June 21, 2021 In Memoriam Remembering Janet Malcolm By Katie Roiphe Janet Malcolm and Katie Roiphe in conversation at NYU, 2012. Photo courtesy of Roiphe. In one of my last email exchanges with Janet Malcolm, in one of the darkest parts of the pandemic, she wrote to me, “I can only try to imagine the hard time you and the children are having. How can you not be stalled on writing? I wish there was something I could do to help.” Her response warmed me, elevating my state of general stagnancy into something almost socially acceptable. The idea of her in my house, helping with my son’s online schooling—his teacher was reading out “rat facts” during his daily forty-five minutes of Zoom—was so incongruous that it made me laugh. Before I met Janet, she was the only living writer who terrified me, because I loved her work so much. I had devoured The Silent Woman in graduate school, and then read everything else. I was in awe of her brutal precision, her sharp inquiries into the production of stories, her moral wrangling with journalism and biography. H. G. Wells once said that Rebecca West wrote like God, and I always felt a little like that about Janet Malcolm. Read More
April 7, 2021 In Memoriam Four Memories of Giancarlo DiTrapano By The Paris Review Giancarlo DiTrapano, the fearless founder, publisher, and editor of Tyrant Books, died this past week at the age of forty-seven. Fiercely independent and loyal to his writers through and through, he was an irreplaceable presence in the literary world, a one-man powerhouse of the avant-garde. With New York Tyrant magazine, he championed rising talents such as Rachel B. Glaser and Brandon Hobson, and his record with Tyrant was astounding: over the course of a little more than a decade, he published Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book, Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life, an omnibus of Garielle Lutz’s short stories, Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life (an excerpt from which appeared in the Fall 2014 issue and received the 2015 Plimpton Prize), and plenty of other strange, deeply felt, highly original books. His work was far from finished. In the months preceding his death, he had been cementing plans to launch a new press. Below, four of his writers and friends (with DiTrapano, there was little distinction) remember his generosity, dark sense of humor, and commitment to literature. Giancarlo DiTrapano. Photo courtesy of Chelsea Hodson / MORS TUA VITA MEA Workshop. I was at a reading, looking at a novel for sale on a folding table. A guy walked to my side and said what’s up. I said I wanted to buy the novel but had spent all my money on beer. “Take it,” he said. Looked like somebody I’d work construction with. “Take it.” He put the book in my hand. This was the publisher of the book, Giancarlo DiTrapano. An open person, a kind person. He’d just give a stranger something, no reason. I knew him only five years. Gone way, way, way too soon. Can’t think of anybody cooler. Was more alive than anybody else I knew. I’ve always admired people who dream to do something and then seemingly before they’ve even woken up from the dream, there they are in the midst of it. At a kitchen table in a cramped apartment, launching something beautiful. That’s what he did. There’s a lot of talk about being “punk rock,” about being an individual—how is it even possible to walk one’s own path, by one’s own standards? I don’t know. But all you’d have to do is look at my shelf of releases from Tyrant Books. There they are, twenty of them in a row. Open any one. You can see the answer in there. Authors he deeply loved. Telling stories they had to tell. Each author could explain how passionate Giancarlo was. How when he believed in someone, in something, it was almost impossible to change his mind. You might get in a blowout fight over what the book needed, but in the end, what was birthed into the world was right, was beloved. Was real. Didn’t come out of a boardroom. The opposite. He rooted for the underdog. He helped the underdog come up into brighter light. Read More
January 12, 2021 In Memoriam On Jean Valentine By Hafizah Geter Jean Valentine (photo: Tyler Flynn Dorholt) What I know about change, I’ve learned from the line break. Never ran this hard through the valley / never ate so many stars, Jean Valentine writes, daring you to guess what happens to her next. Like a Counting Crows promise replaying in my head, something child and vulnerable in me wants to believe “this year will be better than the last.” But quarantine—like a locksmith—copies my every day into sameness. It’s been a metronome of writing and work, in between video chats to Gambia with my nephews, first teeth sprout in the newest one’s mouth. I want to believe “I am changing” behind some curtain with the same control Jennifer Hudson calls up when she sings it, but as a poet, it’s more like I’m standing at the edge of someone else’s line break. I am changing—though, from this vantage point, I can’t yet see how. I interviewed Valentine on December 19, 2013, for a now closed poetry journal where I was an editor. She was eighty-one and had invited me to her Morningside Heights apartment. Between us were fifty-two years and a plate of cookies she set on the table. I’d found her poetry my first year of grad school and each poem had planted in me something tender—inexplicably true—as a land mine that set itself off. And so, when news of her death broke through the world, it leaped. As though over the lacuna a line break creates. Like so many, upon hearing, I thought of her seminal poem “Door in the Mountain,” and found myself, once again, at the mountain’s base. I was carrying a dead deer / tied to my neck and shoulders but had only, in the last few months, realized that that dead deer had named itself America. Deer legs hanging in front of me / heavy on my chest. Read More
December 16, 2020 In Memoriam Everybody’s Breaking Somebody’s Heart By Drew Bratcher Charley Pride. Photo: Joseph Llanes. Courtesy of 2911 Media. Several summers ago, I took my high school best friend, who was going through a divorce at the time, to see Charley Pride in concert at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. I say “concert,” but in reality, it was one of those Grand Ole Opry–style revues in which a few artists play two or three songs a piece and then call it a night. The bill was long, sundry, and strange. It included the songwriter Jimmy Webb (“Wichita Lineman, “MacArthur Park”), the country music hall-of-famer Connie Smith, a three-year-old mandolin player, an indie rock band from New Zealand, Glen Campbell’s kids, and Eric Church, who was joined on stage by Chris Stapleton and Little Big Town for a cover of the Band’s “The Weight.” Church was the main draw. One of Nashville’s leading men, he’d recently released an album that embraced hard-rock riffs and spoken-word poetry in addition to nostalgic reminiscences of the Talladega Superspeedway. On one eight-minute track, he rails against the very Ryman stage on which he was set to perform. “No matter how satisfied her scream sounds,” he says, “she always wants someone new.” I wondered whether Church, in his sunglasses and leather jacket, would go there during his set, whether he’d make nice or cause a scene. I told my friend, who’d never been to the Ryman, about how Johnny Cash had smashed out the footlights with a microphone stand in 1965. I wondered whether we might be in for a repeat. I was talking about music to keep from talking about things I didn’t know how to talk about. My friend’s wife had left him. There was another man involved. It had all come as a surprise. Despite growing up in Nashville, my friend had never been a big fan of country music. At the very least, I thought the show, for as long as it lasted, might take his mind off his troubles. I thought it might even give him a song or two to help him deal with his pain. What else is country music good for if not consoling the brokenhearted? What is it about if not the inevitability of ending up alone? More than Church, the singer I was looking forward to seeing, the name that had made me want to buy tickets in the first place, was Charley Pride, who died at age eighty-six this past weekend of complications from COVID-19. Read More
November 25, 2020 In Memoriam Remembering Jan Morris By The Paris Review “To be writing about a place you’ve got to be utterly selfish,” said the legendary travel writer Jan Morris in her Art of the Essay interview. “You’ve only got to think about the place that you’re writing. Your antenna must be out all the time picking up vibrations and details. If you’ve got somebody with you, especially somebody you’re fond of, it doesn’t work so well.” Although Morris, who died Friday at the age of ninety-four, preferred to travel alone, her writing radiates the qualities of an ideal companion: knowledgeable, witty, relaxed, and always up for an adventure. If you pricked a globe with pins indicating the places she explored throughout her work—Venice, Hong Kong, wide swaths of South Africa and Spain, and, of course, Wales, where she lived for much of her life with her wife, Elizabeth—it would never stop spinning. Morris was nearly as adventurous in her literary endeavors as she was in her travels, publishing more than forty books of history, memoir, essays, diaries, and even fiction. In a foreword to the expanded edition of Morris’s novel Hav, Ursula K. Le Guin writes, “Probably Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognizable type and superb quality.” Morris was also responsible for a groundbreaking account of her own gender confirmation surgery, Conundrum (1974). A tremendously insightful writer till the end, she in recent years published a selection of her diaries, an excerpt of which appeared in the Summer 2018 issue of The Paris Review. In these personal accounts of her days, Morris writes about walking her “statutory thousand daily paces up the lane,” keeping a frayed copy of Montaigne’s essays in her old Honda Civic, and spending days in the garden. One entry consists simply of a poem about her life with Elizabeth: In the north part of Wales there resided, we’re told, Two elderly persons who, as they grew old, Being tough and strong-minded, resolute ladies, Observing their path toward heaven or hades, Said they’d still stick together, whatever it meant, Whatever bad fortune, or good fortune, sent. They’d rely upon Love, which they happened to share, Which went with them always, wherever they were. And if it should happen that one kicked the bucket, Why, the other would simply say “Bother!” (Not “F— it!” for both were too ladylike ever to swear .… ) Below, three of Morris’s longtime colleagues remember her charm: Jan Morris © David Hurn. My fondest memories of Jan Morris are of my visits to her home in North Wales. She and her wife, Elizabeth, lived for many years in a plas, a big house, and when this became too big they renovated the stable block and moved in there. Wales mattered to Jan. In midlife, and at more or less the same time as her gender reassignment, she embraced what she called Welsh Republicanism. Her home, Trefan Morys, is in a remote area near the town of Criccieth. You leave the main road, take a long, rutted drive, negotiate the narrow entrance in a high stone wall, and you are suddenly in an enchanted space. Elizabeth was the architect of the garden and Jan the interior designer. You enter the house through a two-part stable door (Jan always greeting you with the words, “Not today, thank you”), into a cozy kitchen, and then the main downstairs room. The walls are lined with eight thousand books, including specially leather-bound editions of Jan’s own. Up the stairs there is another long room, with an old-fashioned stove in the middle. Here are more books, but this space is given over mainly to memorabilia and paintings. Pride of place is given to a six-foot-long painting of Venice, done by Jan, in which every detail of the miraculous city is rendered (including tiny portraits of the two eldest sons, who were very young at the time Jan painted it). Model ships hang from the ceiling, and paintings of ships adorn the walls. Jan loved ships from the time she spied them, as a child, through a telescope as they passed through the Bristol Channel near her family’s home. Read More
July 30, 2020 In Memoriam A Keeper of Jewels: Remembering Brad Watson By M.O. Walsh Brad Watson. Photo: © Nell Hanley. I met Brad Watson in 2004. He was starting a one-year stint as the Grisham Visiting Writer at Ole Miss, where I was an M.F.A. student, and I’d signed up for his workshop. The week before the semester began, I saw him at a bar in town, newly arrived and sitting on a stool by himself. I went up and introduced myself and he looked me over and grinned. His eyes had this way of shining when he found something funny. “You the one who wrote that weird story with the mannequin?” he asked me. “I am,” I confessed. “I enjoyed it,” he said, and picked up his drink. “I like sort of oddball stuff.” At that point in my life, my glorious and unpublished twenties, I knew only that I wanted to be a good writer, not that I could be. So, this exchange gave me a suspicious confidence. I liked Brad from the start. Read More