Avni Doshi’s debut novel, Burnt Sugar, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize and will be released in the US next month from Overlook Press, has been published in more than twenty languages. It is a startling exploration of memory, loss, and motherhood. In it, we follow a woman named Antara as she weaves us in and out of her traumatic recollections of living with a neglectful, abusive mother, first in an Osho-style ashram, and later begging for money on the streets of Pune. In a novel that is curiously alive with the rococo workings of one woman’s mind, Antara’s brilliance, rage, and eloquence spark up out of every page, as she takes the reader deeper and deeper into the labyrinthine twists of her troubled life.

Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey and currently lives in Dubai. She has a BA from Barnard College and an MA from University College London. After her completing her MA, Avni moved to India to curate and write about South Asian contemporary art. She was awarded the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize in 2013 and a Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in 2014. Her writing has appeared in Vogue, Granta, and the Sunday Times.

I was delighted to speak to Avni on a video call about her first book, the complex ways a reader might find entry into her protagonist’s mind, and more.

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The Rumpus: You recently said something very interesting about the novel’s first sentence. About how you saw, I’m paraphrasing here, but how you saw the entire shape of the book within it. First sentences are an obsession of mine. Was your first sentence really your first sentence?

Avni Doshi: I didn’t know it was the first sentence, if that makes sense. It was only once I got to the end that I realized that it was the first sentence. I heard the voice of the narrator the most clearly in it. It came like at the eighth draft, so, by that point, I knew the story inside and out. I knew parts of the story that would never make it into the book. I knew aspects of the character that didn’t make sense anymore for this particular story, but they were there in previous drafts. So, yeah, I mean, it was there at the beginning, but I did a lot of preparation to get there.

Rumpus: So, the book went through eight drafts—eight significant drafts, you’d say?

Doshi: Correct.

Rumpus: Can you speak about the evolution from the first to the eighth? And how you knew that the eighth was it? Can you give a sense of the mindsets that you cycled through while you were writing those drafts?

Doshi: I think the first draft was so exploratory. I didn’t even know that I was writing a novel until I was quite far along. In the beginning, I was writing mostly in fragments. I must have had forty thousand words before I started to think about putting it together. I mean, it had some kind of flow, but I had to make it more coherent in terms of the narrative. And then I spent a couple of drafts trying to sound like a novelist, because at that point, I’d won the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize. That’s when I thought, oh, I’m a novelist. So I tried to make the book sound like what I thought a novel would sound like. Those drafts were horrible! There was one draft that went back generations, and it turned into a partition story. That draft was in the third-person, and it was horrible.

Rumpus: Third-person didn’t feel like the right point of view.

Doshi: It did not. I also went through a phase where I felt I had to say more, do more. The description has to be more and the character, everything has to seem like it’s coming off the page, and that’s actually so unnatural for me. I think at one point, after I had Antara’s voice in my head, I realized that no, this is an intimate story. It’s about the life of this one woman, and yes, this is her mother’s life also, but it’s told through her experience of her mother. I started with an idea and I had expanded it. I didn’t even know that there was a value in paring back. It was at the beginning of this final draft, where I realized that, no, I have an urge to pull back. That’s what feels good. In my earlier drafts, I’d been fighting that urge.

Rumpus: Let’s delve further into self-consciousness. You’ve mentioned that not having an MFA was something that you were made conscious of. Do you feel the experience of not having an MFA has helped or hindered you, in the sense that an MFA could have provided something you felt you were lacking? Or is it the other way around: you’re relieved that an MFA hasn’t informed or formalized your writing practice?

Doshi: I have mixed feelings about it. I don’t know that I’d still be writing if I had to go through a rigorous workshopping process. I’m pretty thin-skinned, but I do think the structure of an MFA might have been useful. I think the writing community would be nice. I think the fellowship that I did at UEA was wonderful, because it was kind of this in-between space where I felt immersed in this very academic setting, but at the same time I could be as involved as I felt comfortable. What seems strange to me about the workshop dynamic that it sets you up to think that there is no place for bad writing. I think bad writing is essential. Bad writing is the most important thing for learning how to write. Even your literary heroes, if they say they don’t produce bad writing, they’re lying.

Rumpus: In the first chapter, there’s a line that struck me when Antara’s talking about her art project, which is so incredibly powerful. She says that an artist couldn’t be fearful about sharing her secrets with strangers. I feel like that resonates across many forms. A writer also can’t be fearful about sharing their secrets with strangers. I was wondering if that feels true to you not just on the level of the novel, but also on a personal level?

Doshi: To me it’s a fine line between feeling free to get at some kind of truth, but then at the same time, wanting to protect one’s own privacy. This fine line is the difficult line to walk in terms of my own work because I do want my privacy. I don’t want people to assume that the book is my life and then make assumptions about what my private existence looks like. At the same time, I want to feel free to draw on my life experiences. I want to feel like I have ownership over my life. Sometimes I don’t think that there’s such a clear distinction between what constitutes real life and what constitutes art. The closer you look at that, the murkier it gets. But I agree with what Antara says in the book. I don’t want to withhold something that I think is important, to protect something else. Well, that’s what I think now. Let’s see how it goes in the future. 

Rumpus: In an article I read, you mentioned that The Lying Life of Adults was the novel you were most looking forward to reading. Elena Ferrante is a nom de plume that the author has taken to tell her secrets, but also to protect them. How do you feel about that idea? Do you find any parallels between your novel and Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet?

Doshi: I mean, yeah, I love Elena Ferrante. I read her quartet after I had already finished my book. So, I was not familiar with her work while I was writing. I think there’s something in the sensibility, the voice, there’s definitely something in terms of even the themes that run throughout her work that parallels with mine. I do think she’s protecting herself, which is incredibly smart. It’s an interesting question: do I ever want to be completely detached from my work? I wonder if that ever gives Ferrante any pain, that she’s been scrubbed out of the story. I probably have a lot of internal confusion about this question. I wonder how much I want to share, but do I want to be completely absent from anything to do with my book? I have no answer. It’s the thing about the first-person, right? There’s something seductive about believing that the first-person narrator is the author. I can almost understand from the point of view of a reader, especially if your writing is really persuasive, how they can just fall into conflating the author with the first-person narrator. I’m trying to think if I’ve ever done that myself.

Rumpus: It seems to be more common to conflate women authors with especially, quote unquote unlikable, difficult women narrators. Which brings me to the question of an unlikable protagonist, and our palate or appetite for them. What were the kind of hurdles that you faced with having somebody like Antara as the protagonist of your novel?

Doshi: I read reviews where people often say that they just cannot feel empathy for her. She’s completely unsympathetic. I think that is probably the challenge for a lot of readers to find a way into the novel, when you really don’t like the narrator. But I think that was very important for me. I did not want to sugarcoat any aspects of Antara’s character. I wanted to create a space in the novel where she did not have to be polite, where she could be exactly who she was. I wanted to create a safe space for her to expose what she wanted and hide what she wanted, without making anything palatable for the reader. I wanted to push boundaries. If that ends up feeling destabilizing for the reader, that’s okay.

In my understanding, it’s hard to listen to women who sound ugly, or who feel ugly. One reader also commented on how I used the word “smell” about sixty or seventy times. Smell is important in the book, and not just because smell is deeply connected to memory. I’m interested in these ideas that we have about what women are supposed to look like, but also, what are women supposed to smell like? I was interested in that. I talk about the smell of menstruation, the smell of the body before and after giving birth; I talk about different odors that a woman’s body produces naturally. In the same way that a character being unlikable is not palatable for the audience, a female producing smells, having body hair in unacceptable places, or being too fat or too thin, these are all not things that are palatable. It wasn’t important to me to make any of these things palatable. That was the furthest thing from my mind. It’s useful in a way because it kind of holds a mirror to societal expectations, and it exposes a lot of misogyny.

Rumpus: I think that one of the great goals of fiction is to evoke or invoke empathy for someone who is not like ourselves. Throughout the history of literature, it’s been put upon us to have empathy for messed up, unlikable men. Nabokov’s Lolita and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger are two such books that come to mind—where we’re supposed to be rooting for the murderer or the rapist—but when it comes to a woman character who is basically fucked up, and has fucked-up ideals, suddenly, there’s this huge pulling back from readers. Which I think is really interesting.

Doshi: I think as a reader, it’s worthwhile to think about why you’re unable to have empathy for a certain character. And so how is that a limitation of your own empathy, rather than, rather than necessarily a fault of the writing? It might be a fault of the writing or it might be a fault of the novel, but I think it’s worth looking at both.

Rumpus: I don’t think in your case, at all, it’s the fault of the writing.

Doshi: I found what the Booker Prize judges said about the novel very illuminating. One of the judges said the novel pushes the limits of the readers’ empathy but they saw that as a positive thing. I hadn’t given it much thought until then. We’re all difficult women now. How did all the women become so difficult? Suddenly, suddenly, overnight.

Rumpus: What fascinates me about Antara is that she has this art project that’s a central theme of the book. Her art focuses on a sort of pattern-making, or sense-making, by obsessively collecting and hoarding. She’s trying to make sense of the world. I think that’s definitely a trauma response, because she had such a nonsensical childhood. How did you land on that art project as a practice for her?

Doshi: I think it came out of the voice, out of the way I could hear her expressing herself. There was like a lot of specificity in the words she would use, a kind of precision, an interest in the paring down, in getting to what is essential. And almost an obsession with a kind of cleanliness, even a kind of a routine, a sense of hygiene associated with the way I could see she was. I felt Antara was expressing herself, in terms of the language and in terms of the sentences and the rhythm. As a response to her trauma, she’s in search of a kind of coherence, and a kind of wholeness. I felt that her artwork should reflect all of those conscious preoccupations. But what we also see is that a lot of her subconscious preoccupations begin to emerge. Her aggression, her desire for revenge, her kind of falling into these patterns of manipulation, perhaps of lying, that also begins to emerge in the artwork as an underpinning of the work, which isn’t immediately apparent to an average reader, but as you get to know more about her, as you get to know more about her relationship with her mother, it becomes clearer and clearer that under the hood of this order is her deeply troubled, tumultuous experience of a double life being lived.

I think in a way, the artwork offered me a metaphor for Antara in terms of who she’s trying to be for the rest of the world, and who she actually is. I think even the question of performance in terms of the artwork, and in terms of who she is, it comes out again and again, right? Because as Antara says in the book, she’s always thinking about performance. She’s wondering if her mother is also performing. If the world is not watching and you’re not performing, what is your purpose? Even in the end, I think like the last scene, there’s kind of a theatricality. There are several scenes in the novel where this performative aspect, or this kind of theatrical aspect emerges. Those were scenes that I think tie into the art as a performance for the exterior world, but also reflects the kind of interior conflict.

Rumpus: My last question is that there are two editions of your novel that exist: one in India and another in the UK and everywhere else in the world. What does it feel like to have two versions out simultaneously? 

Doshi: In some ways, it’s complicated. On one hand that they’re both my books, so I feel kind of equally proud of both of them. And I also have very complicated feelings about both of them, as you would about any work that you put out. I guess that’s kind of interesting, right? The fact that two versions of the same work can coexist, as you mentioned, and kind of be circulating. But then you can order anything online. So, all editions are available everywhere, to some degree. I guess literature might just be where we expect there’s going to be one kind of master text. There’s some kind of hierarchy in our minds, as far as the written word is concerned. But if you look at other art forms, people often do editions or versions of the same work. It’s interesting to consider that maybe the work is never final, that it has possibility of shifting and changing. So, it doesn’t bother me too much.

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Photograph of Avni Doshi by Sharon Haridas.

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with torrin greathouse about her new collection, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, December 2020), inventing forms, revenge poems, how the pandemic has affected accessibility for writers, and more.

This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month the Rumpus Poetry Book Club hosts an online discussion with the book club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview. To join the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, click here. Upcoming poets include Erin Belieu, Adrienne Christian, Threa Almontaser, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Andrés Cerpa, Kevin Simmonds, Kaveh Akbar, Carly Ingram, and more!

This Rumpus Poetry Book Club interview was edited by Brian Spears.

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Brian S: I can start with the piece I wrote on why we chose this collection for our Poetry Book Club. In it, I talked about your use of craft, the way you used erasure to work with haibun, which is a form I’m not super experienced with. Can you talk some about the ways you use craft in your work, and maybe why you chose that form in particular?

torrin a. greathouse: So, the burning haibun is a form I invented as part of the process of writing this book, and it came out of reading several books but primarily Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, specifically the poems “Immigrant Haibun” and “Aubade with Burning City,” which got me thinking about the ideas of the haibun form and a memory in collapse side-by-side.

Brian S: Oh interesting. I love when poets fiddle with form and remake them to suit a need.

torrin a. greathouse: Many haibun focus on recounting travel or describing an exterior landscape, so it emerged to me that the form could model instead an interior landscape—which could be emotion or memory, both of which are subject to collapse, erasure, burning…

I’m very much of the mind that a poetic form doesn’t just exist in a structural sense, but also in an emotional/affective sense. So, when I use form, I’m trying to attend to both of these concerns. For example, if I’m using a sonnet, it’s not just the formal shape I’m attentive of, but also the expectations carried by the canonical themes of sonnets (which preload tones for some readers, and can allow me to follow or subvert expectation) as well as the affective move of the volta.

Annata Tempinski: It was my first time seeing the form. And, I admit, I didn’t know how to read it: left to right ? The left side, then the right side?

Emily Francis: Have you created or adapted any other forms?

torrin a. greathouse: The idea of mirroring a poem is (to my knowledge) my innovation. Also, Julian Randall and I created a new form over this last summer called the fox’s gambit, although the first poem I wrote in that form will not be coming out until, I think, November 2021.

Brian S: Can you give us a sense of that form?

torrin a. greathouse: It’s an Oulipian form that involves using a random generator, or having a collaborating poet remove letters from your lexicon to restrict your language as you progress through a seventeen-line poem. It’s based upon an episode from the 1990s anime, Yu Yu Hakusho.

Emily Francis: I can’t wait to see the new poem!

Brian S: What a coincidence! I just watched the first episode of that the other day. I’m trying to expand my knowledge of anime.

torrin a. greathouse: It’s a personal fave.

Brian S: So, you write a line and your partner removes a letter or letters, and then you continue?

torrin a. greathouse: If I remember right off the top of my head, it’s every other line starting on the third? So: 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, etc. It’s a hard form. Maybe tougher to write than burning haibun, but I might just have more practice at those lol.

Brian S: That’s an interesting restriction, not being able to use particular letters. Back when I taught poetry, I would sometimes use that as a prompt just to force students to widen their vocabularies.

Annata Tempinski: torrin, how did the “mirror”poem originate?

torrin a. greathouse: So, I had a professor in undergrad who… essentially argued that we should not use the identity of a poet, or the physical form of a poem, in our reading of that work. In particular, he said this in response to me talking about a section of The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay being about Black motherhood.

He pissed me off bad enough that for the final assignment, I decided to write a poem which could not be read without taking into account the form, or my identities. That poem was my final assignment of undergrad, and the first draft of the final poem in Wound from the Mouth of a Wound.

Brian S: I’m sitting here kind of dumbstruck by that take on poetry. Like, I could see suggesting that it’s possible to read too much of a poet’s identity into a poem, but to ignore it completely?

torrin a. greathouse: It’s a hell of a take for someone purporting to be worth their salt as a professor.

Brian S: And to ignore the form itself is even farther than the New Critics went, if I recall correctly. Grad school was a long time ago…

Emily Francis: Seems like even when a poet writes a poem that’s not autobiographical, it’s still their experience told in a different context.

torrin a. greathouse: Yeah, it was a hell of a moment.

Annata Tempinski: I agree, Emily. How can the two be separated completely?

torrin a. greathouse: But I got a better poem out of it than he’s written in the last couple decades, so we’ll call it a win.

Brian S: I wonder how many poems have been written because a professor said something dumb?

Emily Francis: I love revenge poems.

torrin a. greathouse: At this point, I think the “workshop poem” is a time-honored genre.

Brian S: I mean, we’ve all written a few, I’d imagine.

torrin a. greathouse: Though maybe Marwa Helal has the best one…

Annata Tempinski: Yes, and maybe that is why he made that statement. To give the writer an impetus to write in a unique way.

torrin a. greathouse: I sincerely doubt that

torrin a. greathouse: Regarding Marwa’s poem, I encourage y’all to save this and read it later.

Brian S: Oh, yes, we read Marwa’s collection, Invasive species, in the Poetry Book Club two years ago!

Emily Francis: torrin, in your reading the other night, did I hear you correctly when you said you usually have a poem fully formed in your mind before you come to the page?

torrin a. greathouse: Yes! I tend to build them in my head before I ever write them down. I sometimes take notes when I have a good line or image pop up that doesn’t belong to another poem, and I’ll sometimes slide those into poems. But mostly, I create scaffolds of images and ideas in my head and write poems in a single sitting. It’s mostly the longer ones, or ones with more intricate or delicate topics, that take me more sessions to compose slowly.

For example, if y’all know the poem “On Confinement,” I probably spent about six months writing that one on and off.

Emily Francis: I imagine you must be revising in your mind, too. Do you have a process for revising once you have a draft or is it pretty much done once you get it to the page?

Annata Tempinski: I admire that! I have several half-baked poems in my notebooks. I dwell too much and then when I put a poem aside and come back to it, I will make changes. I admire the one-sitting poems because I think that speaks to confidence and a surety in one’s writing.

torrin a. greathouse: A lot of the revising does happen in my head. About half of my poems never get revised on the page beyond their form and structure changing, line breaks being tweaked a little, etc. But the divide is harsh. Poems always come out almost finished, or take weeks to months to finish. The current long poem I’m working on for my MFA thesis has been in progress for nearly two years of drafts and revisions.

I’m also the kind of person who, unless I absolutely cannot, will just stop everything and write it if a poem comes, or just speak it aloud to myself over and over until I can reach a phone or computer.

Brian S: Something I’ve been asking everyone in the book club for the last almost-year now is what it’s like trying to launch a book in the middle of a pandemic.

torrin a. greathouse: Tbh, as a disabled poet who is also enrolled in graduate school… it’s kind of a dream come true. I can do gigs, speak at colleges, read two or three times a month, without interrupting my teaching or fucking up my sleep or ruining my fragile health.

Brian S: That makes sense.

torrin a. greathouse: It’s also suddenly so much more accessible, with CC and ASL for many events. For example, my book release had nearly three hundred people there, from as near as my roommate in the other room of our apartment, and as far as Nigeria. And so many deaf and hard of hearing people who would never be able to access a reading like it before.

Brian S: So, this pandemic has forced the accessibility issue for a lot of organizations who hadn’t considered that a priority? That’s amazing.

Emily Francis: This has been my experience as well. I’ve been able to watch so many readings! I would never get to them if I had to go in person.

torrin a. greathouse: Also, it helped me to push for my book to be released as an audiobook as well, which is now in production; I recorded it in December and hopefully it should be releasing by February.

Emily Francis: That’s fantastic!

torrin a. greathouse: Exactly!

Brian S: That’s excellent.

Annata Tempinski: Congratulations on all your accomplishments, torrin!

torrin a. greathouse: And, not only that, but things that disabled people have been asking for for years are now being done because everyone needs them—and I really hope that stays after the pandemic is over.

Emily Francis: I hope so, too!

torrin a. greathouse: I’m going to be reading with Zeyn Joukhadar for Women & Children First Books on January 21.

Shelly Stewart Cato: torrin, this book is a marvel. You are so brave with form. I am a big fan of the abecedarian. Did I spell that right?

torrin a. greathouse: Shelly, thank you! That’s one of my faves to read! Also, I believe this is usually an hour-long chat, but I’ll definitely stick around longer if folks have more questions, because I’m having a nice time and my internet had me drop in late.

Shelly Stewart Cato: Oh, good. I’ll try to come to the reading on the 21st—“seizures / rattling inside my skin” was so apt.

torrin a. greathouse: Fun fact for that one: it’s actually the newest poem in the book and was written a week after getting out of a week-long seizure observation. Hence the bitterness lol.

Shelly Stewart Cato: Did the five sections in the collection evolve naturally?

torrin a. greathouse: The five sections took a long time to emerge as I was building up the book. It kind of ended up being four sections: 1, 4, 5, & one that was the current 2 and 3, but that section felt too damn long. The current sectioning and ordering didn’t emerge until I found the Franny Choi epigraph, which kind of helped separate those ideas out a little bit and then things naturally fell into place.

Brian S: What’s been on your reading list lately, torrin?

torrin a. greathouse: I’m rereading Meg Day’s Last Psalm at Sea Level. I also just finished Jubi Arriola-Headley’s original kink, and I’m about halfway though Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House.

Brian S: I think we’re going to call it a night now. Thank you again torrin, and Annata, Emily, and Shelly, for your comments and questions!

torrin a. greathouse: Alright! Thank y’all so much for chatting tonight! Hopefully I get the chance to chat with some of y’all more in Q&As etc. for future events. And maybe run into each other in the IRL future. Have a great night y’all!

Brian S: Wow, an IRL future seems so weird now.

torrin a. greathouse: Yeah… tbh it does. But here’s to the IRL.

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Photograph of torrin a. greathouse by Tarik Dobbs.

Dantiel W. Moniz’s debut story collection, Milk Blood Heat, just published this week from Grove Atlantic, but you might’ve already encountered her work in the Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. Moniz writes about family, marriage, class, loss, and race with wisdom and intensity, and her stories are rife with vivid images and sentences that can stand strikingly alone. In “Feast,” she explores a woman’s alienation and grief following a miscarriage; “The Hearts of Our Enemies” details a “cold war” between a shamed mother and her teenage daughter; “Outside the Raft” dives deep into the darkness latent in the human heart. All of the stories here are boldly told and hum with tension.

Moniz is a Tin House Scholar and a recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction and the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminar; the latter was where I met her in 2018. She lives in Northeast Florida, where most of the stories in her collection are set.

I caught up with Moniz recently over email to discuss linked story collections, rituals, motherhood, spirituality, Florida, and the value of writing workshops.

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The Rumpus: I was impressed by the thematic coherence of this collection. Milk, blood, and heat factor into almost every story, often in some form of ritual, like the blood-sisters oath in the title story or the moon festival in “An Almanac of Bones.” Do you think of this collection as an interconnected whole rather than a set of standalone stories?

Dantiel W. Moniz: I definitely do. A lot of times with short story collections, it seems people have trouble thinking of them as linked unless the characters are the same, and that leaves out all of the other points of immersion—why someone might be attracted to a particular book—like voice, place, mood, ideology. Those are not small things, and what would happen if we, as readers, as critics, broadened our definition of what constitutes a link? There are certain words (besides milk, blood, or heat) that I think of as totems, that build resonance throughout the collection. These are cyclical stories, and in putting the collection together, I was interested in how each piece might be in conversation with those around it. How is one story propelling or expanding the reader’s understanding of another?

Rumpus: Motherhood is perhaps the most significant theme in the book. You write about miscarriage and the anxieties of pregnancy in the twenty-first century. There are absent mothers, domineering mothers, sweet mothers, grandmothers as stand-in mothers, and “cold wars” between daughters and mothers. What drew you to explore the many variations of motherhood, daughterhood, and sisterhood?

Moniz: I think, by force of conditioning, motherhood is something that has always been on my mind, even before it was conscious to me. Think about growing up as a girl in this country (and beyond) and all of the gendered expectations that come with that—the kitchen sets, toy vacuums, and baby dolls you might have mothered as play. So, on the one hand, it feels natural to explore all of the joys and anxieties that come with the territory. As far as sister/daughterhood, I’m really interested in the varying connections and shapes of femininity, and how our ideas of what that looks like are both limited and complex. When I was younger, I’d get bored or frustrated with shows, books, or games that had no characters that embodied my lived experience, or ones that were superficially drawn, but now, looking back on those mediums, I’m so intrigued by what those superficialities say about the person who created them, and the societal impact of the time period in which the creator was informed. When I first started this collection, I actually asked my agent: Is it a problem that so many of these characters are girls/women? And she said: No. Period, just like that. I needed to hear that plainly, that I’m allowed to write about whatever I want to write about without worrying about other people’s expectations. Honestly, I’m just happy to get to bring the kinds of characters I’m most interested in to life.

Rumpus: In “Snow,” “The Loss of Heaven,” and “Exotics,” you examine the service industry as a venue where race, gender, and class dynamics play out. Were those stories informed by personal experience at all?

Moniz: I’ve written since I was young, but before the plunge of committing myself to my writing these last four years, the only jobs I held were in the service or retail industries. I’ve never had what people might refer to as a “real job,” which indicates a lot about the ideas ingrained in us regarding low-wage jobs and working-class people in general. I used to have a lot of shame about that, but having had time to reflect on my near-decade of service work, I realize most of that shame was externally generated. Customers loved to get in my business as if for my own benefit—”I hope you’re in school,” “What are your plans after this?”—when often it was just a way to couch their own judgments about how they perceived me and what I was currently doing to keep myself alive. I think restaurants are perfect, dynamic settings to explore characters and relationships, both on and off the page, and I know that’s considered cliché, to write about what you yourself have done, but I don’t care. I’m endlessly fascinated by what can be revealed in the kinds of power dynamics you find between servers and the served.

Rumpus: “The Loss of Heaven” features the collection’s only male protagonist, Fred, and I found him pretty pathetic, but I never felt that you, the writer, were judging him. Are you on good terms with your characters? All of them are flawed, but you don’t seem to look down on them, and you don’t protect them from painful situations either.

Moniz: One of my intentions with this collection was to explore the situational and subjective nature of words we tend to think of as absolute: good, bad, right, wrong. All of these are based in perspective, they’re judgments, and they effectively have no meaning without their opposites. With these characters, I do feel tender toward them, but I tried my best not to protect them from their own decisions and rather, let their storylines play out in a way that felt natural. I’m not judging them, and I’m not trying to lead readers to any particular judgement either. However, when people read these stories, I do hope that they allow space to observe the circumstances under which the characters are judging/being judged, and see where and how the power flows. In any given moment, who is being privileged by definition?

Rumpus: You write from a number points of view—first-person, close third-person, first-person plural—but the point of view always feels intimate, in part because of the way you render the physical experience of complex emotions. How do you decide on a story’s point of view? Did the point of view of a story ever change during revision?

Moniz: This is one of the things I wish I was more conscious of so I can sound super smart and in-control during interviews like this, but really, so much of my writing process is instinctual, and I’m still learning how to articulate it to myself and others. I guess, no matter what point of view I choose, I always want to make sure I can feel “dropped-in” to the emotional layer of the story, which in turn extends that same access to the reader. I want these stories to be felt in the body, so it’s just whatever allows me to do that most effectively. The choice between first and third is sometimes as simple as, how much psychic distance do I need in this piece? Sometimes I want to be able to pan out a little. I want it to be plausible that we can have a snippet of another character’s inner world. It depends. And I just checked to make sure I’m not lying, but for this collection, it looks like only the title story changed point of view, from first to third.

Rumpus: These stories feel so controlled without seeming constricted, and I wondered about your revision process. Do you write loose, messy first drafts and then trim back? Or do you try to maintain control from the outset? Do you tend to begin with an image?

Moniz: Whenever I open a document for another session, I start back at the top and work my way down to wherever I left off. It’s a compulsion in me, especially as I’m so focused on things working first and foremost on the sentence level. I never thought of it like that, as control, but I guess that’s accurate. The tinkering just feels a part of my process. It’s probably why I’m having such a hard time with the novel form. It’s impossible to start from the top once you’re in deep. When I finally have a complete draft, I let time pass before I go in again. Could be a couple of days, could be a week, a month, whatever, and then I open the latest draft and rewrite the newest alongside it. Retyping (as opposed to inserting/deleting) helps me get back into the flow of a story and generate new insights.

Rumpus: It was interesting to read “The Loss of Heaven,” having encountered an earlier version of the story in a workshop. Do you find workshops useful? As a writer you basically get battered with feedback and advice, and sometimes even the good advice isn’t the right advice for a particular story, which can be confusing. Were all of these stories workshopped at some point?

Moniz: Half of these stories were first written during my MFA at UW-Madison, and so were workshopped there. Some later drafts of these same pieces were workshopped at other conferences, like with “The Loss of Heaven” during KWLS. The rest were written after I graduated, but I still showed them to my first readers for feedback. With any feedback, I usually need distance before I can actually digest and see if it’s useful to me. I have to be able to let my guard down.

You make an excellent point regarding advice in the workshop: sometimes even the good advice isn’t the right advice for a particular story. That’s true. I think many of the complaints about the workshop model come from facilitators and participants trying to impose dictums about the craft of writing and from people thinking that the way they choose to write is the best way. I mostly enjoy workshop because I love discussing craft and ideas. It’s exciting. For me, the value in workshop is the opportunity for brains to spark off of one another in a way that can’t be replicated alone. My friend and I were talking about this recently. Writers we consider famous or prolific, like James Baldwin or Toni Morrison, maybe weren’t in workshops, but they didn’t do the work alone. They hung out with their friends in Paris, or cafés or parties, wherever, and talked about the work. That’s the kind of atmosphere I want to generate when I teach: no hard and fast rules, only conversations about what we’re picking up on and how to make it work.

Rumpus: Can you talk a little bit about the Biblical allusions in your work? This book is very much a work of realistic fiction, but it’s also deeply concerned with the spiritual.

Moniz: I grew up around four main faiths, sects of Christianity including Jehovah Witnesses, Islam, and Krishna Consciousness, and though on the surface they might have appeared vastly dissimilar, after understanding more and reading their holy texts, I felt each one was essentially calling the same thing by a different name. In my twenties, I also got really into spiritualists like Eckhart Tolle and Ram Dass, and wanted to discover alternate ways of experiencing spirituality and consciousness. I’m interested in exploring how perspective and our ideas about the nature of God conjoin to form our worldview. Even if indirectly, in all of my work and my existence I’m largely after why we believe what we believe, and what that means individually and collectively.

Rumpus: Your epigraph comes from Their Eyes Were Watching God, and there’s a Zora Neale Hurston reference in “Thicker than Water.” How has her work influenced this collection, and your writing in general?

Moniz: I think about her a lot, and how she died poor and unrecognized, her remains tucked away in an unmarked grave until 1973. I came to her work much later in life; for instance, she wasn’t taught in the schools and universities I attended. Obviously, now she’s rightly getting her flowers, and that’s great, but it makes me conscious of the importance of supporting the art and artists who move and change us before they’re gone, when it can still benefit them.

When I discovered Hurston, it was such a shock and pleasure to me. Here was a writer who had lived in Florida, whose stories took place there. In general, people don’t think of Florida as a literary state or as a place that can inspire literature. I think it’s easy to shit on the South, out of ignorance, out of elitism, whatever, so finding a Black woman who was writing this place before my time affected me in all the big ways. It gave me a pride and a precedent to do my own work.

Rumpus: How has Florida in general and Jacksonville in particular influenced your writing, besides providing the setting for these stories.

Moniz: I have complicated feelings about my home state, my city, but this is the environment that shaped me and I do love it, its intensity and excesses, even its contradictions. It strikes me as a very human place, not good or bad, just multifaceted, sometimes misunderstood, and absolutely singular. I try to capture that on the page when I write.

Rumpus: Were there any other key influences on this book? What was your reading life like when you were working on it?

Moniz: Movies and television shows always. I watched Sharp Objects the summer it premiered and just reveled in the Southern Gothic of it all. I was mostly reading other story collections for a sense of what can be done with the form: Friday Black, A Guide to Being Born, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, etc. When I checked out Female Trouble from the library and started reading, I just had this moment like, Oh, she knows exactly what I’m talking about. This is what I want to do. I ended up buying the book as soon as I was finished.

Rumpus: What’s your writing routine like these days? Do you keep strict rituals?

Moniz: I had a nice setup in my old life where I had the same two consecutive days off and I’d go to a coffee shop around 2 p.m. and stay until close. Some of that stuck with me. I still write mostly in bursts rather than every day, and start in the afternoon because I’m a night person. Even when I was younger, I pretty much always wrote on the computer, but I do outline or ask myself questions by hand. Not detailed outlines because that’s too strict for me, but a loose guide that gives me wiggle room. Always on a yellow legal pad with a Pilot G2 07 pen. I don’t know what it is about the combo, but it does something for me, so I don’t look at it too closely; I just try to catch the writing when I can.

***

Photograph of Dantiel Moniz by Marisa Pilolli.

An estimated one on four women will endure a miscarriage in their lifetime. Yet, the experience of miscarriage is often mired in silence. We sometimes struggle to find the right words to get across the complicated feelings wedded to this particular kind of grief. When reading Chloe Yelena Miller’s debut full-length poetry collection Viable, I began to think we might find that language in poetry.

Viable takes the reader on a journey from want to loss to renewal, and dissects the pressures of childbearing. It’s refreshing to explore this subject through a non-religious lens. Chloe’s poems seek to understand through definitions, recipes, apologies, and examinations of how cultures address pregnancy and loss, like in the poem “Objects”: “In Japan, mothers mourn / lost water children / Gardens of small statues / in red knitted hats, bibs.” The poems are both universal and intimate, marked by an openness that feels like the author extending a hand for the reader to take hold of.

I was first introduced to Chloe’s work at an event in Washington, DC, where she writes and teaches. She read from her chapbook, Unrest (2013). Although I now live on the other side of the Atlantic, I was thrilled to have a Zoom chat with Chloe, a poet and friend I deeply admire, to discuss speaking and thinking in more than one language, publishing during a pandemic, and the years that went into the making of her debut collection.

***

The Rumpus: You speak Italian, and you’ve spent time living in Florence—those influences can be seen throughout the book. Do you see connections between speaking another language and expressing the experience of miscarriage?

Chloe Yelena Miller: The definition poems have found themselves into other poems that didn’t go anywhere, but there’s been this sort of repeating. I have this desire to create a sort of dictionary of Italian, and maybe some English, vocabulary poems that express things in some way. And it kind of started with this poem I wrote about my Aunt Dora. It was called “Magari,” which is a word that doesn’t exactly translate into English that’s sort of like “I wish” or “if only,” and then I define it through an image. I’m not teaching Italian anymore, but when I was I would try to give an experience or show what a word meant so then I was pulling that into the poems, which felt like a really fun kind of prompt or beginning. And, there are some words that just come into my mind in Italian and not in English. Sometimes I feel like I get stuck. I’m comfortable in Italian. I’m by no means a native bilingual speaker, so I don’t think all the time in Italian, but there are a couple places where I’ll just fall into Italian.

Rumpus: Do you feel like there are certain situations or certain emotions that are kind of gateways into thinking more in Italian than in English?

Miller: I think so. I think it feels like it’s mine, since we’re living in America and it’s such an English language world… so it feels like sort of a private thought and a way to investigate, just with myself. It’s private but there’s a distancing of: Here’s this other way to say it. To present it to someone else and to pull it out of myself, which I think the poems do. It makes it possible not to have to—and probably you feel like this—you don’t have to keep remembering because you’ve written it down so now it’s out. It exits you. And then you have it, so you don’t have to keep thinking about it.

Rumpus: I was looking back at the structure of the book—you have it in these sections: “Carried,” “Carrying,” “Carry,” and then “Apologies.” I was wondering what led you to that last section, the apologies.

Miller: It felt natural. Those came later. There were a lot that got cut that were really explicit. I felt like there was a lot I wanted to say as my son got older, to explain the book to him. To kind of understand, think of him as the audience. What would he think of all this? Because for a long time he was just a baby… It was hard to imagine him as a future adult. And then, as he started talking and getting bigger and walking and obviously being this independent person, I really started to think about: How will he read this and what does it mean to him? I cut a lot of poems out that felt too either personal or explicit or not poetic. The publisher was like, You don’t have anything to apologize for. She wasn’t necessarily convinced that they fit, but they felt really important. Once they were pared down I could see that they worked better. I think that was a good choice. But there is a double-edged sword, apologizing all the time, and maybe we do that too much, but I think also being allowed to just say: I’m sorry that happened and I’m sorry I was having a hard time and that wasn’t fair to you. A sort of acknowledgement of this; I mean, I’ll always be sad in some way, but this is sort of closed and he and I are in a different place now. It’s really shifted. I think being able to apologize shows an ending of that period.

Rumpus: In a way, it almost felt like forgiving yourself, maybe, for feeling the need to apologize. Or just coming to, like you were saying, a new place.

Miller: I think so. Yeah. I’m hoping it’s ultimately optimistic. This is a sad book of mourning but there is a turn and change, and here’s this new relationship and self and ability to move forward but not forget. To still have this other possible baby, sort of in my heart but not in the forefront.

Rumpus: I could definitely see the twists and turns that your emotional state was taking, even if it was over years and years. It really comes through. I also don’t want this interview to completely focus on the miscarriage, because the collection is also about becoming pregnant afterward and then becoming a parent. Of course, every parent is terrified when they have a child. And that’s normal, but I think after you suffer a loss, the reality becomes more concrete. I could see that intensified fear, but then I could also see you coming through it. Over how many years were these poems assembled?

Miller: I started with the miscarriage, so that was in 2012, and then I wrote the last poem in the last year. A lot have kind of come in and left; there’s been a lot of… peeking in and leaving, and I’m picking which ones fit. I think there was a lot of repetition early on because I kept trying to say something and then figure out how to write it. There’s a line between the diary poem that’s really personal, and then you write a different one that backs up a little bit and makes it more appropriate for a larger audience, or feels more poetic in some way.

There are others that no one needs to see but definitely helped, too. It just helped to give words to what was happening, and it was easier to write, obviously, before my son was born and in the very beginning, when he would nap more or at least sit quietly and not run away. And I could do it with him because he didn’t know what I was saying, so I could sort of speak aloud and type with him in his little bouncy chair next to me. There were a couple months where that was possible, where he just wanted to hear my voice and be nearby and just kind of sit there. Then there was a bit of a pause as he became a toddler and zoomed off and it was impossible to think.

Rumpus: I think getting a book together in a decade, with a child, is a monumental task, honestly.

Miller: Especially now. So, I keep thinking: Is this the time to share this, in this period of loss and the pandemic and hundreds of thousands of people dead? But all of this is still happening, and I think we need to look toward some kind of loss to understand any of these really large numbers and general loss. Sometimes it feels like we shouldn’t write anything that’s not about the pandemic and so many people dead and injured and hurt, but I think we still need all of our human stories and all the people who are having babies now, or are having a miscarriage in the midst of this, or losing their children and their kids are sick and they have to go to the hospital. It’s all still happening.

Rumpus: I understand what you’re saying about that hesitation. Going back to assembling the book, how did you decide which poems to cut?

Miller: Figuring out how to submit groups of poems to journals highlighted how similar certain poems were. In the early process of figuring out the whole manuscript, I tried to see which ones fit together but weren’t saying exactly the same things and actually had some push forward in the storyline. That really brought to light: Oh, these two are doing exactly the same job, whereas somehow when they were together in the book I felt like: Okay, this is the section about this topic. That sort of breaking them apart in order to put them together helped me to see the overall repetition. I put the book together chronologically, so it was easier to see overlap, too.

Rumpus: What was your revision process like?

Miller: I definitely read poems aloud, underline verbs, try to read each individual line on its own to see how it stands or doesn’t, to consider line breaks, probe it to see what happens in the poem. Then giving some readings, I noticed I was saying the same words over and over. A couple of words I was like: Wow, the same themes come up endlessly and explicitly with the same vocabulary. That really helped me to go back in and vary things or build on that and [ask]: Is there some kind of crescendo with these words? I think time really helps. And, reading the poems aloud and listening.

Rumpus: You mentioned making the poems more poetic. How did that factor in?

Miller: My general process is: start with that question or grief or emotion, and then write it all out. Then, I’ll pull out a few words or I’ll even put that completely aside and start over with the main ideas that came through as I wrote some more. And then I’ll step back and read through for the word choices or the line breaks. I think the line breaks and the gathering together of different ideas is where I start to look more at the craft and how it’s constructed as a poem rather than a raw feeling.

I’m really interested in seeing through something. I love taking walks at night and looking into apartments and seeing to the other side, especially new buildings that are being constructed or they’re empty and for rent and you can just see through the windows to the next street. I love that double distance. A lot of my poems will begin in this space of seeing through something. I think a lot of us keep writing the same thing over and over and then, finally, it appears somewhere else.

Rumpus: Where you least expect it, sometimes.

Miller: Yeah. I listened again to Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem… I feel like the only really personal moment was toward the beginning, and then she just pulls out so large. While our poems are completely different, I really admire that move from the super intimate to a larger idea, and I’m hoping that my poems do that for grief in some way, that anyone who’s not a mother or hasn’t experienced this kind of loss can still read them and be like, I remember this other thing and I felt this core feeling through the specifics.

Rumpus: In the book you also touch on postpartum depression. Were you still able to write while you were experiencing that?

Miller: Yeah. I think the hardest part was once I started the medicine it took a little while to kind of even out and have some focus or alertness again. There was a little bit of numbing that I think helped me get through the day, and then it evened out and I could think clearly again to write. That was a little bit of a lull and that was a little hard. But obviously that was most important thing, to be okay.

Rumpus: Absolutely. Were you reading poetry? Were you reading other books that helped you through?

Miller: When my aunt died, and I read The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke. It really touched me, how she was looking toward literature, and then she has all those resources in the back—which is why I wanted to put together the books that I’d read that seemed most useful at the end of the collection. That’s sort of where I was looking and finding some kind of solace. There’s the silence around the miscarriage and the silence of, but this is what you wanted; you had a miscarriage and you were sad and now you have a baby, why are you still crying? There’s a real lack of understanding of how much your body has physically gone through and the hormones, and the anxiety, and the fear, the difficulties, and just lack of sleep. It’s literally a form of torture to be so tired. Even if you’re fine, I think you can’t get through that easily. I, one night, thought there had been a fire. It was just so hard to focus on any tangible reality. And the doctors were so great. It really helped to just be recognized. That it wasn’t just: Oh, that’s how they are, those moms.

Rumpus: Oh, yes. And I wanted to ask you about the Baby Book project; you worked with the composer Lauren Spavelko, who adapted some of the poems into songs. How did that come about?

Miller: My friend was on Reddit, and she saw Lauren’s call for poems. I don’t even know if it was about family or loss or miscarriage. And my friend suggested: Send her some of your poems. I did, and then we formed this relationship. She created this drastically new thing, which I think is amazing. She said that all these women had come and talked to her. And the sopranos who sing with her, or people in the orchestra, or other teachers—they’ve shared their stories with her. I never would have imagined that these poems would have become something like that. They’re so short and little and then suddenly they’re pulled into this other art form with music and a different rhythm that I didn’t hear in my head, but she heard it. I think it’s amazing.

Rumpus: That is amazing—the transformation. I guess it’s kind of a companion piece to this book, maybe?

Miller: Yeah, and [the collection] had been called “Baby Book” …and I was never quite sure. But then for one of the poems, the publisher suggested the word “viable” in the poem, and I was like: That’s the title of the whole book! It even felt like a slightly private joke; the manuscript had been rejected so many times, it was like, are the poems viable? [Laughter] It felt like it all came together. It felt right.

***

Photograph of Chloe Yelena Miller by Hans Noel.

In the Event of Contact is my mother’s fourth full-length book and the first book of hers that I’ve read. Her debut short story collection, Cut Through the Bone, was published when I was ten years old. I remember her telling me that I could read her stories “when I grew up,” and it caused several raised eyebrows among the faculty and parents at my Catholic elementary school when I informed them my mom wrote books that were “for adults only.”

I could have read my mom’s writing long before this, but I think I was afraid of what I would find in her stories. What if I didn’t like them, or what they revealed? What if I recognized people I knew, especially our family, and myself? Mostly, knowing how much my mother has overcome in life, I was afraid of the pain I might find in her work, and that it would hurt me to read it. I wanted her to remain what she’s always been for me: my mom, the brightest light.

As daunted as I was by the idea of reading In the Event of Contact, I’m at a point in my life and my own art where I want to know my mom and her work more fully. The fourteen short stories in Ethel Rohan’s In the Event of Contact, published by Dzanc Books yesterday, center on crises of contact, various forms of injury, and characters making surprising attempts to recover.

We spoke recently on the deck of our home, while the sun shone through cobwebs like kaleidoscopes, about inflicting pain, dysfunctional families, generational patterns, and the power of no.

***

The Rumpus: Staying with the subject of pain, there are stories in the collection that must have been especially difficult for you to conjure and write. I’m thinking of such stories as “Everywhere She Went,” “Blue Hot,” and “Any Wonder Left.” How do you protect yourself when writing so empathetically about your characters’ suffering?

Ethel Rohan: I’m a highly sensitive person, but I feel an odd detachment while writing. Of course I care deeply about my characters and their desires and struggles, but I’m like a puppeteer working the story and its world from a height. I’ve never consciously considered that this also serves to protect myself. It’s much more a case of my needing to keep a certain level of distance between the work and me, so as to attain the clarity and sadism that storytelling demands. Suffering comes to everyone at various times and in various ways, and so it is with characters. In order for me to inflict pain on my characters, and to depict the realities and fullness of their suffering, I have to immerse myself and bear witness, but not share the experience. It’s a delicate balance of going deep enough to get the job done, but not so deep that I’m hurting myself.

Rumpus: These stories are highly imaginative and I loved that I didn’t know where you were taking me in each one. I was repeatedly surprised by plot and the characters’ choices. Have you always had a rich imagination? If so, how did you express it early on, and how do you sustain and nourish your creativity and storytelling range?

Rohan: From my earliest memories, I adored dress-up and make-believe. I also longed to be an actor and to take on other identities. Through writing, I get to do it all, and with my imagination running wild, at least in early drafts. In revision, I’ll wrangle those flights of fancy into restraints as needs be according to what’s urgent and startling yet believable within the context of the characters and their world.

And art begets art. I sustain and nourish my imagination by enjoying others’ creativity: stories, poetry, music, television, film, plays, musicals, art, sculpture, and on and on. That, and daily meditation. Play, fun, exercise, and generally living well are also essential. I just don’t do nearly enough of the things on the latter list.

Rumpus: In each story it’s not only the protagonist but often several other characters who make various bids for recovery. I also love your one-sentence summary for the collection which describes the work as “stories of survivors going rogue and turning trauma into power.” Can you elaborate on that?

Rohan: I write about the strange and toward meaning, and am most fascinated by characters’ contradictions and mixed attempts at agency. I’m hyper-attuned to the surprising and quirky, and love that a common thread in these stories proved to be characters taking peculiar approaches to recover from their injuries. Their efforts are often flawed, even self-defeating, but they are always acting amid high-stakes and toward transcendence. The roguishness lies in the characters consistently confounding expectations, and they’re empowered by taking charge and exerting influence and change.

Rumpus: You raised me to be outspoken and to live consciously—to think, do, and speak up according to what I believe in. How conscious are you of the personal being inherently political when you write? Do you think writers have a responsibility to create change through storytelling?

Rohan: We’re all inherently political, and biased. We each have our particular way of seeing people and the world, a viewpoint that’s filtered through our experiences and belief systems—much of which are thrust on us as children. Unfortunately, we don’t all live consciously or morally, or examine who we are and what we believe, and why. Too many are selfish, willfully ignorant, and complicit in society’s various systemic ills. Then there are those who are intentionally bigoted, individualist, capitalist, and inhumane.

I’m not overtly conscious of the above when I write. Stories depict life, making them organically political, but I don’t write with an agenda or intended message. My only goal is to tell my most interesting, surprising, and honest stories. Overall, I’m wary of putting too much on stories, and on storytellers. The role of both is to render people and life as specifically and truthfully as possible. Let readers do with that what they will.

Rumpus: There are several similarities between your life experiences and those of many of the characters in the collection. Do you worry about people thinking the characters contain facets that together make up a telltale composite of you?

Rohan: All writing reveals its author. I was first introduced to that idea almost twenty years ago as a college student. Initially, I balked at the suggestion. I believed I conjured my characters and stories solely from my imagination, and that they weren’t drawn from my life and weren’t about anyone I knew, least of all myself. Therefore how could they show anything about me?

But it gets back to our previous exchange: the personal is political and everything about us is colored by our individual worldview. That’s why all stories are unique; there’s only one of each of us. As for how much of my stories are autobiographical and how much are invention, I don’t concern myself with that at any point in the process. Not while writing, and not after publication. I let everything in while creating, and whatever best serves the story stays in the final version—whether there are autobiographical elements or not. When I lay down stories, I’m only concerned with following the sparks, the electricity, of each character and their world. I’m not worried about what the reader will think of me. That’s none of my business.

Rumpus: You’re a wonderful mom, but there isn’t much model parenting or functional families in these stories, especially in “In the Event of Contact,” “UNWANTED,” and “Before Storms Had Names.”

Rohan: [Laughs] Guilty as charged. Model characters and functional families are boring, and unrealistic. I also have several lifetimes worth of experience with negligent parenting and family dysfunction. I loved my parents, but I had a miserable childhood. Why not turn as much of that as I can into art? Make beauty of the bad. 

Rumpus: I’ll always appreciate that you taught me the power of saying no, and to never prioritize anyone else’s comfort over my own.

Rohan: The world would be so much better if every girl was taught that. I was determined that you and your sister wouldn’t ever feel voiceless and subservient, or that you had to be “nice.” I was raised to be “nice,” which is so damaging. The dictum to “be a good girl” grooms women to be compliant pleasers, and to allow life prescriptions and unwanted touch, talk, and all kinds of trespasses.

Rumpus: You also taught me that secrets, silence, and shame are poisonous. Can you talk more about that?

Rohan: Secrets, silence, and shame perpetuate familial and societal patterns of abuse, and cause tremendous and preventable trauma. Too many look away from perpetrators’ crimes and victims’ suffering rather than face their own discomfort and society’s horrific failings. That’s a large part of why systemic and generational wrongs repeat and remain rife.

It’s only by addressing the unspoken and “unseen” that we will ever beat back individual and institutionalized abuse and its horrors. I’m appalled by how many find those who speak out and act up against wrong more problematic than the atrocities under protest e.g. Colin Kaepernick taking a knee against police brutality and white supremacy.

Rumpus: In the Event of Contact has nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic and yet I kept thinking about it as I read; in particular, the collection’s themes of loneliness and trauma, and its conflicts around contact and personal boundaries. Its hope, too, and the characters stubborn insistence on overcoming adversity and wounds. Yet these stories were all written pre-pandemic. How do you account for the striking coincidence?

Rohan: There’s definitely an uncanniness to the collection’s title and themes given the pandemic’s ongoing toll and the current chaotic state of the world. The synchronicity appeals to my imagination and bolsters my hope that this is the right book at the right time. The collection’s stories are a lot of things, including an always timely invitation to look harder at ourselves and our world—the collective magnificence, resilience, fragility, failings, brutalities, and atrocities. These stories portray the timely and urgent need to take care of ourselves and each other. It’s the only way forward, and that is going to be especially true post-pandemic. Most of us will emerge from this global trauma feeling, at the least, dazed and ragged. I’m worried for us, but also hopeful. We’re designed to survive, and to be in community and care for each other, and we’re driven to thrive.

Rumpus: When I was a child, you often read to my sister and me from the Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde. You’ve quoted him over the years, too, and have several of his books on your shelves, so I knew you were a fan, but I was still surprised to find him in your story, “Wilde.” Maybe it’s more accurate to say that the story itself is surprising—speculative and sometimes funny, but also complicated and gritty. You packed a lot into it, including the narrator’s confusion about Wilde’s quote “Every man kills the thing he loves.” What do you think those words mean?

Rohan: Like the narrator in “Wilde,” I’m both fascinated and confused by the declaration. Some scholars attribute it to Wilde’s homosexuality—law and society mandated that he “destroy” it. But it’s such a blanket statement, a lack of specificity that is surprising from Wilde, and begs exploration of its wider meanings, at least one of which you’ll find in “Wilde.”

Rumpus: Read the story, is what you’re saying.

Rohan: [Laughs] Read the whole collection, please.

Rumpus: Blurb is such a strange word for the advance praise a book receives from fellow authors. I say it and immediately want to laugh, but many of the blurbs the collection received are themselves tiny pieces of art. I especially love the blurb from Diane Cook: “Spare, haunting and mesmerizing, the stories in In the Event of Contact somehow capture the ungraspable essence of being human. This book, these characters, put a spell on me.” What happens when the responses to a book aren’t as glowing? Is it a case where the higher some praise is, the more the harsher critiques hurt? What’s most difficult to receive: disappointing responses from industry reviewers, readers, or those close to you?

Rohan: By the time most, if not every, writer has published their work, they’ve already received critiques and rejections many times over, and it’s rarely painless and often brutal. As hard as those let downs are, I decided early on not to let them crush me, and I’ve found the disappointment lessens over time, but it’s something I’ll never become immune to, and some criticism and rejections definitely cut more than others.

I’m not sure I can classify which ones hurt most. It’s a case-by-case basis. For example, I was disappointed by the review of my first novel in The Irish Times. Not even a glowing review for the same novel in the San Francisco Chronicle could soften that sting. One- and two-star reviews will always slice. And I don’t think I’ll ever get over a loved one saying of my first book, Cut Through the Bone, “Would you not write about something, anything, else?”

Ultimately, though, I have no sway over how critics and readers will respond to my work. The only control I have in this entire roller-coaster business is over the words I put on the page and the stories I surrender to the world.

Rumpus: You grew up in a working-class family and neighborhood in Dublin, Ireland and that knowledge of lack and strife—and of the 1980s!—really comes through in several of these stories. Did you rely solely on your memories for the many specific and telling details throughout, or did you need to do additional research to make those stories and characters so alive and authentic?

Rohan: I mostly relied on memory, and the internet. My five siblings still live in Ireland and I sometimes texted with them, too, to question or confirm details. Like, What’s the real name of the park that we called Tolka because of the river? And, Do you remember the creepy guy who owned the shop and made toy trains, or was it toy soldiers? Or am I just imagining all that?

The first half of my life in Dublin is often surreal to me. I’m constantly questioning if much of it really happened, mostly because of how terrible life often was. Several of my friends also had a brutal time of it—abuse, neglect, addiction, struggling at school, teen pregnancies—but we found humor in even the horrible and made the most of things. And of course life could be wonderful, too. I loved the ‘80s in particular: the music, bold bursts of new fashion, and going dancing in the local disco halls, and later the nightclubs in town, invariably dressed in lace mittens, stiletto heels, short balloon skirts, and the glitteriest, scariest blue eye shadow going.

Television became a whole new thing in that decade, too. We got a color telly in our house, and one with five channels instead of two. 1980s shows like Dallas, MacGyver and Strumpet City were also a welcome change from the usual tame, censored fare viewers were previously offered. The outlandish, otherworldly stuff that happened back then, too, like the exorcism carried out in a supposedly haunted house on the street where I lived, which was named Munster Street.

All of that awful wonderfulness has stuck to my insides and I doubt much of it will ever stop showing up in my stories in one form or another.

Rumpus: Again, I’m struck by how much darkness you’ve known and how you continue to be a great source of light.

Rohan: Everyone’s known light and dark. Everyone is light and dark. I try as hard as I can to starve the dark and feed the light.

Rumpus: Now that you’ve introduced me to short story collections, what writers and collections do you recommend?

Rohan: I don’t know where to end. Immediate favorites who come to mind are Danielle McLaughlin, Louise Kennedy, Wendy Erskine, May-Lan Tan, Yiyun Li, Elizabeth Strout, Lori Ostlund, Carmen Maria Machado, Danielle Evans, Brandon Taylor, and Bryan Washington. Come back to me when you’re done with those. I’ve thousands more to recommend.

Rumpus: Is there anything I haven’t covered that you’d like to add?

Rohan: What are you making for dinner?

Rumpus: [Laughs] I love you.

Rohan: Thanks, but I can’t eat that.

***

Photograph of Ethel Rohan by Teaghan Rohan.

The Rumpus Book Club chats with Lilly Dancyger about her debut memoir, Negative Space (Santa Fe Writers Project, May 2021), the book’s long road to publication, learning that conflicting truths can coexist at once, releasing a book in a pandemic, and more.

This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month The Rumpus Book Club hosts a discussion online with the book club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview. To become a member of the Rumpus Book Club, click here. Upcoming writers include Mariana Oliver, Elizabeth Gonzalez James, Cai Emmons, Maggie Nelson, Wendy J. Fox, Gene Kwak, Christopher Gonzalez, and more.

This Rumpus Book Club interview was edited by Marisa Siegel.

***

Marisa: Welcome to The Rumpus Book Club chat with Lilly Dancyger about her debut memoir, Negative Space!

Lilly Dancyger: Hi! Thanks for having me, and thanks for being here, everyone!

Marisa: I’m so looking forward to discussing this book with you! To begin, can you speak a little about the road to publication for Negative Space? How did it finds its home at SFWP?

Lilly Dancyger: Sure. It was… a long road. The first time I queried agents was about nine years ago. The manuscript was roundly rejected, so I went back to the drawing board and revised and tried again—and that happened about four or five times before I finally got an offer from a different small press in 2016. But, I ended up canceling that deal because there were too many red flags indicating that this press wasn’t equipped to support the book and give it the best shot at reaching readers.

So, I revised again, got a bunch more rejections… hired and fired and agent, got rejected some more… and finally went on what I decided was my last round of submissions, after very carefully curating a list of small presses that were established enough to do what I needed them to do in terms of supporting the book. One of those was SFWP’s contest; when I made it to the final round the publisher let me know they were interested in publishing the book either way, but it ended up being selected by Carmen Maria Machado as one of the three winners. Which really just made me feel vindicated after such a bumpy road! And the book finally came out, two weeks ago, more than a decade after I started it.

Marisa: I remember when it out was out for the contest, and you were so hoping it would pan out this way. And yes, now here it is, out in the world! How does it feel, after so much time, to have the book in readers’ hands?

Lilly Dancyger: Surreal, honestly! I think after so long, a part of me started to believe that it wasn’t going to happen, that it was just going to be a manuscript on my computer that I kept revising forever. I haven’t fully mentally adjusted yet to the fact that that’s it, it’s done, it’s real!

Marisa: And it’s getting such a great response, too! I’ve seen coverage all over the place! Definitely is real.

Lilly Dancyger: Yes!

Marisa: You always knew you wanted to include your dad’s artwork alongside your own writing, and you share in the book that initially this began as a sort of catalogue of his life and work. When did you know that the book was in fact also about you, and your journey through grief and toward the publication of the book itself?

Lilly Dancyger: That shift was a long and slow process. I knew pretty early that I needed to include some of my own perspective, because that’s what all of the early readers wanted more of. But I kept thinking I had added enough of myself only to keep getting that same feedback… it wasn’t until the home stretch, about three years ago, that I finally took the plunge and made my story its own separate narrative thread, given equal weight to my father’s story.

Marisa: Was that after our summer at Tin House, when you took the workshop with Melissa Febos? It’s hard to imagine, now, the book without so much of you in it.

Lilly Dancyger: Yes! I did the one-on-one mentorship with Melissa in addition to the workshop, so she read the whole manuscript, and she was the one who called me out on trying to get away with just sneaking a little bit of myself in here and there instead of going all the way. It was feedback I’d gotten before, but I finally listened when it was her saying it, haha.

Marisa: She’s hard not to listen to! I get it.

Lilly Dancyger: For sure.

Marisa: Can you talk some about the process of incorporating your father’s artwork into the book? Which is to say, how you determined what art to include, and where to place it? It felt very intentional—in a good way—throughout.

Lilly Dancyger: It was hard to decide which specific pieces to include, because there’s so much of it—and because I couldn’t ask my father which version out of several similar woodcuts he felt was most “successful,” etc.

But the art is really the central narrative thread, and everything else builds out around it. The very first outline I ever made for the book was actually just a timeline of the different series and images he worked with, and from there I started filling in his life story around the art. And, eventually, my story woven in with his.

Marisa: It almost felt, for me as a reader, like your father was a co-conspirator in creating this book because of how the art provides a kind of connective tissue throughout, if that makes sense?

Lilly Dancyger: Yes! I thought of it very much as a collaboration.

Like this game we used to play when I was little, called Exquisite Corpse, where we’d fold a piece of paper in half and then one of us would draw something, and mark the spots where the drawing connected with the fold, and then the other person would draw the other half, without seeing the first half—a collaboration without having the full picture, without being able to go back and forth on what the finished thing was going to look like.

Marisa: Exactly!

Throughout the book, it’s also clear that we are watching narrator-Lilly learn about herself as she learns about her father’s life. What’s the biggest takeaway for you, real flesh-and-blood Lilly, now that you’ve finished this decade-long project? What do you most hope readers will take away?

Lilly Dancyger: Hmmmm, that’s a tough one… I think one of the central things that the book ended up being “about,” that I didn’t know it was going to be about, is the how often multiple, apparently conflicting truths can all be true at once. That was the case with my father, and how he appeared [to others] versus how he was with me, and it’s true about the nature of grief—it can be very present without blocking out joy.

Marisa: I’m curious whether your mother read the manuscript before the book published? She’s so much a part of this story, too, and your relationship with her changes as you do your research for the book.

Lilly Dancyger: No, definitely not. I didn’t want anyone else’s vision crowding out mine, so nobody read it until it was published.

Marisa: Through the later years of revision and submission, you’ve also worked steadily as an editor. How do you balance the two—being a writer, and being an editor? Asking for a friend (who is me). Do you find your work as an editor helps or hinders your work as a writer? Or, have you found a magic trick to shutting off your editor-brain when you write?

Lilly Dancyger: I think it helps! It’s made me a lot less precious about making big cuts, or dramatic rewrites, because I see from the editorial side how much that’s just part of the process, and writers resisting big changes to the work only hold themselves back.

But yes, I do kind of have to trick myself into writing first drafts without being critical—I tell myself I’m just writing “notes.” Lots and lots of notes that maybe also include sketches of scenes, and chunks of reflection… that start to go in some kind of order that makes sense and flows…

Marisa: What is it like to have your book come out now, amid the pandemic? Especially given its long road to publication, I imagine you had a lot of time to think about a book tour… and then the unthinkable happened.

(I will be thankful to stop asking this question in the not-too-far-off future, I hope!)

Lilly Dancyger: It sucks, to be frank. Not gonna lie.

I’ve had some really great Zoom events, and have been really grateful to receive a lot of love and support for the book online, but it’s definitely not the same as getting to be in a room with people! I really miss being able to hear audience reactions while reading—that’s been a big adjustment of COVID times. You can’t tell if a laugh line has landed! Or hear the hmms and mmms when people like an image or a moment. And you don’t get to go for drinks after the reading!

But I am hoping to do some in-person events later in the year.

Marisa: Yes, it’s finally starting to feel possible we’re only months away from complaining about standing in rooms with cheap wine after readings.

Lilly Dancyger: Yes! Can’t wait for the uncomfortable seats and the expensive cab rides home that you split with another writer you only kind of know because you’re going sort of kind of in the same direction…

Marisa: Has the pandemic been a productive time for you, creatively? It seems like it swings one way or the other for most writers. Are you working on any new projects you can tell us about?

Lilly Dancyger: Yeah, I was always a homebody, already worked from home full-time, and, as you may know from the book, am used to upheaval. So, I pretty much went on as usual. It felt strange at first, like something was wrong with me that I wasn’t spinning out the way a lot of people seemed to be, but I eventually was able to just feel grateful that I managed to keep functioning.

And yeah, I got a lot of writing done! I started prepping the companion essays for the book way ahead of time, so I was working on several of those during the pandemic, and I also wrote a book proposal, which I’m almost done with, including two sample essays. Not making too many details public yet, but the proposal is for a collection of personal/critical essays.

Marisa: That’s exciting! Can’t wait to learn more.

Who are your literary touchstones while you write? And/or, other artistic influences from outside literature? And then specifically, was there anything you returned to reading/listening to/watching while putting Negative Space together, or work you feel the book is in conversation with (beyond, obviously, your father’s artwork)?

Lilly Dancyger: It shifts and changes, but I always return to Lidia Yuknavitch, Melissa Febos, Anaïs Nin…. it was really convenient for me that Melissa came out with an essay collection while I was writing a proposal for one of my own! Haha.

And yeah, I like to switch gears and get ideas from film and visual art… I live right across the park from the Met, so walking through the park and looking at art is my go-to when I’m feeling bogged down or uninspired. Of course, I couldn’t do that for a big chunk of the last year, but it’s been great going back now that they’re open again.

The main touchstone books for Negative Space that kind of charted a path for me were: The Night of the Gun by David Carr, The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, Mother Winter by Sophia Shalmiyev, and Just Kids by Patti Smith.

Marisa: That is a great list of touchstone books!

I miss the city, and museums. I can’t wait to start being out in the world again; the Met is one of my favorite places in Manhattan.

Lilly Dancyger: Mine too! There are a lot of things I don’t love about being uptown; I’m still a downtown kid at heart. But being able to walk to the Met almost makes up for it all.

Marisa: We’d just taken the kid for his first visit right before the pandemic, too!

Lilly Dancyger: Ah, time for another one soon!

Marisa: He’s more of a Museum of Natural History kid, but yes, he’s excited to go again. Unsurprisingly, he’s most interested in the the Temple of Dendur right now.

Lilly Dancyger: The Museum of Natural History is great, too!

Marisa: Is there a question no one has asked you about the book yet that you’re hoping someone will ask?

Lilly Dancyger: Hmm… I don’t think so! It’s been cool having people engage with it after so long of it being just me and the manuscript.

Marisa: And then also, I wonder, is it hard to talk about this book? It feels so intimate and personal—though I know that part of that is craft, too.

Lilly Dancyger: No, not really. I spent so long on it that the book, and the experiences it’s based on, are pretty separate in my mind at this point. It’s an external thing that exists separate from me, separate from my life and my family and my grief, even though it’s made out of all of those things.

Marisa: That is so healthy! I wonder if having so much time with it yourself makes it easier now to let it go.

Lilly Dancyger: Probably! I was ready to be done with it a long time ago, haha.

Marisa: What do you imagine your father would say to you about this book? I think he’d be incredibly proud, and probably thrilled, too.

Lilly Dancyger: I think he would be honored, and proud, but also the book wouldn’t exist if he were alive, so it’s a kind of time travel impossibility that he’d ever get to think anything about it at all. But I know he would love the idea of a book about his art. He was a big collector and admirer of art books.

Marisa: Yes, that makes perfect sense. I think he’d also love how you’ve become such a talented artist in your own right, albeit in a different medium.

Lilly Dancyger: Yes, I’d love to talk to him about the similarities and differences between writing and visual art; I think he’d have a lot to say and also a lot of interesting questions to ask.

Marisa: We’re almost out of time, but I always ask this question and I know you’re going to have good answers (no pressure, lol) so: what’s in your reading pile right now? Any new and forthcoming books you’re especially excited about?

Lilly Dancyger: I’m reading Elissa Washuta’s White Magic at the moment, and really loving it! I’m planning to read Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty next and really looking forward to it. I love everything she’s done so far.

Marisa: We’ll be reading Maggie’s forthcoming book, On Freedom, in the Book Club and I’m super excited!

Lilly Dancyger: Oooh, exciting; I’m looking forward to that one as well.

Marisa: Lilly, thanks so much for your time this afternoon—and for putting this book out into the world! I had high expectations, because I know you well, but truly, it surpassed them. It’s beautiful and brilliant, and I’m thrilled it’s now finally out there!

Lilly Dancyger: Ah, thank you so much, Marisa! And thank you for inviting me to do this.

Marisa: I can’t wait to celebrate over cheap wine out in the real world!

Lilly Dancyger: Yes! Soon, I hope.

And thank you book clubbers, for reading.

Marisa: You were the last friend I saw before the pandemic hit, so it’ll be fitting for you to be one of the first as things open up! Thanks everyone for hanging out with us, and have a great afternoon!

***

Photograph of Lilly Dancyger by Soomin Dancyger.

In her second novel (and fourth book) This Close to Okay, Leesa Cross-Smith continues to prove why Roxane Gay called her “a consummate storyteller.” As a big fan, my advice when it comes to reading work by Cross-Smith is to never, ever assume you know how things will end.

This Close to Okay opens with a tense scene: Tallie is driving home across a bridge on a rainy night when she sees a man, Emmett, standing on the edge. It’s clear to Tallie that he’s considering taking his life. She rushes in to intervene, but instead of calling for help or dropping the man off with someone else, Tallie makes the decision to bring Emmett to her own house for the weekend and to keep from him that she’s a licensed therapist. It’s the first in a series of events that had me putting the book down to pace around my living room, because Tallie isn’t the only one withholding information. With narration switching back and forth between Tallie and Emmett, the reader is stuck in the middle, knowing both too much and not enough.

Leesa’s most enviable talent, if I had to pick just one, is her ability to write good, well-meaning characters who make big mistakes. As I got to know Tallie and Emmett, I found myself rooting for them even as I pushed up my judgmental glasses. Before we began our ”official” conversation, Leesa was kind enough to let me spend a few minutes debriefing all the twists and turns of This Close to Okay, so there wouldn’t be any spoilers in the interview and still, they were difficult to avoid. In this way, it’s a hard book to talk about with people who haven’t read it yet, which is me saying, HINT HINT: Go read it!

Leesa Cross Smith is the author of four books, including So We Can Glow, a short story collection that I hold dear. Along with her husband, Loran, she is the cofounder of the much beloved Whiskeypaper, which is currently on hiatus (HINT, HINT, Leesa) and she is, like me, in love with International Kpop Sensation USB Hub, BTS.

Below, we chat about why Leesa likes putting her characters in metaphorical escape rooms, ageism in the literary world, and how This Close to Okay was the hardest book to write.

***

Rumpus: Where did this story begin?

Leesa Cross-Smith: Maybe in 2015 or 2016, I made a note in my phone that just said, ”Man on the edge of a bridge, woman convinces him not to jump and takes him home.” And then it was over the process of years that it became this story. I loved the idea of strangers meeting and figuring out a little bit of life together, and sharing their secrets in an intense situation. It was born out of that one image, which happens to me a lot with my stories and books.

Rumpus: We switch between Tallie and Emmett telling the story. Who came first?

Cross-Smith: It started with Tallie for sure. With her seeing him. I’d been reading a lot of books that weren’t my typical read, that were really quick and you-totally-don’t-know-what’s-going-to-happen-next style of writing and it made me think, What if I don’t approach this book like literary fiction, like I usually do, but more like an action movie where you see lots of things happening before you can get a grip on what it means. So, I was trying something different with This Close to Okay anyway. It started with Tallie, but once I had a clearer picture of what I was doing I knew I was going to go back and forth, so there would be so much unknown and the reader would get to know these characters at the same time the characters are getting to know each other.

Rumpus: There’s a running parenthetical that happens, from Emmett, and inside those parenthetical asides the language is full of sense-oriented details and images, which is what I call “Leesa Cross-Smith magic” because your work often has that kind of attention to the world of our senses. I’m curious about how you see this working in this novel?

Cross-Smith: I love this. Thank you! I wanted the reader to wonder, What is this? What is he doing? He’s doing something different. We may not know why he’s doing it, but a lot of people can relate to trying to root yourself during a period of great anxiety. It may not even be clear in the middle of the book why he’s doing it, but by the end of the book, it will make sense.

Rumpus: Maybe I’m wrong, but I think this kind of attention to detail is often attributed to women. When you give it to Emmett, it does challenge how we’re seeing him as a whole character, because he’s doing not-so-nice things but then these details humanize him in a way that made me sympathize with him.

Cross-Smith: It’s true; it’s not very expected. I hope it does humanize him, even as he does something that causes the reader to want to write him off. Both of these characters are keeping things from each other that could make you want to cancel both of them. [Laughs]

Rumpus: Yeah!

Cross-Smith: Because she did this and he did that, but I always write characters who really mess up a lot, because we all mess up a lot.

Rumpus: It’s funny you say that, because I was thinking about Whiskey & Ribbons while reading this book—how if you told someone the basic premise of your two novels, most people would say, “No way this can work out in a positive way.” Like, Whiskey & Ribbons is about a woman who falls in love with her tragically deceased husband’s best friend. [Makes a buzzer noise] Get them out of here, but I absolutely fell in love with those characters and believed in their love. And now we have this scenario here, so now I’m convinced you like working in the gray. The dark gray.

Cross-Smith: Right. I can’t really explain why. I just try to make sure the women I’m writing are as complicated as possible. Just allow them messiness and darkness, and then finding out who’s still there when the dust settles. Is Tallie still there for herself when everything settles? It interests me, and keeps me coming back to get the work done. I love a complicated person and a complicated relationship. But only on the page, I should emphasize. In real life, I don’t know how well I deal with that.

Rumpus: This is novel number two, right? Can you tell me how you think you’re growing within the novel form?

Cross-Smith: I can’t really say, because when it comes to This Close to Okay, novel two, it was the hardest book I’ve ever written.

Rumpus: Huh!

Cross-Smith: But I can speak to novel three, which I’ve finished and turned in to my editor, because that book was so much easier for me to write—so I know it’s getting easier. Half-Blown Rose is novel number three, but it is book number five and I’m working on number six now. And feeling like yes, it’s getting easier for me now. But it wasn’t easier for This Close to Okay.

Rumpus: Why was this the hardest?

Cross-Smith: I have no idea, Monet. No clue. I have labored over this and talked to the Lord about it, because I’ve been really free knowing I won’t have these feelings with another book. I went through all that and I know those feelings are done. For some reason, I went through something while writing this book, and I don’t know why. It could’ve been because it was my second novel or it could’ve been because I was working on two books at one time—this one and my second short story collection, So We Can Glow—or it could’ve been all of those things. I really can’t say right now. Maybe one day in the future. But when I finished… I thought, okay that’s done, like a through-the-fire situation and it didn’t happen again. I’m already through another book and onto another one.

Rumpus: Wow.

Cross-Smith: If I figure it out, I’ll come back and tell you. [Laughter]

Rumpus: Okay, deal.

Let’s talk about the shape of the novel, in particular the compression of time. Whiskey & Ribbons takes place over a weekend, and this book is between Thursday night until Sunday. How do those constrictions of time function?

Cross-Smith: In Whiskey & Ribbons, I was forcing two characters to confront what they’d been actively avoiding. With This Close to Okay, I knew that in order for Tallie to be able to feel comfortable doing this, I needed her to feel like she had to distract him—just for the weekend; it wasn’t something that could go on for long because she had to get back to work on Monday morning. He’s going to have to figure out what he has to do. He can’t live with her forever… they can’t forever stay the way they are over that weekend. It’s my version of an escape room. I do that with my books.

Rumpus: The last time I interviewed you (because that’s what we do), I asked our friend, Alvin, to contribute and he had a brilliant question about desire, but not just romantic desire—about desire as a whole. In this book there’s a strong undercurrent of sexual desire that some readers may find hard to grapple with. Tallie and Emmett have enough going on, and yet!

Cross-Smith: Agreed. It’s another complication. So much of that desire is happening more in Tallie’s brain than in Emmett’s, but I knew that it would turn a lot of people cold and they wouldn’t like it. Okay! I still allowed her to have her own inner thoughts, without monitoring from me. I don’t censor my character’s thoughts because someone might not like her. I can’t write like that; she has to be a full person. I let her fantasies about him trot around in her head for a second. But I also want to add that the comfortability and the intensity of the weekend… it’s not so wild for me to think they wouldn’t welcome an escape from everything else that’s going on.

Rumpus: Was there a section that was difficult to write?

Cross-Smith: A spoiler?

Rumpus: Okay, okay! I also wondered about research rabbit holes.

Cross-Smith: I considered going to school to be a therapist for a few years, but the other rabbit holes are also spoilers!

Rumpus: Oh dang it! I’ve decided this book should not be spoiled, if it can be helped. Okay. What did your revision process look like? And/or how is drafting different from revision?

Cross-Smith: I just keep writing and rewriting until I get there. I show it to my husband and dig back in. I show it to my agent and dig back in. When I’m drafting, I’m pedal down, nonstop. When I’m revising, I’m forced to take time because other people are reading it… and that’s a good thing, that distance, so I can get back in it and finish properly.

Rumpus: With all the books you’re working on, you’ve found success at an age when many would’ve told other writers to give up. Ageism cuts both ways in the writing community. Either you’re too young to have anything to write about, or success after thirty (and all those thirty for thirty lists) somehow means success came late. 

Cross-Smith: Right. This is something that never “pressured” me, because everyone is different and I do feel very blessed not to compare myself to other people often. I started submitting stories after both of my kids were in school. I was in my early thirties then. I am in my early forties now. I’m too late for a thirty under thirty or a thirty-five under thirty-five, and honestly, I didn’t even know those things existed back when I was that age. They weren’t on my radar, or on my list of goals. I really do just mind my business about that stuff. Congrats to everyone on those things! I’m fortysomething, minding my business, about to send my first baby off to college, about to launch into promotion for my fifth book coming next summer. Everyone does different things at different times. Doesn’t make a blip in my brain, honestly. Like, who has the time?

Rumpus: You spoke a little, earlier, about writing this book less from a literary fiction standpoint and more like genre fiction, in particular like a thriller. We’ve spoken before about how the current trend of marketing can limit books by categorizing them into neat boxes. Then, it was how Whiskey & Ribbons could be siloed into Christian Lit or Black Literary Fiction and why neither of those is the whole story, and now, with This Close To Okay, I think you cross those lines even more.

Cross-Smith: Yeah, I just consider those labels not my business at all. My team at the publishing company, my agent, they can deal with that stuff because that’s much more their side of things. I can easily say I write literary fiction, but yes, it can be “successful” enough to be called “commercial” fiction and it’s “contemporary” fiction, too. Some of the characters are Christian and some aren’t, and some of the topics are thrilling, and a lot of the characters are Black… a lot of them are women.

I don’t think about the labels at all when I’m writing because they don’t mean anything to me. But I understand they might, to some people! But also, I refuse to be boxed in. I write books, period! Right now, they’re fiction! But maybe one day, I’ll write a nonfiction book about how much I love BTS! *finger heart*

***

Photograph of Leesa Cross-Smith by Leesa Cross-Smith.

The Rumpus Book Club chats with Wendy J. Fox about her new story collection, What If We Were Somewhere Else (Santa Fe Writers Project, November 2021), how she approached writing a book of linked stories, learning not to focus on creative output, and more.

This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month The Rumpus Book Club hosts a discussion online with the book club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview. To become a member of the Rumpus Book Club, click here. Upcoming writers include Gene Kwak, Christopher Gonzalez, Gabrielle Civil, Eva Jurczyk, Suzanne Roberts, and more.

This Rumpus Book Club interview was edited by Marisa Siegel.

***

Marisa: Hi, and welcome to our Book Club chat with Wendy J. Fox about her new story collection, What If We Were Somewhere Else!

Wendy J. Fox: Thank you, Marisa! I’m excited to be here!

Marisa: I’m excited to discuss the book! Can you start by telling us a little about how it came to be? Did you set out to write a linked story collection, or did that form come later?

Wendy J. Fox: I started writing the collection in 2015, and yes, I did set out to write a linked story collection. I have another book of stories that is very much collected stories, meaning, a bunch of random stories I had written over different periods in my life, but for What If We Were Somewhere Else, I wanted to explore a “collection” as something intentional.

And, I didn’t know how that was going to go, but as I was doing it, one of the things I loved was that it felt like I was operating inside of a kind of structure, and that was helpful to me.

Marisa: Are there any other linked collections, in particular, that you looked toward as guides while or just ahead of working on the project?

Wendy J. Fox: Not specifically in advance, but I am personally drawn to certain types of interconnected narratives. Recent books, like Yelena Moskovich’s A Door Behind a Door or Cairo Circles by Doma Mahmoud are examples, but I wasn’t reading those until later.

I think there was something where I felt like I wanted more cohesion in the characters, but I didn’t feel like the stories of the individuals were a novel.

Marisa: I was just going to ask how does the linked collection feel/work differently to your mind than the novel. Did your writing process differ much for What If We Were Somewhere Else than for your last book, a novel (If the Ice Had Held)?

Wendy J. Fox: It did. For If the Ice Had Held, when I was writing it, I was working a very demanding day job and I was struggling with fitting in writing time, so I had this idea that if you take the average definition for book-length at 55,000 or so words (which is still fairly short) and divide that by 365 days, at 150 words a day over a year, you get a full draft.

And that is very much how I did it. As you can imagine, that was an extremely fragmented draft. It took me three years to revise it, so most of the work for If the Ice Had Held was revision.

For What If We Were Somewhere Else, I would try to draft out a whole story at a time, and even though there was still a ton of revision, it was a more sustained practice.

Alysia Sawchyn: When I was reading this, I had a strong flashback to my two months (emotionally, decades) of working at the DOT.

Wendy J. Fox: Thank you, Alysia … and sorry?

Alysia Sawchyn: Hah! It was the connectedness of it. That sense of how you can spend SO MUCH TIME with people and have no idea what’s going on.

Wendy J. Fox: Totally.

Alysia Sawchyn: That’s one of the things I love about books with multiple points of view, how they capture the incongruity of imaginations.

Did you have a “favorite” character, or was there anything different you did to get into the minds/voices of each?

Wendy J. Fox: I don’t think I have a favorite character, but it was more—something I think about a lot, is that you know, most of us work a job of some sort or another, and, to your point, we spend SO MUCH time together, with these folks who we might not have chosen to be our friends or to sit next to, like ever, but they are in our orbit.

I kept thinking, well these people (my coworkers) are humans with lives and families and problems and hearts, like even if someone in accounting in rubbing me the wrong way—like, maybe I should ask myself what’s happening in their world instead of being so absorbed in my own.

Alysia Sawchyn: [whispers] Heather is my favorite.

Marisa: Who was hardest to get on the page? Is there a character in the collection you had more trouble understanding?

Wendy J. Fox: The hardest characters for me were the male characters. In one of the stories (“The Old Country”), when it was on submission, more than three editors said, hey, good story, but that is not how teenaged boys talk.

Alysia Sawchyn: HAH.

Wendy J. Fox: So, I had to listen to that. I spent a lot of time reading the dialogue out loud to people in my life who had been teenaged boys at one point in their life. I was ultimately really happy about that. You know, there’s the thing about writing being solitary, but it really is not.

Also, thank you FOREVER to editors,

Marisa: Did you write these stories in the order we see them in now, or did you worry about that afterward, in revision?

Wendy J. Fox: I wrote them mostly in the order you see now. There are two stories for each character with the exception of Kate (who opens, has a middle story, and then closes)—so when I had the batch of the first stories, I wrote the second half of the book.

But for me, that was something I had to push myself to do. I would think, ugh, this is not working, just move on. I write out of order all of the time, and I wanted to try and do it differently than what my usual tendency is.

Alysia Sawchyn: Oh, interesting!

Wendy J. Fox: Which is something I have been thinking about a lot recently…. I get in writing ruts. Sometimes a structural change helps me.

Alysia Sawchyn: Yes, I have to trick myself into writing.

Wendy J. Fox: Yes. I also think a lot about how even thinking about writing is writing, in a way. How reading is in service of the practice. I have had to re-train myself to not think about output.

I love what the poet Amanda Gorman says about output, which is, to paraphrase, if that’s the only goal (production), you’ve put art in a capitalist framework. I want to write, I want to finish things, but I also want to give myself space to read, and just noodle on things, listen to podcasts, go for a walk.

Managing time can be super hard. It calls for some gentleness with ourselves, I think.

Marisa: Especially now, during the pandemic. I feel like I’ve still not gotten a handle on time again, even two years in.

Wendy J. Fox: 100000000%

Marisa: What’s it like to publish a book right now, compared to the books you’d put out in the before-times? Will you be doing in-person and virtual events?

Wendy J. Fox: I am thrilled about this book coming out, and it launches on November 1, but I don’t have a launch event. Usually I’m very on top of that kind of thing. Not this year. It’s just so hard to know what to do.

But that said, I am slowly starting to set some things up. It’s so different. For my last novel, I started official promotion at AWP in March in Tampa. The book came out in May 2019, and I did my last book event in February of 2020, right before everything shut down.

I was hustling for it, and it was really fun to do multiple events each month and hang out with other writers, but this time—I just don’t know.

Alysia Sawchyn: Amen to that. Mine came out in June 2020 and phewwwwwww.

Wendy J. Fox: Actually, I lobbied the publisher to delay the book because I was a little burnt out, but also, as COVID started to happen, I thought, eh, give it a year. It will be better.

Well…. it’s different.

Alysia Sawchyn: HAH. It sure is. I feel like we’re moving back into that in-between space, where things are opening back up but…

Wendy J. Fox: I want to say one thing for anyone reading this who has a book coming out: I really, really, really encourage you—whether it is virtual or in-person—to team up with other writers for your events. It changes the texture.

When I was on tour for If the Ice Had Held, I had zero solo events. What that meant was instead of me sweating at a podium, I was hanging out with smart people talking about things we care about in public, and it was still exhausting, but it was also energizing.

Alysia Sawchyn: Conversations > monologues.

Wendy J. Fox: And, it takes off the pressure of performance.

Alysia Sawchyn: Absolutely.

Can I ask about the progression of the book? Or rather, about the motifs of climate change, and their radical progression.

Wendy J. Fox: Oh, yes.

Alysia Sawchyn: I’m always curious as to whether these elements are things that appear in drafting and are then polished or whether a writer starts out with them in mind. Also—the leap!

Wendy J. Fox: So, as I said above, I started writing this in 2015. Of course, climate change was happening six years ago! It has been happening for a long time. But it feels like it has really started to be made very very evident in recent years. We talk about it differently now, too. We don’t say something is a weird weather event; it’s extreme weather because of climate change. We name it now in a way we didn’t even half a decade ago.

So, those later stories in the book, I was influenced by that, and how our collective relationship to this collective problem is changing. To answer your question, no. It didn’t start that way.

The story that the Rumpus published, “The Human,” is the most climate-change-y one in the book, and I had to keep checking the math on it, like, this feels too far in the future, and then I think about how different the world was for me twenty years ago. What’s it going to be in another twenty years? Maybe there will be a moon colony.

Alysia Sawchyn: Yeah, it’s funny how time changes everything. Ah, I have goosebumps now. Moon colony!

Wendy J. Fox: I don’t want to go!

Alysia Sawchyn: I would never. Have you watched The Expanse (f*ck Amazon but ….)? I screamed the whole way through. I would not do well in space. I also really enjoyed the contrast—the commune.

Wendy J. Fox: I haven’t seen it!

Alysia Sawchyn: Almost like the two extreme possibilities for the future after capitalism—outer space or the deep woods

Wendy J. Fox: Right. Do you double down and get off the grid, or do you put your faith in technology and hop on a rocket? Hard choices either way.

Marisa: Wendy, who are your literary influences, artistic influences, musical influences, etc.? What kind of art do you turn to shake new ideas loose?

Wendy J. Fox: Always a tough question because it changes over time, of course—but the kind of art I turn to rattle things is the kind of stuff I don’t think I could ever do.

Marisa: Same! For me, it’s music. I have no musical talent at all. (I’ve tried.) See also: visual art.

Wendy J. Fox: For example, I there’s an incredible podcast called Stolen by the investigative journalist Connie Walker that is an incredible story of a missing Indigenous woman—the opening to it has to be some of the best narrative journalism that ever existed.

And, you know, I use this book as an example all the time, The Overstory by Richard Powers—mixed reviews from people, but when I read it, I was like, how did you write this? Then I read an article in the Guardian and learned that he first read 127 books about trees. I really like trees and I love to read, but I don’t think I could read that many books about trees.

I also have zero visual artistic talent. When I used to teach, I would try to draw things on the board, and my students would be like, please don’t. Just say it with words.

Marisa: We are almost out of time, and I always like to close by asking what you’re reading now. And/or, any forthcoming books you’re especially excited for?

Wendy J. Fox: I recently read Jen Michalski’s You’ll Be Fine, and it’s great. Alexis Orgera’s Head Case. J.T. Hill’s Blind Man’s Bluff… there’s so much good writing out there. What I just started is My Year of Rest and Relaxation which I didn’t get to when it was hot, but loving it so far.

Alysia Sawchyn: Oh, yes!

Marisa: There is SO much good writing out right now, yes. My book piles are towering.

Wendy J. Fox: One thing that has changed for me in the last years is really trying to read very, very widely—and I’m loving that. It’s a gift to oneself.

Marisa: Wendy, thank you so much for your time this afternoon discussing What If We Were Somewhere Else! So glad to have featured this collection in the Book Club.

Wendy J. Fox: Thank you, and thank for all The Rumpus does for writers and readers and thinkers!

Alysia Sawchyn: Thank youuuuuuuu.

Marisa: Thank you both for your thoughtful questions and answers, too, and have a lovely rest of the weekend!

***

Photograph of Wendy J. Fox by Bethan Brome.

The first time I heard Leonora Simonovis read, in June of 2020, at Antioch University of Los Angeles, I was holding my breath in silent awe. I was undone by the language, a mixture of Spanish and English, both tender and powerful. The reading completely disarmed me; I knew I’d be reading Simonovis’s poetry for the rest of my life.

Many of the poems Simonovis read that afternoon appear in her debut collection, Study of the Raft, winner of the 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry. It’s an important and critically acclaimed work that intersects themes of oppression, isolation, and camaraderie among women and people of color.

A bilingual poet who grew up near Caracas, Venezuela, Simonovis currently lives in San Diego, California where she teaches Latin American literature and creative writing at the University of San Diego. She is a VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation) fellow, has an MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles, and is a contributing editor for Drizzle Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Gargoyle Magazine, Diode Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, Arkansas International, Inverted Syntax, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others.

Despite its heavy themes, Study of the Raft is a book of hope and of togetherness, regardless of boundaries. Simonovis skillfully uses poetic craft to make this message digestible. When we spoke via Zoom, Simonovis had just heard about the Colorado Prize for Poetry award. We talked about the unexpected elation that came with winning this national award, her family—especially her mother—and life as an exile from Venezuela.

***

The Rumpus: Study of the Raft won the 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Sherwin Bitsui. Well done!

Leonora Simonovis: Thank you! I never expected to win and thought the process of publication would take years. All of a sudden, I got a phone call telling me I won. I actually asked the person, “Are you sure it’s me?”

Rumpus: The cover of the book has a picture of warped, separate planks that are roughly hewn together. In one poem, “Further Study of the Raft,” you write: “Hope cannot hold the logs together.” What exactly is the raft?

Simonovis: The raft is an anchor, or what holds everything and everyone together. I live in San Diego, so many people here think of the border as the US/Mexico border. But for me, the border looks different—I had to cross an ocean to come here—and oceanic borders are real. People cross them on these rafts all the time. People die on these rafts. I wanted to call attention to the fact that these dividing lines we create go beyond physical barriers. They are constructed around the idea of home and belonging: That, over there, is your land. This is ours. Borders are there to separate.

Rumpus: Your book is divided into three sections: “Uno,” “Dos,” and “Tres.” What is the significance of this separation?

Simonovis: When we were kids, before racing or doing something that we were a bit reluctant to do, we would say “Uno, dos, y tres” to give ourselves the push we needed. In writing this book, I had so many doubts and questions about my own work, the process of writing, whether I should be writing or not. Saying those words, and writing them down, making them a part of the book, was a way to give myself the courage to just go for it, finish the manuscript, and submit it.

Rumpus: Does your family’s immigration story inform the intersectionality of this book?

Simonovis: Yes, it does. I was born in Caracas, Venezuela—my whole family is from there—and I spent my childhood there. My family moved to Connecticut when I was about to start middle school, because my father had the opportunity to be a postdoctoral student at Yale. Because he wasn’t being paid, our family lived well below the poverty level, and yet it was still the best time of my life. I attended a school that had a predominantly Black student population—I was one of maybe three Latinas—where I felt welcomed, part of the community. I participated in student activities like choir and drama. It was a happy time for me. After about three and a half years, my father decided we were all moving back to Venezuela. I didn’t want to go back, and neither did my brothers, but we did. I always had the mindset that one day I would come back [to the United States] because I no longer felt at home in Venezuela.

Rumpus: When did you move back to the United States?

Simonovis: When I was twenty-five, after I had saved up enough money. I went to Mexico City with a friend, and while I was there, I met a professor from Washington University, in St. Louis. Her department was offering scholarships for their PhD program. She encouraged me to apply, so I did. I was accepted, and moved to the US at the same time Venezuela was turning. The country’s oil strikes, plus the political climate, ignited volatile protests, demonstrations, arrests. There were terrible gas shortages. The day before I left, my dad and brother waited in line at a gas station for seven hours just to buy enough gas to take me to the airport the next day. In many ways, I chose the right time to leave.

Rumpus: But maybe also the hardest time to leave?

Simonovis: Exactly.

Rumpus: When did you start writing poetry?

Simonovis: I started writing in elementary school, but it was mostly kid stuff. The first poetry book I ever read was The Cricket Sings by Federico García Lorca, a book of verse for children. It was a gift from my mom and I still have it—it’s old and stained now. We also had another book by Aquiles Nazoa with funny poems about chickens and other animals. My mom learned these poems by heart, and recited them from memory. I loved listening to her voice as she did this. I could hear my mom’s voice as I looked at the pictures. I’d repeat lines, aloud or in my head. My experience with poetry was more than reading. It involved all my senses: touching, looking, and listening. My mom was a big part of this.

Rumpus: You dedicate Study of the Raft to your mom: “Para mi mamá, por todo.” She’s also an important figure within its pages, isn’t she?

Simonovis: She is. My mom was a faithful reader of my poems. She always supported me. Like all moms, she knew things about me before I did. She called me a poet before I called myself one. Unfortunately—she was very sick for a long time—she passed away two weeks before I found out the book was going to be published.

Rumpus: I’m so sorry.

Simonovis: Thank you. My mom was a special person. She carried the memories of her family and loved to tell the stories.

Rumpus: Two poems, “Still Life with Baby” and “Water Rituals,” have overlapping themes of mother/daughter relationships, domesticity, death, and alienation. Can you talk about this?

Simonovis: My mom’s family had a lot of secrets and she was expected to keep them. Once I was old enough to ask, my mom realized she couldn’t keep all these secrets if she wanted a truthful relationship with me. I wrote “Still Life with Baby” after she told me the story of her mother, my grandmother, losing a child when she was seven months pregnant. My grandma kept the baby—a fetus—perfectly preserved in a jar in a cupboard. She couldn’t bring herself to bury him. My mother was a child, and it was terrifying for her to open the closet door, to get sheets or something, and there was this perfectly formed baby in a jar. Finally, someone in the family convinced my grandmother to give the baby a proper burial, and she did. The memory lingered. I thought, How can I write about that? I hadn’t seen any of it, but I tried to imagine what the cupboard looked like, and what it felt like to open the door. After my mother read the poem, she said, “Thank you. Now I feel seen.” She had been carrying these secrets for years, and they weighed on her.

Rumpus: What an honor.

Simonovis: It was, and in a way this brought us closer together. On the other hand, “Water Rituals” is about my great-grandmother, who didn’t fit the social norms of her day. She had a strong personality and a bit of a temper. She took lovers. She worked as a nurse and had a son, a baby boy, out of wedlock. She worked odd hours and left him in the care of someone else when he was very sick, and he died.

When my great-grandmother was dying, I helped take care of her. At some point, she started seeing this child coming to her, and asked me, “Can you see him? Can you see him?” I was a teenager at the time, so I didn’t know what was going on. I asked my mom about it, and she told me the whole story of this child. Apparently, not even my aunts had known about his existence. My great-grandmother never talked about it. I think it was a source of shame. First of all, she was a nurse, but she couldn’t save her own child. Also, this baby was the son of a man who was not her husband. This wasn’t acceptable in her generation.

Rumpus: One of my favorite poems in this collection is “Father Lengua,” in which the speaker’s father, a deep-thinking, educated man, tries to explain how to pronounce his name: “Shah-vee-air, he says / —over and over— / It’s Basque. But / they think / Basque is a painter. // When I buy him / coffee, I take the cup from / the barista’s hand and write / his name as many times / as it takes for all to see.”

When I read this, I felt the burden of translation on you. I know your parents weren’t illiterate, but were you expected to be a bridge?

Simonovis: When we first arrived in the US, I really felt that burden of translation that you’re talking about. My siblings and I learned English so quickly! We were immersed because of school. My dad, on the other hand, had to learn as an adult. My parents really wanted to learn to speak English fluently. They asked my brothers and me to speak English at home, but we didn’t want to. We spoke English at school, had ESL classes, and everyone at school spoke English. But home was our refuge! We could relax there, speak Spanish as a family, and be ourselves. I realized, much later, that it was the language of our relationship. We had established a relationship with our parents in one language, so switching to another language would have changed that relationship. It felt awkward.

Rumpus: How does poetry help you to cross those boundaries?

Simonovis: With poetry, I don’t have to choose one language or the other. When you’re writing, you’re creating a different language. Poets create their own language, with a different syntax, different musicality, unique ways of putting images together. It’s not binary. There’s no left or right, backward or forward, this or that, either, or. You just write and see what happens. Everything intersects. This is why I love poetry so much.

Rumpus: One of your poems is called, “Still Life in Exile.” Do you consider yourself an exile, or is this a word to describe your separation from family?

Simonovis: I consider myself an exile because I don’t get to return to Venezuela. On one hand, I decided to leave, and I knew I might not be coming back, because of how things were turning out politically and socially.

Rumpus: The poem has a strong beginning: “Papá calls again: / your cousin died in jail / a policeman came last night / says I’m on the list. // A grocery list on my night table. // I left a country where politicians / play in red berets while people / die for a pair of shoes.” Were there threats to your family from the oppressive government?

Simonovis: One of my family members was arrested and kept as a political prisoner for fifteen years. Because we had the same last name, my family started getting noticed. I went back home twice, to visit my family, and was interrogated at the airport. They asked me, “Do you know this person? Do you know he’s in jail for what he did?” Even my father has been questioned, interrogated, because of his work as a doctor. Once, after treating a patient, he was pulled in for questioning. They accused him of helping the opposition because the patient was supposedly from the opposition. My father has always treated his patients with compassion. It’s about their health and well-being, not their political views.

Rumpus: Searching for safety recurs in this collection, often overlapped by the abuse of power. “The Holy Family” gives the reader a close-up of a nun who abuses her power, as a teacher and as a representative of the church: “The Sister… tells me / how many of the Ten / Commandments I’ve / broken. I’ve never been / good with numbers… I sit / on my bed, shaking.” Was this written from a memory of one specific nun at your Catholic school in Venezuela? Or does she bear the weight of every religious figure?

Simonovis: She kind of bears the weight for everyone. There was one nun at that school who would pull the kids’ ears until they were red. She would just pull them and pull them. It was horrible! All of those nuns had a way of using punishment as pedagogy. Most of the poems I write about religion are really about the abuse of power, bestowed upon these people by the church.

Rumpus: You also address corruption in the Venezuelan government. The poem “Gospel, After OneChot’s ‘Rotten Town’” focuses on the violence in Venezuela at that time: “mothers, fathers, brothers, / sisters, sons and daughters, / bodies piling at the morgue, / They live in a Rotten city / untagged, unclaimed, / unbagged and bound / to a trigger. Murder / They live in a Rotten city / as prayer and redemption.”

What inspired this?

Simonovis: I was definitely inspired by OneChot’s “Rotten Town” video. It showed the violence that was happening in Venezuela, beginning with children playing in the barrios, in the mountains surrounding Caracas. It’s disturbing. In the first scene, one of the kids dies from a stray bullet. From there, [the video] gets darker. The government tried to censor the video, but it went viral. The singer, OneChot, was shot, maybe a couple of years after the video’s release. He survived, but he was in ICU for months. People who lived outside of Venezuela thought, “Wow, how ironic that his song was about all this violence and he became a victim of that violence.” But Venezuelans knew everything he was singing about. It’s why many of us left. So, this poem was me trying to have a conversation with that video. I think that the intention behind the poem is to say, This is our reality right now. How do we talk about it? How do we engage with it? How did I navigate the city and the violence I grew up in?

Rumpus: You have a way of taking memory, history, and even traumatic violence, and turning it into something digestible for the reader. Each poem is haunting, but beautiful. Language is a powerful player on the page. What is your process like?

Simonovis: On a perfect day, I would get to do a half hour of free writing, where I work on new things. Then, take a break. Later, I would come back to revise for two to three hours. That’s my favorite part of the process. Writing can be hard, but revising is like building a house. You have all these parts, and begin to wonder, How do I design this to serve the people who are going to live there? Or, How does the design serve the house? What does this house want to be? When I revise I always ask myself, What does this poem want to be, where does it want to go? Do I need to write more? Write less? What’s working, what isn’t? At times, when revising the manuscript, I’d feel stuck, so I’d just sit in front of a poem and say, “Talk to me. Please say something.” The process, for me, is very messy, not straightforward. One day, I might write a line for a poem, put it away, and maybe forget about it for three months. Once in a while, a poem will come to me whole and will need very little editing.

Rumpus: Were any of the poems in this collection like that?

Simonovis: “I’ve Been Prey for Most of My Life” was like that. It came to me in one sitting. So, I guess going back to my ideal day, I would use the morning to write and revise, and then the afternoon to read, with many breaks in between, walks, and maybe a short trip to the ocean.

***

Photograph of Leonora Simonovis by @meterphoto.

Many writers know James Tate Hill as the fantastic fiction editor of Monkeybicycle. He’s a wonderful supporter of new writers who also relishes the nuances of punctuation. When we worked together in 2020 I remember how he took the time to discuss and negotiate each edit. I’m the kind of writer who could ponder hyphens and semicolons all day, so this was my idea of a great time.

When I heard that Hill had a memoir out on submission about hiding his blindness for fifteen years, I invited Hill to speak at the library I direct. After Blind Man’s Bluff came out this past August to great acclaim, I joined him again at a virtual panel hosted by my local bookstore. Hill’s memoir has since been named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. The Best American Essays editors have chosen two of his works as “Notable,” and he won the Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel for his debut novel, Academy Gothic. Tate continues to edit Monkeybicycle while serving as a contributing editor at Literary Hub, where he writes a monthly audiobooks column. Born in Charleston, West Virginia, he now lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Hill and I have become email pen pals throughout the pandemic. In our most recent email exchange, we focused on how he crafted his memoir.

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The Rumpus: Can you speak about the origins of this book?

James Tate Hill: “Why don’t you write about losing your sight?” a close friend asked me in graduate school, at the bar after evening workshop. I was discouraged by her question, in part because it seemed a response to my most recent ill-received short story, but more so because I tried so assiduously, even around friends who knew about my blindness, to make people forget that I couldn’t see.

I had started writing short stories my senior year of high school, the year I was adapting to vision loss, showing them to my English teacher for feedback. Looking back, I’m sure writing was an outlet for communicating what I didn’t have the words to say. But none of the stories I wrote that year, nor any of the fiction I wrote in college or graduate school, featured characters or plots anybody might mistake for my life. It took me a long time to realize fiction had become another way of hiding, to put forth these characters and plots and say to people, Here, this is me, not the shy fellow too afraid to initiate conversation because he can’t see whom he’s speaking to.

How I grew from that shy and frightened individual wrestling with internalized shame about his disability into the author of a mystery novel with a blind protagonist could fill a book—it’s called Blind Man’s Bluff—but I never planned to write a memoir. I was writing about my blindness in that debut novel, Academy Gothic, but there was still the mask of fiction. I was surprised how good it felt during interviews and events for that book, how liberating, to acknowledge which parts of it were true.

Rumpus: I’m curious about your use of the second person in this memoir. Did any other memoirists influence your decision to mix first and second person? 

Hill: I definitely owe a hat tip to Mark Richard, whose memoir House of Prayer No. 2 was the first time I encountered second person that made it feel exhilarating. Richard’s memoir begins in third person, actually, with “the special child” recovering in a charity hospital after the first of many surgeries on his hips. The distance shortens with the transition from third person to second, but there remains a sort of double consciousness between author and character, a sense of the narrator never fully inhabiting his own body even as the life he lives is very much his own.

I never said to myself, Let’s write three chapters of this memoir in second person. The chapter that was initially the first chapter has never been in second person, but the three chapters of Blind Man’s Bluff that did end up in that point of view have always been in that point of view. I’m not positive that I knew why, at the time I was drafting those chapters, that “you” felt more natural than “I.” But when I read the completed manuscript for the first time, it made perfect sense that I had written those particular chapters in second person. These were the times I was least certain about my identity, the periods of my life when I felt most unmoored from any idea about who I was and who I could be. This isn’t to say the chapters in first person depict a young man who knows exactly who he is, but he is a young man who thinks he knows who he is.

Some readers can be suspicious of the second person. It does feel a little accusatory, doesn’t it? As though we the readers are being actively implicated in this narrative we didn’t sign up for. But memoir, for me, is both the story and why we’re telling it. Blind Man’s Bluff is the story of the lies I told to friends, family, and lovers, but also to myself. “The prevailing theory,” writes Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, in her excellent second-person memoir, Sounds Like Titanic, “is that memoirists use second person when they are writing about something traumatic. But in actuality, for many people… the first person feels like the worst type of fakery.”

Rumpus: Do you have any observations on how gender impacts one’s experience of living with a disability? This is definitely a boy’s coming of age story, and there seems a powerful link between your understanding of masculinity and your decision to hide your blindness. Did your Appalachian childhood also shape your stubbornly independent self?

Hill: This is one of those questions I’m not sure I could have answered accurately prior to writing the book. I knew my reluctance to identify as blind or disabled began (mostly unconsciously) after a few early experiences after losing my sight that reinforced the social stigma associated with disability. Only in talking with a friend my age who had read the book, a fellow writer who also grew up in a rural area, did I connect my stubborn refusal to talk about my disability, let alone accept it, with a generational and regional stoicism that’s probably more common than not among people I knew growing up.

I hope it’s an outdated stereotype that men don’t talk about their feelings, cry, hug, ask for directions, etc. And growing up in West Virginia I knew plenty of women, to be sure, who regarded imperviousness as a type of strength. It certainly felt, as a sixteen-year-old boy, like not being able to drive was going to be a problem when it came to dating. I’m not sure I can separate my own gender expectations from those of partners in my failed relationships, but so much of myself was a construct in those years that I’m sure gender roles and masculinity only added to my impostor syndrome.

Rumpus: Let’s switch gears: Revision. Love it? Hate it? Something in between?

Hill: Give me revision over the first draft any day. I’m revising a novel right now, and although part of me misses the surprise of excavating the story from my mind, I never miss the frustration of not knowing what happens next. Memoir is different because what happens in the book has already happened in life, but when you are revisiting trauma, the excavation can be treacherous in a different way.

If I’m being honest, revising Blind Man’s Bluff was probably tougher for me than the novels I’ve revised. In the latter, I’m adding, deleting, shifting, and everything else you’d expect to happen to a manuscript. With this memoir, a majority of the notes from my (incredibly wise) editor and agent were like, more here, explore this further, and let’s go deeper with this. To belabor the excavation metaphor, the late-stage digging found plenty of emotion deposits I thought I had already mined.

Maybe that’s what I love about revision, that it’s all about effort and want. Meanwhile, the first draft can feel like casting spells, and some days you’re not even sure you believe in magic.

Rumpus: How does writing short personal essays prepare you to write a memoir? In what ways does it not prepare you?

Hill: Boy, this is a tough question. In ways, I think essays are to memoir what short stories are to the novel. The basic materials are probably the same, or similar enough, but there’s a certain narrative endurance in fiction that I only acquired through writing a lot of failed novels. Blind Man’s Bluff is the first memoir I’ve written, so it probably helped me to imagine the chapters as movements, some of them self-contained essays. And maybe the pessimist in me thought, if nothing comes of this book, well, at least I can send out a few of these chapters as essays.

In The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick says essays use the author’s life to shed light on another topic while memoir uses other topics to illuminate the author’s life. Memoirs need a through-line the way novels need a plot, and essays can definitely thrive on tension without narrative momentum.

That said, I love memoirs that meander and breathe, where forward progress sometimes pauses for a deeper dive into ideas. I hope the memoirs I pick up keep me turning pages to find out what happens next, but I’m going to feel cheated if they don’t also offer some kind of wisdom or insight, if I don’t walk away with a new lens through which I can view myself a little differently.

Rumpus: You are often praised for your witty takes on pop culture in writing. How did cultural icons like Prince, the phenomenon of the ’80s shopping mall, and fast food restaurants like Taco Bell shape you into the writer you are today?

Hill: Growing up in 1980s West Virginia, pop culture was my portal to the larger world. Our television received the proverbial three channels and the sometimes-staticky UHF station that would eventually become Fox. Rabbit ears were useless, so we ran a wire attached to an antenna up the hillside fifty or sixty yards, which only helped for a few weeks. My grandparents lived at the foot of our hill, and I spent a lot of time reading their TV Guide, constructing a playlist of shows I’d watch if we had a satellite dish.

I’d like to tell you that by the time cable arrived to our rural area, I had turned to books, that finally having all those channels was anticlimactic, but cable television was everything I dreamed it would be. I stayed up way too late every night, making up for lost time, filling in my pop culture gaps with shows I had only seen mentioned in TV Guide. Every channel was possibility, my remote control opening door after door after door that each led to another hallway of doors.

The mall was much the same as cable, endless possibilities arriving daily on shelves and racks and store windows. And like the You Are Here on all those mall directories, I located myself by my surroundings, always looking outward rather than inward. Which probably didn’t prepare me for the loss of my sight at age sixteen, after which I continued to measure myself against other people.

In the wake of vision loss, pop culture became the way I could still recognize the world that had changed so drastically. It was one way I could still relate to friends. I was also grateful for the memories of so many faces and scenes I could call on after watching television became listening to television. Those countless hours of television and wandering malls, in hindsight, feel like cramming for an exam nobody warned me was coming.

90210 and Tom Cruise and Prince and Seinfeld and The Golden Girls were topics of conversation I could reach for instead of talking about myself. Pop culture was how I made sense of the world, but for a long time it was a way to avoid making sense of myself. My pop culture obsessions reach a sort of climax in a late chapter of Blind Man’s Bluff that interrogates a childhood fascination with Tom Cruise through the film Rain Man. What that disability narrative means to me now isn’t what it meant to me in 1989 or 1997, when I didn’t view it as a film about disability and refused to think of myself as disabled.

And that’s why, I suppose, I come here to praise pop culture, not to bury it. Any obsession can reveal as effectively as it can obscure. The barriers to self-examination are rarely the lenses we’re using, but the willingness to look.

Rumpus: How has the literary world changed over time in its appreciation of audiobooks? How has your Lit Hub column helped convince people that audiobooks are “real”?

Hill: Audiobooks have come a long way from sitcom jokes that implied they’re tantamount to cheating. The biggest part of that widespread acceptance has been popularity stemming from access. With the advent of smartphones, we no longer need bulky CDs or cassette tapes. We can also enjoy digital audiobooks for most new releases on the same publication day as their print counterparts. Twenty years ago, I was lucky to find any non-bestseller published as a commercial audiobook. Thirty years ago, around the time I became a reader of audiobooks out of necessity, the books on tape section of most public libraries consisted of self-help titles and classic literature, some of the latter in abridged versions.

But anyone who thinks the argument has been fully settled on whether audiobooks count as reading should pose the question to their friends. The issue, mind you, has been thoroughly settled. The argument less so.

The chapter of Blind Man’s Bluff titled “Real Books” explores my discovery of books on tape, and it first appeared at Lit Hub in 2018 as “Do Audiobooks Count As Reading?” A perusal of the comments—I know, I know, never read the comments—any of the times Lit Hub has reshared that piece finds plenty of opinions on both sides. To be sure, nobody who says they don’t count ever makes a cogent argument, but I’ve seen the same debate pop up in friends’ Facebook posts, and people who ought to know better continue to dismiss audiobooks as lazy or passive.

Studies that show comparable brain activity and reading comprehension between audio and print are easy to find. I won’t reference them here. The ableist insistence that audiobooks are somehow inferior to print helps to explain how the disabled internalize cultural views of disability as shame. It’s a shame that led me to dedicate a ridiculous amount of energy and time to hiding my blindness for more than fifteen years.

But venues like Lit Hub have been wonderful for embracing alternate forms of reading, and so much of cultural acceptance comes from exposure and awareness. Writing a monthly column recommending audiobooks has been a joy for me, and I hope it’s helped more people understand they are, in fact, real books.

Rumpus: Your memoir is also a story of a failed marriage with the promise of a solid second marriage at the end. I’d compare it to In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado in the author’s use of restraint when writing about disturbing events. Blind Man’s Bluff is also a memoir of the writing life, and the ups and downs of your writing parallel the ups and downs of that marriage. When you say late in the book that true revision is more than correction, you’re clearly talking about more than a novel. How did your writing and relationships both change when you became open about your blindness?

Hill: For sure, it’s no coincidence that the failure of that first marriage tracks with my most frustrating years as a writer. I’d like to say marriage and writing get a lot easier when you’re older, but the success of relationships, like writing, depend less on age than how much you understand—in particular, how well you understand yourself.

I don’t think it’s accurate to say that first marriage would have succeeded if I had been more candid about my blindness. What I can say with some certainty is that secrecy tends to foster more secrecy. Not that I viewed the minimizing of my disability as dishonesty at the time. As George Costanza tells Jerry Seinfeld while the latter prepares for a lie detector test: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”

People say marriage is hard. God knows my first marriage was. But my second marriage has been pretty easy. Life itself, quite frankly, has been a lot less difficult since I stopped devoting time and energy to pretending I was someone I’m not.

I’d like to tell you that writing became effortless in the wake of that self-acceptance, but I’m not sure writing ever becomes easy. What does get easier is realizing when I have something to say.

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Photograph of James Tate Hill by Lori Jackson Hill.