August 24, 2018 At Work There Are No White People in Heaven: An Interview with José Olivarez By Andy Powell The first poem I encountered from José Olivarez’s forthcoming book, Citizen Illegal, was “A Mexican Dreams of Heaven” at The Adroit Journal. When I read it, I started cracking up in the living room. I read it out loud to my partner, who was in the bedroom, and she also cracked up. The poem elicits the painful laughter that comes with so much truth: there are white people in heaven, too. they build condos across the street & ask the Mexicans to speak English. i’m just kidding. there are no white people in heaven. Olivarez’s poems span gentrification, gentefication (which Olivarez defines in this interview as the returning of a neighborhood to the communities who are being displaced), migration, anger, love, cheese fries, family, loss, therapy, white America’s engagement with immigrants and people of color, futures (including defecating donkeys), pasts (including a very sweet imagined recollection of his mother out dancing), more love, tough love, generous love, and, of course, as a Chicago poet, The Bulls. I met Olivarez for a coffee in Chicago to speak about the book. He was coming from a Teaching Artistry workshop at the Poetry Incubator, a conference for poets who integrate activism and community engagement into their creative practice. I already knew of José—he used to work for the same organization, DreamYard, that I work for in The Bronx. He has since worked for Urban Word, and now is at Young Chicago Authors, all organizations centered on building with youth through poetry. His workshop at the Incubator focused on the transformative possibilities of poetry and the imagination. These possibilities are at play in his own work. In “A Mexican Dreams of Heaven” he shifts the power balance and makeup of what heaven is, who gets to go to heaven, what it’s like. I suspect these visionary reversals derive partly from his work with kids, with the desire to imagine a future for them, to start imagining one with them. INTERVIEWER What scares you the most about this book? OLIVAREZ I wanted to make a book of poems that the people I love will be proud of. A lot of the poems are about my family, my experience as a first generation Mexican-American Chicano, and I wanted to write poems that were not shameful, not ashamed. I wanted them to be poems that my brother wouldn’t be embarrassed to show his co-workers, that my mom could share with the family, with her co-workers, that my students would want to give to their friends. I didn’t want them to look at the poems and think wow, José is so ashamed of us, or, José is so sad to be a part of us. I am very proud of my people, where I come from, and my community. Read More
August 22, 2018 At Work Apocalyptic Office Novel: An Interview with Ling Ma By Madeline Day Ling Ma’s debut novel, Severance, transcends any typical classification. It is part satirical office drama, part immigrant narrative, part millennial bildungsroman—with a dash of zombie apocalypse. Severance chronicles the life of Candace Chen, an obedient worker bee who is one of the last people alive in New York City after the Shen Fever strikes. The “fevered” who populate the city aren’t your classic teeth-gnashing, skin-peeling zombies. Instead, victims of the Fever are reduced to creatures of habit—they adhere mindlessly to their everyday grinds until they quite literally work themselves to death. Before the Fever, Candace works for a Bible production company in New York that outsources its labor to Southeast Asia. When the city starts to crumble and all of her coworkers flee, Candace chooses to stay behind and work—in part because her only family is far away in China and in part because she finds comfort in the familiarity of her day-to-day routine. Alone in New York, Candace spends her days wandering through the city and taking photos to post on her blog under the pseudonym NY Ghost. She catalogues abandoned avenues and ransacked luxury stores in hopes that people elsewhere will respond with their own nostalgic or romanticized versions of the city. (“If New York is breaking down and no one documents it, is it actually happening?”) Eventually, when the MTA shuts down and the bodegas close one by one, Candace and a small group of survivors are forced to make their way to a safe “Facility” located near Chicago. All the while, through a series of flashbacks, Candace draws parallels between her own journey and that of her parents, who left their home in China for a new life in the States. In the end, Severance isn’t so much a story about zombies as it is an imaginative critique of capitalism. Underneath Ma’s deadpan comedy lie shrewd observations of the West and the decadence of our everyday existence. We indulge in Frappuccinos and overpriced packaged vegetables at Whole Foods. We live off of products made by labor outsourced to China and Indonesia and Pakistan. In Ma’s eyes, the Fever is an inevitable symptom of Americans’ rapacious consumption. “What you do every day matters,” Candace insists at one point. If we don’t listen, we might just get what we deserve. Although Severance is Ma’s first novel, she has published short stories in Granta, Playboy, Chicago Reader, and elsewhere. She received her M.F.A. at Cornell University and is currently an assistant professor in the creative writing department at the University of Chicago. I had the chance to correspond with Ma the week leading up to the release of Severance, and we discussed her influences, the experiences that fueled her novel, and her opinions on social media. Read More
August 20, 2018 At Work One-Question Interview: Shruti Swamy By The Paris Review Shruti Swamy’s story in the Summer issue, “A House Is a Body,” blazes with the heat of a California wildfire. A mother who has been warned by firefighters to evacuate her home descends into a spiral of thought so intense that you can practically feel the pages singing as you read. There was much we wanted to ask her, but we limited ourselves to a single question. INTERVIEWER Your story is an intense, dark tale of motherhood, grief, and madness. As an expectant mother yourself, how do the acts of creating life and creating art interplay? Are both a certain form of madness? SWAMY For the last few weeks, I’ve thought often about this question, which I had so eagerly volunteered to answer, thinking that as a new mother, I would have suddenly gained the insight I was looking for during the years before I had my baby. In truth, probably because of the sleepless nights, I feel like I have less of an answer now than I did before my daughter arrived, with one exception—her name. All through my pregnancy, I wrote my daughter’s name in my journal like a schoolgirl with a crush. It was a name so strange—singular—to my ear that I couldn’t imagine that anyone else in the world had, in this combination, already worn it. The act of writing again and again this name was like dreaming. Though I could see the changes happening to my body, they felt somehow strangely abstract, not unlike the way a story first feels when it begins inside me. An image, an interaction, an opening, and then the glow of possibility—not of the finished story but of the feeling of listening, following. Pregnancy to me felt like that, a work of the mind as well as of the body, even as the child felt impossible, as stories often feel until they fully arrive. Read More
August 14, 2018 At Work Satirizing Identity Politics: An Interview with Lexi Freiman By Alexandra Kleeman Lexi Freiman. I first encountered Lexi Freiman’s work in a workshop at Columbia University. She had written a short story about a woman in a shifting, phantasmagoric relationship with a man whom the narration treated at some times as a nemesis and at others as a luminous object of desire. One scene from that story, where the female protagonist tends to her lover’s clogged pores while cycling through states of adoration and fear, will stick in my mind until the day my mind ends. Though I’m not even sure that Lexi remembers that story or my visceral, enthusiastic reaction to it, the piece is a perfect example of what I find most interesting about her work: its creativity, its dextrous and controlled use of surprise, its willingness to peer deeply into the realm of the improper. In her debut novel, Inappropriation, Lexi tells the story of Ziggy, a misfit teen at a swanky Australian private school whose search for identity leads her to New Agey communes and right-wing chat rooms and a series of increasingly problematic decisions. We sat down recently—at separate computers in separate places—to discuss, over email, cyborgs and teenagers and the risky rewards of satire. INTERVIEWER One thing that really stands out about your novel is its sense of humor, its willingness to poke fun. These days, it’s common to say that our political moment is so outlandish that it’s impossible to satirize—at times it feels like there’s an entirely new genre of think piece focused on the difficulties of comedians and comedy writers trying to take on the Trump administration. And yet your book succeeds at being both tremendously contemporary and savagely funny, a bit of fresh air. What moved you to write a satirical novel? What do we gain when we view our world through a humorous lens? FREIMAN I actually started writing the book just before politics got really absurd, during the end of Obama’s presidency. I’ve always been drawn to satire—to framing things in a way that makes their inherent absurdity visible—and identity politics was emerging then as a dominant ideology on the Left. The way social media distorted identity politics made the whole cultural moment feel ripe for satire in the conventional sense—as a critique of power. Of course, this sounds counterintuitive, as identity politics is all about giving voice and agency to the marginalized. And in a sense, that’s what interested me about it—that there was this powerful political movement seemingly beyond critique and allergic to humor, and it felt as if questioning any aspect of it was somehow immoral. I wanted to examine the problems of a sacrosanct ideology and of identity itself. Even once Trump was elected, the project remained satirically viable, especially as the Left controls culture and the arts. Read More
August 7, 2018 At Work Mermaids and Transgressive Sex: An Interview with Alexia Arthurs By Abigail Bereola How to Love a Jamaican, Alexia Arthurs’s first book, is a short-story collection that delves into the lives of people who have Jamaica in common. Whether it’s the place they currently live, the place they left, or the place their parents are from, Jamaica always forms some notion of home. And How to Love a Jamaican explores, in part, what it means to make and remake that conception of home. In this book, there’s no single way to be Jamaican—the definition of the word itself expands to encompass each person who claims it. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Arthurs has been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and Granta, among other publications. A story from the collection, “Bad Behavior,” first appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of The Paris Review and was awarded the 2017 Plimpton Prize. Arthurs and I spoke on the phone two days after the collection was published, about invisibility, the idea of “a better life,” mermaids, and more. INTERVIEWER When you were writing these stories, what did you want from them? ARTHURS That’s such an interesting question. What did I want from them? I think I was working through various things and, intuitively, I was trying to make peace with things that had happened or were happening, and with myself. My stories are really personal, so even though it’s fiction, the stories, in different ways, feel as though they’re about me. At its essence, perhaps I just wanted to feel less lonely. These stories allow me to feel heard and maybe even understood. Read More
August 3, 2018 At Work A Conversation Between Nell Painter and Lynne Tillman By Nell Painter and Lynne Tillman Left: photo by John Emerson; Right: photo by Craig Mod Lynne Tillman and Nell Painter can’t remember how they first met. Tillman believes they were introduced at a history conference, while Painter is sure that their first encounter was here, at the Paris Review offices, upon the conduction of this interview. In any case, last spring they convened—either again or for the first time—to discuss their respective new books. Men and Apparitions, Tillman’s sixth novel, tells the story of Zeke, a thirty-eight-year-old cultural anthropologist who belongs to a generation of “new men” and soon becomes the subject of his own research. Old in Art School, Painter’s eighth book of non-fiction, chronicles her decision to leave the world of academic research in pursuit of a B.A. and M.F.A. in visual art. Together they discussed professionalism, the art market, and the personal self-fashioning of writers. Read More