Cyrus Shams
Keady University, 2015

Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over. Clarification. Lying on his mattress that smelled like piss and Febreze, in his bedroom that smelled like piss and Febreze, Cyrus stared up at the room’s single light bulb, willing it to blink again, willing God to confirm that the bulb’s flicker had been a divine action and not just the old apartment’s trashy wiring.

“Flash it on and off,” Cyrus had been thinking, not for the first time in his life. “Just a little wink and I’ll sell all my shit and buy a camel. I’ll start over.” All his shit at that moment amounted to a pile of soiled laundry and a stack of books borrowed from various libraries and never returned, poetry and biographies, To the Lighthouse, My Uncle Napoleon. Never mind all that, though: Cyrus meant it. Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus? Of course it would be easy to establish bedrock faith after such clear-cut revelation. How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation? To make everyone else lurch from crisis to crisis, desperately alone?

But then it happened for Cyrus too, right there in that ratty Indiana bedroom. He asked God to reveal Himself, Herself, Themself, Itself, whatever. He asked with all the earnestness at his disposal, which was troves. If every relationship was a series of advances and retreats, Cyrus was almost never the retreat-er, sharing everything important about himself at a word, a smile, with a shrug as if to say, “Those’re just facts. Why should I be ashamed?”

He’d lain there on the bare mattress on the hardwood floor letting his cigarette ash on his bare stomach like some sulky prince, thinking, “Turn the lights on and off lord and I’ll buy a donkey, I promise I’ll buy a camel and ride him to Medina, to Gethsemane, wherever, just flash the lights and I’ll figure it out, I promise.” He was thinking this and then it—something—happened. The light bulb flickered, or maybe it got brighter, like a camera’s flash going off across the street, just a fraction of a fraction of a second like that, and then it was back to normal, just a regular yellow bulb.

Cyrus tried to recount the drugs he’d done that day. The standard bouquet of booze, weed, cigarettes, Klonopin, Adderall, Neurontin variously throughout the day. He had a couple Percocets left but he’d been saving them for later that evening. None of what he’d taken was exotic, nothing that would make him out and out hallucinate. He felt pretty sober in fact, relative to his baseline.

He wondered if it had maybe been the sheer weight of his wanting, or his watching, that strained his eyes till they saw what they’d wanted to see. He wondered if maybe that was how God worked now in the new world. Tired of interventionist pyrotechnics like burning bushes and locust plagues, maybe God now worked through the tired eyes of drunk Iranians in the American Midwest, through CVS handles of bourbon and little pink pills with G 31 written on their side. Cyrus took a pull from the giant plastic Old Crow bottle. The whiskey did, for him, what a bedside table did for normal people—it was always at the head of his mattress, holding what was essential to him in place. It lifted him daily from the same sleep it eventually set him into.

Lying there reflecting on the possible miracle he’d just experienced, Cyrus asked God to do it again. Confirmation, like typing your password in twice to a web browser. Surely if the all-knowing creator of the universe had wanted to reveal themselves to Cyrus, there’d be no ambiguity. Cyrus stared at the ceiling light, which in the fog of his cigarette smoke looked like a watery moon, and waited for it to happen again. But it didn’t. Whatever sliver of a flicker he had or hadn’t perceived didn’t come back. And so, lying there in the stuffy haze of relative sobriety—itself a kind of high—amidst the underwear and cans and dried piss and empty orange pill bottles and half-read books held open against the hardwood, breaking their spines to face away—Cyrus had a decision to make.

Two Years Later
Monday
Keady University, 6 Feb, 2017

“I would die for you,” Cyrus said alone to his reflection in the little hospital mirror. He wasn’t sure he meant it, but it felt good to say. For weeks, he had been playing at dying. Not in the Plath “I have done it again, one year in every ten” way. Cyrus was working as a medical actor at the Keady University Hospital. Twenty dollars an hour, fifteen hours a week, Cyrus pretended to be “of those who perish.” He liked how the Quran put it that way, not “until you die” but “until you are of those who perish.” Like an arrival into a new community, one that had been eagerly waiting for you. Cyrus would step into the fourth-floor hospital office and a secretary would hand him a notecard with a fake patient’s name and identity on it beside a little cartoon face on the 0–10 pain scale where 0 was a smiling “No hurt at all” face, 4 was a straight-faced “Hurts a little more,” and 10 was a sobbing “Hurts worst” face, a gruesome cartoon with an upside-down U for a mouth. Cyrus felt he’d found his calling.

Some days he was the one dying. Others, he was their family. That night Cyrus would be Sally Gutierrez, mother of three, and the face would be a 6, “Hurts even more.” That’s all the information he had before an anxious medical student in an ill-fitting white coat shuffled in and told Cyrus/Sally his daughter had been in a car accident, that the team had done all they could do but couldn’t save her. Cyrus dialed his reaction up to a 6, just on the cusp of tears. He asked the medical student if he could see his daughter. He cursed, at one point screamed a little. When Cyrus left that evening, he grabbed a chocolate granola bar from the little wicker basket on the secretary’s table.

The med students were often overeager to console him, like daytime talk-show hosts. Or they’d be repelled by the artifice of the situation and barely engage. They’d offer platitudes from a list they’d been made to memorize, tried to refer Cyrus to the hospital’s counseling services. Eventually they would leave the exam room, and Cyrus would be left to evaluate their compassion by filling out a photocopied score sheet. A little camera on a tripod recorded each exchange for review.

Sometimes the medical student would ask Cyrus if he wanted to donate his beloved’s organs. This was one of the conversations the school was training them for. The students’ job was to persuade him. Cyrus was Buck Stapleton, assistant coach of the varsity football team, devout Catholic. Staid, a 2 on the pain scale: “Hurts a little bit.” The little cartoon face still smiling even, though barely. His wife was in a coma, her brain showed no signs of activity. “She can still help people,” the student said, awkwardly placing his hand on Cyrus’s shoulder. “She can still save people’s lives.”

For Cyrus, the different characters were half the fun. He was Daisy VanBogaert, a diabetic accountant whose below-knee amputation had come too late. For her, they’d asked him to wear a hospital gown. He was a German immigrant, Franz Links, engineer, with terminal emphysema. He was Jenna Washington, and his Alzheimer’s was accelerating unexpectedly quickly. An 8. “Hurts a whole lot.”

The doctor who interviewed Cyrus for the job, an older white woman with severe lips and leaden eyes, told him she liked hiring people like him. When he raised an eyebrow, she quickly explained: “Non-actors, I mean. Actors tend to get a little”—she spun her hands in tight circles—”Marlon Brando about it. They can’t help making it about themselves.”

Cyrus had tried to get his roommate Zee in on the gig, but Zee’d blown off the interview. Zbigniew Ramadan Novak, Polish Egyptian—Zee for short. He said he’d slept through his alarm, but Cyrus suspected he was freaked out. Zee’s discomfort with the job kept coming up. A month later, as Cyrus was leaving for the hospital, Zee watched him getting ready and shook his head.

“What?” asked Cyrus.

Nothing.

“What?” Cyrus asked again, more pointedly.

Zee made a little face, then said, “It just doesn’t seem healthy, Cyrus.”

“What doesn’t?” Cyrus asked.

Zee made the face again.

“The hospital gig?”

Zee nodded, then said: “I mean, your brain doesn’t know the difference between acting and living. After all the shit you’ve been through? It can’t be like . . . good for you. In your brain stem.”

“Twenty dollars an hour is pretty good for me,” Cyrus said, grinning, “in my brain stem.”

That money felt like a lot. Cyrus thought about how, when he’d been drinking, he’d sell his plasma for that much, twenty dollars a trip, his dehydrated hangover blood taking hours to sludge out like milkshake through a thin straw. Cyrus would watch people arrive, get hooked up, and leave the facility in the time it took him to give a single draw.

“And I’m sure eventually it’ll be good for my writing too,” Cyrus added. “What’s that thing about living the poems I’m not writing yet?”

Cyrus was a good poet when he wrote, but he rarely actually wrote. Before getting sober, Cyrus didn’t write so much as he drank about writing, describing booze as essential to his process, “nearly sacramental”—he really said it like that—in the way it “opened his mind to the hidden voice” beneath the mundane “argle-bargle of the every-day.” Of course, when he drank, he rarely did anything else but drink. “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you!” Cyrus would announce proudly to a room, to a bar, forgetting from whom he’d lifted the line.

In sobriety, he endured long periods of writer’s block, or more accurately, writer’s ambivalence. Writer’s antipathy. What made it almost worse was how much Zee encouraged Cyrus whenever he did write something; Zee’d fawn over his roommate’s new drafts, praising every line break and slant rhyme, stopping just short of hanging them up on the apartment refrigerator.

“‘Living the poems you’re not writing?’” Zee scoffed. “C’mon, you’re better than that.”

“I’m really not,” Cyrus said, sharply, before stepping out the apartment door.

When Cyrus pulled into the hospital parking lot, he was still pissed off. Everything didn’t have to be as complex as Zee constantly made it, Cyrus thought. Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated. That was one of the vague axioms from his drinking days to which Cyrus still clung, even in sobriety. It wasn’t fair that just because he was sober, everyone expected him to exhaustively interrogate his every decision. This job or that job, this life or that. Not drinking was Herculean enough on its own. He should’ve been afforded more grace, not less. The long scar on his left foot—from an accident years before—pounded with pain.

Cyrus signed into the hospital and walked through the halls, past two nursing mothers sitting side by side in a waiting room, past a line of empty gurneys with messy bedding, and into the elevator. When he got to the fourth-floor office, the receptionist had him sign in again and gave him his card for the afternoon. Sandra Kaufmann. High school math teacher. Educated, no children. Widowed. Six on the pain scale. Cyrus sat in the waiting room, glancing at the camera, the “Understanding Skin Cancer” chart on the wall with gruesome pictures of Atypical Moles, Precancerous Growths. The ABCs of melanoma: Asymmetry, Borders, Color Change, Diameter, and Evolution. Cyrus imagined Sandra’s hair crimson red, the color of the “Diameter” mole on the poster.

After a minute, a young medical student walked into the room alone, looked at Cyrus, then at the camera. She was a little younger than him, wore her auburn hair behind her head in a neat bun. Her impeccable posture gave her a boarding-school air, New England royalty. Cyrus reflexively hated her. That Yankee patrician veneer. He imagined she got perfect SATs, went to an Ivy League school, only to be disappointed by Keady as her medical school placement instead of Yale or Columbia. He imagined her having joyless, clinical sex with the chiseled son of her father’s business partner, imagined them at a fancy candlelit restaurant dourly picking at a shared veal piccata, both ignoring the table bread. Unaccountable contempt covered him, pitiless. Cyrus hated how noisily she opened the door, sullying the stillness he’d been enjoying. She looked at the camera again, then introduced herself:

“Hello, Miss Kaufmann. My name is Dr. Monfort.”

“Mrs. Kaufmann,” Cyrus corrected.

The medical student glanced quickly at the camera.

“Erm, excuse me?”

“Mr. Kaufmann may be dead, but I am still his wife,” said Cyrus, pointing to a pretend wedding ring on his left hand.

“I, I’m sorry, ma’am. I was just—”

“It’s no problem, dear.”

Dr. Monfort set down her clipboard and leaned her hand against the sink she’d been standing near, as if resetting. Then, she spoke: “Mrs. Kaufmann, I’m afraid the scans have revealed a large mass in your brain. Several large masses, clumped together. Unfortunately, they’re attached to sensitive tissue controlling breathing and cardiopulmonary function, and we can’t safely operate without risking severe damage to those systems. Chemotherapy and radiation may be options, but due to the location and maturation of the masses, these treatments would likely be palliative. Our oncologist will be able to tell you more.”

“Palliative?” Cyrus asked. The students were supposed to avoid jargon and euphemism. Not “going to a better place.” Saying the word “dying” as often as possible was recommended, as it eliminated confusion, helped hasten the patient through denial.

“Uhm, yes. For pain relief. To make you comfortable while you get your affairs in order.”

Get your affairs in order. She was doing terribly. Cyrus hated her.

“I’m sorry, Doctor—what was it? Milton? Are you telling me I’m dying?” Cyrus half-smiled as he said the one word she’d yet to speak out loud. She winced, and Cyrus relished her wincing.

“Ah, yes, Miss Kaufmann, ah, I’m so sorry.” Her voice sounded the way wild rabbits look, just on the cusp of tearing off out of sight.

“Mrs. Kaufmann.”

“Oh right, of course, I’m so sorry.” She checked her clipboard. “It’s just, my paper here says ‘Miss Kaufmann.’”

“Doctor, are you trying to tell me I don’t know my own name?”

The medical student glanced desperately back at the camera.

A year and a half ago in early recovery, Cyrus told his AA sponsor Gabe that he believed himself to be a fundamentally bad person. Selfish, self-seeking. Cruel, even. A drunk horse thief who stops drinking is just a sober horse thief, Cyrus’d said, feeling proud to have thought it. He’d use versions of that line later in two different poems.

“But you’re not a bad person trying to get good. You’re a sick person trying to get well,” Gabe responded.

Cyrus sat with the thought.

Gabe went on, “There’s no difference to the outside world between a good guy and a bad guy behaving like a good guy. In fact, I think God loves that second guy a little more.”

“Good-person drag,” Cyrus thought out loud. That’s what they called it after that.

“Of course not, Mrs. Kaufmann, I’m absolutely not trying to argue,” the medical student stammered. “The paper must have misprinted your name. I’m so sorry. Is there anyone you’d like us to call?”

“Who would I have you call?” Cyrus asked. “My principal? I’m all alone.”

Dr. Monfort looked clammy. The red light on the camera was blinking on and off, like a firefly mocking their proceedings.

“We have some great counselors here at Keady,” she said. “Nationally ranked—”

“Have you ever had a patient who wanted to die?” Cyrus interrupted.

The medical student stared at him, saying nothing, pure disdain radiating from her person, barely bridled fury. Cyrus thought she might actually hit him.

“Or maybe not wanted to die,” Cyrus continued, “but who just wanted their suffering to end?”

“Well, like I said, we offer a wide range of palliative options,” she hissed, staring at Cyrus, Cyrus-Cyrus, beneath Mrs. Kaufmann, willing him toward compliance.

He ignored her.

“The last time I thought I wanted to die, I got a fifth of Everclear, ninety-five percent alcohol, and sat in my bathtub drinking it from the bottle, pouring out a bit on my head. One pull for me, one for my hair. The aim was to finish the bottle that way and then light myself on fire. Theatrical, no?”

Dr. Monfort said nothing. Cyrus went on,

“But when I’d finished maybe just a quarter of the bottle, I realized suddenly I didn’t want to burn everyone else in the apartment complex.”

This was true. That little flicker of lucidity, light, like sun glinting off a snake in the grass. It happened a few months before Cyrus had gotten sober, and it wasn’t until he was already good and drunk that he even remembered the existence of other people, and the fact that fire spreads, that if he lit himself on fire in a first-floor apartment bathtub, everyone else’s apartments would likely catch fire too. Booze worked that way sometimes, clarifying—briefly—what his mind couldn’t. It was like sitting in the optometrist’s office, booze flashing its different lenses in front of your face and sometimes, for a second, it’d be the right prescription, the one that allowed you to catch a glimpse of the world as it was, beyond your grief, beyond your doom. That was the clarity alcohol, and nothing else, gave. Seeing life as everyone else did, as a place that could accommodate you. But of course a second later it’d zoom past clarity through a flurry of increasingly opaque lenses until all you were able to see would be the dark of your own skull.

“Can you believe that?” Cyrus went on. “I needed to be drunk to even consider that a fire that consumed me in a bathtub wouldn’t just go out on its own.”

“Mrs. Kaufmann . . . ,” the medical student said. She was wringing her hands, one of the “physical distress behaviors” Cyrus was supposed to note in his evaluation.

“I remember actually sitting there in the bathtub, doing the calculus of it. Like, do I even care if I take other people with me? These strangers. I had to work out whether or not they mattered to me.

How fucked up is that?”

“Mrs. Kaufmann, if you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, we have resources . . . .”

“Oh c’mon, just talk to me. You want to be a doctor? I’m sitting in front of you, talking. I ended up walking myself outside the apartment complex, wet with the alcohol, though not too wet, it evaporated quickly I think, I remember being surprised at how wet I wasn’t. There was a little grassy patch between our building and the one next to us, a picnic bench with one of those built-in charcoal grills. I remember thinking that was funny, lighting myself on fire next to a grill. I brought out the Everclear and the lighter, I remember—this is bizarre—it was a Chicago Bears lighter. I have no idea where it came from. And I sat there at the bench feeling, despite the Everclear in and on me, I remember sitting there feeling, not happy exactly but simple, maybe? Like a jellyfish just floating along. Someone said alcohol reduces the ‘fatal intensity’ of living. Maybe it was that.”

Outside the clouds had grown fat and dark with rain, the whole sky a wounded animal in some last frantic rage. The hospital room had a tiny little window high on the wall, probably placed there so people from the street couldn’t look in. The medical student didn’t move.

“Do you have this organ here?” Cyrus asked her, pointing at the base of his throat. “A doom organ that just pulses all the time? Pulses dread, every day, obstinately? Like it thinks there’s a panther behind the curtain ready to maul you, but there’s no panther and it turns out there’s no curtain either? That’s what I wanted to stop.”

“What did you do?” the medical student asked, finally. Something in her seemed to have relaxed a little, conceded to the moment’s current.

“I went back inside my apartment.” Cyrus shrugged. “I wanted to stop hurting. Being burned alive felt suddenly like it’d hurt a lot.”

Dr. Monfort smiled, gave a tiny nod.

Cyrus continued: “I took a shower and passed out. I remained. But so did the dread. I thought getting sober would help, that came later. Recovery. And it did, in its way. Certainly it made me less a burden to the people around me, created less dread in them. But it’s still in me, that doom organ.” He pointed again at his neck. “It’s in my throat, throbbing all day every day. And recovery, friends, art—that shit just numbs it for a second. What’s that word you used?”

“Palliative?”

“Right, palliative, yeah. All that stuff is palliative. It stills the suffering, but it doesn’t send it away.”

The medical student paused for a moment, then took a seat on the chair across from Cyrus. She was tinted with black-blue rays from the window as if marked by some celestial spotlight. She said, very deliberately, “You know, Mrs. Kaufmann, it’s entirely possible, common even, to have psychological co-morbidities. It sounds like you’ve been getting help for addiction issues, which is great. But you may also have another diagnosis alongside it that’s going untreated, an anxiety disorder or major depression or something else. It could be useful for you to seek help for those as well.” She smiled a little, then added, “It’s not too late, even with the tumors.” It was her way of inviting Cyrus back into the performance, and he obliged. He felt suddenly flush with embarrassment.

Cyrus behaved agreeably through the rest of the act. When they finished a few minutes later and the medical student left the exam room, he wrote her a quick but glowing report before rushing out of the hospital in a flurry of shame.

The post Not All of His Problems Are a Performance appeared first on Electric Literature.

I have a certain type of book that epitomizes a winter read to me. A dense but approachable text that promises not only to challenge me, but to last for a while. A quiet but urgent literary mystery that makes me want to read carefully and pick the book up again and again. A slow, steady pace with a historical timeline that begs to be read closely over long afternoon stretches, with time and attention, when the only thing to do is stay inside.

The settings of these books are primarily inside, too, but they’re still escapist. Big, drafty houses. Warm, dusty libraries. The action of the novels happens here, in these indoor settings, with university archives or local historical records or personal art collections. The protagonists who piece together revelations or unearth new artifacts are graduate students distracted by personal upheaval, historians nearing an unsatisfying retirement, disenfranchised writers concerned for their family’s wellbeing. They are deep thinkers with astute attention to detail as well as personal blind spots that unravel throughout the course of the novel. 

The books below fit this category perfectly, and many of them follow an academic calendar. After beginning in fall, they ease into thick, knit sweaters and snow packed into place underfoot. Not every book follows this calendar, and not every one features an academic protagonist tracking down a discovery. But every novel includes a library or an archive where action takes place, literary mysteries that drive the story, and searching for a hidden truth with lots and lots of close reading. Perfect fodder for slow, satisfying winter reading to last you through the final stretch before spring. 

Possession by A.S. Byatt

Novelist and literary critic A.S. Byatt died last year, and if you haven’t read her Booker-winning Possession yet, now is the time. In the novel, Roland Michell is an American scholar unhappy with his position researching the fictional Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash and unsure whether he will commit to his girlfriend, his academic career, and his life in London. When he finds a stray document in the archive that suggests a relationship between the subject of his research and another fictional Victorian poet Christabel LaMotte, he steals it from the London Library. Roland approaches Dr. Maud Bailey, an expert on LaMotte, and together they search libraries, texts, archives, and even closed-up rooms in a cold, drafty old country house to get to the bottom of the literary mystery. Even better, they fall in love while doing so. 

Landscapes by Christine Lai

Christine Lai’s recent debut Landscapes is a beautiful exploration of art, memory, and preservation against the backdrop of ecological disaster in the near future. Told primarily in first-person journal entries, the novel follows art historian and archivist Penelope as she catalogs the collection of art, books, and ephemera at Morningside, the great English country house where her partner Aiden grew up and where she has lived and worked since graduate school. The house will be sold in April, and just before the property changes hands, Aiden’s brother Julian will return for one last visit, his first in decades after leaving abruptly after a violent altercation with Penelope. Penelope’s journal entries begin in September and continue through spring, as she spends the winter working through the contents of the library, hosting climate refugees in the halls of the great house, and bracing herself to face Julian after all these years. 

The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish

Like Possession, this novel begins with a fictional discovery. In her final year before retirement, historian Helen Watt receives a call from a former student who found seventeenth-century documents in his home. The documents include household accounts as well as correspondence of a rabbi who lived in the house, written by the rabbi’s scribe, a young woman named Ester. Helen, who is ill, begrudgingly enlists the support of American graduate student Aaron Levy. Together, Helen and Aaron work quickly to translate the documents, search for the identity of the scribe, and uncover connections to prominent historical figures before Helen’s retirement—and before the documents become available to other, more prominent scholars. In the novel’s 1660s storyline, the stakes are even higher, particularly with the plague looming. While the stakes are high, the pacing is measured and Kadish’s writing is beautiful, dense with detailed descriptions. Including plenty of cold winter drafts and thick knit sweaters.

The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. by Lee Kravetz

The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. is structured like Michael Cunningham’s Day, with a similar blurring of fact and fiction. In the novel, Estee is a curator for the small, Boston-based St. Ambrose Auction House. While cataloging the contents of an estate, she discovers a handwritten draft of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and embarks on the process of verifying its authenticity ahead of a sale. The other two threads take place during Plath’s life: Dr. Ruth Barnhouse is a psychiatrist who treats Plath while she is institutionalized, and Boston Rhoades, based on Anne Sexton, is a competitive classmate in Robert Lowell’s famed poetry seminar. Throughout the novel, as Estee spends months focused on the newly discovered handwritten notebook, it becomes clear how these storylines, and these women, connect. 

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

In Unsheltered, Willia Knox and her family move into an old home that has fallen into disrepair. The house lacks a foundation and threatens to fall over, according to a local, and the stability of the Knox family is similarly tenuous. Willa has recently lost her job when her magazine folded, and her husband Iano has a one-year appointment that may not be renewed at the local college, after the university where he taught for his career abruptly closed. Their adrift daughter Tig moves back in with them, and so does their son, Zeke, after his wife dies by suicide. Zeke brings his newborn baby with him The final member of their household is Iano’s father, who is ill. The novel follows Willa as she tries to save the house, keep her family together during this time of upheaval, and searches the local archive and more for a historical connection to Mary Treat, an accomplished an undervalued scientist who collaborated with Charles Darwin. The novel includes a 19th century storyline that explores Treat’s work and her life, particularly this correspondence. The scientist is a real historical figure, but the cold, drafty house where the Knox family lives for this transformative year, is fictional. 

Cities of Women by Kathleen B. Jones

This is another thick book with two timelines. In the first, modern-day narrative, history professor Verity Frazier is feeling unsettled and unmotivated when she finds a clue that the illustrator of Christine de Pizan’s illuminated manuscript is a woman named Anastasia, and she heads to London during her sabbatical to prove this theory. The second timeline, my favorite, follows Anastasia’s journey in the 14th century—who she is, how she began illustrating, and how she became connected with Christine de Pizan. 

Babel by R.F. Kuang

Unlike any of the others on the list, this book is fantasy. But the magical elements of R.F. Kuang’s Babel exist so seamlessly in a real historical world that it fits the same winter mood: close, slow reading, cozy atmosphere, and an archive-driven literary mystery. The novel takes place in an alternative 19th-century England, where the nation’s global power is backed by magic, which is derived from capturing the meaning of words that is inevitably lost in translation between languages. Because of this, Oxford houses the Royal Institute of Translation, which is nicknamed Babel. Our main character, an orphan from Canton, assumes the name Robin Swift when he is adopted by professor Richard Lovell as a boy. Lovell quickly begins tutoring the boy in Latin, Greek, and more to prepare him for Oxford and Babel. The book follows Robin through this preparation, his entry to Babel, and as he and the other translators realize the value of their work—and begin to question their contribution to Britain’s colonial power.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Many of the books on this list blend fact and fiction, but Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book is explicitly inspired by true events. In the more recent storyline, in 1996, famed rare book expert Hanna Heath is invited by the UN to analyze the Sarajevo Haggadah, a real document that is one of the earliest illustrated Jewish documents. In its fragile binding, she finds tiny preserved objects, including a piece of an insect wing, stain from wine, and crystals of salt, which she uses to explore the book’s creation and its use since. The other timelines provide a background to the ancient text’s past, bringing the reader through Hanna’s discoveries in a wonderfully atmospheric read.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

This one doesn’t exactly include a library, but the literary mystery does include unearthed ephemera and ultimately hinge on a document. Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries takes place during the gold rush in 1860s New Zealand and reads like a Victorian novel. In 1866, Walter Moody arrives in Hokitika from Edinburgh intent on making a fortune. His first night, he overhears a meeting of twelve local men. A complicated, convoluted, mystery unfolds. The novel demands close reading over long, uninterrupted stretches of time—and, in some cases, goads you into playing the role of researcher, grabbing a pen and paper to keep track of information or to sketch out the zodiac reference, if you’re so inclined . Even more than other wonderful books on this list, The Luminaries has a slow, steady pace that builds into a propulsive literary mystery.

The post 9 Literary Mysteries With a Big Winter Mood appeared first on Electric Literature.

In this book version, she includes her words, the “letters” from other well-known writers, as well as occasional “notes” that include suggestions displayed on an image of a spiral notebook page. There is a progression based on seasons, but the anthology is also what I think of as a writing table book, something to leave on your desk so that you can flip it open to find a burst of inspiration. 

Because 1000 Words includes Attenberg’s thoughts as well as the words of other successful authors from Alexander Chee to Mira Jacob and Elizabeth McCracken, it creates a sense of community—we’re all in this together trying to figure it out. Attenberg’s approach isn’t focused on prompts but instead employs a much more conversational style, discussing issues that her readers will confront as writers. Not only does she provide helpful insights, but she herself is a model to follow. Attenberg is a highly productive writer who has published six novels, a short story collection, essays, as well as a memoir, so who better to motivate other writers? In addition to the release of this book, her next novel, A Reason to See You Again, will be published later in the year.

Jami Attenberg and I recently spoke on Zoom about writing motivation, social media, and bringing people together.

Abby Manzella: I’ve been watching #1000wordsofsummer grow since I signed up in 2019, and I’m continually impressed with what you’ve been able to build both through social media and now with this book. For me, it was fun to read the book from start to finish to see the connections you were making between ideas, but there were points where I had to stop reading to write because what you were sharing was getting me to jot down ideas that wouldn’t wait. I know that the project began as some self-motivation and accountability, but what kept you going after it served that initial purpose for you?

Jami Attenberg: The first year everybody got so excited by it and really responded to it. Sometimes we just create jobs for ourselves. Sometimes we’re like, that is a thing that I could do—not a paid job, because that’s not what this is about—but it’s something where we can contribute and communicate and connect with people. It called on all the skills that I had, which is to reach out to people, be positive online, and access other people’s skills, too.

AM: Do you think that skill comes more from your article writing?

JA: I’m thinking more about the community aspect of it. I have this background where I worked as a producer for online projects. When I started out, it was like everyone else was the creative person and I managed them, managed their schedule, until I realized that I wanted to be my own creative person. I think there is something about me that has that capability of helping people make their art. That’s part of it, and I’ve been online; I’ve had a blog off and on, since the late ’90s, so talking to people online is something I feel comfortable with. 

AM: Since we’re living through an upheaval with social media, are you now thinking about engaging in those spaces differently?

JA: I’m finding that newsletters are actually an ok place to be. It was funny because it really started on Twitter—and a little bit on Instagram—but mainly on Twitter where the hashtag started. It was easier to find each other [then]. Everybody was still on it. Now people have gone to different places, but in terms of the literary world, it was a place. You’d have your morning coffee, get together, and chitchat, and then people would go about their day. Maybe they’d check in here or there. So, for me tweeting in the morning one day it sounded like a good idea, everyone chimed in. Now I feel like you can’t find people anymore. 

When I send out the newsletter people read it. It used to be that I had to post it on Twitter and then people would know about it and things could go viral in that way. I don’t want to say I don’t need other forms of social media because I’ll take whatever I can get; I have a book coming out. [Still, the newsletter] is pretty consistently read. I mean it’s not 100% read, but it’s like 50% or 60%. That’s a lot for almost 35,000 people signed up for it—consistently every week. Is that a brag? 

AM: No, it’s great. It makes me smile.

JA: It’s really nice.

AM: I was wondering at what point you figured out that 1000 Words was a book project? When did you decide you had to take it beyond the social media space and put it all together?

JA: It was a year ago summer, after I finished that round of #1000wordsofsummer, which would have been year five, and it felt big. We raised all this money for charity, and you could see the people on the Slack were doing it all times of day, meaning all over the world there was somebody who was writing and posting their word count. You could see people showing up, which was really cool, and I was like, is it a book? And then I thought, if it is a book, I need to figure it out now rather than later because if I write this book, I know I will have to keep doing #1000wordsofsummer for a while, so I was like, well let me think about it.

What happened was that I took all of the letters that had ever been written, I put them in by contributing authors, and I put them in a document. I needed to just read them all to see if something came out of this. I felt this surge of energy from it—not to be hippy dippy about it—but for real. Oh shit, there’s a lot going on here. All of these people have written books. All of these people have been through it, and they’re all telling me I can do it, and also they’re telling me that sometimes it’s hard to do it, and also that sometimes they feel like they can’t do it, but they have faith. There’s this incredible wave of energy that came off it, and I was like, man, I need to put these all in one place because it’s different reading them online than it would be reading it from cover to cover. But I thought, still, is it a book? I don’t want this to just be an anthology of these letters because I don’t think that’s enough. I felt like my voice needed to be a part of it, too. 

Those letters told me how to write the book because they weren’t all about the season of summer being wildly generative, because I could see all the struggles they had or different parts of their processes, and I knew what my different parts were too. Then I just thought it’s like all the seasons, and once that framework came into play, I was like, I think this would be a book. This would be worth my time; it would be worth the time of the people who would read it. You don’t want to just write something because you can. You want to write something because it really serves a purpose; it’s going to help people. 

AM: I think it’s interesting that you started with other people’s words instead of starting with the stuff that you had written first—that their words were the thing that made the project make sense to you. 

JA: Because I know how repetitive I am. I know what these letters are. Some weeks I’m like this feels fresh and brand new. Sometimes I’m hitting the same note again. I’m writing about revision again. I’m writing about how do you find the strength to finish a book again. But people reading it give it a different context. I could write about how to fine-tune and edit something and you could read it right now, but you’re just at the beginning of your project and it means absolutely nothing to you. Then, a year later, you’re revising and I write the same kind of thing and you’re like, it means something to me now. Anyway, I realized I had more to say about those other [aspects of the writing process].

AM: The blending of your thoughts with the other writers works well. The one letter that’s in my head right now is the piece by Kiese Laymon where he really took that call of the letter approach very seriously, so you feel both the publicness but also the intimacy that’s in that space. 

The other thing that piece reminded me of was the strange question of when to acknowledge COVID on the page. What are your thoughts on this issue because, while so much of the initial writing overlapped with COVID, it will now be in an anthology that will hopefully last long after this moment?

JA: I think we want to honor that because it’s like a time capsule. There were plenty that I didn’t include, but the ones that I did were really potent and still really make me think about it. The real point is that this dynamic of something bad happening in the world isn’t going away. There are always these dramatic dynamics that are impacting our attention spans, our souls, our lives, and our schedules. Figuring out where to put all that and manage all of that and still have the time and headspace for writing is why I thought it was important to include that part of the conversation. There’s always a reason not to write, unfortunately.

AM: As someone who happily has spent time in New York and now in Missouri, I was wondering about your transplanting to New Orleans from New York and how that has related to your creativity. How has that changed you?

JA: I’m glad I had my time in New York, too. I’m probably going to write about it. I don’t think I’ve talked about it in an interview yet. I don’t think I would have started this [project] in New York. I think I had to move to New Orleans to start something like this. I think that my relationship with the idea of community intensified when I moved to New Orleans, and I had a little bit more time on my hands, and life is easier here than it is in a big city like that, and so I kind of evolved into the person who could create this thing.  There’s something about this city being so much about community that opened me more up to it, but that said, I used to have a reading series in New York on the roof of my house. As Emily Flake said to me, that was the beginning of #1000wordsofsummer, you just didn’t really know it yet. 

I’ve always enjoyed bringing people together and watching what will happen. I really enjoy that dynamic. Writing is so cool, and writers are weirdos; they’re wonderful and they’re my people. It’s just very fun to make things happen. I talked to someone today who started a book during #1000wordsofsummer, and he just sold it. It was really validating for me. People who I don’t even know thank me in the acknowledgements of their books, which is totally wild. It’s so cool. 

AM: To conclude, what is the future of 1000 Words? One of the things I’m seeing from your tour schedule is your plan for write-alongs. Do you have anything to say about what that’s going to look like for the future? 

JA: One of the reasons why I started doing the newsletter year-round was because I felt like I had all this information that I wanted to share, and I’d seen so much good stuff come out of #1000wordsofsummer that I felt like I wanted to give it to people for free. Because I don’t have an MFA, there was a time when I felt like [the literary world] was only accessible to those people. The goal is to create events that are accessible to people where they can feel comfortable. 

I think the write-alongs are going to be me talking really briefly about the project, a writing prompt, and then maybe us all hanging out together. I don’t know, but I feel really positive about it. It can be whatever makes sense. It can helpful. It has to be accessible. I want to create something that invites people in as opposed to keeping people out. 

AM: Whatever it becomes, I look forward to see it, and I know that such interactive space is what people are certainly craving.

JA: My greatest wish for this book is that it will sell for a long time, and it will be meaningful for people. It doesn’t have to be a bestseller; I just want people to love it and get something out of it. That’s the most you can hope for. 

I’m excited for people to read it. It’s a simple motivational book. It has a lot of smart people and that’s what’s exciting for me.

The post Building a Writing Community On and Off the Internet appeared first on Electric Literature.

In this stunning debut short story collection, Mary Jones uses her distinctive voice to examine the painful and occasionally surreal ways we say goodbye. The stories—which range from poignant, to darkly funny, to unsettling—will push you out of your comfort zone and ignite intense emotions surrounding love and loss. A woman camps out on the porch of an ex-lover who has barricaded himself inside the house; a preteen girl caught shoplifting finds herself in grave danger; a man hires a professional mourner to ensure his wife’s funeral is a success. Time and again, Jones’s characters find themselves facing the ends of things: relationships, health, innocence, life as they know it. The stories gathered in this collection are arresting, original, and beautifully rendered. The Goodbye Process packs a punch, just the way grief does—knocking us off our feet.

Here is the cover, designed by Anna Morrison.

Author Mary Jones: “I was hoping the cover would be minimalistic and beautiful, with a hint of quirkiness. I think this cover perfectly embodies those things, and more. I love the clean design, and the color palette which feels both sophisticated and playful. I like that the cover image is not explicit, but is open for interpretation, and everyone I’ve shown it to has had something different to say about it. To me it suggests that a conversation is happening, and maybe one person—the person with the colder cup—has been talking for a while, opening up. In all of the stories in the collection characters are at various stages of letting go of things—relationships, health, life as they know it. I feel like with this colder cup, and with the upward spiraling steam, Anna captures the feeling here that something is being released, let go of.”

Designer Anna Morrison: “Working on a collection of short stories can sometimes be a challenge, especially when trying to encapsulate a feeling that encompasses a range of different narratives. However, Mary Jones’s collection, The Goodbye Process, has a strong, overarching theme of loss and grief, with some humor intertwined in the writing. I also wanted to convey a sense of intimacy on the cover but with an unspoken loneliness, too. There are a lot of different perspectives in this collection, but I felt like the steaming cups of coffee could be the background to many difficult (or happy) conversations.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “The Goodbye Process” by Mary Jones appeared first on Electric Literature.

This advice came from other mom writers. I paid close attention, weighed these warnings in my hands. Was I being given sacred protection? Or was I a wayward mother being gently policed, shepherded back into the claustrophobic box of “good mother”? I understood I’d strayed. A “good mother” doesn’t write about the way her palms sting from slamming them on the kitchen countertop. This is not a story mothers publicly claim. It’s a story we whisper. I’ve never been good at being quiet, or subtle, so, of course I wrote the book. I used my name. And despite the high probability of it blowing up in my face, I took my two elementary-aged kids across the country for an 8-day book tour. 

I knew my kids would be tired from the time-zone change, disregulated from the dissolution of routine, and that they’d likely rip loud farts at my events then cackle with delight. Even with my husband doing most of the parenting, the week would be exhausting at best. Still. This book is a career highlight! I wanted to celebrate it with my family. I fantasized that the tour would be a key experience my 6- and 10-year-old would remember. Totally worth missing school for, I said to myself as I sat in the principal’s office filling out the extensive number of forms for kids missing more than five consecutive days. 

I’ve wanted to be an author for as long as I’ve wanted to be a mother, which is to say, forever. I didn’t anticipate that the two identities would end up in competition with each other. I stopped writing for years because the creative labor of mothering took every piece of me. Once I was able to write again, I found I did my best work away from the children. I tried writing in my bedroom, but their presence permeated the locked door. I left the house and wrote at coffee shops, but only ever had a couple of hours before mom-life beckoned. I crossed bridges and counties to attend artist residencies, needing to transform out of my mother-self to be my best author-self. For years I mothered and wrote like this—separately.

It’s been a decade since I began splitting myself into parts. Writing a book about mothering was a way to put myself back together. I thought bringing my kids on tour could be the next level of integration. I was ready—eager—for my children to see me as other than mother, as more than the Maker of Meals, the Bedtime Routine Warden, the Afterschool Pick-up Driver. I know I will always be a big somebody to my children, the way that all parents loom large and take up space in their children’s psyches (for better or worse), but I wanted my children to see me as a big somebody in the world. I wanted them to see how someone so ordinary—the person who smears peanut butter and honey just right on their rice cakes (only Quaker brand, plain, and lightly salted!)—can also be the person on the stage in front of a roomful of strangers. I wanted to be a model, so that they might see that their own ideas are worth cultivating and amplifying. That they too deserve an audience and a microphone. That they don’t need anybody else’s permission to step outside the box of social acceptability, to choose a wayward path, to take up space, to be humongous.

As our family book tour approached and I prepared for my readings, I came up against a new challenge—the content of my book. My children know what my book is about. We’d had age-appropriate conversations about mom rage. My son, the 10-year-old, once ticked off a list that went, “Racism, sexism, mom rage,” which told me he had a general understanding that mom rage is a societal issue steeped in oppression and power dynamics. But it’s one thing for my kids to experience me losing my temper. It’s another for them to listen to me describe my fury and to hear themselves referred to as “rage recipient,” and then to do it again the next night, all in front of an audience. How could I be true to my craft—a good author—reading and discussing honestly the terrifying rage I write about, and also be a good mother, protecting my children from unnecessary harm?

On the plane, my children happily inhabited screenland while I scoured my book for sections that ticked all the boxes: appropriate to read in front of the kids, 7 minutes or less, engaging for an audience. By the time we landed, I’d dog-eared every engaging, child-friendly page in that book. There weren’t many. But there were enough.

The morning of my first reading, I sit with my kids at breakfast and tell them what they can expect that night. I explain that I’ll have a “conversation partner.” We’ll talk about the book itself and also about my experience of writing the book, and at some point I’ll read a section or two, and then take questions from the audience. 

“I want to ask a question,” my son pipes up. 

“Sure,” I smile, hiding the heat of my flaring anxiety. I have a flash fantasy of him standing up in the crowd and asking, Why do you yell at us? (a legitimate question, but a tender conversation I’d prefer to have with him privately—not in front of an audience). “Do you want to tell me your question now so I can be prepared and do a very good job answering it?” 

He thinks then says, “I want to ask, ‘Have you always wanted to be a writer?’” 

I nod and look away, blinking back impending tears. This child. He disarms me. He isn’t concerned with the content of my book. He is curious about his mother—the author. I may feel fragmented, but he sees the whole of me. 

“Yeah, okay, great. You can just raise your hand when it’s audience question time. I’ll call on you,” I say with a grin.

That night at the bookstore, I do one of my “child-safe” readings about my complexities slipping away once I became a mother. I read that even my name disappears with everyone everywhere (at the gym, the playground, the pediatrician’s office) suddenly calling me “Mom.” My son is in the front row. When I finish reading, his hand is first in the air, arm straight, eyes set. I gesture towards him, ready for his rehearsed question. 

“Why do you think everyone was calling you Mom?” he asks. 

Surprised, I pause. The answer is complicated, and the section I just read basically answered it. Seventy people hold their breath waiting for my response. I buy time. “That’s a really good question,” I say slowly. The audience lets out a collective exhale with a small, knowing laugh. Then I answer his question as best I can. He nods. Energetically the audience nods too. 

A few nights later, I sit in front of a crowd of mostly strangers. Someone asks about the different trends in mothering that have occurred over time. I explain that when I was a child in the early 1980s, the reigning trend was “custodial mothering,” which was a more low-key, hands-off kind of parenting than today’s “intensive mothering” era. I share, “My parents were involved in my life, but my mother wasn’t cutting my peanut and jelly sandwiches into heart shapes with a cookie cutter.” My 6-year-old daughter, who’s been drawing in a coloring book on the floor at her dad’s feet until this moment, shoots up with a whoosh and pierces the air with her slender arm. 

“Yeah?” I say smiling at her.

“You cut my sandwiches into heart shapes with a cookie cutter!” The whole room laughs. My daughter recognized the way I mother her, and she unwittingly called me out! 

“Yes, I do cut your sandwiches into hearts,” I say to her, then turn to the audience as my daughter returns to the floor with a proud plop. “As mothers, we don’t necessarily agree with the ideas behind intensive mothering, yet we’ve internalized the expectations as ideal, then find ourselves pureeing baby food from scratch, freezing it into ice cube trays, laundering and air-drying every cloth diaper, and cutting our kids’ sandwiches into hearts with a cookie cutter!” I laugh and look at my daughter. She beams. I look out at the audience, which is 98% mothers. They beam too.

In Mom Rage I write, “Motherhood is so public, and everyone has an opinion.” Yet somehow, I hadn’t considered that bringing my kids on tour would result in the public display of my mothering. My children’s presence ended up transforming my events into live enactments of some of the main arguments of my book. By interacting with my kids in loving ways I was embodying the idea that a person can have mom rage and still be a good mom, a message that everyone in those audiences and every mother who rages needs to hear, especially in a culture that views angry mothers as moral failures. And by reading from my book and discussing mom rage in front of an audience that included in my children, I was demonstrating how we can drag mom rage out of its shame corner by talking about it with our friends, our partners, and even—with care and nuance—our children.

I suppose by bringing my family on tour, I set us up to be…judged, yes, but also witnessed—by the audiences but also by each other. I witnessed my husband laden with bags of books, art supplies, candy, and other child-appeasing items, doing everything he had to do to keep the kids happy so I could completely inhabit my author self. As a mother, it was the exact support I needed. In those moments when my children refused their social mandate to sit quietly, when my daughter jumped up with excitement and my son ditched his rehearsed question for the one that bubbled up inside his good heart, they were celebrating with me, showing me that they wanted to be part of the conversation with their author mother. They raised their hands to be witnessed for their own brilliant, bold selves. They too want to be humongous. They were telling me they already are. 

The post I Brought My Kids On Tour For A Book About Motherhood appeared first on Electric Literature.

They are potent calls both inward and outward, weaving between the many textures of pleasure and rage. Brookins cruises through a range of registers, speaking directly and lyrically about harm and resistance. Everything is fair game: Will Smith’s slapping of Chris Rock, revelations about being read as male, an imagined Black future with comfort, care, and ease. 

This book is a container for the multitudinous sides of a complex voice, bringing the reader into a home where a Black trans poet’s self, along with their legacies and visions of the future, is able to unfurl. 

Joss Lake: What are the essential components of building a “freedom house” in your work and in the world?

 KB Brookins: A lot of the poems are about my personal journeys with things like masculinity. And transitioning is really important to me to be like an invisible trans person right now, because nationwide we’re a lot of places. 44 out of 50 states have at least one piece of legislation that they’re totally advanced this year that is anti-trans in nature. So it’s a lot of misinformation, a lot of people being fearful of what they don’t actually understand. I talk a lot about my personal experience as a Black trans person living in Texas, living in the United States, North America in general, and being trans, and what that feels like right now and how because we live in such a place that really discourages people from being who they are.

So it starts personal: Who are you and how much of you is influenced by what you’ve been told versus who you actually are? And then I think it’s interpersonal, like how we treat each other. You have to [think about that] before you can say “abolish the police”, for example. You actually have to be practicing that principle in your everyday life, like how you treat yourself and also how you treat others. And how do you get through things like conflict; how do you show up in romantic or physical encounters. Those are questions that I was thinking through and writing through in the book. 

And then, of course, there are the circumstances in which we live in on a national and global scale that are unnatural. It is unnatural for the climate to be changing at the rate that it is changing. And whether you live or die every day comes down to your race. It’s very unnatural for people to be so invested in things that at the end of the day don’t bother anybody, like someone being trans, like someone being queer. And it’s also just unnatural to have police and militant people who carry guns around. And it’s unnatural to have the law dictate things like putting the Ten Commandments up on every school in a state, which is an actual piece of legislation that’s trying to be passed in my state. I want to talk about these things very clearly, and I find poetry to be the best medium in which I can talk about them. Because poetry makes space for audaciousness and makes space for exploring things, maybe, in a way like you and me are talking right now. So I’m using things like metaphor, I’m using things like simile, I’m using things like repetition in rhyme and even form, ripping off the form of the curriculum vitae or ripping off the form of a legal document in order to have a conversation with a reader.

JL: A really beautiful aspect of this book is that we can move through these different layers and it doesn’t feel like anything is left out. I’m curious about how you went about organizing this vast container. How did you decide on the architecture?

KB: Let’s say, a bedroom space in which you’re having more sensitive things that you may not have in an open space, like a kitchen. You walk into someone’s house and then they’ll say like, oh, you got to take your shoes off. Or like, here’s the chandelier and here’s how the kitchen is. I was using that section as an orienting space, introducing some of the themes that will be constant throughout the book. I was thinking of bedroom spaces not necessarily where the more internal dialogue poems happen, but maybe more of those [dialogues] are in the kitchen. A lot of intense intergenerational conversations happen at the kitchen table in my family. So I was really thinking: how do those rooms function in a house and how can I display that through the poems that are in those sections?

JL: I was struck how, in another interview, you were naming the trees in your neighborhood and talking about how you commune with them. How did you come to sort of know the names of the trees and plants around you? I’ve been thinking about how we’ve lost touch with our surroundings.  

KB: If I was to make my KB school, it would definitely be a class there in which you just learn about your local environment. People think that being vegan will save the world, right? But I think actually eating local, would eliminate a lot of the carbon footprint. And most people live in a place in which they can forage in their local area. It’s really important to be in tune with what is happening around you naturewise. We owe it to the things that live that are not just human, to care for and be in communion with those things. Growing up there’s an element of nature where I think a lot about: time and who has the actual time to be outside versus who doesn’t. When I was growing up, when people would be so “pro-nature,” they would always be white, right? So I would just be like, “That’s some white shit.” And then I realize—as I grow up and learn more about the environment and about the history of environmental racism—this is very ingrained in non-white folks, that nature is not for us. 

There never was a time when I was growing up where at a certain time in the year my family didn’t go and take pecans from a pecan tree. And we always had these big bags of pecans that we picked from a specific area. And also my family went to this big family reunion every year in Waco, Texas, and I saw all these different kinds of trees and the elders that lived in that area knew what those trees were.I was always given little bits of nature. 

Then I got older and people have their section of gays, right? The “artsy gays”, the “theatre gays,” and when I moved to Austin, somehow, I got enveloped into the “nature gays.” My fiancé used to be an environmental educator and one way I got oriented here was walking around the neighborhood and her being able to name every tree. I learned a lot about my local landscape from her and other people who are invested in keeping that knowledge alive. 

JL: Are there ways that you help yourself refocus on your intended audience and away from an oppressive white gaze, or is that naturally happening for you?

 KB: In the late 2010s, all of a sudden, people were paying attention to writers of color. And the things that people were gravitating towards were always about Black abjection or like some person of color talking about their trauma and the trauma of their experience of being whatever race it was that they were. And it was just interesting because the assumed audience would always be white people that didn’t understand where they were coming from. And I wonder where that impulse came from. I found myself, once I started taking myself more seriously as a writer, when I started getting critiques, it’d be like, “I don’t understand it. So you should change it.” What is this assumption that like I could be reading Walt Whitman and you love him and you don’t want him to explain things, but you want me to explain things. We’re reading Robert Frost and John Ashbery, which are not easy reads. Robert Frost is like “Great monolithic knees.” And you’re like, “I can work with that.” That doesn’t make sense. You’re cool with that and you’re cool with figuring that out in class, but you’re not cool with me, making a reference to my hometown that people who I’m actually writing this for will understand? And people don’t have to be from my hometown to understand some of these things because Google is free, right? If you really want to know, you could just Google it. And that’s what I do when I come across texts that I don’t understand,  I just Google it, right? So or use context, close textual contextual observations. We learn that in close reading, right? But there’s an expectation in which writers of color just hand-hold and write for people that are not themselves and that aren’t in their communities.

JL: Can you talk more about this impulse to include so many different textures and layers of existence. We experience this  sense of self in such a vast and almost  encyclopedic way. Can you talk about the impulse to pull everything into your work?

KB: If I’m going to address a subject matter so large and also so mulled over as freedom, I have to bring in everything, right? And if I’m going to take it from a three-pronged lens of personal, interpersonal, systemic, I have to bring in all of the things that that might include. I’m talking about race. I’m also talking about gender and sexuality, because that’s my existence, right? We can’t really escape our context. Even if I was to write like a sci-fi book, those things would still come in. And then also talking about disability and trying to develop a speaker, I’m like, okay, is it autobiographical? Is it not? That’s kind of up to you to decide, right? It had to be like a book with a very large view. And then also, that’s just how my mind works and how these large concepts like racism work—it’s permeated within the books we pick up and don’t pick up. They get made and don’t get made. And in the environment that we see or don’t see and the interactions that we can and can’t have.

It made sense to riff off of forms. When approaching things like a CV, I’m like, “Well, what if we were really honest about what that experience at that one random nonprofit that we worked at was. What if we were more serious about and honest about what it means to be  a worker or a laborer in today’s late stage capitalism and also, what are those hidden labors?” At the end of the day, our work is emotional labor and the labor of “I just found out that someone that looks exactly like me, died in another place due to police violence. And I’m still clocked in and I still have to be clocked in.” Those large things that feel small in the moment that we have to put up with in order to continue on. Because we live in such a place where you have to prove your housing or you have to earn things like water and all of the things that we actually need to live, we have to work for and like. If I want to talk about that, why wouldn’t I literally just put it in a CV, right? Mission accomplished. 

JL: You write in “T Shot # 4,” “I want the black boy in need to be a river you can’t name even if you send sounds underwater.” Can you talk about the freedom that that can be found in illegibility or if you have a different way of relating to that particular line? 

 KB: I didn’t feel tapped into what a Black boy or Black man’s experience might be until I started transitioning. For Black men and for people who are perceived as Black men like me, there is this hyper visibility. There is a large history of a weird relationship with wanting to emulate whatever that we’ve learned through colonialism. And then there’s also this hyper visibility of everyone [outside of your community] seeing you either as a fetish or a threat. 

This is the conversation on TikTok and Twitter where people are stealing from Black culture and not citing Black people, but making money based off of things like AAVE,  Black food that started in African and Black American traditions and, slang. It’s “Twitter” slang now or “Internet” slang. But no, it’s specifically AAVE and you just took it, right? And then when it really comes down to it, you know, that white rapper or that white lady singing like Drake rap lyrics doesn’t actually want the experience of Blackness. Because the experience of Blackness comes with a lot of negativity due to other people’s perceptions due to hyper visibility. I find freedom in the idea of not feeling like you’ve got to be hyperexposed all the time and having a sense of self for Black men and Black people, which is not so corroded with other people’s ideas of who you are and not so accessible for other people to steal and pathologize. That’s happened a lot. 

Science has a very fraught relationship with Black people and we see that still negatively impacting the way Black people maneuver the health care system and other spaces. At the end of the day, Black men die at very early ages compared to pretty much every other demographic in the U.S. I was thinking about how the perception of me changing has led to some very interesting scenarios, mostly where I think that me not being completely happy, completely chipper is seen as me being aggressive. And I want to aspire in this poem to feel like you can be something that you don’t have to explain or display. 

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Once upon a time, I had a terrible marriage. We couldn’t stop fighting. We fought all night. We fought so loudly the neighbors complained. We threw things and called each other “prick” and “cunt.”

Of course it was a very lonely time. The shame was unbearable and black and continuous. We agonized constantly about how to stop it, and the life we could have if we could just get along. But anything we tried would start a fight. Then we’d be screaming like children, throwing things, terrified, in the filthy kitchen that never got cleaned—when you fight like that, there isn’t time for cleaning. Everything’s dirty like your life.

At the tail end of one of these fights, in the little hours, both of us exhausted and sick on adrenalin, fuck you, it’s you who, cunt, prick, idiot—I suddenly saw how absurd it was and said: “Well, you’re a skoo! And whatever you say, you’ll never be anything but a dirty skoo!”—skoo being a word I’d made up on the spot.

My husband got the joke and rolled with it, saying, “Well, you’re a ca! You’re a low-down ca, and that’s all you’ll ever be! A ca!”

We went on for a little while—you skoos are all, you’re like every other ca—both laughing, grateful, all rancor gone. We even believed we’d turned a corner. We’d had an insight that could stop the fights, and we just had to cling to that knowledge.

In the months that followed, we elaborated skoo and ca into a game. The skoo, we decided, was a weasel-like creature. We imagined a whole folk culture of skoos, where skoos told tales of a trickster figure called the Mandrake Skoo. The ca, meanwhile, was a monotheistic bird that worshipped the Great Ca on the mountain. I called my husband “Skoo.” He called me “Ca.” They were the nicknames we used when we were alone, which no one else was supposed to know.

Most of all, we made their cries to each other. The skoo’s cry was, “Skoo!” delivered with a honking plaintiveness. We skooed to each other as if across a distance, a cold swamp in which a skoo could be imagined to be stranded in a rowboat slowly taking on water. He skooed and I skooed back. We also ca-ed, which was higher in pitch, and had a falling note. One might imagine a ca to be plaintively crying from a mangrove tree in that same swamp, where she’s woken alone, confused, bird-brained, and can’t grasp where her mate has gone. My husband would skoo from the other room. I would ca back. Or we would skoo back and forth. Skoo! Ca! Skoo! Ca! It was amazing how it made us feel better; like singing.

But if we spoke in English, we would fight.

We broke up at last and became good friends. We never fought again, as if a spell had been broken. But we also never said “skoo” or “ca.” His name still came up as “Skoo” on my phone, but I never called him “Skoo.” We had other lovers and eventually spouses. That particular closeness had to come to an end.

Then it felt as if “skoo” was a magic that grew more potent with not being used. Our friendship was sacred and powerful because of it. Our friendship was not like anything else.

Here’s another story to explain what I mean. A few days after 9/11, my friend Michael was dancing in a gay club when the power went out. From one second to the next, the room went black. The music cut out and the only sounds were stumbling and muttering and nervous laughter. Soon even these died away. Michael couldn’t stop waiting for the bomb to hit. He had the irrational feeling that the world outside was gone.

Then out of the void, a frail voice sang: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide . . . no escape from reality . . . .”

Another voice joined in, and another. Everyone there knew “Bohemian Rhapsody;” soon the whole club was singing along. They sang the song through to its end. Then they filed out together into the night, gently bumping into each other and laughing, and found the city still there, its lights still shining, as if their song had conjured it back.

We reach to each other across the abyss. We try. We skoo. We call across the abyss.

So, essentially, this is a happy life. The worst things happen, but we stand by each other. At bottom, humanity is good, not bad. The ca flies out to the skoo in its rowboat and the two of them paddle together to shore. There are other voices singing in the dark.

My skoo husband died a few years ago. The last time I saw him, we were in a restaurant, and he said to me, “Looking back on our lives, what regrets do we have?” and then he told me his regrets.

He didn’t tell me his heart had gone into tachycardia. He just picked at the terrible pasta dish the restaurant served him, for which they will burn in hell, then went home and told his wife he needed to go to the hospital.

They put him on a ventilator immediately. He never spoke or ate again.

His regrets were not having children and having stayed in academia. I had already known these regrets, of course, because we’d known each other such a long time. I don’t remember what my regrets were. My main regret now is not saving his life, though there isn’t any way I could have saved his life. Still it’s hard not to have this regret.

I’ve recently been in the part of town where this happened, so I went on a pilgrimage to the place and looked at the subway station where I watched him go down the stairs alone.

I can’t believe you can’t save people. I can’t believe you ever hate or harm them. I don’t know how it could really have happened. I want to say it’s not true.

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Here is a rather typical method I’ve used. Most query letters contain three or four paragraphs, and you’ll want to keep it to no more than a page, single spaced. [Please note: I’ve inserted additional comments in brackets.] 

First Paragraph 

There are one of two ways to approach the first paragraph. You can keep it simple by stating the name of your work, the genre, and why you are querying this particular agent or editor. For example, here is what I used for How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences. 

Dear _, [and be sure to include the name of a specific editor or agent, spelled correctly] 

Thank you for taking the time to talk with me about How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences at the recent AWP conference. My hope is that you’ll find it to be a good fit for the University of Nebraska Press’s American Lives Series. 

Or if you don’t have a personal connection with an agent or editor, you can simply begin by saying, “I am querying you because_.” [Study the website of each editor or agent. Determine what you think they’re looking for and include that here. In other words, do they seem interested in books on the same topic as yours?] 

Other opening paragraphs can have more of what’s called a “hook,” or what I call a “seduction.” Here is one I found on the Agent Query website for the nonfiction book Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer. 

On assignment for Outside Magazine to report on the growing commercialization of the mountain, Krakauer, an accomplished climber, went to the Himalayas as a client of Rob Hall, the most respected high-altitude guide in the world, and barely made it back alive from the deadliest season in the history of Everest. 

I could have used more of a hook or a seduction for How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences by saying something like “Don’t want to die? Read this book!” And I might have used some thing like that if I’d queried an agent since New York publishing is more “into” eye-catching taglines than university presses. Which is to say you need to tailor your query to the audience—the agent, editor, or publisher—you’re contacting. 

Second Paragraph 

The second paragraph of your query letter is a mini-synopsis of the book and should be under two hundred words. In it you want to introduce yourself as narrator (that is, not the “real” you but the “you” on the page) and address the major conflict or the nature of the narrator’s journey. You can also include the types of obstacles standing in the way of a successfully completed quest. 

Here is the mini-synopsis I wrote for How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences. 

In this book of thematically linked essays, the narrator explores the taboo subject of death. While several pieces use gallows humor as a way to deflect, Silverman also directly confronts her fears of the ultimate unknown. Her fear stems in part from a sexual assault she hid for years. This experience attests to a fact many women know all too well, that death and sex are intimately tied—not in some philosophical way but in everyday life. As this baby boomer grows, from childhood to adulthood, she explores other origins surrounding her fear of death—as well as her goal of surviving it. Her quest is, by turns, realistic and fantastical, worldly and other-worldly. The odyssey begins with the narrator dubbing herself “Miss Route 17,” while cruising New Jersey’s industrial-strength landscape. Along the way, she survives everything from a piano teacher who stifles her natural talent to a faux heart attack to various maladies that afflict us as we age. Her more internal journey to live forever finds the narrator hoarding memories as well as archaic words, which she uses as talismans against the darkness, overcoming and transforming death through language, memory, and metaphor. 

You will be able to find many other examples on the web. See, for example, the Agent Query website.

Third Paragraph 

The third paragraph focuses on your biographical information. Keep it short and related only to your writing credentials, such as journals in which you’ve published, awards you’ve won, where you received a degree, with whom you studied, and such. Here you can also mention any expertise in the area in which you’re writing, if appropriate. 

Fourth Paragraph 

In the final paragraph, thank the agent or editor for their time and consideration. If, on their website, they’ve asked, say, to include the first ten pages of your manuscript, mention that you’ve done so. Some agents or editors also want to see an attached proposal. Be sure to read all the guidelines carefully. Some are even very specific about what you should include in the “subject” line of the email. 

That’s it. Submit. You can’t get published if you don’t try.

Excerpted from Acetylene Torch Songs. Copyright © 2024, Sue William Silverman. Reproduced by permission of The University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

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Though named after Liontas’ widely praised essay of the same name, the memoir never falls into the easy groove of being a book centered around a single successful idea, and resists plot summary. Using interviews with their wife, an innovative collaboration with a previously incarcerated writer, research, reportage, erasure/redaction, and song lyrics, it’s the kind of book that, when one is done, you turn over in your hands asking, how did they do that? 

Though Liontas and I are friends and neighbors in West Philadelphia, we crafted this interview together in a digital format, which allowed for a pleasant and plaintive evolution of ideas, for me to respond to Liontas’ periodic parenthetical apologies—“brain a little slow”—with explanation points and my own updates that I, in a place of grief after just losing my father, was inspired to listen—playing it loud in my office as we typed back and forth to each other—to the absolute banger that is Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.”  

Emma Copley Eisenberg: Annie, you are a novelist and now you are an essayist too. What is an essay to you?

Annie Liontas: I’m thinking about Alexander Chee’s quote, “A story is something you want to run away with, an essay is something you can’t run away from.” I love your question, because we don’t really know what an essay is—is it an argument, is it about perspective, is it about making meaning through reflection—but Chee’s assertion really gets at something for me. I wasn’t consciously building a collection or memoir-in-essays when I first started, but I pretty quickly realized that this work had to be nonfiction. All of the stories we have of head injury are fiction (even when they’re not), because we don’t have the cultural framework to talk about them the way we do addiction or smoking. 

We’ve known since the Egyptians and Greeks what head injury does to the body and person, but we forget what we’ve learned, or we suppress the knowledge through powerful entities like the NFL—and that means the culture hasn’t yet had the chance to masticate and process the knowledge, or change public policy. I felt that I needed to keep asking these questions, and turning the thing on all of its faces to do it any justice. I also hold onto what Annie Dillard says about how an essay is a moral exercise that involves engagement in the unknown, that it can be about civilization but at the end of the day, what matters in this is you.  

ECE: I am always telling my students the formal choices you make in an essay will inevitably be connected to what the essay is about. I also went to a talk where Rebecca Makkai said that in every project she’s done, she’s never solved a major problem by writing around it, only by bringing it to the center. How did you think about the problem of writing about head injury/TBI in the ways it “makes things fiction” or destabilizes things? 

AL: I would have done the book—and, by extension, the millions of “walking wounded,” as survivors of TBI are called—a great disservice if I had not confronted the bodily experience of injury. The condition is really one of erasure, because it’s not a visible condition, and therefore often dismissed or disbelieved by our highest medical and legal institutions. Paul Lisicky calls it getting blood onto the page, and each time I sat down to a new chapter, I asked myself: what is happening to a body in pain? How can I more precisely capture the physical? How can I, even when I’m writing about anger and Henry VIII or Abraham Lincoln and depression or Lady Gaga, or whatever, honor what people are going through and have been going through invisibly, and sometimes for years. So I think it was mostly a gut check about being honest, and direct, and grounding the abstract and the intellectual in the felt experience.

ECE: That makes a deep kind of sense that you were trying (and succeeding) to render the bodily and physical experience because there is something absent or erased at the very core of what you’re trying to say. That does make me think of the erasure essays—there’s three I believe—in which you interview your wife, as well as some of the other craft risks you take in the book—post it chapters, super short chapters, a co-written essay, research and reporting. Were these craft choices a part of your vision or responses to problems/impasses you hit with more traditional forms of narrative? Were there other craft things you tried that you ultimately discarded?

AL: Those erasure essays were a huge risk! I had to be like: “Babe, can I interview you about the worst period of our lives and then let strangers read it?” Lol. In actuality, S and I had a series of recorded conversations, and then I gave her the transcript and a sharpie and said, cross out what you don’t want published. It was an opportunity to extend conversations we were having in our private life and marriage, but also a way to honor and recognize that, while the multiple concussions was an experience I was isolated inside of, I wasn’t the only one being impacted. She was—is—too.  I thought of all the partners and family members and best friends out there similarly suffering silently, and knew that I had to get outside of my own voice and experience. And traditional form didn’t allow for that. I had to invite other voices in. So, yes, while it wasn’t my initial vision, these craft choices are seeking to offer dynamic responses to a set of fairly unanswerable questions. As you note, I do have a collaborative essay in here, one that started as a profile, and I include other testimonies as well–people I’ve met with head injuries, for instance. The work had to expand to ensure they were all heard.

ECE: I loved “Professor X,” the collaborative essay about head injury and legal reform and the implications head injuries have as predictors for future incarceration. You said this began as a profile, can you tell us more about how this essay came to be and what it was like to write collaboratively?

AL: Thanks for asking—this piece is perhaps the most important to me because of the stakes and what it’s trying to do, and the impact it seeks to make in the world. When I was researching discrepancies in the criminal justice system and our treatment of incarcerated people with TBI, I was stunned to learn that people who are in prison are seven times more likely to get a head injury before they ever step inside a cell. You imagine that number will be high, but seven times? It’s a reminder that we incarcerate sickness, as my co-author Marchell Taylor often says. I reached out to Dr. Kim Gorgens, who is doing incredible research about TBI and the prison system—her current staggering data suggests that 97% of repeat female offenders had a head injury in the last year—and Kim connected me to Marchell, a Denver businessman and former inmate-turned-advocate. I thought I was going to write this very distanced, researched profile on Marchell, but we very quickly got close. We became friends, and the process became far more organic than simple interview. We spent hours on Zoom, during which he shared his story through oration, and then I’d work the thing into written text, and we’d go back and forth. It took many months, lots of chats and texts, and eventually some kind of barrier between us fell and we were seeing each other in our suffering. Marchell’s gift is empathy, and connecting with people, and so even though I really wanted this to be about him, he pushed me to engage more deeply, and we decided this had to be a collaboration.  

ECE: That’s so beautiful and speaks to your skill as an interviewer, a curious person excited to look outwards and render what’s going on in the wider landscape of TBI as well as look inward and interrogate what’s going on in on the level of the interior, the personal. One of the essays that especially stayed with me was “Dancing in the Dark,” about your mother and her queerness and her addiction. On the surface this one isn’t as explicitly connected to the theme of TBI and invisible injury, how do you see this one fitting within the broader things you care about in this book?

AL: “Dancing in the Dark,” at its heart, is about me grappling after forty years with my mother’s addiction and queerness. She was an immigrant who was conscripted into an arranged marriage, and while I always had sympathy for her, I think I reacted the way that many children of addicts do, which is to resist the experience and even the narrative—to say, That’s not me.  What I understood—as a queer person dealing with a chronic condition and post-concussive syndrome—was how invisible her suffering had been. I had to reckon with that, and admit my own culpability in being willfully blind. Then I learned that scientists are discovering addiction and head trauma look similar in the brain. That is, damage is damage. I was floored by this. Suddenly, my mother’s experience and my own were not very far apart, and I had to ask myself what it must have been like for her to suffer unseen.  

ECE: You write, “Never marry a writer, they live two truths at once, both the story they tell and its revision.” There’s a lot in this book about lies, doubt, duplicity, and storytelling. I was lucky enough to be on a panel with you last year at AWP called “Hide and Seek.” There is a sense of duplicity and hiding and seeking in this book in the best way. Why was it so important to you to write explicitly about lies and doubt?

AL: A couple of the pieces interrogate the relationship between our public and private selves, and how we must navigate those selves in a capitalist country that demands our full and complete participation: that is, we must at all times create an illusion of wellness and vigor, even when we aren’t well, even when it’s impossible to get out of bed. I had been taught those values, too, as an immigrant from Greece. My father was a welder, my parents were illiterate grape farmers, and no matter what was going on at home—the family, the body—you had to get up and work and produce. I think this was also the kind of erasure I was resisting with essays like “Doubt, My Love,” the fiction of the perceived self that is in service of others even when it comes at great cost. We occupy those false selves even in our most intimate relationships—marriage, for instance—because the borders bleed, and after years of training it can become almost impossible to locate the authentic self. Then one day you wake up and think, Why doesn’t anybody see me?

Most people going through TBI, especially women and people of color, are not believed. Outside of the NFL and sports, we have a very limited lexicon and almost no mental image of what “concussion” means. For instance, girls who play soccer are twice as likely as boys to get head injuries, yet we rarely discuss that. The female body is more vulnerable to concussion, and to post-concussive disorder, but we don’t talk about that, either. Instead, the medical profession and culture seem to trace this back to hysteria, calling it psychosomatic, and dismissing peoples’ actual experiences.

ECE: There’s also a great deal about other kinds of art and creativity other than writing in this collection. We get Bruce Springsteen, we get dancing (a lot of dancing!!), we get your wife the architect, we get riding a bike and a list of song titles. Is there a way in which this book is about art as an enterprise or about how brain injury impacts being a maker and receiver of good art?

AL: Yes a lot of dancing!  Where I’m from, we call it “Church”! I’m drawn to all kinds of art, as I think most artists are, so even if this weren’t about brain injury, it would have been hard to keep art out of these pages, and how it gives us our humanity.  But perhaps the inclusion of the Springsteen lyrics and these other artifacts serves as a tool to further capture the experience of injury and dislocation. On my worst days, I couldn’t listen to music, or exercise, or watch TV, or read. But on the ok days, even when I knew tomorrow was probably going to suck, I could listen to “Dancing in the Dark” and take a walk and feel like some part of me was still alive. Art, even when you’re broken, can make you feel whole.

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