Eisenberg’s newest story collection, Fat Swim, carries forth this ethos across 10 luminous, visceral stories. Within its pages, the body acts as a setting where desire, hunger, and loss can transform. 

I was honored to get to speak with Eisenberg about pushing through writer’s block, bad film adaptations, and the joys of trampolining from one sentence to the next.

— Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas
Editorial Intern

1. Describe your publication week in a six-word story.

Emma Copley Eisenberg: Getting lost on I-95 on my way to Philly bookstores.

2. What book should everyone read growing up?

ECE: Fairytales. Specifically, Princess Furball. It’s a lesser known retelling of a Grimm’s story. Also In the Night Kitchen, and the Alanna books by Tamora Pierce. And Anne of Green Gables. Oh, and Tuck Everlasting. I just reread and it mostly holds up except for the weird age gap dynamic.

3. Write alone or in community?

ECE: Both, I have to say. It’s very bisexual of me. I need to be alone for the generative parts and the focus, but one can’t really write alone. You need people to walk the path with you.

4. How do you start from scratch?

ECE: I have been getting up early to write, which doesn’t come naturally to me. But there’s something about that dawn hour, where night brain and daytime brain are both online at the same time, that helps me. It makes sense because dawn and dusk are when people pray, too. Also playing, reading, swimming, and not being too precious about anything is important in the scratch phrase. And sometimes writing longhand with a fun pen.

5. Three presses you’ll read anything from:

ECE: Graywolf. Dutton if they’re edited by Pilar Garcia Brown. McSweeney’s.

6. If you were a novel what novel would you be?

ECE: It feels aspirational, but I’d be The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers because it has so many different points of view and weird risks and it’s sad but also funny.

7. Describe your ideal writing day.

ECE: Similar to Ursula Le Guin’s ideal writing day. Wake up early for dawn brain, coffee, breakfast (lots of it), more writing, a walk, lunch, a movie or doing something out in the world, reading, then dinner, then bed early with the cats. 

8. What’s a piece of writing advice you never want to hear again?

ECE: I never want to hear that something “doesn’t have a plot” or to “give it more plot” because I don’t think people really know what that means. A lot of books that feel really propulsive have a plot, they just aren’t incident-based. I had a student at Temple say “I think what people mean when they say something doesn’t have a plot is that they don’t care about it.” Or they don’t care about the character. And I think that’s true. If you care about the character or what’s going on then the incident becomes sort of extraneous.

9. What’s a piece of writing advice you think everyone needs to hear?

ECE: Writing gets done sentence by sentence. 

10. Realism or surrealism?

ECE: Impossible bind. I’m more comfortable in realism. That’s the tradition I was raised reading. But realism is also surreal and weird and strange. Kelly Link and Hilary Leichter are writers who show us that all the time. There’s one story in Fat Swim that has non-realist elements and it was hard but we did our best.

11. Favorite and least favorite film adaptation of a book:

ECE: Well speaking of, I hate the Tuck Everlasting adaptation with Rory Gilmore. Makes it so boring when it’s really an open, soulful book. The Sophie’s Choice movie is also really bad. For best adaptation . . . maybe The Devil Wears Prada? I’ve never read the book and I don’t want to, but I will watch The Devil Wear Prada when I’m sick 4,000 times.

12. Edit as you go or shitty first draft?

ECE: Shitty first draft. I don’t understand the edit as you go people. That would break me.

13. Best advice for pushing through writer’s block?

ECE: This is stolen from Alexander Chee so credit him. He says there’s no such thing as writer’s block, there’s only unmade decisions and shame, which I think is basically true. When you’re blocked you’re avoiding making a decision about the draft, or you’re feeling shame that you haven’t written. Easier said than done.

14. What’s your relationship to being edited?

ECE: Into it. Very into it. Good editors are such a gift, and they help you see what you’re doing more clearly. The editor for my first book also changed the structure of the book in a way that helped me understand what I was trying to do. I wish that editors had more time and space to edit in today’s landscape. Huge appreciation to editors, they’re doing the Lord’s work.

15. Write every day or write when inspired?

ECE: Everyone’s life is different, and I think either can work. I sometimes do the latter, but I would say I’m most productive when I’m doing the former. Conditioning your brain to be creative is like a muscle, it does strengthen and start to come online more consistently if you can be consistent with it. Maybe a better way to say that is write around the same time and around the same place as much as you can.

16. What other art forms and literary genres inspire you?

ECE: Collage, ceramics, and film. Films have helped me figure out the shape of what I want to write more than once. For Housemates, the quest was to make it as good as Thelma and Louise.

17. The writer who made you want to write:

ECE: Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver when I was in high school. And James Baldwin.

18. How do you know when you’ve reached the end?

ECE: I think there’s an intuitive body sense where I’m just like, this is the furthest I can take this thing. There’s this concept in sociology called saturation where you ask the same question of different people and you start to get the same answer over and over again. That’s how I feel when I’m asking my characters a question. My first book was nonfiction, and I was asking real people questions, and you start to hear what you’ve already guessed or imagined over and over.

19. Describe your writing space.

ECE: I’m very lucky to have my own little room now. All my books in one place. I do have my little woo-woo objects (tarot cards, James Baldwin candle, some little rocks). And I also have a really big fat pink chair now.

20. How do you keep your favorite writers close to you?

ECE: I have a tattoo of Grace Paley’s face on my arm. I’ll leave it at that.

21. What’s the last indie bookstore you went to?

ECE: There’s a little used bookstore that just opened in my neighborhood in Philly called Little Yenta Books. And then in Baltimore, I went to Greedy Reads when I was there for AWP. 

22. What does evolving as a writer mean to you?

ECE: It’s seeing what I want to do more clearly and then knowing if I’m doing it or not.

23. Outside of literature, what are you obsessed with?

ECE: I got really into the Winter Olympics figure skating. Alysa Liu and also the evil French ice dancing team. I used to be pretty obsessed with making my own ice cream. I’m pretty into knitting and making babushka triangle scarves for my friends now. And seltzer, my favorite brand is Polar.

The post Emma Copley Eisenberg Is Tired of the Plot Police appeared first on Electric Literature.

The novel follows writer Dan Moran as he returns to his childhood home in the Midwest in search of answers about the circumstances of his brother’s life and suicide. His family is surprised to see him, even as they prepare a memorial for his brother—one that Dan was not invited to attend. Unfazed, or perhaps simply accustomed to his ostracism as a trans Asian adoptee, Dan forges ahead with his investigation. From the outset, it is clear that Dan is spectacularly ill-suited to the task—he misreads clues, follows dead ends, and cannot seem to stay on track. It is important to note that Dan doesn’t simply consider himself a detective, but rather a “metaphysical investigator,” a designation that shifts the terms of the inquiry from facts to interpretation. More than that, the term signals Cottrell’s larger project, which lies not necessarily in arriving at answers but in the act of reading deeply. In both Afternoon Hours of a Hermit and Cottrell’s first novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, there’s a strong extra-literary dimension: Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is filled with direct quotations from well-known authors, and Afternoon Hours of a Hermit similarly weaves in references to writers like Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald. 

Moreover, Cottrell’s characters are marked with bibliophilic tendencies. At one point Dan thinks, “My constant curiosity got in the way of my suicide,” a line that reads as his own but is in fact a direct quotation from Bernhard’s The Loser. Dan doesn’t simply think about his life; he thinks through literature. It is no surprise that a reader like Dan would be drawn to detective work—they are engaged in similar pursuits, trying to locate truth, to distinguish between what one thinks and what one knows. In this way, Dan Moran’s investigation stages a kind of deep reading of his brother, yes, but also of himself, probing the gap between reality and how one is perceived. This foregrounds a central tension of the novel form—and of reading itself: the desire to enter another consciousness, and the impossibility of ever fully doing so. If Afternoon Hours of a Hermit reveals anything, it is that truly knowing another person is the greatest mystery of all.

Patrick and I spent a few weeks exchanging emails about detective stories, metafictional doubling, lessons drawn from Thomas Bernhard, and more.

Evander James Reyes: This novel leans into the detective/noir genre, but Dan Moran is—there’s no other way to say this—a terrible detective! What draws you to the detective story and how are you interested in playing with/against expectations?

Patrick Cottrell: The word that comes to mind for me is atmosphere. Rain, fog, cars. I grew up in Milwaukee and I don’t remember many sunny days. I wanted to conjure the mystery/noir atmosphere which means driving around at night, spying on people, questioning them, showing up at places you’re not supposed to, but I didn’t want to be beholden to managing all the plot conventions. The noir genre seems to be about justice so there’s some added propulsion on a narrative level, but that’s also where the humor comes in. Sometimes the most justice-inclined people are also the most delusional and the least self-aware. Dan Moran believes he is attempting to restore justice by writing his psychological thriller, but in reality, what is he doing? 

For me the ending was the most important part of the book and I really struggled with it for a long time. I had to do a major rewrite that involved deleting multiple chapters. When I landed on this ending, I felt a huge sense of relief because I believe it works. I don’t think it answers things in a tidy, traditional mystery sense, but I deeply believe in it on an emotional and gut level. 

EJR: Did you have any detective stories in mind while you were drafting this book? 

PC: I’m indebted to the blurbs in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. I hadn’t read it at the time, but I read the blurbs and something about them made me want to write the book they were describing: private, existential, a fairy tale, philosophical. I tried to imagine what that book could be. The blurbs were actually inspiring which is weird to say. Drive Your Plow is an off-kilter mystery. 

Another detective influence is Bennett Sim’s story “The Postcard.” I love how he refuses to explain the circumstances of what his narrator is doing, the set-up is fairly vague and mysterious in a purposeful, ominous way. Of course, Kobo Abe was a master at refusing to explain things. It can be frustrating for the reader, but there’s something productive about the frustration. Marie NDiaye’s My Heart Hemmed In is not a traditional detective story, but the protagonist is trying to find out why she and her husband have been (seemingly overnight) shunned by their community. It’s a psychological horror novel. The protagonist sets off on an investigation of sorts through her city while her husband is bed-ridden with a festering wound. NDiaye’s imagination is boundless.

EJR: Dan Moran’s decisions often feel frustrating, even self-sabotaging, but they also seem to drive the novel forward. What do you think about frustration as an engine in the book?

PC: Frustration is always part of the mechanics of plot: someone wants something and they face obstacles or they get in their own way and this pushes the story forward. I’m never thinking about plot when I’m writing though. I am mostly thinking about humor, or whatever’s funny to me on the page (I honestly don’t know what’s funny to other people). Frustration and humor go hand in hand. If you’re not a particularly plot-driven writer, you have to find other ways and means to move the book forward. Claire-Louise Bennett is good at that. I always want to stay in her world even though she’s never beholden to plot. She conjures a particular mood or atmosphere via her sometimes-outlandish, embroidered sentences. Caren Beilin does this, too. Sometimes if I’m stuck, I go back to Amina Cain’s description of narrative: “[ . . . ] when objects and characters, and also landscapes, appear together, that is how narrative happens for me.” Amina Cain’s work is always a guiding light.

EJR: The title Afternoon Hours of a Hermit exists both as the book we’re reading and as a book the narrator abandoned writing—what drew you to this doubling?

PC: I think it was a self-serious conceit that’s supposed to be absurd and funny. The narrator seems to take writing seriously but at the same time erases and abandons what he’s doing, as you’ve rightly pointed out. I enjoy the game within the game, the little corners where you can play around to see what you can get away with. I love doubles, twins, doppelgängers, mirrors, etc. because I feel as if, when I was adopted, I myself was doubled in some way—when I was adopted, it’s almost as if there were two directions my life could have gone and it went one particular way, but then there’s the shadow of other possibilities. And transitioning, there’s another doubling, but not.

EJR: Another doubling: In Afternoon Hours, Dan Moran is the author of your first novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. I find this ontological weirdness really intriguing! It creates a strange loop of interpretation—when I went back to Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, I could only read it through the Dan Moran of Afternoon Hours. The same text exists in two contexts at once. What kind of textual game are you playing with that move?!

PC: I love that! I think that’s really cool and funny. Yeah, it’s a weird meta-fictional game. I wanted to try to establish that the world of this book, Afternoon Hours, is not unfolding in the same world as the first book. When I first started writing this book, I had the idea that the narrator would transition in between books. I had never heard of anyone doing that or exploring that. But, I wanted to do that in an indirect way. So, is the Afternoon Hours narrator the same character in the first book, pre-transition, or a fictional invention of Dan Moran? Again, it’s a hall of mirrors. I like that the books can exist on two different planes of reality. 

Someone asked if this is a sequel or if I simply rewrote my first book with a trans narrator. Absolutely not. But I understand why a person would ask that or think that, I really do: suicide, siblings, Korean adoptees, returning home, detectives, etc. Honestly, I think a lot of what I was thinking about with Dan Moran (as the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace) goes back to the fact that my former name will always be tethered to my first book. I wanted to reclaim it with a new name, in a sense.

I also want to put in a good word for McSweeney’s here. Perhaps some of the larger publishers can pulp backstock, reprint copies with a new name, and take the financial loss, but McSweeney’s is a small non-profit organization and they did the right thing and reprinted my book with my name on it. I’ve always felt deeply grateful for them, especially Amanda Uhle and Rita Bullwinkel, both amazing authors. They get it.

ER: What draws you to characters whose relationship to literature is so immersive?

PC: A novel can be a vehicle or container of influence, conversation, and perception. The novel as a form is so capacious. I mostly write to be in conversation with other writers, their traditions, techniques and so on. I spend more time reading than writing. Even though I love writing, I don’t do it every day, but I read every day (for work and for my own purposes). When I was in high school, I didn’t have many friends but I spent a lot of time reading and going to bookstores. Friday nights, two friends and I would go to Barnes and Noble or Half Price Books and browse and sit on the floor and read. So to answer your question, I guess I see that my book is made up of other books and writers and it seems silly to ignore that fact or avoid it. I feel hopeful that this acknowledgement adds depth to the narrative and some minor excitement. When I read Bolaño, I’m always excited to read the writers he mentions. I suppose these mentions of other writers also situate my book in the real world, half-in, half-out.

ER: What is your relationship to Thomas Bernhard? I notice certain stylistic echoes—repetition, the constant returning to earlier thoughts and images, which take on different valences as the novel unfolds. At the same time, this novel doesn’t read to me as a strictly “Bernhardian” rant—how do you see your work in relation to his, and where do you feel it diverges?

PC: I’ve read some of the writers who mimic his voice on a syntactical level and I really enjoy those books. But . . . that’s not really what I’m trying to do at all. I think what Bernhard offers me (as a writer) is permission to sidestep descriptions of physical movement and descriptions of people’s physical appearances, which I’ve always had trouble with. A character can spend pages upon pages physically static but Bernhard creates a mood and atmosphere that’s addictive, so as a reader I don’t care if the character is moving through the world or not. My greatest affinity with him is a way of viewing the world. You understand that at their most basic, people can be incredibly grotesque, selfish, small-minded, and cruel. And the world continues to become more absurd by the day. And yet, there’s compassion in his books, they’re not heartless. To be Bernhardian, you have to have an eye (and ear) for absurdity. He is truly a very comic writer. His sense of humor holds up, it’s not dated at all. About divergence, that’s an interesting question. I might be more aligned with the detective/noir genre although The Lime Works could be considered a crime novel, I guess. I could talk about him a lot. Once you know his tricks and techniques, you can spot his influence everywhere.

EJR: It’s been about eight years since Sorry to Disrupt the Peace—how did writing Afternoon Hours feel different this time around?

PC: It took a lot longer. I’m older and slow. I felt blocked for a while because I needed things in my personal life to settle down. During that time, I would write little stories here and there and interview other writers. Writing doesn’t get easier; I think it gets harder because you expect it to get easier the more you do it, but it actually doesn’t, at least not for me. The only time I feel writing is relatively easy is when I’m working on a really short story, and that’s because my short stories are so short, they’re probably closer to prose poems.

This will sound weird but I felt at peace with taking a long time between books. I didn’t want to write a book just for the sake of writing it and trying to get it published. Not everything has to be published, not everything needs to turn into “a book.” 

All of this is to say, I’m not a very strategic writer, I’m almost pure intuition. With my first book, I felt very anxious while writing. What felt different this time was a sense of enchantment. I wanted to be submerged in something weird and uncanny, and I felt that while writing this. I didn’t feel as anxious. Once I knew what I wanted to write about and the particular angle I wanted to explore, writing the book became challenging in a pleasurable way. 

The post The Deepest Readers Do Not Make the Best Detectives  appeared first on Electric Literature.

Via a lyrical and grotesque collage of patent drawings, PowerPoint templates, tables, corporate jargon that feels less appropriated than leaned into, flash fiction, and Barthesian semiotics, /face proposes that first we first need to look in the mirror, then stop conflating looking inward with knowledge of ourselves. For instance, given that every smart phone camera and photo app is now a weapon of surveillance, self-portraiture no longer means what it has long meant in the realms of art, history, and global culture.

Happily, /face’s hybridity doesn’t feel like the product of a project or a dissertated hypothesis. The more one reads, the more /face reveals itself to be a piece of speculative software neither wholly analog nor digital in origin. Like any work of literature, it requires input from readers to make meaning. That /face asks for so much input, and that it activates routines and protocols that feel very different from those employed by other hybrid forms is the most tangible innovation it risks.

Using our own personal modern-day memexes, William Lessard and I spoke via email, Zoom and DMs about day jobs, MAGA plastic surgery disasters, barn poems, predictive algorithms, Billie Holiday, and the architecture of /face.

Joe Milazzo: /face opens with a dedication that also serves as a gentle, maybe even affectionate, provocation: “To Judith and all the readers and poets that know what century this is.” How would you define this century, and how would you say some readers and writers are failing to recognize the times we’re inhabiting?

William Lessard: I think we’re living in a very retrograde time. I don’t think anybody wants the future. While we’ve embraced the efficiencies of technology for the past 30 years, we have resisted the deeper implications. You have people saying, “I don’t want any AI in anything I consume.” But the truth of the matter is that we’ve all been using AI for years; we just haven’t thought of it as such. Spell check, autocomplete, automatic login when you’re buying something online in the middle of the night (or when you’re half in the bag). This is all AI.

When it comes to poetry, as I’ve discussed in a series of essays I’ve written for Jacket2, I don’t see poets giving much thought to the materials they’re using. Even if they’re typing on a laptop, they might as well be composing with a quill by candlelight. And so much poetry gives no thought to experiences or occasions like: “I spent my entire day bouncing between, you know, X/Twitter updates and text messages and all this hypermediated hybrid content.” But, if you have any type of algorithmic intelligence responding to what you’re doing, you’re collaborating with technology. And even if you are the most analog, crunchy, academic poet and you’re writing poems about barns, you’re going to want to show it off. So what do you do? You take a screenshot of it, and you post it on Instagram or Facebook, and guess what? As soon as you do that, your barn poem or your erasure or your Matthew Arnold poem becomes part of the monster that you supposedly hate.

JM: I’d wager that most people who open to the first page of /face would say to themselves, “I am in the presence of an experimental text.” But do you believe the kind of 21^st century poetry you’re describing is necessarily experimental? And is that experimentation necessarily self-reflexive?

WL: The impulse for the book comes out of my day job. For most of my career, I’ve worked as a technology publicist. Anybody who’s ever worked as a publicist, anybody who has been in media knows something about the sixth “w.” On top of who, what, where, when, why, why now. How and why do we continue writing poetry in the age of surveillance capitalism? Experimentation is one way to answer that question. But here’s how I think about experimentation: it just means that I’m going to do something even though I’m not sure it’s going to work out. I don’t see a lot of enthusiasm for experimentation in that sense because of all the precarity in the poetry world—in publishing, in getting acclaim, in landing a teaching job. Creativity seems to be sublimated to those careerist impulses rather than the kind of defiance you find in experimental work.

JM: I feel that defiance most in how visceral /face’s language is. On page 14 alone, we encounter knuckles, fists, chin, cheek, eyes, lips. All of which makes sense from a narrative perspective, as the book is a kind of gloss on the synecdochical violence (and violation) that is facial recognition technology. Can you talk about where the book’s language comes from?

WL: The language in the book is an attempt to capture the texture of contemporary life in a realistic way. And I think the reality that we’re dealing with here is that language isn’t expression in the poetic sense so much as it’s a mediated object. Language is something that inhabits us rather than we inhabit it. With AI, language is being disrupted more than any other technology or medium right now. 

As Americans and people who grew up on democracy, we tend to view speech as sacred. But I don’t think speech is necessarily sacred. I think speech likes to be commodified, and that’s been true for a long time. Take search engine optimization (SEO). Certain words are worth more than other words. Certain words will appear at the top of this algorithm and others won’t. Now we have AI summaries and GEO, which is generative engine optimization which, in a lot of ways, feels like a further advancement or devolution if you will of that concept. Certain language is privileged over other language, and when you see that privilege you understand that language is outside of us. We borrow it for a little while, maybe we move it around a little bit. But how do we make the language matter? I think keeping the language concrete is essential to it mattering.

JM: In a strange way, you see this in the technical documentation that supplies much of the language that creates friction with /face’s visceral, embodied language. What was the poetic potential you saw in that technical documentation?

WL: I’ve been obsessed with documents and technology for a long time. Back in the Web 1.0 era, when you had all of these dot coms that were exaggerating their value, I would read S-1 filings on the SEC website. Because in those documents, companies were legally compelled to tell the truth. And, in so many words, that’s where you would find companies confessing that they had no business model and didn’t foresee making any kind of profit anytime soon. Similarly, later in my career, I was working with a company that was doing real-time animation software. The idea was you would hold your cell phone to your face and it would capture your expressions. So I started looking up all of the Google patents related to facial surveillance. And in those documents, just like in those S-1 filings, the companies would plainly state their intentions: that breaking facial expressions down to micro-expressions is a way of monetizing human subjectivity. The whole idea that we’re each just a series of preferences and behaviors looks really nice if you’re doing some sort of analytics presentation. But the reality is that we are still people. And there are people attached to all of this technology.

JM: /face is, in part, a sampling of the text and imagery from patent documents. How would you describe the different formal elements of /face, and how did they help you make a book out of the themes and concerns you wanted to address?

WL: The book is structured in three parts. There’s the first part, “techniques for creating facial animation using a face mesh,” which is the documentation. Then there’s this hybrid section, “do we have a plan B?(*),” that I wrote during the pandemic. Here, I took PowerPoint templates and improvised language around them. Then there’s a final section, “head template,” where I took a single PowerPoint slide that I worked variations on, changing the colors and tag lines. The idea is that you start with the theoretical, but you always end with the individual.

JM: That’s also a journey from the face—which we believe gives us insight into what someone is feeling and thinking—to the mind, which we view as the seat of thinking and feeling.

WL: We start with the front of the head and end at the back. That’s the path of the book. But in terms of form, /face is also meant as a satire of how blind we are to our social vigilance. So many of us can’t live without taking pictures of ourselves. We take those selfies without thinking about how much damage that does to the environment. And it doesn’t matter how socially vigilant we are. All we care about is our personal brand.

JM: Yet, at the same time, what is a self these days? Is it, to build on the title of a recent essay by Oxana Timofeeva, “The Soul: A Vintage Concept”?

WL: The “Subject Comments” in the book speak to that. If you think of this book as reimagining a social media feed where there’s received language and ads and algorithmic language, the “Subject Comments” were intended to give it some personal heat and show the physical consequences of using technology.

JM: Right. The “mesh” in “facial mesh” isn’t diaphanous or easily escaped. And, even though it’s surgical, this mesh doesn’t heal. This is what the machine is using to analyze people so the people who operate it can predict behaviors and therefore guide those behaviors more efficiently.

WL: I was drawn to “mesh” because, of all the technology buzzwords, it seemed the most organic. You could create a virtual version of yourself or you could compile every one of your preferences into some sort of agentic AI or bot, but it would never really capture the perversity of who you are. At the same time, there’s this impulse of wanting to get beyond the limitations of subjectivity driving technology like this. We now have the monetization of the face down to micro-expressions. We can turn ourselves into revenue streams in ways never before possible. But that only exaggerates every insecurity that we have. 

Lately, everybody’s been talking about looksmaxxing and Scott Galloway’s new nose and Jim Carrey’s new face. To me, this situation exposes just how much the romantic self no longer exists. You could make the argument that it hasn’t existed for at least 60 or 70 years. Meanwhile, people have always wanted to change into something other than human that somehow feels more like themselves.

JM: It seems to me that /face understands that. It’s poetic in that it’s smart enough to allow a reader to do what readers do: occupy an imaginative space where languages (theirs, the book’s) can meld into something I’d call an intelligence, even if it’s ephemeral. But the artificial intelligence /face defies can’t understand it. It can’t really read the personal stories in those “Subject Comments” and know how life experience shapes a face.

WL: Your face is something that you earn and the whole idea that you should erase it in order to make it more monetizable—or in the case of MAGA face, in order make it more appealing to some great leader—is a bad deal. It utterly destroys your face’s value. I was watching a video of Billie Holiday recently. It’s from near the end of her life, and she’s singing some really sad stuff. When she stops singing, you get to watch her listen to the other musicians: Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, Lester Young. You see her smiling and bobbing her head. And you can’t help but think about her face, her ruined face, like the ruined face of Chet Baker. I think that’s the whole story right there. The human truth is far more complicated and beautiful and joyously inexplicable if you only accept it.

The post How to Write Poetry in the Era of Face-Eating Algorithms appeared first on Electric Literature.

Both Mahreen Sohail and Dur e Aziz Amna’s work reflects a turning point in Pakistani literature: a move toward portraying lives as they are, unburdened by Pakistan as an ontological subject. Together, they represent a new guard of writers probing ambition, morality, and selfhood with nuance and precision. Sohail’s debut novel, Small Scale Sinners, is a kaleidoscopic story collection that interrogates what it means to be good across moments of intimacy, betrayal, and quiet rupture. Amna’s latest novel, A Splintering, follows Tara, a woman navigating class, ambition, and desire as she moves from a rural village to the capital, pushing against the limits of the life she’s been given.

Basmah Sakrani: If you think about the protagonists in your books—Tara in Dure’s, and any one of the women from Mahreen’s stories—what would they recognize in each other? What would feel familiar or unfamiliar?

Dur e Aziz Amna: I can go first. In full disclosure, I read Mahreen’s book a long time ago, so apologies if my memory is murky. But the one line that really stuck with me in “The Newlyweds” is that what really makes a woman is the flexible way in which she is able to change the nature of who she is, depending on her relationships. I am paraphrasing, but it struck me so much that I remember highlighting it.

I feel like that is also Tara, putting on the face she needs with every new person, being flexible in her idea of who she is, adapting based on who she is with.

Mahreen Sohail: Dure, I was looking through your book again this morning. Something that felt very familiar to me was that Tara is always reaching. And I think the women in my stories are also reaching, either for love or for something else.

Another thing I noticed was this disappointment with men, a slow, creeping disillusionment. I think that would feel familiar to many of the characters in my stories as well. 

BS: Both of your books feature characters who commit transgressive acts. As you are writing your characters and they become more real to you, how do you both decide where that moral line lies? What are you thinking when you decide to push something further or ignore that line?

MS: I am not sure that when I was writing, I was thinking about moral lines. Maybe that comes later, in the editing process, and certainly now, as I’m talking about the book.

Overall, there is this idea of women just living their lives. When you are in the midst of living, you are not thinking, this is the line I am crossing. And if the characters are well-rounded enough, it feels believable that they cross those lines, even in the context of a culture or a society like ours.

I am thinking about the story with the child soldiers, which is ambiguous. The sisters in it commit this act of kidnapping a girl. But I am hoping that the sisters’ backstory and their grief over their mother are enough to show how those choices could come about. So, it is not necessarily about crossing the moral line as much as it is about what kind of situation would allow someone to cross it. And often that happens organically. The characters do take over.

DAA: It’s funny you say that it’s in talking about the book when you realize these things. With Tara, she’s telling the story in retrospect, right? We start off with her saying, hey, I’ve done something really bad, hear me out. But it’s the fact that she can see those moral lines more clearly because she’s looking back at them.

In the moment, as Mahreen said, she’s very much just living her life and making the choices that she needs to, to survive or thrive or get ahead or whatever we would like to call it.

BS: I want to talk about being Pakistani writers. Pakistan appears differently in both your books, and I think both of you make this decision of kind of not naming the thing. Dure, you made up the village where Tara comes from, and Mahreen, you don’t name Pakistan at all, but it’s very evident in the description. How consciously do you think about that when you are creating something?

DAA: Yeah, that’s such a great question. I feel like I either have nothing to say about this or way too much.

With American Fever, it was a book very cognizant of the fact that it’s about this girl who’s from Pakistan just by the nature of what she’s doing, which is this exchange program. She feels like she’s representing the place, and then she feels the oppressiveness of that expectation.

With A Splintering, I wanted to leave all of that behind, which is why a lot of things are not named. Even the city that ends up being named, Mazinagar, is fictional, mostly because there’s so much vitriol in Tara’s language about the place that I didn’t want any small town in Pakistan to receive that.

I would have really liked to just completely strip away the proper nouns of places and markers. I also didn’t want there to be any Urdu in the book and sometimes that puzzles people, but I think I’m still trying to figure it out.

I fear that anytime you put in too much specificity, it detracts from the experience because the book can become this anthropological text versus just the story of the people who the story is about. But I’m not convinced that’s the exact solution.

MS: Yeah, I feel you, Dure. I found when I named places, they became associated with all of my specific feelings and attachments to a place. So not naming gave me this way of writing a range of experiences, a range of women who can do whatever they want, whereas otherwise, I feel like if I had named Pakistan, specifically Islamabad, I would have pigeonholed these stories into my version of it.

In some ways, it also feels like a lack. Would I be able to write a story that is very specifically Pakistani and named as such, and would it be good? So I don’t know if it’s me putting a Band-Aid on something or if it’s a good narrative choice. This one is tough for me as well.

DAA: I love that. I think naming things can also be a bit of a block for the writer.

BS: I loved how you both approached the answer to this question because in your responses, there’s this element of protection of Pakistan. Dure, you’re protecting the place from other people projecting things because of how you describe it. And Mahreen, you’re also very protective of your own ability to write beyond the place and write bigger than just the place.

DAA: Post 9/11, there was a lot of literature, some of it very good, which dealt so consciously with Pakistan as this place that either had to be explained or defended. Pakistan with a very capital P. Perhaps I was working against that. Just a small-p pakistan where it’s just a place, the way any place is a place where people live their ordinary lives.

BS: I want to transition to a question about form. Dure, you’ve written two very distinct novels. And Mahreen, you’ve got this collection, and you’re playing around a lot with form inside it. Does the form come first? Do you find relief or comfort in the conventions of the form you’re writing in?

MS: For some of the stories, the form does come first, and it helps contain the story. It defines the nature of what the story can be. But for a lot of them, it was the voice, and I don’t always know what’s going to come first.

“The Sisters” was written as a very traditional short story with a beginning, middle, and end, but it felt a little bit boring to me, so I went in and picked the lines I liked and was like, what if I just had this?

DAA: With both the novels, the voice emerged first and then the form followed.

But I’ve also learned to leave a lot of the certainties of writing by the wayside. You are always surprised and changed by your understanding of who you are as a writer. With the first book, there was an emphasis on language, culture, and cultural assimilation. That completely went by the wayside with the second. And with this third book, it doesn’t feel as voice driven, it feels more like a book about ideas.

BS: So, with that, I’m curious to understand something about how you both create. And I’ll preface this by saying I hate the word process. It just feels so erudite. But in terms of your writing style, are you outliners and planners, or are you feelers? Or is it a mix of both?

DAA: I’m not a planner at all. I still try to make notes, but then those notes get lost and they’re always, for some reason, loose leaf. So, I never know where they are. They’re never in a diary assigned for that project.

At some point you realize that’s the kind of person you are, and you live with it. But at least with the first two books, I knew what would happen at the end. I always know how the book will end, but the way we’re going to get there is very much a discovery.

MS: Yeah, I am so not a planner as well. I also do not even know how the thing will end. I find that if I plan something, it takes the magic out of it.

BS: That is very reassuring and validating, I have to admit. I’ve tried, and I’m now at the point [of] realizing I’m not one of these people. I can’t maintain this thing in a spreadsheet.

What is something in your books or your stories, a small detail, that you’re like, oh my God, I’m so proud of this?

DAA: I wish I had something I could turn to, something to hold onto in my moments of low self-esteem. This will be my homework. I will go back and find something to be proud of.

MS: I will tell you, Dure, one of the things in A Splintering that I thought was amazing was our relationship with Hamad, the husband. It was so nuanced, so well done, both his characterization and Tara’s evolving feelings towards him. It’s hard to believe you are not a planner.

For me, it’s the title. My editor came up with the title for the book, and I do quite like it. So maybe this is a moment for low self-esteem, I couldn’t even come up with a title.

BS: But you had the phrase in your story, so it was there. Who came up with your title, Dure?

DAA: The book initially sold as Farewell, Province. I came up with it and was still somewhat attached to it, but every single person hated it. It was a resounding failure, and the title we ended up with was one of 10 I’d sent in an email. It’s so funny, because I had to reverse engineer the part where it’s mentioned in the book.

BS: What are you reading right now?

MS: Just last night, I think I finished it in a day, was My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. I had preconceptions going in because the books are everywhere, but I loved it. I thought it was beautiful, calming, steadying. It was like reading someone’s diary.

I also just finished Mohammad Hanif’s Rebel English Academy and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This is Where the Serpent Lives.

DAA: I’m thinking of Elena Ferrante’s interviews where she says that all books she grew up reading as a child were by men. Thankfully, I never had that problem. I’ve actually placed a moratorium on myself after getting so saturated with thinking about women while writing A Splintering. So now I’ve vowed to read books by men. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a novel with a fully male protagonist. So part of it is subconscious research, an anthropological interest in what are men exactly.

BS: How about you, Mahreen? What are you trying to do next?

MS: I am not writing much. I have a two-year-old, and I just do not know where the time goes. I do have another book I finished while I was pregnant that I’m hoping to send out. I have the ideas of a novel, but you never know where that goes.

BS: Are you both early morning writing people?

DAA: Sometimes people who don’t have kids ask me this question. I’m like, do you understand what it’s like to have this little thing that can entirely disrupt your day? This is what decides what my routine is for the day. Truly, my routine is at the mercy of the kids, but when things are working smoothly, I write in the mornings after breakfast and tap out by the afternoon.

The one thing I know is that it comes in spurts. There are times when I really, really want to write, and then I have to get all of that done, it becomes a distraction, a thing hanging over my head if I don’t do it.

MS: Before I had a baby, I could write at night. Now, after I get home from work and do bedtime, my brain is done.

Something strange also happened to me after having a kid: It’s become harder to write because the stakes for my characters don’t seem high enough. And in my life, they suddenly seem very high: I have this thing to keep alive. 

DAA: So what exactly does that mean? Did you mean your work as a writer feels like it has to now compete with your role as a mother? Or are you saying that what your characters are going through seems minuscule compared to your role as a mother?

MS: It seems terrible to do things to my characters, to do terrible things to them in a world that my son is growing up in. You know what I mean? That’s what it feels like to me. And it’s a very strange feeling.

BS: Last question. Mahreen, I was going through your other interviews, and in your interview in The Offing, you said this:

The women in these stories, and in some way many of us in real life, are wrestling with the question of how to be the best version of ourselves in our relationships—as sisters, brothers, wives, husbands, aunts, mothers—while still maintaining our independence. How do you keep some of yourself for yourself, and what is lost in the process?

So, with the discussion we’ve had today about womanhood and motherhood and being writers and having relationships and jobs and dreams and ambitions, how do you both keep some of yourself? And what do you feel like you lose in the process?

DAA: There’s this line by David Brooks, about how growing up, becoming an adult, is just how well you give up your individual freedoms and take on responsibilities.

Motherhood was really the first time where I truly felt a full abdication of the person I used to be. It was irrevocable. More than marriage, more than anything else. Now, I can’t even think of myself as anything else. The person that you are, there has to be a new person who comes in and takes that form of you.

I will stop talking now because I think I’m trying to say something, but it’s not coming out the way I want it to.

BS: It’s making sense to me.

MS: You are both further along the journey than I am. I think I have struggled to come to terms with the fact that I am fully this new person because of the small being that is co-opting me completely.

I am always finding ways to see, how can I get this part of my mental space back? It was useful to hear you say you have to just fully embrace who you are now, because I have been seeing it almost as a failing that I haven’t been able to get that version of my brain back. It is good to hear that you can’t go back to who you used to be.

The post Pakistani Literature That Refuses to Pigeonhole Its Setting appeared first on Electric Literature.

When I read Nana’s name, I skidded cartoonishly across the floor to tell my husband and then responded to the email as quickly and coherently as possible that I needed to switch into his class. I had a deep admiration for his words and how he chose to bare them to the world. My gut is always loud and demanding, but I had just started to try this new thing called “listening to it.” It was the right choice. During the semester, Nana and I found common ground over our very millennial memories and growing up in New York. We were both also dissed for having Android phones and being born in the 1900s. But most importantly, I discovered that we were united by the belief that genre is a prison. 

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has defied conventions his whole career. His writing blends surrealism with radical portraiture and horror with hope, often providing social commentary on the world around him. His short story collection, Friday Black, and debut novel, Chain Gang All-Stars, both received awards and critical acclaim. Nana’s also hell-bent on pursuing new creative challenges. So, when I learned that he was releasing a debut album,The Pisces Sciatica, I was curious about how music as a medium would evolve his work. I couldn’t wait to hear how installing new wings allowed him to fly again.

Ashley Leone: What about music liberates you to write more autobiographically?

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: People consider me a prose artist. But The Pisces Sciatica was gonna be a look at my life, and I didn’t want to do that in the same medium. In some ways, the things that I fear about music made it very attractive to me. I’m so craft-focused as a writer, but there’s a rawness in my naivete as a rapper. And I’m not saying that craft makes you a liar, but I can curate the truth into oblivion if I really want to. There was something powerful to speaking about these last couple years of my life with my actual lived-in voice, which is a less finely tuned instrument. It just felt more honest.

AL: What is meaningful to you about rap as a genre for storytelling?

NKAB: I’m from a place called Spring Valley, Rockland County, and even before I ever wrote for real, people were sitting in cars and freestyling. Music is the medium I take in most, probably, because it’s so easily embedded into your day. The artists whose work is closest to my heart are musicians.

For me, making music has a lot to do with needing something for my mind to do when I’m stressed or scared. I think on a loop. So, I listen to instrumentals and write raps to them. I have some obsessive tendencies, anyone with anxiety can connect to that. But with music, it feels natural and kind of fun to be in these repetitive loops.

AL: Is there a specific track on the album that felt most vulnerable for you to write? 

NKAB: “The Pisces Sciatica” is a song about my father and his passing, and me working with him through his cancer. The end of that first verse is “I hate it half the time, because I’m the one who signed Do Not Resuscitate.” Even saying it right now, it’s hard. It’s not something I really talk about, but for me, that was one of those moments that justified the entire project. It’s almost like I have to scream the truth in a forest where no one’s there before I go on with writing it. The music felt like this kind of empty forest for me. I’m slowly getting myself ready to write about those things in some way, shape, or form. But I am scared of it. I have so much admiration for memoirists.

AL: Have you written any fiction that’s felt just as raw and intimate to write?

NKAB: In my first book, there’s a story called “Things My Mother Said.” I think if you’re an artist, you feel this often: I just gotta say this thing. Then “The Hospital Where” is my first version of meta-analysis about writing. You could see I was already getting critical about the pursuit of an artistic existence. Those stories are like the prequel to The Pisces Sciatica.

AL: On this album, there are various references to arts, artists, and culture, like Icarus, Smokey Robinson, Emperor’s New Groove,“making weight” in sports . . . What are the mediums that influenced this album but maybe didn’t make it in as a reference? What are the artforms this album couldn’t exist without?

NKAB: Some of the important ones are the ones you named. I like big, mythic, well-known stories that have a universal lesson, that you can interpret differently if you want to. Like Icarus—the album pretty much starts on that idea, which is kind of dark.

AL: But Icarus gets off the ground. He’s figured out how!

NKAB: Exactly. My best friend messaged me, “People forget he can fly.” 

The album wouldn’t exist if I didn’t have exposure to rap artists like J. Cole or Kendrick, especially their deep-cut, soul-sampling songs. I couldn’t make this without a project like The Water[s] by Mick Jenkins. And I would never in another context name my own stuff, but I just know that I couldn’t make this without writing “Things My Mother Said” or “The Hospital Where” first. They helped me feel brave enough that I could.

AL: Something that I love about hybrid art is that it can only exist because of the artist who makes it. Because you’re coming from your own context, all your positionalities and intersectionalities, whatever makes you you, including your artforms. How do you feel this album specifically contextualizes you in the world? What are you representing of yourself? I heard that Goku reference, and I was like, 12-year-old Nana is so pumped that he could put this in a song.

NKAB: I actually got chills when you said that because I just did therapy before this, and we were talking about that kind of stuff. Doing inner child work has been a big breakthrough for me in general.

The front cover of The Pisces Sciatica is a place I lived in when I was young, and the back cover is of the place I lived in when I was even younger than that. So, it’s absolutely teen/adolescent Nana who’s been trapped in this context because he’s decided he has to fix this thing, and he’s been killing himself trying to become an author.

I wouldn’t say I’m a super happy person, but the people pleaser in me, with the people I’m codependent with, that part of me really likes presenting in a certain kind of heroic way. It’s savior complex stuff. My professional life also really likes that part of me, too. I’m not the most zodiac-y person, but my rising sign is Leo, and I think that part of me is the part that people see. 

There’s [a] little bit of hype and cool on the album, but the inner sad boy is powering everything else. 

AL: In fiction, some of the most compelling characters are the ones that live in their contradictions. “Best Right Now,” which is a more vulnerable, “sad boy” track, is juxtaposed with “And The Miracles,” which is a confident, boastful song. That tension is a good example of how to build a character. So, I wondered how your experience writing fiction informed how you compiled your album. How did you order your track list? How does that compare to assembling a short story collection?

NKAB: I feel like a huge part of being a writer is being able to oscillate between a macro and micro attention to whatever it is you’re doing. I would say macro is more like the structure of a song or a story, and then mega macro is the order. In [ordering] the short story collection, I was imagining it like it was a playlist. 

Now I’m actually making a playlist. The album intro is “Faith and the King.” The vibe is melancholic, the BPM is less, it’s serious. Then “Best Right Now” right after that is a really sad song. In terms of vibes, I can’t just depress everybody. So, then, “And The Miracles” is a fun moment. I do rapper shade. It’s braggadocious. I’m trying to be cool, like, “I’ve been catching bodies” but in the alley of work. You gotta keep some playfulness. I’m always thinking about that. 

The micro-level is the thing I pay most attention to. In this project, I am interested in how I can tell the truth but still be vigilant. Like, being aware of syllables, keeping the rhyme, double entendres. I am thinking with that same level of acuity. I hope.

AL: Revision is an important part of your practice as a prose writer. I know a bit about how that works for you on the page, but how does it work for you when making music? You’re considering many layers—writing lyrics, making beats, working on tone and BPM—lots of elements to be revised.

NKAB: For me, the first stage of revision is somewhere written down, and I just keep doing it until it feels perfect. It’s not that dissimilar to [prose] writing on some level. I have to be able to say it in my head without tripping once. If I trip, it means some syllable’s off, something’s a little weird.

Then, I get to the stage where I start singing out loud to myself, and it changes again. I start moving this word or that word, I look for additional meanings, see if I can get some double, triple entendres. Revision is even more of a discovery in rap. 

In “Ellison,” I said something about medaling, but I was like, wait, medaling sounds like meddling, like meddling kids. So, “Mystery Machine or Team USA, we meddling/medaling.” 

Then, one of my favorite bars in this whole album: “In this life, you could be Vince or Frédéric Weis.” Frédéric Weis is the guy Vince Carter jumped over on the USA basketball team, that famous dunk. “And if I’m offered the choice, always gonna write/right,” like right-handed dunk over him. Then I said, “going straight over your head, black boy flying, they prefer if he was dead.” Black Boy, Richard Wright. Wright like “write/right” from before.

You start digging, you find a little gold, and then you keep going. I wrote that in a hotel when I was working on Chain Gang on a four-day staycation, and I remember being like, wait, am I the best? Revision in rap is crazy because you find explosive gems, which is maybe as, or more, satisfying than revision in fiction.

AL: This goes back to being a hybrid artist and having your hybrid interests inform all your work. Because every reference you make and all the wordplay is so specific that it could only be from you.

NKAB: Yeah, what you reference creates a portrait of who you are. I don’t know how many NBA fans also know Richard Wright, but you could tell I wasn’t worried about other people getting it.

AL: You’re just bringing every part of you, and then when someone understands it or recognizes it—

NKAB: That’s a cool feeling. I feel very grateful for a moment where someone’s caring and they’re being attentive. But even with book stuff, it’s somewhat rare. There’s not enough specificity in general. Maybe it’s just inherently easier with music.

AL: How has collaborating in music inspired you to shift your fiction writing practices, if at all?

NKAB: I think I’m less afraid of collaboration in general now. I just wrote and directed a short film that we shot a little bit ago, and it’s one of the most gratifying artistic experiences I’ve ever had, actually. And that’s all collaboration. With writing, it’s just us.

Getting edited is a very intimate experience, you know? I’ve obviously read your work. You can tell when someone cares and puts effort and thinks about it deeply in a serious way. And it’s a special kind of thing. Getting engineered is almost more intimate than that.

My experience was particular because Mike Mitch is a rapper’s-rapper and the engineer on the entire project. I look up to him. He’s one of my best friends and I’m getting his mentorship. It took us several years to do this, and over the course of the project, his dad was alive and then he wasn’t. So, to your point previously, he understands The Pisces Sciatica more now.

And talk about being obsessive, engineers have to listen to the thing a million times.

My regular writing process is still very solitary. I need to be a little bit alone sometimes. But you know what? I’ve sent some stuff to my agent earlier than I ever have, and maybe that’s influenced by the music. I’m trying to get a little less precious about everything. Sometimes I take a really long time. I’ve had stories for 10 or 12 years that no one has seen. And I like them!

But conversely, I finished a story yesterday that I started probably three months ago that I’ll send her. I’m trying to be more open to the idea that collaboration is not a thing that taints something, but that grows something. Whereas music is different for me—I share unmixed demos with people. Maybe what music has helped me remember is that I trust my vision enough that a wayward eye won’t destroy the project.

AL: To quote S.A.A.M: “What’s the point of dropping gems just to leave it in the vault?” The novel you wrote in college—will it ever see the light of day?

NKAB: No, no, no. That’s not a gem. I’m gonna try . . . you know what? I’m gonna completely redo it.

AL: Well, there’s something that inspired you to make it, and whatever kernel of truth exists in that is worth holding onto.

NKAB: There is a cool kernel. Everything else is not good. I just didn’t have the craft. I didn’t have the ability.

AL: Are there any other modes of artistic expression that you feel drawn to do or that you want to venture into next?

NKAB: I’ve been into photography and film, but I’ve stepped into the short film stuff right now, and it’s really sickening. It’s my whole personality. I’m sorry to my students because we screened like four short films in our last class. 

AL: Any last thoughts to share?

NKAB: I’m really grateful for every single person that listens to this. I’m really grateful that you listened to it. Even one person enjoying [it] is really nice for me. 

I also want to highlight the mix. Mike Mitch did so much cool shit in the mix. It’s just very impressive. That’s another thing about collaboration. You feel better about saying how good your shit is, because it’s not just you.

The post Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Turns to Music appeared first on Electric Literature.

In My Dear You, Khong turns her attention to a wide-ranging cast of characters navigating scenarios that are at once surreal and deeply familiar: a government program that alters how people perceive race and gender, a cat that conjures the ghosts of past relationships, a vision of heaven where memory itself begins to slip. Oscillating between the absurd and the intimate, these stories explore identity, love, relationships, friendship, and the quiet, often overlooked ways we misunderstand one another. The result is a collection that is as funny as it is unsettling—one that asks what it means to love, to belong, and to be a person in a world that rarely makes as much sense as we’d like it to.

I sat down with Khong to talk about absurdity as a lens, identity and belonging, and the complicated, often contradictory ways we connect with one another.

Greg Mania: One thing I love about My Dear You is how the stories take these absurd or speculative situations and use them to look closely at very ordinary human feelings. What draws you to that space where the strange and the everyday collide?

Rachel Khong: I guess I don’t think of the strange and the everyday as separate things. To me, the everyday is strange, and vice versa. So many things that are happening now are so strange and unbelievable—whether it’s the Epstein files or anything that comes out of Trump’s mouth. At the same time, our internal lives are such rich territory. Obviously we’re still writing and painting and making music about human emotion. Even though we’ve been doing it for hundreds—thousands—of years, there is so much more to write and sing about and explore: The complexity of human emotion is endlessly deep and interesting and just weird. I feel that it’s my job to make art that comes from my particular experience, living through this very strange moment in time, metabolizing the events I’m living through on a national and global level, but also on a really private and personal level. I’m not sure why the stories get so weird, but if I were to articulate it—though articulating feels really antithetical to the way I work, which is more intuitive—I think it’s a reaction to our circumstances: When the powers that be want sameness, conformity, and fascism, I want to exist in the world of my own imagination. 

GM: Why do you think the absurd can sometimes reveal truths about the real world more clearly than realism can?

RK: Absurdity is a way of exposing the faulty logic of systems we’ve grown used to. Realism reproduces the world as we recognize it, but I’m more interested in making the structure beneath our world visible. When something becomes ridiculous (like what happens in “The Freshening,” for example), we are more likely to question if our rules make sense to begin with. I recently read the stories of Leonora Carrington; her stories are so strange and absurd—our world isn’t always recognizable in them. But what she and other surrealists did was to suggest that the systems we take for granted as rational and logical really aren’t so—they’re actually terrible and inhumane. What’s absurd isn’t talking hyenas, it’s inequality and the fact of billionaires; it’s losing track of every person’s humanity. Absurdity can be such a powerful lens for looking at racism, misogyny, capitalism—it reveals the illogic embedded within systems that present themselves as rational.

GM: This is your first short story collection. What did writing short stories allow you to explore that felt different from writing a novel?

RK: Stories were how I found my way into writing fiction in the first place. I have been writing stories far longer than I’ve been writing novels. Often, I use stories as a way of exploring topics—writing my way into what I’m interested in. Goodbye, Vitamin grew from a short story about a character named Ruth. That novel expanded my interest in memory, and how we can love each other with our faulty memories. And though they are so tonally different, writing [the story] “My Dear You” led me to writing Real Americans, because it introduced me to my interest in choices: What do we choose for us, and what’s already chosen? How do we become who we become? Stories are a way to experiment, too: I’m much more wacky and playful in my stories because I think wackiness is much more manageable and palatable in small doses—it would get annoying (for both the reader and the writer) in a novel. And I love precision and brevity in writing; I love that stories can be distilled and potent. 

GM: A lot of the stories seem interested in how we see one another—or fail to. I’m thinking in particular of the story where the government injects everyone with a drug that makes them see others as their own race and gender. What interested you about exploring identity and perception that way?

RK: I’ve been really interested in projection for a while now—what we think and assume about other people. I think it’s gotten even worse with social media and the internet. These tools that were supposed to help us have a more democratic society are instead fostering and fomenting a more fascistic one. We assume so much about other people that really isn’t true; we forget the richness of every individual person, forget that everyone else’s lives are as complex as our own. What we assume about other people can be fatal, especially when it comes to Black men and boys dying at the hands of police. How did things get so inverted that the people who are supposed to be protecting us instead cause harm to an entire community? With “The Freshening” in particular, I wanted to try to answer that question: How could we stop this violence? How could we stop making these fatal, racist assumptions? Obviously the answer isn’t so straightforward. 

GM: There’s also this recurring question across the collection about what it means to be an Asian woman in America. When you were writing these stories, what kind of questions about identity and belonging kept surfacing for you?

RK: The main question was probably, “This again?” We’ve talked a lot about absurdity, and I do find racism more than a little absurd. I was interested in writing racism in the way that I experience it most often, which is in a quieter way, almost as an afterthought. It happens when doctors don’t take my complaints seriously, because I’m “probably” healthy. It happens when people confuse me for another Asian author, which happens more often than you’d think. The fact that my books get the most attention when it’s AANHPI month in May. A lot of literature covers racism that’s more overt, that’s really loud, but I was interested—especially in these stories—in presenting it in the more mundane way that I often experience it. 

GM: The dating stories in the collection are often very funny but also a little painful in a recognizable way—awkwardness, misread signals, lingering ghosts from past relationships! What about love and intimacy at this stage of life felt especially rich or compelling for you to explore?

RK: It’s been a while since I went on a date, and I never experienced online dating, but I can recall the weirdness of dating so vividly—and can imagine the weirdness of it, especially now with apps and, like I said, so much projection about other people—that I wanted to write about it. I wanted to write about desiring and being desired, about expectations and falling short, about how the way we love other people might not be exactly the way that they’d prefer to be loved. We bring a lot of assumptions into relationships—about the other person, about what relationships should even be—and at the same time, relationships can be so life-changing and essential and deeply loving. I’m sorry the fetishizing guy is named Greg, by the way. I promise he’s not named after you! 

GM: I appreciate the clarification—I was getting a little nervous there! But I’m curious about what you said about people wanting to be loved in particular ways—why do you think that mismatch happens so often in relationships?

RK: Well, every person’s perspective is so different—shaped by an entire life. I think the mismatch happens with books, too; I could give a book I love to a friend, but my friend might hate it. Who or what you connect with can be so subjective, which is why it feels kind of miraculous when you do meet someone or something you deeply connect with. With both books and relationships, I think it’s important to be humble and open. The assumptions we bring to relationships probably aren’t correct. Can we be open to how interesting the person or book might be, rather than jump to conclusions based on who or what we’d like them to be? 

GM: Several of the stories brush up against the supernatural. There are ghosts, heaven, even the end of humanity! What do those possibilities open up for you when you think about what might exist beyond the boundaries of ordinary life?

RK: I’m not entirely sure our lives are so ordinary; I’m not entirely sure things are exactly as they seem. Our lives are both ordinary and not—that’s always on my mind as I write fiction. It’s pretty magical that the world we live in exists at all, and that we’re here for it. It’s magical that a tree grows from a seed, or that a baby forms in a womb. That our hearts just beat, until they don’t. We’re walking contradictions, in that we are all ordinary and mortal and limited, but we also have these amazing minds and imaginations that can take us practically anywhere. I write, in part, to remind myself of this contradiction: My life can feel so ordinary on a day-to-day basis, yet the fact that I’m here at all is pretty miraculous and odds-defying, and one day I’m going to die. What am I doing with that? Am I spending time with my closest friends, am I doing the most human things possible, am I caring as deeply as I can for the people I’m in relationships with, am I making things—am I creating—what I feel called to? Writing is how I remember what’s most important to me.

GM: What did writing this collection teach you about yourself?

RK: Honestly, putting all these stories together made me a little sick of myself. But as I grow as a writer, I’m learning to have compassion for myself, too. I did learn a lot from this collection, but it’s hard to separate growing older from the writing itself. For me, they’re intertwined and inextricable. I’m grateful to have writing, not to make sense of life—because a lot of it doesn’t make sense—but to accompany me in life.

The post Using Absurdity to Expose the Faulty, Inhumane Logic of Our World appeared first on Electric Literature.

The anything in those days was weekly or bi-monthly writing assignments conducted in the experimental narrative laboratory being run under the guise of a writing workshop. Nora recently reminded me of one of the things her cohort was up to at the time: They had been asked to create a Cornell box in which the page itself would serve as the box or the container and the task would be to place within this box disparate, trembling, precious images and narratives that might speak to each other and resonate in mysterious ways. The anything might be to create in language a vestibule that would then open onto an enormous concert hall; the anything might be to conjure a “Tristan chord” filled with longing and dissonance that, over pages, might move toward a kind of resolution. Or to create a truly bifurcated piece, or an oracular piece, or à la Georges Perec, attempt to exhaust a space in Providence . . .

Years pass of course. Students come and go, the so-called real world imposes its directives and preferences, and somewhere along the way too often a tacit agreement is entered, understandably so perhaps, an acquiesce, a surrender where essentially the same literary formulas, dressed albeit in cool clothing, are reinforced and prevail.

Nora does not succumb to the borrowed, the inherited, the familiar tropes, the conventionally legible expectations. More and more she grows incandescent, fierce, her work unique, the stories a series of intensities before us. Unapologetically, she steps into her talent. Her new collection of stories, Day Care, is an extraordinary record of our moment—of what it is like right here, right now. She asks of the page what far too few writers ask, and she ventures far—passionate, restless, full of wonder, not already decided, alive.

Recently after many years Nora and I found one another again and wrote back and forth for a few weeks before conducting this interview online from our far flung perches in the country. Oddly, though it had been more than a while, and much had transpired for both of us, it felt as if no time had passed at all.

Carole Maso: These stories are astonishing in many ways—they are what I admire most in writing, an event and not just the record of an event; they are a genuine experience on the page. What informs your work? What are your influences?

Nora Lange: I’m influenced by curiosity. I am influenced constantly. I can barely read or see anything without wanting to make notes. I have piles of magazines, cutouts, emails, saved drafts, notebooks, passages underlined. My dreamworld consists of a ceiling made of glass, definitely impractical (this is a dream world!), sleeping surrounded by books, and absorbing what I do not have the time to absorb under ordinary circumstances through osmosis. I work for my family at times—working harvest, or selling wine. For instance, mid-book tour, I’ll be in Charleston, South Carolina working an event called “Pinot in the City.” Often I’m asked at these events, red or white? To which I dutifully answer: Both. 

My influences are vast. You, Carole, for one. Anne Carson until I return to water. Muriel Spark. Lucia Berlin. Lydia Davis. Claudia Rankine. Maggie Nelson. Adrienne Rich. I realize it might be annoying to say, but I am grateful and loving for so many writers and their work. And I write beside them. I live beside them. 

CM: I very much like your stories because they reside in a slightly more abstract and heightened space and are not prone to the usual and often far more facile psychological assignment and expectation novels seem susceptible to. Can you talk about the different forms for you? What draws you to each? What do you hope/want from them formally? What do you think a story might do or might be?

NL: Someone for Publisher’s Weekly wrote, “Lange’s well-honed stories build to stinging epiphanies,” and, not to be so intellectually vanquished as to lean on the review, but that sounds about right. The hope is to build to some kind of release. 

For me, a story feels closer to my life. Active psychosis meets regular therapy, a luxury I do not have, so I write with language to discover. Sometimes I just get brushed with a line. I have many emails to myself with one liners and reminders to build on these or consult later. For instance, one recent Saturday while walking on the treadmill at my daughter’s daycare, I wrote an entire story on my cell phone inspired by a woman—sassing to an alarm—next to me on the stair master. It was a challenge to type as fast as my mind was bending. This is not to say the story is complete. No way. But some part of that experience, and of the text that was written that day, will be folded into a story that I’d like to orchestrate around a kind of alternative self-help group. 

Sometimes (often, I should admit) a story is a problem to view, or a puzzle to sit with and to try to put together (though you’re surely missing pieces!). I have no interest in solving anything. Stories feel alive in a different way than a novel. They have a different pulse. They are bursts and composites and have some constraints (like word count). They are contained in a different way than a novel, which has a different, roomier, perhaps more flexible architecture where, even as the writer, I am allowed to get lost.

I feel the need for a story to be perfect. That’s why, for me, they are incredibly time consuming. It’s like a carving. Or maybe it’s the way a photograph needs to come into focus—this is your shot. Which isn’t to suggest, not at all, that the entire image needs to be in focus. It could just be the daffodil teetering on a windowsill that is sharp while everything which surrounds it is not. 

I can say that with each story I am setting out to explore something in particular. For example, in “Owls Yawn Too,” the mother is absolutely in love with her owl, a kind of rapturous love. Very romantic. Or in “Dog Star,” I wanted to write a story that took place inside a snow globe—how would that work? Which I guess could sound “surreal,” as some pieces in the collection have been dubbed, but living inside a snow globe doesn’t really feel off the mark: People and industries interfere, or intrude upon the ways of life of others all the time. “World building,” such as a lifestyle or data collection center—these have interiors and exteriors in sometimes abstract, “sophisticated” ways, like governmental policy or mining. Or direct, smaller ways like the leaf-blower next door. Now, looking at that language above, I ask myself: How do I say this? How do I say what I want to say? I shall try again, but if this were a story, I would have deleted the former. Whereas here, I’ll leave it be, an experiment. What I mean to write is there are effects of industry and policy that we do not see, which isn’t to say we do not experience them. We do, absolutely. But they are an altogether different kind of imposition, one where most individuals wield little to zero power. As opposed to a smaller, more direct “intrusion,” or interruption (less severe) like a Jehovah’s Witness ringing your bell. 

CM: In this collection there’s an exploration of sentiments, sciences, human dynamics, which is to say animal dynamics. How does language reside in you? 

NL: I just found at the back of my desk, as I sat down to write to you, a slim slip of paper about the size of my ring finger with the handwritten words: 

Patterns of behavior

Alimental, gametic, climactic 

And off to the left, written in a pyramid shape: Causes of migration. 

This is my handwriting. This snippet of paper, with this text, came from my time living in Chicago for years in the ‘00s. I had done a play (written and directed) called Aviary based on the migrational patterns of birds and captivity and other undergraduate musings! The point is, I have carried this snippet of text with me for all these years—and I have moved a lot. I mention this, not only because of the serenity of finding it as I was sitting down to write to you, but because these are the themes that I find myself returning to: a longing for air, preferably fresh, and survival of any sort. 

CM: I feel a hedge against death, a fending off, honoring and bringing up close the chaotic and the dread, perhaps to disarm death in some way. Can you talk about death (in any way you like)?

NL: Odd you ask, as I’ve just completed an ongoing interview with palliative care neurologist and writer Anna DeForest for a column she’s doing in The Believer on this subject. 

I could spend my whole life talking about death, I came to realize in corresponding with Anna. I am realizing now that perhaps I have been doing this from the start without knowing. When we talk about survival we cannot leave out its twin: death. For many, these are the counterpoints which make up life. That is, living it. I am not talking about dying in old age—or surviving elderly existence—but of migration, even the day to day, for many. My mother lived from paycheck to paycheck, and survival was about having just enough. She “held it together” until she didn’t. The force, the weight of getting by, for so many is often alarming. A detail about my childhood, and my life with my mother and brother—which I absolutely understand, though I wish had been different for her—was that soon after divorcing, she remarried. Maybe it was for love. I’d wager it also had something to do with finding support. Working full-time and raising two very young children alone, in a new city, family dead, or far away, can be daunting. I highlight this as a way to illustrate the complexity of a woman’s choice. 

CM: I’m left with the feeling of a world as it vanishes, and so all is heightened and precious in a way not often felt in fiction. Sometimes, as I mentioned, it feels as if it vanishes as we read. The cherished but lost world, or about to be lost, or, if in a precarious present, there’s a tenacity, a holding on as all blurs and dissolves. On this note, the book feels very much a picture of cherished things. As it all disappears, goes to smoke now, what did you think was beautiful there? 

NL: I think to be touched by things is beautiful. Sometimes we—myself and Sylvia (my daughter who is three and a half)—just pull up the heavy black blinds in our rental to watch and discuss the squirrels scurrying along the electrical wires. She will call out to me from the living room to come to see the moon, which after the daylight savings time change is a night-like moon at seven a.m. 

Beauty is to stop and marvel, to be touched. I believe to allow yourself to be touched is radical. I hope that these stories cause people to stop to marvel for a minute, or to meditate on cherished things. But the book will not disappear. Unless of course there’s a flood, or an earthquake, which might prompt any number of things. Perhaps even a divorce in which one partner gets it in the settlement. 

CM: Also conveyed is the mystery of existence, the baffling project of being alive. You create subterranean, complicated responses in the reader that only literature can do. Can you talk about how you move through the world? What is your day-to-day like? What makes its mark on you? 

NL: Interacting makes marks for me. That can happen in reading. I interact while reading, do you? It could be that I stop to look a word up, or write a note or something in the margins, or “JUST THINK.” 

My day-to-day is extraordinarily unglamorous. It involves a lot of discussions with a toddler, who calls herself “kitty cat” and “buttercuppy” and “Jew.” She might be all these things. I have a limited concept of my origins. Recently, under the guise of research for a character that I’m writing, I did the Ancestry thing—spat in a vial and sent it off for DNA testing, which hasn’t shed any light on anything. 

The other evening we passed out fliers around our neighborhood. Posters is probably more accurate. I had written on them: Dear Neighbors! And I was pointing out to Sylvia that the neigh in the word was the sound that a horse supposedly makes. It’s also a word, neighbors, that I notoriously misspell. That evening, even when I’d felt confident I’d spelled it correctly, after the third or so poster spelling it out, I still had to confirm. Self-doubt is all consuming. I work really hard to reject it, if I can. If I’m able. I really do believe that those who want more power, those who have all the power and want more power, want to erode our memory, our sense of self. Therefore, I feel a constant need to legitimize my understanding—even researched—and my intuition—less researched though often accurate. Like when I was in labor but nobody believed me until the baby was nearly on the floor. Or when my water broke and I was asked if I had simply peed my pants when I’d said so. If a person is exposed to enough of that questioning, to that implicit or explicit doubt directed by others, how is one supposed to touch base with themselves? 

CM: Mother runs through many of your stories. Or a mother force field, a mother-feeling insinuates itself often into the prose, even when it remains outside the story’s parameters. What is your experience of motherhood? What windows has the experience of being a mother opened or closed?

NL: Chimera—as the word relates to Greek mythology—generally speaking, a female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. Can birth be so wild an animal that it’s transhuman? 

More calmly, motherhood is time travel. That is how I see it, in all seriousness. On a cellular level and more. I feel very much a part of the circular atmosphere, more now than ever before. On motherhood time travel: I am to write about this very topic soon. Stay-tuned. 

CM: Perhaps a simple question to end on, but Nora—what brings you to the page? 

NL: A deep longing to be there, wherever “there” is at any given moment in time: seated on an airplane; reminding Sylvia to (please) not throw sand in a playground’s sandbox; in a grocery store checkout line; horizontal at rest listening to her breathing beside me. 

An obsession. Raging curiosity. A resolve to participate no matter what angles or forces wish to take me away. Writing is an act of engagement, and I would not know how or what to be without it. 

The post A Snow Globe Theory of the Short Story appeared first on Electric Literature.

After I left LA, I wasn’t keen to re-enter that world: the world of pitching ideas you never thought would reach viewers, of waiting in “development hell” for months, of never getting an official rejection, but instead just watching the industry slowly ghost you. Because of the sour taste Hollywood left in my mouth, I was particularly struck by how much I enjoyed Hallie Cantor’s Like This, But Funnier, the perfect satire of the TV writing industry. Her protagonist, Caroline, captures exactly what it means to spend your days pitching a nebulous idea for a TV show while wondering if your life is ever going to start moving. Cantor deftly describes the negative space that fills your world when the industry demands you have a close personal connection to your story, but your days are spent in your PJs in front of a laptop, so you don’t think that story is quite that compelling. She skewers how attached execs can be to small, unimportant details of a pitch that become impossible to build a world around. She roasts the industry’s obsession with authenticity while making the same type of show over and over again. All while capturing a complex female protagonist struggling to manage her relationship, her career, and her uncertainty about starting a family.

Cantor and I met over Zoom to discuss the screenwriting industry, letting our characters live in uncertainty, and envying the nine-to-five. 

Ginny Hogan: How did the character of Caroline change during the drafting process of Like This, But Funnier?

Hallie Cantor: In my first draft, she was oddly very grumpy and annoyed all the time. And I think that was partly because I was grumpy and annoyed about having to write a first draft. And that came out in the character. It’s also an easy place to find humor: this self-defensive, cynical crouch of like, this is stupid, that’s stupid. But that gets grating over 300 pages. In later drafts, I really pushed myself to find places where she’s more terrified or elated or any other emotion. So she’s not just constantly annoyed.

GH: I imagine that this was very much inspired by experiences that you had as a writer. Did you consider writing a memoir?

HC: I never thought about writing a memoir. I didn’t even think that I was going to be writing about my own experiences at all. I set out looking for an idea for a funny fictional novel. Then, I had this idea about a writer married to a therapist, which I am in real life. Gradually, in my subconscious, I started feeding pieces of my own experiences into Caroline’s, and the story became what it is. But often, when I’m writing, I take a real feeling and hang it on a scaffolding of a bigger premise. That’s not only more fun for the writer, but it’s more fun for the reader to read about somebody who’s lying and stalking, caught in a web of their own deception, instead of a plot that’s more like “she felt bad about herself for a couple years.”

GH: One of the things I loved in the book was Caroline’s TV show pitches. The pitches get worse and worse, but the studio gets more and more excited about them. She gets caught in this web of lies; she’s not sure that it’s ethical for her to pitch the show because the character is inspired by her husband’s patient. And on top of that, she knows the pitches are bad. And I found it very real – it can feel like the industry’s taste is not aligned with your own. But I’m wondering, for a person who is outside of Hollywood, was there anything you wanted to explore that felt too far-fetched? Anything you had to rein in to make it more believable?

HC: Not really. There’s a section that’s just emails from her agents and executives giving her notes on the script. An early reader said, “This section feels like a different tone from the rest of the book. This is a little too heightened.” And I was surprised because a lot of that was taken verbatim. There’s definitely a bit of satirizing, but I didn’t think of the book as a Hollywood satire because the reality of Hollywood is so silly and ridiculous. I just wanted to present that on a plate to people outside of it.

GH: That really comes through. Did you know when you started writing how you wanted Caroline’s story to end?

HC: Not specifics. I had a sense that I wanted her to have a changed relationship by the end, both with herself and with her work. For so much of the book, her fatal flaw is that she feels like to be worthy, she has to be exceptional. She thinks she has to be the most talented, that she has to rise above everybody else in Hollywood. And by the end, she’s open to the idea that her creativity can connect her to other people instead of setting her apart from them. I did note that I didn’t want her to decide one way or the other about the question of whether or not to become a parent, which is also a big thread in the book. I didn’t want the takeaway to be, “yeah, you should have kids,” or, “no, it’s okay not to have kids.” I wanted to honor her ambivalence. And honestly, she’s not even ready to make that decision. I think her journey is about having the self-compassion to not be afraid of her own ambivalence.

GH: That’s so interesting. I know it’s becoming a bigger thing to depict child-free women in books and on TV, which is so cool because that’s definitely been missing. At the same time, I also think it’s so cool to depict a woman who just stays in uncertainty. That is definitely missing from the conversation.

HC: So many articles are like, “I wasn’t sure, but now I have my two-year-old.” Well, okay, you figured it out, but what about the rest of the world? 

GH: There are parts of the book that felt so close to home in terms of how people talk in Hollywood, especially with Caroline’s agent. Was there anything that felt almost cringy to write?

HC: There’s one scene about a Secret Santa gift exchange in a writer’s room. And it’s not even really necessary for the plot, but I always knew that I wanted to include a moment like it. I’ve had these experiences in the TV writing industry, as people do in a lot of creative industries, where somebody makes a joke or says something that’s a bit off, and you don’t realize until later that it upset you. But at the same time, you don’t wanna say anything because getting along with the other writers is such a big part of the job—you want to be part of a cohesive social unit. But with those experiences, you’re carrying the shame, internalizing it, wondering if you were asking for it. And I wanted to show that. Specifically, how the accumulation of those kinds of experiences could affect Caroline. And could affect the way that she feels about herself and her career. But it was difficult to write. I found myself experiencing this self-doubt of like, is this even anything? Should I not even include this? Is she being a whiner?

GH: Creative careers are so idealized, and Caroline is a woman who’s had a lot of conventional success and is still dissatisfied. So I love that scene because it really shows that she has not had a super smooth ride, and yet, she herself still idealizes this career path and can’t imagine doing anything else.

HC: That’s a big part of it. You do idealize the career, and you don’t want to seem ungrateful because you do love what you’re doing. But then, there are these parts of it that you’re like, this didn’t feel so good.

GH: Is there anyone in Hollywood you were worried would be upset by the book?

HC: There are maybe some people who could see themselves in it, but the honest truth is, I don’t think that they read books. And even for people who have read it, it’s easier to recognize a behavior in others than in yourself. In the meetings I’ve had about the book, people have been like, “Oh, it’s so accurate, everybody I know is like that.” And I’m like, “Yeah, and you.”

GH: Did the process of writing the book change how you view your screenwriting career? Or screenwriting as a field?

HC: If anything, it underscored for me how much free work we’re expected to do as screenwriters. It sounds counterintuitive because, obviously, writing a novel is the ultimate piece of free work. But it felt different; I knew that even if I didn’t sell the novel, it could exist as a piece of art in the world. And that was very satisfying. It also made me reflect on the years I had spent working on pitches and scripts that are basically blueprints for something else. And you have a small chance of getting paid and a very slim chance of the work getting produced. It can be very hard to feel that your work is valued in those circumstances.

GH: Was it easier to get motivated for something that you knew you could make on your own?

HC: Definitely. I had gotten to a point where I was pretty jaded about working on pitches because after enough failures, I was like, well, this is not gonna be anything. I’m just doing this on the off chance that I get paid, but no one’s ever going to read it or enjoy it in the way that an audience is meant to enjoy something. So it was very exciting to work on a novel and think that even if I ended up publishing it on a blog, people could still read it.

GH: Do you want the book to change readers’ perceptions of the TV writing industry?

HC: It’s an interesting question. I certainly didn’t set out with that intention. And I don’t think I’m the first person to say that the entertainment industry is tough. In the years since writing the first draft of the book, we had the writer’s strike, which showed people the bigger structural issues facing TV writers. So if anything, the book can function as a magnifying glass. It lets the reader zoom in on what it feels like to work within a system that is constantly demanding that you bang on the door to prove yourself over and over and over. And how easy it is to adopt a worldview about your worth, and value of your labor, and your relationships to other people, and how much you can trust what other people say, and how authentic you can be with other people, and all these things that have a massive impact on us as humans.

GH: The relationship aspect comes through so well in the book. Caroline is married to a therapist. And I know from my own experience that there’s this dynamic between being in a creative career and being married to someone who has a stable job. I’m curious what your thoughts are on it. Does it ever make you envy a nine-to-five?

HC: All the time. And my husband not only has a stable job, but it’s a job that concretely helps people. So it’s very easy to be like, What have I done with my life? But yeah, I’m doing it. I’m telling myself that laughter helps people in its own way.

GH: It does! And I tell myself that all the time too.

HC: And the flip side is that you do get to see the downsides of a nine-to-five, where this person has to go to work every day, even when they feel crappy and wanna take a nap. And as creatives, we do have the freedom to make our own schedule and all those other things that we can appreciate.

The post A Satire That Captures the Absurdity of Being a Writer in Hollywood appeared first on Electric Literature.

In Parted Gods, Alfredo Félix-Díaz builds a novel that moves between the ancient and the modern through the lives of fraternal twins Antonella and Federico Adamo—a painter and a jazz pianist whose artistic ambitions unfold across Berlin, Sicily, and New Orleans. Drawing on classical mythology while remaining grounded in contemporary artistic life, the novel brings music, painting, and literature into constant conversation. The result is a narrative attentive not only to plot but to rhythm, image, and artistic inheritance.

Félix-Díaz comes to the novel with a background in theater and screenwriting—disciplines that emphasize movement, dialogue, and visual composition. Those influences shape the structure of Parted Gods as much as myths do. The novel’s scenes often feel staged and the prose carries a musical cadence that mirrors the inner lives of its characters.

I sat down with Félix-Díaz to discuss the novel’s relationship to myth, how music and visual art shape narrative voice, and what happens when artists working across disciplines bring those sensibilities into fiction.

Summer Stewart: Alfredo, myth has persisted as a structural backbone in literature for centuries. What drew you specifically to the “hermaphrodite” myth and mythic duality while writing Parted Gods?

Alfredo Félix-Díaz: I wanted to start from the biggest cliché about love. Baudelaire used to say that there is nothing more beautiful than a cliché or a common saying—the first thing that approaches people before a “forest of symbols” opens up. Everyone talking about love says things like, “Oh, my other half” or “my better self.” Yet, when you really go into the myth, as my characters do, a huge world opens up. It implies a sense of history. My characters are international beings—Sicilians with a conflicted past. Their father is Argentinian and their mother is Austrian; they feel they have no “path,” but they have the path of this mythical past: the idea that we were once powerful beings joined together, but we were split apart.

It also speaks to a present that is relatable to all of us—the feeling that we are split within ourselves and split from the other. I’m very interested in right- and left-brain dynamics and the asymmetries between them. The myth puts my characters into a dramatic situation. We want to rejoin ourselves; we want to be powerful like the gods.

In Plato’s Symposium, this myth is told by Aristophanes, a comic poet. It’s not presented as a “true” final solution for what love is; it’s a bit grotesque. It goes against the ideal of Greek beauty. We were “monsters” before we were “complete.” This simple cliché about love has layers of darkness, an aspiration toward the divine, and an animalistic side. It implies the things that divide us from the gods—like the lack of “mating seasons,” which leads to the necessity of social controls like the taboo against incest. All these layers were buried in a myth that seems so accessible.

SS: Before turning to the novel, you worked extensively in theater and screenwriting. How do those disciplines shape the way you think about pacing and scene construction?

AFD: A lot of that is subconscious. In theater and screenwriting, you are used to having a “problem,” or something happening in every scene—even if it’s just someone trying to cross a room filled with plants and people.

I always like my characters to have “stage business” or props. For example, I have an image of Federico putting butter on toast while speaking to his sister. I don’t always dare to have a conversation if there isn’t enough stage business to ground it.

However, I tried to move away from cinema in terms of the “embodied self.” When Antonella gains awareness of her brother’s memories, she gains awareness of what he was feeling in his body. That is something I can’t easily transmit in cinema or theater. I leaned into that to avoid making a “cinematic” novel where you are just seeing things from the outside.

SS: Antonella and Federico are both artists navigating ambition and rivalry. What does the dynamic of twinhood allow you to explore, regarding artistic identity, that might not emerge with a single protagonist?

AFD: It allows for dialogue and evades the “echo chamber.” Artists can be very Whitman-like: “I am myself and I am my universe.” The moment you have twins, you have a divided consciousness. Are they one? Are they two? You get the friction that we usually only have inside ourselves.

When you’re writing, is it your brain? Your feelings? Your fear? Your desire to please a reader? With twins, I can take that inner turmoil and dramatize it. For me, drama is always at least two people in dialogue. One person looking at themselves in a mirror doesn’t interest me as much.

SS: The novel moves through Berlin, Sicily, and New Orleans. How did those environments shape the emotional atmosphere, and what led you to choose them?

AFD: I was living in Berlin as I wrote the novel. I grew up in Mexico City and San Diego—San Diego is so spread out and Mexico City is a “monster”—but Berlin is complex and big enough to sustain everything I could imagine. I could contain the whole map in my head like a stage.

Regarding New Orleans, I identified with Federico’s approach because I’ve only been there a few times. He enters it as a complete foreigner, though he has “been there” through his music. Jazz and the piano playing he admires happened there, partly in reality and partly in his imagination. That gives it an unsettling energy.

Sicily is my favorite part of the novel, yet I have never been there. It represents an aspirational world. I love ancient Greek culture, and so much of it was in Sicily. For me, it is a world of nostalgia for something you lost but never actually had. Italian friends who read the manuscript couldn’t believe I’d never been. I compare it to the birth of opera or the violin in the Renaissance; they were created by people trying to recreate the sound of the ancient Greek lyre without actually knowing what it sounded like. From that imagination, something completely new was born.

SS: Music feels embedded in the prose itself. Do you think of scenes in terms of musical composition

AFD: Not exactly, because I’m not actually good at music! It’s a point of frustration for me. I had a piano at home as a kid, but I didn’t start classes until I was 15 or 16, which felt too late.

What you’re feeling is likely that I am a poet, and I think like a poet. I write novels like poems—which is a huge struggle. I wish I could just sit down and write a terrible first draft to get the story out, but I can’t. Every section I start, I have to find the perfect phrase, the right accent, the right alliteration. It’s tiresome, but it creates a musicality that comes more from poetry than from a technical knowledge of music.

SS: Antonella’s work as a painter introduces another artistic language. How did visual art influence your construction of imagery?

AFD: It was exciting to tell the story through the eyes of a painter. It gave me a lot of liberties. She is the narrator, and even when she’s telling Federico’s story, she has an aesthetic vision. She cares about color, shape, and composition.

I’ve written catalogs for sculptures before, and I love interpreting the world through that lens. Again, it’s a bit of a “frustrated artist” thing—I painted a bit as a teenager but wasn’t very good at it. It’s nice to take those frustrations and work through them in fiction.

SS: Many novels about artists focus on success or failure, but Parted Gods seems more interested in the psychological cost of creating. What questions about ambition were you exploring?

AFD: The concept of “success” is actually quite off-putting to me. Having lived in Europe for a long time, I feel this is a Central European novel. There, people aren’t as obsessed with the concept of success as Americans are. I find it strange when people track how much money a movie made on its opening weekend—why do we care? That’s for industry magazines.

The poet Paul Celan once asked the poet Ingeborg Bachmann why she wanted to go to America, saying he was puzzled by a place where experience is measured by success. I share that sensibility.

The twins’ ambition is deeper and perhaps more “dangerous” than success: It’s the act of creation itself—the “peak experience.” It’s about stealing fire from the gods. When you are possessed by the muse, you feel a sense of power. That “high” of inspiration is their true ambition.

SS: You engage with classical mythology without it becoming a simple retelling. How do you see myth functioning in contemporary fiction?

AFD: I think the “hero’s journey” has been cheapened by Hollywood. In ancient Greek myth, a hero isn’t necessarily someone who saves people; a hero is someone who has the capacity to suffer.

I try to do what Flannery O’Connor did with the Catholic religion. Myth was religion. I want to treat myth as an “incarnational” art—as if it were real. There is a famous anecdote about O’Connor where someone called the Eucharist a “wonderful symbol,” and she replied, “If it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” For her, it was a fact.

I wanted to make Greek myth a literal, incarnational fact. In Western art, art has often taken the place of religion. I wanted to take this to the level of the “grotesque,” asking: What if these myths were not myths, but facts occurring in our own bodies?

SS: Do you think of Parted Gods as engaging with a particular literary lineage?

AFD: Certainly Flannery O’Connor, but also the Impressionists like Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. They always used a narrator who was part of the story. Antonella is a bit of an unreliable narrator, but only because she filters everything through her own eyes. She isn’t lying to the reader; she’s telling the story to herself.

I also have to mention Hermann Hesse. I read all his novels as a teenager and then forgot about them, thinking they were “teenage” readings. But looking back, my focus on duality and twins is very much like a Hesse novel—like Narcissus and Goldmund or Steppenwolf. I also touch on alchemy toward the end of the book, which also ties back to that Jungian influence found in Hesse.

SS: Is there anything else you’d like to add about the “incarnational” aspect of the book?

AFD: I don’t care much for “newness.” Homer is the peak; we’ve been going downhill since then! But I think the idea of bringing myth into the body is what makes this work.

Painting has always done this. Antonella values Velázquez. In his paintings, you see Hephaestus working in his smithy. If no one told you he was a god, you wouldn’t know—he looks like a contemporary worker. Rembrandt’s Artemis is a huge, physical woman who has nothing to do with the “ideal” Greek form. Painting brings the gods into the present of the painter. I wanted to do that with the novel: to give the myth flesh.

The post This Debut Novel Transforms Myth Into Flesh appeared first on Electric Literature.

Despite the gravity of this subject, The Daughter Industry is lovingly choreographed by Patel’s recognizable charm, humor, and playfulness as a writer—traits which their players embody as well. Moody Scorpios and fastidious Virgos abound in this book, and gender becomes both a marker of where you are in this place and time as well as a moving target. The cast gives us this rich gender discourse while going into happy baby pose.

While Patel’s formally inventive deep dive into sex selective elimination takes on the South Asian Diasporic context, I am rocked by how we are all culturally implicated in this violent industry of assigned sex and the subsequent roles we are to perform, particularly as daughters. And yet, I am grateful for the ways Patel reminds us that there are still tender ties to our gendered upbringings. Our bodies are continuously yearning for answers, belonging, and to be free. Talking with Patel, I am reminded that the search for genres and forms that can hold these complicated questions is just as meaningful as the ways we make choices about how we embody our gender(s) in this lifetime.

Over email, Patel and I talked about the inextricability of genre and gender “bending” in The Daughter Industry, as well as the various bends, folds, and stretches that accompany the book’s elaborate yoga routine, and more.

Muriel Leung: The title of your latest collection is quite a legendary multi-genre assemblage: The Daughter Industry: A Hauntological Confession, Alternative History, Speculative Autopoetics in Three Acts with Seven Players. In so many ways, the charge of this genre-defiant work is consistent with its gender-defiant message, something we see in the gender bending and multiplicitous cast list (“all unborn ghosts”), and the opening poem “In My Dotted Suit and No Dupatta,” in which the speaker moves through having found their gender to “I hadn’t yet found my gender.”

Can you share the story behind this title (and illustrious subtitle)? How does the title mirror the intertwined relationship between genre and gender you’re thinking through in this work (especially the ghostliness of it all)?

Soham Patel: I’ve thought about the word “daughter” all my life because my parents gave me a name that’s traditionally assigned to sons. I know they wanted a boy and actually, when I was twelve or thirteen, one of my uncles started calling me Sohambhai (bhai meaning brother). It was a term of endearment while also him lowkey poking fun at my T-boy expressions. Gender’s always been a little confusing to me, but I don’t necessarily mean confusing as a bad thing. It’s a curious thing. That led me to the question “what makes a daughter?” and that’s where industry—that idea of making or manufacturing—plays into the title. Sex selection is an industry that eliminates daughters before they are born.

This is why the book is also a hauntology. It sees the ghosts of unborn folx, past, present, and future. One poem early in the collection is built around a speaker describing seeing a ghost. It also works within the tradition of confessional poetry: intensely vulnerable, controversial, conversational. I saw that ghost, and that was one of the starting points of this book. It’s an alternate history that examines a world where these victims of sex selection, these would-be daughters, (maybe) could have been born. I am making many selves through a poetics that imagines new realities about welcoming genders beyond the binary.

ML: That makes me think of Kazim Ali’s coining of the term “genre queer,” referring to the way genre, much like gender, is reflective of the myriad possibilities for embodiment and presentation.  

There are seven players in the book, each of uncertain astrological placement and equally uncertain lineages, whose drama is told through a three-act structure, harkening Western dramatic forms, and also calling upon conventions of Indian theatre. What forms of play/performance did you feel called to draw on for the structure of this drama?

SP: The players allow me to draw on persona as form, messenger speech, and dramatic monologue. I wanted a multigenerational troupe of many genders to tell this story. Sai is masculine-presenting and serves as the solid older bro. Sajani is the matriarch. Suvali is the handsome femme sister who leaves town then comes back home. Sasmita’s younger and thinks this whole problem is audacious. Shasha/Sheetal, they’re kind of shy and obedient but not really. Sarah participates in heteronormativity and defends son preference while she understands it’s fucked up. 

The elders’ discourse is more narrative while the younger ghost’s language use is more conceptual, they use documentary forms and are a bit more playful with the book’s topic and with each other. They’re irreverent but still they learn about the graveness of their situation and their playfulness eventually, by Act III, influences their elders.

ML: How realistic that there would be hierarchy even among the unborn! Why then a verse play? What does the use of verse in play form allow you to do?

SP: Making it a verse play took the pressure off of me and let them talk to each other. The three-part structure is based on the ayurvedic doshas: The first act is grounding, the second act is fire, a kind of metabolism, and the third act is air that’s evaporating not simply in acceptance, more at peace and accounting for the trace elements left by the sex selection processes. I tried this three-part structure in my first two books and I like how it forces some order on my chaotic ways of thinking, 

I also draw on Kathakali theatre’s incorporations of music and dance and its elaborate use of tiny gestures, physical expression, and audience interaction. In the book, the players invite generative participation from readers by practicing yoga, staging a flash mob, throwing drag shows and lip synch revelries. Since a play gives the book a life beyond the page, I want The Daughter Industry to belong to other people and for them to imagine how these ghosts should occupy a stage of their own creation much like in the tradition of V.’s The Vagina Monologues.

ML: All this dynamism feels antithetical to the predetermined death issued by sex selective elimination. I feel the veils of this reality and the spirit realm become porous through every yoga pose and lip sync.

Earlier, you had mentioned your personal connection to the word “daughter.” I’m thinking of the title of your book again, where an industry of daughters indicates that “daughter,” much like girlhood, boyhood, or gendered roles or social positions are all manufactured through the joint production of culture, market mechanisms, and even proximity to or literal death. How has writing this book altered, if at all, your relationship to the term “daughter”?

SP: Daughter is speculation in the same way investments are. “Daughter” can be considered an asset that has a transactional value like a dowry or a diamond engagement ring or the wedding’s rehearsal dinner bill or covering the sangeet reception’s open bar. Both daughter and son function as commodities. In the book some of that function gets shuttled through poetry about trade, marriage, and parenthood. Writing the book also altered my relationship to the term daughter because it got me thinking about the term son with more complexity. I became more patient with both terms. For example, the work made me more sympathetic to the real pressures that are put upon sons within the context of son worship and patriarchal structures. This allowed for more room to give love to the boys and men in my life, that’s why I dedicate this collection to them.

ML: From a Chinese cultural context, I think too of what it means to not be just the eldest daughter but a “daughter-son” fulfilling both roles, given my disabled younger brother’s inability to fulfill traditional social and economic responsibilities as the son. I’ve always known that daughters are treated as commodities, but I think less about how sons participate in this gender economy too, so your explanation also helps me think more compassionately about the overall system we’re indoctrinated into.

Your mention of speculation, which is a market term as well as a literary one, also suggests play and imagination. I see this in the syntactical restlessness of your work. Lines that are playful at times, and at other moments emphasize with great seriousness the stakes of gender violence taking place through interrogation of medical language, religious tradition, and treatment of women as property. How do you know when it is appropriate to crack a joke on the page versus pushing forward a critique?

SP: At a certain point these ghost voices spoke to me and I became their interlocutor. As I moved in the world, I saw it through them and now they live with me and influence how I am thinking. Sometimes when I am watching TV with my wife, I point at a character and say something like, “He’s such a Sai,” “She’s totally giving Suvali,” etc. Sasmita’s likely cracking most of those jokes because for them, witticism can at once offer relief and put forward a critique. Shasha/Sheetal treat crisis with a cool irreverence too, sometimes they simply perform documentary poetics as they repeat the terrible things they overhear with a tonal disdain. Sajani, Suvali, and Sarah are more elegant and conditioned by these traditional forces that almost, but don’t quite, silence them.

ML: I think most people think of ghosts as fixed presences, static in their desires and post-life haunting. But these seven players change their minds, challenge the system of sex selection, confront the contradictions within their own beliefs, and learn that their own relationship to gender influences their positions. I imagine it’s a balancing act to write this book and to see how these different unborn ghosts impact each other.

As this manuscript began as your University of Wisconsin Milwaukee PhD dissertation, can you speak to how these players’ journeys have evolved over the years?

SP: Pronoun preferences and normalizing nonbinary genders became everyday language I didn’t have access to when I started writing these poems in 2010. Mine transformed from “she” only to include “they” which of course reshaped the use of “I” in my collection of lyric poetry about gender, reproduction, and the ghosts of sex selection. And while I read plenty and saw so many media representations, I still knew nothing firsthand about some topics the book approaches, and still [don’t], never will. Childbirth, for instance, or some experiences of both boyhood and girlhood. 

I took a full-time job as an editor straight after completing my PhD. That day job transformed the book’s nighttime revision process in that I newly understood I could cut and reshape the drafts without losing the book’s essence, and I could think about audience more expansively. In the detached role of an editor, I discovered an intellectual and emotional freedom that had been impossible to access before. I also became a step-parent to two beautiful teenagers and that made my relationship fuller with the work. This major shift made me understand Suvali and Sajani’s perspectives on parenting with more accuracy as they now were informed by my lived experience. The speaker of these poems—persona, pantomime, the self of lyric I or otherwise—is always learning and language changes in their worlds every day.

ML: You’ve also published other collections that grapple with gender through ecological considerations—to afar from afar; ever really hear it, winner of the Subito Prize; all one in the end—/water. How do natural elements, from the blended forms that frame each act to the movement and scattered placement of humans that is diaspora, shape this work?

SP: Act II attempts a decentering of the human as it makes a thematic shift to exploring the reproductive practices of some animals. I watched all the videos in Isabella Rosselini’s Green Porno series many times as part of the research for adding this new vector into the book. Her animated shorts were such a great resource and offered a framework for challenging anthropocentric notions of gender.

Something I like about this book is that the work from all my books shape and influence it. The critical race theory and maudlin nostalgia from every really hear it is there, the question of home and belonging from to afar from afar appears, and the ecological crisis born from surveillance paranoia and corporate greed inevitable in our late capitalist structure that worries all the way through all one in the end—/water shores up in this book too. Flood subjects culminating.

ML: Indeed, this kind of spillage abounds and has cumulative force in The Daughter Industry! The collection takes us through a yoga routine—Sid (Sidhangana) does a series of prone poses, then serpent or cobra pose, savanasa the next, chants om, and goes into dead man’s pose—set to a playlist that includes pop classics like Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and Destiny Child’s “I’m A Survivor.” 

One of my most cherished memories of you is witnessing your rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” at AWP Literaoke in Tampa, Florida. I think at some point during your belting of the line, “You’d think I’d lay down and die,” you fell to your knees, and then in the next moment, staggered up with “No, not I, I will survive.” I believe you got some standing ovations, or it could just have been me waving my sweater like a propeller in the air. How do your daily practices and pop culture affinities make their way through the book? And what are some additional poses and songs you would like to add to the karaoke queue?

SP: Oh, I like this game! Add Madonna’s “Vogue” where we can strike a pose while singing along with that queer anthem and “I’m Every Woman,” Chaka Khan, 1978. Besides warrior one and two, I didn’t explicitly fit many triangle poses into the book. These always reshape my days into better ones when I do them, so let’s add some. Right now, as I’m composing these answers (it’s a Sunday, the first day of February in 2026), I just want to rest a bit in child’s pose because I’ve been watching on my phone so many people I love living through all the unrests brought by apocalypse, the start of a civil war, and the end of an empire. So I need to calm my nervous system daily or else I won’t survive. I’d love to start a running queue for any reader of the book interested in participating.

The post Reviving the Unborn Ghosts Lost to Sex Selection appeared first on Electric Literature.