May 23, 2019 At Work Taking on Edward Abbey: An Interview with Amy Irvine By Leslie Jamison Amy Irvine (Courtesy Torrey House Press) Amy Irvine is a writer and a mother, a competitive rock climber, an activist, a caregiver, and a truth teller. (She is also a friend.) Her latest book, Desert Cabal, is a fiercely tender and provocative response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire—his classic and now canonical account of the desert West—on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. Desert Cabal is about Irvine’s own life in the West—raising a family, falling in love with the land and working to protect it—and it explores the myths of Western masculinity, the sublimity of endangered territory, and the kinds of intimacy enabled by spaciousness and proximity. Near the beginning of Desert Cabal, Irvine evokes Abbey’s seductive evocation of solitude as “loveliness and a quiet exaltation.” But her book challenges his understanding of solitude in nuanced and surprising ways. “Now that I have been a working mother wrangling a special-needs child in a complicated and congested world,” she writes, “my definition of solitude has changed.” As soon as I read that line, I thought, Yes! Solitude means something different for women. It has to do with the intense expectations we face around caregiving—the assumption that we’ll take care of places, people, objects, schedules. Before I became a mother, I remember thinking, How does parenting work for introverts? These days—as someone who loves my ten-month-old daughter so intensely I can hardly stand it, but still loves to be alone—I’ve spent much of the past year thinking about the vexed relationship between care and solitude. I’m not an expert in wilderness literature, but Irvine’s book is written for all of us: those of us who know the literature of the wilderness, and those of us who don’t. Because the wilderness matters to us all. We are all beholden, and we are all culpable. In proposing a new way of thinking about the wilderness—not in terms of solitude but in terms of relation—Irvine is posing even broader questions about how we understand ourselves in relation to one another. This is a book written for anyone who has ever wanted to be alone, and for anyone who has ever realized solitude is a delusion. Read More
May 21, 2019 At Work Queerness, Cyborgs, and Cephalopods: An Interview with Franny Choi By Spencer Quong Franny Choi isn’t done thinking about cyborgs. When we met two weeks before the release of her latest collection Soft Science, she told me she was still discovering AI ideas she wished she could have addressed in her poems. Reckoning with the mythology of a “finished product,” Choi is coming to terms with having a book that is both out in the world and still in progress. The process isn’t easy: as one of Choi’s cyborgs says, questioning reality makes her feel “a / little insecure / a little embarrassed haha.” But to be insecure, or still in progress, should never be mistaken for being incomplete. Soft Science asks what it means to live as a queer Asian American femme, someone “made a technology for other people’s desire.” How do we distinguish between the constructed pieces that have been imposed on us versus the parts of our identity that we’ve chosen? Are they always distinct? The voice of Soft Science is often corrupting: Choi inhabits colonized language and uses it to her own ends. In the poem “The Cyborg Wants To Make Sure She heard You Right,” Choi runs negative comments directed at her on Twitter back and forth through Google Translate until the language is transformed into something new. By repurposing language, Choi offers up a record of what is happening to our bodies and minds under whiteness and capitalism, and the beginnings of a way forward. Choi is the co-host of the podcast VS, a member of the Dark Noise Collective, and will begin teaching this fall at Williams College. Soft Science is Choi’s second full-length collection, following Floating, Brilliant, Gone and her chapbook, Death by Sex Machine. Her poem, “Amid Rising Tensions on the Korean Peninsula” also features in our spring issue. Read More
May 14, 2019 At Work The Toxicity of Female Tokenism: An Interview with Kathleen Alcott By Catherine Lacey Though Kathleen Alcott’s third novel, America Was Hard to Find, is set in the mid-twentieth century, its concerns are eerily current—nearly every character is caught between the stability of convention and the blazing allure of revolution. Alcott depicts several big American events—the moon landing, the carnage of Vietnam, and the Reagan administration’s dismissal of the AIDS crisis—but she renders just as many intimate realities with a sensibility that she has come to define as her own. Her prose has a way of finding the cinematic in the personal: the private toil of being a single mother or a fatherless son, the bright loneliness of youth, and, perhaps most vividly, the torrid struggle of a single citizen who is “sickened by the masculine bark of her country” as she tries to find a way toward action. Fay Fern rejects the traditional path her parents had envisioned for her to instead bartend in the Mojave Desert near an Air Force base; Fay’s transition from the doting mistress of a pilot nearly twice her age to a radical antiwar activist serves as the spine of the narrative. Her stoic ex-lover, Vincent, has moved away to become one of the first astronauts in the nascent space program. He’s also unwittingly become a father to Fay’s son, Wright. This triangulation sets the book’s plot in motion, but what hooks the reader are Alcott’s darts of wisdom and finely tuned observations. A woman’s youth is “the reigning god in her life, the thing from which came all permission and unhappiness.” Another character’s relationship with the possibility of suicide is “like some billboard he had to drive by every day … a highly effective advertisement that adorned the horizon on his way to getting anywhere.” The last moments of a sunset are “when all the colors, imperiled, flare up in protest.” Alcott’s narration is penetrating and elegant, but she gives her characters some of the wittiest and most screen-ready dialogue in contemporary fiction. “Call me when you’re sober,” Fay says to her sister over the phone, who replies, “Call me when you shit out whatever rotten thing it is you ate.” A young man in San Francisco stumbles across his apartment and declares of his hungover state: “I feel like a goddamned aborted murder.” I met Kathleen while we were living in New York, and since then we’ve spent our friendship in several American states and just as many emotional ones. Her intelligence and wit are just as sharp in person as they are in writing, and though I wish we could have conducted this interview in person—conflicting time zones required us to write it over email. INTERVIEWER Most of the conventional, collective images of what America “is” changed radically and repeatedly during the five years you took to write America Was Hard to Find. Though the novel is set mostly in the America of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, which had their own snakeskins to shed, did this upheaval change or challenge the concerns of the book? ALCOTT I am certain that it changed what I was looking at, or how I looked at it—the winter Trump was inaugurated I was living in seclusion on the Sonoma Coast, and I spent a fearful, manic period watching the Watergate hearings in their entirety on YouTube; that was research for a chapter I was writing, for a fight that takes place in the gas line the summer of Watergate and the oil embargo. It is difficult to imagine that I would have engaged with those hearings in the same way under a Hillary Clinton presidency but it is also impossible, at this point, to imagine a Hillary Clinton presidency. I mean that, mostly, life outside and art inside are always interdependent, and that to try to see one as the teacher of the other is to say that knowledge in the classroom travels unidirectionally—which I know, from the humiliation teaching has always been for me, is not true. I do know I am confronting structural misogyny in a way I did not during the Obama years, as is true for all women, and recognizing the shortcuts I took to avoid feeling its effects. Read More
May 13, 2019 At Work The Ideal Place to Disappear: An Interview with Julia Phillips By Jennifer Wilson The Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia is a sparsely populated landmass that sits atop the Pacific Ring of Fire. Forty percent of the land is covered by volcanoes, twenty-nine of which are active. There are earthquakes, hot springs, extreme weather, brown bears, rivers turned blood red from spawning salmon, and vast frozen expanses. Not many people live there, though more do now than did during the Soviet era—Kamchatka was a closed military zone until 1989. There are no roads connecting it to mainland Russia and much of the territory is accessible only by helicopter (or dogsled). Julia Phillips is the author of Disappearing Earth, a crime novel set in this remote peninsula of the Russian Far East, “sixteen time zones away” from her hometown of Montclair, New Jersey. Phillips, who studied Russian literature in college, went to Kamchatka on a Fulbright in 2011. While there, she spent a month traveling across Russia’s easternmost tundra with the organizers of the Beringia, a 685-mile dogsled race. More recently, Phillips contributed a piece to BuzzFeed about the challenges facing Kamchatka’s nomadic reindeer herders. In all her writing about Kamchatka, Phillips seems most fascinated by the creative potential of emptiness, identifying in the horizonless tundra feelings of awe and dread in equal measure. Those feelings are written into every page of her debut novel, Disappearing Earth. Told over the course of a year, the story begins with the news that two young Russian girls, sisters Alyona (age eleven) and Sofia (age eight), have gone missing from Petropavlovsk, the capital city of Kamchatka, one August afternoon. As summer draws to an end, and winter settles in, so too do the anxieties of being a woman in an isolated landscape. In Disappearing Earth, Phillips explores the impact the girls’ abduction has on the fabric of this unique community where xenophobia and tensions between ethnic Russians and the indigenous population are all heightened by the disappearance and the criminal investigation that follows. I spoke with Julia over the phone about her stunning debut, Kamchatka as muse, and the feminist potential of crime fiction. Read More
April 24, 2019 At Work Writing Postpartum: A Conversation between Kate Zambreno and Sarah Manguso By Sarah Manguso Sarah Manguso (left) and Kate Zambreno (right) Kate Zambreno’s oeuvre is not just a series of books but a body of thought, an uninterrupted exhortation on incompleteness and the intersections of life, death, time, memory, and silence. She challenges my own tendency to treat pieces of writing as discrete objects rather than divisions of consciousness, and I’ve long felt an intimate and continuous access to her mind, so I wanted to ask her about her newest book, Appendix Project, a collection of talks and essays written over the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, her book on her mother, which took her over a decade to write. Her next book, Screen Tests, an excerpt of which appears in the Spring issue of The Paris Review, is forthcoming this July. —Sarah Manguso MANGUSO As for publishing a “small, minor book,” to quote you from earlier … maybe we could start there? I keep trying to write a Big Book, a grand book, a centerpiece around which the rest of my books will gather, but either my fear of death or my general inability to be grand prevents this. And I’m almost always more interested in the small, minor books of people’s oeuvres, anyway. You also work in small forms—the appendix, the miscellany, the essay formed from small compositional units and assembled over a long period. ZAMBRENO I am more interested in the fragment, the notes, what is ongoing or continuing. My desire in this new writing life of the past few years has been to be small, to stay small, thinking of Robert Walser. To write about what is ephemeral, the daily, and to use it to attempt to think through the crisis of the self and what is beyond the self. When I moved to New York, now six years ago, I felt paralyzed by the prospect of a first-person novel, which I was under contract for, and anxious about publishing’s desire to have the new “big” book, one that everyone talks about, that is on all of the lists, that is part of the conversation, where the self written is assumed to be the same self as the author, and the self is stable, charismatic, and articulate. I felt blocked from the novel for years, I just took notes upon notes, and eventually the novel became about block and paralysis. I thought for a while my sudden longing for smaller forms was a lack of ambition, before realizing that it is my ambition. Read More
March 19, 2019 At Work These Are Not the Margins: An Interview with Bryan Washington By Nikki Shaner-Bradford Bryan Washington describes himself as a writer from Houston, but it might be more accurate to say he’s a writer of Houston. His work not only observes the city, it seems to create it anew. The words rustle through the trees and stomp new cracks in the sidewalk. Washington’s fiction and essays range from food, film, and the arts to sexuality, gentrification, and blackness in America. No matter the topic, his work is steeped in Houston, conjuring the city with equal parts empathy and pride to create a distinct feeling of home. In his debut short-story collection, Lot, an unlabeled map serves as a frontispiece, and the stories, each named after a different area in Houston, fill in the space. Washington’s characters share the same streets, roaming their city and singing a collective history. In the story “Alief,” a neighborhood relishes in the drama of an extramarital affair; “Shepherd” follows a boy sorting through shame and sexuality with a visiting cousin; and a young man finds job security with a veteran drug dealer in “South Congress.” Throughout these stories lives a recurring narrator, a young man growing up in a rapidly transforming city, sorting through his scattered family, his queerness, and his black Latino identity. Houston is a constant, but as the force of gentrification builds in the wake of Harvey, the narrator is forced to choose between leaving and staying. His transition into adulthood is haunted by the ghosts of people who have left, restaurants that have closed, and muddied baseball fields. In the final story, “Elgin,” Washington writes, “Houston is molting. The city sheds all over the concrete.” Lot has been enthusiastically anticipated, and stories from the collection have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, American Short Fiction, and Electric Literature. Although these stories stand alone, reading through Washington’s book from start to finish feels significant, like bearing witness to Houston’s erosion. For every thrown fist and quickly whipped comeback, there is a quiet moment cleaning dishes, sitting in the Whataburger parking lot, or sneaking out on a lover in the night. Just as every city is created by its inhabitants, Lot belongs foremost to its characters, who ask to be remembered, even long after their pages have turned. Read More