Dec 13, Brooke Champagne, Wet or Dry, Hot or Cold: A Climatological Study of the Funny Compass™ (That Could Save America?)

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Wet or Dry, Hot or Cold:  

A Climatological Study of the Funny Compass™ 

(That Could Save America?)

Brooke Champagne

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Standing in the slow security line at Fresno Yosemite International Airport, just past the lobby’s multi-million-dollar artificial sequoias composed of hand-sculpted tree bark, the couple in front of me searches for something interesting to talk about. The woman’s curls shutter tightly against her head, but spring into action with an idea that will make her husband laugh (or chortle, or whatever Republicans do): “You know Tricia’s in-laws? They’re so upset about the election that they bought Trump toilet paper. His face is on every sheet, in every bathroom. How pathetic.” Her husband dutifully laugh-chortles.

I agree it’s pathetic to buy a product that forces you to more frequently see the face of someone you loathe, particularly during vulnerable bowel moments. And while I’m not a fan of the couple in the security line, Tricia’s in-laws sound equally insufferable. How far can you commit to a bit like that, wiping your ass…with a face? But I sort of got where they were coming from, since my favorite present of the 2016 holiday season was the one gifted by our babysitter: an orange-hair-bristled Trump toilet brush. Though, did I sincerely laugh while using his head to scrub our toilets in early 2017? I did not. Who needed another reminder we were living in bread-and-circus times, that the man’s iconography—and by extension, his warped philosophy for governing and living—was so omnipresent, I couldn’t even escape it on the shitter? I figured this out eight years ago. Why were Tricia’s in-laws so slow on the uptake?

Mid-morning on that travel day, during a long layover in Vegas, I munch on eight-dollar peanut-butter-chocolate “energy balls,” and take a picture of the last two to show my five-year-old son. “Those look like my balls!” I imagine he’ll say. After three days away for a writer’s event, I hope to elicit his laughter immediately when I return home. If he doesn’t bring up the balls resemblance, I will. (In fairness, his kindergarten class is learning shapes, and one handout prompts us to search for spherical comparisons out in the world). But the truth is, potty and body humor are part of our love language.

My ball musing is interrupted, rudely, by a large man holding a 10 a.m. whiskey and wearing a spiked hair hat. Between sips he points his finger at an airport attendant who’s asked him to please back away from the slot machines unless he plans to play. 

“How the hell y’all got slots everywhere and, what, we’re not supposed to look?!” The tiny female attendant apologizes for enforcing rules. I drop my balls, surveying this unsettling scene, and the man sees me looking. I’m instantly relieved that rather than yelling at me, too, he tries soliciting my sympathy. “Um, ma’am, that chair you’re sitting in. Those chairs are not for sitting. You’re supposed to stand alongside them. They’re not for your use. Those are non-usable chairs.” Oh good, sarcasm. I perform a knowing nod, offer a limp thumbs up, then go back to staring at my balls. What an asshole, I think. Trump voter. Bully.

“What an asshole,” says the man next to me wearing blue suede Pumas—I’ve committed to never looking up again—talking to his friend. “That lady was just doing her job, what the fuck.” Ah, I think, there are still gentlemen in this world, he’s on my side, all hope is not lost. Then after a beat, “Probably votes Democrat.” Laugh, chortle.

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I’ve tried to understand and replicate what’s funny for as long as I can remember, and in my first decade was raised on comedy greats like Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. Yet early-80s Murphy goes on long riffs mimicking gay male mannerisms and speech patterns, so watching parts of Delirious today is cringey to say the least. But it was funny back then, right? No matter how our country voted in November 2024, outside of evangelical circles, queerness is no longer the cultural taboo it once was; making fun of it makes no sense. What I’ve kept from Murphy and Pryor is their potty and body humor. Outside of the comedy of motherhood, though, much of what’s made me laugh on this long road of middle age has been driven by what I believe to be true about culture and politics. Which has me asking here at the twilight of 2024 (and possibly democracy), what’s funny? 

Despite spending many hours every day trying to perform funny for my captive audience of two children and one husband, plus a rotating assemblage of several dozen students at the University of Alabama, I can’t answer the question. What elicits laughter is just as subjective and personal as what elicits orgasm. The “what’s funny?” quandary has been analyzed by the most exceptional minds across millennia. Aristotle and Plato put forth the superiority theory of reflexive glee at the misfortune of others. My muted laughter had the hair hat guy spilled then slipped on his own whiskey, for instance. Pascal postulated the still-dominant incongruity theory, when there’s an inconsistency between an expected outcome and what actually happens. This one applies best for jokes with punchlines, such as this classic from Rodney Dangerfield: “My psychiatrist told me I was crazy, and I said I wanted a second opinion. He said, ‘Okay, you’re ugly, too.’” Or a less famous example: the first sentence in this essay. Freud believed humor’s primary motivator was the release of repressed psychic energy, whether violent or sexual. He’d have a field day with me, my son, and our balls. There are dozens more humor theories—research labs at universities study these concepts year-round; one is slightly-amusingly named HuRL—but none I’ve ever heard is all-encompassing. They all feel situationally narrow, applicable to particular circumstances in particular times.

Juxtaposing my recent airport interactions with my classroom observations through this election season—examining two very different constituencies of people—got me considering these circumstances and times may call for a new comedic paradigm. Is it possible to be funny in a way that would both make the aggressive man in the hair hat and also my highly literate, Gen Z, mostly-left-wing graduate writing students laugh? Could doing so save our country? 

I mean, I doubt it, but one day in my creative nonfiction class filled with several funny students, I began pondering who is funny to whom, and how and why. It began when Noah made a seemingly innocuous comment on Mike’s essay. “I love your humor,” he said. “It’s so perfectly dry.”

No one will ever call my humor dry, I thought to myself miserably. Then, because I love and trust my students, I expressed this regret aloud. “Why is ‘dry’ the only adjective we can ever come up with for humor?” None of us could figure it out. “If one type of humor is dry, wouldn’t the opposite type of humor be wet?” 

We began discussing why, feeling excluded from dryness, I immediately identified as a wet humorist. According to AI Overview, the opposite of dry humor (or dry “humour”—is the word funnier when you add the second u?) is slapstick, but wet humorists like me also find opposition to dry humorist’s emotional neutrality: wet is highly emotional. It thrives on audience appreciation. Wet is needy and self-deprecating, exuberant and playful, happy to be the butt (or balls) of the joke. Willing to go to any length for a laugh. Dry is observational, focused on musings or ideas, seemingly above all this laughter business (do the dry’s ever truly laugh?). It can sometimes take a moment to register when a dry humorist is being hilarious. Wet, meanwhile, doesn’t wait; it pours a bucket of itself over your head. To use a 90s comic-duo analogy with which many students were unfamiliar, wet is to Chris Farley as dry is to David Spade. 

“Does this have anything to do with geography?” I wondered. “Like am I wet because I’m from the bottom of the soup bowl in New Orleans, where hurricane season is never over?”

Ty recalled their visit to Nola just a couple years before. “It’s not just wet down there, but damn hot.”

Hot damn. If there was wet and dry humor, wouldn’t it logically follow there could also be hot and cold? The idea of locating humor within four quadrants lit up the four chambers of my heart, because now I was thinking back to two decades ago during the last presidential cycle when it felt like nothing would be funny again. Remember when a fascist dum-dum who’d taken us to war on false pretenses was reelected? Back then, pre meme culture, the Political Compass Test went viral on the internet: four quadrants decided whether one fell to the right or left on both social and economic scales of governance. The test contains dozens of philosophical questions, and I took it many times over to ensure I was indeed who I thought I was.

I don’t have the technological skills to create a Buzzfeed-like quiz determining which quadrant one falls into on the Funny Compass™ we spontaneously created in class, but the way I began to understand it in those minutes under my students’ tutelage, I am a hot and wet humorist (humbly disabused of those adjective’s sexual innuendos, Freud). Hot humor is angry and reactionary, and cold humor is seemingly indifferent and detached. Both often hinge on the hell that is other people, but if hot humor (loudly, explosively) punches down, cold (insidiously, calculatingly) pinches down. With hot, you feel the punch more deeply in the moment, but that icy cold pinch can be longer-lasting. Hot thrives off audience reaction, and cold does not give AF. Put another way: 

The curly-haired woman in Fresno? Cold and dry. The hair hat guy in Vegas? Hot and dry (or moist, perhaps, if you count the hat, though I read his adornment as deadly earnest.). Both their brands of humor—and much American humor, if we’re being honest—rely on cynicism and meanness. How much of this has been exacerbated by the politics of the past decade? Another thing that’s niggled me for much of that time is how a substantial portion of the electorate—right, left, and center, I’ve heard all the annoying “let’s think about this another way” podcasts—contends that part of 45/47’s appeal is his humor, his comedy-routine-via-political-rallies. This is the piece of analysis I cannot abide. Yes, he says and does terrible things, and I hate all he stands for, but mainly this motherfucker ain’t funny. 

But. Common sense and my earlier assertion tell us that what makes a person laugh is subjective, so I must acknowledge that for many, Trump incites genuine, I’m-fully-with-you laughter. And what’s worse, shortly after drawing my Funny Compass™ in class and situating myself inside of it, I allowed myself about twelve seconds of satisfaction before this horrific realization: if we applied my compass to Trump, he and I fall in the same lower lefthand quadrant. We’re both hot and wet, though for vastly different reasons. He’s angry at the “injustices” against him and punches wildly against them. I’m angry that so many people agree with his definitions of injustice, and punch wildly at those hair-hatted men and nearly half of all American women. 

I’ve found myself at the center of the horseshoe of my humor theory. I’ve been a comedic bully toward those I’ve felt didn’t fall into my ideal quadrant of comedy or politics, which I’ve ignored because bullying only seemed wrong when they did it. I’m asking questions that my writing itself answers: in this essay I’ve repeatedly made fun of Republican laughter, one of the purest forms of expression we have. How much sense does it make that I’ve chafed when they made fun of ours? (Cue the infinite, snide laughing Kamala memes.) But of course, it’s not the style of one’s laughing at issue here at all. The mocking of laughter is a substitute for mocking others’ values and priorities. For the past decade a lot of what we in the “correct,” left-hand quadrants have found bitterly, derisively funny is them. What they in the right-hand quadrants have found bitterly, derisively funny is us. How can we abide these oppositional affinities? 

That’s sort of my point in all of this: I won’t abide it anymore. We can take online quizzes to help us define ourselves in ways we’ve already decided upon, but we’re not safe inside our quadrants. We’re all living in the same place, and it’s the humorless cynics who want us to believe there are no commonalities or possibilities for connection beyond our outlined perimeters. And remember, we’re living in the age of climate disaster: we’re all mixed up in a rotating mess of hot and cold and wet and dry at any given time. This dismantles the functionality of my Funny Compass™ even more. Which is fine. Because whatever climate you claim to come from or belong to, whatever tests you take or create for yourself, whatever your purported “final destination” may be on any travel day, no one knows where the hell we’re going. While we’re still here, wherever that may be, my hope is that rather than boxing folks out of my comedy, I invite as many people as possible to laugh with and at me. 

Which reminds me: I left out an interaction between me and the curly-haired woman in Fresno. She eventually lost her sense of toilet paper humor in the long line, and tried commiserating with me about the TSA’s attitude: “They’re just barking orders at us this morning, aren’t they?” I mumbled something about none of us having had a proper cup of coffee yet, and she shrugged. Then I noticed our luggage emerging from the rolling scanner, back-to-back; our silver suitcases were nearly identical. Without thinking the bit through, I waved my arm Vanna White-style, offering the woman to collect her luggage first. “This suitcase is yours.” Then I gestured to the one with the Saints scarf wrapped around the handle. “Mine is the one with the bomb in it.”

This punchline, I can see writing it out now, is colder and drier than my usual humor—perhaps catering to my audience?—though I performed it with my typical wet panache. Like I said, the borders of the Funny Compass™, like the borders of our politics, aren’t as rigid as we might think. I don’t even know why I was trying to be funny just then, why I tossed such a bold invitation toward someone unlikely to accept it. Was I testing her? Was I begging to get thrown on the ground by irritable TSA at 5 a.m.? Would I die for a dumbass, ill-timed joke? The answers to all of the above are “yes, and.” But the answers don’t even matter, because the curly-haired woman laughed her ass off. She chortled. And it really was the prettiest sound. 

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Brooke Champagne is the author of Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy, published with the Crux Series in Literary Nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press.  She was awarded the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay, and her work has been selected as Notable in several editions of the Best American Essays anthology series. She is the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellowship in Prose.  She lives in Tuscaloosa, where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA Program at the University of Alabama.

Dec 12: Susan Briante, No Where Is Outside Mississippi

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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No Where is Outside Mississippi

Susan Briante

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Last spring amidst a wave of protests at college campuses, a group of students at Emory University raised tents to call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war and an end to the construction of the “Atlanta Public Training Center,” dubbed “Cop City.” They also created a document, “Emory is Everywhere,” that I have returned to recently at the end of this long dark year. It begins:

As the Palestine Solidarity movement rips across college campuses, college administrators and government bureaucrats are rushing to denounce anyone taking action as an “outside agitator.” Those who grease the gears of the war machine think that this rhetoric will erode public support for bold actions at Emory. They are wrong.

45 years after the Camp David Accords—an infamously botched, imperialist plan for peace between Israel and Egypt with no input from Palestinians—was orchestrated by an Emory faculty alum President Carter, we observe that there is nowhere on Earth “outside” of Emory University. 

The manifesto continues to document the many ways the students believe their university is implicated in broader struggles for social justice: 

Emory University has the highest tuition, the lowest acceptance rate, and by far the highest endowment of any institution in Georgia. Economic barriers, infamously racist standardized testing, and nepotism have barred many from studying at Emory. To students in Atlanta and beyond—we invite you to struggle with us…

Emory’s $11 billion endowment, the 11th highest in the country, is an outsized influence in Atlanta’s economy. While economic inequality widens in the city, Emory remains a bastion of the rich. To the restaurant workers, house cleaners, gig workers, and all proletarians—we invite you to struggle with us….

In 2020, Emory University laid off or furloughed over 1500 employees. To those who are no longer affiliated with the university—we invite you to struggle with us…

I am not interested in this document because I harbor any particular animosity toward Emory University, another corporatized institution of higher learning, not unlike the one for which I work. Without minimizing the students’ grievances, the gesture in “Emory is Everywhere” that levels blame at the institution feels less important to me (at a time when there is plenty of blame to go around) than the invitation it becomes. The authors of this manifesto rhetorically open their encampment and struggle to make room for other students, the working class, the unemployed, and the unhoused. Their observation that “there is nowhere on Earth ‘outside’ of Emory University” is what gets me. It does not read as the kind of “we’re-the-center-of-the-universe” egocentrism so often used to dismiss the views of the young. Instead of sounding like the earliest astronomers, who thought the universe revolved around the earth, the authors of “Emory is Everywhere” remind me of contemporary physicists who understand that the far-flung universe and every particle within it are bound by webs of strings, a weft of dark matter, and “spooky” attractions between the atomic particles that make up ourselves and our world.

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In January 1971, Fanny Lou Hamer addressed a predominantly white audience at the University of Wisconsin in Madison to raise money for her Freedom Farm Cooperative, which grew food for the poor of Sunflower county in her home state of Mississippi. Nixon was just two years in office and a little less than three years from impeachment. The Vietnam War continued to rage. Hamer, a sharecropper and civil rights activist, rose to national attention combating efforts to deny Blacks the right to vote and founding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the Mississippi state Democratic party’s efforts to block African American participation. She spoke at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, calling for mandatory integrated state delegations, and organized the Freedom Summer, bringing hundreds of college students, Black and white, to register African American voters in the segregated South. 

By the time she arrived in Wisconsin in 1971, Hamer had turned her attention to poverty, raising money to purchase Food Stamps for those in need and expanding the Freedom Farm where she and others raised livestock and produce to alleviate hunger. During her speech, she reminded her white audience of the work of other white Civil Rights activists, such as Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goldman, who were brutally murdered in 1964 along with James Chaney by Ku Klux Klan members near Philadelphia, Mississippi. She told the Wisconsin crowd: “And when they died, they didn’t just die for me, but they died for you because your freedom is shackled in chains to mine. And until I am free, you are not free either.”

Hamer continued: “And if you think you are free, you drive down to Mississippi with your Wisconsin license plate, and you will see what I am talking about.”

No where is outside Mississippi, she might have said.

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In the wake of the election to the US presidency of a convicted criminal, who tried to overturn the results of a previous presidential election, which he lost, and who (as a candidate) has threatened the rights of large swaths of the US population, I think a lot about the struggles that will bind and implicate us in the months ahead. The ideas of both ancestor and student activists will be necessary in our fight against policies and rhetorics that incite and divide. Hate is no “spooky” relationship. It is often very clear and estranging, a blade and gun. It causes despots to rise and bombs to fall. 

Atlanta police and Georgia State troopers tore down tents and arrested 28 student and faculty protestors at Emory University in April. As at many other universities, Emory’s administration created new rules limiting protest and prohibiting encampments. And yet, Emory students gathered for a pro-Palestinian demonstration as recently as September.

The Israeli government’s assault on Gaza continues with the Palestine Health Ministry estimating more than 43,000 Palestinians killed at least half of whom were women and children.

Physicists tell us that “spooky” actions or “quantum entanglements” exist between particles such that “aspects of one particle of an entangled pair depend on aspects of the other particle, no matter how far apart they are or what lies between them,” according to physicist Andreas Muller. These entanglements suggest that “when you measure something about one particle in an entangled pair, you immediately know something about the other particle, even if they are millions of light years apart.” This relationship has been proven by strings of equations and decades of experiments; yet there remains no simple explanation for it. It exists beyond our laws or comprehension.

I find comfort that there is so much we still do not know about our universe or the rules that govern it or each other. I find comfort that we still can’t predict what will happen when a young Palestinian uploads a video in Gaza or a college student in Georgia picks up a pen, when a Black sharecropper and organizer speaks to a predominantly white audience, or white college students organize voters in Mississippi. It is impossible to know what relationships formed in protest and solidarity might produce in terms of new ways of imagining our social dynamics, community, and connections, how new social challenges will engender new alliances and solutions.

In 1971, Hamer ended her speech in Madison (which was not read from the page but spoken from the heart: “I’m just here to rap and tell you what it is and to tell you like it is” ) recounting a time she had just been released from prison where she was beaten until her “body was hard as metal.” Still, she asked to be taken to see the Statue of Liberty:

I told the man that I was riding with that day, I said, “I would like to see this statue turned around to face her own problems. And the torch out of her hand with her head bowed because we have as many problems in this country as they trying to point to in other countries.”

I like to imagine the statue as Hamer wanted to see her: turning her head to look toward Manhattan, dropping her arm. If we could uncoil ourselves beyond the gestures of self-mythology and postures of our identities, if we could turn to face our own problems, what would we see? 

There is nowhere on Earth ‘outside’ of Emory University. Everywhere is Mississippi. It’s 1964 and 2024. Our freedom is shackled to one another’s, none of us are free until all of us are free:

to speak at the Democratic Convention, to vote, to make choices about our own bodies. Free from bombs and brutality and hunger.

It seems so simple and so impossible. 

It is way past time we all drove down to Mississippi with our Wisconsin license plates. Get in the car.

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Quotes from Fanny Lou Hamer’s University of Wisconsin speech come from Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (University Press of Mississippi, 2011).

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Susan Briante is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument and of the forthcoming 13 Questions for the Next Economy.

Dec 11: Alison Hawthorne Deming, Of Loneliness

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Of Loneliness

Alison Hawthorne Deming

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I meant to write a letter to Richard Deming after zooming to his reading and talk last May in celebration of his stellar book This Exquisite Loneliness, but I did not. Blame it on my exquisite loneliness. Don’t get me wrong. I am gregarious and outgoing. Like my golden doodle. I love people. But I savor being alone. Or maybe I am just accustomed to being alone. Even as a child, I was a loner. Other kids lived in neighborhoods and hung out together in gravel pits or play grounds. I felt like an outsider if I joined them on occasion. Our house was set atop a hilltop surrounded with woods. I didn’t really understand hanging out with friends as a norm. Sure, there was school. But even there, I felt solitary, and one teacher saw it in me. In third grade, Miss Dwyer picked me to play the rebellious mouse that improvises a dance outside the circle my classmates rigidly performed as positions on an imaginary clockface. The tune was Leroy Anderson’s “The Syncopated Clock.” The worse aspects of my childhood loneliness were the night terrors. Sitting up in bed at night with the light on, terrified if I turned it off and closed my eyes—what could stop me from dying? I was ashamed of the feeling and did not seek comfort from my parents. That isolation within the intimacy of family was the central mystery of my childhood.

     The old saw holds solitude to be a blessing, a contemplative space, a refuge. One chooses solitude, but not loneliness. It chooses one, surprises one, leads to melancholy, depression, and obsessing on mortality. Loneliness is rarely invited. The government warns of an epidemic of loneliness. But I have learned to savor my loneliness in acknowledgement of the existential truth that we are each a miraculous and lonely moment in an infinitude of space-time, a reality we all share on the inner though it’s hard to share on the outer. 

     When I saw the title of Richard Deming’s book, This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity, I leapt for it. I knew we would be kindred. We are not related, except probably somewhere back in the 1600’s, when ancestral Demings settled in Connecticut, finding the Massachusetts colony a bit too restrictive. The book is a blend of memoir detailing the author’s struggles with addiction and an exploration of six writers and artists whose loneliness inspired them to find beauty, meaning, and acts of compassion at our shared vulnerability. The cast of characters offers a sense of the capaciousness of Deming’s endeavor: among them, Zora Neale Hurston, Melanie Klein, Walter Benjamin, Walker Evans, and Rod Serling.

     The turn toward endless fragmentation in our digital lives and cruelty in our political climate invites worsening experiences of loneliness. Loneliness is emotional, psychological, and cultural. It drives us to desire connection with others. In his chapter on Benjamin, Deming writes:

Growing up in an affluent Jewish household in Berlin and its outskirts, Benjamin enjoyed an idyllic childhood. Raised thinking that there would be cultural and therefore financial support for his work as a critic and scholar, he hadn’t anticipated that there would be a shift in intellectual life with the rise of fascism. In other words, he lived to see the opportunities for intellectual pursuits shrink and close. How could he not read that as a world indicating it no longer valued what he believed to be so vitally important? He was cast out of the world he grew up in because he couldn’t help but pursue a life of the mind. This is probably the worst feeling of loneliness: to live in a time that simply doesn’t want you.

Of Serling:

No matter what the situation, The Twilight Zone entered the lives of people where they actually were. In reaching out and recognizing the pain countless people were feeling—displacement, alienation, isolation—Serling was creating a gesture that might make people feel included and acknowledged. A shared fear of loneliness can be a way of feeling connected to others.

“The place is here. The time is now,” says Serling in the opening lines of “Where is Everybody?” He then adds, “And the journey into the shadows which we are about to watch could be our journey.” There, in that moment of connection, there, in that it could be any of us, there, in that insistence of the law of substitution, there, if for no other reason, is where we can learn to free ourselves from the shame that surrounds feeling lonely.

And there is where the prose sings, as it does throughout the book, pulling the reader along on its tide. Deming writes with beautiful clarity, immediacy, compassion, and openness. I love the way the book is the essaying marriage of feeling and thinking. I found myself falling into memories of my childhood, replaying, reassessing, “fleshing out,” as Deming writes of Benjamin, “the memories that were the DNA of who he became.” I remember my now departed colleague Richard Shelton telling students that memoir was always driven by the question, “How did I become the person that I am?”

     “He’s dead.” That’s the book’s opening line. Okay, says the reader. This is not going to be  a stultifying book of scholarly theory. He’s speaking of actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman. A friend with whom Deming got sober in the 1990s has called with the news about Hoffman’s death from an overdose. “But he’s sober,” he says to his friend. “That’s what everyone thought,” the friend replies. When he gets the call, Deming is writing about Hoffman’s role in Synecdoche, New York, a brutal synchronicity. “I’m no actor,” he writes, “but I know those parts too well myself.” The death becomes a catalyst for the author to explore various dimensions of loneliness out of his own sense of personal urgency. “I recognized the latent potency of loneliness.” 

     Of himself, he writes:

Rochester may have been where I dried out, but it was not a cure for my loneliness. I was left on my own to practice drums and piano hours every day, making my way into the school to take my classes, and then drift back to my parents’ house, where I stayed up for hours, hiding bottles of wine though I was supposed to be getting off the sauce. Every week, after my lessons, I went to the art-house cinema and saw whatever was playing. Sitting alone in the dark, whole worlds flashing across the screen, I fell into other people’s lives, other people’s stories. Since in being lonely we feel only the throes of emotional distance, it is through art, books, music, movies, that we can collect our glimpses of others’ lives, that we can collect our fellow travelers.

So I guess this is my letter to Richard Deming, a letter-as-essay so that others can be gathered into the theater of my appreciation for a remarkable and tender book that so movingly speaks of our loneliness and what draws us together.

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Alison Hawthorne Deming has two books coming this spring. The poetry collection Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower (Red Hen Press) and the anthology The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss & Connection (Storey Press). She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona.

Dec 10: David Carlin, it's like you want to skip mourning and go straight to gratitude

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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it's like you want to skip mourning and go straight to gratitude

David Carlin

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1

she said, and I wanted to say—

—

but she said, as she always does,

that is the end of our time for today.

I noticed she had almost a laugh in her voice on the ‘skip’ line.

I wanted to say—

—

See I’ve forgotten now. It was going to be a kind of joke.

Maybe, like: Yes! And what’s wrong with that?

2

I’m leaving my job in two weeks.

My job I’ve been at for 19 years. The newish boss of my boss’s boss, when he arrived a couple of years ago, had the idea of paper bag lunches (they were for listening; to the staff). I went along to one and told him things used to be much better at the university in the old days, in some basic, simple ways. Like how the finance person was called Lyn, and she had her office just nearby, and you could stand at the door and say, I’ve lost the receipt, Lyn, and she’d roll her eyes and say, are you sure?!, and you’d say, I’ve looked everywhere, and she’d shake her head ruefully, because you’d done it again, and she’d say, well, you’re going to have to sign a Stat Dec, David, and you’d say, sorry, Lyn, but thanks!, and she’d say, oh the things I do. But now that’s all been stamped out, I told my boss’s boss’s boss, by which I mean human interactions—those itty bitty laughaday things—between the academics and the finance people, or the other administrators, because they’ve all been CENTRALISED, the latter, into a humming hive of efficiency on some other galaxy, far, far away, that you can only reach by RAISING A TICKET, and thereby initiating a tortuous exchange of emails filled with misconstruals, or by chatting with Lot the Bot. Because some genius consultant—

and he said—the boss of my boss’s boss—how long have you been working here?

and I said, about 16 years (because that was what it was then)

and he nodded his head slowly like that was a very big number and said, that’s a long time!

3

and I thought: is it?

a long time, is it?

I’m leaving to become a freelance person again.

I’m leaving to become an independent writer and artist again.

I’m not retiring, except for tax and pension purposes, in which regard I’m definitely retiring. I’ve saved up enough to live on; between L and I, we’ve saved up enough, and inherited some (lucky us), and saved that too,

But apart from that, I’m transitioning to a new phase.

How lucky am I to be in this position? Of having this choice. (Very lucky.) 

4

I’m seeing it as a second chance. I’ve been reading a book from the local library, on second chances, and also on Shakespeare and Freud, by Adam Philips and Steven Greenblatt. I’m reading it because I heard a podcast of Torrey Peters giving a lecture about another book by Steven Greenblatt. His idea of strategic opacity had led her to thinking about how characters in novels (or anywhere) are more interesting if there’s something fundamentally unexplained about them. Because that’s what people in real life are like. You can’t understand why they do what they do, even though you try and try. Anyhow, I loved what Torrey was saying, because I’ve been working on a novel, which I’ve never tried to do before, because I thought for some reason I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t write fiction, I could only write nonfiction, I couldn’t make things up. Because how would you decide what to make up?, is how I used to think of it. Which is crazy, I know. But that’s why I needed this second chance. And the chance of thinking about it as a second chance only came about by chance. Because, inspired by Torrey, I looked up Steven Greenblatt in the library app (which I love almost more than life itself, now I’ve resolved to stop buying so many books), and they had the (Torrey)/Opacity/Greenblatt book, but they ALSO had the Philips/Second Chance/Greenblatt book. And I thought I’d read the second first.

Psychoanalysis, says Philips, offers the prospect of a second chance. There’s a way to redescribe the past to understand it differently, and thereby not be stuck in the same script, over and over (what Freud called repetition compulsion). But it is scary. Often, we prefer the scripts we are familiar with, because at least they are scripts, there is something prescribed for us, rather than the radical openness of the unwritten future, in which we would have to improvise.

I can see my life as a long struggle between the part of me that believes in second chances and the part of me that doesn’t. If you don’t believe in second chances, you are fatalistic, and stuck in cycles of despair or violence, which—despair and violence—are different versions of the same thing. In the very last pages of the Philips/Greenblatt book, Philips writes:  ‘In Shakespeare’s plays—as in most dramas, and all psychoanalytic treatments—the story begins with something going wrong; and in the Shakespearian tragedies…repair is pre-empted and displaced by revenge, revenge…seeming to be the alternative to, the refusal of, reparation. The escalation of violence preferred to the understanding of what might have prompted it, revenge always forecloses the possibility of new experience, of discovery. Should we choose revenge, then, which is always more of the same, or a second chance which is not?’  

5

It’s not like I’m leaving totally. I’m still going to be involved. I’m still going to have PhD supervisions. I’m still going to be involved in projects. Don’t think of it like I’m leaving, I tell my colleagues, I tell myself. I’m, like, just taking on a new position.

My friend, a novelist, said, why don’t you write fiction, David? But she also said, how are you going to feel about leaving, David? You’ve always loved structure.

As if she knew something I didn’t.

The David character in the novel has always loved structure. But now he wants to take a second chance. 

6

Thank goodness for local libraries. Let’s not bomb them or take away their funding.

7

At my going-away morning-tea—

—I’m thinking that sounds like mourning tea, she said—

I’m going to tell a story about how when I first arrived at the university

all those years ago

I was given an office at the end of a corridor on the top floor of a building

which was in fact temporary structures placed on the roof.

ATCO huts, we called them.

They are still there, like many temporary structures.

And I guess all structures are temporary in the long run.

But my office was special because it was off a side-corridor, and at the far end of my office was another door, which led out onto the roof.

The door was to provide access for maintenance people, and it had a small sign on it saying 

don’t otherwise use it,

but it wasn’t locked

and it was in the days before swipes, and before surveillance cameras,

and you could open it and look outside

where you could see that there were walkways leading across the roofs of this row of buildings on the city campus,

walkways which didn’t look exceptionally unsafe,

and you could go out there for walks

on the roof

sometimes

and discover all sorts of things.

Which, I’m going to say at the morning tea, I loved about this place:

that they gave you an office with an extra door

that led out onto the roof

and nobody stopped you going out there

even when you shouldn’t.

8

mind you, I’ve lost my voice, so I might not be saying anything at the

mourning tea

I’ve lost my voice and haven’t been able to sleep.

She asked me: what do you think mourning is?

And I thought, well if I knew that—

but then I tried to think of an answer.

Since I like to say yes, rather than no, whenever possible.

I said, I think it’s about being sad, and loss, and separation; it’s about separating

from something that you’ve lost.

and then there was a bit in the conversation

that I can’t remember—

until she said: maybe that’s all part of it?

*

David Carlin’s new braided memoir with Peta Murray, How to Dress for Old Age, is out in early 2026. His previous books include The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet (2019), co-written with Nicole Walker. Co-President of NonfictioNOW, he is based in Melbourne, Australia where he is a Professor at RMIT University. And makes ceramics.

Dec 9: Emily Podwoiski, Blanche's Inferno

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Blanche's Inferno

Emily Podwoiski

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A Valentine Girl is Blanche Elizabeth Devereaux, whose initials spell the word “BED.” Blanche’s friends call her a tramp, a 50-year-old mattress, a hooker, a friendly port to the navy, and a slut puppy. But Blanche doesn’t mind: “I’m the biggest slut,” she says like an affirmation.
     In the first episode of The Golden Girls, Blanche sashays onto the screen wearing a shell-pink dress with sequin shoulder pads. She throws on a mink stole even though it’s June in Miami. The contour of her bronzer is so stark that you can almost see the brushstrokes, as if to say, Yes, I’m wearing make-up! Isn’t it beautiful?
     “You look like a prostitute,” Sophia says.
     “Sophia! The things you say,” Rose frowns. “She didn’t mean that, Blanche.”
     “Of course I mean it,” Sophia spits back. “Look at her, my cab driver would fall in love.”
     Estelle Getty once said of Rue McClanahan, who played Blanche: “More people fell in love with her than you can possibly imagine.” Maybe this explains McClanahan’s six marriages (a runner-up to Elizabeth Taylor, who married eight times—twice to Richard Burton). Bea Arthur said of McClanahan, with some discernment: “She’s the total romantic. The total romantic. But then comes the light of day and she thinks, Holy god, what have I done here?”
     McClanahan must have related to Blanche, who’s always in love. Or in heat. When Blanche talks about men, her speech spirals like a whirlwind: “All that manliness in one room, in one crowded room, one hot crowded room, everybody’s steamy bodies all pressed up against each other...”
     “Blanche! Blanche, Blanche, Blanche,” Dorothy says. “You’re about to set off the smoke detector.”

*

There’s a special place in Hell for the horny. In Dante’s Inferno, it’s the second circle of Hell.
     Here, Dante and Virgil stumble upon a hurricane of shrieking, weeping sluts: Cleopatra, Dido, Helen of Troy, and finally, Paolo and Francesca. If Dante had looked closer, he might’ve seen Blanche sail by.
     “Love led us to one death,” Francesca explains to Dante. She was unhappily married to Paolo’s brother, Gianciotto, who eventually murders the adulterous couple out of jealousy. Francesca speaks with regret, even though her first kiss with Paolo unfolded in the most romantic way possible: over a book. Francesca laments, “Often those words urged our eyes to meet and colored our cheeks, but it was a single moment that undid us.” While tracing their fingers over the printed kiss between Lancelot and Guinevere, they chose to imitate the art. “We read no more that day,” she says.
     Francesca is the woman who loves too much. She loses herself in the affair and gives into her basest desires. Ultimately, she dies for Paolo because she’s a drooly slut puppy, and that’s why her soul is eternally doomed.
     Why then, in Romantic renditions, do Paolo and Francesca look so blissful swirling around in Hell together? In William Blake’s engraving The Circle of the Lustful, cast-off lovers rise in one calm, crescent wave. Bodies press up against each other. Above the storm, Paolo and Francesca reach for one another; their arms blend into one.
     In Ary Scheffer’s painting The Ghosts of Paolo and Francesca Appear to Dante and Virgil, the couple is captured in what appears to be a postcoital scene. Francesca looks like a silent movie star, a long-haired ingénue clinging to her man. A bedsheet falls from her body. Her arms wrap around Paolo, who uses the fabric to shield his eyes from the storm.
     I imagine Francesca’s death, her eyes opening and closing against the wind as her vision adjusts to the light of Hell. As she reaches for Paolo’s hand, she asks herself, “Holy god, what have I done here?” to which Blanche, swimming through a sea of nude bodies, might respond: “Holy god, we got into Heaven!”

*

Emily Podwoiski writes about love, loss, and the literary roots of Valentine’s Day. In her essays, she obsesses over Old Hollywood Bombshells, Emily Dickinson’s love letters, and all things valentine. She holds her MA in English from Wayne State University and her MFA in Creative Writing from Oregon State University. Currently, she resides in Corvallis, Oregon, but Metro Detroit will always be her home. In her spare time, you can find Emily collaging, teaching writing courses at OSU, making pierogis, and learning how to roller skate.

Blanche Illustration by Erica Podwoiski

Dec 8: Cameron Carr, On Terminals and Turning Pages

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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On Terminals and Turning Pages

Cameron Carr

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“An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.” —Virginia Woolf

*

London: July 18-21

George Eliot is going to ruin Christmas, but right now it’s still summer, I have not lost two and a half days of my life trying to travel internationally during the largest IT outage in history, I have not used Delta’s paltry apology flight credits to subsidize my Christmas flights, and I have not read any of Middlemarch. Yet I insist it is important to see George Eliot’s grave while visiting my partner’s twin sister in London, because we happen to be in George Eliot’s cemetery, and she is someone I see as important, like I have to use her full name on every reference. But though it feels important to see her grave, none of us have read any George Eliot. I take a quick photo of the tombstone and we move on. Later, we visit a bookstore and my partner’s sister buys a copy of Eliot’s—George Eliot’s—Middlemarch. I consider getting one too, but say I’ll check it out from the library instead, maybe because I don’t feel like carrying its 800-some pages with me while I travel. I promise to have it read by Christmas though, so we can talk about it when we see each other next.

     Three days later, I leave England alone, starting on foot from a cottage on the outskirts of Bath at 5 a.m. London time. I follow the Avon River toward the station where I’ll catch a train to London before taking the tube to the airport. On my flight to Atlanta, the attendants serve “Mile High Tea”: two varieties of triangular sandwiches with cream cheese fillings between crustless bread, a scone with jam and “clotted cream” (whatever that means), and a cocoberry blush chocolate truffle. The whole trip is wholesome and delightful.

*

Atlanta: July 21-22

Until landing, when the pilot announces our luggage had been left in the U.K. Then the flight delays begin. Soon my connection to Tucson is canceled with no replacement. An hour later, a Delta customer service representative tells me the earliest available flight is in three days and there are no open hotels, not that Delta would pay for one anyway. She recommends I “find a corner and curl up.”

     I don’t curl up in a corner for the night. I spend the next two hours on Delta customer service hold, standing in line for another Delta customer service counter while thoroughly reviewing the official Delta Cancellations and Refunds policies, before booking a budget hotel. It takes ninety seconds to walk from the back of the line to the front. I know because I filmed it on my way out. Tomorrow, people will tell me they waited six hours.

     It’s 11:12 p.m. when I start for the hotel. However, the Plane Train is out of service, meaning I have to walk from the international terminal in F Concourse to the rideshare pickup zone “a short walk from North and South baggage claim,” at the opposite end, long ways, of the 6.8 million-square-foot terminal complex. Despite my phone dying two minutes before my scheduled pickup time, I manage to find my driver at 1:23 a.m. local time—or, 6:23 a.m. London time, thirteen hours after I began my journey—three hours after I had expected to be home.

     I will not dwell on my hotel stay beyond saying that there were cigarette holes in my comforter, my room’s door lock did not seem to work, and complimentary breakfast consisted of a drawer of white bread. My aim here is not to complain. My aim here is not to badmouth Delta. (I did eventually receive reimbursement for all my additional expenses, though not for my time.) My aim here is to confess that I love the airport, and that I even loved the fourteen hours I spent in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport the next day. By 8 a.m., I had Taco Bell and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando open at a seat between two tables filled with families sleeping face down on their folded arms. It was great, if I didn’t think about it too much.  

     “The philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy,” Woolf writes early in Orlando. I think she means that happiness can be split easily by melancholy, but I find it true too that sometimes melancholy is capable of cutting quick to happiness. Though a part of me did wish that before leaving London I had gotten a copy of Middlemarch to read.

*

Phoenix: November 27

Which is why I am carrying Middlemarch with me now, four months later, on the pre-Thanksgiving drive from Tucson to the Phoenix airport: because I do some of my best reading in the airport and because I’m running out of time to read this book before Christmas. In truth, an airport is one of my favorite places to read—in truth, I generally like being in airports, which I know is not a universal feeling. But I like airports because in them I get to be somewhat untethered, which is maybe a strange thing to say about a place where it is prohibited to leave your personal and/or carry-on items unattended, but it’s how I feel. 

     Airports are liminal spaces, between two modes of existence. On one end there are the stresses of work, chores, errands, making food, cleaning up. On the other end, particularly with holidays and visiting family, there are the stresses of sleeping on couches and deservedly retired pillows, waking on someone else’s schedule, eating an unfamiliar diet, performing a select and approachable version of oneself, performing a constantly sociable and friendly version of oneself. However much I identify with these complaints (if you’re reading this Joe and Paige: sleeping in Zion’s bed actually rocked, and had I not known it was meant for a two-year-old, I wouldn’t have guessed it—though the log cabin-style safety railings (cute!) are a bit of a giveaway), however much ordinary life is a burden or vacation is an escape, I know that between these I will have the airport. 

     In an airport I feel I can be left alone, or I feel that it is reasonable to dwell alone when surrounded by people and commotion, which makes it a good place to read. Maybe sometimes it is hard to read without a timer, or sometimes it is hard to read when I’m always checking a timer. At the airport, the staff make an overhead announcement when it’s time for me to stop reading and start boarding, which really only means that I have to stop sitting and start reading standing up, which sometimes I do anyways because I get stiff sitting in the airport and on the airplane and in the car. In an airport, I seem to float, untethered from time—at least between TSA and final boarding.

*

Detroit: November 27

But at Thanksgiving, things are not working out. The first problem is Brett. My stupid brother with his stupid idea that we align our connecting flights and his stupid Delta Sky Club membership with its stupid free buffet and its stupid luxury seating.

     By the time I land in Detroit and find the Sky Club, Brett is already a few drinks deep. For some reason, everything is hued with green: his green Outdoor Voices hat, gray quarter-zip with green interior trim, olive pants. Even the Sky Club’s leather seats are a dark green—emerald almost. “I think,” says Middlemarch’s Dorothea as she and her sister compare the gems in their dead mother’s jewelry, “emerald is more beautiful than any of them.” She offers her sister all of it—except the emeralds. “They look like fragments of heaven,” she says, which is what my brother seems to think of the Delta Sky Club: a fragment of heaven, with its free drinks, free buffet, members-only access, elevated seating, elevated location. After entering, the doors close behind us and we start up an escalator—to heaven. 

     Inside, at the summit, we can only see the people in the terminal below, not hear them, which I realize is what I like: being in a place among people. I like reading in airports in the mutual discomfort of the terminal, all of us out of our element, waiting. It is a wonder we do not call airport terminals waiting rooms. Instead we call them terminals: ends. I do not go to airports for ends.

     When we board our late-night flight to Buffalo, I can’t get the reading light to work. I fumble in the dark until I accidentally press the call light as we begin takeoff and a weary flight attendant announces to the whole plane that “we are not able to come to you at this time, please press your call button again to turn off the call light.” So I don’t read. George Eliot sits in the dark. 

*

Buffalo / Corning / Ellicottville: November 28-30

The next problem is Thanksgiving. No one wants you to sit quietly and read at a family gathering. So I don’t.

*

Detroit: December 1

By Sunday, when Brett and I part ways back in Detroit, I’m only halfway through book two—there are eight “books” within Middlemarch, each around one hundred pages—but Christmas décor is “spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.” On my flight to Phoenix, Christmas nears and ominous debts are coming due. It is just three days after Thanksgiving, but as I find a bench just shy of baggage claim, I fear that George Eliot is bound to ruin Christmas.

     Middlemarch isn’t really my type of book. I don’t always love the nineteenth-century novel, or realism, or English aristocracy, or the classics. But I like reading it anyways, trying it at least. A good book can be a gate, because it opens to something or somewhere. And really it would be more accurate to place my airport reading there—not at a terminal, but a gate, the place where I do most of my waiting. A gate leads to something. And that’s why I read a book, especially a brick-sized one like Middlemarch (modular brick dimensions: 3.625” x 2.25” x 7.625”; Middlemarch Penguin Classics dimensions: 5.1” x 1.4” x 7.75”): to see where it might take me. That’s also why I like, sometimes, to be out in a place, among other beings, waiting at a gate. And if you know where you’re going, if you’ve already been there, if you’ve got a cozy corner with your name on it and some throw pillows indented with your body, if nothing is uncertain or unknown or open-ended, is it really a gate?

     Still, in case I don’t like Middlemarch, I also packed my annotated copy of Tone by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno, maybe because I want to think about what the tone inside an airport is, and I remember that Samatar and Zambreno, calling themselves the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere, are interested in the tones of spaces and in tones as spaces. “Tone is a window one looks out of and also a window one looks into,” they write. A window, like a sort of gate, an opening, an end of one space that is the beginning of another, a between, a joining. 

     “We were drawn to the subject of tone,” their committee writes, “because its vibrations informed us that we belonged to it; it did not belong to us.”

*

Atlanta: July 22 / Nashville: July 22-23 / Salt Lake City: July 23 / Phoenix: July 23 / Tucson: July 23

Which is what the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport informs me. When I settle into the pre-terminal food court the morning after my arrival, I still have more than twelve hours till my next flight—twelve hours to wait, living in this tone. And then I have a layover, a couple flight delays, a final flight around 12:30 a.m. (that’s Nashville time—in London it is 6:30 a.m., more than 48 hours after I first left). But to get home Tuesday morning instead of Wednesday night I had to fly to Phoenix instead of Tucson, and the flight delays mean I’ve missed the last Greyhound, so when I land at 2 a.m. Arizona time (which is 5 a.m. for the eastern U.S., which is 10 a.m. for the U.K., which is all irrelevant to my body’s loss of any sense of time or functional circadian rhythm), I still have two hours to wait before the two-hour ride to Tucson before the thirty-minute walk to my apartment. From England, my partner texts me pictures of a cloudy morning tour of the Roman baths in Bath. Meanwhile, I slouch at a metal table and read Virginia Woolf’s fictional biography of Orlando. Over the course of a few hundred years—from the 1500s into 1928—he becomes she, carriages become motor cars, and Orlando ages from sixteen to thirty-eight. When, for Orlando, the clock struck four (p.m., London), “she kept…complete composure.” When, for me, the clock strikes four (a.m., Phoenix), I drool onto a Greyhound bus. For both of us, time passes in strange ways. We are “braced and strung up by the present moment.” I hardly sleep. I read. I wait.

*

Somewhere: Sometime: I Don’t Know: Does It Really Matter?

Back—forward—at the Phoenix airport in late November, I wait for a friend to pick me up. I read Middlemarch, still with hundreds of pages to go. Will George Eliot ruin Christmas? I’m not sure. The first Christmas passed without event, but later Christmases within the book will be “threatening” and “dreary,” though I haven’t really read those pages yet, they’re in book seven and I’m still on book three. Right now, I’m just peeking ahead.

     My phone buzzes. My friend says she’s close, so I walk outside.

     The clock strikes twelve on Orlando as “the cold breeze of the present brushe[s] her face with its little breath of fear.”

     From the Greyhound window, I watch the rising sun make mountains into blush-backed silhouettes.

     In the final lines, George Eliot swears that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.” She offers tribute to “the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

     At George Eliot’s grave, I walk away.

     In Tucson, at 7 a.m., more than two and a half days after leaving London, I step inside my door.

     Stepping outside, at the Phoenix airport, I watch a man scream into the passenger door of a stopped car. Only after a few unmeasurable moments does it become clear that he’s yelling “BACK UP! MY FOOT! MY FOOT!” No one knows what to do after the car rolls back and the young man leans against its side. Some people laugh and glance around complicitly. I wait for my ride. Time passes. The holiday approaches. We open the next door.

*

Cameron Carr is a writer from Ohio. His writing appears in Longreads, The Missouri Review, The Hedgehog Review, and elsewhere.

Dec 7: Leah Mensch, Hard Evidence Had Nothing to Do with My Life

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Hard Evidence Had Nothing to Do with My Life

Leah Mensch

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I’m on the UC San Diego campus where dirt paths weave through valleys in La Jolla pressing up against the skyline like an old lover, where gas costs five dollars a gallon and the sky is an unblemished blue, only a few miles from the ocean. Students walk around with books in their arms, jackets tied around their waists, and the renowned Theodore Geisel library stands tall over campus, like an archaic vessel anticipating its own collapse in debilitating paranoia. Most of the reading floors are similarly brutal, located underground, and the library houses its namesake’s archive—Dr. Seuss. 

     On the fourth floor, the elevator doors open and suddenly, somehow, I’m standing inside a quote. UNLESS SOMEONE LIKE YOU CARES A WHOLE AWFUL LOT, NOTHING IS GOING TO GET BETTER. IT’S NOT. This, in an aggressive red comic-sans font, is wrapped around the entire circumference of the elevator. The woman next to me coughs aggressively without covering her mouth. Seasonal allergies, she moans. Global covid spike, I think to myself. I’ve been walking in circles trying to find special collections, but I keep returning to the same place in the library over and over again, where the walls are papered with Truffula tree murals and quotes from The Lorax and Green Eggs and Ham. It’s easier to pretend an uncovered cough is making me tic than to admit the truth: this is my last-ditch attempt to find the uncut draft of Kate Braverman’s 1979 novel, Lithium for Medea. It occurred to me in the elevator that I had exhausted all other leads. What would I do if I didn’t find the draft? And what would I do if I did? I tried not to think about this. 

*

The origins of my obsession with Braverman, my desire to find her manuscript, exist at once rather than separately. This started in late 2019 when Kate Braverman died in Santa Fe and left little behind. This started when her Jewish grandparents left Russia and tried to silently carve themselves new in the United States. This started when my Jewish grandparents left Iraq, when they came to the United States to forget. And this started in 1979, when Kate Braverman, so the story goes, slept with a bayonet under her bed. This was after she un-enrolled in graduate school at UC Irvine, after she flew from Los Angeles to New York to negotiate edits on her debut novel, Lithium for Medea, with Harper and Row, after her therapist allegedly told her she was too immature for love, after news spread that the Hillside Strangler was lurking around her neighborhood in Echo Park, after her cat ran away, after her father—by some sliver of a miracle—survived his recurrence of throat cancer. I doubt the bayonet had much to do with the Hillside Strangler’s proximity. At age twenty-nine, she already knows so much—too much—about the fragile sham of resurgence and free will. She grew up in the stucco slums along Sepulveda Boulevard, with a father who was perpetually swimming inside a half-life, a mother marred by Jewish inter-generational trauma and tragedy. But Kate Braverman believed herself the exception. Harper and Row had, after all, purchased Lithium for Medea on proposal, without even seeing so much as a draft first. This is a feat for any writer, but virtually un-heard of for a woman in 1978 who had never before published fiction. She walked the streets of Los Angeles buying cocaine to feed her intravenous addiction, then she sat at her typewriter and wrote poems until sunrise. Sleep was extraneous back then. If you knew Kate Braverman, you feared her temper and you feared her brilliance and sometimes you feared her sanity. You might have read Lithium for Medea decades ago, or her short story “Tall Tales From the Mekong Delta” in graduate school. Her work was enduringly well received and celebrated, even if her true literary anointment never arrived. 

     I met Kate Braverman posthumously, the circumference of her life slowly clicking in and out of focus. I know her as a woman marred in human contradiction: she believed in her talent but wanted a Pulitzer nomination. She loathed and loved Los Angeles, her mother, being alive. In old photographs, she’s the street punk mythic poet, holding a cigarette more often than not, a spoon and a syringe never far away. But when I look closely, I see uncertainty in her eyes. In Braverman’s poems, this uncertainty explodes and metastasizes into something more tangible. She was afraid of her own vulnerability: “The gambler husband who got cancer. / Now this daughter,” she writes in a 1977 poem addressed to her mother. “Pale, afraid of everything, / the strange slatted trees, in the thick sunlight / A girl with nightmares and bad posture / no one will want.” [1]

Kate Braverman, 1978 [2]

The truth is, writing Lithium for Medea nearly killed Kate Braverman. The novel draft, almost entirely autobiographical—which followed a twenty-seven-year-old woman through a failing marriage, cocaine addiction, a sadistic boyfriend, a father’s cancer relapse, and a clairvoyant search for her estranged grandmother, which to me, is really a question about an ancestry with open wounds between Jewish women, which was not so much a novel as it was a three-hundred-page poem—horrified editors. They hated the title. They wanted the book cut in length by half. Why were the last sixty pages an italicized inner-monologue? Couldn’t Braverman just come to New York and negotiate the edits in person? Braverman obliged, and fought in a small Manhattan room with the editors for ten days. She won the battle over keeping the title, but took almost no other triumph back to Los Angeles. The process was so intense, Braverman alleged, that her assigned editor quit and never re-entered the industry. When Kate arrived home, she collapsed on her floor and woke up in the Cedars-Sinai ICU, IV drip cords tangled around her thin body, possibly only a few floors underneath the cancer ward where her father had spent many years of his life, sliced open like a fish, as she’d put it in Lithium for Medea. Later, in an article for West View magazine, the writer Ben Pleasants recalled seeing Kate sprawled out in bed, sweating through an unraveling pulse: This woman isn’t going to make it to thirty, he thought to himself.  

     She did make it to thirty, though. She outlived what looked like the end of herself more than once. She published ten more books, garnered a storied literary legacy and burned so many bridges she branded herself an outlaw. She had a baby and got married again and divorced again. She taught at universities across the country, sometimes got fired, sometimes quit, sometimes just disappeared. I mean this in the most literal sense. She left work and never returned. In 2019, she turned seventy in Santa Fe. Later that year, she died of cardiac arrest. 

     Braverman’s legacy is one of incomprehensible brilliance but also, institutionally, one of unhinged bad behavior. She was notoriously difficult to work with, sometimes hurt people in publishing who I believe genuinely hoped to help her, and she paid the price. But frankly, plenty of poorly behaved writers have eclipsed posthumous punishment. I don’t think Braverman’s subject matter helped her. Her work walks the thin line between reality and insanity, dipping into both unapologetically. Women get high without redemption, they abandon their children and invite stalkers into their homes. But Braverman’s work is also deeply clairvoyant, shamanistic, a work of witchcraft almost—sometimes, I think, it is impossible to grasp inside a western framework. To me, Lithium for Medea was largely about intergenerational burdens—turning toward intangible, non-western evidence to heal. The protagonist writes her cousin letters about blood truths. She says to hell with hard evidence—“hard evidence had nothing to do with my life”—and tries to beckon the god of death by killing a cat, recording the patterns repeating in her life, noting every spectral sensation. It’s no surprise to me that Harper and Row wanted significant edits. In fact, nearly fifty years later, I’m still stunned Lithium for Medea, even in its heavily edited form, ever reached publication. When Braverman died, she left little behind. It didn’t take me long to start talking to people, gathering documents, learning about her life and work. Soon enough, I was working on a book about her life. But what I really wanted, perhaps most of all, was to see the uncut version of Lithium for Medea. That’s where she really was, I thought. Or at least the version of Braverman I wanted to know. 

     It’s tempting to move toward the easy sentiment that Lithium for Medea saved me. But from what? For Braverman’s women, there is no over, no redemption, no after. There’s only a desire to feel, to take grief to the ring and declare a sword fight, knowing you won’t come away victorious. Lithium for Medea gave me, rather, a sustaining framework for my life and history. It rendered unspeakable parts of my fraught family history a narrative, even without artifacts or hard evidence. And somewhere inside narrative, Braverman taught me, healing begins. 

*

After four years of searching, I realized that, if the uncut first draft of Kate Braverman’s 1979 novel Lithium for Medea still lived and breathed anywhere, I had hope of finding it in only three places: 

• Harper and Row’s archives (Columbia University)
• The Los Angeles novelist John Rechy’s archive (Texas Tech University)
• Joan Didion’s archive (New York Public Library)

Didion was an automatic dead-end. In early 2023, only a few months after her death, the New York Public Library purchased her archive. Over two hundred linear feet of boxes, it would be, at the very least, years before Didion’s papers were publicly accessible to researchers. And anyway, the chances Didion held onto an emerging writer’s 1979 draft was slim at best. Braverman and Didion, I don’t think, ever had any semblance of a relationship beyond a generous review Didion gave for Lithium for Medea. Surely the women were not in contact when Braverman died, given Braverman hadn’t said a remotely kind thing about Didion or her work in nearly three decades. And even if, by some sliver of a miracle, Didion did have the book, I’m not confident Lithium for Medea would survive the NYPL’s acquisition and appraisal process. Didion died with a legacy twice the circumference of her ninety-year life. Kate Braverman’s manuscript was a non-sequitur. 

     Columbia University’s Harper and Row papers only dated back to 1985 (Lithium for Medea was published in 1979), and when no national archival database yielded results for any papers prior to 1985, the Columbia librarian broke the news I’d been dreading most. There was a chance that Harper and Row had not kept an official archive before 1985. I found this hard to believe—I still find this hard to believe—but it’s been two years since this conversation. I reached out to other scholars and folks connected to what’s now HarperCollins, who directed me to another person, who always directed me back to Columbia University. I posted pleas on social media. But I was just running in circles. 

     Then there was John Rechy. A celebrated queer Southern California novelist, he was one of Kate’s first mentors. As right now, December 2024, he’s ninety-three years old, still living in Southern California, and nearly impossible to contact. Texas State bought his papers in 2019, but his archive isn’t yet accessible to researchers. Sometimes the estate asks for the papers to be published only posthumously, so it’s possible the university is merely holding the uncut version of Lithium for Medea in a climate-controlled box until John Rechy dies. It’s also possible there is no statute on Rechy’s archive at all and Texas Tech is just understaffed. But really, I’m just guessing. Because after a desperate email to the archivist, and two separate desperate follow-ups, I never heard back. So much of Kate Braverman’s life and work I would never see, never know. And after I crossed Texas Tech off my list, at least for now, it occurred to me for the first time that the original Lithium for Medea manuscript might be gone. As Braverman puts it in the novel, “even hard evidence isn’t enough to withstand the flow of time.”

     You don’t examine or study Lithium for Medea. At I didn’t. It’s a book, instead, that you feel and hear. A book that shifted my notion of history and family and identity enough that I sought to reexamine myself. I mean that the book captures the agony and joy of recovering partial histories from a Jewish family gone silent, burdens carried and messily lifted and sometimes re-dropped between women without ever entertaining academic language or high theory. Braverman didn’t need high theory. This was her real life, and it was also mine, though I didn’t have the language for this grief when I first encountered Lithium for Medea. My mother’s father died when she was twelve. His death, that I never knew him, is the central grief of her life. It is also the central grief of mine, though I didn’t have the language for this back then, either. My mother’s parents, my Iraqi-Jewish family, left so little behind. A few letters written in Arabic, a few photographs from my grandfather’s graduation at the University of Beirut. My mother does not even know her maternal grandmother’s name. In Lithium for Medea, Braverman turns toward intangible evidence to consider her family history and lineage because she has no other choice. My mother’s experience, my own, has been largely the same. She was my first divination teacher. I grew up with tarot cards and recorded dreams in my journals. I watched my mother as she searched for signs, asking to speak with the dead. Only much later did it occur to me that other people found this strange, profane even. I knew I’d never come close to understanding Kate Braverman by way of hard evidence—especially because she left so little behind. This did not frighten me. 

     Still, I found myself drawn into institutional archives. And one afternoon, a fourth sliver of light flashed in front of me. I was elbow deep in the Online California Archive database, trying to find Kate Braverman’s mother’s old radio talk show tapes. [3] Frustrated, I typed Lithium for Medea into the search bar, and the University of San Diego appeared. An old friend of Braverman’s had papers there, and though I couldn’t tell for sure, it seemed possible that he had a marked-up uncut draft of the novel, along with his notes. And so a few months later, to California I went, once again chasing hard evidence across states, hours along I-8. 

*

Maybe it’s the non-plasticity of the institutional archive that’s kept me coming back. It promises us that if we look at a record long enough, hard enough, the right way, an answer, a lead will eventually reveal itself. This praxis really only serves the dead who have been preserved with integrity—the dead who held power while they were alive—and leaves marginalized scholars seeking stories of marginalized people in the cold. Because how can I expect the archive to help me liberate Kate Braverman from the obscene and dehumanizing descriptions (crazy, unhinged, cruel, unaware of her unraveling) when the very people and institutions who anchored her legacy are shaping the archives to which I am requesting access? When I was living and studying in New York, another writer looked at me during a workshop and asked, Why does Kate Braverman matter? It was not a rhetorical question, but something I was expected to prove. I needed hard evidence. 

     “The loss of stories sharpens our hunger for them,” Sadiya Hartman writes. “So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and provide closure where there is none. To create space for mourning where it is prohibited. To fabricate witness to a death not much noticed.” Hartman is grappling with a life unrecognized and unmourned—two girls aboard a slave ship on the Atlantic. She wants to imagine and write them as friends, but resists. “Initially I thought I wanted to represent the affiliations severed and remade in the hollow of the slave ship,” she attests. “But in the end, I was forced to admit I wanted to consolidate myself and to escape the slave hold with a vision of something other than the bodies of two girls settling on the floor of the Atlantic.” 

The historical violences about which Hartman writes, the absence and erasure, are unquantifiable. Kate Braverman has a name and documents and books, even if the documents are fractured, the books buried, her name hardly uttered. What Hartman offers me are not lives and violences comparable to Braverman’s, but the permission to walk away from the institutional archive when it’s dragging me in dizzying circles and look elsewhere, even if elsewhere is my imagination. The humility to parse the stories I am trying to finish for Braverman from the stories I’m trying to finish for myself. I do walk away from the library, before closing time, with nothing to show but an ink stain on my palm from a leaking pen. It was time to give up, not because the document was gone, but because it probably wasn’t. The first draft of Lithium for Medea exists somewhere. I’m sure of it. If not in a proper archive, then at the bottom of a retired executive’s old desk drawer; decaying in a Long Island landfill; shoved into a cookbook, bookmarking some farrow and watermelon salad best prepared in August. This is the trouble with archives, with writing histories of the undead. You don’t know your proximity to records, to hard evidence, to ghosts, until you do. Until one day you’re walking along the beach in San Diego, trying to find Kate Braverman, and you realize you already found her—sometime ago. I could search myself into madness, pursuing hard evidence that means very little. Probably, I did. 

*

I don’t have addresses, but I think Kate spent a majority of her childhood living in the Sepulveda stuccos in the Palms neighborhood. Her world extended only as far as the Blue Bus Line went. Sometimes she rode to the Santa Monica pier and collected soda bottles for spare change. That was bus fare. On a good day, an ice cream cone too. The bay was very much alive to her. “My world was bounded by the ocean, the slow arc of the Santa Monica Bay gray and gyring beyond the breakwater,” she writes in Lithium for Medea. It is the ocean, in fact, that partially makes her protagonist think about hard evidence’s lack. “Once, I thought the hard evidence important and that a record of explanation must be left intact. Something undeniable, like trilobites a kind of permanent fetus etched in the center of Paleozoic rocks. The seas which they lived disappeared before collective human memory,” she writes. “But the seas still exist now, still their race their shadows toward some long eroded shore. There is proof. Salt deposits lie at the bottom of oceans. The seas have dried and returned. Again and again.”

     Later that evening, I’m laying in the ocean under a pink strata of fog stretching stretching stretching. I’m playing, really. There’s is no other word for this than playing, as I did when I was a child, the one week my parents took us camping in North Carolina. The ocean was always a novelty to me. I don’t think I’ve ever fully submerged myself in the Pacific Ocean, which as a child, people warned me was colder than the Atlantic. This is true, though nobody told me the Pacific was much bluer, too. 

     I’m surprised to find myself thinking about a line from one of Braverman’s 1977 poems, “Job Interview.” Loyal to its title, the poem moves through a series of historical (or perhaps ahistorical) questions. “You notice I checked measles. / My mother sewed red spots on / my rag doll. / It took her an entire day,” Braverman writes. “But you ask nothing about / winter. My father took me sledding. / He pulled me to the top of / hills. In vacant lots we found streams. That was in Philadelphia.” 

     But you ask nothing about winter. / My father took me sledding. / He pulled me to the top of hills. She’s asking “Do you see me beyond those stuccos on Sepulveda?” It’s a rare moment of decisive clarity. I’m not sure she always saw herself beyond the Sepulveda stuccos and later in life, I think she struggled to see herself beyond writing. Here, though, she’s asking “Can’t you see my joy?” Here, she’s placing evidence where there is supposed to be none. 

     In the Pacific, I’m not thinking about the archival letdown, and I’m not thinking about the Lithium for Medea manuscript either, drifting somewhere in backroom warehouse in La Jolla, or maybe nowhere whole at all. It only occurs to me that I have no idea whether or not Kate Braverman knew how to swim. This makes me sad. I wish I could ask her. I wish I could ask how often she touched the Pacific Ocean, how the water gutted and ravished and brought her back to life at the Santa Monica Pier where the Blue Bus Line and her entire world tapered to an end. 

*

Sweating on a pull-out couch that night, I can’t get the bathroom window to close, and a guy across the street can’t start his truck. I hear him huffing and swearing as I drift in and out of sleep. Kate Braverman pays me a visit. We’re sitting at the table of a greasy spoon diner I only vaguely recognize, the curtains lined with lace, coffee mug stained with someone else’s lipstick. She is young and beautiful, brilliant and afraid, just as she was in 1979. 

     “Did you ever think about revisiting Lithium for Medea later in life?,” I ask her after a while. Our chairs are pulled from the table, and we’re facing one another. 

     Kate shakes her head. “No,” she says quietly. “It had to end there. You have to let it end.”  

     I think I always hoped that in finding Kate Braverman, I’d also find myself. And in finding myself, I’d find my grandfather, and the other Arab-Jewish women in my family whom I never knew, whose pain and joy I carry in my body, feel every day. This is what happened, just not in the way I expected. Because I don’t see myself in Kate Braverman and her work. Rather, I am in Kate Braverman, just as I am inside her work. We are entangled, and in that messy entanglement, I’ve also found the company of my mother’s father, my mother’s mother. And I wonder if it’s true that I never knew them. When there is nothing left to find, maybe the space to feel finally opens. 

     My mother taught me that the dead are always with us. Not judging us, not haunting us, and not always even guiding us. They are just there, lingering, holding time. I don’t have any hard evidence for you, but the older I get, the more I understand. Kate Braverman watched over every moment of my journey. She let me crash up against walls, walk blindly into oncoming traffic, run for days weeks months in the wrong cardinal direction. And then she calls out to me, ever so quietly, prompting me to reach her from some other road.

*

Notes

[1]  “Milk Run” from Milk Run, Momentum Press, 1977

[2]  Credit to RP Bradley for this photograph, his terrific archive of Braverman photographs, and for being a terrific person in general. 

[3]  If you know anything about Millicent Braverman, please write to me!

*

Leah Mensch is likely the world’s foremost Kate Braverman scholar. Find more at leahmensch.com.