and broods, toiling in the kitchen and the laundry room, mop and dust rag. Unless of course these chores are monetized into celebrity empires a la Martha Stewart, Rachel Ray or Marie Kondo or the latest HGTV renovation stars. 

Now, the battle of the stay-at-home moms in mom jeans vs the suit wearing professionals, where one set of duties cancelled the value of the others, have come full circle. Tallie is a professional who owns her own house, makes her own way in the world. And yet aspires, and finds comfort in knitting, making her home cozy and beautiful and doing things for others. A woman showcased as both healer and provider while allowing for the possibilities of good men, men and women working together as a team.

Ultimately, This Close to Okay is a buoyant instructive for living in a loud, loud world. It maps a course of action for reaching out to those in need. A guide for navigating social and emotional isolation. A reminder that in the midst of hopelessness and heartache, it’s the simple things that can life raft optimism and revive the weary.

Oddities and Pleasures: An Interview with Rick Bailey

EF: One of the things I admire most about these essays is how you’re constantly making unexpected connections and leaps. For instance, in “Don’t Wait,” you bop between your faltering hearing, the “what it is” salutation from a former student, a problem with your foot, the article your wife sent you on fashionable hearing aids, and reading The New Yorker. Can you talk a bit about how you create an essay? Where do you start, and how do you know what paths to follow? How do you know when it’s “done”?

RB: Where does an essay start? With a tidbit in the news, with something my wife says, with a piece of music that triggers a memory or arouses a curiosity. Why is this important? Why is it funny? What does it remind me of? Where does it lead my thinking as I walk through the day?

“Make the subject of the sentence you’re writing different from the subject of the sentence you just wrote.” That’s what Richard Hugo recommends in Triggering Town. Introduce multiple subjects. I followed that advice when I wrote poetry and then began to apply it writing essays. “You get 3-4 balls in the air,” a teacher once said. The trick is to keep them from falling on your head. In the piece you mention, “Don’t Wait,” failing hearing, that curious “what it is is…” locution I hear so much lately (reminding me of an eighth grader I taught in 1980), the thing on my foot. . . . It’s all-at-once-ness. When you think about it, that’s consciousness, right? We walk around thinking 10-15 things at once. They’re related and unrelated, random and connected. 

I was driving my son to get his wisdom teeth removed the morning it was announced that Encyclopedia Brittanica would cease publication. That news triggered an essay in which I told the story of my son’s experience under the knife while also reflecting on those tomes I was so familiar with when I was a kid, which drove me to do some fact hunting about Brittanica, how long it was in publication, its shortest entry (woman: female of man), how it has been supplanted by information technology. What often happens when I’m managing multiply subjects is discovery in one thread triggers ideas and possibilities in the another thread I’m working on. I feel like I’m “done” when the two or three threads begin to converge, when I can weave them together in a satisfactory way.

EF: I love the idea of so many balls in the air, of so many different nodes of connection. Along with all these disparate ideas coming together, I see you’re writing a lot about finding balance too, for instance balancing purity and gluttony, health and desire. Having spent so much time in Italy, do you think this is a particularly American phenomenon?

RB: Yes, I think it is an American phenomenon. Especially if you’re from the Midwest. I grew up in a meatloaf family, in a farm town, where we went to the Methodist church and became very wary of sin. Very taciturn. Very modest. One mustn’t call attention to oneself. Then I married into an Italian family that was garrulous and noisy and very big-hearted. “We keep fast on Fridays during Lent,” my wife said of her home, where we sat down to a voluptuous feast that was a fast only in the sense that there was no meat. And after dinner, when we pushed back from the table, her mother and father told family stories and laughed until they cried. It was a different universe. I was (and am) so lucky. I’m still a child of the Midwest, somewhat modified.

EF: Yes! I see that as another kind of balancing here: your Midwestern upbringing and your ties to Italy. Your time in Italy figures prominently in the book, and especially your interest in the language. You mention learning Italian through reading women’s fiction, and how there’s a humility to it. Can you speak to what learning other languages has taught you, and how it’s maybe changed (or not) your relationship with English?

RB: “You seem like a different person when you speak Italian.” One of my colleagues said that to me one night. We were in a restaurant in Florence. At the time I was doing 7-day excursions in Italy with small groups involving what I called “heroic eating.” His remark called to mind something I had been thinking about.

I was lucky to learn Italian in the home, from my wife and her parents. Over time I learned what my wife likes to call “the song,” the rhythm and intonation and phrasing of a language that’s not accessible on the page but alive in your ear. When I said to wait staff in a trattoria, “What do you have that’s good?” I said it the way my Italian family would say it, loading the question with enthusiasm and passion. There was a performance aspect to it, a kind of impersonation. If you have an immersion experience, for me 44 years of marriage, you gradually get the song right. But you have to be willing to get things wrong, to appear foolish. On a train over there years ago, I said something to a nun that made my wife and her cousin howl with laughter. Another time I announced I was going to become the Pope. In a bar I told someone I first came to Italy in the 15th century. 

EF: I haven’t yet hit double-digits in my marriage, but am continually learning that lesson about the willingness to be wrong. Forty-four years married, wow. Obviously you and your wife have grown and changed a lot over those years, and I see that aging comes up throughout the book. I love that you talk about it in so many different ways—sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, sometimes matter-of-factly. One of my favorite lines in the book is when you mishear your wife and write “a word can be Rorschach test . . . you make of it what you will.” There’s something so charming and positive about this. Aging has obviously entered as a subject you write about, but I’m wondering, has it also changed your writing process?

RB: On one hand, I sometimes feel a sense of urgency. In her 80’s my mother disappeared into dementia. I think about that. I think: I should write every day. I should capture memories and the fleeting oddities and pleasures of right now. On the other hand, that urgency, that decision to write, is just part of daily life. All the years I taught writing online, I wrote every day, with and for my students. Since then I’ve blogged for a number of years, which is part of the daily practice, the regular regimen.

EF: What a wonderful thing to have made a practice. Along with aging, I noticed technology and its advancements are a thread through the book. You say in “We’re Melting” that “humans are at war with the natural world.” You mention this in relation to the weather and the hardships of being outside when it’s less than pleasant, but I kept thinking of it in wider terms. Can you talk a bit more about your idea of humans in conflict with nature and how technology comes into play?

RB: Well we certainly have the sense of a ticking time bomb, right? We try to manage nature, all along with a sense of dread. Nature is going to come back and take a terrible vengeance. I read a story the other day about chicken in a test tube: lab-created chicken-ish meat that will be nutritious and environmentally friendly. Just think how excited those lab technicians and food engineers must be, how geeked by the tools they are using, for the betterment of human kind, to be sure, but also with deep engagement and satisfaction with the tools at their disposal. You just think, what about that oops moment. Will that come? We make mistakes, we flub, we cannot anticipate all the consequences of our actions. With tech we alter the world and we alter ourselves. My grandkids are born into a device-ified world. They will not learn to read the way I did. They will not read the way I did. I no longer read the way I did. What impact is tech having on deep cognitive structures and habits of mind? It has always been the case: the world we occupy is thick, complex, evolving, and we have always engaged with whatever tools we have available. My gosh, the sextant, the telescope, the microscope, enlarged understandings and greater human capabilities. I remember reading Rime of the Ancient Mariner, asking the question, Why does he shoot the albatross? Because he’s holding a crossbow. The tools make us do it.

EF: And yet I’m thinking back to your first answer, about how you make those connections between ideas to form an answer, and it gives me hope the computers and lab chickens won’t complete make us obsolete. I’m sure there’s no specific answer for this, but I’m wondering how long you go between living and experience something and then writing about it, or how you know when you’ve got the narrative distance to tackle a subject.

RB: My wife and I were taking one of our long Covid walks a few weeks ago. We were discussing—I should say arguing about—whether it’s safer to step off the sidewalk into the street when another walker is coming toward us or merely move a few feet off the edge of the walk and turn our heads to avoid the contagion. What are the chances of getting hit by a car vs. inhaling the virus? Over the next day or so I wrote on that what-are-the-chances theme, which caused me to remember crossing the Irish sea in 1974, from Hollyhead to Dublin, arriving the morning after a bomb went off. What were the chances? That experience in Ireland had been sitting there, in memory, for decades. It was a pleasure to examine it, to tell that story, and to frame it in the present moment.

I probably tend to lounge around a subject rather than tackle it. In The Enjoy Agenda, my second book, there are a couple essays in which “tackle” might apply, one essay going all the way back to high school (how’s that for distance?), another addressing “shortism,” the size-related bias humans seem hard-wired for, like racism or sexism. I needed distance on that subject. Still do.

EF: Like above, I noticed these discussions or “arguments” with your wife set off a lot of your wonderful tangents in your essays. Your wife figures prominently in many essays, and I read her as somewhat of a long-suffering woman who both loves you and is annoyed by you. Is it difficult to portray someone you know so well when there’s no way to fully incapsulate them on the page? How do you go about turning a real person into a character in your work? 

RB: I’m a very annoying person. She is long-suffering. She is also extremely private, so I take a minimalist approach to presenting her in my writing. My capture mode is mainly dialogue. People who know us will say: In your books, that’s just what you two sound like. In my writing you will know her by her reading and our ordinary interactions that pack married life. She reads everything and she remembers everything she reads. And she is a great summarizer and explainer. Sometimes it’s hard for me to get a word in edgewise. So in many of the essays, she’s kind of a straight man for me. My three collections, I’m getting my edgewise words in. 

Rick Bailey grew up in Freeland, Michigan, on the banks of the Tittabawassee River. A small-town Midwestern guy, he married a woman from the Republic of San Marino and over the ensuing decades became Italianized–avid about travel in Italy, the language, food, and history. He taught writing for 38 years at Henry Ford College. Since retiring from teaching he has published three collections of essays, all with University of Nebraska Press: American English, Italian Chocolate (2017); The Enjoy Agenda (2019); and Get Thee to a Bakery (2021). He and his wife divide their time between Michigan and the Republic of San Marino.

Don't Censor Yourself. Write What You Want to Write: An Interview with Lee Zacharias

Lee Zacharias and I met in Greensboro, North Carolina, too many years ago to specify. We were part of a group of women writers dubbed “Ladies Lit” that convened on a regular basis for drinks, dessert and invaluable rough and tumble criticism of early drafts of our work. I count Lee the person who nudged me toward proper grammar (among other stylistic improvements). An accomplished photographer as well as author, Lee’s books include the short story collection Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night, the essay collection The Only Sounds We Make and four novels, the most recent What a Wonderful World This Could Be (Madville Publishing, 2021). In the post-COVID era, with luck, Lee and I will again hoist drinks across from each other and continue the conversation started here.

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Kat Meads: At what age did you define yourself as a writer? How did that self-identification come about?

Lee Zacharias: I knew I wanted to write even before I could read. I loved books, and when I was in first or second grade I would always put my hand up for "show and tell"—do they still do that?—and make up a story on the spot. I got a lot of encouragement from other students, mainly because the longer I could make my story the less time we would have for arithmetic. I began to write around the time I was in sixth grade. I was reading a lot of girl detective and boarding school novels at the time, so the "novels" I began in the steno books we used for class notes were imitations of those, none of which I finished, likely because I wasn't a good enough detective to solve the plot. And the one my mother found made her so angry I didn't dare put anything on paper again until I left home for college. I applied to a graduate program but married a grad student instead, and so for the next few years I worked full time and wrote sporadically. I didn't start writing in earnest until I was 25, when my first husband finished his exams and we moved to Richmond, Virginia. But even after I began to publish, I never identified myself as a writer. During the years I taught, I would say I was a teacher, because everyone who's ever told the inquisitive stranger that he or she was a writer, knows what follows: "Have you published anything?" And then, "Anything I would have read?" Now that I'm retired from full-time teaching, I'm more comfortable saying I'm a writer, because I've always got a camera, so people want to know if I'm a photographer. Part of not wanting to identify myself comes of having had a mother who was forever defining herself for me, though her definitions were always expressed in adjectives instead of nouns: she was smart, independent, resourceful; I was resentful. I suppose it sounds passive—to let others define you— but I prefer to think of it as an active way of being. Gertrude Stein once said, in her essay "On Poetry and Grammar," that poetry was about the noun and prose about the verb. There are a lot of issues one could take with that statement, of course, but I like the distinction between noun and verb. I write.

Meads: Are there any writing "rituals"—superstitious or otherwise—that you swear by?

Zacharias: I have to work my way into writing. I don't get up at 5 a.m and start scribbling. I tend to write better in the afternoon. I don't write by hand, except for notes, and haven't since I was inventing girl detectives in the steno books of junior high. Before word processing came along, I wrote on a typewriter, so it's natural for me to sit at a keyboard. My hand cramps, I can't always read my own handwriting, and paragraphs and dialogue don't look right to me unless they're typed. But I'm old enough to want to see what I've written on paper, so I print a lot and mark up those drafts with pencil, though at a certain point I switch back to editing onscreen. But that's a ritual of revision. My preparatory rituals are more like stalling: I read the newspaper, check my email, take a shower, nothing in particular, just daily life. The actual rituals are technical: getting my computer to boot up and let me use it instead of telling me it has no internet connection or needs to clean the cache (whatever that is) or blocking out the screen with endless reports of threats it's saved me from, or insisting that the document I am writing has been saved by another user as "read only." Nothing like Samuel Clemens warming up with a game of billiards in his attic or Herman Melville filling inkpots and sharpening his quill pens. No spinning around five times or placing a lucky token on my desk. But eventually there I am in front of a functioning machine, and a few words in, I'm no longer there but wherever those words take me.  

Meads: When you get stuck on a project, what is your go-to activity to help unblock the blockage?

Zacharias: Oh, anything! I take a walk with one of my cameras. Make jewelry. If I'm really desperate, organize a closet, though I've never gone so far as to clean the stove. Right now I'm working on a memoir focused on my mother's life that includes scans of letters from my father written in 1941 and photographs I consider part of the text. I can spend an entire day processing a single image because you have no idea until you blow them up onscreen how full of dust, pinholes, scratches, and cracked emulsions those old photos are. Many are of people I know about but never met, others people I knew in much older incarnations. It's very mechanical work—something you can do even when you're blocked—but it begets an odd intimacy, like picking eyelashes out of strangers' eyes, that leads me back to the writing. I haven't had to process photographs for fiction, but I've often left a troublesome chapter of a novel to look at pictures or read more about the relevant time or place. It's a way of working myself back into the necessary atmosphere.

Meads: How has being a photographer affected your writing?

Zacharias: I used to think of photography and writing as completely separate. I wanted to compartmentalize them, to make photography a break from writing. But they're not nearly as separate as I pretended. Photography is about light in the way writing is about words, and over time I've realized how much attention my writing pays to light and weather. I love old snapshots in which the shadow of the photographer stretches toward the subject. You don't see the photographer, but you're very aware of the presence. To me, that is the story, the shadow the narrator casts. I never write from an omniscient point of view. Photography also teaches you a lot about framing—what goes into a picture, what is left out—and in a much more subconscious way I think that affects the way I construct units—paragraphs, longer passages, or chapters. Rhythm is important to me, so I am very conscious of the music of the language, but I had to learn the auditory part. From the beginning writing has been very visual to me.

Meads: You have a deep connection to North Carolina's Ocracoke Island. How did that attachment begin and how does that particular place contribute to your artistic life?

Zacharias: I first visited Ocracoke in 1971, before the water system was in place, while residents were still using cisterns. Certainly there was a tourist trade, but nothing like the industry that took off once the water treatment plant was built. It was still a fishing village. By the time I started visiting on a regular basis in 1990 a great deal had changed, and each year I would note other changes: the disappearance of the red and white wooden skiffs from the harbor, the paving of the roads in Jackson Dunes, new street signs, a narrow sidewalk, the trail to Springers Point, the bike path, the historical markers. I couldn't go last year because the island was closed to visitors in May for covid, which means I haven't been back since Dorian devastated the community in September of 2019. I have a lot of friends in the village and know something of what's changed, but knowing is not seeing, and when you visit an island every year, that island gets in your blood, becomes necessary to your life. I rarely write when I'm there. I'm outdoors, riding my bike, kayaking, reading or walking on the beach, always taking photographs. I go off season, so it's not as crowded as it gets come summer. There are sixteen miles of beach from which you cannot see a single building, and when I am riding my bike out South Point or Grass Roads, it's just me and the birds, the same when I am paddling up the back side of the island. I stay in a house where I can kayak from my front yard into the Sound. I'm also very isolated. I disappear into nature. I live entirely in the moment and entirely without ego. There is nowhere else I can divest myself so completely of myself, which is to say that it is the restorative part of writing that doesn't show but is everywhere.  

Meads: As a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, what are some of the factors that determine whether you deal with a subject as truth or fiction.

Zacharias: That's never a question for me. I'm writing about myself or my family or something I experienced, or I'm not, and when I'm not it's fiction. My fiction isn't autobiographical—oh, I might steal a detail here or there, a line of dialogue I've overheard, a rug, a sofa, the whoosh of a door's weather stripping because I know how to describe them—but not at all in terms of character and event. Because I've written personal essays, I don't bring any desire to write about myself to fiction. On other hand, my fiction sometimes goes places I wish I had been. In Across the Great Lake Fern and I mourned the town of Frankfort, Michigan, together, she because it was hers and she lost it, me because I wanted it and it had never been mine. In What a Wonderful World This Could Be I wanted to experience the youth politics of the 1960s from the inside because I was married and working office jobs during those years, and I often felt that instead of living it I watched the story of my generation unfold each night on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. That doesn't mean my novels are wishful thinking, though I did imagine, the first time I saw Frankfort, when I was eleven or twelve, that if I only lived there instead of in the industrial wasteland of Hammond, Indiana, I would have a perfect life. But the first thing any writer learns is that a novel is no place for a perfect life. I made Alex a photographer in What A Wonderful World This Could Be because I knew cameras. And at one time I did, very briefly, work as a darkroom technician for a TV tuner plant and for a newspaper, but I wasn't writing about myself. I simply gave her a profession I knew something about.

Meads: As a professor at UNC-Greensboro and instructor at the Wildacres Writing Workshop, what writing question from students a) is most frequently asked and b) the hardest to answer?

Zacharias:  You have written and taught both nonfiction and fiction, so you've heard this. Students always want to know how to write about their lives or what someone might interpret as their lives without damaging their relationships. How do I write about Mom without making her mad at me? I think my answer is the same one most teachers give. Don't censor yourself. Write what you want to write, what you remember, what you imagine, what you feel. You can decide later whether or not to publish. But that's not what students want to hear, because they hope to publish, and they want a formula for writing about others without risk. But there is no formula. Oh, there are the strategies memoirists suggest: changing names or genders, creating composite characters, finding a different setting. But the truth is that writing is a risky business. Others will read themselves into your fiction even if they aren't there—and nonfiction, well…no one's story happens in a vacuum. So some people will be angry about the way they think you've portrayed them or secrets you've revealed. Others may be angry because you didn't think them important enough to write about. It's impossible to predict every response. Some writers show their work to family or friends and invite them to object. I don't. I edit to improve the work, not to spare feelings. But there are also things I choose not to write about. Every writer has to decide what they value most. Writing is hard work, and students want some part of it made easy. But this is the most uncomfortable part, which is why the question always comes up, and why the answer rarely satisfies.

Meads: Do any of your fictional characters continue to nag at you, post-publication? If so, in what ways to they nag, and (best guess) why do they hang about and nag.

Zacharias: No. Someone asked if I intended to write a sequel to Across the Great Lake, and I was floored. A sequel? Fern is eighty-five years old. She dies, or experiences a vision of her death, on the last page. Where in the world would I go from there? Do I still care about her, about Alex, or other characters I've invented? Absolutely. But even though I suppose I could write a book about what Alex would be doing in 2021, I feel no reason or desire to. That may be where the photographer's sense of framing comes in. I framed the part of her life that interested me. What haunts me more than characters are the worlds I leave behind. My first novel was about a classical clarinetist. That is a profession I knew nothing about, and I immersed myself so completely that it was a shock to finish the book, to get up from the table where I'd often lunched with musicians from the Eastern Music Festival who graciously answered my questions and realize I had no reason to come back. I can't sing; I don't play. I've never lived in Michigan or in a collective. To write a novel is to create a world that you will someday leave with the homesick backward glance of an exile.

Meads: Your most recent novel, What a Wonderful World This Could Be, wonderfully interweaves the personal and the political. Was that mix a conscious goal at the onset? What are some of the challenges of that approach and how did you go about narratively solving those challenges?

Zacharis: Oh, yes, that interweaving of the personal and the political was very much a conscious intent. To me, that's really what the book is about, the tension between the two. As a photographer Alex is committed to the individual vision of the artist, to the singular, whereas her husband, the civil rights and antiwar activist is committed to the masses. She is initially attracted to him because she wants—needs—to get outside herself, but ultimately she recognizes the danger in putting ideology above all else. As she sees it, her husband multiplies and strings zeroes, whereas she reserves the right to count on her fingers one by one. I think the biggest challenge came in what happens to her when her husband disappears. She withdraws. I'm quite certain that if I were writing about her in 2020, for instance, she would have been making her voice heard, because there are some things in politics you simply can't ignore. But that's not where I left her. I left her in 1982, when she still bears the emotional scars of her husband's and her own—but especially her husband's—political involvement in the 1960s and wants to think of herself as apolitical. I'm sure a lot of readers will fault her for that. But they are reading in a different time than the one in which she is acting.

Are Women Always Ghosts?: A Review of Karen Salyer McElmurray's Wanting Radiance

The literary relationship between women and nature has a long history, with roots reaching to Genesis. Eve—Woman—tempts pure-hearted Adam—Man—into betraying the reason and logic of Eden and indulging the sweet fruit of nature. On the one hand, women are quite powerful—at least enough to tempt old pure-hearted Adam. They are witches, temptresses, mother nature herself, the giver of all life. On the other hand, associating women with nature in an industrialized patriarchal narrative justifies the masculinist conquest of both women and nature. This is why Carolyn Merchant argued that ecological stories are also feminist stories.

For instance, consider Olivia in Richard Power’s much-lauded Overstory. Olivia undergoes a transformative experience in which she is electrocuted, “dies,” and then is jolted back to life with the memory of “presences” and “beings of light.” They call on Olivia to protect an old-growth forest across the country. Along the way, she also grows detached from her human family, as if, post-death, her more-than-human kinship becomes more meaningful than her human one. Olivia acts as a medium for the desires of the sentient tree spirits who speak to her mostly in flows of emotion.

Olivia is certainly a powerful protagonist, both in terms of her more-than-human connections and her agency. However, her “magical qualities” almost flatten her into a Jungian archetype. Some critics, like Susan Balée, see Olivia as nothing more than an avatar rather than a multidimensional character. Her identity becomes so inextricable from her exceptional ability that she loses human complexity, risking reproducing the magical woman trope that others women even as it grants them special powers.

Karen Salyer McElmurray’s new novel Wanting Radiance wonderfully revises this trope. The novel follows two generations of fortune-telling women whose entangled lives form the foundation of a captivating plot intimately tied to place. Ruby Loving and daughter Miracelle Loving roam mountainsides, coal country, deserts, and towns forgotten by industrialization in search of something like love. The men they encounter, however, might be more interested in “buying up the land, timber, coal, paper but [ending] up owning next to nothing.” Their desire for extracting wealth by splitting mountains open and securing affection by asking women to “stay put” often precludes the love Ruby and Miracelle need. Despite each woman’s magic-like ability to read palms and tarot cards, communicate with spirits, their longing for love leaves them as vulnerable as mountains stripped by miners.

Both Ruby and Miracelle wander like ghosts, detached from place and yet deeply yearning for it. Even as they embody similar qualities as women in other eco-fiction, these qualities expose rather than protect McElmurray’s characters. In one moment, Miracelle confesses, “I didn’t know of what I was more afraid—roads out or all the roads leading inside,” and in another, she asks, “Are women always ghosts?” In many ways, their displacement—their disconnection from any place that feels like home—comes as a result of their relationship with the particular men in their lives.

As Susan Griffin reminds us, both womanhood and nature are terrifying to men, who hunger for the control of both. Ecofeminist fiction exposes the subjugation of both women and nature for being on the same “inferior” side of various colonial and capitalistic dualistic expectations (e.g., feminine/masculine, nature/culture, savage/civilized). McElmurray brilliantly collapses many of these binaries using the image of hands. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, we have been told. Hands are how humans make a living. They are symbols of labor, survival. The cowboys in this novel use their hands to “move the earth.” In lyrical prose, McElmurray describes what men are capable of with their hands:

After [he and his logging crew had] been here awhile, mountains were split open like hardwood, and the scent drifted in the open windows at night. Musk. Tearing. A scent of blood and birth. And behind them the coal men left their machines. Earthmovers. Excavators. Extractors. Big machines with names of companies bold across them. Smyte. Black Diamond. Ruby would walk home from town some nights and see a huge shell of a thing that had taken a mountain’s insides in its wake. Prongs of a forklift, held out like empty arms in prayer.

In contrast to the extraction and separation at the hands of men, hands connect the novel’s women to each other as well as to place. “I saw lines of earth like lines on a palm,” Miracelle narrates. “My heart reached out for that earth-hand like I could study the past. Swirls and twists of roots, and fissures where nothing had grown back. Desolation, but the earth told lives.” Like Powers’s Olivia, Miracelle also seems to hear voices from the earth. Nightmares of “mountains opening up, swallowing other mountains” haunt her like the voice of her mother’s spirit. McElmurray creates tension from magic. The men often find themselves plagued by the loneliness of a flattened mountain or forest from which every tree has been ripped. Miracelle, meanwhile, only pretends to read cards and hands, undercutting the magical woman trope, and the tragic fate Ruby foresees renders her both powerful and powerless to the man she loved.

Part of what makes Wanting Radiance an important ecofeminist novel is that it is also many other things: a gothic love story, a murder mystery, a revival of Jerry Garcia’s bluegrass told by Flannery O’Connor. Voices from the grave haunt the broken hearts of lovers lost and dead. The prose sings the spirit of Appalachia, with sentences that evoke a fiddle’s voice or mandolin’s woody strum. One can taste the sadness of tragedy while at the same time admiring the scenery of “mountains soaking up the dawn daylight” or “wind settling in meadows underneath quiet stars.” Wanting Radiance is a song about the places that feel like home. Home we left behind. Home we head towards. Home we ruin because of how much we want it.