The Paris Review's Blog, page 176

Twinning with Eudora Welty

Young Eudora Welty (courtesy The Eudora Welty Foundation)

In The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty introduces the idea of confluence—of two rivers merging, inexorably, magically, disturbingly. Fate gently takes the reins from Chance. We can rest, we can be held. And the life we thought was singular turns out, reassuringly, to be a strand in a larger pattern.

I became a young woman in the house where Welty spent six months as a young woman. We touched the same walls with our same searching fingers. We grew up shopping at the same grocery store—the Jitney 14—where also, I should mention, a thousand other people shopped; there is nothing sacred about a Jitney. We learned gardens from our mothers, who were always more skilled in dirt than we were; we trailed behind them, gathering blooms, starting our own plots of earth. We left home for college at the age of sixteen, we tried on the North for size. It didn’t fit. I imagine she looked back at the South with that same disturbed wonder that I did—missing it, accusing it, forgiving it. We started publishing in our midtwenties, and we began to migrate: around the world, between jobs, across stories.

You can want to become someone without fully understanding them. Welty was never my favorite author; she was too roundabout. In high school, I got lost in her sentences. Her Southernness felt too artful. Besides, she was notoriously single, one of the many maiden aunts of literature. She found herself in the tradition of women writers who pursued craft at the expense of family—or whose craft was repellent to suitors—or who believed art meant freedom, and freedom meant solitude. To a young girl who still believed in a soulmate-based romanticism, Welty’s aloneness felt damning.

Welty was distant, marble, Katharine Hepburn on a pedestal in The Philadelphia Story, her craft too elegant, her life too celibate. But I grew older. Partners disappointed me; that elegance became a prize. And last year I turned over the soil of Welty’s fiction—carefully tended—and came upon the rich and drifting worminess of her gardening letters.

Tell about Night Flowers, Julia Eichelberger’s selection of Welty’s letters of the forties to two friends—her agent, Diarmuid Russell, and, for lack of a better word, her crush John Robinson—crumbles the marble statue. She is unrepentantly silly; she makes jokes, drinks beer in the morning, gets filthy. She gets into tiffs with neighbors, she has big dreams, she is tired. I had been mapping myself against the facts of her life but never against her character; she was too grand, I was too young. But now, in these letters, we were the same age—early thirties, alone, not wanting to be alone, loving being alone. In December 1941, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, she wrote: “Sometimes I am in despair about people and it feels good to hate them as a kind and to give all your love to a few and to flowers and animals.” How right this sentiment sometimes feels!

My soul fell into hers most readily, like a nesting doll, when she crouched in the dirt and described the heat, the mosquitoes, the loss of dignity, the thrill of a blossom unexpectedly found. “The first flower on the Leila [camellia] opened today,” she wrote John in February 1945. “It is at the back of the bush in the hardest place to see—it means you have to sort of go into the bed on your elbow, full length, and look up.” Gardening for her entailed a purity of purpose; writing, meanwhile, she considered “a secondary thing in my life which gives me intense pleasure (I mean secondary in that it is work—definition)—it is not quite like gardening.” I, too, found my equilibrium in the beds, the only place where words could be entirely banished, and the restless brain could be reduced to a series of mechanical motions: weed, prune, dig, plant, mulch, mow, trim. Some writers took to big-game hunting, others to drink; Welty and I grew flowers.

As I was first reading Tell about Night Flowers last November, I wrote my mother a breathless email:

In five pages, Welty mentions wildflowers growing in Rome; the train from Jackson to New Orleans; writing a novella (“I wish I had a sign to tell me which I had better do that day, write or work the garden”); her inability to prevent her mother from sneakily doing Eudora’s own chores; her mother’s obsession with political news; wanting to write every day (“I jump into it with almost a shout of pleasure—no I don’t quite yell—it just fascinates me and works me”); and a rose that just opened in her garden: MRS. FINCH.

WE ARE THE SAME.

Yes, my own brain was circling around Rome, the Amtrak from Jackson to New Orleans, the tension between wanting to write my novella and wanting to be wrists-deep in the garden, my mother’s kindness, her thirst for news, and the fact that Mrs. R. M. Finch, an antique polyantha rose, was just then blooming in my own bed.

Welty mailed her love of her garden—as carefully packed as a glass vase, as raw as her heart—to John Robinson. She felt easy with this old friend of hers, a writer, a fellow gardener—perhaps because he was a gay man, a fact that she either didn’t know or took pains to not believe. He was stationed in Italy during World War II, where she wrote to him in a voice that’s confused, pleading, flirtatious, a jumble of complicated wants and restraints. (As I read her letters, I too was trying awkwardly to seduce a man via correspondence.) She wrote in November 1944:

It’s been the 18 months—do they just need you too badly. I wish you could get a rest, in Paris or Jackson (I’d enjoy it more here). I don’t know why I thought you were on the way, it was just my interpretation. I wouldn’t take my coat to the cleaners for fear it wouldn’t be back in time. It would be so fine to see you. I thought I might wander to New York and see you light. Write it plain, when you do come—just say Now … I hope you keep warm. I wish you could have this nice day, or rather this moment of it with the sun out and a mockingbird is singing. Mother sends love. Yours, E.

This was what I wanted to say to the man I was yearning for: “Write it plain, when you do come—just say Now.” Sentences even more intimate seemed pulled from my brain—that “all day I was thinking of you”; that “I wish I could see you. The day is so tender here”; that her love was “a daily kind of hope, not ever idle.” She asked him to send a picture of himself, promising to “keep it positively secret, in a drawer, like goldfish that have never seen the light of day.” Ah, that feeling of a world built only for two. “I miss you when I taste something,” she wrote, “like frozen peaches.”

She was in her early thirties, trying to make sense of a love that was unreturnable. I think she was also trying to understand where romantic love fit in the pantheon of emotions. How did it mimic or undercut or amplify her art? I read her words like I was reading my own sadness: “It is so good to hear from you and it changes everything sometimes when things have happened in the world that make a fresh mystery of how you are.” Seeing the heart of another person up close can feel as electric as creating love on the page—no, more so. How could you not want to engage with the reality of what you spent all day inventing? How could you not stumble as you approached its light, its heat?

Love is not a natural companion to art; it may be a competitor. I don’t know how Welty juggled it—what was available to her, what she sought, what she suppressed. If John Robinson had been attracted to women, had returned from the war and dropped to a knee and held out a velvet box, would she have attached her life to his? Would she have had children, written less, become even more of a cheerleader for his career? She sent her New Yorker editor one of John’s stories, which she’d typed and lightly edited; she seemed more comfortable—of course, I think—championing him. But perhaps when I’m in my sixties, I’ll read her letters to the writer Ross Macdonald and learn anew what love is.

Welty was a giver. She was a Southern woman, trained in generosity and sacrifice. I know these things. You can be fiercely independent and still bend to duty. This summer I spent time at an artists’ colony—I went to MacDowell, she to Yaddo—and I was struck by how unusual such indulgence felt. We were both highly privileged women, with means enough to write (mostly) the way we wanted to write, but we also felt keenly the necessity of saying yes to others. In those colonies, there was no yes: there was only the self. We were fed, housed, given tools and time and space, and left alone. I found it radical—she found it “tense.” She was, reportedly, uncomfortable, homesick, and couldn’t work on new stories. Did she ever learn to breathe into that space, to accept it, if never quite to demand it? She worked there on page proofs for her first story collection; I worked on page proofs for my third novel. I picture both of us with our red pencils in the Northern woods, wondering whether home was Mississippi, or home was Art.

If I take her as my model, am I asking for her life: unmarried, childless, alone, creative, someone who gives but also keeps, is kept from some of life’s richness, but also uses her freedom to create more? Or am I telling myself, when I am afraid to be alone, Welty was alone. Which is to say not alone; who among us doesn’t want to have a clubhouse in our backyard where we bring our friends and silly hats and tell ghost stories and dance? A role model is a tool: we use them to push ourselves, to clarify what we want, to console ourselves for falling inevitably short.

Looking for a mirror of ourselves in the world is a primal act of identification. We need assurances that our experiences exist on a spectrum of reality—that we are unique, our character so singular that it must be expressed, but also that we are normal. In this way we are perpetually adolescent. Let me blend in, let no one notice me, but also let me be the only one of my kind. Finding a twin among prodigies is a psychologically easy way to balance both desires at once: I am strange, but in just this extraordinary way. In fact, Welty and I are not alike in voice or talent or accomplishment. We are alike in being women from Jackson, both white, both middle class. Who want both to create and to love, though love is fraught.

But what about the fact that Tell about Night Flowers ends as she embarks, solo, for Lisbon? And that I read those letters when I had just returned, solo, from Lisbon? Some confluences are coincidental and should be discounted.

In Rachel Cusk’s novel Transit, a character finds herself strongly identifying with a famous painter, Marsden Hartley. She eventually comes to a “cataclysm of realisation”: “Rather than mirroring the literal facts of her own life, Marsden Hartley was doing something much bigger and more significant: he was dramatising them.” The mirroring between me and Welty isn’t extraordinary; other people shopped at the Jitney, other people planted roses. It’s the way her life has dramatized mine that’s driven me to write this. Her path is teaching me what my own has meant, or will mean; her story colorizes my own. I read her now—riskily, perhaps—as an oracle.

Last year I took a job at Millsaps College—a few blocks from my house, from her house—where she taught briefly in the sixties. The position was the inaugural Eudora Welty Chair for Southern Literature. The English Department gave me a big sun-filled office in the old English house, where I hung a photograph of Welty looking through a window. I sat in that empty office in the heart of our shared town and looked back at her looking at me. I taught her stories to my students—“Why I Live at the P.O.,” “No Place for You, My Love,” “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”—and tried to keep a neutral expression when they deconstructed her, pointed out her flaws. She is still living, I told myself, imagining her delight—the delight that I would feel if fifty years from now my words were still alive enough to be picked apart.

“The Welty Chair,” people say with raised eyebrows when I tell them of my position, Welty being synonymous with grand, weighty, out-of-reach. But outside my office is a weedy bed, nut grass and Virginia creeper gobbling up the azaleas, and when I sit at my desk grading papers, I feel what I think Welty would feel: not grand at all, but an aching desire to leap up, bolt through the screen door, and start ravaging the clover. “The weeds grow here with a rush practically audible,” she once wrote in despair.  I like to think this makes me suited for the job in her name, but really anyone with a loving heart would be suited for it, and don’t most all of us have loving hearts? Not as wide and deep and knowing as hers, perhaps, but loving all the same? Doesn’t each of us want to give, want to be kept, want to make, want to grow?

Perhaps Welty’s magic is not her uniqueness but that anyone could read her and find themselves there. She allows for the illusion of twinness. Maybe this is what art does: it makes you feel that you are suddenly seen. That you have twinned with something in the world. Trying to force a commonality with the artist herself may, in fact, be missing the point of art.

Yesterday I turned thirty-four. The river of my life will take many more bends, some toward the path of Welty’s river, some away. I might have children; I might only have nephews and nieces. But she and I will always be Jackson girls, will thrill at the sight of a spring flower, will cleave to our families, and will find the broader world a bright palette for our fictions. We start—like most writers, or most Southerners, or most people—with wide arms. The mouth of the river. We gather silt, we open outward, we expand to salt. The confluences become too many to count.

 

Katy Simpson Smith is the author, most recently, of The Everlasting, out this week from HarperCollins

Introducing the Winners of the 2020 Whiting Awards

For the sixth consecutive year, in 2020 The Paris Review Daily is pleased to announce the winners of the Whiting Awards. As in previous years, we’re also delighted to share excerpts of work by each of the winners. Here’s the list of the 2020  honorees:

Aria Aber, poetry
Diannely Antigua, poetry
Will Arbery, drama
Jaquira Díaz, nonfiction
Andrea Lawlor, fiction
Ling Ma, fiction
Jake Skeets, poetry
Genevieve Sly Crane, fiction
Jia Tolentino, nonfiction
Genya Turovskaya, poetry

Since 1985, the Whiting Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The awards, of $50,000 each, are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come. Previous recipients include Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eugenides, Tony Kushner, Sigrid Nunez, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mona Simpson, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Colson Whitehead. Explore all the winners here.

Congratulations to this year’s honorees. And for more great writing from Whiting Award recipients, check out our collections of work from the 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 winners.

 

Genya Turovskaya, Poetry

Genya Turovskaya. Photo: Willis Sparks.

Genya Turovskaya was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and grew up in New York City. She is the author of The Breathing Body of This Thought (Black Square, 2019) and the chapbooks Calendar (Ugly Duckling, 2002), The Tides (Octopus, 2007), New Year’s Day (Octopus, 2011), and Dear Jenny (Supermachine, 2011). Her poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, A Public Space, and other publications. Her translation of Aleksandr Skidan’s Red Shifting was published by Ugly Duckling in 2008. She is a cotranslator of Elena Fanailova’s Russian Version (UDP, 2009, 2019), which won the University of Rochester’s Three Percent Award for Best Translated Book of Poetry in 2010. She is also a cotranslator of Endarkenment, The Selected Poems of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (Wesleyan, 2014). She lives in Brooklyn.

*

“Failure to Declare”

I am beside myself

I have no beast in this ring, no horse in this race

Nobody always waves goodbye

The stars are different here

The wind is gusting in reverse

I left something out, something crucial, crossing through the customs gate

A figure, behind me, waving, reflected in the plexiglass partition

I could recognize the shape but not the face

I didn’t need to; I knew it

An empty window

Limp curtain flapping in the breeze

I pitched forward, tried to right myself, but kept falling without end

Keep falling to no end

There was nothing there to catch on, snag against

A tantalizing glitter, a blatant blank

The fortune in the fortune cookie says Learn Chinese

To have a fever

And When one can one must

Where do I live?

Where do I go when I go away?

The departures board was wiped clean

There was no message

But something happens to interrupt all well-laid plans

I was alert to the fog, a fugue of massing clouds, to a change in pressure, coalescing rivulets of rain

A physical vibration, the faintest tremor of the ground beneath my feet, the shifting of tectonic plates

The chafe, the plea in pleasure, for pleasure’s sake

Or was the fortune: When one must one can?

I recognized the empty window, the tantalizing glitter of my own reflection

The shape but not the face

I knew it, that there would be no message, no way to get a message back

I fell I fall I left I leave something out

The ground beneath my feet gives way

Where were we?

Here I am?

Where do I go?

Who is the witness to this story that I tell myself?

Is this rupture?

Rapture?

Attention? Inattention?

The bonds grown slack?

There is an errand I’ve been sent on

An errancy

I am not spared

I am inside the observation tower beside myself astride the horse

I do not have a horse in this

Nobody ever always waves goodbye goodbye

The stars are different here, the stars do not make sense

I can connect these burning dots

There is a hummingbird

There a dancing bear

There a face with night pouring out of the black sockets of its eyes

What are these strange celestial figurations?

Is any crossing safe?

When does the dancing bear claw its way back to nature?

When does a hummingbird become a hurricane?

Which is the miracle and which the natural disaster?

What is at stake?

Jia Tolentino, Nonfiction

Jia Tolentino. Photo: Elena Mudd.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker, formerly the deputy editor at Jezebel and a contributing editor at The Hairpin. She grew up in Texas, went to the University of Virginia, and got her M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Michigan. Her book of essays, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (Random House, 2019), was a New York Times best seller. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Time, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

*

An excerpt from Trick Mirror:

The call of self-expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which expanded at time-lapse speed, social connections bristling like neurons in every direction. At ten, I was clicking around a web ring to check out other Angelfire sites full of animal GIFs and Smash Mouth trivia. At twelve, I was writing five hundred words a day on a public LiveJournal. At fifteen, I was uploading photos of myself in a miniskirt on Myspace. By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per post. Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection—this feverish, electric, unlivable hell.

As with the transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, the curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I’d guess, was around 2012. People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and bitched about articles that had been commissioned to make people bitch. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse.

Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer. As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem—first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct—like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-traveled on Instagram; this is why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; this is why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself.

Mass media always determines the shape of politics and culture. The Bush era is inextricable from the failures of cable news; the executive overreaches of the Obama years were obscured by the internet’s magnification of personality and performance; Trump’s rise to power is inseparable from the existence of social networks that must continually aggravate their users in order to continue making money. But lately I’ve been wondering how everything got so intimately terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along. How did a huge number of people begin spending the bulk of our disappearing free time in an openly torturous environment? How did the internet get so bad, so confining, so inescapably personal, so politically determinative—and why are all those questions asking the same thing?

As we move about the internet, our personal data is tracked, recorded, and resold by a series of corporations—a regime of involuntary technological surveillance, which subconsciously decreases our resistance to the practice of voluntary self-surveillance on social media. If we think about buying something, it follows us around everywhere. We can, and probably do, limit our online activity to websites that further reinforce our own sense of identity, each of us reading things written for people just like us. On social media platforms, everything we see corresponds to our conscious choices and algorithmically guided preferences, and all news and culture and interpersonal interaction are filtered through the home base of the profile. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the center of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are.

Genevieve Sly Crane, Fiction

Genevieve Sly Crane. Photo: Andrew Baris.

Genevieve Sly Crane is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and Stony Brook Southampton, where she received her M.F.A. She teaches in the creative writing and literature B.F.A. program at Stony Brook. Sorority (Scout, 2018) is her first publication.

*

An excerpt from Sorority:

Even as children, I knew that I loved Shannon enough to fail myself. I loved her liar’s chin, tilted downward with the sharpness of a spade when she spoke. I loved her tiny, fluid fingers that stole gum and Tic Tacs so easily when cashiers rummaged under the counter. And I feared that seed deep within that I could see in her pupils if I disappointed her, if I showed her my own unease.

I see it so perfectly in our photographs now: we were little girls, with potbellies under bathing suits and eyes we hadn’t grown into yet, but my apprehension was there, wavering in my face, undulating with the heat waves behind us on the beach.

She scared me.

She ate raw cookie dough.

She let Corey Welsch touch between her legs the summer before fifth grade. She stole tampons out of her mother’s bathroom cabinet, and together we poured water on them until they bloomed into swollen white petals under the backyard hose, then threw them on the windshield of her next-door neighbor’s car.

She picked up the dead seagull on the beach, its wingspan sagging, and held it at arm’s length, her mouth shut against the horseflies, while she plucked the best feathers and stuck them in her hair.

—I’m a Wampanoag princess.

—You’re going to get a disease, I said.

And she took a feather out of her hair and licked the quill, her eyes on me the whole time, her ten-year-old knees jutting at me, her tongue dragging over the point till I turned away.

—Come and get me, bird flu.

She put the feather in my hair, and I shook it out in the walk back up the beach to my mother’s towel, but even when I lay in bed that night, I could feel it. The prickle or the curse, I wasn’t sure.

When we were eleven, my mother heard her say fuck.

I wasn’t permitted to see her again until I turned twelve. I saw her anyway. We lived half a mile apart from one another, a three-and-a-half-minute scurry if panic propelled me. Late on clear summer nights I would run to her house, the hedges lining our town quivering in the breeze, my eyes averted from the cemetery and its glowing headstones in the moonlight. When I reached the light of her driveway I would stop, hands on my knees, wheezing out my run, so that when I saw her she wouldn’t know that I had been hurrying, that I had been afraid.

Jake Skeets, Poetry

Jake Skeets. Photo: Quanah Yazzie.

Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed Editions, 2019), a National Poetry Series–winning collection of poems. He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Skeets is a winner of the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Skeets edits an online publication called Cloudthroat and organizes a poetry salon and reading series called Pollentongue, based in the Southwest. He is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: A Diné Writers’ Collective and currently teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona.

*

“Virginity”

Clouds in his throat,

six months’ worth.

He bodies into me

half cosmos, half coyote.

We become night

on Bread Springs

road. Shirts off,

jeans halfway

down, parked

by an abandoned

trailer. “No one

lives here,”

he whispers.

We become porch

light curtained

by moth wings,

powdered into ash.

*

“Glory”

Native American male. Early twenties. About 6’2″, 190 pounds.

Has the evening for a face.

—

Possible public intoxication. Native American female. No ID. She reported

being raped.

White shirt. No pants. Her legs swallowed the hotel.

—

Shots fired. Shots fired. Group of males scattered. Native American possibly.

One has a skull tattoo. Some ran east on Boardman. The skull is still here.

—

Medic unit requested. Sagebrush Bar.

Unidentified male not responsive. Possible hit-and-run.

Witnesses described it as a man being spit out from the mouth of a 4×4.

—

Yellow car heading north on Highway 666. Possible DWI. The car is kissing

the median like a wasp against a window.

Its wings torn to pieces.

—

I just saw a young boy get hit by a train. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t

know. He ran onto the tracks and the train hit him. It hit him.

He’s still moving. ……..He’s young. Maybe twenty. We’re on the Westside

by Walmart. Should I help him? He’s moving, he’s moving.

The train hit him. There’s blood all over him.

The train ate through him like a river eats through the arroyo. The train,

.it sounds like a river.

……………………………….Like a river, a river goddamnit,

………………………………………….a river, a river,

………………………………………….ariverariverariverariverariverariverariver

a river

—

This is Officer Carson. Medic requested. Man down. Native male. Late twenties, early thirties. Stab wounds to the stomach. Pulse faint. Blood on the snow. He is being erased from the

Ling Ma, Fiction

Ling Ma. Photo: Anjali Pint.

Ling Ma is author of the novel Severance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), which received the Kirkus Prize and the Young Lions Fiction Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018. Her work has appeared in Granta, Playboy, Vice, Ninth Letter, Chicago Reader, and other publications. She holds an M.F.A. from Cornell University and an A.B. from the University of Chicago. She lives in Chicago.

*

An excerpt from Severance:

Todd opened the Gowers’ front door. Okay, ready! he yelled.

We put on our face masks and rubber gloves. We went inside, carrying empty boxes and garbage bags.

The door opened up to a large foyer. The walls of the staircase were hung with family photos. The Gower clan included a mother and father, a son and an older daughter. The father balding and portly, the mother, a bleached blonde, tightly trim with a wan smile, her hands crossed in her lap, displaying a pert French manicure, the manicure of choice among porn actresses and Midwestern housewives.

How tragic, Genevieve pronounced.

Let’s go, ladies, Todd said. He loved to prod us and make us work.

The men hunted, and the women gathered. Each of us was assigned a division of sorts.

Janelle and Ashley worked Craft Services, gathering cooking supplies and shelf-stable products that the moths and pantry rodents hadn’t touched. Rachel worked Heath, accumulating prescription meds, bandages, aspirins, and skin care products. Genevieve worked Apparel, rifling through the closets for jackets and coats, but more often for quality linen tunics and silk blouses. I worked Entertainment, a broad category that included DVDs, books, magazines, board games, video games, and consoles.

Room by room, we amassed boxes. The boxes were placed out in the hallways for Bob to inspect, taking out or adding items as he saw fit. As the rooms emptied and the boxes filled, Adam and Todd and the other guys would take the inspected boxes outside to the supply vans.

For some reason, this process took hours.

Every time we stalked, this feeling would come over me, imperceptible at first. It is hard to describe because it is close to nothing. Gradually, the din of other people’s conversations or Todd’s heavy footsteps, his ugly, flat gait on the floorboards, would fall away. I would forget where I was or why I was there. I would get lost in the taking of inventory, with the categorizing and gathering, the packing of everything into space-efficient arrangements in the same boxes. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Vertigo. Halo 2. Seinfeld: The Complete Series. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Scrooged. Tales from the Hood. Blow-Up. Apocalypse Now. Waiting to Exhale. The Conversation. Sex and the City: The Complete Series. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Back to the Future. It was a trance. It was like burrowing underground, and the deeper I burrowed the warmer it became, and the more the nothing feeling subsumed me, snuffing out any worries and anxieties. It is the feeling I like best about working.

The only sound that would cut through this ebb and flow was Bob. In every house, he would take the muzzle of his firearm, a vintage M1 carbine semi-rifle, and run it along the walls as he walked. We would hear that scraping everywhere, in the floors above us, below us, and know where he had been. It left a mark, a black jagged line across fleur-de-lis wallpaper, sponge-painted designs, bare white walls. The scent of French vanilla drifted through the rooms. Occasionally, the scraping stopped, and we braced ourselves for the shot that would ring out. We never knew what he was shooting at: a bat trapped in an attic, a squirrel chasing leaves through the rain gutters, or nothing, nothing at all.

Finishing up in the entertainment room, I found my way upstairs to the study.

The shelves were almost all filled with children’s books. Only the top shelf held adult titles, vanity set pieces that gestured toward the cultured minds of the homeowners. In this case, it was a Shakespeare anthology, a Jane Austen anthology, the complete collected poems of Walt Whitman, and so on. They looked stiff, dusty, and barely opened. All except for the Bible, at the very end of the shelf.

Opening up the book, I saw, on the inside front cover, written in frilly teen cursive script, the name of its owner. Property of Paige Marie Gower.

My eyes closed, I opened the Daily Grace Bible to a random page and placed my finger on the text. I’d read whatever verse I touched.

And David said unto God, I am in a great strait: let us fall now into the hand of the Lord; for his mercies are great: and let me not fall into the hand of man.

It was then that I heard it, a quiet sound, like paper rustling. I put the book down. I stood up, slowly, and approached the windows, where the sound was coming from. As I approached, I spotted something beneath the curtains. A pair of socked feet, red polka dots on orange.

I drew the curtains back.

Andrea Lawlor, Fiction

Andrea Lawlor. Photo: Ramin Talaie.

Andrea Lawlor teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College, edits fiction for Fence magazine, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Their writing has appeared in various literary journals, including Ploughshares, Mutha, The Millions, and Encyclopedia, Vol. II. Their publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Rescue, hardback, 2017; Vintage, paperback, 2019), a 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary and CLMP Firecracker Awards.

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An excerpt from Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl:

Paul considered real bookstores (as opposed to sex bookstores) the best places for afternoon cruising, the more serious cruising, date cruising. At night you were all set; you found yourself at a bar or party, drank drinks, met a person, and decamped with that person to a second location. Instant date. No need to arrange or plan, and complete flexibility in the likely case you found a more amenable situation at the last minute. Daytime cruising, when not at a tea dance or beer bust, required more finesse and more certainty. First off, both parties had more time to second-guess between the securing of the phone number and the calling of the phone number. Secondly, you saw the person in the harshest light and without any softening lens such as beer, wine, or whiskey. In Paul’s ranking of all possible daytime cruising locations, gay non-sex-shop bookstores ranked at the top: congregants within were most likely to be both out and literate, qualities Paul valued. He thought fondly of the hours he’d spent at Oscar Wilde or the Different Light back in New York or even the HQ 76 section of the university library’s stacks, though, to his endless disappointment, he’d only ever found library success in men’s rooms.

Paul believed in reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, staking out likely targets rather than canvassing broadly. He strongly preferred to have sex with or talk to people who liked being queer. He was less excited about people still shaking off the poisons of their homophobic families or small towns, or anybody raised religious who was currently ambivalent rather than angry about that religion: they might be (likely were) dirty and wild in bed but Paul found the shame, self-loathing, obsessive postcoital showering deeply unhot. He was not curious about other people’s families or spiritual beliefs. He was not excited by normal AT&T gays. He did not himself care to assimilate into the power structures of heteropatriarchal white Christian America, was bored and horrified by those who did.

Bookstore cruising was also perfect for his current state: a little slower than bar cruising and thus good for someone with a broken part, like a splint. Paul loitered outside the door, pretending to study the posters announcing various benefits and open mics and documentaries of interest to the Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual community. He filled his lungs with the hunter’s sweet air of expectation, and pushed inside.

Jaquira Díaz, Nonfiction

Jaquira Díaz. Photo: Maria Esquinca.

Jaquira Díaz is the author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir (Algonquin, 2019), a Summer/Fall 2019 Indies Introduce Selection, a Fall 2019 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, a November 2019 Indie Next Pick, and a Library Reads October pick. Her work has been published in Rolling Stone, the Guardian, The FADER, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and The Best American Essays 2016, among other publications. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Kenyon Review, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. A former visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s M.F.A. Program in creative writing and consulting editor at the Kenyon Review, she splits her time between Montreal and Miami Beach. Her second book, I Am Deliberate: A Novel, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books.

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An excerpt from Ordinary Girls:

As Papi tried to carry Mami toward our front door, she slid down and got loose, and all the street kids exploded, Pito and Anthony and Eggy calling out, “Light her up! Knock her out! Préndela!” It was the same kind of shouting we heard in our living room during boxing matches, my father and his friends knocking back Medallas in front of the TV, everybody jumping to their feet when Macho Camacho started wailing on José Luis Ramírez, hollering, Knock him out! Light him up! Préndelo! 

My mother tangled her hands in la vecina’s hair, pulled her down out of Gigante’s arms and onto the ground, and started kicking. My father got a hold of Mami again, picked her up in the air, my mother red-faced and shrieking, spit flying out of her mouth. He carried her inside.

Gigante helped la vecina get up. She had three long, bloody scratches over her nose and mouth, like claw marks.

Just then, as la vecina was getting to her feet, Mami burst through the front door, a steak knife in her hand. The crowd moved back, opening up more space between themselves and my mother, and everything seemed to slow down, Pito and Anthony and Eggy, all of them, disappearing until it was just me and my mother and my mother’s knife, the three of us echoing through the years, propelled forward in time. And because I am my mother’s daughter more than I have ever been my father’s, it will be this moment I think of when I’m a fourteen-year-old hoodlum tucking razorblades into the sides of my Jordans, brass knuckles and Master combination locks and pocketknives in my backpack, when I am fifteen and getting jumped by five girls at the bus stop, when I am sixteen and trying to decide how to deal with a friend who has betrayed me, when I am seventeen and fighting with my brother. How I would always come back to this, my mother and her knife and all that rage, la vecina leaping back out of her way. And then my father, my father’s face, my father’s hands, my father’s voice, Jeannette, let go of the knife, how he took both of her hands into his, saying it over and over, Suelta el cuchillo, suelta el cuchillo, suelta el cuchillo.

But my mother would not let it go. Instead, Papi lifted her hands above her head, trying to pry it from her fingers, and Mami bit his shoulder, kicked him. He leaned her up against the doorway, pressing his body against hers until she couldn’t move, subduing her, and when he was finally able to get the knife, some of the onlookers rushed to help. It took three grown men to get Mami, kicking and slapping and hurling insults at them, back inside our apartment.

Outside, as the crowd split—while la vecina was still fixing her hair and clothes, limping around looking for her chancletas—I saw Jesenia. She saw me, too. Standing on the front lawn, outside the crowd’s perimeter, Jesenia in one of her Jesenia dresses, a white one with big yellow flowers, her hair parted down the middle, braided. How she stood there, alone, her face stained with tears, how nobody else seemed to see her, how nobody stopped as they headed back to their apartments or the basketball courts or la plaza, how nobody asked if she was okay, if she needed help, anything. I’d like to say that when I saw her, Jesenia looking back at me, yellow ribbons in her hair, that we had a moment. That as we looked into each other’s eyes, we both understood that we had been lost, that we had been lucky to find each other in a crowd, and we both thought, Here is a girl who sees me. Here is a girl who understands.

The truth is we did have a moment, Jesenia and I, seeing each other, knowing each other, and it was clear: We were the same. I hated her and she hated me. Because we were our mothers’ daughters. Because we could not turn back time to the days when our mothers were just girls, or forward, when we would finally break free of them. Because back then we could not see what either of us would become.

Will Arbery, Drama

Will Arbery. Photo: Victor Llorente.

Will Arbery is a playwright from Texas and Wyoming. His plays include Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Playwrights Horizons), Plano (Clubbed Thumb), Evanston Salt Costs Climbing (New Neighborhood), and Wheelchair (3 Hole). He’s a member of New Dramatists and an alum of The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, P73’s Interstate 73, Colt Coeur, Youngblood, and Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers Group. He’s currently the Tow Foundation Playwright-in-Residence at Playwrights Horizons, where he is also under commission. His plays have received additional support from NYTW, The Vineyard, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Cape Cod Theater Project, The New Group, The Bushwick Starr, Alliance/Kendeda, and Tofte Lake Center. He received his M.F.A. from Northwestern and his B.A. from Kenyon College.

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An excerpt from Heroes of the Fourth Turning:

JUSTIN

I wanted to say something about the liberal… The nice young liberal people. And the system.

TERESA

Okay what.

JUSTIN

So these nice young liberal people are blinded by a system that distracts them from true moral questions and refocuses their attention onto fashionable and facile questions of identity and choice, which gender do you want to be today?, how much sex can you have today?, how many babies do you want? and how do you want them to look?, which is really all part of a larger ideological system that is rooted in an evil, early-twentieth-century quote-unquote progressive trend towards quote-unquote perfection, eugenics, and crypto-racism, endorsed by Margaret Sanger, an American eugenics system which persists, which wants to eliminate anything unclean or imperfect, including black babies and Down syndrome babies, and create a sterilized world based around state-mandated pleasure and narcissism. These are just facts, look it up y’all.

I can honestly say that, having lived in that world, and being a thirty-eight-year-old nomad, I can guarantee that ninety-nine percent of them are willing to just be led blindly into the cave, hooked up to a heroin drip of self-satisfied digital activism and committing vile acts of self-gratification because they’re told that it’s important to “experience” life, when actually they’re numbing themselves to the possibility of real sacrifice or any chance of an ethical life, rooted in the grit and toil of suffering in the name of Christ.

And: there are more of them. We lost the popular vote, by a lot. Despite the indulgences afforded us by our wealthy backers and our electoral loopholes, we lack a unified youth movement. And they have that. And they’re mobilizing. In many ways, they are in power. And they’re trying to wipe us out. They’re wishing for our death. And the only way to survive is to block them out, to focus on the Lord. Try to outlive them. Bake bread, make wine, work the earth, shelter wanderers, and survive.

TERESA

You talk like they’re In Power. But they’re not in power. We are.

JUSTIN

Maybe for now—

TERESA

No, and there are more of us, too. There are. We just aren’t as loud, and we don’t have control of the media. And we need to come together to fight, not to bake bread. It’s honestly baffling to me that someone as strong as you would already be giving up the fight when it’s barely begun—

KEVIN

Teresa Teresa.

TERESA

What.

KEVIN

I don’t feel like a hero.

TERESA

Okay.

KEVIN

But the thing

I was born in 1989

I’m supposed to be a hero

TERESA

Well it’s an archetype. Not everyone is a hero. It’s just an archetype—a collective thing.

KEVIN

But I could be a hero. If I learned how to shoot a gun… I was always afraid of holding one cuz I thought I’d just stare into the barrel and pull the trigger.

EMILY

Kevin…

KEVIN

Haha sorry, but if there’s a war coming, then uh I can be part of the heroes! I’ll definitely die I’ll definitely die. But I’ll die with the heroes. You guys, Teresa is saying we’re heroes! Let’s be heroes! Come on let’s be heroes. And hahaha okay here’s my thing: if there’s a war coming then why is Catholicism all about sex, seriously why is Catholicism OBSESSED with telling me not to have sex because all that led to is that I have an addiction to the internet and it’s like I’m combing through it like a unholy un-Bible that keeps dissolving toxins into my eyes and all I ever think about is what to do with this goddamn thing between my legs—

JUSTIN

Kevin, can you stop.

KEVIN

Why.

JUSTIN

You’re scaring everyone.

KEVIN

Okay I didn’t mean to scare everyone, I thought I was riffing—Was that not funny?