What wearies me is how often I have found myself stunned and silent in recent years. What especially wearies me is having such a finely honed vocabulary for tragedy.

***

On Monday, April 15, during the running of the Boston Marathon, there were two explosions near the finish line. The elite runners had already finished their races but there were still many runners on the course, many spectators on the sidelines cheering the runners as they tested their limits and reminded us of what it means to be human, always striving for something greater.

We don’t know facts yet, not really, because it is too soon. In some ways, it will always be too soon to have definitive answers and numbers and explanations. Authorities do know, as of this writing, that three people are dead including an eight-year-old boy. More than 130 people are injured, some critically, some children. No one has claimed responsibility for the explosions. No suspects have been taken into custody. It has been hours and we still know so little while wanting to know so much.

***

A sense of community swells during these collective gasps of horror, hopelessness, helplessness. Whether loved ones live near the epicenter of a tragedy or not, many of us call those who matter most to check in, to hear familiar voices, to say, “I am here,” and to ask, “Are you there?”

We take to our social networks in disbelief, in anger, to help by sharing what we hope is useful information for the people who most need it or offering a place to stay for those in need, to get a better sense of what is happening, who is responsible, why this terrible thing is happening, as if there could ever be satisfying answers.

And of course, there is the social media sanctimony. If we cannot police the wrongdoers, we can, at least, police each other. We will be reminded that terror is a way of life in certain parts of the world, as if through this reminder, the global playing field will finally be even. People decry humanity, disgusted with everyone, everywhere. Do talk about this, don’t talk about that, as we develop an ever evolving code shaped by arbitrary measures of gravity and fitness, as if through proper comportment we might atone for the sins others have committed or, as if through proper comportment, we can begin to set things right again, we can find the right way to proceed through our shock, our grief, our fear.

We just want to find that right way.

Or perhaps, when people are telling others what to do during these collective gasps of horror and disbelief, what we ultimately seek is the illusion of control in circumstances that are desperately beyond control.

***

When I was in high school, I attended boarding school in a small town in New Hampshire. The nearest big city was Boston and there were regular weekend trips to the city, via a chartered Peter Pan bus. Boston was a place for the handful of black girls to get their hair done. It was a place to shop and flirt with boys and get in trouble and then it wasn’t.

On October 23, 1989, Charles and Carol Stuart were driving home from birthing classes when Charles claimed they were carjacked by a black man who shot Carol, heavily pregnant, in the head, and Charles in the stomach.

I had just started my sophomore year in high school and the news coverage was constant—so much anger and paranoia and speculation about a horrible tragedy that had befallen good people.

Carol Stuart’s baby was delivered via C-section but the infant died a little more than two weeks later. In the days and weeks following this alleged crime, the Boston Police Department conducted an unprecedented “stop and frisk” program throughout Boston, indiscriminately stopping black men because Charles Stuart claimed he and his wife had been shot by a black man.

It was, from what I remember, a nightmarish time in Boston for black men, I mean, more than it usually was. Black men could be and were stopped for any reason or no reason at all. Racial tensions in Boston, which had long been troubled, grew increasingly fraught. Stuart new exactly what he was doing when he accused a black man. In South Carolina in 1994, Susan Smith knew exactly what she was doing when she said she was carjacked by a black man with her children still in the car when she, in fact, had murdered her children. Every time a black man is the convenient scapegoat for a crime he did not commit, the accuser knows exactly what he or she is doing.

There were many holes in Charles Stuart’s story but he was given the benefit of the doubt for quite some time. Stuart went so far as to identify a black man, Willie Bennett, as the assailant. When people lie about such things, they’re only telling their audience what they want to hear.

Eventually, in Boston, the truth came out because Stuart’s brother came forward and admitted that Charles had concocted the plot as part of an insurance scam. Before he could face justice, Stuart committed suicide. For the black men of Boston, the damage had already been done. That damage could not be undone.

During CNN’s coverage on Monday, Anderson Cooper noted that a BOLO (a police term for “be on the look out”) had been issued for a “person of interest,” this vague new term that allows us to forget about civil liberties as law enforcement officials try to ferret out criminals.

This time, the BOLO was issued for someone dark-skinned, maybe a black man, maybe with a foreign accent, wearing a black backpack and black hoodie. The description was damning, vague, and eerily reminiscent of too much. The description was broadcast, over and over, to millions, many people on edge, worried, newly suspicious, now armed with an overly broad racial profile of someone onto whom they could focus their new suspicions, confusion, and fear.

In major cities across the country, because this kind of suspicion spreads like cancer, men who fit this vague profile are going to pause before they leave their homes or walk down certain streets while the rest of us are blithely exempt.

There are many kinds of terror in this world.

***

I heard the news of the explosions at the Boston Marathon and still had two classes to teach. There was, at nearly the same time, news of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winners. I sat with my students in the first of my two remaining classes, and they had no idea what happened in Boston. For an hour or so I could pretend I had imagined it all. And then I had an hour break, just enough time to see too much online. I called my parents and spoke to them about nothing important but still the call was important. I heard a charming story about my baby niece saying “bye bye” to my parents’ suitcases as they left Port au Prince for the week. Children are a refreshing reminder of how life goes on.

And then there was another class, the students still largely unaware of what had taken place in Boston. They were focused on final projects, their lives shuffling toward the end of the semester and for many, graduation and an unknown future. Life always goes on. No matter what happens, this, too, is a constant.

After work, I went home and was so tired I took the elevator. As the doors hissed shut, I didn’t push the button to go to the next floor. I found myself kicking the wall over and over, muttering profanities under my breath—very uncharacteristic of me. I’m more of an emotional hoarder, swallowing everything I might be feeling. Eventually, I thought, “Well, this is crazy.” I pushed the button.

I was still in stunned silence when I stepped into my apartment, but then there was too much of that silence, too much openness and shapelessness. I turned to words because in the wake of something terrible, my gratitude for reading and writing only amplifies, sharpens. Yesterday, today, for some time to come, I am many things. Mostly, I am grateful.

***

Second image by Reuters.

Related Posts:

• Boston Marathon Roundup
• The Wind-Up [Marathon] Chronicle
• The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Spill
• “so I took a deep breath and I jumped”
• Letter From Boston

My Foreign Cities (Liveright Publishing), out this month, is Elizabeth Scarboro’s memoir of her first marriage to a young man, Stephen, with cystic fibrosis, while she was also growing into herself as a person, as a woman. My Foreign Cities is the story of a young woman making the choice to love a man with not enough life to live, even if she was unable to realize the whole of what she was choosing. The memoir is deeply moving, particularly because the writing, the story being told, is not overly sentimental in the way it might have been in the hands of a lesser writer. My Foreign Cities is, in its way, and much like The Chronology of Water, a book about the body, the impossible frailty of it, how love enables us to do the seemingly impossible, and also, about finding joy in the face of overwhelming grief.

My Foreign Cities has been selected by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the Top Ten Memoirs of Spring. Scarboro is also the author of two novels for children, and her work has appeared most recently in the Bellevue Literary Review. She lives with her family in Berkeley, California.

Yuknavitch is the author of the novel Dora: A Headcase, a modern farce, and The Chronology of Water. She writes and teaches and loves and mothers in Portland, Oregon, and her essay “Explicit Violence” appears in the anthology, Get Out of My Crotch, from Cherry Bomb Books, co-edited by Kim Wyatt and Rumpus columnist Sari Botton.

In recent years, as I’ve read more memoirs, I have struggled with how to talk about memoir critically, how to separate form from content. Both Yuknavitch and Scarboro, whose books echo each other in interesting ways, were willing to talk with me about this question of what to do with memoir, and much more.

 ***

The Rumpus: Is memoir a genre we can consider critically? How do we begin to approach such a thing given that memoirs so often expose such intimate things from a person’s life?

Lidia Yuknavitch: The question you ask is puzzling. Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to “critique” as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.

Your question is itching at the skin of CONTENT. Memoirs have at their heart a content that “happened” to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone’s actual face?

Rumpus: Yes, that’s definitely where I am struggling. Oftentimes when I am reading a memoir that feels intimate, that shares someone’s difficult personal history, I don’t know how to separate content from how the content is communicated.

Yuknavitch: In both Liz’s excellent book My Foreign Cities and in my anti-memoir The Chronology of Water, we are troping life and experience. We are bringing literary practices to memory and experience, and giving literary shape to them (or anti-shape, as is the case with COW—shapes against the grain of the inherited conventions). On a spectrum of literary productions, memoir is just another form. If the person doing the reviewing or critiquing was ill-educated about literary forms, they could write something dunderheaded about the author or their life (I’ve seen these and barfed at them), but anyone who is well-practiced and educated in literature—why would they leave that at the door when entering memoir?

Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person’s life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don’t quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms. Poetry, for example, goes so deeply into the space between corporeal affect and deep emotion (even primal in some cases) that, as Emily Dickinson said, it can blow the top of your head off. Poetic language is sometimes misunderstood as “abstract” when in reality, it’s precise—precisely the language of emotions and the body. Underneath the forms of fiction and poetry, you can bet your ass the ground comes from someone’s actual life experience.

When I was reading My Foreign Cities I felt a lifestory, yes, but I also felt story. The practice of storytelling. The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content. One thing about humans is that we all have them—lifestories. We live by and through them. But writers of memoir are particularly good at bringing literary strategies and form to experience (at least the good ones are). The thing that turned me inside out in My Foreign Cities is that the ”plot” and the “telos” of the story exploded ordinary expectations. The convention of the coming-of-age story and the love story were literally abandoned—because they had to be—and a new kind of coming-of-age and love story emerged that required a different kind of telling the story.

Elizabeth Scarboro: I never read memoirs until I decided to try to write one. After reading at least fifty, my first response is that they can and need to be critiqued. That’s easy for me to say in the privacy of my own home, where the writers of the memoirs I’ve read will never hear or read my reactions to their work. But I do feel memoirs should be held to high standards (and their authors would want that), even if they are different standards – even if what we want from a memoir is different than what we want from a novel, in the same way that what we want from a documentary film might be different than what we want from another kind of movie.

Maybe one way is to think about how the writer has crafted the story, rather than the life out of which the story has been carved. I’m always interested in structure, because it’s hard to move a story forward and deepen it at the same time, and both are required in memoir. The balance between momentum and reflection seems key. And also the writer’s relationship with his/her narrated self. I loved This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff because I felt like he got that right—he was affectionate but critical, clear-eyed about who he’d been as a boy, and it made me love his character and get bound up in what might happen to him.

It might be more relaxing to critique memoir when you think about everything the writer has left out of the book. It’s the writer’s job to reveal the right intimate details, and to think hard about what not to put in as well as what to include. An intimate detail that might feel awkward to address as a reader has already been sifted through, shaped, written and rewritten many times, so by the time it’s in your hands the writer probably has some distance from it.

I agree with Lidia about the forms being less distinct than they’re made out to be currently. I think about a book like So Long, See you Tomorrow by William Maxwell, which might be billed as a memoir today, but in 1979 was allowed to exist as “a novel based on fact.” The story in memoir runs the way story runs in a novel—underneath the surface, using the plot to bring physical shape to what the writer wants to explore.

In my memoir, I wanted to write about the experience of youth and mortality colliding. I tried writing it fictionally and it didn’t work, so I settled on memoir. Halfway through I thought it would be better as a collection of essays but I was too far-gone. But if a writer can find a form that allows the entire ocean of the story they want to tell in, it’s magic. Which was how The Chronology of Water felt to me. Lidia somehow found a form (and I’d love to know how she did it!) that makes room for the messiness and complexity of experience and memory. I know she considers COW to be an anti-memoir, and I don’t want to step on her toes, but the genre sure could use to include it a straight-up memoir, to crack open the formal possibilities.

Yuknavitch: The WRITER of memoir gets incoming weirdness in very odd ways. I was recently talking to a memoir writer whose work just went meteoric—but some of the comments and communications and gestures she gets in the wake of that success are stunningly and atrociously over-personal, as if suddenly people feel like they know her and her life intimately, and have permission to transgress all her “life” boundaries. To a certain extent that happens with all kinds of successful writers and artists and celebrities, but there is also something about the form of memoir that creates an eerie reader space of intimacy that is only “real” in the space of the text.

The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I’ve read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.

Rumpus: Lidia, what you note about the ways people comment on memoir, the liberties they take, is something that has been on my mind as well. Do you ever worry, both of you, about how you expose yourself and about how people may feel entitled when they encroach upon your life simply because they’ve read what you choose to tell them about your life?

Scarboro: I do think about it, but my book hasn’t come out yet so right now I’m in the stage of just hoping for a few readers. When I was still working on it, and getting help from several astute readers, I remember having a hard time when they expressed judgment about the more difficult feelings I articulated in the book. I wrote about my first husband Stephen’s addiction to painkillers, and got the general response of, Why did it bother you, and why couldn’t you just give him a break, since he was sick? Which at first made me impatient and defensive, but when I heard it a few times from people I respected, I realized I needed to address that question in the story, to explore it. I also wrote about the ways he changed after the transplant, some of which really frustrated me, and I got the question, “Couldn’t you just appreciate that he was finally breathing well, and accept and even enjoy his new qualities?” This also ended up giving me a jumping-off point. Now that the book is finished, and I’ve explored the material as much as I want to publicly, I think those same kinds of comments will be much more painful to hear.

Readers might approach me with their own stories of illness and grief and addiction and complicated second loves. That feels all right to me, but I can imagine ways it which it could get weird. I do like when it happens in life—I’d rather talk about death at a party than make small talk. And since these subjects are taboo in our culture, I’m glad to have them out in the open. I always appreciated strangers and acquaintances who were willing to speak about them with me while I was living them out.

Rumpus: I think very carefully about how much I expose of myself in my essays because implied intimacy with strangers is difficult for me to make sense of. I don’t want people to assume they know me because they know of a few experiences I have shared from my life. I don’t want to put too much of myself out there and leave nothing for myself. At the same time, I am sharing those experiences for a reason and it feels important to talk about certain experiences that we tend to keep to ourselves. It’s all rather fraught. How did both of you, in writing your (anti-)memoirs, decide on what to include and what to leave out? How did you begin to shape the stories of your lives?

Scarboro: I started with a much wider lens. I ended up focusing narrowly on my relationship with Stephen, and our relationships with CF [cystic fibrosis]. I found I could only handle the three of us fully—maybe this wouldn’t have been true if this were my fifth book, or if it were fiction, but I felt overwhelmed when I tried to follow threads that involved other people who were important to our story. In order to capture a parent, or sibling, or friend, it would require a hundred pages to give him or her the depth and nuance required. People appear, but my relationships with them aren’t fully realized. I also cut lots of parts of the illness, and hospital trips, letting only a few stand for many.

The hardest part of the story to leave out was a close friend’s sudden death. My friend Steve died in a car crash, and his death was life-altering for both Stephen and me. I still miss him, and think about life differently because he’s not here. Originally this was an integral part of the book. But readers kept saying it was too much. It came a year after Stephen’s transplant, and a week after my dad’s near-fatal bike crash, and less than a year before Stephen died. Of course in life it was too much, too, so I tried to write it that way—stepping out of the narrative. But eventually it just felt too large to be held by the story that I was writing. It deserved its own book. Or to not be a book at all—to never have happened. I couldn’t figure out how to do it right.

People assume that when you’re writing a memoir, you’re making peace with spilling your guts. But it doesn’t feel like that to me. You’re definitely revealing yourself in a way you wouldn’t to an acquaintance, or in some moments, even a very close friend. But you’re in control of every aspect of the revealing.

Yuknavitch: This is what happened to me while I was writing COW. Right about page fifty or so, I was hit by lightning. I nearly fell out of my chair. I felt a ZAP of electricity I’m pretty sure was the collective unconscious. I realized two things: one, I wasn’t writing a memoir. I was writing a WEmoir, meaning, the ONLY reason to keep writing would be if even one other person in the world felt less crazy, alone, messed up, wrong, ugly, backwards, invisible after they read it. I got this weird sort of creative “surge” that pushed me to “tell” beyond the fears I had about telling, fears about the form itself and how it gets trashed (not fancy literary enough, too narcissistic), fears about humans related to me or close to me reading it, fears about my weird formal choices, fears about mean things people could say to me.

When someone says something dunderheaded to me about the material, it’s usually a big neon sign revealing their own damage or ignorance, so my compassion kicks in.

I don’t think I exposed myself (but I love the way that sounds). What I exposed, or what I HOPE I exposed, are the limits of a narrow kind of storytelling that validates some people and not others, and the limits of a narrow kind of identity formation that validates some people and not others, and the limits of a narrow kind of writing and reading that validates some people and not others. I set out then to call the tribe—misfits, nerds, fuck-ups, loners, sad people, drunk people, people who got in trouble or struggled—maybe all of us. I decided to let the story be about both the mess and the grandeur.

Like Liz, I had to be judicious about what to bring in and what to leave out. I had a superb editor in Rhonda Hughes at Hawthorne Books—without a doubt the most amazing collaboration I’ll see in my writerly life—so that is very important. But how I decided what to follow as a writer had to do with discovering the “through-line” of my own story. The through-line was this: this is the story of a girl who had to swim back through her own life to resuscitate a self. Anything that did not serve THAT story is for another book.

As far as being territorial about one’s own life, that’s a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for “material.” Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.

I LOVE what Liz says when she says, “I think people assume that when you’re writing memoir, you’re making peace with spilling your guts. But it doesn’t feel like that to me.” The best memoirs don’t spill the writer’s guts. The best memoirs—like This Boy’s Life, or Crazy Brave [by Joy Harjo], for instance—bring you through a private river of storytelling that joins a major ocean of human struggle and joy. The act of enunciation—the forms and strategies of storytelling—are every bit as literarily serious as they are in poetry or other prose forms.

Rumpus: What do you look for in a memoir? What stands out to you as “good?”

Yuknavitch: I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don’t ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. See what I mean? I also thought of The Lover by Marguerite Duras as a memoir. Most of Carole Maso’s books and Kathy Acker’s novels read as memoirs to me. Paris Spleen by Baudelaire. On the Road by Kerouac.

You can see how my memoir turned out different.

But of the variety everybody else likes too, Mary Karr seems to be understood as the Gold Standard (I learned that way back from Andrei Codrescu, who told me to cut one-third of COW out…ha), but I like Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, Cool For You by Eileen Myles, Yarn by Kioko Mori, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, and The Stuff of Life by Karen Karbo better… Hell, I even liked Just Kids by Patti Smith, though the writing wasn’t artful. And of course there’s my comrade-of-the-heart Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, which pretty much killed.

Scarboro: I agree with Lidia that good memoirs, and I love the way she puts this, “abandon the glory of the self in favor of the possible relation with another.” The memoirs I love best find a way to be deep and wide, even as they are very particular. I need the feeling that the writer isn’t just relaying a story, but is searching to understand it. I’m moved by stories where I can feel the undertow of the writer’s struggle to make sense of what’s happened, to find honest words. A few memoirs I’ve loved are Three Dog Night by Abigail Thomas, Falling Through The Earth by Danielle Trussoni, Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, and The Mercy Papers by my own comrade-of-heart Robin Romm.

Yuknavitch: One thing I very much admired and felt awe about in your book was your insistence on writing about relationships differently (thank you, thank you, thank you) than the oddly linear plot lines we’ve inherited, available to us as women writers. I’d love to know what you think about that?

Scarboro: I’m not sure how intentional it was, but I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder about that linear narrative so maybe that’s how it came about. Or maybe it was intentional. I made certain choices—like not including a wedding scene—because I felt like it would be expected, especially from a woman writer, and of course that made me not want to do it. But mainly I wanted to stay as close as possible to the particulars of the relationship I lived out, to articulate it as best as I could, which meant being wary of falling back on a structure that didn’t have much to do with the way I lived.

I was writing not only about young love (ugh!), but love in the face of illness (cue an awful movie), so the only way I could do it was to fight any urge to be sentimental or to romanticize it. Hopefully I succeeded at that. I’ve never liked love stories—or, at least, ones with that narrow plot. I am always suspicious of them in books and impatient with them in movies. I just want a life story. When my editor told me she wanted to describe my book as a love story, I said, “Could it be a love story for the love-story-averse?” I know she means love story in a broader sense, but as someone who rarely picks love stories up off the book table, I’m hoping the other love-story-averse readers out there won’t shrink away from my book the way I shrink away from Julia Roberts movies.

Yuknavitch: I get kind of tired of the “But it’s your life!” attitude about memoir. Do YOU? I wrote. I engaged in artistic production. I made a piece of art. Why the preciousness or mystical unicorns around “memoir”? I’m curious how you feel about it just now.

Scarboro: In reviews of memoirs, reviewers write more about the content and less about the form, than they do, say, in reviewing fiction. I find this really frustrating. The life itself isn’t up for review—the book is. I hate hearing reviewers talk about what a crazy life someone led, or how brave they were. It’s not the life that’s being evaluated, it’s the story, and the way the story is told. Just as with fiction, you could give two writers the same circumstances to write about, and come out with very different narratives.

Rumpus: So many of the memoirs I’ve read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir; the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.

Scarboro: When I found out my book was being published I didn’t know that books commonly have the subtitles of “a memoir” or “a novel” so that they can be distinguished for selling purposes. I wanted the title of my book to appear on its own, without the subtitle, but I couldn’t get away with it. I remember when I worked in a bookstore, it was before most had separate shelves for memoirs. At that time (at least at that particular store) memoirs were included all over the place—some in biography, some in with the fiction, some in with feminist studies, etc. Recently, I visited a bookstore that sells new and used books, and for the used section, the memoirs were shelved with fiction. This made me happy. The genre of any book is secondary to the story the author is telling—being the best vehicle that the author can find. I’m the kind of reader who would probably be happiest if all the books at the bookstore were shelved together, so I could stumble across a great book on physics I’d never pick up otherwise.

Rumpus: What are some strategies you use to bring literary shape to your experiences?

Yuknavitch: Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form—semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation.

I work from the body—I try to develop a language of the body. I’ve invented a term I call “corporeal writing” around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there.

With COW, specifically, I was also interested in literally inventing a language that corresponded to the way memory works—specifically in terms of biochemistry and neuroscience. I shaped the words and sentences and fragments according to what I understand about memory. I shaped them around what’s true about the body.

Scarboro: Lidia might kill me here, but I had an aversion to the one literary theory course I attempted in college, so much so that I ruled out majoring in English. But that may have been my bad luck with a particular professor. In any case, I think my strategies come less from an understanding of the larger context and more from the accumulation of all the small things I’ve absorbed as I read—book by book—all the possibilities out there that wouldn’t have occurred to me on my own, whether I love them or run from them screaming.

But it’s interesting, because while we may have come to it differently, what Lidia says, about both memory and the body, speaks to me. Several readers have remarked that MFC is filled with physicality, and I didn’t realize this so much while I was writing, but I see it, looking back. I wanted to get as close as I could to the whole of my experience, and to be as honest as I could. And when I tried to do that, I found myself staying close to visceral memory, to everything that had no words. And then I had to find the words. Many words fell short and got thrown out. (Sometimes I feel disheartened thinking about how many pages I’ve written that are in the trash, but a friend made the analogy to being a musician—hours of practice that go into the final product, but aren’t the product itself—and I like that).

In terms of shaping my experience for the narrative, I was interested in finding a way to convey the underlying feeling, the personal reality, of the life I was leading, rather than conveying the details of the life itself. I don’t know if that makes sense. When I was leading that life, it was always hard to explain that inside that life it felt different than you might think it would, with death always right there in the room. So it was important to me that the book felt like the life, because that was part of what I was trying to write about—to complicate the picture we have—of what kind of life is worth living, or love is worth having.

Yuknavitch: For the record—and this is totally true—I think

The reason I loved theory was that I read all

The material as if they were novels—and then

I placed the authors in my head as if they were

In the novels—Foucault was a suave snappy

Dresser. Kristeva swam naked in moonlight.

Derrida had the best hair and smoked opium

Laced cigarettes.

Rumpus: How, if at all, do you try to “crack open the formal possibilities” in your writing?

Scarboro: I love thinking about form when I read, but in my own writing I love the idea of experimenting with it more than I actually do it. Though I did try in my memoir to not tether myself to the expectation that I’d explore the story only through scenes. There were places I knew I needed a different way to express what I needed to express, or where I’d find myself interested in a particular reflective path, and I’d go where it took me. Lately I’ve been writing essays, and I realize how much I enjoy following the paths that open up unexpectedly in them. Somehow it’s been more natural for me to break open formal constraints, writing essays, than it has been in other genres.

Yuknavitch: I don’t have much interest in writing if there are not opportunities to crack open the inherited forms. The writing I love to read most does this as well. I’m a form junkie. One path I’ve used a lot is to deeply and thoughtfully consider a trope or a tradition, and then set about taking it apart—but only in the service of a character or story that deserves it. Another path I often employ is to put form into “play”— to set it free from its ordinary constraints and let it be free-floating and broken-apart and rearranged. To be honest, we live in an exciting time where form is concerned. My sincerest hope is that more people will notice this and agree to play and invent—the only way to not succumb to the complacency and market-driven schlock of the present tense is to continually interrogate it from the inside out.

Related Posts:

• Book Club Member Josh Anastasia on Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water
• Falling for Lidia
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The “middle” in these stories, represents many things. The men Gavin writes often come from middle-class beginnings and want things just beyond their grasp and find themselves in the, well, middle, of situations they cannot fully control or make sense of. The strength of the stories resides in seeing how these characters reach for what they want, how they try to cope with how little they know or control.

Jim Gavin is a talented writer who allows his stories the room they need to be told. These are stories that are intelligent and quiet and moving, stories that take up time and space in satisfying ways. I recently had the opportunity to talk, via e-mail, with Gavin about his collection, his writing, and more.

***

The Rumpus: The stories in Middle Men were long short stories and I really enjoyed that, how you took time to tell these stories. Did the length of these stories come naturally?

Jim Gavin: I’ve always written long. Historically, my stories run past what would be a reasonable short story length, and then they die on their way to becoming a novella. I’m really good at hitting that thirty-eight-page dead zone. For a while I tried to write shorter short stories, but it was only so I would have a better chance at getting published. I figured if an editor had a choice between reading a thirty-eight-page story, with a staple barely holding it together, and an eight-page story, they would always give first crack to the shorter one.

I’m always amazed by writers who can deliver a knockout blow in a really short story, but I don’t currently have that in my bag, and I had no better luck trying to publish shorter stories.  At some point, I just accepted that my “natural breath”—to use Frank O’Connor’s phrase—was longer. I don’t think I can understand my characters unless I see them in a complete world, with a distinct texture and sense of place. I like to take the time to build that world, and I like to have them bounce off other characters, and that takes up space, too. The English comedian Noel Fielding, of Mighty Boosh fame, described his stand-up as more “atmospheric” than punch line-driven, and that made a lot of sense to me.

My only hope is that the stories don’t read long. If you’re writing longer you have a greater obligation to be entertaining on some level. If anything, a longer story has to move faster than a shorter one. I’d rather write a big, flawed story that’s memorable, than something really short and tight that doesn’t linger in the mind.

Rumpus: I’m always interested in how writers organize a short story collection. What was your intention in the way you arranged these stories? Did you want to have some control over the reader’s experience?

Gavin: I wanted each story to work on its own, but I wanted the reader to feel a movement throughout and a sense of culmination at the end. I didn’t have a plan before I began writing any of these stories, but at some point I started thinking of them in terms of the old guild system, the movement from apprentice to journeyman to master. Many different jobs and pastimes are evoked, but the primary vocation here is life, and what it means to be a full person.

The first three stories are apprentice tales. They are brighter and more overtly comic. The protagonists are naïve and vain and clueless about the grim realities surrounding them and the people in their lives. They are racing towards the future where all their dreams will come true. The next three stories are journeyman tales. In these, the mood grows darker. The protagonists have come of age, they know a little bit more about life; they’ve amassed various triumphs and failures, but they’ve had to revise their sense of the future. They still don’t know who they are, and what’s waiting for them, and for the most part, they are just drifting along and holding on to their old dreams and vanities. The last story, “Costello,” is about a master. He has lived past his dreams. He takes the world as it is and gets on with the business of life. Husband, father, soldier, salesman—he is a complete person. I didn’t feel the need to make this structure explicit anywhere, but in almost all the stories there is some kind of mentor relationship going on, even if the knuckleheaded protagonists don’t quite realize or appreciate it at the time.

Rumpus: How much of yourself have you put into these stories? 

Gavin: The stories are very autobiographical. I’ve done all those jobs and lived in all those places. In my mid-twenties, I wanted to write stories that were as far away from my own experience as possible. I tried writing a couple historical novels, but I just couldn’t pull it off. For a few years I stopped writing altogether, but after I my mom died, when I was twenty-nine, I felt like I wanted to try it again; not to become a writer, but to make some sense of my life, which in no way resembled what I thought it would be. I took an adult education class at UCLA and for the first time I started writing about the world I actually knew. My goal was to get down on paper, in a larger and more meaningful way, all the stories I would tell friends in the pub.

Except for “Costello,” the master, every protagonist in the collection is me, or some version of me, and the worlds they pass through are worlds I know really well. But experience is not enough, and anecdotes are not enough. Even when you’re writing deeply personal stories, fiction allows you to invent characters and moments that bridge the gaps in your understanding of the world, and it gives you the opportunity to create something that, hopefully, has wholeness, harmony, and radiance. It gives you the chance to go beyond yourself, even if you have your head up your own ass.

Rumpus: Do you like the “version of you,” that appears in your stories?

Gavin: I think people tell stories in one of two ways (and I mean just in everyday life, not in writing fiction). The first kind of storyteller always cast themselves as the hero, while everyone else around them is a fool. The second kind of storyteller always casts themselves as the fool who is bumbling through life, while everyone around them seems to have figured everything out. I’m definitely the second kind. I’m the fool. I’m always to blame. I’m always the last to know. I’m the source of the plague in Thebes! The versions of me in the book have many naïve and annoying and destructive traits, but at least when they crash on the rocks, they know it’s their fault. They’ve been humbled a million times over, and will continue to be, but because of this they might actually learn something.

Rumpus: Has your writing helped you to make sense of your life? Are there ways in which writing hasn’t been able to bring that clarity?

Gavin: In my mid-twenties I quit a job at a newspaper, and spent a few years doing a bunch of different jobs in the Bay Area. I wanted to be a writer, and I took some classes, but I just wasn’t ready. I was in your classic “wants to be a writer, but doesn’t want to actually write” stage. At some point I stopped altogether and a few years passed. Those were important years if for no other reason that when I started writing again, and took that class at UCLA, I no longer had any hope that it would be career. It was just something I wanted to do, regardless of what happened. In that sense, writing has helped me. I don’t think I’ve come to any major insights about my life—I’m still bumbling through it—but writing has given my life purpose and on a couple occasions it has provided a moment of catharsis that I don’t think I would’ve experienced otherwise. I don’t think I was born to do it. In college, my dream was to write comedy for film and television, and if I had somehow managed to enter that magic and lucrative world, I probably would’ve never looked back. I’m thankful where I ended up. I love movies and I watch ungodly amounts of television, but fiction is always the thing that snaps me back into life.

Rumpus: So many of the men in Middle Men are, literally, in the middle of something and, perhaps, searching for a way to get away from that middle and closer to a more fixed point. What I appreciated is how these men weren’t the typical aimless men of a certain age, refusing to grow up in all the usual ways. Did you consciously work to avoid that rut?

Gavin: The context of this book is the American middle class, at least as I understand it. Neither of my parents went to college, and only a couple of my friends had parents who went to college. Mostly they were electricians and plumbers and truck drivers, but at the time, those jobs provided more than enough for people to own a house in a decent neighborhood. The kids I grew up with were all expected to do better than their parents, to go to college and use their brains instead of their hands. My family always lived month to month, with no savings, and after my dad lost his job, my parents spent the next fifteen years trying and failing to climb out of debt. We did our best, and managed to hold onto the house for a while, but the bank finally took it. In this way, I think we were very typical of the middle class, working more and more for less and less, and always living beyond on our means.

In the book I was trying to capture this feeling of always being on the edge—the dream of moving up, the fear of falling down. The characters are flawed in many ways, but if nothing else they care about the world and they want to be part of it. Though some are lost in grief, they are not passive; they’re trying to make something happen in their lives, whether it’s falling in love or trying to master an art form, like stand-up. None of them are rebels. The things they want are fairly conventional, but a conventional life is getting harder and harder to come by. They’ve lost, and will continue to lose, but I don’t think that makes them losers. Ayn Rand would probably call them second-handers, but they’re not going to give up and they’re going to find some accommodation with themselves.

Rumpus: Who or what have been some of your creative influences?

Gavin: If I ever say anything remotely funny or intelligent, there’s a ninety-nine percent chance that I’m quoting The Simpsons. I didn’t start reading seriously, on my own, until college. One afternoon, I randomly picked up The Crying of Lot 49, because I liked the cover, and it blew me away.  I didn’t know there were books like that, incredibly funny and mysterious, with sentences that seemed to create an entire new reality. So I became a Pynchon freak, and that sent me in all kinds of different directions.

Later, I read Ulysses, because I wanted to read the big books. I understood about five percent, but that was enough to make me obsessed, but it was more of an intellectual obsession. I didn’t get the emotional underpinnings of the book. After my mom died, I re-read the first chapter, and it destroyed me. It was like an entirely different book.  It was simple, honest, and humane, and more than anything, hilarious. There are still vast sections I don’t really get, but I also don’t know the names of all the constellations. That doesn’t make the night sky any less beautiful.

I’m also constantly inspired/intimidated by all the amazing stuff that’s going on right now.  Writers like Jesmyn Ward, Ben Fountain, Sam Lipsyte, Suzanne Rivecca, Claire Vaye Watkins—they just seem to be on another level. They all cut to the bone in a way that seems entirely new.

Rumpus: I was really moved by “Bewildered Decisions in Times of Mercantile Terror,” and, in particular, the ending with that moment between Nora and Bobby, the grand gesture she makes, and the way you leave things implied but unsaid. How did this story come to end in such a place?

Gavin: I struggled with that ending more than any other. I rewrote it dozens of times, over the course of a couple years, and it never seemed right. As the story was falling into place, I saw it as a kind of dark night of the soul duet, like “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues, the P.O.V. shifting back and forth between Bobby and Nora, but I couldn’t get the final chorus, when they sing together. I always had Bobby going into Ringo’s bathroom to shave—that is kind of foreshadowed throughout. But then it finally occurred to me that he should shave his head too, especially since that’s what he might’ve done as a college swimmer. And so for a while I saw the end as Nora shaving his head, but this seemed to lack an essential balance between the two characters. I kept rewriting, feeling that something was missing. Then, almost without my knowing it, Nora made the final gesture, and this seemed to line up the whole story, from the title down through each moment, until these two characters find themselves alone together.

Rumpus: Early in that story, Nora wonders about “her own reaction to mortal danger,” as she studies the laminated safety card. How would you react to mortal danger? Why are laminated safety cards so inscrutable? (I like to steal them, as an aside.)

Gavin: I’m pretty sure I would shit myself. When my dad tells his Vietnam stories, I usually just sit there, imagining myself running away and crying. But I guess you never really know until you get there. The whole safety procedure on planes, starting with the laminated safety cards, is so bizarre, but we’ve all become immune to flight attendants breezily walking us through the worst nightmare anyone can imagine. But maybe that’s exactly how it should be.

Rumpus: Los Angeles is always such an interesting setting for fiction. I’ve always loved writing about that city and how in great hands, the city becomes a character itself. How did you think of place in these stories? What did you want a sense of place to do for these narratives?

Gavin: I’ve never lived outside of California, so once I started writing about my own life I guess it was inevitable that it would take on a certain weight. I have one Hollywood story, set on a movie lot, but that world is seen entirely from the bottom. All the other SoCal stories are set in places less well known, or maybe less depicted in film and fiction. Those just happen to be the places I feel most at home.  At some point I saw certain things popping up again and again—freeways, pools, fast food joints. I decided to be as specific as possible with all these things. In some sense, I wrote these stories for people who grew up here. I love books that give me the texture of a place, even if I’ve never been there; or I should say, especially if I’ve never been there. I love hearing the names of streets, bars, lakes, and all those little things that loom in a character’s imagination. In these stories, I don’t think I offer a very picturesque vision of California—I somehow forgot to include the obligatory riff on the Santa Ana winds—but I tried to capture it through the eyes of the characters, who love the place, if only because it’s the only place they know.

Rumpus: What is your favorite book about Southern California?

Gavin: All of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels. A few years ago, while living in the Miracle Mile neighborhood, I was reading a Macdonald novel and from a few stray references I figured out that Lew Archer’s shitty bachelor apartment was also in the Miracle Mile. I felt less alone!

L.A. Breakdown by Lou Mathews. This one is out of print, which is a travesty. It’s set in the late sixties and revolves around the eastside street racing scene. Mathews was a mechanic for twenty years. No one knows more about cars and, hence, Los Angeles.

Tapping the Source by Kem Nunn. Surf noir set in north O.C. The plot is insane, and the local details are perfect. Zeroville by Steve Erickson. I love all his stuff but this one, a descent into the pit of 1970s cinema, is just so much goddamn fun. Favorite SoCal movie: Repo Man.

Rumpus: What do you like most about your writing?

Gavin: This is a diabolical question! I think my one virtue is that I have a sense of proportion.  I’m an average person, from an average background, and I have an average intelligence. I don’t have anything profound or original to say, and I don’t have a natural gift for language. But I think all these things are blessings, because I can just get on with telling a story. I have total faith in fiction. I struggle to write—it’s the absolute hardest thing in the world—but I never struggle with whether or not I should be writing, or if fiction is worthwhile, or a relevant form, or if Language can truly convey experience, or if there’s any true meaning in the world. I’ll let the Ivy League kids sort that stuff out.

***

Photography of Jim Gavin © 2013 by Fred Schroeder. 

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The ceremony was what it was and MacFarlane is who he is. Most of his jokes fell flat, not because they were offensive, but because they weren’t good. They lacked imagination or intelligence and were largely predicated on the notion that the word “boob” is hilarious, which if you are eleven, I suppose it is. By the end of the night MacFarlane had rendered himself irrelevant, sticking to traditional jokes about the length of the ceremony and waiting for the show’s merciful end, for all of us.

And then, there was a tweet from The Onion, referring to nine-year old Quvenzhané Wallis as a c-word. The tweet was meant to be satirical because satire is what The Onion traffics in. I am guessing the tweet was designed to comment on how we discuss famous young women on a night where Anne Hathaway was criticized as too earnest and Kristen Stewart was criticized as too sullen and unappreciative of her blessings. Young women in Hollywood cannot win, no matter what they do. There are more than a few smart jokes that could illustrate this rock and hard place women in Hollywood are crammed into.

I do believe the person responsible for The Onion tweet in question would have made that tasteless joke about any nine-year old actress. This tweet was ill advised and repulsive, not just because the actress was nine, or because MacFarlane had, earlier in the evening, made a joke about her being too old for George Clooney in sixteen years, but primarily because young black women, black girls, are regularly hypersexualized. There was this additional, fraught context that someone didn’t take into consideration and probably couldn’t take into consideration because they are oblivious. They are oblivious to the context because they’ve never been around people who are familiar with it, because they’ve never been held accountable.

People often fail to understand the importance of diversity. They assume it’s all about quotas and political correction but it is about so much more. Diversity (and we’re talking race, class, gender, sexuality, political affiliation, religion, all of it) is about putting multiple points of view into a conversation. It’s about ensuring that no one is operating in the kind of cultural vacuum where they don’t stop to consider context. It’s why certain people and shows and publications keep running into the same brick wall of public outcry about diversity—because these people consistently demonstrate a callous and willful ignorance of context. They see these lines that shouldn’t be crossed and cross them anyway because they are blissfully unencumbered by context.

I’m not outraged about this one tweet. I’m outraged about the cultural disease that spawned this tweet, the one where certain people are devalued and denigrated for sport and then told to laugh it off because hey, you know, it’s humor.

Or I’m outraged because I was twelve the first time I was called a cunt and I didn’t even know what the word meant. I was nearly thirteen the next time, and by then I did know what the word meant. An old man told me he loved “fresh cunt” and was not shy in detailing what he was going to do to mine. I was wearing a jumper and tights. And that’s also part of the cultural disease, this need to explain to you that I didn’t ask for it, that I was dressed modestly. This particular incident is not even something I have ever spent too much time thinking about because, frankly, it’s one of the lesser offenses. It barely registers until something reminds me of it, like a poorly considered tweet. Cultural disease.

If you get too riled up about this sort of thing, you’re humorless. You’re easily offended. You’re told to “get over it.” You’re told to have a “sense of humor.”

I might be all laughed out.

Rarely does anyone stop to consider that certain groups of people are always the butt of the joke, and, all too often, the jokes are just stupid. Give folks a break, once in a while.

Or, you, sirs, are no George Carlin.

When a wound heals, first the bleeding stops. A scab forms and slowly the skin around the wound grows thicker and stretches under the scab until it reaches the other side of the wound. When the scab falls off, there is new skin, there is healing. But sometimes, wounds aren’t allowed to heal. Sometimes, they are picked at and picked at and picked at, and they stay open, weeping.

Maybe I’m not outraged. I’m exhausted and open and exposed and a lot of other people are too because we are wounds that get picked at and picked at and picked at one day, there won’t be anything left to heal.

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I was raised in a devout Catholic home but I wasn’t oppressed by my family’s Catholicism. My parents were religious but they were not evangelical. We were raised to believe God is a God of love—no fire or damnation and they’ve made great strides in embracing things that might have once made them uncomfortable. I am ever grateful for that. The only thing that truly oppressed me about church on Sunday and CCD on Mondays, was boredom. Thankfully, I had an active imagination so I used my time wisely and devoted myself to daydreams and admiring the pomp and circumstance.

There came a time when I stopped going to church. I didn’t see the point in going through the ritual when it held so little meaning for me. I also wanted no part of a church with terrible stances on issues that mean so much to me. I cannot reconcile the Catholic God—one who would turn a blind eye to children sexually abused by priests, to those of us who are gay or bisexual, to those of us who want to have unfettered access to birth control and the right to reproductive freedom—with the God of love I was raised with.  I’d rather have no faith than be part of a faith so rigid and exclusionary. It is hard to rid yourself, though, of years of Catholic doctrine. My body continues to hold the memories of prayer and ritual.

A family member died this fall. He was way too young, killed by a drunk driver. We convened to attend his funeral, held in a beautiful church—gorgeous murals, a soaring cathedral, ornate pews. Catholics know how to create stunning places to worship. The priest was affable and very good at his job. He joked that this was the first funeral mass he had given where there was a skateboard in the church and managed to find the right blend of humor and sorrow and anger at a senseless death. He did what we hope religious leaders can do when they are called upon—he filled the church and the people mourning within its walls, with a bit of faith, whether they were devout or lapsed.

Throughout the mass, I was struck by how I remembered when to sit and stand and kneel. I was able to recite the prayers as if no time had passed between my childhood and that moment. But still, I kept thinking, this beautiful, hallowed place is part of a church that stands against everything I stand for. Any spark of faith I felt was quickly extinguished.

On February 11, Pope Benedict resigned, said he was no longer up to the rigors of the papacy. His resignation was unexpected and it’s odd. It feels like there is more to the story though we may never know. The last pope who resigned did so 598 years ago. People at all levels of the church hierarchy expressed surprise at Pope Benedict’s decision to resign but there was also sympathy from church officials, from everyday people. It is a difficult job to be the spiritual leader for millions, to dedicate your life to constant service, and of course, to be the leader of an institution who holds, among its principles, the oppression of women, the denial of homosexuals, and the protection of pedophiles. Such corrupt leadership is a burden, I imagine, that can make an old man feel more ancient than his years.

When the Pope’s resignation was announced, the Pope jokes and witty barbs were everywhere. This is how we respond to common cultural events. This is a new kind of ritual. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. I personally wondered what Robert Langdon would think about this turn of events. I am very interested in symbology.

Of course, it’s easy to judge the pope and the Catholic Church in the same way it’s easy to have opinions about anything that is so much larger than ourselves. It’s easy to judge when you’re not in the position to be so judged, when you will likely never be in such a position. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pass judgment and Pope Benedict, in particular, has given us many, many reasons to judge.

He is a consummate scholar whose ideology is theologically conservative. Since assuming the papacy, he has dedicated himself to returning the church to its most fundamental, conservative values. Rather than softening the church’s stances, he became more deeply entrenched in his beliefs and practices and, in turn, the church’s beliefs and practices. I do not believe Pope Benedict is an evil man. He is simply… a man, brilliant, deeply flawed in large part because of his faith, and part of a sprawling religious institution whose corruption began before he was the leader and will continue long after his resignation.

I keep trying to have an open mind about the issues that challenge me most. In this instance, it is particularly difficult. I tell myself Pope Benedict is not an evil man. I tell myself the church does more good than evil. But then I think about children who trusted their spiritual leaders and had that trust broken in the most terrible ways and were then shamed or silenced. I think about people who merely want to love who they want to love, who are shunned and shamed. I think about women carrying pregnancies to term because they have no other choice, because their priests tell them it is God’s will. It is really hard to do anything but judge when faced with this painful reality. I judge even though this is so much bigger than me, so beyond me, and still so close.

The Pope announced his resignation. He will be replaced by someone who will be just like him—brilliant, deeply flawed, part of a corrupt system, unwilling to change it. It feels hopeless. It is one more reason why I still struggle to have faith of any kind.

But still, as I said, my body continues to hold certain memories. I always found the Bible interesting. I enjoyed reading it as a book of stories. There was so much beautiful prose and I admired the fragility of the Bible’s pages between my fingers. There is a story about Jesus giving sight to a blind man in the Gospel of John, Chapter 9, Verses 6-11.

When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam. He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing. The neighbours therefore, and theywhich before had seen him that he was blind, said, Is not this he that sat and begged? Some said, This is he: others said, He is like him: but he said, I am he. Therefore said they unto him, How were thine eyes opened? He answered and said, A man that is called Jesus made clay, and anointed mine eyes, and said unto me, Go to the pool of Siloam, and wash: and I went and washed, and I received sight.

There was something about this story, about this miracle of a blind man being given sight, that has always appealed to me. It always makes me think of how we take sight for granted but it also makes me think of how sometimes we incorrectly assume a blind eye is being turned to injustice simply because nothing is said.

When Pope John Paul II died, my mother took it hard. He was a good man, she believed, who had done a great deal of good throughout the world. On the morning Pope Benedict resigned, I called to see how she was taking the news and she said, it was for the best, what with the church’s shameful business of covering up all the raping of children. I was so proud. I wished, in that moment, and in many moments since, that miracles were possible, that all it might take was spit and mud and anointment so the next pope might receive the sight necessary to right so much wrong.

***

First image by John K. Nakata.

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This week marks the launch of the anthology The Better Bombshell, a collaboration of writers and artists exploring female role models. Contributors include Rick Bass, Elizabeth Bass, Charlotte Austin, Dave Barry, Siolo Thompson, Paul Szynol, Raechel Running, Heather Fowler, Kate Prtage, Jason Thompson, and many others.

At Feministe, Angela Eloise Smalley describes the project as one that “explores how feminine role models and sex symbols of the past have given way to new and developing ideas about women and sex, sorting through the barrage of conflicting ways women are portrayed and perceived in today’s popular culture to identify positive, multidimensional female role models and gain new insights into the way modern female role models affect us all.”

If you’re in Seattle, join some of the writers and artists on February 14, 8-midnight, at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle.

Details on other launch events can be found here. Buy the book! Browse the website! Consider what the better bombshell might look for you?

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It has been a bloody year.

A gunman enters a school in Newtown, Connecticut where children are supposed to learn, where they are supposed to be safe, and he guns them down. We do not yet know the extent of this tragedy, but we can begin to imagine and it is horrifying.

A gunman enters a mall near Portland, Oregon where people are shopping for the holidays, for themselves, it doesn’t matter. They are supposed to be safe. The gunman randomly shoots. Two are killed, one is injured.

A gunman enters a Sikh temple in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. People are there to worship and commune. They are supposed to be safe. Six are killed, three are injured.

A gunman enters a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. People are eating popcorn, watching a highly anticipated movie. They are supposed to be safe. The gunman guns them down. Twelve are killed, fifty are injured.

The facility with which we can recite the details of these tragedies speaks to how utterly, shamefully common they have become. We do not have the luxury of wondering if there will be another mass shooting in the United States. Instead, we wait for when there will be another mass shooting. We wait to learn the scope of this latest tragedy. We have to somehow reconcile that while gun ownership is an inalienable right in this country, safety from gun violence is not.

Today, and not tomorrow, we are waiting for you to step up because you are the president. We are tired of tomorrow as the better time to talk about gun control. We have run out of tomorrows, President Obama. We cannot afford to wait any longer.

We are struggling to make sense. We are crying out for change, for a mental health care system that can truly help the people who soothe their inner torment by reaching for weapons of such destruction. We are crying out for gun control laws that, at the very least, make it more difficult for such tragedies to occur. We are sick with grief and smallness and fragility.

How much blood needs to be spilled before you take a stand? How much blood needs to be spilled before you say, “Enough.” You are a father. You have always shown us that your fatherhood is part of what guides you. You are also a human being. You are our leader, the President of the United States. Today, not tomorrow, we need you to lead. Today, we need you to say, “Enough.”

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While Seigel’s poetry is excellent on the page and has a truly captivating quality, to see him perform his work is to truly fall in love with his words. He towers over the microphone, one leg slightly in front of the other, practically leaning into the audience as he tells of the rust of forgotten places, the frenetic energy of children running wild and free, wounds that won’t stop weeping.

We had a long e-mail conversation about This Is What They Say, the place from whence he writes, the magazine he founded, and much more.

***

The Rumpus: One of the most compelling themes in This Is What They Say is how you evoke both texture and a sense of place. How did this book come about? Why do you write, in these poems, about these gritty rural places?

M. Bartley Seigel: I grew up in Lakeview, Michigan, which is about a fifty miles drive northeast of Grand Rapids, up in Montcalm County, if you’re familiar with that neck of the woods. It’s approximately dead center of the mitten if you do that thing with your right hand. Like many Michigan towns, and as its name suggests, Lakeview overlooks a small inland lake, Tamarac Lake. It has two little islands out in the middle. Back in the early 1900s Lakeview was that quaint little slice of mid-western Americana we know from legend: sandstone facades in a bustling little downtown, lots of pretty picket-fenced houses, Protestant churches on every corner, quaint little family farms dotting the rolling country side between woods and water. They even had a little park out on one of those islands in Tamarac Lake where they’d have music and dancing on Saturday nights. Doesn’t that sound idyllic? They had their problems, I’m sure.

It’s a pretty enough spot to look at, still, but by the time I was growing up in the ’80s, Lakeview had gone the way of many little midwestern towns. Businesses closed. Those family farms were either abandoned or swallowed up by larger, more industrially-minded operations. Neglect took over. The standard story. And Tamarac Lake? That had been poisoned by an old pickle packaging operation that had sat on the shore decades before. No dances on the lake for me and mine, thank you very much.

My dad was a tool and die maker in a little mill town to the south, Greenville. Most of the mills are shut down now, but it was a little better when I was a kid. There were jobs for people with little education, you know? Kids ran a little feral. I spent my afternoons rummaging around in old barns and derelict buildings, building forts in abandoned woodlots, dodging rusty nails and throwing things into rivers and lakes, or later smoking cigarettes in the old cemetery. I have burned into my core this image of a place dominated by rust and abandonment, poverty and the particular kind of hoarding that accompanies it, scarred people and houses and machinery, broken glass, fetid water, brush, wood smoke, and ashes. It’s a hard place to escape for a writer, or at least it has been for me.

I should note here, for my parents sake and for everyone I know that still calls that place home, I had a pretty easy time of it as a kid. I acknowledge that. My folks made a living. They kept a neat and tidy house. I didn’t want for much. There’s still a lot of bucolic beauty to be had in Montcalm County and good people there in spades. The poems in This Is What They Say aren’t the whole story, by any means.

Rumpus: Did you succeed in letting the people from these poems speak for themselves?

Seigel: I have no idea. I hope I did. I tried. But it’s probably not for me to decide. We’ll see.

Rumpus: You said this place where you’re from is a hard place to escape as a writer. I can really relate to that with certain themes in my own writing that I cannot escape. Do you want to escape or have you made your peace with where your writing wants to be?

Seigel: No matter where we go, there we are, right? I am haunted by many ghosts. At a certain point, I think I hoped This Is What They Say would exorcise some of them, but instead the book taught me (a) my ghosts are here to stay, (b) they have stories to tell, and (c) I need to be more attentive to their voices. I mean that in a totally metaphorical kind of way. Which is to say, yes, I’ve accepted and made a certain kind of peace.

Rumpus: I notice, in many of these poems, this juxtaposition of the concrete and the abstract. “We are all paper dolls. We are all scroll work and the creative use of light.” These moments, these unexpected pairings of things and ideas, are just gorgeous. How do you compose a poem? How do you think through language and rhythm?

Seigel: I don’t have a set way of composing, per se. Rather, individual projects seem to develop processes of their own. For this collection, most of the poems started out as very short essays and stories. I liked starting out big, expansive, to get the ideas worked out, articulated. Then I would contract, cut, weave, whittle, and repeat. Over and over again. The density and intensity, the eccentricities of the language, are a product of that time on the page, I think. I spent a lot of time with those pieces, sentences, words, connotation and metaphor, sound, rhythm, years in some cases. And then, of course, there were my readers and my editor, helping push things toward their end.

Rumpus: The title works so well as a refrain. As I read each poem, I said the title aloud before each one and it really brought an exciting energy to the book. How did you settle on the title?

Seigel: See, you’ve heard me perform these pieces at readings and I always use the title as a refrain during performance because that’s how I hear the song in my head! That’s what I always intended, but it didn’t work on the page so well. But do you think the book invites that from the reader? I hope so, but I’m dubious. For here on out, dear reader, do that thing. I love that thing. Do it.

The title has its very earliest origin in a kids’ song:

“When pigs get up in the morning, they always say g’day.
Oink oink oink oink, that is what they say.”

By the time I was working on this project in earnest I’d had a daughter, now nine-years-old, but she was a baby at the time. It was one of the songs my wife and I always sang to her. So I had this absurd song stuck in my head at the time and I started to apply it to my life on a daily basis. For instance, I’m at the grocery store and the clerk puts my eggs under a gallon of milk, and while they’re replacing my broken eggs, I’m singing in my head:

“When clerks gets up in the morning, they always breaks my eggs.
Broken eggs, broken eggs, that is what they say.”

Beyond dorky, but there you have it. So this was stuck in my head and I was writing those poems and the refrain “that is what they say” kept creeping in until it eventually became this leitmotif directing the project.

Then, of course, once it was articulated it started to evolve and complicate the work and I had to start interrogating it. As the project developed I started thinking about things like identity, about exodus, about carpet bagging as an artist and what it meant to be working with that place, those characters, those themes from memory. It was all so fraught and I wanted that acknowledged up front and the title was a way of exploring that. I was also writing for and about characters who are so often discussed by the various talking heads that plague our contemporary moment, but who are seldom offered the opportunity to speak for themselves. I wanted that interrogated, too. Who’s speaking in these poems? Who’s speaking for whom? Why? Etc. By the time I was done writing everything, the title was written in stone and there wasn’t much I could do about it.

Rumpus: Are there other ways in which your children have influenced your writing?

Seigel: Absolutely. Children realign and refocus our lives in interesting, surprising, and utterly unique ways, for better and for worse. They make us see things differently. They make us say things we’d never otherwise say in ways we’d otherwise never say them. Children bend our perception of time and space. They force us to expose and interrogate aspects of our own lives that we might otherwise manage to evade as adults. If that doesn’t influence my writing, I don’t know what else would.

Rumpus: Throughout This Is What They Say, there’s this undercurrent of anger. There’s an edge, giving these poems a satisfying, hard shape. “They die and we want to put our anger in a pill we can pull open at will, snort or cook for a needle. We want to take over, but we’re too busy smashing and peppering, too busy burning and punching out teeth–what the fuck are you looking at?” How is writing a useful place for anger?

Seigel: It has its limits. That said, I find anger to be as transformative as it is destructive. It’s a very immediate, very focused, very efficient, emotion. It cuts through intellectual pretense and ceremony like little else. Like fear, it’s also an emotion carved from different kinds of desperation. Insofar as I believe poetry, and maybe good writing in general, to be about saying what is true and necessary in desperate moments, I think anger has a place and use on the page.

What’s the line? If you’re not mad, you’re not paying close enough attention?

But I hope there’s more than just rage in my work. There’s love there, too, and beauty. There’s endurance. There’s even hope if you’re looking in the right places.

Rumpus: What kind of editorial relationship did you develop with Jen Woods?

Seigel: I found Woodsy through Lumberyard Magazine in 2010. I’d been following Lumberyard closely for a few issues, just loved their whole deal, their editorial aesthetic, the design and letterpress thing they do with collaborator Firecracker Press. I loved that they were from Louisville, Kentucky and not one of the poles. Anyway, they were closed for submissions in 2010 and had been forever and a day. I finally e-mailed them and said, “What’s up? I want to submit.” Woodsy emailed back almost immediately and said, “I’m finalizing Lumberyard 5 and have a blank spot. It has to be short and it has to be relevant to truckers.”

I could do that weirdly specific thing! She and I had never met, she’d never heard of me, and it was so perfect, just this truly magical submission moment. She published three of the prose poems I submitted in that issue, and those three then went on to form the backbone of the book.

Woodsy is tough. I wanted an editor, not just someone who was going to slap my poems on the page and hit print. I mean, it’s exciting that editors like me and my work as is, but sometimes my poems and I aren’t as good as they could be. Sometimes we need some real intervention and that’s supposed to be the editor’s job. Woodsy got out her machete. She said, “this is going to sting a little,” and she went to work on my manuscript. What came out the other end was a much leaner, much more raw, but also much kinder and more emotionally intense and honest collection than I could have produced on my own.

One of the first things she said to me was, “There are two writers in your poems: a poet with wisdom and perspective, and one who’s a petulant teenage asshole; we’ve got to kill that second poet.” I didn’t like that at the time, of course, but it was really good medicine. I just wish we lived closer to each other so we could drink together occasionally. She’s pretty rad.

Rumpus: It’s exciting to hear that Woods(y) was an editor who edits. That seems to be something that happens less and less. Typecast has such an interesting outlook. They say, “Typecast considers the publication of a book a fantastic event to be celebrated, and the role of publisher most sacred.” It’s interesting to see a publisher come out and say that and it’s even more interesting to see how that translates into the books they produce, always a unique design, letter press covers and the like. When you finally held your book in your hands, did it feel like a sacred object? Are you happy with how it has turned out?

Seigel: To be perfectly honest, my initial reaction when I first held that book in my hands was one of mild loathing. I held this inside for a couple of weeks after the book’s release. I finally mentioned it to my wife one day, but she’s the only one, and this is the first time I’ve discussed this publicly. I want to stress that it had nothing to do with Woodsy, or the press, or even the book product itself. It was, instead, me, my control issues. It was some kind of weird postpartum depression I was suffering from. I’d spent so much time with that book in my belly, so much focus and obsession on an abstraction so deeply personal and particular to me, that when I first beheld its artifactuality, its undeniability, its exhibitionism, it felt both foreign and somewhat monstrous to me. That passed, thankfully.

I can see the book clearly now, touch it, smell it, watch as others read it and make meaning from it, watch readers love it or hate it themselves, and it grows more sacred to me every day. It’s a beautiful, weird, complicated thing, that book. It’s a beautiful artifact. The poems are full of snakes and black magic. I love it so hard.

Rumpus: As a writer, reader, and editor, do you worry about the future of print artifacts?

Seigel: No, I don’t. To be human is to live through and within story—always has been since we became human, always will be until we become something other than human. Whether story is conveyed by sound or symbolic language, on parchment, on paper, or via electricity seems largely irrelevant to me. Storytellers, for their part, will continue to use the tools at their disposal, as they always have, and audiences will continue to seek them out.

Rumpus: You went on a tour all over the damn place. Where did you go, what were some of the highlights (or lowlights) as the case may be? Is touring worth the time and energy you put into it?

Seigel: I toured the Midwest in October, a bunch of stops, bars, reading series, a university symposium, a book festival. I love touring, though I get lonely on the road. That’s the short of it.

The long version is that writing poems, reading poems, performing poems, talking about poems, watching people react to poems, answering questions about poems, those are all radically different things requiring radically different skill sets, none of which come naturally to me. Comics and musicians know this. Performance poets know it. Anything that forces an artist to articulate the method behind his madness, anything that forces him to put his money where his mouth is, anything that forces him to answer for his work, that has to be a good thing. Touring can force that interogation in spades.

Contemporary American poetry, the page based stuff in particular, the academic stuff, is an oddly myopic space. It talks mostly to itself. It preaches mostly to its own choirs. It’s self congratulating and profoundly smug. These are just a few of the key reasons why poetry is largely so irrelevant to many people. It doesn’t reach out. It’s unnecessarily convoluted and obfuscating. Can you only perform for other poets or can you perform to audiences radically far afeild? Touring will lay open your limitations and delusions of grandeur like little else. It’s good to sing for your supper now and again.

Rumpus: You live in what might generously be called the middle of nowhere—beautiful but remote. Do you feel connected to the literary community from that distance? Is a connection to a literary community something you need?

Seigel: I live in Houghton, Michigan, which is in the Keweenaw Peninsula in the far northwestern Upper Peninsula. For those looking at a map, the Keweenaw is that little thumb of land that sticks up into the middle of Lake Superior. We have a puddle-jumper flight that connects us to Chicago, but otherwise it’s a ten-hour drive, eight hours to the Twin Cities, ten hours to Detroit, etc. It’s some of the most remote and sparsely populated country anywhere in the eastern contiguous United States. Lots of forest and swamp, deer, black bear, mountain lions, and wolves. Big snow in the winter. Hardy, self-reliant people. And there’s the big lake, Lake Superior, which is more of an inland fresh-water ship-sinking sea than a lake. It’s a very cool place to live, a very awe-inspiring and physically demanding landscape.

True, I don’t get to eat Thai food unless I cook it, which you should read both literally and as a broader metaphor for where I’m at. True, my literary community is largely elsewhere, via [PANK], via readings I give around the country, via the magical interwebs, etc. But I’m okay with this. I personally find too much community of a certain kind to be stultifying to my art. Too much community, much like too much isolation, leads to people talking too much to themselves or to their hive selves. Too much community means you don’t have to try anymore, as true of large city scenes as it is of MFA programs or social media. I’m in a little bit of a catbird seat. I live in this stunningly beautiful place where there aren’t a lot of other writers and readers, but I get to travel a lot and spend a lot of time with other writers and readers, I run a magazine that reaches thousands of writers and readers, but I’m not beholden to any scene or program making decisions by committee. I teach at a university, but there’s only a very tiny English program, no MFA, and I’m the only creative writer on faculty. I get a lot of perks with very little of the bullshit, interference, or art by consensus. It isn’t that I don’t have my crosses to bear, but I wouldn’t trade my remoteness for another’s connection.

Rumpus: You started a literary magazine up in the U.P. How has the magazine evolved? Has your vision for the magazine been realized?

Seigel: I feel really weird answering questions from you about [PANK], but it’s for the readers, right? Yes, I moved to the U.P. in 2005 when my wife took a job at Michigan Technological University in Houghton. I got a small adjunct gig at the time as part of her deal. In short, her department had $500 dedicated to a defunct in-house lit mag, gave it to me, and told me to do something with it, no strings attached. I cobbled together another $2,500 and the first print issue of [PANK] was born. I shopped the first print issue around AWP in Atlanta in 2007 and got the stink-eye from all the card carrying “writers.” You came on in 2008 and we launched the web magazine. We had the present print/digital/press platform more or less in place by 2010, and we landed a nod this year in the New York Times, who named us one of the heirs to avant-garde pioneers like the Dial. In six years we took it from 250 print copies from Michigan’s U.P. to a respected international literary platform with over 300,000 readers in over 150 countries. This year alone, there are seventy-seven countries in which more than 100 people read [PANK]. It’s not the Huffington Post or anything, but I think it’s still pretty sweet. Now, show me how to monetize the thing, pay my writers what they deserve, and I’ll call myself happy.

Seriously, though, my work as an editor and publisher is dedicated to creating an original and vibrant publishing platform for the kind of literary diversity that others can’t or won’t pursue, and for a real and meaningful audience for those writers. I’m still sick of reading the same story and poem over and over again in the pages of pedigreed magazines.Where are the women writers, the black, the Hispanic writers, the queer writers, the literature in translation, where is the avant-garde? Where’s the writing that doesn’t put me to sleep after the second line? I know we’re not alone, but hopefully these things are reliably present in [PANK].

Rumpus: We hear a lot of talk these days about writers and the necessity of an online presence. You’re one of the writers I know who doesn’t have a huge Internet presence. You’re there, but you don’t have a website or a blog. Why do you stay away from that?

Seigel: So much of the internet is noise, a distraction, even a nuisance. I have enough of that in my meatspace life. I also have a lot of issues with crowd sourcing. Online, you can always find someone to agree with you and you’re seldom challenged in productive ways. The anonymity of online environments gives critique a decidedly lowbrow, and for the most part pointless, affect. That said, I like the digital, find it to be an incredibly useful tool. But it’s just a tool, one of many.

Rumpus: What are you working on now? What’s next?

Seigel: At this precise moment, I’m spending virtually all of my writing time on tenure documents, grading, and keeping the boat from sinking. So it goes. PANK, as you know, always takes up an enormous amount of time. And I have two writing projects in the beginning stages, a new poetry collection and one of short lyric essays, but both are far too young to speculate on.

Rumpus: What do you like most about your writing?

Seigel: I’m more articulate on the page than in person, less scattered, more collected, more coherent, smarter. I can say what I mean.

Related Posts:

• Step Aside, Dashiell Hammett
• “so I took a deep breath and I jumped”
• Boston Marathon Roundup
• Stunned Silence
• The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch

And then I wasn’t.

In 2010, an eleven-year-old girl in Cleveland, Texas, was gang raped by more than twenty men, repeatedly, over the course of four months. It was a crime of ever-increasing magnitudes, each new detail about the rapes more horrifying than the last—the abandoned trailer where a lot of the rapes took place, the sheer number of assailants, the video evidence, the way the town reacted, the way journalists reported the story. Every time I think about the case, I get nauseous. I am nauseous now. Revulsion is a reasonable response.

Consent is complex and that complexity can be uncomfortable but legally, a minor cannot give consent, even if she gives consent. Morally, we know that if a man hears an eleven-year old girl say yes, what he should really hear is no. If more than twenty men hear an eleven-year old girl say yes, what they should really hear is no.

Eleven is desperately young but it’s also so close to adolescence, to the whole world changing, to new ways of understanding, new ways of wanting. No matter who an eleven-year old is, though, there is no version of that age where a child is capable of making an informed decision about sex, let alone a gang rape with multiple assailants over the course of four months, which is what happened in Cleveland, Texas.

We don’t know how to talk about children anymore. We get so wrapped up in these shallow narratives about children being preternaturally advanced, about little girls wearing make up and dressing provocatively and seducing the camera, about little girls maturing faster, developing sooner. We forget. They are children, babies really, if we would allow them to be.

In the trial of Jared Len Cruse, one of the accused rapists, his lawyer Steve Taylor said, “Like the spider and the fly. Wasn’t she saying, ‘Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly?’  I’m sure he thought he was quite clever. He made this statement while questioning Chad Langdon, the lead investigator on the case. Taylor thought this might be a feasible defensive tactic. He thought he could plausibly assert that an eleven-year old child had the wiles to seduce all those men and that her complicity would somehow negate any guilt on the part of said men.

Langdon replied, “I wouldn’t call her a spider. I’d say she was just an 11-year-old girl.”

Taylor, having not quite reached the bottom of his ethical barrel, told Langdon he hopes such an accusation never befalls his teenage sons as if that might somehow make any part of the situation acceptable. Fortunately, Taylor’s strategy was unsuccessful. Cruse was found guilty. He will be in prison for a very long time. Most of the assailants in the case will be in prison for a very long time. They call this justice. And still, there will be more rape cases and more defense attorneys blaming victims of all ages and believing that’s a viable strategy because, historically, it has been.

We don’t know how to talk about children anymore. Even when the Cleveland, Texas case first gained national attention, we were at a loss for finding the appropriate language. There was no vernacular to accommodate everything terrible and wrong about the crime. We were careless. The New York Times, in one of their first articles, was concerned about the town and how the town was affected. The town’s citizens wondered where the girl’s parents were, and worried, of course, for those boys. Everyone everywhere wondered how such a horrific crime could happen. And still, we were talking about a girl who was eleven.

Over at Jezebel, Katie J.M. Baker posted about Steve Taylor’s remarks and a commenter discussed an eleven-year old girl to whom she is loosely acquainted. Of the girl, the commenter said:

She continues to dress like someone twice her age at family events, like Thanksgiving, where she was dressed as what I can only describe as a “sexy secretary” with a tight, shiny satin red shirt and a very tight pencil skirt with heels.

and

What can you do, really? I’m not her Mother. I’m not even her sister. But I feel like she could find herself in a bad situation if this continues. On the other hand, it feels distinctly un-feminist to tell a girl how she should dress or act because it suggests that any blame would lie with her.

We have no idea how to talk about children anymore. While I don’t believe there was any malice intended by the commenter, while I do believe she is, as she noted in her comment, conflicted, her words are still full of misplaced concern, victim blaming and this pervasive cultural belief that women and girls dressing provocatively leads to women and girls “finding themselves” in “bad situations,” instead of what actually happens— bad situations finding women and girls no matter where they are, how old they are, what they are wearing, or how they are comporting themselves.

This is of course compounded, in this instance, by the fact that we’re not actually talking about women. We are talking about girl children. Eleven-years old. No matter what they say or how they act or how they dress, eleven-year olds are children and we have twisted ourselves up so much that we have no idea what that means or, worse yet, perhaps we don’t care what that means.

It’s strange, this eagerness we have for placing the culpability for sexual violence everywhere but where it actually resides. I’m done with conversations about rape that do not place the responsibility for rape with rapists. I am absolutely done with questions about what the victim did or did not do to make themselves so vulnerable instead of what the predator did as he (or she) preyed. I am done with conversations about what potential victims can do to prevent rape instead of what rapists can do to stop raping. I am done with conversations about children and sexual violence that try to rationalize issues of consent and sexuality.

I’m not sure if misogyny is so culturally embedded that we cannot bear for rapists to bear the responsibility of their actions or if we’re terrified of our own vulnerability, no matter what we do to protect ourselves. Maybe we don’t know how to talk about children or even think about children because we don’t want to remember how little we once knew or face how much we would someday know.

Related Posts:

• Tramp
• In the Wound Lies the Gift
• So Raped
• Step Aside, Dashiell Hammett
• “so I took a deep breath and I jumped”

Books I’ve read lately have given me a lot to think about in how we approach gender, and how, all too often, we treat discussions of gender in isolation, as if gender exists in a cultural vacuum.

***

If women’s fortunes improve, it must mean men’s fortunes will suffer, as if there is a finite amount of good fortune in the universe that cannot be shared equally between men and women. This is certainly how I felt while reading Hanna Rosin’s interesting, intelligent but ultimately frustrating, The End of Men and the Rise of Women. What does it even mean to suggest that the end of men is explicitly connected to the rise of women? There’s no denying women are doing better than they ever have but is that really saying much? When you consider what life was like for women before suffrage, before Title IX, before the Equal Pay Act, before Roe v. Wade, before any number of changes that made life merely tolerable, most any success women encountered would seem like a rise in circumstance.

Rosin has clearly done a great deal of research and makes compelling arguments. I particularly appreciated the way she tried to advance the conversation about gender by upending our expectations. So often when we talk about gender, we have tunnel vision, where we can only understand the lives of women as being grounded in disadvantage. Rosin complicates that notion by revealing the many ways women are gaining the upper hand in education, industry, and in the culture at large.

I was skeptical as I read The End of Men but Rosin made it easy to respect many of her ideas. At the same time, it’s pretty easy to frame an argument convincingly by being selective in the data presented. No writer or critic is free from this selectivity but at times it stood out as problematic in The End of Men. In the chapter, “Pharm Girls: How Women Remade the Economy,” Rosin discusses the rise of women in the pharmaceutical industry. She notes that, “In 2009, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who continue to hover around 50 percent.” This is an encouraging statistic and an important one but women still earn 77 percent of what men earn and that cannot be ignored. We make up half the workforce but pay a pretty steep price for that privilege.

Throughout the chapter, Rosin highlights the great strides women have made as pharmacists, how they are practically dominating the field and it is truly inspiring to see how far we’ve come in a field once entirely male-dominated. At the same time, this is only one field. For every argument there is a counterargument. Women are doing well in pharmacy, but the statistics are starkly different in, say, the sciences and most engineering disciplines.

One of the recurrent themes throughout The End of Men, is that of female ambition—women are working harder, are more focused, and willing to do what it takes to fulfill their responsibilities, both personally and professionally. At many colleges and universities women are the majority while men are choosing not to enroll or not finish their college degrees. Rosin doesn’t do enough, though to explore why this trend has emerged. She highlights that there was a time when men didn’t have to go to college—they could work in manufacturing or earn a trade and make a good living for themselves and their families. As more manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and the economy has collapsed, however, nothing has replaced these jobs. Men haven’t adapted. What goes unsaid is that women might be more ambitious and focused because we’ve never had a choice. We’ve had to fight to vote, to work outside the home, to work in environments free of sexual harassment, to attend the universities of our choice, and we’ve also had to prove ourselves over and over to receive any modicum of consideration. Women are rising but Hilary Clinton, the Secretary of State, must still answer questions about fashion. CNN feels comfortable publishing an article suggesting women’s votes might be influenced by their hormones.

And then Rosin discusses violence, the increase in female aggression, and notes that, “women today are far less likely to get murdered, raped, assaulted, or robbed than at any time in recent history.” This is excellent news but there’s a curious aside when Rosin continues, “A 2010 White House report on women and girls laid out the latest statistics straightforwardly, to the great irritation of many feminists,” but doesn’t provide any evidence of this supposed feminist irritation. It is hard to swallow that feminists would be irritated that there’s a decline in violence against women, as if the rise of women is somehow antithetical to the “feminist agenda.” So much oddness is always placed at the feet of feminism. Rosin goes on to cite several other statistics without acknowledging how much abuse and sexual violence goes unreported. The truth is that we’ll never have a truly accurate statistical count for the violence women, or men for that matter, experience. We can only make best guesses.

Another advance Rosin touts is how the “definition of rape has expanded to include acts that stop short of penetration—oral sex, for example—and circumstances in which the victim was too incapacitated (usually meaning too drunk) to give meaningful consent.” This has been a critical improvement in acknowledging the breadth of sexual violence but we also have to consider the many different kinds of rape we have learned about over the past year as conservative politicians blunder through trying to explain their stances on sexual violence and abortion.

Richard Mourdock, running for the Senate in Indiana, said, in a debate, “I struggled with it myself for a long time, and I realized that life is a gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something God intended to happen.” I’ve been obsessing over these words, and trying to understand how someone who purports to believe in God, can also believe that anything borne of rape is God-intended. Just as there are many different kinds of rape, there are many different kinds of God. I am also reminded that women, more often than not, are the recipient of God’s intentions and must also bear the burdens of these intentions.

Mourdock is certainly not alone in offering up opinions about rape. Missouri Representative Todd Akin believes in “legitimate rape” and the oxymoronic “forcible rape”, not to be confused with all that illegitimate rape going on. Ron Paul is a proponent of “honest rape,” turning a blind eye to the dishonest rapes out there. State Representative Roger Rivard believes some girls, “they rape so easy.” Lest you think these new definitions of rape are only the purview of men, Senate candidate Linda McMahon of Connecticut has introduced us to the idea of “emergency rape.” Given this bizarre array of new rape definitions, it is hard to reconcile that women are rising when there is still so much in our cultural climate, working to hold women down. We need more than statistics and anecdotal data to determine if the lot of women has truly improved. We need to consider the cultural climate, and right now, certain parts of that climate seem bleak. If this is what the rise of women looks like, there is some comfort, I suppose, in knowing we don’t have that far to fall.

***

In Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman, she suggests that historically speaking, women haven’t accomplished much at all, that women have not yet risen. Moran says, “Even the most ardent feminist historian, male or female—citing Amazons and tribal matriarchies and Cleopatra—can’t conceal that women have basically done fuck-all for the last 100,000 years. Come on—let’s admit it. Let’s stop exhaustingly pretending that there is a parallel history of women being victorious and creative, on an equal with men, that’s just been comprehensively covered up by The Man.” According to Moran, women simply haven’t had the chance to achieve greatness the way men have because of a number of socio-cultural factors that have favored male dominance.

How to Be a Woman is a memoir cum feminist text also approaches gender matters in a selective manner, one grounded in a narrow brand of feminine experience. This is a book where the main thesis revolves around asking if men are worrying about the things women worry about. It’s a catchy idea. One of the most oft-quoted excerpts is, “And it’s asking this question: “Are the men doing it? Are the men worrying about this as well? Is this taking up the men’s time? Are the men told not to do this, as it’s “letting our side down”? Are the men having to write bloody books about this exasperating, retarded, time-wasting bullshit?” Who wouldn’t want to be on board with this succinct philosophy? Of course we have to overlook the use of the word retarded. We have to pretend that word choice is okay because Moran’s philosophy is witty and nicely applicable to many situations. We have to believe cultural ignorance is totally fine in the face of “refreshing” feminist ideology.

There’s so much in this book that demands we reconcile casual insensitivity and narrow cultural awareness for the sake of funny feminist (albeit dated) thinking. Again, we have to deal with selectivity because while people love quoting this question, “Are the men doing it?” they ignore what Moran says further down the page about her stance on burkas. “It was the “Are the boys doing it?” basis on which I finally decided I was against women wearing burkas.” This is an odd, glaring statement because I’m not sure what Moran’s stance on burkas has to do with anything. Laurie Balbo notes in an article about an Egyptian newscaster choosing to wear the hijab during a newscast, “There’s no difference between forcing women to wear hijab and forcing them to not wear. The ultimate decision must be that of the individual.” Western opinions on the hijab or burkas are rather irrelevant. We don’t get to decide for Muslim women what does or does not oppress them, no matter how highly we think of ourselves.

In How to Be a Woman, Moran also says, “I want to reclaim the phrase ‘strident feminist’ in the same way the hip-hop community has reclaimed the word ‘nigger.’” This is a baffling statement because there is simply no reality where the phrase “strident feminist” can be reasonably compared to the “N-word.” I am fascinated by the silence surrounding this statement, how people will turn a blind eye to casual racism for the sake of funny feminism. For the most part, lavish praise has been heaped on the book. The New York Times raves, ““How to Be a Woman” is a glorious, timely stand against sexism so ingrained we barely even notice it.” More than one review has noted the dearth of humor in feminist texts given, you know, that we love the narrative of feminists as humorless. As such, they are that much more appreciative of the humor in Moran’s book. Once again, we can overlook cultural ignorance so long as we’re made to laugh.  Time and again Moran undermines her ideas by thinking she should apply her outlook to cultural experiences she knows nothing about. She undermines herself, by privileging feminism as something that can exist in isolation of other considerations. Her feminism exists in a very narrow vacuum, to everyone’s detriment.

***

But then there is writing about gender that is unapologetically sprawling, that reaches both backward and forward, and tries to explode the vacuum of cultural conversations. We should start at the end of Heroines where Kate Zambreno writes, “For my criticism came out of, has always come out of enormous feeling.” What intrigues me most about Zambreno’s writing is how it so richly embodies the ethos she espouses. In her latest book, Heroines, Zambreno has created a hybrid text that is part manifesto, part memoir, and part searing literary criticism. This hybridity is the book’s strongest feature and the way she moves between these different ambitions works very well. Not only does she try to elevate the conversations we have about gender, she leads by example.

Her criticism rises from emotion. It is appealing to see a writer so plainly locate the motivations behind her criticism. All too often, criticism is treated rather antiseptically under the auspices of objectivity. There is no such distance in Heroines. Zambreno revels in subjectivity.

Zambreno shifts between the personal and the political at a brisk pace but the narrative style works because it so clearly embodies what Zambreno calls for at the end of the book when she says, “A new sort of subjectivity is developing online—vulnerable, desirous, well-versed in both pop culture and contemporary writing and our literary ancestors.” The nature of the book also rises out of how much of the book comes from her blog, Frances Farmer Is My Sister, where Zambreno chronicles certain aspects her life and her cultural and critical interests.

They say every writer has an obsession and in Heroines, that obsession is reclamation or, perhaps, breaking new ground where women can be feminist and feminine and can resist the labels and forces that all too often marginalize, silence, or erase female experiences. She discusses her personal life, relationship, the challenges of acclimating to Akron, Ohio where she moved with her partner, what it meant to follow her partner and intersperses these personal observations with examinations of women writers and artists who have, in various ways, been marginalized, silenced, or erased.

Zambreno also notes the disparity between how books by men and women are read and received. “The texts of the woman writer,” she says, “will be read, not as existential, but in starkly autobiographical terms. A woman is read so close to the body/skin.” She examines the critical reception of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, and how the book enjoyed the interpretation of the protagonist’s anxiety as existential while a similar book by a woman would render the same anxiety as “pathological.” Zambreno also says, “It’s infuriating to think how coming-of-age-novels about the feminine experience are read and dismissed as chick lit or school girl books or YA, etc. when Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, surely also a very unformed Bildungsroman, is still considered great literature.” She goes on to suggest, “As if the female coming-of-age-experience is somehow more frivolous or less rending than the male one.” Ultimately, Zambreno calls for an alternative canon, and a more intelligent reading of women writers and artists, that doesn’t always render them as tragic, mentally ill, or unduly toxic.

Heroines is not a perfect book. There are silences, particularly surrounding race and class and heterosexual privilege. What does it say when the majority of a woman’s heroines are white, heterosexual women? No book can be everything to everyone but it would have been nice to see what Zambreno, with such electric thinking and writing, would do if she extended her reach, if she exploded the vacuum of cultural conversations even more.

***

I have been conflicted about Junot Diaz’s latest collection, This Is How You Lose Her. There is no denying Diaz’s talent. The man can write exceptionally well. His stories are vivid and memorable, intelligent and intense. He understands how to work within the short form and brings a real elegance to the structures of his stories. Diaz grounds his writing in a rich cultural context and is able to capture the authenticity of his characters by allowing them to be unapologetically flawed. These nine interconnected stories follow Yunior, his family, the women he has loved, lost and scorned, and how, in the end, he ends up alone, amidst the ruins of his misdeeds. I have been conflicted about this book because I loved these stories, the richness of the details, the voice, the way the stories pulled the reader from beginning to end. These are stories with gravity. They hold the reader in place.

“Otravida, Otravez,” about a woman who works as a laundress and is in a relationship with a married man, Yunior’s father, speaks so beautifully to the immigrant experience, to the choices women make in love, to what they tolerate from men, to how closely they hold their hopes. The narrator, Yasmin considers her friend Ana Iris. “Ana Iris left her own children back on the Island, hasn’t seen her three boys in nearly seven years. She understands what has to be sacrificed on a voyage.” “Otravida, Otravez,” is, without a doubt, one of the finest stories I have ever read

There is something to admire in each story. In “Invierno,” I could not forget the description of a long, desolate winter when Yunior, his brother, and mother are first brought to the United States, what snow felt like on Yunior’s bare head. In “Miss Lora,” Diaz makes it easy to sympathize with both Yunior, sixteen, and mourning the loss of his brother and Miss Lora, the middle-aged women he has an affair with. The collection ends with the title story, one filled with regret and sorrow as Yunior details the years after his fiancée breaks up with him because of his serial cheating. The story is naked, intensely confessional, a rending of the self, Yunior trying to purge himself of his wrongdoings.

Then, there is the sexism, which is at times virulent. In an interview with NPR, Diaz says he grew up in a world where, “I wasn’t really encouraged to imagine women as fully human. I was in fact pretty much—by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV—encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men.”  The influence of that world is plainly apparent throughout This Is How You Lose Her. Women are their bodies and what they can offer men. They are pulled apart for Yunior’s sexual amusement. There’s nothing wrong with that, the fact that Yunior is a misogynist of the highest order, that he is a product of a culture that routinely reduces women, that he is unable to remain faithful to his women, that none of the men in this book are very good to women. This is fiction and if people cannot be flawed in fiction there’s no place left for us to be human.

Still, I keep coming back to the relative impunity with which the men in This Is How You Lose Her get to behave badly, and to the tone of the critical reception to these stories, which are not only stories but confessions, lamentations of wrongdoings. We have all been influenced by a culture where women are considered inferior to men and I would have loved to see what a writer of Diaz’s caliber might do if he allowed his character to step out of the vacuum he grew up in and that we all still live in.

These limited ways in which we talk, write, and think about gender, these vacuums in which we hold cultural conversations, no matter how good our intentions, no matter how finely crafted our approach, I cannot help but think, this is how we all lose.

Related Posts:

• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Kate Zambreno
• It Never Hurts To Take A Second Look
• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Junot Díaz
• Shopping For Comic Books With Junot Díaz
• This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Díaz