[{"id":258153,"date":"2026-09-16T11:33:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T15:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258153"},"modified":"2026-09-09T14:23:55","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T18:23:55","slug":"incantations-for-a-migrants-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/16\/incantations-for-a-migrants-journey\/","title":{"rendered":"Incantations for a Migrant\u2019s Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Incantations for a Migrant\u2019s Journey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The vulture does not scoop<br \/>from life\u2019s streaming nectar;<br \/>the osprey is not drawn<br \/>to the delicacy of carrions\u2014<br \/>may the jaws of this famished road<br \/>be sealed against the lure of your flesh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u00c0\u1e63\u1eb9<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The earth carries with ease<br \/>the weight of waters;<br \/>the snail does not buckle<br \/>beneath its own shell\u2014<br \/>may you bear your life\u2019s burden<br \/>with the grace of weaver ants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u00c0\u1e63\u1eb9<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Flitting monarchs do not long<br \/>for the pupa\u2019s jade;<br \/>Ecdysial pythons do not yearn<br \/>for yesterday\u2019s covering\u2014<br \/>may each season\u2019s new flavour<br \/>thin the taste of old pleasures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u00c0\u1e63\u1eb9<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ag\u1eb9\u0301m\u1ecd\u2019s boast of a thousand rainbows<br \/>is a testament to its scaly skin;<br \/>the fringed toes of the basilisk<br \/>is a miracle on water\u2014<br \/>may you unearth new delights<br \/>from your body\u2019s many wonders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u00c0\u1e63\u1eb9<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like the coconut,<br \/>may your journey break<br \/>open into sweetness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u00c0\u1e63\u1eb9<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And at its end\u2014<br \/>more sweetness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u00c0\u1e63\u1eb9<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like the coconut,<br \/>\nmay your journey break<br \/>\nopen into sweetness. <\/p>\n<p>\u00c0\u1e63\u1eb9<\/p>\n<p>And at its end\u2014<br \/>\nmore sweetness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258469,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[10691],"tags":[667],"ppma_author":[88890],"class_list":["post-258153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-poetry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - 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He is a Best of the Net nominee and has been translated into French.<\/span>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;"}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Screenshot_20260818_161703_Gallery-GB.jpg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258153"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258154,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258153\/revisions\/258154"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258153"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258444,"date":"2026-09-15T08:17:56","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T12:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258444"},"modified":"2026-09-09T09:18:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T13:18:08","slug":"books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\/","title":{"rendered":"Books that Made Me Gay: &#8220;The Group&#8221; by Mary McCarthy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Provided that your girlfriend can drive on the freeway, you might spend Saturdays at the beach. Mine can and we do. After ritually sacrificing a tube of sunscreen, we unwrap soft deli sandwiches and I am bowled over by my good luck. Lately, the ocean in Los Angeles is warm, weirdly warm, remarking in tones of surprise and disquiet warm. Recalling the blue-lipped ocean swimming of my youth and queasily confronting the sea as a changeable, changed thing, I feel bad, almost, halfway, about how lovely it is to play in, the gaudy ease. Within seconds I\u2019m diving under docile green waves and laughing, mouth wide, floating star-fished, body endless. After the swimming is the sprawling. We stalk back to our blanket to eat watermelon out of the cooler and smear salt on our phones. Generally, being annoying, I haul along several books for a single beach day. The selection will include one or two aspirational titles, things I feel I ought to be reading, perhaps to write about, or else for some squinty sense of my edification. Almost always, having touched these with wet hands, crouched over our beach bag feeling my pulse in my knees, I will toss them aside in favor of one of my fat old favorites, those books which, read for a dozen summers over in hazy gulps, read while drenched in seawater, sticky with bug spray, floaty from wine, in the attic of my grandparents\u2019 old house and in the backseat of cars, while lying in grass that made my sunwarmed ankles itch, read with legs propped on the railing of postage stamp motel balconies and beneath the sound of my mother chatting beside other people\u2019s pools, have come to read like messages from past selves, from summers long burnt out and worlds only half-remembered. We go limp and quiet as the sun dries our hair and I enter the first chapter, experiencing as equally true and real both the hot sand beneath my feet and the walls of the chapel at St. George\u2019s on Stuyvesant Square as they erect around me. When I come up for air, I see a reedy blonde draping orange and white striped towels over a circle of low-slung chairs while another woman, an echo of the first in all but the pattern on her sarong, maneuvers a teeming plastic wagon into the shade of an umbrella and begins to unload cheese plates and bottles of ros\u00e9. Soon, as I attempt pointed eye contact with my girlfriend, who is normal and doesn\u2019t care, more women descend upon the camp, hugging and laughing and raising plastic wine glasses in the direction of the friend whose bikini is a crisp, striking white. A bachelorette party has sprung to life before our eyes. Suddenly, I am reading <em>The Group<\/em> in 4DX.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mary McCarthy\u2014sharp, principled, a bit of a hilarious crank\u2014was already well ensconced as a critic and essayist in midcentury New York\u2019s lefty intelligentsia scene when she wrote her novel about the dawning of adult life for eight graduates of the Vassar College class of 1933, a cohort to which McCarthy herself belonged. <em>The Group<\/em>, released in 1963, received pans of varying rigor from the professional intellectuals McCarthy counted as friends, while moving, before the year\u2019s end, more than three hundred thousand copies<em>.<\/em> Alongside accusations of frivolity, the book was deemed unsporting by other Vassar alums who complained about an inappropriate and unkind public airing of their affairs. McCarthy would famously insist that all she\u2019d done was, \u201ctake real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.\u201d The book Norman Mailer called \u201ca trivial lady writer\u2019s novel\u201d spent two years on the New York Times best-seller list, its popularity with the unwashed (or, in this instance, perhaps, the fastidiously manicured) masses surely serving only to affirm the noble disdain of the literati. I am not against snobbishness. In fact, I mourn both robust and catty criticism and believe public discourse would be well-served were we to resuscitate such attitudes today. Mailer and his ilk do not wound with their self-satisfied sexism and refusal to understand McCarthy\u2019s project. The issue is they\u2019re dead wrong: <em>The Group<\/em> rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s a fine June day and Kay Strong has stunned her college roommates by becoming the first of their number to wed. Hungry, playful Kay, a \u201cself-announced scientific atheist\u201d and daughter of the American west, is marrying Harald Petersen, an arrogant switch-blade of a man, lean, miserable, gleaming, who intends to be a playwright. Before the novel concludes, Kay will be dead. In between the vivid scenes of her wedding and funeral, we bound through seven years in which the girls attend parties, flirt with communism, begin careers, breastfeed babies, ride the bus, adjust their gloves, talk to Mother, get deflowered by misanthrope artists, and cook p\u00e2t\u00e9. As the close third person narration moves between characters, we glimpse each from different angles, exposing the gulf between their self-conceptions and how they are perceived. A close-knit garrulousness prevails. McCarthy\u2019s prose is all-encompassing, deft\u2014long soliloquies on political theory run up against lively descriptions of dresses, dinners, apartment layouts, gynecological equipment.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Though she operates in a key of wryness, eschewing sentimentality, and while the book is more than occasionally funny, the heart wins out. I, a mark, in fairness, am deeply moved by these girls, their hopes, their plans, their very bad dates, their Sunday night hair-washing, their faith in the myth of American progress which will prove grievously mislaid. As a social history of privileged, white young womanhood in 1930s America, <em>The Group<\/em> is a feat of tone control, threading the personal and the political gingerly and never toppling over, in either direction, into sneering condescension or braindead superficiality. I\u2019ve heard talk\u2014i.e. someone said this to me at a party once and I was rude about it\u2014of readers struggling to tell one woman of <em>The Group<\/em> apart from the others. As an expert in the field of Girl Types, I have never had this experience and I cannot relate. It is instinct for me to note the most minute distinctions between said types of girls and to commit them permanently into my psychic rolodex. To those less adept, I can offer only my best wishes and this handy power ranking: 1. Lakey (savvy) 2. Polly (capable) 3. Helena (independent) 4. Priss (thoughtful) 5. Kay (vigorous) 6. Dottie (repressed) 7. Pokey (clueless) 8. Libby (delusional).&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kay\u2019s wedding, a casual affair absent adult figures and featuring baked Alaska for dessert, is a challenge to the sensibilities of her blue blood schoolmates, and a fabulous set piece wherein to meet and get a sense of them all. Priss Hartshorn, \u201ca dyed-in-the-wool-liberal\u201d and general sweetie, senses that the Vassar girls have sown class animus amongst Harald and his few guests \u201cthrough no fault of their own.\u201d Episcopalian asthmatic Dottie Renfrew is winked at by a depressed guy and forgets her concerns about whether Kay lied her way into a church wedding. Sensing the haphazard nature of the nuptial events, Polly Andrews, a resourceful blonde and the affluent circle\u2019s token Depression victim, her father having lost his fortune in the 1929 collapse, nurses a pitying urge to offer that the party may continue over coffee at her aunt\u2019s home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And Elinor Eastlake\u2014referred to by the pet name \u201cLakey\u201d, a moniker ridiculous enough to slip sideways, if you\u2019re a sicko, into charming, sexy\u2014finds Kay\u2019s entire wedding a travesty. Kay\u2019s pretension, in Lakey\u2019s view, in marrying \u201cin J.P. Morgan\u2019s church\u201d despite poor prospects, offends her only slightly less than the choice of groom. Lakey, \u201cintellectual, impeccable, disdainful,\u201d and \u201cthe Mona Lisa of the smoking room,\u201d is the severe beauty around which the other girls orbited at school. \u201cIn private, they often discussed her, like toys discussing their owner.\u201d Lately, Lakey has soured on Kay, an outsider she herself plucked from the crowd at Vassar and established within her moneyed clique. (\u201cYou used to like her best, Lakey. In your heart of hearts, I think you still do,\u201d chides Dottie.) The other girls share in a sense that Kay, having not grown up amid the gilded festoonings of old money entitlement\u2014about which the rest have some amount of embarrassment\u2014can get carried away in her glorification of them. Only in Lakey does this clumsiness inspire disgust, maybe because she imagined Kay better. \u201cNaturally, she had not explained any of this to Kay; she had expected Kay to feel it for herself, which was just what Kay couldn\u2019t do and remain the blunt, natural, unconscious Kay they all loved.\u201d Yet it is dour Lakey who quietly slips out to buy bags of rice with which to surprise the newlyweds as they\u2019re seen off, fistfuls of grain raining down on the subway platform. \u201cThat\u2019s banal! That\u2019s not like you, Eastlake!\u201d Kay shouts back across the turnstiles, thrilled. Lakey exits the narrative here to study art history in Paris. When World War II forces her return, she will do so, obviously, with a lesbian lover in tow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I first conceived of this column, I was grasping at the idea of fiction as a mirror, and interested in sitting anew with books that in some way helped me to see myself more clearly. While leery of overinvesting in the transformative power of art, it is true that throughout my life I have used, unconsciously and otherwise, novels to help expand and refine my definition of myself. \u201cBooks that Made Me Gay\u201d is merely a series of words I thought could be memorable, if for nothing but the inducing of embarrassed winces. I did not need <em>A Separate Peace<\/em> to tell me I had something a bit funky going on in the sex and gender department. I was merely happy to have it. But if ever a book did truly thrust gayness upon me, it was <em>The Group<\/em>, this immensely pleasurable brick of becoming which ultimately, and improbably, posits lesbianism as one of the only safe paths for a woman in the world. Further, it includes this very funny and aspirational line: \u201cIt occurred to them all that Lakey, who had always been frightening and superior, would now look down on them for not being Lesbians.\u201d (Always a capital L on Lesbian. On account of the Fear.)&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The Group<\/em> documents ordinary girls trying to figure out what sort of women they\u2019ll be during an incredibly interesting political moment. \u201cThe most conservative among them, pushed to the wall, admitted that an honest socialist was entitled to a hearing.\u201d Reading <em>The Group<\/em> in 2026, it\u2019s hard not to think about how the field of acceptable ideas has been shrunk, willfully and with violence, in a century of that vaunted American progress. It seems unlikely, for one, that Polly\u2019s once wealthy, still manic depressive father, would today become a hobbyist Trotskyite to fill his post-divorce days. Each quotidian incident echoes outward to join the story of a nation. Dottie has sex one time and flees to the desert and a mining tycoon. Dear Priss gives up the job she loved with the National Recovery Administration after multiple pregnancies end in miscarriage. When she births a living child, her doctor husband insists on implementing cutting edge parenting approaches, leaving Priss tormented as her son cries down the hall. One needn\u2019t like self-aggrandizing gossip Libby McAusland to feel a wrench of horror as she instantly refashions a sexual assault into a fizzy anecdote. \u201cWhen I turned him down, he tried to rape me! My new Bendel dress is in ribbons\u2014did you like it?\u201d After Harald has the stubbornly healthy Kay committed to a psychiatric hospital, her education cannot help her.&nbsp; \u201cThey were using psychology on her: it was not her own choice, and she was not free.\u201d The only chapter that misfires is one following Hatton, the English butler in service to the family of Pokey Prothero. Hatton\u2019s maniacal snobbery is amusing enough, but one does feel they\u2019ve been ripped from the good stuff so that McCarthy can be cute. Pokey herself never takes center stage; busy flying her puddle jumper to and from veterinary school, Pokey is blissfully without social or economic introspection which could add to the chorus of her friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Though flagrant dykery is not enough to keep the girls from receiving their beloved Lakey back into the fold, they do titter amongst themselves about the \u201ctragedy\u201d which has \u201chappened to Lakey.\u201d The notion of lesbian sex induces terror. \u201cOnly Kay claimed to be able to picture their \u2018embraces\u2019 with equanimity.\u201d They attempt to find comfort in imagining Lakey\u2019s partner, Maria, the Baroness d\u2019Estienne, as their innocent friend\u2019s captor, only to run up against the truth of Lakey\u2019s imperious majesty, her strength, in their memory, above all things. Certainly, it was just as likely Lakey who ensnared the widowed Maria. This duality, the conspicuous freedom within a romantic relationship outside the bounds of man-and-wife, the very idea that power dynamics could be complex and changeable and not determined purely by biological sex, freaks them out. \u201cThe fact that it was possible to reverse the relationship like an hourglass was what the girls found so troubling.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s lesbianism, yes, and her literal escape from the frenzied promise of interwar America into the aesthetic splendor of the dying old world, but also her prioritizing of the mind over the material, her intellectual expansiveness and, frankly, her genuine snobbery that protects Lakey. She stands irreducible. Not all of the straight, married women in <em>The Group<\/em> are unhappy, but all have seen their visions of the future warped by the culture that raised them, the one that sent them off to Vassar for an education it would henceforth resent. When Harald, the simpering failure who beat and belittled Kay, sees Lakey at the funeral, he coughs out a flood of absurd entreaties, insisting he and Lakey are alike in their superiority over their simpleton peers. He is desperate to be told that Kay deserved all she got, to obscure his own cruelty by highlighting some essential flaw in his former wife. Elinor Eastlake needs only to invoke the specter of her power to erase his. She regrets how hard she was on Kay\u2014\u201cOne was so callow then. I don\u2019t like to think about it.\u201d\u2014and extracts from Harald a small recompense in leading him to wonder whether Lakey herself ever slept with Kay. His belligerent reaction obliterates all performance of sophistication. \u201cLakey was content; she had forced this dreadful man at last to be truthful; the fact that he revealed a hatred of \u2018abnormality\u2019 was only to be expected.\u201d Leaving Harald to sputter obscenities on the highway\u2019s hot shoulder, \u201cLakey smiled like a lizard.\u201d She has returned home a hero of sorts, though she couldn\u2019t save Kay. In escaping the varyingly depressing lives of her classmates, staying hot, studying art, getting pussy, Lakey represents an alternate way of being, a type of womanhood which does not necessitate subjugating one\u2019s self to a man, nor the capitalist temples built in his image.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is a relief to know that <em>The Group<\/em> stands flanked by paperback thrillers and diet guides on sagging, dusty bookshelves all across this world. There are many girls who haven\u2019t met Lakey yet. And it\u2019s not nothing, to me, to some, to certain travelers, at least, no, it\u2019s not nothing, the hopeful knowledge that they still might.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Provided that your girlfriend can drive on the freeway, you might spend Saturdays at the beach. Mine can and we do. After ritually sacrificing a tube of sunscreen, we unwrap soft deli sandwiches and I am bowled over by my good luck. Lately, the ocean in Los Angeles is warm, weirdly warm, remarking in tones [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258450,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[88387,81576],"tags":[88657,9465],"ppma_author":[88388],"class_list":["post-258444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-that-made-me-gay","category-essays","tag-books-that-made-me-gay","tag-essay"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Books that Made Me Gay: &quot;The Group&quot; by Mary McCarthy - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Provided that your girlfriend can drive on the freeway, you might spend Saturdays at the beach. 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After ritually sacrificing a tube of\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Rumpus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/facebook.com\/TheRumpusDotNet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-15T12:17:56+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/groupmary.jpeg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"442\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"694\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Tess McGeer\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@the_rumpus\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@the_rumpus\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Juliana Luna\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"13 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/15\\\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/15\\\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Juliana Luna\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/623ef0cfc02d1f2e01dc4cbfe666e1a4\"},\"headline\":\"Books that Made Me Gay: &#8220;The Group&#8221; by Mary McCarthy\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-15T12:17:56+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/15\\\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":2612,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/15\\\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/groupmary.jpeg?wsr\",\"keywords\":[\"books that made me gay\",\"essay\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Books That Made Me Gay\",\"Essays\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/15\\\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/15\\\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/15\\\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\\\/\",\"name\":\"Books that Made Me Gay: \\\"The Group\\\" by Mary McCarthy - The Rumpus\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/15\\\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/15\\\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/groupmary.jpeg?wsr\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-15T12:17:56+00:00\",\"description\":\"Provided that your girlfriend can drive on the freeway, you might spend Saturdays at the beach. 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Mine can and we do. After ritually sacrificing a tube of","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Books that Made Me Gay: \"The Group\" by Mary McCarthy - The Rumpus","og_description":"Provided that your girlfriend can drive on the freeway, you might spend Saturdays at the beach. Mine can and we do. After ritually sacrificing a tube of","og_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\/","og_site_name":"The Rumpus","article_publisher":"https:\/\/facebook.com\/TheRumpusDotNet","article_published_time":"2026-09-15T12:17:56+00:00","og_image":[{"width":442,"height":694,"url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/groupmary.jpeg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Tess McGeer","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@the_rumpus","twitter_site":"@the_rumpus","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Juliana Luna","Est. reading time":"13 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\/"},"author":{"name":"Juliana Luna","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#\/schema\/person\/623ef0cfc02d1f2e01dc4cbfe666e1a4"},"headline":"Books that Made Me Gay: &#8220;The Group&#8221; by Mary McCarthy","datePublished":"2026-09-15T12:17:56+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\/"},"wordCount":2612,"commentCount":0,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/groupmary.jpeg?wsr","keywords":["books that made me gay","essay"],"articleSection":["Books That Made Me Gay","Essays"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\/","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\/","name":"Books that Made Me Gay: \"The Group\" by Mary McCarthy - The Rumpus","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/books-that-made-me-gay-the-group-by-mary-mccarthy\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/groupmary.jpeg?wsr","datePublished":"2026-09-15T12:17:56+00:00","description":"Provided that your girlfriend can drive on the freeway, you might spend Saturdays at the beach. 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Her work has appeared in Bright Wall\/Dark Room, Dirt Child, Flood Magazine, Vice, and on Substack at\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/themoonseesme.substack.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" data-saferedirecturl=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=http:\/\/themoonseesme.substack.com&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1758902673485000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0ludyPFh0OTb0-rGP-L1WT\">themoonseesme.substack.com<\/a>."}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/groupmary.jpeg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258444"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258445,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258444\/revisions\/258445"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258444"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258599,"date":"2026-09-15T08:12:42","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T12:12:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258599"},"modified":"2026-09-14T08:31:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T12:31:18","slug":"writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing the Long, Strange Aftermath: A Conversation with Emily St. John Mandel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like many Americans, I have recently found myself looking for ways to understand how political transformation reshapes ordinary life. I often turn to fiction in moments like this, not for answers, but for stories that capture what it feels like to live through uncertainty. For years, Emily St. John Mandel\u2019s novels have offered that kind of clarity. From <em>Station Eleven<\/em> (Knopf, 2014) to <em>Sea of Tranquility<\/em> (Knopf, 2022), her work has traced how people adapt after familiar systems collapse, often focusing less on catastrophe itself than on the long, strange aftermath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Her new novel, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/exit-party-a-novel-emily-st-john-mandel\/3ef137360aed18ae?ean=9780593321461&amp;next=t\"><em>Exit Party<\/em><\/a>, continues that inquiry. Set in 2031, the book imagines a fractured United States divided into republics, city-states, and militia-controlled territories. It opens at a party in Los Angeles during the first spring after national collapse, when the city\u2019s curfew has lifted and peacekeeping troops have withdrawn. That gathering becomes the novel\u2019s gravitational center: a party where something shifts, where a man vanishes, and where reality itself begins to feel unstable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">From there, the novel follows Ari, a woman recently released from prison, as she moves through a landscape shaped by political uncertainty. She remains largely adjacent to power rather than inside it, absorbing the effects of political violence while still needing to find housing, secure work, and form relationships. In Mandel\u2019s near future, ordinary life persists\u2014there is still oat milk and low-paying retail work\u2014even as reality begins to split into parallel versions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I spoke with Emily St. John Mandel in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, during the San Miguel Writers\u2019 Conference in February 2026, on her first visit to the country. We talked about disorientation and doubling as well as about writing near-future fiction without trying to predict what comes next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The Rumpus:<\/strong> You\u2019ve said <em>Exit Party<\/em>, coming out in September of this year, is the best book you\u2019ve ever written and the hardest. What made it the hardest?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Emily St. John Mandel:<\/strong> Yes, both of those statements are accurate. I feel like I pushed myself very, very hard with this book. Philosophically, I always feel like as writers we should be working at the very outer edge of our talent. Because otherwise, we are not improving and the books aren\u2019t getting better. I feel like I really did that with this one. It was a difficult time in my personal life, which definitely played into that. But it\u2019s also a very complicated book. There are two universes and so imagining not just doubled characters, but a doubled state, was a wild imaginative exercise. It was really fun, but also incredibly difficult.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It was easy to start this book because you don\u2019t have to be a prophet to look at the American news and imagine a civil war. You can just be awake, alive, and consuming media, and find yourself wondering where this kind of extreme hyper-partisanship might potentially lead. So that was not hard to imagine. My inclination is more to look at what comes next, to look at the aftermath the same way I did in <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/station-eleven-a-novel-national-book-award-finalist-emily-st-john-mandel\/0e96a86b5246b32c?ean=9780804172448&amp;next=t\"><em>Station Eleven<\/em><\/a>. So the book opens in the aftermath of a civil war. It\u2019s also increasingly easy to imagine what life might be like in a totalitarian state, if that\u2019s not an experience that one\u2019s previously had. But figuring out how to pull that whole thing together and how to end it was incredibly difficult. I ended up doing a complete rewrite of the second half of the book, at least twice.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> Was that rewrite on your own volition or at the direction of your editors?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> It was somewhere in between. My experience with editors has been that they are great at identifying problems, and it is kind of up to you as the writer to solve the problem. One of the early notes for the draft I submitted to my editors was, \u201cCould the second half be more of an investigation?\u201d And at first, I was confused by that, because the short answer was no. But I think our job as writers is sometimes to look at the note behind the note. So if someone\u2019s asking for an investigation, do they mean a literal investigation of somebody trying to solve something, or is that another way of saying that section of the book needs more propulsion? Or more surprises and reveals and discovery? So I took the note that way, and that kind of broke open the book for me. That was what finally tied it together.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> What was the exact moment for you when you felt like you figured out the arc of the book?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> It was definitely after that total rewrite of the second half. There\u2019s a character in the second half who is actually fairly sinister. She\u2019s a high-ranking officer, basically in a police-state government apparatus. That character arc was really what landed the plane for me, tracing how someone goes from being afraid of the monsters, so to speak, as a little girl in a totalitarian state and seeing a friend disappear, to <em>becoming<\/em> the monster, which is not the worst play. If you\u2019re afraid of the monster, you might choose to become the monster. So figuring out how that character, specifically, is influenced by her environment, and how that also tied into the whole first half of the book, which is how people are influenced by living in a more chaotic environment, that was the idea that kind of drew it together for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> As I was reading, I couldn\u2019t help but think about the way the totalitarian states and contemporary politics impact who we are and the paths that we choose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> Yes, absolutely. I had a hard time writing the section of the book with a totalitarian version of the United States because events have moved so quickly since Trump took office. When I started writing it, I was trying to imagine these sort of dark, totalitarian scenarios, and by the time I was done, it was difficult to keep ahead of the news cycle.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> What were some of the specific events that influenced the book? Could you pull in some of those threads for us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> My personal life was profoundly distracting while I was writing this book. And, I feel like sometimes, in difficult and distracting moments of life, a book can feel like an escape. That was definitely true for me with <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/sea-of-tranquility-a-novel-emily-st-john-mandel\/d0e68a0e74aa5ad2?ean=9780593466735&amp;next=t\"><em>Sea of Tranquility<\/em><\/a>, which I wrote during the pandemic in New York City. That felt like a magical world I was escaping into. This book didn\u2019t really feel like an escape, except in the way that being immersed in the kind of grand project of a novel is an escape. It is a world over which you have total control, which is something that differentiates it from the work that I\u2019ve done in TV writing, and something I really love about writing fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> Were there any political events or political moments that you feel like were influencing you while writing this book?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> Not really, because I started this book in the spring of 2022 when Trump was certainly on the horizon. What I remember thinking in the years before our most recent election, is that it almost doesn\u2019t matter if Trump wins or loses: It is devastating that it\u2019s even close. Of course, it matters very much that he won, and that has been incredibly damaging to the country. But the thing that I found kind of devastating was how close it was, that there were so many people who supported him. And it was just so easy to imagine where that kind of political environment could go. You just have to read the news. And that was true in the spring of 2022 when I started writing the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> There\u2019s a lot of mystery in this novel and at times I felt delightfully disoriented. How did you decide how much disorientation is productive for the reader versus potentially confusing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> I was influenced by <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/the-leftovers-a-novel-tom-perrotta\/2cfc4082e46ca080?ean=9780312363550&amp;next=t\"><em>The Leftovers<\/em><\/a> by Tom Perrotta, specifically the television version. I found the first season to be kind of a grind. It was very bleak. But, seasons two and three had these moments of lightness that made it much more watchable. It was people living their lives and trying to survive in this strange time where something inexplicable had happened in the past. It was more about how to move forward than how to solve it. I was thinking about that when I wrote the book. I am drawn to speculative, slightly strange scenarios. They just really interest me. I like the juxtaposition of sci-fi weirdness and characters who I\u2019m really working hard to try to feel real with a speculative, but unfortunately somewhat plausible, political backdrop. It\u2019s such a fine line as a writer when you take a kind of weird path\u2014for lack of a better phrase\u2014to be mysterious, but not maddeningly confusing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> At this stage in your career, do you still have people read your work as you\u2019re drafting? Do you have beta readers or trusted early readers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> I do. They\u2019re so helpful. My very first editor had a really good description. He was talking about the phenomenon where you\u2019ve read your manuscript so many times that there could be a typo in the first sentence and you literally wouldn\u2019t notice. He said, \u201cYou just get snow blind.\u201d I thought that made sense. You get snow blind. You can\u2019t see the problems anymore.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is the first book where I\u2019ve ever had anybody read it before I was done. My wife, Laura, read iteration after iteration, and she had helpful notes. She\u2019s not a writer, but she is a reader. She reads a lot and sometimes that\u2019s better. When I had what I thought was a polished draft, I started sending it out to beta readers. I think it was four or five people: two novelists and two or three TV writers. If you want people who understand plot, talk to TV writers. They really understand plot and narrative arc. So yes, I sent it to four or five people whose taste I really respect. I felt I could trust them to point out problems. The last thing you want to hear is: \u201cIt\u2019s terrible, put it in a drawer.\u201d But the second to last thing you want to hear is: \u201cIt\u2019s perfect; don\u2019t change a thing.\u201d That\u2019s not helpful. There\u2019s always something to improve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> I\u2019d love to talk a little bit about the main character, Ari. Both where she came from, but also how you as the writer feel about her because she\u2019s a bit morally ambiguous.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> She\u2019s very morally ambiguous. She originated as Aria, the character in <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/the-singer-s-gun-emily-st-john-mandel\/84111c20a9e04992?ean=9781101911976&amp;next=t\"><em>The Singer&#8217;s Gun<\/em><\/a> (Unbridled, 2010). She\u2019s unambiguously the villain of that story. I found myself thinking about Aria over the years, even after I\u2019d published other books. I wanted to know who she would be after an eighteen-year prison term. She\u2019d be a different person. What if I released her into a country that had fractured and was coming together into city-states? She\u2019s able to survive in part because she\u2019s one of these people that has been through the worst she could possibly imagine, and she didn\u2019t die. That can give people a kind of reckless courage and strength. They\u2019ve lost everything already, and so that\u2019s not scary anymore. So, that\u2019s how I was thinking of her: Someone who is uniquely adapted for survival in a world where you really have to improvise and think on your feet and navigate a very difficult terrain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> While reading, I couldn\u2019t help but think of the way that totalitarianism or political upheaval affects everyday people. Even if it takes three hours on foot, as it does for Ari, people still have to go to the grocery store. Was the realness about what it is like to survive under these kinds of circumstances in your mind or did that just happen as you were writing this world?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> Well, I was trying to think through what systems start to break down, and the movement of goods is one of them. I remember this one surreal Christmas a few years ago where people at this gathering I attended kept opening up boxes with a photo of the gift they were going to get because of supply chain issues. The fragility of the supply chain is something that I\u2019ve thought a lot about since I wrote <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/the-glass-hotel-a-novel-emily-st-john-mandel\/ddff3c568b838ff5?ean=9780525562948&amp;next=t\"><em>The Glass Hotel<\/em><\/a> (Knopf, 2020), which has that whole shipping element. So then I found myself thinking, what begins to break down if a country no longer exists?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> Is this the nearest future you\u2019ve ever written in a book?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> Yes, I think so. I might be forgetting some section of one of my books, but yes I think it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> And do you have anxiety about doing that? About getting it wrong or getting it right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> There\u2019s some anxiety about that, but probably less than I had earlier in my career. You get a little toughened by dozens upon dozens of events where people are like, \u201cThis is more of a comment than a question.\u201d You know, people will always point out what they think you got wrong. My first event for <em>Station Eleven<\/em> was at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. The first question was from a guy who raised his hand and said, \u201cHow is the Traveling Symphony getting their vitamin C?\u201d You know, I didn&#8217;t figure out that particular detail. But I didn\u2019t walk them through bathroom construction either. So you know, my feeling is that I don\u2019t have to explain everything. My point is, somebody will always be able to find the \u201cgotcha\u201d moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> In a way, it shows how engaged they are with what you wrote. But yes, I can imagine it being a little exhausting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> So why is it always guys?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> Can we talk about that for a minute?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> Oh yeah, we can talk about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> You\u2019ve talked a bit about the sexism you experienced on your book tours and the ways that it prompted you to write <em>Sea of Tranquility<\/em>. Can you talk about what that was like for you? And have those questions changed now?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> Some things have changed. On the one hand, I am taken seriously as a writer, which might not have been the case in previous times. On the other hand, I do feel that I\u2019m asked questions that male authors are not asked. For example, I\u2019ll sit down for an onstage conversation\u2014I mean, I\u2019m a National Book Award-nominated, international bestseller\u2014and the interviewer will say, \u201cHave you ever thought about writing a book for children?\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now, there\u2019s nothing wrong with turning your attention to writing children\u2019s literature. Those books can be amazing. But there is nothing obvious about my body of work that would point in the direction of middle grade or YA. It\u2019s not that I mind the question, per se. It\u2019s that I\u2019ve never heard a male author be asked that question.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> So how do you deal with that, in the moment?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> I answer it and let it go. Because the thing is, I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any malice whatsoever on the part of the interviewers. I think we all have unconscious biases. And, you know, I don\u2019t want to mortify somebody and ruin their evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> And now are there differences in these questions? Or are you always braced for them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> I\u2019m always braced for them. But you know what\u2019s really funny\u2014and I didn\u2019t see this coming\u2014when I went out on tour for <em>Sea of Tranquility<\/em>, every interviewer was like, \u201cI\u2019m kind of scared to interview you.\u201d Now, I swear I didn\u2019t write that book to put interviewers on their best behavior. I told them, \u201cWell, if you don\u2019t say anything crazy, then we\u2019re fine.\u201d And they did not find that reassuring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> I want to make sure and ask you about something that you do that your fans adore. Can you tell me about the connections between past novels and why you bring back characters into new books?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mandel:<\/strong> I sometimes just become attached to a character. It can be really interesting to take a character further, because novels are so finite. Everything that is in the novel has to serve the novel. So you can\u2019t talk about any character for too long. But how interesting and cool to get to see that same character eighteen or twenty years later when they\u2019re a totally different person? But that past remains as a kind of a deep backstory from the previous books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Maybe I also have a longing for order in a chaotic universe. None of my books are sequential. There are no sequels. They don\u2019t have to be read in any particular order. But I do really enjoy drawing the pieces of this universe together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Philosophically, I always feel like as writers we should be working at the very outer edge of our talent. Because otherwise, we are not improving and the books aren\u2019t getting better. I feel like I really did that with this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258613,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":"{\"authors\":[88901],\"author_categories\":{\"88901\":\"1\"},\"fallback_author_user\":\"140487\",\"ppma_author_box_select\":\"\",\"selected_authors\":[{\"id\":88901,\"display_name\":\"Kelsey Erin Shipman\",\"is_guest\":1,\"category_id\":\"1\"}]}"},"categories":[81578],"tags":[219],"ppma_author":[88901],"class_list":["post-258599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","tag-interview"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Writing the Long, Strange Aftermath: A Conversation with Emily St. John Mandel - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Philosophically, I always feel like as writers we should be working at the very outer edge of our talent. 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I feel like I really did that with this one.","og_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/","og_site_name":"The Rumpus","article_publisher":"https:\/\/facebook.com\/TheRumpusDotNet","article_published_time":"2026-09-15T12:12:42+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1024,"height":1289,"url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Emily-St-John-Mandel-photo-credit-\u00a9-JiaHao-Peng-1024x1289.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Kelsey Erin Shipman","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@the_rumpus","twitter_site":"@the_rumpus","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Juliana Luna","Est. reading time":"15 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/"},"author":{"name":"Juliana Luna","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#\/schema\/person\/623ef0cfc02d1f2e01dc4cbfe666e1a4"},"headline":"Writing the Long, Strange Aftermath: A Conversation with Emily St. John Mandel","datePublished":"2026-09-15T12:12:42+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/"},"wordCount":2927,"commentCount":0,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Emily-St-John-Mandel-photo-credit-\u00a9-JiaHao-Peng.jpg?wsr","keywords":["interview"],"articleSection":["Interviews"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/","name":"Writing the Long, Strange Aftermath: A Conversation with Emily St. John Mandel - The Rumpus","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Emily-St-John-Mandel-photo-credit-\u00a9-JiaHao-Peng.jpg?wsr","datePublished":"2026-09-15T12:12:42+00:00","description":"Philosophically, I always feel like as writers we should be working at the very outer edge of our talent. 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I feel like I really did that with this one.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Emily-St-John-Mandel-photo-credit-\u00a9-JiaHao-Peng.jpg?wsr","contentUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Emily-St-John-Mandel-photo-credit-\u00a9-JiaHao-Peng.jpg?wsr","width":1777,"height":2237,"caption":"Photo Credit: JiaHao Peng"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/writing-the-long-strange-aftermath-a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Writing the Long, Strange Aftermath: A Conversation with Emily St. John Mandel"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#website","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/","name":"The Rumpus","description":"An independent arts and culture magazine for risk-taking voices.","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#organization","name":"The Rumpus","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Rumpus-Logo-FC.png?wsr","contentUrl":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Rumpus-Logo-FC.png?wsr","width":2560,"height":1707,"caption":"The Rumpus"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/facebook.com\/TheRumpusDotNet","https:\/\/x.com\/the_rumpus","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/the_rumpus","https:\/\/therumpus.tumblr.com\/"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/#\/schema\/person\/623ef0cfc02d1f2e01dc4cbfe666e1a4","name":"Juliana Luna","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/23e7bcd4306ff58a34eb2645e984b76bf58a1517ff3259ac94f80fe088dcacbf?s=96&d=mm&r=gc90dbb975d959e35091c18702a00709e","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/23e7bcd4306ff58a34eb2645e984b76bf58a1517ff3259ac94f80fe088dcacbf?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/23e7bcd4306ff58a34eb2645e984b76bf58a1517ff3259ac94f80fe088dcacbf?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Juliana Luna"},"url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/author\/jnluna\/"}]}},"authors":[{"term_id":88901,"user_id":0,"is_guest":1,"slug":"kelsey-erin-shipman","display_name":"Kelsey Erin Shipman","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"1","user_url":"","last_name":"","first_name":"","job_title":"","description":"<p><span data-sheets-root=\"1\">Kelsey Erin Shipman is a writer, ghostwriter, and recovering Texan based in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Her work has appeared in <em>USA Today,<\/em> <em>The Austin Chronicle<\/em>, and most recently on the <em>Dirtbag Rich<\/em> podcast. She is the co-founder of Write Up, an online community for writers who want to make a living without losing their minds. When she\u2019s not ghostwriting cookbooks or memoirs for clients, she publishes her newsletter <em>Cheese Toast with White People<\/em> and chips away at her own memoir about food, family, and the strange inheritance of Southern white culture. She loves big dogs and breakfast tacos.<\/span><\/p>"}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Emily-St-John-Mandel-photo-credit-\u00a9-JiaHao-Peng.jpg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258599"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258612,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258599\/revisions\/258612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258599"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258383,"date":"2026-09-15T06:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T10:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258383"},"modified":"2026-09-08T22:47:30","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T02:47:30","slug":"you-wont-hear-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/you-wont-hear-this\/","title":{"rendered":"you won&#8217;t hear this"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My mother was dying. She was lying in a bed with tubes protruding from her body, in an overpopulated hospital with people littered throughout the hallways waiting to be examined. My mother had given birth two days prior, but now \u2026 she was dying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Two days before, she was lying in a hospital bed getting ready to give birth to me. I\u2019ve seen pictures from the day. My aunt loved taking pictures, so there were tons of photos of the day. Pictures of mom in the hospital bed, of me, sticky with eyes squinched, of blood on the floor, and even some of the alien-looking placenta. Every time I see pictures of my freshly birthed self all I can think about is how long my head is and how hard my mother must have squeezed me before I finally slid into the world. I wonder if it was her way of giving me one last internal embrace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When mom would tell me the story of my birth, I always imagined the hospital room was dark, like the only light was coming in from the hallway or maybe a small nightlight plugged into a far corner of the room. But in the pictures, it\u2019s not dark; light comes from above though the room does have a dingy sort of glow. I try to imagine being in that room, in 1997, seeing my mother with the bags under her eyes, her hair becoming increasingly frizzier as she turns her head side to side, tracking family members and nurses across the room or maybe trying to shake away the pain radiating up from below. I imagine myself taking her hand, trying to comfort her. I wonder if her hands were cold or did clenching her fists through every contraction heat them up. I wonder how it smelt in there. The usual smell of chemicals in the hospital? Or maybe it smelled like the perfume that my aunt or grandma might have been wearing. Did it smell like the inside of a human body? I want to lean over her and kiss her head, in thanks, in guilt, in sorrow because I know what she\u2019ll go through. I know how often Black women die in childbirth. I don\u2019t know what the numbers were then, but I know what they are now, so I can only imagine the suffering, the lives lost.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I know she\u2019s tired, but I want to ask her if she knows why. Why she\u2019ll end up near dead in the next couple of days. I want to ask her if she knows why this happens to so many Black mothers? I want to ask if she knows why Black women are more likely to die due to pregnancy and childbirth-related complications? I want to ask if she knows that it\u2019s probably because doctors don\u2019t listen to them. Does she know that they don\u2019t listen when a Black mother says something&#8217;s not right? Does she know that they don\u2019t listen when a Black mother says she\u2019s in pain? Does she <em>know<\/em> that they don\u2019t listen? That they <em>won\u2019t<\/em> listen? Does she know?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Maybe she does. Maybe she\u2019s heard stories. Maybe she\u2019s suspicious of doctors like I find many Black people to be. Maybe she has an idea, but soon she\u2019ll know with absolute certainty. She\u2019ll know that they don\u2019t listen. She\u2019ll know that they tell Black women in excruciating pain that nothing is wrong. She\u2019ll know that they think Black women are overreacting, are overexaggerating, are lying. She\u2019ll know all of this two days after giving me life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I want to lean over and kiss her head. In sorrow, in guilt, in thanks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I know the details. I know them so well from how often I\u2019ve asked my mom about it. It\u2019s almost like a history book that I keep shelved front and center in the library of my mind. I open it often. I read and reread and memorize the facts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It goes like this. After spending about twelve hours in the hospital waiting for the moment she would bring her daughter into the world, thirty-year-old Willette Mathis had finally dilated ten centimeters. She was instructed to start pushing. She would not finish pushing until three hours later at 6:35am on June 13th, 1997. Throughout the delivery, everyone kept asking her, \u201cYou can\u2019t push that little baby out?\u201d This woman, hearing a refrain of \u201c1,2,3 push, 1,2,3 push,\u201d having contractions rip through her body, feeling the tightening and releasing of her muscles for three hours, was continually asked why she couldn\u2019t push that little baby out. Her husband, her sister, her <em>doctor<\/em> asked her this throughout the three hours. All the while, she repeated \u201cMy chest hurts, my chest hurts,\u201d but all she heard was \u201cYou can\u2019t push that little baby out?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At a certain point, when she\u2019d had enough of her husband telling her to push the baby out, she screeched, \u201cDidn\u2019t I tell you my chest is hurting? You push that motherfucker out.\u201d During this three-hour long game of push and berate, her doctor told the nurse to retrieve him when the head was out because her daughter would seem near crowning and then would retreat into the warmth and safety inside her. The doctor told the nurse that he would be taking a nap in the room next door. About an hour later, around 6:15, the doctor came back and said, \u201cYou haven\u2019t pushed the baby out yet?\u201d He then proceeded to get what Willette would later describe to her daughter as a suction cup and he yanked the baby girl out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After spending so long in the birth canal, I swallowed some of my mother\u2019s urine and developed an infection that would cause me to spend the first few days of my life housed in a room with infants rocking in a cradle between life and death. My mother, on the other hand, was not as lucky. She was discharged two days after giving birth and went home feeling as if she had a cold. Thinking she was just a little sick, she sent my cousin to the store to buy cough drops. Her doctors had cleared her to be discharged, so why would she think anything was seriously wrong? My mother lied down to rest and soon she felt like death was upon her. She scared herself awake. She got her friends to rush her back to the hospital while my grandmother stayed behind to watch my brother. At the hospital, my mother had a hard time catching her breath and when she attempted to tell the medical staff what she was feeling they asked her why she was talking weird; she replied, gasping, \u201cI \u2026&nbsp; don\u2019t \u2026 know.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Eventually, they determined her body was drowning her. Her lungs had filled with fluid because her heart had stopped pumping properly. The doctors told my mother that she had gone into congestive heart failure. The blood and other fluids that were supposed to run like a life-sustaining river through her body had backed up inside her lungs. Before she left the hospital a few days later, she would have fourteen pounds of misplaced fluid flushed from her body. All my mother\u2019s doctor had to offer was \u201cI\u2019m sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My mother was close to being one of the many Black women who die because of a prejudiced medical staff. She would\u2019ve been another forgotten statistic. After the ordeal, she had to stay on numerous medications for a few years, and, for the rest of her life, she will have to take high blood pressure medication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sometimes I find myself asking who should apologize to my mother. The little baby who refused to be pushed out? The doctor who ignored her complaints of chest pain? Hospitals that employ indifferent doctors? The system of racism that has influenced how Black women are perceived? Who is going to look at my mother and say \u201cMs. Mathis, I\u2019m sorry I almost killed you\u201d?<br \/><br \/><br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When mom would tell me the story of my birth, I always imagined the hospital room was dark, like the only light was coming in from the hallway or maybe a small nightlight plugged into a far corner of the room. But in the pictures, it\u2019s not dark; light comes from above though the room does have a dingy sort of glow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":349,"featured_media":258384,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[81576],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[88882],"class_list":["post-258383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>You won&#039;t hear this - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When mom would tell me the story of my birth, I always imagined the hospital room was dark, like the only light was coming in from the hallway or maybe a small nightlight plugged into a far corner of the room. But in the pictures, it\u2019s not dark; light comes from above though the room does have a dingy sort of glow.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/15\/you-wont-hear-this\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"you won&#039;t hear this - The Rumpus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When mom would tell me the story of my birth, I always imagined the hospital room was dark, like the only light was coming in from the hallway or maybe a small nightlight plugged into a far corner of the room. 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She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, Hunger, Opinions, and others.\u00a0She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. Roxane was the founding Essays Editor for The Rumpus and is now the site editor and co-owner. You can find her at roxanegay.com.\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/author\\\/roxane-gay\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"You won't hear this - The Rumpus","description":"When mom would tell me the story of my birth, I always imagined the hospital room was dark, like the only light was coming in from the hallway or maybe a small nightlight plugged into a far corner of the room. 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She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, Hunger, Opinions, and others.\u00a0She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. Roxane was the founding Essays Editor for The Rumpus and is now the site editor and co-owner. You can find her at roxanegay.com.","url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/author\/roxane-gay\/"}]}},"authors":[{"term_id":88882,"user_id":0,"is_guest":1,"slug":"lydia-mathis","display_name":"Lydia Mathis","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"1","user_url":"","last_name":"","first_name":"","job_title":"","description":"<strong>Lydia Mathis<\/strong>\u00a0has an MFA in fiction from New York University. She is the recipient of A Public Space\u2019s 2023 Editorial Fellowship and is currently an assistant editor at A Public Space. She has stories published in\u00a0<em>North American Review<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Southeast Review<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Torch Magazine<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Stanchion<\/em>,\u00a0<em>Five on the Fifth<\/em>, and\u00a0<em>oranges journal<\/em>. Her new book,\u00a0<em>Desperate Bodies<\/em>, is out now from Roxane Gay Books."}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/shutterstock_2605937627-scaled.jpg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/349"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258383"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258385,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258383\/revisions\/258385"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258383"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258442,"date":"2026-09-14T09:12:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T13:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258442"},"modified":"2026-09-14T11:48:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T15:48:33","slug":"a-pair-of-death-trips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/14\/a-pair-of-death-trips\/","title":{"rendered":"A Pair of Death Trips"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Midwestern Death Trip<\/em> opens with quotes collected in <em>Wisconsin Death Trip<\/em>. Pulled from the local papers in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, during the 1890s\u2014those Gay Nineties\u2014they tell stories of barns set aflame, lake monsters stealing hogs, and a woman split in three by the train. Meaghan Garvey sets the tone for the memoir ahead, situating the Midwest not as \u201cvoid of drama\u201d but as a world filled with aging bards drunk on Old Styles and visionaries overcome with baroque dreams.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Her inspiration, Michael Lesy\u2019s 1973 book <em>Wisconsin Death Trip<\/em>, was a spiral into the past, sucked into the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society and the haunting, fin-de-si\u00e8cle images of Charles Van Schaick\u2014those stills of babies in open caskets and farmers and fiddlers with crazed eyes. Lesy\u2019s descent into these dusty archives recalls a story he told me about the Depression-era photographer Walker Evans: He once walked into a Dollar General and was rapt, somehow transfixed, by the bargain goods lining the shelves. Evans, like Lesy (I\u2019d argue), had this unbridled sense of attention and joy. His eye never lapsed, always caught in this state of reception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This intensity, this ability to find stories where others refuse to look, is the basis of Garvey\u2019s project, taking place down winding country roads in a blood-red Cadillac. She sets off, trawling rural dives and supper clubs, hoping to find the strangeness of the Midwestern spirit lingering in the present. That open road defines both form and content of Garvey\u2019s 2026 collection, each essay another stop (or two) along the dizzying network of county highways. She takes US Route 41 all the way north to the Upper Peninsula, but she just as easily pulls off, headed twenty minutes toward Gay, Michigan, a hollowed mining town stripped of everything but its name. Her essays are pulled by two desires: the stream of fast-paced images whirring past the reader and the detour, the digression, the slow meander.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On these journeys through the Midwest, Garvey meets Buddhists addicted to coke, Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s exterminator, and a bartender who rose from the dead. Journalism quickly becomes Romantic, and you begin to wonder: <em>To what extent does Garvey deal in folklore? How far does she get sucked into the lies of these locals, worlds fabricated by men who grip onto the Tartarian Empire?<\/em> Compared to the world of <em>Wisconsin Death Trip<\/em>\u2014one made so estranging by its flat tone, each event narrated journalistically, so spare and matter-of-fact\u2014Garvey\u2019s descriptions are indulgent. They taste of fried fish and white Russians. Each detail is suffused with fantasy. The hundred-foot mound in Cairo, Illinois, starts to rival the Pyramids; post-industrial residues, copper vats, and old steam pumps are agglomerated into a labyrinth of manufacturing and decay; in a quiet town, busts of Nietzsche and Beethoven become an aging bachelor\u2019s roommates. In Garvey\u2019s Midwest, people live in the maximalist, almost fictive worlds they have fashioned for themselves, riding on carousels with armored mermaids and roosters, or log cabins with a \u201cmurky 4,000-gallon aquarium.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But even Lesy, so tethered to the archive, has received criticism for dwelling in fiction. The initial readers of <em>Wisconsin Death Trip<\/em> were unable to \u201cdecide if it was poetry or history, a fabrication or a discourse, a hoax or a revelation.\u201d For Lesy, it was fabricated. <em>Wisconsin Death Trip<\/em> was an experiment in collaging, through both image and language. Lesy takes Van Schaick\u2019s photos of taxidermied deer and mirrors and splits them in half, and sutures the news into a montage of psychological crises and diphtheria. Textually, Lesy mainly intervenes through composition. Operating under the guise of chronology, he stages poetic juxtapositions (for example, news of a butcher dying from a nine-day nosebleed is followed by a failed decapitation performed by an amateur magician).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These stories feel surreal, and the archives and the journalistic discoveries inspire doubt, but the spirit lives on. The relationship between Lesy\u2019s and Garvey\u2019s texts presupposes a continuity between the madness of Black River Falls and the strangeness of the contemporary Midwest, one which even the historian picked up on. When Michael Lesy met the mother of his first wife, she seemed straight from <em>Wisconsin Death Trip<\/em>. Walking into her quaint, Midwestern house, Lesy was immediately quizzed, \u201cYou know what the price of pork loin is these days?\u201d A reformed Jew who kept kosher, Lesy bluffed and bought time before being interrupted by the follow-up, \u201cYou believe in the apocalypse?\u201d She only asked the important questions. For Lesy, this was perfect\u2014a portal back into Black River Falls, a woman stripped from the archive and reanimated, someone who lives both in the present and the end of times.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The more Lesy learned about his mother-in-law, Hazel, the more he lost himself in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society, the more her stories somehow became standard. She was institutionalized after the birth of one of her kids, compelled to kill herself with boiling water, yet Lesy brushed it off: \u201cI don&#8217;t think any of this is extraordinary. I think life is very difficult. That\u2019s travail.\u201d Like Hazel, those old residents in Black River Falls lived among tragedy, and they lived casually among it. If a guest visited, they would go through their photo albums, flipping through photos of dead children, \u201cand for a moment, commiserate.\u201d The town did not have a higher incidence of mental illness, infanticide, or religious extremism. Black River Falls was just an average town in turn-of-the-century Wisconsin, which meant it was totally paranoid and wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For Garvey, the old spirit of Wisconsin can reemerge through spectacle and self-parody. The blissful escape of the pineries, where men \u201ccaught smallpox from each other and clap from the girls in the dens,\u201d transmutes into the Lumberjack World Championships, where men run vertically up trees and free-fall down their trunks, just to celebrate by smoking outside the small-town strip club.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u200bAnd sometimes, this tendency toward parody and excess creates something totally unrecognizable. Take the Pinehurst Inn in Indian River, Michigan. It is owned by Alvis, an Elvis impersonator inspired \u201cnot by the rockabilly stud of the late 1950s or the black-leather Elvis of the \u201968 comeback special but the pill-bloated Sun King of the late Las Vegas years, when he was pushed onstage to pantomime his former glories.\u201d It\u2019s an impersonation of a man reduced to impersonation, or rather, a hamfisted attempt to revive the past in the present, one so imperfectly accomplished that it becomes a beautiful, tragic invention. The excess found in Indian River continues as Garvey enters the Dam Site Inn in Pellston. There, she meets a man who tells her of the ascendant rise and fall of his wealth, how inheriting a few Norman Rockwell paintings led to a cross-country motorcycle journey and, eventually, drug-fueled, late-night lawn mowing. Every character is full of too much life. Fantasy punctures through their sallow skin and radiates off their bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Garvey continually plays with that line between myth and reality, the mix of lies and histories disclosed at the bar, a form of journalism which says as much about its narrator as the doubted narrative. One Midwestern man, mired in masculine myth, pops up continuously throughout the essay collection: Ernest Hemingway, dubbed by his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, as \u201cthe biggest literary liar since Munchausen.\u201d And those lies and all that bravado linger over the aged men who populate the bars in <em>Midwestern Death Trip<\/em>. Garvey seems to catch these broken, lost boomers in their routine, at the dive telling the same story they\u2019ve been telling for twenty-five years now, each time more embellished and haughty.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In a way, <em>Midwestern Death Trip<\/em> is a portrait of the myth-makers. Garvey\u2019s work leans on archetypes insofar as to show you the psychology of their fabricators. In this land that both she and Lesy describe as a land of false promises, where the American Dream dissolved into disappointment and desolation, she sees beauty and tragedy in, for instance, that lonely Elvis impersonator, a dying star clinging on to the promise of glory. And for Alvis, the man captivated by redemption, for a brief moment, the spotlight still flickers in that bar with the broken jukebox and our faded American flag.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There, she meets a man who tells her of the ascendant rise and fall of his wealth, how inheriting a few Norman Rockwell paintings led to a cross-country motorcycle journey and, eventually, drug-fueled, late-night lawn mowing. Every character is full of too much life. Fantasy punctures through their sallow skin and radiates off their bodies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140309,"featured_media":258631,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[88628],"tags":[8535],"ppma_author":[88772],"class_list":["post-258442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-criticism","tag-criticism"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>A Pair of Death Trips - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"There, she meets a man who tells her of the ascendant rise and fall of his wealth, how inheriting a few Norman Rockwell paintings led to a cross-country motorcycle journey and, eventually, drug-fueled, late-night lawn mowing. 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as Relay Race: A Conversation with Mar\u00eda Elena Mor\u00e1n"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">T<em>he Winds of Maracaibo<\/em> by Mar\u00eda Elena Mor\u00e1n accomplishes one of fiction\u2019s greatest feats\u2014bridging the gap between the outside and the inside world. The novel hits the right notes of external and internal conflict, becoming intimate and expansive at once. Mor\u00e1n reminds us that our lives exist within the context of larger conversations. Yes, we belong to ourselves, but we also belong to the world, to countries that shift between cycles of decay and resurgence, and that connection to the world, and to those countries, for some of us, remains inextricable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The novel explores the lives of a family trying to find peace and refuge within themselves amidst the ruins of a post-Ch\u00e1vez Venezuela, diving into the Venezuelan crisis with accuracy, nuance, humanity, and beauty. Mor\u00e1n balances the aftermath of a political crisis with the internal, intimate turmoil of her characters, who, despite their circumstances, remain palpably human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is rare to read a novel that can skillfully contain multitudes: one that satisfies both our need for human connection\u2014through the pains and joys of its characters\u2014and our curiosity about the workings of the world those characters inhabit. <em>The Winds of Maracaibo<\/em> satisfied my readerly needs, both emotional and intellectual. I found myself wrapped in Nina\u2019s world\u2014her desire for safety, love, peace, and stability for herself, her family, and her country. I found myself rooting for her, often in awe of her humanity\u2014her capacity to persist, as a person, mother, and citizen of a fractured country, in the face of obstacles, both within and beyond her control. And most importantly, I found myself enamored with Mor\u00e1n\u2019s words and the palpably fraught and very realistic world she rendered on the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We spoke via email about the Chavista identity, political tumult, subverting expectations, and her inspiration for <em>The Winds of Maracaibo<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>This interview has been edited for length and clarity.&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-medium\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"350\" height=\"525\" src=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/THE-WINDS-OF-MARACAIBO-Jacket-350x525.jpg?wsr\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-258479\" srcset=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/THE-WINDS-OF-MARACAIBO-Jacket-350x525.jpg 350w, https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/THE-WINDS-OF-MARACAIBO-Jacket-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/THE-WINDS-OF-MARACAIBO-Jacket-800x1200.jpg 800w, https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/THE-WINDS-OF-MARACAIBO-Jacket-1365x2048.jpg 1365w, https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/THE-WINDS-OF-MARACAIBO-Jacket-1320x1980.jpg 1320w, https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/THE-WINDS-OF-MARACAIBO-Jacket-600x900.jpg 600w, https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/THE-WINDS-OF-MARACAIBO-Jacket.jpg 1650w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The Rumpus:<\/strong> What inspired you to write <em>The Winds of Maracaibo<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> The novel emerged from a profound sense of loss. I was trying to make sense of my father\u2019s death, the collapse of my homeland, and the failure of the political project that had shaped my generation in Venezuela. At some point, those different forms of grief became impossible to separate, and fiction became the place where I could begin to explore them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At the same time, I couldn&#8217;t stop thinking about the images coming from Venezuela: overcrowded borders filled with people, my own people, leaving everything behind. Friends and family were suddenly living through extreme vulnerability and uncertainty. There was an overwhelming sense of exposure, as if they had nowhere safe to stand. I wanted to move beyond the headlines and write about the intimate experience of migration, about what exile does to memory, family, identity, and the ways we imagine home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> <em>The Winds of Maracaibo<\/em> starts with a great deal of immediacy and velocity. Right from the beginning, we see the weight of being a migrant and refugee. Talk to me about beginnings: What\u2019s important to you as a writer? What was particularly important for this novel?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> I think a beginning should create an emotional atmosphere, put the readers in the eye of the storm, no matter how big or visible that storm might be. In <em>The Winds of Maracaibo<\/em>, I wanted readers to feel the urgency before they fully understood it. Migration rarely unfolds in an orderly way; it throws people into uncertainty from the very first moment. I wanted the novel&#8217;s opening to embody that emotional disorientation and immediately place readers inside Nina&#8217;s experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> What role does the Venezuelan crisis play in the development of the plot?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>\u200b\u200bMor\u00e1n:<\/strong> The political crisis is the condition that shapes every character\u2019s life, but it isn\u2019t the protagonist of the novel. I wasn\u2019t interested in explaining Venezuela or writing a political chronicle, even though I did draw a detailed context. I wanted to show how history enters the private sphere, how it transforms families, friendships, marriages, and even the way people remember themselves. Politics is never abstract in the novel; it is always experienced through intimate lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> Talk about the \u201cChavista\u201d identity. How does it manifest in the novel? What were some challenges and rewards of writing about Chavistas?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> One of my goals was to resist caricature. Chavismo is often portrayed in simplistic terms, but millions of people, myself included, genuinely believed in that political project for complex historical reasons. I wanted to portray characters whose political convictions were inseparable from their hopes, contradictions, disappointments, and humanity. I was particularly interested in those who failed to recognize the rise of authoritarianism within the very movement they supported until it was too late, not because they were na\u00efve, but because acknowledging it meant confronting a deeply painful failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The kind of literature that moves me is one that allows us to inhabit complexity, that refuses to reduce people to familiar, overused symbols, and instead invites us to encounter them in all their contradictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> I was struck by the incredible balance you achieve with this novel. In part, it tells a story of political upheaval. But for the most part, it tells the story of a family enduring personal tragedies amidst the chaos of the world they inhabit. The novel is both intimate and expansive. How did you come to strike this balance? What were your goals?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> I wanted to explore big-H History through individual stories, to filter it through the subjectivity of a family and its wounds. I wasn\u2019t interested in separating the political from the intimate because, in reality, they are inseparable. The choices people make, the people they love, and the families they build or lose are all shaped by the historical moment they inhabit. Literature allows us to experience History from the intimacy, from the inside. I think that\u2019s one of fiction\u2019s unique powers. Between the abstraction of history and the singularity of one person\u2019s experience, it is often the triggers of a character&#8217;s emotions, the obliquity of their perspective, or the specifics of the situation they face that moves us most deeply. Fiction gives us access to history through emotion and imagination, allowing us to understand it in ways that other forms of knowledge, such as history, sociology, or political analysis, often cannot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That\u2019s why I tried to embody different dimensions of this collective historical conflict in each character\u2019s individual journey. I wanted each of them to have a distinct psychological dynamic, one that would shape the way they experienced grief, loss, displacement, and hope. Although they all share the same historical catastrophe, none of them lives it in the same way. Their responses are shaped by their family values, their political beliefs, their relationship to class, and even the generation to which they belong. My hope was that, taken together, these different subjectivities would offer a more truthful portrait of a country in crisis than any single perspective ever could.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> How do the novel\u2019s characters change in the face of political turmoil?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> The crisis doesn\u2019t simply change what happens to the characters, it changes who they have become by the time the novel begins. They all carry the marks of political displacement and disillusionment, although each has arrived there by a different path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Many of them once believed deeply in a political project that promised a more just society. The novel takes place after those promises have unraveled, so what we witness is not the moment of disillusionment itself, but its aftermath. Through memory, the characters reflect on the ideals they once embraced, the compromises they accepted, and the painful realization that no political project should demand absolute loyalty or silence dissent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Exile intensifies that reckoning. It forces the characters to renegotiate their identities, their relationships, and their sense of belonging. Some become more resilient, others more fragile, but none of them remain unchanged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> Though <em>The Winds of Maracaibo<\/em> centers on Nina and Elisa, it is told from multiple points of view. What influenced this choice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> I conceived the novel as a polyphonic work from the very beginning. Even before I knew exactly who the characters were, I knew I didn\u2019t want the story to be told through a single voice. In a way, that would have reproduced the very logic of authoritarianism: the idea that there is only one legitimate version of reality. I didn\u2019t want the novel\u2019s form to echo what it was questioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The polyphonic structure became both an aesthetic and an ethical choice. I wanted to create a mosaic of perspectives that, by their very nature, are partial, flawed, and incomplete. Rather than offering readers a definitive moral judgment, I wanted to place them in the uncomfortable position of having to constantly reassess their own assumptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I often thought of the novel as a relay race. A character tells their version of events, and the reader may begin to sympathize with them or judge them. Then another voice takes over and complicates everything\u2014confirming, challenging, or completely transforming that first impression. That movement between perspectives felt essential to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because the novel is rooted in the Venezuelan experience, where public discourse has so often demanded certainty, unanimity, and ideological loyalty, it was important for me that the novel become the opposite of that. I wanted to make room for doubt, disagreement, self-criticism, and contradiction. I wanted imperfect, fallible, disenchanted, but still hopeful voices asking questions of one another, and of themselves, as they move through a story where it is often impossible to tell where a country ends and a family begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> Displacement and family separation are overarching themes in the novel. How do you write about these complex themes? What were some of your concerns? What was rewarding?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> I tried to avoid sentimentalizing migration or turning suffering into spectacle. Separation is painful, but it is also full of contradictions, guilt, hope, resilience, and even humor. I wanted to approach these experiences with as much respect and care as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of my main concerns was the tendency to judge people too quickly, especially in situations of migration, where choices are often made under impossible circumstances. I am interested in questioning those automatic judgments and inviting readers to approach the experience of others with more empathy and curiosity.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What has been most rewarding is seeing readers recognize that complexity. Many have told me that they found themselves identifying with characters they never expected to understand, or even with characters whose choices or political beliefs differ from their own. For me, that is one of literature\u2019s greatest possibilities: expanding our capacity to imagine the lives of others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> Many of the stories centering Venezuelan migration focus on the journey to the United States. <em>The Winds of Maracaibo<\/em>, however, centers Nina\u2019s experience in Brazil. Can you talk about this choice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> Brazil has been one of the most gentle and welcoming countries for my people and has received hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, yet their stories remain relatively invisible internationally. It also happens to be the country where I have been living for the past fourteen years. I wanted to broaden the literary map of Venezuelan migration and remind readers that exile takes many different routes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> Nina leaves Elisa behind, a decision that resonates with many migrants and refugees, who sometimes embark on migratory journeys without their children, leaving them in the care of loved ones until they can be reunited. Can you talk about the complexity of this choice and how it manifests in the novel?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> I wanted readers to understand how incredibly difficult that decision is to make. People often judge these choices from a place of stability, but migration frequently forces parents to choose between two unbearable alternatives. Nina doesn\u2019t leave because she loves her daughter less. She leaves because she hopes that temporary separation might make a better future possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was also interested in the gendered dimension of migration and in what scholars call transnational motherhood. When fathers migrate to provide for their families, they are often seen as courageous or even heroic. Mothers who make the same choice are much more likely to be judged as having abandoned their children. I wanted to explore that double standard and the immense emotional burden it places on women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the novel, those judgments are embodied by different characters. Nina internalizes them herself, constantly questioning whether she has failed as a mother. Graciela, who belongs to an older generation, carries many of the cultural expectations and prejudices surrounding motherhood and reinforces them, even while loving her daughter. Elisa hears those judgments too, but more importantly, she is simply too young to understand the reasons behind her mother\u2019s decision. What she feels is abandonment. Having already lost her father, she experiences her mother\u2019s departure as a second orphanhood. That emotional truth is just as important as Nina\u2019s, because in the novel there are no easy villains or heroes, only people trying to survive impossible circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> The migrant experience forces people to reassess and redefine how they interact and rely on others. Nina is an independent, self-sufficient woman who inevitably has to rely on others. Can you talk about this dichotomy of interdependence and reliance?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> For me, one of exile\u2019s deepest transformations is that it dismantles the illusion of self-sufficiency. Migration exposes our dependence on strangers, institutions, friends, and unexpected acts of generosity. Nina struggles with that vulnerability because accepting help also means accepting that she can no longer be the person she used to be. She needs help; she needs to learn how to ask for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think there is great power in knowing our limits, in understanding that asking for help doesn\u2019t mean that we have failed. There is also power in recognizing that, of course, there is evil, selfishness, and prejudice in the world, but that there is also solidarity and generosity in human nature. It just doesn\u2019t make the news that often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We are constantly being taught that we should need no one but machines and technology and, of course, the money and power that sustain it all. But we have to remember that human history is a collective one. We are more powerful and happier together. Nina\u2019s journey is also about remembering that truth, and that\u2019s probably the most political issue the novel addresses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> What kind of research did you do to write this novel?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> The book grew out of years of conversations with people from my homeland who experienced forced migration, stories shared by family and friends, testimonies I came across in books, articles, and interviews, and my own reading about Venezuela\u2019s recent history. I absorbed all of those voices, mixed them together, and transformed them into fiction. I sometimes think that the novel is biographical; not of one person, but of millions. In that sense, its emotional truth comes from a collective experience rather than an individual one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The novel also relies on my own experience of migration. I left Venezuela years before the crisis, by choice and for personal reasons, so my story is very different from the one the novel tells. Even so, the experience of leaving your homeland (the ruptures, the longing, the redefinition of identity) carries emotional echoes that I recognize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> What do you want the reader to take away?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> More than anything, I hope readers leave with more questions than certainties. I hope they see migration not as an abstract political issue but as a profoundly human experience, and that they come away with a greater appreciation for nuances.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If readers can feel the impossible weight of Nina\u2019s choices without rushing to judge her, understand Elisa\u2019s sense of abandonment, recognize the love that coexists with Graciela\u2019s prejudices, see the deeper emotional roots of Camilo\u2019s behavior rather than reducing him to his politics, and feel Ra\u00fal\u2019s helplessness as he endures the ultimate exile, death itself, then I will feel I have accomplished what I set out to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don\u2019t expect readers to agree with my characters or even to like them. I only hope they will be willing to inhabit their worlds for a while. To me, that\u2019s one of literature\u2019s greatest gifts: it allows us to encounter people in all their contradictions and to leave a story with a little more empathy and a little less certainty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> How did your background as a screenwriter inform your writing of this novel?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> Screenwriting taught me to trust scenes, dialogue, and the intelligence of the reader. It trained me to think in terms of action rather than explanation, and to reveal characters through what they do, what they say, and what they choose not to say. I suspect that background naturally found its way into my fiction. I tend to think of scenes not only through plot, but through sound, space, light, weather, and the sensory experience of a place. Landscape is never just a backdrop for me; it is another way of telling the story and understanding the emotional lives of the characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At the same time, writing a novel allowed me to explore territories that cinema can\u2019t reach in the same way. I could spend more time inside my characters\u2019 minds, follow the texture of memory, and linger in contradiction and ambiguity.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don\u2019t think one form is better than the other. They simply ask different questions of the writer, and I enjoy moving between them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> What was it like to work with a translator?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> Working with Maddie [Madeline Jones] was one of the greatest gifts this book has given me. Translation is a strange and beautiful process because someone else has to inhabit your language from the inside and recreate it in another one. That requires not only technical skill but also deep literary sensitivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Throughout the process, we were in constant conversation. Maddie asked incredibly thoughtful questions, especially about rhythm, cultural references, and the emotional undertones of certain passages. Those conversations reminded me that every translation is also a close reading. She approached the novel with remarkable care and generosity, and I always felt she was trying to preserve not just the meaning of the sentences, but the experience of reading them. I couldn\u2019t have hoped for a better companion in bringing the book into English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Rumpus:<\/strong> What is your writing process like?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mor\u00e1n:<\/strong> My writing process usually begins with an obsession rather than a story. There is a question, an image, or a moral dilemma that I can\u2019t stop thinking about, and I write because I don\u2019t yet understand it. Fiction is much more a space where I investigate questions than one where I illustrate conclusions I\u2019ve already reached.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Structure is essential for me. Before I start writing, I spend a great deal of time thinking about structure and narrative strategies, because I believe form is never neutral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As I write, I keep listening to what the story and the characters are asking of me. There are always adjustments along the way, but I rarely feel that I am imposing a preconceived idea on the novel. I\u2019m always asking whether the form is doing justice to the emotional and ethical complexity I\u2019m trying to explore. For me, writing isn\u2019t about certainty. It\u2019s a way of thinking, of listening, and of discovering what I didn\u2019t know before I started.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I often thought of the novel as a relay race. A character tells their version of events, and the reader may begin to sympathize with them or judge them. Then another voice takes over and complicates everything\u2014confirming, challenging, or completely transforming that first impression. That movement between perspectives felt essential to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[81578],"tags":[219],"ppma_author":[88501],"class_list":["post-258401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","tag-interview"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Novel as Relay Race: A Conversation with Mar\u00eda Elena Mor\u00e1n - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I often thought of the novel as a relay race. A character tells their version of events, and the reader may begin to sympathize with them or judge them. Then another voice takes over and complicates everything\u2014confirming, challenging, or completely transforming that first impression. That movement between perspectives felt essential to me.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/14\/novel-as-relay-race-a-conversation-with-maria-elena-moran\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Novel as Relay Race: A Conversation with Mar\u00eda Elena Mor\u00e1n - The Rumpus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I often thought of the novel as a relay race. A character tells their version of events, and the reader may begin to sympathize with them or judge them. 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She is the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize and the author of the short story collection <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I\u2019ll Give You a Reason<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> from the Feminist Press. A Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, her work has also received support from Tin House and has appeared in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guernica<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">American Short Fiction<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Michigan Quarterly Review<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Brooklyn Rail<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and elsewhere. L\u00f3pez received her MFA from the University of New Orleans. She is an assistant fiction editor for the New Orleans Review and is working on a novel.<\/span>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;"}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Maria-Elena-Moran-Author-Photo-1.jpg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258401"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258481,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258401\/revisions\/258481"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258401"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258151,"date":"2026-09-13T10:29:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T14:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258151"},"modified":"2026-09-14T07:40:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T11:40:39","slug":"off-the-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/13\/off-the-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Off the Books"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Twenty-two years of tinnitus. Eleven different medications. Acupuncture is the only thing that works, and I don\u2019t believe in acupuncture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I lie face down on a folding table covered with a beach towel that has faded from blue to grey. My right cheek presses into the plastic, my left arm hangs off the side because that\u2019s where Jaume told me to put it the first time I came, two years ago, and I haven\u2019t changed the position since. The towel smells of detergent. Underneath, the table smells of older men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jaume works behind me. I cannot see him. I hear his breath\u2014nasal, measured, slightly congested. I hear the click of the lighter when he relights the incense. I hear the small dry sound of a needle leaving its paper sleeve. I do not hear him think, but I sense it: the pause before each insertion, the calibration of a man who learned this from a weekend course in Castell\u00f3 fifteen years ago and has been pretending ever since that the diploma he printed himself was issued by someone serious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He charges thirty euros per session, cash only.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The flat is on Carrer del Crist, second floor, no plate on the door. His mother\u2019s flat, kept exactly as she left it in 1991. Curtains the color of weak tea. Above the sofa, the Sacred Heart on oil-on-board, the kind no one buys now and no one throws out. A pharmacy calendar from 1987 by the kitchen doorway. December. The page has never been turned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I have been listening to a high-pitched tone in my ears since I was nineteen. Around 5,500 Hz, the audiologist said, the year I bought my first pair of expensive headphones. The tone has a slight wobble in the right ear, a steadier signal in the left. It does not stop. It never softens. It does not respond to medication, silence, alcohol, sleep, or the thirteen relaxation techniques the public health system tried before discharging me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It responds to Jaume.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A man at the bar told me about Jaume two and a half years ago. He had used him for sciatica and could walk again. He didn\u2019t say acupuncture. He said: He knows where to push. He gave me a number written on a paper napkin and looked over his shoulder as he passed it across, as if even the napkin embarrassed him. I called from the car the next day, parked outside my own building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I do not know why. I have a degree. There is no mechanism by which a man with no medical training can, by inserting a needle into a specific point on my body, switch off the sound that has accompanied me for two-thirds of my life. And yet, every time, the tone fades. Around the eighth or ninth needle, it begins to grow quieter. When he inserts the last one\u2014the one in the small toe of my right foot, which he always saves for the end, and which he twists clockwise twice\u2014the sound disappears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I would say I lie here for that moment. For the silence. But it would be more accurate to say I lie here because the silence has become my only certainty, and certainty, when you have been disqualified from it for half your life, is worth thirty euros and one hour of immobility on a stranger\u2019s mother\u2019s folding table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He is on the fifteenth needle now. Lower back. I feel the cool wipe of alcohol, then the small dull pressure, then nothing\u2014it is in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I count my own breath. The needles in my chest forbid deep inhalation. They forbid most things. They forbid scratching, swallowing too vigorously, shifting weight, turning the head, sneezing. There is one in the web between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand that pings when I shift weight. There is one above the bone of my left hip that I cannot feel at all, and this absence of feeling worries me more than the others, because I do not know whether it has met a nerve or has met empty space. The first time I came, I asked Jaume what would happen if I needed to use the bathroom. He laughed and said: People who need the bathroom shouldn\u2019t drink three coffees before coming. I did not drink coffee that morning, and I have not drunk coffee on the morning of a session since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is a small ceramic heater on the floor near my feet. Chinese, from the bazaar on the corner. The kind whose plastic casing has the brand name scratched off. It runs on a thermostat that doesn\u2019t work, so Jaume leaves it on the highest setting and turns it off when he remembers. The room is small enough that the temperature climbs quickly. He likes the patient warm. He read somewhere that the meridians open with heat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The heater makes a sound like a small dog being slightly choked. <em>Chk. Chk. Chk.<\/em> Then a longer hum. Then <em>chk<\/em> again. I have been listening to it for forty minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jaume moves around to my feet. I feel his thumb on my ankle, the familiar pressure, looking for the bone he wants. Cold alcohol. Then the needle. Then nothing. He works his way up the arch, then to the side of the foot. Then to the small toe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He pauses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I hold my breath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The needle goes in. He turns it once, twice, clockwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The sound stops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is no other way to describe it. The high tone, which has been the constant background of my existence since I was nineteen, simply ceases. I want to cry. I have wanted to cry every time, for two years, and I have not, because Jaume is in the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He does not speak for a moment. He never does. He understands this part, at least, even if he does not understand why what he does works. He moves quietly back to the head of the table and adjusts the towel under my cheek. Then he says, the way he always says it:&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI\u2019ll be back in a few minutes. Don\u2019t move.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I hear his slippers on the hallway floor. The kitchen door. The chair he pulls back. He will smoke one cigarette at the kitchen window. He always does. Then he will come back. He will remove the needles in reverse order. The sound will return the moment the last one leaves my foot. I will pay him thirty euros for the forty minutes the silence has lasted. It is the only deal I have been offered in twenty-two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But today, when his slippers reach the kitchen, I don\u2019t hear the chair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I hear nothing for a moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then I hear his voice on the phone. Low. Cordial. Speaking in the slightly higher register he uses for older clients.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cYes, t\u00eda Pepica. Yes. Of course. Half past five. Yes<em>.<\/em>\u201d A small laugh. \u201cOf course.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I cannot turn my head. I lie with twenty-two needles in me\u2014I have counted, over time, the standard number for my treatment\u2014and listen to Jaume reassure t\u00eda Pepica about her appointment. The heater clicks. The incense is half-burnt. I can smell it changing: The first hour is sandalwood, the second hour is a thinner, sourer smoke as the stick burns down to its bamboo core.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think, without meaning to: If there were a fire, how would I get out?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Fifteen metres to the front door. Six to the room\u2019s. A hallway. With twenty-two needles in me, with my right arm asleep, with nothing on but a sheet across my hips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Carrer del Crist has no traffic on Wednesday mornings. There is a bar on the corner that opens at eleven, but it is ten fifteen. The neighbour on this floor is an old man who is deaf. The flat above is empty since the man who lived there died in March. No one in this building would hear me if I shouted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am beginning to feel the warmth from the heater on the soles of my feet. It has been on for forty-five minutes now. The plastic must be hot. I have not, until this moment, considered the plastic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jaume finishes the phone call. The chair scrapes. The lighter clicks. He smokes. I hear the long inhale, the slow release. Three more inhales. Then he taps the cigarette out on the windowsill, the way he always does, and his slippers come back down the hallway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He enters the room. He stands by my head. I cannot see him but I can smell the tobacco on his fingers. He places one of those fingers on my temple, gently, the way he does to check whether the patient has slipped into sleep. I have not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI\u2019m going to try something new today,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I say nothing. There is nothing to say. I am held in place by twenty-two thin steel rods and the silence of the disappeared tone, and the only certainty I have left in the world is that this man, for reasons no one can explain, can do this to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI\u2019m going to add a little reiki,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He says it the way other people say <em>a little salt<\/em>. The way they say <em>a touch of milk<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I hear, in my left ear, the high tone return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is not gradual. It is not a fade-in. It is the sound switching back on, at exactly the volume it had before Jaume\u2019s last needle, with the slight wobble in the right ear and the steadier signal in the left, and it fills the room I have just been able, briefly, to hear without it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jaume\u2019s hands hover over my back. I cannot see them but I feel the air move. He hums quietly. He has, I realise, been planning this. Reading something. Or told by a cousin, by a man at a fair in Val\u00e8ncia, that the cure could be deepened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He stops humming. He rests his palms on my shoulder blades. He breathes audibly through his nose. He believes the silence was his hands. He has decided to be of further use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The smell I could not place is plastic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is not the warm-plastic smell of a heater on too long. It is a different smell, sharper, blacker. The heater is two meters from my face, and I cannot see it. It is melting plastic. I have known the smell since I was a boy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I do not move. I cannot move. There are twenty-two needles in me, one of them in the small toe of my right foot, Jaume has not yet removed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jaume hums again. He has not noticed the smell. He is breathing through his mouth now, in the slightly performative manner of a man who has read that breath is important. His palms move down my back toward the small of it, hovering an inch above the skin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I hear, very quietly, a sound that is not the click of the heater. A faster sound. A rustle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is a curtain by the heater. The curtains the color of weak tea. The hem of the curtain on the left side of the window, the side near the table, has been brushing the top grille of the heater for two years. I have never thought about this. Jaume has never thought about this. Jaume\u2019s mother, presumably, thought about it once in 1991 and then thought about other things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The rustle is the curtain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The heat from the heater on my feet is no longer warm. It is uncomfortable. I am alone in a room with my back to the only window and twenty-two needles in me and a man behind me with his palms in the air, humming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The question, the one I never asked, comes back. Sharp. Specific. Practical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>From here, how do I get out?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I cannot turn my head. But I can move my eyes. I shift them as far left as they will go, until they hurt, and I see, at the very edge of my vision, the lower corner of the curtain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first flame is the colour of an old wedding ring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am held in place by twenty-two thin steel rods and the silence of the disappeared tone, and the only certainty I have left in the world is that this man, for reasons no one can explain, can do this to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258465,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[23715],"tags":[1206],"ppma_author":[88889],"class_list":["post-258151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - 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He writes in Catalan\/Valencian and English. More at<\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/ausiastsel.com\/\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400\">ausiastsel.com<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">.<\/span>"}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/katherine-hanlon-QgcdtM9rA5s-unsplash-scaled.jpg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258151"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258580,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258151\/revisions\/258580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258151"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258539,"date":"2026-09-11T10:46:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T14:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258539"},"modified":"2026-09-11T10:46:19","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T14:46:19","slug":"ceiling-and-visibility-unlimited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/11\/ceiling-and-visibility-unlimited\/","title":{"rendered":"Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It was a CAVU sky: ceiling and visibility unlimited. I knew the phrase because my father owned a two-seat, single-engine Cessna airplane, and flying had given our family a vocabulary for weather. The sky over New York that morning was infinitely blue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I flew into LaGuardia the night before on the last commercial flight into the airport. I had been in the Bahamas celebrating my friend Ellen\u2019s fortieth birthday, and everyone else was staying until Wednesday, the day after her actual birthday. I left early because I had already taken my allotted time off from work and felt guilty taking more. I was president of the design division of my company, and wanted to set a good example for my staff. At the same time, I flew home while my friends were partying in the Bahamas. I felt guilty about that, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 2001, I lived in Chelsea, close enough to walk to my office in on the 17<sup>th<\/sup> floor of the Empire State Building. I loved working in that building; I considered it the castle of New York. Although I have always been a night owl, for some reason I woke up early that day, and left for work around 8:30.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As I was walking, I overheard someone say that a plane had flown into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. I immediately imagined something the size of my father\u2019s Cessna and assumed it had to be an accident. But the weather was so clear! I called my father from the street, and we tried to make sense of it together. He surmised the engine malfunctioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I got close to the Empire State Building, I saw people streaming out of every entrance. I shook my head and thought it ironic that the one day I managed to get to work on time, we were having a fire drill. I found some of the people from my office, and we began gathering in front of the Starbucks across the street. I learned that this wasn\u2019t a fire drill: we were being evacuated because of the plane that had crashed into the World Trade Center. Apparently it wasn\u2019t a small plane. The possibility began to circulate that if what had happened was intentional, the Empire State Building might also be a target.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The idea that anyone had deliberately flown a plane into the World Trade Center was so inconceivable that morning that three designers from our office took the elevator up to the observatory to try and see what was happening downtown. Someone eventually reached them and learned that they had been refused entry and were coming back down. We found them, and when it became clear no one would be allowed back into the building, I suggested that everyone come to my apartment. It was, after all, only a short walk away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">About forty of us were walking back toward Chelsea when we heard that another plane flew into the other tower. Whatever explanations we had been trying to construct for the first plane no longer made sense. I tried calling my father again, but I couldn\u2019t get through. By then, everyone was trying to reach someone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When we got to my apartment, we turned on the televisions in my bedroom and living room and gathered wherever there was room. We sat on the floor, on the bed, on the sofa and on chairs, watching in disbelief, terrified, trying to comprehend what we were seeing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We watched one tower fall and then the other. Some of us were wailing, some were shaking. Someone grabbed my hand. The billowing smoke took over the sky, paper fluttered to the ground, dust covered everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Stuart and Renee were among my colleagues who came to my apartment that morning. They were a young couple who lived in a high rise a few blocks from the World Trade Center and had gotten a late start that morning. They left their building after the second plane hit, and walked up the West Side Highway to my apartment with a backpack and their dog. Stuart had seen people jumping from the towers and could barely speak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the days that followed, New Yorkers searched for friends, coworkers and family members. Photographs of the missing appeared on walls, lampposts and storefronts. Much of lower Manhattan remained closed. Ellen and my friends in the Bahamas were stuck there for over a week. After several bomb threats, the Empire State Building shut down indefinitely. Stuart and Renee stayed with me until they were able to re-enter their apartment. Over time, we realized we became witnesses well before we knew what we were witnessing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Twenty-five years later, I keep returning to the sky. It was so impossibly blue, ceiling and visibility unlimited. It was perfect flying weather.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The idea that anyone had deliberately flown a plane into the World Trade Center was so inconceivable that morning that three designers from our office took the elevator up to the observatory to try and see what was happening downtown. 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They were marching across my neighbours\u2019 kitchen worktops and climbing up and down the rigging of their Venetian blinds. He said my house should be treated in case the little buggers tried to jump ship. I gave him fifty pounds and let him go about secreting sweet sticky traps around unsuspecting corners of the house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It occurred to me that the beetle I had befriended at my desk might actually be one of them. I thought of the orange segments I\u2019d offered her as she moseyed along top of my books. I\u2019d seen her in the bathroom too, walking the perimeter, and given her a jolly salute.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019d never spoken to the couple next door beyond a bin-wheeling \u201chulloo!\u201d but living so closely packed in our terraced row, I\u2019d hear their unguarded private voices through the wall. A few months ago I had gleaned that she was pregnant. I\u2019d heard his gruff disgruntlement and her plaintive muffled replies. When he went off to work, she would put on high-energy popular music and there would come a fast metrical thumping which I took for dancing. If I pressed myself against the wall I could feel in my flesh the vibration of her body and the music\u2014I let it permeate and flow through my layers as I pictured her there\u2014dancing like no one was listening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After a while, it had become clear the baby wasn\u2019t coming. I wondered if this was a tragedy or a blessing, of great importance or just one of those things. No more permeating music at any rate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The sticky traps had remained empty except for the one in the alcove of the spare room. There I\u2019d found the stricken body of my former invertebrate friend, prostrate in a layer of residual gloop. I\u2019d squinted up close, considered launching her, in her sticky makeshift coffin, into the fast-flowing river at the park, or having her extracted and mounted under glass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Feeling unexpectedly bereft, I decided to make a new companion, to do just one small thing and see what rippled outwards. I went to the shops. I bought custard and cream and sherry and sponge fingers and raspberries and strawberries and tinned mandarins and a shaky-tub of chocolate flakes. I would assemble them in the beautiful cutglass serving bowl I had cunningly stuck on the wedding list all those years ago, and managed to keep hold of, so all the glorious layers would be on view.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That night, I dreamt the cockroaches had worked my house free from the end of the row of terraces and the woman from next door jumped aboard, her dark ponytail swinging decisively, proclaiming our lives were richer without the encumbrance of husbands and babies, and she and I and our shiny-shelled crew of beasties sailed down the hill, through the city, and away. We took biscuits and cream and lots of fruit to keep scurvy at bay.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She froze when she saw me through her kitchen window. She stood with her hands thrust into the pouch of her oversized hooded top, like a Victorian lady with a muff. Then she came and timidly opened the back door. The kitchen was only a little dishevelled and smelled pleasingly of citrusy cleaning fluid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was unsure what to say. I had gone easy with the shaky chocolate flakes because I didn\u2019t want to remind her of the former infestation. I wanted to say this is just a small and modest gesture of friendship and solidarity. I wanted to say I\u2019m not saying you must climb aboard my house and escape down the hill with me and our crew of marvellous matey roaches, but we can see how things go. I went with the simplest of all of the things I wanted to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cA trifle,\u201d I said, holding up the bowl so she could admire the layers.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The sticky traps had remained empty except for the one in the alcove of the spare room. There I\u2019d found the stricken body of my former invertebrate friend, prostrate in a layer of residual gloop. I\u2019d squinted up close, considered launching her, in her sticky makeshift coffin, into the fast-flowing river at the park, or having her extracted and mounted under glass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258130,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[23715],"tags":[1206],"ppma_author":[88876],"class_list":["post-258125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>A Seafarer\u2019s Trifle - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The sticky traps had remained empty except for the one in the alcove of the spare room. There I\u2019d found the stricken body of my former invertebrate friend, prostrate in a layer of residual gloop. I\u2019d squinted up close, considered launching her, in her sticky makeshift coffin, into the fast-flowing river at the park, or having her extracted and mounted under glass.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/11\/a-seafarers-trifle\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Seafarer\u2019s Trifle - The Rumpus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The sticky traps had remained empty except for the one in the alcove of the spare room. There I\u2019d found the stricken body of my former invertebrate friend, prostrate in a layer of residual gloop. I\u2019d squinted up close, considered launching her, in her sticky makeshift coffin, into the fast-flowing river at the park, or having her extracted and mounted under glass.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/11\/a-seafarers-trifle\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Rumpus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/facebook.com\/TheRumpusDotNet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-11T14:45:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/bogomil-mihaylov-4Twt-oY2e3s-unsplash-scaled.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1707\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"2560\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Shelley Roche-Jacques\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@the_rumpus\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@the_rumpus\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Juliana Luna\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/11\\\/a-seafarers-trifle\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/11\\\/a-seafarers-trifle\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Juliana Luna\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/623ef0cfc02d1f2e01dc4cbfe666e1a4\"},\"headline\":\"A Seafarer\u2019s Trifle\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-11T14:45:00+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/11\\\/a-seafarers-trifle\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":679,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/11\\\/a-seafarers-trifle\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/bogomil-mihaylov-4Twt-oY2e3s-unsplash-scaled.jpg?wsr\",\"keywords\":[\"fiction\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Fiction\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/11\\\/a-seafarers-trifle\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/11\\\/a-seafarers-trifle\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/11\\\/a-seafarers-trifle\\\/\",\"name\":\"A Seafarer\u2019s Trifle - The Rumpus\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/11\\\/a-seafarers-trifle\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/11\\\/a-seafarers-trifle\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/therumpus.net\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/bogomil-mihaylov-4Twt-oY2e3s-unsplash-scaled.jpg?wsr\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-11T14:45:00+00:00\",\"description\":\"The sticky traps had remained empty except for the one in the alcove of the spare room. 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She is a winner of the Bath Flash Fiction Award and has been twice Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize for flash fiction. She has also published two collections of poetry in the form of dramatic monologues. She lives in Yorkshire, in the UK, and teaches Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.\u00a0<\/span>"}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/bogomil-mihaylov-4Twt-oY2e3s-unsplash-scaled.jpg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258125"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258126,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258125\/revisions\/258126"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258125"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":258157,"date":"2026-09-11T08:52:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T12:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/?p=258157"},"modified":"2026-09-15T09:05:53","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T13:05:53","slug":"two-poems-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/11\/two-poems-20\/","title":{"rendered":"definition towards a cripple\u2019s lexicon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>definition towards a cripple\u2019s lexicon<\/strong><br \/>[ spiel ] : [ play\/game\/performance ]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">on the one side : light &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; skinned<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">alive to my shadow &nbsp; &nbsp; gallows : puppeting<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right wp-block-paragraph\">sense : eclipsed the other<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right wp-block-paragraph\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;blots&nbsp; &nbsp; white : taints<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">silk : screened&nbsp; &nbsp; skin : mine<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">on which projections              needle : \u2018i\u2019 : in seeing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right wp-block-paragraph\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;worlds&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; apart : hurting : still<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right wp-block-paragraph\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;part of me &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; divides<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the play : acting &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; surgically : cuts<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the conceit : i am<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right wp-block-paragraph\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;some thing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right wp-block-paragraph\">alive : maybe<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>the play : acting       surgically : cuts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140487,"featured_media":258476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"secondary_featured_image":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[10691],"tags":[667],"ppma_author":[88892],"class_list":["post-258157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-poetry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Definition towards a cripple\u2019s lexicon - The Rumpus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"the play : acting    surgically : cuts\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/11\/two-poems-20\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"definition towards a cripple\u2019s lexicon - The Rumpus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"the play : acting    surgically : cuts\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/2026\/09\/11\/two-poems-20\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Rumpus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/facebook.com\/TheRumpusDotNet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-11T12:52:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-09-15T13:05:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/BenjaminJLarner_-Authorphoto-Ben-Larner.jpg?wsr\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"975\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1021\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Benjamin J. 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Larner","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"1","user_url":"","last_name":"","first_name":"","job_title":"","description":"<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Benjamin J Larner is a London-based disabled poet of Iraqi-Chaldean, Irish, and Ashkenazi heritage. He was runner-up in the 2025 Spread the Word and CRIPtic Arts Disabled Poets Prize and the 2024 King's College London and Mahler &amp; LeWitt Ivan Juritz Prize; a finalist in the 2025 Texas Review Press Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize and the 2025 Fugue Journal Poetry Contest; and longlisted for the 2025 Bridport Prize, the 2024 and 2025 London Magazine Poetry Prize, the 2025 United Agents and Goldsmiths Pat Kavanagh Prize, the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize and the 2023 Dreich Classics Chapbook Prize. Recent\/upcoming publications include <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Poetry Review<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Magma<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Epiphany<\/span><\/i> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Magazine<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Poetry London<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, the PROTOTYPE 7 anthology, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gutter<\/span><\/i> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Magazine<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Aftershock Review,<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and the Propel Anthology 2025. His debut collection will be published in the UK by Akoya Publishing in 2027.<\/span>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;"}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/BenjaminJLarner_-Authorphoto-Ben-Larner.jpg?wsr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140487"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258157"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258684,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258157\/revisions\/258684"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258157"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therumpus.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=258157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]