Wren Awry: Sin City Notebook

“A modern city, however, is not only a place, it is also in itself … a series of images, a circuit of messages. A city teaches and conditions by its appearances, its facades, and its plan.”

-John Berger, “Ralph Fasanella and the Experience of the City,” About Looking

“I stand in another world.

Not the past not the future.

Not paradise not reality not

a dream.”

-Anne Carson, “Wild Constant,” Float

 I want to write a smart essay about Vegas, I scribble in my new notebook, But all I’ve been able to grasp on to are fragments.

It’s 7 am, the end of December 2016--holiday season, and that strange, eye-before-the-storm stretch of time between Trump’s election and inauguration--and I’m sipping Keurig coffee in my room at the Golden Nugget, trying to get a few words down before a day of visiting my grandmother and hanging out with my parents and partner.

My grandmother lives in downtown Vegas--she lived here with my grandfather until his recent passing, and I visit at least once a year. Each trip, I’m curious what I could essay about this heterotopic, high capitalist wonderland, but I always put it off--I’m not a Vegas expert, I don’t know the history or sociology of the city, can’t speak for daily life here. I’m also concerned that I’ll be too critical--I don’t gamble, I dislike capitalism, and loud noises make me jump; I’m exactly the sort of person who loathes Vegas (and yet, coming here year after year, I’ve developed an odd affection for the city). Maybe it’s my dear grandfather’s death, the way the election jarred me, or how I’ve become more comfortable with my role as a poet, and the symbolism and associative leaps that role entails, but suddenly everything feels more pressing, more visceral, and this trip I decide, finally, to give writing about Vegas a go. I buy a cheap, spiral-bound notebook at the 24 hour Walgreen’s, and start to fill it.

I write about a commercial playing in the Golden Nugget for Jerry Seinfeld’s upcoming Caesar’s Palace show: “We go out,” Seinfeld says--pacing a stage, microphone in hand-- “To forget how much our life sucks.” I write down a line from Joan Didion’s essay “Marrying Absurd”--“Almost everyone notes that there is no ‘time’ in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future”--and follow it with a comment about visiting the Clark County Museum: In the outdoor ghost town, a wooden covered wagon, its white paint chipping, stands in a field of creosote. Subdivisions spread out in the background, and behind them stand red-hued, rocky mountains, the whole scene a picture-postcard of Manifest Destiny. I recall how, once, flying into Vegas, I flew over the Hoover Dam, and the iodine blue waters of Lake Mead. There are islands in that lake that don’t look like islands, but like the tops of drowned mountains, sunken in the rush to feed this thirsty metropolis. I admit that, out at a fancy restaurant with my family, I order a French Revolution cocktail, $11: “That’s perfect,” my partner says, “You love the French Revolution.” In my excitement I agree then, moments later, correct him, “No, no it’s the Paris Commune, not the French Revolution, that I like.” But the drink has arrived, pink and fizzy and served in a champagne glass, a hibiscus flower suspended in the bubbly. Taking a cocktail sip, smearing butter on a piece of sourdough bread: this is where my anti-capitalist critique of Vegas falls apart; I am seduced, time and again, through my taste buds.

I also journal about spending time with my grandmother: We’re working on a crossword puzzle together. She points to 12-down, which reads, “____ Enchanted, 2004 Blockbuster.” “I don’t know these newfangled clues,” my grandmother tells me, her coral lips cracking into a smile, “They aren’t in any of my crossword solvers, either.” “It’s Ella Enchanted,” I say--I remember seeing that movie in theaters as a teen. I scribble “E-L-L-A” in the puzzle squares. 14-across reads “Famous 20th century golfer.” My grandmother was a golfer--she and my grandfather belonged to a country club back in the Midwest--so I’m sure she knows.  Seconds later, she gives me a name. I check it against the number of letters--it is, of course, correct.

Las Vegas is good to my grandmother--she frequents the same casinos regularly and has made friends with servers and bartenders that staff the casino restaurants. These friends care for her--driving her to appointments when she hurts her hip, checking in about her needs when they hear my grandfather has died.

From my grandmother’s apartment, I can see the Trump International Hotel. Two months ago, in October 2016--before the third presidential debate--the Culinary Workers Union built a “wall” of taco trucks outside it in protest, both of Trump’s position on immigration and his unwillingness to recognize unions in the hotel.

            One morning, I take off by myself, leave the Golden Nugget and walk south through the Fremont Street Experience--four pedestrian blocks of casinos and souvenir shops watched over by Vegas Vic, that iconic neon cowboy who is so often a metonym for the city as a whole. At night, animated Bon Jovi and Beatles light shows illuminate the Experience’s LED sky, and zip liners slide on steel tendons above daiquiri-swilling crowds; but in the morning Fremont Street is quiet, populated almost exclusively by panhandlers with clever signs (one reads, simply, “Fuck you”--I smile at its brashness) and men nursing beers purchased from the 24 Hour Walgreens.

The Fremont Street Experience ends at Las Vegas Boulevard, but the street keeps going, and so, on that morning, do I. I pass under the neon archway that announces the beginning of the Fremont East District, an enclave of hip bars and restaurants: The Smashed Pig, Beauty Bar Las Vegas, Le Thai. Vintage neon signs rise from the median, including two of my favorites: a martini glass with an olive the size of my face; and a glittering, scarlet-red high heel. The high heel is posted outside of the El Cortez, the oldest casino in Vegas.

The El Cortez is a dim-lit throwback to when downtown was the heart of Vegas--before the Strip, two miles south, tempted away the tourists with its themed casino-resorts, faux Eiffel Tower and cartoonish volcano that rumbles and explodes on the hour. It’s my favorite casino in downtown--I like the dark wood paneling and that, once, when I stayed here, there was a roll-top desk in my room. Run for a time by infamous gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, the casino feels like a time capsule--I can imagine Joan Didion posted up at the lobby bar, sipping a martini and scribbling down notes for “Marrying Absurd”: “Las Vegas is … bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification, a place the tone of which is set by mobsters and call girls and ladies’ room attendants with amyl nitrate poppers in their uniform pockets.”

Atomic Liquors, the oldest free-standing bar in Vegas, is a few blocks south of the El Cortez. A neon sign advertises “Liquor and Cocktails,” the yellow arrow below it pointing to a building with a gray-stone facade. The bar opened in 1952 and, throughout that decade, patrons scrambled onto the roof to watch mushroom clouds rise from the nearby Nevada Test Site. I know how environmentally dangerous the testing was and continues to be^[1], and how it represented the specter of Cold War nationalism. I admire the anti-nuclear activists who walked on to the Nevada Test Site throughout the second half of the 20th century, risking arrest in a struggles against war, and against poisoned bodies and landscapes. And yet, I admit to myself, watching that atomic spectacle from the roof of the bar, cocktail in hand, must have been beautiful. In “Marrying Absurd,” Didion calls Vegas “the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements” and this bar, where militarism and Cold War fears melted into entertainment, feels emblematic of that.^[2]

South of Atomic Liquors, the hip stores and tourist spots disappear, and Sin City shows its seams. I walk past abandoned motel after abandoned motel, trash shored up in the bushes along the cracked sidewalk, houseless individuals asking for spare change and huddled on stoops in front of boarded up businesses. I photograph a vacant lot with the Stratosphere rising behind it and an image of Edgar Allen Poe--a favorite icon of my birth father, who died from the effects of sadness at fifty--painted onto an electric box. I’m walking through the Las Vegas tourists rarely see, the people and neighborhoods that aren’t shiny enough to be commodifiable or put on display. At least, I think I am.

I see a sign up ahead for a bakery, and a donut or cookie sounds good, so I decide it will be my destination. But, crossing Fremont Street, I see that the bakery is no longer open--it, like so many of the neighborhood businesses, is abandoned. I pivot and head north, back towards the Fremont Street Experience and my family, walking on the side of the street with all the shuttered motels. Their signs remain--they have whimsical names like the Desert Moon and the Peter Pan. The buildings are gated and boarded up, but when I look closer I noticed that they’re also covered in murals. Fake doors and windows have been painted onto plywood boards covering the actual doors and windows of the motel rooms, and bespectacled cats and dogs peek out of the false frames--a motif that repeats itself for blocks, on motel after motel. In the courtyard of one, two semi trucks are welded together

into a spectacular piece of public art, foregrounding a spray-painted sign that reads “Life Is Beautiful.” It seems a strange message in this stretch of the city, and I--ever the anarchist--wonder why artists are painting abandoned motels, making huge sculptures in their lots in an attempt to attract tourists, instead of breaking them open and refurbishing them into homes for Vegas’ houseless community.^[3]

“Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder,” Didion writes, and I, the beholder in question, cannot stop seeing the cracks on Vegas’ shiny facade, the discord beneath the pinging of slot machines and the rock bands playing on Fremont Street stages.

            The Writer’s Bloc bookstore has a defunct printing press (“We’re working on it!” one of staff people tells me) in the front window and a curated selection of small press books and best sellers in the back. It also has a bunny rabbit named The Baron--who I was invited to pet but not hold--and a children’s section replete with toys and piles of books. It’s the kind of place I’m prone to hiding in and I go there again and again during my week in Vegas, sometimes with family and sometimes alone, sometimes just to run my hands along the spines of books that I have no intention of buying.

It’s at The Writer’s Bloc that I pick out a copy of Anne Carson’s Float--a Christmas gift from my parents. I audibly squeal when I see it on the shelf in the New Books section and, later, reading the collection of chapbooks in my hotel room, I wonder what Carson--classicist and poet, student of that which rises and falls--would write about Vegas (from her Float chapbook “Maintenance”: “4. Replace the lightbulbs we have hundreds better still turn the lights off.” ) It’s at The Writer’s Block, too, that I read a small card they have on display about Joan of Arc:

After Joan of Arc was posthumously pardoned, she became the focus of one of the outbreaks of cash-in memoirs. Ma semaine avec Joan (My Week With Joan), written by Gilles de Rais, chronicles his time with Joan during the Siege of Orleans. The idea that there might have been any romantic spark between the legendary Joan of Arc and creepy, unpleasant Gilles, who had been a low-level squire in the campaign, captured the imagination of the world.

I take a picture of the card, and tweet it. Will Slattery, Essay Daily’s managing editor and a fellow lapsed Catholic, replies with, “‘Creepy, unpleasant Gilles de Rais’ is maaaaaaybe just a bit of an understatement”--de Rais was a confessed child serial killer and one of the possible inspirations for the fairy tale Bluebeard. I explain that The Writer’s Block hosts creative writing workshops for children--I’ve seen flyers for them around the shop, and “creepy and unpleasant” might be an attempt to keep that particular bit of history PG. Still, when I attend Christmas Eve mass at my grandmother’s church, St. Joan’s, a few night later, Perrault’s Bluebeard keeps sneaking into my thoughts between prayers.

            I return to The Writer’s Block one afternoon with my cousin Katie and both of our partners. The shopkeeper offers us free baked goods, a holiday gift to the store from a nearby coffeeshop, and Katie--who is as bubbly as I am awkward and shy--strikes up a conversation with him. He turns out to be Scott Seeley, one of the bookstore’s co-owners. Seeley tells us the history of The Writer’s Block--he moved to Vegas several years ago from Brooklyn, with his husband, Drew Cohen, and opened the shop in 2014; it’s the only independent bookstore in Vegas. He tells us, also, about Codex, the shop’s education program--they offer free writing classes for youth ages 5-18, school field trips at the store, and events and book groups for adults.

“We have the workshops in the back space. Have you seen it?” he asks and when we shake our heads no, gestures for us to follow him.

The five of us walk through a portal-like tunnel of trees--Seeley’s tall and stoops so as not to be hit by faux-branches or get a faceful of fabric leaves. He ushers us into a back room, well-lit with big wooden tables. “This is where our workshops are,” he says, pointing to a raised area straight back, “And that’s the stage where we have performances.”^[4] I imagine the room full of kids, hard at work on comic books, poems and short stories. I teach creative writing to elementary schoolers in Tucson, and I’m in awe of the work they produce, how children’s vulnerability so often leads them to write in such fresh and startling honest ways.

Seeley points to a shelf of student anthologies, perfect-bound volumes printed on the store’s Espresso Book Machine. He pulls a few down, excitedly telling us about them, the stories they contain and who drew the covers. I want to ask if I can sit down and thumb through them, but Seeley needs to get back to the front of the shop, and the five of us need to leave if we’re going to be on time for family dinner. We exit back through the arbor of trees into the bookstore and, thanking Seeley, go on our way.

As we walk north up Fremont Street, towards the casinos and neon lights, I decide that next time I’m in Vegas, I’ll return to The Writer’s Block, conquer my shyness, and ask if I might sit in that back room for a while, flipping through kid- and teen-written anthologies. I wonder what I’ll find in those pages, what those young wordsmiths will teach me. I’m guessing there will be small glimmers of everyday Vegas, the city that exists alongside the city’s glitz: a city of boring homework assignments, hard days, and simple joys that isn’t glamorous enough to be written up in guidebooks and gangster biographies, or noticed by the tourists who fuel Sin City’s economy.

If words are veils, what do they hide? What difference does it make to see a wharf building as a cathedral for ten seconds or two months or a year, to see Apollo, the god of healing and truth, as a murderous pun?

-Anne Carson, “Cassandra Float Can,” Float

___

Wren Awry teaches creative writing to elementary schoolers via the University of Arizona’s Writing the Community Program, is an editor at Tiny Donkey and Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, and has writing at or forthcoming from filmmakermagazine.com, Rust + Moth, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, Fairy Tale Review’s Fairyland, 1508, and Ghost City Press.

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[1] The impacts of nuclear testing in Nevada and surrounding states remain: Rates of leukemia and cancer in communities downwind from the test site have skyrocketed, and 300 million curies of radiation are estimated to have been left behind when testing ending at the site in 1992, radiation that’s currently leaking into the water table.

[2] Didion also writes, of Vegas, that “the sense of what happens there has no connection with ‘real’ life” and is “divorced from some historical imperative.” Of course, this is an illusion: Las Vegas was built on stolen Paiute land and, for decades, coal from Black Mesa, in the Navajo Nation, helped power its brights lights and pinging slot machines. Mining on Black Mesa has led to an increase in black lung and other diseases and had forced residents from their ancestral homelands.

[3] Later, I will learn that the motels were exhibition spaces for the Life Is Beautiful festival, a celebration of music, art, and food that sprawls across downtown each September. A section of the 2017 Life Is Beautiful website reads, “And because it’s not all about you all the time, book with Hotels for Hope and a donation will be made to Project 150, giving homeless, displaced and disadvantaged high students the tools they need to succeed and graduate.” Project 150, and Life Is Beautiful’s support of it, seems like a worthy thing, but it doesn’t erase the fact that people who are houseless or have recently been released from the city jail are resting in front of chain-linked motels with boarded up doors and windows--shelters they cannot access, shelters that have become canvasses instead of homes in this city of glint, of gleam, of surfaces.

[4] Students for each class are chosen by lottery. There are whimsical classes, like “Build Your Own Theme Park” and “Fantasy Newspaper,” and also classes on blogging, speculative fiction, and a high school writing workshop.

Trish Salah interview

Below is the next entry in a series on trans writers and the essay, this time with Trish Salah. The author of Wanting in Arabic and Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, she is also a critic and editor, focusing on trans literature and writing. I was thrilled to chat with her about form, genre, and memory, and of course about her own writing.

Check out some of the earlier conversations in this series, too, with Torrey Peters, manuel arturo abreu, and Ching-In Chen. 

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T Clutch Fleischmann: I begin these interviews by asking everyone about their relation to genre as a writer and to gender as a writer, and specifically how you respond to your work being labeled as "trans," as "poetry," as whatever categories it might intentionally or unintentionally run into. I wonder if you could speak to such categorization to get us started. Your statement in Troubling the Line, for instance, that "the writing is singular, and eclipses particular modalities of thinking about," suggests one way of resisting such categorization.

Trish Salah: Thanks for asking, Clutch. Such a loaded question for me. When I was a kid I liked genre writing, as in “low writing,” best: science fiction, fantasy, horror, porn, comics. Sometimes I still do. My first attempt at a book length work was a collection of interconnected short stories—I wanted it to be both grittily realist and baroquely fantastic, à la Angela Carter’s Love and The Bloody Chamber, and also to pay homage to the Halifax goth/punk scene I fell in love with in my late teens. But while I was writing it I was also reading more intergenre works, like Borderlands/La Fronteras, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and so the thing morphed and I ended up writing poems as intertexts to weave the stories together. Oddly those poems are what, from that project, ended up being published some years later, as the core of the Language Becoming a Girl section of my first poetry book.

In the time between writing that short story cycle, and publishing Wanting in Arabic, I’d begun my transition, and perhaps as importantly, had read the following line from Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Writes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto”: “…I suggest constituting transsexuals not as a class or problematic “third gender,” but rather as a genre-a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored” (Camera Obscura, 165).

And while I’ve persistently quarreled with what I’ve understood to be the material and psycho-social implications of Stone’s argument for forgoing passing—implications she is well aware of, and allows for within the manifesto— I’ve also been profoundly enabled in my thinking and writing by Stone’s suggestion that trans people actively seize and redeploy the genres through which we have been written. In a certain way I’ve been pointedly literalist in my reading of that suggestion, focusing on the literary and political potential of taking archives of sexological-psychoanalytic, anthropological, feminist/queer, and literary representations of “transgender,” as critical objects for my doctoral dissertation, and as found material for the Lyric Sexology project.

Relatedly when we—Casey Plett, Owen Campbell, Shelagh Pizey-Allen and I—were planning our trans literature and criticism conference at the University of Winnipeg, we titled it Writing Trans Genres. That was not just to add to the long list of bad trans puns, but in order to surface the way in which, as Namaste, Prosser and others’ have pointed out, trans subjects have been rendered, as textual figures, and to recentre the question of literary genre around trans authorship and audience. To do that was effectively to ask the question of minor literature. That is, beyond articulating a minority discourse—self-representation, which is still an important goal— to ask how might trans writers, critics, audiences intervene in and revise how and what we mean with and by genre, figure, literature, writing?

I'm excited by that process, in which similar archival material is rendered from critical object to academic dissertation and from found material to poetic text. Your work often seems like it is engaged in these multiplicities, of form or genre, discipline or writing practice. Could you speak more to how that might offer us some of those trans revisions to genre, to writing? I'm also thinking of what comes before the text I read. 

The presence of the archival also makes me think of the question of documentation, of self and information. In Wanting, in the surgical diary, you say "The question is how I can here try to rewrite this body which is less truth than occasion…" The turn to occasion seems to allow for these archives to speak on the present moment (the event) in an important way, maybe even insists upon it. Does truth in some way need to be turned away from, or decentered, for occasion to come?

Within "Surgical Diary" there is as you say a documentary impulse, and it seems to sometimes be read as a key to other poems in Wanting in Arabic. As you know documentary is often received or interpreted as somehow mimetic, as if it were less evidently writing than is obvious with other forms. Certainly there are truth claims evoked by the genre... and on the other hand, the Foucauldian and feminist discourses on truth claims vis a vis sex and the body, have been, by and large, deployed in ways that are anti-transsexual.  So, in terms of occasion, in a minimal way I was troubling truth as something either arising from or written on the body, but also allowing for something more modest, local, and active to be done with/as a body.

Regarding your first question, I think for me the important thing is that the palimpsest of "trans representation" we encounter as if it were what was knowable be made available for recollecting and reworking, or for analysis or deconstruction, rather than that it exist as a foundation for our being. Poetry and critique both offer ways in, as do other genres. My own preference is obviously for showing the trace, its violence and the ambiguity of it.

When you say "poetry and critique both offer ways in, as do other genres," are there trends we could align between those particular genres/ways-in? Poetry might be particularly adept at showing the traces, for instance. If that's the case, what might the essay, or the memoir, lend themselves to, as ways in? 

I'm wondering especially about the utility of memoir, how its attention to personal memory seems to offer some ripe potentials for trans writers, while in reality trans memoirs tend to default to that "foundation for our being," rather than the reworking or analysis (that is, there are exceptions, but trans memoirs seem often to write themselves into the memoir genre, rather than rewriting that genre).

At the same time, we find memory dealt with across other forms of art making-- the domestic, home movie of Gender Troublemakers: Transsexuals in the Gay Community, or memory in a Ching-In Chen zuihitsu, etc.

What might memoir, as a genre, offer you? Anything?

I think that is what I was trying to get at, a little, not a solid correlation, but perhaps a tendency, an associative drift or drags within any given generic repertoire. So sure, poetry or any work of erasure or fragmentation might stage or disclose traces, whether of "the body is the inscribed surface of events" or the mystic writing pad variety. Where is the common ground between Kate Eichorn's Fond and Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin? There are really different orders of traces. For instance,  "phrases in dispute," and the question of what might be a trace of a violence that conceals (or cancels out) the evidence of violence having taken place. But again if we think of ecriture feminine as that which is a writing of the incommensurable of the feminine and the libidinal with a syntax that precludes feminine subjectivity and embodiment, there is a doubling of the liminal with what’s excessive.

As for the essay, Stein famously asked us to experience writing as a way of holding time, and for her composition practices duration and extension. What would a Steinien attention to duration look like in terms of trans memoir? Her sense of composition does resonate for me with zuihitsu, in fact, although maybe there is the deployment of genre breaks internal to that form to mark changes in thought's tempo and topos within a long duration? I've thought more than once that a book like The Heart's Traffic looks like a novel from one perspective and like an essay from another.

I wonder about erasure as it features within the conventions that guide both the writing and reading of trans memoirs. Xanthra Phillipa and Mirha-Soleil Ross’Gender Troublemakers is a self portraiture, but certainly not memoir; more like kitchen table theory and a love letter and a call to accounts, each with different points of address, and in places its polemic and its satire are indistinguishable.

But I've always felt that trans memoir, even within its conventions, was a hybrid form, and some of this is from Prosser. But if you look carefully at the memoirs and at bildungsroman like the Well of Loneliness or Stone Butch Blues, you can see within those forms, others: the medical case study with its sexological introduction, the social protest novel, as well as elements of the how to guide and the erotic reverie in the stylized narrations of self discovery, etc. 

That said, I look forward to memoirs that look nothing like what I've read so far.

Lastly, could you speak a bit about the differences between writing and publishing in, say, 2002, when Wanting in Arabic came out, and writing now? What have the efforts and shifts in trans representation, in focused trans publishing, in trans scholarship meant for you, putting words on the page?

In 2002 there wasn’t a broader trans literary context that I was aware of, but in Toronto there was a community context, thanks to zines like gendertrash and the Counting Past 2 film festival, which had in previous years brought to town writers like Aiyyana Maracle, Viviane Namaste and Max Valerio. Xanthra Mackay, who edited and published gendertrash, and Mirha-Soleil Ross, who curated the festival, were also both writers, performers and film makers, and very actively thinking about the politics of trans representation. Counting Past 2 included a performance cabaret, and panels on transsexual cultural production, and transsexuality in cross cultural contexts, and Wanting in Arabic was launched as part of CP2 in 2002. South of the border, kari edwards had two books out that year, and had published post/(pink) back in 2000, but I didn’t know of her work until she invited me to submit something to Transgender Tapestry a couple of years later.

Anyway I had been unsuccessfully trying to place my poetry manuscript  for several years before approaching TSAR in 2001. They specialized in diasporic and postcolonial literatures, and had recently started publishing queer of colour work and that along with Counting Past 2, and the left, were my contexts. There were early and generous reviews of the book by queer writers like Margaret Christakos, Rachel Zolf and RM Vaughan.

The launch for Wanting in Arabic was organized by Anju Gogia and May Lui at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, which was an important site of qtpoc feminist organizing at that time. As was the feminist literary periodical, Fireweed, which had a trans guest collective in to edit a special issue called “Trans/ Scribes: Writing from Trans Communities” in 2000—that was one of my first times being published by other trans people. There was also Jason Barsic’s zine, Willyboy, out of Portland, which Xanthra and I had work in and which Mirha organized a virtual launch for in 98 or 99….

Of course since that time, or rather since around 2007, we’ve seen countless trans special issues of journals, the rise of an academic subfield, trans owned presses and literary journals, anthologies, novels, short story and poetry collections, as well as blogs, reviews, panels and conferences on the subject of trans literature. There is a much larger discourse, and there is a lot more opportunity to be in conversation with other writers who want to think about as well as make trans literature. In many many ways that has been wonderful, making our thinking and writing more complex, more attentive to differences among us, and to the great variety of possible literatures we might make. On the other hand, I do sometime think that this exciting proliferation of newness might inadvertently function to eclipse or erase what has come before it.

Lia Purpura on Imagination

(This essay, like the others published this week, was originally presented as part of the AWP 2017 panel “Imagining the Essay” with Rebecca McClanahan, Ander Monson, and Lauret Savoy.) 

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Well, everything’s changed, hasn’t it. At this very moment, I feel a sense of terrific urgency and a sharpening of alertness; I’m scouring, as never before, the worth, intention, purpose, and role of my work and my teaching. This is a necessary and constant task of course, but one that requires a new kind of attention to the forces bent on decimating the commonwealth. Today I’m going to speak as a writer who teaches and I’m going to talk about imagination, and the cultivating of it in the context of this historical moment, wherein language is being dangerously and concertedly macerated, and where the truth is being perverted, and for good measure, shredded. How to teach in such a climate?
     We are accustomed to calling up good content—the poem, story or essay as anti-toxin approach. This is important. More important than what to teach our students, though, may be how we teach them—specifically, how we communicate what they’re being trained for. I’m proposing that we consciously discuss with our students not just the value of Poetry or the Essay or Fiction, but that we discuss the values students are upholding by practicing as writers and readers. So this goes out to all of you who are teaching and working to articulate what you do in broader, more public ways. (I’m slanting towards undergrads but you can extrapolate.) Let’s be unabashed about the term “values” and haul it back from those forces that have profoundly narrowed its meaning, appropriated it, and politicized it. The values of art-making are among the most humane I know, and I want my students to understand exactly what it is they’re upholding and building and creating by being involved in art creation.
     In general, I make it a point to teach my students to live like writers, which includes teaching them practices that openly resist the forces of noncommital irony, unchecked consumerism, passive perception, and inherited assumptions about who’s stance and subjects “matter.”
     At the beginning of each semester, I ask them to assent to a practice for those 14 weeks—not in order to make professional writers out of them, but to confirm that there exist ways of being and habits of mind that will feed them for the rest of their lives in ways they can’t even imagine right now, and so they undestand that the act of creation is open to them, and is not some rarified realm for experts. I am direct about this and I make these claims openly: I say these practices will feed you for the rest of your lives in ways you can’t even imagine right now, and the act of creation is open to you. It is free, it is yours and it is powerful. So here are some of the practices I teach, and the values I associate with them and openly discuss with my students—3 points.


1. Keeping a Journal and The Problems of Perception

The practice of keeping a journal helps students recognize, take seriously, and make use of shades of perception. These back of the head thoughts, flashes of image and insight, unworded emotion are the first to be compromised by a “goal oriented” society—or currently, by a totalitarian leaning one. The culture at large generally devalues roaming and dreaming and conjuring. Much that isn’t quickly identified as potentially “useful” gets jettisoned. The first step is to teach how to recognize worthy inklings and then confirm that it takes work to keep these thought-realms alive. Keeping a writer’s journal shows how to protect a young, green idea from critical pruning too early on. I give explicit and daily assignments in how to perceive or what to think on, look at, look for, remember, and then how to notate quickly and unselfconsiously and how to keep it all organized in once spot. We read aloud from these assignments in class to show our different angles of entry, we listen for both exciting subjects and language moments, and I spin out for them how an image or perception might work itself into further complexity or depth—in other words, I make up stuff in front of them. I imagine ways in to a poem or essay—I “what if” my way through on the black board with them. I remind students that work spins out from the smallest moments. I confirm that pressure to set forth “big ideas” stifles and tanks the free imaginiation in search of idea.
     But in addition to imagining into their words, I talk about the ways that contemporary life makes perceiving and imagining really hard. I’ve always know this was important but an impromptu moment last semester illustrated this very clearly. There was an amusing, triggering event for this but I won’t go into it here….I asked my class to put their phones on the desk and empty their pockets, and instructed them to go outside and walk, look, just notice stuff, pay attention for 20 minutes, by themselves, without stopping to talk to anyone, then come back to class. What they had to say was pretty shocking. One woman said walking over dry leaves startled her terribly because she always had earbuds in and was totally unaccustomed to other sounds. Another said it was so unexpectedly bright out because she was looking up and not down at her phone; similarly another said she couldn’t even get herself into an upright position because she was usually bent over texting which she realized looked in others like the “posture of depression”. One guy reported a “quiet screaming in his head” because “I always mange to distract my mind with music because I’m too afraid to hear my own thoughts”. One said she felt as she hadn’t in years, like a child, and “she remembered how green the grass was and everything felt new upon inspection.” Yet another said “I was suddenly able to look at things around me and see how small I was in this world which I know should be terrifying but for me was calming. I enjoyed the peace so much that I’m actually craving it now as I’m talking about it.” And “I felt completely naked without my phone but it was an unexpected great feeling to find out I had my thoughts to accompany me.”
     So, while we as teachers and writers know we’re up against the forces of techno-distraction in many forms, I want to show my students how those forces actually manifest, and it’s a whole lot more potent if they themselves see how distraction and mediation manifest, than if you harp on them about it. (Show them exactly what they’re up against and exactly how to notice and counter that.)


2. How to Think About Time in Revision and Reading

I've talked about teaching students how to perceive, and how to recognize the impediments to perceiving. Now, about how to work with Art time. Art-making reframes time in profound ways. Art comes into being over a kind of time that’s mighty different than the urgencies students are accustomed to, and have to adapt themselves to (production, efficiency, evaluatives). I want them to understand revision as the practice of “working with time”. I lay out the different kinds of time they might encounter. There’s the rare gift piece that just descends whole, say in the shower—though I confirm that the daily practice of sitting down to it lays the ground for the gift’s arrival. I talk about the whittle and build methods of incorporating others’ comments. I have them write something on the first day and I hold it till the end of the semester and ask them to revisit it and what can happen when you let something sit for a long time—how you either lose total contact with it or it snaps quickly into place. I bring in 20 drafts of a totally failed piece of mine that just had to be let go. Or that got utterly rerouted. In other words, I want to make explicit for them the many things that can happen with time. Why is this important? This shows a way of imagining creation and collaboration which runs contrary to a reliance on singular, immediate fixes. You might also use this sort of discussion to teach a wariness about any one singular solution, any one claiming that he “alone has the power to fix our problems.” Similarly, as we know, poems, essays, stories need to be read very differently than other words on the page: repeatedly, slowly, for seepage. Not for informational gist or fact gathering. So many students sort of sheepishly admit “they had to read a thing 3 times before it really sank in”—I let them know this is exactly right according to Art values and art time and that art asks exactly this of you, and this kind of time is worthwhile and lets you be a slow grower, not a quick gulper. Take any opportunity available to point out occasions for depth over gist.


3. Workshop as a Way of Thinking and Being

Give explicit instructions for workshop that accord with the values of the free imagination and the drive to maintain that freedom for all. So you might say in your instructions that “the goal of a workshop is to see what a piece itself wants to be and help it grow into its best self. Not make the piece what you want it to be.” Once that language is posted, and persistent reminders laid in, it can be used and referred to by students and it becomes a ground of shared reasoning. Workshops are complicated - -so many “issues” roiling around. I’m sidelong addressing the “self-assigned gatekeeper issue,” those students bent on adjudicating what’s “proper art” tonally and subject wise—and this is done either overtly or it’s unwittingly coded and maintained by the consent of a majority aesthetic. You can read in depth about one form of this in Claudia Rankine’s profound article in last fall’s AWP Chronicle “In Our Way: Racism in Creative Writing." Some of my language directions include not using the phrase “I want” as in “I want the father here to do x or y”or “I want more of...”—not only is this the language of unfettered//grabby consumerism, a kind of personal pan pizza approach, but it’s language that short changes critical thought. It’s really not about what you want (and who are you anyway?) There are things other than “wanting” at stake here. I say. We teach forms of imaginative entering –empathy—by way of the very language and stances and roles we ask students to use or avoid—but these need to be well defined and our reasoning behind them made clear. So yes, I know “I want” is shorthand, but again I’m emphasizing the issue of time, and the importance of confirming how long it takes to fully articulate thought on behalf of the work.


Conclusion

I mean to encourage you to articulate the values at the heart of the practices you’re already likely teaching and present those values as central to the health of imaginative behavior. I hope to give my students a language for this subtler register of perception, and confirm what they already suspect: that those realms and registers, the ones that come on hazy and grow slowly are not only worthwhile, but are in fact where the deepest roots of civically important values like empathy, curiosity, tenacity, surprise, justice, historical contextualizing, and so on, are planted. And it’s the realm where spirit lives, and where the ineffable finds its body. Though students may have a sense of why their work matters to them, I’m trying to help them sustain a sense of the practice of art as a way to uphold a humane, creative society—one that we are all in danger of losing if we do not actively tend to its best and most powerful features.

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Lia Purpura is the author of 8 collections of essays, poems, and translations. Her awards include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, NEA and Fulbright Fellowships, and four Pushcart prizes. On Looking (essays) was finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, MD and is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County. It Shouldn’t Have been Beautiful, her new collection of poems, has recently been published by Viking/Penguin.

Rebecca McClanahan: The Essay as a Warm and Shifting Presence

(This essay, like the others published this week, was originally presented as part of the AWP 2017 panel “Imagining the Essay” with Lia Purpura, Ander Monson, and Lauret Savoy.) 

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Several years ago, during an AWP panel similar to this, I was sitting in the audience, and as the panelists began their talks about forgotten essayists, I caught in my peripheral vision a sudden movement, and something animal moved in me, for being at the time a NY apartment dweller, I was accustomed to that form of furtive skittering. Some of you were there, too, and know where this is heading, so I’ll cut to the chase: When in the course of human events a mouse appears, all bets are off. For mice are all about movement, digression being their foremost power. They live and breathe their grammar of prepositions, all those outs and ins. And this particular mouse—Mus Musculus, as I would later name him—was something to behold. His digressions included among the boots, between the aisles, along the extension cord, beneath the tablecloth spread for our panelists’ modesty, and now here he was skittering across the room and onto the partition, lifting his head in a literary pause as if to acknowledge his audience, and then he was out of sight.
     Later, as I thought back on the event, Cynthia Ozick’s essay came to mind—“She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body,” which meanders through quotations and arguments and suppositions, coming to rest on this: the essay is not an abstraction; “She is too fluid, too elusive, to be a category.” She has contours, a body, is “a presence in the doorway.”
     Which brought me back to Mus Musculus. A warm body, yes, and a presence—in the doorway and elsewhere—but beyond that, an active, moving presence. He was, the more I thought about it, the Essay Mouse. For one of the primary elements of the imaginative essay is its movement. Ozick describes this as “the movement of a free mind at play.” Phillip Lopate notes the movement of the personal essay as “wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of a matter.” And Deborah Tall and John D'Agata, in their editors’ notes in Seneca Review, write, of the lyric essay, “It elucidates through the dance of its own delving.”
     Drawing on these ideas, I began to examine some of my favorite essays not for the elegance and surprise of their language or for the voiceprint rising from the page—the two characteristics that usually seduce me as a reader—but rather for the moves the writers make.
     I started with short essays, like Barbara Hurd’s “Moon Snail,” which moves swiftly from its title, to an epigraph from Aristotle, to her first sentence—three words that begin an argument with Aristotle—followed by an “if” supposition, and then a description of a shell. And we’re only into the third sentence. As with most essays, as Alfred Kazin once observed, “… it is not the thought that counts but the experience we get of the writer’s thought.” And reading an essay rooted in imagination, we sometimes hang on for dear life because we are on a moving track. The more essays I studied, the more I saw, until my list of moves grew to more than seventy, including sidewinding, colliding, weaving, reversing, echoing, shifting tense, shifting point of view, employing negative space, as well as numerous camera and editing moves—flip image, splice, stop action, split screen, zoom in for closeup, and on and on.
     One of the most gear-shifting, wide-ranging essays was Reg Saner’s “Pliny and the Mountain Mouse,” which (speaking of the essay as a warm body) opens from the point of view of a marmot, who after months of hibernation wakes in what we now know as Colorado, though it is not yet named Colorado, for it is August 24, AD 79, and, as Saner moves on to say, “You and I aren’t here yet.” In this essay, Saner not only inhabits other minds than his own and moves backward in time, way back, he also imagines his way across wide expanses, sometimes straddling two continents at once, thus employing what I think of as the classic “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” move. We’re now seven thousand miles to the east, in Herculaneum, with science writer Pliny the Elder, who is sweating over his voluminous Natural History to insert facts about marmots. Then Saner moves on to the eruption of Vesuvius, which results in the death of the Elder, and then (here comes that wonderful “meanwhile” again) it is “evening in another country,” and we are back with the marmot, but in our own time. For, as Saner writes, “We can be here now. It’s our turn—to be, and be curious.” Finally, the “I” of the essay enters, an “I” who has seen hundreds of marmots, and, recalling one particular marmot, remarks that “to remember what sheer courage looks like, my mind’s eye often invokes him.”
     The mind’s eye, of course, is the eye of imagination. For some essayists, the eye of imagination does not leap like Saner’s across expanses of time and space but rather looks inward, finding the rocky, constantly changing terrain of the mind more than sufficient landscape to traverse. This kind of essayist might appear at first glance to be single-minded, but upon closer reading is shown to contain any number of multiple identities, including past and imagined selves as well as the present-tense self, a self that changes even as the words appear on the page. I’m reminded of Lewis Thomas’s “My Magical Metronome,” an ode to his pacemaker. At one point, he admits that in the past, writing as a physician, he had been critical of such technologies. Now, as the patient, he writes, “And here I am, enjoying precisely this sort of technology, eating my words.”
     Imaginative essayists are constantly eating their words, like Pac-Man ingesting dots so he can move to the next level, even while the ghosts pursue him. Reading their work, we can witness this process on the page; we can witness them eating their words. For they not only digress, they retract, reconsider, go forward one step, backward two, take another forward step, sidestep, and reconsider, because the act of writing moves that self more deeply into its most deeply divided thought. While in real life—whatever that is—we are often instructed, “No ifs, ands, or buts,” in an essay of imagination, these conjunctions are sometimes the main characters, and should be invited in as often as possible, like guests who disagree with our opinions. Here’s Montaigne in “On the Art of Conversation”: “When I am contradicted it arouses my attention, not my wrath. I move toward the man who contradicts me: he is instructing me.”
     Let’s take Montaigne’s idea a step further and imagine that “the man” (or woman) “who contradicts me” is myself. The first time I read C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, decades ago, I didn’t notice that he was doing exactly that. At the time, I was too hungry for answers. Or, if not answers, at least consolation. Wisdom. Guidance. A pathway through the forest of grief I was lost in. If you know the book, which I consider an extended essay, you know that I got more than I bargained for. Forget comfort and consolation. This writer is on fire, arguing with his culture, his God, established notions of grief, and, most startlingly, with himself, writing his way through the grief of losing his wife, yet refusing to solve the dilemma. “I will not, if I can help it,” he writes, “shin up either the feathery or the prickly tree. Two widely different convictions press more and more on my mind.” Paragraph to paragraph, sentence to sentence, Lewis employs ifs, ands, and buts freely, contradicting himself, eating his words. Here are three brief examples:

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me . . . I mean my own body. 

What does it matter how I remember her or whether I remember her at all? None of these alternatives will either ease or aggravate her past anguish. Her past anguish. How do I know that all her anguish is past?

I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness . . .The less I mourn her the nearer I seem to her. An admirable programme. Unfortunately it can’t be carried out. Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again;

It is a commonplace that “essay” is rooted in “attempt” or “try,” as in trying an experiment. But let’s enlarge and re-imagine “to try” to include “to put something on trial,” to argue both sides of the case. Because sometimes an essayist argues both sides of the case. She is both defender and prosecutor. She is, literally, beside herself.  Not out of her mind, but rather out of her single mind, making room as she writes for two or more aspects of herself to exist in the same moment on the page. She begins writing and finds that, say, the mother inside her is arguing with the daughter. The doctor with the patient. The ex-Catholic with the Buddhist. Through the process of imagining, of allowing—no, encouraging—collisions, she creates her own personal call-and-response choir. Turns out Ozick was right, or partly right. The movement of the essay is the movement of a free mind at play, yes, but is also the movement of a free mind conversing with all the other free minds living beside, and above, and beneath it.
     Which leads me to imagine that the most important questions an essayist can ask herself are, “At what place am I most deeply divided? Where am I of two minds? Or three, or four? And how can I bring those minds into the essay?” As Whitman suggests, we contain multitudes. Why not put them together and let them talk (or sing) it out?

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Rebecca McClanahan has published ten books of nonfiction, essays, poetry, and writing instruction, most recently The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change and a new edition of Word Painting: The Fine Art of Writing Descriptively. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, The Sun, and numerous journals and anthologies. McClanahan has received the Wood Prize from Poetry magazine, a Pushcart Prize in fiction, the Glasgow Award in nonfiction for her suite of essays, The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, and literary fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She teaches in the MFA programs of Queens University and Rainier Writing Workshop.

PREDATOR VS AWP / Ander Monson on the Imagination of Predator

(This essay, like the others published this week, was originally presented as part of the AWP 2017 panel “Imagining the Essay” with Rebecca McClanahan, Lia Purpura, and Lauret Savoy.)

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I’d like to begin with a quotation from Nicole Walker, the Jesse Ventura of literary nonfiction:

Fiction is just nonfiction that hasn’t happened yet. 

If it’s in the essay then it’s happened. I mean, it’s happening right now—something is happening right now—out loud and on the page and in the little stage that is your mind as you hear these words and try to parse the mask. I hope you can hear me through the mask. That’s how the magic works, that the thing you read—however incomplete the record is—is a recording of my lighting up that lights your light up when you read it or when you listen. Ask John D’Agata. He’s got my back on this for sure. From our boats we can just make out the semaphore. Or ask Robert Pinsky, who tells us that the medium of the poem is the body of the reader. Or ask Ice Cube who tells us that the medium of the predator is the body of the editor.
     It’s that we watched the film in 1987 that anchors us. It’s that we ate the thing alive and still it moves in us these thirty years later. If you haven’t, it’s not too late to become one of us, we temporary predators. Walk home from this talk and watch and become another.
     Or just listen to this song I sing, a secondary echo. Let it hit you in your sedentary retro. Or think about it later on the metro. Let it sort the future from the past. If it kicks a little ass so much the better.
     In his novelization of the film, the poet Paul Monette tells us that the reason the Predator gets obsessed with us—humans, the only thing it cannot become—is that we have souls. It can shape-change into any other creature in the book (though not the film: the novelization was novelized from an early version of the script, before the film discarded that) and does. But not into our hot protagonists, sweating and gleaming and shooting their way through jungle.
     Any form it cannot assume it wants to know. We know this well. How obsessed we can become with others’ forms. (Check your libraries of porn or funny videos of pets.) We can settle at least for second-best: in watching a thing we hope to inhabit it. In inhabiting a thing we become it for a minute. Becoming something for a minute means we can become it always if we find that moment in it in ourselves—that movement, the way it moved, the way we moved in it, the way it moved in us, that mode of being Predator. Becoming something other than ourselves means we embiggen (what? it's a perfectly cromulent word), deepen, contain more, become bigger Predators, better editors. This should remind us—even if it probably won’t, because I know how we are, poor in thought and deed, always seeking to feed on something smaller—that when we act we do not act alone.
     Watching Predator is exercise in otherness, an associate’s degree in empathy with a minor in animal husbandry. If the film has genius, which I believe it does, it’s in how we get the creature’s POV, its thermal vision mainly and its attempts to parse our speech. Now I can approximate that effect with a little camera dongle that shows me the world in thermal ways. In Tucson, Arizona we appreciate the heat but cannot read its gradients without long expertise or tools. This is how the creature sees, not in solids but coronas. How the line of sweat that crests my brow cools the skin a degree can be measured: I change color. Compare to Alien: that animal is unknowable, even in the fictional. We have no clue how it sees us except as reproductive hosts. Does it have a soul? Monette never wrote the book on that to say.
     But Predator observes our interactions, our stupid jokes that we have to explain to land, how men speak to each other when they’re alone. In this way we are shown ourselves in ways we’re not in, say, Commando or Total Recall. The Predator does not share nor understand our language. Listening to men talk what the president refers to as “locker room talk” I wonder what I understand about our language. I am not around them often: presidents nor predators nor when they are one and the same. I do not live with them. Visiting my brother the investment banker the Trump supporter, I’m surprised what parts of me arise and what I’m capable of saying. When he starts in on the NEA I reach for my laser spear. There is much of me I’ve put away, it seems, since 1987.
     As usual I’ve taken it too far. Maybe I’ve eviscerated a few things but not yet a human (though one could argue that this is what a good essay does). I’m overcivilized through and through. Like you I drive a Subaru and tweet. If I could wear the thing as easily as I wear its mask I would have killed all of us already with my shoulder cannon or some other cool weapon—or at least those of us who are armed.
     Thomas Hardy tells me “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.” Imagine the cognitive work it takes to think like another thing. Now think of the I in essay as another thing, a role you play, a rubber suit you have to work to get on yourself with a visor inside the mask that shows you—forces you to see—the world in a slightly different way. That’s what you want: to be yourself but inside another, to activate something new in you when you put on the suit. To give yourself permission to speak—to think—to live in a different way.
     The exploratory draft is where you start to figure out the features of you that show that will become your role. In a second draft you start to play it better, to see the contours of the I, and give the creature that you’ve made of you more to chew on, more to see and do. This is how to figure out its idiosyncrasy. It doesn’t have to think like you exactly, this thing you made: your homunculus looks like you but the more you feed it the more independent it gets. That’s good. Key discoveries can come by rhyme or tracking language, even in error. In another draft you can introduce it to other people, throw it in situations it’s unaccustomed to: an Alison Bechdel situation, for instance, to watch it try to camouflage itself in a cold old room with an absent father. How much other is too much other is a question we shouldn’t bother with. It’s transformation that we’re after.

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(Photo credit: Edward McPherson)

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Ander Monson is one of the curators of this site and coeditor, with Craig Reinbold, of How We Speak to One Another: an Essay Daily Reader, out this month from Coffee House Press. If you're reading this and enjoying it, you should really buy the book.