September 4, 2018 Arts & Culture Because the Story Was Mine By Thea Lim I can’t remember the first time someone asked me what I was. The question has always oueen a part of my landscape, as common as denim or dirt. Now people ask it of my daughter. The question itself is funny—what are you?—so nonsensical, so naked of etiquette, frenzied to know. Sometimes it’s friendly, a password whispered in front of a door, asking if we are the same. Usually, it’s not. I used to try to play games with the question, beat it. Well, I would say, I have a bachelor’s degree in political science and English literature. Now, made sad and wise by age, I just tell people what they want to know, reeling it off like a rhyme: my mother is white from England; my father is Chinese from Singapore; I was born in Canada. Is there something necessarily humiliating about having to list your race—and your parents’ race and your grandparents’ race—before you can gain entry into conversation? If so, it’s only because we’ve made race something to be ashamed of. This is what I tell myself: you can think your way out of this trouble, this pain. I never wanted to write fiction that was rooted in where I came from. That where is overexposed, like a stripped nerve. This is a problem for writers of color—or for anyone who knows there’s a narrative attached to their body, a narrative over which they have no control. Telling the truth, just being me, felt like a crude performance. Writing about my life was giving into the lust of the dominant gaze. And there was no way I could write my story and pass it off as pure fiction: I reverse migrated with my family from Canada to my father’s country, Singapore, and then I migrated back to Canada, my birth country, as an adult. This journey was so embarrassingly specific, so convoluted, it could not be masked well enough to be a story of its own, loosed from autobiography. Instead, I swung hard in the opposite direction. I wrote angry, reactionary work, telling the world all the ways it was wrong. I published a novella of feminist fiction in 2007 because if my writing didn’t have a righteous point to make, how could I justify doing something as bourgeois as writing? (Bougie in the Marxist sense not the Migos sense.) An instructor told me that when you write, you have to leave the soapbox behind—you can’t let politics determine the story. Because he was white, I ignored him. Maybe it was easy for him to put aside politics, but mine weren’t something I could take off like a T-shirt. Then, at a workshop for writers of color, another teacher said the same thing, a little differently: if you can’t get past your own morality, you will be judging your story too much to write it. This was a ground-shaking relief. It gave me a choice that wasn’t either turning my cheek or slapping back. It gave me permission to walk away. Read More
August 31, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Wedding Woes and Mutual Hatred By The Paris Review This summer I visited my ancestral home, which is loosely defined as Cleveland, Ohio and tightly defined as any room holding my Great Aunt Laura. She maintains not only my family history (the memory of my great grandmother staying up late playing solitaire, for example) but also a more general understanding of four generations of life in Cleveland. In the hours I wasn’t rapt around her table, I was reading Dorothy West’s The Wedding. Turned on to West by The Paris Review’s Feminize Your Canon column, I tore through her novel of a late-summer wedding. Set within a carefully cultivated black upper-class community in Martha’s Vineyard, The Wedding is the story of the much anticipated nuptials between a daughter of a respected family and the white jazz pianist with whom she has fallen in love. West’s sympathies are teasingly veiled. Through her characters, who span generations and therefore approach the couple’s union differently, she suggests a certain difficulty but not impossibility of judgement. The Wedding certainly has enough heartbreak and suspense for a beach-read, but West is a sociologist of the first order. Though they are given little credence, writers (and aunties) know better—history is always complicated. The Wedding published in 1995 when West was eighty-seven is a beautiful novel and a record worth keeping close. —Julia Berick If you scroll too deep into the Internet, it’s easy to feel like the world is ending. The Polar Ice Caps are melting and Trump is gushing toxic tweets. Olivia Laing’s debut novel, Crudo, is a merciless catalogue of the political and personal anxieties that plague us, breathlessly recounted by a middle-aged writer named Kathy who bears an undeniable resemblance to late punk-poet Kathy Acker. In the seemingly cataclysmic summer of 2017, Kathy is about to be married to a man twenty-nine years her senior. But instead of planning her wedding, she spends her days swiping through social media and bemoaning the omnipresent panic brought on by an endless onslaught of information. “Ten years ago, maybe even five, it was possible to ignore the atrocities, to believe that these things happened somewhere else, in a different order of reality from your own.” Though the plot itself is sparse, Kathy’s narrative tumbles along at breakneck speed; it’s uncomfortably crowded with Kathy’s wedding woes, her reactions to political events, and the gossip of the boring, heterosexual couples that Kathy encounters during her vacation in Tuscany. It’s less a novel than a single moment in modernity, deconstructed by the savagely entertaining, Acker-inspired voice of Laing. —Madeline Day Read More
August 31, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking With Pearl Buck By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. I’m in Vermont for the summer, living in the town of Winhall, where Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973), an American famous for novels about China, lived during one of the strange closing chapters of her long, strange life. Every day, I pass Pearl Buck Drive and the road to Buck’s summer home. Nearby is the old Liftline lodge on Stratton, where she and the 38-years-younger ‘dancing instructor’ who was her companion in her final years liked to have dinner. After Winhall, Buck, the dancing instructor, and his young, male entourage moved a few mountains over, to Danby, Vermont, where she ended her years, “seated at the window in Chinese silk robes, drawing five or six thousand people each summer as the town’s sole tourist attraction,” according to the excellent and riveting Hilary Spurling biography, Pearl Buck in China. Read More
August 30, 2018 Arts & Culture The Aristocracy of Freakdom: E.E. Cummings on Coney Island By E.E. Cummings Although it is true that the inhabitants of the U.S.A. have ample cause for pessimism, thanks to Bad Art, Bootleggery and 26,000 lesser degrees of Bunk, it is also true that said inhabitants are the fortunate possessors of a perfectly genuine panacea. Were not this so, throughout the breadth and length of our fair land mayhem would magnify itself to prodigious proportions, burglary would bulge to deadly dimensions, policemen would populate our most secret sanctuaries and such notable nodes of Kultur as New York City would leap en masse to the celestial regions. Unbelievable as it may appear, there might even come a day when not a single campanulate congressman went to sleep on duty and not a single authentic artist starved at his Corona. In short (and to put it very mildly) anything might happen. But the panacea is genuine. Crime, accordingly, is kept within quite convenient bounds, murder is monotonously punished, unart and nonliquor exchange visiting cards and the dollar bill waves triumphant o’er the land of the free and the home of the slave—all of which is due to the existence of an otherwise not important island, whose modest name would seem to suggest nothing more obstreperous than the presence of rabbits. No wonder learned people state that we occupy an epoch of miracles! At the outset, one thing should be understood: it is not owing to sociological, political, or even psychological predilections that the present and unlearned writer partakes of the cure in question. Quite the contrary. Like those millions of other so-called human beings who find relief for their woes, each and every year, at Coney Island, he occupies these miraculous premises with purely personal intentions—or, more explicitly, in order to have a good time. And a good time he has. Only when his last spendable dime has irretrievably disappeared and his face sadly is turned toward his dilatory domicile, does it so much as occur to your humble servant to plumb the significance of his recent experiences. Such being the case, there can be no reasonable doubt as to his intellectual honesty re the isle and its amusements, concerning which (for the benefit of all thoroughly unbenighted persons and an unhappy few who are not accustomed to lose their complexes on The Thunderbolt) he hereby begs to discourse. Read More
August 30, 2018 Bulletin Announcing Our New Editors By Emily Nemens My first few months as editor have flown by, and I’m excited to share the fruits of this busy summer soon—the Fall issue will go online just after Labor Day. Much of this summer has also been spent getting to know colleagues up and down the masthead. There are a few people I’ve yet to track down for a meal or a Skype date, but talking shop with the staff, city editors, advisory editors, and the board has been lovely and informative. Through those conversations, I’ve also identified several opportunities for growth, as well as several key editors to help us with that growing. Prime among them is Hasan Altaf, who will start as our managing editor in September. Hasan and I are both excited about his editorial expertise and his commitment to bring new voices to the magazine. We’ve also appointed novelist Christian Keifer to fill the newly added role of West Coast Editor. Christian’s inveterate energy, good taste, and large network have already proven valuable to my first issue, and we should all be thankful that he connected us with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose Art of Poetry interview is now underway. The ranks of Advisory Editors have expanded. Some of the new additions, like Poetry Editor alum Robyn Creswell, have been contributing to the magazine for years. Others, like new advisory editor Saskia Hamilton, brought us content—unpublished Elizabeth Bishop!—that will appear in my first issue. Christopher Merrill is already working to expand our international reach, so stay tuned. As a means of introduction, I asked each editor for a bio and a favorite piece from the archive. —Emily Nemens Read More