The Greek writer Amanda Michalopoulou is the author of eight novels, three collections of short stories, and more than a dozen children’s books. She studied French literature at the University of Athens, worked for many years as a columnist for Kathimerini, and now teaches creative writing at various Greek institutions. Her work has been translated into twenty languages; the first of her two novels to appear in English, I’d Like, won the National Endowment for the Arts International Literature Prize in 2008, and the second, Why I Killed My Best Friend, was short-listed for the 2015 National Translation Award. (Both books were translated by Karen Emmerich.) Her new novel God’s Wife, translated by Patricia Felisa Barbeito, has just been published by Dalkey Archive Press.

Michalopoulou spent this fall in residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, where I had the good luck to continue a conversation with her begun long ago in Athens. But it was only after she departed for Greece that we embarked on this interview via email.

INTERVIEWER

The premise of God’s Wife is at once audacious and unsettling. Can you talk about the origin of your novel and the kinds of research you undertook to tell such an unlikely story?

MICHALOPOULOU

Certain books start with a disturbing question. My question here was, What if God had a wife? How would she be, what would she expect from him, and what would he expect from her in return? The Bible is full of submissive women who wished to have many children and either followed their husbands or became prostitutes. I read somewhere that these women speak 1.1% of the words in the Bible. In this patriarchal view, God’s wife would be an introverted human being, an acolyte. But what if she didn’t comply with this model of thought because of her education? I played around with this idea for some time and in 2012 I started reading philosophical and theological texts in a more focused way. What would a girl married to God have access to? What would she want to read, especially if her husband was mysterious and reserved? I wanted to write a bildungsroman about a female protagonist who changed her views on life and love because of the books she read. This is my romantic view about education.

INTERVIEWER

On the first page of God’s Wife, an epistolary novel written to an unnamed reader, the narrator declares, “Having lived for so long by the side of Him who created All from Nothing, I am finally creating something of my own. I am creating you.” How do you imagine your reader(s)?

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A writer I know, being a little flip, once said that you need to know only three things about James Merrill: he was gay, he was rich, and he was serious about Ouija. The subtext is that it’s already hard enough to be taken seriously as an artist, a writer, a poet in this country—so hush up about the damn board, James. Yet we treasure Hilma af Klint’s vibrant swathes of color and William James’s somber meditations, both influenced by spiritualism and the occult, as were scores of others, from Yeats and Dickens to Kandinsky, Rilke, and T.S. Eliot. In J.D. McClatchy’s interview with Merrill in this magazine, Merrill walks right up to this perplexing point with refreshing candor:

Well, don’t you think there comes a time when everyone, not just a poet, wants to get beyond the Self? To reach, if you like, the “god” within you? The board, in however clumsy or absurd a way, allows for precisely that. Or if it’s still yourself that you’re drawing upon, then that self is much stranger and freer and more farseeing than the one you thought you knew. Of course there are disciplines with grander pedigrees and similar goals.

It is worth considering that Merrill must have been aware that whispers of “fairy” were following him, with or without the Ouija board. In nearly every age, artists, thinkers, and deviants have risked going up in flames or down into the river for doing a thing that is incalculable or unquantifiable or plain mad.

Dorothea Lasky and Alex Dimitrov, highly accomplished poets whose poems have appeared in our pages, see the value of delving into the darker arts. Together, under the Twitter handle @poetastrologers, they have created a riotously funny astrology feed about which they couldn’t be more serious. They see the zodiac and poetry as two realms for which the maps have been lost, or at least damaged. They’re a way of countering the rational, quantifiable data points on which our society is built. Their hope is that their account’s half a million Twitter followers, or the readers of their new astrology book, will sit, at least for a few minutes a day, with the unknown and unknowable. As we talked in the hushed studio from which they record their podcast, their respect for each other was unmissable. The interview felt like a playful pas de deux between practiced partners—Dimitrov frequently referenced specific lines of Lasky’s work and Lasky’s contagious laugh registered in Richter’s. We were interrupted once by a young audio technician readying another room for a later recording. Dimitrov referred to the person as “a libra who is doing work with me later.” With this lightly offered, slightly outré marker, Dimitrov extinguished gender like a candle flame.

INTERVIEWER

Dorothea, what is your origin story with astrology? How did you come to it?

LASKY

I like to tell the story that my parents met through astrology. It was the seventies, and they were both invited to a party where they’d been told there would be other guests, but they were the only guests. They were being set up, of course. And supposedly, my father bounded up to my mother and said, “I’m a Gemini, what are your hang-ups?” And she said, “I’m a Libra and I’m shy.” That produced a long love affair of over thirty years, which then produced me. So, I feel like I was born of astrology, an astrological convergence. But I didn’t totally get into it until I was in my early twenties. I was really obsessed with this Gemini—June 15, Sag moon, Virgo rising. He was so hot and he had some math knowledge, and I used astrology to better understand him.

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Reginald Dwayne Betts Triptych by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

I first met Reginald Dwayne Betts at the Cave Canem Retreat in the summer of 2006. There, we received the sublime gift of studying with luminary black poets such as Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, Elizabeth Alexander, Patricia Smith, Kwame Dawes, and Cyrus Cassells. We stayed up each night with wonder, whiskey, and dancing, and still managed to turn in new, searing black poems each morning.

I will always remember first seeing Betts clearly, the sound of his laughter, the bold light in his dark eyes, the shuffle of his Timberlands. He spoke expansively, across frequencies, bringing history, violence, humor, race, and love into uneasy and difficult tensions. This is what is at stake in Betts’s poetry—those unbearable transmissions of desire and fear. I recognized him as a brother I had known my entire life.

Betts writes about black bodies, black masculinity, and America itself with an eye toward a devastating reckoning. Betts was himself incarcerated at age sixteen, and he confronts justice only to show us, and himself, that it is always both personal and political. Years ago, I photographed Betts for the cover of his first book, the memoir A Question of Freedom, but the most acute portrait of who he is exists, brutally and urgently, on the page.

In Betts’s writing, no matter the form, his voice is electrifying. His poems are about the complicated relationships between black men, between black men and freedom, between black men and love, and about how those black men—loved, unloved, murdered, freed—risk their lives for one another by attempting to see one another.

In his third poetry collection, Felon, Betts looks at cages literal and psychic, and at how imprisonment happens in the cages of love, family, and art.

INTERVIEWER

One of the first things I noticed about the book is the cover, which features the art of Titus Kaphar. You and Kaphar collaborated on “Redaction: A Project,” an exhibition at MoMA that draws on source material from lawsuits filed on behalf of people incarcerated because of an inability to pay court fines and fees. You have four poems in Felon that are erasures/redactions with specific titles (“In Alabama,” In Houston,” et cetera). They’re all mappable, yet the erasures show the systematic obliteration of black life. Could you speak about this?

BETTS

I’m trying to find ways to connect my identity as a lawyer with my identity as a poet. I’m on the board of the Civil Rights Corps, which deals with money bail. They are specifically trying to challenge the fact that many states incarcerate people and leave them incarcerated just because they can’t pay their bail or because they owe fines for traffic tickets or things like that, citations. Read More

Late one evening early in October, I struggled to fall asleep. The sheets scratched, the cats in the empty lot next door screeched. These small irritations distracted me from sleep just long enough for all the big, looming concerns to descend. The presidency, the planet. Those who have wronged me and those whom I have wronged. Nothing, it seemed, could put my mind at rest.

Carmen Maria Machado might seem a strange companion for such a night. Her debut collection, ​Her Body and Other Parties​, conveyed the horrors of living in the world and inhabiting a body so vividly that it made her a finalist for the National Book Award. She is not a writer who will sing you to sleep. When I picked up her new book, In the Dream House, I was hoping, instead, for someone to sit with me in the dark of the night.​ ​I turned the final page just as the birds outside my window began to chirp.

In the Dream House ​is billed as a memoir, but the word hardly captures the variety within its pages. The book is centered around the narrative of an abusive relationship, and each chapter offers a new, illuminating metaphor: “​Dream Hous​e as Omen,” “​Dream House ​as Lost in Translation,” “​Dream House ​as Exercise in Style.” These riveting fragments weave together folklore, fiction, and scholarship on queer domestic abuse. This book is bold yet nuanced, expansive yet specific. And perhaps most of all, it is an utterance that emerges from within deafening silence. That tells a story which has yet to be heard.

Machado and I spoke over the phone a few weeks ago. Even after a long day of teaching, she was a lively and generous interlocutor. Her frank speech carries a sort of bracing wakefulness, similar to how I felt that early morning—eager for the light of yet another perilous day.

INTERVIEWER

You write in the prologue about Saidiya Hartman’s concept of archival silence, how some stories are “missing from our collective histories.” What is it like to write from within this silence? To tell a story that has a history, but which has not been entered into the collective archive because it is a queer history?

MACHADO

It’s very lonely. It’s lonely and strange and special. I wish I had a more exciting answer. It’s really hard. Of course, I worry about what I missed and I worry about how the book has failed and it gives me a lot of anxiety. It’s a very stressful place to be in.

INTERVIEWER

I imagine. If you fear you failed at something, what is it that you were hoping to achieve? I’d love, also, to hear more about your research process.

MACHADO

When I first sold the book to Graywolf, it was mostly just the memoir pieces. I knew I wanted to do a heavy research element, but I didn’t know what exactly. And when I began my rewrites, I was looking for the history of the way we’ve talked about queer domestic violence. I was also looking for places where this conversation existed, but where it wouldn’t necessarily have been called that. The former part was a little easier. I managed to trace, as you saw in the book, this timeline of the way that the conversation evolved and devolved and moved in interesting ways within the community in the eighties and nineties, and into today.

But the latter part was much harder. I found myself researching a lot of woman-on-woman violence. As I was researching, it seemed people would really notice only when the violence was really salacious, like when one girl killed another and people would say: Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness, what is that all about?

I kept thinking about how many things happen behind closed doors. Domestic violence almost by definition happens in the home, and so you’re always reading between the lines. I’m not a professional historian, so it was difficult. This is not my area of expertise. But I wanted to create some context because just saying, This happened to me, wasn’t good enough. I wanted to try and figure out the framework around this thing that happened to me. How can I understand it as not just a thing that happened to me, a discrete thing, but also in the context of history and in queer history, and in the history of gender?

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In January 2016, Dan Piepenbring—then The Paris Review’s online editor—was offered an opportunity to collaborate on a book with the artist Prince Rogers Nelson, known variously throughout his career as The Kid, The Artist, The Purple One, The Prince of Funk, Joey Coco, Alexander Nevermind, an unpronounceable symbol, or, simply, Prince. Yes, that Prince. Purple Rain Prince. “Act your age, not your shoe size” Prince. Prince Prince.

The famously enigmatic musician, then in his late fifties, was grappling with how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world. He wanted to write a memoir about the music industry, about his childhood, about his experience as an African American artist. With Dan’s encouragement, Prince began putting his thoughts on paper. Like his music, Prince’s prose was lyrical and unexpected, reflecting his singular voice and a unique sensitivity for narrative. Even in its nascent form, the book promised to be extraordinary. But, just a few months into the project, Prince died unexpectedly, leaving the fate of the memoir uncertain.

Grief-stricken and reeling, Piepenbring and his editors at Random House moved forward with the book—transcribing Prince’s handwritten drafts and curating them with a selection of photographs, lyric sheets, and other ephemera collected from his estate. Introducing the book is an essay by Piepenbring that details the unlikely story of their profound, if short-lived, collaboration.

Like much of Prince’s oeuvre, The Beautiful Ones defies traditional categorization. Part collage and part elegy, the book tells a fragmented story of the musician’s young life beginning with his very first memory (his mother’s eyes) and continuing through the early days of his career. In it, Prince writes with candor about his epilepsy, his first kiss, his parents’ separation, and his rise to fame. 

Much of Prince’s story is told through miscellanea: childhood photographs, a middle school report card, his first check from Warner Brothers. Particularly poignant are the excerpts from a seventies scrapbook recounting when, at the age of 19, Prince first moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music. The photographs, accompanied by handwritten notes (“My first car!” “A crazy snapshot of me!”) capture the hopeful excitement of a young man in the foothills of stardom. What emerges from all of this is a richly textured and intimate portrait of one of the most mysterious pop-cultural icons of the last century.

My interview with Dan took place earlier this fall at a cafe near The Paris Review office. 

INTERVIEWER 

I want to start by asking a little bit about your relationship to Prince’s music. How old were you when you started listening to him seriously?

PIEPENBRING

I have a vivid memory of the first time I encountered one of his albums. It was at a Walmart in Hunt Valley, Maryland in 1999. This is embarrassing to admit but, at the time, I was really into nu metal—Korn and Limp Bizkit and other thirteen-year-old-boy stuff. I would go to Walmart, because they sold censored versions, which were the only ones my mom would let me buy. I remember browsing the shelves and coming across the cover of Prince’s record Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. He was going under his unpronounceable symbol at the time. If memory serves, he’s on the cover wearing a blue vinyl outfit with a kind of sparkly texture. It’s skin-tight. It looks very extraterrestrial, very Y2K. And he’s giving this imperious, sultry, mysterious look to the camera. I was utterly drawn in.

But I didn’t really go deep into his music until I got to college. Someone in my dorm, from California, had seen him on the Musicology tour and was raving about it saying, If you’re not into Prince, you don’t know what you’re talking about—in the way that eighteen-year-old boys can just throw the gauntlet down with some critical bullshit. So, I started getting my hands on all the Prince I could. and really became obsessed. By the end of freshman year I had amassed his whole discography and was steeping myself in it, listening to it all the time, forcing it on friends. I was a goner.  Read More

Kaveh Akbar, left, and Leslie Jamison, right.

Leslie Jamison makes her life more difficult than it needs to be. In her most recent essay collection, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, the subjects she chooses—the world’s loneliest whale, Second Life devotees, the Museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia—could carry the pieces with their propulsive novelty alone. Certainly, Jamison is brilliant enough as a sculptor of language that we’d happily oblige her. But what makes Jamison one of the essential essayists of our generation is her rigor. She renders her subjects, the world that made them, and her own gaze all within the same frame. In each of these essays, there is the subject, but there is also the long history leading up to it, and then there is also Jamison herself, observing and writing. So should we call her new book journalism? Or literary criticism? Or memoir? Yes. For an imagination, a curiosity, as expansive as Jamison’s, there can be no partitions. Her writing, like her mind in this conversation, leaps freely between each world.

AKBAR

Can we begin by talking about grace? One of the things I’m most drawn to in the book, and in your work more broadly, is the steady orbit you make around the idea of grace. There’s a moment in one of the early essays in this collection where you crystallize it, writing: “The definition of grace is that it’s not deserved.” I have been grappling with this idea in my own life, the notion that if I’m capable of doling out grace only to those obviously deserving of it, it isn’t grace exactly. It’s kindness or it’s pity or it’s maybe even just propriety. What is grace to you? And what can it do?

JAMISON

Starting with grace is like diving into the deep end of the swimming pool—so much better than slowly lowering each inch of thigh down the steps in the shallow end. Or maybe it’s really like diving into the deep end of an infinity pool, where you come up to the edge and see that below is a more infinite body of water than the one you’re swimming in. Which is part of what grace means to me, you feel the world get larger around you, feel yourself get smaller within it. And the world can get large around you in so many ways. As a bespoke digital wonderland, as the infinite hall of mirrors of your prior lives, as a big blue whale large enough to swallow us all. All of these things—mythic whales, past lives, digital waterslides—can be sources of grace. The vending machine of grace is vast and it never gives you exactly what you asked for. And that means we have to pay attention, because we’re not always aware that grace has arrived. As you wrote, “I live in the gulf / between what I’ve been given / and what I’ve received.”

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