Inside the church at Tepoztlán

One winter in January, I stood with the Irish poet Paul Muldoon in front of a glass coffin, in the Mexican town of Tepoztlán. Inside, a figure lay under a purple cloth.

“Is that a saint of some kind?” Muldoon asked. “Do you think that’s real?”

I said I doubted it.

“That’s disappointing. Where I come from in Ireland, in the cathedral in Armagh, is the head of blessed Oliver Plunkett. A church without a head is really no church at all,” he said, with the bare trace of a smile. “When your expectations are as high as mine, almost everything is going to be disappointing.”

We had walked to the church together from town, retracing the poet Hart Crane’s footsteps around Tepoztlán. Muldoon walked slowly, his tweed jacket flapping, his brows knit together behind his thick frames. I was nervous and enthusiastic, wanting to make a good impression. I was standing next to a real writer; someone I’d read and admired.

We were in Tepoztlán as part of a writing program—Muldoon was leading a poetry class, I was participating in a cultural journalism workshop. I’d traveled there from Paris, where my husband and I had recently moved for my husband’s work. I’d never been published, despite many dozens of story submissions. I kept a blog, which was read by my mother and three friends. I worked odd, exhausting jobs, determined not to commit myself to any serious work that might get in the way of writing, but was rapidly losing faith in my own potential. Read More

West Virginia, EPA photo by Jack Corn, 1974

“Why all the middle-aged men, Mike?” my writing professor asked me one afternoon during my junior year of college. She was curious (concerned? baffled?) why, in the two semesters we had spent together, my stories were often about white men twice my age. While my peers wrote about college and high school kids doing college and high school things, I veered toward chronicling the failures and half-measures of middle-aged men. My professor asked whether I had ever thought to write about my own life, my unusual background—my mother is Korean and my father is Appalachian. I remember feeling squeamish at the thought. It had occurred to me, but I wasn’t ready to write about it. I told her maybe I would when my parents had passed on, but that wasn’t the only reason. In many ways, I had never fully felt half Korean, which is an odd thing to say, to be fully half of something. But what I mean is, I identified then as mostly white and Appalachian and my being half Korean, though undeniable in my features, seemed secondary. What seems extraordinary about our lives to others is often ordinary to ourselves. I could see why my professor might see the fertile ground in such stories, but they held little appeal to me.

Around this same time, I came across a short story set in India in a national magazine. I disliked the story and thought that the only reason it had been published was because of its unique setting. It was as if our struggles back home, all the poverty and hardship in Appalachia, were givens, not worth reading about—surely not the stuff of the stories that the New York publishing world seemed to crave. In the late days of the twentieth century, at the small state college I attended in Bowling Green, Kentucky, there was not a lot of talk about agency, representation in literature, or appropriation. I could have been wrong about the exoticism I perceived in that story in the magazine, but I don’t think so. It made me think that if I wrote about my parents, myself, what it had been like to grow up half Korean in a town with an ugly racist past, my stories would be published only for that content and not for their prose. I feared that if that happened, I would be trading on my heritage and exploiting it. So I hunkered down into white male characters and the white male writers who taught me how to write about white men.

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Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears. Here’s an example. In the first year that I really got into bird-watching, I used The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America. The book has a checklist in the back where you mark the different species you’ve seen. That many birding books have such a list tells you a lot about how people tend to approach this activity; in its most annoying form, bird-watching potentially resembles something like Pokémon GO. But this was somewhat inevitable for me as a beginner, learning to pick out discrete, individual birds. After all, when you learn a new language, you start with the nouns.

Over the years, my continued attention began to dissolve the edges of the checklist approach. I noticed that certain birds were in my neighborhood during only part of the year, like cedar waxwings and white-crowned sparrows. In the winter, my crows came by less often. Even if they stay in the same place, birds can look different not only throughout their life but during different seasons, so much so that many pages of the Sibley guide have to show different ages, as well as breeding and nonbreeding versions, of the same bird. So, there were not only birds, but there was bird time.

Then there was bird space. Magpies abounded near my parents’ house an hour south, but never here. There were mockingbirds in West Oakland but not in Grand Lake. Song sparrows had different songs in different places. The blue of scrub jays got duller as you went inland. Crows sounded different in Minneapolis. The dark-eyed juncos I saw at Stanford had brown bodies and black heads (the Oregon subgroup), but had I traveled east, I would have seen variations. Read More

“Why do you need him to be gay?”

This is how a friend (urban, liberal, male) responded when I told him I was working on a historical novel about Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with Joshua Speed. The implication of his question was clear. If I was going to go there, if I was going to plant my rainbow flag on the Great Emancipator’s grave, I would have to account for my private agenda.

Now that I type it out, that phrase sounds an awful lot like “gay agenda” and peels away to reveal the same fear at its base—that our received notions about historical figures might crumble under too close an inspection. And yet, in many cases, the evidence is often hiding in plain sight. Queen Anne, as the recent movie The Favourite underscored, wrote passionate letters to the Duchess of Marlborough. Michelangelo composed love poems for his male models. King James addressed his beloved Duke of Buckingham as “my sweet child and wife,” and Shakespeare publicly directed his first 126 sonnets to a “Fair Youth,” theorized by some scholars to be Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton.

Lincoln may look like he played things closer to the vest, but even his contemporaries, pondering his youthful aversion to girls, his lack of female conquests, and his relatively late marriage, struggled to come up with face-saving explanations. Judge David Davis, a friend of Lincoln’s from his circuit-riding days, insisted it was only the great man’s conscience that “kept him from seduction” and “saved many—many a woman.” William Herndon, Lincoln’s biographer and law partner, spread rumors (almost certainly unfounded) that Lincoln had caught syphilis from a girl in Beardstown, and went so far as to resurrect a long-dead New Salem maiden named Ann Rutledge, who emerged under Herndon’s burnishing as the love of Abe’s life. Read More