Advent 2021, Dec 4, Jodie Noel Vinson: Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. It's 2021.

After Gay Talese's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold"

Frank Sinatra slipped off his mask to sip his bourbon. Tucking the elastic bands back behind his ears, he stared at the patrons strung out around tables placed at six-foot intervals across the dance floor of the private Beverly Hills club. When one of his songs came over the speakers, no one got up to dance.

Sinatra, silent and still, as if conserving energy, let his recorded voice speak for him, serenading the club with silken strains.

That Sinatra was ill was obvious to everyone in the unventilated room. The two blondes who’d sidled up to him at the bar were shifting on their stools. They’d caught sight of the famous blue eyes hovering above the mask: pale and watery, without their usual spark.

Both blondes wore face coverings coordinated with their monochrome attire. The club had recently adopted an “honor system”—if vaccinated, you didn’t have to mask. Probably neither had gotten the jab, though you never could tell. The blondes hadn’t cared much about honor systems before the health crisis.

Sinatra had been too busy, so he claimed, to go get the shot. Rumor was he hated needles. When he ducked his head to sneeze, one of the blondes gestured to the other, and they slipped away.

The singer sat glumly at the bar in his immaculate suit. He was the victim of an ailment so common that, were it not the middle of a pandemic, most people would consider it trivial. Frank Sinatra had a cold.

Beneath his mask, Sinatra sniffled. His eyes were lakes of stormy blue. Twice they paused on a young man near the pool table. When Sinatra looked again, it was clear there was going to be trouble. Everybody knew the kid wasn’t vaccinated. It didn’t matter that Sinatra wasn’t either. The guy was unmasked; he was breaking a rule.

“Hey, kid!” Sinatra called over the clack of billiard balls. There was a raw edge to his voice; though muffled by the mask.

When his target didn’t respond, Sinatra addressed the man nearest him instead: “What kind of mask is that? N-95?”

The man nodded and, sensing a fight, moved off. Sinatra swaggered closer to the kid, and the room went quiet, billiard balls, for the moment, still.

“Hi, where’s yours?”

“Look man, I donno.” The kid shrugged him off. Then, perhaps noticing the sickly glint in Sinatra’s eye, frowned and took a step to the side. “Is there a reason why you’re talking to me?”

“Is there a reason you’re not wearing a mask?”

“Sorry, man,” the kid snatched an idle cue from the wall and held it between himself and Sinatra. “But no one tells me what to wear.”

At this point, one of Sinatra’s men stepped in. “Com’on, kid, get the jab or go home, ok?”

Someone else went for the manager, but the kid eventually left, mumbling something about his first amendment rights. At which point an assistant manager showed up.

“I don’t want anyone in here without a mask,” Sinatra told him.

*

Sinatra with a cold is Brady without a ball, Trump without Twitter. Robbed of his fleet-footed voice, the singer becomes surly, initiating what one writer has called a “psychosomatic nasal drip” through his personal staff of 75, his family, his friends, his flunkies—those who depend on him for their personal welfare. A sick Sinatra had, in the past, sent small tremors through the entire entertainment industry. People came running, ready to restore him to health. But Sinatra with Covid? The nasal drip was real.

The press manager who’d sat next to him at dinner stopped by CVS for a rapid test. The woman who looked after Sinatra’s 60 hair pieces for 400 bucks a week was out with a fever. Her grandkid’s school went back online. His daughter Nancy felt a little under the weather, but like many of her generation, was already vaccinated (she’d been working on her father). Everyone worried about his valet, who had a pre-existing condition. Testing sites around Beverly Hills were filling up in Sinatra’s wake. The lines were astronomical.

Because the singer traveled by private plane, there was less concern his illness had spread outside these close-knit circles. But within them, circumferences grew. While many had said they’d kill for Sinatra, no one wanted to die because they’d caught Covid from him.

One thing was clear: Sinatra would need to be tested before recording his next show—a performance he’d been looking forward to for weeks. Plenty of planning and over fifty rapid tests had gone in to ensuring the event would be safe. The 43-person orchestra was reduced to 21 musicians fronted by plexiglass. The director and his staff were also behind glass, enclosed in a control booth overlooking the orchestra and stage. Camera crews, technical teams, and security guards all wore masks. The Budweiser ad men had been banished to the parking lot, and the secretaries from other parts of the building, who might have otherwise left their desks to watch, were all working from home.

Despite these precautions, at rehearsal the following Monday a current of unease rippled through the orchestra.

Frank Sinatra might have Covid.

Rumor was he’d agreed to the test. Apparently, the run-in with the unmasked kid had scared him. Now the whole world seemed to await the results (it was a PCR test).

Finally, there was a stir from inside the control booth: the test was negative. An audible sigh coursed across the studio, followed by a collective intake of breath. Sinatra had arrived.

He was, as yet, unwell. Instead of his usual tailored suit he wore a cozy gold sweater. His shoulders slumped, and his face was ashen. When, on his way to warm up in the rehearsal room, he glanced into the studio and saw the stage and orchestra platform were not close together, as he had specifically requested, Sinatra turned a shade paler. From the next room you could hear his hoarse shouts, as he pounded the top of a piano.

The director came down from the control booth to explain the safety measures that required the extra space between the singer and his accompaniment in the airtight studio. A sullen Sinatra took the stage.

After a few songs, his voice had lost its silken quality to a noticeable rasp. Following a rendition of "I Did It My Way"—during which Sinatra’s voice cracked noticeably, twice—there was a long silence from the control booth.

Sinatra shifted in his well-polished shoes. “What the hell are you doing up there, anyway?” he demanded at the darkened glass.

Silence.

“You having a party up there or something because there’s limits these days on how many you can have in a…”

The intercom crackled to life, and the director’s voice could be heard, sounding loud and sure over the failing vocal cords of the talent. “Okay, Frank.” It wasn’t working; Sinatra could hear for himself.

They didn’t want him in the control room, so someone tossed him headphones. Arms crossed, Sinatra glared up at the dark glass of the booth as he listened back, wincing at occasional intervals. Then he ripped off the headset and stared at a large monitor, where a voiceless mime of himself continued to sing soundlessly.

Turning his back to the image, the singer fixed a wounded, glassy gaze on his orchestra. Some of the musicians had accompanied him for twenty-five years. “I know what you boys have been thinking,” Sinatra sniffed. “But what you got there,” he nodded at the screen, “is a man with a cold.”

After ordering the day’s work destroyed, Sinatra left the studio.

*

Word of the botched recording spread like the pandemic itself, down Sinatra’s staff, throughout Hollywood and across the nation. Speculation about the singer’s vaccination status circulated widely.

Sinatra disappeared for a while. It was 21 days before he declared himself ready to record.

He strode into the studio a new man. He was still impeccably dressed, and he still wore a mask. But his eyes danced in a way that told you there was a smile below. The troubled waters had cleared. As he resumed his place on stage, the musicians, from a distance, raised their instruments in silent salute.

Frank Sinatra had been vaccinated.

*

Jodie Noel Vinson holds an MFA in nonfiction creative writing from Emerson College. Her essays and reviews have been published in Harvard Review, The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Ploughshares, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature, among other outlets. She lives in Providence, where she is working on a book about creativity and chronic illness.

Advent 2021, Dec 3, Mieke de Vries: Subjunctive

After Naima Coster's "Subjunctive"

Let’s say your name is Ashley. But you never liked it, so you were always Ash. We met at a high school, a shitty one, in our hometown. And let’s say we loved each other from the start, and we decided when we were 14 that we would be together forever, and we knew this was reckless and improbable but we decided anyways. Let’s say we wanted to get married, but at that time we couldn’t, so we settled for lifelong love. Let’s say once we graduated from high school we moved out of the suburbs and into the woods. Let’s say we adopted a cat and then another cat and then a dog and that all these animals made us want babies to kiss and hold close to our chests. Let’s say I knocked you up when we were both 19 and we were so foolish we thought it would be fun. Let’s say I got a job in town while you stayed home with our baby and I started to hate working nights so when I got pregnant the next year, I proposed that we switch. And let’s say you took to being the breadwinner with ease and confidence, enjoying your independent days and coming home with a sense of excitement to see us.

You are beautiful—this is not a metaphor—and you grew up in a cold place. Let’s say you still learned darkness and lightness. Let’s say your mother emptied her pill bottle and you opened the door to her bedroom and your sister found her on the bed and you took the cordless phone from her bedside table and called for help. Let’s say you were ten. Let’s say your father was at work, if work is another word for gone. 

I thought I was broken and hid away. I didn’t know then that nothing about me was broken. My mother was full and didn’t empty any bottles. She took up all the space our house contained. My father was smaller, more my size. They loved me so fiercely I felt guilty that it wasn’t enough, that I wasn’t enough. When I was ten nothing bad happened to me.

Let’s say we are happy together with our family in the woods, a sense that feels unfamiliar to us both. Let’s say we are the type of moms who go hiking with their babies in backpacks, panting up the side of a hill. Let’s say we are so wholesome we bake pies together on Sunday. Once our kids are old enough, they help us measure out the butter and lard, the flour and salt. You build a stool for them to stand on so they can reach the kitchen counters. You find miniature rolling pins, light enough for small child hands to grasp and roll tiny circles of dough. We fill the dough circles with apples and cinnamon and sugar and sing while we wash the dishes. We eat our miniature pies with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and watch the leaves drop outside our kitchen window.

It is in our cabin in the woods that my nervous system (and yours) can finally release. I journal in the mornings and weep while our children play in the dirt. We bury seeds in the ground and watch them sprout. Our children show you our daily progress when you arrive home in the evening. You call your sister and tell her to come visit. You want to share with her our hideaway.

There are daily mistakes in our daily love. We are women but that doesn’t mean we know how to communicate with each other. You hide away your sadness until it bubbles up and drowns us both. I tell you about my sadness until you press your fingers into your ears. I coddle the children and you let them light things on fire.

A diagram—

When she was ten, your mother’s mother cut off her long blond hair with her mother’s sewing scissors. Her grin, triumphant, as she admired her new look in the dirty bathroom mirror. Now, she could pass for a boy. When your great-grandmother returned from the store, she held the sewing scissors by the closed blades and struck your grandmother across the face with the hard metal handles. Your mother’s mother tried not cry. Your mother’s mother learned how to be a woman.

My mother showed me how to shave my armpits when I was 13 with a plastic pink razor with only two blades. When I attempted to shave my legs, I sliced off a two-inch hunk of flesh. Like slicing a milky block of mozzarella before the blood appeared. I had smooth legs covered in plastic bandages. I had long blond hair that hung from my head and bare armpits coated in chalky deodorant. I learned how to be a woman.

A cousin who took her husband’s name and moved from her father’s house to her husband’s house. She loved her husband and wanted to be with him and they had children right away. She also hid from herself a deep inner knowing that although she loved her husband she had also kissed her best girlfriend when they were both 15 and she couldn’t stop thinking about that drunken kiss despite 10 years passing. And it was so much effort for her to suppress this knowing, to hide it from her very self—

An uncle who wore his mother’s clothes when he was home alone and finally felt like himself—

A grandfather who bloodied his son’s face when he found the son wearing his wife’s clothes—

The uncle who bloodied his daughter’s face when he found her kissing her best girlfriend in the basement—

Your mother’s empty pill bottle and my mother’s fullness—

The sunflowers we grew together in the woods.

The road to our house is long and dusty, and the tall trees cover us. Here, we are protected by the sounds of the forest. The flapping of a crow overhead, rattle of branches against our single-pane windows. We stack logs and collect kindling for winter. We gather around the fire pit in our backyard. Fire spits and hisses as rain collides with it. Rain on my face when I look up, it soaks into me—fills me. I look over to your face and it’s wet too. Our babies are protected in their rain jackets and they pounce on every puddle. We wanted to escape and we deadbolt our front door, close the storm shutters. We’re safe here, in our cabin in the woods, with our babies and cats and dog. No one knows we’re here. In the back yard, surrounded by tall trees, gathered around a fire. Even now the dog is in the yard, running circles around us.

*

Mieke de Vries is a queer, neurodivergent writer and editor of Dutch and Danish descent. She currently lives as a settler on the unceded, traditional territory of the Cowichan First Nation. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria and during her time there was a student intern on the fiction editorial board at The Malahat Review. She writes in the genres of fiction and creative nonfiction. Find her on Twitter @miekeleigh.

Advent 2021, Dec 2, Joe Bonomo: Confession

After Stuart Dybek's "Confession"

Father Krastel was the priest who usually awaited me. He was the pastor, large and vaguely unfriendly, with wisps of dark hair on top of his head and a pinched smile he’d direct at us when he’d visit our classroom. He sweated a lot, though he didn’t seem or feel quite human; none of the priests or the nuns did.

There were times in the sacristy when Father Krastel angrily slammed shut the cabinet and refrigerator doors, his voice raising in last-minute commands to me and the other altar boys, minutes before Mass would begin. In the way that adolescents intuit things before they have the language to describe them, I felt that Father Krastel was unhappy then, or anyway deeply pissed off. (I wonder now if he drank during those years. I imagine him hiding bottles behind the plastic bags of communion wafers, or deep in a closet behind the cassocks, and arriving at church suffering.) Yet those were rare flashes of startling human behavior, surreal, as if I’d dreamed them. Years later in high school, a legend arose that a priest had admitted to the student body that he’d become addicted to masturbation, his body imposing itself as something greater than his vocation.

As usual, I’d saved the deadly sins for last: the lies and the cussing, biting my little brother on the arm, stealing glances at the Hustler and Oui magazines on the high shelf at Wheaton Newsstand, which I’d been convinced was one of the worst sins of them all. But I was already lost. Across the street from my house, under wet leaves at the bottom of a hill, somebody had stashed a Playboy or a Penthouse, and there it stayed, unrepentantly cached in a tree stump. I knew that being alive meant that I was sinning. He knocked and said I was forgiven.

As for Penance: “Go in peace, my son, sit and recite ten Our Father’s and ten Hail Mary’s, and think about your transgressions.” Later I’d wonder if a priest would ever admit to suffering enough for the two of us. I’d wonder if sometime during the early years of his calling the inevitable, unhappy sins of his body had been gratefully taken by God, the temptations and irritations and hungers lifted from and unburdening him, but that seemed impossible. What would be left?

*

Joe Bonomo's most recent books are Field Recordings from the Inside and No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing. He writes music essays for The Normal School and blogs at No Such Thing As Was. You can visit him at @BonomoJoe.

Advent 2021, Dec 1, Heidi Czerwiec: The Resonance of Lyric Essays, or Lyre, Not Liar

I shall write about resonance. Here’s the truth: when I first heard the resonance, I sang out loud. The song burst forth, I could not stop it. And now that I’ve admitted singing, I shall admit this: what sounded forth was jubilant, rhapsodic, astounding—whatever is the opposite of calm.

Resonance is what Judith Kitchen insists with her declaration against D’Agata: “to be lyric there must be a lyre…. The lyre, not the liar.”

Resonance of origins, lyric, Orphic, endorphic. Strike a chord, an accord of notes, denoting and connoting, a word-chord of word-play, proliferating.

This is how to begin. This is how to begin again. This is how to wear your refrain with a difference. Don’t space your rhymes too far apart for the ear to hear. Don’t amplify your alliteration, lest you write like the slut you are so bent on becoming.

Resonance begins with sacred theft, then a gift, and ends with a bargain. Apollo’s sacred herd returned; the fine, Hermes’ invention, a lyre from a liar; then, offered to Orpheus. Tortoise shell strung with entrails. Hollowness that hits you in the gut so hard even Hades himself will trade with you, your lyric skill for your silent sylph of a wife.

Resonance is how we learn by rote: the English rote, small lyre the bard strums in time with the mnemonic rhymes to firm them in the mind.

We will not be discussing whether “that really resonated with me” so let us never speak of it.

Resonance: at all the “Thirteen Ways” essays, the bawds of euphony cried out.

Resonance, the rosin on the bow creating texture in the text, the drag across the strings, resinous. The bow bows to no one.

A bard, a bird, traveling throughout the piece, a Chanticleer strumming his Oo-De-Lally.

Resonance as aural tagging of significant words, signifiers spray painted with bright sound—semantic underlining, a sonic highlighter.

Songbirds decorate their nests with scraps of resonance, some spectacular bits, but beneath it, nested patterns of sound provide the structure.

Language interpretation happens in the left-hemisphere of the brain, yet musical sounds are interpreted by the right hemisphere. Resonance as the harmony of the spheres. When the tonic and fifth of a chord are played perfectly in tune, their soundwaves average to create a ghostly third—invisible scrim, thin meniscus vibrating between. Both sides are listening intently.

We carried the resonance itself. We marched for the sake of the march, simple writers, soldiering with our pens, because it was cadence, it was anatomy, and the resonance was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the resonance was everything—and for all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that we would never be at a loss for sound to carry.

Resonance, what carries, bears us back, each thread, each spoke of speech starting from the same wheel hub.

Resonance the rhythm, the soundtrack below the action, the beating heart, the pulse along the vocal chords, an unbridled galloping faster and faster until the beat is beat back. A stick in the spoke. Stop. Restart.

While refrain means to bridle, restrain a thought or feeling, the lyric refrain is freeing, unbridled, a body leaping across the expanse of the page.

Resonance a sound re-sounding, to reverberate, to echo, the sound patterning a system by which we echolocate through the essay’s space.

Resonance as sonar. In English, sound comes from Old Norse sund which also means swimming, a body in water. As well as a body of water bordering the sea. A body made mostly of water in a body of water, dissolving borders (between writer and reader, between word and speech), where the ear (whose?) amplifies sound, sounding the depths of an essay. It shall be called Bottom’s Dream because it hath no bottom.

My music theory teacher taught us sound is founded on three conditions: a source, a medium through which sound travels, and a receiver. Thus, the tree falling in a forest koan, resolved. Timber/timbre a relationship based in sound. Do you hear what I hear? Without you, dear reader, no resonance.

Resonance: I saw Doyle do it and I saw Kincaid do it, and I saw Purpura and O’Brien do it and I hang on to that.

*

Note: This piece contains riffs/reworkings of bits of Lia Purpura’s “Autopsy Report,” Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” Wallace Stevens “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Timothy O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Brian Doyle’s “Leap,” and borrows its form from John Scalzi’s “Being Poor”

*

Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of the lyric essay collection Fluid States, selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and the poetry collection Conjoining, and is the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is an Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com.

Essaying toward Action: Janisse Ray in Conversation with Amy Wright

Janisse Ray put a moratorium on personal air travel in 2008 in an individual Kyoto pledge to reduce carbon emissions. She also rides bicycles and trains when she can, in addition to making other choices that honor her environmental values. It can be hard to understand such devotion when ethics inconvenience us, and it is far easier to discount another’s commitments than ask the same of ourselves—until we meet one who essays into difficult territory with reasons that sparkle like treefrog-filled vernal pools. Ray’s newest collection, Wild Spectacle, illustrates the potential of responding to the climate crisis with gestures equal to the natural world. Moved by the beauty of these travel narratives—after over a year of travel restrictions—I reached out to her to learn more. —Amy Wright

*

Amy Wright: You dedicate Wild Spectacle “To my teachers, past, present, and future.” How does this book represent or speak to gratitude for your education?

Janisse Ray: Any success that I’ve had at imagining the life I want, or any progress toward creating it, has been due to the guidance of brilliant, wise, and generous teachers. I am reminded of this at the end of a yoga session (which is embodiment more than mindfulness practice to me) when I say those exact words. I am flooded with images of teachers, not just schoolteachers or professors, but friends, children, passers-by, journalists, authors. A good deal of study has been conducted regarding gratitude; being grateful, apparently, makes a person feel more optimistic and more connected. For me, I think it’s easy to dwell on what I don’t have and what isn’t working, so the habit of being grateful reminds me of what bounty and privilege I do have. 

AW: Wild Spectacle is divided into three sections: Meridian, Migration, and Magnitude. How do these sections shape and reflect the arc of the book?

JR: The shape of three is primal, archetypal—it’s the pyramid, the trilogy, the mountain. It’s the classic shape of a story, the entrance, the middle ground, the exit. Of course there’s a fourth part, but it’s underground, inside the reader. That’s the mycelium. The three aboveground sections in Wild Spectacle are divided spatially, starting with time I’ve spent in Montana, which is important to me as the place I came of age as a writer. The middle section, “Migration,” happens in farther-flung places. I try to come home, in many ways, in “Magnitude.”

AW: The first essay in the book recounts a time you and your husband Raven were able to get very close to a band of elk, thanks to a camouflage of wind direction, willow trees, and rain. You say, “We were so invisible we were two spirits, crouched by a stream.” The theme of disappearing into nature recurs elsewhere in the book. Is one of your goals as a naturalist to sublimate human presence in the natural world?

JR: This is such an interesting idea, that of sublimating humans in nature. That’s not what I’m intending to do. I believe there are multiple—at least two—worlds that interface and overlay each other. One of them we see and experience in bodily, meaning sensual, terms. The other(s) we may not. But those worlds—the psychic one, the emotional one, the spiritual one—are there. This is the idea I’m approaching by comparing Raven and me to two spirits.

AW: Wild Spectacle is subtitled “Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans,” yet several essays in this collection portray profound human connections. How have human relationships informed your relationship with the natural world?

JR: Sometimes humans are my guides into the natural world. Sometimes they are my inspiration. Sometimes they are conveyance. Often they are a valuable source of wisdom. Another human does not necessarily detract from a magnificent experience in the wild but can add to it. Alone, I have myself, the thing I’m experiencing, and the feeling it produces in me. With someone else, we each have those three entities, and we have another, as well, which is the platform of the shared experience. The philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore talks about the shared experience.

I hope I’ve not gotten too philosophical here. Let’s just say I love people and that I think there’s a relationship with the wild world that lies beyond human relationship. Conversely, the natural world can also be relational, in the way that humans are relational.

AW: In “The Dinner Party,” you describe an hours-long meal in Sitka, Alaska, saying, “In my memory that meal has come to represent a whole territory…a provenance of superhuman wildness, ten times to the wild power.” I appreciate how this paradox encourages readers to imagine wildness and humanity not as mutually exclusive, but what would you say human wildness aspires for, or means?

JR: Mostly this is hyperbole. I think that describing the wildness I found in Alaska as “superhuman” is kind of funny. And this is a very profound question. It seems simple but asks a lot. Let me just say that human wildness means, at its very basic, acknowledging that humans are part and parcel of nature, biological creatures, and that’s inescapable and precious.

AW: In “Montana,” you track kestrels “flashing copper trails” to illustrate the moment you fell in love with the West. The essay ends with your confession, “But I could not stay.” Who or what pulled you away?

JR: A weird and inexplicable loyalty to my homeland.

AW: In “Bird-Men of Belize,” you describe many bird species, including the descriptively named blue-crowned motmot. Would you share a favorite bird encounter or sighting?

JR: Oh, so many. Those scissor-tailed flycatchers in the hotel plaza the moment we arrived are not to be forgotten.

AW: As the title indicates, you focus on wonders in Wild Spectacle, but you also include a devastating account after a brutal storm left hundreds of thousands of monarchs dead in Angangueo, Michoacán, Mexico. How would you hope this book prompts readers to respond to the climate crisis?

JR: I hope the book illuminates the incalculable services, the irreplaceable beauty, and the unbelievable, staggering, bewildering, profound wonderment of life we are losing because of climate instability and chaos. My hope is that the book will turn each of us into a serious, committed defender of life on earth, ready to make the changes necessary to save it.

AW: While working in Costa Rica’s oldest national park, you say, “Words leave multiple and often incomprehensible meanings dangling all over the vegetation.” As a nature writer, you’ve given a lot of thought to language and nature. How do you think about the relationship between them?

JR: Language works in service of nature. I just wish it did a better job.

AW: Each essay includes a prefatory note of the setting to orient readers, including “Bob Marshall Wilderness, Montana,” “Belize, Central America,” and “Crystal River, Florida.” Given this book’s release during COVID-related travel restrictions, these travel narratives seem timely. Were you inspired by the pandemic to gather these stories now?

JR: Travel is being curtailed by the pandemic, and as we sink deeper into the climate emergency, travel becomes less feasible, less practical, and less ethical. For example, I quit flying about fifteen years ago because of the climate, so there will be wonderful wild spectacles that I won’t get to see. I doubt I’ll ever get to Africa on safari, for example. I believe that we First-World humans need to stop seeing travel and tourism as an inherent right. Because we have the funds and the means to do it, we believe it’s okay. We have an entire mythology that is not an apology for all our wasteful wandering-about but a mythology of entitlement. How much and how often we travel is one way we judge our importance and success in the world, which is simply ridiculous. Global travel is not a basic human right. As I said, it’s mostly not even ethical anymore. And this is freaking sad. I love to travel. There are many places on earth I’d like to visit. I’d like to see my ancestral homeland in Great Britain. Hopefully one day I can catch a boat headed that way.

AW: The book concludes with a dramatic essay titled “I Have Seen the Warrior,” in which you make a canoe rescue to save a poisoned teenage boy. Your physically demanding gesture to help him reminds you of your yoga practice and your teacher, who says, “Sometimes the only weapon we have is awareness.” Since this book is devoted to raising awareness of the natural world, will you talk about the relationship between awareness and action?

JR: A couple of steps are missing in that equation, I think. Awareness leads us down the path to empathy, and with one quick turnaround we’re on the doorstep of love, and love catapults us to action. It happens very quickly and predictably, except that one thing can derail this process, and that would be at any step of the process fear becomes too great to allow us the natural evolution. Fear can throw up a lot of walls and cliffs and bramble thickets. (Although often it’s on the illusion of walls, cliffs, and thickets.) Our job, then, is to keep working at being the best lover we can be, “lover” of course used here in the bigger sense. My yoga teacher was right about awareness. Staying aware can be a powerful tool. My sense is that the unspoken part of her wisdom is that it inevitably directs a person toward action.

*

Janisse Ray is a writer, essayist, and reporter whose subject is often nature. Her first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, was named a New York Times Notable Book. Ray’s latest, a collection of essays titled Wild Spectacle, is forthcoming from Trinity University Press in October 2021. Ray has won a Pushcart Prize, an American Book Award, and Southern Environmental Law Center Writing Awards, among others. She lives and works in Georgia.

Amy Wright is the author of Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round (Sarabande Books, 2021) as well as three poetry books, and six chapbooks. She has received two Peter Taylor Fellowships to The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her essays and poems appear in Fourth Genre, Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.

This Jade World Isn’t So Jaded: Emily Dillon on Ira Sukrungruang's THIS JADE WORLD

While packing up the house after his divorce, Ira Sukrungruang throws out or gives away much of his belongings. As he says, “If I were to start over, I would start over, like a fire that rebirths a forest.” 

Spoiler: He is admitting to more than just throwing away his t-shirts.

Sukrungruang’s new memoir, This Jade World, out this last week, chronicles the aftermath of his first marriage and, in a way, Sukrungruang chose to burn his life down. The first chapter, aptly titled “The First,” hits with a wallop. For one, it is compact like a fist; there is not a single paragraph break in three pages. For another, it narrates Sukrungruang’s first sexual encounter after his marriage ends, one in which he fucks a nameless woman from the internet. 

I use “fuck” deliberately here. As Sukrungruang says a few chapters later: “The body acted on the things it had wanted to do for years. To fuck and fuck and fuck. I was a body. A selfish body. A greedy body in movement.” Of course, sexual intimacy alone—even a lot of it with multiple partners—does not mean that Sukrungruang burned his life to the ground. It is not “fuck” here that collapsed his life into ashes, but “selfish” and “greedy.” In fact, he dips a toe into these adjectives even before he has sex with other women: before his marriage dissolved, he took his wedding ring off, went to a bar, and chatted with another woman, all without telling his wife. And when he does start having sex, afterward he doesn’t always answer the phone when his partners call him. Even in his interpretation of these memories on the page, selfishness sticks around: “This was a form of mourning. This was a form of healing.” Importantly, “this” is vague enough that we don’t know whether it was the sex that was healing, the ignoring of others, or both. 

Now, it may very well be that Sukrungruang believes selfishness is the root of the human condition and, in my pessimistic days, I might cheer him on. But I doubt that was his aim. After all, the final chapter of the book focuses on raising his son, ending with “Son, you can have anything.” No, I think Sukrungruang is onto something a bit more nuanced than selfishness: he wants to talk about exposure. 

Throughout This Jade World, Sukrungruang gives us his worst selves: the one where he treats sexual partners with callousness; the one where he rages and picks a fight with a man on the street; the one where he aims to hurt his ex-wife, spite sticking to his tongue with “you're not going to get anyone better than me”; the one where he manipulates women into caring for him while sick. He is direct about these failures, admitting, for example, that he “should have told her no” when a date made him soup during an illness. We could forgive the lapse in judgement during the illness (he was sick after all!) but it’s what comes after that’s a bit more unforgivable: he never replies to her texts, and he can’t remember her name.

This selfishness would certainly be more easily excusable in a memoir about the distant past, about a high-school boy or a college hook-up. For the most part, we all agree that we make mistakes, that we are greedy and selfish. But back then. Before we knew better.

But here in This Jade World, Sukrungruang is much older—he left undergrad over two decades ago—and some of his worst stories are only a few years behind him. The radical nature of this book is its immediacy. How soon after our failings can we admit to them? How soon after can we write about them?

These questions of exposure stand in stark contrast to the silence that choked his marriage. As he says, “Silence slithered into our lives and settled there until it was too late.” After a particularly nasty day in their marriage, he recounts, “We didn’t say anything after that. We didn’t say anything about the situation any time afterward either. We buried it, as if it never happened.” And so, This Jade World, in its whole being, exists to turn the tide by exposing everything, to admit to the hard things, the things we don’t want to talk about, the things we put off for the day when we think we will be better, or it will be easier. Let them go, it says, even if they’re still being discovered.

Now it would be an easy pivot here to assume that Sukrungruang is also challenging stereotypes of Asian culture, rooted as those stereotypes are in voicelessness or, kindlier, humility. But Sukrungruang doesn’t let this stereotype land. He fills his memoir with Thai people who are direct and unflinching. In particular, his mother and his aunt—two women whose lives fill his chapters with color and humor—are more open than most Western psychologists. His mother, for one, is quite direct about the ongoing political challenges in Thailand: “What does the other side want?” she offers up. “For the other side not to win,” she replies. Then, in one particularly funny scene, his Aunty Sue asks about his sexual relationship with his ex-wife: “did she climax?” So no, it is not Asian people specifically that he pushes to expose themselves, but anyone in a place where silence reigns supreme. At times this place is, in fact, Asian culture, but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it is American culture; sometimes it is masculinity or broken relationships; and, most often, the silence is in the self wanting what it won’t admit.

For, in the end, much of the narrative arc of the book follows Sukrungruang discovering the silence within himself. Specifically, it is about him not admitting that he wanted a child. In a particularly grueling scene, one in which his ex-wife gets an elective hysterectomy, Sukrungruang works so hard to believe that he, too, does not want a child. The images keep looming (“you imagine a child, one you’ve created, one without a face, a child, your child, yours”) but he pushes them down because he loves his wife and wants what is best for her. And haven’t we all had these moments, the ones where we wanted one thing so badly that we didn’t admit we wanted another, almost entirely incompatible thing? 

For the record, it’s not immediately clear if This Jade World is a memoir or a collection of essays. It is likely both, for it has the best qualities of both: a narrative that pulls us from naivete to discovery and a layering of self-contained essays that recolor the world like light filters over a lit bulb. This structure serves him well, mirroring the way he lived through the divorce—one step at a time and also in circles. Or at least, that’s how he lives it until the final sections of the book. While the first seven sections all finish with a chapter titled “July 10th”—the date of his wedding anniversary—the final two sections close with the chapters “Goodbye” and “The Next Life.” In the end, he names his departure—exposes it—and then moves on.

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Emily Dillon is a writer and educator from Maryland whose creative work ranges from nonfiction to poetry and all the lyrical places in-between. Ever an avid reader, she also publishes book reviews and teaching guides. Find her: www.emilydillonwriting.com

Hanging on the Telephone: Ander Monson on Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade

There’s something wobbly and rare that happens in Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade’s Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, the latest winner of the CSU Poetry Center Essay Prize, which has produced some badass books in its first few years by the likes of Lily Hoang, James Allen Hall, Shaelyn Smith, and Amy Long. 

I’m thinking about how primal the self often seems to be in the contemporary American essay, how we prize the contours of the self and its slinky thinkiness, how that is the thing that I’m really interested in when I read anyone’s essay, and that’s what we’re usually talking about when we talk about essaying and annoy the non-essayists among us. I mean, it’s not the subject (though it’s sometimes the subject): it’s the architecture that the I dances around the subject: how the I is transformed by it, or vice versa, and probably both. 

So I was prepared to be skeptical of an essay collection composed by two Is, though I’m not really sure why. I like both Brenda Miller’s and Julie Marie Wade’s work. And in other media, duets are often standouts. I’m all about collaboration in my editorial work and increasingly my teaching. But when it comes to the I, I guess I’m not so sure I’m ready to give that up. 

Maybe I’ve just read some bad experiments in deselfitization before? I find that when you lose the I in a book or in an essay I just get less interested in most cases. It’s like when a graphic novel trades language (which is the only thing I really care about, it turns out) for image: it’s not a good trade, at least not for me. I want both. 

Wade and Miller tell us in the “Authors’ Note” that “We have chosen not to label the speaker in each section so that our individual voices surrender into a more collective, and communal, authorship.” So when I read that I’m all totally like ugh, no. 

I’m not that good a reader, though. I don’t really want to play that game. So even if Miller and Wade choose not to identify who is speaking or manifesting in each section, I naturally start to assign certain bits by what autobiography I know from each writer (I know neither well but having read their individual nonfiction you start to get an idea). I couldn’t stop myself. But it’s not always easy to do that, or maybe I don’t care enough to follow through all the way on it, so after a while I had to mostly give it up. 

And after I gave it up, the feeling I started to get was a productive uncertainty, in which I began to care less who was talking or writing or thinking, and the two began to just spin around each other. I thought of the metaphor of the thaumatrope, where you have a card attached to a string or stick, and on one side is an empty cage, and on the other side is a bird, and when you spin the card, even though you know it’s two images, you see only the one image: a bird in a cage:

But it’s not quite that. Neither writer abdicates the I: many of these sections are intensely personal or autobiographical. They often let the I extend some thinking. The book doesn’t collapse the two Is into one another, a single collective I. It’s not a we: it’s two Is. They’re just not identified. The Is do start to correspond (their method clearly involves closely reading the other and often following an associative link from one writer’s piece to the next. At least I think they’re alternating. It’s to the authors’ credit that after a while I couldn’t really tell). Through that practice of closely listening to the thing the other wrote, they start to approach each other as we go deeper. This effect is amplified because as I have to give up on trying to figure out who’s memory is whose, so both Is contain both of their memories. The I isn’t collapsed, but it is expanded.

Maybe the better metaphor is the area between two things that create a field of force between them. I’m thinking magnets here, how there are spaces in between the two in which one is subject to both pulls, variably. And at the equilibrium point between the two one floats perfectly between them, pulled in neither direction at all. It is a kind of freedom that’s accomplished in moments like this, and as a reader I felt very strangely free. 

Oddly, it’s often form that helps make me feel a little more at home with this freedom. Well, that shouldn’t be surprising: those who love form know form is freedom. And Wade's and Miller's essays are presented in short sections, sometimes titled, sometimes not. Sometimes those sections are alphabetized, as in an index or a catalog, and I was particularly drawn to those, because the reliability of the repeating form lets us focus on the form rather than the questions of I. 

They tend to be collected or categorized by a category (“Heat Index”’s sample subsections: Bikram, Blush, Boiling Point, Can’t take the, Dead, etc.). The category becomes the thing that each section references or riffs on (“Of Madison County” or “Over Troubled Water,” for instance, from “Bridges: a Catalog”). There’s a pleasing associative logic that plays out in these particular essays that yokes the subtitle to the title, and we make the leap with them each time (we hope), and doing so we’re drawn closer to the Is, I mean the I, I mean it’s becoming a we now, isn’t it, with our having to do a little bit of assembly as readers, and, damn, that’s a fine trick.

I felt it most sharply in the more form-forward essays, but this leaping we’re doing is also a function of the interplay between the two Is throughout the book, as in the game of telephone that gives the book its title, so we read it everywhere. 

By the time I was halfway into the book, I realized I’d given up on I, at least the kind of I work that I was used to essays doing. Was I cured? Suddenly free from its tyranny? I doubt it, but I noticed that my natural urge to resolve the I had vanished in the reading process. What had replaced it? An admiration for the play between the two. And it’s not just wit, either, that I’m admiring, though I do greatly value wit in art. Wit and chemistry, I guess. Maybe all wit in this context is chemistry? But it’s also a real commitment to the methodology: after all, so much of the way literature is rewarded and counted in academia and in the larger literary world is as a solo act. I thought of conversation—not just the telephone kind of conversation, but something closer and more intimate. It’s more like the podcast kind of synergy, where two (or more rarely three) voices and minds together and their collective work is what makes the conversation come to life. Consider I’ll Find Myself When I’m Dead (from the essay world) or Reply All (before one of the hosts left) or even Car Talk, which shows up in one of the essays in this book, and is built on the expertise and affection of both brothers. It was sad when that ended because one of them could no longer do it.

By the time I got to the last epistolary essay, the epilogue, it was jarring to all of a sudden see the names and the methodology so clearly identified: here, after all, was Julie writing to Brenda and signing her name, and vice versa. It felt a little like a reveal, but also an acknowledgment of a different kind of intimacy, this one practiced in the summer of 2020, right amid our covid isolation, where writing to each other really did feel novel and necessary. Maybe in that enforced soloing we needed to assert the communicative nature of our prose? That essay, if it’s an essay—I’m not sure if it’s an essay—does feel like it’s operating differently than the others as a result. It didn’t give me the same kind of floating feeling that the others did, but then you have to get out of the book somehow. I realized, after writing this all on my own, that the better methodology would have been to correspond with one of my many witty collaborators in a game of telephone about Telephone, but I guess I haven’t learned my lesson yet. I guess it'll take another couple books from this double I, which I'll look forward to.

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Ander Monson's next book is Predator: a Memoir, coming out in September 2022 from Graywolf.