Everyday Maneuvers: Jan Bindas-Tenney on Driving Claudia Rankine to the Airport

Everyday Maneuvers: On Driving Claudia Rankine to the Airport

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The sky still dim one April morning, I picked up Claudia Rankine at the pink adobe Arizona Inn to drive her to the airport after her reading at the Tucson Poetry Festival the night before.  As we drove quickly down the empty early spring streets, she told me that she isn’t particularly concerned with the tenets of nonfiction. Yes, she is concerned with accuracy, as Citizen: An American Lyric is documentary or a “community document” as she described it at her Tucson Poetry Festival reading. Some of the stories in Citizen are certainly her own, but she also includes anecdotes collected from friends and colleagues, both black and white. Rankine told me she wants the people in her book to recognize themselves as responsibly and accurately portrayed, but is less concerned with a true story; she wishes to interrogate the feeling inside of a moment.
     There is something there, in the emphasis on tone rather than story. Writers often talk about the emotional distance required to properly portray. Some things are too close, we say. Reading Citizen, I have the sense of peeling away the narratives around a series of moments and climbing inside. Rather than a spectator of the scene, I am part of it: the perpetrator, the addressed, and the exposed. As Rankine elaborates in an interview with Lauren Berlant in BOMB Magazine: “Tone is an everyday kind of maneuver. It disrupts and communicates aggression, disgust, dis- respect, and humor, among a myriad of possibilities, thereby allowing language to morph into a blanket or a gun.”
     The truth is that I had hoped to do a full-length interview with Rankine (that I might have transcribed and posted here). But being nominated for (and winning) the Los Angeles Times Book Prize crunched her time in Tucson and I was lucky to get this daybreak-drive. Rankine in her gauzy scarf asked me many more questions about my work than I expected. She gave me a wide-ranging list of book and film recommendations that I am still working my way through, including Tina Fey’s new television show as well as Rankine’s new anthology The Racial Imaginary. As we drove south on Campbell Avenue, past the university football stadium and the off-campus party dorms, a few people stumbled home from the previous night. I asked her again what she meant by not being interested in nonfiction. She elaborated, “I’m interested in getting at an affect – not a story.” Citizen uses documentary as a way to be present to the emotions and feelings of the people in it, but not necessarily to document fact. We drove by a sea of Airstream trailers on Benson Highway, as I addressed and she responded, she addressed and I responded. We created a moment not dissimilar in its mechanics to the many interactions documented in Citizen: in the Starbucks, at the grocery store, in a car. While our physical orientation mimicked scenes from the book, I hoped our conversation’s content and tone were distinct.
     As many have observed, much of Citizen unfolds in second person prose blocks documenting daily racist microaggressions between small groups of people in what cultural theorist Sara Ahmed might describe as the “drama of contingency.” The second person address is a multi-layered and complex quilt; the “you” implicates the reader with a persistent address that is both self-reflexive and interrogative. As B.K. Fischer elaborates in the Boston Review, Rankine utilizes “the subjective ‘you’ that trails the self, the ‘you’ that stands in for the ‘I’ and also telescopes the reader’s apprehension… Cracked open by the temporal deixis of ‘you,’ the lyric space becomes a field of notice, expansion, and interrogation.” Something happens in my reading experience of Rankine’s “you” that creates an elastic contingency between myself, the “you,” the he and she. Because of the “you,” her scenes unfold between us; feelings and tones emerge as if I am recipient of the address rather than merely spectator to a narrative scene.
     Early on in the book a scene opens, “You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there / You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having. / Why do you feel comfortable saying this to me?” At times Rankine’s “you” feels directive (you are in the dark, in the car), other times narrative (you think maybe), standing in for the I, he, or she, and still other times the “you” becomes interrogative. In these interrogative moments, perspective shifts inside the mind of the “you” to reverse the address outward (to the he, or maybe to the reader).
     Rankine seems to trouble this issue of addressability, giving examples when the “you” is invisible and others when the “you” is hyper-visible. Rankine quotes Judith Butler in response to a question about what makes language hurtful: “Our very being exposes us to the address of another. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.” By focusing on the affect of the address rather than story, Rankine reveals the pervasive infiltration of racist tones in everyday language.
     In the car, Rankine and I approached the discount airport parking lots with their red ramadas and neon signs. Shuttle van drivers waited with their engines running as we zipped by. I asked Rankine about the role of spectatorship in Citizen. I said the Situation Videos give me a sense of interrogating the inside of a moment rather than looking from the outside at a past event. She said she was glad I was thinking about that; the book is all about spectatorship. We smiled. I held the steering wheel with two hands.
     Rankine’s “Scripts for Situation Videos” in Citizen provide text scripts to video collaborations with the filmmaker John Lucas (the videos can be found on her website). She explains in the same interview with Berlant: “The decision to exist within the events of the ‘Situation Videos’ came about because the use of video manipulation by John Lucas allowed me to slow down and enter the event, in moments, as if I were there in real time rather than as a spectator considering it in retrospect.”  The videos provide an abstract reenactment for the original event: not an exact replica, but one that explodes the emotional moment. In “Stop and Frisk” (number 6), the video opens with the monotone breath of an accordion bellow and a suburban street where several young men walk down the sidewalk. As the young men enter a clothing boutique to try on jackets and sweatshirts, digital galactic sounds perforate the dull roar of the accordion, and Rankine’s voice over begins: “I felt that whatever is happening is happening in front of me, but the police vehicle came to a screeching halt in front of me like they were setting up a blockade.” The blue and red of cop lights flash across the young men’s faces giving me anxiety and a sense of urgency as I watch, despite their smiles as they try on jackets. The sounds coalesce into police sirens as the eerie accordion monotones throughout, sometimes interrupted by President Obama’s voice, or a conversation over a police radio: “Is it a male or female?” “You don’t know why?” Rankine’s voice tells the story of a person with a briefcase (a lawyer?) being pulled over for no reason on the way home, repeating this refrain as the interaction escalates: “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.”
     The title “Stop and Frisk” points to a very specific violent policy of the New York City police concerning young black men. Living in Brooklyn for seven years, I often watched the cops throw middle school kids up against brick walls then dump their backpacks on the sidewalk. I approached these situations when I saw them happening. “Are you okay?” I asked the kids. Do you want me to document what is happening to you? The cops yelled at me that it was none of my business. I worked hard to figure out responsible ways to be in solidarity with individuals and groups trying to change the City’s racist policing practices. My complicity was also complicated. There are many ways that my white body contributed to the ordinary violence I saw happening in my neighborhood. Newly gentrifying neighborhoods, especially like Lefferts Gardens where I lived, often saw the highest levels of policing and most increased numbers of frisks.
     Rankine’s story of the lawyer’s arrest for nothing does not document a “Stop and Frisk” apprehension in particular, but gestures to the many ways black bodies get policed in America on the street, in cars, in the airport, in the coffee shop. Rankine’s voice-over juxtaposed with an everyday situation of men trying on clothes and layered with the urgent visual and sonic affects of sirens, police radios, and lights all give the sense of an ordinary danger. It reminds me of seeing the children against the brick wall on the way home from school. Rankine’s choice to explode the Stop and Frisk moment out, when she might have attempted an accurate story, does more work to reveal the hidden, displaced, and negated insides of a moment than might ever be possible to unpack as a spectator. In that sense she seems to investigate the tone of Stop and Frisk, not the story.
     Rankine and I arrived at the quiet Tucson airport terminal and laughed about how different her experience arriving at LAX would be, compared to our hushed desert departure lounge. We said goodbye. On the way back to town and for these past two months, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of interrogating the tone inside a moment. My short conversation with Rankine bounces around my brain like a pinball. I see manipulations of tone everywhere I look. Citizen makes important moves to reveal the layers of racism imbedded in everyday interactions. Perhaps by focusing on accurate story, as a white writer I’ve been blind to giant tone missteps, microaggressions, or even macroaggressions in my essays. I want to work hard to peel those layers off, work hard against imbedded racisms, interrogate my tones. As police murder young black men around the country, kneel on a fourteen-year-old girl in a bathing suit and, and wave guns at unarmed teens, as a young white man mass-murders nine people at a church prayer meeting, this hard work is crucial.
     I want to write an essay from the inside out, exploring the hidden, negated, displaced emotions in the drama of our everyday interactions. Reading Rankine’s work and thinking about our conversation makes me want to deeply investigate the subconscious tones in my own essays. I’m left wondering how I might get closer, shoulder-to-shoulder, with my narratives to recognize their limits, the way racism unconsciously infiltrates my stories. Especially as a young white essayist in America at the beginning of my career, I want to think hard about which are my blankets. Which are my guns?

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Jan Bindas-Tenney is a candidate in the nonfiction MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. She is at work on a book-length collection of essays exploring enclave (gated, secluded, and intentional) communities and their relationships to a continually dissatisfying and unattainable desire for the good life. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Gulf Coast Online, Guernica, and CutBank Online, among other places.

Maggie Messitt: On Finding & Vaulting Story

I watched her search for my story (thinking little of what she would find. After years of reporting inside a small rural community in South Africa, I arrived at Thoko's homestead on a Sunday morning, this time as a customer. A traditional healer, she’d said to me once that she’d never thrown the bones for a malungu and told the malungu the truth, the whole truth—only the shiny parts. She’d said that she’d be honest if I wanted, that I could count on her reading each bone as the ancestors placed them. At the time, I nodded and smiled. She knew little of my life, but after spending so many months, years even, so intimately at her side through obstacles and successes, inside her ndumba and shebeen (backdoor illegal pub), I was finally ready to sit there and hear her tell me about my life. Inside her ndumba, I sat, legs swept to the side, and watched Thoko begin something I’d seen her do a dozen times over the previous year.  Her voice grew raspy. And she began to speak to her ancestors. She shook, lifted, and released the bones into the air, onto the mat, across the floor. She pointed to the constellation of objects and told me what she could see. Her wooden spear pointed to specific pairings and single items, each telling me something about my life and my family. Some were shiny. Some were dark. A few secrets, things I’d recently discovered and some I would only discover months later, were on her ndumba floor, for both of us to see.)

Lists push what I don’t know how to say onto the page (knowing no other way to parse through life’s hard parts. After years of long form journalism, years of writing about others, my first blank page staring back at me was meant for me. I spent a year looking at the list I transcribed from Thoko’s ndumba, everything the ancestors told her about my present, and everything they outlined for my future—the story of my life had been plot-lined through futsu seeds and coins and the bones of animals that roamed nearby. But, years later, I could not write of this life, the life she told me about, with the same ease I’d grown accustomed. I had so much to say, but I’d lost my long form voice. My marriage had slowly stolen my words and I grew to speak only when spoken to. After—once things were over—I maintained this silence for many years, on the page and in person. Words about others have come back, but words for myself are still hard to come by. And so, I make lists. I trick myself into millimeter steps toward writing about issues of death and violence, infidelity and manipulation, race and the character of a place I still call home. I play with these lists, pushing and pulling them like silly putty, stretching inside some spaces, and rearranging each item or sentence for narrative. I let there be room for absence and leave space for my imaginary reader to make connections. The truth is, I am not writing essays. I write these with no intention to publish. They are a collection of iceberg tips. They are a map for me to explore.)

Our words are often the first thing to go (slipping into survival mode.)

My mother is quiet (choosing to express very little of herself on the page. I’ve rarely seen her write letters. She writes lists. A lot of lists. She rarely tells stories of growing up. And I was more likely to steal affection from her than to receive it unsolicited. She spends ages inside greeting card aisles and writes only Love Kris, Love Mom, or Love Nana inside birthday cards, Valentines Day notes, and milestone congratulations. For serious affairs, she calls the Cenacle for a personalized sentiment and a commitment by the church—her long time rock, the space in which she silently speaks—to pray. On those, she signs nothing. When her third child, my older brother, moved as far away as (at the time) it seemed possible, my mother started to cut Dick Tracey, his favorite comic strip, from the paper each morning and sent a batch at the end of each week. On top of each, she placed a yellow sticky note, wrote the day of the week and one line. The weather. Simple news from home. Eventually, my mother was cutting comics for all six of her children and keeping the post office in business with her weekly priority drops. Tiny paper tweets two decades before I sat at the kitchen table and helped my parents sign up for Twitter so they could follow Pope Francis. Her account remains blank, much like the letters I know she would like to write and the sticky notes she no longer writes. Eventually—soon after her youngest sister, a woman who would send you an eight page handwritten letter, went missing—my mother's words found paper and other people less and less.)

I force myself to find and stretch language inside the confines of form (finding ways to write around and around the subject I should be facing until I am left staring at what I’ve been avoiding. Lists are just one of these. Crots. Panels. Modeling unnamed forms like this very one you see here. Or this one. Or this one. These are all tricks. They are games. They get me moving. And, they push my voice to fill the space. And, now, I have stacks of these shape-shifting pages. Lists as tombstones. Lists as eulogy. A collection of crots in search of myself and our own cartographic existence. Segments that compartmentalize a long string of events I have never shared with another person. And, as I work to tell my aunt’s story, impossible to separate from my own, panels and maps help me explore her life, her art, and the island where she disappeared. I have written these late into the night, on airplanes, in other people’s homes and hotel lobbies in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. Last I counted, I have written more then one hundred and forty of these essay-like-things, digitally stacked inside a vault. Every once in a while, one gets loose and finds itself a home, but they are more about piecing together the plot lines Thoko identified in front of me, my narrative and my mother's, prying open a closed door, rusted by years of pushing away the past or scarred shut. They have become like calisthenics, assaying toward a truth.)

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Maggie Messitt has spent the last decade reporting from inside underserved communities in southern Africa and middle America. Author of The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa, Messitt lived in northeastern South Africa for 8 years during which time she was a long-form reporter, newspaper editor, and founding director of a writing school. Since returning to the US, her essays and reportage have been published in Creative Nonfiction, Essay Daily, Memoir Journal, Mother Jones, River Teeth, and the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance magazine, among others. Messitt is currently a PhD candidate at Ohio University and a 2015 Scholar-in-Residence at Bowers Writers House.

Jane Piirto: T47W-R27N Rocks

This last month, Michigan State University Press published an exciting multigenre collection called Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, edited by Ron Riekki, who's doing as much as anyone living to highlight the many writers who write about Michigan and/or consider Michigan their home. He's edited several anthologies now, and Here is the most recent and perhaps the most exciting. As soon as a friend tipped me off to its publication, my mouth started watering, and I'm glad to say it's a great collection, one that you should certainly check out. Michigan's my home state, and my state of mind, and since I live in Arizona now, whenever a new Michigan anthology drops, I'm filled with a sense of longing for my home, and I think anew about what it means to write about or to or from a place—or to write a place, as we do, since we're not all writing documentary. We have complicated relationships with the places we're from or that we choose or choose us. 

One of the great things about these anthologies is how they introduce me to writers that I didn't yet know writing about a place I do—or that I thought I did, until I read their work and saw it new. Jane Piirto is one of these writers, and we asked her here to talk about place and writing place and her connection to it. (And a little later in the year, we'll hear from another contributor to Here, Emily Van Kley.) In the meantime, enjoy Jane's essay—and check out the anthology. I promise it'll be worth your time. --Ander

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T47N R27W Rocks

Jane Piirto

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“It was no wonder that they found iron ore; it was everywhere; this is the Marquette range; these are the two richest Michigan iron townships, land descriptions that still have a ring of greatness about them: T47N R26W and T47N R27W.” 

--John Bartlow Martin, Call It North Country: The Story of Upper Michigan

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I was wearing a white cotton sweatshirt with blue letters saying “Ishpeming High School” for the July 4, 1986 celebration of the centennial of the Statue of Liberty along the Hudson River in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. A woman came over to me as we were watching the parade of tall ships, Operation Sail, under the Verazzano Bridge.
     “Ishpeming,” she said to me. “You know where Ishpeming is?”
     “I grew up there and still go home every summer.”
     “I was the makeup artist on Anatomy of a Murder. It was very far away and very cold.”
     We chatted for a few moments. The Verrazano Bridge, beneath which we were standing, is the longest suspension bridge in the U.S., but the Mackinac Bridge that spans the Lower and Upper Peninsulas of Michigan, is the 3rd longest, after the Golden Gate Bridge. She recalled the fear she experienced crossing the Mackinac Bridge, which had only just opened when she had her sojourn in Ishpeming.
     She laughed when I told her I give directions to T-47 N.-R.26W by saying, “Turn left at the Mackinac Bridge and drive 180 miles, all of it on two-lane roads, except for the last 15. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan has few four-lane highways.”

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The next month, about 1200 miles from Brooklyn, as I slid down the steep, rocky cliff overgrown with brush, on my bum, my knees up and my heels guiding me, I spied it. It was beneath dense green undergrowth on dry leaves, in a sumac stand in leafy-topped wild carrot that hides the ground and harbors garter snakes in moist cool darkness. My mother forged the lead, and she was already down to the bottom; even though I am 25 years younger than she, I was hard-pressed to keep up with her in the woods behind our house on Jasper Street in Ishpeming, Michigan. This is the back of the Hard Ore Addition in arguably the richest iron ore township in the USA. We were off trail, bushwhacking, trying to find an old footpath to Lake Sally, the lofty lake that was the water supply for our town. When it was first surveyed in the 1840s, this land was so rough that chaining a straight line was almost impossible.
     The rock was a heavy, white, scored, chunk of snow quartz. I grabbed my camera from around my neck, spreading my newly painted red fingernails about its football-sized circumference, and took this photograph. We were in the middle of the decline, and it was steep, the quartz very heavy, too heavy to pick up and carry home. I mentally marked its place and followed my mother to the swampy bottom, where the marsh marigolds grow in May, and where the ground was spongy even now in August. I had just arrived from New York City, where I worked as a school principal at Hunter College Campus Schools—thus the red fingernails. They tell the time of the photograph as I only had red fingernails at that time in my life, in 1986.
     That rock is still there, I believe, under the underbrush on that hill’s cliff, born there over ten million years ago, to hide there unappreciated. I could never find it again, even though we are denizens of this wood and know it well. The wood is dense with trails for buggies and horses, the trails designed in the early 1900s by landscape architect William Manning for the nearby cottage of the iron magnate William B. Mather, of Cleveland. It contains over 200 varieties of plants, many imported, including the wild carrot, which has overrun many yards. Our neighborhood, aptly named Cleveland Location, was his home in Ishpeming. This quartz was most likely part of a wide quartz vein in the famous Negaunee iron bed. The cottage is still used by the bosses who travel to town from Cleveland to assess their iron holdings—now open pit mines. When I was growing up our town had underground mines, and my father worked the Blueberry Mine for awhile, but he didn’t like it underground. He then worked for years as a welder at The Brownstone Shops, on East Division Street, a union man working for the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company. He died in 1974 of lung cancer at the age of 62.
     I know these woods so intimately I mentally walk and crosscountry ski the paths when I am under stress, and I can recall specific trees and rocks along the paths. Since I live near Cleveland, Ohio, I have spent time researching the Mather family and the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company at the Western Reserve Archives, where many of their papers languish. Next to the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame on the south shore of Lake Erie, is their private ore boat, the W. G. Mather, also a museum. This boat was the flagship of the 13 boats the Company owned. One photograph in the Western Reserve museum shows the family reclining on deck chairs over the ore pockets on their annual trip up the lakes to Marquette. One of the mining towns in this area is named after Mather’s mother, Gwinn. Perusing the plat book for Marquette County describes the ownership of much land by the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company. We only bought the land our house stands on from the Company in the 1970s, though we have lived in the house since 1938.
     In my yard I have a sacred circle of rocks which I have picked up on my travels, including speckled salt and pepper granite from Yosemite, copper-bearing rock from Calumet, and stones from Russia, Australia, England, Finland, Slovenia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, New Zealand, Hungary, and other places I have traveled. Coming home with a small rock in my purse has never caused me to be searched at customs. The local rocks are the ones I treasure most. I have round black basalt from the shores of Lake Superior, and many others of water-tossed Superior granite as well. Though I have tried, I have never found an agate while beachcombing. Round wave-smoothed Lake Superior rocks also lay placed above the firebox in our sauna stove out at camp, as they do in fireplaces and sauna stoves all over the region. The cover of my book of poems, Saunas, is one of the old saunas built by immigrants in the Finnish way.
     The rocks from mine waste piles of Township 47 North also form a spectacular stone wall probably laid by Italian stone masons who immigrated to work in the mines early in the twentieth century. This wall is one of the secret treasures of the town, and when you enter our street, Jasper Street, you think you are entering an estate. This is a secret work of art that few people, even in Marquette County, Michigan, know about. We line up against the wall across the way for family photographs each year.
     This particular neighborhood, or location, as we call neighborhoods in our mining town (locations of mines), was mostly populated by Finnish immigrants after the turn of the twentieth century, and the alley still bears the characteristic carpentry of rural Finnish hay barns. The location is now poor, rundown, and a rumored meth locale, with many rental properties. We are among the last of the original families who still live in the family home.
     Quartz is supposedly a rock with spiritual, healing powers, and vibrations and energy and new age connotations. I particularly remember the crystals that were displayed in the hallway entry at the Windows on the World, the top of the World Trade Center where we used to go for drinks or Sunday brunch, and the huge crystal boulders in the yards of rich folks in Sedona, Arizona. Those are crystals that form spears and prisms. But quartz is also present where there is iron. And gold. Our town also has a defunct gold mine. Quartz is a signal mineral, the second most common on earth. Lake Superior has an iron collar and prospectors knew that iron was near when they found hornblende and quartz in the hills bordering the southern shore of Lake Superior. Copper ore and float copper are also present in this mineral-rich peninsula, but that is 80 miles west of the Marquette Iron Range.
     Iron is the sine qua non of my town; the names of the local athletic teams reflect this--the Negaunee Miners and the Ishpeming Hematites. Hematite is a type of iron. Iron here is in the form of pocket ore, not powder, as it is in the Mesabi Range, of the western Lake Superior region. According to the U.S. Geologic Survey, the Marquette Iron Range is made up of the Ishpeming Formation, of Goodrich Quartzite and Bijiki Schist and the Negaunee Formation, of similar geologic rock.
     About a half mile north from my quartz rock is another phenomenon, the largest gem in the world, a high mound or dome of banded hematite. The silver blue hematite and deep maroon jasper are shown in the cover photograph of my book of collected works, A Location in the Upper Peninsula (1995), in a portrait of the rock taken by my artist/photographer son.
     Jasper Knob is one of the most idiosyncratic features of this region, and when we were kids, and even now (last summer) geologists from universities all over the nation on field trips, would arrive with their students, and we would guide them up the rocky, slippery needle-covered path, over the ore-red-tinted paths, beneath the white pines and Norway pines, mountain ash with its orange berries, and long-wild apple trees. One of my colleagues in the geology department uses the cover of my book to illustrate banded hematite and he told me he himself was on a field trip to the bluff while getting his Ph.D. from Iowa. The story of this bluff is dramatic. On this rock, in 1864, two explorers camped for the winter, built a shack and lived on potatoes, to claim it for the Graveraet Mining Company. Some claim jumpers came, shot at them, and drove the men away. The interlopers made the claim for the rival company after a winter race 200 miles east to Sault Ste. Marie to where claims were registered. Tales of such chicanery and violence inhabit the myths of this place.
     One genre of the local stories concerns immigrant characters from Cornwall, Sweden, Italy, Finland, and others who came to mine and log, to extrude ore and to cut first growth huge timber on the land. The third extraction of the region is fish from Superior. Robert Traver, the pen name of local lawyer and Michigan Supreme Court Judge John Voelker, gave me, for Christmas, 1987, a copy of his book called Danny and the Boys, with tales of these characters. He inscribed it thus, in green Sharpie: “Merry Christmas, thanks for your book and the best of good luck to Jane Piirto from her fellow Ishpeming writer. John Voelker (Robert Traver) Dec. 25th 1987.” He is most well known for his best-selling novel, Anatomy of a Murder, the film of which was made in Ishpeming. For months in the late 1950s our town buzzed with sightings of Jimmy Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, Eve Arden, Count Basie, and the director, Otto Preminger. My aunt was an extra in the courtroom scene; she’s the one with the white streak in her hair.
     Last summer I was at the old Roosevelt Bar where I met my husband in 1963. He was in the Air Force, stationed at K. I. Sawyer Air Force Base, on a high plain 20 miles east. The bar is closed down to the public but I was there listening to the local musicians jam during their weekly meeting. When the guy who now owns the bar heard my story of growing up there, going to college at Northern Michigan University nearby, and meeting my husband in this very room, he took me down the basement, where, inscribed on a wall were the signatures of all the stars, who used to hang out there after shooting. He even gave me a t-shirt screen printed from a photograph of those signatures on the wall. The town takes its history as a rich iron source for granted, and mainly ignores it, in favor of bragging about this one movie made here. I was a senior in high school then, and my claim to a movie star sighting is seeing the young, dark, and handsome Ben Gazzara one night as I was driving my family’s 1955 Chevrolet station wagon down library hill, on a rainy, windswept night. Gazarra was running from the Mather Inn, our local fancy hotel where the cast was staying, to the local bar on the corner, the same one owned by Voelker’s father, and from where the tales in Danny and the Boys were told.
     Even with all this history, including the first ski jump tournament started by immigrant Norwegians, and the National Ski Museum, our town’s most recent claim to fame is that this is the place where the coining of the term “catfish” came from. The original documentary showed how one of our local housewives reeled in a New York City boy with internet promises and seductions. Their house is on Strawberry Hill, just up from the Carnegie Library, and now we crane as we pass by, hoping to catch a glimpse of this lady, Angela, or her husband, Vince, who told the catfish and cod story that morphed into the catfishing concept which has been elaborated upon in many Dr. Phil shows where he scolds the fools who have been so gullible as to be taken in by internet seduction.

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If you turn left at the Mackinac Bridge, onto US 2, right on Michigan 127, left on Michigan 28, merging onto US 41, taking 28/41 the back way to Ishpeming, turning left at the Cleveland Cliffs mining laboratory, you will be on Jasper Street in Marquette County Township 47, where you can drive through the gates and drive up the hill between the lovely stone walls, park next to the carved shiny hematite steps, and hike up Jasper Knob to see the banded hematite in its shiny profusion, and then you can cross into the Cleveland Woods, where you may be the lucky one to find that heavy quartz rock. I’m sure it is still there in the rugged terrain, on a ledge halfway down the cliff, beneath the underbrush, visible at eye level if you slide down the hill on your bum, but you have to go in summer, spring, or fall, because it will be invisible in winter, hidden in the deep, deep northern snow.

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Jane Piirto is a native of Ishpeming, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Her poem, “Here,” is the title poem of the recent anthology: Here: Women Writers on the Upper Peninsula, edited by Ron Reikki for Michigan State University Press. Piirto is an award-winning scholar in the area of creativity studies and gifted education. She has 20 books and chapbooks, both scholarly and literary, and has received Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council in both poetry and fiction. She qualifies for listing in the Directory of American Poets & Writers as both a poet and a writer. She has received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Northern Michigan University and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mensa Foundation.

Kerry Howley: The Satan of Small Things

The devil “works like a noiseless file,” St. Theresa writes from a cold room in a walled city. This is past the time when various friends insist that her rapturous erotic visions are works of Satan, whereupon she undertakes a course of “severe mortifications.” This is past the time when a church authority reassures her that what she calls “detachable death” is a legitimate spiritual missive, at which point she allows herself to see Jesus, Hell, a fire-wielding seraph slashing at her heart.

Still she talks of the devil, because it’s not as if she can stop worrying whether the voice of God is the devil pretending to be the voice of God. And its not as if Interior Castle, her instruction manual for fellow contemplatives, can proceed for even a few pages without reminding the instructees of the danger in which they engage through daily meditation.  The soul is but a “little butterfly,” blown between the Darkness and the Light.

For example: Should you feel impelled to pray an extra hour, you will take this to be a divinely inspired will toward holiness. But you must stop to wonder: Is this inspiration diabolical? Because the devil is known to tell sisters to pray so long and so hard that their health fails, whereupon they can no longer attend to the pressing business of the 16^th century nunnery. And then you must wonder: Is this doubt that I feel in my own will to pray what is diabolical? As in, is the devil shouting over God’s orders? Or is this doubt God, the one with whom the soul craves Celestial Marriage, trying to shut down the devil? I am not in fact sure that the devil works like a noiseless file. In Theresa’s telling, he seems pretty loud.

To write about the self is to fight a lifetime of acculturation, to resist the scripts that have relentlessly reordered memory into plot. “Enter within yourselves,” the Prioress instructs, sending a thousand butterflies to battle. So we do, and we find Shakespeare, Seinfeld. The enemy is diffuse. He cannot even be relied upon to be the enemy.

I find Interior Castle to be a funny book, not only because of the persistent devotional whipsaw but also because of Theresa’s ever-present reminders to check in with your superiors before acting on a personal revelation, personal revelation being anathema to the social order in which Theresa, now a high-ranking nun, has become complicit. I mean I laugh out loud when I read it. In this I suppose I am something like poor George Trow and his fedora, envious at an ironic distance I’m powerless to close. How much better to conceive of one’s inner world as an eschatological battleground, chaotic with the clamor of war, the stakes high, the enemy whole. 

Late in life, Theresa prayed herself into an excruciatingly painful trance, “the entrance low and dark and confined, the floor swarming with putrid vermin… My bodily sufferings were unendurable… a pain so acute I know not how to speak of it… The soul itself tearing itself into pieces.” 

It was the closest she ever came to knowing the devil on Earth. The vision, she said, was heaven-sent. 

Kerry Howley is the author of Thrown. 

Oindrila Mukherjee - How To Survive a Visit to India: The Ethics of Representation

When I was growing up in Calcutta, during the twilight years of Mother Teresa, my hometown suffered a peculiar ignominy. Its leper colony had already been the subject of French author Dominique Lapierre’s 1985 novel City of Joy, adapted into film in 1992 (starring Patrick Swayze.) Mother Teresa’s hospice for the destitute, Nirmal Hriday (Home of the Pure Heart,) and the work she did in Calcutta drew attention chiefly to the city’s poverty. As a child the only “foreigners” I ever saw (apart from cricketers during tournaments) were tourists with fancy cameras, taking photographs of the slums and the homeless people on the city’s sidewalks. As a child, this filled me with shame and anger. When I left India to attend university in England, one of the first people I met was a gardener who worked the vast college grounds where I lived. As soon as he learned I was from Calcutta, he remarked, “But one hears of so much poverty there.” Looking back, I know that instead of feeling much compassion for those less privileged than me in my country, I was always defensive, always out to try and prove that we had shiny things too, just like the West. We had nice buildings, pretty clothes, posh schools. I cultivated a distaste, along with many of my contemporaries, for any negative portrayal of India by the Western media. This reaction of course can lead to a glossing over of the harsh realities that many Indians indeed face. But before the reaction comes the representation.


The Winter 2015 issue of Brevity, a journal I admire greatly, published an essay called “One Hundred Days In India,” by Jennifer Sinor. At first, when I read it I was certain that it was intended to be a parody of cliché images about India. But I soon realized I was wrong, that in fact the author had intended to write a sincere essay about her travels. As an Indian writer and critic, I was baffled at the thought that even in these times, an academic and experienced essayist could seem so unaware of both questions of authenticity – that is, the very truth which creative non-fiction seeks to unearth – and of the ethics of representing the other.


Sinor’s essay begins with the sentence, “In India, a dog, a monkey, and a cow attacked me.” This is the sentence that made me laugh out loud, expecting a clever spoof worthy of The Onion, a tongue-in-cheek mimicry of the reductive stereotyping that often occurs when Westerners attempt to represent India – think memoirs like Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert or movies like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, where the East is celebrated as a bastion of spirituality, where Indian characters speak in exaggerated accents, becoming caricatures of themselves, where poverty is romanticized for Western audiences. This is hardly a new phenomenon, but is all the more disturbing for continuing to perpetuate old imperialist views. Sinor’s first sentence sets up several problematic assumptions. First, she does not specify a city or neighborhood or region, but broadens her experience to be representative of the entire country. The sentence implies that either one or all of these animals attacked her everywhere she went in India. Second, the first reference she makes is not to a single person she met out of the 1.25 billion that populate India, or to the ancient and ever-changing culture, or the landscape, but to animals, as if India were a nation of beasts. She speaks of three creatures that are not commonly seen roaming the streets of America, thus establishing a divide between the two countries. Third, the verb “attacked” suggests acts of violence, hostility, danger, committed against her, the foreign, white woman, a trope that can be traced back to colonial literature about colonized people who are more comparable to beasts than civilized humans.

This first sentence sets up the tone for the rest of the essay which lists, in a matter of fact manner, the many ills India is made up of – slums, poverty, leprosy, dogfights – all images that are negative and unappetizing, including the pasta she and her family are served at a restaurant. (Pasta, incidentally, is the only food mentioned in an essay about India!) Readers may be forgiven for interpreting the essay as a litany of India’s ills. The sentence “The Ganges is the fifth most polluted river in the world” is a stand-alone paragraph that is not narratively connected to the ones preceding or following it. It is simply thrown in there to add to the sense of misery, and national and cultural failure.

The first sight that greets Sinor when she is exiting the airport in Mumbai is that of the city’s infamous slums, which “unroll for miles in all directions.” Now, this is a fact. The slums are apparent, even from the air as the plane prepares to land. Miles of blue tarpaulin roofs cover the shanties that have been celebrated in so much literature and cinema, including the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire. But Sinor’s fascination with India’s poverty blinds her to all other realities there. She fails to see the glaring markers of wealth around her in the same city, India’s financial, showbiz, and fashion capital. She makes no mention of the swank clubs and restaurants, or BMWs and Hondas crawling through the city, or the hundreds of towering high-rises including what is now the largest private residence in the world. I do not mention these to demonstrate India’s “bright” side. But how can one fail to notice the irony of such disparity. Why is there no attempt to contextualize the poverty she sees, against the backdrop of the country’s post-liberalization economy? Perhaps the author can only see that which is obviously different and none of that which might remind her – and her readers – of America.

Sinor’s imperial gaze continues when she visits a hill resort in the Himalayas which Indian tourists throng in the summer to escape the heat. They go for rest and recreation. But all she sees in McLeod Ganj are the “hundreds of destitute families” who live there. She is reminded of how good people and pets have it back home. In the West, she reminds us, “dogs had owners and poverty was concealed.” Perhaps Sinor has never been to an animal shelter or seen a homeless person in America. Ultimately, a limited vision about a foreign country is a limited vision about one’s own.

I use Brevity as a textbook in my undergraduate non-fiction class. When I shared this essay with my class this past semester, many students visibly cringed when we read about how the author and her son handed out coins to the poor. “She seems completely unaware of her Western privilege,” said one student. These were mostly young people who had never travelled outside the US, but they recognized instantly what was problematic about the essay. Sinor’s use of graphic images like the leper woman’s stumps to evoke pity among her readers objectifies the poor in the worst possible way. Her act of giving alms to the voiceless beggar in Benares is paternalistic and futile because it does absolutely nothing to eradicate even a tiny fraction of the real poverty in India or elsewhere. Instead it upholds the white savior complex, thus empowering, not the poor victim who is left with no agency, but the wealthy American.

I teach a fair bit of travel writing, often beginning with Jamaica Kincaid’s essay, “The Ugly Tourist,” where she insults the Western tourist with some harsh truths and explains at the very end where this bitterness comes from. The dynamic between the observing traveller and the observed local is always a complex one in travel writing. But it is multiplied when the traveller is from a historically empowered group and the local from a disempowered one. The history of travel writing is rife with problematic representations of colonized subjects by Eurocentric narrators. Historically, this genre has fallen prey to stereotypes and imperial rhetoric, as European colonizers “discovered” foreign lands and attempted to interpret their native populations for audiences back home. Canonical texts such as Edward Said’s Orientalism and Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation have famously criticized Western travel writers for their imperial gaze and for their primitivist representations of other cultures. Contemporary scholars have gone on to complicate Said and Pratt’s theories and methodology, by developing the idea of the persona and point of view, and the concept of travel as a continuous, global process. Both contemporary travel and the genre of writing associated with it have undergone many changes. It is necessary to ask, what responsibility, if any, does the travel writer have when writing about a place that is not native to her? And also, who has the authority to represent the other?

It is by no means only the Western writer who faces challenges when representing India. Several writers from India, both resident and diasporic, have sometimes resorted to cliché or stereotypes when writing about their native cultures, for a variety of reasons that are beyond the scope of this essay. To answer the second question I posed above, it seems clear that anyone has the authority to represent a place or its people, so long as she is willing to do her homework and examine the historical and cultural context of her subject matter. This brings us to what I consider a critical element in the writing of non-fiction: Research.

Research is not only the realm of the reporter or academic. One of the biggest challenges I have faced when teaching non-fiction is to engage students in research. So often, young writers are content to write about experiences that are deeply personal but not universal. There is a belief, encouraged by reality TV, social networks, and confessional memoirs, that the writer’s personal opinion and experience are enough. Sometimes, they might be. Often, such as when drawing inferences about an entire group of people, it is not. Travel writers have a special responsibility. No writing is perhaps more political than travel writing. It is essential for practitioners to be wary of one’s own prejudices and of the dangers of resorting to cliché.

An essay published on Essay Daily a few months ago, by Lawrence Lenhart, called “Tigris! Tigris! A Species Loneliness” is a good example of how to do this. Lenhart demonstrates acute self-consciousness about his status as an American visitor to the Sundarbans, the mangrove forests that spread across both India and Bangladesh. He goes there hoping to see a tiger but returns to America without having seen one. His failure to see the expected animal is anti-climactic but real. Just because you go to a forest in the Indian Subcontinent that is famous for tigers does not ensure that you will see one. When a fellow tourist makes the joke about needing to “disorient,” Lenhart chants “Said said Said said Said said Said said Said said Said said Said said ” to remind himself not to give into any impulse to exoticize. When he encounters a religious shrine in a village in the Sunderbans, he inquires about the origins of the myth, thus giving a voice to the local people who, ironically, are not sure about the response. There are no easy answers for Lenhart, only questions. His essay does not pin the tiger to South Asia, but traces its existence in Western literature, music, and other media. His is an exploration of the tiger across the world. This universality enables him to blend with his characters and subjects. The tiger is de-exoticized and belongs to the entire world. What helps his essay immensely is his research. Admittedly, it is easier to incorporate research into a longer essay than one under 700 words. But brevity cannot be an excuse for lack of nuance.

On May 30 this year, NPR ran a piece called “Mary Ellen Park and the Caged Prostitutes of Mumbai,” celebrating the deceased photographer’s project published in 1981. The photographs of the prostitutes of Falkland Street, Mumbai, are stunning, and prostitution indeed exists in Mumbai (as it does elsewhere.) But Born Into Brothels, the 2005 award-winning documentary by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, about Calcutta’s red light children, was also a well-made and poignant film highlighting the plight of some of India’s wretched. It is when we start to stack up these creative projects by Americans about India, that a narrative pattern emerges. India is a country of miserable poverty and social ills, and it is up to the white savior from the West to champion its cause and in the process win critical acclaim. In an essay in The Huffington Post called “5 reasons why ‘poverty porn empowers’ the wrong person,” Emily Roenigk writes: “Poverty porn tells donors that because of their position in society and because of their resources they have the ability to be the saviors in vulnerable communities they might know nothing about.”

On May 28, The New York Times published an article called “Holding Your Breath in India” in its Sunday Review section, by Gardiner Harris who served as South Asia correspondent in Delhi for three years. In the article Harris complains about India’s pollution, sewage system, heat, tropical disease, traffic and so on. He says, “When I became a South Asia correspondent for The New York Times three years ago, my wife and I were both excited and prepared for difficulties — insistent beggars, endemic dengue and summertime temperatures that reach 120 degrees. But we had little inkling just how dangerous this city would be for our boys.” He lists the difficulties they were prepared for, but never tells us what they were excited about. He describes Delhi as “one of the worst public health disasters in the world.” As an Indian who has spent much time in Delhi I have to agree with Harris. But this is not the place to discuss Delhi’s pollution levels. Those are facts, increasingly well recorded. What strikes me as a bit odd is that over the period of three years Harris and his family lived in Delhi, they seem to not have registered any positive or even enriching experiences in India. No Indian friends or rewarding work experiences or travels or cultural experiences find a mention in his piece, which, significantly, is not a news report but an editorial, a genre that has room for much analysis and critical thinking. Harris does not take advantage of this and the result is yet another one-sided, predictable personal essay about India.

The representation of India does not appear to have altered much in the last hundred years. EM Forster’s colonial characters in A Passage to India, published in 1924, complained about the heat in India and the predatory impulses of Indian men. In the middle of the 20th century, American hippies depicted India as a nation of mysticism and spirituality, an equally reductive view. Visit any urban metropolis in the country today and you will find, at least on the surface, little semblance of spirituality, as young people race to collect more electronic gadgets, bigger cars, and more real estate, to become, in short, as Americanized as possible.

A writer does not have to be an activist (and writing alone is not real activism anyway,) but essayists do owe it to readers to examine the truth in all its nuance and complexity. Those of us who also teach young writers share an even greater responsibility. Ignoring the politics of representation means ignoring the truth that we essayists must strive to examine. It is not separate from craft but an essential element of it.

What Sinor’s essay has really done is create a persona that is liable to become a subject of ridicule. Imagine a white American tourist surrounded by Indian pilgrims in the famously religious Hindu city of Benares. For dinner, her family orders pasta. Then they walk around the city, expressing shock and awe at the sight of every street urchin that cleverly asks them for American money. They hand out coins to everyone they see and then fold their hands in an elaborate Namaste, and procure a bottle of polluted, nasty water from the Ganges, ask for everyone’s sins to be washed away, and head home so she can write about India’s problems for American readers. I am not the one who came up with this caricature. It is a cliché of the author’s own making. Surely we owe it to our readers to represent not only others but also ourselves in more complex ways.



Oindrila Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University. She holds a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. Before moving to the US she worked as a journalist in Calcutta. Currently, she is working on a novel and a collection of stories. You can follow her on twitter at @oinkness.

Wren Awry on editing Tiny Donkey, short-form fairy-tale nonfiction

At the end of Kate Bernheimer's “Introduction to Fairy Tales” class, she asked her students to fill out a survey about course content. One of the questions was, to paraphrase, “Of all the authors we read this semester, who was your favorite?” Kate’s syllabus was loaded with great reads, including work by J.K. Rowling, Lucy Clifford, Aimee Bender, and Neil Gaiman (alongside the classic tales, of course). But, without hesitation, I typed “Maria Tatar.”

Tatar, a professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at Harvard, edited The Classic Fairy Tales—which served as our textbook—and the annotated edition of Peter Pan that we read. While she is more often thought of as a scholar than as a writer, I’m riveted by her introductions to and notes on texts—I sometimes love them more than the texts themselves. That's not so weird if you know me: I'm an info nerd with a strong interest in obfuscated, folkloric history. (This interest started years back: I’ll never forget how frustrated I felt when, at age twelve, my American Online Parental Controls precluded me from doing a successful search for “Snow White”—I needed, desperately, to know if it was of French or German origin.) But, even among writers of fairy tale scholarship and history, Tatar's writing is special. She keeps me glued to the page in a way that no other fairy tale scholars, and few fairy tales, do.

When I pitched the idea for Tiny Donkey, the online journal of short-form fairy-tale nonfiction that's an offshoot of Fairy Tale Review, Tatar served as a major inspiration. It was Kate who challenged me to make Tiny Donkey “short-form” and, though I didn't recognize it at the time, brevity is also characteristic of Tatar's writing—she has a way of summing an entire history or theoretical approach in a single, perfectly paced paragraph. Take, for example, this 243 word opening to her Classic Fairy Tales chapter on “Hansel & Gretel”:

Food—its presence and its absence—shapes the social world of fairy tales in profound ways. It is not at all uncommon for a peasant hero, faced with three wishes, to ask first for a plate of meat and potatoes, or to be so distracted by hunger that he yearns out loud for a sausage while contemplating the limitless possibilities before him. “What shall I command?” asks the hero of a Greek tale when told he can have anything he wants. Without a moment's hesitation, he responds by asking for “Food to Eat!” Wish fulfillment in fairy tales often has more to do with the stomach than with the heart. As Robert Darnton has pointed out in his discussion of the origins of fairy tales in adult peasant culture, “To eat one's fill, eat until the exhaustion of the appetite . . . was the principal pleasure that peasants dangled before their imaginations, and one that they rarely realized in their lives.” The same could be said about small children. While many folktales take us into the rugged and often brutal world of peasant life, where survival depends on getting your next meal, fairy tales often take us squarely in to the household, where everyone seems to be anxious about what's for dinner and about who's for dinner. The peasants of folktales may have to worry about famines, but children in fairy tales live perpetually under the double threat of starvation and cannibalism.

Like Tatar's work, Tiny Donkey allows its contributors to take a slice of the fairy-tale universe, chase it down a rabbit hole, and sum up findings elegantly in about four-hundred words. Of course, Tiny Donkey essays aren’t limited to scholarship, and neither is Tatar. In The Annotated Peter Pan, Tatar includes a section of quotes from Charlie Chaplin, J.R.R. Tolkein, Virginia Woolf, and others who love or loathe Barrie’s tale. Woolf says, simply, “We went with Gerald to Peter Pan, Barries [sic] play—imaginative and witty like all of his, but just too sentimental.—However it was a great treat.”2 These two sentences let me imagine the author of Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando in the box of a London theater, grappling with a children’s play. We want to leave space in Tiny Donkey for works like this, little memoirs that emphasize the I and analyze how fairy tales interact with our lives.

Fairy tales have a deeply personal resonance for me—they've cropped up over and over again throughout my life. I chose Tatar's opening paragraph as an example, in part, because I love food. I'm a culinary memoir addict, which means that I read story after story about an author's childhood pantry full of cornichons, or the macho, fast-paced heat of a New York City restaurant kitchen. While I remember my mother's Christmastime “spritzer cookies” fondly, and I've worked as a professional prep and short-order cook, my strongest food memories are the stranger, more fairy-tale ones. There are the Greek diners of suburban New York where, in high school, I'd eat late night “disco fries” and talk about Alice, Tom Waits' album-length take on the questionable relationship between Liddell & Lewis Carroll. Then there’s the kitchen of the cooperative I lived in the first time I went to college, where friends and I once prepared a “Lost Boys”-themed meal that consisted of homemade donuts and platters of raw vegetables (an alarming number of those donuts ended up on the facade of our house during the requisite food fight). And there’s the kitchen I found myself in when I, in a way, got lost in the woods, and ended up spending a year of my life working with an anti-mountaintop removal direct action campaign in southern West Virginia. The outdoor kitchen was made of tarps, plywood and propane burners, and it was manned by a career cook and activist who was once described as a “figure straight out of Tolkien” by the Missoula Independent. There, in that little compound along a West Virginia river, I knew it was time to wake up when the scent of cowboy coffee, made with a dozen scoops of Maxwell House in a giant pot, wafted through the air. Much of the kitchen equipment, and the cook himself, came from an organization called Seeds of Peace. One of Seeds of Peace's slogans is “Eat First! Then Smash the State,” which reminds me of the Greek hero in Tatar's paragraph, who demanded food before anything else. In social movements, like in fairy tales, food is crucial, central, and not to be forgotten.

Tatar mentions that “. . . fairy tales often take us squarely in to the household, where everyone seems to be anxious about what's for dinner and about who's for dinner.” The household is oft considered the heart of society and family, and meals are an extension of this. But homes, and food, can exist on the margins, too. Hansel and Gretel find their way to a witch's house deep in the woods, and the jumbled collection of houses I trampled through in West Virginia hardly resembled my parents' kempt, suburban home. Likewise, Tiny Donkey is particularly interested in marginal and unique voices—we want to publish the work of undergraduates, writers working outside of the academy, and writers underrepresented in fairy-tale scholarship and literature. When we serve up our brief dishes and you ask what's for dinner, we want it to be something you haven't tried before.

To submit to Tiny Donkey, please visit us here.



Wren Awry is a writer, student and cook based in Tucson, AZ. They’re a contributor to and founding editor of Tiny Donkey, an undergraduate journal of online, fairy tale non-fiction affiliated with Fairy Tale Review. They occasionally write criticism for The Anarcho-Geek Review, and their creative nonfiction has been published in Loom Art Zine. In the past, Wren dabbled in advocacy journalism, zine-making, and media strategy for environmental campaigns.



References:
Tatar, Maria. "Introduction: Hansel and Gretel." The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. 179. Print.

Tatar, Maria, and J.M. Barrie. Ed. Maria Tatar. The Annotated Peter Pan. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. 345­73. Print.

Klemz, Patrick. "Time to CUT a Deal." Missoula Independent. Missoula News/Independent Publishing, 10 Apr. 2008. Web. 03 June 2015.

Justin Chen on Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, long-distance family connections, and a syncopation of Circadian rhythms

What Comes Next

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better.

                                -Roberto Bolaño

His Mother’s Side 

On the plane he opened The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. He liked novels without a clear plot—stories that can’t be summarized only experienced.

People were slouching in their seats—a particularly dense form of slumping found on overnight flights. He liked that he could tell which passengers were traveling together by the angles of their bodies to each other; there was a familial gravity drawing clumps of people inward. His father was watching a movie without headphones. That was the way he preferred—to be a deaf observer of flashing images.

It was gray and raining. His mother and younger sister were still in bed. From the hotel window he studied a stonewall with small fountains at regularly spaced intervals. Rain drained out of a line of small holes in the wall—streams of arching water looking like the rib cage of a small animal. Whenever the wind blew, the streams swayed, never in unison, but one after the other like someone riffling through the pages of a book.

Twenty something hours on the plane (Boston to New York to Tokyo to Taipei)
One hour on high-speed rail down the coast of Taiwan
75 minutes in a car to his maternal grandfather’s fish farm

Inventory of his mother’s side of the family as performed by his father: 
A college graduate
A high school drop out (HSD)
A, technically, middle school drop out (MSD)

Reading as if the book was splitting his mind like a prism dissecting layers of light so that there were two of him moving through the story. A lighter layer that skimmed over the text, feeling the texture of the words, the tone and shape of the sentence. Then a denser, visceral consciousness sinking into the plot and emotion of the story.

Vegetation (trees, fronds, weeds, bushes) crept in on the city like notes scribbled in the margin of a book. Most houses had metal corrugated roofs, tiled walls and bare concrete floors. The innards were exposed—piping, propane gas canisters, air ducts. There were dogs—feral dogs, wild-looking dogs with long tongues chained to fences, dogs in fancy jackets with pleated padding urinating on the sidewalk.

What he learned on the one-hour high-speed rail: 
It was his parent’s 30th anniversary
They were married on December 25th because that’s when his father had winter break and could fly home from school in America
His father would say that his mother was stupid and she would say well you’re the one who married me 

The Savage Detectives follows the agitated, combustible, lives of poets (the Visceral Realists). To them, poetry, politics and life are inseparable. They interrupt lectures of rival poets, steal from bookstores and plot to kidnap Poet Laureate Octavio Paz. Exiled from their homes in Mexico City, they pass through Paris, Tel Aviv, Vienna and Barcelona. The three main characters are Juan Garcia Madero, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano but there are more than forty characters giving kaleidoscopic experiences of abandoning friendships to disappear in the desert, flickering in and out of love affairs, writing personal truths that the world forgets.

His family never stayed in the same house for more than one night. He thought of the desultory lives of the novel’s characters—their fatalistic and melancholy machismo as they are drawn further and further out into time away from the lives they expected.

The highway median held grass and sparse shrubs. The car sped along an empty road bordering a flat, gray ocean. If he looked straight out the passenger window at the bushes passing by, they became vague and opaque like little puffs of amber smoke splayed out in the wind.

His father adjusted the air condition of every car they got into. His mother closed every door behind her complaining of mosquitoes that kept her up during the night and were invisible to everyone but her. Watch out for the mosquito she said and he imagined one large mosquito with a hat or some other distinguishing feature following her from town to town.

His family spoke Taiwanese which he knew 1/100th as well as Chinese which he knew 1/1000th as well as he knew English.

This is your maternal grandfather’s fishpond. They worked all day and night and sent your mother to college which was pretty rare. Then your mother and myself worked hard to send you to college. If you fail out of grad school you could come back and work here.

Questions he is asked by relatives: 
Do you speak/understand Chinese/Taiwanese?
How old are you?
Do you have a girlfriend?
Do you remember me?

In the countryside he drank tea with the last fish farmer on his grandfather’s land—a sixty-year old with jet-black hair who made tea on top of a piece of driftwood. A marvel in directional fluidics. Water boiling. Water poured into teapots. Teapots emptied into other teapots—an elaborate transfer like that of a street magician switching a ball between cups. Water sloshing and spilling, running down the channels and contours of the driftwood to collect in a single reservoir.

The teacups had the dorsal silhouette of two fish painted at the bottom so that when you swirled the cup you expected them to sway.

They spoke with the circular logic/rhythm of spoken word poets: 
Here’s my daughter
She’s your daughter
Yes, my daughter
She looks like you
She’s a vegetarian
She’s a vegetarian?
She only eats vegetables
So she’s a vegetarian
She doesn’t eat meat
Why didn’t you tell us?
We were in a rush and forgot
So she can’t eat meat right?
Yeah, she only eats vegetables

He discussed with his sister about being able to understand Taiwanese but not speak it. It’s like old English or Shakespeare. People can get the gist but no one uses it.

What he learned at dinner with his sister, father, mother, his uncle’s widow, her daughter (his cousin), his cousin’s husband, their 1.5 year old daughter: He was a slow baby. He learned to walk late. His father brought him to the doctor because he wasn’t talking.

He’s still slow. Slow to make friends but also slow to make enemies. Slow to learn and slow to forget.

When he was young, his mother took him to the library, He remembers walking out with a stack of twenty books. He read as if he didn’t know what hit him, as if he were falling down a well. He would stay up until 1am with the neck of his desk lamp bent over his pillow--the sound of his mother’s footsteps enough for him to switch off the light and fling himself under the covers. Then her hand cupping the heat of the bulb. Her voice a mix of exasperation and resignation.

In the villages they ate pig’s head soup. They said Americans like to bake but we cook everything in oil. After he was full and ate more and insisted he was full they went out on motorcycles and came back with bananas and pomegranates. They opened photo albums with his parents. You’re old they told his parents. We’re old his parents said. Kids grow up and you grow up too. 

In the photos he saw people at the beach scowling on motorcycles. People in wedding dresses or posing in their newly opened bakery. The MSD was seven and standing begrudgingly next to a bride. Amber hued polaroids where people are hugging each other on top of an open wagon and squinting into the wind. A bride and groom crossing a parking lot with a broken basketball hoop and stacks of rotting wood. People looking young and beautiful, looking oblivious like they couldn’t help but last that way forever.

He told himself that he knew his family would die. He felt prepared but instead he learned that people close to him could have a quiet and sinewy unhappiness. It never occurred to him that they would struggle against nostalgia and that everything they loved and mourned would be inextricably intertwined.

Their happiness was not his happiness. His happiness was insecure and carnivorous—always seeking more of itself. More and more. Happiness as a way to validate his existence.

He stayed with his aunt, a widow, in a narrow four-story apartment on top of her pharmacy. She gave his family her bedroom and slept on a cot. In the morning, tottering down the staircase, he almost missed her sparse form beneath the sheets. The room, gray with morning light, was filled with boxes and stacks of thick books. A window was cracked open and he heard the world shifting around them—the sputtering of exhaust ghosting through city streets, the auditory comets of birds flitting through the air.

Two framed photographs on top of his aunt’s piano: one of her husband, one of her father. He stared at them as if studying himself in the mirror.

He wondered about adult happiness. The happiness you feel after your spouse has died, your children have had their own children and the land of your childhood is replaced by another. He thought this happiness would be fuller than his—weary and self assured. Happiness with some weight behind it.

His Father’s Side 

They visit a hole in the wall with napkin dispensers along the back, steam tumbling through two flapping kitchen doors, a bathroom marked by a grizzly bear poster. They discover a Casino/Al-Capone themed breakfast buffet in the hotel lobby. He has rice with pickled seaweed, sushi, braised mushroom in oyster sauce, grapefruit, silky yogurt in German packaging, two bowls of cereal, noodle stir-fry, croissants, a chocolate sauce and peanut butter sandwich. They have nine-course meals where the food, intricate and bright, reminds him of tropical insects. They crowd into a restaurant along a wedding reception where a slideshow flashes images of the bride and groom. “See this!” His father holds up a gray sphere on his fork. “It’s a fish ball,” he exclaims. “Like a meatball but with fish.”

Eating as a language. You stuff your face and nod. Then the person across from you does the same.

At times they eat for two hours, get back on the tour bus and begin discussing dinner plans.

He enters a daze where he feels his stomach—tight and resistant. Then a trance-like- inertia—the type that carries him from late night into early morning, floating at the interface between consciousness and sleep. As if he were too tired to sleep or too full to stop eating. He sinks into fullness until he feels the resistance of his stomach relax. Then he eats until he feels his stomach again—as if they are all pink, glistening stomachs sitting and conversing around the table. Stomachs just wearing faces and hands. Then again the sinking against satiety and relaxation into another hidden chamber of hunger. Again and again—tightness to relaxation—a hypnotic oscillation that carries him into the night where the light is hazy and all faces familiar.

He isn’t religious. He thinks that when you die you are gone forever. A lonely thought but he can’t help it. Sometimes he imagines the history of peoples: the citizens of Pompeii preserved in ash, Revolutionary war soldiers marching down a dusty road, immigrants singing to crying babies in their native language. He imagines ghosts walking down the street—the air thick with them, jammed full like the rings of a tree trunk. Ghosts on top of ghosts on top of ghosts, all going about their lives and oblivious to one another. This thought calms him down a bit.

His grandmother is almost ninety. Her hair is white and stubbly. She wears an auburn wig and on top of that a red or green hat—the kind that French artists wear. She likes to giggle—a maternal tyrant orchestrating family photographs (Pose with a surprised face. Now with your mouth wide open. This time extend two fingers in a peace sign….) She has trouble with stairs. Going down, she walks backwards, looking over her shoulder, the lead foot groping the air. Going up she says don’t wait for me and begins her deliberate helical climb up the stairwell like a vine curling around a post.

Whenever he’s surrounded by bookshelves he feels like he’s walking through the heart of a forest. The stillness, the sense of compressed time. Each book its own world in a set of parallel worlds. The dense layers of words—visions and dreams from disparate times stacked on top of one another. This is what home should feel like.

Translator Natasha Wimmer writes that Bolaño idolizes the detective as someone who has seen more terrible sights than anyone else and never turns away:

He is a witness, a watcher, someone who gets to the marrow, the literal bloody core. In a poem from the collection Tres, he writes: 'I dreamed I was an old, sick detective, and I had been looking for lost people for a long time. Sometimes I happened to look at myself in the mirror and I recognized Roberto Bolaño.'

Halfway up the mountain his uncle stops the car and buys a bouquet of flowers from a roadside stand. The flowers have purple petals and long, strong stems the length of his forearm. His uncle divides the flowers into two groups and leans them against the front seat. He handles them like machetes.

It’s a clear day at the peak. Small shrines, gray rock engraved with bright yellow and blue, are terraced into the mountainside. The trees and shrubs, pruned to crisp edges, have the weightlessness of well-groomed objects. The lightness of the trees merges with the weight of the mountain. The land is somber and meticulous.

The temple is a library of urns—floor to ceiling shelves holding cremations. He imagines the thousands of cores of ash suspended around him like water droplets in a storm. They leave half of the flowers by his cousin’s urn. Everyone is restrained and this relieves him. His cousin, a year younger than himself, had been riding a motorcycle and collided with a garbage truck. This was four years ago. He studies the urn and the name—almost his name expect for the last character. The urn, the center of all the mourning and chaos that he has been tangential to—the steady center of his family’s black hole. His jaw begins to pulse. It feels like someone has punched him in the side of the face. He clenches and unclenches his mouth and the feeling lingers.

He often mixes up time and place. The past feels like a distant country, still accessible through effort and cunning.

His father walks along the streets of his old university. The night, hazy with streetlamps, is framed by the dark silhouette of palm trees. What’s your favorite college memory? He asks his father. My favorite memory? His father laughs as if the question is absurd. Do you see that bump in the road? I biked over it with no hands. I had a calculator in my shirt pocket and it didn’t fall out. All the girls didn’t think I could do it. 

He had always treated his cousin as an alter ego—another version of himself that existed in a parallel universe. Except that they would meet every few years to share stories. He had tried not to think about his cousin’s death. He feels that he should feel worse then he does. Then he feels thankful for not feeling worse than he does.

His extended family spends a night in a bed and breakfast in the countryside—a narrow, multistory building that’s simple and refined: expensive wood, tranquil pastel colors, rectangular hot tubs cut into each bathroom floor overlooking a balcony and rock garden. I can’t believe your father is paying for everyone his mother whispers.

The next day, whenever they sit down to a meal, he stands up next to his mother and mock announces Eat up. It’s all on me. I’m paying for everything. 

In the morning he runs for an hour uphill into the mountains. It’s one of his most redeeming qualities—the need for constant motion and the bleary tranquility of fatigue. His hair, wet with sweat and moisture of low hanging clouds, swishes against the side of his face. Up in the mountain everything is a lush waxy green and vibrantly alive like the skin of a tree frog. Upon returning to the hotel he soaks in the hot tub, his shoulders and neck resting on the wood’s edge. It’s still early and the sky over the balcony is a delicate membrane of blue and lavender. There’s a long bridge on the horizon. He knows it’s grimy and mechanically coarse but from this distance it’s delicate, almost non-existent and cuts the sky like the line dividing a column of oil and water.

Tiring of the view, he wipes his hand on a towel and opens The Savage Detectives. While reading, his sense of the world dulls around him until all he feels is a breeze through the window that flattens to nothing on the molten surface tension of the water.

The rules of pig:
Late at night, sit in a circle with your aunt and cousins and sister
Deal each person four cards
Take a card from the remaining pile. Either pass the card to the next person or keep it and pass another from your hand to the next person. You will always have four cards
Each person accepts a new card and passes another to continue the flow
The goal is to get four of a kind
When you have four, stick out your tongue
When you see someone stick out her tongue, stick out your tongue
The last person to stick out his/her tongue is a 1st level pig. If you are already a 1st level pig then you are a 2nd level pig and so on
You can only talk to people who are on the same level as you. If you accidentally talk to a lower pig then you descend a level.

He’s amazed by how girly and playful his aunt (a company executive) can be. She has short pixie hair, sits cross legged on the bed and pushes her body up against her daughter and the other girls around her. It’s not fair she says Justin never talks so he’ll never be a pig. He doesn’t fall for the trap. But she catches him later when asking who’s supposed to be dealing and he answers. 1st level pig she announces.

On the return flight to New York the cabin lights are low. People rise up sluggishly out of their seats as if detaching themselves from an accident. Their figures, dark and soft, walk up and down the aisles in an aimless lethargy. The strips of light lining the floor are a seam of light under a heavy door. His family sits together in a row. They are sleeping with their heads rolled back and mouth wide open—his mother, an auditory Picasso, rearranging normal snoring sounds into something beyond his understanding.

It doesn’t feel like they are in the air. It feels like they are in the belly of a ship with the water jostling around. He hasn’t moved his legs in 8 hours. He can’t wait until they are on the ground but he has a premonition that he’ll remember this moment for the rest of his life. That when his parents are gone, he’ll reach back for this bracket of time: The four of them together huddled around a cone of warm, stale air traveling 600 miles per hour. All the almost infinite permutations of history and configurations of molecules converging on this moment. Months later, waiting for a subway train, he’ll pull up this memory and wonder what the big deal was.

Whenever he finishes a book, he wants to go back to the first page. He doesn’t care about already knowing what will happen. All he wants is to bend time and, with the flip of a page, find himself unscathed at the beginning once more. Not the memory of the beginning but the true beginning.

He is lying horizontal in his apartment in Boston. The watch face glows green in his dark room as he resets the time. He feels a sensation, like the liftoff of a plane, of peeling up and away. It’s 11am in Taiwan. His grandmother could be sitting in the sofa that massages her back and feet. Or maybe she is flipping through clothes and deciding between the green and red hat. Your mom wants everything to be neat she had told him while pushing rolls of dresses across her bed but it’s fun to be a little messy. His uncle could be getting lunch ready for the two of them. Over the next few days he overlays a pale version of his family’s daily life in Taiwan over his own—a syncopation of Circadian rhythms. Over time, the weight and warmth of their lives sublimates and he is pulled back into this life. Then they leave his mind all together.



Justin Chen is a graduate student at MIT using frog embryos to study face formation. In his previous life as an undergraduate at Oberlin College he studied creative writing. He has published one essay, describing long distance running, in The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review.