John Cotter’s Under the Small Lights is a journey back to that time in one’s life when nothing was yet decided. You hadn’t yet ended up with anyone, or spent decades in the same job, or the same place. In this novella, winner of the 2009 Miami University Press Novella Prize, Cotter explores the lives of a group of smart, artistic friends as they step from stone to stone away from adolescence into the undiscovered continent of the rest of their lives.

Cotter doesn’t give a lot of background to these characters; rather he shows their interactions in swiftly paced scenes that allude to what came before and where they may end up after. They hang out with friends, make art, discuss big ideas, and endeavor to leave something new in the world. Jack, the story’s narrator, wants to be the next great American poet. He and Bill are writing a play together—perhaps emulating their literary heroes, they write on a typewriter and don’t get started until they’ve drunk whiskey and popped some pills. They pull random books off their shelves to find lines to use in the play. Bill suggests, “We’ll get a bunch of texts together and cut them up and make an ur-text.” When they hit a writing block, they lug the typewriter to Walden Pond. In the middle of winter. And somehow lose it in the snow.

While this pair’s inexperience and immaturity can be exasperating, the prose in which Cotter writes about their artistic struggles is simple and beautiful. After some time in the winter woods trying to write, Jack is unable to type and notices that “[t]he cold that had settled in my hand for twenty minutes was reaching up my arms. I felt it blush in my spine.” The author conveys the frustration of creative work accurately: “I stared at the typewriter. I couldn’t make something happen.”

Bill and Jack are young enough to be fearless. They know all the rules but want to test them out and discover what they believe without just blindly inheriting the world. In an argument about a scene they’re writing, Bill asks:

“Remember Chekhov and the shotgun?”

“Fuck those rules. Who made that rule?”

“Chekhov.”

“Who said that things had to have a certain structure? How about new forms? Plays with guns over the mantelpiece and they never go off. Storms where no one learns anything. Poems that don’t begin.”

John Cotter

Throughout Under the Small Lights, Cotter puts Jack in situations where he tries to challenge rules and rebel against received wisdom, including a night when he and his friends Paul and Corinna sleep together. Cotter’s writing about sex is charged with emotion and sensory experiences, and never says more than it needs to. “I don’t know how but we were all on the bed and my mouth was on her again,” Jack describes. “I could smell her thickly and I felt her breath go sharp.”

After this one night, Jack is left out of the threesome as Corinna and Paul become a couple. Jack begs Paul for another chance with Corinna and reveals the depths of his desperation:

To Paul’s small credit, he was in a position to say any number of things next. From You’ve Had Your Chance to She Doesn’t Want You to Which Of Us Is Fucking Her to She’s All I’ve Wanted to Don’t Kid Yourself to You’re Not Man Enough to You Think She Is Someone She Is Not to Why Should You Have Everything And I Have Nothing to She Chose Me Not You She Chose Me.

Even after she’s married, Jack continues to pursue Corinna. “What the fuck is marriage anyway but an ornamental restraining order?” he asks. Bill serves as the voice of reason once again, admonishing Jack, “Admit it. You’re in love with both of them and you wish things were just the way they were. You wish you all lived together. It doesn’t work that way, though. People can’t live that way.”

It’s painful to watch these characters grow disappointed by their personal limitations as well as society’s, yet there is also something sweet and vulnerable in the experiences Cotter describes. These late-adolescents are trying on adulthood—working their first jobs, throwing their first dinner parties, buying alcohol legally—while also reveling in their youth. In a local wine and cheese shop, they chase each other through the aisles in a contest to find the worst smelling cheese: “Matrons and tan old men avoided staring as we scuttled around the place… I tried to sneak up on Paul with the same wedge but he saw me coming and dodged me, nearly hurling himself into the limburger. My fingers reeked, reminding me I’d touched something that came from an animal.”

I spent my early twenties haunting the same bookstores and cafes in Boston as Jack does, trying to be a writer. Like Jack, I could be insufferable at times. With a fresh nose piercing, chain-smoking over a mix of Alanis Morrisette, Smashing Pumpkins, and Nirvana, I talked in circles about all my hard life choices—where to live (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, or Eugene), which guy to date (one summer, I strung along four at once), what to do for money while I wrote the book that would make me rich and famous (teaching or stocking shelves). I was all promise and passion, but too inexperienced to comprehend the gulf between my ambitions and my skills. I never once considered how privileged I was even to have these choices, to be able to ask the question Who do I want to be and what do I want to do in the world?

I wasn’t initially eager to revisit that time in my life, but what’s terrific about Under the Small Lights is that Cotter’s novella demonstrates a maturity that is beyond the characters who populate it. He writes with insight, nuance, and respect for the complexity of these young people’s lives. The prose is lyrical and lucid; the scenes are powerful and vivid. Cotter’s novella—that in-between container that is neither a short story nor a novel—shows what can be accomplished by this form, underscoring how these characters exist in their own limbo: neither children nor adults, caught on the threshold of the rest of their lives.

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• The Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement

Miguel Syjuco’s novel, Ilustrado won the Man Asian Literary Prize while still in manuscript. A Filipino American reviewer considers the fate of Filipino writing in the American literary world.

**
If you’re only reading this review to find out whether Miguel Syjuco’s novel, Ilustrado, is worth your time, here’s the short answer: Yes. If you enjoy a good murder mystery, or a multigenerational family saga, or a love story, or a hero’s journey in search of something lost, or an inside look at how the elite of a former U.S. colony live—or even if you like texts conducive to lit-crit discussions of the metanarrative, the postmodern, the postcolonial, or the political—you will find many things to admire in Syjuco’s debut.

When was the last time you read a novel by a Filipino about any aspect of a Filipino experience? Have you ever wondered about this former colony, the stories its people might tell?

If you’ve never read a novel about the Philippines, then read Ilustrado. If you’re dismayed at how few books are written and published by Filipinos, then buy twenty copies.

Ilustrado is an exuberant, complex, and fascinating ride through 150 years of Philippine history. In the Prologue, a young writer, the fictional Miguel Syjuco, describes a body floating in the Hudson River. The body is identified as Crispin Salvador, a.k.a. “The Panther,” the protagonist’s literary idol. The story that ensues details Syjuco’s attempt to piece together what happened to Salvador and to find The Bridges Ablaze, Salvador’s final manuscript, a rumored masterpiece.

The novel is comprised of fragments of texts written by different authors, but mostly taken from Salvador’s oeuvre, which includes about a dozen novels—and including essays, novel excerpts, short stories, interviews, blogs, blog comments, jokes, and unpublished manuscripts. The reader must work to make the connections between the fragments, but I was never confused. Syjuco’s writing is playful, smart, and confident. The pacing is quick and the last third of the novel hums with energy. I felt fully immersed in this world, and though the novel’s final pages frustrated me, I admired the previous three hundred.

That’s the end of the short answer.

Here’s the long answer: Despite the ugly stereotype that Filipinos are like crabs in a barrel pulling down those who get too close to the top, my experience is that we love when one of us succeeds. If a Filipino is singing on Oprah or replacing Steve Perry in Journey, we contact every Filipino in our address book. When my father, whose music collection is rich with Kenny Rogers and Chuck Mangione, asked if I’d heard about the Filipino in the Black Eyed Peas rapping about bebots, I knew the hive’s communication system was highly efficient. When I was a little girl, a Filipina appeared on our first color TV in a shimmering mermaid dress; my parents roused us out of bed to see a sight as rare as Halley’s Comet. All night long my parents’ phone rang, Filipinos congratulating each other as if Rosario Salayan, runner-up in the 1980 Miss Universe pageant, were their own daughter. We wore yellow during the People Power movement of 1986 and framed the front page of our local newspapers when Corazon Aquino was elected President.

The converse is true, too. We shake our heads in shame when one of us makes bad news—such as Onel de Guzman, who may have created the “Love Bug” virus that caused causing an estimated $10 billion in damage, or Andrew Cunanan, who killed Gianni Versace, before killing himself. “But Cunanan was only half-Filipino!” we insist.

There are so many of us living far away from home—about 8 million overseas Filipino workers. Remittances make up 10% of the total Philippine economy, and yet we hardly see evidence of our existence. Filipinos are integral to operations in the cruise ship, hotel, hospital, and other industries—but we often work in the back, invisible, taking care of what others don’t want to do. Take for example, the U.S. Navy, which has hired Filipinos since 1898 as stewards and mess boys: By 1970, there were nearly 17,000 Filipinos in the U.S Navy, many performing cleaning and cooking duties on the ships.

So two years ago, when a Filipino’s unpublished novel won the Man Asia Literary Prize, for weeks I heard about the news from multiple sources. Now that Farrar, Straus & Giroux has published Ilustrado, I can’t get through my day without someone forwarding an article or stopping me in a parking lot to tell me about it. People in my community have been encouraging each other to buy Syjuco’s book and attend his events. His success is a success for all of us.

As an aspiring Filipino novelist myself, I have an interest in Ilustrado’s success. If one of us moves books, publishers may be more inclined to publish Filipino novels in the future. The problem with this, of course, is that if a Filipino’s book doesn’t sell well, publishers may be less inclined to take a risk.

Perhaps my theory is too cynical. Perhaps if Filipino novelists just write books that are good enough, they’ll be published by major U.S. presses. Perhaps, in the end, publishing decisions are solely about craft, story, and the writing.

Or not. Before winning the Man Asia, Syjuco could not publish in American literary journals and was rejected by many agents, despite his attempts to participate in the literary community, moving to New York to study creative writing at Columbia University, working entry-level jobs at The New Yorker and The Paris Review. After rejecting his work, one agent recommended Syjuco read E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, a detail that makes its way into the novel.

Syjuco’s struggles inspired me to research how Filipino novelists in the diaspora had fared in mainstream U.S. publishing. Everyone I know in the book world talks as though the novel in general is on its deathbed—but what I learned about the plight of Filipinos writers was even grimmer. In the past twenty years, Random House imprints have published several novels written by Filipinos that were either set in the Philippines and/or featured central Filipino characters, including Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990), Arlene J. Chai’s The Last Time I Saw Mother (1996), F. Sionil Jose’s Dusk (1998) and Don Vicente (1999), Bino Realuyo’s The Umbrella Country (1999), Tess Uriza Holthe’s When the Elephants Dance (2002), and Merlinda Bobis’s The Solemn Lantern Maker (2009).

The Penguin Group published two novels by Filipinos, a decade apart: Cecilia Manguerra Brainard’s When the Rainbow Goddess Wept (1994) and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle (2004). Philippine national hero and novelist Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) , first published in 1887, became the first work of Filipino literature published by Penguin Classics (2006). W.W. Norton published Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War in 1988 and Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son in 2001. HarperCollins published Sophia G. Romero’s novel Always Hidingin 1998.

At smaller presses, Noel Alumit published Letters to Montgomery Clift (MacAdam/Cage, 2003) and Talking to the Moon (Carroll & Graf, 2006). The University of Washington Press published Peter Bacho’s Cebu (1991), which won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and Linda Ty-Casper’s DreamEden (1997). Dalkey Archive republished Wilfrido D. Nolledo’s But for the Lovers, which was first published by Dutton in 1970. Temple University Press published Carlos Bulosan’s The Cry and the Dedication in 1995. Bulosan died in 1956. In his autobiography, America Is in the Heart (1946), he wrote, “Do you know what a Filipino feels in America? He is the loneliest thing on earth [surrounded by] beauty, wealth, power, grandeur. But is he a part of these luxuries?”

Farrar, Straus & Giroux published MacArthur Fellow Han Ong’s novels Fixer Chao (2001) and The Disinherited (2004), before publishing Ilustrado.

According to Bowker’s Books in Print, there were 240,000 adult fiction hardcover titles published in English in the US from 1990-2010, or roughly 12,000 every year. If we interpret the above numbers generously, every year about one novel featuring Filipino characters written by a Filipino in English is published in the US. One out of 12,000. Over time, you can see how little literary production that is. In the past twenty years, twenty novels out of a quarter million have passed through the needle’s eye to find a U.S. publisher?

This isn’t because there aren’t enough Filipinos interested in the literary arts, or because we don’t write in English. The first Filipino novel written in English, A Child of Sorrow by Zoilo M. Galang, was published in 1921. About 93% of the Philippine population over the age of ten is literate, among the highest literacy rates in the developing world. The language of instruction in schools is English. And there is a sizable population of literate, English-speaking Filipinos in the U.S.: According to the 2000 Census, there were 2.4 million Filipinos in the U.S.—18.3% of the Asian American population and the second largest Asian ethnic group after the Chinese.

We’re here, but like many people of color we don’t see ourselves reflected in books or movies or TV programs. If we are referenced in pop culture, it’s Joan Rivers making another joke about us eating dogs, or characters on Desperate Housewives disparaging Filipino medical schools. Otherwise, we’re invisible.

In 2001, when Roley published American Son, his first novel, he asked, “Given our numbers and status as formerly colonialized subjects, why are we so invisible to other Americans? Why do many Americans seem so much more interested in people from just about any other Asian country—Japan, Korea, Tibet, and now India? Could it be that after being forcibly Westernized, we no longer appear Asian enough to be viewed as exotic? Could it have something to do with America’s colonial past not fitting in with its idea of itself as a democracy?”

And it’s not just American readers who don’t want to read Filipino novels. In The Philippine Star, F. Sionil Jose, celebrated author of dozens of important works, recently commented that “many Filipino writers don’t consider themselves anointed until their work is published in the United States.

This then is one of the greatest obstructions in the building of a nation—the colonized mind… And this servility is accepted, in fact encouraged by our major bookshops. Their front windows display foreign titles and bestsellers—not our books, as is done in all other countries.

Jose criticizes Filipino readers for being more interested in John Updike and Philip Roth,

these Western writers who wallow in the arid trivia of suburbia, who do not really say anything of much importance to us. Nobility, heroism, forbearance are absent in the work of most writers in the Imperial West today… this about sums up some of the literary ejaculations of such authors who we read with so much attention.

Of course, there are other options for Filipino novelists besides “anointment.” We can create our own opportunities, as did Eileen Tabios of Meritage Press, which publishes Filipino literature under the BABAYLAN imprint, and Cecilia Manguerra Brainard of Philippine American Literary House (PALH). Or, if you can’t publish in the U.S., you can publish “back home.” New York residents Gina Apostol published Bibliolepsy with the University of the Philippines Press (1997) and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata with Anvil (2009); and Eric Gamalinda has published three novels in the Philippines, including Empire of Memory with Anvil (1992). They have published here also, most recently collaborating with fiction writer Lara Stapleton on The Thirdest World: Stories and Essays by Three Filipino Writers (2007), with Factory School, a small U.S. publisher.

Maybe the biggest reason we haven’t read more novels by writers of Filipino ancestry is the novels haven’t been written yet. Writing and publishing a novel is incredibly difficult. Many people want to write a book, but without encouragement, resources, and opportunities to develop, I imagine many aspiring novelists of Filipino descent eventually give up. If Miguel Syjuco hadn’t won the Man Asian Literary Prize, how long could he have persisted despite the constant rejection?

I don’t usually want to read a novel about writers, but the scenes in Ilustrado about literary life were funny because they were spot on. Take, for example, this description:

Rita Rajah, the Muslim poetess from Mindanao; her eyebrows are as thin and carefully drawn as her verse, her makeup applied in the generous manner of one who was nearly a great beauty and still savors wistful memories of being so darned close. Her literary fame is based on five poems she wrote in 1972, ’73, and ’79.

Syjuco introduces us to “the literati of the Philippines: the merry, mellowed, stalwartly middle-class practitioners of the luxury of literature in the language of the privileged” with a hilarious scene at the University of the Philippines’ literary center, where a young poet reads earnest poems at a podium while Rita raises her voice to make tsimis, gossip, about Salvador with the fictional Syjuco and Furio, another writer:

Rita: “Autoplagiarist’s problem was it was more about Filipinos than for Filipinos.”

Furio: “It’s the sort of book Americans love and Filipinos hate. We have to write for our countrymen.”

Rita: “Countrywomen.”

Me: “Then why couldn’t he get it published abroad?”

Furio: “The same reason the rest of us Filipinos have hard time.”

And:

Me: “Did any of you like anything Crispin wrote? What about his masterpiece—Because of–”

Furio: “Dahil Sa’Yo? Not authentic enough. It didn’t capture the essence of the Filipino.”

Rita: “The trouble with that book is that in its obsession with the new, it was really just being old.”

Furio: “I preferred his work when he was merely trying for approval.”

Syjuco, the author, pokes fun at himself, too. The fictional Syjuco struggles with writing a novel in a locked room in the apartment she shares with his girlfriend, who asks what the mysterious crying noises are. He admits he was watching pornography and lets her into his writing room.

Like a connoisseur pointing out the levers, gears, and jewels that fascinate within clockworks, I showed her the top-shelf videos on my hard drive. I introduced her to my favorite strumpets: Jenna Haze, Belladona, and the Filipina-American Charmane Star. I told her my dream of writing about them in a book that would get published by a major literary house.

Grace Talusan

Syjuco reveals that Salvador, when a young writer, also won a prestigious prize for the unpublished manuscript of his first novel, The Enlightened, which “could not live up to the fairy-tale hype.” The term ilustrado is synonymous with “enlightened,” and refers to the Filipino educated elite under Spanish colonial rule. The most famous ilustrado in Philippine history is another novelist, José Rizal, whose novel Noli Me Tangere criticized Spanish colonial rule. Before Rizal was executed by the Spanish in 1896, he left a final poem, “Mi Ultimo Adios,” my last farewell.

Reading fiction should be an emotional experience, and there were many moments in Ilustrado when I felt. For example, the scene at a funeral when a coffin is opened one last time and the protagonist watches his uncle’s wife holds her husband’s hand for the last time. And the family-meal scene in which the protagonist’s father oppresses a caged tiger stayed with me long after reading. I also felt delight in recognizing cultural references and details. Syjuco wrote about people and places that I knew. Ilustrado is a Filipino novel and presents the complexity and vibrancy of the Philippines that I know. I enjoyed, for once, being on the inside of a joke.

Aside from the extended joke that features a recurring cast of characters who appear throughout the novel, there are other pieces of texts that aren’t attributed. There are fragments in italics, like this one, which I admired:

Our nostalgic protagonist sits on the bed… where did my own life go? he thinks… So many unfinished story collections. Epic novels that reached chapter two. And those damn confusing experiments with style. The thing is to write a straight narrative. That’s the trick, no trickery. Go back to basics. Emulate A Passage to India. Write Crispin’s biography. Spin the yarn, follow it home… Maybe maturity—he thinks—is merely accepting the tally of all the finite and disappearing options of life.

There’s a danger in using so many different texts in a novel—can one writer convince us of so many different writerly voices in one work? There are even fragments within a fragments—the fictional Syjuco quotes Salvador’s sister’s girlhood diary in his biography-in-process—but these fragments add up to something meaningful and satisfying, and make Ilustrado an inventive and exciting debut.

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Here’s the situation: Claire Kessler, an artist and real-estate stager, and her husband Jay, a research psychologist, live in Chicago. They have been married almost two years. They don’t have children yet but, after some ambivalence, Claire now realizes she wants to be a mother. Then one night at a party, Jay hurls himself over a high-rise balcony, falls twenty-three stories, and dies. On his desk at home, he’s left a binder full of paperwork, including account numbers, tips on taking care of his cat, and a goodbye letter to his wife.

How and what we tell ourselves about our lives matters. The words we choose matter, and how we shape the story matters. Happy Now?, Katherine Shonk’s debut novel is the story of what happens to Claire after her husband jumps. Shonk shows us how she grapples with the life she thought she had with her husband, and the way his suicide forces her to reexamine that story. While moving forward in the present action after Jay’s funeral, Shonk circles back to tell the story of how the couple met, as well as stories from their life together. Shonk also unfolds the details of Jay’s suicide and Claire’s attempts to interpret those details. These details accrete to tell a certain story that Claire needs to hear, and then over time, as the details are reinterpreted, this story changes and reveals a slightly different, more honest retelling.

Claire constantly replays the last voicemail from her husband to comfort herself. She hears the beating of his heart. She believes Jay has left her a final message of love through this sound. But later, a more likely, less romantic explanation is revealed. Claire struggles with the right word to describe what happened to her husband. She tries “event,” “disappearance,” “accident,” and “tragedy,” before settling on “incident.” All are correct in their own way, but their real purpose is to describe Claire’s relationship to what happened, as opposed to the words she asks others not to use: “death” and “suicide.” This careful examination of Claire’s thought processes and emotional turmoil enables Shonk to portray realistically the complexity of grief.

Katherine Shonk

And somehow, though the situation is far from comic, Happy Now? can be funny. Shonk balances humor and levity with the emotional burden Claire carries. In an imagined dialogue with her psychotherapist, Claire wonders whether her husband’s suicide was “a fleeting impulse.” In her imaginary exchange, her psychotherapist answers, “A fleeting impulse? Your husband didn’t just leave a suicide note. He left a suicide binder. ” Late in the novel, Claire realizes “Jay’s parents had picked out the casket. It was tasteful, made of ash, like something Pottery Barn would sell if Pottery Barn ever decided to sell caskets.”

In one of several strained exchanges, Jay’s sister Veronica asks Claire for a copy of her brother’s suicide note. Claire, Shonk writes, “wanted to see if Veronica would say it aloud: Be a dear and take your husband’s suicide note over to Kinko’s for me, will you? ” During a heated session with Jay’s psychologist, Claire pushes Dr. Ackerman to reveal what Jay talked about in his sessions; she worries that her nagging pushed her husband beyond the point of no return. Ackerman pauses to consider Claire’s logic. “You’re asking,” she said, “whether I think Jay killed himself because you asked him to organize the closets?” The absurd question may make a reader chuckle, but Claire’s honest concern and suffering comes through poignantly. Ackerman replies, “He didn’t say anything about your closets,” and Shonk’s comic timing lets us feel something of Claire’s great relief.

Though Shonk’s humor is often successful, the novel’s strangely flippant title left me puzzled. Happy Now? —is this Claire asking Jay, her dead husband; or is she asking it of herself, as time passes: “Am I back to my baseline contentment yet?” One doesn’t encounter many questions-as-titles, and I’m still not sure what I think this one means.

When someone ends their life, their loved ones are left with a painful mystery that can never be solved, questions that can never be answered. Even if the person leaves a binder full of information, and a note that says it’s not your fault—as Jay did for Claire—you still don’t have a real explanation. Finding out why and how it happened is the work of a lifetime of aftermath, and Katherine Shonk’s Happy Now? gives an in-depth and complex exploration of that aftermath, its depression, its grief, and its love.

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“After the phone call from The New Yorker, I walked more than a mile to church to thank God. But then I told God I would talk to Him another time and darted home.”

This interview was originally published February 26, 2009

Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan is the author of the story collection, Say You’re One of Them. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in 2003 and graduated with an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2006. Akpan’s stories are set in Rwanda, Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia and tell stories about children caught in horrible situations. Two of the stories in his first collection were published in The New Yorker. He was interviewed by Rumpus Books writer, Grace Talusan.

Talusan: I was not only raised Catholic, but Filipino Catholic. It was very important for my parents and relatives to have close relationships with priests. They became honorary family members and attended the important events in our lives in addition to leading us through the sacraments at birth, confirmation, and marriage. I bring this up because I’m finding it hard to address you as anything but “Father,” even though I know you only through your writing.

Akpan: Father Uwem is fine…my mom, who’s very Filipino Catholic, would love that!

Talusan: Are you “Father Uwem” only in your life as a Jesuit priest and Uwem Akpan, the short story writer, in your literary life?

Akpan: It is not possible to keep the two roles separate. I’d say my religious life has shaped my worldview; my writing, I’d say too, is an extension of the pulpit…it reaches folks who don’t care for organized religion in a different way. I also believe that Jesus was both priest and poet. Imagine those powerful parables! My experience as a priest tells me it’s not possible to reach the hearts of the congregants without a bit of poetry and storytelling. The Bible itself is full of incredible stories.

Talusan: When someone is in a coma, you’re encouraged to talk to them and should assume they can hear you. I know people who read books and talk to their pregnant bellies with the assumption that their baby can hear their voice. Many of the stories in Say You’re One of Them close with a sound. In “An Ex-mas Feast,” the narrator, a street child, leaves his family: “My last memory of my family was of the twins burping and giggling.” In “My Parents Bedroom,” where the title of the collection comes from, Monique, a nine-year old girl in Rwanda after the massacre, hears her brother “babbling Maman’s name.”

Akpan: I didn’t do this intentionally. Actually “Fattening for Gabon” also ends with that awful scream of the Yewa who couldn’t escape and “Luxurious Hearses” with the dog barking.

Talusan: Why did it feel right to end the stories with sounds?

Akpan: As I’ve said, Grace, this wasn’t a conscious decision, and I’ve never thought of it till now.

Talusan: When I was fourteen and preparing for the sacrament of confirmation (when Catholics become adults in the church), my religious education teacher talked to us about the call to religious life. I took the idea of the call literally, and for a few months, after my bedtime prayers, I’d wait expectantly for the voice of God to leave me a voice message in my thoughts. I was afraid because I thought the call meant I’d have to join a convent, but at the same time, I knew I’d be flattered to hear it because it would mean I was special. Can you share your experience of being called to the priesthood? Were you also called to writing?

Akpan: Like you, I was born Catholic and started thinking of the priesthood quite early. Like your family, we had many priests come around our family. I was fascinated by what the priest does. And I started feeling I was called to do this. My high school was a minor seminary, and I attended a lot of ordinations. I picked the Jesuits because of their spirituality, the way I saw them relate with people and missionary spirit. For me, I say the calling became evident over time.

Regarding writing, I have always loved stories. There was a lot of storytelling in Ikot Akpan Eda, my village, where I grew up. Yet when I started to write, I wrote poetry and essays. I never knew I could write fiction till a Nigerian newspaper rejected my articles. Seeing that it also published fiction, I tried it and got serialized for many consecutive Saturdays in 2000. I was very excited and wrote lots and tried out so many things. When I got to study theology in Kenya, I came up with most of the first draft of Say You’re One of Them.

Talusan: Why did you decide to study in an MFA program?

Akpan: After ordination to priesthood in 2003, I went to work as a vice principal and English teacher in a high school in Abuja, Nigeria. That was when my superiors finally said I could apply to writing school… I always felt my writing could benefit from the attention of established writers. I knew my work could grow and be better.

So I looked up the best programs on the Internet, and Michigan was one of the places that admitted me… I did some ministry, but I didn’t teach during my MFA years. I went to Michigan with two hopes: to develop my writing and to see whether I could get a foot, as they say, in the publishing industry.

Talusan: Can you tell us about the process of publishing your first story in The New Yorker? Did an agent submit your story for you?

Akpan: I had no agent. The New Yorker had rejected “An Ex-Mas Feast” twice before I got to Michigan. So when my teacher, Eileen Pollack, told me to resubmit it after one semester at Michigan, I was reluctant. By this time, though, I’d rewritten it over and over again. She gave me the name of an assistant editor to whom I submitted it. After four months or so, one afternoon, I got a call from Cressida Leyshon, the assistant editor.

For a long while I was confused with happiness, because we’d been told in writing school that if they called you it meant you stood a big chance of your work being published. She was very nice on the phone, but then when we came around to the issue of my submission she said they’d cut my work to fourteen pages from twenty-four. I wasn’t amused and started arguing with her, telling her my work had now grown to more than thirty pages in the four intervening months because I’d been rewriting the story. (Each time I learnt something new in the workshop, I would go back and apply this to all my stories.) So I told Cressida that my classmates and teachers liked the latest version of my story and that that was the version I was comfortable publishing. She emailed her critique. At the end she asked me to resubmit the story in a month’s time, taking her suggestions and those of the workshop into consideration.

After the phone call, I walked more than a mile to church to thank God. But on getting there, I couldn’t sit or kneel or pray, out of excitement. I ended up hurrying around the outer aisles as if I was doing a fast-motion Stations of the Cross. Then I told God I would talk to Him another time and darted home. I was lucky no car hit me on the road.

When I told Eileen later on about the argument with Cressida, she rebuked me. “You don’t argue with The New Yorker!” She explained that I should allow them to publish whatever they wanted and then I could change the story once I got a publisher, which would happen easily only if I got into The New Yorker. I thought I’d lost my golden opportunity, for I didn’t know The New Yorker was that big an entity on the American literary scene. I was mortified…well, within four days, I’d rewritten the story as best as I could. Cressida sent me an email two weeks later, not one month as she had initially said, asking me whether I could send in the story. I did and they accepted thirty or so pages.

Four publishers did come forward as soon as “An Ex-Mas Feast” appeared in the fiction edition of 2005. It was just as Eileen had said about The New Yorker! But I refrained from getting contracts because I felt I wasn’t ready yet. I still had one year of writing school to go. I was in dreamland…

Talusan: Father Akpan, why didn’t you want a publishing contract?

Akpan: Grace, I wanted to work some more on the collection before I committed myself. My classmates had a big party for me. To cut a long story short, my editor at The New Yorker helped me a lot. I had walked into something I knew nothing about. She and Eileen helped me find an agent, who had to contend with twelve publishers the following year when “My Parents’ Bedroom” came out and I was finally ready.

Talusan: Reviewing Say You’re One of Them in Time, Lev Grossman wrote, “It is a stunning book by a writer of immense gifts, and I couldn’t in good conscience recommend it to anybody. . . You could read it, but why? Kiss your family, enjoy a hot shower, and donate the price of a hardcover book to charity instead.” The New York Times criticized that the characters in your collection, children in the most abject conditions, “remain little more than stand-ins for the suffering millions.” How do you respond to these reviews?

Akpan: Actually, I’m lucky my book has received a lot of positive reviews, much more than I’d thought. Whatever the case, I don’t think it’s useful to bask too much in good reviews or even to pick a fight with negative ones.

But, hey, I’m happy if my book makes you want to kiss your family… if we can reconcile with each other no matter where we are on the globe because of a book about how some children are struggling with the conflicts in Africa, how is that a bad thing? I’ve encountered many people during my book tour telling me they could relate to the family dynamics in my stories, though the living conditions of my characters are completely different from theirs. Maybe if we can find time to hug and cherish our families and the people around us, child suicide or college suicide wouldn’t be rampant.

For me, I don’t believe in the art-for-art’s-sake philosophy. With the raw material before me and the gifts within me, I did my best to celebrate the voices and intelligence and sweetness and dreams of the children in spite of their chaotic, outer worlds… there’s something then missing if, with the endless opportunities and beauty and riches of this great America, the inner life of many a young American is so messed up and chaotic that suicide becomes an option. In my travels in some places in the developing world, where things are really bad, the youths are resilient; suicide is not even in the cards… And about whether we should send money to the poor or not—which is also what some people ask me on tours—as our elders say, “Sometimes a leper may appreciate a handshake from the healthy more than gifts left at the leper’s doorsteps at night.”

Grace Talusan

Talusan: Being a Catholic was a big part of my identity, but after the Boston sex abuse scandal broke, I could not continue my relationship with the Church. I stopped pursuing anything to do with religion, God, or spirituality. But recently, after reading your stories and hearing you speak about your role as a priest, I’ve reconsidered that the Church might be more dynamic than I thought. How did you react to the Church sex abuse scandal?

Akpan: Thanks for sharing your hurts about the sins of the Fathers.

Actually, I’ve been bracing myself for this question, as I travel around America talking about the wellbeing of children… The child abuse scandal was a big blow, and many people were and are wounded in the wake of it. I remember I was in the seminary when the scandal broke, very close to ordination. I remember the shame and worry and discouragement. I mentioned this in “Communion,” an essay I wrote for The New Yorker‘s “Faith and Doubt” edition last June.

How did we allow so many sick people to be priests and to get away with hurting the weakest, most innocent among us? And for so long? Our crimes and wickedness cry out to heaven for vengeance. To be frank with you, I’m amazed that many people still come to church. Yet, what has touched me the most, I have to say, is how so many lay Catholics still reach out to support the clergy. I ask myself: How can these lay people who have been hurt and scandalized by us, priests, still reach out to console us?

I say this because many of us, priests, were and are still broken by the scandal. We are not that many anymore, and most of us are old in this country. Ashamed and afraid and demoralized, it is sometimes difficult to minister to people. And yet for ministry to be effective, one doesn’t need fear and shame. Sadly but understandably today, many a good priest has withdrawn into his shell, for fear. And once warmth is out, there isn’t much left in ministry.

Personally, without the support and encouragement of my lay friends and family, I don’t know how I would have had the courage to step forward for ordination or how I would have coped with the aftermath of the scandal. These people have represented for me the grace of God in a huge way… So for me in all this, the lay folks have been the heroes. Where they get that added grace to reach out, in spite of the pain, to heal their priests beats me.

I’m glad too that the American courts forced the Church to open up, to own up…without this, we would have lived in denial and kept hurting the young. Now that is a secular structure helping the Church to grow!… However, the money angle worries me, too, and I have questions. Why didn’t the American Church give all these large sums of money it is now being forced to give to child abuse victims to the Church in developing countries long before the scandal? Who knew we had that much money? Is there a connection between the Church being too rich, strong, and not being attentive to the care of the weak and vulnerable, say, these child victims?

Again, though people are more important than money, I’m not convinced these large sums of money paid out to victims is the best. Listening to the some of the victims, I think we could have avoided a lot of this if the Church had humbly apologized to them, but we tried to bully some of them. I pray the victims are healed.

Talusan: You’re an African writing stories about Africa, but in Say You’re One of Them you also write about characters and situations outside of your home country and experience. What did you do to prepare in terms of research and observation?

Akpan: I have been very afraid of writing about other cultures and countries. I’ve been worried about getting the research wrong. I ask a lot of questions. I try to visit the area. If I’m not able to do that, as in the case of “My Parents’ Bedroom,” which is set in Rwanda, I search out people from that country who live elsewhere and ask questions.

So I try to put a lot of work into research, but I only do this when I have finished writing the first draft of the story, when I think I’ve figured out the human drama in the story, as it concerns the issues I want to dramatize. For me, as I’ve said many times, the story is not research. The story is how the characters relate with each other and with the environment… I try to apply my imagination to what could have happened and how a little child could have viewed and processed the event… So, yes, I believe artists should be able to step into other people’s situations, contexts and cultures and work from there. If artists don’t have that freedom, then, as someone has said, are we all writing our autobiographies? Why shouldn’t a man write about a woman or a black man a white character?

You see even if I wrote my autobiography, my siblings could still disagree with how I represented them. So where do you draw the line? And remember that you can know all there is to know about your culture or background but cannot still write a story about it.

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The opening to Ru Freeman’s debut novel, A Disobedient Girl, immediately deposits the reader into the life of Latha:

She loved fine things and she had no doubt that she deserved them. That is why it had not felt like stealing when she helped herself to one of the oval cakes that were stacked in the cabinet underneath the bathroom sink in the main house. Who would care if one went missing from the seven sitting there, awaiting their turn in the rectangular ceramic soap dish bought at Lanka Tiles to match the new pale green bathroom towels

It’s easy to slip into the world Freeman creates because it is so vivid and visceral. Latha, who has worked as a servant to the wealthy Vithanage family since she was five years old, daily looks forward to the moment when she can clean herself with a bar of Lux soap. “Every day the soap, pink and fragranced, filled her nostrils with the idea of roses,” Freeman writes. “She had only seen real roses once.” This intimate and heartbreaking moment, and the phrase, “the idea of roses,” draws me fully into her world. While we learn the particular tragedies of Latha’s life, this introduction to her stayed with us throughout the book—at eleven years old, all Latha wants is to feel clean, but given her position this basic human dignity must be enjoyed in secret.

The novel alternates between two women, Latha and Biso, and their unrelated narratives. The alternating chapters provide an interesting tension; Latha’s story leaps and bounds over several years and the passage of many significant events, while Biso’s occurs over the course of a single train journey. This is a fascinating structure that only a writer as skilled and creative as Freeman could accomplish.

Ru Freeman

I could not help but search for other parallels, points of comparison, and binaries. The story of one character’s life becomes clearer in context and relation to another’s: Latha serves Thara Vithanage, a girl roughly the same age as her but whose privileged life stands in cruel contrast to Latha’s—even the girls’ experiences of first menstruation are marked by their economic and social standing.

In the alternate chapters, we journey with Biso, a mother fleeing with her children from an abusive husband. As she rides the train away from her miserable past, Biso thinks about her husband and murdered lover, comparing the two. Discovering and mulling over all the contrasting elements that Freeman sets up is one of the novel’s deepest satisfactions. In one of Biso’s chapters, Freeman describes “the pinch-and-kiss kind of love,” a phrase that reminded me of my particular Filipino upbringing. “What we women do to babies, gathering the soft folds of skin on plump cheeks and backsides and thighs and squeezing, just a little harder than we should, then kissing them; because really what they make us want most is to swallow them whole and keep them very, very safe.” I’d never encountered such a depiction in literature before and I was thrilled to read it described so well, remembering my aunts’ and grandmothers’ greetings. As a Filipino American writer, I sometimes struggle with how to convey specific cultural experiences in prose, and Freeman shows how this cultural information can be woven into the story naturally.

As a girl, I would search for characters in literature who looked like me. I found characters of Asian or Asian American descent in brief appearances—mostly offensive, stereotypical representations, often in roles peripheral to the dominant narrative. By allowing their stories to dominate her novel, Freeman restores dignity to characters who are often invisible or shoved to the sidelines. This is not to say that Freeman, as a Sri Lankan writer, has a responsibility to correct misrepresentations or present only positive depictions—the characters in A Disobedient Girl struggle, like any of us, to make the best decisions. But because she brings them to life so well, they have range and depth, their complexity bringing this world into focus sentence by sentence.

This keen insight and observation ensures that a character like Latha will come through in three dimensions. Consider this passage in which she tries to convince herself that she’s different from other servants:

She could spot servants from a mile away. There were several right here: they wore shabby clothes that were clearly hand-me-downs or, if they were new, in a cut that simply aped a current style but did not suit them: ankle-grazing dresses on short, stubby women, tight printed T-shirts on chesty ones in colors not picked up by their skirts; they wore Bataslippers or sandals that did not match their clothing; their hair was bunched together and frizzy; they didn’t smell fresh like she did; there was no mistaking the servility in their manner.

Freeman’s characters may encounter bad luck on top of bad luck in this novel, yet like Latha reaching for the Lux soap to provide a brief respite from her misery, they are driven to find relief and to make whatever positive change they can in a dire situation.

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Vicki Forman’s Bakeless Prize-winning memoir recounts the premature births, and deaths, of her children.

When my niece, a toddler then, first lost her eye to cancer, we were preparing ourselves for the possibility she would lose her other eye, too. I wanted to know what life with a blind child was like and in my research came across an essay in The Santa Monica Review by Vicki Forman, a mother who must accept, after a series of surgeries, that her baby will never see. I was impressed by this writer’s ability to tell a complicated, emotionally harrowing story and wanted to read more.

My niece did not lose all of her vision. But I continued to follow Forman’s writing in her blog and her column, Special Needs Mama, where she wrote about being a mother and advocate for her son, Evan, who was not only blind, but lived with multiple disabilities. Evan and his twin sister Ellie had been born severely premature, at twenty-three weeks; Ellie died four days after birth while Evan was left blind, with a seizure disorder and developmental delays.

Periodically, I checked in to read about Evan’s setbacks and triumphs. Evan started school. Evan learned to use a cane. Evan ate lunch with other children in the cafeteria and met new friends. Vicki also wrote about family life—including her husband, Cliff, and older daughter, Josie. Despite the challenges of caring for Evan, Forman wrote about hope, acceptance, and about life improving. Professionally, things were also looking up: Forman’s memoir, This Lovely Life: a Memoir of Premature Motherhood, won the Bakeless Prize and would be published by Mariner Books.

And then an email arrived last July announcing Evan’s sudden death, a few days before his eighth birthday. As the aunt to six small children, I can’t contemplate anything more devastating than the death of a child. As a writer, I’m not sure how one would write about this, much less write about it well.

In his foreword to This Lovely Life, Tom Bissell writes, “[W]hen I finished this book, I felt an electric, wide-awake sadness, as though I had lost a close friend and made a new one on the same day.” Forman recounts the complicated medical history of the twins’ birth, and her own emotional journey, with simplicity and honesty. She takes us to wings of the hospital where parents are confronted with the painful realities of their children’s bodies—from the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) and Peds (pediatrics), to the cemetery where her daughter’s remains will rest, to her home where her son is hooked up to various medical devices, and to an alternative healing center in the desert. She reveals her anger, grief, and acceptance with insight and clarity. She allows us into intimate moments. Arguing with her husband in front of their daughter’s memorial plaque, she realizes, “This was how marriages fell apart in times like ours, when needs were potent and conflicting, when one partner could not offer comfort or sympathy because his or her own pain was too great.”

Vicki Forman

After the birth of their daughter Josie, for a couple of years, Forman and her husband had tried to conceive again, enduring fertility treatments, which led to disappointments. At last, she became pregnant with twins and looked forward to completing her family. She wanted these babies desperately. Yet, in the moments after the twins are born, Forman writes, “When I learned they were coming so early and so fragile, I had only one wish: to let them go.” If Forman had given birth in a different hospital or in a different state or even during a different shift, the outcome might have been different.

When the doctor places Ellie in Forman’s hands, she thinks, “This was my daughter? Nothing resembled the human. I saw tendons and muscles. Only the palest sheen of skin hid her blatant shape. Her color shocked the most: rusty, raw, more skinned animal than human being.”

Forman navigates time skillfully, breaking the present action at just the right moment. The reader isn’t distracted with questions about how she feels about Evan’s multiple disabilities because she tells us: “Years later, I would reach a point where I could love Evan apart from (or because of) his disabilities, for the person he was. At the time of his birth, I did not want this life, this kind of birth.”

At four days old, Ellie is taken off life support; Forman and her husband hold their daughter while she dies. She reports what these agonizing two hours was like:

I don’t know what I expected: a movie ending perhaps, a final cry and then stillness. What happened instead was this: my daughter’s body grew cold and then colder, her skin turned dark and then even darker, and when I felt nothing from her at all, no warmth or movement or breath or heartbeat, I cried and asked the nurse to check again and pulled back the quilt so she could reach Ellie’s chest and she put the stethoscope on my tiny baby and shook her head and said, ‘No,’ meaning, No, not yet, and this went on, over and over, a dozen times perhaps, over the course of the next two hours.

Even while grieving over her daughter, Forman must also be a mother to Josie and Evan, and must learn to accept how life is, not how she wishes it to be. She excerpts a page in her journal, where she writes over and over again her wish that her son could see. But her desires don’t change reality. She “came to understand that if I didn’t sit there, learn how to change his three-inch-square diaper, wait for the moment he opened his eyes for the first time, and question the doctors about their every move, then who would? I was suffering? I had not gotten what I wanted? What about Evan and this early, fragile life?”

“One of life’s great illusions is the notion that we can want—and get—things on our own terms, no matter what. It’s human nature to seek pleasure and avoid suffering, but what happens when suffering finds you?” Forman asks early in the memoir. This Lovely Life is an honest, hopeful account of what one writer does when faced with unthinkable hardship and heartbreak, how she struggles to cope with the reality of her new life, how she creates meaning, finds beauty and even loveliness, amidst suffering.

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What American teenager hasn’t wanted to run away from an unhappy home?

When I was thirteen, a girlfriend and I spun elaborate fantasies in which I ran away to her house and lived underneath her canopy bed. After a fight with my parents one Saturday morning, my teenaged sister made it as far as the train station, a place where people from our suburb commuted to jobs in Boston. Because it was a weekend, the commuter trains weren’t running—while she waited, my sister’s teacher talked her into returning home.

But what if life on the streets, even with danger and scabies and wet, cold nights, were still more appealing than the home you were leaving? What if there were an underground system to help you survive? And what if there was a group you could belong to, travelers, whom you followed on trains from one city to the next, who even shared your taste in music and drugs?

When Debra Gwartney’s two daughters, Amanda and Stephanie, left their home in Eugene, OR, they were 15 and 13. Newly divorced, with two other daughters and a full-time job, Gwartney cobbled together her limited resources in search of her girls, finding clues to their whereabouts in Portland and San Francisco, where the trail went cold. In Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, Gwartney chronicles the anguish of this experience with clarity, perspective, and honesty. A former reporter at The Oregonian newspaper and correspondent for Newsweek, she reports the story with the in-depth research of a trained journalist, while shaping events into a complex and satisfying story. Except for a stunning scene in which Stephanie, the younger runaway, gets stabbed in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, Gwartney mostly sticks to the story she’s most familiar with: her own.

And it’s not an easy story for a mother to tell, since Gwartney has to account for why her young daughters wanted to leave and figure out her own contribution to this devastating time in her family’s life. Regret plays an outsized role in this telling, as in Gwartney’s recollection of her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s final plea to stay together:

“I might have given him a different response if I’d been able to see the ways in which my daughters would be torn apart in the years to come because of the battles between their parents, two people who didn’t belong in a marriage together but who couldn’t manage to find a decent way to split up.”

After moving her daughters far away from their father, Gwartney discovers that Amanda has begun to cut herself. One therapist dismisses the severity of this symptom, and although Gwartney doesn’t agree, she ignores her suspicions. “And yet,” she writes, “I didn’t seek out another therapist, another expert, who might give me a different opinion or offer a solution. I simply told myself that my daughter would get past this soon. Then it was too late.”

Debra Gwartney

Gwartney lets us into painful moments such as a particularly bad Christmas right before the girls run. She knows they are going to leave for good and she tries to stop them physically, eventually calling the police in a desperate last effort. But running away from home was decriminalized in 1974 and the police won’t help.

“I hung up and went to the front door. I made my body wide. My arms out, my feet spread. I waited there, a joke. If they wanted to go, they’d go. A part of me believed it might even be better just to get it over with and let them be gone. Except this night felt different than the other times they’d left. This time it seemed that what I’d stitched together in our little house was about to follow them out the door as a long, unraveled thread.”

Gwartney wrote Live Through This over a period of eight years, during which time excerpts were published in literary journals, and a segment was produced for the radio show This American Life, including interviews with her daughters. The title comes from the 1994 Hole album of the same name, a poster for which hung in Amanda and Stephanie’s bedroom. “Live through this” might be a command, a retort by rebellious daughters as they are leaving; or it might be an affirmation, as in, “You will live through this.” Gwartney goes on to tell how she did just that, coping with a parent’s nightmare, trying to give her two younger daughters a normal life, all the while fighting to bring her older daughters home from the streets and from the hole of drugs and despair they’ve fallen into. When no one, not even Amanda, has heard from Stephanie for months, Gwartney makes an excruciating admission to her now-husband, the writer Barry Lopez: “I drove to Barry’s house and sat up on his rug, woven reds and purples and blues… I said what I’d come to say. ‘I think Stephanie might be dead.’”

Gwartney’s narrative moves back and forth in time, relating moments from the past that impact the present. It is her voice that binds the story together—steady and reflective, lyrical and emotional, but never sentimental or overly dramatic. She takes material that would make any parent hysterical and renders a memoir so important and satisfying that you will want to force every parent you know to read it. You must experience for yourself the gorgeously written final pages of the book, a scene so powerful and hopeful, I held my breath.

**

Illustrations by Laurenn McCubbin

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Nothing obviously dramatic is happening here—a woman describes someone who is not present to someone who is—but Yoon writes about the mundane in a way that evokes an entire relationship. The woman recalls how “each strand shone like amber from the shower he took prior to meeting her…”

While reading those lines, I was surprised as a forgotten memory bloomed in me: sixteen years old, peeking out the second-story window of my parents’ house as I watched a boy ring the doorbell, waiting to go on my first date. From that angle, I glimpsed the red and blue striped cotton jacket the boy wore and the top of his head, his hair neatly parted, still damp.

I’d have to wait a couple of years to read more work from Yoon, as “Once the Shore” was his first published story (it first appeared in One Story). Now, Sarabande has published Yoon’s debut collection, named for that same piece; I read the stories slowly, doubling back to read them again, drawing out the pleasure of the experience.

The stories take their time to develop, unfolding in a way that feels as big in scope as a novel. And contained within the stories themselves are paragraphs that suggest entire stories, as in this example from “Faces to the Fire”:

“Her mother passed away while Sojin was at work. She was found lying on the rush mat that she had preferred over a mattress. Her ear was pressed against a portable radio. It had awoken her husband in the morning and before he left to gather eggs, he had told her to shut it off. When he returned it was still on, tuned to a station that played swing music. She died grinning. With saxophones and trumpets.”

Paul Yoon

I was startled by how beautifully Yoon writes about the horrifying: a bereaved woman repeatedly runs full force towards a cliff, stopping short of the edge in “So That They Do Not Hear Us,” a person is consumed by flames in “Faces to the Fire,” and a couple lovingly collects human body parts floating in the ocean in “Among the Wreckage.” He writes with precision and artistry: “She was drenched, her clothes revealing a body loosened by age, all her years contained in the folds and pigment of her skin, like the inside of a tree” (“Among the Wreckage”) and “[H]e knew then what it was to be afraid. It was the feeling of diminishment” (“Once the Shore”).

The eight stories in Once the Shore, all previously published in literary magazines such as TriQuarterly, Glimmer Train, and Ploughshares, span a fifty-year period on Solla Island, a fictional island off the coast of South Korea which Yoon makes feel both foreign and familiar. He imagines the impact of time and the various forces at work on the island’s landscape over the decades, including war and, later, tourist dollars. Landmarks such as Tamra Mountain, the caves, and the East China Sea stay the same; while the farm sold to a developer in one story just might be the tourist-resort setting of another.

Characters from different social classes and historical moments move through the stories, ranging from a seawoman in her sixties to a young girl whose mother has just died to a middle-aged husband evaluating his life. Yoon convincingly inhabits these disparate characters, some of whom move through more than one story as the author shifts people and areas of the island into the background or foreground depending on the story. It was a delight to wonder if the seawoman, a lead character in one story, is the same character who appears in a later story to sell a bowl of shellfish.

In “Among the Wreckage,” Bey searches for his missing adult son and remembers when his son was small enough to ride on his back and look at the stars. “They were happiest then,” Bey thinks. This certainty—that one’s happiest moments are in the past—is depressing, but Yoon somehow leaves space for his characters to experience dignity, or momentary pleasure, in the lives that are suggested beyond each story’s end. He explores what is said between people and what is unspeakable, the ways people attempt to connect and the ways they disappoint one another, and the impact of the stories—and the lies—we tell ourselves, each other.

See also: The Rumpus Interview with Paul Yoon

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“After the phone call from The New Yorker, I walked more than a mile to church to thank God. But then I told God I would talk to Him another time and darted home.”

Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan is the author of the story collection, Say You’re One of Them. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in 2003 and graduated with an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2006. Akpan’s stories are set in Rwanda, Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia and tell stories about children caught in horrible situations. Two of the stories in his first collection were published in The New Yorker. He was interviewed by Rumpus Books writer, Grace Talusan.

Talusan: I was not only raised Catholic, but Filipino Catholic. It was very important for my parents and relatives to have close relationships with priests. They became honorary family members and attended the important events in our lives in addition to leading us through the sacraments at birth, confirmation, and marriage. I bring this up because I’m finding it hard to address you as anything but “Father,” even though I know you only through your writing.

Akpan: Father Uwem is fine…my mom, who’s very Filipino Catholic, would love that!

Talusan: Are you “Father Uwem” only in your life as a Jesuit priest and Uwem Akpan, the short story writer, in your literary life?

Akpan: It is not possible to keep the two roles separate. I’d say my religious life has shaped my worldview; my writing, I’d say too, is an extension of the pulpit…it reaches folks who don’t care for organized religion in a different way. I also believe that Jesus was both priest and poet. Imagine those powerful parables! My experience as a priest tells me it’s not possible to reach the hearts of the congregants without a bit of poetry and storytelling. The Bible itself is full of incredible stories.

Talusan: When someone is in a coma, you’re encouraged to talk to them and should assume they can hear you. I know people who read books and talk to their pregnant bellies with the assumption that their baby can hear their voice. Many of the stories in Say You’re One of Them close with a sound. In “An Ex-mas Feast,” the narrator, a street child, leaves his family: “My last memory of my family was of the twins burping and giggling.” In “My Parents Bedroom,” where the title of the collection comes from, Monique, a nine-year old girl in Rwanda after the massacre, hears her brother “babbling Maman’s name.”

Akpan: I didn’t do this intentionally. Actually “Fattening for Gabon” also ends with that awful scream of the Yewa who couldn’t escape and “Luxurious Hearses” with the dog barking.

Talusan: Why did it feel right to end the stories with sounds?

Akpan: As I’ve said, Grace, this wasn’t a conscious decision, and I’ve never thought of it till now.

Talusan: When I was fourteen and preparing for the sacrament of confirmation (when Catholics become adults in the church), my religious education teacher talked to us about the call to religious life. I took the idea of the call literally, and for a few months, after my bedtime prayers, I’d wait expectantly for the voice of God to leave me a voice message in my thoughts. I was afraid because I thought the call meant I’d have to join a convent, but at the same time, I knew I’d be flattered to hear it because it would mean I was special. Can you share your experience of being called to the priesthood? Were you also called to writing?

Akpan: Like you, I was born Catholic and started thinking of the priesthood quite early. Like your family, we had many priests come around our family. I was fascinated by what the priest does. And I started feeling I was called to do this. My high school was a minor seminary, and I attended a lot of ordinations. I picked the Jesuits because of their spirituality, the way I saw them relate with people and missionary spirit. For me, I say the calling became evident over time.

Regarding writing, I have always loved stories. There was a lot of storytelling in Ikot Akpan Eda, my village, where I grew up. Yet when I started to write, I wrote poetry and essays. I never knew I could write fiction till a Nigerian newspaper rejected my articles. Seeing that it also published fiction, I tried it and got serialized for many consecutive Saturdays in 2000. I was very excited and wrote lots and tried out so many things. When I got to study theology in Kenya, I came up with most of the first draft of Say You’re One of Them.

Talusan: Why did you decide to study in an MFA program?

Akpan: After ordination to priesthood in 2003, I went to work as a vice principal and English teacher in a high school in Abuja, Nigeria. That was when my superiors finally said I could apply to writing school… I always felt my writing could benefit from the attention of established writers. I knew my work could grow and be better.

So I looked up the best programs on the Internet, and Michigan was one of the places that admitted me… I did some ministry, but I didn’t teach during my MFA years. I went to Michigan with two hopes: to develop my writing and to see whether I could get a foot, as they say, in the publishing industry.

Talusan: Can you tell us about the process of publishing your first story in The New Yorker? Did an agent submit your story for you?

Akpan: I had no agent. The New Yorker had rejected “An Ex-Mas Feast” twice before I got to Michigan. So when my teacher, Eileen Pollack, told me to resubmit it after one semester at Michigan, I was reluctant. By this time, though, I’d rewritten it over and over again. She gave me the name of an assistant editor to whom I submitted it. After four months or so, one afternoon, I got a call from Cressida Leyshon, the assistant editor.

For a long while I was confused with happiness, because we’d been told in writing school that if they called you it meant you stood a big chance of your work being published. She was very nice on the phone, but then when we came around to the issue of my submission she said they’d cut my work to fourteen pages from twenty-four. I wasn’t amused and started arguing with her, telling her my work had now grown to more than thirty pages in the four intervening months because I’d been rewriting the story. (Each time I learnt something new in the workshop, I would go back and apply this to all my stories.) So I told Cressida that my classmates and teachers liked the latest version of my story and that that was the version I was comfortable publishing. She emailed her critique. At the end she asked me to resubmit the story in a month’s time, taking her suggestions and those of the workshop into consideration.

After the phone call, I walked more than a mile to church to thank God. But on getting there, I couldn’t sit or kneel or pray, out of excitement. I ended up hurrying around the outer aisles as if I was doing a fast-motion Stations of the Cross. Then I told God I would talk to Him another time and darted home. I was lucky no car hit me on the road.

When I told Eileen later on about the argument with Cressida, she rebuked me. “You don’t argue with The New Yorker!” She explained that I should allow them to publish whatever they wanted and then I could change the story once I got a publisher, which would happen easily only if I got into The New Yorker. I thought I’d lost my golden opportunity, for I didn’t know The New Yorker was that big an entity on the American literary scene. I was mortified…well, within four days, I’d rewritten the story as best as I could. Cressida sent me an email two weeks later, not one month as she had initially said, asking me whether I could send in the story. I did and they accepted thirty or so pages.

Four publishers did come forward as soon as “An Ex-Mas Feast” appeared in the fiction edition of 2005. It was just as Eileen had said about The New Yorker! But I refrained from getting contracts because I felt I wasn’t ready yet. I still had one year of writing school to go. I was in dreamland…

Talusan: Father Akpan, why didn’t you want a publishing contract?

Akpan: Grace, I wanted to work some more on the collection before I committed myself. My classmates had a big party for me. To cut a long story short, my editor at The New Yorker helped me a lot. I had walked into something I knew nothing about. She and Eileen helped me find an agent, who had to contend with twelve publishers the following year when “My Parents’ Bedroom” came out and I was finally ready.

Talusan: Reviewing Say You’re One of Them in Time, Lev Grossman wrote, “It is a stunning book by a writer of immense gifts, and I couldn’t in good conscience recommend it to anybody. . . You could read it, but why? Kiss your family, enjoy a hot shower, and donate the price of a hardcover book to charity instead.” The New York Times criticized that the characters in your collection, children in the most abject conditions, “remain little more than stand-ins for the suffering millions.” How do you respond to these reviews?

Akpan: Actually, I’m lucky my book has received a lot of positive reviews, much more than I’d thought. Whatever the case, I don’t think it’s useful to bask too much in good reviews or even to pick a fight with negative ones.

But, hey, I’m happy if my book makes you want to kiss your family… if we can reconcile with each other no matter where we are on the globe because of a book about how some children are struggling with the conflicts in Africa, how is that a bad thing? I’ve encountered many people during my book tour telling me they could relate to the family dynamics in my stories, though the living conditions of my characters are completely different from theirs. Maybe if we can find time to hug and cherish our families and the people around us, child suicide or college suicide wouldn’t be rampant.

For me, I don’t believe in the art-for-art’s-sake philosophy. With the raw material before me and the gifts within me, I did my best to celebrate the voices and intelligence and sweetness and dreams of the children in spite of their chaotic, outer worlds… there’s something then missing if, with the endless opportunities and beauty and riches of this great America, the inner life of many a young American is so messed up and chaotic that suicide becomes an option. In my travels in some places in the developing world, where things are really bad, the youths are resilient; suicide is not even in the cards… And about whether we should send money to the poor or not—which is also what some people ask me on tours—as our elders say, “Sometimes a leper may appreciate a handshake from the healthy more than gifts left at the leper’s doorsteps at night.”

Grace Talusan

Talusan: Being a Catholic was a big part of my identity, but after the Boston sex abuse scandal broke, I could not continue my relationship with the Church. I stopped pursuing anything to do with religion, God, or spirituality. But recently, after reading your stories and hearing you speak about your role as a priest, I’ve reconsidered that the Church might be more dynamic than I thought. How did you react to the Church sex abuse scandal?

Akpan: Thanks for sharing your hurts about the sins of the Fathers.

Actually, I’ve been bracing myself for this question, as I travel around America talking about the wellbeing of children… The child abuse scandal was a big blow, and many people were and are wounded in the wake of it. I remember I was in the seminary when the scandal broke, very close to ordination. I remember the shame and worry and discouragement. I mentioned this in “Communion,” an essay I wrote for The New Yorker‘s “Faith and Doubt” edition last June.

How did we allow so many sick people to be priests and to get away with hurting the weakest, most innocent among us? And for so long? Our crimes and wickedness cry out to heaven for vengeance. To be frank with you, I’m amazed that many people still come to church. Yet, what has touched me the most, I have to say, is how so many lay Catholics still reach out to support the clergy. I ask myself: How can these lay people who have been hurt and scandalized by us, priests, still reach out to console us?

I say this because many of us, priests, were and are still broken by the scandal. We are not that many anymore, and most of us are old in this country. Ashamed and afraid and demoralized, it is sometimes difficult to minister to people. And yet for ministry to be effective, one doesn’t need fear and shame. Sadly but understandably today, many a good priest has withdrawn into his shell, for fear. And once warmth is out, there isn’t much left in ministry.

Personally, without the support and encouragement of my lay friends and family, I don’t know how I would have had the courage to step forward for ordination or how I would have coped with the aftermath of the scandal. These people have represented for me the grace of God in a huge way… So for me in all this, the lay folks have been the heroes. Where they get that added grace to reach out, in spite of the pain, to heal their priests beats me.

I’m glad too that the American courts forced the Church to open up, to own up…without this, we would have lived in denial and kept hurting the young. Now that is a secular structure helping the Church to grow!… However, the money angle worries me, too, and I have questions. Why didn’t the American Church give all these large sums of money it is now being forced to give to child abuse victims to the Church in developing countries long before the scandal? Who knew we had that much money? Is there a connection between the Church being too rich, strong, and not being attentive to the care of the weak and vulnerable, say, these child victims?

Again, though people are more important than money, I’m not convinced these large sums of money paid out to victims is the best. Listening to the some of the victims, I think we could have avoided a lot of this if the Church had humbly apologized to them, but we tried to bully some of them. I pray the victims are healed.

Talusan: You’re an African writing stories about Africa, but in Say You’re One of Them you also write about characters and situations outside of your home country and experience. What did you do to prepare in terms of research and observation?

Akpan: I have been very afraid of writing about other cultures and countries. I’ve been worried about getting the research wrong. I ask a lot of questions. I try to visit the area. If I’m not able to do that, as in the case of “My Parents’ Bedroom,” which is set in Rwanda, I search out people from that country who live elsewhere and ask questions.

So I try to put a lot of work into research, but I only do this when I have finished writing the first draft of the story, when I think I’ve figured out the human drama in the story, as it concerns the issues I want to dramatize. For me, as I’ve said many times, the story is not research. The story is how the characters relate with each other and with the environment… I try to apply my imagination to what could have happened and how a little child could have viewed and processed the event… So, yes, I believe artists should be able to step into other people’s situations, contexts and cultures and work from there. If artists don’t have that freedom, then, as someone has said, are we all writing our autobiographies? Why shouldn’t a man write about a woman or a black man a white character?

You see even if I wrote my autobiography, my siblings could still disagree with how I represented them. So where do you draw the line? And remember that you can know all there is to know about your culture or background but cannot still write a story about it.

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Grace Talusan reviews Masha Gessen’s fascinating but hard look at the decision to get a preventive mastectomy, in the context of Talusan’s own decision to get a preventive mastectomy.

A couple of years ago, as I decided whether or not to have a preventive mastectomy, a friend pointed me to a series of 2004 articles in Slate magazine by Masha Gessen. The author documents her decision-making process after learning she’d inherited the same genetic mutation that had caused her mother’s death at 49. Like me, Gessen carried the genetic mutation, BRCA1, one of two “breast cancer susceptibility” genes which confers a high risk of breast and ovarian cancers.

Gessen writes, “I did, I was told, have the option of getting out, or at least of sticking one foot permanently out the door, by getting all the potentially offending parts cut off before they went bad.”

This was before actress Christina Applegate made news by having a double mastectomy with reconstruction, after a breast cancer diagnosis and positive result for the BRCA1 gene mutation (“I’m going to have cute boobs till I’m 90,” Applegate told ABC News), and before Gossip Girl writer Jessica Queller published Pretty Is What Changes: Impossible Choices, the Breast Cancer Gene, and How I Defied My Destiny, a memoir she wrote after her mother’s death from hereditary ovarian cancer. Two years ago, PBS had not yet aired Joanna Rudnick’s documentary, In the Family, about families living with the burden of the BRCA genetic mutations.

In other words, besides the online community FORCE (Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered), founded by Sue Friedman, there weren’t many resources for someone like me.

In Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene, the book developed from the Slate articles, Gessen repeats a sentiment I appreciated when I first read it two years ago: “I politely suggested I could just shoot myself tomorrow: That would prevent my death from cancer with a 100 percent probability.”

When I mentioned the possibility of preventive surgery to some friends, they suggested I was overreacting. But when I referenced Gessen’s investigations, I didn’t feel so crazy.

With access to the world’s best experts, including a 2002 Nobel laureate in economics who quantifies the value of life with the preventive surgeries versus life with cancer, and a psychologist who researches the relationship of beauty to happiness, Gessen details the absurdity of making health decisions as a “genetic mutant.” She interviews a dazzling array of sources and weaves a stunning amount of information into an engaging narrative.

After learning the results of her genetic test, Gessen recounts a tense conversation with genetic counselors, whose nondirective approach only thinly veiled their belief about how best to prevent cancer. Gessen punctures this ostensible neutrality, finding it “as elusive and misguided as the ideal of objectivity in journalism.”

Gessen articulates the lonely and troubling circumstance of knowing one’s genetic destiny. Skeptical of surgery as the only solution, she consults with expert after expert and reviews all the latest medical literature. But eventually she circles back to surgery.

“It came to make sense to me that the frontier of genetic medicine was, in fact, surgical. The simple and decisive nature of surgery is seductive. It is a one-shot deal. Being able to mentally reduce one’s own body to a collection of parts creates a powerful sense of control. Cancer, particularly hereditary cancer, makes this feeling of control especially desirable. Cancer is one’s own cells gone awry. Cutting out the potentially offending organ before it has a chance to betray you shows the body who is boss.”

Blood Matters includes an astounding amount of material about hereditary diseases, behavioral genetics, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, personalized medicine, and more. Gessen explains medical studies and complex processes with the authority of a scientist, and delivers her stories in lucide, riveting prose. She makes forays into controversial topics such as attempts to link intelligence traits and Ashkenazi Jews, and the search for genetic markers prevalent among particular ethnic groups. Discussing the African American Heart Failure Trial, Gessen addresses the biological imprecision of racial categories: “The only terms less specific [than 'African American'] might be ‘human.’” She also details the Dor Yeshorim program, a service for young people in Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish communities which aims to prevent severely debilitating genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and cystic fibrosis by screening potential mates discretely.

I read Blood Matters on the one year anniversary of my preventive mastectomy. It was difficult to read it without thinking, “This time last year, I couldn’t get out of bed without assistance. This time last year, I was milking drains; I was held together with glue and tape; I was miserable…”

A year later, I’m used to my new body. Even better, I’m not preoccupied with worry. And reading about people in Blood Matters who were faced with Huntington’s disease, a devastating degenerative disease, or people who have had their stomachs removed to prevent stomach cancer, I almost feel fortunate to have only removed my breasts, which after all could be approximated through reconstruction.

Gessen exemplifies the best of what narrative nonfiction can encompass: candid and compassionate stories about her mother, partner, and son; profiles of researchers and their research; and interviews with families affected by genetic disorders. She tours a silver-fox farm where Siberian researchers breed generations of friendly and mean rats and describes the complex terrain of behavioral genetics. I was so excited about what I was learning in the book that I’d find a way to steer everyday conversations to maple syrup disease in Old Order Mennonite children and the four mothers of the Ashkenazim.

At times, reading Blood Matters can feel a bit too much like reading a book of essays on genetics, albeit fascinating, incredibly well-researched ones. The book’s structure, in three parts – “The Past,” “The Present,” and “The Future” – offers only a loose organization; on subsequent readings, I read the chapters out of order, as if I were skipping to favorite songs on an album. But throughout, Gessen makes the material come alive in the way only a great storyteller and journalist of the highest caliber can. Anyone taking a genetics class or interested at all in heredity or the future of personalized medicine should read this book. Genetic medicine is not the future, it’s now, and Gessen’s Blood Matters is an illuminating primer.

See Also: Ghost Train To The Eastern Star, reviewed by Annie Wyman

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