I am in a barn-red house on a hill. In my room there is a bookshelf, a desk for me to write at, a soft bed covered by a blue quilt, a wooden crucifix on the wall that opens to reveal the items necessary for administering last rites. Where I am now, there are peacocks, a rust-colored mule named Lulu, and hundred-foot-tall pine trees. Where I am now, I have my own bedroom.

Here are some of the places I slept last year: Under a bush in front of a high school in Evansville, Indiana. In the stairwell of an apartment building in St. Louis, Missouri. In a car-wash stall in Kentucky. In an open field behind a McDonald’s in Illinois. In a booth at that same McDonald’s. In a laundromat. In the backseat of an abandoned car. In a stranger’s garage. In a chair at the public library. In a toolshed. In a burned-out mobile home. In a drug dealer’s backyard. On a drug dealer’s living room floor. On a drug dealer’s couch. In a drug dealer’s bed. On more than one occasion I’ve woken up on a total stranger’s front porch with no memory of how I got there.

Last year, I was arrested three times for possession of methamphetamine, charged each time with having a single loaded syringe in my pocket. In Illinois, any paraphernalia containing residue of a controlled substance is considered possession, a Class III felony, carrying a sentence of two to five years in prison. The last time I was arrested I spent over six months in jail before my grandmother agreed to post bond. The rest of my family would hardly speak to me. I have yet to be tried.

Nine years ago, I had just finished a master’s degree in writing at Washington University in St. Louis, was awarded a postgraduate fellowship, and had my very first short story published in Granta magazine. It was the tale of a young addict jailed on drug charges, titled “Here Is What You Do.” When I wrote the story, I had never been to jail. I had never injected drugs. I was clean, working as a college instructor, taking care of my son, spending a few hours every day working on other stories I wanted to include in the manuscript I was about to send to agents. Read More

Illustration by Anthony Russo.

The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines half of each of those marks. It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly. Texts (both handwritten and printed) record the testing-out and tinkering-with of punctuation by the fifteenth-century literati known as the Italian humanists. The humanists put a premium on eloquence and excellence in writing, and they called for the study and retranscription of Greek and Roman classical texts as a way to effect a “cultural rebirth” after the gloomy Middle Ages. In the service of these two goals, humanists published new writing and revised, repunctuated, and reprinted classical texts.

One of these humanists, Aldus Manutius, was the matchmaker who paired up comma and colon to create the semicolon. Manutius was a printer and publisher, and the first literary Latin text he issued was De Aetna, by his contemporary Pietro Bembo. De Aetna was an essay, written in dialogue form, about climbing volcanic Mount Etna in Italy. On its pages lay a new hybrid mark, specially cut for this text by the Bolognese type designer Francesco Griffo: the semicolon (and Griffo dreamed up a nice plump version) is sprinkled here and there throughout the text, conspiring with colons, commas, and parentheses to aid readers. Read More

Jamie Allen is the creator of the Squirrel Census, a data, science, design, and storytelling team. With the help of 323 volunteer Squirrel Sighters, the six-person team performed a count of eastern grays in Central Park in October 2018. In June of this year, they released the Central Park Squirrel Census 2019 Report.

When you put on a squirrel census, you get asked a lot of questions.

One of the most popular is, Why? In an era marred by gaslighting, climate change, and ill temper, it’s almost as if the act of tallying squirrels becomes the one hunk of gristle that people can’t swallow. But it’s time to answer the difficult questions.

“Wait a minute—why?” is the query that aims for the project’s jugular.

Though the Squirrel Census team had completed several counts of eastern grays in Atlanta, some observers couldn’t take us seriously when we set our sights on Manhattan’s Central Park in October of 2018. It may astound you, but there has never before been a comprehensive count of squirrels in Central Park. Squirrels are really common, of course, and paying close attention to their numbers, while other animals are going extinct, was an effort deemed a bit too twee and citified. On several occasions, our census was labeled a “quirky science project.” Maybe that’s at least partly true. But this is key: once you have filed the project into these categories, you have inhibited your view of it. For instance, we are conditioned by the media to assume that every legitimate research project must have an identifiable, singular purpose: why. You perform a controlled study to find out ___________. But this was a census, which doesn’t seek one answer. It gathers loads of data and stories. In that mosaic emerges a clearer overall picture of the species and the space it inhabits.

Further, most scientists and researchers I’ve encountered enjoy our project, in part because they appreciate any act of discovery that claims no other reason than “because.” Many scientists and researchers are poets at heart. Or maybe poets are scientists and researchers at heart. In the end, they are trying to answer the Big Questions in life: How did we get here? What is the meaning of all this? Why doesn’t he/she love me?

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In fifth grade, I picked Abigail Adams from a list of American history topics because I wanted to find out what this woman had done to land herself, nearly alone, on a list of men. I soon despaired to learn that she hadn’t actually done all that much, at least not in the ways that I understood “doing.” She ran the family farm and raised the kids while her husband, John Adams, was off signing the Declaration of Independence. She followed him to France, then Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., then back to the farm. I chronicled these relocations, while thinking that I must be missing the point. Defeated, I turned in my report, aware that it was, as grandiose as this sounds, my first intellectual failure.

I’d gotten plenty of spelling words wrong before, but those were failures of memorization, not comprehension. That a life might be valued in terms other than battles won or lost, institutions raised or razed, was alien to me. The “great man” kind of history was the only kind I’d been taught, and the only kind I knew how to value.

I unlearned that lesson gradually. In another American history class I reread some of Adams’s letters and could recognize their significance: “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no Voice, or Representation.” She was one of the earliest advocates for the rights and education of women in the United States, although neither representation nor rebellion would came to pass until long after her lifetime. I learned that beyond great deeds, what people thought or said—or sometimes didn’t or couldn’t say—had value.

Or at least, I thought I had learned this. Then I found myself, years later, waist deep in a novel inspired by the life of the eccentric French composer Erik Satie, dully chronicling actions: first he did this. Then he did that. I showed the first chapter too early, to someone in whose opinion I placed too much stock. “Is there a reason you aren’t just writing a biography?” he asked, and I cringed.

What was I writing, and why? I’d been fixated to the point of paralysis on the question of what fiction owes to history, tangled up in the impossibility of knowing every single thing about Satie’s biography, his music, let alone the entire time span of 1866–1925. Then I started asking, what does fiction offer to the historical record?

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, The Living Room, 1921, 59″ x 35″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Käsebier Takes Berlin is a book about the power of the press. Not journalists or reporters, but the medium itself. Today, we might call it a tale of a story gone viral. In a week with no newsworthy stories, a journalist at a Berlin newspaper writes a short, throwaway article on an unknown popular singer, Georg Käsebier. But when the story is picked up by a famous poet and a young writer on the make, this nobody, whose name translates to “Cheese-Beer,” becomes Berlin’s new star, the everyman they’ve been looking for. Writers, photographers, moviemakers, and bankers flock to Käsebier, hoping to convert his fame into reichsmarks. Berlin becomes a Käsebier economy. Yet fashion moves on quickly in the overheated capitalism of thirties Berlin, and when Käsebier falls, many others fall, too.

Though this novel is ostensibly about him, Käsebier is almost incidental to the story. The real protagonists of the book are the well-meaning journalists who unwittingly set off this fiasco. The writers at the Berliner Rundschau are a scrappy bunch of sleuths, critics, and know-it-alls dissecting and reporting on the world around them (though they can never publish the “really good stuff,” as they like to complain). When the Käsebier boom engulfs their own newspaper, they can only watch helplessly as they fall victim to their own creation.

Gabriele Tergit wrote Käsebier in 1931, but its depictions of fake news, sudden stardom, and bitter culture wars between left and right feel unnervingly contemporary. As she wrote, the Weimar Republic’s fragile parliamentary democracy was tumbling into dictatorship and Nazi terror. In only two years, she would have to leave the country, and would never live there again. Read More

Caravaggio, Narcissus, ca. 1595, oil on canvas, 43″ x 36″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I saw Edward Hopper’s Pennsylvania Coal Town for the first time in a gallery on Madison Avenue in 1994. I was a freshman in college; I had come into New York on the train for the day, alone. It was February. I had never been in a New York art gallery before, but I had seen reproductions of Nighthawks, and I wanted to know more. The room where the paintings were displayed was not large—the size of an ordinary living room. Apart from the gallery attendant behind her desk, I was the only one there.

I loved all the paintings, but when I stopped in front of Pennsylvania Coal Town, it seemed to me, in that moment, that I was looking at a perfect work of art. The man, who has been stooped over, raking leaves, raises his head to look in the direction of the setting sun. The curvature of his back is a little exaggerated, giving him a feeling of intense, though perhaps accidental, humility. He’s raised his head almost in surprise, without expectation, but his gaze is fixed on whatever lies on the other side of the house: on the source of light, of course. You’re not supposed to think about what exactly he’s seeing; his head, his chin, is lifted, looking toward the horizon. The little alley, the side yard between these no-nonsense, matter-of-fact clapboard coal-town houses, is flooded with light. It’s an image of transfiguration. The accidental quotidian life, illuminated from another angle.

In those days I was thinking almost nonstop about transfiguration by light: or, to use a more familiar term to writers, epiphany. I was thinking about it but not quite getting it to happen. I wanted my stories to have endings like Joyce’s “The Dead,” or Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” or Cheever’s “Goodbye, My Brother”:

The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming—Diana and Helen—and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.

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