July 21, 2020 At Work Stalin’s Bodyguard: An Interview with Alex Halberstadt By John Jeremiah Sullivan Alex Halberstadt is a writer who was born in Russia and lived there until he was nine, when his family (or part of it) immigrated to the United States. He did the rest of his growing up in Long Island City. Educated at Oberlin and Columbia, he has written all sorts of things, books and reportage and profiles. His previous book, the excellent Lonely Avenue, is a biography of the songwriter Doc Pomus, who cowrote “Save the Last Dance For Me,” “This Magic Moment,” and a list of other lasting hits. The New York Times called the book “taut and affecting.” His newest is titled Young Heroes of the Soviet Union. Unexpectedly, given the title, it is a deeply personal book, an engaging and subtle piece of nonfiction that’s full of history and Alex’s own wit, which can flick back and forth from dry to wet in a very effective way. This new book has had the misfortune to be published during the pandemic-related downturn, a moment when many good writers feel like their new books are vanishing into wells. Halberstadt himself caught COVID-19 a couple of months ago and has been suffering some in isolation. I am glad for a chance to call attention to Young Heroes of the Soviet Union. For this interview, conducted in May, we communicated electronically between Brooklyn, where Halberstadt has lived for the past twenty-six years, and Wilmington, North Carolina. INTERVIEWER I remember sitting in a bar with you maybe fifteen years ago, and I told you some story about my grandfather that I thought was interesting. When I was done, you sort of waited a beat and said, “My grandfather was Stalin’s bodyguard.” Which is an unfair trump card to be carrying around in your pocket all your life. Then you told me you’d never met him. I said something like, “Why don’t you go find him and write about it!” Any physically conscious person would have said the same thing. What’s remarkable here is that you actually did it. You went to Ukraine and found him. How is it that you had never met your own grandfather? HALBERSTADT My father stopped speaking to his father, my grandfather, Vassily Chernopisky, when I was born. There were many sound reasons for him to do this, but mainly he did it because he wanted nothing to do with what his father stood for, which was Stalinism and the power of the Soviet state. My grandfather had been an officer in the secret police for most of his life, and for thirteen years one of Stalin’s personal bodyguards. He was an absent and sometimes brutal father. He was also a gifted photographer, and a really great-looking man obsessed with clothes. When my mother and I left Moscow, when I was nine, we took with us one photo of Vassily and my grandmother Tamara. They are sitting near a lake; he’s wearing a fedora. For years, that was all the proof I had that my grandfather existed. I assumed that he had died sometime shortly after I was born. Then in 2004 my father got a call from a distant cousin who said that Vassily was alive and mentally still with it. That’s when I told you about him at that bar—I had just found out he was alive. Read More
July 14, 2020 At Work What’s the Use of Being a Boy: An Interview with Douglas A. Martin By Spencer Quong Though a work of fiction, Douglas A. Martin’s recent novella Wolf is written in response to true events: in the early 2000s, two boys, ages twelve and thirteen, were persuaded by a child predator to kill their father. Wolf shifts between various timelines as it imagines the lives of the boys preceding the act—the mental abuse by the father, the manipulation and sexual abuse by the predator—the moment of violence itself, and the courtroom proceedings. In real life and in this novella, the boys were tried as adults and ultimately sentenced to, respectively, seven and eight years in prison. It’s difficult to write about true events, especially those that receive extensive press coverage, but Martin explicitly writes against the callous sensationalism of the news cycle. He returns the story to the boys themselves. With a narration in the close third person, Martin creates a composite, in all its contradictions. The boys are seeking freedom from their father. They genuinely believe they’ve found an answer in the abusive family friend. Martin allows this belief—this optimism, curiosity, sensitivity, earnestness—to live on the page alongside violation and claustrophobia. What makes Wolf unique is its refusal to disentangle all these emotions for the reader. In one particularly wrenching scene, the younger boy is writing notes about the nature of love—it seems, perhaps, to be a love note addressed to or about the family friend who has been abusing him: “He writes it on pieces of paper, like it was going to happen the way he wants it to. He knows what love looks like. This was how at first it was going to feel, he has to know like the friend said.” And despite all I know about the context, it is difficult to refute this certainty, he knows what love looks like. The voice is so immersive that I am alongside the boy and, if only for a moment, conflate love and abuse. Even after I shake myself into my own body, I have to ask, How well do I understand the difference? I’m realizing how much I usually depend on instruction to understand and name suffering. Wolf asks us to do this work on our own. In one of the courtroom scenes, Martin shifts to the perspective of the jurors, who think to themselves: “Best not to get too close to them. Best not to imagine being like one of them, having felt what either must have at one time or another.” When I wrote to Martin, I wanted to ask how to resist this tendency: Best not to get too close. I wanted to know how writing—despite how regularly language is used to lie and mislead—could ever be enough. This interview was conducted over email in May. INTERVIEWER How did you first learn about the crime that inspired Wolf? When did you realize you had questions that needed to be explored in writing? MARTIN It was about a year after the actual event, once the story had gone national and the trial was beginning. One day it was a front-page piece, and that was the first I saw of it, almost twenty years ago now. I am not someone who normally reads the paper, but I wanted to know more than just what was behind the picture of two boys and a much larger man in court. My reaction to how my care was being solicited was part of what led to me writing, but also, any time the boys were quoted, it felt so out of place. When I tried to read about the story, the reporting kept bothering me. It continued to play out in the paper for a while, along with new headlines like “bizarre twist,” and stories taking angles on how it was all part a growing trend of children who might be tried as adults given the severity of their violent acts. It got to the point where I felt if I read anything more, I should write it more as I felt it. Read More
July 1, 2020 At Work Music-Making across the Distance: An Interview with Alan Pierson By Garth Greenwell Still from Ten Thousand Birds / Ten Thousand Screens I first met Alan Pierson in 1996 at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. I was a freshman voice major, and Alan was a first-year graduate student in composition. We got to know each other through music: Alan signed up as my pianist for lessons and recitals, and we have remained very close friends ever since. During the end of his time at Eastman (he would eventually, in 2006, earn his D.M.A. in conducting), Alan founded the sixteen-player new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, which quickly established itself as a vital part of the new music scene in New York. Over the past two decades, AWS has premiered pieces by John Adams, Steve Reich, Wolfgang Rihm, and Meredith Monk, and has produced a wide-ranging discography, including music by Donnacha Dennehy, David Lang, and Aphex Twin. In addition to his work with AWS, Alan is principal conductor of Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, codirects the Contemporary Music Ensemble at Northwestern University, and is a frequent guest conductor for ensembles including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the London Sinfonietta, among many others. In 2014, AWS premiered John Luther Adams’s piece Ten Thousand Birds as an immersive outdoor musical experience. On June 3 of this year, Alan and AWS released a new video, Ten Thousand Birds / Ten Thousand Screens, for which Alan and his boyfriend, Paul Melnikow, reimagined the piece using twenty-six phones, tablets, laptops, PDAs, and iPods carefully arranged around their Brooklyn apartment. The result is a strangely beautiful, moving, charmingly wacky experience. On May 26, I spoke with Alan via Zoom about this project, Alarm Will Sound, and his vision for music-making in an age of social distancing. Read More
May 26, 2020 At Work Unflinching Honesty: An Interview with Meredith Talusan By RL Goldberg Though I have never met Meredith Talusan in person, she seemed, one Tuesday in late April over Zoom, familiar to me, like we’d been in conversation already for a long time. Perhaps it’s because I’d just recently finished reading Fairest, her memoir. Perhaps it’s because Fairest is written with that kind of wrenching honesty and unflinching self-evaluation—often just embryonic or gestural in most other memoirs—that engenders a feeling of quiet intimacy with the writer. Perhaps it’s because her account of queer desire and trans longing felt adjacent to my own, as I am, like Talusan, a trans person who medically transitioned after graduating from Harvard. Her description of walking home, after a party, to her dorm down Mt. Auburn Street—wearing a dress in public for the first time—was a vertiginous aide-mémoire, returning me to the first time I wore boxers and a binder and a horrible pleather jacket, walking down Mt. Auburn Street, heading home by the same streets, a little more than a decade after Meredith did. Fairest tracks transitions that aren’t visually perceptible, but are narratively indelible: transitioning from a boy to a nonbinary trans-feminine person; moving from a small village in the Philippines to Harvard; being mistakenly perceived as white because she is albino; unlearning overvaluations of whiteness and the desire to be perceived as white. Over a quiet afternoon, we spoke about the tropes of trans memoir, recursive fantasy, the ethics of autobiographical representation, shame and narrative revision, and queer cruising. INTERVIEWER Your memoir felt radically different from any other trans memoir I’ve encountered. Why did you choose the Proust epigraph about being imprisoned in the wrong body, which is a longstanding trope of these memoirs? TALUSAN I was primarily interested in thinking about precedents, windows of existence around work that I’ve read before, with the understanding that different eras have had really different conceptions of gender. I was actually much more influenced, in certain ways, by James Baldwin, so I was looking for a Baldwin epigraph from Giovanni’s Room, but his work is even worse when it comes to portraying trans people. I felt that contextualizing the work of the present within the understanding of how people have seen gender in the past was important. Especially in Sodom and Gomorrah, how tortured that relationship to gender is, how during that period of time there was a much greater overlap in peoples’ conceptions of gender and sexuality. Where I come from, the Philippines, gender is contextualized in certain similar, though significantly less, phobic ways. INTERVIEWER As soon as I asked that question I thought, well, you’re also working with familiar language, there’s rhetorical continuity in your work with mid- and late-century American trans-feminine memoir. I’m thinking of books like Christine Jorgensen’s A Personal Autobiography and Reneé Richards’s Second Serve, where language like “no longer a son,” or “the man I used to be” was used. I don’t see that anywhere now in contemporary memoir, other than in your book. What’s at stake for you in that move? Read More
May 19, 2020 At Work Charmed: An Interview with Stephanie Danler By Leah Dieterich To call Stephanie Danler generous would be an understatement. Before we ever met, she read an advance copy of my memoir and posted about it on her Instagram account. For this fledgling author, it felt like the equivalent of being on a late-night talk show. Thinking it was a shot in the dark, I asked if she would be in conversation with me for an event at McNally Jackson in Williamsburg. At that time, in 2018, Danler lived six months out of the year in Los Angeles and six months in New York. She was in production on the second season of the television adaptation of her best-selling novel, Sweetbitter, and six months pregnant with her first child. And yet, she said yes. I had heard about Sweetbitter, but I hadn’t yet read it. Its publishing story is mythical: the waitress who hands her manuscript to someone at Knopf and gets a book deal. I’d seen the wine glass on the cover, the bestseller status, and somehow reading it didn’t feel urgent. Really, I was jealous. I assumed I knew something about Danler’s life. It seemed charmed. I read Sweetbitter and realized it had earned every bit of praise it received. It is a work of careful and keen observation, full of yearning, and satisfying in an almost gastronomical way. Then I read a precursor to her memoir, Stray—a heartbreaking and lucid essay called “Stone Fruits,” which appeared in The Sewanee Review. In it, Danler reckons with her abusive mother, now disabled from a brain aneurysm, and her drug-addicted and largely absentee father. Any notion of her life being charmed was demolished. Or was it? I had always thought charmed meant easy or without friction. But really to charm is “to control or achieve by or as if by magic,” and Danler’s prose has a sorcerer’s prowess and a wisdom that borders on mystical. The writer and witch Amanda Yates Garcia says that each initiation we face can teach us what our magical powers are and what gifts we have to offer the world. Danler offers beauty and hope in the redemptive powers of writing. Her gifts lie in her willingness to share some of the most intimate and painful parts of her life. This interview was conducted over the phone in late April, while both of us were quarantined at home. INTERVIEWER A lot of people have called your first book, Sweetbitter, an autobiographical novel. And yet, though you obviously drew on your own experiences to write that book, it is not quite autobiographical. Why did you choose to write Stray as memoir? DANLER I’m generally not concerned with genre. As a reader, I don’t care how factual a novel is or how fallible a memoir is. But when I started to write about people I love, who are still alive, it became important to me that I held onto the truth as much as possible. It’s my truth, so it’s subjective, but I think if you are going to say that your mother hit you, or your father overdosed, or that your lover treated you cruelly, you owe it to the people involved—whether they like it or not is a different story—to tell the truth. I wanted several times to turn it into a novel because the idea of hiding behind something was so appealing. Controlling the story when you’re writing fiction can be such a relief, especially when you’re dealing with the unruliness of real life, which doesn’t conform to a narrative arc. I think I struggled with Stray for so long because I didn’t have a big ending and I thought memoirs demanded real turning points. For Sweetbitter I had an ending because it was invented. I thought, Oh, this is the swelling of the symphony that marks the end of our journey. With the memoir, I could have ended in a thousand different places. It’s really about that ongoing-ness of living. I would have loved to just disguise myself and not feel so raw about it. But I do think it’s important for readers to know that it’s true. INTERVIEWER I don’t know if you outline or not, but did not knowing the ending hinder you as you began to write? Or were you writing because you were trying to figure something out? DANLER I was collecting pieces for such a long time that it became a kind of outline. But I could not actually write the book until I knew the shape of the entire story, which included the ending. In the meantime, I was able to research California, continue examining my past, collect memories, talk to family members. I wrote the first draft of this book in nine weeks from start to finish, but at that point I had hundreds of note cards. They had been tacked up in fifty different arrangements and many of the passages had already been written, so I had a very clear sense of where I was going. I also couldn’t write it until I figured out the present tense story line for Stray, which is moving back to California and being embattled in a love affair. I wanted the narrator to be speaking from a clear place. INTERVIEWER There are two romantic relationships in the book. There is the Monster, a married man with whom you’re having an affair, and the Love Interest, with whom you are slowly falling in love (and who you later marry.) At one point, the Love Interest seems worried about the way you seek drama and asks, “You can’t write if there isn’t conflict?” Was it more difficult to write about your relationship with him since it’s less “dramatic” than your relationship with the Monster? DANLER In a way it was easier. When I was very slowly falling in love with the Love Interest, I didn’t trust the depth of a relationship that felt good or easy or “healthy,” which is a word that I hate when it’s applied to relationships. It’s too virtuous. It’s gross. You want to do something devious when you hear that. I had a really hard time believing my relationship with the Love Interest could sustain me or interest me. But that’s conflict, that distrust. That’s something to write about. Writing about the Monster was really difficult—to remember how deeply in love we were. There was something very pure and electric and life-altering about the way we felt toward each other. We were willing to risk so much to try, and we kept trying, we couldn’t let it go. I think that my adolescent value system is still enamored with that kind of love. Where you’re powerless, you have no control, you submit yourself over and over again. You fetishize the pain. It’s so different from the kind of love that I am experiencing now in my life with my husband. And so, to inhabit both … to go from my office, reading, you know, a ten-thousand-word sexting WhatsApp transcript from five years ago, to then walk out and to see my husband, to nurse my child, I actually felt like I was going crazy. It was a very beautiful time, while I was writing Stray, but it took me hours to recover myself at the end of the day. And, you know, you don’t have hours when you’re a writer and you have a newborn. Read More
May 12, 2020 At Work Aiming Smaller: An Interview with Jenny Zhang By Lauren Kane During our phone call in the middle of April, Jenny Zhang set the scene: “There is something really bittersweet about talking to you right now, because we had originally wanted to meet up in New York City. I had imagined that we would be walking around the streets of Manhattan and talking about poetry, and it would be really cinematic and literary. That’s something I always wanted to do because of books I read when I was a kid, and I wanted to live that life. This is, I guess, romantic in a different way—in the way that I yearn to do that, and we cannot.” Zhang’s childhood became a touchstone in our conversation, memories and anecdotes unspooling in response to my questions. Her award-winning collection of short fiction, Sour Heart, was told from the perspectives of children and “in the language of childhood, with its unruly spirit and raw emotions.” Her second full collection of poetry, My Baby First Birthday, out today, delights in the same riotous way as her fiction and her first poetry collection, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find. She writes in a wild and phonetic vernacular, pairing the sonic incantation of visceral sounds with internet slang and bodily functions; she is playfully irreverent, deploying words like cunt with a wink, daring you to be offended. But there is a sense of control thrumming underneath everything, the same grounded feeling communicated by Zhang’s smart, down-to-earth sensibility. INTERVIEWER Your book of stories, Sour Heart, received a glowing reception in 2017. Was there any temptation to continue writing fiction? Why did you turn back to poetry? ZHANG I did feel like retreating after getting all of that really great positive press for Sour Heart, and doing all those interviews, and constantly talking about my process, and after the fact, trying to make a story out of the stories I had written. I felt like every time I sat down to write, I couldn’t rid the audience from my mind. As soon as I’m calculating for an audience, I lose interest in writing. It’s just another exhausting performance. I wanted to practice writing fiction without any thought of sharing it. When I’m writing, I don’t write with the thought that I’m going to share it with the world. Or, I prefer not to think that way. As a fanciful seven-year-old, I wrote diaries and I was sure that someone would break into my home, and steal all of my journals, and be so dazzled by this seven-year-old writing in a journal that they would come back and like, introduce me to their uncle who would be a scion of the publishing industry. I had those fanciful thoughts and would write diaries with the intention of making that happen. But now I really treasure the feeling of writing without expectation and without the thought that it would reach anyone, but just to write. Just to, I don’t know, process something that maybe is a little bit more unconscious. The other thing was that I missed poetry. There was a time when I used to read my poetry two or three nights a week. And sometimes, these would be poetry readings where there would be twelve people there. You know, there’d be five readers, and each person brought a friend. I missed the intimacy of poetry. I missed the immediacy of poetry. I was sick of telling narrative stories with a beginning, middle, and an end. I just wanted to go into a different place. And I also just wanted to be a little smaller. I know the ultimate goal is often to be bigger, and bigger, and bigger. But I guess I was interested in seeing if there was some other way to be. INTERVIEWER So, poetry was a kind of a sanctuary, in a way. It was a place without an audience and a place where you could just be for a while. ZHANG Exactly. I’m also a very slow writer. I let things sit for a while. It’s like I purposefully want my things to be less relevant, or something. Because if I wait, and put things in a drawer, and don’t share them for a while, then the moment where I wrote them has passed and we are in a different moment. And it’s almost like I want to know with stories, those poems, whatever the thing I wrote—is it still relevant now that the moment has passed? Read More